Carol Ch. 10

The next day, Friday, we didn't see each other. She left directly after her class to go home and get ready -- that was the plan, at least. Myself, I just stayed in my apartment, biting my nails.

When the clock reached 7pm, I was dressed nicely in slacks, button-up, tie, and jacket, and a 'man-purse' filled with stuff. I left the apartment, got on the subway, and went to Grand Central Station.

I was tense. I stared around the broad open space with the Mission Impossible music in my head. On or around 8pm, Carol would enter the main hall of Grand Central -- or she wouldn't. I'd sent the email, so she knew the plan for tonight, she knew generally what we'd be doing. If she showed, then she was okay with everything... if she didn't show, then I knew I'd pretty much lost her.

Of course she'd still be my 'girlfriend,' but I knew even then nothing in a vanilla relationship would compare to our first few months. There was, really, no going back. We could accelerate, or smash into a wall and stop, but we couldn't slow down.

I stood on the floor overlooking the sunken main hall, staring down at the massive tidal flows of commuters passing through the station. There were day laborers, business people and students, all hurrying through the open space, all hurrying to busses, cabs, subways and trains. Every single person represented a unique set of hopes and dreams, eyes, libidos, personalities, outlooks. If Carol appeared, it signified that she was willing to stand in the middle of the flux, to let them see her, to take all this humanity into her.

8pm -- she wasn't there.

8:05 pm -- she still wasn't there. I willed myself to be calm. The subways are hit and miss, you can't time them to the minute. I'd even wait until 9pm, I decided, bleakly. 9:30pm.

8:15 pm -- I caught a glimpse of someone dressed in white at the far end of the great hall, the opening through which her her subway train would disgorge its passengers. I craned my neck, straining to see more. There was a crowd streaming through the entry, and I couldn't see any one of them clearly.

My attention paid off. There she was, striding through the crowd, dodging clumps of people reading train schedules. I let out a breath -- I hadn't noticed I was holding it. Carol was mine, at least for a while longer. She'd read the email, and she had appeared anyways.

I knew she'd read the email, because she had a single rose in her hand. That was the first rule of the night. I'd written: "If you agree to everything, show up at 8pm in your sexiest, smallest dress, and carry a single rose in your right hand."

There she was, and there was the rose. She'd read everything I'd sent in the email. She knew. We were still on the same page.

As she moved through the crowds towards the information stand in the middle of Grand Central Station, she peered this way and that, looking for me. In a moment, I'd go down and join her. But for now, I simply enjoyed the sight of her.

She was looking around, and so she had to notice all the heads turning towards her. She was making eye contact with every person she looked at. How daunting for her -- that every person she glanced at was staring at her, prying her open with their eyes.

And people were looking. She wasn't naked, or even slutty looking. She was, simply, beautiful and elegant. Her hair was made up and piled on top of her head, with tendrils of curly hair hanging down and brushing her cheeks. She had little make-up on, that I could see, and pink lipstick.

Her dress was white, and she was tan. She looked incredibly fit and healthy, under the negligible little dress. I realized suddenly that I'd never seen a real tan line on her -- I'd have to ask her about that.

Her dress was a wrap-around. It had long straps that started halfway up her breasts, went over her shoulders, and down to her waist in back. It closed in front like a bathrobe, one side over the other, and the only thing fastening it shut was a heavy, silvery brooch over one hip.

That night, before leaving her house, she'd consciously decided where to place the brooch: if she closed the dress too tightly, there were no secrets -- it would slip off her pointy parts too easily, or let everything shine through its semi-opacity. If she closed it too loosely, everything would flap open. Just thinking of her frame of mind, as she experimented with the brooch in her room, made me hard.

It looked to me like she had decided to err more on the side of looseness than tightness (and err is all you could do with that dress). The split down her chest went to an inch or two below her sternum. The split up her leg went to an inch or two below her crotch. With every step she took, the light white fabric -- silk -- split easily up her leg, revealing long stretches of her upper thighs. When she paused, and threw out her right leg, the dress split higher than with her left leg.

