Under Pressure

It's not going to be all that easy to explain how I got to be stuck huddled underneath Paula Prufrock's bed that night.

My situation was the result of some quick thinking, which over the years I have found has the capacity to both save one from the nasty surprises that life sometimes tosses about but can also generate troubles that the wildest dreams could not imagine. In this case, I suppose it was both.

Paula Prufrock and I had been an item for almost a year. It is all too fresh for me to diagnose very well at the moment, but I will probably look back on our time together as an amazing adventure in love and lust. After I get over the sting and hurt of rejection that still lingers, like background radiation after a supernova.

I had moved into her place in Brookline over the summer, which at the time I thought a marvelous omen. Our sex-life had gotten so hot I was in a perpetual state of arousal, a high of stunning proportions. I should have known better, since this was not the first time in my life that a period of intense sexual activity with a lover preceded a breakup. I cannot explain it.

I met Paula in my Metaphysics class the Fall of my last year at Boston University. She had fluffy dark hair and flashing eyes, and possessed what would turn out to be a riveting chest, although you never would have known it by the clothes she wore, loose untucked flannel shirts and jeans. She claimed it was "standard high-school garb" in her hometown of Shrewsbury, but I was always a bit skeptical, that central Massachusetts town isn't that provincial. She thought I was "cute" with my sparse beard and short, wiry build, barely a couple inches taller than her.

But she was whip-smart and we started having coffee together after class. To shorten the story, we were smitten, and by the end of spring term she had invited me to share her flat after her roommate moved out in June.

Although she would continue on at BU, I had graduated with my BA, a Philosophy major (don't ask) with no real job prospects. I had been working at a bicycle store, and upon graduation I just slid from a part-time position to full, until I could come up with a better scene. Kenny, the owner, was glad to have me, and since my bicycle was my transportation, and really my lifestyle at that time, that was fine. My legs had grown strong and hardened in the urban commute. Splitting rent with Paula would save me money and cement our connection, or so I thought.

Silly me.

It wasn't as if Paula changed dramatically when I first moved in. We adapted to living together pretty well I thought, I cooked about half the time and did my share of clean-up (although not surprisingly, she had higher standards than I on this particular front, which took some adjustment.)

I already knew she had a short fuse sometimes, so that was not a surprise either, but of course proximity and our closer quarters I suppose magnified things. One time I had not closed the top of the mustard jar tightly, and it came off in her hand when she took it out of the refrigerator (she had picked the jar up by the top, not a very bright move it seemed to me, and I made the mistake of pointing this out) and the jar overturned and mustard spilled everywhere and made a mess. She turned on me, her face red and hot, and I got it both barrels. Okay, sorry.

But it also turned out that lots of times after we had a spat, our make-up intimacies were especially intense.

That same night after the mustard incident, she rode me fiercely on top in bed, pressing her meaty breasts into my face and grinding her cunt onto my prick until I came real hard. I then I licked her soppy, wet furry cunt to climax since she hadn't come yet. We lay together afterward, all sweaty and loose, our kisses sharing the cunt-liquor/sperm taste mixture in my mouth that had come from finishing her off. And slept like royalty in that creaky bed, all happy in each other's arms. It seemed perfect.

So anyway, our little disagreements grew more frequent, petty and explosive. We had the nuclear event about a month later. It was one of those arguments that started small and turned into a whirlwind. I think it began because I had finished off the last of the potato salad, and it turned out she had been hoping for a share.

Now if she had just told me that, of course I would have saved a portion for her. But mind-reading has never been one of my strong suites. The argument devolved into exhaustive character analysis and a rather negative overview of my Weltanschauung, and a whole pile of other things I would rather not go into at the moment. If you are a guy (and I don't care what kind of guy you are) up against an angry, determined woman with a full quiver of accusatory arrows, you are done for. Plus she held the trump card - her name was on the lease.

