Milla at College - Day 01

Milla had never gone to school before she stepped onto the campus of Santa Rosa, one of the mid-level universities in the California system. Most of her life, she had lived with her hippie mom and an odd and rotating cast of their friends. Her childhood, such as it was, had been a sporadic and hodgepodge afterthought to their life growing high-grade marijuana in the Sierra Nevada foothills and avoiding federal agents and local snoops.

While she walked in the cool shade of the specialized arts building courtyard, looking for class numbers or a map, she was also intently checking out the students she passed. The women -- no matter if tall or short, amply figured or slender, pale white or darker shades of other places and other races -- were put together. They wore clothes that fit crisply, even the sweatshirts, and had traces of makeup and hair that wasn't so much combed through as configured. Milla couldn't help but feel self-conscious as fuck in their midst.

Not that her long, wavy blond hair and honeyed complexion looked out of place, or the lean physique that she'd earned through living off the grid most of her life hauling water, walking everywhere and eating vegan. In fact, if you caught sight of her just right, you might have thought that here was an obvious sorority queen and the belle of the campus ball.

Until that is, you noticed the earth mother attire -- worn vegetal leather sandals, shaggy knit top a couple of sizes too big and a long, flowing skirt. Beyond that, there was an air of shy observation to her that betrayed a sheltered childhood and a recent -- and bewildering -- change of circumstance.

A young man with khaki pants and a rumpled t-shirt seemed to notice, and stopped to ask, "Do you need directions?"

He was cute in a shabby sort of way, although some of his pimples were large enough to have pimples of their own, and Milla smiled as she said, "Yes, Room 212?"

He pointed straight ahead and said, "Go up those stairs and turn right at the top. The classrooms are arranged around the courtyard, so you're bound to find it."

She thanked him and he placed his hand on her forearm and wished her luck before continuing on his way. The place his palm had been tingled with the echo of his touch.

Milla had been raised by a single mother and her on-and-off-again radical lesbian feminist girlfriend, Fatima. There had been men, but mostly transient ones who didn't leave much of an impression on her, even if there had been a few rolls in the hay with some of them. But the truth is that she hadn't had much in the way of positive male attention while growing up. Which meant that being spoken to by even a doubly-pimply-faced adolescent could leave her gasping for breath.

Her first class was Acting 1 with Joseph Harrison. She arrived at Room 212 and peeked through the small door window: Harrison stood at a podium, tall and slender with a beard that was starting to go grey at the chin.

He reminded her physically of Charlie, one of the more recent newcomers to the pot farm, after marijuana had been legalized and money -- at least, legit money -- had started coming in. Charlie had always found excuses to stand close to Milla, and to brush up against her whenever he could. He would ask her probing questions that bordered on the personal, like, "Don't you love the way soft cotton feels against your skin?" She knew there was something creepy about his behavior, but it left her buzzing with anticipation anyway.

"I don't know you," Harrison said dully as she walked into the classroom. She approached him and said, "Yes, I registered late."

He looked her up and down and asked, "What's your name, then, late registrant?"

"Milla Adamley," she answered.

"Well Adamley," he replied, "you go straight to the top of the class." He took a dramatic pause before explaining, "Alphabetically. Have a seat, we're about to get started."

He proceeded to make the students do a number of trust exercises that were designed, he said, not just to rely on their acting mates, but also "to get your attention away from the prison that is your mind."

During one exercise, a person stood in the middle of a circle of classmates, getting shoved by the others. When it was Milla's turn, Harrison scolded her for being so stiff. "Come on, Adamley!" he yelled, standing face to face with her. "Let's. Knock. You. Off. Your. Center!" he said, punctuating the gaps between words by jabbing her with the butt of his heel on the shoulder, then her belly, the hip, culminating with her forehead.

To Milla, it seemed kind of violent. And a little erotic.

After class he called her to the podium and said. "Well done. It was challenging for you, I know, but you got it in the end."

She blushed a lovely shade of apricot. "Thanks."

"Last class, the other students were assigned to pair up and choose a scene to perform next week from a handful that I handed out. That means you will have to do the only scene not chosen. This one," he said, floridly handing her a photocopy of a stage scene. "And you will be performing it with me, I'm afraid."

