Dear Olive Ch. 02

Note: Scroll down to the divide in the page to get straight to the erotic part.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself in my dorm room. In early May I couldn't help but keep my window open to let the cool night air in as I slept, so this morning the Sunday stillness of a collective campus-wide hangover allowed the sounds of nature to come in bright and uninterrupted. Light poured into my room, and I sat up in bed. Must be at least 10. Too late to go to the cafeteria. I headed to the showers with a towel around my waist. I'd wait to wash my hair, I decided, and just stood under the shower head, watching the spray glint in the sunlight that glared through the dingy beige shower curtain. Today would be an easy, carefree day. I'd probably find a little nook in the library and watch the sun's position slowly turn the moods outside. We were all captive to the season, seeing ourselves as too mature to realize how playful we really were. Our spirits were like big unfolding flower buds after all those long nights of clenched concentration and study.

Still dripping, I walked back down the hall, when I saw Jesse knocking insistently on my door.

"Dude!" she yelled at my door, just before I caught her eye.

"What's up?" I asked, walking past her. I opened my door, and Jesse followed.

"Where did you disappear to last night?" she asked. I just looked at her blankly, until last night's party came flooding back into my mind. I turned away so Jesse wouldn't see my face light up with the memory. She was as perceptive as Kate was book-smart, and she had read my mind with spooky accuracy before. Not sure how I felt about her reading me now...

I started getting dressed, partially shielded by my closet door. I knew Jesse wouldn't mind. Aside from Kate, I couldn't imagine anyone I was closer to. Jesse kept looking, trying to figure things out from my movements. Maybe a telltale static or tension to my silence, or a sidelong glance? She could pick up a scent from a fucking mile away. Good thing I had just showered, or she easily could've put the pieces together.

"Disappear? I just got a tour of the house. Nothing to tell." I said to fill the silence.

Jesse collapsed in my bean bag in the corner of my room, hanging her arms over her knees.

"You know, you really need to decorate. Place looks like a monastery" she said distractedly, letting her eyes wander around my room. Nothing on the walls, and not a single stray sock on the floor. All my earthly possessions fit on a bookshelf and a dresser. As you might expect, it wasn't a great place to hang out.

"It's a bit late for that" I said, as I slipped my shoes on "Six days till graduation, remember?" I walked up and stood over her as she looked around. She had white and blue striped linen shorts on, a black shirt for some band with the sleeves cut, and converse high-tops. Her hair was blonde, very curly, and short. Her face was angular, almost masculine, but her soft green eyes flecked with brown and small lips tipped the scales in favor of a bubbly pixie look. When she got drunk, though, or wore those aviator sunglasses of hers, a distinct note of chiseled masculinity took center stage. She reached her arms towards me, and I helped her up. We headed down the stairs and began walking through the main quad -- a large square patch of green spidered with the worn down paths of least resistance for students as they gravitated blindly to class, food, sex, drugs, etc. We, however, sat at the picnic table we had dragged into the center of the square. The Buildings and Grounds staff could care less in these last weeks of classes, having far more important things to accomplish than having a tug-of-war with some seniors over outdoor furniture arrangements.

Jesse leaned back, watching a sparrow slice through the deep blue sky, as if to properly calibrate herself for the frictionless days ahead. "The way I see it" she said languidly "there are two possibilities."

God damn. I didn't have to ask. I already knew her inner monologue had taken up a psychoanalysis of me: full-tilt, no holds barred. But I asked to keep up appearances, knowing I was too lazy to keep them up against the usual calculated barrage for long. "Please tell me you're talking about breakfast."

It was astounding. She looked so laid back she may as well have been on K, and yet her eyes were sharp and no-nonsense. "Either..." She started, loving to drag these things out, raising her index finger to begin enumerating "you became a mule for some elite, clandestine, strictly collegiate drug ring, or..." she raised another finger "You got laid."

"Jesus, Jesse, let's get breakfast." I was normally tolerant of shit like this-- even getting high off the thrill of our game of hide and seek. I swear, she could have been a genius at gossip, if she weren't so principled (and slightly antisocial). I sat stock still, waiting for the verdict.

"Fine. I came to get you to go eat anyways. Kate's treat."

