Graduation Ch. 01

NOTE: This is a 23K+ word story that doesn’t start heating up until halfway through. I respect the value of a quick stroke story, which is why I’m warning you to keep looking if that’s what you’re after. If you’re down for a long read with a hot payoff, though, then pour yourself a glass of your favorite little something-something and pull up a seat.

This story has been updated to correct typos, add some small scenes, better flow into potential future chapters. Check the comments for a changelog. Yes, this erotic novella has a fucking changelog. Kids, if you’re lucky enough to have an editor, tell him/her how much he/she is loved every day.

As you’d expect, all characters involved in sexual activity are at least 18 years of age.

* * * * *

As the name implied, Silver Spoons was used to catering to a clientele old enough to be called “clientele.” Years of serving people who looked 35, 45, 55 left them rusty on the art of spotting a fake ID, which suited the teenagers of Westbrook Heights just fine. At first it was just one or two seniors rolling the dice on their new cards. Afterwards, they carefully passed the tip on to other seniors and select junior-aged friends that could pass for 21, people that wouldn’t spin so far out of control that it would encourage Management to revise their ID-checking policies.

It shocked a few Westbrook High students to learn that Caleb Bradstreet was one of those people; they expected the scene of a high school team’s tailback to involve kegs and backyard bonfires, not an old man’s bar on a Thursday night. But History had always been his weakest subject, and after two weeks of studying non-stop for a final that he just cleared that afternoon, Caleb needed a beer and some ambiance.

He sat at the bar and drank slow, relishing what little there was to relish of his Bud Light. He thought about endings: Thought about how weird it felt to know he had taken his last-ever high school test. Thought about his impending graduation on Sunday afternoon, and the blowout that was happening Saturday night after next. Thought about the signatures he still wanted in his yearbook. Thought about the teachers he never wanted to see again (like Mrs. Warner, the sadistic bitch who knocked him down to a B- for holding his pencil incorrectly). And he thought about the teachers he really wished he could take with him to college, like—

“Caleb.” The bartender, Drew, was making a point of keeping his voice down, motioning Caleb to look behind him, “You know that chick? Seems like she knows you.”

Caleb turned around and almost dropped his beer.

Miss Piper stared back at him, wearing that orange dress he loved so much, the one that fit her upper body like a glove and had its neckline cut just low enough for him to know that his cock would fit comfortably between her tits. She was bug-eyed behind her round, frameless glasses; her jaw was slack, a glass of dark liquid frozen in her hand.

What the fuck was she doing here? Did she hear about this place and decide to troll for underage drinkers? Why was that her business, days away from graduation?

Fuck!

Caleb knew none of those questions mattered; either way, he was screwed. Caught off guard, he could only raise his beer in a slow, befuddled toast to Miss Piper, and wait for her assuredly absurd, possibly violent response. Not that she wasn’t a collected individual, but how can your reaction to running into your under-the-drinking-age student at a bar be anything other than “What the FUCK?”

Well, Miss Piper’s reaction was absurd, all right: She returned Caleb’s toast with equal speed and befuddlement, then literally looked the other way.

Huh.

Caleb turned back to try and embrace his relief, if only he could stop asking himself why she wasn’t dragging him out of this bar by his ear.

* * * * *

Perhaps years, or maybe even months down the road, Penny was going to look at the latest in the steady stream of engagement announcements or baby photos from her old classmates on Facebook, she was going to decide that she was she was tired of being on her own, and she would find a veterinarian who liked rock climbing and fine wine and had access to a trust fund and a ranch up in the country. And after they got married at a beautiful destination wedding in Venice, he would let her keep her awesome name.

“Penny Piper” was a name fit for the plucky sidekicks she idolized in her youth. It had a musical way of rolling off the tongue, and it suggested someone intelligent, caring, and — in certain situations — innocently sexy, all qualities she aspired to in her adult life. Befitting of the first two qualities, Penny had been teaching for seven years now, working at the same high school she graduated from. The job left her with little opportunity to affirm the third quality; she contented herself with pornography and a semi-occasional Tinder hookup, but they were practically interchangeable with güvenilir bahis visits to the spa. Few regrets, but fewer connections.

