The_Soloist
Experienced
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2012
- Posts
- 36
Apartment 710, Fall 2016
Balancing the groceries in the crook of my arm, I fumbled with the lock of the apartment building. The bottom key had to be shook and wiggled just so before it caught and rotated. I collected the mail — bills, naturally: the second tuition payment and electricity. One of the elevators was out of service. The one that worked emptied a pair of girls whose faces I vaguely recollected, maybe from a party somewhere. We mumbled our greetings. I hit the 7.
One of my roommates was in. She was the one I didn't know so well. Jack and Liz shared the larger of the bedrooms. Gina and I were supposed to share one as well, but she had broken up with me before the semester started. As I couldn't afford half the lease on my own, we rented out the third bedroom that Jack and I had intended to be our man cave. Éponine, named for the character from Les Mis, was in the kitchen. Whereas Jack, Liz, and I were graduating in the spring, Éponine had just started graduate school (French lit). She needed a place to stay at late notice. Fortunately, she was more into existential philosophy than Victor Hugo and death metal than musicals. The name suited her though. She had a young face and a waifish body. She looked good when she bothered to clean up. I saw her wear a dress exactly once in the month we had known each other.
She was puttering around in the kitchen. I brushed past her as I put the groceries away. (OK, a lot of what I bought was beer. It's made from grain and has calories.)
Unlike the rest of us, Éponine cooked regularly. She was stirring a soup.
"It smells great."
She sprinkled herbs on top.
"Do you want some?" she offered. "I made enough for two."
"Yeah, sure. Do you want me to do anything?"
"Cut the bread." She pointed out the baguette on the countertop.
I did as I was told and set the table as well. Given that we were dipping French bread into a soup, we really should have had a nice Bordeaux to complement this. Conjuring one into existence is against the laws of physics. Or in any event, I don't know the trick. I pulled the tops from two bottles of beer when the first ones had been drunk.
After soup, she brought Mac & Cheese out of the oven.
We lingered at the table over more bottles of beer. She was easy to talk to, and this was our first real conversation. She told me hilarious stories about this professor she had who would almost always show up to lecture five minutes late, nod hello with a curt "Bonjour," and write the subject of the day's lecture in a scarcely legible scrawl. He would then extemporize the rest of it. Invariably, this man digressed from the topic at hand and listed seventeen or nineteen books — it's anyway some prime number — that everyone must read in order to understand the substance of some barely funny joke that Jean Genet had made in The Miracle of the Rose. And then he would continue the aside on the prostitution business in modern Paris, and how the red light district had shifted away from the center of town, a fact that made things harder for the desperate. Somehow, he invariably meandered from tangent back to topic in the last five minutes of the seminar and everyone felt they learned something.
I had a paper due for a core course I hadn't bothered to get out of the way earlier. She had some reading. We settled on opposite sides of the sofa. At a low volume, MSNBC cycled through the daily diet of news about the endless election campaign.
When she leaned back against the side of the sofa with her book settled on her abdomen, she sat crosslegged. The seam of her jeans was frayed where the legs joined. Under the threadbare tendrils was a wink of yellow.
On my one and a half cushions, I had the laptop pointed down, balanced against my right knee, which was planted on the floor, and my left calf. Recalling Ken Burns, I made quick work of the introduction of the paper on the causes of the Civil War but didn't have much consequential to say after that. While I browsed Wikipedia and chased links, my eyes kept returning to that hardly perceptible patch of yellow.
Our two bedrooms shared a wall. For the rent we paid, you would expect better craftsmanship in the building, but we were handing our money over to Slumlord, Inc. This is a convoluted way of stating that I have heard her masturbate. There was a liquid action while she drove her fingers or her dildo into her pussy. She moaned softly. Sometimes she used porn for inspiration. She made small mews when she came. I had wondered about her cunt. Did she keep it bare? Were the lips thick and meaty? When she finished, did she lick her fingers clean? How did her juices taste?
I looked down below the trackpad and noticed the beginning of an erection tenting my shorts. I pulled my t-shirt down. As I finished the maneuver, my eyes strayed back to the split of her legs. I lifted my gaze at once, but she had noticed my scrutiny. I smiled sheepishly. She smiled back, more warmly. Her right knee nudged my left.
