[This is written for the professor]
Caitlin knew she was attractive.
Her parents had been the supportive types who encouraged their girl to think that there was nothing she could not do. As a parenting strategy this was good — but there were caveats: it could be taken too far, and if your child already thought she was queen of the universe, it could have undesired effects. Not that Caitlin thought them undesirable.
As she entered adolescence other assets were added to her burgeoning self-confidence. Her striking red hair grew lush and long, making a striking impression on all who saw her. As her breasts developed, they added to her allure — not too full (34B) but firm, with nipples that curved up at the ends. She was tall, six feet by the time she entered College. Those baby brown eyes shone with mischief. The boys liked what they saw, but Caitlin was too wily for them. Their efforts to grope were met with firm refusals, and any attempt to press the matter was usually followed by reprisals; she was not a judo black belt for nothing.
But for all her self-confidence, Caitlin had a problem. That was why she wanted to study the world of literature. She wanted to escape into other worlds. How could it be that a woman of eighteen who, almost literally, had the world at her feet, could be so bored? Boys her own age were impossibly gauche, even if she had wanted them, from what her friends told her, it would have been so they could shoot their load and move on. How tedious. Older men lusted after her, but that did not interest her.
Her dear mother, Ruth, impressed on her the importance of making a good marriage, but was happy, as was her daddy, Peter, to let her go to college. She was clearly a bright girl and needed the stimulus. If only they had known, Caitlin sometimes mused! She was bored. She read Sartre, she read Camus and concluded she was existentially bored. College would, she hoped, provide something more stimulating.
In preparation, she decided to treat herself to a silver nose stud and have her ears and bellybutton pierced; all in the best of taste but it added a little something, she thought. She decided that skirts and shorts would be the things to show off her figure. As with the piercings, nothing too slutty, but short enough to show off her toned legs and firm backside. It was not a case of if you have it, flaunt it, more a case of “why not?”
As Caitlin had expected “freshers’ week” at college was a triumph — if by that one meant men panting after her and admiring glances. But she was not impressed. She took it as her right and she was bored, bored, bored. Someone offered her drugs at a Saturday night party, but that, she thought would simply be to treat the symptoms by creating another problem.
Only on Tuesday afternoon was there a ray of hope. She went to the first Literature lecture given by Professor Foster. The Professor was probably the most famous member of Faculty. Her novels had created a sensation in the noughties when where crossover between feminist fiction and lesbian porn had made her a feted and hated figure: the moralists decried her descent into what they called “porn”, her admirers hailed her breaking down of boundaries. Caitlin wondered whether the notoriety would make her any different from the bores she had met over the first few days. For once, the first time in ages, she was not bored.
Professor Foster must have been in her fifties, Caitlin calculated, but she had worn well. She was a smallish, thin woman, not much to look at, but the way she spoke, and what she said, pulled Caitlin in. She spoke with passion and, it seemed to Caitlin, directly to her. Jabbing her finger, leaning forward, sweeping her arms, her voice rising and falling with emotion, the professor seemed to enact and inhabit her lecture rather than give it. It took Caitlin a few minutes to realise that she was the only student left in the lecture theatre. She felt dazed and as she made her way to the front exit, she saw she was not the only person left in the place — Professor Foster was looking at her.
“Are you okay? You look dazed.”
Her speaking voice was deep, almost as deep as man’s, without having anything manly about it. Her blue eyes seemed to laser into Caitlin.
“Yes, yes. Your fault,” she smiled, reasserting herself.
“How so?” The professor smiled back.
“Never heard anything like that — you, the way you did that!”
“Is there any other reason to do anything? If you don’t fucking care about something like this, why the fuck do it? Stupid question, most of you kids don’t give a fuck, you just want your degree and the bugger off into the City or become a hot shit lawyer or, God help us, a fucking politician! Sorry, rant over. I’m Helen, you?”
The vehemence of the professor’s language, and what she had said, threw Caitlin.
“Me? Caitlin, in your class on Friday.”
“Want to grab a coffee? I don’t have a class till eleven, you?”
“I have some fucking boring shit about how to behave or something, let’s have a coffee.”
Caitlin could see the professor liked the way she looked. She’s been wondering for some time whether, given the boredom men induced, what it might be like to be with another woman. For some reason the thought stirred in her over coffee with Helen.
Caitlin found her disarmingly easy to talk to, and it was clear to her that Helen also enjoyed their conversation.
“So, this existential boredom fuckery, you are NOT going to drug your way out of it are you?”
Caitlin had told her about the boredom “thing”, and taken aback by her vehemence she replied with the assurance that she was not stupid, and that creating one problem as a way of solving another held no appeal.
“So, why not do what so many of your peers do?”
“Which is what?”
“Fuck their way to oblivion.”
“As a professor are you supposed to say such things to a student?”
“As a professor I am supposed to encourage you to think, not stuff your mind with platitudes and tell you to be a good consumer, but thinking is hard work.”
Helen looked at Caitlin in a way that made the latter shiver; there was a tell-tale tingle between her legs.
“Is it thinking or acting that will lift me? From what I was reading, I am suffering from accidie.”
“You sure it isn’t just you are bored with the vanilla life laid out for you and your generation?”
“Is there a difference?” Caitlin suddenly got into a groove, as though she knew where Helen was coming from and how to play it.
“Only for the French,” Helen laughed, “existential angst is what it is. The question you have to answer, Caitlin, is what are you going to DO!”
