8. Mia
EIGHT
Mia
I’m half asleep in a warm and cozy cocoon. A man cocoon with giant Zeus arms, both of which are wrapped around me, one large hand holding one of my boobs. Just holding, casually, as one may hold a cantaloupe while standing in the middle of a grocery store. There is a hard, massive dick currently pressing into my ass. Go, me.
I snuggle in, and the cocoon deity moans softly, barely a noise. He thrusts once, a subconscious movement. The owner of the hand realizes he’s holding my boob and starts kneading it. It’s when his thumb and pointer finger start rolling my nipple, slowly, as if he’s still dreaming, that I begin to wonder if I’ve woken up in an alternate universe, one in which I actually got laid on Tuesday night after the Greenpoint bar.
It’s when I start getting fantastically moist between my legs that I open my eyes and see the Mexican takeout containers on my bedside table.
I freeze.
“Elias,” I whisper hysterically.
He hums low in his throat, rolling my nipple more deliberately. He noses my hair aside to gently suck on my neck. My eyes roll to the back of my head, my ass instinctually pressing backwards.
“Fuck, baby,” he murmurs, thrusting forward to meet it.
“ELIAS!” I scream.
Many things happen at once. Elias wakes up, realizes who he’s fondling, jolts as if he’s been electrocuted, and throws himself on my floor.
We look at one another, chests heaving and eyes wide and unbelieving and distraught.
“What did you do?!” Elias says frantically, as if I weren’t just a passive recipient to his neck-sucking.
My mouth drops open. “ME?!” I shout, gesturing at the giant dick that is currently tenting the front of his athletic shorts.
“Fuck,” he mutters, not bothering to adjust it, running his fingers through his curls instead. He stands up, turns on his heel, and storms out of my room.
I bury myself under the covers and try my hardest not to think about it. “Don’t do it, Mia,” I repeat, over and over again. I hear the shower go on in the bathroom. “Fuck it,” I say, and shove my hand down the front of my panties.
The bus ride to school is uncomfortable, to say the least. Elias is carrying my luggage but has refused to look me in the eye, wordlessly taking my suitcase and stepping on the bus instead.
It’s peak rush hour, so we are packed in like sardines. I don’t need to hold on to a bar because I’m sandwiched between two people, both of whom are keeping me propped up vertically. There is a man standing between Elias and me, but Elias towers over him by a head, so we can still see one another in shame.
Elias clears his throat. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, seemingly to the woman smooshed in front of him. She turns her head to look up at him, confused at first, then delighted to be spoken to by this towering Lax Bro Captain America. “Not you,” he tells her. “Mia,” he clarifies. She shrugs, making sure her shoulder has a chance to rub against what I know now is a rock hard egg carton of a stomach.
“What?” I whisper.
“You,” his mouth says in my general direction. “I’m sorry about this morning.”
“Oh,” I manage.
“I didn’t mean…” he continues, quietly, basically into the hair of the woman in front of him. “I passed out sometime during that Korean dating show. Then this morning… I didn’t… it wasn’t…” he stammers.
“I think I’m a little bit freaking out,” I tell him, while very much freaking out. “I guess I could feel exactly why you have a constant parade of women in and out of your room,” I’m rambling in an unhinged way, not making any sense and wanting for this not to happen on a public bus. “I mean, I guess I saw why during Bathroom Incident, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the fucking tree trunk pressing into?—”
He looks like he wants to crumble into a pile of dust and blow away in the wind. “Mia, it just happens . It doesn’t mean?—”
“Yeah, Mia, it’s happening to me now,” the man standing between us interjects.
In just under a millisecond, Elias’s entire face switches from ashamed-boy-next-door to murderous-juiced-up-axe-wielding-psychopath. He does the thing where he seems to double in size. He swivels his head downwards, slowly, as if he’s just located his prey and is preparing to pounce and rip it to shreds or eat it chunk by chunk while it’s still alive. His eyes narrow, slightly. “Are we about to have a problem right now?”
