Once and Again

1978 -- San Diego State University

"Smegma".

I didn't look up, although I knew immediately that the distasteful word had been whispered to get a reaction from me. Still looking down at my book, I let my eyes roll to my right to view the girl, the young woman, who had taken the seat kitty-corner across from me.

It wasn't the first time I'd noticed or admired her, but it was the first time we had ever shared a table. Most days, here on the fifth floor of the university library, there were multiple of us from my engineering classes who studied together at this table. She normally sat at the table next to us, along with multiple of her fellow students. Today, for some unknown reason, it was just the two of us.

Our eyes had crossed before, and although there had always been that little spark of attraction between people who didn't know each other, this was the first time either of us had spoken to the other. We never arrived nor departed at the same time, it's just that we "shared" adjacent tables, and I knew her eyes strayed my way as much as mine did to her. I'd looked for her around campus, but despite desiring to say hello when my fellow engineers or her friends weren't there to overhear or interrupt, it had never happened.

Normally I was in the library first. I'd let my eyes roll to the side or let my eyes rise to admire her body. I don't know as she always checked me out, but often her eyes met mine. That is, they would if I could raise them from her gorgeous bust that she was showing off to the world.

There was no doubt that she was showing off her breasts to the world. I guessed that they were probably a C cup; large grapefruit-sized breasts ensconced in her top, but not the massive melons of my friend Carol, nor were they the unencumbered exaggerated nipples of her co-ed friend who never wore a bra and had tits so small she really didn't need to. That her co-ed friend was showing off her nipples as much as this girl was showing off her larger bosom was readily recognized by me. If nothing else, just by the smirk when she caught me looking. This girl wore crop tops that left her belly exposed; tube tops that left her belly and shoulders exposed and often required regular 'adjusting' to keep her girls in check; a silky top that allowed the black or red bra she wore beneath to show through, or perhaps her most common: something with a deep vee that left the insides of her breasts bare, the bra cut back enough that it didn't show. All were designed to show off her breasts and seldom did she arrive that I, or more than one of my fellow engineering nerds, looked up to admire her. Many had been the discussions later as we left about how hot she had been that day.

"That's an unusual word to speak to me for the first time." I said it so that she could barely hear it, just as she had spoken "smegma" almost under her breath.

"What?" she said, pretending she hadn't heard or understood. I knew she had. "You talking to me?"

"I said, 'That's an unusual word to speak to me for the first time'," repeating myself just a bit louder.

"What makes you think I was talking to you?"

I turned and looked her in the eyes, purposely letting my eyes drop "You normally sit at the other table, and this time you sat across from me. And then you say an...

unusual...

word just loud enough for nobody but me to hear while gauging me to see if I'll react. Was my reaction enough for you?"

"You don't even know what that word means."

It was a challenge, and I didn't need to think about how to respond. "Peter Butter? Vagina Jelly?" I said, letting her know that I did indeed know what smegma and its sexual definition was and that, perhaps, I could embarrass her as much or more than she thought she could embarrass me. I could almost feel the heat from her blush.

"I didn't think

anyone

would know that word." I gave it a wry smile and nodded that yes indeed, I did, know that word.

"Jeremy," I said a moment later. "You?"

"Meredith."

"Glad to meet you, Meredith. What's with the... unusual... word."

"I just learned it in my biology class. It's been in my mind, and I've never heard it before."

"So, you tried to embarrass me with it?"

"No, really, I didn't think that

anyone

would know it. How do

you

know it?"

"My wife and I taught sex-ed classes for a couple of years."

"You're married?" she said, glancing at my hand and seeing nothing.

"Past tense. You?" Marriage at 18 is no longer a norm, and suffice it to say my wife and I found out why. It was a wonderful two years, followed by one year of hell before we separated. Surprisingly, my ex-wife and I were better friends than we were spouses, our friendship over the last couple of years had twice included mutually sharing marital benefits. I could see the rock on her finger and assumed Meredith was married, although I had reservations about

her

age. She appeared quite young to me, probably a freshman, so 18, maybe 19 at the most?

"Not yet. Engaged."

