How I Became Emperor Ch. 03: Friday

Friday

The next morning I woke up to an empty bed. It took me a moment to get my bearings. This bed was wider than mine, had too many pillows, the blanket was the wrong colour and the mattress was definitely far too soft.

An initial moment of panic was followed by Cindy coming out of the bathroom drying her hair - otherwise completely bare to the world. That threw me for another complete loop, making me achingly aware of my morning glory, but also reminded me of where I was.

"Morn-yawn-ing" I managed blearily.

"Good morning sleepy head," Cindy replied, sounding hurried. "I'm sorry, I've got to run, I'll be late for my lecture as it is..."

Distractedly she threw on a blouse, skirt and a jacket, leaned over the bed and gave me a mouth-watering kiss. "The keys are on the table there," she said pointing, "I'll see you in the library then." And with that she was gone out the door.

I got up slowly, took a shower - using Cindy's shower gel again - and got dressed. I briefly considered getting a new change of clothes at home, as well as some breakfast, but decided against it. I had to get this essay done, fast.

Therefore I took only one detour on my way out the door: to get a glass of water in the kitchen. I had barely turned on the water at the tap when behind me I heard a timid "Hi."

I spun, nearly dropping the glass in my hand. Keisha was sitting at the table, a half-eaten toast before her, wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe. I must have completely missed her, focussed as I was on thoughts of my essay.

"Uh...hi." Was all I could think to say. Pretty obviously both of us were remembering the moment last night when she had just come home to find me and Cindy in a compromised position.

At some point I figured one of us had to make a first move, and with the tension increasing steadily I eventually snapped under the pressure. Putting on a winning smile, I stretched out my hand to her and introduced myself. "Hi, I'm Cindy's new boyfriend."

"I'm Keisha, Cindy's roommate." She replied, taking my hand. Obviously she immediately understood that we both had to act as though the previous night hadn't happened.

"Nice to meet you, Keisha. I'll be out of your hair in just a moment. I just wanted a glass of water."

Keisha returned to eating her toast. "Oh, don't worry. Take all the time you need." She affected nonchalance really well, though I could still see the flush of remembered embarrassment.

I took my glass of water and drank it quickly. Then I tried to be as cordial as possible as I took my leave. "I'm sure we'll see each other again soon. Enjoy your day."

Keisha returned the sentiment, and I left.

At the library I spent a good fifteen minutes doing some research on historians and political philosophers who either outright supported my arguments - of which there were few - and those whose words could be twisted to support at least part of my arguments.

Having accumulated three large stacks of books and journals at a desk in the corner of the library, along with a goodly sized list of websites, documentaries and public speeches that might be useful as references. I took out my laptop, opened my essay and set to work pulling quotes, references and so forth into my essay.

Again I got so sucked into the subject that I lost track of the world around me. But I got quite a bit of my essay done. I had over-run the minimum quota of words permitted to me by a good thousand words (a common problem for most of my essays) when I re-awoke from my reverie. I had waxed eloquently on historical military integrations as they had happened in Ancient Rome, Greece and China, through quasi-federal systems at necessity. Examples such as the integration of non-roman units in the auxiliary wings of the legions, the shifting pacts of the nomads of the middle east and the repeated splintering and reintegration by warlords in both ancient and 1930s China all offered good feeding grounds for my arguments. I had gone on to explain how - by the very nature of the beast - modern wars were only ever initiated - and then waged - unilaterally when power discrepancies were so vast that it became little more than a live military exercise for the aggressor nation. In particular I pointed to the most recent Russian actions in Ukraine, Abkhazia and Georgia. In contrast, any other war had by necessity required some sort of alliance to undertake. The Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, even arguably the Libyan civil war had become wars of grand alliances against one individual enemy. The only other kinds of wars still being fought were civil wars (often with foreign involvements). In fact, since the world wars, the world seemed increasingly to be ruled by formalised alliances, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and soon the European Union. The inevitable conclusion would be that, at least in part through the formalisation of military and political alliances of ever increasing integration, a federalised and centralised government would be established for the European Union as a whole.

