A Reputation Ch. 10 - The Vehicle

But her teeshirt had become untucked. I could not quite see right up her shirt, even though she was positioned right above me, but... I could see some curves.

Those could not be real.

I resolved to make sure I hung around after the demonstration, so I could be found.

She leant further out over the rail, and the shirt swung further forward. Those bouncing boobs, quivering with laughter, were unsupported by any bra. I could see the milky under-curves plain as day.

Those were definitely not real, and I had never...

"Will!" I heard a shout from across the way. Then another, and another. My dorm had shown up at last. Good thing Dale and I hadn't gone first... There were more cries of my name and, I was glad to hear, even a few shouts for Dale, too. That was nice. He'd never met a one of them, so Mitch must have told them his name. I didn't imagine that Dale got to hear his name being cheered out by girls very often...

There they were, almost 25 of them, gathered along a section of railing on the opposite side, up above us at street level. It was easy to tell that they were all together, aside from the way they were all calling my name, and were pressed in close. Almost all of them were wearing identical, white, custom teeshirts.

Across the front of those shirts, in bold black lettering, were the words, "Go, Shower Guy!"

Oh for fuck's sake.

Then I saw Rachel, who of course was there, and of course was wearing one of the shirts, turn around to say something to Chad behind her (also wearing a shirt, amazingly). The back read, "Drive it up there, hard!"

Oh for fuck's sake.

I wanted to be mad. I wanted to text a death threat to Jimmy. But I just shook my head and grinned a little. The price of fame. Possibly the price of Miss Enhanced up above me.

Then I caught sight of Shawn. She had an occasional nickname of 'Waldo', because she virtually never wore anything but jeans, sneakers, and horizontally-striped, crew-neck shirts in any number of combination of colors. Today, she had the usual nicely-fitting jeans and Converse sneakers, but even she was wearing a Shower Guy shirt.

I looked at her, and she met my eyes. I gave her a pained, et tu Bruté expression. She just shrugged and smiled. I shied away from the image of Shawn thinking of me as Shower Guy.

Rachel was there, and Cassie. Tonya was there, standing with Yolanda and Stu. All were wearing the shirts, of course. No Danielle in evidence, which I was shocked to find made me feel a little hurt. Jesus, I was entitled...

"Right on, guys!" Mitch called. "Don't crash!" He had his arm around Kate, both wearing the shirts. It was nice to see Kate. I hadn't laid eyes on her since the day Mitch had walked in on us.

"Who are all the yahoos yelling at us?" Dale asked sourly.

"Come on, man! They are our cheering section," I said reassuringly. "Most of them are from my dorm. They are here to support us."

The next vehicle went off on its ultimately doomed trip. To look at it, I expected it to fall apart on the first straightaway. But it actually made it almost two-thirds of the way up the ramp before it had just enough failing power in its rubber band to tilt over the inner edge of the curve and roll down the slope to the pond, falling completely apart before it made it to the water.

The crowd loved it.

By the time the next vehicle had failed in pretty straight-forward, boring fashion, I started noticing that not all my dorm were standing in the one clot. The shirts were scattered around now.

Then I realized that most of those other shirt wearers were not from my dorm, nor even standing with my anyone in my dorm. I saw Xavier from my English Lit class, wearing a shirt. Dammit, I had seen him at the start of the demonstration, and he had not been wearing a Shower Guy shirt then...

Had my dorm brought fucking extras?

Son of a bitch.... They were selling the goddamned things! I decided with grim amusement that I had better get a cut.

As the next vehicle started its run, it was clear this one was going to be another pedestrian failure. That was good, as I could take the time to figure out what was suddenly getting Dale so upset. He was scowling, and hanging his head.

"What's up, dude?" I asked, concerned. I needed his head in the game.

"Those are all from your dorm, right? The assholes in the teeshirts?" he asked, refusing to gesture at them.

"Pretty much," I replied. "But it's cool, the shirts are just a joke."

Dale looked around, not mollified, and obviously bewildered. "I shower, Will. I shower every day... now. I have ever since... I mean, I have a specific set of criteria on when I need to shower, and has resulted, on average, in my taking a shower 13.1 times every 14 days over the last 17 and a half months. Your dorm mates are jerks. They don't even know me!"

