by Rowan Wells
Because her book sales had tanked, and our family was low on cash. And to make things worse, my first tuition bill came in the mail. Mom and Dad thought I hadn’t see them hunched over the dining table with the bill and a calculator while I lugged suitcases from my room and to the car. Plus there was the deactivation of our cable services, and the way Mom hunched over her computer, typing furiously, for most hours of the day. We had one day until I had to move back to college, and I could tell that there wasn’t any money to pay for my tuition.
Still, Mom and Dad put on a good face, helped me move into my dorm and stuffed a twenty dollar bill into my pocket.
Last semester, I’d gotten five hundred.
“I have an idea,” my room mate, Summer King, said as we started to make our latest cinderblock cell into a semblance of a home. “You can strip. Or do porn. There’s lots of money in either one, and your body is killer.”
I paused as I strung a set of Christmas lights around our single window to glare at Summer over my shoulder. My parents hadn’t been thrilled to see her with her jet black hair, thick black eyeliner paired with blood-red lipstick, and hot pants when we got to my dorm in freshman year, but Summer proved that looks didn’t tell the whole story of a person. Without her outgoing personality, I would’ve been a shut-in my first year of college. Now, I was only a partial shrew thanks to her.
She grinned cheekily from where she sprawled on her lofted bed, plastering glow in the dark stars to the ceiling. If we hadn’t roomed together last year and become fast friends, I might have spent part of my yearly allotment of swear words to tell her off. I’d caught her up on my summer break minus my bathroom adventure, because while she knew of my virginity situation, there were some things I wasn’t ready to share with anyone. Don’t get the wrong idea—Summer never pressured me to lose it.
Teasing me, however, was another story.
“Oh, oh, here’s another one, Mags,” she said, bouncing on the bed. The wooden loft creaked suspiciously, but she paid the sound no attention. “I bet you could find some rich sheik or oil baron to pay millions for your virginity and you’ll never have to think about tuition again.”
I snorted. “Like that actually happens.”
“I swear I saw it on the news once.” Summer hopped down from her bed and dug into one of my suitcases. Her parents lived close enough that she could go home often, so she never brought much to school, unlike me. “Let me help?”
I shrugged and went back to my lights. “Thanks.”
“Well…I guess you could get a legit part time job.”
“Yeah, because that nine dollar minimum wage is going to pay twenty-five grand for a semester of tuition, fees, and living expenses.”
“I could’ve gotten the point without the sarcasm, thank you very much. Wait, what the hell is this?”
I turned around to find that Summer had Chained Love in her hands. You better believe I used one of those swear words at that moment as I dove to snatch it from her, but the damage was already done. The smile on her face was one she made only when she was about to cause trouble.
“What’s this, Magdalena?” What was up with Magdalena? She only ever called me Mags. “You’re reading erotica now? And why is it so battered up? Have you been doing what I think you’ve been doing with that book?” Summer began frantically wiping her hands on her shorts. “Gross, I can’t believe I touched that!”
“I got it at one of mom’s conventions,” I gritted, shoving the book into one of my empty suit cases and then putting the suitcase in my half of the closet. “It’s not what you think.”
That wasn’t a lie, really. Since the incident in the toilets, I hadn’t time to even turn one of its pages because I was too worried about our money situation. And I only brought it to college so my mom didn’t find it.
Of course, I could’ve just thrown it away, but that would’ve destroyed the meager connection between me and my stranger, and between me and the Magdalena who dared to go that far. I didn’t want to lose either one.
“Sure it’s not,” Summer sang. “But you know what? Now I have a really freaking great idea about how you can make some quick cash.”
“I don’t think I want to hear it.”
“Uh, trust me, you do, because this should come easy for you. Just do what that Kat Boots lady did and write some erotica!”
Now wait a minute. All those news reports about her did say she made tens of thousands of dollars a month now with her series of erotic books by putting them up online herself. Who’s to say I couldn’t do the same thing?
Except there was one pesky little problem.
“A virgin can’t write erotica,” I said.
“Says who? You don’t actually have to have sex to write about it, just like you don’t actually have to—have to have, like, an alien pop out of your womb to make a movie about it,” Summer reasoned. “You just need a bit of an imagination and some writing skills.”
“Yeah, but—”
“If you’re so convinced that you can’t write erotica without some knowledge of sex, then study it.” Summer dug a course manual from her desk and tossed it at me. “I was so thinking of signing up for the psychology of sex class this year but I couldn’t fit it into my schedule. It’s on Mondays and Wednesdays at one thirty.”
“I don’t have anything on Mondays and Wednesdays at one thirty…” I mumbled.
“It’s a sign from God!”
“Oh, please. I can’t afford to pay for any more credits. Plus, if that class shows up on my bill, my parents would be me in a convent so fast you’d think I was abducted by those aliens you were talking about.”
Summer rolled her eyes. “Think out of the box, Mags. You don’t have to enroll in the class. It’s held in a huge lecture hall. The professor won’t notice one extra body in the room.”
The scary part was that Summer’s words made a heck of a lot of sense. Way too much sense. I was starting to think that maybe Summer was onto something. Use a pen name and no one would ever know how I made my money. And if my folks asked, I could tell them I was writing other things without being specific.
Still, a virgin who had a grand total of one orgasm under her belt, writing convincing erotica?
