FAIR

by Cardaniel

Chapter 1


Cammy sucked in a quick breath and sat upright in her desk chair at the sound of the tap on her dorm room door, her eyes alight. She quickly set down her highlighting marker and closed her textbook, fumbling to straighten her notes and close up the notebook.

Behind her, her roommate Taylor giggled from her bed. She'd watched Cammy change clothes four times in the last hour, and had only asked, "Boy or girl?" Now she said, "Think your girlfriend's here, Cam."

Cammy could feel her face flush. "She's not exactly..."

Cammy could sense that Taylor was smiling ironically without having to look. "What is she exactly, then?"

Cammy sat frozen, her heart pounding. It wasn't that she was afraid of opening the door. She wanted today to get started more than anything in the world. But she was weighed down by a feeling of the significance of the moment. Her first date with Alisa. Admittedly it was her first date with anyone, ever. But if there had been previous ones, none of them would have been Alisa.

She finally jumped out of her chair when the knock was repeated. She stopped herself from jerking the door open, wanting to preserve some sense of decorum in front of Taylor.

She took a deep, slow breath and opened the door calmly, with shaking fingers.

When she saw Alisa's face light up, Cammy thought: it's for real! This is all really happening!

Cammy couldn't think what to say, other than "You look nice," and immediately wanted to unsay it. Alisa did, in fact, look nice, but was dressed very casually, in a white t-shirt featuring a sunburst design and fairly worn denim pants. Cammy was dressed only slightly more formally, the outfit she had finally settled on being old brown corduroy pants and a yellow buttoned shirt tucked in at the waist. She was worried Alisa might take the remark as sarcasm, and was relieved when Alisa gave her a sincere smile and said, "So do you."

Cammy's urge to kiss Alisa, to pick up where they had left off in the library last night, was arrested by her perception that several girls were in the hallway, not all looking this direction but nevertheless there. Not to mention Taylor sitting upright in the bed behind her, watching. Cammy didn't quite feel ready for Public Displays of Affection yet. She wasn't completely sure her relationship with Alisa was at that point yet. She wasn't sure how to tell whether it was or not. She had no experience to guide her.

She could see the tiniest move by Alisa, leaning towards her then back, her eyes flicking up and down between Cammy's eyes and her lips. She's feeling the same thing, thought Cammy, both the urge and the restraint. Of course she is, Cammy pointed out to herself, her lips curling up in a tentative smile. I already know how much we think alike.

Alisa's lips maintained her smile. "You ready?"

Cammy nodded eagerly. She looked back at Taylor. "You're coming, right?"

Taylor blinked and suppressed a laugh. "Umm, not right this minute." Of course, thought Cammy, feeling like an idiot. Obviously Taylor wasn't coming with them still dressed in her bedtime undies. Taylor went on, "Waiting for Jim." Jim was her boyfriend.

Cammy nodded and turned back to Alisa. She nearly repeated Alisa's "You ready?", but instead came out past Alisa into the hallway, remembering at the last second to close the door.

Alisa fell into step beside her as Cammy walked past her into the hallway. Cammy, uncertain once more, demanded of her internal self whether she should take Alisa's hand. That's not as big of a deal as kissing, right? she asked herself. It's not... possessive, right? But what if she doesn't think we're ready for it?

Then she thought back again to last night. She felt the tingling start up once more between her legs. That was real, she told herself. That really happened.

She made her right hand reach for Alisa's left, and saw that, in a movement that had to have started before hers, Alisa's hand was reaching for hers. Again, Cammy thought, a thrill running through her, we had the same thought at the same time.

Their hands clasped together, their fingers interlaced, they walked through the dorm's front room and out into the sunlight.

*   *   *   *   *

It seemed very strange to Cammy, now, that she hadn't really noticed Alisa through the first three weeks of first-year calculus class. She'd seen her and been conscious of her presence, but Alisa in no way had stood out, in Cammy's perceptions. Alisa usually took a seat three rows to the right of Cammy. Cammy thought Alisa was cute -- high cheekbones, small nose, clear skin, full lips, the kind of face Cammy liked. Her hair was short, parted in the middle and swept to the sides and back, a style that also appealed to Cammy. Cammy felt some attraction, but there were several other girls Cammy felt more physically drawn to. She had no interest in the handful of boys in her classes. She'd never understood how girls could be attracted to them. But among the girls, Cammy had a number of heartthrobs.

Not that she ever felt moved to do anything about her attractions. She'd always felt a distance from other girls, distance established by those other girls. Cammy was in no way mean, or unpleasant, or insulting to anyone. It was just the kind of thing that happened among kids when faced with a peer who was intellectually far beyond them. In high school, Cammy was aware of being called "supernerd" behind her back. That was one of the nicer nicknames.

