The RA
Chapter One: Fall Break
 
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so. During the hiring process last year. We didn’t do interviews together, but I remember walking into the room as you were on your way out. I remember doing a double take and then feeling like a real heel about it. But, um, yeah. You looked good.”
Ramona let my cock slide out of her mouth and shifted to a two-handed grip. I’d never had anybody two-hand me before. It felt like there was a lot of ways it could go wrong, but my manager made feel all too right. “Wrong answer, master, but it’s sweet enough I’ll let it slide.”
“Oh?”
“RA training. Not here, but last year. My first at Lakeview. I did a training campus-wide session. Creating community buy-in, or something like that. It wasn’t very good.”
“Oh yeah! Yeah, now that you mention it. Your hair was different then. Like… not blonde, but… Orange? Kind of?”
“It was a phase. We don’t need to discuss it. I’d just gotten married and I was already chaffing. My hair was something I could rebel with.” 
Ramona gave my shaft a few slow, sensuous licks to maintain lubrication. Or maybe she just needed another microdose of whatever it was whoever it was had pumping out of every pore in my body.
“That doesn’t count as meeting, though. Every RA on campus was there. I went to a Taylor Swift concert in high school but I don’t tell people I met Taylor Swift.”
“Don’t think I won’t be asking what baby Spencer was doing at a Taylor Swift concert–”
“I went with my girlfriend.”
“–but it wasn’t just the presentation. Afterwards I was talking to some of the other HD’s and you walked up to ask John something. We were introduced, very briefly.”
I shook my head. “Dang. I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I mostly remember noticing you were cute, though then less in the sense of wanting you for myself. At the time, I’d noticed the half dozen RA’s watching your every move and being glad I didn’t have that distraction on my staff.”
“And now you’re on my staff.” I couldn’t help myself. Puns were the worst jokes and sex puns were the worst puns, but still. A whole week of lounging around the empty residence hall with nothing to do but fuck my manager had worn out my premium pillow talk.
“I thought you said you preferred we maintain the illusion that I am in control of Higgins Hall,” she said, moving her knees a little closer so her breasts brushed against my shaft. “But if you prefer we inform your coworkers that they now report to you…”
“I was kidding!”
Ramona smiled, then split that smile to make room in her mouth for my cock. It still looked like a smile, though. Maybe it was that joy in her eyes. We’d had sex so many times I knew every tiny bump inside her vagina by heart, and she’d had no complaints, to put it humbly. Yet it was my cock inside her mouth that truly drove her wild.
It made me miss Savannah something awful, but she was keeping busy back at her parents’ place. We’d texted a little, but she’d finally sent a message last night that said she needed to see me, and her intended arrival time Sunday. I somehow doubted talk was what she had in mind. If there had ever been a woman who loved sucking a man’s cock as Savannah loved mine, I’d never heard of her.
“I know you were kidding, master. I was teasing. Though, if the Spencer effect is pronounced as you say, it seems it will wind up that way anyway.”
“Hmm. You’ve got a lot of jokes for a lady who was told to blow her master.”
Those words were hard for me to say, but less hard than they’d been at the start of break. Still, Ramona was not kidding about her enjoyment being my sub, so I’d been teaching myself to be more domineering. It was a favor, really, though I wasn’t going to pretend it was an onerous one. I’d always thought of myself as a giver in the bedroom (not that mine and Ramona’s spaces had distinct bedrooms), but in this case, giving her she wanted from me meant taking what I wanted from her.
Case in point, my manager’s eyes slid shut as she took my mild rebuke to heart. The woman really knew how to put her whole body into a blowjob. Jerking me off while her mouth worked the top, her tits brushing against it with each bob of her neck, bobs that went down her whole torso. She brushed her hair back at frequent intervals to make sure I had an unfettered view of her at all times. Like in porn, she’d said, and I had to concede for once that porn was doing sex right in this particular instance.
Marisa would hate to hear me say that. Professionally, she found pornography fascinating; privately, she found the whole industry morally complicit. Less so for the way it often mistreated the people who produced it, though there was that, too; for her, it was about popularizing so many stupid, backwards techniques and acts and styles. Things that showcased massive cocks and jiggling tits were so often less pleasurable in the thick of it. How had she put it? Something like, porn was to good sex what a slam dunk competition was to a good game of basketball.
I wondered if she was doing OK. I hadn’t talked to her in weeks now, since she told me she couldn’t keep helping me figure out what Ramona and I now simply called “the Spencer effect.” She’d worried my feelings for her would keep me from looking at the Hancock Institute, where she interned for her grad studies on human sexuality. I didn’t like it, but part of me was glad anyway. I’d made my peace – or was trying to, at least – with what my presence was doing to my residents and my coworkers. The thought of Marisa begging for a taste of me… it was too much. Besides, if I ever decided to get serious about going after Hancock, she loved that internship, and helping me take them down could wreck that for her. Maybe there was some shadowy biotech cabal churning out pheromone sauce in the basement, but on Marisa’s level, there was an honest effort to better understand sex. She deserved that chance.
“You’re not coming, master. Am I not pleasing you?” asked Ramona, vigorously working my shaft. Her accent was there, thicker than usual. It got thicker, the hornier she got. It was usually pretty thick of late.
