by Deveraux, CM
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or locales or to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First edition: November 2013
Copyright © 2013 by CM Deveraux
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any print or electronic form without the written consent of the author.
SCHOOL OF SEX SERIES BY CM DEVERAUX
Passion—Jess’s Story (School of Sex, Book 1)
COMING SOON:
Pleasure—Sasha’s Story (School of Sex, Book 2)
Pain—Callie’s Story (School of Sex, Book 3)
Play—Kenna’s Story (School of Sex, Book 4)
Perfection—The Finale (School of Sex, Book 5)
CHAPTER 1
My name is Jess Hudson. Not Jessie. Not Jessica. Jess. And this is my story.
My quest for passion began with online dating. It wasn’t like I had much choice in the matter. Something had to change.
All of my friends were married, unhappily, for one reason or the other, but not a one was satisfied. Not a one! During our weekly “bitch” sessions, also known as dinner, sex was described by my friends as dull, painful, boring, and my personal favorite: lasting too long.
Too long?
In my world, it could never be long enough.
Tantric sex anyone?
As for me, I’d never married and only ever had one long-term boyfriend in college. Long-term meaning the relationship had lasted more than six months. His name was Brian. And the sex, you ask? It wasn’t worth writing home about. We only “did it” one way, and it wasn’t Gangnam Style. Once, after growing weary of doing it in the missionary position, I’d uncorked my nerve and suggested something new. I turned the shower on, and when the bathroom had achieved a smoldering level of sexy steaminess, I appeared in Brian’s room wrapped in nothing but a short, white towel. I’d twisted the edge in front a few times and plunged it into my cleavage, giving the illusion that my breasts were a full size bigger than they actually were.
When Brian finally tore his eyes away from the book he was reading after I’d cleared my throat not once, but two times, I donned my best sultry smile and beckoned him closer. To my surprise, he cocked his head to the side, lifting an eyebrow, and twisting his mouth as if to say, “What the hell are you doing?” He then flat-out refused, saying sex in the shower was overrated. He admitted he’d tried it with his last girlfriend. He hadn’t liked it. He saw no reason to try it again. It was wet and slippery, and he couldn’t “feel” anything. He further suggested I shower by myself, promising to be in bed waiting for me when I was done, after he’d finished studying for his history exam.
What a square.
I’d been rejected by a boy who should have been in the sexual prime of his life, but instead of seeing it for what it was at the time, his problem, I’d convinced myself that it was mine. What was wrong with me? Was I too fat? Was my long, dark brown, perfectly wavy hair a turn-off? Or maybe it was my hazel, oversized, turtle eyes. Maybe I was repulsive in ways I hadn’t even imagined, and the only way he could have sex with me was under the covers, at night, with the lights out.
Only girls want to have sex that way—right?
Standing there before Brian that night, scantily clad and feeling like last night’s stale leftovers, I had realized something: the time had come for me to find out what good sex really felt like—the kind of sex people wrote songs about, the kind in all of those tantalizing rated-R-but-really-should-be-X movies. And one thing was certain: Mr. Square wasn’t my ticket to ride. I hurled the towel to the ground, allowing Brian to take a good look—it would be his last. Through the cheap, cotton sheets he was snuggled under, an erection raised its white flag, prompting Brian to regurgitate his previous words. He called me “baby” and “honey-bee” (two names I had always hated). He swatted the empty space on the bed next to him with his hand and demanded me to, “Come here.”
Oh, I came all right that night, but not with him.
“Jess? Did you hear what I just said?”
I broke free from the college memory and glanced at Sasha, who eyeballed me as if to say, “Well...?”
Over the last several minutes, I’d watched her mouth move in rapid succession, but as for what she’d been saying, admittedly, I hadn’t the slightest clue. I stood, tossed my Hermes handbag over my shoulder, and tried to think of something nice to say so I wouldn’t look like an indelible ass as I made a quick exit.
“Where are you going?” Sasha asked. “You just got here. What about your dinner?”
I glanced at my partially eaten oriental salad and looked around the table. Sasha, Kenna, and Callie could have pierced my skin with their steely glares. I pushed the chair in, trying to avoid eye contact. “I’ll stay longer next time. Promise.”
“What’s gotten into you over the last several months?” Sasha prodded. “You seem so...different.”
“I feel different.”
“Mind telling us why?”
“We’ll have to save that conversation for another night. I’m sorry, guys. Truly, I am. I have a date tonight, and I’ve got to go. I’ll stay longer next time, I promise.”
“But this is girls’ night,” Sasha said. “There are no guys on girls’ night.”
“Only because you’re all married,” I said. “If you were single, it would be different. Trust me.”
“You always have a date,” Kenna chided. “I can’t even remember what a date feels like anymore. Not a hot one anyway. And I never will again.”
She groaned as if her life was already over. She wasn’t even thirty.
“We sit here, week after week, pouring our hearts out to you about our lousy lives,” Sasha said. “You listen, but you never chime in.”
I shrugged.
