I Werewoman 1 Read online

  “Mmrraahhh—it’s so good to see you!” Katie beamed at me, releasing me from the hug and bouncing back a pace, tucking a few stray hairs beyond one delicate ear. Although she usually wore her layered blonde hair down around her shoulders, tonight she had it up in some kind of elegant ‘do.

  “Wow, you look good,” she exclaimed, reaching up to brush her fingers against the short stubble on my chin, “Kind of sexy with a bit of scruff on you.” I flushed at that, and she laughed. “Ohhh, my god, it sucked not being able to talk to you all summer!”

  “Ditto!” I agreed, still grinning myself. “I kept wanting to call you up and ask you out for lunch and then remembering that I couldn’t!”

  “I-I kept waiting for you to call me up and ask me to lunch and then remembering why you weren’t!” The pretty blonde girl laughed, and her eyes sparkled. Something stirred inside of me at the sound of her laughter, and to my surprise, it suddenly occurred to me that the two of us might not have expended all of our physical chemistry during the previous academic year. There was still something sparky there.

  “Like you said,” I laughed, quickly, suddenly flustered, “It sucked!”

  Over Summer Break, while the demands of my course of studies kept me confined to the States, going through a Met museum collection in New York City, Katie had travelled overseas to London, Normandy, and Paris to explore medieval archival material related to the Angevine Empire. The two of us had loosely kept in touch over text, but there hadn’t been very many opportunities to really sit and talk, and now, now that she was smiling at me the way she was, and sparkling at me the way she was, and now that I could feel my body responding to her the way it was… I wondered if all that time apart hadn’t invoked one of the lesser laws of the universe: ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’

  Or, well, given the way she was looking me over and the way my eyes kept being drawn down towards her ample… um, assets, maybe it wasn’t the heart that was so much at play here, as the pants. I was still sporting a substantial, um… arousal, from a few moments before, when I’d been staring at the Airbrushed Beauty across the rooftop, only now the hardness in my pants seemed to be responding to Katie’s proximity rather than to the woman in the red dress.

  Speaking of which…

  I glanced up from my blonde lady friend’s face and gazed out over her head in the direction of the raven-haired woman whose loveliness had held me so transfixed only moments before, but she was gone now. For just a moment, I frowned, feeling a brief surge of disappointment, but it quickly passed. Just now, with the bright and bubbly Katie bouncing up and down excitedly in front of me, the strange, almost fatalistic captivation, resignation, and acceptance I’d been feeling just a few seconds earlier had all but gone, leaving only a strangely frustrated sensation deep inside of me. Fleetingly, I wondered what had happened to the airbrushed goddess. Had she found whomever it was she was looking for? But before I could follow that thought train more than a few inches out of the station, the brightly beaming smile of the blonde girl in front of me pulled me back out of my thoughts and brought me back into the moment at hand.

  “So, uhm,” I shook my head slightly and frowned, coughing and redirecting my attention back towards the pretty blonde girl in front of me, simultaneously forcing myself to keep my gaze focused several inches above her prominently displayed bosom, “How was Archiving?”

  Katie’s smile grew wider, more mischievous, as she watched me visibly refocus my gaze—and restrain myself from letting my eyes drift any lower than the level of her shoulders—either flattered, tickled, or pleased by the attention; I could not tell which. Stepping up to the balustrade alongside me, she turned and leaned back against the railing, slipping my nearly empty drink out of my hand with a wink.

  “It was good,” she enthused, her eyes lighting up once more. She launched into an exhaustive, breathless account of her adventures diving into the carefully curated Medieval archives of both lower England and Northern France, excavating venerable, weathered codices reaching hundreds of years, nearly a millennium back in time, and growing almost rapturous in her description of actually holding a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript in her (carefully gloved for preservation purposes) hands. Apparently, her faculty advisor on campus had travelled with her, and his contacts in the Archival and Museum disciplines abroad had opened doors for Katie that allowed her access to numerous old, incredibly valuable pieces of antiquity that she would never have been allowed to view as a student on her own.

