The Morning After

"Maybe you should just take your shirt off, Mr D." Again, her usual impishness kept this from being too offensive. I gave her a withering glance anyway, then bent back down to get Chloe. I'm blessed with a strong stomach, which was fortunate: the whole area smelled thickly of Chloe's stomach acid. I reached underneath her, getting a grip on her upper back and her legs, then rolled her toward me; her head lolled as I straightened up and took the weight. Yup, about 115. Her body was firm inside the dress.

"Awesome!" Alicia was right next to me with a tissue from her purse, wiping at Chloe's mouth. "You're strong, Mr Davis."

"Whatever." Chloe showed no sign she understood what was happening; I saw the briefest glimpse of her blue eyes before they rolled back up into her head. "Where's your car?"

Alicia showed confusion for a moment, as if I was a preschooler who couldn't figure out where to sit. "My car? Oh no, Mr Davis; we took a limo here. I was hoping we could use your car."

Shit. "Not allowed," I snapped flatly. "No way. Teachers don't give rides to students. I'll carry her inside, Alicia, but after that she'll have to take her chances with Dr Bourne."

"Oh, come on!" There was real distress in those warm hazel eyes at that, and she actually put her hand on my shoulder to keep me from turning around. "No way, Mr D; come on. She lives like ten minutes away. We'll just get her home and drop her off with her parents, then we'll come right back. Bourne won't even know we're gone. Please?" I was a little surprised, actually, that the girl didn't start crying right then, but I was adamant.

"No way," I repeated, and that's when Chloe chose to puke again, all over herself and the leaning Alicia and, of course, my shirt; I felt the warm liquid on my chest and shuddered in revulsion, the girl spasming in my arms. "Goddammit," I muttered in disgust. Alicia just blinked, her lovely neck now spattered with chewed-up bits of Chicken Kiev. "Shit. Just follow me." I stomped off toward the parking structure, my mood incandescent, listening to the clip-clop of Alicia's heels as she rushed alongside me.

"This," she observed, all her impishness gone, "is gross." Her hand came around my chest with another tissue, wiping ineffectively, and I just went faster. "I'll, like, get that cleaned for you," she offered, and now as I slowly came awake it seemed that that was exactly what was happening.

* * *

"Your shirt's in the washer," she explained, her hand tickling absently at the top of my asscrack, "and I sponged off your pants as best I could, in the shower. They're hanging up in the bathroom. My dress is totaled, though."

"Fuck! The green one?" Kaylen finally tore her eyes away from my junk. "I loved that dress."

"I know, right? I can get it dry-cleaned, but I'll make Chloe pay for it." Alicia leaned her head against my shoulder, her other hand caressing my arm. "You want to shower? Or just lie back down? Either way, we've got time to kill while your clothes dry." She turned her head now, trailing a line of kisses up my shoulder in a frighteningly familiar way, as if she'd been making out with me for years.

"I could use a shower." Kaylen's face was fixed in a calculating smile, her eyes once more trailing across me. "What do you say, Mr Davis? You could do my back; we could save water..." She cackled.

I was getting dizzy, the shock of my situation and the unprocessed tequila combining with the sunlight dazzling through the window to make me woozy. I shut my eyes. "He's going to barf all over the sheets," I heard Kaylen say with a certain clinical interest.

"Oh, my poor Mr D," Alicia gushed, her hand returning to my back. "Kaylen, can you go run a bath for him? I think he just needs to unwind in peace."

"I'll get a bowl, too," Kaylen chortled. I felt Alicia's pointy chin digging into my shoulder, her breath across my ear.

"Just try to relax, Mr Davis," she cooed. "I'm sorry about the booze; I really shouldn't have taken advantage of you."

"Urghh." I had nothing to say about that; my crippled brain still couldn't remind me about just what kind of advantage she'd taken.

* * *

But I hadn't been worried about that yet, as she and I had stood in urgent secrecy outside my car, dabbing furiously at each other with Alicia's inadequate tissues. "Sorry about this," she murmured, my hand holding the back of that swan-neck as gingerly as I could while I blotted regurgitated chicken from the front. "The puke kind of turned this into a bigger thing than I thought."

"No, it's better this way than to have Chloe passed out on a hotel lawn all night." I was very conscious of her skin under my hands, the proximity of that lovely, fresh face as she stared down at my shirt. I felt her hands wiping at the fabric. "You're a good friend to her."

