A Story of Sex and Girl-Power
"Changing Plans" erotica by Chuck Von Nordheim
Mom had nixed the idea of following Dean to UC Davis. She put up with a daughter who acted out stereotypical subservient roles as long as they both wandered the sweltering Bakersfield wilderness. After all, speaking truth to patriarchal power is hard to do in a locale where monster truck nights are the top attraction, and besides, plotting revenge against the traitorous bitch of a divorce lawyer responsible for their sun-baked sojourn took up a most of Mom’s time.
Sharon slid her fingers through Dean’s matted tangles. Nothing but knots and dry ends now, he needed to find a girl who knew moisturizers, instead of the long-hair-hating Republican bimbos he must be hooking up with.
Mom got savvy to Sharon’s impending peril, though, when she noted an absence of college apps exiting the stucco-sided ranch-style of which she was now sole owner. Mom knew sublimating yourself to man led to being tossed like an empty beer after all your good years got gulped. She insisted Sharon find her feminine mystique, go girl-power radical, and shake off the dust of her blah birthplace from her beaded sandals as soon as she could.
Sharon’s body tensed. She clutched a clump above his nape. His roots remained sturdy, a good place to anchor against the ripples of sensation he stirred with each arc of his tongue.
Step one of Mom’s plan called for Sharon going free agent. Sharon got coached on giving the “if you love something, set it free” speech. Mom, despite being a fully evolved feminist, channeled a whole lot of Hallmark.
Her toes grabbed the foam tendrils of the egg-crate pillow-top as Dean probed folded flesh with his wet tongue. Her legs taunted. She felt her ass rise up like it was being levitated.
Dean’s puppy-dog eyes kept her from cutting him off cold. Instead, she downgraded him from boyfriend to guy with benefits. Mom slammed dishes into the dish rack for a month to let Sharon know how upset she was about step one not being carried as the plan specified.
Sharon’s pelvis circled and bobbed. Dean had brought home new skills, but she kept wondering about who had done the tutoring.
The renegotiated Sharon-Dean contract provided for the said parties to check each other out on trips home. Provided both were up for it. Provided neither had committed to an exclusive arrangement with a party of the third part.
He made her wait. He jabbed here, there, with wedge-shaped tip. This nerve pinged. That one jittered. Close, closer, but never quite hitting the hardening button that would send her surfing up and over the rising swell.
Series One: 11 by Shunga, available at Obsession Art
Dean stayed in Davis over Veterans Day, not that Sharon cared. Santa Cruz made students take midterms too, and besides, a road-trip to Bakersfield spewed a lot of carbon. You had to think about the impact your actions had on the planet.
Tidal surges as sandpaper-rough taste-buds rubbed. He brushed the stem, but backed off from the crowing bulb. She quivered as he toyed with her.
Not even Dean could duck Turkey Day, not that it mattered one way or another to Sharon. She, certainly, could not opt out of the annual guilt-fest, the ever-popular emotional tussle as to whether she ate pie with mom or dad.
A stifled giggle as thrust turned to tickle. Okay, he earned a few bible-thumping bleached blondes for this.
Dean elected to exercise the provisions specified by the agreement, not that it would have made any difference to Sharon if he had not. He scaled her cinderblock wall; he crept across her windowsill.
Sharon had explored like Mom asked, romped with fourscore and ten since moving into Lincoln Hall. She liked English majors because they recited poetry. No one though, besides Dean, made her feel like she had been capsized.
In the morning, she wrote in her diary:
Greyhound got me home for Thanksgiving. Mucho carbon-friendly, but the bus took six hours longer to bounce down I5 than my Escort. I made a soldier happy in the Fresno terminal. Hope he gets the spooge off his dress greens.
Mom would say silly homesickness, but Dean made me feel all melted inside when I saw him, like the feta in a pita pizza roll.
He worries me though. He looks like he needs someone to watch over him. Maybe I should go up to Davis once in a while and make sure he hasn’t joined a cult. You can get beaucoup homework done on the bus if you don’t waste time talking to soldiers.