Then September happened.

The outfit certainly had something to do with how things changed. She never liked wearing her belted sunset orange dress to school; she preferred blouses and jeans to minimize her top hourglass figure, maybe an occasional pencil skirt. But her laundry backlog had snuck up on her, leaving the dress as the most appropriate thing she could have worn that day. It wasn’t scandalous, but it was cut just low enough and fit her bust well enough for people to recognize that she had won the genetic lottery. It wouldn’t be the end of the world for the guys in her class to know that she had big boobs, but it wasn’t the way Penny liked to present herself — especially on her first day. She dreaded the day-long fight to keep everyone’s gaze pointed upward, preemptively resenting herself for allowing her students to see her as a kind of sex object because she couldn’t be bothered to do her damn laundry.

He was the first, arriving at least a full minute before the bulk of her first period class filed inside. Early-comers tended to be bookish types like herself, having few friends to slow them down on the way to class. “Miss Piper?” he asked from the door, drawing her bespectacled brown eyes to his bare, shocking blues.

With his clean face, sharp blonde hair, and game-for-everything grin, Caleb Bradstreet did not look like the bookish type. It was a hot day, and the loose, light clothes that Caleb wore did him favor after favor. He had a lean yet sturdy frame, with arms and legs that looked like they were precision-sculpted by lasers in the same hot dude laboratory that blessed the earth with Channing Tatum. (Okay, he wasn’t as developed as those guys, but for a high school senior, he was pretty cut.)

She remembered introducing herself. She remembered Caleb taking a seat at the front row, just across from her desk, which ended up being where he’d always try to sit for the rest of the school year. And she remembered thinking that she probably would have written him off if it wasn’t for that damn dress, because all throughout the period she could feel his eyes searching her. She always got looks whenever she was in that dress, but his particular gaze had a specific heat signature associated with it, melting her insides and sending the runoff down her thighs.

Penny had never thought of a student like that before. There were a few guys she taught over the years whom she wouldn’t have kicked out of bed if they were older. However, they weren’t older, nor were they really “guys” to her. To say that her sense of duty as a teacher always won out over her respect for a healthy male body implied that there was even a struggle to begin with.

Maybe all her frustrations with dating were finally catching up to her. Maybe some repressed part of her psyche that wished she was Prom Queen material broke free and stormed her control center, taking hostages and making demands. Penny was far from homely and not quite plain, but aside from the regular gym visits that kept her in shape, she always put more effort into what was in front of her than herself. Even in her orange dress, even on her occasional dates — hell, hookups — she never felt noticed, at least not beyond “Gee, that looks like a fun amount of boob on her chest.”

Not only did Caleb Bradstreet notice her, though, he stared at her like she was perpetually walking out of the pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and it threw Penny into quicksand. Early on, while she was passing out her syllabus, Penny got a closer look at Caleb’s thick, sturdy arms. She instantly conjured an image of those arms molding themselves into her naked, supple waist. His powerful legs supported her while she thrashed upon his upright 6′ frame, her dirty blonde hair flying wild, her glasses barely holding onto her ears. For a moment she felt lightheaded while the image seared itself onto her occipital cortex.

That first class was a 45 minute battle to not stammer through her introductory lecture. The memory of the rest of her day was an incomprehensible blur of light and color. She was pretty sure she got through it without blurting out anything inappropriate, but her next clear memory was of stripping off her clothes on her way to her shower and pulling off its detachable head.

She didn’t even close the bathroom door; all the better to imagine Caleb making a surprise appearance, bending her over until her hands were splayed against the tile, impaling her on his thick rod and plunging into her sopping warmth over and over, holding on to her thick, shapely breasts like he was dangling off a cliff, faster and faster, gathering her in his arms, drowning her in the tangle of his muscle, his scent, the water, until she seized, shuddered, and slid down the tub, puddling into a twitching heap of flesh.

