The Baroness

Ω

    “I’ll see you at Comicon, won’t I?”

    I looked up from my computer terminal to see Maureen, one of the new temps, leaning over my desk.

    “Um, no, actually,” I fumbled. “I hadn’t planned it.”

    “Oh,” Maureen said. “That surprises me.”

    “W-why is that?” I asked, still stammering. Modest though her vestments were, Maureen’s blouse and skirt could not cloak her fireplug physique. She had an incisive prettiness, with jet-black hair that cascaded all about her shoulders. Her glasses framed her dark eyes alluringly, and now she was adjusting them as she spoke again.

   “I thought if anyone around here were going it would be you.”

    “What gave you that impression?” I asked.

    But I knew the answer. I wear glasses and ill-fitting clothes. One of the bros in accounts payable once told me that I look like I work at Radio Shack.

    “I just figured,” Maureen said, “you might be into comics.”

    “I was,” I said, “but that was when I was a kid.”

    “But not anymore?”

    “No,” I said.

   Maureen stood up straight, relinquishing her hands from the edge of my desk.

   “That’s too bad,” she said. “Every year I try to do a Comicon, but I’ve never gone alone. Do you know anyone else that would be interested in going?”

    “I’m not uninterested,” I said. “I’ll go with you if you’d like.”

   “Would you?” Maureen said. “That’d be sweet. I just get so self-conscious by myself.”

    “If I went to a Comicon alone,” I said, “I’d be self-conscious too.”

    Maureen smiled but did not laugh.

Ω 

    We agreed to meet in front of the convention center. When I got off the bus, I was immediately cast into a crowd comprised of two subsections of people: thirty-somethings who dressed like teenagers and cosplayers who, with a few exceptions, looked like depressive versions of their favorite licensed characters. I couldn’t find Maureen, though.

    “Dimitiri!”

    It was Maureen’s voice, and I wheeled around to find where it was coming from.

    “Over here!”

I turned and matched the voice to the person, but all at once I couldn’t put a name to the face. I was at a loss for words. Clip-clopping toward me in black thigh-highs was an archetypal vamp, statuesque body packed into a red cat-suit. She wore a plastic breastplate, bosom moulded into twin, missile-like humps. That breastplate bore a licensed insignia, the same one that was emblazoned on her gun-belt. Her raven hair swept behind her as she approached.

    With respect to the cosplayers, she was one of the exceptions to the depressive rule.

   “Dimitri,” she said, throwing her arms around me. “I’m so glad you came!”

    “W-who…?” I said. There was that stammer again. As I hugged her, I noticed that heads were turning to look.

    Maureen pulled back. “You don’t know? Didn’t you ever play with GI Joes?”

    “For a time,” I said. “When I was little. But that was a long time ago.”

    “You don’t have any idea who I am?”

    “It's on the tip of my tongue—”

    “I’m the Baroness! From Cobra? GI Joe's archenemy?”

    “Yes,” I said. “I sort of remember.”

    “Come,” Maureen said. “Let’s go in.”

    As we walked in, Maureen’s heels clacking like claves, a lot of pimply thirty-somethings and depressive superheroes were staring at us.

    It was more of the same inside. As soon as we stepped into the lobby, fanboys swarmed Maureen. They wanted pictures of her and pictures with her. For some, she’d aim her dual handguns at the camera, tilting her expressionless face. Alternatively, she’d point one gun at the ceiling and tuck the thumb of her other hand under her bandolier. The fanboys loved all of it. Their faces brightened. They smiled so avidly. It was if they were meeting a celebrity. Lines formed, in fact, even after we’d started up and down the aisles. Maureen’s lines seemed longer than those that had formed for some of the washed-up actors stationed at the various booths.

  From time to time, the swarm got too chaotic. Maureen would shoot me a glance, raising an eyebrow. I’d start off and she’d follow, telling her admirers she had to move on.

   “Thanks, D,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver. You see why I can’t go to these things alone.”

    On our way out, we ran into a pair of red-bearded, heavyset men who were especially giddy. They couldn’t stop praising the detail Maureen had put into the costume. While the one squared up a perfect selfie with Maureen, the other took me by the forearm.

    “You’re very lucky,” he said.

    “Why is that?”

  “To be dating such a proficient cosplayer,” he said. “To be dating the Baroness, no less.”

    My brow knitted up. “We’re not dating,” I said.

