[Officelover]

Groggy and sore, Will woke up the next morning with a small puddle of beer on the floor in front of him. He got fucked up the night before, out till 3 AM. He had been looking for someone to take home, but, embarrassingly, proved unsuccessful. All his boys had found someone. He lay on top of his hands, staring at the ceiling for half an hour before he felt that it was time for some black coffee.

Will checked his phone as it was steaming. No new e-mails. No text messages. No angry phone calls from mom and dad. He uneasily thought to himself that he was in the clear. The coffee was strong, but his headache was stronger, and he succumbed to a nap, and when the battle between the two got too fierce he was forced to open a book and do some homework.

Three days went by without incident. Will spent Sunday in a fog, and Monday and Tuesday went by quickly. Wednesday, Will went to his Women’s Studies seminar. He had to fulfill a values requirement and this was one of the only classes that fit into his schedule, so he suffered the three-hour discussions in almost flawless silence. He was the only boy in room. “At least it only meets once a week,” Will thought to himself. He hated the professor, hated the readings, and hated most of all the girls in the class. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a feminist—at least that’s not what he would say. He just hated the kinds of girls that took these classes: ugly, stuck-up, always ready to jump into conversations about ‘privilege’ and ‘hegemony’.

Then there was Jule. Tall and slender, jet-black hair tied readily into a messy bun. She always wore dark, dark lipstick, and no other make-up. She really didn’t need to. She had high cheekbones, a Greek nose and a pair of drawstring eyebrows that seemed to arch miles above her eyeline. She wore a white thrift-shop sweater two sizes too big that still looked damn small on her and black skinny jeans. Will couldn’t tell if Jule was different from the rest of them or just hot, but whatever it was, in a sea of fourteen uninviting faces hers was a sight for sore eyes.

So when she came over to talk to him before class began, Will straightened up a bit. “Did you do the reading?” she asked.

“Yeah…” he lied.

She laughed and said, “I didn’t.”

“What was keeping you from it?”

“I don’t know, truth be told, I baked cookies and got blazed yesterday.”

He smiled, “Is that so?”

“I have the leftover cookies to prove it. Want one after class?”

“After this class, I might take all the cookies you’ve got.”

Throughout class, he couldn’t stop looking at her messy bun. She sat in the same row as him, three seats ahead. Yes, she was different. He wouldn’t have guessed she was a stoner. Will was never a big smoker; he’d tried weed a few times before, with friends. Usually he was drunk by the time he’d gotten high. There was something sexy to him about a girl that knew how to relax, to blow things off, to not take things so seriously.

Three hours went by slowly for him. Today they were beginning a conversation about intersectionality and bell hooks’ theories of the politic of domination. Not very interesting stuff for someone who benefitted from that politic. He spoke up once, maybe even twice—he figured the last thing he needed was to fail this class his last semester.

When class was finally over, Will walked over to Jule’s desk. He stood there for an uncomfortably long time, waiting for her to get up, say anything. She left him there like a fish on a line, smiling and adjusting her sweater. She got up all of a sudden and said, “cookies?”

They left for her dorm. “What year are you?” Will finally asked.

“A sophomore. And you’re a senior?”

“Yep. You know I lived a floor above you when I was a sophomore?”

“No shit. Was it just as shitty then?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

They stopped in front of her door as she fished out a pair of keys from the back pocket she sewed onto her jeans. Her room smelled faintly of incense but didn’t look like a stoner’s room. Neat, but free. Christmas lights and a real bookshelf in the middle of the room, stacked tight with novels and tons of thin volumes he assumed were poetry or plays. The only recognizable poster in the room was the typical “A Woman Without A Man Is Like A Fish Without A Bicycle”.

She reached under her bed and pulled out a Tupperware container full of chocolate chip cookies. She took off the lid and offered them to him. He didn’t know if this was some kind of test, to see how many cookies he would take. He decided three would be a reasonable number. He got to work eating them quickly, complimenting her baking all the way. She took one and nibbled on it.
Then, tossing her cookie aside, she sat down on the bed and asked him if he wanted to watch something on Netflix. Of course he did, and they started streaming a movie. Will didn’t understand much of the plot of the movie, though. At first he was just distracted by Jule. He kept seeing her biting her lip in suspense throughout the movie, reacting subtly and in bare obviousness at the same time. His distraction only heightened when he began to be aware that she was paying attention to him just as much as he was her. He couldn’t understand himself, she was only a 7, maybe an 8, why couldn’t he stop thinking about her?

About an hour into the film, the plot stopped making sense altogether.

Will woke up the next day calmly. He had overslept—totally missed one of his classes. This was not out of the ordinary, and he didn’t let it get to him anymore. He felt a little giddy.

He made himself a pot of coffee, poured it and let it sit. There was a cardinal perched on the tree outside his window; he wasn’t used to seeing birds after the long winter. He looked at the calendar and thought to himself, “did I really miss my whole women’s studies class today?” The memory of that class, of bell hooks, of Jule’s dark lipstick came back to him. What happened to yesterday?
He drank the cup of coffee and tried thinking about what he did after class yesterday. He attributed this failure to the kind of thinking one does the first half hour of being awake, one before reason.

It was then that he saw a large manila envelope tucked underneath his jacket. It had his name neatly printed on the top of the front. He opened the brass fastener and pulled out a half dozen 8½ by 11 glossy photos of him naked, lying on a bed, with his hand on his penis. Written on his forehead in the last three was the phrase, “CUM HERE”. His eyes were extremely red in each photo. A note, written on a folded over piece of regular lined notebook paper said, “I suggest you do everything Mistress and I tell you from now on.” It was signed your friend, Jule. “P.S. – You owe me $40 for the weed cookies.”

Will hurried over to a mirror, as if to shake himself. There, in plain capital letters, in red Sharpie the instructions were. It was all real. It was really happening. He tried processing what happened. He must have gotten really high yesterday—fuck, he must be really high right now. Bits and pieces came back to him. A kiss. He looked as those photos—he could be sure those weren’t the only copies. He couldn’t burn them away. There could be more. Kali could have them by now.

Fuck, he thought. How did Kali find Jule? How did she get her in on this?
All he knew is that he was completely and utterly fucked. The threat just got so much more real now that he had a face and a presence associated with his domination. Kali… who he had seen once, through webcam, didn’t feel like a threat. The fact that someone was walking around campus with files they could use to ruin his life... his education, his friendships, his career…

He checked his e-mails. One from his Mistress, big surprise.

“Don’t make me tell you again.”

That was all it read, and Will knew what he had to do. He had to follow the instructions. He set up a video camera, on a tripod, in his bedroom. Recording, slowly, he slid his penis out through the crevice of his underwear. He started jacking off as quickly as possible. He didn’t want much footage. He couldn’t control his thoughts—he thought about Jule, about seeing her naked, about touching her breasts.

He could feel the semen building up in him. He finally came, into the palm of his right hand. He tried catching all of the cum but some of it made a putrid drop on the floor. He took what he had on his hands and spread the warm stuff on his forehead, right where the arrow pointed. Feeling more pathetic than he had ever felt before, he took his smart phone out, and took a selfie.

He gulped as he sent both the video and the selfie to Kali, reminding himself that it was better than the alternative, whatever that may be.