…or, Jamie On Top, Missy On Bottom

Monday, Astera 14th 222 (Evening)

By the time I got back upstairs, the lounge was starting to get crowded with people watching TV, doing homework, heating up food, or just talking, so after the pizzas arrived, we moved the party to my room and watched TV. Rather, we talked with the TV on.

My little couch under the loft bed was not big enough for all four of us no matter how narrow Iason was, but Marlot just wheeled her desk chair in. Actually, Iason and I wheeled it while she held the pizza boxes on her lap. That had been Iason’s idea, but it hit me as we were doing it that I hadn’t seen her stand or walk all evening.

I didn’t say anything about it. If her knee was sore, I didn’t want to make her any sorer.

With just the three of us on the couch, there was plenty of room, but somehow we ended up squished together, anyway. Iason had no shame about casual touching. I might have been surprised if he’d started giving me a handjob then and there, but only just.

We all talked about our childhoods and where we’d come from. Iason talked the most. Most of the stories Marlot and I had were ones we shared, and Missy didn’t seem to feel like she could say anything about herself that would be half as interesting as Iason’s description of how he strung his bow.

We learned that he was in his third year of studies. He’d been a year-round student for three semesters, but hadn’t taken anything like a full load of classes; the maintainers of Treehome Hall didn’t require students to be full-time, as elves often spent a decade doing the work that a human would do in three or four years. He’d moved up to twelve credit hours last fall to be eligible for the skirmish team.

Not surprisingly, Magisterius University was his first direct experience with human culture. He hadn’t socialized with non-elven students outside of classes before he joined the skirmish team, and then he’d been hanging mainly with other jocks and the people who went to their parties.

“Why here?” I asked him. “I mean, what made you decide to go to a human university in the first place, and why one in the middle of the Imperium? Not that this isn’t a good school, but it seems like an odd choice.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think there were a lot of elven undergrads,” Missy said.

“This is true,” Iason said. “I came here on a whim, following my cousin Meles, who is seeking a master’s degree. Elven education is too slow and meticulous for my tastes. I decided I could spend twenty or thirty years of my cruelly limited lifespan apprenticing myself to a mentor, or come to unversity and do it myself in half the time.”

“Boy’s got ambition,” Marlot remarked sardonically.

“How old are you?” Missy asked him. “If that’s okay to ask.”

“I am thirty in Calendula,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She sounded disappointed. Sometimes it seems like people expected elves to be born already hundreds of years old somehow.

I’d wondered about his age, myself. He seemed relatively young in his attitude, but many elves became set in their ways at an early age. There really was no way to tell.

He told us stories about his experience with the skirmish team. He’d been recruited as light infantry, but proved to be more effective when he broke away from his squad and acted on his own.

He also told lies about his hunting experiences, which had Missy enthralled. Her fascination with elves didn’t apparently extend to actually learning anything about elven culture, which annoyed me. She apparently had the idea that elves were tree-worshipping vegetarians who never wore clothes when they didn’t need to. Hearing Iason’s recitation of his nicknames hadn’t apparently shaken this impression enough for her not to flip out a bit when he bit into a slice of my meat pizza.

I listened to his stories and decided I had been right about him when I’d noticed his smile. He could be a disingenuous prick, but there was no guile in him. He was a rogue, but a harmless one.

At least, one who wouldn’t do harm on purpose.

I didn’t feature me having his bracelet on my wrist until the day that I died, but M.U. had the best enchantment program in the country. Somebody would be able to get it off, if it came down to that. It would be a shame if they ended up having to disenchant an old and valuable family keepsake to do it, but he didn’t seem too concerned with the bracelet’s disposition.

I cut Iason a lot of slack for being hot, but that was all I really needed from him. I could tell from the way Marlot was eyeing him that she was sizing him up as my potential boyfriend, but I wasn’t looking for that. I wasn’t looking for somebody to watch my back or keep my secrets safe. He was hot and he knew what he was doing.

We talked about our classes for the next day and about an awful lot of nothing. Missy learned a lot of fun facts about elven culture, each one more amazingly mind-blowingly incredible than the last. By the end of the night, she’d fallen asleep leaning against me on the couch.

Not just asleep, either. She was completely zonked out.

I felt tacky about waking her up, like she might think I was only doing it because we were supposed to be having sex. So, when the party broke up, I covered her with the quilted blanket from the back of the couch.

“I hope you still respect her even after sleeping with her,” Marlot said.

“Very funny.”

I declined Iason’s offer of having “very quiet” sex before he left. It was a, uh, firm declination, but I stuck to it. His goodnight kiss caught me by surprise. I still wasn’t used to the idea of kissing.

I thought that I could get used to it. I could even warm up to the idea of being “pretty”. I enjoyed his attention, when it wasn’t crushingly inconvenient. He’d just have to work on his sense of timing a bit.

Tuesday, Astera 15th 222 (Morning)

I woke up to the sound of Missy stirring

“Oh, sweet fucking Khersis, my back,” she said. “Jamie, if you’re up there, never let me sleep on that couch again.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You looked so tired, we didn’t want to wake you.”