“Seriously,” Summer pressed, “this could be quick, easy cash for you, girl. If you don’t do this, you’re pretty much confined to taking out a shit ton of loans, which is exactly like whoring, just to the student loan companies. Why don’t you just go to the class at least once, try writing one thing, and see how it goes?”
I flipped through the course catalogue idly while thinking. My eyes caught and fell to the bolded psychology headline and quickly found psychology of sex, a 100 level course. It promised an introductory examination of the human preoccupation with sex, fetishes, and deviancy. Enrollees were warned of the explicit content included in the class’s study materials.
“So,” Summer asked. “What do you say?”
Maybe there were other ways the new me could make an appearance?
“Okay. I’ll do it.”
EIGHT
September 6, 1:27 pm
I don’t know why I was so surprised to walk into the lecture hall on Monday and find almost every seat full, but I lingered in the door way, gaping at the rows of bodies and wondering if I’d made a mistake. Someone ran into me from behind, a pretty girl with red tresses and green eyes and confidence to die for. Nothing about her seemed hesitant as she eyed me openly before curling her lips into a falsely polite smile, like I had VIRGIN stamped to my forehead.
(That last part may or may not have been projection on my part. Take a guess and yours will be as good as mine.)
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“Oh, sorry.” I edged out of the doorway, face flaming. She breezed up the nearest stair way with determination, heading to the back of the lecture hall. A few people were glancing my way, making me feel as if I had no choice but to take a seat, so I trailed after her, taking a space in the final row and only a seat away from the red hea
d.
I whipped out my laptop and busied myself setting up a Word file for notes. Really, I was listening to the conversations around me. Some people teased their friends, asking why they were in this class when they had to be an expert on sex from all the sleeping around they did, or telling their friends to keep their hands above the desk where people could see them.
And then I heard someone say, “Hey, guess what I heard we’ll be doing as our first lesson?” The guy didn’t even wait for his friend to try to figure it out. “Watching porn!”
I choked on my own saliva. The red-head shot me a sidelong glance before going back to her own computer. Okay, watching porn was one thing. Watching it in a classroom with over a hundred other people was an entirely different creature, one I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with. My fingers lingered on the back of my laptop lid as I considered making a quick exit when the lights suddenly shut off.
All the chatter died away. A side door leading the lecture stage opened, admitting someone but even with all the laptop screens lit up, it was impossible to make out more than a shadowy figure moving to the podium. Behind the figure, a projector screen began crawling down from the ceiling. The second it came to a rest, a video started playing on it.
A video of a woman in a barely-there scarlet dress answering her front door. On the other side was a handsome man in a shoddy police uniform.
The class burst into laughter—everyone, that is, except me. Because I was too busy dying. The rumor was true. Psychology of Sex started by watching two people having it. I felt myself dampening at the mere thought of what was to come, and sank down in my seat.
“I heard you were the victim of a robbery,” the fake cop said.
“That’s right, officer,” said the woman without an ounce of fear or distress in her voice. “It happened in the bedroom.”
Some guy in front of me snickered before saying, “Of course it happened in the bedroom,” earning a smattering of laughs from the class.
The cop and the woman went into the bedroom, where she began explaining the events of her home invasion, which involved the robbers tying her to the bed. When she sprawled out on the mattress to reenact the event at the request of the cop, she noticed a pitch in the crotch of his pants and asked him what it was. Instead of answering, he showed her. And then his penis ended up in her mouth.
An arrow of arousal shot straight down, hitting the sweet spot between my legs so strongly that I let out a squeak. I hadn’t thought anyone could hear over the woman’s moans of pleasure at having the tip of someone’s cock ramming the back of her throat (which seemed like the least sexiest thing to me but still got me hot), but the red-head shot me a look. I glared back at her until she went back to furiously typing notes into her computer.
What the heck could she be writing down? And why didn’t the video turn her on so much that she could focus on looking at it academically? Everyone else in the lecture hall seemed to be doing the same thing, or snickering, or whispering to their friends. I had to be the only one squirming in her seat to dampen the fire growing between her legs. My stomach was taking flight again, just as it had in that bathroom with my stranger. This was so not good. I didn’t know if I could climax just by sitting here, listening to and watching people have sex while clenching my loins together, and I didn’t want to find out.
I gathered my things, shoving my laptop into my backpack as I hastily beat a path down the darkened stairs.
Just as I hit the bottom, the video died and the lights snapped back on. Everyone turned to stare at me, including the person on the lecture stage, a young man who turned out to look exactly like the stranger my imagination cooked up. It was impossible for me to get any more flushed than I already was, but that didn’t stop blood from pounding in my head out of mortification.
The young man leaned against the podium and targeted me with a crooked grin. “Well, well, well. There’s always someone who has to make a mad dash for the toilets once the clip is over, but I think this is the first time that it’s been a girl.”
I barely heard the class erupt in boisterous laughter because the beating of my own heart was too loud.
I knew that voice.
It belonged to my stranger.
Coming Soon: Seduction 101,
the next book in “The Scarlet Diaries” Serial!
After discovering that her stranger is also teaching the psychology of sex course, Mags is mortified, but at the same time intrigued once again by his sexy cadence and easy confidence. Can she use her stranger’s knowledge of seduction to turn her into a master erotica author—without falling head over heels for a playboy?
Contact the Author:
E-Mail: [email protected]
Website: http://rowanwellswrites.weebly.com/