Chapter 367 - Is She a Professor?
The stadium lights were the sodium kind.
Old. Warm. The color of late evening poured into bulbs and hung on poles forty feet up, washing the outdoor court in a flat, generous gold that made everything below it look slightly cinematic — the worn paint on the three-point line, the scuff marks from a thousand sneakers, the long clean arc of a basketball leaving a pair of hands and dropping through netting with a sound that was its own particular reward.
’Swish.’
Gareth caught his own rebound off the back of the board, spun, dribbled twice — the smack of rubber on concrete bouncing off the surrounding garden walls — and passed clean to Marcus on the left wing without looking.
Marcus fumbled it.
"Come ’on.’"
"I didn’t see it coming that fast—"
"You never see anything coming." Gareth wiped his face with the hem of his shirt — dragging it up, the sweat-dark fabric pulling over the flat grid of his stomach, the lights catching the moisture across his abs — and let it drop.
From somewhere behind the court fence, a sound drifted over.
High-pitched. Deliberately produced. The kind of sound two girls make when they have decided to be noticed.
Gareth didn’t look.
Marcus did. His whole face rearranged.
"’Bro.’" He grabbed Gareth’s arm. "Bro. The one in the red."
"Don’t."
"I’m just ’saying’—"
"I know what you’re saying." Gareth took the ball back from where it had come to rest against the fence post, bounced it twice. "You say it every night."
Devon — long, lazy, perpetually eating something — wandered in from the far end of the court with his hands in his hoodie pocket, having contributed approximately nothing to the last forty minutes of play, and dropped himself onto the bench with the boneless satisfaction of a man who considers witnessing effort to be effort.
"Why don’t you just pick one," he said. To Gareth. Gesturing vaguely toward the fence line. "The red one. The one with the—" He traced a shape in the air that required no clarification.
Gareth looked at him.
"I’d rather fall in love and then have sex." He said it the way he said most things — flat, certain, without heat. "Going around just ’fucking’ women is trashy."
The silence that followed was the silence of three men experiencing the same response and choosing different ways to express it.
Marcus covered his mouth with his hand.
Devon stared at the middle distance like a man watching a philosophy lecture he hadn’t signed up for.
The third one — Jin, small, quick, currently the only one still holding a ball — said, very carefully: "Bro. You’re ’built’ like that." He gestured at Gareth’s general existence. "And you want to ’fall in love.’"
"Yes."
"Like. Candles and feelings and stuff."
"If that’s what it takes." Gareth took the ball from Jin without asking and shot from the three-point line.
’Swish.’
"Listen," Marcus said, recovering from the initial shock of the sentiment, "I respect it. I respect the vision. But what if—" He paused. Appeared to be choosing words. "What if we just. You know. Cover her eyes. Tie her hands. Take turns."
Gareth turned and looked at him with an expression that Marcus would later describe to Devon as ’I genuinely thought he was going to fold me in half.’
"I’m sorry, man." Marcus raised both hands. "I’m kidding. Obviously. It’s a joke."
"It’s not funny."
"It’s a little—"
"It’s not funny."
Jin coughed. Devon had found a protein bar from somewhere and was eating it with the calm of a man who has chosen to not participate in anything happening around him.
"Either way," Devon said, mouth still full, not looking up from the protein bar, "it’s just fantasy stuff. Why would any woman actually let herself get tied up? Like, in real life?" He shook his head. "No woman’s doing that."
They all considered this.
The stadium lights hummed.
The sound arrived before any of them identified it.
Low. Rhythmic. Wet.
Not music — not mechanical — something organic and unmistakably ’human’, coming from the garden strip that ran along the east wall of the outdoor courts, where three old oak trees grew thick and close together and the sodium lights didn’t quite reach.
All four of them stopped.
Gareth’s hand paused mid-dribble.
The ball bounced once more on its own momentum and then rolled sideways, slow, into the fence.
Nobody moved to get it.
The sound — PAH. PAH. PAH. — came from between the trees, dense and rhythmic, accompanied by something lower and broken and female.
Marcus and Jin looked at each other.
Devon put down the protein bar.
They moved toward the trees the way people move toward sounds they know they shouldn’t investigate and are going to investigate anyway — slowly, collectively, with the instinctive group stupidity of young men who have temporarily lost individual decision-making.
They stopped at the garden edge.
Looked through the gap between two trunks.
Gareth saw it in pieces, the way the brain processes something it hasn’t filed a category for yet.
A skirt — dark, bunched at the waist, gathered in a large fist.
A broad back. Male. The muscle definition catching the faint spillover of stadium light in long, clean shadows.
Then the woman.
’Thick’ — that was the first word, the only word, the word that arrived before anything more articulate could form — thick through the hips and thighs and everywhere else, bent forward against one of the oak trunks, hands tied behind her back with something that caught the light — her own bra, Gareth registered distantly, the white fabric looped around both wrists in a knot that looked professional.
Half her face was covered.
Her own panties — bunched and pressed against the lower half of her face as a makeshift mask, the waistband hooked over one ear — left only her eyes exposed above it, and her eyes were currently doing something that Gareth’s brain filed as ’not fully present’ and moved on from.
Her ’breasts.’
He looked away from her breasts immediately. He was not the kind of person who lingered there. But the involuntary image his brain had already captured — heavy, full, swinging freely with each impact against the tree trunk, the nipples catching cold air, the sheer ’weight’ of them bouncing with a force that registered as somehow excessive even from this distance — sat in his peripheral awareness and declined to leave.
The man behind her was driving forward in long, dense strokes, the thick outline of his cock visible even from here as it withdrew and plunged — ’cucumber’ was the thought that arrived in Gareth’s head with the officious precision of a brain that has been asked to size something and has committed to accuracy — the hairy lips of her cunt stretched visibly around him, wet and red and clearly well past the beginning of this.
PAH. PAH. PAAAH.
Her ass — full, soft, bouncing back against the man’s hips with each impact in a rolling clap of flesh that sounded louder than the ambient noise of the stadium lights and the distant city — snapped forward and back like it had been doing this for a while.
It had been doing this for a while.
Gareth stared.
He processed.
’’How did they get in here.’’
That was genuinely the first coherent thought — the logistical one, the campus-security one, the thought of a young man who had spent four years on this campus and knew exactly which gates locked at what time and was currently doing math.
’’Is she a professor? She looks—’’