FICTION: The Jet-setter, Part II

PDF * Part I * Part III

This is one of the few cities I go to where I don’t stay in the conference hotel. Montreal. City of Festivals. This city has far too much character to stay in a newly constructed, expensive, and utterly generic conference hotel. With 10 hours of jetlag and a city you’ve never been in, it’s nice to know exactly what the place you’re staying at will be like ahead of time, but Montreal is close to home, and it’s one of my favorite towns in the world.

I stay at the Holiday Inn in Chinatown. It’s a block from all the best grocery stands in the world. Fresh dates that crunch like apples and taste like honey and rosewater. Mangosteen. Durian. Red-bean paste cakes. And it’s all so fresh (well, okay, you have to search for fresh, but it’s there) Foodie heaven.

I step out of my taxi, practicing French under my breath, sure I will speak it out loud this time. I don’t. I scrabble out a “Bonjour-hi!” to the woman behind the front desk and chide myself silently. I don’t really have time to practice my French and get it wrong, or at least that’s my excuse. I’ll order a coffee in French later.

I check in. I throw my bags on the bed. I refrain from reading the red-paper letter Justin left in my bag. I go, again by taxi, to the conference hotel so I can give my talk. It all feels far too efficient now that I’m here, and I wish I’d booked another day.

It’s almost time, so I hand my laptop to one of the conference volunteers, and at that instant the rush of embarrassment in remembering the story that’s sitting on the desktop cements her face in my mind. Dark hair, almost black, but not unnaturally so, about 28, freckles, pale skin, eager, but harried looking (but then all students are). She has beautiful lips…

I browse my notes, just to clear my head and steady myself for the talk. I’ve read them a thousand times before in a hundred different variations, but not reading them before talking would be like not brushing my teeth in the morning. I step out onto the stage. The black-haired student is there with my laptop, and I imagine a trace of red in her cheeks as I pass her and step up to the podium. I sip at the bottled water and look out over the podium…

***

God I’m glad to be done. I walk out of the Place D’Armes rail station towards the hotel self-satisfied that I’ve avoided the usual “taking the keynote speaker out to dinner” road-show. It’s only 8pm. I see all those people all the time, and they’re beginning to bore me to tears.

Back in my hotel room, I clear off the bed of my things, turn down the covers, and flop down on 1,800 thread-count sheets, flipping my hair back and letting it flow over the pillow. The cool of the fresh bedclothes spreads over the back of my neck and I long to be rid of my clothes. I close my eyes and start the long process of unbuttoning everything that goes into making myself artificially look as informal and off the cuff as possible. Coat, blouse, skirt, hose, bra, panties, all go onto the chair in a heap. I smile knowing that a dry cleaner, not me, will have to deal with unwrinkling them. I nearly fall asleep before I pick up Justin’s letter and the red satin drawstring bag it’s attached to. I open the bag first and behold a masterpiece.

I never thought before I met Justin that I’d develop a fetish for stainless-steel and bronze, but holding his latest creation in my hand is making me instinctively wet. He got his master’s in mechanical engineering and a bachelor’s in industrial design, but he’s never sullied his talents in Industry. Instead, he has a machine shop that he’s kept in continuous construction at home since before we moved in together. He works a day-job as an electrician to pay for his hobby in part and pays for the rest with gallery art shows. Most of his work is in galleries, but a few things are saved exclusively for me. Like this. I open the letter.

Evening, dearest love,

I’m done with it, finally. Remember we talked last Christmas about how you’d like something that gave you good dreams at night in the hotel? This is designed so you can slip a pair of panties over it and leave it in all night.

It’s also designed so you’ll want to. There’s a timer on the bottom that you can set to delay it starting until you’re well and truly asleep, and on top of that, I’ve made it so that it’s sensitive to your movements — if you get too close to waking up, it’ll calm itself down, but if you’re too still, it’ll speed up, change vibration styles, and even where the vibrations are centered.

So my further instructions for you tonight should be easy… Don’t come while you’re awake. Leave it in all night. Let me know how it goes. Write down what you like and what I should change so the next one’s even better.