The man takes one look up at Elias and shrinks even smaller than his current corporal body allows. “Kidding,” he mumbles. “Sorry.”
Elias isn’t finished. “Kidding about your pencil dick getting hard in the middle of public transportation? And telling a woman about it? Do you think that’s a joke? Do you think that’s funny?” Each word is punctuated with a threat to tear him limb from limb. I want to chime in that actually, we were doing just that, but now doesn’t seem like the time.
“No,” the man mumbles. “Sorry.”
He tilts his head, playing with his prey. “Why are you apologizing to me?”
The man turns to me. “Sorry,” he mutters to my feet.
“Sorry, who? You know her name now, it seems,” Elias croons.
“Sorry, Mia,” the man coughs, and he wiggles his way out of our section towards the back.
“Wow,” I think I hear the woman in front of Elias whisper. She fans herself.
The guy standing in front of me shakes his head. “Men,” he says, in a general sort of way.
“Right?!” I shriek.
We peel ourselves from the bus at our stop and begin the three block long walk of shame together. He’s shifted back to toeing-at-the-ground Elias. I try to catch his eye, but they remain fixed on the ground.
Elias clears his throat. “So, are we going to talk about it, or are we going to forget it ever happened and never bring it up again?”
“I kind of want to talk about it,” I admit.
He looks alarmed.
“It was just a natural reaction to waking up to someone in your bed,” I go on. “It’s not like it was real. If you’d known it was me, maybe that wouldn’t have happened?”
He eyes me then, squinting. He makes a noncommittal noise.
An idea pops into my head. “Besides, maybe we should add something like that to our lessons,” I add. “Like not only the flirting and the dating, but maybe physical?—”
Elias stops walking, forcing me to stop, too. Now he fully turns to look at me, blasting me with the force of his blazing green eyes. “Hard no, Mia. That’s where I draw the line. I will not be putting my hands on you ever again.” These words are tinged with a hint of something… maybe disgust?
I’m not shocked that he refuses, but something about his vehemence stings. “I… okay.” I reply. “I just thought, maybe, that after your reaction on Monday, that maybe… it wouldn’t be such a chore. What if you just thought of it as a clinical… task?”
He scrubs his face with his hands. “Is that what… A chore? Clinical? You think…” I hear him mutter. Warring emotions flit over his face. He seems to come to a decision, finally, his body and face settling into a resigned slump. “The answer is no, Mia. Fuck, this is making me feel really fucking uncomfortable?—”
“Okay, well, sorry I’m such a bridge troll then,” I mutter, taking my luggage and rolling it away myself. “Thought maybe I could qualify for the Blonde Brigade. I didn’t realize your standards were so high.”
He grabs me. I notice absently that his hand is able to wrap around the entire circumference of my arm, with room to spare—his fingers still overlapping. He whirls me towards him, and I’m blown away by the ferocity of his gaze. He takes a step closer, forcing me to crane my head back to meet his eyes. He leans down, and I can feel his breath on my lips.
“I want to be very clear with you, Mia. I am saying no because you are my best friend’s little sister, and he made me make him very specific promises regarding you. I’m already breaking some of them by helping you with your fucking sexts—,” and I’m mesmerized by the way his teeth pull his lower lip back when he says fucking , “—but do not for a second believe that you are a bridge troll or that you even exist on the same plane or universe than those other fucking women.” He grabs me by the hips then, forcing me to close the inches of distance into him, so that I can feel his hard length pressing against the front of jeans. I think I whimper. “This is what happens if I simply think about your gorgeous tits in that outfit or filling my hand this morning, or any time I look at your fucking mouth now. So make no mistake.”
He releases me then, adjusting the front of his pants. He takes both of our luggages and rolls it away, in the direction of the school, while I stand there feeling hot and cold and electric and damp and confused all at once.
“Aren’t you only leaving for… one day, Ms. Roberts?” Amaya asks me after raising her hand, her eyebrows furrowed.
“Uh, yes. Why?” I respond, pausing my—I look up at the clock—now twenty minute diatribe slash pep talk.
