A Gift in Disguise Ch. 09

You said she saw you in your swimsuit today. She also saw you in your nice business suit when you were my guest at Harper. Get a new tie, have that suit cleaned and pressed, and I'd be shocked if after the concert you and Bethany didn't end up at her townhouse getting much better acquainted.

Why don't you call Bethany tomorrow and invite her to the concert? You won't be disappointed. I'm positive."

I assured Sharon that I would call Bethany. I also noticed that Sharon was beginning to once again show some signs of fatigue, so I tried gracefully to end the conversation. Her last words were, "Be sure you let me know after you talk with Bethany so I can send the tickets over to you."

My Monday 1 p.m. class ended at 2 p.m., so I called Bethany. Unfortunately I got her cellphone's voicemail. I headed for the library to study for an hour before my last class of the day, but Bethany returned my call just as I reached the library's main entrance.

After telling her how much I had enjoyed talking with her at the SUB just a day earlier, I got right to the point of inviting her to the symphony concert. She eagerly accepted and thanked me not only for the invitation but for giving her enough lead time to adjust her work schedule. She made no effort to camouflage the excitement in her voice. Before ringing off, she asked me to call her again next week, just to talk. She said I would probably get her voicemail, but she assured me she would return my call quickly.

Then, as promised, I called Sharon to give her the news. I got her voicemail, so rather than play telephone tag, I left a message telling her Bethany had eagerly accepted my invitation.

My Tuesday morning classes were uneventful. Because of the unseasonably warm weather, I couldn't wait to get back to my apartment to change into my cargo shorts and loose-fitting tee shirt. I even peeled my socks off and slipped into a comfortable pair of boat shoes. I hoped it wouldn't be too casual for Marta, but she had said to come to be comfortable in the forecast heat.

Just as I pulled into my apartment's parking spot, my cellphone rang.

"Tom, it's Marta. I've got to make a quick run into town to file a document at the county clerk's office. I may not be back by one, so could we reschedule for two?"

"Sure, two's fine. Will you reset the garage code for the new time?"

"Oh, rats. I forgot to do that, and I'm already on my way. Look, let's do this. I'll call you when I'm leaving the courthouse. If I get home before you get there, I'll reset the code. If not, I won't be far behind you, and I'll let you in when I get there."

At 1:15 Marta called back.

"Tom, I'm on the way home, so I'll be able to reset the door code. When you get there, just pull in the garage and close the door behind you. I'm going to jump in the shower right quick to rinse off and cool off. When you come from the garage and into the hallway, turn left and go to the door at the end. That's the garage entrance to my guest house. I checked the carpet in my office, and it's not quite dry enough to walk on yet from this morning's cleaning. Besides, it has that wet-carpet smell to it. I'll put a pitcher of lemonade on the kitchen dinette table. Make yourself comfortable; I won't be too long."

The drive to her house outside town took about 35 minutes. I pulled into her long driveway at five minutes until two and stopped in front of the middle garage unit about two minutes later. I entered the door code on the keypad, and the door quietly went up.

I followed her instructions and entered the guest house. I could hear water running in some distant room, so I assumed Marta was showering in the guest house bathroom. I poured a glass of lemonade and waited.

Maybe ten minutes later I heard a door open. Then Marta walked into the kitchen wearing a short, white terry robe that stopped just below mid-thigh. Her fashionable sandals accentuated her shapely legs. While she walked, she was using a towel to dry her black hair. And when she raised her arms to dry her hair, her robe hiked up even more. She looked elegantly casual and quite relaxed.

Though in our meetings at Jamie's lab Marta was always wearing makeup which accentuated her hafu beauty, she wore none now having just exited the shower. Even without makeup, I felt a hard-on building.

Making no effort to hide my interest, I stood to greet her when she entered.

"Please, sit down, Tom. I'm sorry about the schedule change. Rather than keep you waiting any longer, I hope you don't mind that I came out in this and with my hair still a little wet."