“No, you’re good. I’m sorry, let my mind wander. Was thinking about Marisa again.”
Many women would have gotten angry that the man whose dick they were sucking openly admitted they were idly thinking about their ex-girlfriend. Not Ramona. If anything, she seemed to like it when I got distracted. Probably why she talked so much while we fooled around. Rather than slap me, like I probably deserved, or try to refocus my attention with some extra elbow grease, she took the opportunity to slow things down. Which, for her, meant climbing into my lap backwards, placing my hands on her boobs, and grinding that dynamite ass of hers against my slippery wet cock.
“I keep telling you, you ought to simply march over there, whip it out, and make her one of us. You obviously want her. She obviously cares about you, too.”
“I thought you said you agreed I shouldn’t look my gift horse in the mouth, poking around at Hancock.” I massaged her tits while I spoke. Having serious conversations in the midst of intense intimacy had become normal this past week.
“I did say that, and I stand by it. You’ve been given an incredible gift. As have I. As have the rest of your ‘Hotties.’” She always used the term with a heavy injection of bemusement. “Look too hard into your gift horse’s mouth, and this little paradise of ours could crumble beneath our feet before we know it.”
“I know, I know. You drive me wild, boss, but I do listen when you talk. And you’ve said that one a lot.”
She sighed delightedly at my use of her pet name. It was so steeped in irony, a reminder of everything wrong about our relationship, of everything hot about it, too. I did my best to be this “master” she was so infatuated with, but all the inverse nicknames were sour on my tongue. Slave, pet, toy, slut… Not for me. An ironic “boss” for this woman who’d left her husband for me? I could do that, at least.
As for her point – she’d repeated that idiom about gift horses so many times I was starting to wonder if she was hinting at what she wanted for Christmas – I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t deny that her position had an argument. Right now, the Spencer effect wasn’t hurting anyone. I’d denied it and denied it, but aside from the fight with Quinn and Leigh back in August, everybody who’d been subjected to it seemed more than pleased with the results.
It wasn’t that simple, of course. Leigh had been hurt, if not by me. So had Quinn, also not by me. We had no way of knowing if, when this experiment ended, my Hotties would snap out of it horrified by the debauchery they’d previously basked in. No assurances another melee wouldn’t break out over jealousies. Hell, we were dealing with cutting edge neurochemical reactions – there was no telling what might happen if somebody had an allergic reaction to me or god knows what else. I had real feelings for Savannah, yet the Spencer effect only invited opportunities to cheat on her and keep her at arm’s length – or worse, to cheat on her and make her accept the betrayal as the cost of getting her fix.
That had been my line. Even after all those hypothetical explorations with the women in my life, I’d still had misgivings. Ramona, however, took the opposite position. Girls fought over boys sometimes, no chemicals needed. People were intimate with people they enjoyed in the moment but later regretted. Nearly every hottie had licked my sweaty, bare-chested body at massage night, and nobody had gotten hives, not even an itch. I wasn’t being exclusive with Savannah, but she’d not asked me to. I still had the option to at any time.
“Yes but–” I’d said to her, over and over. But every time, she was making her case. The sex was incredible. For them, and for me. The influence their infatuation gave me was making me the best RA I’d ever been. It put me in a position to exert tremendous influence over them, which I’d been using to help steer them in developmentally positive directions. Even with everything else going on, Savannah and I were getting along great. Vickie, too, and while I didn’t think of her so much as girlfriend material, she was a great girl, and an amazing lover. We had fun, no complaints on either end.
Plus – and this was the real sticking point, the rationale that had finally gotten me to shut up – the alternative was… bleak. If this really was some kind of sexual mind manipulating conspiracy, and I unmasked it…? I didn’t know if I even could put a stop to it. There was a very real chance that exposing the sorts of people who would do something like this might not take kindly, might leave me like this, a pleasure-dumping factory in human form, forever. I’d get to talk to my family on Zoom, but it hadn’t taken twenty-four hours to make Quinn so besotted she’d put a finger in my ass. How much longer would this stuff take to do that to my mom, or my sister? It seemed unthinkable, but then I’d had three minor celebrity triplets agree to suck my balls and kiss my ass, and they’d taken it as a favor.
Supposing they could reverse it, or that someone else could figure it out, that would be a brutal return to reality. I’d only just found out about it all, but that didn’t mean a jury would believe that. (I’d made a case that perhaps nobody would try to take me down over it, but I’d been reminded that Janis existed.) Which, whatever. Then Ramona had presented a case that made all too much sense to me about what the revelation could do to the Hotties, my coworkers. the girls would be devastated when they found out. As it stood, they took it as a flirty little game, kinky college experimentation. Tell them the truth, and kinky became traumatizing, experimentation became victimization. Many of them would carry this as a memory a violation of their innermost selves, not only of their bodies but of their very minds.
I’d pointed out that the fact that the truth could be so damaging was only proof that going through with this was wrong, but that had devolved into all sorts of late night between-coitus debates about morality and ethics that I had frankly lost, badly. “If a child falls off the bed and lands on their teddy bear with a bounce and a giggle, you don’t do them a favor by throwing them off again so they know how painful it ought to have been.” 