"Too bad," I nodded, crestfallen. I really meant it, just in these few words together I knew that if she hadn't said that, I was going to ask her out, but instead, I backed off.

"Well, I'm not married yet." The electricity jumped between us as she said this, my cock expanding in my pants.

"So, you're flirting with me?"

"Like I said, engaged."

That was the beginning of our flirtatious interactions. In my mind, that she was engaged meant she was off-limits. I could tease and flirt with her, which whenever we were alone is what happened, but I wasn't going to even try to get in her pants. Not that I wouldn't have liked to, but until she lost that ring, she was off-limits for me.

~

"Heya, Meredith!" I greeted her in the elevator. I'd been studying at my same old spot for the last three days, this was the first time, in this new semester, that I'd run into her. "What's new?" I jostled her elbow with mine, causing her to hold up her hand and show me the now-complete wedding ring. "Oh wow! Married?"

"Over the summer break."

"Damn. I guess that means no more flirting for me?" She just gave me a wry smile and said nothing.

~

"Jerry!" Rick called out from the table he was at in the commons. I'd just grabbed a beer and was heading toward another friend's table when he saw me.

"Hey Rick, what's up?" I asked as I slowed down, glancing down at the open Electrical Engineering book on the table. Rick and I had been in a Physics class and then later a Chemistry class together the previous year, although he was a civil engineering student, and I was electrical. He was at least a year behind me, we'd just crossed paths as I'd taken other classes first, going back to take the obligatory science classes that all engineering students had to take.

"God, I don't understand this shit at all." I moved behind him and looked over his shoulder, recognizing the basic electrical theory textbook, and the elementary circuits showing on the pages. I remembered how I'd had a hard time when I saw it the first time too, but I considered it easy now. Once I got a few basic concepts into my mind, the complexity of the rest sort of fell apart and became a little easier.

"You changing majors?" I asked, pulling up a seat next to him.

"Oh, fuck no! No, I've gotta take this basic electrical class and it makes no sense to me. Do you get it?"

I understood the query and suspected he was here, in the commons, strictly to bump into me. I'd been by this spot many times since we'd been in Physics and Chem together, but this was the first time he'd shown up where we used to meet. Back then we'd regularly come here after class, cussed and discussed what we'd just had in class. For the price of a beer, I'd then explain what it was that we'd done that he hadn't quite gotten. It got to where he called me "professor" as I always seemed to be able to explain things in a different way, sometimes requiring several times, until I could practically see the lightbulb illuminate in his head. "Need a tutor?" I asked, knowing full well this was his plea for help.

"I need something." He looked over at me, "Do you think you could maybe tutor me? Help an old buddy out?"

I sighed. Yeah, I could tutor him. No, I didn't really have the time, but I also knew that while he'd thought I was tutoring him in Physics and Chemistry, my having to explain it to him had also made me understand it better. That I got an A in both of those classes (while he squeaked by with just B's and C's and almost flunked one of them) had been as much because I had to learn it better to teach him what he didn't know. In a convoluted sense, I felt I owed him for my success, even as he thought he owed me.

I looked around and sighed. "Yeah, I can help. Not here though, too damn noisy and we'll need lots of scrap paper and room to spread out. The library is too picky about noise and talking, otherwise that would be perfect. Do you have someplace at least semi-quiet?"

"How about after school? Come to my place?"

"Depends. Where's your place?"

'My wife and I have a studio apartment..."

"Wife? Holy Shit man! I didn't know you were married." I glanced down, seeing a simple gold ring on his finger

"Yeah, last summer. Mary and I have been dating since high school and we got married over the break."

"Well, Congrats! What made you get married now?"

He grinned, and I knew what he was going to say. "Sex, of course. Do you know what the difference between a fiancée and a wife is?" I could feel that this was a joke -- but didn't know the punch line.

"Nooo..."

"One goes to bed and goes home, the other goes home and goes to bed." I shook my head and rolled my eyes, but couldn't help laughing. I'd heard something similar previously but didn't know why it didn't come to mind until then. I moved to the side, pulled up a chair, and dropped my backpack onto the table opposite. "OK, gimme your address," I said, pulling out a notepad. He gave me the address and I said, "What time are you available?"

