Chapter 25: Two Freshmen and Two Mistresses

Jason spent a very bleak New Year's Eve, sitting alone in the house. His parents and sister went to the country club to celebrate New Year's, in a bizarre façade of family unity. Jason couldn't stomach spending a night at the country club play-acting with the other members of his family, nor did he have any desire to risk running into someone from his high school. He would spend the night alone, since not even the maids would be in the house.

At first Mrs. Schmidt wanted to insist that Jason accompany the rest of the family to the country club, but her husband was willing to let the teenager have his way. As he put it: "That kid's a fucking embarrassment, and if he doesn't want to come, that's fine with me. Let him sit at home and do whatever it is that he does when he's by himself."

The elder Schmidts and their sullen daughter left the house at about 8:00 p.m. Jason, in his normal manner, immediately stripped off his clothes. He was very stressed and decided to calm himself down with some exercise. He put on his athletic shoes and went running on his father's treadmill for a full hour. He decided to run 10 kilometers and enjoy the feeling of the cool air of the workout room on his bare skin. Halfway through the run he stopped to open a window and turn off the heat to the room, to feel the cold winter on his unprotected skin. He enjoyed running in the cold, although he knew that as soon as he stopped he would want to shut the window and warm up. He stretched and then used the sauna and hot tub. He finished with swimming for over an hour in the pool, both to exercise his muscles from the run and relax. By the time he was finished it was past 11:00 p.m.

He went into the main hallway, where there was a full-size mirror mounted on one of the closet doors. He studied himself, admiring his attractive body. He felt some regret knowing that as far as his health and attractiveness were concerned, this was it. He was at the peak of his health. It wasn't going to get any better. For the next 60 years he faced a slow steady decline, which at best he could delay if he took proper care of himself.

He turned around to study his backside in the mirror. His bottom had received plenty of attention from his girlfriend over the past semester, ranging from loving caresses to savage swats of the belt. His naked backside also had been on display to just about everyone in the university, whether in the art classes, or during the Tri-Alpha run, or just running up and down the hallway of his dorm. He felt no regret or embarrassment that so many people had seen him, because he enjoyed being naked in front of other people. He especially enjoyed situations where he was the only nude person among a bunch of other people who were dressed. Before entering college he had constantly fantasized about that. The year before he had felt guilty but, having fulfilled part of his fantasy life, he now had accepted that part of himself.

He ran his hands over his bottom, gently caressing his skin. It felt good, but of course it felt so much better when Cecilia was doing it. He thought about how much he loved submitting to her, presenting himself and his body for her to spoil or discipline, as she saw fit. He became erect as he thought about both Cecilia and the exposure of his body to public view. He became even harder as his thoughts wandered to her discipline.

So Jason, are you a bad boy? Oh yes, I'm bad. And what do bad boys get, Jason? They get punished ... punished on the bare bottom ... the bare, naked bottom. That's right, Jason, and I'm gonna give you what you need. Yes, what he needed. He began massaging his penis with one hand and his bottom with the other, much in the same way Cecilia massaged him when she was getting him aroused.

Over the past semester Cecilia strictly prohibited Jason from masturbating, because she wanted to enjoy his sexual energy in its entirety. As she put it: "I'm not sharin' you with a fuckin' toilet. You're keepin' all of it for me." However, it would be another 10 days before he would see her again and he just had to relieve himself. He continued massaging his bottom and stroking his erection in front of the mirror, as he fantasized about sex, nakedness, and punishment. His mind wandered from fantasizing about the erotic spankings she was giving him with the leather paddle, to the real thing, the very painful experiences he had endured submitting to her belt.

At that moment he wanted the belt. He wanted to be on his elbows and knees on her bed, his bottom properly presented and the heavy leather fiercely biting into his sweaty, unprotected skin. He wanted to be properly punished so he could have a good cry. Then, after a good cry, he would kneel and put his arms around her while she gently stroked his hair and his teary face. She would tell him that everything was OK, that she had forgiven him; that he had been a good boy for having taken such a cruel punishment so bravely. Then she would reward him for being so brave, gently touching him and granting him permission to enter her. It had happened that way a couple times already, and he desperately wanted it to happen again.

