Vol.5, Chapter VI — A Sanctuary of One

It's no secret that I don't like social interactions, but I really hate it when they are forced interactions. That was the bitter-sour feeling in my chest as I looked at the slip of paper I had pulled out of the box our teacher carried around as he visited each of our desks. Mine was green, Abby's was red and so was Mathew's, while Stephen had gotten a yellow one and Mathilda was blue. This had been our teacher's idea of how to form work groups for today's class. I really, really hate how teachers have this dumb idea that they have to force us to work we people outside our group because "when you're an adult, you'll have to work with different people all the time". Such a stupid argument. I'd love to ask him if the rest of the teaching staff was constantly changing or what sort of job is there where co-workers are different every day. Just leave us asocial people like me alone for God's sake!

“Mr. Wilson? Do you mind if Violet and I go to the bathroom really quick?” Abby asked, grabbing my hand, making me wonder what she had in mind. In a way, I already had a suspicion.

He agreed to letting as go as the tables had to be rearranged so that four people could sit around them to work on whatever assignment he had planned.

I let Abby guide me, not asking what this was all about as I was sure I’d soon find out. Sure enough, it was what I had conjured in my mind.

“Here, let’s make the switch,” she told me, holding up to me pink panties with as strawberry print she had taken off as soon as she got us inside one of the toilet cubicles. “You might need it.”

“Haah, you’re worrying too much,” I said, taking mine off all the same. “It’s just going to be a bit more mentally tiring to me is all.”

“It’s also better to be safe than sorry, don’t you agree?” she said, crouching down in front of me. “Now, lift a foot at a time.”

She also didn’t need to put hers on my herself as if I was some sort of… strange perversion of the Cinderella fairy tale, but again, I played along, both as my usual act of acceptance to her quirks, and to save my energy to deal with whoever I’m teamed up with.

…

“Erm, Abby?” I asked as she made sure she had put her undies on me properly, running her fingers around the leg holes to undo any curling up they might have done, but mostly as an excuse to fondle my rear. “You don’t think that I’ll be paired up with Vanessa, do— Eeek! A-Abby!?”

“Hehe! There’s no point of fussing over stuff out of your control, you know?” she childishly giggled as she kept tugging the wedgie she just gave me. “Eek! Hehe! Violet!”

As payback, I gave her a wedgies too, making her tiptoe a bit. After that, we fixed each other up while I thought about her words. Like she said, there was no point to fuss about something out of my control. And besides, our class was of twenty-eight students, meaning that there were seven groups of four. The chances of me being teamed up with Vanessa were quite low.

…They feel warm…

And I also had that bit of Abby’s warmth hugging me hidden from everybody else, so I should be fine.

“Abby, hold up,” I said, giving a quick head check to the corridor to make sure there was no one there.

“What is—Hmm! Mmh! Hehe, babe, stop it! You’ll make me have one of my giggling fits!”

She already was, all red cheeks, bobbing side to side, and her voice bubbling up with love and happiness, but I just couldn't resist giving her a kiss before we got back inside the classroom and be away from each other for the next hour.

I was still staring at her as we walked inside the classroom when an excited voice called out to me.

“Violet, Violet! Over here!”

It was Jessy, calling out and waving at me from what was apparently my group table. For a moment I was relieved as she could be a bit of a pain to deal with, but she was all right. Just a bit too excitable, eager and… well, there was also the sparkling eyes she looked at me with. Abby could be all that, but at least my girlfriend knew how to, and when to, reign in her enthusiasm. And she was my girlfriend, so looking at me with sparkling eyes wasn’t… complicated.

My relieved crashed to the ground as I saw who was sat by her, looking away from me with an arm on the table propping her head up.

No! Oh God, please no!

Hearing my mental anguish, Abby gave my hand a squeeze and a sympathetic look, everything she could really do in this situation, but I still felt like begging her to take me with her.

Maybe it was fate, maybe I had jinxed myself, but it was undeniably Vanessa another member of my group, and I’d be sitting directly across her. For a second, I considered asking the guy sitting across Jessy to change seats with me, but that would further aggravate the situation, wouldn’t it?

“Hi everybody,” I said, sitting down, trying to sound as calm and polite as possible.

“So, it’s you whom we will be working with, huh?” the guy sitting by me said, smiling. “Do you think we can beat the group Abby is in?”

I let out an awkward laugh, saying that I’d give my best, but that Abby is really, really smart, so we might still have our asses kicked. A bit of humour, you see?

“Well, I’m happy to be working with you,” Jessy said. “I’ve always wanted to be paired up with you in something.”