* * *
Sharon surveyed Bogart’s. Student blogs rated the club primo hunting ground. She avoided it, though, since she found the mix of noir posters and Santa Cruz Banana Slug memorabilia cheesy.
But the herds had fled her usual savannahs, so she stalked Bogart’s. Blame Hallmark. Their fake holiday had triggered a stampede into relationships.
Even Bogart’s had been ravaged. The flat-screen montage of Hollywood kisses played to empty stools. She spotted only one potential prey, an acne-scared guy dancing solo in a cowboy get-up.
Mom’s girl-power plan demanded sacrifices. If it were up to her, she’d take a bye. Unfortunately, she had a promise to keep.
Five words whispered into a knobby ear and Sharon left with Lone Ranger. He rubbed against her on the way our as she paused to hit the panic-bar. Well-filled Levis might make up for this hook-up’s high cheddar rating, but he’d have to be hell of a bucking bronco to make up for calling her a “little filly.”
Back at the ranch, Sharon swiped her card to enter Lincoln Hall and took the elevator up. Then she scurried down the stairs and popped the door for Lone Ranger. The passage stank of cement and lacked paint, heat, and importantly, a security camera: a fact Sharon found most helpful for breaking curfew.
His faux four inches flopped out when he unzipped. Revoke the rodeo. Cancel any dom/sub fun. When he barked at her to face the wall he had hoped to hide his lack of length, nothing more.
She supposed the mirror above her vanity counted as an unexpected complication for him. She noticed the reflection of a Nike logo before he kicked it under the bed. At least he went high-end for his falsie.
So, here she was. Head jammed into her university-provided pillow, foam pellets jiggling against her face. The sheets smelled of lemons and bleach.
Sharon believed in peace and positive energy. She wanted Lone Ranger to walk off with stoked self-esteem. But, sometimes, physics interfered with intention. This cowboy lacked the lasso to bridge the gap from arroyo to box-canyon.
She felt him wriggling at the edge of her pubic patch. It jerked around like a night crawler about to be baited, like the ones dad had carried in a can when they went to the lake. She doubted, though, that there would be paddleboats or ice cream after this cowboy finished fishing.
She had suffered the sting of being mocked for her own body’s defects. She remembered, for instance, a head-twanging bop that sent tortoise-shell frames flying. Then, gales of lacerating laughter as the self-appointed troop comic pretended to start a campfire with her 20-20 prescription. Sharon wanted to handle the Lone Ranger’s soul with more care than her so-called friends had given hers.
Neck flexed perpendicular, she pondered possible plan B’s. She knew she could make him spout if she applied suction. The seal on her mouth-vac elicited rave testimonials, but she doubted she could keep a straight face as she slurped on what more closely resembled a licorice-stick than a hot dog.
Sharon bet Lone Ranger could fix it with surgery. Some of her sorority opponents had re-sized their boobs to keep competitive. Maybe he waited for a well-hung donor to keel over. Maybe spares filled hospital fridges like packs of ballpark franks in market deli aisles, but thinking about the operation soaked him with sweat. The notion of lasers slicing her eyeballs made her queasy.
Sharon did her best to live by Mom’s girl-power plan. She had fudged steps connected to Dean, though. She held memories of the two of them she wanted to keep free from the infection of others. She held back pieces Dean particularly prized. But desperate times called for desperate measures.
“Poke your little filly from behind, cowboy,” she said.
Sharon wrote in her diary while Lone Ranger snored.
Mom’s girl-power plan boiled down: be a slut so men don’t make you their whore. Same idea said with other words in gender studies. Although I doubt Professor Kaye lets any bulls tend her turf.
Sluts pick who. Sluts say when. Sluts snag the top hotties.
Sluts also get snubbed. Sluts get skipped when florists arrive with roses. And sluts lack sock-stuffer radar.
Parents and professors put us in boxes. Live this way, not that. Choose A or B.
Dean called me back. He promised he wasn’t doing midnight sacrifices or anything else weird. He said he had to study. He studies a lot.