And have fun,

– Justin

Anyone else in the world, and I’d be dubious. The first few vibrators he made were alright, but nothing I couldn’t buy at the store. Then I started helping him design them. After the sixth vibrator he made, we spent one whole weekend with just him, me, a shibari manual, a felt marker, and a hundred feet of cloth measuring tape. I keep the pictures we took in my bedside table. He keeps them in his shop desk.

I turn the vibrator over in my hands. It’s cool and hard, but the curves are so smooth and the polish of the metal is mirror perfect. On the outside, it’s shaped exactly to match me, with a little prong in the back to reach up to my anus and an artistically forked bit in front to cradle and spread the love to either side of my clit. The dildo is shaped nothing like a cock. It has ridges and curves and flares in places we’ve learned through some rigorous experimentation. There’s no-one in the world this would work for as well as it does me. It’s mine.

I flip in on and it hums a single note quietly. He packed lube, but I don’t need it. I lie back and turn it on gently just to feel it against the outside of my cunt. I dip it in just barely and rub it around my labia on the lowest setting. It’s so perfect. My nipples harden almost instantly, and I long to let it go, ignore the instructions, and come now, but I don’t. I turn the timer on until the dial points at 1 hour (beautiful art-deco etched lettering on bronze). I slide it in. My hands graze over the on switch once more, so tempting. and I grab my panties off the chair without getting out of bed and slide them on to hold it in place. Despite the burning tension between my legs, the paradoxically gentle and organic steel, I only ruminate for a few minutes before exhaustion takes over and I drift off to sleep.

… Insomuch as I can “tell” anything, I can tell when the vibrator turns itself on, because the dream I’m having suddenly changes tone. I’m dreaming about the inevitable after-dinner drinks that I managed to evade anyway earlier tonight — the ones where they gather around the keynote speaker and vie for attention. The change comes when I’m talking to a friend of mine from back in grad school who’s now a prof at SUNY Buffalo. My lust is so sudden and inexplicable that I realize I’m dreaming, but I still reach out to him while we’re all standing there talking and start unbuttoning his Oxford, planting kisses on his chest where each button comes undone. Everyone’s staring at us, but he smiles numbly, “Go on,” and I start stripping him with fierce efficiency. My clothes evaporate into the dream as I take his cock into my mouth. I suck in long, slow strokes so that he groans and yells for me to be faster, but it’s my dream, it’s not about him, and all I want is for him to get harder and harder until he has to fuck me as hard as I want to be fucked. I wait, lingering on his cock until I’m so wet I can barely control myself, then I turn to face the crowd with a smug grin. They all wish they were me. He thrusts into me and I abandon the rest of the dream to the feel of his cock.

I wake up as I come, face down, hands clenching the sheets. Fortunate that I’m face down, because I turn my head and bury my face in the pillow and scream into it as wave after wave of contractions take me. I’m only half-awake really, and I stil have the image and can practically feel him driving his cock into me from behind. I bend my knees up underneath me between convulsions. The vibrator sings on my ass and clit, pushed into me by my change in positions and I scream and whimper into the pillow more. I feel like I’ve been coming for hours when the vibrator starts to slow down of its own accord, not from lack of batteries, but like Justin said, sensitive to my body. It gradually lets me down, letting me catch a few more contractions and a last fleeting image of the dark haired man as I half dream him pulling out of me, spent, his come buried deep in me like a guilty secret.

I lie there for a few minutes, staring at the clock which registers nearly midnight while consciousness slowly returns to me and my body stops shivering. At 11:57 I’m awake, and there’s no going back to sleep for me just yet, so I take the dildo out unceremoniously, throw on some loose clothes and head downstairs to grab a martini and read my book.

The woman I handed my laptop to at the conference is sitting in a couch looking mopey. She brightens as our eyes meet, and I wave before ordering a classic, James Bond style, two olives.

“Hi. Not at the conference hotel?”

“No, my friends and I pricelined a hotel room to save money, because the department takes forever to reimburse anyone. We’re up on the fifth floor, but there’s two beds, and six of us,” She pauses to take a drink at a cosmopolitan, “My sleeping bag is apparently in Dallas. I was thinking of opting for this couch, sadly.”