   Upon hearing that, the fanboy’s body somehow managed to sag even more. He seemed disappointed, even as he snuggled up to Maureen for a picture.

   “Did that guy just ask if you were my boyfriend?” Maureen asked.

    “Yeah,” I said.

  “Ha!” Maureen said, letting out a gusty laugh. “I think it’s time to leave.”

    In the lobby on the way out, Maureen received applause. She took a bow. As she did so, it struck me that she actually transcended all the real-life celebrities. She had these fanboys lining up to meet a fantasy.

  “Well,” I said as we stepped outside. “This has been an adventure.”

  “Indeed,” Maureen said. “But we haven’t done a mission debriefing. Yours is the same bus as mine. Let’s take it. C’mon.”

   The bus was just pulling up to the stop. Maureen hurried over in long, metronomic strides, and I scrambled to keep up.

    There weren’t many people on the bus, but the ones who were there gave Maureen a wide-eyed once-over. We sat down at the back.

   “Phew,” Maureen said. “Today was crazy. I thought the photos would never stop. But it’s always that way with the Baroness.”

    “Oh yeah?”

   “Yeah. I do a few characters. When I started, I mostly did Psylocke. I’ve done the Baroness in black and in red. I do Catwoman sometimes. For that, I use the same suit as the classic Baroness in black, I just ditch the glasses and put on a hood with cat ears. But the Baroness is always what gets them, especially in the red. I don’t know what it is. I guess it’s the sexiness. Maybe it’s the glasses. All I know is that I have an easier time finding my way around as the Baroness. People have an easier time finding me. What do you think it is, Dimitri?”

      “I couldn’t say,” I said.

   “You said you played with GI Joes. Did you have a Baroness?”

      “No,” I said.

    Maureen murmured, turning to look out at the sidewalk hurtling by the window of the bus.

    “You’d think,” she said, “that a person would tire after a day like that. But I’m strangely invigorated. That’s always the way it is at these things. It’s just what cosplay does for me. It lets me really get to explore the energy of the character. It lets feel the energy that other people channel into the character, and it lets me feed off it. For a fleeting moment here and there, it’s like I can feel what it is to be that character, even though she's fictional. It’s like an out-of-body experience. You’re outside of your conventional self. And it’s completely uplifting. It’s energizing.”

    Maureen pulled in closer to me, lowering her voice. “You know,” she said, “the last guy I was with, Peter, he used to always come to these conventions with me. He’d dress up as Destro—that’s the Baroness’s boyfriend in Cobra, as you may recall. Anyway, his costume was never as good, but he could feel that energy, too. He’d feed off my energy. And when we would get home—oh, this is so perverted—we would have the wildest sex imaginable. Like, nothing else in our relationship would compare. Makeup sex, birthday sex, you name it, it all paled against Comicon sex. It was this wildly erotic thing. I think maybe that’s why so many people do cosplay in the first place. Don’t you think?”

      She whispered this last part in my ear.

    I nodded, waiting for the gooseflesh to subside on all my limbs. When I spoke, it was sotto voce.

    “When I was a kid,” I said, “I never had the Baroness. She was never available. But I always wanted her.”

    “Do you want her still?”

    “Yes,” I said.

    “You're in luck.” Maureen said. “You've got one Baroness left on the shelf. And this next stop, that's where the Baroness gets off.”

Ω

    “Welcome to the snake-pit,” Maureen said as she turned the key and pushed open her apartment door.

    We stepped into a standard-issue one-bedroom apartment, albeit a well-furnished one.

  I took off my shoes but Maureen did not remove her footwear. She kissed me feverishly on the mouth. Her lips were quick, her tongue was sinuous, and her front teeth placed little periodic bites on my lower lip. Meanwhile, she unbuttoned my shirt and yanked it off. She unzipped my jeans and pulled them down.

   “We’ve still got some debriefing to do,” she said, and then tugged down my boxers, placing kisses on my thighs.

    Maureen backed me up into her living room and pushed me down onto her sofa. As I sank into the imitation leather, she squatted down in front of me. She stayed my bobbing erection with her mouth. She pulled back the hood of foreskin and her eyes narrowed on my glans. Her tongue flicked in and out snake-like, going tip-to-tip with my manhood. I stared up at the ceiling’s serpentine craquelure as if in prayer. And in my mind, there cycled a prayer, of sorts—don’t come, don’t come, don’t come. Whatever you do, do not come.

