Ashley the First

My text message sat on "read." I couldn't believe he wasn't falling all over himself to craft a witty reply. I couldn't just let this lie.

"So what are you up to??" I rolled my eyes at myself. I couldn't believe I was trying to press a conversation with this guy.

"Programming." He was certainly a man of many words.

"Hey I can't sleep. I was going to go to the library to study so I don't bother Kim. Can I just study at your place instead?" I hit send before I even thought about what I was doing.

I mean, it wasn't a lie. I needed to cram. Our study session earlier was only going to get me so far. Or maybe I was lying to myself and it was a thinly veiled booty call. I guess I still don't completely know. I slammed my phone down on my bed next to me and buried my face in my hands. What was I doing?

My phone buzzed shortly near my hip. "Sure." His reply was just as short as the notification buzz.

I felt foolish and confused but I sat up in bed nonetheless. I looked over at Kim, still absentmindedly scrolling. "Hey, cool if I hit the lights for a bit?" She just shrugged without looking up from her phone. I hopped out of bed and hit the light. I couldn't very well show up in my PJs for a study session. I stripped off my plaid shorts and baggy T-shirt. I stripped out of my grey cotton panties that had gone dark in the gusset from my playtime. I balled them up and shoved them to the bottom of my hamper to hide the evidence.

I put on my cute red bra and matching panties, then covered myself with a grey knit tank and short jeans shorts. I quickly threw my hair up in a messy bun.

"Going out?" Came a sleepy voice from Kim's bed.

"Yeah - I figured I'd go get some studying in. I've got that test on Wednesday, you know."

"Bullshit ash. Those aren't studying undies."

I get my face flush and I tried to come up with a quick comeback but before I did, Kim continued, "whatever. Go get that freshman dick. Just don't let him fall in love with you."

I rolled my eyes at Kim and spritzed myself with a shot of a fruity perfume. She smirked at me. I threw my laptop in my backpack, slipped on my black wedges and made my way out the door.

The March air was cool, but not unpleasantly so. We had a bit of a heat wave going which meant it was still tolerable at night. It wasn't a long walk to Luke's dorm - sorority row to the union, the union across the quad, and finally one street over to his dorm - but it was enough time to really come to terms with my intentions. Yes, I needed to study, but I realistically I could study at the library if I really wanted. Luke was a great resource for CS, but I also knew that there was a solid likelihood that it would turn into more than a study session.

I got to the back of his dorm and texted him: "hey, I'm outside!" and waited impatiently for him to let me in. It gave me time to reminisce. This was Katie's dorm from last year. She had moved out this year but I wondered how Luke would react if he knew what we got up to inside these walls (Check out Ashley Alpha Phi Ch. 01 for deets!)

The back door opened with a loud "ker-chunk" and Luke let me in. It shouldn't have felt any different. I was here to study. It did feel different though. Not just anybody shows up on your doorstep for a cram session at 1:30 AM.

We walked quietly through the hallway until we reached his room. He was wearing grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt. It wasn't unreasonable that he had changed clothes from earlier... I mean, I had. His door was open when we got there but he closed it gently behind us when I walked in. His room was impeccably clean, just like earlier.

"Here I cleared you a spot." He said as he gestured to the desk on the far side of his dresser. His room was laid out like Katie's had been but mirrored since he was on the boys' wing: on the left were two closets book ending an alcove containing the bunk beds. On the right were two desks facing the wall separated by a built in dresser and mirror.

"Thanks" I replied. Something about the quiet tone in the dorm had me feeling a little shy. I sat my bag by the far side desk and pulled out my pink laptop. Luke just resumed poking away at the keyboard on his computer, not paying any attention to what I was doing.

Kicked off my wedges, flipped open my laptop and installed the program for programming he had shown me earlier. I shamefully hadn't yet gotten around to it. After not too long I was running through the basic steps he gave me for writing my own "hello world" program. I glanced over at Luke occasionally but he seemed pretty wrapped up in what he was doing. I spent a solid 15 minutes on it and when I was finally ready, clicked the green "play" butting on the top of my screen. Instead of a friendly "hello" from my computer, I got a screen full of red messages telling me my "syntax" was malformed. I tried playing it a few more times, but kept getting the same issue.

