Fonding and Permission Finale

Theresa now saw that the light was coming from near the far end of the first-floor hallway. She still could not see the source directly, but there, perhaps fifty yards away, another corridor branched out of it to the left and it seemed that this one was fully lit.

For a moment, she wanted to slink further up the stairs, leaving the light well behind. But then she thought it better to discover more about it. As a rule, lights did not turn themselves on. Taking care to make no jerky movements, she pushed open the glass door, took one step into the hallway, and stopped, still holding the door to prevent it from falling shut and betraying her. She imagined that she heard the last, fading echo of a distant door closed just seconds before and, quieter still, of a mutter ...

She continued to listen, but in vain. Something caught sharply in her nose. Something sanitary. Soap. Then she saw the mop leaning against the wall at the far end of the hallway. She withdrew soundlessly and continued her ascent of the stairwell.

The light faded again. One landing up, the second-floor hallway plunged into darkness. But something was lying on the ground, just behind the glass door: A shirt --definitely not a coat-- folded quite clearly into an arrow-shape, which pointed away into the long gloom.

Theresa stepped into the hallway, closed the door softly and hesitated. Her discovery on the first floor had thrown a new light on things and she quailed. She was not supposed to be here now. If she was found, she would have to escape quickly or speak. Both were easier with protection. So it was with a thrill of fear that she lifted the tunic from her body and layed it gently on the tiles beside Felix's shirt. Then she thought better of it, picked it up and hid it in a wall cupboard. The shirt was his choice, but she would not risk losing her creation.

She crept on down the corridor, guided by her phone's torchlight, feeling more vulnerable with every step she took away from her precious tunic. The feathery draught on the skin around her bra as she walked reminded her how exposed she already was. She was counting now. If she knew his summer attire well, at most two more instructions were possible, three if he had come with a belt.

She arrived at the junction right above the lit up corridor one floor below. Yes, that little heap on the ground before her was a pair of shorts in arrow-shape. It pointed her to the right, away from the lit corridor one floor beneath. That, at least was reason to relax. But she could not slow her pulse as she took the keys from her shorts, let the latter slither down onto his own and stepped out of them in her thin underwear only. If the head of college ever got wind of this, she would have a lot of explaining to do ...

What if there were cameras here? Was she being caught on film? She kept glancing back over her bare shoulders, as though her eyes could root her relinquished clothes to the ground. She gripped the keys firmly as she walked to stop them jangling.

Theresa knew the destination this passage led to and it was the very one she had most recently been glad to escape. The tall, wooden double door loomed out of the night as she neared its end and when she saw what lay at its feet, she knew her final test had arrived. She stood for a minute, trying to countenance what she was about to do. She was still utterly alone, wasn't she? The empty silence behind her felt huge by now, almost protective ... Yet she feared that just a hundred paces and one floor away it held unknown eyes, which might at any time come for her and turn the corner ...

She remembered that moment on the balcony, those seconds as she had waited for her courage to come. This, surely, was less drastic. Or was it? No-one knew her down in wild Spain. Here, on the other hand, was a place whose people she knew and would see for years to come ... and this time, they would recognise her if they did.

She began by undoing her hair. If she was to do this, she would do it in style, properly. She felt her curls fall over her shoulders and down her back, tickling her, offering some little cover. But long as it was, her hair was too short to hide what she would now bare. She tried telling herself she was an old hand at his now, that if he could dare this, so could she. But her hands were sweaty as she undid the catch at her back and let the bra fall onto the cold tiles next to his underpants. She looked around furtively. Almost there, she thought, looking down at the terrifying sight of her freed breasts. She had given them fresh air here before, but always while dressed, always with the means to hide them in a fraction of a second. Not this time ...

In a rush, she grabbed her panties, pulled them down and kicked them away. And suddenly she felt liberated. If you wore clothes, you feared to lose them. With them gone that fear went too. She turned and ran fifty paces back down the corridor, just to prove it to herself, feeling the air brush over her nakedness, then ran back with a giggle that echoed into the distance. The silence was broken.

