General Chemistry Ch 01

The humid sky felt like a hot towel draped across my shoulders, sweat forming across my arms and chest. It was Friday afternoon late in my freshman year and I sat on the soccer bleachers watching the girls' practice on the next field. An endless mob of students flowed down the central walkway of the athletic complex behind me, walking or jogging or riding their bikes, all buzzing with the possibilities of the weekend.

It would have been cooler in the dugout but I preferred to wait where I'd be able to see the girls coming. Maybe I needed to torture myself a little too, to keep my mind sharp before Pri and Liv finally found me.

I sighed and tried to ignore the way my stomach clenched like a fist. It had everything to do with Liv's texts from yesterday.

Olivia: hey

Olivia: do u want to study tomorrow

Olivia: for gen chem

Olivia: me and pri need to go over chap 10 to 13

Olivia: BAD

Jackson: Sure thing

Jackson: Tomorrow, like Friday

Jackson:?

Jackson: What about Sammys party 🙁

Olivia: wah

Olivia: pri said u know more

Olivia: we can go to my dad's house after practice

Olivia: its not far

The more I reread the messages, and I must have reread them four hundred times, the more they had me spinning. We'd always met in the library or in the caf, or sometimes in the lobby of their dorm. Never somewhere private. And chemistry was Pri's specialty. They should know they didn't really need me for that. It was... fucking weird.

Was this just an excuse to hang out? That was also pretty hard to believe. Nationals were creeping up, so it's not like they had spare time for fake studying, and skipping house parties certainly wasn't like Liv.

I heard the team break down their huddle from where I was a couple hundred feet away. After a tangled moment, I saw them emerge from the crowd of girls in orange pinnies, laughing and waving goodbye to the others.

Liv had her arm around Pri's shoulder, heads together almost conspiratorially. Pri pushed her away, shrieking, and broke into a run. Like kids, they chased and jostled, trying to trip each other, gym bags swinging wildly from side to side. When they were within hollering distance, I climbed down to greet them.

My friend Liv was thin with narrow hips, and tall, only an inch shorter than I was. Not quite lanky, but more tom-boyish than elegant, she had a heart-shaped face covered in freckles. Tom-boyish or not, she was a natural athlete, with long, lean arms and wiry calves. Though she usually tied it up, her brown hair bounced off both shoulders as she ran. She was beautiful, but not so much that she seemed untouchable. I'd sometimes joke that she looked like a model from a department store ad and she played it up, voguing against the wall in loose jeans and hoodies.

I knew how funny she could be but most people thought of her as

tough

. She would say things that were too honest sometimes. On a soccer team full of big personalities, she had an effortless energy that made her the center of attention.

Pri was similar in some ways. Smart and intense, always the last to tap out during study group. Funny, but more sarcastic, almost sly, and not nearly as direct as Liv could be. An athlete, obviously. Short and thickly built, she was in remarkable shape even compared to her teammates, with wide hips and muscular thighs. I'd heard she had the freshman girls' squat record already.

There was a physicality to her that was hard to explain, like her movements were more real, like they were somehow easier or more natural than for other people. When she looked at me, you could feel the weight of her attention. Her magnetism was not social but almost... visceral.

She smiled and waved. My stomach did a somersault.

"Hey hey, let's get out of here!" she shouted across the baseball diamond.

"For sure!" I called back. As they got closer, I saw how brutal their practice must have been. Their uniforms were drenched with sweat and sprayed with mud. Their knees and shins were scraped and filthy. "You guys, and I mean this with all due respect, look disgusting."

They both laughed and struck poses, modeling their mess with pride.

"If you like that, take a look at this," said Pri. She turned her thick, brown calf to show a bloody gouge. "Cleated in the first fifteen minutes."

"You're pretty gross too, Jacky," said Liv. She was the only person to ever call me Jacky, and I didn't mind it. It made me seem slightly more outgoing than just Jack, and it was miles better than Jackson. "We'll clean up at the house. We can eat too. My dad's got all kinds of stuff."

"Do that talk walking," said Pri. "Because I am actively bleeding."

Liv's car was a short walk away in the athlete's lot, while I had parked down in the commons. The girls discussed the merits of hydrogen peroxide versus alcohol, and then vodka versus isopropyl, for wounds or otherwise. No one had mentioned studying yet.

