Chapter 1

March 7th, 2024. Amed Younis.

The sculpted curvature of Julie Lambert’s inner thighs drew Amed after her with an inexorable force. Fuck Thanos — those thighs were true inevitability. Her loosely pleated purple cheerleader skirt bounced around her toned legs as she strode through the oddly deserted, fog-curled corridors of Magnolia West Academy — a purposeful, aggressive gait. Amed was dragged after her as if bound by an invisible thread — the red string of fate. The decisive purpose in her steps perfectly mirrored the utter lack of agency he felt in his own pursuit. His heart thundered in his chest, and his palms were slick with sweat.

It still amazed Amed that even in a woke world, the school allowed its cheerleaders — the Magnolia Angels — skirts that short. They were all technically adults — the school’s Diversity and Equity Office had ruled that the COVID lockdowns had disproportionately affected under-represented demographics, so to avoid bias the whole school ended up held back a year. The seniors were eighteen or nineteen accordingly. Even given that, it still came off as delightfully spicy for small-town Arkansas.

He had enough exposure to anime to be familiar with the term zettai ryōiki, and this was some definite Grade A. The loose, light and bouncy fabric of the skirt flip-flip-flipped as her purple sneakers clip-clip-clipped on the tile floor. The inside of the pleats was grey, contrasting with the rich purple of the skirt overall. When it bounced up enough to show the thin white cotton of the panties covering her pale, sculpted cheeks, Amed’s breath caught and he staggered, almost falling on his face. Julie’s steps did not lose their rhythm.

Julie was Amed’s dream girl. There was nothing exceptional about that — she was probably the dream girl of more than half of the male student body even before she started her subtly sexual campaign to become prom queen. Now, with the swishing skirts, subtle flirting and general niceness, Amed would be surprised if she hadn’t transfixed every cock in a twenty-mile radius.

But they weren’t here. The whole school seemed deserted save for him and her. The corridor smelled like its usual mix of Lysol, sweat, perfume and spilled fruit juice. They passed by the school’s crest, prom campaign posters, AFHU recruitment posters, crimson and gold school pennants, the Stallions’ trophy case, social distancing signs and a corkboard clustered with student social notices — but no students or faculty. A peculiar, coiling fog obscured the tiled floor from his sight.

She stopped abruptly at the door to the Social Studies classroom, trying the handle. It was locked. She turned to face Amed. “You wouldn’t happen to have the key, would you?”

He stared. She was six feet exact, a few inches taller than he was. Her long, fiery red-brown hair was tied back in a ponytail with a purple satin hair ribbon matching her uniform. The tightly swept-back hair highlighted her perfect oval face, making her features look intense, sensual and alluring. Her lips were bright red and glossy, her cheeks blushed, her lashes long and curled. She wore the kind of makeup one associates with a centerfold, and was more than capable of staring down any teacher who tried to tell her it was inappropriate.

She had an athletic body with a toned midriff and elegantly curved hips that swayed sensually as she walked. Her cheer-uniform left her toned midriff bare — the top was styled like a miniature suit-jacket covering the same area as a sports bra. A single coat-button graven with the school crest held the two sides together, emphasizing the enticingly pale flesh of her upthrust cleavage.

He realized he was staring — and not into her wide green eyes, either — when she finally cleared her throat. She didn’t seem offended, though — if anything, she reveled in the attention. Amed knew that about her. Everybody knew that about her.

“You have the classroom key,” Julie told Amed. “It’s in your jeans pocket. You stole it to impress me, so we could hook up. I’m sure it was all very thrilling, and made you feel quite clever and macho. Guys will be talking about your caper for ages.”

Amed failed to contextualize the simple oddity of Julie’s oneiric genre savviness, but did manage to get the classroom key out of his pocket and hand it to her. She unlocked the door and sashayed in, her hips swiveling in a way calculated to make his cock twitch. The classroom was empty. Late afternoon sunlight filtered in through frosted windows, giving the classroom an ethereal blue glow.

Mist coiled around Julie’s feet as she strode purposefully up to Mrs. Loomer’s desk, sweeping the papers, books, office supplies and globe on it to the floor imperiously. The globe rolled across the checkerboard floor almost comically, coming to rest beside a grimy-looking trashcan near the door. A shocked feral hamster hissed, and scuttled away from behind the trash can into the shadows with lightning speed. Julie ignored it (as all the students did by this point), and sat on the side of the desk — legs spread in an insouciant but casual pose. She bit a cherry red fingernail playfully.

“Well?” she finally asked. “What are you waiting for? We both know what we’re here for, so let’s get the party started.”

