Full Life Volume One Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Full Life: Volume One

  End Note

  Full Life

  A series by

  V. Marks

  Full Life

  By V. Marks

  Published by V. Marks at Smashwords

  Copyright 2014 by V. Marks

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cassie stared at the blank page. It stared back. She sipped her coffee. She rearranged her pencils. She thought about peeling an orange, then rejected the idea. She did those and a dozen other things, as the sun rose outside and the limited time she had ran out, none of which was writing a sex scene for her evening writing class.

  She'd graduated with a degree in anthropology a few months before, and since then had been, to use a word she both hated and recognized as being completely accurate, floundering. She'd loved college - she loved studying, she loved writing papers, she loved that all her friends lived within a ten minute walk. Then, like Wile E. Coyote running over a cliff, she'd graduated. Without the structure college provided, without authority figures telling her what to do, she found she didn't really want to do anything. For the first month of what was supposed to be her glorious adulthood, she'd sat on the couch in her parent''s basement, the same one she'd sat on in high school, alternately filling out job applications and watching Netflix.

  But Cassie didn't like feeling useless, so, as her favorite anthropology professor had told her every time she'd hit a wall with research, she'd decided to "be patient, and experiment, experiment, experiment." She took a job as a researcher at a marketing firm. She took a Pilates class. She moved into her boyfriend, Blake's, apartment. She washed her sheets once a week. And when her friend, Melanie, suggested they sign up for a night class in creative writing, she'd jumped on it. She slowly molded herself into what she thought an adult should be, and, like the good anthropologist she was, stepped back and observed.

  At that moment, the experiment was not going well. She set a timer on her phone for five minutes, told herself she had to have pencil on paper until it went off, and, with a determined sigh, started to write.

  She was lonely, and he was hungry, she wrote. They knew they'd never love each other, but their bodies didn't care. He grabbed her by the back of her thighs and lifted her up on the dresser, knocking over her half empty bottles of lotion and makeup. With a savage jerk, he tore off her yoga pants and touched her moist vagina.

  Cassie stopped and stared at the paper. She erased "vagina" and wrote "cunt," then erased "cunt" and wrote "pussy," then erased "pussy" and, bowing to her sense of decency, wrote "thing," knowing, as she did, that the whole paragraph was awful and getting worse. She crumpled the paper, dropped it on the ground, and got up to get some Tylenol. She'd had a headache for the last week, and something about failure was making it worse.

  Not that a headache would be an excuse. Their professor, Lamar, had told them that not doing it would result in an F for the class. "Sex is one of the most basic things in the world," he'd said, "but it can go so many places. Make it. The only grading criteria will be that it makes at least one of us feel something real."

  Cassie liked sex. She thought maybe she was even good at it. She wasn't doing what her friend Melanie called the "advanced curriculum," but she had the basics down, and so far, no complaints. But writing about it? And then reading it out loud? She'd been avoiding the assignment all week. Now, with class that night, she was under a time crunch, and her fear of failure was fighting against her fear of looking like a pervert. It wouldn't have been so bad if her first piece for class hadn't been a huge success. Lamar had leaned forward, captivated, as she read it out loud, then had made her email it to the rest of the class, telling the students they could learn something from it.

  Cassie wanted that approval again. She respected Lamar's passion, and if he just so happened to be fit and black and smart in just the way that made Cassie have trouble meeting his beautiful brown eyes, well, who could judge where inspiration came from?

  She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. She had an hour and a half before she had to leave for work. You got this, she told herself. Clock is running out. Time to crush it. She sat down at the table. She remembered there were leftovers in the fridge. She got up. No. She sat back down.

  In his very first lecture, Lamar had told them that if they felt uncomfortable while writing, they were on the right track. Writing about sex made Cassie plenty uncomfortable, but maybe it wasn't enough. She asked herself, what would she be most embarrassed to read in front of the class? What would make her blush harder than anything?

  With that, she found words.

  He came from behind her, grabbed the waist of her jeans, and pulled her towards him. Instead of kissing her neck, he kept his mouth slightly above it, blowing hot breath across her skin as he moved towards her ear. Being so close to what she desired, but still being denied, sent a jolt of lust through her. She turned to kiss him, but he used the hand on her jeans to yank her back. His other hand rose to her throat, caressing it but suggesting much more.

  As had happened while writing the story Lamar had liked, ideas seemed to bypass her brain and form themselves on the page. Her breath quickened, her eyes became unfocused, and she grew wet. She shifted her legs, enjoying the sensation, and she wanted to touch herself, but more than that, she wanted to keep writing.

  She looked over her shoulder at him. He smiled at her.

  "Please," she whispered, wanting more. He smiled, leaned forward, and kissed her.

  Suddenly he drove them both into the wall besides them, the pressure from his body, the wall, and his hand on her neck all the same. Nothing existed except for these sensations and the knowledge that all he was focused on, all that was in his world, was the two of them. Her back arched as pleasure ran through her body.

