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  Stay After Class

  A.C. Rose

  STAY AFTER CLASS

  Goddess Communications

  Copyright © 2017 by A.C. Rose

  Digital Edition 2017

  Cover Design: Najla Qamber Designs

  Editor: Alex Yuschik

  Proofreading: Marla S. Esposito at Proofing with Style

  ISBN-10: 1-941630-05-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941630-05-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Please do not participate or encourage piracy of copyright-protected materials in violation of author’s rights. Please purchase only authorized editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  In Chapter Seven, the class discussion about the narrative poem Venus and Adonis is based on a work by William Shakespeare published in 1593 and includes an excerpt that has been widely reprinted in literary and scholarly works. The painting referred to as Venus and Adonis, is a classic painting by artist Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680). He painted more than one of the mythical couple but the artwork mentioned has a specific pose. These classic words and images are often discussed in college classrooms and they are shared in that spirit.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Amanda’s VirgEnd Playlist

  About A.C. Rose

  More Books From A.C. Rose

  Read Other Books and Stories by A.C. Rose

  Prologue

  Project VirgEnd Begins

  Hi. My name is Amanda. I’m a college senior who enjoys reading, studying, and hard work. I don’t drink (much), do drugs, or smoke. My secret passion is astrology and following my horoscope and learning new things about life. And, oh, I’m a virgin and I would like not to be.

  My finger hovered over the keyboard for a moment before I finally pushed “activate.” Within moments, I received a text:

  Greetings, Amanda!

  We have received a request to activate your VirgEnder profile and app

  Please confirm your identity and your intention

  to lose your virginity by your designated date.

  Click confirm and the activation will begin.

  I drew in a deep breath and clicked. Done! My stomach was filled with butterflies but it was time to take fate into my own hands. Another text arrived.

  Congratulations, Amanda!

  It’s cherry popping season.

  Your VirgEnder Profile # 1009 and VirgEnd App is now activated.

  Your time will come. Hope you do too!

  Please follow this link to your personal VirgEnder Blog.

  We encourage you to share your thoughts and experience.

  And so, my “activation” began.

  I heard a beep and a noise that sounded like people cheering as the app appeared on my phone. The icon was shaped like a cherry with fireworks behind it.

  I stared for a long time, letting it sink in, and then sat down to write my introductory blog post. I titled it “Why I Waited to Swipe My V-Card.”

  Why I Waited to Swipe My V-Card

  By Amanda

  I wanted to share my story with all of you on the VirgEnders website because I think you will get it–this whole late bloomer, still a virgin thing.

  That’s why I joined this online group of people my age who are aiming to ditch their virginity this year and why I activated my VirgEnd App.

  Non-virgin people think college virgins are like unicorns. I read that 12.3 percent of women and 14.3 percent of men aged 20 to 24 never have never done it with the opposite sex. And I heard that some virgins hold on to it for so long that they become obsessed with losing it, and end up just screwing the first person that comes along.

  I am trying to follow a more structured plan for doing the deed.

  I can be honest, right?

  When I was sixteen my mother worried that I was not like every other boy-crazy girl in my neighborhood because I turned down three invites to the junior prom. Guys would hit on me when I was out with friends and I had zero interest. So she took me to have a reading with her astrologer. The experience stuck with me.

  He was this older, gray-haired man with wise eyes. He took one look at my chart and shot me a knowing glance. “You’re an old soul,” he proclaimed, tracing his finger on the computer printout of my astrological chart. “And that explains your disinterest in boys. It is and will be tough for you to tolerate men whose frontal lobes are not fully developed.”

  “Huh?” I looked at him curiously.

  “It means their brains are not fully developed, whereas yours … well, your chart shows great emotional and mental intelligence, but also inexperience and insecurity when it comes to romance. Your progress will be slow but you won’t miss male attention, until you’re into your twenty-first year. That’s when the window of opportunity opens for you to make a good match.”

  I’d carried a secret shame that there was something wrong me for not liking boys, but the astrologer’s words took a weight off me.

  “Until then, your passion will be for education and mental development,” he said, circling something on the page with a red pen. “Honor your mind and savor academic achievement. And save your body until this most opportune time, as you won’t have success at romance until then.”

  Since I wasn’t much interested in men, the news did not alarm me. But there was one caveat.

