I can't believe I lost so much time daydreaming today.
I'm actually kind of embarrassed about it; you know what my classload is like this semester, Sylvie. I don't have time to daydream, especially not with finals coming up. Remember how I told you I was going to the library today and I was going to really hit the books hard for at least five hours?
Shyeah. Like that happened. It's not fair, having weather this nice when we're trying to study! And it's extra not fair having a library with big, wide, panoramic windows that show the whole freaking campus! Here I am, staring at engineering textbooks that can make a student's eyes glaze over at the best of times, and what am I looking out over? Hacky sack, frisbee, and sun-tanning! I think I got about two paragraphs in before my eyes wandered up over the textbook to stare at the warm, sunny afternoon.
I tried to keep my focus at first, I really did. I dragged my eyes back down to circuit diagrams and tried to calculate resistances, but every few minutes my pencil would just start doodling and my eyes would drift back out to gaze aimlessly. I could just picture it in my head, the lazy heat of late spring and the breeze just strong enough to cool that heat off. It just felt so vivid to me that the real world of the library just sort of faded away, and the only thing I saw was the picture inside my head.
I was sun-bathing. I don't really tan, actually; I'm an engineering student, I think it's in our contract that we have to have milk-white skin regardless of gender. But in my daydream, I was in a tiny little electric blue bikini, and I was spreading out my towel, and everyone was looking at me--and not in that creepy, weird, "Does she know she has that mole there?" sort of way, like I always worry everyone's looking at me when I'm showing any skin. No, they were looking at me like I was actually pretty--oh, shush, Sylvie. You always say that.
And in the daydream, I lay down on my towel, and just as I got out the suntan lotion, one of the hacky sack players broke away from the game and wandered over to me. And he knelt down next to me, and he said, "Do you need any help putting the lotion on?" He had just the tiniest trace of a French accent, and he looked...don't laugh, okay? He looked like Adrien Brody in 'King Kong'. And I looked at those long, slender hands and I gave this tiny little nod, because the sun was so warm and I was already so relaxed and it just felt like too much effort to move, even in my daydream.
I could imagine it so perfectly, Sylvie. It felt way more real than the library. I could actually feel the coolness of the lotion as it dribbled out of the bottle onto my back, and I could feel the warmth of his hands as he worked it into my skin. It felt so good, like all my muscles were melting, and I let out a little whimper.
Then I realized I'd actually whimpered out loud. That snapped me out of the daydream pretty quick. I know I was blushing as I looked around, but it must not have been that loud because nobody was glaring at me or anything. I tried to refocus my eyes; I must have sat there blinking for about a solid minute before the text looked like anything but blurry squiggles to me. I'm sure it was totally obvious to anyone who looked that I was off in la-la land.
My trip back to reality didn't last long at all. I read about six pages before I realized that I couldn't actually tell you what was on any of them; I'd just been sitting there, turning pages and staring at the text without really taking any of it in. My eyes were seeing the words, but my mind was seeing the warm towel again, and feeling the hands on my body rubbing and massaging the lotion in. The campus had totally vanished, now; I was on a sandy beach, somewhere in the Mediterranean, staring off at that warm water that's such a bright shade of blue that it almost seems fake. I didn't know why my brain had decided on the Mediterranean, but a little voice in the back of my head kept describing it, and it sounded so good that I found myself going right along with the idea. The waves kept washing in onto the shore, making that dull crash that fades into a dull roar, and it all felt...perfect.