A Reputation Ch. 03 - Study Break

Fair warning to readers new to this series: I don't bother with much in the way of recaps usually, and this story is no exception. You can certainly enjoy it on its own, but it will make a lot more sense (I think), if you were to start with Chapter 1. Regardless, as always, do not hold your breath for realism in my work. I aim to be plausibly ridiculous.

----------

A REPUTATION 3: STUDY BREAK

Monday was a much calmer day... at least at the start. Part of the culture of the School of Engineering is early classes. I was carrying a five-course load, and three covered engineering of various stripes. Those all met and were done before eleven on the days they were held. Russian and English Literature, my non-tech efforts, both met around lunch time, Monday-Wednesday-Friday and Tuesday-Thursday respectively. That meant my afternoons were always free. I saw it as a small(ish) price to pay, getting up at seven every morning in college, to have my afternoons completely free... mostly to work.

I was grabbing an early lunch, just before I had to run to Russian. I sat by myself with my reliable soup and salad. Even school meal programs can't screw up soup, right? (Spoiler Alert: They can.) I looked up to find our third floor RA, Shawn Maccan, and the RA from my own floor, Jimmy Banks, moving toward me, their food and books left a few tables away.

I looked up, curious. I was pretty sure that they weren't gong to hassle me about the shower incident, but I didn't know why else they would want to talk to me. I didn't make trouble, Mitch and I got along, and I wasn't the type to go to the RAs with emotional troubles. Besides, my only emotional trouble had been not getting laid, and rain had most definitely fallen in that desert. It would be a while before I'd whine about sex again!

"Will, can we talk to you?" Shawn asked as they reached me. Indicating that they should take a seat, I nodded happily. I was suddenly doing most things happily...

"Listen, Green," Jimmy started. He had gone to Exeter and has that preppie habit of calling all males by their last name, as if assuming that your Family is more important than you as an individual. "We both like Shawn's idea of doing a dorm thing to watch your vehicle competition. How about it?"

"Well, it is open to spectators," I smirked.

"Yeah," Jimmy said brusquely. "But are you yourself going to be competitive?"

I hesitated.

"Like I said before," Shawn added hastily, "I doubt that you want us bringing a whole bunch of house-mates to watch, if your vehicle is going to break on the first challenge."

"Yeah, that would be awkward," I said slowly. "But I'm still not sure that you are going to get a big turnout to watch paper and wood cars drive up a hill."

"Come on, Will. This is a pretty elite college," Shawn encouraged, understatedly. "Everybody's smart and recognizes a challenge. We'd get a decent crowd, since they would have someone to cheer for."

"If you are going to be competitive," Jimmy iterated. "Are you?"

I pursed my lips. "There are a lot of factors still fluid. It is mostly a matter of weight-to-structural integrity. Dale and I have sound designs for each functional component, and need only to make them sturdy enough, while still keeping the total mass low so as to be able to move. With what we accomplished this weekend, I know we are ahead of most of the field in all but that last bit. Each year, the mean number of vehicles that complete all the tasks without either breaking or needing modifications between the tests is three out of twenty-plus teams. There is still almost a month until the demonstration. I could tell you in about two weeks whether I'm going to be among that top three or not, okay?"

Shawn looked at me, easily comprehending the moving parts of what I was saying, like a Math major. Jimmy looked at me like a Sociology major. He heard 'two weeks', and was satisfied for now, discarding whatever the hell else I had said. Exeter or no, I always kind of felt that he was one of those members of our student body, the most 'elite' facet of whom was their Family. Nice guy. Smart. Not brilliant.

"Great," the red-headed Canadian smiled. "We don't have to do much beyond rounding up snacks to bring. There would be no other logistics, so we can decide to do it or not with two weeks out. Thanks, Will," she smiled and they turned away. Jimmy waved with a smile of his own, adding, "Thanks, Green. Now bear down. I'll be honest, we are behind our participation goals for dorm activities."

I watched them go. More accurately, I watched Shawn's lissome legs and graceful round butt, showcased un-self-consciously as always, in perfect pale blue jeans.