  “Astrologically, I see a strong pull toward romance in the latter half of your twenty-first year,” he said, pointing to symbols on my chart that I couldn’t decipher. “But if you don’t lose your virginity by your twenty-second birthday, opportunities will be lost, doors will shut. And you have to wait two more years, or more. By then, you will be awakened to passion and you won’t want to miss out.”

  I didn’t think too much about it, until after I turned twenty-one. And even then, things did not heat up until I was about five months away from my birthday.

  Now that my twenty-second b-day hangs like a looming deadline, I’m on a mission to swipe my V-card by 12:31 a.m. on June 5.

  That’s how I ended up in an art course, in pursuit of my professor, and staring at a naked penis.

  Believe me, this was not how I imagined my first encounter with the lower half of a man.

  Anyway, hope to share more later. Good luck to all of you! And to me too.

  Yours Truly, Amanda

  Chapter One

  Wednesday, April 13

  Spring Semester

  Basic Art Class

  De Verge University

 
Queens, New York

  I was in the front row of the class in my usual seat, when a gorgeous, robed man walked into the art classroom, stood on a small platform, untied the sash to his robe and let it fall on the floor. He was naked.

  Turning to take an innocent glance at the model, I nearly gasped out loud when I found myself eyeball to eyeball with his penis. It just dangled there, almost resting on his thighs, protruding from a dark tuft of hair that made a happy trail up to his belly button. He was trim, and well-built, and had a cute face framed by a mane of dark copper hair. He seemed so unashamed, so unaffected, as he stood there gazing out at all who studied his naked form.

  I looked at my friend Tara and she looked at me. It was the tenth week of the semester in our Basic Art course, but we had no clue what was going on until the professor stepped in front of the room.

  “Today we’ll be working with a live nude model so we can learn to translate the human form to paper,” he announced. “We’ll be working with charcoal, so remember, we’re looking for the essence of the human body—the shape, not details.”

  With that, Professor Jem Nichols passed around the box of charcoal crayons and handed out huge sheets of drawing paper. As he got closer to me, a rush of warmth flowed through my body and ended in a nervous tingle in my stomach.

  Maybe it was wishful thinking, but when he reached my desk to distribute the supplies, I could swear his hand lingered an extra moment near mine as I claimed my two pieces of charcoal from the box. And that he looked at me a certain way.

  When he moved on to the next student, I breathed a sigh of relief, only because I worried my physical reactions to his presence would reveal I had a crush—a big one—on my teacher.

  Most guys my age held no interest for me. Professor Nichols was different, a cool mix of pure male with an artist’s soul. I fantasized about having sex with him but there was one problem: I’d never been intimate with anyone before.

  When I was around him, I tried to forget the taboo that also stood in the way: he was my professor and at least a generation older than me. Both of those facts gave me a thrill but sometimes made him seem way out of my league.

  I breathed in the delicious scent of him that still lingered in the air around me as he walked toward the next row of chairs. He always smelled freshly showered, with subtle hints of aftershave, mingled with a clean cotton aroma. Sometimes there was a whiff of paint on his skin.

  As a rising star in New York’s art world, he was often written up in glossy art magazines for his innovative approach. He was a gorgeous, well-built work of art in his own right. When he first came to the university as a visiting distinguished Professor of Practice, there was great fanfare. He was hailed for having a masters in fine art and a PhD in art history as well as great commercial success as a painter. Last semester he accepted a full time professorial post in the Arts and Humanities Department and I’d heard he was already being considered for the tenure track.

  I worried about coming off like an inexperienced idiot, or being too forward, yet I wanted him to notice me. The reason he noticed me the day the model was there was not what I had in mind.

  With supplies given out, he positioned the model on the stage: sitting on a stool, one leg to the floor, one bent at the knee and perched on the footrest. In this position, the model’s penis was flung over the edge of the seat, kissing close to his left thigh.

  Tara and I looked at each other, again. I was in slight shock, but she was more gleeful about the whole thing.

  “How exactly are we supposed to draw that?” I whispered as low as I could.

  “Amanda, you’re such a prude!”

  “I’m not a prude, it’s just…”

  “We’ll just have to keep looking at it until we get it right!” she said, excited. Tara was far more relaxed, and experienced, than me when it came to men.

  “Damn! I’ll do all the looking if you want, ladies,” said one of my gay male classmates, overhearing us. “This man candy is cute enough to eat. And look, the carpet matches the drapes. A true copper. Yum.”