"Hey Luke..." I broke the silence. "Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong here?"

He didn't say anything, he just got up out of his chair and came over to my side of the room. He placed one hand on my desk and one on the back of my chair. It was the first time he felt... authoritative.

"What do you need to end a statement with?" He asked me, professorially.

"I.. I don't know."

"Do you remember the site I showed you earlier?"

"Oh right!" I minimized my coding program and popped open my browser while I dug out my notebook to find the notes I had taken during our study session earlier.

"What's this? Planning a trip or something?"

I glanced up to see the website from the venue we had discussed at chapter. "Not exactly, see my sorority does this thing once a quarter. It isn't a huge deal but it kind of takes a lot of planning... oh here's the site!" I had wanted to discuss the event with him. Just not yet. My cheeks felt like they were burning at my awkwardly forced transition, but I pulled up a new tab and brought up stack overflow and stared at the screen"

"Great.. now copy in your error." I followed his instructions, and was met with a few different answers about semicolons. I flipped back to my program and found the offending lines. I made a few quick corrections and hit the green play button. In simple black and white letters my screen showed: "Hello World <3"

"Hey it worked!" I exclaimed. I looked up at Luke elated, but he wasn't there. At some point while I was fixing my bugs he had already sat back at his desk. Now he worked furiously at his keyboard. It was break time for me.

I stood up and arched my back into an exaggerated stretch, pointing my chest towards the ceiling causing a flash of my red bra to poke out of the top of my tank. I looked over to Luke but he was still absorbed, he hadn't even noticed my posing. I padded over behind him and put my hands on the back of his chair. His screen was a blur as he was flipping between multiple tabs and seemingly thousands of lines of code on each.

I exhaled heavily to announce my presence. "Well, I think it's break time for me! So... uh... what are you working on?" The frantic tab flipping and chaotic coding stopped and he turned. He started to put his arm on the back of the chair, but when his forearm touched my hands he quickly withdrew it and awkwardly braced himself against the cushion.

"It's just this pet project I've been working on for a while."

"Don't be so secretive! What's it do?" I teased giving him a playful slap on the shoulder. He turned back to look at the screen.

"Nothing, right now. I'm still trying to work out a few of the core functions."

I laughed in exasperation. "I mean, what's it supposed to do then? Stop being so difficult."

He turned back to me. "It's hard to explain." I leveled my stare at him and eagerly leaned over putting my elbows on the back of the chair.

"Try me."

He let out a sigh like it was difficult to find the words. "There was this game that Braylee and I used to play together all the time." I twisted my mouth in disapproval. "Yeah. I know. Anyway we came up with idea for a mod... which is kind of like a way to edit the game and to turn it into something new. Which was cool for a while but I wanted to do more with it, and started to run into limitations working on top of the game engine. So I decided to write my own engine and adapt the mod into a standalone game."

"That's... that's really impressive" was all I could reply at first.

"Thanks! I've been having trouble with some of the physics modules and it's causing the whole thing to crash, but I'm hoping I'll be able to get it debugged soon."

"Can you show me?"

"There's not a lot to show right now..." he clicked the green "play" button. After a few seconds a menu came up with a rendered castle in the background. He hit the "Start" button and we watched the progress bar of a loading screen. It got nearly to the end and the game disappeared.

"I think I have it narrowed down to something in the physics engine. Anyway it's supposed to be a castle simulator."

I probably should have just dropped it, but I couldn't help myself. "So you and... Braylee." I let the name linger for a moment. "That's how you did it for three years? By playing games?"

"What do you mean?" He seemed confused by the question, but it had been nagging me all day and I needed answers. I left the back of his chair and leaned up against the dresser so I could face him better.

"I've just never met anyone like you before. You're a little bit of an enigma."

He didn't reply.

"I mean... did you guys ever even make out? Hold hands? I'm just trying to figure out what that relationship looked like."

"You mean because we... because I'm a virgin?" He was very matter-of-fact about it, but definitely got hung up on her end of the status.

"Yeah."

"We kissed goodnight occasionally. We typically went out with friends or in big groups at LAN parties so there wasn't really time for anything more."

