Chapter 5: Chapter 5
Tuesday arrived with a folded schedule tucked under Chloe's door. She read it over coffee in the dining hall while Ruby explained the geography of the building between bites of toast. Two morning classes, a lunch break, and then a three-hour block in the afternoon with no subject listed, only a room number and a single word: Applied Studies.
The morning was ordinary enough to feel almost like a trick. Advanced Composition in a wood-paneled room with a distracted instructor who assigned essays on unreliable narrators. Then European History, where Chloe took notes on the Congress of Vienna and tried to pretend she was at any other prep school in the world. The girl beside her underlined dates with a gold pen and never once looked at her. It was almost restful. She ate lunch quickly, half expecting someone to intercept her on the way out, and no one did.
The room number took her to a low-beamed classroom at the end of the east corridor, one she had never noticed. Eleven other girls were already filing in. Marguerite caught her eye near the door and gave her a small, shy smile, which Chloe returned. Dot was there, blonde and pink-cheeked, sitting with her hands folded like she was at church. Liv sprawled in a back chair with her long legs stretched out, unhurried as ever.
The instructor was already at the front when the clock struck one.
Chloe had met Vance, and Vance had seemed like the apex of the species. This woman made her revise that opinion immediately. She looked to be in her mid thirties, built like she trained for something, with flowing black hair that fell past her shoulders and pale blue eyes that moved across the room like searchlights. Her black dress was fitted and low-cut, and her chest strained the fabric in a way that was frankly architectural. She had the presence of a villain in an action film, the kind who tortures the hero with a smile and gets the best lines.
"Sit," she said. They sat.
She wrote nothing on the board. She simply stood in front of them, hip cocked, and let the silence run until one girl near the front squirmed.
"My name is Instructor Voss. You will call me that or nothing at all. For the rest of your time here, the majority of your afternoon classes happen in this room. Not all of them. But most." She let that settle. "This school will teach you languages, history, mathematics, and you will learn them well, because some of you will marry men who talk about the Congress of Vienna at dinner. But this room teaches the other curriculum. The one that actually decides your life."
Chloe felt the room's temperature change. Beside her, Dot had gone very still.
"You are going to learn everything anyone could ever know about sex. Not the fumbling version you already have. Everything. It is the most powerful manipulation tool that has ever existed, and most people use it like a hammer when it can be a scalpel." Voss began to walk slowly along the front row. "I am not going to stand here and tell you that your worth is your body. I want to be very clear about that, because you will hear it implied everywhere else in the world, and it is a lie told by idiots. Your brain is your most powerful sexual tool. An average woman who understands sex, who understands desire, who understands what men and women want and why they want it, is more effective than any supermodel or sex symbol alive if that woman is an idiot. Beauty is a drawing. Knowledge is the hand that holds the pen."
She stopped walking. Pale blue eyes swept the room and snagged, briefly, on Chloe.
"Today is an introduction. To the penis."
Someone laughed. It came out before the girl could stop it, a nervous burst from a willowy brunette two seats over. The laugh died the instant Voss turned her head.
"Something funny?"
"No, ma'am. It's just, we all, I mean, we've seen..."
"You've seen. Of course you've seen. You've sucked and fucked more than enough by now to know the basics, or you wouldn't have survived Monday." Voss's voice didn't rise at all, which somehow made it worse. "And that is exactly why you are laughing, and exactly why you are wrong. A girl who thinks she already knows a cock is a girl who has learned nothing from one. The difference between you today and you in eight months is the difference between a girl who drives a car and a girl who can rebuild the engine blindfolded. Men cannot tell the difference, most of them. Their wives can. Their mistresses can. The women who take things from them can. Sit down, and laugh in this room again and you will spend the hour writing anatomy from memory."
The brunette sat. Nobody laughed again.
The first hour was anatomy, and it was like nothing Chloe had ever seen in a classroom. Voss used real photographs, projected large on a screen at the front, unflinching and clinical: the shaft in cross-section, the twin columns of sponge inside it, the way blood filled them and pressure pinned them. Videos followed, ordinary men in ordinary light, erection filmed from every angle, the skin of the shaft sliding because there was genuinely more skin than shaft. She had cutaway models on her desk, and she passed the first one down the rows so each girl could pull the layers apart and see where the nerve endings crowded and where the tissue went numb.
"The head is where he lives," Voss said, while the model made its way along. "The ridge, the underside, the little band of tissue where the skin meets the glans. That is where sensation concentrates. The shaft has feeling, but it is secondhand. When you learn to use your mouth, you will learn that his reaction lives in his face and his thighs, not in the four inches you've stuffed yourself with. Pay attention to him, not to your own performance. A woman watching her own technique is a woman alone in the room."