I started down the stairs towards her, my eyes consuming her, noticing how the inside of her right thigh looked so smooth and powerful in the light. Under the silk, which slid willingly over her curves, you could see all the way around her thigh, almost to her hip bone. When she twisted to look over her shoulder for me, you could see under the curve of her right breast.

And, apart from her dress, the rose, the brooch, the elevated clogs she wore on her feet, and something in her hand -- that was all. I'd told her to carry the flower, one subway token, and her fake driver's license. She had nothing else in the world with her.

As I came up, she'd already aggregated a small crowd of people around her. Mostly men, trying not to stare at her, but ogling whenever they could. I imagined her trek to Grand Central, and all the other men who had seen her. Attractive women are plentiful in New York, but only a few times a year do you come across a show-stopper like this. And when you see one, you try to drag the encounter out.

She finally noticed me as I came up. A smile grew on her face, and she reached up to kiss me.

"You look -- lovely," I told her.

"Thank you! I wasn't sure," she said. I took her hand and walked her through the station, unable to help noticing how her breasts rocked back and forth with each step. I couldn't stare from so close beside her, but I had the next-best thing: people staring and making way for us. You would have thought she was painted blue, or that she was Hollywood royalty, from all the attention. We passed, in effect, through a corridor of commuters, everybody side-stepping to watch her go past.

She continued, "I could have gone with something more transparent, and also pretty small. But, I remembered how you said that loose clothes are better than tight clothes, because there's more of a chance to see something."

"And did you think about loose clothes when you decided where to fasten that brooch on your hip?"

She giggled. "How are you able to read my mind like that? I spent ten minutes finding just the right spot for it -- and it was still too loose. I didn't factor in 'walking' or 'wind', or even 'shifting my weight.' The dress was flying open as I walked down the street. It was just sliding off me as I walked through Queens. I had to fix it. So as I was waiting for the train, I refastened it again."

"You were in the subway, and you took the brooch off, and then put it on again?"

"Yes," she said. "I was holding my dress shut with my pinky. In your honor, I made sure I was standing among a bunch of guys. I fiddled with the dress for thirty minutes, bending and twisting, throwing a leg out. Staring down at myself. When I sit, you can stare down my cleavage to my crotch. I started getting advice from the guys."

Yowza. "You can loosen it again in the cab. Now that you're with me."

"Okay," she said. "Are people really staring? Do I look that cute?"

I glanced sidelong at her, a little surprised. But no -- she was perfectly serious.

I had planned our night in three phases: Dinner, bar, and then a XXX adult theater. Carol knew this, but not the specifics. And by the end of the night, Carol would add her own phase, phase 4, but neither of us knew that yet.

* * * * *

Phase One

It was a nice restaurant, with a maitre'd and incredibly expensive structural cuisine served in tiny portions on gigantic plates. Carol sat across from me, and her legs glowed like expensive polished wood in the candle-light, as they stuck out past the table where the staff had to step around them.

She'd undone the brooch in the cab ride over, and loosened the wrap of her dress. I'd also suggested she should pull one side of the dress lower than the other before fastening it. Now, the right side of the dress hanged lower over her thighs, but the strap also went lower over her right breast.

It was mesmerizing to see so much of that breast. The V of her decolletage gaped open to below the table, from the side you could easily look under the breast and out the other side of the dress. The rounded pink edge of the aureole peeked at me as she shifted during dinner, almost subliminally subtle at times, other times quite clearly.

But the dress, contrary to my expectations, didn't look weird or unkempt. Carol now looked like a model in some designer outfit straight from the catwalk. You know those outfits -- so showy, gaping, and stupidly inefficient, you're sure nobody will ever wear them out? But here she was. A real model would have worn a wrap or a faux-mink stole for modesty; for Carol this was all she had.

Anyhow, she was the tastiest thing in the restaurant. She sat with her back straight, and searchingly glanced at waiters as they went past. She merely stared as one came to take our orders, her head sideways and her lips split. The waiter was a handsome twenty-something guy, and he doted on Carol, leaning in and making jokes. She barely replied, instead staring at him fully with an upturned face, with whetted lips and a tiny Mona Lisa smile.