“How long was I out for?”

“Since about one,” I said. I’d slept in my boxers and t-shirt just in case, so I hopped down over the side of the bed. “You were kind of cute, asleep.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“There was surprisingly little drooling.”

“Oh, thank heaven for small favors,” she said.

“Most of it ended up on me, but I needed a shower anyway,” I said.

“So, um,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“We didn’t have sex last night.”

“No.”

“But that wasn’t on purpose,” she said. “I mean, you didn’t change your mind.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Because I still want to. More than before.”

I looked at the timepiece on the wall. It was just past six.

“It’s early,” I said. “My classes today don’t start until after lunch.”

“It’s too early,” Missy said. She stretched, leaning way back. It gave me a nice visual. “And I need at least a short nap on a proper bed before I do anything. I can get a few hours in, at least. You going to be up for breakfast, or sleep until lunch?”

“Meh. I don’t think I could if I wanted to. I slept most of the night already,” I said. “Maybe head over at nine?”

“That works for me,” she said. “What’ve you got again, today?”

“General thaumatology and my weapon proficiency,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me how your thaumo class goes. Mine seems like it’s kind of a joke.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The teacher’s one of those goofy types who thinks he’s making learning fun, or something. I’m stuck right up close to the front, too, because I was almost late coming in. I have to look like I’m paying attention, or it’ll be really obvious.”

“Sounds like hell,” I said.

“Oh, stop it,” she said. “I think the girl who sits next to me must be the world’s biggest nerd. She looked like she was ready to drop to her knees and blow the professor by the end of class.”

“Heh,” I said. I didn’t have a strong feeling against people who took their education that seriously. Marlot had gotten a lot of shit for being a nerd in high school, on top of the shit she got for being fat, being weird, and being lame.

“I think it was that Harlowe girl, the one who looks human?” Missy said. “Which, if it was, either they don’t have showers over there or they don’t know how to use them.”

“Or she, in particular, didn’t shower for some reason,” I said. “Like, she might have been in a hurry.”

“Oh, I don’t mean like that,” Missy said. “But, she’s kind of representing her dorm, and you only get one chance to make a first impression, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Anyway, I’m going to go hit the bed,” she said. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you at breakfast, ‘pretty boy’.”

“See you.”

I was cutting her slack, too. If I dropped everybody who occasionally said something stupid from my list of potential partners, though, I wouldn’t even be able to masturbate. Considering that I was paying extra for a private room, that was unconscionable.

I thought about Missy and Iason both while I did my, uh, morning devotionals. Both separately, and then both together. I’d never considered that before. There’d always been a wall in my head between what I did with guys and what I wanted to do with girls. Iason had shown no sign of interest in the opposite sex, but it was pretty obvious Missy at least liked the idea, the fantasy, of two guys.

I lay in bed for an hour or so, not asleep but not really doing anything, either. I got up and showered around eight. I took my time, as neither my imagination nor my libido were exhausted.

Iason really was hot. He thought I was pretty. I’d have preferred “hot” myself, but damn it all, I’d take it. I thought about him, and about Kurt Stiles, the big skirmish player who was on my floor. Did they know each other? Kurt would probably never be anything more than fantasy fodder for me, but it was a good fantasy, all the same.

I went through the two of them, and some of the other elven guys I had known, and Iolana and Fee-Fee the green-haired mermaid, and of course, Missy. She’d become hotter than the rest of them by default, by dint of being real and within reach. She was nice, she was enthusiastic, she was into me.

She wasn’t racist, I decided, so much as inexperienced with anybody other than her own kind. I could handle that. It was college. We were all having our horizons broadened. I’d indulged a side of myself I had thought I would have to ignore, and nothing terrible had happened.

I thought I got a weird look from a guy shaving at the sinks when I came out of the shower area. He was one of the ones who had been watching the fights on TV when Iason and I had come into the lounge the night before. He was a short and skinny boy with light brown hair, not at all an imposing figure. That was one thing about going to an enchantment school: not all the guys were jocks.

“Hey,” I said. He’d seen me looking at him looking at me. A safe, non-committal greeting seemed in order.

“Hey,” he replied. “How’s it going, man?”

“Good,” I said.

“Weird being here, you know?” he said. “I woke up this morning and thought I was back home for a minute.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just not used to having so much noise in the morning.” He was nervous, rambling. “Also, I keep jumping every time the door opens when I’m trying to shave. I’d probably have sliced my face up if my razor wasn’t safed.”

“Heh,” I said.

“I just wish there were some freshmen dorms with private bathrooms,” he said. “It doesn’t seem fair that we have to share but everybody else gets a choice.”

“At least we don’t have open showers,” I said.

“Hell yeah to that,” he said. “I’m Eric.”

“Jamie.”

He’d relaxed a little. I might have still been some faggot, but now I wasn’t some faggot who wanted to sneak a look at his junk in the shower.

It wasn’t perfect, but I’d take it. Missy was right about one thing: first impressions were a powerful thing.