  “So yeah, it was good,” she said again, gasping for breath at the end of her account. We both laughed, her cheeks flushed with excitement and embarrassment at having gotten so swept up in telling the story of her summer adventures, and then she took a sip of the ‘punch’ and made a delighted sound deep in her throat. “Mmm! And so is this! What is it?”

  “Uhm,” I shrugged and relaxed back against the balustrade myself, trying to keep my eyes off of Katie’s figure and playing the renewed attraction between us cool. “Some kind of tropical punch, but I think someone added a bit of a… kick to it.”

  “Ooooh, yeah?!” Katie grinned again and took another sip, then closed her eyes and made a thoughtful face as she let the taste wash slowly through her. “MMmmm… yeah,” she pronounced a few seconds later, “I think you might be right. There’s like a sort of fruity aftertaste, a bit like, um, like…” She seemed to struggle with locating the word.

  “Pineapple?” I suggested, based on my own guess.

  “Pineapple, yeah! Something like that—but there’s like a little burn, too…” She took one more, final sip of the punch before it was gone, and then giggled, shivering and doing a little wiggle all up and down her body. “Annnnnnd yeah, there’s that, too!”

  I felt a flush come to my cheeks again and had to pull my eyes away from Katie’s deliciously scrumptious figure again for the… something-th time that evening. I remembered a little detail that she’d told me during a particularly sexy round of history-themed drinking-game-trivia the previous year about her body’s… stimulating reaction to alcohol, and felt an abrupt resurgence of my own arousal tightening up inside my pants.

  “It’s turning you on, isn’t it?” I asked, licking lips that suddenly felt dry.

  She giggled again, and impulsively snuggled into my side, leaving the question hanging in the air.

  “Oh, Rick, Europe was amazing!” She exclaimed, waving the empty glass around demonstratively. “I wish you could have been there! I mean, the food in London is terrible, but the French food I ate in Paris totally made up for it. And there’s so much to see and explore—Oh, I went to the Tower! Did I tell you that?”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Eiffel or London?”

  She nodded emphatically, and then laughed. “Both! Yes! Oh, and Stonehenge! It was so incredible. I mean, to stand there, in the presence of those ancient stones and just, you know, feel how old they are, and how much they’ve seen, and how much more they will see, like, long after we’re all gone?” She held up an excited finger. “Hey, you know, I bet that’s how your roommate—you know, Brian—I bet that’s how he feels when he sees the Pyramids, don’t you think?”

  I nodded eagerly, finding myself caught up in her enthusiasm. “Yeah, probably. Did you get any pictures?”

  “Mmhmm, lots.” She nodded, tried to take another sip of the ‘Punch,’ and then frowned with disappointment when she realized that there wasn’t any more to be had. “And of the Roman ruins in London, too.” She grinned when I stood up a bit straighter at that, showing my obvious interest. “Haha, see? I thought you’d like that.”

  I nodded, grinning out of one side of my face again. “Well, you were right. What all did you see?”

  Katie reached into the shoulder bag that she had slung over her left shoulder and crosswise across her body for her smartphone, pulling it out, unlocking it, and diving into the photo gallery while I craned for a look around her head.

  “Ummm, let’s see. The Old Roman Wall,” she
started listing off sights as they came up in her gallery, “The Baths at Billingsgate, the Amphitheatre—those two are just foundational ruins, though, I’m afraid.”

  I shrugged. “Hey, I’m flattered you thought to take any pictures for me at all.”

  She winked mischievously at me and snuggled just a little bit closer. The sensation of her soft, warm body pressing up against mine made the arousal in my trousers grow just that much more insistent. “Well, I suppose you were… kinda on my mind, a lot, while I was over there,” she teased, in a sort of half purr.

  The sound of her purring stiffened the arousal in my pants into a full erection, and I sucked in a breath, taking Katie’s lead as an invitation and sliding one hand around her waist and down over the fullness of her hip. The raven-haired woman that I’d been fixated on just a few moments before was all-but-forgotten now.