As I put the finishing touches on what really was quite a good essay - so I thought at the time, and still do - I looked up to notice that Cindy had taken a seat opposite me. She had grabbed one of my books on the Roman Empire and was reading intently. I watched her read, and turn the page before I stood and went around the desk to kiss her. She smiled as she closed the book. "Hey, you." She purred, "Finish your essay?"

"I think so, yeah. Did you get here a while ago?"

Giving me a hug Cindy replied, "a little bit yeah. But you were so deep in thought, I didn't want to disturb you."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a number of boys, and I think one middle-aged professor that were enviously watching Cindy hug me. I have to admit, it made me feel powerful, proud and most certainly lucky. I also felt strangely guilty for thinking of Cindy as little more than a prize to show off. I quickly reminded myself of her smarts - she had a really complex book in her hand after all and seemed to have no difficulty understanding it.

"Is your essay good?" Cindy asked as she helped me to pack up and return the books.

"Mhm. Do you want to read it? You seemed interested in that book about the Romans."

Cindy chuckled, "Sure."

"I'll print you off a copy, that way if the lecture bores you, you can read the essay." I offered.

A mischievous gleam entered Cindy's eyes. "Oh, I think I can find ways to entertain myself."

We had lunch at the university cafe, where Cindy told me about her exasperation with her morning lecture - apparently a long soliloquy by the professor on Chaucer's implications for contemporary authors - and as midday approached we headed to my own lecture on the origins of civil rights.

I had some trepidation going in that Cindy would get very bored with this lecture. It was a dry topic, interesting only to a small subset of the attendees to start with, and certainly requiring a large modicum of knowledge in relevant topics.

The class was quite small, given the hyper-specialization, and the 15 of us that met every week for these lectures and seminars all knew each other reasonably well. Cindy therefore got some strange looks, but no-one really commented as our professor entered a short moment later. Cindy and I had taken seats at the back of the steeply sloped lecture hall. The hall was small, but could seat 40 people so our small class spread out a bit. I don't doubt that Dr. Lex saw Cindy sitting by me, and immediately knew exactly what she was doing there. But my Professor did not betray even a twitch of an eyebrow as she jumped right into her lecture.

The class itself was heavily female, we were only four boys, not even a third of the class, but all of us agreed without restraint that Dr. Lex was extremely hot. She always had her long hair pulled back strictly into a bun or ponytail, more out of a wish to keep it from falling into her face than aesthetic preferences. She was tall, usually wore some small heels anyway, and always a tight, well ironed women's suit. When it grew colder she might from time to time wear a tight turtleneck, but always she kept herself pristine. A high forehead, immaculate make-up that accentuated her cheekbones and lips, and a complete disregard for her effect on men as she turned to write on a whiteboard, or bent over her notes on the lecturer's table made each of her lectures a blissful torture as we tried to focus on the subject instead of her cleavage or well rounded back.

It was doubly hard to focus on this particular day. The first time professor Lex turned to make a table of the various ancient and medieval definitions of 'citizen' on the whiteboard, Cindy leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear "I can see why you want to fuck her."

Cindy's hand snaked onto my thigh and just rested there. Professor Lex turned back to the class and continued to talk about the transformation of the citizen into a political force with legal rights. It didn't take long, though, for Dr. Lex to turn back to the whiteboard again to help illuminate how different regions developed different concepts of the citizen. Cindy leaned over to me again and whispered, "I'd like to watch you fuck her. Tear that sweater off her and suck on her tits..." Cindy's hand moved up to simply rest atop my groin. She neither squeezed nor stroked my semi-hard boner, but simply let her hand rest on my bulge.

I tried to focus on the lecture, and to take notes, but a couple of minutes later Professor Lex had again turned her back on the class to write on the whiteboard. "Can you imagine holding that head in your hands while she sucks your cock?" Cindy breathed in my ear and pulled down my zipper stealthily so she could sneak her hand under my pants and underwear to rest against my increasingly hard member.

As Dr. Lex turned back to the class I think I caught an involuntary twitch in her eyebrow and lips, but if I did it was so quickly controlled that I could not be sure. Barely a minute later and Professor Lex once again had her back to the class, and I had Cindy whisper in my ear as she gently stroked me.

