Michelle slumped into the Victorian sofa while Samantha made coffee.  Night now felt as natural to her as daylight, and though it was nearly three-thirty in the morning, she did not feel the urge to sleep.

In a few minutes Sam came in, the room filling with the scent of rich coffee.  Michelle drank hers compulsively.

 “When I was eighteen, I went to college,” the dancer began.  Her coffee sat motionless in a saucer cradled in two hands on her lap. 

“Really?” Michelle said.

Samantha smirked.  “It’s not such a surprise, is it?  A lot of strippers have some schooling of one kind or another.”

Michelle said nothing.

“Anyway,” Sam continued, “I was in school for a year, and then my mother died from alcohol poisoning after a three-day bender.”

Though Michelle had heard about Sam’s mother’s death before, she rarely remembered personal information about people who weren’t herself.  This revelation, therefore, came as a surprise to her.  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

Sam shook her head.  “It’s okay, it was a long time ago.  Anyway, they didn’t find her for awhile.  She was alone in her house and finally after nobody heard from her for a few days my aunt went over to check on her and well, as you can imagine the house stunk pretty bad by then.”  Samantha took a sip of coffee.  “Long story short, she was not a happy woman.”

“What about your dad?”

“What about him?  Anyway, I was alone, and nineteen, and a sophomore in college.  My mom left me enough money to finish out the year, but none to continue with the last two years of my education.

“Now, I had friends at school, but when something that intense happens, you’d be surprised how many people become fair-weather, especially at that age.  Basically, I was all by myself, and despair comes easy in solitude.

“I had this professor, and he must have noticed something, because one day he asked me to come to his office hours, and instead of talking about the text, we talked about our lives and our problems, and before I knew it, I was crying over his desk.”  She paused, drinking slowly her cooling coffee.

“What did you major in?” Michelle asked to fill the silence.

The mug rested again on the saucer with a clink.  “History.  And Psychology.  But he was an English professor.  Everyone had to take at least one English literature class in my program.  His name was Louis, and he was British, except you usually couldn’t tell unless you listened to him hard.  He was young for a professor, probably in his late thirties.  He’d lost most of his accent, but he’d always slip and say the British words for things, like cues instead of lines, things like that.  His hair was always a mess, and it looked like he never ironed his clothes, but most of the girls thought he was handsome in that intellectual, brooding sort of way.  He was very smart and very sad and unsatisfied.  We started to meet regularly during his office hours, then for coffee outside of his office hours.  When the semester ended and I didn’t have him as a professor anymore, we still continued to meet.”  She chuckled to herself and set her coffee and saucer on the table.  “It probably looked atrociously unprofessional, but really, nothing was going on.  It was just that, well, he was my only friend, and I think I might have been his.

            “My mother, you see, she was very religious.  She brought me up very scared and very chaste, and aside from a few very fumbled make-out escapades early in college, I was completely naïve when it came to sex.  Our relationship was innocent.  I told him about my mother, he told me about his dissatisfaction.  He was… he was a very interesting man, but I think you wouldn’t know it to look at him.  A dullness surrounded him that I think was imposed by his situation.  He hated the dry world of academia, and I was starting to agree with him in that final semester.  I honestly probably could have gotten a scholarship to continue, but my will to learn was just gone.”

Lily had wandered in from Sam’s bedroom.  She was now sitting on the sofa in between the two women, flicking her tail from side to side and purring, eyes half closed, as Michelle scratched under her neck. 

“So, frankly, was my will to live,” Sam continued.  “I mean, aside from this guy, who was twenty years older than me, I was totally alone in the world.  I can talk about it now fairly calmly, but at the time, I was devastated.  I thought my life would never recover, and one night I decided to end it.