    She took the length of me in her mouth all at once, gagging. I couldn’t help myself but watch. Here now, kneeling in front of me, was a perfect likeness of the Baroness sucking my cock. Here before me was a spot-on incarnation of the action figure, giving me an enthusiastic blowjob. My eyes rolled back in my head as I contemplated a formless, pre-sexual desire for the Baroness that had stirred inside me when I saw her figure warming the shelf when I was a child. But this Baroness before me was even better. She was the figurine made flesh. She had countless points of articulation, all of them working in tandem to proffer me pleasure.

    In servicing my member, she alternated between her mouth and her gloved hand. She used all of her mouth to coat my cock in saliva. Her glove would pump furiously at the root of it, then slow up to pull my foreskin over and back, over and back at a pleasurable crawl. From time to time, she’d bury her mouth beneath my scrotum as she jerked me off, tongue-tip circling around my perineum.

    She took me to the verge of ejaculation and then pulled her face from my testicles.

     “Up!” she said, straightening her glasses.

    I did as she asked and then she stretched her long, lissome body out on the couch in full costume. She took me by the arm and pulled me on top of her, positioning me so that I was half-kneeling over her chest, one socked foot planted in the carpet.

  She squared up my cock between the mammary-shaped mounds molded up from the plastic breastplate. My cock hovered atop the mouth of the cobra. With my middle and ring fingers, I pressed down on the base of my member and pushed between those breast molds with short strokes. And each time my cock snaked through to full extension, the Baroness’s tongue lashed out to lick the very tip, occasionally catching the top of the glans with the bottom of her tongue. The plastic moldings offered a blissful resistance.

    Don’t come, don’t come, don’t come, I prayed.

   Maureen rose up and pushed me away. She snapped to her feet, locked her eyes on mine, and joined her hands on her gun-belt. Her thumbs girded the Cobra insignia at the center of the belt, which was right over her mound of Venus. She unclipped the belt and let it fall to the floor. She peeled off the breastplate. She pulled off her boots. All the while, she tilted her impassive face at a variety of angles, as if she were posing for a fanboy’s photo. She undid the buttons of the cat-suit proper and then turned her back to me. In just a few deft articulations, she peeled the suit down and off of her body. She turned her naked body to me.

  Neither office attire nor the Baroness costume had approached doing justice to Maureen’s naked physique.    

    Her breasts were natural, round, and wide-set. The lower halves of her breasts were pale. Her aureoles were long and ovular. The punctum of her nipple was dark and as incisive as her eyes. Her ribcage dipped sharply into a trim, cylindrical waist, only to flare out into deliciously wide hips that were squarish at the top and gave way to exquisite, tawny arc on either side. There was a thin strip of paleness across the lower tropic of her hips, evidencing some recent history of low-rise bikini briefs. Her Venus mound arced outward, like unto a cobra’s hood. An inverted pyramid of pubes, narrow yet scruffy, trailed up toward that Venetian mound, but not too far, as per my preference.

    I reached for her cunt, but she sidestepped my grasp.

    “No,” she said. “First with your mouth.”

  She pushed me down onto my back and then swung her knees onto either side of my head. I caressed her trim thighs in anticipation as she lowered her pussy onto my face. That tiny cloven enclave hovered over my mouth for several excruciating seconds, then she lowered herself. I was smothered in cunt. Labia blotted my vision. In the blackness, I found her clit, and it seemed like a throbbing monolith against my tongue. Defensively, my tongue circled and circled and Maureen conceded a moan. She counter-circled her hips, grinding her pelvis against my chin as I sucked her esculent sex. She cranked back, hand gripping my cock and jerking me off wildly in the meantime.

    Don’t come, don’t come, don’t come.

    Maureen didn’t seem to have the same thought process. In a twirling paroxysm, her hips circling like a tempest, and she came. Having juddered out her orgasm, she pushed herself up, planted a pivot foot in the carpet and spun herself around. She aligned her vulva with my erection, pulled apart her labia with two fingers, and then flopped down, sheathing my erection in hot, wet cunt. She clapped her tawny, round ass-halves down onto my erection-horned midsection, hollering in triumph with each downburst. On occasion she’d pause to adjust her glasses, my glans ensnared between her labia. While she did so, I’d thrust up once or twice into her dewy pubes, just because I loved the feel. Her hips were tireless, swiveling round and beating down, pale ass clapping and rippling as it stamped by cock over and over. Maureen rode me until her hips gave way to a circling that seemed involuntarily, and then she shuddered and squalled with another orgasm.