Usually she was bubbly and talkative, dragging guys into conversation. So I pondered her restrained behavior, and finally realized what she was going through. See, in the email I'd sent her, I'd said that our goal tonight was twenty -- 20 -- men shooting off in her mouth. I'd written it partly to freak her out, and partly because I'd been getting turned on while writing the email (I had increased the number three times).

Carol was thinking: A five-hour long date. Four men per hour. Who is the first?

Carol had barely glanced at her menu. I said, "Would you like me to order for you?"

She nodded. "I just think I should eat very light tonight. If I'll be filling up later."

I got her a glass of wine and a simple salad. I got the same for myself, realizing suddenly that I had absolutely no appetite.

When the waiter left, she glanced at me inquiringly. "Do you want me to follow him to the back?"

"Jeez, no."

"How about him?" she nodded at the maitre'd.

"Only if you want," I smirked. "It will be very obvious when it's time. For now, just relax. This dinner is for you. To show you how much I appreciate you."

She just nodded, not returning my smile. Something was on her mind.

I reached forward and grasped her hand. "Are you feeling too uncovered?"

She glanced down (so I did too). The scrap of silk covering her right breast was very low off the curve of her chest. Ludicrously low. When I pulled her hand to me, I could see in the uncertain candle-light how the skin of her breast changed near the nipple. A thin quarter-moon slice under the soft fabric. "No. I love this dress! I barely notice it. It's just..."

"What?" I asked. I was getting a little worried. "I'm holding your hand, baby. You can tell me anything."

Keeping her voice low, she started talking. "You're sitting there across from me, all happy and excited. And all I can think about is what I'll be doing tonight. With all those men. Twenty men, you wrote. There could be more, or less. But that's a lot of men."

I nodded, and she continued. "When we first started going out, you said I had a responsibility to 'not commit a crime.' I shouldn't be able to steal fantasies from men, by covering up. You know, and I know, that's just a funny way of saying I should drive men crazy around me. Make them happy. And when I started kissing men, and letting them grope me all the time -- it was just a way of making them happy. When my guy-friends started calling me 'Cock-tease' to my face, it was just a side-effect of making them happy.

"And I was proud. I still am. I like having all those friends. I like it when some guy I barely know calls me by name and hooks a hand around my waist. When some old guy in the deli I spoke to a week before nuzzles my neck. Wherever I go, they all get this needy expression. I just have to visit each of them, and hold them to me, and stare into their eyes as I kiss them."

She sighed. "But in my mind, I'm calling myself Cock-tease. I don't think of myself as 'Carol' anymore. If a guy doesn't stare at me, or doesn't wrap his hands all over me, I get a sort of left-out feeling, like, 'what am I doing wrong?' And all my guy friends? They don't have girlfriends. They're waiting for me every day, and letting girls pass by without making moves on them. Their whole sexual satisfaction is coming from me.

"I'm getting into a kind of rut, and that's okay with me as long as the rut gets deeper and deeper. But I'm leading all of them into the same rut.

"And now everybody thinks that I give blow-jobs just for fun. All my friends, they know that about me. They don't know that I just started. For all they know, I've been like this all my life. And my Dad's friends call me 'Stripper' when Dad's not around. And men on the subway rub up against me. And I get patted on the ass while I walk down the halls at school, and I don't even know who is doing it -- I can't keep track of all the hands.

"The other day, some strange guy on the street grabbed my ass, and I suddenly wasn't sure if I knew him. I just smiled at him and waited to cross the street, and so he grabbed my ass again (under my skirt). I'm still not sure I even knew him." She sighed. "And when guys say, 'Cock-tease,' I say, 'Yes?'"

I nodded. Of course, I was greatly turned on by her description, but I couldn't just say, 'ooh, yeah, baby.' I had her words, but I didn't have her mood yet.

"What are you getting at?" I asked.

"We're accelerating. I'm asking for more, and we're doing more. I'm doing, and wanting, things I never thought of. But you have to be honest with me."

"I'll be honest," I promised.