"Thank you. I think I picked the right teacher to help me, too." She said it a little haltingly, but with her usual sense of general confidence. "I mean, wiping Chloe Bishop's stomach contents off my neck; that's above and beyond, especially since I'm not even your student anymore."

"I got most of it," I announced, ignoring her conversational thrust. She still had some of the stuff crusting along the top of her dress, right beside her sweet cleavage, but no way was I going to get that. It was bad enough that a student was groping my chest in a parking lot; I didn't need to return the favor. "Let's get going, before someone finds us here."

"Right," she agreed smoothly, taking a final swipe at my shirt. "You'll need to get this into a washing machine soon, Mr Davis. I managed to keep it off your jacket, I think," she went on, looking critically down at the bundle in her arms.

"Thanks." I slipped into the driver's seat of my secondhand Toyota, ignoring the slumped red-and-scarlet shape in the backseat, and started the engine. "Where are we going?"

"Just drive," Alicia said carelessly, settling the seatbelt between her breasts. "I'll tell you where to go." She was frowning at herself, then shot me an accusing look. "I've got puke all over my boobs, Mr D. You didn't even try to get it off."

I made one of those incredulous snorting sounds as I steered carefully toward the exit. "You're way over the line already, Alicia," I told her flatly.

"Maybe," she admitted, not at all sorry, "but at least I tried to get the vomit off your chest."

"Hardy har har." I was not in the mood for any kind of jokes about this, but I could feel myself blushing; it's not every day that attractive, sexy young ladies talk to me about their chests. "Watch the road, Alicia. I'm in enough trouble already without getting lost in the greater metro area."

"You're not in trouble," she rapped out confidently, "and I won't get you lost. Just try to drive smoothly; you don't need her hurling all over your backseat."

"You always were a smart one," I replied automatically; I could never, ever stop with the damn sarcastic responses. I felt her look curiously over at me.

"Huh." She paused. "I almost think you mean that, Mr D."

I did, but there was no way I could admit it now. "Whatever. Look, when we get to her house, I'm just going to let you off and park a ways away. I'll wait for you and get you back to the dance, but you'll need to handle her parents on your own. I don't want you mentioning me."

"Ooh! A secret!" She giggled. "See, first of all, you're not taking me back to the dance with my dress all nasty. You're not going back either, for the same reason." She was undoubtedly correct about that; it would be a bad idea. "Second of all, I know she's light and I'm an athlete and all, but you're on drugs if you think I can drag her drunk ass all the way into her house." Also true, I reflected. "And third of all, her parents are on vacation until next Monday."

I looked skeptically over. "Who put you in charge here?"

She laughed in my face and touched my arm briefly. "Oh, Mr D," she shook her head indulgently, "I don't mean to make you feel bad. But I just think I've got a better plan than you do, that's all." She cocked her head sideways. "Just because I'm eighteen and you're like twenty-two doesn't mean I'm not capable of handling this. Relax; you're not my teacher anymore. Turn left up ahead."

Shit. "Okay, so what's your plan?"

She shrugged. "You pull into her driveway. We carry her inside and put her to bed. You look the other way while I get her clothes off. We tuck her in nice and neat. Then I find some of her mother's clothes, you find some of her dad's, we do some laundry, and we sit down and wait. I crash at Chloe's house, you drive home once your shirt's dry." She tossed her hair back. "I've done this kind of thing before, though not with a teacher. I have a lot of friends who drink."

"Huh." It was not an ideal plan. "You know Dr Bourne will realize I'm gone."

"So?" She shrugged again. "I mean, I know you're only a second-year teacher and afraid of getting fired, but if he asks, you can always say you were patrolling the parking lot to make sure kids weren't leaving early. Or you were manning the coat-check. Or, hell, you were just in the bathroom taking a dump. How should he know?"

I hesitated. "Alicia, you've got a devious mind." I looked at her, her eyes shining and her skin flushed in the dashboard lights. "I never knew that about you."

"I used to cheat on your tests, too," she confessed at once. "Turn right up here."

"Good Lord," I muttered. As if my situation wasn't already precarious enough, I could hear Chloe groaning from the backseat.

* * *

Groaning, if the truth be told, like I was groaning now; I could hear the bathtub filling, and by now I was lying back down with Alicia's hand absently running through my hair.

"Everyone feels better after a tub," she soothed. "Cleaner, too; I think I might have gotten you a little crusty last night." Now her other hand was plucking at the hairs that trailed down from my belly button, gently separating them, again with that scary sense of familiarity. Like she was my wife or something. "Make sure you get all this shit off you."