She felt the bottom fall out of her stomach, but she tried her best not to show it. She needed to memorize the lines of the character Andrea and figure out a time to practice with Harrison. "Okay, thanks," was all she managed to blurt out.

* * *

Milla walked across the Quad -- a beautiful, shady expanse of green -- to the shops on Walton Street, where she met up with Linda, the only person so far at school who felt like a friend to her. She was a bit older, a junior who had helped Milla carry her things up the stairs to her dorm room.

"We have got to get you some new clothes," Linda had said while Milla unpacked. "That hippie vibe doesn't do a thing for you."

She spotted Linda in front of a shop called Campus Casuals, and admired her honey-toned Latina coloring and curvy figure. If Milla could have swapped bodies with her new friend, she would have. What she didn't realize is that it would have been a trade that Linda would have okayed.

They tore through the store looking at everything -- and each had selected fifteen or so items to try on. The store employee manning the fitting rooms told them, "Only one room is vacant, do you guys mind sharing?"

Linda answered "No" without hesitation. Milla had hesitated, but she was curious to see more of Linda.

As Milla took off her t-shirt exposing her breasts, Linda said, "I wish I could do that -- not wear a bra."

Milla looked at the underwire-and-lace tan bra Linda was wearing. Her breasts were larger than Milla's, more pendulous-looking in the bra, but not by much. "Why can't you?" she asked.

"I don't know," Linda said a curious expression on her face, part shame, part wishfulness. "The idea of it freaks me out a little."

Milla shrugged, "I just never got used to wearing them."

When Linda saw the big white panties that Milla wore, she actually started to giggle. "I am NOT going to let you wear those!"

It wasn't a large room, and Linda's bare arms kept brushing against Milla and vice-versa as they tried on outfit after outfit. Milla, who had never been turned on by women despite her mom's sexuality, couldn't help but feel a bit aroused, and she found herself leaning into her new friend a bit, welcoming the casual contact.

Finally, they had made their selections, and Milla bought a number of short dresses, skirts and tank tops and breezy blouses. Plus some non-granny panties. After she paid with the bank card that contained all the money she was expected to need for the semester, she frowned.

"I think I'm going to need to get a job," she said to herself more than to Linda.

"Why don't you apply at the Corner Cafe with me?" Linda asked. "They have a sign saying they're looking for waitresses."

The two women walked a few blocks, and Milla saw that the Corner Cafe wasn't a coffee shop, as she had expected, but a restaurant with a bar/nightclub attached to it.

After a few minutes of talking to the manager -- a handsome guy in his 30s named Drex who gave off the vibe of a former student who had liked school so much he'd never left -- he said, "The jobs are yours if you want them. We have one opening in the bar and one in the restaurant -- which do you want?"

"I'm not 21 yet," Linda said.

"Neither am I," Milla admitted. "Is that legal?"

Drex shrugged. "We've never had a problem."

"What's the difference?" Linda asked.

"The hours, the money, the uniform, the attention," he said.

Linda and Milla looked at each other expectantly, neither one eager to speak first. "I'd rather work in the restaurant," Linda said finally. "It's what I know."

Milla nodded. "Bar's fine," she told Drex.

"Great," he said and pointed at a side door to the office. "The uniforms are in there. Restaurant on the left, bar on the right. Take two and always keep one clean."

Both uniforms involved white shirts and black skirts. The shirts for the restaurant staff were satiny Oxford-style shirts with floppy collars and the top two buttons missing; Milla would need to wear a peasant-style blouse with elastic under her breasts and a plunging neck line in the bar. The restaurant skirts went to mid-thigh, and looked elegant, while those for the bar staff were shorter, a little flouncier and decidedly sluttier.

Milla looked at herself in a mirror in the storage room, wondering how badly her nipples showed through the material. The skirt she had grabbed on was a size small, but its waist kept sliding down her narrow hips, despite the not insignificant outward curve of her cheeks.