I'm sure Marta noticed my eyes going straight to her long, smooth legs toned with dancer's muscles. Her mother had been right. Marta could easily have been a model. With her Asian face and uncharacteristically long, slender legs, she would have been fighting off the offers for glamour magazine covers. Even as she was just a few weeks from turning 40, I was willing to bet that with her legs and figure, she would still look great on either the runway or the dance floor.

"No apologies necessary, Marta. Thank you for being so willing to help me with my thesis submission."

"Oh, you're welcome, Tom. Grab your lemonade and follow me into the sun room. My notes are there, and its actually cooler there than in here."

"Nice guest house," I commented, trying to make small talk.

"Thank you," she responded. "C'mon, I'll give you a quick tour before we get down to business."

As we walked, she explained, "My own house is on the other side of my office. Like this guest house, it's small by most standards, about 1300 square feet. Two bedrooms, each with its own separate full bath, a functional kitchen, no formal dining room, and a spacious sun room. Of course, my own place on the other side of the office is decorated to my own tastes. After all, I live there.

This guest house that shares the garage with my office and home is an absolute necessity, though I had a tough time convincing my architect to do it the way I wanted it done. Sometimes architects look at what the next buyer will want rather than what the owner who hired him wants now.

You see, Tom, I have several prominent clients who might be recognized if they needed to check into a hotel or motel when they're coming to my office on business. In deference to their desire for privacy, I had this guest house included when I built out the property about eight years ago. Normally they're only here for one or two nights, so the guest house is a better alternative to the hotel-restaurant mix. There's almost no public exposure and no drive time from a downtown hotel to the office here."

As we walked, she pointed out each of the rooms, all conveniently accessible from anywhere else in the compact guest house.

I commented that from the outside the complex of garage, guest house, her office, and her home didn't look that large.

"That was the plan, Tom. Being single, I don't need a lot of space for things like entertaining. A large, pretentious house would attract unnecessary attention, too. This place is functional. It meets my needs. And if a client needs to have any of his or her staff, they can stay downtown at a hotel. You'd probably be surprised at how eager some big names are to get away from their staff sometimes."

She concluded the tour - it only took maybe five minutes total because of the guest house's size - and walked gracefully to the sun room, where she motioned for me to be seated at a small table.

"Wow!" Great view," I said as I looked out the north-facing windows to the river and valley below.

"Thank you, Tom. I wanted my guests to feel at peace here and not have to see or hear anything other than the sights and sounds of nature. No neighbors within three miles."

Then even in the casual atmosphere of her home's guest house, the consummate professional sat down with me at the small table and got down to business.

"I should first explain how the university's plagiarism detecting software works," she began. "It's actually a variation of some software several intellectual property attorneys perfected a few years ago. The attorneys needed a way to quickly narrow down the field of comparative writings from which their clients were accused of plagiarizing.

The software developers came up with a program consisting of about 39 elements. They assigned a weight to each element. Each subscribing attorney could select the elements relevant to his particular client's case.

At about the same time, universities began to see an increase in plagiarism by their undergraduate and post-graduate students in papers and theses. The Internet promotes plagiarism, particularly as universities began digitizing their students' and faculty members' scholarly works and making them available online.

It logically followed that the universities would want the same software or some variation of it as the attorneys did. The universities' IT people looked at what the attorneys' software contractor had already developed, reduced the number but not the content of the elements, and voila! Relatively inexpensive software which the university could use to quickly identify students and faculty who were not delivering entirely original content and not giving credit to the original writer.

Does that kind of make sense, Tom?"

"Sure, but how do you know what elements the university will use to examine my thesis?"

"I was one of the five attorneys who joined together to create the original software. We protected our work, then formed a company to market it. The company name is Original Work?, Inc."

I admitted to Marta that I'd never heard of the company.

"There's no reason why you should have, Tom. We no longer advertise, because we don't need to.

Because the company customizes its elements to each client, we have records of what each client uses. That includes the EE department at the University, Tom. So, I simply ran the electronic version of your thesis through the software elements the University EE department uses.

