Melissa was excruciatingly bored as she looked out at her eighth period Algebra class. It was her first year working at a private school after six years working at the wildly underfunded city school district that was only a 15 minute drive from where she sat, but may as well have been on another continent.
Her morning walk had been through metal detectors, but now was past organic tomato and Brussel Sprout beds that where fertilized by compost created by the student run "Environmental Team."
While at first having nearly 100% attendance at each class and having multiple students offer to answer each question had been exciting, Melissa soon grew bored. She could have walked into the room threw the text book on the floor and gone to sleep and these future Ivy Leaguers would be fine. Even the ones that weren't that smart had parents who would make whatever "donation" was needed to make it happen. After teaching this class for six year previously she even had all her lesson plans done for pretty much the whole year.
This new job also afforded her the opportunity to live without a roommate for the first time, which at first had been great. No one else's mess around, quiet whenever she wanted it, those first few weeks had been glorious. It didn't take long though to start hating those exact things. Melissa didn't have a ton of friends, and she wasn't that aggressive in her dating life. It became so easy for her to leave work without having talked to many other adults, then come home and talk to no one, then do it all over again the next day.
Melissa had quit trying to get to know her fellow faculty members soon after arrival. Most of them had been here for many years, and they actually thought they had hard jobs. She could not bear to listen to them complain about meeting all the "diverse needs" of their students. I mean, dear god, some of the students this year had asked for less homework!
Thankfully ninth period was her free class, and then she just had to manage her "extra activity" before she could call it a day. Extra activity was just way to assure each student had plenty of extracurricular garbage to fill out those precious college applications. She was also expected to write a glowing recommendation for each student in her group.
Once the bell range and all her students politely filed from the room Melissa was free to read "her stories". She liked thinking of them that way because of the way her mother used to call the soaps she watched that, and it made her giggle to compare her mother's love of those ridiculous old shows to her enjoyment of the dirty adventures the characters she would read about would get involved in. Melissa closed the door and found a new chapter from one from one of her favorite authors. It was about a college freshman trying to pay her tuition in an unusual way.
She was about half way through when she heard a knock on her door. Annoyed, she closed the window on her computer and said "Come in."
The young IT guy walked in, looking a bit tentative. He was also new; Melissa had met him at this summer's new staff orientation. He was tall, a former college swimmer who clearly kept himself in shape. She thought his name was Pierce.
"Hi" Melissa started after it appeared he wasn't going to explain what he was doing here. "Can I help you?" Melissa was able to glance at his staff ID, she was happy that she was right about his name.
"Ummmm Hi Ms. Jones, I umm, I'm Pierce I'm the new IT guy" Melissa didn't understand why he was being weird, he had seemed pretty confident this summer.
"Ya I remember meeting you at the new staff event in August, what can I do for you?" Melissa wanted to get this over with.
"Well, I ummmm, part of my job is to monitor internet usage and ummmm there is kind of a problem coming from your room."
"I doubt it, I teach math and I never have the students on computers, sorry" Melissa wished he would get out.
"Ummm well it's ahhh from your account. The log shows that you have visited a pornographic website multiple times. At first I thought it might just be a mis-click so I ignored it but I kind of need you to know I can see whatever you do online here."
Melissa's heart sank. How could she be so stupid? At her last school the computers were so old she had used her own laptop for work, and the IT department was so overwhelmed that on the days the internet worked it was simply an open connection that anyone could connect anything to. She had gotten used to that freedom and hadn't even considered someone was paying attention to such things here.
"Oh my god, I uhh I'm so sorry, I just ummmm" Melissa felt like she was drowning.
Pierce jumped in. "I'm the only one who can see this kind of thing, and honestly the board of trustees running this place seems totally baffled by email, so I doubt anyone is going to try and audit my records. I don't put any blocks on the staff accounts as it's sometimes helpful to show a clip from a movie or TV show that would be blocked if shown in its entirety or something like that."
Melissa didn't know what he was getting at. All she could think about was how she was going to explain to her friends that she had been fired from her new job. The city might actually still take her back even with something like this, but she would have to stay there for the rest of her career.
"So I'll delete this stuff for you, but just know I can see whatever you're looking at. I don't want to sound creepy but it's kind of my job." Pierce finished.
It took Melissa a moment to understand what he was saying. "So you mean you're not turning me in? I'm not going to lose my job?" Melissa asked.
"Uhhh no, don't worry about it. I don't really want to sit in a meeting and explain the kind of stuff you were looking at to a bunch of rich 80 year olds. Also I don't want to explain why I didn't say anything the first 10 or 15 times you did it." Pierce said with a slight grin.
Melissa felt light headed, she was so relieved. In a matter of five minutes she had gone from horny, to annoyed, to sick to her stomach to feeling overwhelming relief.
"Oh my god, thank you so much, I'll so, oh fuck I'm so embarrassed I just get kind of bored and well I shouldn't..." Melissa finally stopped her rambling and just looked at this young man who suddenly looked a lot more interesting. "Thank you."
Pierce stood up to leave, "Don't worry about it, and by the way I'm also looking forward to finding out how Taylor earns enough money for her tuition. I also think that was some solid advice you gave the author after chapter three." He then winked at her and walked out of the door.
Melissa just stared at where he had been sitting. Taylor was the main character in the series of stories she had been reading. Had he been reading along also? He could even see the comments she had made? She had revealed some very unique "personal" interests in some of those comments. He probably even could see her rating for each story. Melissa dropped her head to her desk. She was relieved to still have her job, but now she was going to have to come to work with someone who knew her dirty interests. She wondered if anyone else had to sit in faculty meetings with someone who knew they liked stories where babysitters blackmailed MILF's and a college student made a freshman lick their feet while they masturbated.