"There we are," she whispered to her self. "This isn't too bad, is it?" She felt her body answer that this was an understatement. For a minute she stood there, grasping her situation, letting it rouse her. He was in there, she thought. Just he? What if others were in there with him? No ... no chance, surely ... With a great crescendo she turned, took the double doors by the handles and swung both wings wide open.

Bright light poured out of the exam hall into the passage and over her naked body. Her heart screamed. She nearly slammed the doors shut, but stopped just in time, left them pushed to and ducked swiftly out of the glare. What to do now? Not stay here, caught, surely, when Felix must be just round the corner ... She crept back to the crack between the wings and peered through, scanning the great walls for cameras. Slowly, she widened the gap again and stood herself right inside it, allowing the light to kiss her body all over, feeling it murmur in response.

The great hall was empty. The doors opened to the bottom, the podium in whose middle stood the lectern. Vacant chairs rose away beyond it in tier upon tier to the hall's high far end. She could hide among them if she had to. She made her decision and stepped inside, gently closing the doors behind her, then walked to the very middle of the podium and stood there, wearing nothing but her phone and keys. She looked down at the impossible sight of her stripped self standing centre stage in the art college's exam hall, then back up again.

The other kind of quiet lay here now, not the pressure of dozens of silenced students but the same, benign stillness that had accompanied her all the way up to here. A kind of melancholy seemed to flow from the empty rows of chairs: the absence of four hundred lives. What if all those seats, at a wave of her wand, could be filled with faces? She would give them seconds, time enough to see her and cry out in astonishment, then wave her hand once more and be alone again. She parted her feet, closed her eyes, cast the spell with one arm and lowered the other to stroke herself, smiling blindly into the light.

She thought back to what she had told Felix in the Bear's Cave: that she needed melancholy without misery. Had he had that in mind for her here? He knew her well enough now ... Was he somewhere here, watching her do this? She knew he liked to watch her ...

She realised that she would never come here again without thinking back to this. She beamed. What a talisman to have when she had to sit her next exam here. Thank you, Felix ...

But where was he? Was he hiding among those rows of chairs? Theresa slowed to a halt and opened her eyes. Then, step by step, taking her time, she mounted the central aisle, peering down every row on either side, looking for his crouching form. But he was nowhere to be found. She reached the very top, turned and looked down, feeling suddenly in charge. She descended slowly, like a young goddess deigning to alight on the face of the Earth. If anyone came in, she would gaze serenely down at their gobsmacked face and simply continue her divine procession. At last she had returned to the lectern.

"Felix?"

She said his name loud and clear. The echoes fled to the lofty corners of the hall. But once again no answer came. Her anticipation was beginning to give way to confusion and impatience. He had been so close only half an hour ago. Now he had vanished without trace. Had he ever existed?

Her eyes returned to the lectern, the centre of the room. The answers should be there or nowhere. A sheet of paper lay on it, a biro at its side. She picked up the former. A casual glance put her in mind of a forgotten maths paper. But it began in the wrong tone.

Dear Harvest Maiden,

I promised that your best exam was yet to come.

Task 1: sketch the graphs of the following equations in Cartesian coordinates. Hint: if you find numbers 8, 13 and particularly 5 tricky, leave them until the end. You will probably see the answer without them.

1.) x = 0 for --1 < y < 1

2.) y = --1 for 0 < x < 1

3.) x = 2 for --1 < y < 1

4.) x = 3 for --1 < y < 1

5.) x = 3 + 2{√[0.5^2 -- (|y| -- 0.5)^2]} for -1 < y < 1

(...)

There were 15 equations in total. Theresa gaped at them in blank astonishment, then let out an uncertain laugh. Had he really meant her to do a maths test at this juncture? What for? Was this some kind of twisted joke at her expense? She almost felt hurt ... But that wasn't like him, was it? He must have some unfathomable reason for this ... Task 1 took up most of the written space, so it took her a moment to notice what it said underneath:

Task 2: go there.

Go where? Had he, for once, lost it?

There was one more row of text:

Good luck! -- Let's have no slips twixt c. and lips.