"All this stuff we're doing. It's not about driving men crazy, is it? It's all about making me cheap and easy. It's about humiliating me. In a soft way, building up slowly, we're piling humiliation on humiliation. We're breaking me down, until I'm a girl who won't say 'no' to anybody. And where will it end? It's been so gradual, that half the time I don't care where it ends. But, honestly, it's not that we're being nice to men: We're making me into a slut."

She squeezed my hand, and her eyes were tearing up. I glanced around. Our voices were low, so apart from a dozen pairs of masculine eyes raking up and down Carol's body, our conversation was as private as could be.

I knew this day would come. The day when Carol half-came to her senses and penetrated that first... lie I'd told her (way back in chapter one). My 'thing' was not about giving a gift to all men. The men were inconsequential. My 'thing' was, as Carol has pointed out, about engineering the perfect, completely-available girl, with no limitations and no boundaries.

I said, carefully, "I've been balancing two things -- my self-centered fantasies about a slutty girlfriend, and the fact that I love you so much. You deeply affect everything I do in life. Maybe my balance is off sometimes, but usually it isn't. Like tonight: Three phases. Us, You, Me."

She gave a little laugh. "I was thinking of the triple-X theater as 'Me.' I guess that's part of my question. What's the difference between me and a slut?"

We paused to receive our plates from the startled-looking waiter.

I said, "If a girl is a real slut, there's something broken in her, so she does the wrong things. She doesn't engage her mind, she doesn't make a decision. A slut is defective, and men take advantage of her, and use her, and she doesn't know... any better."

"Oh," she said.

"For you, it's always a choice. For you, it's a turn-on. It's a game. It's the next exciting step. It's part of a plan, a bunch of games we play, for fun. You're not a slut. You know that, I know that.

"All your guy-friends -- you've worked on them all semester to think of you like a slut. For you, acting like a slut is something you put on, like a dress. And why? Because you're having fun, because you're having incredible sex, because you can. That's the big difference -- at least for me. There would be no fun if you were just... broken. What would we talk about afterwards?"

The waiter cleared his throat. "I suppose this is a good time to ask if you'd like ground pepper on your salads?"

"Yes, please," Carol said to him.

I was feeling too intense to stop just because some stranger was stooping over Carol, grinding a phallic pepper-grinder onto the table settings because he was staring down her chest.

"Carol, after college, you're going to get a job. You're going to get married to someone. You're going to have kids. Do you think you'll have these adventures your whole life?"

She shook her head. "No! It's all going to change eventually. I only plan to kiss strangers, make out with them, suck them off, and -- soon, right? -- fuck strangers, for just a few more years. Maybe eight years -- till I'm twenty-seven. I'll stop at thirty, for sure. Maybe thirty-five. Naw, twenty-five. I don't know."

"For other girls, they're broken their whole life. They mess up relationships. They are sad inside. You -- I know this -- you're full of joy."

"I am," she said earnestly.

"And all our games -- they're making you happy, and confident. You like how you feel before you do something slutty, you cum while you do it, and you like talking about it afterwards."

"I sure do," she said. A small smile appeared around her lips.

"And you'll look back on your time in college with a big secret smile. All the other women, they'll have their fantasies and their what-ifs. But you'll always know you took every opportunity, and tried everything."

She nodded. "I should do what makes me happy inside. If I'm sad, I need to change my life."

"I think that's true of everything. Not just our weird thing."

The waiter was still hovering. When I glanced at him, he finally backed away.

I kept talking, painting a picture of how I truly saw her. Lovely, funny, fun, intelligent -- and unafraid of the tawdry. Willing to jump into something, and get the rewards. Willing to share herself, and make people around her happy. Beautiful and brave enough to be one of those rare one-in-a-million women that men will remember for their whole lives.

Now, when she glanced at the waiter who hovered over her shoulder, it had a note of challenge. Like, 'Come on, ask me three times.' Her mood lightened. She got him talking about wines. Then she got him to ask her out. I listened while they made plans for next week.

When we left, everybody stared at her on my arm. If I'd been in the restaurant, I would have stared too.

We went out to have our next adventure.