I didn’t like it, but she had an annoyingly difficult position to argue down. However immoral it would be to take advantage of the Spencer effect, doing so was also the most ethical course. The wrongness of concealing the truth was injurious to me alone; the pain of correcting that wrongness would be painful for everybody involved. Looking Andi in the face after I broke the news and extolling the virtue of Truth wouldn’t make her feel any less violated. Inviting her and a few of her friends into my bed, however, would be her dream come true.
Additionally, of course, Ramona was only too eager to use her own case to make her point. She never shied away from an opportunity to remind me how offering herself to me as a sex slave was the best she’d felt in years. Maybe ever. 
“Would you fuck me, master? Please? My pipa aches to feel you inside me. I promise you, I will be worthy of your permission.”
Like that.
“You’d better be. Gonna be hard enough, transitioning to a new normal around here where I let them all just… yeah.” Hard for me, that was. My residents had all made it plain they wanted nothing in the world more. (Except maybe Tori, who’d somehow retained some semblance of realizing that thirty-some girls all throwing themselves at the same guy was a little icky. It hadn’t stopped her from stuffing those big brown tits of hers into her Higgins Hotties half-shirt, though.) “I’d really rather not have to figure out how to explain that my boss moved in so she could be on hand for quickies.”
“Not too quick I hope, master,” Ramona said with a tantalizing smile over her shoulder as she slid her pussy down onto my waiting cock. Most girls I’d been with needed to use either their eyes or their hands to guide me in, but Ramona, she’d spent so much time on my cock this week that she could do it by instinct.
I fucked my boss, and I came inside her, and she came all over me. She thanked me for letting her. She sucked her cum off of my cock. It was after midnight, though, and with Savannah and my Hotties returning in the morning, I wanted some sleep.
“Keep sucking me off while I drift away though,” I instructed her. Her eyes flashed with delight. Nothing turned her on more than commands, especially ones that were nakedly selfish. Ordering her to fuck me was mutual, she’d explained, but making her perform for my amusement was an acknowledgment of her desire for subjugation. It was an explanation I didn’t understand, but like the rest of it, I didn’t need to. If there was one thing I’d learned from Marisa, it was that a good lover tried their best to fulfill their partner’s desires and fantasies. It didn’t mean you phoned it in or that you had to do things you weren’t comfortable with, but if you could swing it, swing for the fences.
I was still in a roleplay mindset as a dom, but if our plan to go all in on the Spencer effect panned out, who knew? Pretty soon, I might be the domineering sex god she dreamed of instead of a poser doing his best with a tricky situation.
I supposed, as my eyes slid closed, as my boss’s lips closed snugly around my cock with sound bubbling up from her well-stuffed throat that was pure ecstacy, it wasn’t so bad.


****************************************************************


I woke up to the sight of Higgins’ hall manager clipping on her earrings, her work outfit on point. It was weird, seeing her clothed knowing the tapestry of tattoos her sleeveless blouse and skirt were hiding. This past week, she’d only gone down to her office in the center building a few times, in part to correspond with the exterminators tending to an ant infestation on mine and Janis’s floors. Discovering that little gem was the least pleasant shower I’d had since Quinn’s assault on Leigh, though it had given Ramona and I an excuse to get a hotel for a couple nights to have some really loud hotel sex. Six years in the residence halls had meant six years of learning to keep the volume down, especially surrounded by my nosy, horny Hotties. Ramona and I had been able to cut loose with just the two of us, but the hotel returned me to a world of eavesdropping neighbors, which had turned me on more than I’d expected.
The other reason Ramona had put in some office hours, though, had nothing to do with ants or their persecutors. She wanted me to fuck her in her office – which, as it turned out, was exactly what I wanted. Whatever reticence I’d felt at first about taking advantage of a woman whose attraction to me was in no small part a reaction to the chemical soup I’d been unwittingly marinating her in all semester had cleared up early on. I simply couldn’t see a woman enjoying herself that much and beat myself up over it. Her recurring lectures, often mid-coitus, as to why I was wrong to hesitate to enjoy myself had helped. That smoking hot body of hers had helped even more.
It had been some incredible sex, this week. I’d never had the kink for using and degrading women. The opposite, in fact. I wanted to give as much as I got and then some, shatter that sexual glass ceiling with trills of female ecstasy. Ramona, though, had out-paced my best efforts. She wanted to be put on her knees before a subordinate. She wanted to have to ask permission to suck my cock. She wanted me to bend her over her desk, rip her panties off, and test if she could breathe evenly enough while she came that the resident’s parent on the other end of the phone call could tell what a fucking slut she was. (Nothing like an ant infestation to provide a flood of such opportunities.)
Outside of those visits downstairs to fuck her in her office, though, we’d been hanging around Higgins 3 mostly or completely naked. I’d chuckled to myself the day before when I realized I’d stepped out into the hall without a stitch on, not having even consciously considered that the Hotties weren’t back from break yet. Seeing her dressed again, knowing I had to let her stay that way, it was a sobering reminder that it was finally time to get this slutty Spencer show on the road.