    While she murmured madly, momentarily come-drunk, I made my insurrection and took control. I lifted her off me and shunted her forward onto her hands and knees. I gripped her by her deliciously squarish hips and squared her up, stuffing my cock in her pussy and then slamming my pelvis into her ass and upper thighs. Again and again her hind met my lower abdomen in a sublime thunderclap. Maureen was braying and hissing—she seemed to alternate between these vocalizations with every thrust. With each thrust it was like I was chiseling away at a masterpiece figurine. As I hammered away, Maureen's backside raised up higher and higher into a steeper arch. I stood up into a squat, raining down thrusts, almost sitting on her ass as I delved straight down, 12-to-6, into her cunt. My cock felt anaconda-thick wedged inside her. All metaphor and costuming disappeared: I was fucking the Baroness.

    The Baroness shrieked as she came again, her effusion like a humid squall that my cock kept thrusting headlong through.

   The Baroness calmed herself down to a warble. I shortened my strokes, testicles pitter-pattering against her generous upper thighs. I slowed down, conscious now that I was once again on the verge. I’d been on the verge for a while, in fact, but it didn’t really matter. I felt like I could go all night. She snapped her head back in profile.

    “You're going to come, aren't you?”

    I nodded rapidly and murmured in the affirmative. And with that, her vulva relinquished its grip and she scrabbled off the sofa to the floor. Here, she picked up the breastplate. She laid it out on the far side of the couch, and then leaned overtop it, her nipples grazing the peaks of the plastic moldings.

   “Fuck these plastic tits again!” she said. “I command you to fuck the cobra's mouth!”

    “Yes, Baroness!”

    The Baroness’s heavy, fleshy breasts dangled over the plastic breastplate like nosediving zeppelins. I slapped my cock down between the plastic hillocks, threading it through the diamond shape aperture created in the stacked cleavages of fake breast shapes and the Baroness’s very real tits. The Baroness spit down onto the breastplates for lubrication, but I hardly needed any more. My cock was coated with the Baroness’s secretions.

    The Baroness’s breasts were so warm and inviting, my hips involuntarily thrusted my cock upward toward them. In concert, that hot breast-flesh and her humid breath were too much.

    “Come on!” the Baroness hissed. “Give me your venom!”

    With one final, decisive thrust, a bolt of come shot out onto her left breast, followed by another which landed in her glossy black hair, followed by another that landed on her cheek, and another which streaked her glasses. The conclusory beads that followed dappled the prim, satisfied smile that had formed on her lovely lips.

    “FUCK!” I growled, and then collapsed as if hit by a sniper’s bullet.

    “That,” the Baroness said, “was hot.”

    “Yes, Baroness,” I said, left side of my mouth chewing at the couch cushion.

    “Will you be reporting for duty at Comicon next year?”

    “Yes, Baroness,” I said. “And maybe next time, you can wear the black suit, Baroness.”

    Maureen burst into laughter.

Ω

    But Maureen and I never went to another Comicon. She was only the Baroness a few days out of every year; the rest of the time, she was a temp. And, as per a temp, she was gone from the office within a couple months. I came back the Monday after a long weekend, only to have a co-worker bro explain that Maureen was gone and then introduce me to her replacement.

    I really hadn’t gotten to know Maureen well enough to miss her, but I found myself bringing her to mind from time to time. That happened less and less through the months and then the years, but that night we spent together is still with me, springing up now and again in subtle ways.

    That was the case, I think, a few Fridays back when I got into a bit of a spiral online. I was looking for Maureen on social media. When I couldn’t find her, I got to watching clips from the old GI Joe cartoon. By 3 am, I found myself on eBay, scouring the listings for figurines.

    The Baroness arrived today. I paid more than I should have to get her, but she’s in mint condition, first run. I’m not going to take her out of the plastic, but that’s not for display purposes. She’s for six-year-old me, I think, and maybe for that version of me that actually showed up to a Comicon. She’ll remain unopened, I think, out of an appreciation for times I can never have back.