"Don't touch me there," I protested weakly, my head still exploding behind my closed eyes. I felt obscurely like I had to assert some sort of authority, but of course she demolished that notion with her bell-like laugh.

"Calm down, Mr Davis; if you didn't want me to take care of you, well, then you shouldn't have agreed to spend the night with me." She bent and kissed my forehead. "I'm always attentive to the boys I sleep with, even when they're grown-ups."

This was entirely too icky for me. "I'm leaving as soon as I get myself cleaned up, Alicia. And this isn't ever happening again."

"What?" She was kissing me again. "What isn't happening again?"

"This." I waved a weak hand in front of me. "Whatever we did last night." She tsked.

"Poor man," she murmured, her hand still playing near my pubes, "you still don't remember." I was far too tired to disagree, and she was telling the truth anyway. Last night was only coming back to me in fits and starts. From down the hall came Kaylen's voice, telling us the tub was ready.

* * *

"Well!" When Alicia flopped onto the couch in Chloe's living room, her hair was damp; she'd been wearing it in an elaborate updo at the dance, and now she seemed to have rinsed it underneath the sink for a few minutes. But, as she settled into her seat down the sofa from me, I can't say it was her hair I was looking at.

It was evident that Chloe got her lack of height from her mother, because if I was now seeing Mrs Bishop's clothes, then clearly that woman was about three sizes smaller than Alicia. A t-shirt clung to her upper body like a wetsuit, the arms tight and short, the neckhole straining to counter the insistent pull of Alicia's high young breasts; I could detect no bra at all. The shirt's hem gave out well north of her belly button, the tanned expanse of her firm stomach surrounding a small stud in her navel. Mrs Bishop's sweatpants worked hard to contain her lush hips and powerful thighs, and they looked on her tall body more like those pants George Washington wore.

If George Washington had prominent camel-toe. I'm guessing not.

I must have been staring, for Alicia stopped in mid-settle, her body twisted oddly, with her boobs thrown to one side and her thighs to the other. Her impish smile returned. "What?"

Like I could talk about wardrobe; for starters, Alicia was a teenaged student at my school, and as if all this wasn't inappropriate enough, I was not yet at the point where I felt I could comment about how amazingly sexy she managed to make such banal clothes look. Besides, I was stuck in the shirt-and-boxers combo of Mr Bishop, a man apparently much, much fatter than I was. Or ever would be, I hoped. I was positively swimming in a logo shirt from the University of Godknowswhere; the boxers, thrown on over my own tight grey boxer-briefs, reached nearly to my knobby knees. I looked hurriedly away. "Nothing," I muttered. I held out the TV remote, which had been frustrating me while Alicia had been putting herself together. "Do you know how this works?"

"Sure!" She bounced across the couch, drifting toward me like a cruise missile, with the same smooth accuracy and deceptive snakelike speed; she took the remote and ended up right next to me in a cloud of rose-smelling hair. "It took me forever to figure this out," she mused, staring hard at the flat-screen. "Her dad loves his hi-def hockey."

"Um, what does Chloe's dad do?" The house was huge and expensively furnished, the kitchen looking like a restaurant's. Chloe's room, when I'd carried her in there and laid her down, had been enormous; I'd noticed a walk-in closet larger than my living room before Alicia had shooed me out. She shrugged, manipulating the complicated device.

"Who the fuck knows?" If she'd ever had any qualms about swearing in front of a teacher, they'd been firmly undone by the fact that she had me right next to her on a couch in someone else's underwear. Whatever was left of my dignity was apparently not worthy of any deference; she was treating me like a peer, and a part of me sort of liked it. "He's some kind of broker. Stocks, real estate, money markets; I don't know." She turned and looked at me. "Nice choice of outfits, Mr D." Her eyes twinkled. "Do you have a girlfriend?"

"Huh?" The non-sequitur threw me fully.

"I'm guessing no," she went on smoothly, "because no woman would let you even think to wear that color shorts. I know you were scrounging through a stranger's drawer, but for God's sake show a little color sense."

A silence followed this extraordinary speech. "Well," I said at last, "I'm sorry I've offended your tender sensibilities."

"And how." She looked over at me, her face now within a foot of mine as our shoulders touched; she made no attempt to move back to her end of the couch. "If you really want fashion advice from me, Mr Davis," she said seriously, "I'd be happy to oblige. You're a nice-looking guy; all the girls think so. Usually you dress okay."