I don't think I can remember Dr. Lex ever using the whiteboard as much as she did in that class. It was blissful torture, with Cindy putting absolutely dirty images of me and Professor Lex in my mind, and keeping a gauge on her success with her hand on my penis.

Two hours later the lecture finally came to a close. Cindy passed her hand over my penile head, scooping up a small glob of pre-cum on a finger and quickly transferring it into her mouth, making it look as though she was just tending to a paper-cut. I took as much time as I dared clearing away my notes into my bag, trying to give my raging boner time to subside.

Cindy just smiled at me innocently as I took my time. When I did finally stand up to leave I heard Dr. Lex call out my name. "A word, please." She commanded.

Cindy gave me an embarrassed shrug, and told me she would wait for me outside. I descended to meet my professor with some trepidation.

Even more unnerving was the fact that Dr. Lex hardly glanced up from gathering her notes until I had arrived before her desk. Then she very pointedly looked me sternly in the eye for a moment before she spoke.

"I'm ok with your girlfriend joining us today," Professor Lex declared, "but let's leave her behind next time, hmm? She seems to have had a slightly..." the professor's eyes darted towards my crotch momentarily and it seemed to me that a hungry gleam was quickly suppressed in her eyes, "...distracting influence on you."

"Yes, ma'am." I agreed.

"We'll go on then, I bet she's already waiting." Dr. Lex shooed me out the door.

I escaped as quickly as I could, sure that my face was broadcasting a shade of red to make a matador envious. But I had hardly taken two steps out the door when Cindy grabbed me and dragged me into a ferocious kiss. She must have scouted out the nearby rooms, because without hesitation she led me to a nondescript door near the bathrooms that proved to be some kind of heat-distribution room. At any rate it had a tangle of pipes and large appliances cramped inside it.

In my defence, I only noticed the pipes because I banged my head on one as we entered, and even then it was only a tangential thought. Cindy had fished my pecker out of its cage before the door had slammed shut behind me, and raising one leg over my hip took to kissing me between whispering in my ear.

"I want you to imagine you go to Dr. Lex's office. When you open the door she's got her legs up on her desk and a big dildo up under her skirt. She doesn't see you come in, and you quickly close the door from the inside."

I gave up the last of my hang ups, and lifted Cindy's skirt for ease of access to knead her butt while supporting her efforts to climb atop me.

"You whip out your massive cock, and start to jerk off. Dr. Lex notices you, slips out of her chair and crawls across the floor to you sexily. - oh FUCK!" Cindy exclaimed as I slipped a finger under her panties to titillate her clit.

"Can you see her red lips around your cock? Can you feel her saliva on your head?" Cindy spread a small amount of her own juices on my stiff boner.

"Then she leans over the desk and spreads her legs wide for you. What do you do?" Cindy asked, feigning innocence as she emulated her own words, hiking up her skirt, bending over one of the machines in the room and spreading her legs.

I didn't need inviting twice and stuck my face deep in that inviting crack. Cindy moaned in pleasure, and for a time completely forgot to mention my professor at all.

When I let up licking her ass and pussy from behind, and moved to position myself to fuck her from behind, Cindy spoke up again. "We are really going to have to work on getting you into prof. Lex's pants."

"We?" I responded a bit surprised, "that sounds more like a project for you."

"Fine," Cindy moaned, "now just fuck me right!"

I obliged, of course.

We came out of that maintenance room without a trace of our tryst. The hallway was thankfully empty nevertheless, and we hurried away into the quad. Cindy had one more lecture to go to, and I toyed with the idea of getting her back for what she had done to me in my lecture, but decided against it when I found out it would be attended by over 200 students, and was in physics. Definitely not my cup of tea. Instead I decided to catch up a bit on my reading, and maybe see that I studied for the seminar I had on Monday.

So I chose a comfy place underneath an old oak tree and set about reading and preparing.

It wasn't long before Abby somehow turned up leaning against the oak tree. I didn't notice her at first, for all I knew she'd been there all along observing me studying. When I did notice her with a start, she plopped herself down beside me and pulled my book into her lap. "'The limits of kings, the power of peasants; a study of feudal legalism and nationality.' How decidedly dreary."