Cammy had established a shell around herself, to protect herself from the hurt, from the disdain, resulting from being so different from anyone she met. She had learned to blank out the nasty looks she got when test papers with red-circled "100%" were returned to her.

She understood those looks, really she did. She knew many of the students were putting a lot of work into the attempt to get good grades, and the resentment they felt at anyone seeming to breeze through successfully without obvious effort was, to Cammy, very natural.

Understanding didn't make it hurt less. But the shell did.

So far in college Cammy had kept a low profile, avoiding volunteering answers to her professors' questions. Supposedly the general intelligence of college students ought to be higher than in high school, Cammy thought, but she continued seeing blank stares when the professors made remarks Cammy considered obvious, hardly worth saying.

Cammy remained largely invisible in the classroom. She was good at it. She never considered the possibility that another student might have the same knack of invisibility, for the same reasons.

*   *   *   *   *

Last night, Friday, Cammy had been sitting at her favorite study carrel on the fifth floor of the library, intent on her biology homework. Friday nights were a good time for studying in the library -- it wasn't deserted, but it was a lot less populated than at other times. It suddenly occurred to Cammy that she was thirsty, and she suspected she had been for some time -- she knew she tended to lose contact with her physical body when reading absorbed her attention, as it so often did.

On her way to the water fountain, she passed by Alisa at another carrel, hunched over a book opened on the table. Despite Alisa having registered on Cammy's conscious mind as nothing more than a seatholder in her calc class, Cammy did know her full name, Alisa Atwater, since Professor Simpson kept track of attendance in class, and for the first week or so she had called out names until she knew the students on sight.

Cammy was struck again by a feeling of attraction to Alisa. Standing this close, Cammy saw now that Alisa's hair, which she'd thought was brown, actually had more red in it, a sort of dark copper color. Her eyebrows were the same, so Cammy gathered that the color was genuine.

Alisa didn't look up, or make any other sign that she was aware of Cammy walking past her, her attention fully focused on the page she was reading. Cammy didn't intentionally try to identify the book, but it was automatic for her eyes to read a sentence or two of any text that passed in front of them, and she stopped suddenly, with a short intake of breath. She recognized the text: it was from book 1 of "The Mantanor Chronicles," a series by little known fantasy writer Selena Norrell. Cammy's mother had given her the first book for her tenth birthday. Because of its length, Mom had assumed it would take Cammy a year to get through it so that she could deliver the second book on Cammy's next birthday. Cammy had finished it in a week, and begged Mom to get her the next volume immediately.

Cammy had read the series from beginning to end four times in the years since. And she had never met anyone else at school who had ever read it. Until this moment.

Reaching out to Alisa through the shell seemed risk-free. Alisa wouldn't ridicule Cammy's taste in literature over a book she herself was reading. Heart pounding for a reason she couldn't identify, Cammy asked, "Who's your favorite character, so far?" Cammy suspected that at this point in the story, it would probably be Wendy.

Alisa gasped and convulsed in startlement and looked up, wide-eyed. Cammy immediately said, "I'm sorry, I should have made sure you knew I was here..."

Alisa laughed. "No, it's no problem. I get kind of... zoned out. Anyway, it's Sandra, of course. She's kind of like me, except really daring in a way I wish I was."

Cammy blinked in puzzlement, and looked again at the page Alisa was reading to make sure... yes, it was the first volume. Sandra didn't appear until the second book, but became one of the main characters from that point on. The solution to the puzzle became clear. "So you've read the whole thing before?"

Alisa blushed slightly. "Well, yeah. A few times. I re-read books I like. It never matters that I know what's going to happen. Each time I still... well, it's like I'm fully in that world and not this one anymore. Like I know all the people, the characters, and I'm part of what's happening." She smiled, still looking a little embarrassed. "It's weird, I know."

Cammy stared at her for a moment, and finally managed to whisper, "No. No, Not weird. Not weird at all." She reached blindly behind herself and managed to locate a chair at a nearby table. She pulled it over and sat in it beside Alisa. Alisa seemed not to mind her reading being interrupted.

They talked.

They started with the Mantanor series, then branched out into other fictional works -- their reading histories seemed nearly identical. They started finishing most of each other's sentences. Cammy knew, before she asked, that Alisa, like Cammy herself, used to read at the dinner table, a habit her parents had tried to break until they realized that if she were given an ultimatum to choose between reading and eating, eating would lose.

They went on to other subjects -- family life, childhood memories and special events, goals, dreams. An undercurrent in Cammy's thoughts grew, not quite rising to the conscious level: the sense that something profoundly special was happening. Cammy's sense of separation from the world had to give way when faced with Alisa's existence. It was as if an emptiness inside Cammy was finally being filled.