Chloe took notes without realizing how much she was writing. The clinical language was doing something strange to her head; every fact landed with the memory of Monday attached, Charles's cock in her hand, in her mouth, the way he had gasped when she'd found the place under the head. She had found it by accident and instinct. Now there was a word for it, and a diagram, and a reason.
At two o'clock, Voss walked to the door and opened it.
Four men came in.
They were young, maybe mid twenties, plain and unremarkable on purpose, Chloe suspected. Ordinary bodies, ordinary faces, ordinary clothes. They arranged themselves in a line at the front of the room like exhibits, and in a way that was exactly what they were. Voss faced the class with her hands on her hips.
"Four men. Four different cocks. This is the second half of your introduction. First, you examine. All twelve of you, up close. You will look, feel, squeeze, move the skin, look at the head, examine the veins, and scrutinize. You will notice everything and touch everything. These men are professionals and they are being paid to stand there and be studied, so take your time. When the physical examination is done, you will each write a report on the details and differences of all four. I will read every word."
The men unbuttoned and stepped out of their trousers without ceremony. Underwear came down. Four cocks, soft, four different answers to the same question, hung there in the afternoon light, and the room went quiet in a new way.
"Form lines. Two at a time is fine. Touch first, look second."
Chloe ended up in the line behind Marguerite, who had gone the color of a peony. The first man in the row was the biggest of the four, and even soft he hung heavy and long, with a blunt wide head and a thick vein running the left side of the shaft. When Chloe's turn came she reached out and took him in her palm, and he was warm and dense and shifted against her fingers like something asleep.
"Move the skin," Voss said, from somewhere near the wall. "Don't just grip it like a door handle. It slides. Watch how it slides."
Chloe slid her hand slowly, and the loose skin rolled over the shaft under her palm, the head swelling a little as blood began to arrive uninvited. She looked closer. The veins branched like ivy. The head was a shade darker than the shaft, the slit a small dark crease. She released him and moved on.
The second man was shorter and thinner, with a slight upward curve and a foreskin that gathered in a soft pucker past the tip. When she drew it back the head emerged slick and pink and startled-looking, and Marguerite made a tiny sound beside her that was almost a laugh, almost a gasp. The third was thick, not long, with heavy balls that hung low and a shaft that barely moved at all when she squeezed it; it was like gripping a forearm. The fourth was somewhere in the middle, ordinary, except that a pale scar of a vein crossed the base and the head flared wide like a mushroom when she moved the skin.
They wrote their reports at the row of desks along the wall while the men stood dressed only from the waist down and waited. Chloe filled two pages. Differences in length and girth, yes, but also the way each man's body betrayed him differently: one flushed pink across the chest, one's breathing went shallow, one went hard in slow stages and one all at once. Voss read over shoulders without touching anyone, and once stopped at Chloe's desk for a long moment before moving on without a word.
"Now the second part," she said, when the last pen stopped. "You will take each man from soft to hard, any way you like. Hands, mouth, whatever you choose. You will do it in front of the class, because the class is watching the men and learning from their faces, and you will do it well. One rule." She held up a finger. "You do not make them come. Not close. Not almost. The men will stop you if you push too far, and if a man has to stop you twice, I will know your name. Begin."
The room rearranged itself in a scramble of chairs and knees. Chloe took the man with the foreskin, because she wanted to see it again, and knelt in front of him with a dozen other girls kneeling at a dozen other stations around the room. There was nothing private about it and nothing shameful either; Voss walked the rows like a gardener inspecting beds.
Chloe started with her hand, slow, feeling the foreskin glide, and he began to fill almost immediately. She watched it happen this time instead of just feeling it, watched the blood swell the shaft until the skin pulled tight and the pucker of skin slid back on its own, and the head emerged fat and dark and glossy. She leaned in and licked the slit, and his stomach jumped. Good. She'd written that in her report: the thin one starts in his stomach.
She took him into her mouth and worked the head with her tongue, one hand moving the shaft in slow counterpoint, and within a minute his breathing had gone ragged and his cock had gone steel. Somewhere behind her a girl was doing something to the third man that made him groan out loud, and Dot, of all people, was demonstrating an alarming natural talent on the fourth, her blonde head bobbing with cheerful concentration. Liv had the big one and was taking her time, one hand and then her mouth, unhurried, watching his face the whole way like Voss had said.
Chloe got carried away. She knew it the moment his hand closed in her hair and pulled her back, his cock sliding free of her lips wet and straining and dark, his voice rough.