Julie reached inside her skirt with both hands and pivoted her hips in a way that made Amed’s heart skip a beat. Two seconds later, the enticing cotton panties that has so transfixed his gaze a minute or two earlier slid down her long, silky legs. She stepped out of them, flashing more delicious upper thigh in the process, then twirled them on her finger saucily like a veteran stripper before tossing them aside.

Amed walked up to her, his heart thundering. He stepped inside her personal space for the first time, and looked in her eyes — and just choked, finding himself unable to do anything. Some neurotic part of his mind warned him that he had a really visible, really embarrassing boner. Any worry about this, however, was obliterated from his mind when she leaned forward to kiss him. It wasn’t a romantic good-girl kiss, either. Julie was a lewd and aggressive kisser, her tongue probing into his mouth. He could taste the oil in her lip gloss. He felt light-headed, and struggled not to faint. His boner problem did not get any subtler.

Amed had never kissed a girl, even in his dreams. He wasn’t ugly, with his short, neat black hair, slender build, olive skin and chiseled Lebanese features — but he was a criminally shy recent immigrant, only semi-confident in his English skills and uncertain of American social dynamics. His parents would kill him if he got a girl in trouble, or got in trouble because of a girl. He knew that all too well. So he stayed on the sidelines and focused on his grades.

“This ... this has to be a dream.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I mean, duh!”

“Right.”

“So, you’re having a dream about the head cheerleader everyone at your school wants to nail. What do you do next? Any answer that doesn’t parse out to making it a wet dream is categorically incorrect, by the way.”

“So. Um. Would you ... would you be willing to go someplace a bit more intimate with me?”

“Nope!”

His face fell.

“Oh, don’t give me that. If you wanted to go some place intimate, we wouldn’t be here right now. We’re exactly where you want us to be and you know it, so don’t chicken out now!”

She grabbed his boner through his jeans for emphasis, and he jumped. “You want to do it right here. I mean, sure, we could find some place all intimate and secluded and have boring vanilla sex, but who wants that? You want to be able to say you plowed the head cheerleader right on Mrs. Loomer’s desk, don’t you?”

Her hands were working at his belt. His jeans fell to the ground. He heard laughter, and saw shadows move. He flinched. His boxers stayed tented, though. His shirt was gone. He didn’t take it off — it just vanished somewhere along the way. “You’re cute, you know. The shy guys so often are. I’m weird that way. I actually like vulnerable — sometimes, at least. It’s better than arrogant, anyway. You’re actually pretty impressive downstairs, too. I can tell you don’t exaggerate it here like some guys do in their dreams. I’ve seen enough by now to know authenticity when I see it.”

Her delicate hand slid inside his boxers to grip his erect shaft. Her fingers felt teasingly cold. Red-lacquered fingernails brushed against his pubic hair, and he struggled not to come.

“I’ve ... I’ve never done this before,” he stammered.

“You won’t come until I do,” she told him confidently. “I know it.”

He finally steeled himself and kissed her again, this time with the aggression, the need, on his side. She seemed to like it — and she looked spectacularly dirty and lewd with smeared lipstick on her face. They kissed more, and Amed slid his hands up her toned thighs to feel her firm, flat and very conspicuously bare ass. His hard cock brushed against her pleated skirt — somewhere amidst all the tongue action, his boxers had unwound into an ethereal grey mist. Julie ground her body against his almost animalistically, the fabric of the skirt scraping the head of his cock.

“So,” Julie whispered moistly in his ear as she guided his hand between her legs from behind to cup her vulva, “you know why they call it a wet dream, right? Cause I sure do!”

Her juices slicked his fingers. He squeezed her pussy. She moaned, and clawed his back. After a few more minutes of wordless but hardly silent grinding and not-at-all-dry humping, Julie heaved herself up on Mrs. Loomer’s desk and lay down on her back, spreading her legs. Her ponytail had become unbound at some point in the makeout, and her long, silky red hair lay splayed around her head like a fiery corona.

“Yeah,” Duke Stangrove said from the front row. “Nail her! Go for it, dude!”

Amed looked out in shock. Suddenly the classroom was normally colored and full of people — his fellow students. What the fuck! Holy fucking shit!

“I’m so jealous,” Marjorie Watkins said. “Fuck Julie Lambert.”

“That seems to be the idea,” Laurie Xiu, the class clown, observed dryly.

“Pull up her skirt,” Donny Broekner shouted out. “I wanna see that grade-A cheerleader rump!”

“You will not panic,” Julie told him, making odd gestures with her left hand. Her voice was oddly resonant, almost choral or harmonic. “You will have no doubts. Your confidence is immutable.”