Balancing the groceries in the crook of my arm, I fumbled with the lock of the apartment building. The bottom key had to be shook and wiggled just so before it caught and rotated. I collected the mail — bills, naturally: the second tuition payment and electricity. One of the elevators was out of service. The one that worked emptied a pair of girls whose faces I vaguely recollected, maybe from a party somewhere. We mumbled our greetings. I hit the 7.
One of my roommates was in. She was the one I didn't know so well. Jack and Liz shared the larger of the bedrooms. Gina and I were supposed to share one as well, but she had broken up with me before the semester started. As I couldn't afford half the lease on my own, we rented out the third bedroom that Jack and I had intended to be our man cave. Éponine, named for the character from Les Mis, was in the kitchen. Whereas Jack, Liz, and I were graduating in the spring, Éponine had just started graduate school (French lit). She needed a place to stay at late notice. Fortunately, she was more into existential philosophy than Victor Hugo and death metal than musicals. The name suited her though. She had a young face and a waifish body. She looked good when she bothered to clean up. I saw her wear a dress exactly once in the month we had known each other.
She was puttering around in the kitchen. I brushed past her as I put the groceries away. (OK, a lot of what I bought was beer. It's made from grain and has calories.)
Unlike the rest of us, Éponine cooked regularly. She was stirring a soup.
"It smells great."
She sprinkled herbs on top.
"Do you want some?" she offered. "I made enough for two."
"Yeah, sure. Do you want me to do anything?"
"Cut the bread." She pointed out the baguette on the countertop.
I did as I was told and set the table as well. Given that we were dipping French bread into a soup, we really should have had a nice Bordeaux to complement this. Conjuring one into existence is against the laws of physics. Or in any event, I don't know the trick. I pulled the tops from two bottles of beer when the first ones had been drunk.
After soup, she brought Mac & Cheese out of the oven.
We lingered at the table over more bottles of beer. She was easy to talk to, and this was our first real conversation. She told me hilarious stories about this professor she had who would almost always show up to lecture five minutes late, nod hello with a curt "Bonjour," and write the subject of the day's lecture in a scarcely legible scrawl. He would then extemporize the rest of it. Invariably, this man digressed from the topic at hand and listed seventeen or nineteen books — it's anyway some prime number — that everyone must read in order to understand the substance of some barely funny joke that Jean Genet had made in The Miracle of the Rose. And then he would continue the aside on the prostitution business in modern Paris, and how the red light district had shifted away from the center of town, a fact that made things harder for the desperate. Somehow, he invariably meandered from tangent back to topic in the last five minutes of the seminar and everyone felt they learned something.
I had a paper due for a core course I hadn't bothered to get out of the way earlier. She had some reading. We settled on opposite sides of the sofa. At a low volume, MSNBC cycled through the daily diet of news about the endless election campaign.
When she leaned back against the side of the sofa with her book settled on her abdomen, she sat crosslegged. The seam of her jeans was frayed where the legs joined. Under the threadbare tendrils was a wink of yellow.
On my one and a half cushions, I had the laptop pointed down, balanced against my right knee, which was planted on the floor, and my left calf. Recalling Ken Burns, I made quick work of the introduction of the paper on the causes of the Civil War but didn't have much consequential to say after that. While I browsed Wikipedia and chased links, my eyes kept returning to that hardly perceptible patch of yellow.
Our two bedrooms shared a wall. For the rent we paid, you would expect better craftsmanship in the building, but we were handing our money over to Slumlord, Inc. This is a convoluted way of stating that I have heard her masturbate. There was a liquid action while she drove her fingers or her dildo into her pussy. She moaned softly. Sometimes she used porn for inspiration. She made small mews when she came. I had wondered about her cunt. Did she keep it bare? Were the lips thick and meaty? When she finished, did she lick her fingers clean? How did her juices taste?
I looked down below the trackpad and noticed the beginning of an erection tenting my shorts. I pulled my t-shirt down. As I finished the maneuver, my eyes strayed back to the split of her legs. I lifted my gaze at once, but she had noticed my scrutiny. I smiled sheepishly. She smiled back, more warmly. Her right knee nudged my left.
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