"Um. Thanks?" All the girls think so? What was that supposed to mean? "No, I don't really have a girlfriend." She cocked an eyebrow at that.

"Huh. I'm a little surprised. Want a drink?" She got smoothly to her feet, that camel toe now staring me in the face; no way in hell was she wearing any underwear. "I'm in for the night, so I hope you won't be scandalized if I have a little nightcap?"

Was she asking my permission? "You're not twenty-one, Alicia," I pointed out.

"Chill, Mr D," she scoffed. "We've already got a couple of secrets this evening; what's one more?" She disappeared down a hall, a wedgie working its way steadily into her ass, the tiny sweatpants painted on. "I'll bring a glass for you," she called back.

"No need," I spluttered. There was a reality show on the TV, one of those vapid pieces from the trashiest end of the television industry; naked people strolling on a beach, sketchily pixelated, though whether they were trying to survive in the wild or trying to score a bachelor at a resort was not immediately clear. "I'm leaving soon, remember?"

"No you're not," she shot back confidently from a nearby room. "I ran your pants under the water; they'll need to air-dry." She emerged with a square brown bottle and a pair of shot glasses. "I figure you've got at least three hours here. Besides," she said airily, once more taking a seat right beside me, "what's the rush? It's not even 8:30." She dimpled a grin at me as she poured for herself, the scent of tequila wrinkling my nose and assaulting me with brutal memories. "Want a shot? I promise I won't let you drive home drunk."

I sighed. High school had apparently changed since I'd gotten out, if this confident young woman was any indication. "Tequila and I have a past," I admitted. She looked quickly up at me, her eyes wide.

"Ooh! Do tell!" She held the bottle ready above my glass.

"Nothing. Just... I had too much once and got super-sick." I shivered. "Bad memories."

"Ah." She hesitated, grinning, then poured me a shot. "Don't worry. I'll take good care of you." She slid the glass across the coffee table and raised hers. "To better memories?"

* * *

In some ways, I guess. Certainly different ones, I reflected in the morning as I lurched toward the bathroom. That other time, I'd been puking sick; at least this time, I didn't seem to have thrown up. Yet. And as far as I knew, I hadn't gotten laid that other time; this time, I apparently had. But I was still trying not to think about that as I reached the bathroom door, Alicia clucking in my wake. I heard a shower running inside.

"Here we are," Alicia said briskly, leading me in. The shower was separate from the tub in a bathroom this expensive, and behind the privacy glass I could see a pink body wiggling under the spray. "That you, Kaylen?"

"Ye-es!" came a singsong reply from Kaylen. "Tub's ready," she shouted unnecessarily. "Don't mind me in here, Mr Davis," she taunted. I frowned and stayed in the doorway.

"Oh, come on," Alicia urged, rolling her eyes. "You're being silly." The tub was, of course, a whirlpool, broad and spacious enough for any two average people. "Hop in. I love the tubs at Chloe's house." She eyed me up and down, grinning at my swinging cock. "They always feel nice. Their tubs have bubble jets!"

"No shit." I was not at all enthusiastic about this. A bath would definitely feel excellent, no doubt, but I already seemed to have embroiled myself with one naked student; there was another in the shower now, and I wasn't interested in getting involved with her. Kaylen Rapp had been an asshole in my class last year; I felt no affection for her at all. I was still reeling that she'd seen me naked. Alicia, beside me with her hand affectionately around my waist, sensed my hesitation.

"Quit being a baby," she whispered fondly. "She's harmless. Go ahead and soak, and we'll talk after you're feeling better." And then – holy shit – she actually smacked my bare ass. "Go on. Scrub down, Mr D." And then she was gone, and I sighed as I padded toward the tub, scratching absently at an itchy groin, my patchy memory already hard at work...

* * *

The tequila had been expensive, apparently, and quite good. The first two shots had attacked us both with a will, our faces twisting as we coughed, but after that the enjoyment had begun. Like I said, quite good.

"I'm not sure I like this show," Alicia reflected, pulling her long tight legs up onto the couch so that she could curl them underneath her. "I don't buy that these people act differently on TV just because they're naked."

"Wouldn't you?" I was quick with my response, the conversation flowing very, very naturally after four drinks; she really did feel like a peer. Dangerously so. "I mean, if you were naked, you'd definitely act differently."