Sylvan Courtyard 7: Workout Craze

I'm honestly not sure how realistic this chapter is, but I think it is fun, with some weirdish sex, so enjoy. Regardless of how plausible it is, it is certainly ridiculous, so keep that in mind as you read!

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Sylvan Courtyard -- Seven: The New Workout Craze

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I had remained at Mandy's until almost 10:30 that night. It had been almost dangerous driving back home to Sylvan Courtyard, I was so exhausted. Going on nine straight hours of astoundingly educational sex, with only breaks to accomodate two cups of tea, one small plate of cheese, and one glass of sherry, will take it out of a guy.

The next day, Thursday, I found that my mentor had a grant presentation in Dallas, so I would not have a chance to see him until Friday. That morning, I swept into his office as early as I could. First and foremost I had to address my readiness to defend my dissertation. But almost as important, for a number of reasons, I needed to tell him what had happened. I didn't really believe that Mandy would actually tell him herself, but I sure as hell was going to fess up, and as early as possible, so he would hear it from me first if she did decide to drop a bomb on him at some point about what we had done.

"Hello, Ken," he said as I knocked on his door. He did not look up from the two data charts he had on his desk before him, frowning as he looked back and forth between them. He simply waved me to a seat on the other side of his desk.

"Are our results still not reconciling?" I asked, curiously.

"No, they are not," he said mildly, still looking down. "And I am convinced that that is telling me something important," he muttered. He went on to ignore me for a bit. This was not unusual at times when I dropped in and he was wrestling with something that pissed him off.

Suddenly, his fist shot out over the desk in my direction and hung there in mid-air. He waggled it impatiently a second later.

"Huh?" I said, reaching out to bump my knuckles against his. "Did you just figure out the problem?"

"No," he snorted, but he leaned back in his chair. "The fistbump was for you. I hear congratulations are in order."

Wait. She had called him while he was out of town to tell him she had screwed his favorite? What sort of one-upmanship were these two into?

"I'm sure you came in here to ask me where I think you are regarding your dissertation, and if you could possibly defend it in the time you'd need for that Colorado job," he went on blithely, causing a record scratch in my mind.

"Yessir," I said, barely missing a beat.

"You haven't called me sir in years, Ken. Don't get nervous in the homestretch," he said dismissively.

Then he proceeded to detail to me that I was indeed in the homestretch. My research was done. Complete. And so was my dissertation, at least in principle. I still had formatting and illustration to complete, but that was a matter of detail. He had just reread my current draft on the flight home, and while it still needed polishing, it looked very good. "More importantly, the state of your work now shows the depth of your understanding of what you've proven. That's the part that will earn you your doctorate. By the time you finish editing and focusing the manuscript, and maybe rewrite section four entirely, I think you will be ready."

He looked at me with a friendly yet cruel grin. "In fact, I have just this morning scheduled you for your defense on September 30. You will need to kick some ass be ready."

"Wow! That's... fast," I said breathlessly.

Reality set in then, as it usually does. "But... this all seems pretty presumptuous of us, doesn't it? I mean, I've checked out the program there. It's small, but no slouch. And Colorado, especially in the mountains, is one of the places I have identified as a major preference to work. The position seems ideal for me. But am I really going to be ideal for them? I mean, I haven't even contacted them yet. All we have is the news that the opportunity exists, from a friend of the professor leaving."

"I'm glad to see you don't have stars in your eyes, Ken," my mentor said, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers as he was wont to do. "But what kind of mentor would I be if I let that pain-in-the-ass-on-wheels do all the work of finding you a home for the future? Fortunately for my status as your favorite, while She knows the professor there who is leaving, I have two papers in common and am currently working on a third with the chairman of their department."

Oh.

My.

"Let's just say that I spoke with him yesterday. At length. If you live up to my billing, he thinks you are the ideal solution for him, and in more ways than one. You are a darned near perfect fit for what he needs, and more importantly, he won't have to do a lot of work to find you. Fair warning, the guy is unreasonably brilliant but never met a shortcut he didn't want to take. Just make sure he keeps thinking that you are that shortcut."