  Brian might not be the only one who gets lucky tonight, I thought, more than a little bit surprised myself. I had been fairly sure that this thing between Katie and myself was done, had been done, for months now, but now that we were back in each other’s presence, after only three or four months apart, it felt like all of our physical chemistry was suddenly reigniting.

  “I thought a lot about you, too,” I admitted to the blonde girl, turning my face towards hers and pressing my lips and nose against the soft hair on the top of her head. I felt a little shiver of pleasure run through her body, and the hand I had resting on her hip pulled her even more closely against me, as I turned my body towards hers and pressed my—

  Blooooop-bloop… Blooooop-bloop… Blooooop-bloop…

  “Fils de Salope!” Katie swore, vehemently, in a language that I belatedly recognized as French, as her smartphone began persistently bloooping at the two of us from inside her purse with an incoming call notification. We both froze for a moment, hoping that the call would just go to voice mail, but after a good ten seconds of waiting the annoying noise paused for only a couple of heartbeats before returning once again.

  “Damnit,” I swore, under my breath.

  “Yeah, you said it, pal,” Katie groused.

  Pulling away from me with a frustrated sigh—I backed away slightly myself, to give her more room to maneuver—Katie fumbled with the clasps and zipper of her handbag momentarily before she was finally able to remove the loudly ringing device from her bag. The phone kept on ringing throughout. Whomever was on the other end did not seem inclined to let matters go.

  “I’m sorry,” Katie shot me a frustrated, somewhat frazzled look as she turned the phone right side up in her hand and glanced at the screen. She pouted, taking a deep breath. “I forgot he was going to call…”

  “He?” I stood up a bit straighter and blinked, taking a quick look at the screen of her phone myself.

  “‘Pierre?’” I asked, feeling a sharp, jagged mixture of both surprise and jealousy run through me as the memory of her mentioning a ‘Pierre’ somebody or other from the Archival Staff at one of the Paris Institutions she had worked in over the summer abruptly returned to me. “Le Trésor des Chartes Pierre?”

  “Yeah, um…” Katie’s frustration melted into a grimace of apology and embarrassment as she backed another half step away and raised her thumb over the glowing green ‘Answer’ button superimposed on the screen of her phone. “We hooked up a few times in July, and I kinda promised him that we’d keep in touch, and…”

  While the surprise faded, the jagged spikes of jealousy which were still running through me started stabbing, dagger-like, at the feelings of renewed attraction and arousal that had been building up inside of me not more than thirty seconds ago. My ardor began to deflate like a punctured hot air balloon. The shadow of bitterness and resentment fell upon me, as much as I tried not to let it –after all, we hadn’t been an item or anything when Katie had gone overseas for the summer, and we weren’t even hooking up for the better part of the spring semester before that, but still, somehow, the idea that she had gone and casually hooked up—repeatedly—with some French guy over summer break, without ever mentioning it to me—which was fine, in and of itself—and that then as soon as she got back to Boston she’d tried coming on to me again, without—apparently—having really broken things off with the other guy, did made me feel… a little disposable. Used, even.

  Our relationship had always been, from inception, really, a casual, physical thing, without any of the deliberately datey-romantic aspects that both of us had claimed we were trying to avoid while we started off in grad school, but still… I had thought there was some kind of emotional bond between Katie and myself. Mutual friendship and respect, if nothing else. I wouldn’t have gone off and fucked someone else and then come back and tried to get in Katie’s pants again without having at least some kind of conversation about it. Sure, we were ‘casually’ hooking up, but we were also friends, right? But now, the image I’d had in my head of a sort of… special, unique connection between Katie and I started to crumble. Apparently either ‘our thing’ was much more casual than I had actually understood it to be, or I was less prepared for an on-and-off again fling than I had thought I was. Maybe both were true. In the moment just then, though, I wasn’t able to fully process my emotions. I needed some… well, some space. Some air. I needed some air.