  Her pencil scratched, her nipples grew hard. Then, from behind her, she heard, "Her back arched as pleasure roared-"

  Her face flushing, she grabbed the paper and flipped it over. Her boyfriend, Blake, reached around her and tried to grab the paper, but she bent over it, shielding it with her body. When he couldn't get to it, he settled on tickling her, his fingers running up her stomach and ribs.

  "Jerk!" she yelled, squirming away. She tore the paper in half, crumpled it, and dropped it on the floor. What she'd written wasn't like her, and with Blake there, she wanted it gone.

  "Hey! I was getting into that," he said, teasing. "I was waiting for whips to make an appearance."

  "You're going to be waiting a long time," she said, still blushing. "That paragraph took me a week to write, and it blows."

  "Are you afraid you might get-" he deepened his voice, "-'broken?'"

  He saw her face fall and realized she wasn't interested in that kind of joking.

  "Hey," he said, "That scene wasn't really you anyway. Aren't you supposed to write what you know?"

  "Yeah. But I kind of wish I knew something more interesting," she said. She was getting sad this assignment was so difficult, especially after the last had been so easy.

  "Aw, hey. You're interesting. Maybe you just need to do some research."

  With a smile, he reached out and tweaked her nipples. Already aroused, and feeling better, she squirmed, this time not out of embarrassment.
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  "I'd love to," she said. "I just need to find a good assistant."

  "I'm interested," he said. "And, I think you'll find, more than qualified."

  He took her hand and put it over the front of his pajama bottoms. She squeezed and, feeling his cock already hard, moaned. He bent down and kissed the base of her neck lightly and slowly, then moved up with slightly more pressure at each stop. Once he got to her ear, he slid his arms under her small, curvy body and lifted her up, carrying her to their bedroom and dropping her on their bed. He pulled her shirt up over her head and started kissing between her breasts.

  The bed was still warm from where he'd been before. Wanting to feel his weight on her, she grabbed his hips and tried to pull him on top of her, but he resisted.

  "Wait a moment," he said. "Perhaps reflect upon the goals of our research."

  He left the room. She could hear him enter their bathroom, brush his teeth, pee, splash water under his armpits. There had been so much more urgency and passion when they'd started seeing each other, when they'd been learning each other's bodies. He never would have gotten to kissing her breasts and been able to pull back. But over time, each of their quirks had surfaced. Blake, despite his blue eyed lumberjack meet British aristocracy looks, really hated to be smelly during sex.

  The early morning sun just streaming in the window, Cassie found herself getting sleepy. She closed her eyes and started drifting.

  She was laying on her back on a table in the writing class, naked, her arms off to the side and grasping the legs of the table. The class watched as Lamar, also naked, ran his tongue up and down her labia, then slipped inside to tongue her clit. Warmth moving down her neck and into her chest, Cassie moaned and bucked her hips, wanting Lamar's mouth, his body, his cock.

  But when she looked down, she saw Blake. For the first few moments, she was still in the dream, embarrassed at what the class had seen, worried that Blake might find out, but not wanting it to stop. Lamar had felt even more amazing than she'd daydreamed, as if he was touching some part of her that no one had reached before.

  Gradually though, Cassie came back to reality, where Blake was licking her exactly how he knew she liked it. Moaning, she pulled at her nipples and wiggled her hips.

  Blake looked up and smiled. "Researcher Cassie, I believe you're losing your impartiality."

  He slid two fingers into her. She might sometimes want other people, but no one knew her body as well as Blake. She moaned, and he went back to her pussy, sucking on her clit and fingering her. Her moans got louder, and she started to get up to return the favor - she always wanted to blow him when she got really turned on - but he was already kissing his way up her torso, and she reminded herself that he didn''t have a lot of time before work.

  Once he was up to her lips, he paused and looked into her eyes. "I love you, Cassie," he said. The tip of his cock pressed hard against her pussy, ready to enter her. She tilted her pelvis towards him, asking a silent question, and he moved himself in, the first half slow, the second half swift and just a touch hard.

  "Blake," she cried out, lost in how his skin felt against hers, in how he'd wrapped his arms around her. She felt safe, good, taken care of. As they worked towards climax with their usual rhythm, it wasn't individual sensations she was feeling, but a combination of love and deep pleasure. She didn't know what had come over her this morning, first with the story and then with the dream. This was what she wanted.

  As they got closer, their tempo increased, and with each thrust Blake pushed a little deeper. His hands moved down to her ass, drawing her closer towards him. As they came together, she called out his name.

  Afterwards, they rolled to their sides, still holding one another. In the warmth of the early morning sun, in the bed she shared was the man she loved, Cassie was content.

  After eating breakfast and showering, she hadn't had any time to work on her submission. On her walk to work, the leftover warmth from sex with Blake shielding her against the late winter chill, she decided she'd been thinking about the scene all wrong. She''d been trying to write something she thought other people would find exciting. But she liked that her sex life was sweet, and she'd argue with anyone who didn't call that real.