I snorted to myself. I had not wanted to be over-cocky, but there was zero chance that Dale and I were not going to be contenders. I was already sure that we could perform all tasks, and probably not break. After the weekend, I was proud to the point of smug about that little vehicle, even if it was Dale's new truss that was the key to holding it together. It just didn't pay to promise too much, too early.

*

I dashed through the rest of my lunch, and headed off to suffer through another boring, difficult Russian class. You would think that getting laid twice over the weekend, with two different women no less, might have calmed down my libido and let me concentrate on how krasniyeh my karandash was, but no.

At first, the usual distractions were worse. To be honest, I found myself speculating about how much fun my tall, hot (if admittedly boring in the classroom) professor would be, were we in a shower, instead of Room 310-2. I pondered rubbing soap all over her pale white skin, making sure her boobs were good and clean before getting all dirty... Her height would be a very good thing for sex standing up, I considered. We might not even need the bench.

A couple of times, early in the class, I tore my mind off Svetlana to try to learn something... only to imagine Elaine, currently sitting two seats to me right, barging into my shower instead...

Unusually, despite my even more over-active than usual imagination, I managed to learn a thing or two by the end of class. Ms. Godinova suddenly somehow remembered that there was such a thing as classroom participation and started springing questions on us instead of just droning on and on. Unfortunately for me, I was her first victim. My mind had been full of Elaine's tits, and I totally missed the question. When she repeated it, I made a hash of the answer. Fear of embarrassing myself like that again kept my eye on the ball for the rest of class. I doubt that I spent more than five minutes the rest of the way thinking about what kind of nipples Svetlana possessed, and how I'd like to choke on shower water running over them.

*

I liked to keep my academic life fairly regimented, and Mondays and Thursdays were my regular Study in the Sun days. La Floridita dorm was made up of four three-story 'houses' in a quadrangle, with facilities like the dining hall, dingy little laundry room, communal student kitchen, etc., filling in the spaces between. A cool feature of the complex was the wide catwalks connecting the houses on the third floor. Those catwalks were nice places to lie out in the sun and study... or lie out in the sun and take a nap with a book or laptop propped open as if studying. I almost always actually studied. If I am honest, most of my fellow students seemed to believe that they could absorb the material through an open book on their lap... if they just napped hard enough.

I went up to the catwalk between Houses 2 and 3, as was my habit, around four o'clock. The sun was not quite so harsh by that point, and I could lie in it, and get a little color in my skin without worrying too much about burning. It also meant that the area would be much less crowded than it usually was earlier in the day.

This afternoon, as was often the case, there was only one other student up there, standing uncertainly beside her usual chair, just fussing with her books and looking less rock-solid calm than usual--Cassie Amberleigh. She looked up as I walked out onto the catwalk and smiled. "Hi, Will," she said, looking at me. Cassie lives on the third floor of our house (we are in Number 2), and while we basically knew each other well enough to know each other's names, she seldom actually used mine. "I wasn't sure if you..." she started, then waved herself off. Instead she gathered her breath for some reason. "Listen, could you watch my stuff? I... It is so nice out today, I'd like to get a little tanning in for once while I work on this Calc."

I nodded my consent, a bit puzzled. Cassie always struck me as choosing to study out on this catwalk to be outside in the fresh air, not to get a tan. She certainly never sported much of one. And while she looked great in the form-fitting khaki shorts and short sleeved, plaid, button up shirt that were practically her uniform, the outfit wasn't exactly tanning wear.

I watched her briskly walk back inside, because, well, Cassie was nice to watch walk away. Not nearly as much fun as she was to watch walk toward me, mind you, but still... She was super-petite, no more than an inch over five feet tall, if that, with nice legs and a rounded butt that filled her habitual khakis without ever stretching the fabric tight.

I settled myself on one of the adjustable chaises the school had put up here a few years back. They were fairly cheap to begin with, and years of direct sunlight and exposure to weather had done little to make them look great, but they remained comfortable and structurally sound. I had not changed from class and was still wearing my black cargo shorts and a button down white Oxford cloth shirt. I looked like an engineering student... At least, I could undo a button or two at the throat to let any sun spread out the tan triangle beneath my throat, and I rolled my sleeves up further than usual. The look was a far cry from my newly upgraded mental image of myself, but what was I going to do?