“Good morning, master.”
“Morning, Ramona. What time is it?”
“Early. Not quite eight. The locks are programmed to let residents’ key cards resume working at eight on the dot, though. Since you said you wanted to ease your way into this, I thought it would be easier if we didn’t risk any of your women seeing me exiting your room first thing in the morning.”
“Smart.” Intrusive little scamps that they were, they’d indubitably find out about Ramona and I eventually. For now, though, our story in regards to her presence was that after the drama and irregularities endemic to Higgins 3 this year, the Lakeview Office of Housing and Residence Life had posted a full-time professional staff member to help keep an eye on things.
(We’d notified Bob. There had been no reply, but whatever filter he was employing to scrub evidence of this whole fiasco had deleted our message from the servers within minutes.)
“Do you feel ready? Not that there’s a timeline. Only that… Well, I think we both know how quickly your young women tend to heat things up. Do you think you’ll be ready to reciprocate?”
I stood out of bed, shrugging. “I don’t honestly know. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Obviously. I figure I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done, and if it feels right, I’ll go with it, and if it doesn’t, I won’t. Best thing for everybody. But… I dunno. This probably sounds cheesy as hell, but I really like these girls. Best floor I ever RAed, hands down, even without all the… yeah.”
“Though all the ‘yeah’ helps, I imagine.” Her eyes were locked on my flaccid penis, head tilting to the side as she studied it.
“Sure. But I’m just saying, I don’t want to do anybody dirty. Open communication, honesty, empathy. No going door to door for the pair of tits I feel like seeing that day, snapping my fingers and putting a girl on her knees to blow me.” I pinched Ramona’s butt, snapping her out of her stupor. “That’s what I have you for, right?”
She slid down to her knees by reflex. “So very right, master.” No way of knowing how much of her submission was chemical and how much her fetish. She’d confided that it had never been that way with her husband, but he hadn’t turned her on like I did. She hadn’t wanted to, and he hadn’t had the stones to try. So she said.
“I thought the locks opened any minute now?” Her presence at my feet was already stirring me back to action. I swiveled my hips, playfully tapping her cheeks with my growing shaft.
“I’ll be fast, master. Please? Please, I promise, I’ll be so fast. Just let me–”
“Later. If you’re good. And if I have energy after Savannah tears into me. Said she’d be getting back late afternoon.” Man, it wasn’t easy being that cold. It was honest, though, and whether we were still boss and RA or if we’d crossed entirely over to master and servant, we agreed honesty was important. Besides, the dismissiveness only turned her on more. One less thing she had to decide on. She would get fucked when and if master decided, and until then, she had a building full of residents to welcome back, and to reassure about the insectoid menace.
She left to go man her battlestation. The other HDs weren’t working today, as it was a Sunday, but we anticipated some upset students and parents. I’d already helped prepare and post signage around the building for her explaining the situation, but the price tag of housing and tuition ensured that there would be those who felt entitled to the revocation of natural law, as if we could enact policy that ants would follow.
I had a bowl of pineapple chunks for breakfast, then headed for the gym. I’d long thought all that stuff about it changing the taste of semen was an old wive’s tale, or more likely an old husband’s, but Marisa had given me the science of it. I figured it’d make the impending good times that much better. Plus, after Bob had explained that whatever my body was emitting was in my sweat, I thought greeting residents ripe and ruddy would help get the ball rolling. It had been over a week, after all, so who knew if the Spencer effect had waned while the Hotties and I had been apart.
After a week in which my only exercise had been sleeping with Ramona, it took a toll on me. It felt good, though, to ache. As I made my way to the Lakeview chapel, I contemplated who would be first. Someone I’d already hooked up with, like Andi or Casey? Somebody who’d been throwing themselves at me extra hard, like Leigh or Lexi? Somebody I hadn’t gotten to know as well yet, like Danielle or the triplets? A whole week I’d been ruminating on it, and I still hadn’t decided. I’d decided a few of them were off limits, namely Dawn, Peyton and Sydney, our lesbian contingent. Sleeping with happy, horny girls who loved cock and none more than mine? Sure. Not so hard to make my peace with that. Worsening the confusion of those three? I’d sooner have Ramona move them to another floor. I still might, depending on how they reacted to what was coming. 
Oh, and no cock for Sammi, either. Not until she’d properly apologized to Kyu-Ri for her racist stunt and proven she’d learned a lesson. Frankly, I suspected being denied access to me was going to be a better teaching tool than any amount of community service Ramona might have assigned her.
It had been years since I’d set foot in the chapel. I knew I’d been, but the why of it had faded. Knowing me, probably giving my Rowland guys their campus tours in Welcome Week. They’d renovated it, I knew, though aside from it looking cleaner and brighter, I couldn’t have said what was different. To my surprise, there were some students in there. Oh right, Sunday. I kept quiet and distant, taking a spot on a bench near a stained glass window. My hands sort of folded themselves; I wasn’t especially religious, but this was a religious place. It felt right. The late morning sun filtered in red on my left hand, and blue on my right. It felt like that was significant somehow, but I couldn’t articulate how.