At Kate's house, down the road from the college, we sat at dainty wooden chairs in her kitchen/dining room. Jesse and I had biked there, 1.4 miles apparently, with slight inclines. We had just started breaking in pearls of sweat when we arrived. Our faces were flushed when we stepped into Kate's unnaturally cool kitchen.

Kate sat, solid black ponytail down her shoulder, tied with a thin, dove white hair band. She satirically turned her head in a mock silhouette, looking to the sky with a champagne flute hung in her fingers, "Well, should you have been any later--" she said in an English accent running like thin honey.

It was cute, but it creeped us out sometimes. She had never gotten far enough out of her shell to act in any performance, but she would take any sudden moment of framing to experiment with one of her personae. We sat.

The window was wide open, fresh thyme on the sill, the breeze billowing in on occasion.

"Well," Kate said, in her usual goofy voice. "You all are about to get served."

She pulled a frittata out of the oven, along with fresh pancakes and a half-done pie, which she checked at the table, and put back in the oven to set. The table had been set when we walked in the door, with total silence upstairs, downstairs, near the bedrooms. Her family must have been away. In all her bright momentum, she gracefully swung down into her seat and folded her skirt under her. Placing her arms on the table, she said, "Goldmund, you should eat. You must be exhausted from last night."

The brightness of it all gave me a bit of a headache. Oh how graceful she was, yes yes. Well, I could use some food. I ate silently, along with Kate and Jesse sitting next to each other across the table. As I uncovered the bottom of my plate, I paused for a beat and found Kate and Jesse openly talking about me between bites, just quiet enough not for me to hear. I stared until they looked over, laughed, and joined the table again.

"Sorry, Jesse was just telling me about her Senior thesis. Did you want some more?"

"I'm okay, thank you" I said. Shit. Maybe I was getting paranoid. It sometimes happened, especially on beautiful days with bad hangovers. Feel life slipping a little faster than before.

Kate and Jesse continued talking, including me this time. I just listened. I took the plates to the sink to wash, and Jesse went to the bathroom. Kate appeared on my right to help dry the dishes.

"You feeling ok?" Kate said, looking right at me this time.

"--Yeah, I'm fine" I said, trying to keep my cool.

"You know I'm worried about you, right?"

Remaining bent over the sink, I said "Last night... I... I was captured by aliens. They asked us questions and made us do unspeakable things. I just don't think I'll ever be the same", then turned to frown at her.

She shoved me lightly, smiling. "Ok, I get it. Just know you can come to me, okay?"

"Sure." I said, feeling a little conflicted. With such openness, I felt as though I was being sucked into her ray of affection against my will. But the feeling was partly driven by my own desire to open up to her. I gave her a defensive, earnest look, and she understood.

"Want to study in the library tonight?" I asked.

"On a night like tonight will be? I don't know. Wouldn't you rather go stargazing?"

"Well, I hadn't thought of that, but the grass may gather dew tonight, it's going to be colder than you think."

"Well, a little wetness never killed anybody, but sure, let' study" she said.

"I'll be working on anything but my resume." I said pitifully.

Kate dried a metal mixing bowl. She gazed out the window above the sink, at some vagueness in the branches of the trees. "I don't think we will ever forget this week", she shook her head, seeming old somehow. I washed the suds off my hands and we headed into the front yard. Jesse and I gathered our bikes, and Kate waved, barefoot, from where her driveway met the street.

As soon as we got back to Farrar college, I took a quick shower and shoved some books and a notebook in my backpack. Jesse was with a friend from orchestra class. I walked down to the old, half-abandoned library at the bottom of the slope the college was built across. Opening on the third floor, the library had five floors, and that honestly impressed the hell out of me. A real fucking citadel of learning, tucked away in the forgotten fifth corner of campus. It sincerely bothered me when I thought of the state of the old library. The outside was as neglected as the inside was clean and well-kept. Well, there were certainly a couple of students you could reliably find haunting the shelves in the lower levels. Jacob, for one, always with his nose in some desert-dry philosophy or psychology tome. I'd accompany him, on occasion, but all that dust and solitude can't be good for the lungs, so I would only go when my curiosity got the best of me. I suppose it's unfair of me to paint him so oddly, we readers tended to see each other as freaks, based solely on the moments we caught each other catatonically absorbed in some book that hadn't been touched in eons. Truly, we could become gargoyles, perching in the aisles, hardly speaking on the off chance we brushed past each other in an interdisciplinary aisle.