I'd met Olivia and Pritha in Bio II, fall semester. We realized pretty quickly that we learned well together, and when we saw how similar our course loads would be, we fell in naturally. Soon we'd evolved from Olivia to Liv, Pritha to Pri, and, of course, Jackson to Jacky. We'd been organizing study groups ever since.

We even picked some spring classes together. Having friends along took some of the sting out of morning lectures. Morning or evening, I was usually over-caffeinated and the first to raise my hand. The girls had gone to high school together and often worked in tandem, picking at every detail until the professor gave up and pushed us all to office hours. Our Bio prof once called them a "coordinated attack, akin to the German

blitzkrieg

," which was the bizarre sort of comment that Liv held on to for months.

"Are you listening?" Pri poked me in the arm. "I said no parties on or around the 25th. We need you bushy-eyed for the drive to Concord."

"But not too bushy-eyed," said Liv. "Let's not repeat the mistakes of Bio II cram-pocalypse. I think you were weeping espresso by the end."

"Hey now, I got us through all the sperms, didn't I?" I counted on my fingers dramatically. "Gymnosperms, angiosperms, flangiosperms..."

"Anglosperms," offered Pri. "Uh, mangosperms..." We broke up laughing at that.

"I'm excited though," I said. "Really. I still haven't seen either of you out there. I'm assuming you're sick on the pitch."

I'd been to one game earlier in the season. The tickets were free but the girls never played so they asked me to keep away. ("Save your Saturdays," Liv had said. "Unless you're just feeling some supreme Timberwolves pride.")

"Field, Jack," said Liv with exaggerated intensity. "We call it a field in this country."

"Speaking of

foreign sports

," said Pri. "I heard you've been playing squash with Morrison."

I groaned.

"Squash?" Liv raised an eyebrow. "For real? What, you up for a big promotion at the firm?"

"Okay..." I said, not really having anywhere to go with it. "He asked me. As a favor. It's not that bad. And it's a great workout." That part was true. I wasn't a college athlete but I was still in shape. I'd been swimming since high school, lifeguarding every summer, but the cardio of squash was no joke.

"He said you wear the goggles."

"They're his goggles! You have to protect your eyes!"

"You expect us all to believe..." Pri paused dramatically, like a TV lawyer. "That Morrison owns multiple pairs of squash goggles?"

"I can't believe that you

don't

believe it." That set us going for a minute. My roommate was a bizarre guy and everybody had their own special Morrison story. That occupied us the rest of the way.

Liv had parked her SUV in the rear of the lot. The cab was stifling hot and the girls stepped away after tossing their bags in. The car was new, or at least new-adjacent, and the two of them were filthy.

"Your poor seats," I said. "To receive such disgusting bodies."

"Your concern is noted," said Liv. "I'm pretty sure I've got some towels back here..."

I shrugged. "So, come to the west entrance and I'll follow you?" I was parked a few minutes away. "And you said your dad's is close?"

"Close-ish," said Liv. "Hold on, we'll take you to your car and leave from there."

"Oh, okay. It's not a big deal though." I hiked my thumb in the right direction. "I can just walk it."

"We'll only be a minute," said Pri cryptically. A minute for what? "Stand over there and keep an eye out." I narrowed my eyes a little but did as she said.

I stood on the opposite side of the car, squinting against the gleam of dozens of windshields. No one nearby, not really. Casually, mumbling something about moldy towels, Liv pulled her jersey over her head. Her freckled breasts strained under a black sports bra. I straightened up, panicking a little, and aimed my head towards the inner lot.

Did they not realize I could see them through the window? My heart thumped so loud I thought they might hear it, but no, they chatted away like it was nothing. Slowly, carefully, I angled my head. Jesus Christ! Pri had her jersey off too and she just dropped her shorts to the pavement.

Olivia was incredible. Tall, fit, with a bubble butt and taut stomach. A knockout.

I barely saw her.

Pri shook out her thick mane of black hair, pulling it back into a ponytail. Her orange sports bra barely contained her perfect handfuls of tit flesh. Yanking at the strap, she dabbed herself with a towel, revealing the stark brown on brown tan line across the top of her breasts. Blood flooded into my cock. My mouth filled with saliva.

Pri propped her foot in the door, scrubbing her knees and shins, the towel coming away with dirt and blood. Her incredible, muscular thighs bulged against white compression shorts. Soaked with sweat, the shorts were practically see-through, and I could easily follow the trail of dark hairs on her stomach as they transitioned into the thick mass of pubic hair between her legs. Her vulva, dear lord. The white fabric was pulled up into her and I could plainly make out the lips of her pussy.