A Matter of Taste

  I got a job as a teaching assistant in my later college days. The class was called “Comparative Civilizations,” a two-term, multi-instructor survey course in the humanities, and its only unifying thread was how brief, sweeping, and overly general nature of its various modules. The modules were based not upon literature, philosophy, or history, but rather on geographic regions. The students got a couple weeks on Africa, a couple weeks on South Asia, a couple weeks on East Asia, and so forth. It was taught by lazy emeriti in waiting, also-ran associate profs, and go-nowhere adjuncts. This amounted to an academic dog’s breakfast, which was harder to take as a TA than as a student. I spent every minute of my free time cramming ahead on cultures and continents I’d barely read a thing about, let alone studied in any academic depth. Atop that, every two weeks there was a test to mark. The students loved it, though, for every two weeks the class left them feeling like experts on a new, exoticized culture. They were mostly pre-med and pre-dental types trying to knock off their humanities requirement without having to write a paper. Every two weeks, I was left to decipher their grossly over-generalized scribblings about “the marvelous continent of Africa” and “the wonder that was India.”

  The faculty member entrusted with handling South Asia was an unintelligible Indic septuagenarian. He spent an inordinate amount of his lecture time talking about Advaita Vedanta, or non-dualism. When you have so much to cover in so little time, I suppose sticking to this sort of all-encompassing monism is as good a strategy as any. Advaita was, he insisted, the essence of all Indian philosophy and religion. I got a spate of emails from students who couldn’t make out the accent and couldn’t parse what the prof was saying. Still, no one showed up for my office hours, which afforded me more time to read ahead.

  The day before the India exam, the shutout was broken. A knock sounded on the door to the honours-student carrels, which I’d left ajar. I looked up to see a young woman in big glasses clutching a textbook to her chest. When she confirmed she was in the right place, I invited her in.

  She started by reclaiming her previous exam, which I fished out from the stack in my carrel. She had received a 78%, and she explained that this was considerably lower than her otherwise unimpeachable GPA. Her sights were set on medical school, and she would need to maintain at least a 3.9 to even have a shot at admission.

 She was very attractive, but this was not necessarily remarkable for pre-med and pre-dental types.

  “So what I’m saying,” she said, “is that I need to do way better on this test tomorrow. But I’m going crazy trying to study.”

   “What’s the issue?” I asked.

  “It’s this Advaita Vedanta,” she said. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.”

 “It’s monism,” I said, in a tone that would probably later qualify as mansplaining. “Everything is one. It’s actually quite simple. It’s all Brahman, the singular essence of the universe. Atman, which we can think of as the individual soul, is the same as Brahman. Realization of that through knowledge is enough.”

  “But it’s not,” she said. “Everything is not one, and it’s not all Brahman.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

 She pushed her glasses up on her nose, gearing up to deliberate. She was not only attractive, but she was adorable, too.

  “The problem is Maya,” she said.

  “Oh?” I said. My voice sounded calm enough, but mentally I was scrabbling through the cognitive lexicon I’d wrought from the course notes.

 “Yes,” she said. “This guy Shankara—it’s Shankara, right?”

   “Yes.”

  “Yeah, he talks all about Maya, this illusory force, creating the plurality of appearances that make all the things in Brahman look different. But if there’s another entity acting on its own to create this plurality, then isn’t that two things? Isn’t that dualism?”

   “No,” I said. “Maya’s not real.”

   “But aren’t its effects real?”

  She a lovely skin tone, and every part of her was pert. She had lowered her textbook down into her lap, revealing a horizontally striped t-shirt that strained atop her bosom. Her breasts were very firm, very high and very sizable, and I presumed (running that quick, fleeting inventory that the heterosexual male gaze enables), that she had a preternaturally perky bosom (especially given the size of her breasts). Either that or she benefited from a push-up bra. Whatever the case, it was no lasting concern of mine, as I was the TA and she was one among a slew of students who were complicated enough without personal ties. Moreover, she had philosophical questions she wanted answered.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it for the test,” I said.

  This was the best I could muster. She wasn’t satisfied. Her brow stormed over.

 “What if,” she said, “Maya is more like a power of Brahman? Wouldn’t that make more sense?”

 “That,” I said, “is whole different school of thought. Pure Advaita, it’s called.”

 I was impressed with myself for having retained some of my ancillary reading.

   “So what’s that all about?” she asked.