"LAN parties? It sounds like your high school experience was vastly different than mine."

He smiled a toothy smile. "It was a lot of fun! Here, check it out..."

He clicked through a couple of folders and eventually pulled up a picture in a darkened room with a bunch of his friends. It looked like maybe a parent had taken it from a doorway. Each had their own computer in front of them, except Braylee who was draped across Luke's lap.

"What, did Braylee not have her own computer?" I teased, playfully.

"She did. But she was my girlfriend, you know? It wasn't like we didn't want to be close."

I shot a smile at him. "You're telling me that never turned into anything more?"

He seemed lost in thought for a moment and I gave him time to mull it over but he finally replied in a defensive tone, "We knew what our expectations for each other were. We were really careful not to push any boundaries."

"Oh come on. There was no way that wasn't super frustrating for you! Her sitting on your lap like that. I know how guys get." I thought about how to put it delicately, "Certain things never came up?" I extended two fingers from my fist.

His face was beet red, staring at either my extended fingers or my tits. I couldn't figure out where exactly was his eye line landed.

"I don't mean that it didn't... happen. Occasionally." The words seemed hard for him to get out and it occurred to me that this might be his first time talking about something like this with a girl. "But I was always pretty careful about making sure she didn't know. That was my problem not hers. I didn't want her to have to deal with it"

I teased him a little and tried to lighten the mood. "Oh you didn't her to deal with it did you? I saw her picture. She was cute."

"It was hard." I smiled at his double entendre and he acted like he didn't see it, but the smallest smile betrayed him in his cheeks. "But I kept our promise." He trailed off and seemed to get a little sad again.

"My first boyfriend and I decided we were going to wait for marriage too, you know." He raised his eyebrows at me doubtfully.

"What, how is it that hard to believe? We were in high school and it was a romantic thought!"

"Do you regret it at all?"

"Having sex?""

"With your ex, I mean. Since you're not together anymore."

"No of course not! It happened, and while Hunter and I aren't together anymore, it opened up a whole new world for me."

Luke looked back at the screen, at the picture of Braylee seated on his lap with her arms wrapped around his neck. "I kind of wish we had," he admitted after a moment. "Now that it's over. Now that she's gone off and... lost it... with another guy. I wish it had been me."

"What she did was really fucked up. But on the bright side it sounds like she might have been game after all!" I offered. It got a little smile out of him.

"Even if I had wanted to at the time, I wouldn't have known how to bring it up. I had no chance." He looked at me with curiosity splattered across his face. "How did you and your ex... you know?"

"Hunter. His name was Hunter."

"How did Hunter bring it up?"

I flipped my hair and feigned offense. "I never said it was Hunter who initiated things."

He seemed to work that over in his head. I could almost see the gears turning, like he was trying to make sense of my code that was lacking semicolons. "What made you decide to then? If you were sure you were going to wait?"

"It all happened pretty organically. It wasn't like one day I was convinced I'd stay a virgin until marriage, and then the next I was wanting to get my guts rearranged." He cringed at my analogy like I had said something painful, but slowly came around to it and his face morphed slowly into an awkward smile. I chewed on my tongue for a second as I considered my next moves letting the tension build as much as I could.

"We were making out once and I felt him through his shorts. Gym shorts don't hide much." I gave him a wink and paused for a second while the memory of our parting embrace earlier that afternoon lingered in the air. "I guess I was curious." I continued, "I had seen pictures of them online, but I hadn't seen one in person... and thinking about him going home and taking care of things himself got me a bit wound up."

"Taking care of things himself?" He asked, without a hint of irony. "You thought he was jacking off?"

This time it was my turn to be confused. "Of course he was!"

He stared at me flatly. I immediately felt the air go out of the room as if I had made some baseless assumption that I needed to defend.

"It's no big deal, everybody does it. It wasn't like I was judging him for it or anything. Besides the thought of him all worked up and tugging it just made me want to see it, you know? Feel it a bit?" I shoved off of my perch on the dresser and grabbed my chair. I pulled it close to Luke with the backrest facing him, and swung a leg over it to mount it reverse. I was spread open on display. His eyes were glued to the gap between the seat and the back of the chair.

