Carol Ch. 15

In the end, I had a dizzying eight months with Carol. In these long chapters I've related the first few months, and how fast and how far we went. We went very, very far.

Shall I touch on everything? Short as life seems sometimes, the episodes stacked up quickly, and college kids seem to have experiences compressed into very short spaces. In college we lived whole relationships in the course of a weekend.

Shall I talk about how she opened "Carol College" in the study carrel in the Library? Once the word got out among her guy-friends, we have to rescind the "ask me three times" rule (except on secret, randomly picked dates). Let me say, she was kept busy, and each day she was brimming with... kinky things to report to me.

Should I cover her (attempted) seduction of a teacher's assistant for a language lab, just so he would adjust her grade down to a B? He shocked her with a turn-down, but then I guess bragged to the other TAs. She was asked to stay after several classes, for innocent conversations filled with smoldering stares. Carol didn't really want to screw up her academics, so she merely teased them mercilessly. Several stories there!

Should I touch on how she eventually did get her job as a stripper (at the seediest place you could imagine)? How she would go there after spending hours as a shot-girl in a liquor-drenched micro-bikini? How she ran across an ex-boyfriend (who'd dropped her painfully) and she spent the evening giving his friend lap-dances while he stewed?

How she turned tricks for gas money as we drove down to Mardi Gras. How she got arrested at Mardi Gras. How she got a job at a video rental place just so she could be fired for incredibly improper behavior?

How, for two crazy weeks, she wore the same frock, and had her friends hole-punch it whenever they wanted? -- That was one of my last inspirations, when I was running out of ideas. She carried the hole-punch with her, and anybody who talked to her got invited to make a little hole in her dress. A 'social experiment', she told everybody, including her sociology professor, who helpfully documented it with pictures every day. It made for an "A" paper.

My roommates helped. We threw an 'avant garde' party where we pretended Carol was a performance artist. She handed out flyers on the street with a picture of her in panties and a scarf in Times Square (that was a big adventure too). For the party she dressed the same, and played a clueless poser. When the attendees started complaining about the lameness (she was reciting poetry and trying to juggle), she pretended to get very worried, and lose her composure.

She bit her lip prettily, saying, "And I'll finish with a... I don't know. It's very advanced, if you don't know art. I'm going to be the exhibit." She turned down the lights and lay down on the coffee table, taking the guests into her one by one, everybody who had the nerve. Then she asked them to fill out short feedback forms on her performance, 'for her art teacher.' That lead to an "A" for Saul's photography class.

And then there was that time we took her to suck a horse. We were quite drunk when Carol showed up heard us snickering about something. We finally suggested it to her. "Erm..." she said. "Um... okay. Is that even done?" Saul's friend worked in a stable in mid-town, and was very interested in filming Carol. As it turned out, we couldn't find the stable, even though Carol kept stopping the cab to ask directions.

Each adventure is just a blur in the mind now, until I think about it closely and review it step by step. There is no time for a Tolstoy-sized novel. Looking back, it was one of the craziest, most alive times of my life.

* * * * *

Break-up sex

The reason Carol and I split up was prosaic. A huge chunk of my brain was telling me, college is for getting experience, fand for putting notches in the bedpost. After eight months with Carol, my life-tally was still three girls slept-with, four girls made-out with. Hers was on the level of eighty men slept-with, a hundred-sixty sucked, untold hundreds made-out with or groped-by. And that wasn't counting repeats.

I'm not exaggerating. Carol worked it out for me, on our last night. "About ten guys a month, on average," she said.

She was pulling out of her red micro-dress. She was the only stripper I'd heard of who wore her stage costumes out of the club after working, with her day clothes in her backpack.

She clarified, "Ten different guys fucked each month, usually three per week. Our first months were pretty low, until I got with the program. The last few have been really crazy. And I was sucking dick by month four, remember? But twenty different guys sucked per month might be low, since you started taking me to the adult bookstores all the time. And Saul takes me to a different one when you're studying, so there's that too."

On my bookshelf, we had jars filled with jelly bellies. Each night she'd drop beans into each jar: Men sucked, men fucked, men who groped her, men she kissed, men "on the hook" for all of the above. The jars were a huge turn-on for both of us... especially lately, when she would go downstairs to get coffee or milk, and come back and drop a bean in the "groped" jar.