I sat there, stunned. Things were moving fast, even faster than the day before. I had a great opportunity, but a lot of understandable doubts about whether I could measure up. "Wow," was all I said.

"I'm confident you can do this, Ken. All of it. But it is going to take some work and discipline." He paused. "You'll need to sit at your desk quite a bit for a while. I hope your ass isn't too sore. I mean, I hope it's sore, just not too sore."

The fact was, my butt cheeks were a little delicate even now, with the physical memory of Mandy's passionate fingernails. But... I was back to confused about what he had been fist-bumping me for.

He laughed. "If she didn't scratch you up, you did a bad job, boy. And she did not sound, from the subtext, like you did a bad job. I think she wanted to claim that you were better than me, but there was no way she was pulling that off with a straight face."

I am fairly sure I gave a brief masterclass in imitating a big-mouth bass, before I rallied. "I think I gave a good accounting of myself," I said, with a haughty air that his demeanor told me I could get away with. "My back is still sore too."

"Ha! Nice. Have you looked at yourself?"

"Um. No."

"Pull up your shirt, I want to see," he said.

"Huh?" I said, intelligently. But, because I owed him everything already, and was about to owe him more, I shrugged and tugged up the back of my golf shirt while turning away.

"Damn..." I heard him hiss. "You ought to get some ointment on those."

*

"Well, well, well," I mused as I reached the parking lot, heading out to my truck early the next morning. I had more calls to make to Colorado over the next week, and I was putting myself back on a seven-day-a-week work schedule forthwith, to get myself ready.

Okay, it was Summer. They weren't going to be seven full days...

My sudden morning smugness realted to other matters, because, as I got out to the parking lot, I saw, parked about ten cars from mine, the little orange hatchback that I recognized as Patty's pride(?) and joy. It was still very early that morning and there was a thick coat dew on her vehicle...

I smiled, though I was sure it was not as satisfied a smile as the one Jesse likely sported currently.

I spent a solid four hours refining my imagery at the lab before I felt virtuous enough to head back to the Courtyard. It was an excruciatingly nice day, and I suspected everyone, despite no scheduled event, would be around the pool.

All work, no play, dull boy. You get my motivation.

I waved at several friends as I entered the courtyard. People were getting an early jump on sun time by the pool. With an eager bounce in my step, I went up the stairs and swiftly changed into some nice board shorts. I grabbed a camp shirt but didn't put it on. I had a pretty good tan already and wanted to get some more sun before I donned it. With that, I grabbed a six-pack of beer good enough to share with the right people and headed back down, barefoot.

I wandered out into the sunshine and looked for some conversation. I started with a nice discussion on the surprisingly positive season so far for the Cincinnati Reds with Robert and Frank. We all had an unaccountable fondness for the Reds, despite none of us ever living in Ohio. But both of them had not been so wise and foresighted, beer-wise, as I, and got thirsty. I chose not to grant them a third of my beverages, and they did not ask, but they both went to grab some from their own apartments.

I turned and approached a massively more scenic, if not necessarily more entertaining, group consisting of Jane, Rhonda, and Mimi. Mimi was an undergraduate, and Jane and Rhonda were dispensing life advice... old crones of 26 like they were. As such, it was not a riveting conversation for me, but I hung around politely. Also, I hung around because in recent days I had come to believe that Mimi had at some point gotten an understated boob job, and in the bikini she wore this day, I felt I now had confirmation of that, right before my eyes. Thus I kept my eyes where they were for a spell.

You know... just to re-confirm my results.

But, given the fact that the conversation revealed that she had already hooked up somewhat seriously with another tenant down her way, and the fact that nice as they were, there were plenty of other wonderful tits to look at around the pool, I soon turned to move on.

I had gotten barely three steps when I heard at least two of the women I had just left whistle softly.

"Damn, Ken," I heard Rhonda call out louder than I would have liked. "You get caught in a rose bush?"

"I... uh, yeah. Something like that," I said, turning back to them and trying not to look frantic as I slid on the shirt I had brought with me, as I should have done to begin with.

All three laughed.

"Well, he was certainly deep in a bush," Mimi drawled, displaying an admirable capacity for evil, "but I don't know if the owner's name was Rose..."