"So the next time we were making out in his room I climbed on top of him." I wriggled my hips a bit to demonstrate. My seam caught me just just right, but I was more intrigued by Luke's reaction.

He crossed his legs while awkwardly trying to hide adjusting himself. I paused and watched him as he shifted, making it as obvious as possible what I was doing. When he finally settled down with his arms folded across his lap I gave him a playful side-eye. I started to continue my story, but he interrupted me.

"Not everybody." His voice was shaky like he was going to get in trouble for what he was saying.

"Not everybody?" I parroted back, trying to work out what he meant.

He sat up in his chair and steeled his voice. "I haven't... taken care of things myself."

I don't think I responded at first. I don't think I was able to respond, really. I'm almost certain my face cycled through a few reactions though: confusion as I tried to work out what he was saying, humor as I figured he was fucking with me, arousal as I began to assume it was a (terrible) attempt to pick me up and finally just flat out disbelief. He didn't say anything and just watched me never breaking eye contact.

When I finally picked my jaw up off of the floor I managed a meek "are you fucking with me?"

"No."

"Never?"

He just shook his head calmly. I was anything but calm. My world was turned upside down. There didn't seem to be any lie behind his eyes. In one day this guy had gone from a comedic footnote in one of my sexual escapades, to my sweet if not a little sheltered CompSci tutor, to the subject of a shameful late night sexual fantasy turned booty call, but now... I don't know what he was. A project? I knew one thing, I couldn't just leave this as is.

I finally broke the silence after what seemed like an eternity. "I.. have so many questions."

He looked confident. He looked smug. I feel like he knew he had flipped the script on me.

"Ask away. I'm an open book." I knew that was a lie. His newfound confidence was getting the better of him. There was nothing about Luke that I had seen that day that made me think "open book" but he looked so proud of himself for surprising me anyway.

"So have you ever..." I extended my forearm toward him that had been resting on the back of the chair and made an erupting gesture with my fingers.

I caught myself staring at his lap, wondering if he was even hard right now or if he was some sort of wizard that could just summon and dismiss it at will.

"No. I mean, like everything works - it happens at night occasionally."

"But you've never done it to yourself?"

"No, of course not!" He seemed genuinely repulsed by the idea.

"How!?" I exclaimed. "I mean, what do you do when you're hard?"

He looked at me like I had two heads. "Just wait for it to go away usually. Distract myself. I guess I program sometimes."

"And it just... goes away?" My mouth dropped open again. I stared in disbelief. "Dude. You've never had an orgasm." I followed this quickly with, "you know what an orgasm is, right?"

"Of course I know what an orgasm is. I took health in high school."

"But you've never given yourself one?"

"Why would I? The whole point of what Braylee and I were doing was waiting so we could share our first. It isn't like I haven't thought about it. I've thought about it a lot... it just seems..."

"Seems what?"

His mouth twisted into something that kind of looked like a smile. "Do you pick your nose and eat it?"

"What the hell!?"

"But it's your nose. Your boogers. It's all connected by like an inch of throat. It's all your body - but you're saying there are limits to what you'll do with it?"

I scrunched my nose. "You haven't done it because you think it's disgusting?"

"Kinda. Yeah, I guess! I kept thinking I was going to do it after she broke up with me... but it just hasn't felt right."

I put on a mock pouty tone. "Luke... do you think I'm gross?"

"Of course not!" He retorted confidently but as he continued his confidence began to wane and his voice got picked up a little shake. "I actually think you're very beautiful. Why would you ever say that?"

My heart was pounding in my chest. I wasn't used to having to spell this out for guys so plainly. "I took care of myself earlier tonight."

I let it sink in. He just stared at me wide-eyed like he was caught in the headlights.

"Well, almost anyway." I rolled my eyes, sighed and bit my lower lip. "I didn't finish. I usually do though."

I caught his eyes as they darted down to the space between my legs and quickly back up to my face. "You?"

I shrugged playfully and nodded. I wanted him to feel comfortable. I wanted him to know it wasn't a big deal. "Most days I do, really. Some days are harder to fit it in than others so I won't but some days I just can't help it." I let out a nervous laugh as and continued, "tonight for instance I had to take care of it with my room mate in the room."