  This prompted my regurgitation of all I’d read about Shuddhadvaita Vedanta. For the next fifty-ought minutes, I told her about how the soul was of the same essence, but not equivalent to, God in Suddhadvaita, among other Vedantas. She asked about these other Vedantas, so I told her all I could remember. It was an unfamiliar thrill to have a science-type undergrad so rapt.

  “They’re pretty much all united,” I told her, drawing to a close, “by the fact that it’s not simply knowledge of the oneness that gets you to liberation. It’s accepting that you’re not fully god, and then drowning yourself in devotion to him or her or whatever, that gets you salvation. And salvation isn’t just oneness. It’s separation.”

  “Because that way,” she jumped in, “you can still, like, feel love for god, right?”

 “Yeah,” I said. “You’ve got it. Why be the sugar when you can taste it?”

  “Yeah,” she said, irises burgeoning behind her big glasses. “Yeah. Man. That makes a lot more sense than Advaita. And Advaita’s supposed to be the be all and end all of Indian philosophy? It’s too simplistic. It’s too deeply flawed. Why didn’t we hear about all these other ones?”

  I shrugged. “The prof’s got his biases. And it’s too much in two weeks. You could do a whole course on all the kinds of Vedanta and you still wouldn’t get through them all.”

 “There’s more?” she asked. “Tell me about them!”

  She touched my hand and I shot up in my seat as numbness shot up my arm. I looked at her face, which was so eager, and then my eyes retreated to her hand atop mine, the wristwatch on my wrist.

 “No can do,” I said, relinquishing my hand. “Office hours are over.”

 “That's all right,” she said. “Can you do coffee? I’m free in an hour if you are. There’s a Starbucks I always go to after class down in the mall and—”

  “No,” I interjected. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

 “TAs aren’t really allowed to fraternize with students outside of class. It’s a bit…unseemly. They make us do a web workshop on what’s acceptable and what’s not. This wouldn’t be.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. Thanks very much for your help. It feels like I’ve learned more in the last hour than I did in class.”

 “Have you had trouble understanding the prof?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine with the accent. It’s this Advaita that I can’t come to terms with. Anyway, I think I can handle it on the test tomorrow.”

  She reclaimed her textbook and hugged it to her chest anew.

  “Thanks again. And I’m Aubrey, by the way. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

***

  I did not, as it turned out, see Aubrey at the test the next day. The class was split up into two lecture halls so as to space the students out and prevent academic dishonesty, and Aubrey was with the other group. As I waited for my group to finish, I leafed through a leftover copy of the exam. Sure enough, the essay question was on Advaita Vedanta.

***

  I ended up marking the papers of the group I’d supervised. Because of the way the TA hours were divvied up, the prof had to mark the other half, much to his barely perceptible but nonetheless intensive chagrin. We finished marking by next Tuesday and posted the marks online with a notice that they could be picked up early at office hours. Come Wednesday, I lugged the stack into the TA office, and then waited for students to show. No one did.

    Except for Aubrey.

 She showed up in a fluttery rose-print sundress and white heels. She wore a choker around her throat, and a red beaded necklace around her shoulders.

  “Hi,” she said, poking her head in through the door. “I came to pick up my paper.”

  “Aubrey,” I said. “Hi.” I skimmed through the test papers. “Here we go. Right here—”

  I trailed off as I noticed the mark. She took the paper from my hand, flipped to the back.

  “It’s rough, I know,” she said. “I failed. I took a risk, I guess. It didn’t pay off.”

 She adjusted her glasses, brought the back page of her test booklet and the backhand red-ink scrawl thereupon closer to her face. She nodded.

   “Yeah,” she said. “For the long answer I wrote about Pure non-dualism and how it made more sense. ‘Any Vedanta but Advaita’ was how I put it. I said Advaita had philosophical problems, and probably political problems, too. When everything’s Maya, what happens to all the world’s problems, you know? What about poverty? What about, say, the caste system, or whatever it’s called. He says here that this was my own ‘whimsical vision.’ His words. He says I’m ‘too far removed from the real matter at hand.’ Oh well. At least he didn't give me a zero.”

  “I wouldn’t have failed you,” I said. “There’s some actual critical thinking there. That’s a lot more than I got from most people.”

 “That’s sweet,” Aubrey said. “And I want to thank you again for everything. I learned a lot. Maybe you’ll even let me get you a coffee.”

  “I told you,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You can. I dropped the class.”

  “What?”