“Bleh. I’m sorry,”

“S’okay. Hi, Dr. Ivanova. I’m Bethany,”

At first, I selfishly refrain from offering my spare bed to her out of expediency, but two women sharing midnight cocktails at a hotel bar can at least be using first names, “Katya’s fine. Were you just volunteering, or presenting a paper?” I feel momentarily bad that if she did, I missed it, and I just made that obvious.

“I was presenting some of my dissertation research, actually. Just intermediate results. I defend in August.”

We chatter on and both order another round of drinks, and then, much like the dream, the tone changes, but this time gradually, and when she drops the bomb, I know i’m awake. She turns red.

“I erm, ‘fixed’ your laptop for you before you got on stage. If you go looking for the story, I closed it and moved it to the My Documents folder.”

“Oh.” Shit, I manage not to say. I thought I’d at least closed out of it on the plane.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but if it was your writing I didn’t want it to go missing.”

“No, it was something a friend sent me,” Why did I just say it like that? Friend? “I finished it,” Damn booze, “Er, not that you necessarily wanted to know.”

Her turn to blush and grin, “Actually, I did.”

I heat up inside in an uncomfortable silence that I break all too quickly with, “Oh hey, I meant to say earlier. Totally unrelated, but If you wanted, I’ve got a spare bed in my room. You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

“Sure, I’d like that. I’ve been just about to run you off for the last ten minutes and say I needed sleep, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to.”

“I’m in 714. Grab your stuff and give me a knock. I’m going to head on up and get ready for bed.”

We part ways, and I get in a separate elevator to collect my nerves. She’s a student. No students, not even other people’s students.

I’ve just started to sit on my bed and wait for her when she knocks. “Hi there.”

“Hey,” She throws her stuff in the corner and sits down on the bed. The light’s still on, and as we face each other, there’s a pregnant pause where I think about turning out the light and sliding under my covers, but I don’t. I just look at her lips, and she says,

“I was sleepy until I got to the room. Do you want to play cards? I brought a deck.”

“Sure,”

She hops up and onto my bed, and we play cards and talk for awhile longer, all the while the talk getting a little more flirtatious. At some point, she suggests a singularly uneven game of strip poker, and when she’s topless and I’m completely naked, the cards go and we start making out on my bed. Just kisses, and her breasts feel so good in my hands. Guilt climbs into me as her kisses get more passionate. Her hands grab my butt and squeeze, and it feels so good to be touched by her. Gradually pleasure and guilt become indistinguishable. Not students — the back of my mind calls to me. My lips are full on her breast when her hand grazes the inside of my thigh and pleasure turns to panic. I pause long enough for her to sense that something’s wrong.

“Is it okay?”

“Yes. Or, no actually, but only because. I’m sorry… it’s so late, and I.. like you a lot,” Her hand moves from the inside of my thigh to just around the small of my back and surprisingly, she smiles. I haven’t ruined her moment, somehow, but I go on anyway, my mouth getting ahead of me. I want her hand back where it was so desperately… “But I have this thing. Not students. Not anybody’s, I’m sorry, there’s a reason for it.”

“It’s okay,”

“But I want you. I do.” I feel so ashamed; but she smiles,

“I won’t be a student after August. I actually felt the same way, or at least I always say I do, that I’d never have sex with a professor as long as I’m a student. I’d feel guilty tomorrow, too if we go on. Probably.”

I move my hand off her breast and trace her collarbone, sadly. We dump our heads into the pillows at the same time, and this makes her giggle. Her hand is on my side, now, and it feels comfortable. There’s still a smile on her face, and I cannot put into words how much that means to me right now. I smile back, and we just stare into each others’ eyes for awhile until gradually hers begin to close. I let mine close, my hands folded under the pillow now, and hers still on my waist.

When I wake up in the morning, I realize with titillation at the thought of pleasurable punishment for failing to follow the letter, that I’ve forgotten to leave the vibrator in all night like Justin said. Then I open my eyes to the back of Bethany’s head and I think briefly again of Justin and how much he’d like to be a fly on the wall here. My heart floods with feeling for Bethany. Through the night’s tossing and turning we’re now spooned and I’m holding her breast gently in my hand. She’s still sleeping, just starting to stir at the morning light. I hug her to me once more before she wakes.

If you missed part I, it’s here.

Continue to Part III