She spoke and it was so. The class giggled and cat-called — but he just didn’t care. He glanced out at friends, tormentors and strangers — then back at Julie. Then he strode forward and shoved his cock into her eager, slippery opening.

Yeah, now he knew why they called it a wet dream. Julie was incredible inside — both slippery and tight, moist and wanting. She was hungry, possessive on an autonomic, muscular level. She clutched him, massaged him and egged him on — vocally as well as vaginally. “Yeah, Amed! Pound me! I know you’ve seen people do it so hard and raw you can hear the skin slapping — don’t you want to feel that?”

He remembered seeing videos like that. The image filled his mind, and a second later he was experiencing it in the first person. Slap! Slap! Slap! Julie squirmed and moaned under his locomotive assault, clutching at her breasts through the mini-jacket cheerleader halter. His classmates cheered and hollered raucously, and some started clapping. Minutes of rhythmic motion etched themselves into his memory as the perfect alloy of pleasure and vindication. Faintly, in some far distant realm, he heard an older lady shouting in Arabic. Julie apparently did too, as she heightened the pace of their already kinetic fornication with the kind of intoxicating hip-pivots only a trained cheerleader could manage.

“Go on, show them,” she goaded him playfully. “Prove you’re a man. Earn your peers’ respect. Make me come — right here, right now!”

Her hands clenched around her halter, tearing it open and sending the single purple suit-jacket button flying. Amed’s eyes gleefully devoured her exposed breasts, sloshing about back and forth. She tugged and pinched her own nipples roughly for that extra little bit of stimulation. “Nail me!” she shouted. “All the way! I want it all! Gimme! Sheathe it! Go deep!”

Her thighs were starting to tremble, and she lowered one hand from her tortured nipple to rub her clit for all of ten seconds before Amed felt her vaginal walls clench and spasm around his cock. “Fuck yeah! You did it, Amed! I’m coming! Oh, god, I’m coming!”

It was like she said the magic words. As soon as she told him she was coming, his own seed started spraying out in pulses so forceful as to be almost painful — yet so overwhelmingly much more pleasurable. Nothing he had ever experienced before in his short life was quite as perfect as that one prolonged eruption. The whole classroom cheered. Confetti rained down and the Star-Spangled Banner started playing as Amed stood rigid, balls-deep in Julie Lambert as the head cheerleader lay splayed out on Mrs. Loomer’s desk.

The dream would have collapsed into incoherency shortly after his orgasm even if his mum hadn’t been screaming at him about homework, prayer service and a loaned bicycle. He came back to consciousness slowly, dimly aware that he had a rather shocking quantity of semen running down his legs and smeared all over his sheets — and probably less time than usual to get ready for school. He was just thankful he’d locked his door last night!

The dream stuck with Amed over the next several days. He remembered it with an unusual vividness. The cleanup was a big nuisance, but he thankfully didn’t get caught. He assumed (incorrectly, as it happens) that his parents could never understand. He had no realistic aspirations of hitting on or dating Julie Lambert. He thought of the dream as a secret treasure, a memory to cherish. It was oddly personal to him — which was part of the reason he found the locker room conversation after football practice so disconcerting.

“You had one too?” Brett Tollard asked, laughing.

“Yeah,” Duke Stangrove said sheepishly. “I sure did. Just last week.”

“What happened?”

The Stallions’ quarterback laughed. “It’s a dream. What do you think happened?”

“You nailed her, right? And you remember it. And it kicked ass. At least, it did for me.”

“Man,” Donny said. “That chick. It’s like she’s the erotic fever dream of this whole school!”

Brett laughed. “Well, she is the head cheerleader, right? That’s what they’re for — to give us that little extra motive to nail the final touchdown, right?”

Amed felt oddly defensive, suddenly. He was only a reserve linebacker, but it had nothing to do with that. He felt weirdly possessive, protective toward Julie. “Isn’t that a bit sexist?”

Troy snorted, bristling. “If we can’t be a bit sexist in the locker room, I think it’s a sign Armageddon is actually here.”

Duke nodded slowly and spoke with an odd introspection for the sort of meathead he normally was. “It’s not really sexist. That’s literally what the cheerleaders do. And I think Troy’s right. If we can’t talk about wanting to bone a hot girl anywhere, it actually does lead to Armageddon. Haven’t you heard the joke about sexual repression and getting Hitler a hooker back in 1935? That’s as good a reason as any to not want diversity officers in our locker room!”

It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment. The DEO’s decision to hold the school back a year had created a lot of resentment among both students and parents, and their imperious dismissal of any criticism didn’t especially help de-escalate the tensions. Now it simmered constantly, just below the surface at MWA.

