Ella was a woman a took out a few times
when I lived in Greenville. She was a Sanskritist by trade, and she'd
done her baccalaureate and Ph.D. at Harvard. Now she subsisted by teaching Intro to Hinduism at the local cow college. We met on a
rather esoteric online dating app that I was trying for the first
time.
Ella and I had some very fine meals and
some very fine discussions. By our fourth date, we'd exhausted most
of the half-decent restaurants in Greenville. We wound up back at a
charcuterie we liked. Over a third and fourth glass of wine, we
lamented the paucity of culture in the town, and the lack of
libraries. By our fifth glass, Ella turned inward.
Ella said that from age 8 to 18, her
whole life had been dedicated toward getting accepted into Harvard.
Every exam, every term paper, and every social activity was dedicated
to boosting her CV so that it would be Harvard-worthy. Ella told me
she'd started studying for the SATs since she was ten, and taking
practice tests from age 13. Ella estimated that her whole pubescent
life had consisted of 14 hour workdays, Harvard the magnetic north toward which
every activity was oriented. By eleventh grade, she was putting in 18
hour days. Ella told a story about how at 16 she'd given up all
Friday and Saturday night outings, and how, one spring Saturday, her
mom had given her a fifty dollar bill and told her that she had to get
out of Long Island for the weekend and go with her friends into the
city. The irony, Ella said, is that the few friends she had were also
straining to get into Harvard, or if not that Columbia. But she had
wanted the best, Ella told me, and she got the best, and she did get
into Harvard. She basked in being the best that whole summer, and
then she got to Harvard and now The Best were all around her—there
was the best in organic chemistry and the best in physics and the
best in literature, among other heavyweight disciplines. She was not
the best in any of those—far from it—but she wanted to be the
best in something. By her third year she was focusing on languages,
Greek and Latin and Avestan, and then she found Sanskrit. Sanskrit
was the best of all languages, in that it was the classiest of the
classical languages, literally meaning "refined," Ella
explained, and it was also the hardest. If you had Sanskrit, you could
have any language. So she focused hard in on it, Ella told me, and
she spent every waking hour on conjugations and declensions. She
worked on it as hard as she'd worked on getting into Harvard,
mastering this language that nobody spoke. A dead language, as Ella
described it, made her feel alive. And so she mastered Sanskrit, and
graduated at the top of a small but prestigious crop of students with
a South Asian languages specialization. She was The Best. There were
so many people at Harvard who truly were the best at whatever they
did, and now she was one of them, too. Flaws and all, it didn't
matter how she'd fumbled in the heavyweight subjects, for she'd
bested a heavyweight discipline all her own. And being the best, she
followed up with two graduate degrees. She re-translated portions of
the Kama Sutra, she thought I'd be interested to know. She translated
tantric texts. She won awards for best dissertation, best
translation. Her work was heralded. She was one of the select few
among the select few.
And then she tried for a tenure-track
job, she said as she tossed back her wine-glass and poured another, and
there was just nothing. She got form rejections from state schools,
and the Ivies, in the rare cases they were hiring, sent nothing. She
had to apply for lectureships and adjunct faculty gigs. This brought
her south, deep south, to Greenville.
She said that last part too loud. She
poured down another glass. It was all very awkward. I suggested we
leave. I recommended we take a circuitous route back to her place so
she could sober up. She retreaded much of what she'd already said,
talking about what it meant to be The Best—"capital T, capital
B" she kept saying—and how when it all played out there was
just nothing.
When we got to the door of her
building, I extended my hand to shake. It would mark a downgrade from
the cheek-peck we'd exchanged after our last date, but I wasn't sure
I wanted to see her again. She took my hand and pulled me into a
kiss—a sloppy, white-wine kiss. She pulled open the door and yanked
me into the lobby. I had no choice but clomp behind her up the
stairs.
Inside her tiny apartment, Ella threw
me against the partition wall and kissed me, kicking the door closed
behind her. I kissed her defensively. We'd never been intimate to
that point, but for the cheek-peck. She swung me around, reversing our positions so that she
was against the wall. Then she pushed me away, turned around, and
pulled down her jeans, baring her buttocks.
"Kiss it," Ella said. "Please
kiss it."
She was reaching back, rubbing at the
thigh of my jeans, pressing at the denim around an erection I did not
to that point know I had.
In my head there was confusion and
reluctance, but these were countered by the magnetic pull of Ella's
pert buttocks. I feel to one knee, taking one pristine butt cheek in
my right hand, pressing my lips to the left cheek.
"Yes," Ella said. "Kiss
it like that...and my pussy, too."
I did as I was asked. Her labia lips were
fat, and when I licked them, I felt lubricant rivulets cascading down
onto my tongue.
"Mmm," Ella said. "The Kama Sutra says there are, mmm, three kinds of women. Ah! It goes by the size of their pussies. The deer, the mare, and the elephant woman. Isn't that—mmm, right there—awful? The elephant woman? There are three types of, mmm, men, and they correspond to the women. The hare, the bull, and the horse. Mmm. It goes by the size of their cocks. Oh! The elephant woman goes with the horse man. But I'm not, mmm, an elephant. Look at that tight little pussy you're tasting. Is that elephantine? No! But now look at my ass! Take your face out of my pussy and look! I'm built for the best kind of man. I'm the ashvavrishani. Mm, you like that? I'm a stallion woman."
I slipped a finger inside her. It came
out soaked. I licked my fingertip loudly so she could hear, then slipped it
back inside. Her juices tasted spirituous, I felt intoxicated.
"Now your cock," Ella said.
"Your linga. Into my wet yoni."
I stood up, guiding my member straight
up in between the flawless pink symmetry of her slit. She moaned. I
eased deep. I stayed low, legs at a wide vertical base and pumped
upward slowly into her yoni. She juddered and yelped, scraping at the
greying walls.
"Yes!" she screamed as she
came. "Now give me your hot retas."
"Uh...?"
"Your come! Give it to me! I want
to see it on my ass!"
I slipped my cock out of her snug
little yoni. I pumped furiously at my cock, my hand a peachy blur. I
rose onto the balls of my feet as I climaxed, and opalescent beads
appeared in rapid succession on the arc of Ella's alabaster ass.
"Oh," Ella said, turning her
smirk to me in profile, looking down at her prominent backside. "Your
come is perfect."
"Thank you," I said.
"And my ass," she said. "My
ass is the best, isn't it?"
"It's spectacular," I said.
"Mmm-hmm," she said. "It's
perfect."
"Yes," I said. I felt like I
was lying, but it was true.
"You mean it, right?"
"I really do."
Ella and I had a shower and then
watched a movie on Netflix. She kept apologizing about her place, how
it was the best she could afford. When that finished, she started
reading to me from one of her articles. When she started looking for
a second one, I told her I had to go home. I promised I'd call her.
And I would, but not for a while. As I
walked home, I thought about what I would tell her. Would I say I'm
not ready for a relationship? That was also not a lie. I was ready and willing to have a relationship with someone, but not someone like her.
I had time to think about that, though,
so my thoughts moved to other things. I thought about the app on
which we'd met. It was called Elite Singles. It advertised itself as
the go-to app for the highly educated. I decided as I arrived back at
my building that this was the last time I was going to use that app.
Image credit: Lies Thru a Lens, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons