Discreetly yank your chain

You narrow your eyes at the door and decide that as long as you can do it quickly and discreetly you should be fine to rub one out right now.

You step into the shower and feel the hot water rinse the accumulated sweat and grime off your body. You soap up your body, shampoo in your hair, marveling at how different it feels from before. Where there might have been just a little bit of fat under your skin there is now none, even if you aren’t a musclebeast, you definitely feel fitter than you did.

Fitter and bigger, you think, as you feel your cock bouncing up and down in front of you. You rinse the soap and shampoo off yourself and reach out to the conveniently placed pump-bottle of moisturizer, and are quickly lathering up your pecker.

As you begin to stroke your shaft, memories of Vernius from last night come flooding back to you. You close your eyes and focus her image in your imagination, the feel of her skin against yours, the softness of her body under you. With each stroke, you grow closer to your inevitable release. You imagine how it would have felt to unload your aching balls inside that goddess’s body, just filling her up with your seed. Your hand moves faster and faster, the pressure building up inside you, a grunt escaping from your lips drowned out in the sound of running water.

You feel your pleasure and the pressure inside your balls mounting, mouth hanging open now. You grit your teeth, bucking your hips into your hand in pursuit of your release, which is being shockingly coy. Something feels up, you think, usually it isn’t this hard to get your rocks off, but right now, for whatever reason, it is.

Your efforts at self-pleasure redouble, and you bring your other hand up to stoke your entire length at once. Again, you feel the pressure and pleasure building, but no ejaculation shoots forth.

Your eyes scrunch, quietly grunting, your hands sloppy with moisturizer and precum, but still no release.

For Alice, idly staring into and stirring the chicken noodle soup in the kitchen, she also could not help but feel like something was off. She’d been smacked in the face with some musky smell, sweet and earthy like ripe fruit, that was overpoweringly strong on walking in here which had left her head reeling and eyes nearly watering.

But Mark’s note had given her suspicions. He had opened the windows, what a few hours ago, and it still smelled like this? Had it smelled all musky here last night when she had helped John into his dorm? She could believe that John, being a college boy, might relax his hygiene standards in the comfort of his own dorm, but what could even do to make the whole place smell this much?

And then there was John. Her eyes narrow at her bespeckled reflection in the soup. Something about John seemed off. She could have sworn that he looked, what, different? More muscular? More unkempt? More manly? Had he been going to the gym more often and she hadn’t noticed? Who exactly was he trying to impress?

Alice shrugged, tucking a hair behind her ear. She had to suppose that he’d probably think the same things if he showed up at her door after she slept in all day. Except for the going to the gym part, she thought, glancing down at herself.

Regardless, she would like to think that she would not have never come to the door with sweat-stained underwear that basically hid nothing from view. She glanced over at John’s bedroom, the door ajar, the water running. She was quite sure that she’d herself never be quite that shameless, even if it technically wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before.

Her eyes narrowed at her reflection in the soup as it started to lightly bubble. She turns down the heat on the stove to keep it warm.

There were still a lot of things in her mind that hadn't added up about last night that she wanted to see if she could get answers from John before submitting a formal report. She frowned as she searched the cupboards, and then pulled out two bowls and soup spoons. A formal incident report was not what she wanted on her record, especially if she wanted to go off to graduate school after next year.

It wasn’t even a matter of John being a clutz, both he and she were off the record and on the down low working down there in the archives unsupervised. If she submitted a formal incident report about a student falling off an unstabilized ladder as part of the department’s little black ops, that became a minefield that was administrator and legal team territory. That was people getting asked to give signed statements, injury lawyers circling like vultures with dollar signs in their eyes, and anyone without tenure possibly looking at the door, and Alice was not about catching any of that smoke if she could help it. No, she thought, keep it under wraps for now. If John didn’t say anything about it then neither would she.

She sets the bowls out on the table, and looks at Mark’s note again. Her eyes narrowed to slits. She was pretty sure she knew exactly who the “she” in his note was referring to, and she did not like it one bit.

She wasn’t surprised that Mark had, well, opinions about her, no doubt in part passed along from John. She knew it was an unreasonable expectation for John to actually be fair and unbiased to his roommate about their shared history, but that did not make her feel better. Just the way that Mark had underlined she, her, Alice, was not supposed to be here. She was the begrudgingly welcomed guest, if that, it was hard to tell if John was surprised, upset, or indifferent to her just showing up at his door after the events of last night. Last night.