“Nah,” Troy jibed. “It’s the cocks, man. Cocks scare them, at least when they’re attached to guys.”

Everyone laughed nervously — even Amed. Being from Lebanon didn’t make the thought police any less scary to him, even if they were in ideological theory there to champion immigrants like him. If anything, they reminded him of home in deeply unpleasant ways. He wished he hadn’t said anything. Fortunately for his social standing, though, Amed was actually a pretty transparent guy.

“He’s not offended,” Donny said, grabbing Amed by the waist and sloshing him about, thrusting his arm in the air triumphantly. Donny weighed twice what Amed did, and it was all muscle — but there was no threat in the contact, just a jovial camaraderie and lack of boundaries. “He’s jelly!”

Everyone laughed again — this time, loudly and without fear.

“Tell us,” Troy said hungrily. “What happened?”

Stark terror gripped Amed’s heart. He couldn’t; it was too personal. Besides, how could he tell his classmates he railed Julie in front of them, all but cuckolding them? But a surge of the same confidence he felt in the dream came back to him then, and he just spoke what he felt. “I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s too personal.”

“Chill,” Duke said. “Most guys don’t talk about this shit. We’re just pervs.”

Troy shrugged. “Sorry, dude. I didn’t mean to be weird. I’m just...”

Brett grinned. “Horny?”

“Yeah, that. Lots of that. We good?”

Amed nodded in relief. “Yeah, for sure.”

“Wicked!”

Amed laughed in spite of himself. They all just had such ... enthusiasm. There’s worse things in the world that meatheads, sometimes.

“It’s not just us, though. I heard she visited Derek van Worten from the Anime Club last week. He’s ... not shy about sharing his fantasies. Honestly, that kid has no filters at all.”

“And?”

“Well, let’s just say Julie can fill out Mokoto Kusanagi’s latex bodysuit nicely and apparently looks really hot when pissed off and firing a rail gun.”

Everyone laughed. Troy looked fascinated. There were other stories too — guys having spicy dreams about Julie Lambert. Donny floated the theory that it was some kind of synchronicity event based on collective groupthink.

“So,” Brett said, “translated into non-geek, what you mean is Julie’s really hot, some guy has a wet dream about her, he talks about it, dreaming about fucking her sounds really fun, so everyone’s subconscious decides to get in on the act.”

Donny — well-known for his love of conspiracy lore and Fortean events — looked annoyed. “Well, yeah, but when you put it that way it sounds so mundane!”

Everyone but Donny laughed, and eventually even he joined in too.

“You had one?” Donny asked Brett.

“Already told y’all. Julie looks great squeezed into a retro 50s diner uniform. She got off shift, and I nailed her rough and hard right in the diner parking lot while her preppie Canadian boyfriend waited impotently for her out front in his lime green Studebaker.”

Inwardly, Amed sighed. It was Brett Tollard, so of course he had to be fucking over some other guy in order to fuck Julie. Life was a zero-sum game to him, all winners and losers.

Troy turned back to Duke. “So, you wanna keep yours private as well?”

“Nah,” Duke said. “You guys know I love those old pulps, right? Well, as it happens I was catching up on my Raymond Chandler before bed...”

February 28th, 2024. Duke Stangrove.

The dame was trouble. Gumshoe Duke “Roustabout” MacLain knew that the second she sashayed into his office, those glorious crimson locks spilling down her shoulders in perfectly styled finger curls. She was dressed all in black — a very figure-hugging black. Her suit jacket’s broad shoulderpads gave her an imposing air, but the tight black pencil skirt and narrowed — possibly even corsetted — waist radiated raw sexuality. Her circular steel glasses had tinted black lenses, and the netting of her birdcage veil hung down over her eyes. Her full-fashioned sheer black stockings all but worshipped her long, elegant legs, being perfectly fitted — their seams like the trails on a treasure map pointing the way to paradise.

The crimson of her fingernails perfectly matched the crimson of her lips. Black lace encased her hands, and her cured leather purse with brass trim had an avant-garde look to it. The bulbous signet ring on her right hand bore the ornate crest of a very wealthy and influential Boston family. She did not wear a wedding band on her left.

Duke couldn’t help but stare at her as she walked. The way her hips pivoted was almost hypnotic, enslaving his eyes. Bands of light and darkness slithered over her body like stroking hands as the ceiling fan above her carried on its languid rotation. She sat down in a green leather armchair beside his desk, crossing her legs in the fashion of a women who has spent time specifically practicing crossing her legs. Stockinged ankle rubbed against stockinged ankle intoxicatingly, and Duke even imagined he caught a glimpse of her garters. “Mister MacLain, I presume?”