“It was very spontaneous, and I understand rather clichéd now, but I swallowed half a bottle of pills and sat there for a long time, waiting to pass out and die.”  She smiled a little, her eyes downcast to her left.  “Then I thought of my mother, and her rotting, bloated corpse, and what an undignified way that seemed to be to go, and I realized that’s what would happen to me.  They’d find my body rotting and bloated in my dorm room, and me only nineteen.  My mom had been thirty-six when she died, and that was even younger than Louis, my professor.  I saw how much time I’d have left to change things if I kept going, and I panicked.  I called the first – the only – person I could think of and told him what I did.  Louis called an ambulance and I rode through the night all messed-up to the hospital where they pumped out my stomach and made me drink a charcoal milkshake to clean out my system.  I spent the night there.  They wanted to keep me there under observation for a day or two to make sure I wasn’t going to do it again, try to kill myself again.  I wasn’t going to at that point, but I guess they did what they needed to do.  I studied psychology for a couple of years, so I knew what they thought of me, and I knew that they were pretty much wrong on all counts.  But I played along and slept for two nights in a stiff hospital bed with a sheet that smelled like bleach.

“The day after I came in, it was a Saturday, Louis came to visit me in the hospital.  He was compassionate, and didn’t look judgmental or disappointed at all.  He just sat with me and we talked like we always had.  We talked all day, and I think that was when I realized how much I really loved him.  I mean – I felt like I knew him in a way I had never felt about anyone before.  The next morning they released me and he came to pick me up and drove me back to my dorm.”

Lily had walked over to Michelle’s lap and was curled up in a warm, sleepy ball.  Sam drank again from her mug, even more slowly this time.

“When we got to my dorm, he asked if I wanted to be alone.  I said I didn’t, and he asked if I wanted to go somewhere else.  I said I didn’t care where we went, just as long as I was with him and away from other people.  I just couldn’t talk to anyone else yet.  I wanted to stay in this world we had suddenly created, where it was him and me just floating in this black kind of sea.  So he took me to his house, and once we were inside, alone, we looked at each other in this certain way – you know that way you look at someone and you just know you both want each other.  Like you need to become one with this person.  He looked at me and I looked at him, and we didn’t say anything.”

“You just did it,” Michelle said.

Sam choked.  “No – well, I mean, in a sense.  It’s complicated.  This’ll be hard to understand.  We… he reached out and touched my knee, then I reached and touched his face – his forehead – just lightly.  Like a feather.  But I looked in his eyes and I just.  Saw him.  Like I knew everything about him, could see his whole life in his face.  I knew what he knew.  I – I loved him.

“I was so glad the pills hadn’t killed me.  I wanted to make that – that connection that Louis and I shared – the rest of my life, so at the end of that semester, I left school for good and found stripping.

“Louis, I know, left the university a year later.  He sent me a letter telling me he was resigning and moving back to England, and I was happy for him.  He promised to send me a note with his new address, but I never got it.  It may have been because I moved around so much those first few years, but he may have just forgotten or changed his mind.  It doesn’t matter.  My time with him was what it was, and I’m glad to have had it, but any continuing relationship with him would almost seem superfluous.

“Like I said, I moved around a lot for awhile.  I worked at a lot of different clubs, from dives to the huge, classy places.  When I was about twenty-four, I found The Caribou, and I just liked it.  It fits me.  I’ve worked there ever since.”  She stopped and sat for a few moments, the story of her adult life washing over her.  “Well,” she said, “I guess it wasn’t that long of a story after all.”

Michelle, cuddled with the cat, breathed in deep, languid rhythm, eyes closed.  Sam reached out a long arm and shook the girl awake.

“You better get to bed,” she said.  “Work again tomorrow.” 

Michelle blinked, nodded, and apologized for falling asleep on her neighbors couch before leaving for her apartment.

Right before she fell asleep in her own bed, she remembered pieces of Sam’s story, but realized she didn’t know how it ended.  She wanted to go back, but she was too tired and too embarrassed to pull herself out of bed.  In the morning, she had forgotten it entirely.

Filed under: Michelle, Samantha, sex by Jade