NOTE: I'm flagging F/F sexual content for full transparency, but it's light and the gaze remains male throughout.
Author's Note: Yes, I know that "Melissa" and "Deborah" weren't high on the list of baby girl names in 2000 - but I couldn't resist, as they both originally meant the same thing. "Melissa" is "bumblebee" in Greek, and "Deborah" is "bumblebee" in Hebrew. When I learned that, I had to set up a situation like this one... Also, if you've read "Master of the House", you might notice that Deborah is described a lot like Kim in that story - this is not an accident.
Always interested in feedback.
2024 - A couple of weeks ago
Deborah Sanders was sitting down to a late dinner, still wearing the blouse and skirt she'd worn to work. She was an attractive young woman, with long hair neither medium brown nor red but kind of both, and a pretty face dominated by a strong nose. Deborah wasn't tall, and was youthfully slender, but had an impressive bustline that she had to keep tightly reined in with a supporting bra in order to maintain professional standards at work. But she still got stared at more than she'd like.
The door chime sounded, and Deborah's roommate, Melissa Costas, pranced across the living room to answer it. In contrast to the short, dark, curvy Deborah, Melissa was tall, sandy blonde, and slender. This evening she was dressed to impress in a wine-red dress that fell surprisingly low for a date - all the way to her lithe knees, nearly meeting her high black boots. The dress was still sexy, though, as the velvety fabric clung tightly to every youthful curve.
Melissa opened the door to reveal her date. He was fairly new - this was only their second or third time going out, as far as Deborah knew. And though he wasn't necessarily bad-looking, he wasn't Deborah's type. Hair longer than fashionable, and taken up at the back in what was more a samurai queue than a man-bun, and he obviously compensated for a nondescript face with a workout-toned body. On a second look, he appeared even older than Deborah had first thought - judicious hair coloring couldn't entirely hide his grey. Nor moisturizer his crow's feet. He was clearly too old for the Millennial Melissa, but she didn't seem bothered as she leaned in to greet her man with a kiss.
As Melissa and her beau left the apartment, Deborah reflected that her own night was unlikely to lead to the same kind of romance. She was going to go to the movies with a friend of a co-worker, and from experience was expecting yet another bland STEM graduate with no real game.
Followed by another night alone.
Dammit. She was unusually horny this evening, too.
Sighing, Deborah drained the rest of her tall glass of water and refilled it from the communal pitcher in the refrigerator before glumly returning her attention to her Caesar salad.
1998
In the kitchen of the apartment they shared, Jack Torrance and Gina Campagnaro were sitting down to dinner after coming home from the UC Irvine campus where both were grad students. Jack was a biochemist, and he constantly felt that he was lucky to be with Gina, who not only was beautiful, but was already a rising star in the small world of literary anthropology.
Jack had made a fresh salad, while Gina, who had no interest in cooking, had brought home a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket deli. Gina didn't have much interest in anything outside her studies, Jack reflected. Sometimes he wondered how much interest she really had in him.
The couple communicated, after a fashion. At least, Jack tried some gambits about his day and current events, but Gina only responded with monosyllables until he asked her about how her research was going. That was the only time that Gina blossomed.
Gina was making slow but steady progress in proving her graduate thesis. Her research was about a strange connection between cultures from around the world who have strangely similar mythology despite never contacting each other. Gina was establishing conclusively that the tribal cultures had no cultural or linguistic connections - they can't have been communicating.
Gina wasn't that interested in the mythological stories themselves. She was more an anthropologist than a literature critic.
But the stories were all that was interesting to Jack, who had always had a life outside of biochemistry. The story about a young trickster who seduces the goddess of love by fondling her breasts, so different in poetic form across cultures, so similar in details. The tales of gods who sow their wild oats, mortal women becoming unbearably horny upon just seeing them, and then becoming suggestible and obedient - even submissive at the feet of the gods - when aroused.
Gina's stories were uncannily similar whether they came from Madagascar, Patagonia, Hispaniola, Sardinia, or Hokkaido. But she had found no linguistic connection, no trade relationships, no explanation at all. Gina didn't need an explanation to defend her thesis, though, so she spared little thought for the matter.
Jack couldn't help it, though. Every time Gina had related one of these stories to him, Jack had always wondered if they were a metaphor. If they were just-so stories explaining why the women in the tribes were easily seduced and sexually submissive.
On his own, on a lark, Jack was doing some extracurricular reading to see if there were any environmental connections between the areas. Jack was attending a prestigious school with an excellent library, after all. But even in the capacious stacks at UC Irvine, Jack found nothing obvious.
No correlations genetically between the populations. Weather patterns, volcanoes, ocean currents - nothing obvious. The cultures had nothing in common other than that they were all coastal tribes in areas where farming was marginal so they depended on fishing for survival. But there was nothing unique there, there were cultures like that all over the world.
Jack had stopped telling Gina about his extracurricular reading. She didn't care.
2024 - Earlier this week
Deborah couldn't sleep. Her long, dark hair was damp with sweat, and her sheets and pillowcase were clammy. She was desperately horny. She'd been getting spontaneously aroused all week, nipples getting hard on their own, vagina getting moist just sitting at her desk at work.
Deborah had been resorting to fingering herself in order to fall asleep for a few days now. Tonight would be even worse as she could hear her roommate Melissa through the walls of their shared apartment.
Melissa had brought her new boyfriend home and Deborah's besotted roommate was still at the "can't keep her hands off him" phase. The older man was playing it cool - although Deborah felt that Melissa was out of the guy's league, he seemed to be taking her attention as no more than his due.
Melissa and her date had barely exchanged a couple of hasty greetings with Deborah before the infatuated young woman practically dragged her man to her bedroom.