But the upshot was I was booted, that night. Came back the next day to clear out my stuff, which luckily wasn't a lot, and now I'm living at Jimmy Rondo's place until I find a more permanent spot.

So it was a warm Thursday night in September, a few weeks later, and I had remembered I had left behind a couple books on the bookshelf (what I had regarded as "our bookshelf") and I wanted them back.

Now, what I should have done was just sent a text to Paula to tell her I was coming by. But in the fury and confusion of my eviction, I hadn't even given Paula back my key to the flat (actually, it hadn't even occurred to me to do so), so I still had it on my keychain. I figured I'd pop over, it was just after dinner, and retrieve my stuff. If Paula was there, fine, but I was hoping she wasn't, and I could just slip in, grab my stuff, and go.

My key got me through the apartment front door, and I ascended the stair-flight to our third floor landing and knocked. Well, she wasn't home, to my relief, and I let myself in. Got the books easy enough, Spinoza's Ethics and a Husserl. I was just standing there looking around the living room - "our living room" - next to the kitchen. All manner of memories were working away on me, the view out the window to the street, the green leafy trees along the block, how happy I had been when spontaneously she had sucked me off while I was sitting on the couch one night.

And then everything went wrong. I heard footsteps coming up the stairway (we were on the top floor, shared that level with one other couple in a flat across the landing.) I recognized Paula's footsteps, and that would have been awkward enough, although I would have explained everything, talked for a few minutes and left, however uncomfortable that would have been.

But there were other footsteps too and voices. Paula was talking to someone else, a male.

Holy shit. What was I going to do?

Whatever part of my brain that handles panic usually has a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, and I didn't even get far enough in my thinking to register the accuracy of that particular analysis.

I dashed into the bedroom while I heard Paula's key turning in the lock, and for one micro-second paused. Not many choices, closet was out of the question, Paula was so neat I knew she would be using it anyway, which left under the bed.

Okay, so bear with me here. I scrambled under the bed, pulling my backpack with me and got towards the center. The covers only hung down maybe halfway around the bed, so there was a good four-inch gap, and I hoped it would be small enough to conceal me. I mean who else besides somebody on the run regularly checks under a bed for trouble?

So Paula and her male friend enter and they are talking in the kitchen now, my blood pressure at a most uncomfortable level, if you have to know.

And I recognize the voice! It is Mitchel, the rat. Another philosophy student, a big slobbery guy with a perpetual five-o'clock shadow, fuzzy hair, obnoxious to a high degree. He was smart, blast him, but totally pompous, and I always cringed in Metaphysics class when he'd pose a highly technical question and then start on one of his interminable rambles.

So they're talking in the kitchen, and I hear some liquid being poured and they move to the living room. "Our" living room.

All this time, as you might guess, I am trying to figure out just how this little adventure is going to end. Unless they went out again, which seemed highly unlikely, I was going to have to hide under the bed until Paula left in the morning. She was usually off to campus on the early side, so there was some chance I might even make tomorrow a "normal" day and get to the bicycle store before it opened at ten.

I will not tell you the rest of my thoughts, which mostly involved kicking myself, cursing my bad timing, and abusing my normally robust sense of honor and self-worth, and all that.

They didn't last long in the living room. Things had gotten quiet, and my imagination was keen enough to more or less figure out what that meant. If two young philosophy students aren't noisily debating some topic or another, it's not because each of them is busy examining the state of their fingernails.

So I hear them enter the bedroom, Paula first, and I hear her tell him that he can leave his stuff on the bedroom chair. And my head starts doing contortions since I have figured out what is next, the big lug is going to spend the night.

This night, his big body, and Paula's familiar soft temple of skin, flesh, and love, are going to be just a few inches above me, and there is not a damn thing I am going to be able to do about it.