“I’m not married,” I said. “I don’t feel qualified to give you all advice. Besides, you wouldn’t like what I had to say if I did. Venting isn’t the same thing as asking me for my opinion. If you’re looking for unsolicited advice, you’re not going to get it...not from me.”
“Come on, Jess,” Sasha said. “You were the only one smart enough to stay single. You say you have this wonderful new guy, yet we know so little about him. Give us something to live for. We’re dying here.”
“Yeah,” Kenna chimed in. “Let us live vicariously through you—please?”
Callie, who up until that moment had sat in the corner in silence, rested the fork she was clutching on her plate and folded her arms. “Jess is too reserved. She’ll never talk to us about her sex life.”
Reserved?
That wasn’t a name I’d been called in a while. It reminded me of the old me, not the new-and-improved Jess standing before them today. It made me feel rigid and stuffy. Callie had a look on her face like she’d just bitten into a sour grape. I looked at Sasha and Kenna. Did they all see me this way? Based on the unified looks on their faces, they did.
I pondered my next move. If I said what I’d been longing to say for the past several months, it would change the way they looked at me. It was a risky move. But these women were supposed to be my closest friends and confidants, the girls I trusted more than anyone in the world. We’d all been friends since grade school. Week after week they spilled their innermost thoughts, and I’d reciprocated, just not in the way I should have. If they really saw me as reserved, we definitely had a problem.
Sasha’s husband was cheating on her—had been for years—and, not just with one fleet
ing woman, but a whole plethora of them. She knew it, even though he was oblivious to the fact, yet she did nothing.
Kenna had lost her virginity on her wedding night to her new husband Robert, who, had also been a virgin. Neither of them had the slightest idea what they should be doing in the bedroom. Exploring their options was out of the question and viewed as too taboo to even mention. So they didn’t. They skirted the subject, sucking all the spontaneity out of sex by an arrangement they’d made after the first week of marriage. When they moved into their love nest together, they placed a pair of candlesticks on opposite ends of the fireplace mantle. Robert’s candlestick was on the left, Kenna’s on the right. If either was feeling a little randy, that person moved the candlestick to the center of the mantle as a kind of nonverbal gesture of his or her intention. If the other person agreed with this idea, then both candlesticks would meet in the middle. When this happened, the two met in the bedroom, the only place they ever had sex together. They never minced words, always getting right down to the main event like the act was some kind of routine business transaction, which I suppose it was. Five or six minutes later, it was all over, and the two returned to life as usual.
And as for Callie?
Callie married Sam at age twenty-one after a brief, three-month courtship. It wasn’t long after tying the knot that the two realized they weren’t right for each other. The marriage was annulled, after which Callie met her current husband, Josh, six months later. This time she waited a year before eloping via drive-up window in Las Vegas, the city where we all lived. Despite the “quickie wedding”, the marriage had been going strong. In the bedroom, Callie was what I liked to call a “sexual introvert.” A woman who wanted more than anything to furnish her man with the best sex of his life. She dreamed about it. She fantasized about it. She talked about it. The only problem? She was too nervous to turn her seedy, salacious thoughts into actions. This sent a message to her husband that she wasn’t interested, prompting him to fill his time with twice weekly poker nights with his buddies while she stayed at home, raising their kids, dreaming about what could be.
I decided my plan of friendly attack would be to start with one woman at a time. I pivoted on my heel and bent down, hovering over Sasha. “How long are you going to wait before you confront Damon about his cheating?”
She jerked back. “What? Where’s this coming from? We ask you to share one juicy tidbit about your own love life, and we’re back to talking about mine?”
They asked for it. Too late now.
I crossed my arms. “Answer the question, Sasha.”
“I...I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“No, it isn’t. You walk up to him, yank his conservative blue-and-red-striped tie toward you until his circulation has been cut off, and say two little words: IT’S OVER. Of course if you want to add one expletive or five, I’ll leave it up to you.”
Callie and Kenna’s bodies slanted forward in one swift motion, their eyes wide, fascinated. Neither spoke.
“I don’t think I can,” Sasha muttered. “I don’t know. I mean, I—”
“Of course you can,” I said. “I’ll help you get rid of the two-timing piece of trash, and then I’ll help you find a man you can rely on. Someone who will meet your needs. All of them.”
“My needs? I don’t even know what those are anymore.”
I pulled the chair back out, sat down, and addressed the group. “Week after week, I sit here listening to you all fuss over your imperfect, unfulfilled lives. You’re tired, you’re bored, and yet none of you do anything to change it.”
“And your life is so much better?” Sasha asked.
I smiled.
“It is, because lately I’ve made it that way. I set boundaries. I learned how to get what I want out of life, and you can too. I’m happy, I’m free, and ladies...I’m about to learn what it’s like to be completely satisfied by a man.” I looked at Sasha. “What happened to the fiery redhead I knew back in high school? You couldn’t walk past any guy without him craning his neck to gawk at you. Just because you’ve been married for several years to some preppy, insensitive ass doesn’t mean we can’t breathe life back into you again.”