“Then why are you talking to us like you’re going to be gone for the rest of the school year?” she continues.
I scratch my head sheepishly. “Well, I just want to set you all up for success. We’ve only just started our Olympics unit, and we’re going to lose precious learning time while I’m gone?—”
“Won’t we have a sub?” Kyle asks.
I mime pulling my hand out of my pants as a nonverbal reminder. He pulls his hand out. “Yes, you’ll have a sub?—”
“Aren’t you leaving them plans?” Sean asks.
I wonder when my eight-year-olds have skipped twenty years of time and suddenly know the inner workings of the teacher contract. I blow out a breath, “Yes, I’m leaving them plans?—”
“So then you have nothing to worry about,” chimes in Amanda.
“Yeah, chill, Ms. Roberts,” Mohammed adds on.
I blow out a breath. “Fine. Let’s get started on today’s work. Get back in your groups and take out the posters you made on Olympics history and symbols. We’re going to do a gallery walk.”
I set them up with a template that helps them organize and take notes on each of the posters. There’s space for writing down new things learned, follow-up questions for the poster creators, things of that nature. I’m setting up the Olympic anthem to play from my shitty laptop speakers when Lina walks in.
I wave. “Good morning, Ms. Sanchez.”
“Good morning, Ms. Sanchez,” my class chants dutifully after me.
“Hi, Ms. Roberts. Hey, Class 304. Keep working, please. Don’t let me interrupt all your hard work.” She turns to me. “Just wanted to come find you before you left for the conference,” she tells me. She smiles at the students working diligently, pleased that everyone is on task. “Are you all set?”
“Yep,” I tell her, gesturing to my suitcase in the corner of the room. “I also packed one of the teacher guides to... Words of Wonder.” I wince. “So that I can read it over on the flight.”
“Great. Have you had a chance to look at the conference schedule?”
“…Yes,” I go with, instead of I’ve both printed it and taken screenshots of the entire thing . “There are a ton of relevant panels and workshops I’ve identified that could help us with our… problem ,” I wink at her. “I’m going to have a busy four days.”
She sighs, still looking so different from the boss bitch Lina that I’m used to. “I really appreciate you doing this, Ms. Roberts. Thank you so much. This is going to be a lot of help… not only for me, but for our entire school community.”
I squeeze her hand. “Of course. You’re crushing it. We’re all so grateful to you.” We look out at my students together. “Want to read some of their notes?”
She smiles. “Sure. Just a few, but then I have to go.”
We wander over to a group by the windows. “Any fun things you learned today? Any questions?” I ask.
“Yes,” Amaya says, very seriously. “Many questions. One—what’s a steroid, and why have so many athletes been kicked out of the Olympics for using them?”
“Oh,” I say, taken aback. “Well… a steroid is… Ms. Sanchez, do you want to help me out here?” I divert to her, floundering.
She frowns. “Well, I guess it’s a type of medicine that some athletes take to… try to make their muscles bigger and stronger.”
Amaya nods firmly. “Ah. So it’s cheating.”
I contain a smile. I’m obsessed with this girl. “Exactly. It’s also very harmful to your health.” I look around the group. “Any other questions? Comments?”
Carlos speaks up. “Was Tonya Harding guilty?”
Lina snorts.
I chime in. “Well, I think she was found guilty of impeding the investigation?—”
“But she didn’t do the actual crime?—”
“But she knew it was happening?—”
“So that means she’s guilty, because she didn’t tell the police?—”
“I bet she told her husband to do it?—”
“I think her hus?—”
I clap my hands in a call to attention: clap-clap-clapclapclap . “All right everyone, this is a really productive conversation, and I’m so glad you all clearly did some pretty in-depth research. I want everyone to write down their opinions on more… controversial Olympics events. We can have a full class-wide debate when I get back from the conference.”
Lina smiles at me. “Have a good time, Ms. Roberts. Don’t have too much fun,” she winks.
“Don’t worry,” I answer, thinking of Elias and my jam-packed schedule. “I won’t.”