I have a four-inch tall pillbox of a window from under the bed, of course, so I can see their feet and ankles as I watch the big doofus remove his shoes and socks. It sounds as if Paula is removing her top, I am going by noise here, and the knowledge of her normal evening routine. The closet door slides to the right so she can put her shirt in the clothes hamper inside, and that brings into my line of vision the full-length mirror on the door, the one that I had installed so that we could watch our lovemaking in bed, (and this called up all manner of other unbidden memories, as you might imagine.) The mirror comes into my line of sight and with the new reflected angle of view, I could see a little more of them now from the back, up to about their waists.

Mitchel pulled his shirt off and tossed it on the chair. Paula couldn't be too happy with his carelessness, but I guess he would learn. Then his pants come off, and his boxers, and sure enough, his dick is about half hard.

It is a nice looking one, I wish I was not reporting this, with a big head and nice hanging furry balls. Thick dark hair on his legs.

Paula's bra comes off and into the hamper, then she pulls off her jeans. She's wearing a thong, goddammit, she never did that for me, and she moves towards Mitchel. They embrace, her hand going to his cock for a brief fondle, which I can just barely glimpse from my awkward vantage point.

He makes a little show of pulling her thong off, getting on his knees for chrissake, and nuzzling her mons, while he slips that silly thing down her legs. It's red even, and he lets it lie there on the floor. He nuzzles a little too long at her cunt, I can only see the back of his head in the mirror, but I remember Paula's smell well enough. It feels like I'm getting punched in the gut.

They ease into bed, and their damn foreplay, luckily for me, doesn't go on for long. They must have been pretty hot for each other, I couldn't blame the guy, although what Paula saw in Mitchel is a different matter.

My view via the mirror wasn't super, but good enough to see him kneeling by her head while she sucked him, her hand running up underneath his crotch and caressing one of his ass cheeks.

I wish I wasn't telling you this, but my penis had inflated itself and was pressing fairly uncomfortably against my shorts. I wanted desperately to shift position to give it some room, but was deathly afraid of any noise I might make. Probably anything short of a mighty sneeze they wouldn't have noticed, their attention was completely on each other, but I didn't dare move.

As he pulls out and just before he settles in next to her, I see his cock, all curved and upwards pointing and wet with her saliva. And of course I know what is next. Paula turns out the light and all grows dark.

The bed sags as both of them settle in, there is enough space they won't bottom out on me, but every movement is going to be immediate and close. The mirror no longer gives me any vantage, and it's too dark to see much anyway.

So they're lying there next to each other, I am hearing the sounds of kissing, and I am guessing his fingers are doing their thing on her lovely chest, probably her labia too, maybe even her hands are on his penis, I cannot tell. But they do this a bit and I am hearing Paula's breath get a little noisier, the shallow pantings I remember so well when she was getting aroused. The air under the bed is close, claustrophobic.

And the bed shifts and it seems the big lug has mounted her.

I remembered the little sigh of pleasure, a sudden intake of breath, she always gave out when my penis first pushed its way home and settled into her, the exact same sound now replicated just above me.

And he starts humping her, judging by the mattress movement anyway. It has sagged down more, their combined weight in the middle. Slowly at first, then picking up speed as the bed legs vibrated and made noise against the floor. This, of course, I remembered too, but from a different perspective.

He did not go on for real long. Paula's breathing got more rapid, and the guy is going pretty good, the rhythm picking up. If my experience is any guide, he is going to come before she does. For us, unless I licked Paula until she was just right at the edge, and even then it was rare, she would rarely climax in the time we took to couple.

It's pretty frantic up there, and the bed movements are getting more violent. A long mighty bed thump and a strangled low-throat noise from above suggests the first batch of sperm reached its target, the movements slowly diminishing until after five or six more heaves of sperm it is still.

My penis is aching.

It is quiet for awhile, until they start making sickening love-murmur whispers to each other. Some repositioning, it appears he is fingering her, the sucking and smacking sounds are probably his lips and mouth on the nipples of that lovely chest.

Some shifting of position suggests he is probably settling his face in between her legs to lick her. She is slow to arouse sometimes, but that night her breathing got busier and louder and she finally came. She doesn't make much noise usually, but I could tell, even from underneath, how rigid her legs had become, and the little wiggles her hips made as she went over the edge, shaking the bed ever so slightly.