"Dude, whoever she was marked you up good!" Rhonda said, as all three closed the distance back up between us.

"What I want to know is, how far down do the scratches go?" Jane followed up.

"More importantly, were they worth it?" Mimi asked.

"And was it someone who lives here?" Rhonda added.

Well, I wasn't answering any of those impertinent questions. But while I really should have been old and mature enough not to, I blushed.

Fuck it.

"Can I offer any of you ladies a beer?" I asked, trying not to seem smug. Smug seemed like a good defense against answering those questions.

*

The scratches healed. The ointment I belatedly applied helped.

Patty was soon a near-permanent fixture around the complex, with her car in the lot overnight more often than not.

The good news from this was that Jesse, despite remaining super conscientious about everything, slowly became much less controlling and fretful. The huge water balloon fight that broke out one afternoon around the pool drew no more than a casual request from him to make sure the broken latex didn't get in the pool filters. Two months before, he would have been freaking out about safety and us running around the pool area, while immediately shutting down the fun.

Josie was her usual self, working just as hard as Jesse all over the complex in her khaki shorts and flannel shirts, but it was clear that she was in a much more relaxed mood all the time. Who knew that Patty's arrival would make just about everything easier about life around the place?

Me. That's who had known. I decided that I was a genius, but I kept it to myself because I'm modest like that. And I didn't want to get thrown into the pool, which was a common fate for boastful weenies.

The only downside, if you could call it that, was that Jesse stopped trying to organize the social lives of all the tenantry all the time. He still took care of his pet projects, and he had developed a new fondness for the pool parties, which were happening slightly more often than in the past, but he stopped coming up with new ideas, and he was less careful with other regular activities.

Josie was happy to pick up the slack but in her own way. Instead of driving herself crazy, trying to suggest and control everything herself, she started looking to us to come up with ideas and organize them. She still wanted to foster the active social life that made our little community so special, but she wasn't going to kill herself making it all happen on her own.

I always knew she was a smart woman.

New social activities started, ones that didn't much interest Josie or especially Jesse. A surprisingly large board game club arose. I avoided joining because I was in super-hard(ish)-working mode. I didn't have time for the new Bridge club either, but I joined that one anyway. My parents had taught me the game at an early age, and I felt my mom's memory demanded that I join so I could dominate the proceedings.

I did get willingly sucked into Sunday Water Polo because... women in bathing suits bouncing up and down.

Another upshot was that a few long-needed adjustments to The Way Things Have Always Been Done became more thinkable. This led to my attendance at a small party in Wills Martin's apartment. Wills was the dude that Mimi had gotten involved with, and the two of them were leaders in the renewed push to split the beer and wine club up and have Wine Club and Beer Club each become their own things.

It was not supposed to be a party. It was supposed to be a meeting of a subversive cell of radical revolutionaries who wanted to overturn the established order of things. B&W Club was one of Jesse's first efforts. The problem with our ambitions of sedition was, over half the membership were attending, so it was hardly a controversial movement. Those not attending were mostly the beer-only types. They weren't excluded, they just figured that if the wine geeks were going to do all the work, they'd just get on with their lives.

Thus... it ended up being simply a nice party. The business was dealt with before everyone even arrived, and we just sort of did not leave, standing around and drinking... wine. The gathering was almost two-thirds women, a little higher even than the general population distribution of the complex. Attending were most of the women with whom I had had some adventures since my arrival. Josie was even there, further undermining our attempts at appearing subversive and revolutionary.

Numerous spent bottles of wine in, I was chilling in a small group including our host and Mimi, as well as Rhonda and Susan. The sixth among our little conversational knot was Dani, a masters candidate in Journalism. She had been one of the more eager among us to drink to our successful plan, and while she wasn't drunk, she had lost volume control a while ago.

"I mean really, I'm not going to kick him to the curb or anything," I heard her say to Susan at a suddenly elevated volume. I think everybody heard her say it. "But, I mean, really. Like he thinks he can get away with going out with his boys and getting a lap dance?"