The türkçe bahis shower head slipped from Penny’s fingers. A darkness that not even the ceaseless drone of water-on-ceramic could penetrate overwhelmed her for what felt like minutes. When she did wake, her legs were cement and her head was cloudy from all sorts of negative thoughts. Am I a pervert? Am I going to act differently around him? If I do, will that put off all the other students in my class?

How the hell am I going to make it through the year?

* * * * *

How the hell am I gonna get out of this?

Caleb couldn’t even touch his beer while his mind ran the worst case scenario on a Möbius strip assembled from frayed nerves and sweat. For some reason, the police must have suspected Silver Spoons to be an underage drinking haven, and planted Miss Piper to help them bust it open. How and why they would approach her out of all the other teachers, or why they would use an easily-recognized teacher to catch their own students drinking didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was instructed not to make any moves on their behalf; just observe and report, and let the cops handle it. It made no sense, but maybe it did and he didn’t realize it.

“Hey, you wanna hear a joke?”

Of course, the morning he’s due to graduate, that’s when the cops would knock on his door with a warrant, hauling him into a cop car in front of Mom and Becca. Of course Miss Piper would visit to tell him about the disappointment he turned out to be.

“What fucks like a tiger and blinks?”

“I don’t know, what?”

Granted, that was stupid, but…uh, nothing, it was stupid, full stop. Of course he wasn’t taking a perp walk for underage drinking. And Miss Piper wasn’t an idiot, she had to assume that a guy like him could easily get a fake ID and was no stranger to alcohol. But certainly, this bar would be shut down, and he’d go down in history as the guy who blew it for the future junior and senior classes of Westbrook Heights. He might as well throw in a perp walk on top of that.

“You tell me.”

“Oh, I get it. You’re blinking a lot, and that’s supposed to moist my nethers or something.”

The words coming from Miss Piper’s table finally seemed to register with Caleb. She wasn’t having whatever that dude was selling; that subtle sharpening of her otherwise fragile, airy voice always signaled that a class clown was about to get cut the fuck down if he wasn’t careful. For a brief moment, he considered how good Miss Piper was at commanding authority when the situation called for it. In her class, if you were disrespectful and you got off with a mere visit to Vice Principal Sturgeon, you were lucky.

“Can you blame a guy for trying? Lemme buy you a drink. My apology for the bad joke.”

The noxious smugness in his voice reached Caleb before the content of his words did. Caleb’s first instinct was to turn quickly with his whole body, but his smarter angels won out and he settled for an over the shoulder glance, as subtle as he could manage. The dude could’ve looked like Chris Evans and he’d still be an asshole, but the fact that he looked like a younger version of the bald white dude from House made him angrier. That he actually looked annoyed with Miss Piper, like it was her fault that she didn’t recognize the panty-melting comic genius of some random douche walking up unannounced to tell her how hard he could fuck, made him flat-out pissed.

Yet he convinced himself to hang back, because he knew Miss Piper. Miss Piper was awesome. Miss Piper didn’t need him.

Did she?

* * * * *

Every year she taught at Westbrook Heights High, the thing Penny felt most proud of was handing out copies of The Light in the Forest without throwing up in her mouth a little.

Ben Jacobi, who ran the English department, was crazy about having that book in the curriculum, possibly because it had a young protagonist and was thus somehow more relatable to young people than Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath could be a bear to teach, to be sure, but all The Light in the Forest had to offer was a cast of annoying characters developed through dry, plodding prose to a depressing and maybe-possibly-slightly racist endgame. When she first read it in high school, she wondered if she’d grow to appreciate it, and seven years of teaching it at the start of every spring semester answered that question with fierce prejudice.

This year, finally, one good thing came out of the toilet paper that Conrad Richter wiped his ass with: Caleb had not been doing any of the assigned reading, which gave Penny a reason to offer him extra help.

It wasn’t all lust. It wasn’t even mostly lust. Truth be told, most of her concerns from the beginning of the year turned out to be unfounded. She certainly called on him more often than she otherwise might have — and she may or may not have added the orange dress that got her noticed into the permanent rotation — but güvenilir bahis siteleri despite Caleb turning out to be a bright, funny, positive voice in the classroom, each of his answers chipped away at his beefcake mystique and helped Penny see him more as the student she was responsible for.