Whether out of some deep-seated confidence in him or sheer curiosity about a situation that would never happen to her again, she picked up the pencil, still laughing, and began to work her way into the problem. By the time she had done number 4, she had half forgotten her plight. Number 5, however, proved quite as tough as he had promised. As doubt took her, she suddenly remembered where she stood, that the great doors behind her might be opened by anyone at any moment and that he was waiting for her elsewhere. Talk about exam nerves and time pressure ... She skipped number 5 and moved on.

She long remembered the moment when everything changed. She had just done number 8. It was as though the paper had turned into his face and was smiling at her in congratulation ... The sketches she had drawn were more than mathematical shapes. They formed letters. And the letters seemed to say:

L I I R

Two minutes later they said:

L I I R A

Theresa's heart began racing. She nearly ran from the hall there and then. But no, she must finish unpacking his present. Business before pleasure ... Number 5 must be crackable. Maths was her best subject, as he well knew ... It was a circle equation with absolute value in it. How did those two combine? ... She tried to concentrate her melting mind.

And then she had it. Trembling with triumph and excitement, she took the pencil, turned the second I into a neat B.

L I B R A R Y

She stepped off the podium, turned off the lights and heaved a great sigh. She was merely standing unclad in the dark exam hall now. Commonplace.

One more journey. No time to lose. She tiptoed out of the double doors and back into the second-floor hallway. Had her efforts earned her the right to get dressed again? She looked at his underwear, lying next to her own. It would not move. Neither would hers.

Her final destination lay near the other end of the building. She had known what she must dare as soon as she had seen the letters emerge. The quickest path there led right above that well-lit passage she had glimpsed before. There was nothing left to do but brave it.

Feeling the darkness like one single, great eye, Theresa turned and walked back down the hallway towards the junction. She looked back at where her bra and panties must lie, then turned away and walked on. She had never done this, walk through a great building fully on display, leaving her unattended clothes further behind with every step. And that she knew this building by day made it no easier now. What if someone found them and locked them away? She imagined herself forced to bicycle home naked through the nightly town ...

She crossed the junction and walked on until she knew herself to be right above the lit-up corridor. She felt like one caught in the eerie quiet above a fire when everyone else has fled. The floor must hold. There was another stairwell fifty yards ahead of her and she fancied that she could see the glare from below reflected on its wall. The closer she got, the clearer it got.

Mere yards from the glass door at the end of the hallway she suddenly stopped. There was sound from beyond it. She thanked her trained ears for picking it up. Far away, or so it seemed, someone or something was muttering incessantly in a grim tone, but she could make out none of the words except for an occasional 'drat'.

What now? She must get closer to the danger before she could flee it. But what if the speaker came here while she was gone? What if they found her clothes and Felix's and stole them? She remembered her tunic, hidden in that cupboard, her socks in the cellar, the rest, strewn about this floor ...

With no more sound than the breeze, she opened the glass door, slipped through it and closed it. She could hear the voice quite clearly now. The glass door to the hallway one floor below must be open and she knew now that down there, no more than two dozen paces from herself, stood an old man, muttering away angrily to himself and, by the sound of it, rubbing or scraping away at something obstinate.

"Drat their dratted gums ... leave poor old Hutter to clean up, that's right ... drat their rubbish ... one of these days he'll gum up all the doors ... drat them."

Pity and shame mingled with her fear. She could practically see through his eyes, see his dull evenings, working long hours to clean the building that its careless users had soiled. Did he have a partner waiting at home, scolding him for his lateness and bad mood? She considered for a moment going downstairs right now to talk to him, brighten up his night ... But the poor fellow might get a heart failure if he saw her ...

There was another way to help him. Aware that she was losing precious minutes, Theresa slipped back into the hallway and trotted the entire length back to the exam hall, picking up their clothes as she went, seizing the opportunity to put phone, keys and exam paper back in her shorts. Kindness to the old creature made her collect two dropped juice boxes, a tissue and a paper dart and on the way. She carried them to the nearest bin and, thinking this might be the strangest moment in her life, bent over and cautiously, silently, placed them inside it. At last, she took the turning back towards the first stairwell, collected Felix's shirt and her tunic and returned slowly towards that voice, fighting the urge to turn back at every step.