"Is that such a big problem?" Mimi asked her blandly. This confirmed my growing suspicion that Mimi was a world-class shit-disturber. I knew I liked more about her than the elegant fake boobs.

I and several other guys around the room looked at Wills, wondering at the life of a guy with a girlfriend who seemed okay with boyfriends getting lapdances.

"I... I mean... I don't really know," Dani sputtered, caught off-guard with the question. "I mean, I'm not even really sure what a lap dance is!"

Mimi seemed surprised at that. "Really? Do you think you want to know?"

"No!" Dani said quickly. "But... okay, yeah. I mean. I'm curious," she added, finally lowering her voice. But by this time, all other conversation had quieted and everybody else had moved closer to listen to the floor show. "Do you know what they're like?"

Mimi snorts and gives an in-joke sort of look at her boyfriend. Wills just grinned back and said to her, "I dare you."

Mimi frowned at him, but with no heat.

"You worked the conversation around to this point, girl," Wills said.

Mim looked at him, then around the room.

"Fuck it," she said. She turned and stepped over to Alice Watkins, who was sitting in the big, wide armchair Wills had in the room, facing the kitchen. "I'm going to need this seat, babe," Mimi said.

Alice got out of the seat politely but with a puzzled look on her face. Lots of faces were puzzled. Mimi just looked at Wills and gestured at the empty seat. Wills sat. Both of them were grinning now.

"Hey Siri," Mimi called out loudly, "Play Girls, Girls, Girls by Motley Crue."

Wills' Homepod, which heretofore had been playing light jazz, blooped accomodatingly and began playing the loud club song.

"Here you go, Dani. Watch," Mimi invited, and stepped in front of Wills, nudging his legs apart with her shin. More than just Dani was watching. We all were, none of us quite sure what we were about to see, but preemptively not believing our eyes. I stepped back and perched my ass on the edge of the dinette table.

Mimi had moved between Wills's knees and immediately begun demonstrating how many axes about which the human female ass and hips could rotate in time with music. No one was talking or looking anywhere else by this point.

Mimi was staring down at Wills, who was almost taunting her with his eyes. Then she languidly turned, less than 20 seconds into her 'demonstration', to face away from him and shook her ass in his face. Then she bent down, bracing herself lightly on his thighs and brushed her rounded ass lightly over his crotch.

Yep. Pretty much a lap dance. Pretty much. I mean, she wasn't...

Then Mimi straightened up and tugged at the hips of the short dress she was wearing and smoothly pulled it up and over her head, all without slowing the axial rotation thing! In fact, she started turning around once more to face Wills. No matter which way she faced, she was also facing many of their guests. The chair was in the center of the room.

The little pirouette let everybody see that she was wearing a thong. No, let's be more precise, she was wearing a g-string--a satin green one. It matched the green of the lacy, insubstantial, see-thru bra she wore.

Yeah, those had to be fake, that little scrap of fabric she wore up top was not what was making those things stand out so perkily.

I traded a sidelong glance at Josie, who had perched beside me on the table's edge, to examine how she was taking this. She just rolled her eyes at me and looked back at Mimi's little 'lesson'.

Mimi, now facing fully away from Wills, just circled her essentially bare butt, with the green dragon tattoo up her left flank and one claw seeming to grope her ass, before him. Wills' smug, teasing expression had faded, his eyes widening that Mimi had gone quite this far.

If they had widened before, there was suddenly white visible above and below his pupils as Mimi reached behind her and unhooked the bra. In a single motion, she turned to face him and slid the bra completely off. Now she danced in front of him for a few seconds, holding the dress in one hand and the bra in the other, before she bent over, letting her bare tits pass downward crazily close to his face. She draped both dress and bra over his shoulders and said in his ear in a loud but whispery voice, "Hold onto those for me, will you, Baby?"

With that, she stood up yet again, again sweeping her tits agonizingly close to his face, especially his lips, and began to dance once more.

Topless. In front of about 15 guests.

I could not help but examine the stunned faces of my fellow spectators, especially Dani, who stood close by, looking like she was seeing Elvis debarking a flying saucer in the saddle of a T-Rex. But as I looked, I snorted with quiet laughter.