Images of John on the floor, not moving, hardly breathing flashed across her vision.

She was getting herself worked up, she could feel it. She had been working herself into a right tizzy all day, and was outright panicking when John had been a no show at the archives. The fact that she had shown enough concern to speed over here from campus to check on him, for him shocked herself a little, some little ember of―

“The past is the past,” she sighs, halting that train of thought there, setting out the spoons on the table and swallowing down her simmering anger.

She shouldn’t get angry, she thought to herself. But she also knew herself, and knew the sort of snipes that she took at John all the time, and knew that she did not know why, except that she did. Why was she so rude to him all the time, she thought. Did he deserve that sort of treatment?

He was her ex-boyfriend from high school; he had been the one to hear the first time she had ever uttered those three little magic words high school girls desperately wanted to say, “I love you”; he had been the one who had laid her down in her bed and made her a woman for the first time; and he had been the one that she first thought seriously about building a life with after school.

She frowned. Of course, when a teenage girl says “build a life” that is more fantasy than achievable reality. It is dreams of a painless love that ill prepared her for the sheer hard work of loving someone else. Made no easier by her own inadequacies, which when she was little her princess movies had told her would magically disappear once she found her Prince Charming. And when her own inadequacies didn’t, and she clammed up, well―

Then she heard a knock at the door, jolting her out of her introspective state.

“Coming!” she says, moving fast out to the living room.

Alice opened the door, surprising Kathrine and herself into stunned silence. There’s a long pause as the two women collect themselves, exchanging dazed looks.

“Hey, uhh,” Alice says, stiff as a board, “Kamila?”

“Hi Alice,” Kathrine replies, “it’s Kathrine,” stiff as a two by four.

“What are you doing here?” Alice asks, glancing around behind Kathrine suspiciously.

“My brother lives here?” Kathrine replies, looking around behind Alice at the inside of John’s apartment just as confused.

“Oh, yeah,” Alice replies with a **** laugh, “right.”

“And what exactly are you doing in his apartment?” Kathrine askes, “and where is he?”

“Oh,” Alice says, giving an awkward smile, “I, ahh, well,” she continues, Kathrine raising a curious eyebrow, “he’s in the shower?”

“Kay,” Kathrine replies, “can I come in?”

“Oh,” Alice says, stepping out of the way, “yeah, come on in, but, ah,” hesitating as Kathrine steps through the threshold, “but be careful of the smell.”

Kathrine gives her an accusing glance.

“What’s that supposed to―” Kathrine snaps and then stops mid-stride, hit with vertigo and her head full of the musky smell of something noxiously sweet, earthy, and alluring.

“Yeah,” Alice says flatly, “that.”

“Wow,” Kathrine coughs, suddenly feeling her heart beating faster, “what is that?”

“Beats me,” Alice replies, leading Kathrine into the kitchen to check on the soup. Alice watches as Kathrine sits down at the table, still recoiling from the smell.

They sit together in silence, the two of them exchanging sidelong glances at each other. Both of them are anxious, not sure if or how to approach the conversation at hand.

“There’s soup here,” Alice says, “would you like some?”

“I’m good,” Kathrine says, “but,” she coughs again, chest feeling warm, “let me open a window.”

Kathrine, feeling increasingly lightheaded, went to the kitchen window and slid it open, getting a single breath of fresh air before the musky smell invaded her nose again. She wandered into the living room and repeated the step, opening the window.

Alice watches as Kathrine opens the door to John’s room fully, and watches her flinch back, hard. And then the smell hits her again for a moment, stronger again.

“Oh wow,” Alice says, blinking hard.

For Kathrine though, her head is dizzy, and her stomach hot. She blinks and looks to the window in John’s room, cracked open just enough to let in a little air. The heat in her stomach is spreading fast, and she forces herself into the bedroom, holding her breath the whole while, until she can throw the window wide open.

She breathes again, doing her best to only do it through her nose, but she catches a whiff of something different and unfamiliar. Not the earthy smell that permeates the whole room, but one that she can’t quite place, something like ammonia or squid perhaps. She sniffs the air, her knees growing weak, following it without knowing it, zeroing in towards your hamper.

The sound of the water shutting off finally brings her back to the mortal realm, and she hurries out to the less fragrant air of the kitchen and sits down at the table, trying to compose herself.