Remember, each element has a weighted value; some elements have more weight than others because they're more important. The lower the point total, the more likely the work is original. Most grad students at the University have scores in the range of 25-65 out of a possible 120 points. The client institution is provided with a detailed breakout of each element and its score for a particular work. Then the client's rep, frequently a thesis chairman, compares our results with the actual thesis or paper and decides how to proceed. In that range of 25-65 points, it is most likely the student's carelessness or sloppiness that caused the score. Higher than that, particularly in the important elements, and the client should have increasing concern about intentional plagiarism."

Marta had put on her "lawyer face" and just stared at me without any indication of what my score was. Finally, she broke the tension.

"Your score was 17, Tom. Frankly, all of those points were in elements that our company experts might jokingly characterize as 'We've got to find something, anything, wrong with this writing.' To put it simply, Tom, the only reasonable conclusion your thesis chairman and committee can draw is that your work was original, and where you drew on the work of others, you properly and very meticulously attributed it to the original authors."

Marta no doubt saw the relief in my facial expression.

"But keep in mind, Tom, that my examination was only to find indicators of plagiarism or the lack of them in your thesis. My results say nothing about the technical accuracy of your information or conclusions. That's why Jamie's input after reading your thesis will be so important. She's an engineer; I'm a lawyer. Our software only compares words phrases, and clauses, not ideas. I think she planned on burying herself in your thesis this past weekend, so if your goal is to get your thesis to your chairman by the end of this week, you should be okay."

"I've already talked with Jamie. Essentially she suggested that I make no changes unless you saw something that required correction."

"Well, then I'd say you're going to be able to start making the copies you need so you can turn your thesis in to your committee chairman on Friday. When it comes to evaluating the work of her profession, Jamie is uncompromising. If she was impressed, I suspect your committee is going to be blown away."

I assumed from the tone of Marta's voice that our meeting was ending, so I once again thanked her, then started to get up to leave.

Marta quickly reached across the table and put her soft, warm hand firmly on top of mine. Her eyes and her tone of voice were almost pleading when she said, "Tom, if you have a little more time, I'd like to talk with you a bit more about your thesis - or more accurately about what I found to be a completely unexpected connection between it and your 'gift'."

Well that got my attention. That and the fact that when Marta reached across the table, her robe opened slightly to reveal more of her cleavage. Until then, I had paid far more attention to her legs and what it might feel like to have them wrapped around me. Now, seeing a glimpse of her breasts for the first time, I wondered what other secrets she had been hiding.

What possible connection could my master's thesis on Bio-Electronic Interface Sensors and Transitions in Nanotechnological Design have with my ability to bring women to mind-numbing orgasms? After stealing one more glance down Marta's robe and certainly hoping for more, I sat back down.

When speaking earlier about her software's analysis of my thesis, Marta's voice had been pleasant but confident, crisp, and professional as one would expect from an attorney talking to a client. Now, it was more personal, tinged with both softness and appealing uncertainty. The vulnerably human, less professional side of Marta Cruz was quickly becoming more and more alluring and arousing.

"Tom, please be a bit patient with me. This isn't easy to explain.

Normally, running a document such as your thesis against the plagiarism detecting software does not require the operator — me in this case — to read or have any understanding of the document's content. But all of us — Lorraine, Kim, Jamie, Amanda, Emily, and I — have taken a particular interest in you. It's clear to all of us that you have remarkable intellectual skills as well as your sexual gift. So I decided to go a step further and actually get some idea of what was in your thesis.

As an intellectual property plaintiff's attorney I have to read my clients' works which they believe may have been stolen by others. As you can imagine, their subject matters can be very diverse, and I can't possibly be well-versed in every possible subject area. So what I've developed is a methodology that starts first with me just skimming a client's written work to get an overall idea of its complexity. I'm not doing a word-by-word reading for even the most basic understanding, let alone full comprehension of the client's writing.