They were both startled by an announcement over the loudspeaker, "The library will be closing in fifteen minutes."

Cammy looked at her watch, astonished. She and Alisa had been talking for four hours. She didn't see how that was possible. She looked around. The fifth floor was deserted. She couldn't recall everybody leaving, though she was sitting less than thirty feet from the elevator and she thought surely she should have been hearing it.

She looked back at Alisa, and was suddenly overwhelmed by Alisa's presence, fully conscious of Alisa being right here, right now, right in front of Cammy's eyes. That sense of how special Alisa was in her life, now bubbling up to the surface of Cammy's consciousness, released a need long denied, long suppressed, long unfelt. A need that had been intellectual and emotional. And physical. There was a sudden tingling feeling between her legs.

Drawn by something like a gravitational pull from Alisa, Cammy leaned forward, and saw that Alisa was doing the same. Their lips met, and fastened together, moving. Cammy had never kissed anyone before, and had always assumed she would worry whether she was doing it right -- would her nose bump the other's, was she supposed to suck or just touch lips... Unexpectedly, she found it all instinctive.

She felt Alisa's arm go around her and draw her closer. Her hand came up to stroke Alisa's hair as the kiss continued, intensifying. She heard a tiny sigh from Alisa, and another closer one, which Cammy decided must have come from herself.

Cammy let go Alisa's lips with her own at last, with a soft liquid sucking sound, and immediately Alisa's lips sought hers out to renew the contact.

They both jumped, their foreheads banging together, momentarily painful, when the voice on the speaker said "The library will close in five minutes."

Cammy looked at Alisa's face, so close to her own, eyes wide in seeming astonishment, cheeks heavily flushed. She saw Alisa's lips -- so full, and now Cammy knew, so soft -- curl upward in a smile copying the one Cammy knew she wore.

Cammy's resistance to getting in trouble struggled, and finally won, against her urge to explore the new world of physical intimacy with Alisa, the boundaries of which she had barely had time to cross so far. She said in a near whisper, "We better go." Alisa giggled and nodded, and quickly gathered her notes and books together, while Cammy went back to her own carrel to pick up her own.

Cammy, holding the straps of her satchel in her right hand, took Alisa's hand without thinking about it as they walked to the elevator. Once the doors of the elevator, carrying only the two of them, closed, Alisa turned to her and threw her arms around Cammy. Cammy dropped her satchel and her lips quickly sought out Alisa's again, her own arms going around Alisa, both of them tightening their hold, Cammy feeling the softness of Alisa's breasts under her clothes flattening against hers. The tingling between Cammy's legs intensified, punctuated by a damp coolness. Alisa's moan was louder than before.

They broke the kiss when the elevator stopped, and separated by unspoken agreement before the doors opened. Together, Cammy barely stifling a giggle, they walked together without touching past the front desk, the two student workers behind it paying minimal attention to them as they gathered their own things prior to heading back to their dorms.

Outside in the cool night air, Cammy didn't want her time with Alisa to end, but she did feel a need for some alone time to process what had happened. The two urges, to stay with Alisa or go back to her dorm, fought within her. The one feeling she had that was not in dispute was that her life had permanently changed.

Alisa seemed to be facing the same struggle, opening her mouth several times to speak and then stopping herself. At last her eyes lit up -- clearly the right way forward had just come to her. "Do you want to come to the fair with me tomorrow?" Tomorrow, Saturday, the annual Fall Fair was scheduled on campus, an event meant to welcome first-year students but open to all, and to the public. Throughout the day preparations had been visible, booths and tents being set up.

Cammy gasped at how perfect the idea was: a way to spend the entire day on a first date, with fun experiences to be shared, along with being a solution to Cammy's do-I-want-to-stay-now-or-go problem. "Sure! Where should we meet? When?"

Alisa considered. "You said you're in Trent, right?", identifying Cammy's dorm. "That's closer to the football field than I am." The fair would occupy the practice field and some open spaces around it. "What if I meet you at your room at... ten o'clock?"

"Okay." Cammy gave her the room number, and hesitated once more, wanting to kiss Alisa again but not quite ready to do it in the open. She saw Alisa lean briefly towards her, then away. Is she always going to feel the exact same thing I do? wondered Cammy, a smile curling her lips. She finally decided that her urge for some processing time was the winner. "I'll..."

In the same second, Alisa said "I'll..."

They both giggled, and Cammy said as rapidly as she could, "I'll see you then," spun around and began trotting towards her dorm.

In her room, she found that Taylor wasn't back from her date with Jim yet. She quickly made her preparations for bed, wearing, as usual, only her panties. Underneath the covers, she thought back to the library again. And Alisa. She slipped her fingers in under the waistband of her panties and began rubbing. Presently she moaned.



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