I still have those jars even today. They're locked in a trunk in the attic somewhere. If I dug them out now, I'd never stop jerking off. College girlfriends hold such power over old men! Each jar with its beans, representing buckets of jism spent on or inside Carol.

"Meanwhile, I've fucked three girls. In my life." I groused.

"More than meeee!" She sang. "Watch this: Today I had classes, and then I 'auditioned' for a job at a law firm." Plink, plink, plink. She dropped jelly beans into the jars. "Then I served shots at the bar, from six to eight." Plink, plink. "You try being a shot girl at six in the effin' afternoon. Lemonade body-shots... who tips for that? Then I went stripping." Plink, plink. Plink-plink-plink. "And I rode the subway back here." Plink.

Each jar was represented today. She looked at then with deep satisfaction.

"I have a fake-wife gig tomorrow night, so I won't be able to see you."

Oh, yes. She'd put an ad in the personals: Rent-A-Wife. Newly single? Need help around the house? Call Carol! (Ex-stripper.) Watch in disbelief while I take things in hand. Palpable relief. Groups. She liked talking about it, and setting up 'gigs', but thus far hadn't made it out the door. Each time, we succumbed to dirty-talk about what she'd be doing, then we would jump into the sack, and she would have to cancel.

Forget how coarse she had become sometimes (mostly a turn-on). Forget her growing distance from me and all the men. Our big problem was that we hardly talked. I hardly saw her anymore. There are only so many hours in the day, and her time was completely divided as she searched for the next new high.

No.

None of that is true. We love people for reasons. Because they're pretty, or clever, or ambitious, or because they like us back. We don't shack up with people we don't "connect" with. And that connection is what Carol and I were missing.

See, what I wanted most during that period of life, what Carol had been able to give me, was a girl to run into the mud. A girl to cheapen (and, yeah, I guess, humiliate)... and what's more, the girl had to want it too.

Simply put, after eight months there was nowhere lower for Carol to dip. She was cheerfully shameless, brightly fearless. There were no more raw edges or skinned-up propriety for us to coo over together. I was effectively out of the picture in Carol's adventures.

So I started the break-up.

"I've seen you only two nights in the last ten days."

"We should go see a movie," she said.

"Naw."

"Yeah," she winked in my direction. "I can try to get us in free. I'll take it all the way to the manager if I have to!"

"No," I said.

"Okay then. When the lights go down, I'll disappear. And my task will be to come back at the end with cum all over my chest. I'll just have to find a way. And I can't leave the theater."

"That's not watching a movie together."

"You can dress me! And then afterwards we'll go to a club with black-lights, and I'll be frickin' glowing with cum!"

She started digging money out of her backpack, dropping it on the top of my bureau. The surface was covered with money, singles, fives, twenties, hundreds. More than I could spend, and certainly more than Carol could keep at her house. She added to it daily. My roommates even used it as spending money, which pleased her. When she learned, she crowed, "You're all my bitches! I wonder how many men I could keep supplied?" She didn't care -- there would always be more money.

"I can't do late nights at the end of the semester," I said. "My grades aren't as good as yours."

"Grades!" she snorted. "Then, I can pretend to pass out on the street again. I'll do it right down by your stoop, so you can be studying and looking out the window. Ass-up on the sidewalk and pretending to sleep? That was an insane night, wasn't it?"

"No."

"Bet me at the pool hall? You can gamble me out."

"No..." I held firm. She knew I liked talking about that.

"I'll start bringing back girls, for threesomes," she said. "That will catch you up to me, eventually." I knew how much this cost her to say. She hated the idea of sharing me with anybody.

"No. Well, maybe. I mean no."

"I'll make another pass at my professor, for you." She was starting to look concerned.

I shook my head and looked away.

"I'll spend ten hours at a glory hole, new record!" She offered, I shook my head. "And we can film it. We can mail the pictures to a porn mag, like you always wanted."

I just shook my head.