  With that, Tara and me, and several other women in the class laughed. Out loud. For me it was more of a nervous, weirdly uncontrollable laugh that relieved some of the tension. But it took me an extra moment to stop laughing and that’s when the professor turned to see where the racket was coming from. He may have gotten the impression I acted alone.

  “Is there anything you would like to share, ladies?” He looked directly at me, his dark eyes drilling into mine. Adding to that, the art majors in the class were sneering at this apparent lack of propriety.

  “Sorry,” I said, warmth rising to my cheeks as my face flushed a deep red.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a penis before, Ms. Slade?”

  He didn’t just ask that, did he? He was being sarcastic, and probably did not realize the irony of his comment, but my heart was racing. Naked men and their organs were not part of my college curriculum, or my life, however badly I now wanted one to be. But I couldn’t say that.

  “Um…”

  “Well?” He continued to stare me down.

  I took a deep breath and just blurted it out. “No.”

  Bombshell dropped. Tara shot me a sympathetic look but the whole class gawked at me, stunned. The model was eyeing me too. I felt more naked than him when I saw the look of astonishment on the professor’s face.

  I guess he didn’t expect to hear that. He backed down a little.

  “This is a human body,” he said, softer, yet directing his glance at me. “There is no reason to be embarrassed by nudity, or afraid of it. The body itself is a work of art.”

  “I understand,” I murmured, lowering my head like a child being scolded.

  I reached for my charcoal and rolled it between two fingers, noticing how quickly it blackened any spot that it touched. I’d spent years trying to stay pure in a world where most people my age had no concept of how to refrain from sex. The professor’s little public foray into my inexperience with the male anatomy brought my secret out in the open. It was an unexpected relief, a dark cloud lifted.

  I just hoped that this would be the last conversation I’d have on the topic, ever, because I planned to make my sexual debut by the end of the semester. And I’d set my sights on Professor Jem Nichols.

  “Now let’s get it together people and get to work on our project,” he said, taking back the reigns of the class and shutting down the chitchat that had ensued after the laughing incident.

  He looked over at me, perhaps a little differently now.

  Chapter Two

  I was a little distracted, to say the least, but wanted to do my best. As a Business major with a Psychology minor, art was an elective course, but grades were important to me. Professor Nichols’ approval was too.

  Following his directions to “look at the model through the eyes of an artist,” I scanned his form and thought of him as a human muse. He was handsome, and his skin was smooth. With biceps and abs that were beautifully chiseled, his body had many interesting curves, angles, and edges. But who was I kidding? He had what seemed to be a big, huge penis and it was staring right at me. And honestly, it was difficult disassociating the organ in front of me for art’s sake from the kind of penis that would take part in a sex act.

  I wondered how I’d get through the class and actually draw this guy. Because of my secret crush, I was always nervous around my teacher, but after being called out for laughing, I wanted to prove I could handle the task at hand. He had to know I was mature enough to deal with this situation. My best bet had to be speaking to him through my “art.”

  Grabbing hold of my rounded charcoal crayon and pressing it firmly to the large sheet of drawing paper, I quickly created an outline of the model’s body. I let my eyes glide over the model and his position on the stool, and back to the page as I outlined and sketched his form, just as I was taught to do during the first few weeks of class when we sketched inanimate objects. I was no expert, but I liked drawing, so it did
n’t take long to get into the flow, contouring the head, shoulders, torso, arms and legs.

  There were two challenging spots, however, that I had a hard time capturing: the way his knee was bent with his foot perched on the footrest and, no surprise, the way his penis fell over the edge of the stool and partly rested against his thigh. It was dangling there.

  I sketched around it, working on the lines of his thighs but leaving the space between his legs empty, until I heard the professor call out instructions that I was certain were meant for me. “The assignment is to include everything,” he said. “He’s not a Ken doll. And this is not kindergarten arts and crafts. Make sure you include his package, or the essence thereof. Don’t be afraid to draw a real body, people.”

  “Package?” I looked at Tara.

  “Penis and balls,” she whispered, trying not to crack up.

  “OMG,” I mouthed to her, feeling out of the loop. I could quote from Johnson’s Triangle Theory on Love (the triad of love, commitment, and intimacy) and the Proximity Principle (we become close with those we are in close proximity too) from my Social Psychology course, but slang for body parts was not part of my vernacular.