Schoolgirls Pt 01 Lara

"Do you know what next Saturday is?"

Lara Oleski, standing in the doorway to my empty classroom. School over for the day. I look up from my desk where I am correcting papers – sophomore essays on Flannery O'Connor. Struck again by how damn

nubile

she is. The sweet curve of her teen-aged breasts beneath her white uniform blouse, the grey pleated skirt and high socks: a perfect Catholic school girl. For maybe the hundredth time since I first encountered her in Junior English a year ago, I whispered,

be still my heart.

At seventeen, nine years younger than me. And untouchable. No matter how much she flirted with me, no matter how, at 26, I could react to her presence, with a stirring that was at once perfectly normal and completely, professionally, ethically - hell, religiously - inappropriate.

"No, what?" I ask her, trying, as always, to keep my voice studiedly non-committal.

She waltzes through a line of student desks to the corner of mine, and sits, with a studied brazenness on top a scatter of my papers.

"Do you mind?" I ask her.

She lifts herself up: barely enough to let me move my Sophomore essays out from under without having my knuckles graze her bottom. I'm rather intensely conscious of the small expanse of skin along her thigh where her skirt has ridden above her knee. Hoping that Sister Marian, our dough-faced principal or Sr. Phoebe, the Dean, doesn't pick this moment to wander up to the second floor.

"You love it," Lara tells me.

"Lara," I try to warn her.

"Come on, Will," she prattles at me. And, for the thousandth time, I regret my decision two years ago when I started teaching at St. Catherine's Academy of New York (commonly known by the Catholic cognoscenti as St. Kate's), to eschew formality and let the girls use my first name instead of calling me Mr. Meehan.

"April 15

th

, don't you know what that is?"

"Tax day?" I suggest.

"Wi-ii-iill," she whines. Altogether too fetchingly. "I told you last year. Didn't you remember?" She leans across the desk top toward me. I try not to look at the gap between her shirt and her throat.

"Sorry, if it's not tax day, I got no clue."

"God, Will. Duh. It's my birthday."

"The fifteenth?"

"Uh, yuh, dummy. And how old am I gonna be?"

"I do not know."

"Earth to Will. I'm gonna be eighteen."

"Eighteen."

"Eighteen. And I think you should take me out."

"Lara. Are you kidding? No. You're my student. I'm your teacher. And, whether or not you are gonna be eighteen next week, you are seventeen today. And we are not having this conversation."

"So, you're not gonna take me out for my birthday?' Exaggerated pout.

"No," I tell her. "I think that's a really safe bet."

"I knew you were gonna say that."

I am too much aware of her: the long unruly tangle of her black hair, the thigh only half hidden beneath her skirt, faint smell of sweat and perfume.

"Good," I tell her. "I'm glad you're showing some sense of decorum here. Now get off my desk, huh? You're totally gonna make me lose my job."

"Why, you haven't done anything?"

"Appearance of impropriety," I tell her.

She shifts her bottom across my desk, moving incrementally closer to me.

"Not the near occasion of sin?" she asks.

"No," I say, trying to impart finality.

"Well," she says. "If you won't take me out for my birthday, maybe I'll have to take you." And, smiling, reaches

inside her blouse,

draws something out, lays it on the desktop near my hand.

A ticket. The Pretenders. At the Orpheum.

April 15, 1978.

She shows me two more in her hand. "Chrissie Hynde," she whispers. Then sings, half growl, half whisper, "

Special. I'm so special, I gotta have some of your emotion, give it to me.

" Waves the tickets languidly through the air. "Sarah Robinson and I are going. We thought you'd like to too."

"Lara, there's no way..."

"Hey, it's cool, Will, just think about it. It's general admission. You don't even have to hang out with us. Or we could just hang out a little bit."

"Lara," I start to say.

But then she leans down and –

Jesus Christ –

plants a short kiss on my forehead, then jumps down off my desk. Straightens her skirt. Dazzles me with her smile.

"By the way, did I tell you that Sarah's birthday was back in March? By next Saturday we'll both be sooo

legal

.

That smile again.

"Just think about it. Okay? I gotta go. See you tomorrow in class. Will."

Then glides away through rows of desks and out the door.

I look down at my desk, my ungraded papers.

The ticket.

"Oh, shit," I say softly to myself.

*

Let me just say that, right at that moment in my life, I was vulnerable.