With a sigh, I took out my Industrial Design text and started catching up on my reading there. My focus on the vehicle competition had been eating up a lot of my bandwidth from other classes.

Cassie returned, and my casual study time came under heavy fire. She had gone back to change clothes--well, only her top, apparently. But now, instead of her usual plaid shirt, Cassie was wearing just a bikini top. A quite modest one, honestly. It was a string bikini, though the cups provided quite full coverage. But even a modest bikini top on Cassie was unusual, and...

Here's the thing. The first week or so of the new school year, when everybody was just getting to know the other people in the dorm, I had been sitting with Mitch and a few other guys in the common room, when Cassie had wandered through on her way elsewhere. When she left, one of the other guys, Stuart North I think, uttered almost involuntarily, "How can such a little girl have such big tits?"

Cassie was endowed like Harvard--that is to say, extravagantly.

She never flaunted those tits. She didn't need to, and it wasn't her style. This bikini top was the closest I had ever seen to her putting that bust on display. In fact, this definitely seemed like a display. I was puzzled at that, since experience said that we would see no traffic up here until at least dinner time, but whatever. I was not complaining.

She muttered an idle, "Thanks," to me that her stuff had not been spirited away in her absence somehow, and stretched out on her chaise near me. She settled in with her math book, a pad of paper and a pencil. Surprisingly, she looked up at me, and as I said, her new sunbathing attire had derailed my attention on Industrial Design. I whipped my nose back into my book, hopefully not too overtly.

We both settled down to study. Or she did. I settled down to try.

The thing was, it was actually pretty hot that day--more so, even, than usual. Scenic distractions aside, I was little jealous of Cassie's attire. It occurred to me that I could simply take my own shirt off and get some actual sun myself.

I was momentarily taken aback that I was even considering taking off my shirt. I'm not super-modest or anything. I am not that guy who wears his teeshirt on the beach or by the pool. But I also have always been self-conscious enough to be hesitant about just hanging out with a bare torso. I'm fairly certain that the events of the last couple of days, however had imbued me with a new level of confidence about my body. I unbuttoned my shirt and took it off.

To be clear, I was not trying to show off. I'm in shape, but it wasn't like I have some rippling muscled chest to flaunt. I just wanted some sun at the moment, and suddenly found it much easier to let people see me getting it. And if that made Cassie feel more comfortable about wearing bikini tops out here... so much the better. I would be very much in favor of her making this a habit...

I folded up my shirt and set it aside, then settled back with my book. During the whole procedure, I managed to take a good further look at Cassie and her... They really were big. Any bigger, and they would have been comical, but they weren't. Her generous curves filled the large triangles of her top, showing off their well-formed shape. The slightest ripples in the otherwise tightly smooth triangles of the top betrayed that her nipples were in just exactly the right position, where God, Hugh Hefner, and Boris Vallejo intended.

I rapidly discovered three things. One: It felt great to get all that extra sun--my body clearly relished the Vitamin D production. Two: My cock was relishing the sight of Cassie in that unaccustomed bikini top... And Three: I no longer had my shirttails to conceal the whole 'relishing' thing going on with my cock.

Casually, I rolled over onto my stomach, adjusting the chaise to lie flat, then propping myself up on my elbows to read the book I laid down in front of me. This had two benefits. My hard-on was concealed. And it would also have a chance to subside, since I was no longer staring in Cassie's direction. The drawback was, I was no longer staring in Cassie's direction.

I got through almost a page and a half of my textbook before Cassie piped up out of nowhere in her bird-like little voice, "Damn, Will! No wonder there was so much noise."

I froze. Fuck. Had the stories gotten so far through the dorm as to reach relative loners like Cassie?

"Excuse me?" I asked tentatively, not looking at her.

"Your back."

"My back?" I asked in new surprise, twisting, but of course unable to see what she was talking about.

"Yeah," Cassie said, amusement in her voice. "That girl in the shower with you must have really been into it. No woman leaves marks like that unless she is extremely satisfied with how things are going."

"There are scratches?" I asked momentarily confused.

"Oh yeah. In sets of four all over, from a woman's fingernails."