I had no idea how to respond to that, so I just let out another laugh as I thanked her. I also committed the mistake of glancing at Vanessa. She was giving me a side-eye that could kill. She very likely was doing her best in achieving that too. I couldn’t blame her in a way, I had been praised to hell and back ever since I got here, and judging by their reactions, I was already being praised before too. I didn’t really hate her, I just found her unbelievably annoying, but if I did and I heard people praising her non-stop right in my face, I wouldn’t like it either.

Still, as understandable as that might be, I still hated it and felt like curling up into a ball but had to keep acting normal. Why? I don’t know. Social expectations, I guess. The eyes with which Jessy was regarding me certainly made it difficult for me to not try so hard to act like it.

“How’s… how’s your nose?” I asked, trying to be approachable.

“It whistles in the morning and at night thanks to you,” she growled, going back to looking away.

I opened my mouth to try and defend myself, but Jessy spoke before I could.

“Come on Vanessa, don’t be like that!” she said, leaning closer to Vanessa who was now glaring at her. “She didn’t do it on purpose!”

“Yes she did! She looked me right in the eye before hitting my face with the ball!”

“That was an accident!” Jessy said, her voice coming a bit louder. “Everyone knows Violet is a klutz when it comes to sports!”

Ah, yes, another “my client couldn’t have committed the crime you accuse her of because she’s too incompetent for that” moment. It never gets old, does it?

“Oh, please!” Vanessa scoffed. “As if it isn’t obvious that it is just an act!”

“An act!?” Jessy cried out.

Now, now, let’s call down you two,” Mr. Wilson said, having come to our table to deliver the sheet telling us what we had to do and to defuse the situation. “You should be working together, not arguing like that! Come on, say that you’re sorry to each other.”

We all scowled as we looked at him. He was aware that he was talking to high-schoolers, not pre-schoolers, right?

He must have realised that, as his demeanour shift a bit. He cleared his throat and handed up our work sheet, but he wasn’t done being nosy.

“Vanessa, Violet, I get it that you two have your differences, but why don’t you two work on this part of today’s exercise together?” he said, pointing at a particular part of the paper. He didn’t wait for our answer as he turned to Jessy. “Jessica, would you kindly change places with Violet so she can work with Vanessa more easily?”

I have no words to describe the acts of violence I wanted to do to him, nor the nasty words I had tied in my throat, eager to come out.

Instead, somehow, I managed to keep my cool as I sat where Jessy had been. I think my face was mostly frozen, and I say mostly, as I could feel the corner of my left eye twitching. And then I saw him walking away with a self-satisfied smile plastered in his face, probably thinking he did something great.

I’m putting a tack on his chair next time we have class with him.

He wanted to treat us like little kids? Fine, I’ll act like one. Tacks on his chair, glue, maybe a nasty critter in a chest drawer. Those were my phantasies as I studied today’s assignment. And of course, it was all done in a way that it forced us to work in pairs to solve each problem. They were all questions with three steps to them, A, B, and C. You could solve A and B by themselves, but to answer C, you had to have solved the previous two. There were also too many of them, and the way to solve them took time, so it really wasn’t possible to do it all alone.

“You do A and I’ll do B,” Vanessa told me, nay, ordered me.

I looked around our table to se how Jessy and our boy classmate was doing. George, apparently, as that’s what I thought I heard Jessy call him. She also noticed my stare and blushed a bit, stealing glances at me. I suppose that was a cute reaction. Honestly, it was, but I it didn’t elicit much of a reaction in me. I think I mostly recognised the gesture as cute because I had seen Abby do that before, but that was it.

And thinking of Abby made me look towards her group. Our eye briefly met, and I felt a bit calmer. I took a deep breath and focused on solving the exercise, and right on time as Vanessa was starting to glare at me for not doing anything.

I solved it easily enough, managing to do so even before Vanessa, but I pretended to not be done with it until she was done with her part so not to rock the boat even further.

Ah! She made a mistake…

She had done everything correctly save for that one little thing. During the solving, switched a five for a seven in the middle of a number, and as she continued solving the exercise, that error got compounded as it went.

Should I say something?

Should I? Probably, but… couldn’t she think that I was being smug or condescending towards her? Yeah, she probably would think that. She does think that I pretend to be a klutz in PE after all. And there’s also me ranking second behind Abby grades-wise if you don’t count PE in. Vanessa was… was she ranked twelfth or something? Abby told me about it, but I wasn’t paying attention then. It was Vanessa Abby was talking about after all.

“How are you two doing?” our teacher asked, having come to check, looking over us with each hand on one of our shoulders.