I had walked the same path down the entry corridor, into the wide open room with the checkout station, and over to the dimly lit stairwell. Time felt slow there, now that my final year was coming to a close. I looked at the faded carpeting and felt my old gloom as a first-year afraid to raise his head to the world; I hopped down the stairs two at a time, and felt the tightly-wound doom of sophomore year that had propelled me. This place was home to me, and all the personalities I had shed over the years.

I found Kate sitting upright on one of the sofas. She had her legs curled under her thighs, her black pleated skirt lightly draped over the curve of her thigh. Papers were fanned out on the floor next to her. Her hair was in a broad ponytail, tied off with a black ribbon, and she was tapping a highlighter to her pursed lips. She wore a simple navy blue top, with opaque tights, and bright little black shoes.

"Hey" I said.

Kate shushed me without looking up from the papers she held over her. After marking a couple spots, she patted the cushion next to her. I plopped down, started to pull a manila folder from my backpack, then decided on an old book instead.

"So..." Kate said, putting her papers down and staring at me.

I set my book in my lap and turned to her. She had this reaching look, with a steady gaze, like she was desperately trying to make contact. "Okay... I had a moment last night."

"Mm." She sounded disapproving. "And who is this mystery girl?"

"Olive" I said in almost a whisper. Kate paused, then just said "mmhmm" vaguely.

She turned to her work and pretended to be immersed in it. "Hey," I said after a minute, "I'm going to go look for a book."

She nodded, but didn't look at me. I felt a bit guilty, but didn't really know why. It wasn't like I initiated anything last night, and I was only gone for an hour or so. I didn't abandon her at the party or anything. Best not to think too much into it, I guess.

I headed down to the basement, where the philosophy and sociology sections were. As soon as I opened the door I was hit by the low droning hum of the heating system. Every once and a while the old place would creak. If anywhere on campus was haunted, it was this floor. I walked down the aisles, letting my eyes shift from title to title, waiting for one to catch my attention until I found a familiar little spot to focus my browsing on. I slid a book out and began flipping through it. Over the droning, behind me on the other side of the aisle, I heard a shifting. Suddenly I was on alert. I knew the sounds of this place, and that one didn't fit. I turned and squatted a bit to peer in the gap between two shelves, and saw someone's torso in a tight-fitting mustard yellow sweater. Another rustle came, and a voice: "hmm". A small shock traveled through me. I knew that voice so clearly...

It was Olive. It had to be. I walked slowly down until only two shelves of books, back to back, separated us. I felt her there, in those imperceptible sounds that let me know a presence was near. I kept my head down, pretending to read, and I felt her doing the same, though I knew she was as keyed in to my presence as I was to hers. Both of us, on either side, staring down, saying nothing. And yet, it was as if we had made contact, and communicated something important through mutual silence. She paced slowly away, out of her aisle and to the opening to mine. Now, we were close enough to touch.

It was her. She had her hair up in the same little bun, with the strands of hair on either side of her face. Her sweater was a yellow turtleneck, with long sleeves. She had an onyx black necklace with a strange, intricate little pendant that hung between her breasts, stark against the yellow. Her turtleneck met form-fitted synthetic black yoga pants at the waist. I saw her fuzzy purple no-show socks peeping out from under her flats. Her eyebrows raised slightly as she gave me a half smile. "So, what brings you to this neck of the wood?" She had a mesmerizing way of speaking, so cool and intimate. My face must have shown her that she had changed my life last night.

"I was about to ask you the same thing. I spend most days here, and I've never run into you once." I said, trying to regain my composure. I was a bad actor, and she knew it.

"Well, I suppose our minds are at odds, then." She put her hands in her back pockets, and put her weight on her back foot. "You busy?"

There was still daylight outside, I had to remind myself. It always felt like 3 AM under these untrustworthy fluorescent lights. I felt a tremendous openness warm my chest. I don't know what it was, but I stopped trying to act for Olive and became myself for a moment. "When it's you asking? Never." Then, for the first time she smiled fully, in pleasant surprise. Her eyes lit up with a richness I had never seen before. I felt as though I had reached a precipice, with my old anxious self trying to drag me back to the bottom. Still, I didn't care. Being with her was living, plain and simple.