Were they watching me, even here? It was hard to imagine. I’d been looking over my shoulder the whole walk here. Hardly anybody was out and about on campus, so it was hard to imagine I was being followed. If they were using hidden cameras and spy-tech like that, no way they’d have bugged this place. While I’d scoured every room on Higgins 3 for surveillance and found nothing, Bob had seemed certain that “they,” whoever “they” were, wanted data. I’d even wondered if the exterminators were part of it, sneaking into the empty building to plant fresh bugs. I’d not dared suggest it at Higgins; at our hotel room, though, Ramona assured me at length it was nothing nefarious. There were even pictures. Still, they were getting their data somehow.
In fact, I hoped they were.
Aloud, I’d capitulated to Ramona’s logic on its merit. Inwardly, though, my conflict raged on. Conventional ethics didn’t apply to a situation like mine, and I’d given up analyzing it through that lens. What had sold me, however, was what I’d learned in my three semesters as a business major. Innovation didn’t go away. Whether it was beneficial technology like the internet, or a global threat like the atomic bomb, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle once you rubbed the lamp. Someone had found a way to make a person sweat, bleed and ejaculate aphrodisiacs, and whatever I did wasn’t going to change that. 
I’d found nothing whatsoever about it online, which meant the tech was in its infancy. Plainly, the data they needed was not only about how it affected people in prolonged cohabitation, or there wouldn’t have been any need to fill Higgins 3 with the hottest freshmen at Northside. If all they wanted was to see if anybody had some allergic reaction or psychotic break, they could have learned that from anyone. The more I thought about it, the more sure I felt that they wanted to know if my cum could enslave those who swallowed it, or if spending the night in my bed, bathing in the full potency of the effect, broke the will forever, or if not forever, how long, exactly?
So I could fight them, deny them their precious data and shake my fist at these invisible meddlers, maybe even expose them and drag them through the courts of law and of public opinion, do some damage. The technology would still be there, and it would be even less understood for my refusal. Or I could give the what they wanted. Take advantage of my situation to enjoy myself, and to help some nice women enjoy themselves, use the ultimate motivator to create the ultimate community. 
I didn’t have the delusions of grandeur some college students had, that I would be the one the change the world. I was going to give my residents the best year I could, survive, and graduate. With luck, I would help make a dangerous thing safer for whoever it was injected into next. Maybe next time, there wouldn’t be a Quinn. Just a little epicenter of semi-consensual bliss, no one the sadder for it.
I looked away from the window. How long had I been sitting there? Long enough that both hands were red now. That, too, felt like it should mean something, but I didn’t like any of the interpretations that suggested themselves.
I was alone when I left the chapel, so I stayed a little longer. I didn’t expect to have a lot of time to myself for the foreseeable future.
Back at Higgins, the parking lot was beginning to fill as students returned for the second half of the fall semester. There was a line outside of Ramona’s office of bullish fathers and a few mothers, there to make a proper show of looking out for their daughters. As if the only thing preventing Ramona from sanitizing the already sanitized building was a stern lecture from Mr. So-and-so.
I saw some residents in the breezeway, though none of them mine. No, there was one, actually; I just hadn’t recognized Jo in baggy jeans and a cozy, spacious hoodie. My sense was that we were too far off to wave or anything, but the moment she saw me, she turned toward me and picked up her pace.
“Oh, hey, Jo. Have a nice–”
“You’ve got to talk to Lexi!” she blurted over the top of me. I knew that tone. Early in the year, the two had had a bumpy relationship. Lexi with her preference to sit around the room naked or nearly naked, and Jo, somehow, not. Back then, I would have assumed “you’ve got to talk to Lexi” meant “I’m going to kill her so you better step in.”
This was not that. This was concern. Grave, alarming concern.
“Let’s go.”


****************************************************************


We passed a few Hotties on our way in, but they could see in my pace that I couldn’t slow to say hi. There were some parents around, too, checking out dorm rooms and meeting roommates they’d only barely been introducted to in August, but were now integral parts of their daughters’ lives.
Jo was walking ahead of me, and I was struggling to keep up. We reached their room quickly, a few doors past mine. I heard it before I saw it, but when Jo stopped, smoothed her hair and gently opened the door, I saw it.
The crying, I’d expected from the moment Jo caught up to me in the breezeway. She hadn’t said anything about why on the way up, aside from “she’s not good” in response to my inquiry. It would have been surprising if she weren’t crying. Her face was beet red, blotchy and tear-streaked. Her hair looked like it had been an outlet for her emotions, too, likewise not a shocker.
What I had not anticipated were the two huge, perky, stiffly nippled tits fighting to burst through her tank top. 
To be clear, it’s something I expected from a good many of my Hotties. Whoever had created this floor roster with instructions to make ‘em eye-popping had certainly had a taste for the busty ones. Lexi, though, had always been the exception, and if her body wasn’t quite “boyish,” as I’d heard her teased, it wasn’t far from it. 
Or rather, it hadn’t been. These… they were…
“Oh my god, Jo, you did not just bring our RA down here!” Lex hissed at her roommate.
“You were freaking me out and I just happened to bump into him and he followed me up. That’s all.” Jo looked to me. She’d done her part by going to get help; now she plainly expected me to work my magic.
