Late Night With Lisa

Lisa seemed to be everything that I wasn't. She was petite with honey blonde hair that hung in a long ponytail, with a slim frame and bounce in her step; I was the tall, big boned girl with the dark eyeliner and purple lipstick. She set her alarm for 6 a.m. sharp; I stayed up reading deep into the night. Lisa had a label on everything she owned and her clothes hangers were color coded. I shoved things into whatever drawer had space at the time.

So, naturally, we were made freshman year roommates. I knew there was going to be a problem when I had just affixed my Buffy poster to the space next to the door, and this perky voice said, "Uh, you weren't going to put that *there* were you?"

"I was just seeing how it looked," I said, since I was too afraid of getting off on the wrong foot with my new roommate. "But I think I'll put it next to my bed." Next to my bed was where I was going to put my Muse poster. I tried to fight back the small amount of resentment and fear that built up in my throat as I walked meekly to the other side of the room.

"Good," she said. "I don't want any distractions when I study."

Distractions? What the fuck?

That was how I met my roommate. Less than thirty seconds and my optimistic fantasy of being besties disappeared over the placement of a Josh Whedon poster. Poof! There went my vision of late night talks about boys and sex and professors and sex and classes and sex and...well, you get the picture.

It's too bad Lisa was such an uptight, control-freak bitch, because there were actually some things we had in common. Both of us were major bookworms. Lisa studied a lot. You could tell she was one of those types who pulled the top grades through sheer force of will. Even on Friday nights sometimes she was up late reading, using a pink highlighter for her biology notes and a green highlighter for humanities. This drove me crazy, as well—she was always around. Always. Of course, I only knew this because I was always around, too. It just didn't seem fair. If I was going to get an oh so perfect Barbie wannabe for a roommate, shouldn't she be going out all the time and partying and give me at least a few hours to myself on the weekends?

Lisa wasn't a partier. The second weekend of school, she told me, very primly, "I expect that you will want to drink. What you do is none of my business, but I don't drink myself and I would rather you not do it in the room."

Honestly, seeing as how she never left the room in the first place, there was no way I was going to party in our room anyway, and like all of her irritating remarks, I just let it slide.

As much as she got under my skin sometimes, I really did want to like her. She was horribly insecure about school and I could tell she felt so much pressure from her parents to succeed. I knew a lot about insecurity, but all of the times I thought to bring it up, I'd fumble for what to say and just stay quiet. And here's a silly thing, but something that made me think that inside of her was someone fun and mysterious: she had the most adorable underwear.

You'd never know it, since she dressed out of a J. Crew catalog. But underneath each one of her perfect outfits was something sensational. You would never get me to admit it to her, but it was damn sexy. Of all the odd things about her, this one was always the oddest to me.

Mostly, though, she was a pain in my ass and I was a pain in her ass. We were never going to be friends so we tolerated each other as best we could. I was far from a slob, but I could never keep things neat enough for her standards and I gave up trying to win her over after a while. The thing I could tell annoyed her the most about me was that I liked to stay up late and read or chat after she went to bed. I knew she hated it since she always made the biggest fuss, tossing and turning and sighing and putting her pillow over her head. I would just roll my eyes and keep doing what I was doing.

One Thursday night in October I was finally the first one to bed. Lisa was out, which was unusual for her on any night, let alone a night when she had class the next day. I had drifted off and I was woken up by this crashing, fumbling noise. It was Lisa, and she was drunk. I knew right away. I could smell the beer and cigarette smoke on her from across the room. I pulled my pillow over my head and blocked out the light from her desk. I thought about huffing and puffing and making a big old show of how rude she was being, but I knew it would be lost on her. I knew she was drunk for sure when I heard the sound of her clothes hit the floor right before she snapped off the light and crawled into bed. In six weeks of living with her, every single piece of clothing went either to the laundry basket or to the drawer or hanger where it belonged.

I don't know what time it was; I had really been deep in sleep. I tried to settle myself and found it weird to sleep with her moving and breathing just a few feet away. I actually had a little sympathy for her when I thought of how she went through that with me every single night. Just before I drifted away again, I heard something.

I wasn't sure what it was at first. It was movement, I could tell that. A sort of rubbing noise, and I strained to discern what it was. A moment later, Lisa whimpered, and I knew exactly what was happening: my prim and proper roommate was masturbating.

I didn't know what to do so I laid still. Was I supposed to make a racket and let her know I was there? She was probably too drunk to notice and just because she got under my skin a lot I had no desire to embarrass her. So I waited.

She wasn't stopping, though. The rubbing got faster and her breathing got a little louder. I'm not afraid to admit that it turned me on immensely. Being horny in the dorm sucked. The few times I felt so turned on that I couldn't just dial things back down I would sneak into the bathroom that we shared with the neighboring room. I couldn't that night, though, not without disturbing her. Seconds agonizingly turned into a minute, and I got hotter and hotter. I could hear Lisa on the bed next to mine. The rubbing sounds had gotten wetter.

The next sound I heard told me that Lisa was drunk enough that she wasn't going to notice if I squirmed around a little: she moaned. Not just a quiet moan, either, but the kind of moan you might make at that first sensation of penetration by a cock or fingers. I never wanted to touch myself more than at that moment.

So I did. I sneaked my arms down alongside my body, pulled my panties aside, and touched two fingers to my already slippery lips. Oh Jesus, I wanted to scream, it felt so fucking good. A few feet away, Lisa wasn't holding back. I know she was penetrating herself because I could hear the wet slurping sounds her fingers made. I dared to touch my clit and I shuddered, emitting the tiniest gasp. I froze in place, waiting to see if Lisa noticed. She was still rubbing away, writhing in her bed. I turned my face to her and could barely make out her shape in the dim light of the alarm clock on her nightstand. I wondered if she could see me if she were to look over. I thought her eyes were open, but I couldn't tell.

I've always suspected that she knew what I was doing because her moans got louder and louder. In the quiet room I wondered if our neighbors on the other side of the bathroom could hear her. Not that I cared. When my finger pressed on my clit I groaned. Not as loudly as Lisa, but loud enough that if she was aware at all of my existence she would have heard it. When she didn't stop what she was doing I drew my knees up to my chest and yanked off my panties, frantically sliding them down off my ankles to bare my lower half. The sheet slid away, and had someone turned on the light they would have seen me lying on my back, head turned to the left, naked from the waist down, two fingers hooked inside my pussy while I rubbed my clit with my thumb.

Lisa's moans emboldened me. I moaned, too. All of the friction from our first six weeks together made it so much more intense. As much as she irritated me I still craved connection with her and approval from her. This was the closest I was getting. She groaned, I groaned. She fingered herself faster, I fingered myself faster. I thought I could see her face turned toward me in the darkness, and that's how I came, arching my back and picking my ass up off of the mattress, my thumb pressed to my throbbing clit, imagining that she could see me. By the time I caught my breath, Lisa had stopped, too. I pulled the sheet around me and tried to calm myself but my heart was pounding. Within a minute or two, the sound of Lisa's breathing changed and I knew she was asleep. It took a little while, but I fell asleep, too, bewildered and excited by what had happened.

Neither of us it mentioned it, not the next day or ever. Lisa didn't say anything about coming home drunk, and I didn't bring it up. God knows I wanted to, because from that day on I had a love-hate crush on her. Many times I'd replay the scene in my head, always with a different ending...her acknowledging it the next morning or me climbing into her bed that night. Maybe it's for the best, though: at least I have one pleasant memory of her!