The rough with the smooth
While I knew deep down it was the end I wasn’t prepared to let it go easily. I waited. And waited. No letter announcing my next tutorial arrived. Days turned into months and eventually a year. My teacher had left the seat of learning without looking back. One day, lovelorn, I visited the block of flats. I waited outside not sure what to do. I stood at a safe distance knowing that an unexpected visitation would decimate whatever hope I had left. Nothing happened. No one arrived or departed. I was helpless. After 4 hours I gave up, but I had closure. One door closes and another opens. The rhythm of life.
Luckily my other, but much less stimulating, tutorials gathered pace and I was now in my last year as a student. I shared a house in a down market area of west London with four fellow students. As we all earned money during our employed periods we could afford to have our own bedrooms. We drew lots. Somehow I ended up with the big bedroom at the front of the house on the first floor. Lots of luck. It also had a large double bed. There were times during our occupancy where my house mates haggled with me for use of the front bedroom for ‘extra-curricular’ studies. House mates indeed. This seemed to involve a lot of ‘cramming’ with students of the opposite gender. Certainly a lot of exercise seemed to be taken and none of them were majoring in PE.
As ever I was on the outside, giving up my bedroom to guys who seemed to have some kind of magic that I didn’t. But I was now a Batchelor of Physical Fusion and yet my qualification seemed to stand for nothing. Perhaps I should wear a badge? A sign of competency. A quality standard. People needed to know, I had skills. The trouble was those skills didn’t seem to be compatible with the university’s social scene. Without my gorgeous educator I was back to square one. What was worse some kind of hierarchy was evolving in the household. The boys started to put notches on their wooden bedsteads. I was on zero and they were on numbers that kept rising. Clearly it wasn’t only numbers that kept rising.
Questions were being asked about whether it was fair that I had the front room with the big bed. To quell the discomfort I used to go home at weekends just to allow a fair distribution of resources. My only condition was that I had clean sheets fitted for my return. It seemed only fair.
Times were rough. But things changed unexpectedly. Far and away the most good-looking and prolific boy in the house was Mr Smooth. But Mr Smooth had a dark secret. He was actually Mr Shifty. A year earlier in an unresolved incident someone had stolen money from my wallet. All the evidence pointed to Mr Shifty and when the same thing happened at another party later that term, again he was chief suspect, but was never incontrovertibly convicted.
Not only was he a probable thief and a serial ‘notcher’ but he also had a long-term girlfriend in Coventry. He went home most weekends; I thought to sleep for 48 hours because he was obsessed with late night fraternisation during the week. Girls were always sighted leaving his room at breakfast time rushing for their first lecture at 9am. Different girls. Nightly. Weekly. I was green with envy. We nearly replaced his bedroom door with a turnstile. But apparently he spent the whole weekend being proactive with his girlfriend. It was little wonder that he always looked exhausted. Possibly also no wonder that he didn’t do well in the final exams. Although for the rest of his life, if the going got tough, he could always fall back on his First in Adultery.
Mr Smooth had a habit of being nasty to girls when he’d had enough of them. Well, when he’d had them, actually. It was a bad habit and some girls didn’t take kindly to it. One morning I was leaving for an early lecture and left at the same time as a very pretty girl who was crying. Mr Smooth was nowhere to be seen so I walked to college with her. She told me all about Mr Smooth who she’d visited on a couple of occasions. It turned out he was actually Mr Shit not to mention Mr Small. I comforted her and we eventually ended up laughing about it. I was good at being a shoulder. My apparent destiny. Mr Comforter. The trouble was that Mr Smooth had got there first. But this was a frat house and the rules of the jungle applied. I also badly needed some notches.
The trouble was I liked her. She had a certain detached sense of humour, almost quirky. She was slightly shy but had a quiet confidence. She was also very attractive and made me laugh. I like girls that can make me laugh. She also had very big breasts. I was at an age where I was shallow and this was a factor that made her even more desirable. Disproportionately alluring.
I underestimated just how much she hated Mr Smooth. I never found out exactly why, but she was scheming and had a plan. Her plan involved seducing me. I turned out to be a very willing accomplice.
The front bedroom adjoined a smaller bedroom on the same landing. The smaller bedroom belonged to Mr Smooth. The walls between the two rooms were thin which meant I always had to bear witness to Mr Smooth’s nocturnal manoeuvres. But this rarely disturbed me because any groaning and moaning was restricted to short bursts which never seemed to be prolonged.
When I made my first move I was surprised at how willingly my new girlfriend responded to my faltering advances. Suddenly I was a lady killer. Or so it seemed. She was delighted that I ‘wanted’ her. However, she couldn’t entertain me at her flat because she had nosey flatmates and anyway my house was ‘far nicer’. She insisted on visiting the upstairs front room with the large double bed. She also insisted on being uninhibitedly noisy during lovemaking. What’s more she was not only hungry but ravenous. We often had sex for hours long into the night at her insistence. Not that I was complaining.
It took a few visits for me to realise that her passion for me was possibly disingenuous. Clearly she loved our sex. It was red hot, extremely vigorous and wildly passionate. I remember her giving me a love bite on my neck that required me to wear the only polo neck in my wardrobe for five consecutive days much to the consternation of my class mates. But it began to dawn on me that she was at her horniest and most vocal when she knew that Mr Smooth was in residence. On those nights she loved the springs of the bed to squeak, she’d bang on the wall during copulation as if by accident and she’d be like a football commentator on acid. When she knew Mr Smooth had a female companion she was at her most dangerous. It was as if she wanted to leave my next door neighbours in no doubt that she was being shagged properly, with real finesse and definitely to the point of no return. Not once. Not twice. In fact who was counting? Clearly she hoped, Mr Smooth. It also seemed as if she was desperate to let Mr Smooth’s companions know that they might be missing something.
It dawned on me after a few weeks that perhaps I wasn’t becoming an Adonis. Perhaps I was being used in some game of revenge. But I never thought of complaining. I had my own revenge to consider and the game was far too much fun to get principled. My notch count went off the scale. My reputation in the house rocketed. Except with Mr Smooth who seemed to avoid me at all costs. He went to elaborate measures to make sure our paths never crossed. This was mutual revenge and it tasted sweet…..What was once rough had become very smooth indeed.