Her arms full of clothes, she once more stole through the door and fled up the stairs to the third floor. With two floors between herself and old Hutter, she felt almost safe again. But her heart had not stopped racing. It rose to a peak as she arrived at the library door. It stood ajar.

The carpet deadened her footfall as she entered. She knew at once where to go. She could already see the table with the fig tree pot on it in her mind, the place where it had all started and would now flower ... She could see the final turning now ... five steps ... four ... three ... two ... one ... She stepped into the last southern aisle.

There stood Felix, upright, patiently gazing out of the long row of connected windows, one hand resting on the sill. The curtains were mostly drawn, but he had opened two of them and moon-soft light fell across the courtyard from the dormitory building and through them onto his pale, lithe body.

'Hey ...'

He turned at her murmur and his face lit up the darkness as he saw her. She dropped their clothes and the exam paper and ran towards him.

"Well done," he said quietly, drawing her into a warm hug. He was wearing as much as herself and she felt the gooesbumps rise on his skin at her touch. She said nothing and only tried to bury herself deeper in his embrace, wanting nothing but to feel his complete nakedness all over her own.

"Whoa ..." he whispered. He seemed taken aback at her speed.

But her patience was over. And she could feel him catching up. She pressed her midriff against his to spur him on further, feeling him harden quickly against her belly, hearing him murmur her name into her ear, then sigh it. She sank back against the window sill, parting her legs.

"Just get in ..."

She felt him lift her onto it and gasped as he pressed her naked back into the cool glass. It must hold or she would fall three floors to her death. He bent forward to kiss her on mouth and breasts. And even as she parted her lips, she felt his hand part the other two below. Darren flashed across her mind and she shuddered, reddening, then widened her legs further to ease Felix's insolence, feeling like a leaf on a twig he was shaking ... And that hardness pleading entrance was not a finger ... It was far too thick, far too warm.

She took hold of him with her arms and legs and pulled him into herself as hard as she could, sighing, laughing. She didn't care how much noise they were making. The silence had found a worthy end. Let Hutter come. Let someone watch from the dormitory ... any of those two hundred eyes might see her if they happened to penetrate the dark distance. So what ... Let them ... She was Felix's and he was holding her from all sides, even the inside. Nothing could happen to her ... She didn't hear the distant creak, nor the rising mutter ...

The light came on. She opened her eyes and read nothing but shock in his face. She had quite forgotten to tell him, but they could both hear the voice now ...

"And leave the dratted doors open, that's right ... who's to close'm? ... poor old Hutter ... drat their bloody boots."

She looked about wildly. The bookshelves offered no hiding space. There was only one hope of concealment. She grabbed the window handle, pulling herself to her feet and motioned to Felix to join her.

'Quick!' she mouthed.

He whisked the clothes from the floor, pushed them onto the sill she had mounted and climbed it himself, then drew the thick curtain across both of them as fast and quietly as possible. She watched it desperately until it hung quite still, then let out a long, silent breath and went limp. She caught his eye and they exchanged a look of courage.

They stood, trembling, as Hutter paced about the library, now closer, now further away, never interrupting his stream of mutters. He seemed to be taking a horribly long time to cover the room. What would he do when he got here?

There was just room enough for her to turn without touching the curtain. Which way did she want to face? The dormitory building was not too far off and now, with the light at their backs, they must be visible ... Should she turn away from it? But that meant turning to face Hutter, if he opened the curtain. At least he would not see their silhouettes through the thick, brightly lit curtains, would he? They must be safe as long as he did not open them ...

Theresa took Felix's hand and held it, then looked again into his face and realised her mistake. He was grinning. God damn it. He had far too much perspective. She new she would not hold her untimely laughter in for long if she watched him try to keep his face straight. She squeezed his hand to inject some kind of seriousness into both of them and eyed his cock instead. It seemed to have changed its mind abruptly about the situation in the past few minutes. She longed to restore its good mood ... But that could not be dared, not here and now ...