I could not help but laugh. Dale didn't like that.

"Easy, big guy," I said with a smile. "The shirts aren't about you. I am Shower Guy."

"What?" Dale exclaimed. "You are the cleanest guy I know. How do you get any work done is beyond me with all the primping you must do."

Primping?!?

All I do each morning is shower (alone) and brush my hair. Usually there is some deodorant... and a touch of pomade... and the tiniest touch of cologne lately, but not enough for anyone to notice consciously.

"Then why do they call you Shower Guy?" Dale asked grimly.

I did not want to get into this, now of all times, with my partner. I told him we needed to watch the competition.

"Competition?" Dale snorted, referring to the current, pedestrian vehicle. It had just run out of power for the second time on the hill, and thus had less than zero chance. "So," he bore on, "are they making fun of you because you shower all the time and are such a hygiene freak?"

"I am not a hygiene freak."

"Then why the name?"

Crap. Dale had locked in on the subject. When he did that, he was not going to let go. A lot of people think that he is on the spectrum, but I know he is not, because he has the test results to prove he is not. At least he doesn't carry those around with him anymore. But he does get locked in on a puzzle.

I sighed. "I have gotten the nickname Shower Guy over the last month of so. Half the campus knows about it, or at least about the name, even if they don't know Shower Guy is me."

"For what? Taking too many showers?"

I let my shoulders sag in defeat.

"I had sex with a girl, one of the ones up there in the shirts, in the shower in our dorm. And we got caught. And I got a reputation. That reputation has led to me having a lot of sex, with a lot of women. Right now, I can see seven of those women watching us right now. Six are wearing that shirt, and laughing at my embarrassment."

Dale looked at me, agog. I knew it. He was going to be totally distracted now, asking me questions. This was totally not the time to have to explain the bird and the bees to Dale!

He squinted at me, brow furrowed. "Let me try to understand," he said, his face a picture of innocent incomprehension. "Not only do you primp yourself all the time," he wondered (unfairly), "But you have that much sex, and you still keep your grades up? How?" He literally scratched his head. "It's just... where do you find the time? I mean, I have sex twice a week and it is still almost too much."

Wait.

I looked at Dale like he'd grown a second head. Dale has had sex? Dale was having sex regularly? Dale was having enough sex, for long enough each time, to be problem for his work load?His having grown that second cranium would have made more sense to me. I had genuinely not been certain that he knew sex existed...

"Twice a week?"

"We've been averaging a little more recently. There is no set schedule."

I just stared at him. "How long have you had a sex life, Dale?

At least he blushed at that. It turned out to be a long story. To make it short, his Anthropology grad student neighbor and he...

She was also at the event, so Dale had his own cheering section, which was nice.

It turned out that I was so bemused by Dale's tale that it was me, not he, who got totally distracted by the conversation. We almost missed the first real contenders. Their vehicle was elegant, and innovative, and light-weight. It was a scary design for us.

It also broke.

The next device was a bad design, but at least it got a lot of cheers when it dove into the pond.

And then it was our turn. We had installed a brand new rubber band that we had carefully examined and tested, and wound it the precise number of turns we needed. Then we used a laser-pointer to align our machine perfectly. A few leaves had fallen in our path, and Dale ran to sweep them aside. I waited for a slight breeze to die down before I released the vehicle.

It trundled obediently toward the ramp. When it reached it, instead of bumping to a halt and waiting until we re-wound and turned it, it kept going. I had designed a little steering mechanism that worked almost like a blindman's cane, letting it feel its way up the ramp's outer wall, without hitting anything or wasting much of any power. At the top, it straightened back out automatically and rolled across the finish line, coming to a stop on its own, a meter and a half past the required distance. We never touched it on the whole run.

To the onlookers, it seemed totally uneventful, but successful. Our competitors were amazed or appalled, depending on their own hopes.

To Dale and I, it was the most beautiful thing either of us had ever seen. And I've seen my dick spewing cum all over a Russian former prima ballerina's tits. We were going ape-shit, jumping up and down like lunatics. My cheering section at least caught on that things had gone really very well, and their polite cheers grew loud and rowdy.