* * *
Sharon’s mom viewed the government as a patriarchal conspiracy, so she took a negative stand on the celebration of President’s Day. Term-paper deadlines loomed since February 19th fell smack dab in the middle of the winter quarter. Further, if she did go, she had this two-headed conundrum to consider: 1) Twenty hours of Greyhound martyrdom was a steep price for thirty-six hours of hometown happiness, 2) motoring there to avoid said martyrdom spewed nearly a ton of carbon into the atmosphere.
The cons crowded one side of the scale, but one fact weighed down the other side. Dean would be in Bakersfield.
This is how Shannon smoothed the waves of green guilt that rippled from deciding to go. She hopped on a terminal in the McHenry Library and hit Carbonfund.org. She bought five bucks of offsets. She paused at the Arco on Rio Del Mar and plumped each tire to 32 psi to ramp up fuel efficiency.
Now, Dean daubed chocolate goo on Sharon’s boobs like a repairman spackling a wall. The Kama Sutra Sundae kit included a flat-bladed knife. He had warmed it under an armpit to prevent the nipple shrinkage cold steel caused.
Vanilla incense burned. The goo smelt like a melting pudding pop. She recalled nibbling on a Long John in Dean’s kitchen while their dads drank coffee and talked sports, the memory floating up like a warm bubble inside her.
“This make up for not getting a box of chocolates?”
“Mom says Valentine’s celebrates the subjugation of women. She says I’ll be free of the need to acquire such tokens of slavery once my feminist consciousness fully evolves.”
“And think of the cash you’ll save by skipping shaving.”
Here, the rise of a mole molded in chocolate. There, the contour of a pulsing vein captured. Knife-stroke by knife-stroke he created a topological map of lust in candy.
She had missed this, Dean’s commitment to do a job right. When he took on a tune-up, he tweaked sparkplugs and timing-belts until the engine’s coughs and sputters smoothed into a throbbing hum. And when made love, he did the same.
The goo spread on slick like suntan lotion or baby oil. Then it turned gummy, like cheese whiz hors d’oeuvres made too far in advance. Her skin stretched this way and that as the candy congealed, a chocolate sauce massage.
Her body heat hardened the chocolate. She shed wisps thin as peeling sunburn that floated to the sheets she had hauled home from Lincoln Hall. Dean would sigh and spackle on another layer.
“Like a page torn from the same old book. Man gets dessert. Woman gets exploited.”
“I bought the gold upgrade. You get your own kit. Yours features a tub of dipping sauce.”
Dean’s blade skirted the swaths of skin her aureoles darkened. He told her their delicacy posed adhesion issues. Better to tackle it, he said, after honing his chocolate-spreading elsewhere.
Sharon’s nipples swelled. Their tips crinkled as they stiffened. Goosebumps clumped. Dimples dotted.
She would shake and shudder to her core when a thumb stroked them. Or a tooth nipped their edge. Intense as being drenched in an icy shower in the dark of the night at Camp Kickapoo, the four-eyed reject Girl Scout.
Her toes wriggled as she anticipated the tweaks Dean would make. This part would be finger-twisted to proper tightness. That one nudged to correct tolerance. Then piston of his passion would start chugging.
“I’ve been thinking about boxes. About the one I want to live in.”
“The Kenmore refrigerator box is roomy. That’s what I’d go for if I had to be homeless.”
“If I’m right about the box, I’ll never feel like an abandoned kid again.”
After he slipped back over the cinder block wall she wrote:
Mom will be pissed. I’m shelving her girl-power plan. Mom dreamed about me living out the plan for years. Maybe ever since Dad left. But some things fit you wrong. And like trying to jam DD boobs into a B cup bra, you’ll never squeeze into it no matter how much you hold your breath.
I choose Dean. The box I want to be put into is his wife.
I’m keeping parts of the plan. I want Dean to see his Republican hussies. His horizons expand; my orgasms amplify. Maybe he’ll be less likely to leave if he’s allowed a refuge when he gets bored. As for me, English majors will be my extracurricular fun. Sonnets beat cigarettes.
Originally published April 2010