Sasha glanced at her plate, then at the floor. “We’ve been together so long; I don’t know how to live without him.”
I reached out, clutching her freckled hand. “Yes, you do. You’ve been doing it for over seven years now. When was the last time Damon was there for you? When was the last time he supported you? Not with money—with his time. Do you even remember?”
She twitched in her chair, crossing one leg over the other, then uncrossing them, then crossing them back again. She bit the inside of her mouth, something she’d done ever since we were kids whenever she was about to experience a panic attack.
“Breathe,” I said. “It’s time you face what’s really going on.”
“So I tell him to go to hell and you’re going to...what? Wave a magic wand over my head and change my life forever?”
“Something like that.” I squeezed her hand. “When you decided you’ve had enough, let me know. I’ll be waiting.”
Sasha shook her head in disbelief. Once the dust settled and she had a moment to process what I’d just said, I detected the faintest smile. She looked like a door had just been propped open and she could see her life’s dreams behind it. I wasn’t sure how long it would take for her to finally make a move, but the seed had been planted.
CHAPTER 2
My own schooling had commenced several months earlier. I’d arrived home to find Patrick, my live-in boyfriend of eight months, schtupping Lola, his barely-legal secretary. On my sofa. Wearing my lingerie. The framed photograph of us as a couple, our arms swaddled around each other that was usually positioned on the middle of the coffee table had taken a dive, face-planting into the carpet below. I suppose looking at me while fucking her was a bit of a stressor for him.
After one final, strenuous thrust, he made a pathetic gurgling sound, during which he glanced up, spotting me in the corner, arms crossed, my middle finger waving hello. He shot off the sofa, glaring at Lola like he’d suddenly developed a severe case of amnesia, and then said the same stupid ass thing they all say: “It’s not what you think.”
Really?
I didn’t think anything. Seeing was believing, and I’d seen it all. Why did guys always say they were sorry? What in the hell was I supposed to do with that—swallow it and delete it from my memory now that his joke of a dick had shriveled to the size of a fish stick, and he’d stuffed it back inside his pants?
“Say something, hun,” he had said. “Anything. Please.”
So I did. Two words actually. “Fuck” and “you.”
It was the first time he’d ever heard me express “the F word” aloud. He didn’t like it when women talked “that way.” In his opinion, that kind of lewd language was unbecoming of a lady. But cheating on his devoted, faithful girlfriend was somehow okay.
Go figure.
I spun around so fast I almost collided with the sharp, wooden edge of the coffee table and darted for the door, trying my best to hold my head high. I wanted to feel strong, tough. I deserved better, and I knew it. Instead, I felt like I was the one doing the walk of shame. So many years had come and gone since college, and still I hadn’t learned a thing about meaningful relationships.
Three days later, Patrick moved out I hit the gym, pretending I was actually interested in using the treadmill. One month in and I hadn’t garnered any attention for all of my hard work. I was considering perhaps the life of a gym rat wasn’t for me. Then she walked in. A single flip of her long, Farrah Fawcett bangs and every guy in the room stood at attention, only they weren’t saluting her with their hand. Her name was Veronica Fox, and she knew how to straddle a weight machine in such a way that every leg press directed a man’s eyes to one area: her crotch.
After a couple more weeks, it became apparent that I was no longer going to the gym to scope out all the hot guy
s. I was going for Veronica. I wanted to be Veronica. I wanted men to adore me the same way they adored her. I just didn’t know how.
One afternoon she sauntered in like she always did, swaying her hips in rhythmic motion to the beat of her own inaudible drum. But instead of going straight for the machines per her usual, she smiled at me and mounted the treadmill to my right. The men looked confused, and all I could do was giggle like a pig-tailed girl in grade school.
“I’m Veronica,” she said, smiling at me.
“Jess,” I replied, too nervous to meet her gaze.
“I’ve seen you in here several times,” she said, “but you never leave the treadmill. You should make the rounds once in a while.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re obviously not here for the workout.”
“What makes you say—”
“You never focus on the machine,” she said. “You’re always gawking at all the men around you.”
I was embarrassed she’d noticed.
“I’m guessing you’re single?” she continued.
“My boyfriend and I broke up recently...yes. Why?”
She set her machine to warp speed, and I watched her long, spindly legs sprint with all the grace of an Olympic runner winning the gold. Through staggered breaths, she said, “Unless you change something, you’re going to end up in the same kind of relationship you’ve always been in. You get that, right?”
“Get what?”
“You won’t find what you’re looking for in here. Other women will, but not you.”
Did she honestly think no guy at the gym could ever fall for me? Not even one? My jaw fell open, but instead of responding, my mouth felt like it had started harvesting cotton. I hopped off the treadmill and bolted for the door, determined never to step foot in there again.
I’d made it almost all the way to the car and had even managed to click the unlock button on my key fob when the sounds of footsteps jogged up behind me. “Wait a minute. Hang on.”