Never judge a book by its’ cover.
When I was first at University I wasn’t the hardest working student in my year. Far from it. But I was and still am very bright. In the first year I hated going to lectures because they were always held in the mornings between 9am and 12pm and I rarely got up before 11 in the morning anyway. I read the textbooks and used to obtain the lecture notes in another way.
Every week we would be given a list of questions to be answered as part of our course work. One of the courses I attended was physical chemistry and many of the problems given to us required a good knowledge of mathematics and a quick mind. These characteristics appeared to be lacking in many of my classmates who slavishly sat and took lecture notes without really understanding much of the information being provided. They certainly didn’t have much chance to answer some of the more complex problems in thermodynamics given to them.
The course work had to be finished and handed in by Monday at 5pm. Every Friday night my mate Paul and I would sit in the pub, have a few beers, and work out the answers on the back of beermats. We would the each prepare our own hard copies over the weekend, and then each week one lucky individual would be offered the solutions to the questions in return for their previous weeks lecture notes. These would be taken away and photocopied.
This worked well until the end of the first term when Paul and I came top in just about everything without “apparently” any effort. This was not true of course because we worked differently and did do some work mainly in the afternoons and the early hours of the morning after the pubs had shut.
After that folk stopped giving us their notes and the expedient of Paul attending half the morning lectures and me attending the other half had to be taken.
Thinking back, we weren’t the nicest people. One of the tricks we used to play was conducted when waiting to go into an examination room. You will remember it is common for a crowds of people to gather in the twenty minutes or so before an examination room is opened. During this time, many people can be seen frantically going through their notes or textbooks trying to cram a few extra facts in.
Paul and I would select our target, and then in a voice just loud enough for him or her to hear, discuss the high likelihood of something we hadn’t studied appearing in the examination. This would inevitably provoke a hurried fumbling through a book by a flustered individual and cause even more agitation than they were normally feeling. We always chose a nice, complicated topic that nobody could begin to remember in the five minutes remaining before the exam started. Maybe derivation of the Nernst equation or something similar.
The next step in illustrating our superiority over the rest of the class was to appear as cool as possible under the pressure of the examination process. Once I had taken my seat and before I started to read the examination paper when permission had been given to start, whilst the majority would hurriedly read the paper, I would open the case containing my pens, pencils, and erasers and take out a plastic bag containing miniature bottles and ice cubes and prepare myself a whisky and coke and only then “read the rubric.”
And before you question how anybody can drink alcohol in an examination room, at the university I attended there was a university statute stating anybody could ask for a glass of sherry to be provided: although I don’t think this had happened for many years.
Unsurprisingly Paul and I were not too popular with some of our classmates who worked harder than we did with less success.
Amongst my peers was a young lady called Elizabeth. She was a typical swot. She was good looking enough in a plain sort of way, but didn’t wear much make up, had glasses, and always looked tired, presumably because she was always in the library.
I never saw her in the library myself of course because I rarely visited it. Indeed, in my first year, when I took a group of final year school students considering an application to the university physics course on a departmental tour, I couldn’t immediately remember which floor the library was to be found on.
I had always assumed that Elizabeth didn’t like me but thinking back she and I did not move in the same circles. She always sat at the front of the lecture theatre whist I always at sat at the back. I never saw her in the pub or at a disco, and whilst I would frequent the student’s union and have a coffee and a cigarette I never saw her there either. In three years at University, I never spoke to her once.
But she and I had one thing in common. We were always top of our class.
During my last year at University, I was going out with a girl I had met the previous summer and was away most weekends, but this relationship ended two months before my finals which allowed me to finally apply myself to my studies and I graduated with a First in Physics and an offer of a place to Study for a PhD in the Department of Physics.
Elizabeth also graduated with a First, the only other person to graduate with top honours in our year, and this is why we met.
At the graduation dinner we both were sat together. Prior to dinner I arrived early for drinks and had my customary whisky before going to the table where a card with my name on it was placed. As I sat waiting I was intrigued to meet her. And then I saw a women approaching. She was slim with shoulder length hair and brown eyes. She had applied cosmetics and lipstick and was wearing perfume, and no longer wore glasses. It was Elizabeth I. could swear that the conversation in the room stopped as she made her entrance but that may just have been the affect she had on me.