  And so, I said that out loud.

  “You know, I think I… I think I need some air.” Holding up a hand, I cut Katie’s explanations off in mid-sentence. Wearing a tight smile, trying to show that I wasn’t angry with her or anything, I backed a few steps of my own away, slowly, putting some distance between the two of us, and then turned to go, nodding at the phone in her hand as I did so. “We’ll catch up later. I’ll give you some privacy for that.”

  “Rick! Richard!” Katie called out after me as I departed, but I resolutely kept walking. “H-hey!–I’m sorry!”

  I knew that. And I really wasn’t trying to hold anything against her or make her feel bad. I just needed to be somewhere else just then, so that I could breathe a little, and think. And she needed to answer that call. A moment later, as I sliced my through the middle of the still moribund clump of frightened first years hovering on the outer edge of the big clump of partying grad students circulating around the center of the rooftop, I heard Katie finally pick up the call from Pierre, crooning something low and inaudible, but unmistakably French, into the microphone in a conciliatory tone, and shook my head, feeling a strange mixture of both jealousy and pity towards the unsuspecting guy on the other end.

  Chapter Four

  Leaving both Katie and the balustrade behind me, I angled, in perforce a sort of meandering manner, towards the punch bowl on the opposite side of the rooftop, hoping that another glass of the probably-spiked drink would help me wash away the bitter taste of my disappointment. And to my relief, it did. Somewhere near the middle of my second glass of the fruity nectar, I sighed, feeling my shoulders slump with the release of tension, and let go the negative emotions I was holding on to.

  Katie hadn’t done anything wrong, hooking up with a French guy while we she was away in Paris. She’d done exactly what I would have done under similar circumstances. I could see that now, after a few more sips of the delicious Tropical Punch. We weren’t a couple; had never been a couple, and we weren’t even actively sleeping together when she’d left for Paris in the Spring. Hadn’t been for months! If it had been me in her place, me who had gone off to Paris and met some hot French… girl named, um, say… Jocelyn, or Nicolette, or something… who was into me, I would definitely have slept with her, and that would have been totally okay! I mean, hopefully I would have told Nicolette, or Jocelyn, or whoever that whatever we had was a totally casual thing (not sure what was going with Pierre, there, in that regard), and if I’d run into Katie on my return from Summer Break and decided I wanted to hook up with her again, I’d like to think I’d have told her about my summer hook-up prior to climbing into bed with her again, but…

  I don’t know. Maybe that wasn’t as realistic an expectati
on for either me or Katie to have fulfilled. Would I have reacted with such disappointment if she had mentioned Pierre after we’d slept together again? Making my way through the crowd towards another corner perch on the opposite side of the rooftop from where I’d been standing before, I had another sip of my second glass of ‘Mystery Surprise Punch’ and regretfully concluded that I probably would not have cared, had Katie mentioned her hooking up with Pierre to me in any other context than the one we’d just experienced—getting a call from said French foreign booty call while she and were in the early stages of what was shaping up to be a renewed casual fling of our own.

  Reaching that conclusion drained the last of my bitter resentment away. Katie hadn’t done anything wrong—not with regards to me, anyway, although she might owe that Pierre guy an awkward conversation or two. Although the feelings of disappointment, and my lingering hard-on, were still with me, I didn’t hold anything against Katie. And although she’d already apologized to me, I realized belatedly that… she didn’t really have anything to be sorry for. In fact, if anything, I felt like I probably owed her an apology now for the abruptness of my exit.

  Glancing back over my shoulder in the direction of the opposite end of the rooftop, I momentarily considered crossing the distance again to apologize to her right then and there. I ultimately decided it against the idea, however. I couldn’t make Katie out on the far side of the rooftop through the mass of party-going graduate students continuously circling about the center of the party space, but even if she was still there, she could well be in the middle of an emotionally uncomfortable conversation with Pierre, and I didn’t want to stick my nose into that whole mess again. Better to just give her some space tonight and then text her first thing the following morning.