"You need a smaller skirt," Linda said, glancing over. She had tried on the right size clothes for the restaurant uniform on the first try, and she looked sexy but elegant, Milla thought with more than a bit of envy.

"Yeah, I think you're right," she said. Then asked suddenly, "Can you see my nipples?"

Linda bent down for a closer view. "If you get really close," she said, but it'll be dark in the club, remember."

Milla nodded and found a skirt in extra small. It fit better for sure, but it was a tiny bit shorter, too, and she worried that it might not totally cover her ass. "Jeez, it's short," she said nervously.

Linda came up behind her. She was taller than Milla by a few inches. "Baby," she said, putting her hand on Milla's chin and pointing her gaze to the mirror. "You look hot as fuck," she said. "If anyone can pull it off, it's you."

Milla smiled back at her friend's reflection. She ran her finger behind her ear, pulling a long strand of blond hair behind it.

"Just don't bend over," Linda said and smacked her lightly on the ass.

* * *

After the Corner Caf, Linda went to a municipal government class, while Milla took a bus back to the dorms. She was surprised at how crowded the bus was. She stood in the aisle, hanging onto a hook that hung from the handrail, with people pressed in on every side. With every bump in the asphalt and every curve, she would press into bodies in front and behind her. The contact wasn't intentional on anyone's part, but it brought to mind Professor Harrison's hard shoves during acting class, and how her body had responded to them.

After dinner, Milla rummaged through her new clothes trying to decide which would be the best for lounging around her dorm room in, settling on a cropped tank and one of her new underpants, a pair of pink thongs. She had bought a few thongs in different colors and wasn't entirely sure she would feel comfortable enough to go a whole day in them, so she thought she might try to get herself acclimated.

She grabbed her psychology textbook and went over to the comfy armchair she had placed near the window. But she couldn't bring herself to look at the book. Her room was on the 3rd floor of the dorm, looking over a green space that students were using in the gathering dusk to chat in small groups or toss a frisbee around.

They chatted and laughed and showed each other things on their cell phones.

They looked so different from one another -- black, white, tall, squat, blonde, bald -- and so, well, right. Milla had been feeling herself to be completely abnormal: unsure of how to stand or speak or act in order to appear normal to everyone else.

Part of her realized that she would never have made it onto campus if her life hadn't changed dramatically when marijuana was legalized. At that point, their cabin and grounds had suddenly overflowed with farmhands to help with the bud trimming and the climate control of their expanding number of poly tunnels. And the sales and marketing people who helped her mom name the brand of pot: Smoke Show. It was typical of her mom and Fatima to take a younger person's expression and totally misuse it.

One of the things that her mom had gotten with the now-legit proceeds was wifi -- mainly in order to be able to conduct Smoke Show business, but the person whose life was most affected may well have been Milla. Before that, her mom and Fatima had given her an odd assortment of books to read, and pretended that was enough of an education. She had read and discussed Oriana Fallaci and Fritz Fanon, but not the staples of everyone else's schooling. Like, say, Shakespeare.

But after they got the internet, Milla had taken matters into her own hands, schooling-wise: In order to attend college, she needed to pass a high school equivalency exam which required her to take a number of accredited classes. She signed herself up with an online class provider and got to work on English literature and American History and basic math. But she hadn't gotten everything right in terms of what she needed to take, and there had been delays with the whole remote school process, so here she was, a 19-year-old freshman who registered late and was already behind in her homework, who was looking out her dorm room window and who couldn't help but feel like all those kids on the green below her knew a bunch of things that she had no clue about.

Dusk had given way to night, and her room grew a deep shade of indigo. One by one or in small groups, the students outside stood up and trailed off into nearby dorms. Milla looked at the streetlights shining through window, and wondered if they would give her trouble falling asleep. They were still a little alien to her.

She got up from her chair after a while and set the psych book down on her desk. She went to turn on the overhead light, but as she neared the switch near the door, it opened quickly, letting in the hallway light and the silhouette of a man.

He closed the door behind him and Milla heard the push of the button in the knob, locking the door. She had never needed to lock a door in her life, and she realized quickly that she had left it unlocked.