"How about dinner time?"

"How about after dinner?"

"How about before? Come over before and I'll have Mary make us dinner."

~

Student apartments are nothing special, especially when they're studios. Bed, kitchen, kitchen table, and maybe there's room for a sofa or easy chair. The only advantage to Mary and Rick's place was that it was within walking distance of the school.

The couch was non-existent and there wasn't even room for it. The bed, just a double bed, not even queen size, took up the majority of the one room. There was a slight alcove of a kitchen, of which currently the table was pushed in there to give room elsewhere. A TV was on a small stand directly opposite the bed, taking up enough room so one needed to carefully squeeze between the TV and the bed to get by. There were two folding kitchen chairs and one with fixed legs in the "living room," the total of all furniture in their apartment.

"Come on in and I'll get us a beer," Rick said as he answered the door. I followed him inside, and seeing that the table wasn't where we could sit beside each other, I pulled it out toward the bed while he opened the fridge and grabbed us beers. Reaching for the folding chair, I saw the wedding picture on the nightstand beside the bed. I recognized her immediately: Rick and, although he'd called her Mary, I knew her as Meredith. I reached over and picked up the picture, just as Rick stepped back with two beers. "That's Mary," he said, "Quite the looker, isn't she?"

"Meredith." Similar to the way she wore clothes to show off her tits in the library, her wedding dress did the same. Her shoulders were bare, as were the tops of her breasts. The deep vee between them was accented by a panel of mesh. I couldn't help it when I thought that Rick had probably had his cock pushed up between those gorgeous globes many times.

"What? You know her?"

"Yeah, we've been studying at the same tables in the library the last couple of semesters."

Rick stopped and looked at me for a moment, the lightbulb illuminating in his face as I'd seen so many times when he suddenly 'got it,' as everything came together in his head. "You're Jerry."

"Yeah..." I responded quizzically. "You know that." Of course, I was Jerry, he knew that. Like the dummy that I can occasionally be, it didn't dawn on me that the way he said it, he was reiterating something that Mary, or Meredith, had told him.

"Mary's told me about the Jerry that she's been studying with, I just never realized it was you."

"Small world, isn't it? But Mary and I don't actually study together, just that she normally studies with her girlfriends at the table next to where I study. She told me at the beginning of the semester she'd gotten married, but never told me your name, so I had no clue it was you." I reached over to put the picture back on the bedstand. "She's sure gorgeous, isn't she?" Rick handed me a beer without answering. "To studying!" I said, holding my bottle out to him and he reached back, clinking his beer bottle to me.

~

"No!" I reiterated, yet again, perhaps the fourth time I'd tried with this particular simple circuit. "That one is in

series

. You have to go

through

both of them to get from point A to point B.

These two

paths are in parallel. You don't

have

to go through either of these two, but you have to go through one or the other. Look, it's like the streets. To get from here to the U, do you go down Broadway? Or do you go down Main?"

"Usually Main."

"Right. Makes sense, it's closer." I tried again with the street analogy, using different streets and different paths, "... so that one path from B to C is "

in series

" with either of these other two. Right?"

He looked at it again for a moment, and I knew what he was going to say even before he did. "I don't get it."

"Jesus Fucking Christ, Rick!? Why do you have to make everything so difficult?" I heard a giggle behind me and turned to find Meredith standing at the end of the bed, a smirk on her face.

"I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks he can be obtuse."

"Jerry, this is my wife, Mary."

I stood and turned to her, "Glad to meet you

Mary

," I said, holding out my hand to her. "You know, you look just like this woman who's been studying at the table next to mine in the library. She's a spitting image of you... goes by the name of Meredith. Do you know her?"

"No. No... I don't think I've ever met her." She smiled, the tip of her tongue slithering across her lips. I'm sure my eyes got large, understanding with my cock that Mary had just flirted with me in front of her husband. That I'd imagined her tongue slithering between my lips or over my cock head, that this was also what she was thinking, was unmistakable. Embarrassed at the sudden swelling in my pants, the same swelling that Meredith had been inducing in the library for months now, I turned back to the table and sat to ignore her and concentrate on Rick's problems.