They lie there together for some time, I am trying to keep my thoughts in check, stifling the impulse to dart out from underneath the bed to clobber the guy with a lamp or a chair, until finally he gets up to piss. The light is still off, so I see his feet go by, then I hear the sound of a long splash of urine in the toilet next door. I am wondering whether he knows enough to put the lid down if he doesn't want to get chewed out the next morning.

Back into bed and the long night commences.

I did fall asleep at some point, long after them. When all had gotten silent, I was able to move myself into a slightly more comfortable position, although that's not saying very much.

One necessity was handled, adroitly if I say so myself, with a welcome dose of luck. I needed to pee something fierce, as you might imagine. Luckily I had a wide-necked, almost finished energy-drink bottle in my backpack, so I drained the residue down a very thirsty throat in a fairly awkward way, and managed to pee into the empty bottle without spilling urine anywhere or making much noise. Sealed it up, back in the backpack, which I used as a pillow, and like I say, I did sleep a little.

Their awakening in the morning got me up, and Paula hit the loo first. Coming back in she spoke to Mitchel.

"I'd appreciate it if you would lower the toilet lid after you piss, okay? This is my place after all, and that's the least you can do while you're a guest here."

Yep, I could have predicted that.

The big lug made some sort of apologetic noise and then he got up for his turn.

It is after seven, the light in the room has grown brighter, and I am looking out at Paula's ankles.

I hold my breath since she has stooped down to retrieve her thong, still on the ground after disrobing last night, and my heart stops. She pauses, thong in hand, and for some reason tilts her head to look under the bed.

She looks straight at me, we make eye contact, and I am frozen. I have no idea absolutely of what to do.

Her eyes grow wide, a million different expressions fighting for control of her face.

I really have no idea what is going to happen. My first reaction is relief that she hadn't let out a scream, which certainly would not have been an unreasonable response. But she didn't.

She looks straight at me, opens her mouth, then shuts it again. There is some anger in her eyes, but I get a glimmer of hope that life might not come to an end.

She stands up and goes about her morning business, although I do note that she contrived to stay completely out of my view while putting her clothes on. The big lug has returned of course, and they say a few worlds to each other before wandering into the kitchen for breakfast. It takes half an hour but she finally scoots him out the door (I hear a kiss before the door closes) and I hear her footsteps coming into the bedroom and see her feet from under the bed.

"Get out from under there, Randy Swain. I want to hear what you're going to say."

Well, one part of me (actually my whole body) is quite happy to do this, as I have been on eight-hour trans-Atlantic plane flights that were more comfortable than this last night, but of course I am prepared for some ugliness.

Her arms are crossed when I pull myself out and stand in front of her.

"So?" She glares at me, eyebrows hitting the ceiling.

I elected for short, direct and honest, figuring that was my only chance. It wasn't short and sweet though.

"I came back to fetch a couple books, that's all. I should have texted you but was in the neighborhood and just figured I'd pop in and out." I waved my keychain at her.

I pulled out my backpack and showed her the two books.

"That's it. That's all. I heard you guys coming up the stairs and panicked. You're smart enough to figure out the rest."

Her face was stern, but it wasn't getting any harder at least.

She stared at me for a long time. I keep my gaze level too, I didn't have any other option. If I had looked down or sheepish and looked away she would have been on me in an instant.

A dopey smile broke out finally, and I felt my body relax.

"You gave me a start, you dumb fuck." She shook her head.

"Let's have your key, you shoulda given it back to me last month. And then get moving."

"Can I use the bathroom first?" I had a full bladder and was aware of looking disheveled and pathetic.

"Okay, but lower the lid, alright?"

I was quick and out of there in double time.

"Randy Swain, don't you ever try something like that again," she said before closing the door.

It was a promise I felt I would be able to keep.