“We just finished the exercise you told us to,” Vanessa said, sounding like she was done with him. I was too, but that point of agreement wasn’t enough to get us on better terms. Sadly so, or happily so, I didn’t care at this point, I just wanted to go home.

“…Which one of you did part A?” he asked.

My whole being froze. I had failed to consider another possibility.

“It was me,” Vanessa said, her voice growing smaller.

“You made a mistake here,” he said, showing her with his finger. “See here? You replaced a five with a seven. You did everything correctly after that, however.”

That note of praise didn’t stop her from glaring at me. She was undoubtedly thinking that I had noticed her mistake and said nothing just so she could embarrass herself in front of our teacher. If her previous glances could kill, the way she was glaring at me could atomise my being.

I CAN’T WIN NO MATTER WHAT I DO, CAN I!?

I looked towards Abby, desperately calling out to her with all my heart and mind, hopeful that she’d pick my calling. And to my unsurprisingly surprise, she did, her head perking up just the same as if I had verbally called out her name. She then looked at me, our eyes meeting. She gave me another smile, this one a bit sad, and she tapped her lower stomach, reminding me of our previous exchange. It wasn’t much, but it helped me finding some sense of balance, specially once I placed a hand over my lap. It was all in my mind, but I could swear they were still emitting some of her warmth under my skirt.

“Mr. Wilson? Could Violet switch places with George now?” Jessy chimed in. “I need her to help me with something I’m having a hard time understanding.”

“Certainly!” he said. “It’s for things like this that I like putting my students working together. Violet, George?”

I was very thankful for Jessy to have asked for my help and giving me a break from so much negative energy being projected towards me.

“So, what do you need my help with?” I asked, feeling very tired but still managing a smile. There was no answer coming from her however, so I looked at her. Her nose was just a palm away from mine. “Erm, Jessy?”

“Ah! S-sorry!” she said, giving me some much needed personal space. “I was just trying to figure out what your perfume smells like. I noticed it as you sat down.”

Right, I momentarily forgot that Jessy could be a bit tiresome for other reasons. Too much positive energy from this one. Still, a million times preferable to Vanessa on one of her better days.

“Is it too much?” I reflexively asked, despite knowing it wasn’t as it had been Abby who had applied it to me before we left home.

“Honestly, you could have applied a bit more of it,” she said, leaning a bit closer again.

“Anymore of that, and it can be a bit troublesome,” I said, not thinking my words through. “You see, Abby’s nose is very sensitive. Anyway, what did you need my help with?”

When the bell finally rang, it was like the church bell over someone’s funeral as I was completely dead. Vanessa was the pain that she was, Jessy was her own brand of pain, and I had to put up with that for a whole hour.

Vanessa went to her friends, Jessy did too after profusely thanking me for all the tutoring I did with her, and George leaving was something I didn’t even register.

“Babe? How bad is it?” Abby softly asked as she leaned over me as I was taking my sweet time to get my stuff in my bag.

“Can we go somewhere after this?” I asked, my voice, that had been audible until now, now a trembling whimper.

She gave me a nod and looked up to Mathilda and the boys as they approached me. They simply looked at me and them shared a look without saying a thing, and I was thankful for that.

“Here, we’ll take care of your bag,” Stephen said after I was done packing.

I thanked him with a nod as I handed it to him and then turned to Abby. She hugged my arm and we got to walking, me leaving her the job of directing us. There was a twenty-minute break until we had to go to another class so we had time, just not that much to do anything.

The spot she took us was to a chair well, away from prying eyes as we went to the bottom, sitting on the last two steps. I let out a huge sigh and Abby lowered my blazer and started working my shoulders with her magic fingers.

“How bad was it?”

I didn’t answer right away as I was relieving everything in my mind. It was bad enough that I wanted to curl up in a ball in a dark place, and I could finally do that.

I turned to face Abby, her face a silent question as she couldn’t really read me now. It was only natural as there was nothing in my head, just instinct.

I lifted her skirt, exposing her thighs and my violet underwear that she was wearing. I hid my head there, Abby reaching down to remove my glasses so they didn’t get bent out of shape. Without them, I pressed my face flat on her thighs, the top of my head pressed against her stomach. It was dark, it was warm, and it was all Abby. And I felt like tearing up. I curled up, hugged her legs, and started venting my frustrations, the perfect composed person I had been for the past hour crumping down to the real mess that I was as my girlfriend listened patiently and patted my head and shoulder. It was a very childish thing to do, but I was with Abby, my rock, my home, my sanctuary, my world, my everything, so I could finally do that. And I was spent after it. Spent, but feeling incredibly light, all thanks to her.

“Thanks Abby, for listening to me bellyache,” I said as I came out from under her skirt.