“It’s good to see you, Lex.” I winced the moment the words were out of my mouth. I’d only meant to open with something friendly, but suddenly I felt like I’d told a blind girl to make sure she dotted her I’s. Or, as it were, told the girl who’d sprung for a radical boob job to cross her T’s.
Lex wailed, flinging her arms over her chest. It didn’t help. If anything, now I could see the newly expanded acreage stretching out a tank top that had once been snug to the point that there was ample sideboob peeking out the arm holes. 
Gently, I sat down beside her, patting her back softly. Predictably, it brought out more tears, but sometimes it was best to just get it all out so talking could ensue. Jo hovered near the door, watching anxiously. Voices came and went from the hall beyond. Finally, Lex shuddered, drew a few ragged breaths, and attempted words.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered. Then there were a few rounds of me reassuring her there was nothing to be sorry about, her apologizing for her misperception, insisting she was fine, apologizing for over-apologizing, and so on.
“So what’s going on? I can see you’re upset.”
“Well gee, what do you think? Not like you haven’t been staring since the second you came in.”
“It’s the, ah… Your… The procedure to make your, um…”
“My tits huge? Yeah, that.” She bucked my hand from her shoulder with a sneer.
“Can you say more? I can see you’re upset, but do you mind telling me why?”
“Because I’m the stupidest fucking bitch on the planet, maybe?!”
“Hey! Hey. You’re not stupid. Why would you even say that?”
“You have to say that because they pay you too. But look at me! I’m a total fucking freak! Everybody who knows me here is going to know I’m some weird ho who blew a semester’s tuition getting these ridiculous, ginormous things! I can’t hide these! The other girls here, my professors, the people I work with at Target…? They’re all gonna take one look and know what a stupid ho-bag I am!”
I moved around in front of her, pulling up a desk chair. “Why would people think that? What difference does the size of your breasts make in what kind of person you are?”
“Easy for you to say! You’re the reason I got them!”
I wish I could say I did one of my classic Spencer blinks of surprise, but… well… “Me? What do you mean, you got them for me?”
“Because I’ve seen the way you drool over Kyu-Ri and Jean and Angel and all those other massive knockers around here, and how you ignore girls like me and Georgia and Jacqui because we’re on the itty bitty titty committee!”
“OK, whoa, let me slow your roll. I haven’t drooled over anybody on this floor, and if I were going to, cup sizes absolutely would not be on my list of criteria. I happen to think you’re beautiful. Before, and still. OK?”
But Lexi barely heard me. “What was I even thinking? I’m going to wind up needing a semester off to pay to get these suckers taken back out. My parents, they said… They said I was…” With that, the valve on the water works reopened. 
While Lexi was burying her face in her pillow, Jo crept over to murmur in my ear. “Drugs,” she whispered. “Painkillers for her surgery, but… she took three of them since she got back, and I googled it, and…” She shook her head.
“WHO FUCKING ASKED YOU, JOCELYN?!” shrieked Lexi. “I’M GOING THROUGH SOME SHIT, OK?!”
I patted Jo’s knee and nodded to the door. People needed to grieve and process and have their meltdowns in peace sometimes. Me, too. I could always check in later, as I’d found being seen at one’s worst could tarnish an entire relationship. Honestly, if not for the fact that I’d been explicitly blamed, I probably would have sent in her friends and recused myself. 
Except… those things were for me. After a week of psyching myself up to take on the task of taming Higgins Hotties one at a time, it was hard to put that down and do my job. In fact…
“Can I see them?”
In my defense, the opportunity to bask in my sexual admiration was usually a welcome boon around here. 
Slowly, Lexi pushed herself upright and scooted to the edge of the lower bunk. Her face was positively frightful. Plus, sure enough, as I studied her I could see her eyes a little out of focus, her head swiveling a little, off balance. Jo’s tip rang true, it seemed. Still, my own sightline couldn’t help but fixate on those two whoppers jutting out from her chest. 
“You want to see them.” It sounded more accusation than curiosity.
“I mean… I’d be lying if I said I weren’t curious. I know you’re upset and all, but, I don’t know, maybe you at least deserve the validation of the guy you got them to impress, right?” I ventured a curious smile.
“Vali…” Her jaw dropped. And not in an excited way. “Validation?! I basically stole seven grand from my parents to make myself look like a pint-sized porn star, because I let a stupid crush turn into an even stupider competition to impress some guy who’s already ruined like three of our lives just by being good-looking and dorky sweet–”
“I… what? Three…? What now?”
“–and here I am trying to figure out how best to fucking die, but lucky me, my fucking RA is here to see if he can’t squeeze in a quick honk on my way out!”
“Whoa, hey, I didn’t mean–”
“WOULD YOU GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
So, yeah. That didn’t go well. After what she’d said, I couldn’t simply walk away, but she was so distraught, and so pissed off at me, that staying wasn’t an option either. None of her close friends were in yet, so I settled for a few friendly types to take turns keeping watch on her. The Lakeview health center wasn’t open on Sundays, so there was no rushing her off to a counselor, at least not without going to the hospital. When the line to yell at Ramona thinned out, I popped in there to consult her. By then, it was taken out of my hands altogether; Ramona told me she’d received what she felt were believable assurances that Lexi wouldn’t do anything drastic tonight, and that tomorrow she’d let some friends take her to the health center and touch base with her afterward. I didn’t miss the exasperated look my boss shot at her master, no doubt for my less than savvy handling of the situation.