My jeans were suddenly too tight. I turned away completely and adjusted myself, baking in the heat like a clay pot in the oven. I took a few deep breaths and willed myself to look anywhere else. I even alternated pinching my forearms, hard, trying to distract my body from its masculine impulse.

"Okay," said Liv cheerfully. "Let's boogie." They'd changed into loose shorts and over-large logo'd t-shirts, outfits that were about as un-erotic as possible. They looked like those characters from Pulp Fiction, dressed in donated clothes after they'd killed a guy.

"Great." I climbed weakly into the backseat and we were off. We found my car quickly. "So," I choked out. I cleared my throat. "How far are we talking?"

"It's not that far..." said Pri, and at the same time, Liv said, "Thirty minutes."

That was much farther than they'd let on and I was sure my face was a mess of confused feelings. I was stifling lust, covering the erection in my lap, invited to a strange location with two beautiful women, one of which was the sexiest creature in human history, and no one had actually mentioned studying yet.

"Why don't you just grab your bag and I'll drive?" Liv asked. "No sense in wasting gas." Pri nodded as though this was sensible.

I think they could have told me to walk the whole way and I would have agreed. I retrieved my backpack, heaved it really, since it was weighed down by two textbooks and a laptop, and slid back into Liv's car. The seats were still scalding hot.

"Maroon 5 or Ed Sheeran?" Liv asked.

"Trick question?" I guessed.

"Trick question," said Liv, tapping her phone to play some Gaga.

The ride was mercifully uneventful. Whether by accident, or whether they sensed that I was feeling off, the girls ignored me for most of it, content to talk podcasts and tournament prep. I was a little shaken, and it got worse when I saw it in the backseat.

Pri's compression shorts.

They were hastily stuffed into a webbed pocket on her bag, right next to me. Intrusive thoughts crawled around my brain. Had I really looked away at the moment she had taken them off? What was she wearing now? Was she wearing anything? Or wearing nothing? What did they smell like? Fuck, what did they

taste

like? I really considered grabbing them, or pretending to drop something so I could lean down and sniff. What the fuck was wrong with me?

I'd given up trying to relieve my erection. Excitement was the wrong word. I was like a teenager spying on his first real tits. There was nothing in the world that would get my cock to lay flat. I breathed in counts of five and stared into the roof of the car.

College had certainly been an adjustment. The textbooks were hardcore, not to mention murderously expensive. Dorm showers were, in a word, gross. I had to learn how to smoke weed without anyone catching on that I'd been stone straight my whole life. My highschool of a thousand kids in Bumfuck, Connecticut did little to prepare me for university life among twenty thousand strangers.

Out of my many struggles, however, I was the worst with women. I'd never seen so many beautiful women in one place outside of my occasional trips to New York City, but in the city there was the anonymity of the crowd. You could look, you could stare even, and it didn't matter. You were just a wisp of exhaust, ready to blow away on the next wind.

At State, there were gorgeous, available girls everywhere and they could

see you

. It seemed like everyone was getting to know everyone, like they instinctually knew to collect as many friends as humanly possible, and people were fucking each other like crazy. Even Morrison was getting laid.

And here I was, cock hard in the backseat, still a virgin.

I wasn't completely inexperienced. I'd had my share of hookups in highschool and in college. Two highschool girlfriends suggested that I wasn't unattractive, but whether at Norton High or at State, things always seemed to sputter out right before I would actually have sex. And I knew that, factually, statistically, going into college as a virgin was normal. What wasn't normal was how virginity clung to me despite four house parties a month and an active Tinder profile. I'd been on a dozen dates with perfectly fine people but it never seemed to click.

Except with Pri and Liv. Click wasn't the right word though. The way we got on was something different, something I was terrified to mess with. Morrison would groan whenever I came straight home after a study session.

"You're hopeless, my dude," he'd said, banging his head against the door like he thought it would knock sense into me somehow. "These are, like, beautiful, complex, hot women, and you do nothing. It's like some tragic Greek myth of virginity. If you're not gonna make a move, at least introduce me."

"Mo," I told him, not for the first time. "You have actually met them already."

"You don't have to say it like that, man."

Even then I knew that it was all about Pri.