It'd been three years since my college girlfriend dumped me and got engaged to a guy from my old fraternity. Since then, sex had been intermittent and generally unrewarding: a desultory affair with another graduate student while I was picking up a Master's Degree in English Lit at City. That ended when I dropped out of the Doctoral program and took a job teaching at St. Kate's. A few months with a woman from an acting class I took – phenomenal sex, ended when the class did. A couple drunken copulations with a friend's sister's roommate, a sweet, thin, blonde girl who ended up going back to Minnesota to Med School.

And, at the time that Lara left a ticket on my desk, it had been almost a year since the last time I'd had anything resembling intimacy with any human being.

So, yeah, I let the girls at St. Kate's call me by my name; and I let them flirt and half flirted back, and I enjoyed the warmth of some schoolgirl crushes. And yeah, I did it more with Lara and her friend Sally because I was only twenty-six and four years out of college; and New York City could be a lousy place to be lonely; and they both were the kinds of girls, even at seventeen, that I would have been interested in. And Sally was eighteen now. And in a week, so would be Lara.

Oh seriously shit

.

*

I hung the ticket on my refrigerator in my three-room apartment in Brooklyn, looked at it daily and resolutely intended not to go. Spent days at school surreptitiously watching Lara. Taught her in Survey of Poetry, barely able to concentrate on Andrew Marvell:

Had we but world enough and time/Thy coyness, Mistress, were no crime ...

Lara sitting in the back of the room

.

Crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Distracted.

Half aroused in front of a class of Catholic schoolgirls.

Counting the days until her birthday.

Until on Friday,

seeing her in the first floor vestibule at the end of the day, a sea of girls milling around her, saying,

happy birthday, since I won't see you tomorrow.

She glances at me, sloe-eyed, dark hair falling over one eye.

And I suddenly understand everything about Bacall and Bogart.

You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?

Saying back to me as she waltzes out the front door into the New York springtime,

"Oh, you will." Smile. "Will."

*

And yet, in the end, I was going to be sensible.

The ticket was going to stay on the refrigerator on the refrigerator.

Chrissie Hynde could sing "Special" to Lara and Sally without me.

Until, at five in the afternoon, my buzzer buzzes.

Intercom: "Yeah, who's there?"

The voice instantly recognizable: "U.P.S."

"Lara, Jesus Christ, I am not letting you up."

"Wi-ii- ill. Come on. I rode the subway all the way over here. From Jackson Heights. I'm gonna pee myself. Plus, it's raining."

I close my eyes, acquiesce.

Don't I always?

She's in High School.

Why is she so much stronger than me?

Press button. Loud buzz. Open my door. Wait for three flights of stairs. Then she's here. Wrapped in a raincoat, carrying a small bag of something, rushing past me, down my hallway, into my bathroom. Closes the door.

I wait some more.

Then the sounds of flushing, running water.

The door opens.

"You have hand towels," Lara tells me. "Totally civilized for a bachelor."

The bag she carried in is gone.

She has opened her raincoat. What I notice in a flat second: that she's wearing tight jeans, a white shirt, collared like a man's. Two top buttons undone. Semi-sheer. There's a dark bra half visible beneath. I'm loose jeans and a ratty t-shirt: my standard weekend wear. I'm dimly aware of how good she looks and that I look like shit beside her.

She is using a the afore-mentioned hand towel to dry her hair. Thick, black tresses, rubbed into tangles.

Smiles at me. Wanders away to my living room, inspecting. My Goodwill couch. The messy piles of paperbacks on the floor.

"Clean," she judges. "My mother would give you high marks. My room is a total hurricane. I never put away my clothes."

Looks briefly at the kitchen, then opens the incongruous glass doors into my bedroom, that used to be a dining room before some landlord chopped everything into apartments. Shrugs out of her raincoat and throws it toward my unseen bed.

Turns. Dazzles me with her goddamn smile.

"Well," she says. "Aren't you gonna say it?"

"Say what?"

"Happy birthday."

"Happy birthday, Lara." I tell her.

"Thank you," she says demurely. Then, "I thought, if I let you alone, you'd chicken out."

I shrug at her. I know she's right. And she knows I know.

I'm still in the hallway by the front door.

She's in the living room.

Vamps for me a little.

Says: "Come on, Will. You know I look good."

I shrug, almost don't answer, but then tell her the truth.

She smiles at the compliment.

"And you know how old I am today?"

"Eighteen," I tell her.

She nods. Her smile is killing me.

Uses a finger to beckon me into the living room.

If I go in there ...

