Goosebumps rise up on my neck in spite of the heat, and I shiver.
He squeezes my hand. I run my tongue over my lips and look him dead in the eye.
“What if you’re my Daddy?” I say, deadpan.
“Then I’ll have to punish you for getting fucked so hard.”
“Christ, Luke,” I mutter. I’m blushing, equal parts turned on and cracking up.
“Ring looks good on you,” he says, glancing down.
“What’s gotten into you tonight?”
“Sometimes I get like this after I play. I don’t know, I’m just all hyped up. It’s the competition, I guess.” He shrugs and takes a sip of his whisky drink. “Sky, I’ve loved taking care of you.”
“You loved being my bitch.”
He laughs. “Whatever you want to call it. But I don’t want you to forget about all we’ve done. But lately, I can’t stop thinking about fucking you. My mind is going wild. I’m having sex dreams every night.”
“About me?”
“Unless you have a twin.”
“What happens in them?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“That bad?”
“Let’s just say one of the dreams involved handcuffs, a blindfold, and you getting into whichever position I ordered you to.”
“That sounds hot. Why wouldn’t I want to know the details of it?”
“What were you saying to Ryan?” he asks, and it’s not lost on me that he changes the subject without giving me the details of his dream.
“Operation Romper,” I say, taking another sip of my drink. “I think it may actually be working.”
“Jennifer’s cheating on him this week,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his jawline, and looking whimsically into the crowd. “I know she is.”
“Holy shit. Why don’t you tell him?”
“Obviously I don’t know for sure. Just a hunch, instinct. Anyways, we both know that Ryan would shoot the messenger, and somehow it wouldn’t be her fault. He’s beyond irrational.”
I hate admitting he’s right.
“So we go through with this to the end.”
“Why stop now?” Luke says, tilting his head back as he takes a drink.
And there is it, that dark edge again.
Suddenly I get the feeling that Luke might actually enjoy fooling people with this lie.
I would judge him, except that I’m starting to enjoy it too.
“So I hear fiancée head is the best head. Is that true?” I say, twirling my hair.
“I wouldn’t know,” Luke says, tapping his lips. I lean in to give him a kiss.
“Well, what do you say we go back to my hotel room and find out?”
18
Skylar
The way spring term finally arrives at Greene State makes me think of a butterfly coming out of its cocoon.
The dirty grey snow—blackened by the pollution after it’s been around all winter, finally melts away, yielding to the blooming flowers, budding trees, and the green grass.
It’s a happy time of year to be reminded of why the school is called Greene State and not Grey State.
Three weeks into the term, I get my cast off, and damn if I don’t feel like a whole new butterfly myself.
Nothing like walking around on crutches for a month to remind you how great it is to be able to simply walk around on your own two feet.
Except for a little scar on the left side of my face, my body looks and feels as good as new. When I waltz into Professor Rose’s Human Sexuality class—yes I got in—I even do a little robot dance to show off my new bones, which gets a chuckle.
I sit down next to Janice, who smiles cordially at me.
Ever since I’ve gotten engaged, I can tell she’s become a little distant. Like Luke is to Ryan, she’s a loyal best friend. From her perspective, I think she’s worried I’m jumping head over heels into something a little too quickly, which I respect.
Professor Rose starts class off today with a picture of a woman in farm garb.
“Hysteria. Where does the word come from?”
She continues. “It was most commonly used as a medical term in the late 1800s. Marriage was a lot different in those days than it is from today. Women basically had two paths: that of the Madonna, or that of the whore. Well, I guess technically three if you want to add the part of the ‘old maid.’ Now, going back as long as humans have used agriculture—oh, about four thousand years or so—women have been largely used as bargaining. Chips, property, seen as nothing more than a way for the patriarchy to make children.”
She paces the class and lets that sink in.
Professor Cole Hanks, her husband, sits on a stool to the side, nodding. He’s got glasses, a few grey hairs popping out of his beard, and I’m pretty sure every woman in the class is wishing he wasn’t married.
“Female sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly high on the priorities list. Which is fair enough when you’re more worried about where your next meal was coming from, or if you lived on the plains and you were worried if you were going to be able to plant enough food by hand for this year’s harvest.”
“However,” Professor Cole Hanks steps in. “In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a strange phenomenon began to occur. Women came down with a mysterious sickness called hysteria. Symptoms included anxiety, insomnia, and sexual forwardness. They would head to the doctor’s office, where they would be ‘cured’ of their hysteria by a fun new treatment. The doctor would roll up his sleeves—all doctors were men back then, mind you—pull up the patient’s skirt, and get to work fingering her clitoris.”
Jaws fall open throughout the class, and a gasp is heard.
“That was like…a real thing?” says one of the slack-jawed guys in the front row.
“Sometimes they would even put up a curtain around the woman’s waist, so they wouldn’t even look her in the eye while they ‘administered the orgasms.’ Some treatment, eh?”
The class is so quiet, you could hear a pin drop.
Professor Rose poses a question to the class. “Why do we think these wives were so desperate for release?”
“Their husbands couldn’t get the job done!” some joker from the back yells out. That gets a laugh.
“Actually, that’s not far off. But why not? Think a little deeper.”
No one answers, and Professor Hanks continues. “American culture, by nature, contains a vein of Puritan sexual suppression. It’s almost inescapable. Men had grown accustomed to viewing women in a simplistic fashion, in one of two ways: a virginal Madonna or a whore.”
“Some men only used their wives for procreational sex, and nothing more. Anything above missionary position sex in the dark was construed as shameful, especially with one’s wife! If you turned your wife and did her in that style of which the animals do…oh the horror!”
My mouth spreads into a smile, and—would you believe it—this lesson on historical sexual repression makes me think of me and Luke’s doctor role play. Maybe it was such a turn on because we took a historical repression narrative and owned it.
Or maybe it’s just that I find whatever Luke does to be super hot. Even right now, I feel myself getting a little heated up at the memory of it.