That was my approach with your thesis. I skimmed it. But two completely unexpected things happened after that initial reading. One was very unusual, but the other was absolutely shocking.

I had completed the first look at your thesis then set it aside, intending to let my mind clear, so to speak. That's what I usually do with any client's document.

But as my mind started to relax I suddenly realized that I had intuitively understood your material to a far greater extent than I should have. That's not to say I understood every technical detail of it in the same way Jamie and the engineers on your thesis committee might, but my elevated level of comprehension of it was so unexpected that it got my attention. With only my initial skimming of your thesis, there is absolutely no way I should have achieved the level of understanding I had.

But what shocked me more than you can imagine was that simultaneously with my realization that I understood your thesis material far better than I had expected, I felt something else. I had become quickly and very unexpectedly sexually aroused.

My arousal was so overwhelming that I left my office and rushed into my bedroom, stripped off my clothes, and lay on my back in bed and masturbated. You were the focus of my masturbation fantasy, Tom. It was as if you were in the room with me. It took two incredibly intense orgasms, one right after the other, for me to fully relieve myself.

While my mind was recovering during its post-orgasmic haze, fragments of my mother's teachings about shifuku coalesced in my mind. It took several more minutes of lying quietly to arrive at an explanation for my reactions to your thesis."

That Marta could speak so calmly and yet so frankly was unsurprising, but I had difficulty processing that she had somehow become sexually aroused after reading my EE thesis.

"Tom, I know that Lorraine and maybe Jamie and Kim have superficially explained to you that my Japanese mother indoctrinated me into the practice of shifuku. But based on what happened to me after I read your thesis, I think there is more you need to know. You see, I've not told Jamie and Kim all my mother told me. Something — maybe my mother's spirit — is telling me now to tell you the rest of the story."

Marta was clearly uneasy with her inability to completely comprehend all that was happening. Her logical attorney mind was obviously conflicted. Still, she continued but now her typical attorney-like confidence was gone, replaced with a sexy uncertainty that did nothing to lessen my erection.

"As both a registered nurse and a practicing licensed psychologist, Lorraine has shown a very definite interest in shifuku. Her interest is primarily academic, though. She is fascinated with the exceptional mental discipline and preparation required of those comparatively few women who engaged in our ancient Asian sexual practice. Given its complexity, she finds it remarkable that shifuku is learned by word of mouth. I'll try to explain, because I believe it is very relevant to understanding my unexpected response to your thesis and to your 'gift'.

Even though I have demonstrated the power of shifuku to Lorraine during sex with her, she specifically declined my offers to teach her the practices. Lorraine wanted to remain an objective observer rather than become a committed practitioner and immersing herself in it like Emily has. Consequently, because Lorraine intentionally avoided immersing herself in the mental discipline it requires, she has never fully experienced its power during her own orgasms." She paused. "At least not from the ones I caused."

Marta's last words, spoken emphatically but with a definite air of mystery, sent another twinge of desire through me. She continued.

"Unlike Lorraine, Emily embraces every aspect and nuance of shifuku. Though I am the master and she is the student, the power of Emily's shifuku energy is truly remarkable. You experienced it yourself.

I have already shown or explained to Lorraine and Emily everything I'm about to tell you about shifuku, however Jamie, Kim, and even Amanda are not. And none of them including Emily and Lorraine know I'm even talking with you about this. Revealing this to a man is contrary to shifuku's teachings and principles. If I didn't think it was relevant to understanding your 'gift' I wouldn't do it."

Marta paused again, appearing to organize her thoughts.

"Women who practiced shifuku are called shifuki. They were often unable to be separate from exceedingly dominating husbands or other males for more than a few minutes, they needed to learn, develop, and perfect truly a remarkable set of sexual skills.

Again, it's important to realize that relatively few women in the larger population ever knew shifuku even existed. Initiation into it was by seduction and invitation by a practicing shifuki. Those few invited and taught were generally already sexually adventuresome and tolerant. In contrast to them, the vast majority of women unaware of shifuku remained submissive to and dependent on their men.