My Only Talent Ch. 18
Thanks for Thanksgiving
My old high school nemesis, Alley Shitty, drove the big Suburban steadily north on the interstate, and I watched her progress as Jay and Nora slumbered. By the time we got as far north as Round Rock, all of Nora's defenses were completely down, and I had located her Suzie 'flight data recorder' and began to scan her sexual history. It was one with a few high spots but mostly disappointment. She had already told me that thanks to her parents instilling in her an abject fear of 'talent' males, and fear of sex in general, she got the same kind of indoctrination that I did about remaining celibate, and took it to heart just like I did. She had skipped so many grades that she did sixth form at Charterhouse being much younger than any other student there, but still she excelled. Probably due to her mega IQ, she found most of her so called elite classmates boring. There were a few incidents of sexually charged hazing, but she found none of them exciting in the least; they were merely something to endure and survive.
She did seem to have a tendency to attract the attention of what she had once told Suzanne she called the 'high born lout': a male from a storied family who seemed destined to not only disappoint academically but to be an embarrassment socially for many years to come. They seemed to believe they might somehow do her a favor by forcing themselves on her. She took classes in Krav Maga and actually had to use it on one pushy toff who had a very tenuous and probably false claim to royal lineage as a descendant of Eggbert of Wessex. She was happy to leave her so-called social circle behind in choosing to go 'across the pond' to ESU, where she encountered a few students with intellects that were comparable to hers, and some others that were on the complete opposite end of the bell curve. She did develop crushes on one male and one female peer, and as a seventeen year old rising junior, she had her first two sexual experiences. I located the entries in her 'flight log' and began to drill down for the details and the effects the experiences had on her.
Nora almost woke up when an Ill considered lane change by a big truck caused Alley to lean on her horn for a while, but then she settled back down into my shoulder and continued her unprotected slumber. I resumed my Suzie snooping.
A female classmate named Hannah flirted with Nora, and in one passionate encounter, confirmed Nora's potential for attraction to and satisfaction with another woman, but the classmate's next day denial that it even happened had ultimately made Nora even more fearful and suspicious and too scared of taking the risk of another such relationship. In her history, Suzanne was linked to this other girl, because as near as I could tell, she was the only other woman that Nora trusted and was also attracted to. She just didn't want to risk having a sexual adventure that ruined their friendship, especially since Suzanne, as her supervising TA, was officially her 'boss' from the ESU point of view.
Before meeting Suzanne, she also developed a major crush on an ESU incoming freshman football player, who was just about as much an opposite from her former British plonker pursuers as one could possibly imagine. Jalen was big, black, and smart, almost as smart as she was, and he must have had good taste, because he fell pretty hard for Nora, pursued her avidly, and he caught her. The sex was great for them both. But his judgment was suspect; perhaps he was spoiled because of the Texas football culture that a good player can do no wrong. Nora was deeply offended by him wasting his potential by taking easy classes for a dead end sports marketing degree, since he was sure he would make it in the NFL. He also desperately wanted to be another kind of 'player' to be seen in clubs and be photographed with rap stars, hardly Nora's goal for him. But the straw that broke the camel's back was his announcement that he could no longer have an exclusive relationship with Nora as his only girlfriend, because she was now just one of his 'string'. Her distrust of the male of the species was now just as strongly reinforced as it was for the female.
Since those two ultimately unsatisfying relationships, Nora had been throwing herself into her studies, sublimating her desires. She had certainly excelled academically, and was about to finish two degrees in three years, but she was horny as hell, just like Suzanne had been. She wanted Suzanne, and she wanted me, and the prospect of having both of us at once was galvanically exciting for her, and in fact it was the central image in all her masturbatory activities since the current semester began. But her fear and distrust, plus her parent's early indoctrination, was enough to keep her from actually taking advantage of the opportunity. There was some other connection to all this that I could not tease out, another signal akin to the others but different. It was linked to all the sexual images I was deciphering, but I couldn't pin down what it was.
I did find that my newly developed and improved Suzie signal receiving capabilities allowed me to delve into her recorded fantasies in detail, and I was just about to tap into and enjoy playing them back in chronological order when Alley Shitty's voice broke my concentration, and what's worse, startled Nora fully awake.
"Salado, Texas, everyone! Shopping stop in progress! This is a great place to get an early start on Christmas shopping, with stores full of unique stuff nobody else will find to give to any of your friends and family."
Suddenly Nora and Alley were best buds, sharing Christmas gift lists and suggestions. Alley parked on the south end of a strip of stores east of the interstate, and they announced they were going to work their way north for an hour or so. Jay and I realized we should probably look for few gifts too, and we sheepishly tagged along. Nora took charge of making me choose appropriate gifts for my mother, grandmother, older sister, and Lara and Suzanne, tapping out my gift budget and all the money I had made on Kevin's bets at the fraternity and sorority mixers. Alley did the same for Jay in searching for gifts for the females of the Kincaid clan. Two hours later we were back on the road, but Nora was now energized and never got even close to going back to sleep.
.....
Sarah Stevens Susskind was on a mission. She told her parents she was going to visit a new friend in Dallas first, then drive on to Texarkana to meet them at her grandmother's for Thanksgiving dinner. She actually planned to spend every minute until early Thanksgiving morning following Robbie. She was devastated that he had not wanted to spend Thanksgiving with her, and she was never going to let that happen again. She was going to find out what he was doing, who he doing it was with, and see where his family lived. Robbie had never seen her car, and it was well suited to her surveillance mission: an average looking grey Jetta TDI that got great mileage and could go over 600 miles on a tank of diesel.
She had no trouble following the big Suburban on the interstate, and she stayed close to their car while Robbie and the others went shopping at Salado. She took advantage of the break to go to the bathroom and fill up her fuel tank. But not long after they left Salado and went north again, she was foiled when they went through a private gate where she could not follow. She found a place to park that was shielded from view by some trees, and waited, watching that gate, and accessing Google Earth on her smart phone to try to see where that gate might lead.
.....