She opened her mouth to say something when the guy noticed her. She couldn't see any of his features, but he was a good bit taller than her and had short curly hair. Before she could say anything, he coiled his bare left arm around the portion of her midriff that her tank top left bare, and pulled her tight to his body, clamping his right hand over her mouth. It smelled oddly good, like sandalwood.

He raised the index finger of the hand on her mouth, which put it in her vision, cross-eyed and a bit out of focus. "Don't give me away," he whispered huskily. "Please."

His arm was tight around her, pinning her right arm next to her body, with the fingers of his hand settling into the indentations between the ribs on her left flank. She could feel the tautness of the muscles of his chest through her tank top and the rough surface of his jeans on the skin of legs and stomach. She was suddenly very aware of the mostly undressed state that he had caught her in.

From this close, she could see that he was Black, and a more clued-in person might have been scared, but Milla, mostly unaware of associations in the culture at large, was mainly curious as to why this guy was in her room. And there was something about the way he said "please," urgently and with a little fear, that let her know that, unlike what anybody else might have thought, he felt like in their current situation Milla had the power.

The man cocked his head toward the door behind him, and the light seeping through the bottom of the door illuminated the underside of the long, very curvy lashes of his eyes. Now she heard sounds coming from the hallway. Feet running, and then a guy stopping and asking, "Did you see him?"

"No," another short-of-breath male voice answered. "Did he get it?"

"I think so," the first said, and they were running again.

The guy looked back at her and removed his hand from Milla's mouth. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark, and she could now tell that he was dark skinned and very handsome. "You okay?" he asked, mostly mouthing the words at her.

She nodded, then pointed with her free left hand toward his belt line. "But that's scratchy," she whispered.

He glanced down and then formed an "O" on his lips. He loosened his grip on her midsection a bit, but didn't let her go, then reached inside the waistline of his jeans with his free hand and pulled something out, setting it down on her dresser. It looked like a book of some sort.

There was more running in the hallway, and the guy put his hand back over her mouth, more gently this time.

"Could he be in one of the dorm rooms?" a male voice asked.

"Knock on those over there," another one answered.

"What the fuck guys?" said a woman who was clearly not involved in the search.

Milla settled in against the black man's body, touching his ribcage lightly with the fingers of her left hand. She was enjoying the contact between them, the way her breasts were pushed up against him, the smell of his skin, even the possessiveness of the arm wrapped around her. When someone rapped hard against her door, the two of them startled. He smiled at her and she tried to smile back, although it was covered by his large and oddly fragrant hand.

They stayed still and very quiet; through his t-shirt and her tank top, she could feel his slightly elevated heartbeat syncopating with her own.

"Dammit!" one of the guys in the hall said, and then the sounds seemed to move into another area of the dorm.

The man removed his hand from Milla's mouth and extended it toward her chest as if to shake hands. "I'm Rane," he said.

Her right hand was still pinned to her side by Rane's left arm, so she placed her left hand in his in a manner that suggested she might be expecting him to kiss it. He shook it instead with a broad smile. "Milla," she said.

The sound of another pair of feet running through the hall froze them in place. After it receded, Rane said, "Well, Milla, would you know of some way that I might sneak out of this dorm?"

She realized after a heartbeat that she did, surprisingly given that this was her first full day on campus. "Sure," she said.

"I would recommend that you put some clothes on, though," Rane said. "I think you might attract too much attention with what you have on."

She chuckled. With the lights out, she didn't know how Rane could be certain of what she was wearing, but there had been enough inter body contact that she was sure that he could at least make a fair guess. She slipped out of his grasp and put one of her new skirts on in the dark. Then she turned the light on and got a good look at him.

He was at least 6 feet tall -- she was a modest 5'4" -- and starkly handsome. Muscular with smooth skin that ranged in color from roasted almond to dark chocolate. His hands were enormous, with slender, elegant fingers.

He was checking her out too, and apparently not finding her appearance displeasing. He kept looking from her long blond hair, to the nipples showing themselves through the fabric of her tank top, to her exposed midriff, to the hem of her short skirt. After a moment, he touched the book on her dresser and said, "Can I leave this with you? In case they see me on the way out?"