"Not the words I would use, but I can see how one could think that." I answered guardedly.

"So what does it mean?" Abby asked not looking at me but flipping through various pages of the book. "Limits of kings. Do kings have limits?"

"Of course." I answered immediately. "After all, a king couldn't just do whatever he wanted. He had to keep to various laws, both written and unwritten."

"Like?"

"Well, the church laws to start. An excommunicated king was in danger of being run out of office by his own council, by revolt, by his neighbors or even by the pope himself."

"Ok. But that's not really worth... 600 Pages???" Abby asked incredulously.

"Well, there's more than just the church. As a merchant class starts to rise, particularly in the main cities of Europe: Paris, London, Rome, Munich, Vienna, all of Northern Italy, Constantinople and the levant..."

Abby interrupted "the what?"

"Levant. The Middle East, particularly on the Mediterranean." I explained. "Anyway, as these cities grew with a burgeoning merchant class this new group began to make demands on the king, and because of their importance to the nation's economy, a king could hardly just ignore their demands. Similarly, increasingly powerful nobles would form shadow parliaments with little power, but with a strong voice in national politics. Various wars in the Holy Roman Empire were a result of this, and a strong warning to all the monarchs of Europe that the nobles would not be oppressed. With time these nobles would also force a king to make laws or accept the rights of a parliament: the Magna Carta for example, various bulls throughout Europe, and so forth.

"But most poignantly, a king had to adhere, if perhaps limitedly, to a national sense of justice, fairness and equality. He had been given by God - and the virtue of his birth - a nation to lead and he was expected to do so to the benefit and well-being of his subjects. He could not mislead them into sin, injustice or other immoralities. Doing so would be seen as just cause for revolts and revolutions. In fact, that was one of the main arguments made for the French Revolution, seen by most Europeans as the foundation of modern democracy."

"'By most Europeans?' Why only the Europeans?" Abby asked, interested.

"Well, the Americans prefer to think of the American revolution as the first true anti-monarchic revolution. After all Napoleon did make himself emperor after the French Revolution, and the parliament they created was very quickly made powerless.

"It's a convincing argument to be fair. And some Europeans have succumbed to it. However, there is ample proof that the Americans were in danger of falling prey to the same faults as the French. If George Washington had wanted it he could have made himself a king. You also have to consider how Napoleon pacified his people through constant wars of expansion. Almost as soon as he was out of power, the French very quickly reverted back to a surprisingly volatile, but robust parliamentary system. The American system, which sought to prevent the formation of political parties, actually quickly got bogged down in a recurring fight between Democrats and Whigs. A monarchy of sorts also quickly appeared, in that certain political dynasties would control the White House, and for a long time the congress and senate. The most famous of course are the Roosevelts and modern day Kennedys, but look back to the founders, and very quickly the two ideological dynasties become clear. In fact, the only four presidents I would exclude from this are Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln. In the modern day you can see the same dynastic elements appear, in the Clinton's and Kennedys on the left, and the Bush and Reaganites on the right."

"Hmmm." Was all Abby commented. She flipped through the book a bit more, quoting random sentences at me, followed by an arched eyebrow and an expectant glance requesting me to explain. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being tested. On what I was being tested, I had no idea, but I submitted willingly.

This continued for some time, and before I knew it Abby had reached the end of the book and flipped the back cover over to close it dismissively.

"Well I suppose it's interesting enough." She declared, "but not enough to explain. It's got to be something else. Maybe..."

"What?" I asked confused.

"Hmm? Oh, nothing." Abby failed to explain. She stood and smoothed out her dress, bending forwards and raising the back hem tantalisingly high; drawing the eyes of some nearby freshmen lounging and enjoying their relative freedom. Abby seemed not to notice.

"We'll talk again later. Once I've thought this through a bit more." She told me in a lecturing tone and sauntered away without saying goodbye. I watched her go, half trying to figure out what that whole session had been about, and half mesmerised by her dress as it flipped up and down as she bounced away.