Over the rest of the morning, one other team completed the course intact and in the allowed time, with no more than the permitted touches. That made three entries that 'completed' the basic competition. But our car had made a complete run untouched. It was the first vehicle to manage the feat in four years.

My steering mechanism had been the difference.

And Dale's truss support structure had given us the reduced mass that let me build the thing to begin with.

We were steely-eyed missile men.

The stretch goals were literally anti-climactic, although we pulled off four of the six, which was better than any other team. But our clean run in the main demonstration meant we had already won.

*

By the time all the stretch goals had been run, most of the crowd had left. Even a few of my cadre of bizarre, shirt-selling mercenaries had bailed. It was almost one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, after all. There was goofing off to be attended to.

Dale's surpassingly hot, nerdy, graduate anthropologist 'not girlfriend' came over and stuck her tongue down his throat by way of congratulations. The two then went off to have sex, or argue about whether Marvel's Phase One films were better than Phase Two (or vice versa).

Maybe they were going to argue about that while having sex.

I did not care. I was on Cloud Nine.

I had just pulled off a major feat of engineering design and construction. And I was facing a crowd of people who were totally excited about something that I had done that did not involve my penis for once. It was a heady time.

Apparently, either a faculty member or, more likely, an upperclass engineering student had explained to my house-mates just how impressive our feat had actually been, because most of them had kind of forgotten the teeshirts. It was indeed a very heady time.

Then, as we all walked back toward La Floridita in a big group, the teeshirts were remembered when three attractive girls that none of us seemed to know all passed the other way, and in unison called out, "Hey, Shower Guy!" in a sexy harmony.

"You live a strange life, don't you?" Shawn asked, walking along beside me.

"I do," I laughed agreeably.

"I am sorry about not telling you in advance about the shirt thing, but I was sworn to not spoil the surprise."

"Well, we can't have spoilers, can we?" I looked at her sidelong. "But I see you are not apologizing for the shirts themselves! Tell Jimmy that I want my cut."

Shawn actually looked away for a moment, then faced me as we walked and squared her shoulders. "Um, they were my idea, actually."

I stared at her, trying to summon a look of betrayal. It wouldn't come, so I grabbed my chest, mocking a heart-attack and 'swooned' to the ground.

The crowd around us all stopped. People who hadn't quite seen what had happened shouted in dismay. Shawn looked at me sarcastically, but did nothing. Tonya, who had been walking ahead of Shawn and me, improving my view immensely thereby, turned and shrieked. She dropped to her knees over me.

"Will! Are you all right?" she exclaimed, genuinely scared.

"I just took a dagger to my soul," I said hoarsely. "I think I need mouth-to-mouth," I added theatrically.

"As if," Tonya snorted, swatting my shoulder. She popped to her feet, as if in a huff, but then she reached down to take my hand. Someone else, Freddie maybe, took my other hand and they helped me get up.

"Some other time," Tonya whispered in my ear, voice full of promise. That didn't suck.

Shawn had floated to the back of the group of people who had initially thought I was actually hurt or something. We shared a look over the others. Mine, directed at her said, 'I provisionally forgive you. But I still want my cut.'

Her impassive, good-natured gaze back at me said, just as wordlessly, 'Thanks, but I'm not terribly sorry. And not on your life.'

I had had no idea that Shawn harbored such hidden depths of cheerful evil...

*

When our group at last made it back to La Floridita, I was subjected to a final humiliation of being forced to take a picture in front of the statue in the entry courtyard, surrounded by everyone who was wearing a Shower Guy tee. Like all large group photos, it took forever. The hassle and humiliation was significantly ameliorated by the way Cassie and Randi, a girl from another house in the dorm who had never previously shown any interest in me whatsoever, even after the Shower Guy thing began, had their breasts mashed against my shoulders and the back of my head.

A shot was finally taken in which Pierre Smythe managed to not make a derp face, and we broke up at last, most people, including me, went into the dorm. I floated up to my room in a wonderful haze of accomplishment, mammarian neck massage, future recurring interest from Tonya, speculation about Randi, and Shawn's surprisingly delightful betrayal.

Kate had made herself scarce, temporarily I presumed, and Mitch followed me to our room.

I grabbed a Coke from my fridge and collapsed onto the bed.