She sighed. "Fine. And I'll mail a copy of the porn mag to everybody from my high school. I'll pay for it. I'll send it to my Dad's friends. I'll ask them all over for a party and I'll fucking blow them." She looked at me. "Isn't that humiliating enough? With enough planning, we can obliterate the girl I used to be. We can shit all over a high-school girl, me!, and change what I was forever. We haven't talked about going backwards to find something new and low. How much more do I have to humiliate myself?"

"That's not what I'm looking for," I said, feeling miserable. "It's just not what I want."

"I don't get it," she said, finally a little angry. She crawled up the bed to me and pulled the sheet down... of course I was hard. Dirty girl-talk always gets me hard. "Look at you! You're as hard as diamond!"

She climbed onto my lap and eased my cock into her. "Number four, today."

"Four?" I asked. I couldn't help myself.

"Yeah, baby," she said. She started rocking slowly. "And I'm starting to dig the older men. I'm talking, sixty-old, not thirty-old. They're just so needy. But nothing beats a really hard cock."

We went like that for a while, until she said, "You still haven't told me what's bugging you."

"I know. And I know it's not fair."

"You're shy to ask me?" she gave my cock a squeeze. "We're in a no-judgment zone. Remember that?" She smiled, and I couldn't help but smile back.

"You want animals, don't you," she said. "I know it's your thing. You want me to finally suck off that horse. Swallow down buckets of horse-cum? So my stomach sticks out? And you can hear it sloshing while we walk? I'll do it. It can be a regular thing. I'll get a tattoo: sucks horses."

Since when did she think that animals are my thing?

She saw my perplexed look. "Okay! And it will be in the magazine. And I'll send it to everybody I ever knew. And I'll send it to my professors. I have a high school reunion. I'll fucking bring copies, and write my hotel room number on them. I'll have a line out the door of my hotel room... every boy I ever knew... I'll fuck them. Every man and boy who ever saw me, since I got my tits... I'll milk their cum out of them. We can hire a photographer. Who cares if my family finds out, finally?"

I could only shake my head. I could feel how wet the talk was making her.

She said, "Then I can put a new ad in the paper. Rent-A-Dog-Groomer. For the single man, with a pet. Groups okay. All grooming must be filmed."

I finally had to stop her before anything new floated up from her imagination.

"Animals aren't my thing, except maybe to talk about sometimes," I said. "And you're getting incredibly depraved."

"And since when do you not totally get off on me being depraved? Do you hear what I'm saying? Just to get you out of this stupid mood? Since when do I have to beg to be used badly? I haven't had to ask a man since... I don't know when. They all beat me to it. What the hell is wrong with you?"

"We need to break up," I told her.

As soon as I said it, I knew it was really true.

She stopped cold, looking down at me. "I know we do."

She slowly started moving again. And so did I. I pulled her more tightly to me, hands grasping the hot skin of her hips, grinding her clit into my pubic bone. A flush started spreading across her breasts. I wondered how many other men (today alone) had seen that flush.

"You're so wet," I breathed.

She nodded, looking down at me, eyes slowly going wilder. "This morning? On the subway. Some dude behind me put his hand up my skirt."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, T. He had my puddy full in his hand. His fingers were in me. I had to wait until he let go -- you know the rule. I still obey them sometimes, on certain days. According the the rules, I can't break contact anymore. I missed my transfer, because his hand was buried in my puddy."

"And..."

"I came in his hand, honey. And he could feel it. He could feel my need, how I squeezed his fingers. Some guy I never saw." She smirked suddenly. "But one of my old professors saw. He was in the same car as me. Watched the whole thing. He probably knew what was going on, though I was being discreet. I think I'll do a private conference with him later. Invite him out for drinks."

We went on like this until we both finished, and she flopped beside me, breathing hard.

She said, in a tone which was a lot more relaxed, "To tell the truth, I'm glad we're not wrecking my high school years. Sure it would be really wicked. But when I'm twenty-five (or thirty), I have to be able to switch back. To being a normal girl. I'll need some sort of anchor."

"If we know each other when we're thirty, then..."

She interrupted me with a quick kiss. "No, Tyler. At any time in my life, you're in. When I'm thirty five, you can call me on the phone, and tell me what you want me to do. And I'll do it. I'll send you the pictures, if it's not you I'm doing. Call me any time. When I'm a hundred."