I liked Liv too, and I'd even had a crush on her for a few weeks at first, but she was dating someone. Ryan. Nice guy, a senior public admin major.

Pri, on the other hand, was still single. I heard that she went on a few dates with another freshman early in the year, a Cal-something. It hadn't gone very well and she'd been unattached since then.

So Pritha invaded my thoughts and my dreams. The way she would scrunch up in her hoodie on cold days, the time she shaved one leg but not the other to show us the difference. She had this wonderful, barky laugh but she didn't give it away. She was cool, and not in a showy way, more like she had seen it all before and was patiently waiting for the world to conform to her and not the other way around. I wasn't stupid enough to think this was love, but I was clearly into all-consuming-infatuation territory.

And we were driving together to a distant, possibly private, definitely personal location. My fantasies from last night had been conservative to a fault. A gentle look. A laugh and a soft touch on the hand. A kiss, shit! A kiss and a "text me later."

Now, despite the warning bells ringing in my mind, I thought of pushing Pri against a wall, squeezing her full breast in my hand, her fingers drifting down towards my stiff cock...

We finally pulled off the highway into a placid looking suburb. Two-lane roads, pine trees, mail boxes, that sort of thing.

"And Maury's gone? Doing his thing?" Pri asked as we turned down a deadend street that revealed itself to be a cul-de-sac. My anxiety took control, deflating my dick to something I could tuck and hide.

"Yep," Liv chirped. "Doing his thing."

She parked in front of a ranch style house made of brick. Distracted as I was, I thought it was nice. Big but hidden back behind some oaks and manicured bushes. Though I knew Liv's mom was still in the picture, her dad apparently lived alone. It was a hell of a house for a single man.

Trudging under the weight of our bags, we made small talk under a wicked sun as Liv fumbled with the keys. It was no cooler inside. When we entered, the girls kicked off their slides and disappeared into the kitchen. I kneeled to untie my sneakers. I couldn't quite hear them, almost like they were talking low on purpose. Liv came out with some bottles of water in her arms and fiddled with the thermostat.

"We can sit on the patio while this place cools down," she said. I spied Pri opening the glass doors leading out back, carrying some oranges. Their gym bags were gone.

I carried my own bag over my shoulder and walked through the house in my sweaty socks. The furniture was... comfy, I guess was the word. Lots of patterned quilts and big potted plants. Not really a man's touch, if I was being honest, and I couldn't remember if this was where Liv had grown up. Her dad had interesting art though, lots of it, and even had a piano. The house really felt lived in but not messy.

Through the glass of the backdoor I saw that she had a decent sized pool, a grill, and a line of vinyl lounge chairs. The water looked cool and inviting. The girls were already sitting at the patio table and they looked up abruptly as I came through the door. I leaned over a chair and Liv tossed me a water.

"You didn't say there was a pool," I said, holding the cool bottle against my forehead. The yard was big and secluded, with tall trees hanging over the fence line. "I'd have brought my suit. Man, it's really nice back here."

Liv waved her hand like it was nothing. "My dad's project. There was just a scrubby yard here six or seven years ago. He did a lot of it alone."

"Hell of a project," I said. No wonder his daughter was such a badass. I saw the glint of a huge glass construction around the side of the house. "And a greenhouse too? He's a man of many talents."

"Huh?" said Liv. She followed my line of sight and laughed. "No, that's a solarium. My dad could kill a cactus. If it's green around here, I'm keeping it alive."

"Ah," I said. For the first time in the months we'd known each other it was like we'd run out of things to say. I looked around the yard, nodding mindlessly.

"So, you guys want to chill first or study first?" asked Liv. It was the first time anyone had mentioned studying. I actually sighed. In relief or despair, I didn't know.

"You don't want to wash up?" I asked. "I can just hang out here for a bit." Liv was looking at Pri and didn't turn when I spoke. It was like she didn't hear me.

Pri paused for a moment and then blew out some air. "Chill first," she said. Liv grinned and clapped her hands like she was breaking a huddle.

"Cool, I'll get some towels," said Liv. "Be right back." She trotted into the house and out of sight.

"Uh, towels?" I asked. Pri looked at me with a thin smile.

"We can use the pool. Liv's dad isn't home," she said for some reason. She stood up. We were only a few feet apart. "We're still sweaty. So we can cool off." She sounded strange, like she was reading off cue cards.