 “It’s going to kill my GPA. I'll just take the withdrawal penalty and be done with it. I can still get into something else. Now how about that coffee? Are you up for it?”

   “Yeah,” I said. “For sure.”

***

  We did not, as it turned out, go to the coffee shop. She took me to her place, one of the row-houses just off campus with a slanted roof and eyebrow dormers. She lived here with a few other young women. None of them seemed to be at home. Her room was on the ground floor. There was a desk, a dresser, and a twin-bed. The closet doors doubled as mirrors. A window looked out over the backyard, and sunlight poured in.

    We sat on the bed and kissed for a while. Her kiss had a bright taste. Then Aubrey got up and closed the curtains, so just a thin tine of light shone in onto the bed. Smiling, she pulled her sundress up over her head. She wasn't wearing a push-up bra. In fact, she wasn't wearing a bra at all.

   Some people make a big deal about breast implants. Personally, I don't have any issues. I don't think of them as “fake tits.” While they are sometimes a bit uncanny or glossy, they are as real as their effects. And contemplating the perfect, protuberant globes on Aubrey's chest, the effect was a pronounced erection that distended the front of my jeans.

  Aubrey saw that erection and sank gracefully to her knees. She took my zipper between her thumb and forefinger and slowly lowered it. She reached into my pants and claimed my cock, gently wrestling it out. She hefted it in her tiny, hot hand, and then pecked at the very tip with her smiling lips. Her tongue poked out, its tip tracing the foreskin and the upper venations. She slowly ravelled back the foreskin and traced her lips along the crown of my cock. Soon, the empurpled glans glistened with the tracings of her spit. She opened her mouth and abruptly took three quarters of the length in one go. Her glasses slid down, and she pushed them back up to the bridge of her nose. She did this periodically as she sucked my cock. All the while, I squeezed her implants, as if spurring the dick-sucking movements of her head. I cast occasional glances to the full-length mirror, the little college girl postured perfectly pertly, naked on her knees sucking cock in the sunny afternoon, and me, with my hand in my pocket, contemplating her sucking my cock.

  She laid down on the bed on her back. As she crawled back, her legs opened, displaying a vadge like a halved peach, plump pussy lips glistening in the tine of sun that traced the untanned span of flesh around her mons. I crawled into the diamond-like perimeter of her legs and jammed my tongue into that esculent cunt. She tasted like salty, slick candy. My tongue lapped manically, auto-piloted by passion. Aubrey whelped. As her torso writhed with waves of pleasure, it was as if her pussy was wringing itself out.

  Smeared in saliva and secretions, she was more than ready for my cock. She told me as much. I crawled up onto my knees and guided my member between those pudgy pussy lips. Soon, I was mired sweetly. Soon, she'd rested her pretty ankles on my shoulders. In the mirror, I locked eyes with myself, gaze concentrated as I fucked her, lips pursed. She looked over, too, mouth in a gaping smile, eyes fluttering. I watched myself lean in and bear down, pressing her sleek shins back all the way to her collar. We were almost forehead to forehead. 

    “You like it? You like it?”

    “I fucking love it, I love it, I love it!”

   Her manic, murmured mantra trailed off into a keening wail. Her brow stormed with a pleasured frown, and she hollered out as she came. I eased back, and, as I accelerated my pace anew, I wrapped my fists around her nimble ankles. I churned my member deep into her—as deep as I could go—and, with my arms, manipulated her sprightly legs back and forth as if I were a cross-country skier. She laughed through her moans.

   Still gripping on her ankles, I pulled her legs sideward and she rolled over onto her stomach and up, her beautiful hind pressed out in full splay. I buried my face in her pussy, nose squarely in her ass. Her anus had a chokecherry musk. I moved my tongue up into it, the salivating tip circumnavigating her pristine chokecherry Cheerio. Saliva ran in rivulets down toward those fat pussy lips. Those rivulets eased my re-entry. I fucked her doggy-style for a while, gripping up mounds of milky flesh on Aubrey's heart-shaped hind. Soon enough, my hands found their way into her hair, gripping it, pulling back. She didn't bridle at having her hair pulled. She snickered saucily. Braced as such, I quickened the pace of my fucking, issuing brusque thrusts in which my thighs and crotch percussed her ample ass. From time to time, I'd let up, letting her circle that ass in what was essentially a slow twerk atop my enveloped cock. Eventually, she pushed back, and I laid down on my back while she turned to face me, feeding my cock up into her pussy.