  When she got to the office, sentences were running through her head. She told herself she'd get them down before digging into work. But sentences turned into paragraphs, paragraphs she thought were damn good. The morning's sunlight had been nicely romantic. She felt like she'd worked some symbolism in with it. And she thought her descriptions of Blake's chest weren't too bad either. She was about to start writing about Blake entering her, when her boss, Trent, called her phone and asked her to come into his office.

  "Please shut the door," Trent said. When Cassie thought about what an adult should be like, she drew inspiration from Trent. Although he was just a few years older than Cassie, he managed her whole floor and somehow still found time to train for triathlons, tutor underprivileged children in math twice a week, and host dinner parties on the weekends. When he'd hired her, he told her he liked her energy, which she wasn't sure but thought might be a come on. At least, after one of Trent's dinner parties, Blake had thought he had a thing for her. Cassie very consciously tried to keep things professional, even if she did sometimes wonder what a triathlete's thighs felt like, and once, as she was showing him a bit of work, she'd noticed a box of extra-large condoms sitting, mostly buried by paper, in his paper tray.

  "It's a little vanilla," Trent said, reading off his computer. "But maybe it's about to move on from there."

  "Sorry?" said Cassie.

  "Hey, I'm no writer. But aren't people into kinky stuff now? Whips and rope and things like that?"

  Cassie started blushing. The headache, which she'd forgotten in the excitement of writing going so well, came back.

  "We have key-logging software installed on all the machines," Trent said, leaning back and smiling disarmingly. "You typed 'cock.' My computer got pinged. I looked at your screen. I found what certainly looks like non work related material."

  "I am so, so, sorry," Cassie said, brilliantly red. Trent laughed. A small bit of Cassie's mind flared up in anger, but she squished that down.

  "Don't worry about it," Trent said. "It is, technically, schoolwork, and I like that you're continuing your education. Although I am hoping this is the last cock I see on your computer."

  Cassie blushed more.

  "Of course."

  Trent's smile deepened. He seemed to be enjoying making her embarrassed. Maybe he did like her.

  "You can go, Cassie," Trent said, breaking his gaze and looking back down at his work.

  "Thank you," Cassie said. But, before she left, without thinking about it, her eyes darted to where she'd seen the box of condoms. She could just barely make out the black and gold of the box. Realizing what she was doing, she looked back at Trent, to make sure he hadn't seen. But he was looking at her, and when she met his gaze, he winked.

  "She knew it was going to hurt, because, unlike her ex, Rob was a man," Rick, a fifty year old retired auto worker going back to school for retaining, read. His hands were shaking so hard the paper rustled. "But he was what she needed. A man."

  The classroom was the opposite of sexy. Fluorescent lights, sterile carpet, chipped plaster walls. Most of the students were nontraditional, with the oldest being a woman well into her sixties. The only other person in class close to her and Melanie's age was Joseph, whose piece Lamar had sent out last week along with Cassie's as an example of great writing. Cassie half-jokingly considered him her rival.

  Cassie had walked into class and sat down just moments before it started, taking her customary seat next to Melanie. Without having to say anything, they'd both started giggling at what was about to come, but were silenced by a look from Lamar.

  The first part of the class had been him lecturing for twenty minutes on characterization. Then he'd asked them to circle up their desks and share their writing.

  Rick had gone first
. As he read his piece, his eyes kept flicking to the women in class, and he couldn't stop coughing. Cassie, and, she suspected, the rest of the class, was glad when he finished reading.

  Melanie went next. Her scene was about the captain of the cheerleading team losing her virginity to the quarterback. It was clichéd at times, but Melanie read it loudly and clearly, and it was nothing if not explicit. Cassie found herself a little turned on by the end, but that felt like a weird response to something her friend wrote, so she pushed the feeling out of her mind. Besides, she was going next.

  Claire had used the hour she had between work and class to go to a cafe and pound out the rest of her scene. She was happy with the finished product. She felt like she'd managed to be sweet, deep, and romantic, and thought that her choice to not get too into the nitty gritty of things felt fresh. But as she read, she noticed people looking at the clock, doodling on their papers, and cleaning their nails. Everyone was bored.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time that day, her face grew red. She realized that on some level she had known the scene was boring, even though she'd convinced herself it wasn't. It was torture to have to stand in front of the class and read something she knew was bad, and even though her scene was the least explicit of those read so far, she got more embarrassed than even Rick had been. She sat down as she finished and, as the class applauded halfheartedly, stared down at her desk.

  She was so embarrassed, she couldn't focus on the next few stories, and only started paying attention again when Joseph started reading. His piece was written in first person, and opened with a thin, longhaired, naked brunette tying up the narrator. She slipped a blindfold over the narrator's eyes and started kissing his naked body. As the narrator described the rushes of lust pulsing through him while she kissed her way through his body, Cassie found herself getting turned on.

  "She pulled away, and I heard something drag across the floor," Joseph read, his voice loud and clear. "Swish, swish. The noise, the only one in the room, was heavy and rough, like someone pushing a box across a concrete floor. Without being able to see, my world narrowed down to that one noise, and my body strained towards it. Swish. Swish. Then, for a moment, it stopped, and my world was nothing."