Clubs

Delilah arrived on campus wanting to put the weekend's events behind her. And she made the attempt with all the effort a B-minus student can muster. She lasted all the way till lunch, when she entered the dining hall to meet Sebastian. Finding him wasn't hard. At first he kept a somewhat stable schedule, so whenever she needed to find him she just followed the French and looked for the man out of time wearing a Biggie shirt. As she walked into the main area, the sounds of talking and cooking filled every nook and cranny the same way cheese fills macaroni. Back when the school actually had money it was a buffet-style service, and the building is still designed to support that setup, but given the many years of leaner budgets everything is made to order; it saves on the food budget and is supposedly better for the environment. Delilah never had an opinion because her lunch was either ramen, nothing, or paid for with Sebastian's goodwill.

She still found it strange to be able to afford a lunch that someone else made. She found herself palming the heart in her choker without thinking. She had been given access to a level of comfort she could only dream of at the cost of her privacy and sexual autonomy. Her mind was screaming the trade wasn't worth it. Her stomach wasn't so sure. She tucked the choker's pendant into her shirt, the silver heart resting between her breasts. Today happened to be grilled chicken with a baked potato and what the FDA called a side salad. At the coffee machine was Sebastian, using the dispenser to pour milk into his coffee. "Uhhhhh" rolled slowly out of Delilah's mouth with the speed of frozen molasses. On the machine there was a sticker that said, boldly, *Local Milk — Proudly Served by Edgar's Family Farm*, with a picture of a woman with a cow's-ear headband, a big bell on her collar, and a livestock tag on her ear. The image cut off just at her shoulders, but if the image had continued Delilah had a good guess of what else was there. Sebastian raised an eyebrow. "You alright?" he asked while taking a sip of his American coffee flavored with Edgar's hucow breast milk. Delilah felt her stomach become the setting for a Bruce Lee fight scene. Her wincing pressed the sides of the belt into her soft skin, teasing her pussy with the reminder of what it can't have. She made a point to look elsewhere when he would take a sip of coffee.

They sat and talked. Sebastian talked mostly about all the things medical students learn about, most of which was gross and went over the finance major's head. "And then we went through the central artery," he explained, while Delilah chewed her food. The meal itself was nothing exciting, but Delilah was so used to skipping the midday meal that something in her stomach was welcome, even as she listened to Sebastian talk about music that was new when her parents were teenagers. Delilah did make her tastes known, reminding the med student that music with instruments was just as good as music without them, citing her preferred dark emotional ballads. The conversation remained in its place of going nowhere until both students departed for their afternoon classes, stepping out into the concrete courtyard that was between all of the school buildings.

The clubs were out fundraising. The campus gave each club a grand total of 200 dollars, which was generous in 1981 but now wouldn't last a month. So club fundraising was about as common as fog and DUI notices over at Greek Row on the weekends. Delilah passed the anime club with its loud tablet and their big busty waifu statues. Delilah used to like anime. Well, she liked the Pokémon anime and still did, but found it hard to set some time aside for … anything, really, when you're trying to paradoxically keep your head above water and get ahead in life. Delilah passed quickly, narrowly dodging someone who stopped to look. Next was the Culinary Collective, which was just the cooking club with a fancy name and a fancy look. Basically they got access to some of the fancy old stuff from storage that the campus hadn't sold yet, which created an air of 1970s luxury that sat in the uncanny valley because all of the students only understood the seventies from movies their parents introduced them to. They commanded the most space, so Delilah had extra steps to her trip by going around them. Speaking of movies, the Cinema Club was next and it was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get situation. They watched movies, pirated of course, and the fact that the town's only movie theater had closed down ten years ago made them very popular. The pair of students ducked into the crowd to get closer to the next building. After that it was the Civic Society, student government, and student UN, which Sebastian avoided since he was the only French student on campus and was busy enough. Delilah went the long way around the 4-H club because their milking demonstration was giving her flashbacks and cute piglets weren't going to trap her. She did briefly allow her mind to wander to dark places. Suddenly the picture of the cow getting milked was replaced with a woman with pendulous udders getting milked, her gagged mouth moaning in ecstasy. But she quickly shook those thoughts as she slid through a gap between two tables and passed by a third. Geology club, slackline club, poetry society were all perfectly normal, save for one of the rocks on the Geology club's table looking a little too long and smooth to be natural. "Get your mind out of the gutter," Delilah lectured herself. Then, as she turned down the concrete concourse, she felt her heart skip a beat.

It was the queer student union. "Oh, here we go," Sebastian sighed, but Delilah was deaf to his exasperation; a faint buzzing was all that could be processed in her ears. The Queer Student Union was Dominique's baby — she'd taken an undersupported gay-straight alliance and turned it into a political force that could command the administration's attention. Delilah found it impressive, if not inspiring. Threatening the union was a mistake, and several local churches and a few members of the administration had made it this year already. Dominique had her own internal fire, and her parents' money behind it. She had just this year held a protest outside the church that was frequented by one of the administrators overseeing the college's finances. Dominique had also managed to rope in members of the English department, Coach Debbie and Coach Langstaff, and even the football team. It was a major scandal for months until a private agreement was reached. Delilah was weak to someone who had such confidence and moved through the world with such grace. Like the hunchback who could only watch from far away in her cathedral, Delilah looked at her Esmeralda from afar. So far away, in fact, that within a month Dominique had scooped up Delilah's fellow finance major Riley Fisher without Delilah even hitting Dominique's gaydar. Of course Delilah was dating a man who was actively cheating on her at the time and refusing to acknowledge her more sapphic feelings, so the situation was more complicated than a simple romance story. Sebastian was witness to this ritual at least once per week. His normally very focused friend would be caught unprepared when she saw the foreign student and let her schoolgirl crush fall out of her brain. "You don't think it's a little weird that you're crushing on someone who's already taken?" he asked, slinging Delilah right back into her body. Delilah stiffened like an icy stick in winter and shot back with, "No, I don't… I mean, no, I don't have a crush." Delilah went into defense mode. Sebastian just shook his head. "You're going to have to address this stuff or it's going to manifest in weird ways." Delilah didn't have the capacity to explain, both to herself and to Sebastian, that it had in fact gotten very weird already. What was also weird, from Delilah's point of view, was Dominique's outfit.

Though Dominique never used the words herself, her frequency of both black and sharp suits put the Spanish girl into the corporate goth category in terms of dress. So any deviation was worth noticing. And Dominique's current outfit was definitely worth noticing for Delilah. It was a black sports jacket and pants, while underneath was a skin-tight latex bodysuit. "No way," Delilah whispered, making notes in her head. Heat pooled behind her belt as her body demanded satisfaction that it couldn't have. Dominique clocked Delilah from a few feet away the way a hungry lion clocks a wounded gazelle. The latex gleamed in the daylight, with everything from the neck down wrapped in a layer of gleaming material. It was a bit too convenient for someone on campus to be running around in latex while she had had her hide blistered by someone wearing latex. Delilah needed to really get down to it and start putting the facts together. But as she watched Dominique from afar, Delilah's mouth went dry and her sex continued to cry for attention. It would be horrifyingly perfect for her crush to be her blackmailer, but as much as she subconsciously wished it was so, wanting it didn't make it true.