"Oh," I said. It sank in. "Wow."

"Yeah," she said. Her look was earnest. "You know what I'm saying? Even if my life is completely different, and I'm as normal and plain-Jane as the next girl. You give me the call, and I'll walk out of my wedding and go whore at a truck-stop, and send you the money."

She thought for a while, and then smiled. "Or hopefully it's something less extreme. Anyway, my husband will just have to understand. I guess I'll have to explain all about myself to whomever I end up with. And maybe I'll make him a little kinky in the process, if I miss 'the life.'"

She glanced over at me, "I fully expect at least a few calls like that, after what we've shared. And I know I'll hear from you during your mid-life crisis. At least, call me once when you're thirty."

I don't know how she did it. Always. She had my mood changed again, and I was starting to giggle.

"And," she said, "I'll get you a rebound girlfriend. Someone who will lose interest in you in, um, two months? To ease our separation process."

I laughed out loud. "I can't imagine it: You, talking to a girl?"

"Hey! I can talk to girls. I can pretend interest." She sat up. "To show you I'm serious, all the rules are off. Really off. No hanky panky. Until I get you the girl, I'm going to be normal."

"Can you even do that?" I asked, agog.

"It will chafe and burn," she said. Then we burst out laughing. "I won't quit my stripping job, or the body-shots, though."

We eventually quieted down. She said, "Here's your rebound girl: Somewhat shy around guys. Not extroverted like me at all. Built like a brick house, not a virgin, okay with oral sex -- but absolutely not easy. Is that vanilla enough? But -- when you get her drunk, she's completely out of control. That's so you can go wild sometimes. Just get her drinking, you have your fun, and she's all apologetic in the morning, and you can tease her and make her blush. Also -- she has some prior commitment, some boyfriend or maybe she's an exchange student, so she's never quite there and she's out of your life when you need it."

I was amazed. "That actually sounds... pretty good. Almost a total reversal. For just two months, right?"

"Right. Just a restorative. And that goody-two-shoes thing is how I'll find her. I'm going to look in bars. She'll be the one in regular boring clothes who is completely blasted, doing body-shots spread on the bar. I'll... seduce her... and bring her back here.

"I'll promise her three guys, and if she agrees then I'll know she's the right girl. We'll sleep with your roommates. In the morning, when you walk out, you meet her. She'll be naked (we must remember to throw her clothes out the window), and hung over, and mortified. You just joke her up, get her breakfast and coffee. You just do your thing. I'll be there... to help."

Her voice quavered. She was tearing up a little. As it turned out, this is exactly what happened. Mandy -- great girl. Mandy and I were both rebounding, and were very 'mature' about our relationship.

"Carol," I said, shaking my head. I gathered her in my arms. "How did you get so cool!"

"I've always been cool. And it's the least I can do, since I'm leaving you."

"Huh!" I said. "I'm leaving you!"

"No, baby. Sorry. I think I left you a long time ago."

And so we settled down to doing what we'd always done best: Planning what Carol would do.

After a while, Andy stopped by the door and asked if Carol would like to see his new bedspread. For the first time in four months, she didn't just say, "Yes." She checked with me.

"Sure," I said. I didn't need her to go off the rules. That was her suggestion.

Carol slid down to the edge of the bed and crooked a finger at him. "Let's stay in here, Andy, okay? Tyler and I have to plan this out." She flipped over on her stomach with her ass in the air, and gave me a wink when she heard Andy step forward.

* * * * *

When I told my roommates that Carol and I broke up, they almost kicked me out of the apartment. They wouldn't talk to me for days, until Carol started dropping by again after a suitable break, as a friend.

* * * * *

Thirty three

I surfed the web and eventually located her in Missouri, working at a paper company. My email to Carol was simple:

Hi C -- what's your status? -- T

I got back a reply the same day:

So it's you. I'm thirty-two. I'm going through a divorce. My DH cheated on me, I cannot abide that. I'm completely boring and so very, very sad. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm ashamed to tell you this. I'm ashamed all the time.

I remember you. At one time I felt like I was on top of the world. Remember our two-month anniversary dinner? You said that some girls were broken inside, and always sad... am I broken? What happened?