“Hello Elizabeth,” I said.
“Hello David.”
“Well done. Although I’m not surprised,” I said.
“And we all thought you and Paul would get one.” she said.
And then we started to talk about other things and over the course of the evening we finally got to learn about each other. I shouldn’t have been surprised but she had an amazing breadth of interests and was great company. We talked about classical music and modern art, and politics, and I discovered her parents were divorced and she had lived with her mother and two younger sisters and money had been very tight. She was determined to do well which explained her studious nature. She like me had just finished with her boyfriend of three years and who had been a postgraduate student but was now moving away. She had decided that she wasn’t going to marry him and so a long-distance relationship when she saw hm only every other weekend was not the way to go.
And then.
“I’m accepting the offer to study for a PhD here.”
At the end of the dinner, I asked her out her out the following evening. She thoughtfully agreed, and the next day we spent a pleasant few hours in the pub but at end of the evening when I had walked her home and tried to kiss her on the cheek she drew back and did not ask me in. Nonetheless, as chastened, I turned to leave she called after me
You can take me out for a Chinese next Saturday.
“The Red Dragon, 8 pm”
On the Saturday I arrived at the restaurant 10 minutes early. Promptly at 8 o’clock Elizabeth arrived. She wore a short dress and a blouse and looked and smelt great, having applied the same perfume as the night of the dinner. I was on my best behaviour and was the perfect gentleman. I know I was trying to impress and wondered why if she hadn’t been willing to let me peck her on her cheek she still wanted to be with me. I Remember her telling me that I wasn’t the person she had thought I was and that she had always thought my behaviour was a little childish. And after that I put any thoughts of seducing her on the back burner and decided to just enjoy the evening and her company. Nonetheless we had a wonderful time and I thought she was warming to me.
After I had paid the bill she looked me directly in the eye and said.
“Ok, let’s go to bed”
And so, we did. It was the best sex of my life up until then. I have had better sex since then, although only with Elizabeth. When I saw her naked that first evening I could not believe that this confident and lithe firm breasted goddess was the same bespectacled and unremarkable looking girl who had sat scribbling through three years of lectures. She had successfully hidden her real nature from me and the rest of the guys and girls in our year.
Her intelligence is matched only by both her imagination and dirty mind, and an ability to have multiple orgasms. She has a diverse collection of sex toys and is able do things with chocolate bars and vegetables that before I met her, I could only dream about. And I soon realised that the reason she always looked tired at morning lectures was that this was her “slept with look.”
That first evening although we started and finished in bed we did this via the dining room table and the lounge settee. She had me screw her in the missionary position in bed and then doggy style over the table before she rode me to her umpteenth orgasm whilst riding me. Finally, she spread her legs and had me lick her out and after that she gave me the blow job of my life. And then in the morning she requested a repeat performance.
We are now eight years on, and both of us have our doctorates but continue to work as post-doctoral lecturers in physics. Although I didn’t love Elizabeth when I met her, and I know the feeling was mutual, we are very much in love now. Our sex life is still fantastic, although sometimes I worry I won’t be able to keep up with her in 10 years’ time!
And just as importantly she is my soul mate. We share our bed (and the table, settee, floor, or anywhere else we can make love) and our lives. We still find one another interesting and talk about our everything and anything, or as Lewis Carrol said, “of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.”
One evening about 6 months after we met, and we had both had a few glasses of wine I confided in her how surprised I was when she came to the table at the graduation dinner. I had imagined I would be sitting with a boring swot, and instead she had turned out be interesting as well as pretty.
In turn, Elizabeth told me that she imagined she would be sitting next to a rather lazy, childish young man, albeit clever, who didn’t take life seriously enough. She remembered being surprised to learn that I had taken the time to listen to classical music and study the surrealist painters and wasn’t “as vacuous as I appeared.”
Although she thought I was good looking that would never have been enough to sleep with me. Indeed, it took her three meetings to decide that I wasn’t “play acting” to get her into bed, and that I might be worth getting to know better. Even then she had only “screwed me” on that third evening because “she hadn’t had a dick in her for three-weeks” since finishing with her boyfriend and was “gagging for it.”
It had taken her another week or two to decide I was “a keeper.”
And after she told me this she smiled at me and her “come to bed eyes” crinkled, and I kissed her hard and deep.
And then…..