Julie Murphy was running late, as usual. Since moving to Birmingham 20 years ago, she had wholeheartedly embraced the Southern tradition that, if you're 10 minutes late, you're right on time. She had come here right out of graduate school, taking her first full-time academic position at UAB. She never meant to stay, figuring to be here for 5 years at the most. But she met her husband Jonathan in Birmingham, they had started a family, and Julie had quickly moved up the career ladder. Full professor; tenure granted a year ahead of schedule; she had even served several years as department chair.
As chair, Julie had granted herself permission to establish a Center, a request that had been denied by all her previous chairs. The Center for Mathematics Education was a one-woman operation, but it had quickly become her passion. The Center had two primary focuses: encouraging more high school students, particularly girls, to consider majoring in math; and providing workshops for high school teachers to be able to teach math in ways that made it more interesting to their students.
By any objective measure, the Center had been a stellar success. More than 30 local high schools had fully participated as 'partners' in the workshop series, and dozens more had completed at least some of them. Among the 30 partner schools, they had seen an increase of nearly 40 percent in their graduates who planned to major in math as college students; the other schools had smaller but still impressive gains. Follow up interviews showed that most of these students continued as math majors and were excited about their academic choice.
Most gratifying to Julie were the testimonials she got from the teachers. Many of them had been teaching for decades, and had long since given up on finding new ways to make math relevant and exciting to their students. Some of them cried when they talked about how the workshops had reinvigorated their careers. All of them were excited about the increases in majors. And they gave Dr. Julie Murphy all the credit.
As much as she has loved her own teaching, and as good as she had been at being department chair, Julie came to see the work of the Center as her genuine contribution. So much so that she stepped down as chair, and cut back on her teaching, to be able to devote more time to running the Center.
The only part about running the Center that Julie hated was the fundraising. The University gave her no funding, and damned little in the way of resources. She'd had to fight like hell to get course releases to teach fewer classes. She relied on outside sources of money to keep the operation afloat.
She got some grants, and received sporadic funding from national organizations, but since this was primarily a local initiative, Julie relied on the business and philanthropic communities in Birmingham. The fundraising wasn't something she enjoyed, but she had gotten good at it.
Julie Murphy would have been described by nearly everyone else as a stunning woman. But not by herself. She had grown up with an almost crippling lack of self-confidence. She reached her full height of 6' 2" in junior high school, and was teased and tormented by cruel classmates and a particularly hateful older sister throughout her high school years. More than anything, she wanted to disappear. Not literally, but in that way that many seem to have, during those awkward teenage years, of becoming invisible.
Julie tried her best to divert attention from herself. She wore loose-fitting jeans and baggy sweatshirts, and slouched down whenever she had to stand. She sat on the back row, kept her head down, stayed quiet, and focused on her schoolwork. She rarely dated, and outside of a few close friends, had little in the way of a social life.
By the time she was in graduate school, however, Julie had blossomed. Her height had always made her stand out, but now the rest of her appearance did, too. She had small, perfectly shaped tits, topped with prominent nipples that were always hard. She hated wearing a bra, and so rarely did. She assumed that no one would notice, but nearly every man who looked at her knew instantly.
Hard work in the gym had toned her body and flattened her stomach. Her best assets, those impossibly long legs, were lean and powerful from running. Her thigh muscles rippled when she walked. And you could have bounced a quarter off her tight ass. Julie had gotten prettier, too, in the way that so many gangly girls seem to do as they get into their 20's. She'd grown her hair out longer, and it had developed a loose natural curl that was very appealing.
In short, Julie Murphy was a tall, beautiful woman, who now drew a lot of attention to herself. Men hit on her constantly, a new experience for her, and she let them seduce her. She wasn't stupid; she knew they only wanted to have sex with her. So she decided to play their game.
She entered into what she thought of as her "slutty" phase (although, she would have been furious if anyone else had used that word). She ran through bed partners at a rate that would make many men feel woefully inadequate. She had a series of very short-term relationships, many of them one night stands, over the next several years.
Along the way, Julie acquired two things. One was a tremendous amount of sexual experience. She learned what she liked, and what men liked, and frankly just became a really good fuck. Her experience gave her a measure of confidence, and she learned the art of flirting to get what she wanted. The other thing she acquired was more problematic, though. She developed a taste for that spark of a new relationship. Since all of her relationships remained "new", she never learned the virtues of comfort, familiarity, or contentment.
When she started in her Ph.D program, she decided that her slut days needed to come to an end. Her work load at school was going to require a much more disciplined approach, and this was starting to get close to real life. Time to settle down. During her last year, she began dating a law school student, and they married shortly after they both graduated. He moved with her to Birmingham.
They settled in to life in their new city. They bought a home; he set up a private practice; Julie started teaching and establishing her research agenda. But it turned out that her husband had been with Julie for the same reason that all those other men had: he liked the sex. He just liked it so much that he stayed around. He was somehow able to hide his true self from Julie for a while, but eventually it came out. He was a horrible person, and a worse husband. Before the end of her first year in Birmingham, she was desperately unhappy.
One of the first people Julie had met in her new home was a man named Jonathan Brown, who worked in a research office on the UAB campus. They developed an easy friendship, and often had lunch together. They were also part of a group from campus who would meet for drinks after work on Friday afternoons. One Friday, they stayed as the others drifted home, until only the two of them remained.