All in all, it was one of the biggest fuck-ups of my RA career, and they hadn’t been back from break for a whole day yet.
Then someone knocked on my door.
“Come in,” I said, turning my chair to face the door.
I’d expected Casey, Andi, or maybe even Sammi, here to chew me out on Lex’s behalf. The optimistic part of me, what was left of it, thought maybe it was Savannah or Vickie stopping by to see me.
“Mrs. Dana’s mom…?” I almost rolled my own eyes at my term of address. I’d taken to calling her that in my childish (yet so very adult) fantasies, and now that she was darkening my doorway, I’d let it into the real world. Well played once again.
As for Mrs. Dana’s mom, she was a vision. I’d been telling myself my memory of her attractiveness was exaggerated, but nope. She belonged here as much as Dana. That gleaming blonde mane, eyes so blue they shone. That body – basically what Lexi had bought, only with matching everything else. Unlike my mental image of Dana, however, her mother was very much not smiling. 
“Spencer?”
I took my feet. “That’s me. What can I do for you?”
“Please, have a seat.”
I said back down. She let herself in, closing the door behind her. I offered a seat, but she declined. “So what can I do for you? And sorry for the ‘Mrs. Dana’s mom’ thing. She talks about you so much it feels like you’re one of my friend’s mom, and I–”
“I’m sure you do.” She folded her arms beneath a pair of tantalizing breasts, cleavage freely offered in a low-cut dress. “Dana and I had some very interesting talks this past week about the sort of show you’re running her, Spencer my boy.”
“Interesting… how?”
“Oh, don’t you ‘interesting how’ me. My daughter told me plenty, and I’m sure there’s plenty she managed to hold back. But what she did tell me…? Underwear massage nights and bikini day at the lake and those obscene shirts with your floor logo. Her RA having sex in the showers, multiple girlfriends coming and going. I’m glad you’re having fun here at college, but I’m trying to make sure my daughter doesn’t get knocked up pursuing an M.R.S.”
“Pursuing a… what? I thought she was majoring in pre-med, going into nursing…?” Her irate expression held until I processed the term. It was so irate, in fact, I leapt to the assumption that I was learning a bit about how Dana came to enter this world. It would help explain why her mom looked closer to big sister. “Oh, I see. Well you have nothing to worry about. Dana’s a great student, and an absolute role model behavior-wise. I promise, she’s doing really well.”
“Good.” The fire behind those icy orbs didn’t diminish, though. “And I promise, if I find out you’ve violated my daughter in any way whatsoever, I will make it my mission in life to take you down. I liked you when we first met.”
“Same, totally.” Not that I could reconcile this enraged mama bear with the over-flirtatious vixen I’d met in August.
“Don’t make me stop liking you.” She’d been moving gradually closer the whole time she’d been in here, and by then, she was looming directly over me. That seemed not to be enough, though, because then she was placing a hand on either shoulder and leaning right down in my face. “I can be an absolute fucking cunt when I don’t like someone, Spencer. You get me?”
Maybe it was her use of the c-word. Maybe it was her breasts threatening to spill out of her neckline. Maybe it was all the dreams of her I’d had these past months, and plans I’d been cooking up this last week of what Dana and I would do when she got back. 
I kissed her.
She only resisted for a moment, but the instant my tongue made it past her teeth, she was kissing back, no bones about it. She squealed for a moment, tried to pull back, but my hand on the back of her head was firm – for a moment, anyway, after which there was no more need. When I pulled her into my lap, she resisted not at all. My hand moved up her side and came to rest on her breast. God, they felt amazing. My brain tended to interpret amazing form as amazing feels, and boobs had a way of always feeling amazing, really.
And then there was air moving between my lips again, and a moment later, a slap so hard it knocked me out of my chair.
“You horny little shit!” she hissed. Then she kicked me in the stomach. 
“I… I thought you…!”
Another kick, though this time I blocked it with my forearms. “Just you wait until your manager hears about this!”
She stormed out before I’d come close to recovering. At least she had the courtesy to close the door behind her so I didn’t have to explain why I was curled up on the floor groaning in pain.


****************************************************************


I made my way across the street to Penderdast food court and went to the traditional meal line, where they served up vats of carbs on your plate like they had in high school. I needed mac & cheese today.
Then I went up for seconds.
Then thirds.
A handful of Hotties came through while I was sitting around undoing the morning’s exercise. They barely looked in my direction. I didn’t know if it was because word had gotten out that I’d asked a potentially suicidal resident to show me her fun new titties, or that I’d made a move on Mrs. Dana’s mom. If the latter, hopefully they at least didn’t know I’d gotten my ass kicked. Which I totally supported in principle. The only Hottie I knew of who had a boyfriend was Casey, who’d repeatedly insisted her long-distance beau was glad I was around to keep his girlfriend horny as hell. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t become a homewrecker, but with my milf fantasy made flesh before me, I’d gone from pushing a woman to cheat on a boyfriend and right on up to husbands.