    With the soles of her pretty feet staked in the sheets, she bounced up and down on my cock, globe-like breasts in an almost imperceptible quaver. Eventually, she hit her knees, smothering my cock in her tight, muggy vadge. She circled her hips tirelessly. Her hands played in her hair, stringing it out, spooling it around her wrists. Faster and faster she went around, and then bore down—up and down—fucking my cock until it was coated in her slickness. Then those sleek calves pressed up, and, sliding a finger her under her clit and stretching that sweet flesh upward, mouth at full gape, she let out a brief, hot effusion that pattered hotly onto my abdomen.

  “I want to taste my pussy,” Aubrey said sunnily.

   I stood up, feet sinking into the mattress. Her mouth found my cock. Slick with her juices, I slid deep into her gullet. She was her own best lube, her head speedily moving up and down on my member, eyes closed behind those big frames. I steadied myself with one hand on the bulb of her shoulder. My other hand steadied the base of my dick between the curl of my thumb and forefinger, keeping it squarely ensconced in her mouth as her head rifled back and forth. She was slurping back, getting a good taste of her nectar, and I envied her. I gripped her by her hair, pulled her mouth off my cock, and hunched down to kiss her fiercely. My tongue was profligate, lolling around in her hot, sticky mouth. That kiss tasted saccharine.

  She drew back, coughing out ropes braided with saliva and the sweet secretions she'd sucked so as to reclaim. She placed tiny kisses along the length of my cock, which ran parallel with her thin little smile.     

   “Are you going to come?”

  “Pretty soon,” I said. “I want to fuck your tits first, though.”

  “Okay,” she said, then fell back in cruciform toward the foot of the bed.

 I kneeled atop her tiny, cylindrical waist, pushing my member between her implants. Squeezing her round breasts together, I pushed forward and back between those sleek, spheroid hillocks, keeping my eyes locked on Aubrey's, even as I sped up the pace. Saliva and secretions served as my lube, enabling a rapid glide between her breasts. Aubrey's smile was as tireless as her hips. She put her hands on her breasts, thumbing either nipple, and squeezed her titties together tighter. As I manically fucked her implants, an involuntary moan coursed out from my throat. I was close and, hearing this, Aubrey beckoned me closer. I shuffled up on my knees, squared myself.

  I knelt atop her chest, her implants cushioning by thighs. My dick dangling perpendicular across her pink lips, I kneaded my glans furiously between my thumb and forefinger. At last, the come surged forth and shot out in arcing jets onto her high cheekbones, her pretty smile, her noble brow, her hair, and most of all onto her glasses. Her dark eyes were open wide, and soon so too was her mouth. As I blissed out draining my seed, I was only faintly aware I was letting out along with it a long, sustained growl. Aubrey unwrapped my fist from my cock and replaced it with hers. She squeezed the final beads of semen from my cock-tip. Come had clotted on the frames of her glasses. A long, opalescent rope decorated her left eyebrow.

   I rolled off her and sank into the twisted comforter. She took her glasses off, setting them on the nightstand.

   “Tell me more,” she said, “about pure non-dualism.”

  I let out a gust of air. I folded my hands behind my head.

   “Maya is real,” I said, sitting up. “It’s how god reveals himself endlessly, and it’s how we realize god. And do you know why he does it?”

   “Mmm,” Aubrey murmured affirmatively, her mouth full of my cock.

  “For his own pleasure. He conceals himself with Maya only so he can have the pleasure of revealing himself. And love,” I said. “Pure love is the only way to bliss.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Aubrey murmured. She drew back. “That’s beautiful,” she said.

  I guided my cock, swelling anew, back into her mouth.

   We eventually did have coffee, but not before I’d shot another salvo of come deep into her throat. She stirred three whole sugar cubes into mine, even though I’d asked for it black.

***

 When Aubrey and I parted ways later that evening, we made plans to see each other again. We never did, however.

  I suppose Aubrey went off to medical school, or wherever people go who don’t get in. They return to their anonymous towns and boroughs and neighborhoods, I suppose, to spouse-hood and parenthood. It’s as if they never existed.

  But Aubrey was all real, and she’s a realization that reveals herself to me anew whenever I taste coffee that’s too sweet, and whenever I pull chokecherries off the branch to chew and swallow whole, seed and all.