The way her professor emphasised that last word, sent shivers down Caitlin’s spine – and elsewhere.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that action, not words is what you need. You know it. I know it.”
“Do I?” Caitlin made light of it, but Helen was now like a dog with a bone.
“Yes. Go to the bathroom and take your panties off and give them to me when you return.”
Caitlin’s gasp made others look round.
“I do hope you weren’t going to the ‘you can’t be serious gambit’ because I am. Do it or don’t. You make a choice. The consequences will follow, whatever.”
The sheer insouciance of Helen’s attitude piqued something in Caitlin, and without pausing to answer, she went to the bathroom.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror as she walked to the stall. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright; she looked – and felt – alive. Whatever this was, boring it was not.
In the stall she pulled her red thong down; she noted it stuck to her pussy; it was wet, gooey even. But what to do with it? She balled in up in her fist and walked out. She felt cool air around her pussy and ass. ‘Fuck’, she thought, ‘if I’d known I would not be wearing panties I’d have chosen a different skirt.’
As she walked back to Helen it felt as though every eye was on her, that they all know what she had done, what she was not wearing. Helen smiled.
“Put them on the table.”
In for a penny, in for a pound, Caitlin thought, and she put her soiled thong on the table.
Helen lifted it to her nose, smelt it and put it in her bag.
“Sit.”
Caitlin sat.
No one had ever treated her this way. It was as though she existed to do as she was told. No choice. No boredom.
Helen smiled as though she could read Caitlin’s thoughts. Which, in truth she could.
“So how does that feel – alive?”
Caitlin felt a rush of blood to her cheeks – and other parts of her anatomy.
“Yes, very!”
“What, to sit there with no panties on, or to obey me, or both?”
“Both,” Caitlin admitted.
“What would you call a girl who went about with no panties on in public?”
Helen’s eyes seemed to tease Caitlin, tempting her out beyond her boundaries of comfort; but she seemed to herself to need that. Suddenly her tongue felt big in her mouth, and she was conscious of a dampness between her thighs. She hoped her skirt was not going to show any sign of it. She struggled for a moment.
“I did not ask you to think, Caitlin, you do enough of that, I asked you to tell me. What was the first word you thought of? Tell me!”
“Slut, professor, a girl with no panties in public is a slut.”
“But Caitlin, you are a highly intelligent, highly desirable young woman, you could probably have almost any man of woman in this coffee shop, so why are you being such a slut? By the way, adjust that skirt or it will stain. You can sit with your bare butt on the wood.”
The words, and the actions (which she did at once) both sent shivers through Caitlin.
“Because you told me to professor.”
“But you have the reputation of being an independent-minded, not to say somewhat arrogant young woman. So again, I ask, why have you done as I told you? You are not exactly known for your deference to authority. Don’t think, talk, girl!”
That “girl” at the end did it for Caitlin. Helen, the professor as she was coming to think of her, was right; of course she was. Caitlin could have had any one she wanted; she just didn’t want them.
“It’s not authority. It’s you.”
“Me? But I am a middle-aged professor with a notorious past and a line in an area many academics consider porn. Do you find me attractive?”
“It’s you – it’s the package – it’s not easy to explain.”
“Go back to the bathroom, Caitlin. I want you to rub your pussy then come back. You are not allowed to orgasm.”
Nervously, but immediately, she did as she was told.
In the stall she sat, and at last did what she had wanted to do, which was to rub herself. But she was so tingly – and so squishy – that it almost hurt. She took time to examine her skirt, which, fortunately, bore no sign of the gooey mess that was between her thighs; she blushed to think of the state of the chair. She knew it might be hard to stop if she went on too long, so, with a great effort of control, stopped after a few minutes.
Brushing her skirt down, she opened the stall door and, instead of washing her hands, she went back to the table. Helen smiled. Caitlin was suddenly sure everyone knew what she had been doing.
“Sit. Let me taste your fingers.”
That was all Helen said. Caitlin did as she had been told, glad she had spread her skirt before sitting down.
Helen looked into her eyes as she tasted Caitlin.
“Your cunt tastes salty and tangly; flavours I like.”
“Please….”
Helen cut her off.
“What, don’t call your precious vage a cunt? Time we women reclaimed that for us. Tell me, did a shiver run through you at the word?”
Blushing, Caitlin had to admit it had.
“Good girl.”
At which fresh shivers ran the gamut of Caitlin’s body.
“Right, I have a class.”
Reaching into her bag, Helen handed Caitlin a card.
“You’ll be there at eight o’clock this evening. You will wear something classy, but no panties. There will be a security check for that.”
“What!” Caitlin was startled back into life. “You’re going to make me go without panties tonight too?”
“I,” she said, with the emphasis on the personal pronoun, “am not making YOU do anything. You will do it because you want to.”
“And if I don’t?” Caitlin said, trying to wrest back some semblance of the balance that had existed three quarters of an hour before when they had sat down.
“Your choice. If I ever tell you to do something your first instinct is to reject, then reject it.”
“And what, and this ends?” Caitlin sounded almost peevish.
“No, it means I am the wrong woman for you, and you are for me. We remain friends, but no more. There is no point wasting both of our times.”
With that, she left, leaving enough to cover the bill and a tip.
Caitlin sat there. Her conscious mind was wondering what the fuck she had done. But her instincts were telling her she was no longer bored.