He finally went to the closet and got a towel. He returned to his spot in front of the mirror, laid the towel on the floor, got back on his knees, and proceeded with his orgasm. Again he ran his hand over his bottom as he stroked himself and watched his reflection. Yes ... Yes ... what he needed was another session with the belt. Finally he did climax, shooting jets of semen all over the towel. The orgasm spent itself as he stopped stroking and caught his breath. However, the fantasy, or rather the desire, of submitting a to belt-whipping remained in Jason's mind. He was determined to get his girlfriend to strap him as soon as he got back to Huntington Hall from Wisconsin.

The dilemma Jason faced was that Cecilia would never whip him unless she felt she had a very good reason. At the same time he didn't want to do something deliberately stupid just to earn a punishment. Then, he figured out there was something that most certainly would get her to punish him. He remembered the CD of X-rated images saved from his hard-drive taped to the back of the drawer of his desk. All he needed to do was pull the CD off the back of the drawer, hand it to her, and confess that he had hidden it instead of getting rid of the images. He knew what would happen, she wouldn't exactly lose her temper, because he was confessing to something on his own. However, she still would discipline him, because he had deceived her. So, that was taken care of. At some point after he got back in January he would submit to his third severe punishment.

The thought of another belt-whipping totally terrified him, but it was partly that terror that made the need to be punished so vivid and real in his imagination. He actually needed to have his bottom severely strapped; to feel real pain and be forced to cry. The experience would overwhelm him and allow him to could break free from the emotional contamination that had collected in his soul as a result of his time at home with his dysfunctional parents. He needed the release a good punishment could provide him from this hideous Christmas vacation he was enduring with his screwed-up family.

The week after New Year's Day was anti-climatic for both Jason and Cecilia. For both of them the week was a period of down-time during which they simply waited for the university to re-open and to be able to get back together.

Jason spent most of the time alone at home, exercising and swimming while his father was at work, his mother was at the country club, and his sister was at school. In spite of spending New Year's Eve together, Jason's father, mother, and sister were not speaking to each other. If any of them had anything to say to one of the others, they relayed it through Jason. However, there was little for him to relay. He could not imagine his parents communicating very much after the confrontations in December.

Even more worrisome was what had happened to Cassie. Before being so thoroughly humiliated by her own father she had been outspoken and boisterous. She never had been a very nice person because the influence of her clique, but she was someone who was easy to talk to and could express what was on her mind. Christmas changed her. She became very quiet, looking at everyone with side-long glances of sullen resentment. Something in her died that night, and Jason did not see how whatever it was that she had lost could be brought back.

Cassie's relationship with her boyfriend had indeed ended, not so much because Mr. Schmidt had insulted him, but because he simply ran off. She couldn't respect him after his display of cowardice, so at one level her father had accomplished what he wanted, getting rid of that pothead. However, because he had so brutally stamped out her effort to rebel by humiliating her, his daughter now was lost to him. Never again would she want to talk to either of her parents nor have any trust in them. Instead of rebelling to their faces, she would rebel in secret, not letting anyone else in the family know what she was doing. As for the boyfriend, he was replaceable. It was not as though the world lacked pot-smokers and useless guys. She would find another guy just as useless within a few days and continue her downward spiral.

Cecilia and Suzanne never repeated their sexual encounter. The opportunity to do anything outside the RA's room disappeared with the return of the dorm director and the other dorm staff members the day after New Year's. The privacy the two women needed for the unique mood that had spurred them to make love had come and gone, so their moment of experimentation was over.

In fact, Cecilia spent New Year's Eve alone, because Suzanne went to a party with a guy from one of her classes. Out of courtesy the photographer had invited her, but she could tell that her friend was secretly hoping she would not accept. Fine, let her get mixed up with yet another loser, thought Cecilia to herself. Anyhow the party was one of those art department get-togethers and she really could not stomach the art crowd. Suzanne was OK, but the others...

Like Jason, Cecilia spent New Year's Eve masturbating alone. As badly as she wanted to call Jason and talk to him, she decided not to, because hearing his voice without being able to see him would only make things worse. Ten days ... ten more days to go before she would see him again; and she was going nuts.