That mystique was shattered completely during the MacBeth unit, when Caleb preemptively asked for extra help since he always bombed Shakespeare units in previous English classes. Caleb had warned her that he was hopeless, but she didn’t think he was so bad; he just needed some personal guidance to grasp the finer points of Shakespearian dialogue. Still, that was enough to remind Penny that she was responsible for part of his development into an educated adult.

On the other hand, Caleb was an absolute joy to spend time with in those sessions. When he didn’t get it, he was patient and self-deprecating, even if he was clearly frustrated. When it clicked into place, he could spitball from what he just figured out and come up with insights on his own that would impress the hell out of Penny. Most importantly, Caleb got an obvious kick out of the multiple voices Penny would do for scenes with more than two people. She never really left behind her inner high school drama geek, so this was her favorite part of doing extra help for Shakespeare units. Some of the other students she helped thought it was corny; now that she felt validated by Caleb, those students could go to Hell.

Of course, it also didn’t help that Penny got to sit up close to Caleb and admire his tight football-player body, bulging the skin of his arms in all the right places. Nor did it help that their proximity and isolation made it easier to sense him stealing heat-vision glances at her chest. Still, despite the obvious mutual attraction, there came a point where Penny realized that she had gone two weeks without thinking of Caleb in the shower, and that it was about to be another night.

Her sense of duty was still, in some form, intact. It was the best sleep she had gotten in years.

Now it looked like Caleb needed her help again, but the only thing that concerned her was that in the case of MacBeth, he had come to her unprompted. After five classes on The Light in the Forest where Caleb could only stammer through some bullshit answer whenever he was called on, he still wouldn’t ask for help. She doubted there was anything going on at home; they only covered the book two days out of every week, and Caleb had no trouble with homework on those other days. She just didn’t understand why he was so quick to ask for help with MacBeth but not this.

“So,” Penny asked after all the other students filed out. She didn’t have a second period class to worry about, just the responsibility to get Caleb to his next class as soon as possible. “The Light in the Forest. What’s going on with that?”

“It’s, uh,” Caleb stammered, “It’s just really hard to get through, is all.”

Penny nodded. “Let me ask you something, Caleb,” she said. “Where do you stand with your football team? Are you the MVP, just another cog in the machine, the black sheep, what? I’m going somewhere with this, promise.”

Caleb laughed; of course he did. He had a great laugh, too. He never struck Penny as someone oblivious or charmed, but he somehow escaped the plague of disaffected teenagership all the same. Not even she was that lucky growing up. “Well, the season’s over,” he explained, “but I’d say Jeff — he’s QB1 — he’d be the MVP. Our friend Chris, who’s a wide receiver, he’d probably be next in line. I’m the tailback; I run the ball or take short passes when the usual receivers are covered. Since our offense tends to favor the passing game, I don’t get the ball that much. But I get enough respect, and the team knows they can count on me when it’s time to change things up.” Penny nodded. “Too much, Miss Piper?”

“No no, it was very educational,” Penny laughed. “Here’s what I’m getting at, and I’m gonna tell you a little insider’s secret about teaching here.” Caleb nodded; he tilted his body forward just a bit, locked his eyes — those beautiful blue eyes — on hers. She loved that Caleb made such a point to listen to her droning. “It’s like this: the secret to a great class is the class itself. If a student likes being with his classmates, they don’t dread the class as much. And if those classmates participate in the class, and they’re smart and they’re engaging, the rest are more willing to absorb anything I have to teach them. You see where I’m going with this?”

“I think so.”

“On your football team, you’re maybe one or two shades off the top, but in here, you’re my MVP.”

“A B student is your MVP? That’s really sad, Miss Piper.”

“I’m gonna pretend you weren’t just being a wiseguy for a second. You might not have the best grades in the class, Caleb, but you’re what makes the class worth coming to. If you can’t step up, that makes everybody less interested, and it makes my job that much harder. So what I want to know is, what’ll it take to get you back on track?”

The late bell rang. Caleb didn’t seem concerned, “It’s a little whiny,” he sighed. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”