Chapter 6: Coping with Change

The rest of the weekend passed by without anything special going on. After Friday's night out, my flatmates had been pretty much shattered, so Saturday was a really quiet day. I tried to get Ron interested in watching some TV, but he spent a good portion of the day napping. As for myself, I kept wishing Clara would call me, and managed to control my impatience and avoided searching the net for the resources I needed to know about.

I wrote the daily e-mail to the stranger. This ritual was the thing I resented the most at the time, even if it hadn't yet become habit. It wasn't enough for the stranger to completely intrude in my life, but I had to practically write him daily prayers too. Nonetheless, there wasn't a lot I could do about it, so I just lied and wrote how I had thought about his feet as I had masturbated. I'd been careful not to voice any words then, and there wasn't any way he could tell otherwise, so it was as safe a lie as they come. Oddly, something in me was uncomfortable about lying to the stranger. I couldn't at the time tell whether it was just the act of lying itself, or whether I had begun to fear or respect the stranger in my own mind to that extent. I could only hope it was the former, and I told myself that deceit was perfectly justified in my situation, against someone who was using not only deceit, but threats and violence. (Yes, what he had done to me did very much count as violence.)

Another thing I didn't like was how the stranger had forced me, through his rules, to think about masturbation far more deliberately than I was used to. Before this all, I used to simply masturbate when I felt like it, and tried to otherwise give it as little thought as possible. While it wasn't like people thought it was a crime, or anything, it still wasn't something that was particularly socially well regarded, and having to think about it in advance, to practically have to schedule it, had made me far more uncomfortable about doing it in the first place. So I didn't ask for permission for Sunday, and it was already late for Saturday. Hopefully Monday would be doable.

Towards the evening I tried to rally Ron, Alan and Victor, but they were completely unwilling to go out. I didn't even bother Chris: if he already was busy with academic stuff I doubted he'd have been very interested. I could have gone out by myself, and I played with the idea for a few minutes, but the same issues which had kept me from going out the day before were still unresolved. It was simply the case that I was becoming a bit bored with it all, and I was actually starting to look forward to going to lectures and having something to do, though probably I'd look back to the free time with some fondness later on, when the workload would go up.

Sunday was a grey day, and it actually drizzled. Summer time was clearly going away, and soon we'd be surrounded by damp, cold, windy weather; shorter and shorter daylights; leaves piling up on the pavements; and all the signs of autumn. Spring had flowers, at least, and you could look forward to summer, but autumn was just a time of twilight, a season for hope and cheerfulness to carry through a wise strategic withdrawal before the winter. For people like us, living in cities, the harvest didn't have all that much good to say for it either. It was time to prepare oneself to start work again, even if our work was studying. There wasn't that much of a difference, in the end, between going to lectures and being swamped by coursework, and clocking one's time on a boring job. I knew, I'd had summer jobs.

My schedule was ready for Monday, I had everything I needed, and all I wanted was for time to stop stalling here, to stop belabouring the point, and flash forward. They say life is what happens while you're making plans, and maybe there's some truth to that. I'd have never expected things to go as they had. But now and again, you feel like you're stuck on a pointless detour, a mere digression in a story, and you simply want something meaningful to happen. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad, it just has to be something important. Those were my thoughts as I managed to fall asleep on Sunday night. I felt a nagging twinge, something my mind was trying to remind me of. Something which needed to be done. No matter, surely it could be done on Monday.

I woke up, quickly followed my morning routine, and went to my lectures. I lived reasonably close to the university buildings, and I was rather glad of that. That difference would let me wake up a little bit later, and I wasn't exactly a morning person. The lectures themselves were ok, mostly introductions and reminders, although we did manage to cover some material. Thankfully, no coursework yet, but we were divided in small groups for seminars, where, we were given to understand, most coursework would be dealt with. It wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it was action, it was different. It wasn't sitting by myself in my room brooding, and that was fine with me.

I went home for lunch, made myself a sandwich, and drunk some tea in the empty common room. I had plenty of time before lectures begun, so I took it easy. If the day had been sunnier, I may have gone out and walked about instead, but it was rather dull, so I went to my room. I was going to write some notes on my diary on uni stuff, when I saw the pair of socks on my pillow, again. I stood still for a few seconds, trying to deal with my annoyance, sighed, and went to pick them up. I wanted to see if there were any instructions, just in case, and it was good I did. The note this time, said, simply, "Tonight". I put them in a drawer under the sink, turned on my computer, and checked my mail. No instructions. No personal mail either, just spam. So I wrote my diary reminders, before I completely forgot about it all, played some music, and lay in bed for about an hour, until it was time to leave again.

After coming back from my afternoon lectures, I saw Ron in the common room, eating some fruit. It was a bit late for that, dinner time wasn't too far away, but it was his call. I joined him, though I didn't want to eat anything right then.

"So how did your first day at uni go?", he asked.

"It was fine. Pretty crowded, and changing theatres is a pain, but that's about it. They didn't seem to introduce anything I obviously will not be able to cope with, so I'm a bit relieved."

"Hmm, more or less the same for me. I don't get why you don't believe your grades. I mean, it's not like you had a lot of difficulties in school."

"Yes, I know. I suppose I just had to see it to believe it. With you, your parents went to uni and all that, mine didn't. So it still seems like something special, you know? Not just school. At heart it's basically the same thing, though, I imagine. Why are you eating now? You won't have much hunger left for dinner."

"Yes, mum", he mocked. "I just felt like eating some fruit. I had a small sandwich for lunch, that's not exactly going to keep a strapping lad like me going all day long, now is it? Anyway, we could watch some TV for a bit, then maybe make dinner. What do you think?"

"Sounds good. Oh wait! No, actually, I've got some stuff to do." I couldn't avoid blushing. "How about you let me know when you feel like cooking? I need to ... do some coursework in the meantime." The lie escaped my lips without conviction, and really, by then I had had to tell so many lies that I was hoping I'd at least get good at it eventually.

"Coursework? Wow, is it for tomorrow?"

"Not exactly. Still, it's good if I start to get in the habit..."

"What do you mean not exactly? Is it for tomorrow or not?"

"No, it's not for tomorrow."

"When's it for, then?"

"For ... Friday", I improvised. Even I realised how bad an actor I was, how I was stuttering at every sentence. I wasn't going to tell Ron my coursework consisted of hand-washing some socks, though. I didn't know what the stranger had meant by tonight, and I meant to be cautious about it. If I ended up missing the deadline because of watching TV and getting involved with dinner, I would regret it.