After New Year's Day, Cecilia continued to model for Suzanne. The nude forays around Huntington Hall came to a stop, because the dorm director returned to work on January 2. Other RA's began trickling back, so Cecilia's last day as duty RA was January 5. Instead of modeling around Huntington Hall, Cecilia put on her workout clothes and went with Suzanne to the gym to sweat and have her pictures taken while working out. Apart from a few pictures taken in the women's locker room, Cecilia kept her clothes on while Suzanne was photographing her.

Suzanne gave her friend some impromptu lessons about picture developing and explained what she was after in her photography. She was searching for the sexual soul of the ordinary person, attempting to find the inner sexual being of her models. She was not interested in photographing anyone who had undergone plastic surgery or who was wearing makeup. She wanted to natural, uncovered individual, because what she wanted was to capture personality and emotion.

Cecilia suspected the blatant eroticism in Suzanne's work was actually an outlet for her own sexual frustration. In some ways the photographer fit the description of the "tormented artist", because her chronic bad fortune in relationships was vented in her images. Cecilia wanted to point that out to her friend, but did not know how to phrase her thoughts to avoid sounding offensive. Besides, what Suzanne was putting out was extremely powerful. Cecilia knew that if she were at peace with herself the tension in her pictures would be absent.

Cecilia thought about her own future, and what she wanted to accomplish in the spring. As various dorm staff meetings indicated university life shortly would be returning to normal, she decided that one issue she wanted to tackle was her grammar. There was nothing about her; not her manner of dressing, not the way she wrote, and certainly not her tastes in music and popular culture that would indicate where she was from. The mean streets of New Jersey were fading into a distant memory in Cecilia's mind after having been away for a year and a half attending college classes.

However, as soon as she opened her mouth...

A year and a half of reading and writing scholarly material in English had done little for the Domincan's manner of expressing herself when she spoke. She was becoming frustrated when she noticed snobbish people wincing at her strong East Coast accent and occasional lapses in her speech. She had hoped that classes at the university would change that, but the biggest improvement had been her vocabulary, not the way she spoke. If she really put her mind to it she could tone down her accent and grammar, but normally her speech remained stubbornly stuck with bad habits acquired from her years growing up.

She decided to tackle the problem of speaking from another angle. If it was so hard to improve her English, then why not try improving her Spanish? Cecilia had grown up with Spanish in her household and spoke it on a daily basis, but if anything, her Spanish was even worse than her English. She had never taken a formal class in the language, so her speech was full of Dominican and New Jersey street slang and populated with anglicized words. What if she were to take a Spanish class at the university level and learn correct "Castillano", as they put it? It was worth a try.

She brought up the issue with Ruth Burnside in an e-mail, asking permission to enroll in a third year Spanish grammar class being offered in the spring. The economics department had to approve any class Cecilia wanted to take as a condition of her scholarship, hence the e-mail. Burnside would have to justify allowing her student to take a class outside the department to the scholarship committee, but it seemed to her a reasonable request.

Cecilia finally received the go-ahead to take the Spanish class. She would show herself no mercy, deliberately choosing a professor from Madrid who had a reputation for harsh grading. When she bought the books and saw what she actually would be studying, she had second thoughts about the language project. She rebuked herself, thinking no, I'm gonna see this through, even if I do have to bust my ass for a Spaniard.

The day that Jason returned to the university there was another heavy snowstorm. Unlike the day after Thanksgiving when Mr. Schmidt managed to beat the snow and safely make it to his downtown refuge, during the January trip he and Jason were caught right in the middle of a white deluge. Jason's father was in a totally foul mood from having misjudged the weather and spent a good portion of the journey savagely cussing out the National Weather Service. The worst part of the trip was at the very end, when Jason and his father sat in a long line of parents trying to return their sons and daughters to the university. The fact the university's parking and driveways were restricted because they were only partially cleared compounded the normal beginning-of-the-semester traffic jam. Jason was hugely relieved to finally see the outline of Huntington Hall though the thick snow. His father cut off another driver to get a parking spot, exchanged insults with the other man, and told Jason to grab his stuff out of the car. Jason quickly complied, and with the briefest of good-byes, Mr. Schmidt began the arduous task of getting out of the university, after having spent so much effort getting in.