But, like I said, I was vulnerable. More than that. What she was, I don't know. I went in.

When I get near to her, she wraps the small towel behind my neck, pulls me close to her. Our mouths are nearly touching, her breath is warm against my face. There is almost no space between our bodies. My chest brushing against her shirt. I look at her eyes, grey green, moving, almost nervous.

"Lara," I say, trying to put some caution into my face.

"Too late," she whispers.

And pulls me in for a kiss.

*

Her mouth is warm, her tongue is velvet.

We twine each other in the space between our teeth. My hands find her face, her eyes, my fingers drift into the endless tangles of her hair, the hidden delicacy of her skull. She has let go of the towel by which she's drawn me in, it falls onto my shoulders, and then to the floor. I am aware of her hands pressing, splayed against my chest, then moving downwards to the bottom of my shirt and, lifting, she finds the skin beneath.

Her voice surrounds me, she is unable to form words, and so just hums.

So do I.

We are a sudden song, a harmony.

And when we have almost suffocated from the dance of our tongues, we break apart. Our bodies still pressed, and I am helplessly hard against her.

"Lara," I say.

I want to say more, to tell her we shouldn't, can't.

But she shushes me with a finger on my lips.

"Don't," she whispers. "If you say anything,

I

might chicken out. I'm coming on like a total slut here, but I'm not all

that

brave."

Still, she moves against me, groin to straining groin. Her hands still inside my t-shirt, restless above my hips. "Besides," she whispers. "I don't think you wanna say no right now. It doesn't feel like you do."

My hands moving, nearly involuntarily, to her throat, the incredible softness at the unbuttoned opening of her shirt.

"Oh fuck, Lara," I tell her. "I don't think I do."

That smile, that smile.

"Happy birthday to me," she says.

*

Outside, the rain intensifies. Wind whistles through the airshaft outside my bedroom windows. Lara looks at me, mouths – almost but not quite soundlessly –

"Undress me, Will."

"You're sure?" I ask. My hard-on straining hopelessly against the jointure of her legs.

She nods at me. Teeth worrying her lower lip.

And I do.

*

My fingers find the remaining buttons of her shirt and undo them, one by one, leaning as I do to kiss each new expanse of her skin. My lips against the center of her chest, hard bone beneath, and then finding the utter softness of her breasts, above the black lace of her bra. I kiss her nipples through fabric, suck lightly, eliciting a groan of pleasure from this beautiful girl (

my student!

). And downward across her taut belly to place my tongue inside her navel (she twitches, twists away from me, complaining that it tickles.)

And then, I find myself at the soft, electric middle of her: jeans, belt (that I unbuckle, pull apart) and then, slowly, pull down her zipper. "They match," I marvel at the black silk and elastic of the exposed triangle of her panties.

"Well, what did you think?" Lara asks. " I'm a woman of fashion."

"You're barely a woman at all," I answer. And yet ... I am kneeling before her, worshipful. I put hands on her hips and fold her blue jeans down along her legs. They are tight enough that it is like peeling paint. Her legs are long, thin, teen-aged and coltish, topped by the soft fleshiness of thighs. I find, with the back of my hands a warm dampness through the fabric of her panties.

"Oh, god, Will" she says as I graze her.

"Help me out here," I tell her . And she braces herself on my shoulder and lifts a leg so I can pull off her jeans: one leg, then the other. I brush her shoes off as her pants fall to the floor. Lara, my student, her pants off, shirt open. Black lace everywhere.

I stand, slide her opened shirt off her shoulders.

She nods downward toward her bra.

"It's a front loader," she says.

And so I find the plastic clasp between her breasts, unhook her. Her breasts , revealed, are perfect teardrops, pink nippled, erect. I kiss each one and slip her straps down along her dark-downed arms. And then and finally, I touch and pull down slowly her black panties. She is trimmed, not shaven, her labia sweet and swollen and I visit them with lips and tongue. She is sharp and salty and moans as I barely lick her. Her fingers twine in my hair, while my hands find and glide across the soft mounds of her behind.

"Oooooh," she says. "Not yet, okay? Not yet. I want to see you first."

I stand for her, my hand cupping her mons. She squirms beneath my touch.

"Okay," I tell her.

And it is her turn.

I am easy. A t-shirt, jeans, standard issue white shorts. She rubs me though fabric and then pulls them down. My hard-on erupts out at her. And Lara's cool hand finds the end of me and grips, moves. Waves of sensation course through my body.