“Hehe, don’t mention it,” she said, fluffing herself closer to me. “You do this all the time I need after all.”

I looked at her and felt a huge tidal wave of love and affection towards her, instinct taking over. Next thing I realised, Abby was giggling for me to stop as I kissed her, her body flushed against me as I got my hips between her legs and pulled her closer by her rear.

“Babe! Babe, we are still at school,” she lightly laughed as I nibbled her ear, my senses coming back to me this instant. “And you’re squishing your glasses between us.”

I pulled my head back, our eyes meeting. Her face was flushed, her eyes glistening and she was smiling at me, seemingly amused at what I had been doing to her.

“S-sorry, I… I don’t know what came over me,” I told her, feeling a bit out of breath.

“Pfft, hehe! Well, I do,” she chirped, cupping my face between her hands and giving me a kiss. “It was an overwhelming wave of love and appreciation over your lovely, cute, little girlfriend, wasn’t it?”

“Pfft, fufu! Yeah, I guess you’re exactly right,” I said, smiling back at her. Then, I fell her heels kicking my buttocks.

“Still, we shouldn’t be making love here, should we?” she hummed. “Not that I’d mind.”

I let out a sharp “huh!?” over that. She was still smiling and looking playful, but something told me she wasn’t kidding at all.

“I really am not,” she said, putting my glasses back on and still kicking my rear with her heels. “I’m dead serious. Maybe as a graduation celebration?”

“I-I’ll think about it,” I stammered as I removed my body from between her legs, Abby cackling over my reaction. It had been a long while since she had elicited such a strong reaction from me. She then sat flush with my side, her head coming to rest on my shoulder.

“Better?” she asked, taking one of my hands, our fingers interlocking.

“Yeah. Still super tired, but much better. Thank you, honey.”

“Hmm. It was a pleasure.”

I leaned my head on her and closed my eyes as I hugged her waist. We still had some more time, so I’d enjoy it with her before I had to go back to my public persona.

◊◊◊

Our arrival home had been more or less how I had imagined.

Violet was dead tired from a very long day, but also needing some of my special touch and love. It started slowly enough, but she got progressively more enthusiastic and passionate. Right now, I was staring at the white ceiling of her room, still recovering from her. And Violet? She too was on her back staring at the ceiling, thinking about stuff and perhaps waiting for me to be ready for another round. She was a lot better now, having decompressed and made love with me, her safe harbour, our souls connecting into one being. Even now we were still connected as our breathings were still in sync.

I thought Violet was going for a second round when she shifted in bed to go back to being on top of me. I awaited her to start moving, but she stayed still, each of her elbows on one side of my head, framing it as she run her fingers through my hair, her face complicated but loving as she looked into my eyes.

“Are we going for seconds?” I asked, smiling at her and putting my arms around her neck.

“No. Not yet anyway. You probably still need another minute or so,” she hummed in a low, dragged out, voice. And to confirm it, she moved her hip once, gauging my reaction. “Yup, you still need a minute or so.”

“Then, why this position?” I asked, my face a bit warmer now and trying to get my feet up top her butt to kick it with my heels but only managing to get them to her knees as they still felt like they were made of lead. That was also good, so I started running them over her calves. “Not that I’m complaining. It’s always nice having my Violet blanket.”

She thought for a bit longer before opening and closing her mouth a few times.

“You know, I really, really love you,” she said, sounding sure about what she was saying, but unsure how she was saying it. “And I want to be with you forever. I know it’s naïve to think that you’re the only person for me as there’s probably others that could be a good match—or hell, even better matches, but… they aren’t you, so I don’t want them, even if you completely disappeared from the face of the earth and from my memory. It really has to be you, and I really want to have you in my life until the day one of us dies, and even after that.”

Was she proposing? It sounded like she was proposing to me.

“I guess, what I’m trying to say is… I love you more than anything, Abigail Gardener, and I’m eternally grateful that you were so stubborn in becoming part of my life. I couldn’t make it past days like these if you weren’t here, and you make my good days all the better simply by being by my side all the time.”

“Gee! Now you’ve done it,” I whimpered, tears starting to run out of my eyes. “And just so you know, I feel the same down to every single word you told me.”

She smiled at me and we kissed, both our arms wrapping around each other. It hadn’t been a proposal, but it carried all the same emotion and impact.

“You can move now,” I said, once I calmed down.

“Are you sure?” she asked, raising her head enough for our eyes to meet.

“I should be fine,” I told her, giving her a playful smile. “As long as you’re gentle.”

She smiled at me, her lips approaching mine.

“In that case, I’ll be extra gentle,” she whispered, her lips tickling mine.