"You have pretty feet."
I looked up to see who was speaking. It was Deena, a freshman who lived on my floor. She had long black hair and beautiful olive-brown skin and dark exotic features that made her look as if she was from somewhere far away...Indian maybe, or Polynesian. Later, when we were friends, she told me that she was from New Jersey. Her mother was Jewish and her father was Cuban. The mix worked; she was a gorgeous girl, maybe 5'3", with a great little body and an infectious smile. I spent the first semester of that year avoiding her. I was her R.A., her Resident Assistant, after all, and I didn't want to get in trouble. But the breathtaking sight of her roaming the hallways in nothing more than a t-shirt and shorts, with her hair down and that mischievous smile, had provided me with a distraction that I couldn't deny. I wanted her.
It was the end of February, on an unusually warm day, and I was studying in the common room of our floor, a place I usually avoided, but I was feeling lonely. Since the last spring, when I'd broken up with Kate, my first real girlfriend, I hadn't been with anyone, except for the few times I had sex with this beautiful blonde girl in my theater class. But she had a Eurotrash boyfriend, and she wanted to have a threesome with him. She was a sex maniac; one of those teenage girl models all grown up who wants to tell you about all the girls she fucked while she was posing for catalogs in Japan. I didn't believe half the things she told me, but she was an expert at eating pussy, and I missed sleeping with her, especially when she broke out the strap-on...but anyway...
I was in the common room my bare feet leaning on a chair in front of me Deena sat down. I didn't notice her at first. I was trying to finish "All the Kings Men" for my Southern Literature class that night and I was barely making a dent. She sat down on the sofa opposite me and opened a notebook. I noticed her feet as well. Sandals. A pedicure. Creamy nail polish. Her bare legs, looked freshly shaved. I looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back. "Thank you," I said. "You have cute feet too."
She smiled again, and that, I thought, was that.
When I look back on our first few meetings, I guess I should have realized that she was just as attracted to me as I to her. Attracting women (and men), was never a problem for me. I'm about 5'7", 120 lbs, with short brown hair and green eyes. My boyfriends in high school always told me I was beautiful. Sometimes I wish I was less WASP-ish looking, but I guess it works for me. I began college in the theater department, but now I wasn't so sure it was the right thing for me. I dated only boys at the beginning, but I was always meeting women, mostly in my theater classes who were willing to experiment. As my Junior year began, I met Kate, a stunning graduate student from England. We spent about ten months together, before she homesickness became too much for her. It was obvious to our friends that I put more into the relationship than she did, but at the time I didn't care. I was in love. And the sex was fantastic.
After we broke up I decided to move back into the dorms and become an R.A. The money was right (free room and board) and being away from the student ghetto made it easier to forget Kate. I didn't have to walk past all of our old haunts anymore. But it seemed a little wrong for me to be lusting after a girl on my floor, even though she was a consenting adult, and I wasn't her instructor. I was a senior and she was a freshman. But she seemed more mature than most freshman girls, and as I got to know her I learned that her father was a history professor at Princeton and her mother was a photographer. She'd traveled a lot growing up, and she had a couple of siblings that were much older than her.
So there I was, sitting across from her in the common room and we were admiring each other's feet. Mine were unpedicured (and unpolished), but I took care of them, and I guess they were better than most.
After that we were silent for awhile. I raced through a particularly boring chapter and then another, and then I watched her scribble in a notebook for a few minutes. I guess I was staring. Finally, she looked up.
"I was going to go to the cafe," I said. "The one next to the music building. Would you like to join me?"
"Okay," she said.
We walked the long way, avoiding the steep hill just outside of our dorm, and passed through the main campus. Deena said "hi" to several people, including a couple of professors, as we approached the cafe. Obviously, I wasn't the only one who was taken with her
We sat down in the cafe and ordered drinks. It was clear, after only a few minutes of talking, that she wasn't nearly as innocent as I had been lead to believe, but still she was young, and not nearly as jaded as most of the women I knew at school. She told me about the guys she'd met at school one of whom (the lucky bastard), she spent most of the previous semester with, although she dumped him after the Winter break.
"He was really into porn," she said. "He was always surfing the web for stuff."
"That's lame," I said.
"All these guys I know do it," she said. "He wanted to do stuff with me that he saw in porno movies."
"Typical."
"And he was always asking me if I'd ever kissed a girl...he was obsessed with it. We went to this lame off-campus party once and these gross girls were making out on a couch in front of everybody. All the guys at the party were like, cheering them on. I watched him looking at me and then looking at them...it was such a turnoff. It was like he was leering, you know, like a dirty old man. That's when I decided to break up with him."
I told her about some of my relationships, but I was afraid to come right out and tell her that I was basically a lesbian. I wanted her, but I didn't want to put it out there, at least not yet. Her friendship was more important.
As the weeks passed we saw more of each other. We saw movies together and spent a lot of time in the common room. We went swimming together at the pool in the new athletic center that was right across the street from our dorm. She was good swimmer, and matched me lap for lap. Of course, my favorite part was when we'd dry off and sit at our lounge chairs and talk. We touched each other a lot; she didn't mind when I would grab one of her legs, or give her a playful punch. And she was flirty with me as well. Asking me about guys, telling me how pretty I was. After the pool, we'd sometime get a drink, before going our separate ways; she to the library, me to one of my night classes, until the night before the beginning of Spring Break. She'd told me that she was going to Florida with her family for the week. I was staying on campus to finish a paper. I was feeling nervous about our friendship. I felt like a week apart might change things. I wanted to say something to her, but I couldn't figure out how I was going to do it and what I might say.
It was a particularly cold night. We were both bundled up in coats and hats. My hands were bare, hers were in stylish leather gloves that her mother bought her on a trip to Italy. We were freezing and as we walked up the steep hill (to save time) she shivered and I put my arm around her and squeezed tight. Then she put her arm around me and I walked up the hill suddenly feeling very warm. When we got to the top of the hill we separated and she took one of my hands into hers and looked into my eyes. I made a joke about how chapped my hands were from the cold and she frowned and rubbed both of them with her gloved hands to warm them up.
"That feels good," I said.
"I'm glad," she said. "You looked really cold"
We began walking and she seemed distracted. I stopped. "Deena," I said.
"What?" she asked.
I looked at her and suddenly felt very scared. "Nothing," I said. "It's stupid..it's just that I'm going to miss you."
"I'm going to miss you too."
We began walking again and she looked at me and smiled.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"Oh...now you're saying nothing."
She laughed. "I was just curious."
"About what?"
"You never asked me if I'd kissed a girl."
"Well, I wanted to ask you"
My heart began to pound. Was she asking what I thought she was asking?
"Have you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"That girl?"
"What girl?"
"That blonde girl. The really beautiful one. The one I saw you hanging out with last semester."
"Anya?"
"Is that her name?"
