Pennsylvania #2
I titled it Conference Materials 2023. Academic training had taught me many things, but perhaps the most useful was how to disguise deeply embarrassing material beneath a layer of administrative boredom.
The folder contained two things.
First: a list of what I wanted from a man.
Not intellectually. Physically. The kind of list a woman makes after years of being quietly, consistently, almost insultingly undersupplied.
It specified the grade of stubble I preferred, the shape of a mouth, and—because I had stopped apologizing for it—entries that used words like girth and length.
Second: a library. Months of carefully bookmarked links, organized into subcategories I had developed organically as my research expanded. I used the word research with total sincerity.
The subcategories had names. Broad shoulders. Picked her up. Pinned her down. Says her name. Eye contact. Finished inside.
There was a subcategory simply titled Yes that had become the largest folder and the most accurately labeled.
I preferred videos featuring a certain type of woman—women who were small the way I was small, with curves in the places I had curves. Women who looked, in other words, like they could have been me.
I was, to be precise about it, one hundred and eighteen pounds. My waist was small. Above it, firm. Below it, the architecture of a woman who was petite everywhere except where she was emphatically not.
The men, meanwhile, tended toward a different extreme. Large. Muscled. Broad shoulders. Large hands. The sort of physical scale that generally extended to other measurements.
My enthusiasm for this particular category of man eventually forced me to revisit a belief I had once held with confidence.
The belief in question: size does not matter.
Unfortunately, I am not a woman who can leave a hypothesis untested. I am a woman of empiricism.
So, I tested the assumption.
I purchased a dildo that came with audacious dimensions and approached the experiment with an open mind.
The first time I used it, I made a sound I had not previously heard myself make.
The initial discomfort gave way to something else—deep, full, inexorable.
A heavy, throbbing pleasure that built until my fingers found my clit and the whole overwhelming experience of it collapsed into the correct answer to a question I had been asking for years.
Full. Completely, overwhelmingly full. In a way my fiancé had never once managed.
I revised my conclusion: size mattered enormously. It was not, however, the only variable under consideration.
I wanted a man for whom my body was not a logistical challenge. I wanted effortless strength. The kind that made lifting me, moving me, or holding me in place feel less like exertion and more like a matter of course. I wanted hands that already knew what they were doing before they arrived.
Which brought me, somewhat inevitably, back to James Calloway.
The more I contemplated the matter, the more James Calloway appeared to satisfy the specifications with alarming precision.
I imagined his hands at my waist. At my hips. Spread wide across my lower back.
This was not the time for this!
Focus, Meghan Callahan.
Scipio Africanus, military history.
Click.
***
“The Zama campaign,” I said, pulling my attention back to the slide, “is the culminating proof of the argument. By 202 BC, Scipio had done something no Roman commander had previously attempted. He had taken the war to Africa. He had forced Hannibal, who had been operating in Italy for sixteen years, who had won at Trebia and Trasimene and Cannae, who had destroyed Roman armies with a consistency that should have been statistically impossible, to abandon Italy and return home to defend Carthage.”
Across the table, Professor Hendricks set his pen down in the specific way that meant he had an objection forming. Dr. Reyes had done the slow exhale through the nose—the academic equivalent of clearing a weapon.
I pulled my attention back to the slide.
“Scipio did not do this by being stronger than Hannibal. He did it by making the strategic situation untenable. He made it more dangerous for Hannibal to stay in Italy than to leave. And then, when they finally met at Zama, Scipio neutralized the one weapon that had made Hannibal invincible for two decades—the war elephants—by ordering his troops to simply step aside and let them run through.”
I had spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time in love with this image.
The elephants charging the Roman line, the line parting, the elephants running harmlessly through the gaps while the battle continued around them.
The simplest possible solution to a problem that had broken armies for generations.
Open a lane. Let the threat exhaust itself.
Scipio had looked at a problem everyone thought was insurmountable and asked: What if we simply moved?
My notes slipped slightly in my hands.
This was the fifth time in the last ten minutes. My hands were not quite as cooperative as they normally were, which I was attributing mostly to the heroic quantity of caffeine currently rioting through my bloodstream.
The other contributing factor was that James Calloway had leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and appeared genuinely engaged with the elephant passage.
His forearms rested on his thighs. Sleeves rolled up.
His forearms were thick and corded, a faint map of veins against the skin.
I had a brief, vivid, involuntary thought about how they would look braced beside my head.
How the muscle would shift and bunch as he held himself over me.
Whether a man with hands that size would be as thorough as I had, on multiple detailed occasions, imagined him to be.
I swallowed.
Focus, Meghan Callahan.
I reached into my bag without breaking the flow of the presentation and retrieved the third can of NeuroXCore 8000. I cracked it open. Dr. Harmon glanced up. I kept talking.
“What distinguishes Scipio from his contemporaries is not that he was fearless. The historical record doesn’t support that. What the record supports is that he acted despite fear without the hedging or delay that characterized even gifted commanders like Fabius.”
Harmon’s pen moved. I took a long gulp from the can.
The guarana hit thirty seconds later. The room tilted by a degree.
My notes were still in my hands.
I was still talking.
“The lesson of Scipio Africanus is not that genius wins wars,” I said, and my voice was still steady, still exactly the voice I had been deploying for three years in rooms that were not always listening.
“The lesson is that intelligence plus decisive action wins wars. Every time. He never waited for perfect conditions. He created conditions, and then he moved.”
The room tilted. More pronounced this time.
Hmm.
I looked down at my notes. The words were there. Forty-three pages, printed at eleven p.m., meticulous, everything I needed. They had stopped making sense.
Then the pain arrived.
Pressure. It was like a fist was closing around my sternum from the inside, squeezing. It radiated outward. Left arm. Jaw.
The sweat came fast and cold.
My pulse hammered. Uneven, stuttering, missing beats.
I couldn’t get a full breath. This was mechanical. Something that was supposed to be working had stopped.
The room erupted. Chairs scraping, multiple voices at once, someone calling my name. Something fell. A water glass, a laptop bag—I couldn’t tell. Footsteps, fast. Calloway was moving toward me.
I was falling.
The floor came up hard. My head hit with a thud.
Blue light flooded my vision.