Maybe she and Ramona could commiserate while she was down there wasting her time trying to get me fired. Even if she got frustrated with Ramona and tried to go over her head, she’d only be confronted with Bob, who was much more interested in furthering his secret backers’ research than employee accountability.
My phone buzzed. We need to talk, master, said the notification. I sighed and put it away unanswered. So far, my big perk of the miraculous Spencer effect today was that I could put off being lectured by my boss for fuck-up after colossal fuck-up.
Finally, a food court worker came and gently asked me if I was done, and if so could they have my tray and dishes. Right, they closed early Sundays. I surrendered my stuff and headed back over to Higgins. This time, I made my way straight down to the basement. My ambitions to be the Higgins Harlot seemed to be DOA. Right now, what I really needed was genuine human connection. Somebody who actually cared about me, not merely wanted to fuck me.
Relieved to see light coming from underneath, I knocked on Savannah’s door, forcing a smile in case she looked through the peephole. I heard shuffling, murmured words – must be interrupting a phone call, or perhaps she was fielding resident crises of her own. But the door opened, and there she was. Savannah. The most beautiful woman I’d ever shared oxygen with, much less everything else we’d done. She was looking good, too, a cute little off the shoulder top and a pair of leggings that… damn.
“Spencer, hi,” she said, perhaps a bit less warmly than I’d have hoped. 
“Hey, Savannah. Boy are you a–”
A sight for sore eyes, I’d been meaning to say. Only she cut me off, firmly. “I know, so late, right? Don’t worry, I got Carmen to cover for me. Price and I were really slow heading out this morning – or should I say afternoon?”
She turned, and it provided a window to see who she’d been talking to when I knocked. There in the bed was Price. I’d seen him before, tagged in her social media. He was even better looking in person. I should send Lex to ask him where he bought his shirt, it was so tight over his pecs. He nodded, though didn’t bother looking up from his phone.
“Oh. Um, yeah. Was the drive good, or…?”
“Yeah, little traffic as we got close with the whole campus moving back in, but not too bad. How about you? Good drive?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah, not too bad.” Shit, but it felt horrible to lie to her, even over something small like where I’d spent my break, even just to play along with her own lie of omission about why her ex-boyfriend, presumably no longer ex, was driving her across the state, laying in her bed, not even trying to hide an erection.
“So, um, can I do anything for you? Sorry, Price is only here for the night, so unless it’s urgent, maybe we can talk tomorrow…?”
“Oh, yeah, totally, sure, yeah, sounds great, totally, yeah,” I heard myself say. “I’m Spencer, by the way,” I said to the guy in my girlfriend’s bed. Ex-girlfriend, I supposed now. Like the last kick in the gut, it was only fair, even deserved, but that didn’t make it easier to walk around bearing the weight of it.
“Nice to meet you, brah.” No name. Just… brah.
“All right. Talk to you later, Spencer. Have a good night,” she said in that gentle voice of hers, right before she closed the door in my face.
I didn’t dare try to see Vickie. If one more encounter blew up in my face, my fault or no, I wasn’t sure I could keep going. So I climbed the stairs right past the ground floor door to her floor, past 1, past 2, and back to Higgins 3. Home sweet home. Only… something felt different. Doors were open, but only a few. It was quiet, even subdued. No warm greetings, though. No hugs, no inappopriate comments. No Hotties shirts in evidence. It was fall now, I supposed, and a cool day even if it was warm here in Higgins.
I didn’t make it far onto the floor before one of the open doors suddenly had a person in it. “Hey, Tori,” I said. I couldn’t even make myself smile.
The floor governor fixed that confident gaze of hers on me. “I was looking to schedule a meeting of the floor government for tomorrow night.”
I nodded. “Sure, sounds good. I’m on duty, but I should have plenty of time between rounds.”
“I wasn’t informing you as an invitation,” she clarified. “As you may or may not be aware, the RA isn’t an official part of floor government, merely the intermediary through whom we gain access to our funds. In fact, the reason I’m bringing it up at all is to ask you not to come.”
“Not to… what? Is it some kind of surprise or something?”
She chuckled, but not in a happy way. “It shouldn’t be, but after hearing what you said to Lexi, maybe it is. In fact, you’re the only member of the Higgins 3 community who isn’t invited.”
“You heard, huh. Yeah, I… Well, never mind. What’s on the agenda?”
“You.” She gave me a few slow nods as I struggled to puzzle out what that meant. “Your days of treating this community as your personal private pussy buffet are over.”
Her door shut in my uncomprehending face. A moment later, the stairwell door opened, and there was Casey, bags in hand. “Hey, Casey. How was–”
“Leamme the fuck alone, Ra!” she yelled, but there were already tears pouring down her cheeks as she blitzed past me.
I sealed myself in my room. When Ramona knocked gently a bit later, finally free from her office, I calmed myself long enough to ask her if we could talk tomorrow. Whatever her response was, I lost it in tears of my own.