I sat up, feeling my face redden. In something akin to, but not nearly panic, I said, "I, uh, think I better go back to my room." I stood up and grabbed at my books.

"Oh, hey, Will!" Cassie said, contrition in her voice. "I didn't mean to embarrass you! I just... Sorry. You don't need to give up your study time."

"Ah," I said, not quite sure why I had been about to bolt, and suddenly not wanting to look cowardly by running away. "I was, um, just going to see in the mirror what you were talking about with my back."

"I've got a better idea," Cassie said. "Hold still." With that, I heard a smartphone camera sound effect behind me. Oh wow.

"Here, take a look," Cassie said. I turned around to see her holding out her phone, screen toward me. "This is better than trying to look at yourself in the mirror."

Almost involuntarily, I stepped forward. "What makes you think I'm Shower Guy?" I asked tentatively as I looked at the screen.

"Come on," Cassie snorted. "I'm not sure who the girl was, but I got it from someone who was there that you were definitely the guy."

Fucking snitch! "Who's your informant?" I asked, morbidly curious about who some of the main gossips were.

"Oh, the story is just going around, but I confirmed the details with Rachel."

"Rachel?!?"

"Hey, her room is right there. You know she had to have heard if she was around."

I snorted in amusement to myself. Really Rachel? How did you not burst out laughing when you told that whopper?

Still... fair play. I would not out her now. If Cassie was going to eventually find out Rachel's actual part in the event, which she probably would eventually, it would not be from me.

I took a good look at the picture on Cassie's phone. Wow, Kate had really done a number on my back. There were no bloody rents or anything, but there were lots of long, reddish streaks everywhere. There was no mistaking what they were.

No wonder I'd been itching all day...

The urge to still deny everything was strong in me, and I seized on one thing I could honestly deny. "I absolutely did not get those from... this Shower Girl person," I said. Somehow, my brain thought saying that was a good idea...

"Wait..." Cassie said, leaning forward, her teasing voice now surprised. "Those are fresh. Are you saying that you rocked two different girls' world that hard, in the last two days?"

My innate instinct for honesty had combined with my suddenly confident loose lips in a hellish brew...

I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I could figure out nothing that would not make this worse. Looking at Cassie, I practically begged her to let me just shut up.

Cassie just grinned, then bent back to pick up her pencil. I sat, but didn't lie, back down, unwilling to turn my back on her again. I grabbed my book. The usually nice sensation of having Cassie around was long gone, in conjunction with her sudden transmogrification into this teasing machine... a teasing machine with a picture of my scratch-covered back on her phone.

I heard her mutter something under her breath. I couldn't make it out but it contained the same word twice. "What was that?" I found myself asking. Why was I engaging her further?

To my surprise, this time, Cassie was the one suddenly blushing at having been heard.

"Come on," I teased her. I knew I should just shut up, now that I had her backing off, but the fact that I somehow had regained some leverage here made me reckless.

Cassie looked at me. "I... I just..." she trailed off. She paused again. Then she opened her mouth, paused again, drooped her head and said in a rush. "I was just wondering to myself what it might take to get you to go three for three."

Now we both paused. Understand, I grocked her meaning instantly, but it was taking some serious effort to make myself believe she had said it.

"I... I mean... It's been a while for me," Cassie started to let her mouth run away with itself. "I mean, even for a date, let alone..."

I'll admit, I looked at her skeptically.

"Hey!" she said defensively. "It's not easy finding guys who don't just stare..." she cut herself off. Cassie seemed to have a lot she felt compelled to say, and yet did not want to say a lot of it. "Anyway, I admit the whole Shower Incident thing turned me on, okay? I mean, even when I first heard about it, it sounded hot. But then at lunch today, when Rachel went on and on about how epic it had sounded, I was practically squirming. And then when she told me for sure it was you, and I realized Shower Guy was someone I actually knew and saw around?"

She may have been babbling, but I was at a loss for words. I did have enough sense to just let her keep going, though. I stared at Cassie, not sure I has having this experience--watching her babble about how hot stories about me had made her. And holy shit, she was not lying. Those tell-tale ripples giving away the position of her nipples? They were full-on tent poles suddenly.