"Hello, Will," she says to me, to it.

Her smile, her hair.

Cascading onto her shoulders.

"You think I'm pretty," she says. Statement, not question.

I nod. She knows I do. Her hand moving on, around my shaft.

She cocks her head toward the glass doors, my bed.

"I think we should go in there, Will, don't you?"

I nod again.

She is naked. She is more than pretty.

Her fingers on my dick; my hand on her mound, one stray finger in between her lips.

Rough hair of her, soft wet inside.

"Yeah, god help us, Lara, you know I do."

"God's got nothing to with it, honey." That smile. Her hand on me, moving.

She is being a perfect slut for me.

No matter how scared she is, we are.

I follow her.

I would follow her anywhere.

*

In my bed, we roll together, my erection pressed against her belly, my balls nestled in the short carpet of her pubes. Exploring each other. My hands drifting across the small of her back, the small slope of her ass, finding the crevice of her and, with two fingers tracing the sweet pucker at its center, while her hands mirror mine and I feel with glorious discomfort her finger probe my asshole, then other fingers drifting below to the base of my balls. We are being gloriously wanton with each other. I have taught this girl in Modern Poetry, American Lit, and now I am familiar with the rough skin of her asshole, the wet silk of her pussy. We kiss, look at each other, kiss again.

I am gone with her. I drink her skin with my lips and tongue, swirling around her nipples, making her gasp with sensation. And she, Lara, finds again my straining dick, strokes me, pulls me closer to her flesh, closer to the end.

She scooches upward until she holds my dick between her legs.

"Rub it in me," she begs.

And I take myself and move inside her. The warmth of her is beyond intense. I plow her gently, the sweet wet inner skin of her, the hard, tiny knob of her clitoris ("Oh, shit, Will, omigod, shit.") and then, moving downward, inward, I find with my glans the soft declivity of her vagina. Impelled by desire and biology, I move inside the narrow, muscled entrance of her.

Her hand around me, blocking me.

"Not yet, Will, please not yet. I'm not ready for that yet."

I slide outward, back along her slit.

"That's fine," I say.

"No," she says. "I mean really not ready. Like, I haven't ... ever."

I lean back from her. My dick throbs in the rich swamp between her labia.

"Virgin?" I ask.

"Vaginally," she answers. "I think I've done everything else. There was a guy last summer when I was a lifeguard. But I've been kind of saving myself, y'know?"

Low whistle. This wrinkle hadn't occurred to me. Lara talked too good a game.

"I get it," I tell her. "I think."

"I can still make you feel good."

"Oh, girl, I'm sure you can."

"Just keep doing what you're doing, though. I like it when you move inside me."

She closes her eyes. I move my hips against her.

She shudders with pleasure.

I shudder with sensation.

"I have to stop," I pant at her. "I'm gonna ..."

Her hand finds me, squeezes until the moment passes.

"Let me," she whispers and rises, turns until we are sixty-nined along each other's bodies.

And suddenly, I am enveloped by her mouth. She breathes on me, soaks me, sucks on me.

While I dive into her and move my face inside the hot interior of her. My tongue on her clit, along the canal between her labia and finally probing the inside of her virginal vagina.

Time stops as I lick her.

Until at last, her breathing tightens and suddenly she rolls aside, her thighs clamping around my head. And comes loudly, shuddering against my face.

And still her tongue snakes around me, she is sucking me, sucking me until and I, suddenly, finally, wrongly, rightly, burst and spasm out what feels like gallons of myself into her still sucking mouth. She lets it happen, drinking, swallowing everything that spills out of me until finally we subside and lie, my face in her redolent cunt, my dick softening inside her mouth.

Eventually, I fall out of her. She falls onto her back, looks at the ceiling, speaks, rough voiced and breathless, to no one, to the ceiling, and indirectly to me.

"Will. Maybe," she says. "Maybe, if you can do it, it's time for me not to be a virgin anymore."

"What do you think, Will?' she asks me. "What do you think?"

*

I hover above her, braced on my arms, my eventually revived dick positioned at the very edge of her. Even there, I can feel an inner warmth radiating out from between her legs.

"Should I wear something?" I ask her.

"Not yet. First time. I want to totally feel you in me. If you're gonna, you know, you gotta put it on. I want you to come in me though. I wanna know how that feels."

"You sure?" I ask her.

Lying beneath me, Lara salutes like a soldier, says, "Yessir. Let's do this thing."

And so it's with laughter that I enter her for the first time.