"Well, I can work with that" she said, a hint of duplicity creeping into her voice.

"You might not believe me, but you haven't seen even half of this building. Follow me." She said, pivoting lithely on the ball of one foot, and walking down the aisles, out of sight. I followed close behind. She unlocked some foreign and incredible landscape in my heart which told me, no matter where I was, however ordinary and deep set into my own blindness the setting could be, I would be safe from the prison of my artless life. In short, every step I took to follow her made the path into a new world clearer and clearer. Things fell into perspective, under the smells and sounds of my distant, forgotten childhood, and the shelves moved past us in file, one by one, in a holy procession. Ahead of me, in her yellow sweater, Olive became the horizon of my own pitiful life, and I followed her because I felt my great escape depended on it.

The shelves went on and on. It was only much later, reflecting on this moment of deep intoxication, that I noticed how long we walked before coming to a door at the end of the drastically elongated space. Again the strange mineral smell, too faint to be sure I wasn't just imagining it, seemed to hang in the air.

In the corner, as always, was a wooden door with a rectangular window in the center. It was pitch black inside the little study room, and I couldn't remember anyone ever being in there before. Once inside, I saw the faint outline of a long couch along the far wall, and a defunct television in an opposite corner. On the rectangular table in the center of the room I could make out an angular box.

Olive closed the door behind me. "Sit." She said, motioning toward the couch. Once I sat down, I found my eyes drawn to the mysterious box in the center of the room. It stood nearly four feet tall, and two feet wide. It widened from front to back, like a trapezoid, so the panel was on the widest side. On the side facing me, a wide lens protruded from the panel. Something about it made me afraid to take my eyes off of it, and like an unusually lifelike statue, it seemed to bristle with latent energy, like it might move at any second.

"Try to relax while I set things up" Olive said distractedly, as she fiddled with something on the wider side of the box which faced the wall opposite the couch. I looked at her warily, but decided not to argue. Honestly, any sense of confusion I had was completely overridden by my arousal. Without realizing it, I must have been waiting for a repeat performance of the night before.

Suddenly, an almost insectile clicking softly escaped the insides of the box. The lens, pointed at the wall above me, lowered until it was trained right on me, and a low hum filled the room.

"Okay." Olive said, satisfied. She leaned back to look out the window in the door, and motioned to someone outside.

*****

Immediately, the door opened and Janell walked in. I felt my eyes widen involuntarily. She had on a plain black tank top, and gym shorts with a silver line down the side. She stood with one knee bent slightly, her legs looking even longer in those tight shorts. She had on blue trainers, with white ankle socks visible just below her ankle. Hands on her hips, she looked at me with a small glimmer of interest in her otherwise cold objective eyes. Without saying a word, she walked over, her brown hair swaying in its high, tight ponytail. She had long eyelashes, and a nose tipped up slightly at the point, which was always just slightly pink. (I used to stare at her as she gave presentations in an art history class we shared last semester.) She smirked as I watched her come to me. Sitting down next to me on the couch, she pulled me so my feet rested on the couch, then swung her long legs so her knees bracketed mine. She slid her trainers past my waist and I felt her kick them off behind my back. They dropped to the floor next to the couch.

"Uhh...Janell--" I began to say, but she put a finger on her lips and widened her eyes as she tugged off my shoes. "Shut up, Goldmund", she said, her voice dry and hot.

Pulling me toward her forcibly (she had some upper body strength, built up from ballet classes) she laid me down so my legs ran past her tight ass. She scooted closer and leaned back on the arm of the couch, then pulled her socked foot up to hover an inch above my face. The curve of her five toes clearly stood out and shaped the sock, with the fabric spread taut in her toe-clefts. Her sock was worn so thin at the heel and the ball of the foot that I thought I could see her foot under the fabric. I felt her lean forward and pull my pants and boxers down to my knees. She pulled her other foot from behind me, placed the gap between her toes and the ball of her foot on the tip of my penis, and scrunched her toes. Then she pushed it flat against my stomach and began to rock her ankle sock back and forth. Her foot was warm through her sock. I looked past the foot she held at my face and saw her looking down with a condescending smile on her face. Her cheeks seemed slightly flushed.