As Jason struggled with his bags in the snow, he could see the RA's desperately shoveling the sidewalks. He thought he recognized Cecilia in the distance with a shovel, but knew better than to try to approach her. He would have to handle her carefully when he finally did get together with her that evening, because it was obvious she was going to be tired and not in a good mood.

The hallway was full of wet freshmen loaded down with suitcases, backpacks, and boxes. In spite of the unpleasant trip and the chaos in the dorm, Jason was enormously happy to be back. He was free from the confinement of his father's house and the vicious tension between his parents. He would miss his grandmother, but she was the only person in Wisconsin he missed.

As soon as Jason was back in his room there was a lot to take care of. He needed to get his things put away before Cecilia came by. That was priority. In contrast with his first hours in Huntington Hall during his first semester, his first concern was straightening his room. He called his girlfriend's phone to leave a message that he was back, then decided to go to the gym. After a very stressful trip, he had plenty of tension to work off.

Ken was back as well, and happy to go work out with Jason. While working out, the two freshmen exchanged their vacation experiences. It turned out the Ken's vacation had gone extremely well in comparison with Jason's time in Wisconsin. Ken had spent a lot of time with his father and obtained his parents' approval to join the Tri-Alphas at the end of the semester.

Ken also brought Jason a startling piece of news.

"You know that Mike's not coming back."

"What!? But why?"

"He and Lisa split over Christmas. She'll be back tomorrow, but he's staying in Santa Cruz, and I guess transferring to Berkeley next year."

Ken relayed what he knew about the break-up. Apparently Mike and Lisa's relationship, while working just fine in California, had become strained in Chicago. As the fall semester had progressed, Mike felt more and more out of place. Finally decided that he wanted to return to California, where he felt much more at home. Lisa, meanwhile, had adapted to the university just fine. Over the past four months their interests diverged, and by December it became hard for them to even hold a conversation. Mike decided that Chicago was ruining the relationship and that he wanted both himself and Lisa to stay in Santa Cruz during the spring. Lisa flatly refused, telling Mike that he could do what he wanted, but she was going back to the Mid-West. That left Mike in an impossible situation, because he had given Lisa an ultimatum; either stay behind in California or break up. Lisa called his bluff and Mike had no choice but to tell her she'd be going back alone. He was a proud and stubborn person, and was not one to go back on a threat. So, Lisa was coming back by herself, without the guy she had been dating since she was in high school.

It already was well after dark with Jason and Ken returned to the dorm. Cecilia had left a note on his door, telling him that she was back in her room waiting for him. He went to the bathroom, suspecting he might not have the chance to go again for a while, and then called her. In a flash she was over to escort him back to women's side of the floor. She passionately hugged and kissed him, but said absolutely nothing other than "Come on, let's get to my room."

As soon as she had the door shut she grabbed him and kissed him hard. She was hot with erotic hunger. Three weeks had gone by since she had last seen him and two weeks had gone by since her sexual encounter with Suzanne. The time she had spent making love to herself just didn't satisfy her anymore.

She unbuckled his belt and pushed his pants to his ankles. As usual, Jason wasn't wearing any underwear, so he now was completely nude from his waist to his ankles. Cecilia continued to kiss him with complete desperation as she ran her hands over his bottom. She pulled at his shirt and looked at him with a wild expression that clearly stated, "get this shirt off or I'll rip it off myself." Jason quickly complied, pulling the shirt over his head.

Again Cecilia pushed him against the wall. She grabbed his hand and guided it up under her skirt. She wasn't wearing any panties. As his fingers brushed up against her, he realized she was very wet. He became hard himself, in spite of the rather shocking assault he was experiencing.

She passed him a condom. He would have liked a bit more foreplay, but it was obvious that wasn't going to happen. She needed him inside her, immediately. She hopped up on the bed, pulled her skirt up, and waited for him to get the condom on and get inside her.