"Congratulations, dude," Mitch said, grabbing a Sprite. "I think you might have a future in the fast-growing, lucrative field of rubber band-powered automotive transportation!"

I raised my Coke in appreciation. "It is a very low emission technology."

We laughed and drank for a few quiet moments.

"Did people at least have fun?" I asked, curiously.

"Actually, it was more fun than I think most of us expected," Mitch said happily. "It was clear how hard the challenge was for you guys, and there were some good competitors. And the one car that went full Thelma and Louise was hilarious!"

"Plus you all got to make fun of me," I added drily.

"Oh yeah," Mitch replied, rolling his eyes, unrepentant. "We all stood around, practically shouting that my roommate is a sex god. I'm sure he was totally humiliated by it all..."

I wanted to throw a pillow at him, but he had a point.

"Well, I am going to crash for a little while," I announced instead. "My brain is fried."

"Drink a Coke, then try to take a nap. Sound plan, genius," Mitch chuckled, getting up. "Did you use that same planning prowess on your vehicle?" He opened the door. "I will leave you to your caffeine-ruined sleep." And he closed the door quietly behind him.

I collapsed back on the bed. Coke or no, I probably was not going to sleep.

I had just enjoyed a major success in my chosen field, one that would give me and Dale a new reputation in our department that would help both of us immeasurably in the years to come.

I also was having great sex with an absolute raft of sexy women, and had a Reputation that was assuring more of the same.

But I felt a little vaguely, somehow dissatisfied. Worse, I could not put my finger on why. I had been feeling that particular unease grow for a while now, though. A bit of panicked introspection told me that no, I was not unhappy with having large amounts of sex with multiple partners. And that I was damned if I was going to do anything to divert that course, as long as it lasted. That made me feel relieved. I had no undiagnosed head injury. Good.

But the awesomeness of the experience was not un-alloyed. And I need to figure out why. What did I need to take away or add to make my apparently perfect life... truly perfect?

*

Son of a bitch, I actually napped. My mind really had been worn to a nub by the whole competition. With that pressure at last off my brain, it had gone into maintenance mode or something.

I sat up several hours later, clear-headed, and I realized that I had also, during system reset, gotten an insight.

Beyond the Disney World analogy, I was a passenger.

I had shown that at least I could say no, but beyond that, my sex life was mostly driven by chance, or if by design, then by the designs of women. Girls came to me for sex. Or, if we encountered each other randomly, it was the girl who pushed to make the encounter sexual. The closest I had come to planning the sex I subsequently had, was with Svetlana, and that was more me simply deciding how to go along with the play she was already making. And even there, I might have messed it all up without coaching from Elaine (yet another girl).

I had no problem whatsoever with sex coming to me. I hoped that trend continued unabated for the foreseeable future. But I also realized that I wanted to know that I could make it happen proactively myself. I needed to know that I could.

Even, in the relatively few, non-college life, sexual experiences I'd had before the shower incident with Rachel, my partners and I had largely stumbled into the event.

Could I actually successfully hit on someone? Would my Reputation make that something that I could do?

At this point, my ego was the size of a Humvee, and made of solid titanium, yet even it could not make me sure about that.

I flopped back down on the bed, thinking furiously. I needed a plan. I needed advice and a plan. And I had an excellent source for both.

I looked at my phone. I had slept nearly three hours. I had clearly needed it, because I had not felt this energized in ages. I had a plan, and I decided to see if I could put its first parts into place.

The first thing I did was... take a shower.

Fortunately, I was uninterrupted by anyone, especially Rachel. Don't get me wrong, if she'd decided to mess with my mind, I'd had dragged her under the water again and put my new plans on hold. I was not going to give up having sex thrust upon me...

But I showered, tidied myself, and got dressed unmolested. I did not primp. Soap. Deodorant. Hairbrush. Pomade. Cologne. Nothing out of the ordinary. Get over yourself, Dale. You and your 13.1 showers a fortnight, and >2.0 sexual encounters per week with your nerdy grad student who has you fix her computer all the time...

With a look in the mirror, it was time for advice.

I hopped up the steps to the third floor, and was relieved to see Shawn's door ajar. I knocked on it and poked my head in. "You busy?" I asked.