Rick gave her a brief explanation that he'd gotten stuff out to make a simple spaghetti meal for dinner and asked if she'd make it while we continued to study. Mary agreed, but said she was going to take a shower first. Sitting where I was, I ignored her, just hearing her moving around behind me, and not seeing anything until suddenly I heard the bathroom door close. A moment later the shower started. As the shower came on, the lightbulb in Rick's head also came on -- and suddenly,

he got it

! Everything I'd said before he could repeat, reiterate, reword, and say another way -- and he got it right every time. Moving on to more advanced concepts, within twenty minutes he'd made more progress than he had in two weeks of beating his head against the wall.

I heard the door to the bath open and heard Meredith, or Mary, as Rick called her, coming out. With the bathroom behind me, I didn't look up to see her until she squeezed by the table and me into the kitchen. As she slipped around me, my eyes came up to find her bottom ensconced in a form-fitting sweater dress. I couldn't help it, my eyes latched onto her gorgeous butt, realizing there was no sign of any underwear visible. Her dress was like a second skin from behind, clinging to her bottom, the cleft of her ass quite visible without a single panty line. I felt my cock expanding in my pants, once again so glad that I was seated behind the table. I momentarily imagined her bottom naked, her bending forward and me sliding my cock through the crack of her ass. I guiltily looked over to Rick, he was looking at his papers and book, not even paying attention to the delectable wet dream that had squeezed by me. A minute later Mary called to him from the kitchen and he got up and walked to her. He was standing between Mary and me so I couldn't see or hear what they were saying, but I hear him giggle, and as he turned back, his "That's up to you," I did hear.

No longer could I concentrate on what Rick and I were supposed to be studying, but now that he'd gotten over the initial hurdle of differentiating parallel and series, he was making great progress on his own and I didn't have to. That my eyes continued to caress his wife whenever he didn't have a problem and I wasn't looking at what he was doing, I don't know if he knew or not. Occasionally her eyes moved my way and her eyebrows would rise, or she would lasciviously smile, flirting with me just as she did so often in the library.

I'd lusted over Mary in the library. We'd flirted, we'd teased, but except that she had a lot of blouses that displayed her magnificent cleavage, not in any of that time had she worn anything braless, at least that I'd ever detected. And I definitely tried to detect that, daily. But she was definitely braless now. The gentle sway of her breasts, as she moved around, was like a magnet to my gaze. Her breasts were too large to go braless in public, but here, in the privacy of her apartment, her breasts and cleavage were completely covered although I readily detected she had left them unbundled. That her nipples were erect, or at least visible where they pushed against the sweater dress, was also obvious. I tried to ignore her, but every time I looked away from Rick and his work, I found myself looking at her, my eyes drawn to the titillating enticement of her unencumbered bosom. Several times she turned to catch my eyes rising from her bosom with a knowing smile. She knew she had great tits and enjoyed showing them off.

Rick came up with another little problem. I reworded what he didn't understand, explaining it to him differently, and as he jumped into understanding it was right as Mary moved up beside the table and Rick. Putting her hand on his shoulder, he sat upright, his hand slipping behind her and onto her butt. I could see through my peripheral vision, without looking directly at her, as his hand caressed her bottom. "Dinner's ready. Can we put this away for the night?"

"Oh my God, Babe! Jerry has gotten me going finally. I've made more progress here tonight than I have in weeks in that damn class," he enthused.

"Good! Does that mean we can put it away for the evening and maybe watch a movie after dinner?"

"Go to the movies?" I asked, not understanding what she meant.

"On TV," Rick explained, "We've got a VCR."

"

You've

got a VCR?" I repeated, shocked, as the price of a VCR was well out of range for the typical college student. VCRs had only been around for a few years at the time. Hollywood had sued to prevent their implementation and sale claiming that the ability to copy or record movies was infringing on their ability to make money from getting people to go to the movies. They lost, but the price of VCRs was still in the many hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Not many starving college students could afford them.