"Enough. You were two seconds from finishing me."
"Sorry," she said, and meant it mostly.
"You weren't." But his mouth twitched. "Good, though."
They wrote their second reports with the men standing around the room hard and patient, twelve girls flushed and licking their lips and pretending they weren't. Chloe described how each man responded differently to mouth versus hand, which one liked the underside licked and which went stupid when she hummed, and she caught Voss reading her page for the second time.
"Last section," Voss said. "I choose the teams. Three girls to a man. You will make him come. You will do it together, and you will handle what he gives you together, because how a woman receives is as instructive as how she gives. There will be a third report." A thin smile. "Consider it field notes."
She pointed. "The foreskin. Whitmore, Okafor, and Delacroix."
Chloe watched that trio work while her own name waited in her ears. They took turns, passing him between them like a rumor, one on the shaft with her hand, one on the head with her mouth, rotating every thirty seconds so the sensation never plateaued. When he came it was sudden, his whole body going rigid, and the girl with her mouth on him pulled off at the last instant and the three of them leaned in with their faces close as he sprayed cum across them, thick stripes across cheeks and lips and chins. Then, on Voss's single raised eyebrow, they pressed their mouths together in a three-way kiss, passing what they'd caught between them, and swallowed in turns.
"The second man. Jansen, Ito, and Brandt."
Those three worked in a tighter formation, all three mouths stacked at the head of his cock, lips overlapping, and when his hips jerked they opened together and let him shoot into all three mouths at once, cum pooling across their touching tongues, and then they kissed and shared it openly while he shuddered above them and Voss narrated distances and volumes in a low voice for the note-takers.
"The third man. Liv."
Liv stood and gathered Dot and the willowy brunette who had laughed, and Chloe saw the brunette's face change and Liv's hand land briefly on her shoulder, steadying, unhurried. They attended the thick one, and it was the brunette who got greedy in the end, sucking through his orgasm rather than pulling back, cheeks hollowing, and when her mouth came up full she turned to her two teammates and kissed it into them, one and then the other, sharing it out whether they'd planned it or not. Dot took her share and swallowed with her eyes closed.
"Last man," Voss said. "Bennett. Marchetti. Sorensen."
The biggest one.
Chloe walked to him with her pulse in her throat and the room watching. Marchetti was a dark-eyed girl who knelt on his left without a word, and Sorensen took his right, and Chloe stood in front of him for a moment, close enough to feel the heat off his cock before she ever touched it.
He was huge. She had written that in her first report in flat clinical language: longest of the four, near the limit of what a hand can close around. Now it was at attention and level with her mouth, and the sheer size of it made her understand something about Monday that she hadn't known she didn't know.
She sank to her knees beside the other two and took him in her hand first, both hands, one stacked over the other, and there was still shaft left over. Sorensen leaned in and licked the head while Chloe worked the length, and his breath left him in a long rough stream. They traded. Chloe put her mouth on him and could only take the head and an inch past it, her jaw already aching at the stretch, her tongue working the ridge where she now knew the nerve endings stacked. Marchetti went lower, hand and mouth together, and they built him in layers for long minutes while Voss moved around the three of them and the class watched in a silence you could have heard a pin drop through.
He lasted. That was the thing about him; his report had said it too, the big one lasts. His thighs flexed, his stomach clenched, his cock went darker and harder, and still he held on, and Chloe realized dimly that he was being professional about it, giving them the full lesson.
Then his hand fisted in the air at his side and Voss said, quietly, "He's there."
Sorensen pulled back. Marchetti pulled back. Chloe stayed.
She felt the first pulse against her tongue and understood in the same instant what her group had decided without deciding: she opened her mouth and pulled off, and he came in a long thick cumshot across her face and tongue, half of it catching her lips and chin and the groove of her open mouth, jet after jet while Marchetti and Sorensen leaned close and his cum kept coming. When he finished, Chloe turned and found Marchetti's mouth with hers and kissed her, sharing what she'd taken, pushing half of it across with her tongue and taking some back, the taste of him thick and bitter and salt and the kiss wet and open while the whole class watched them do it.
Sorensen wiped her chin with a finger and licked it, grinning.
And then, without prompting, without being asked, Chloe turned back to the man. He was still hard, still panting, his cock slick and softening at the edges and streaked with his own cum. She leaned in and took him into her throat, one slow deliberate inch at a time, deeper than she'd managed all lesson, and cleaned him as she pulled back off, tongue gathering every trace from the shaft and the head until she came off the tip with a soft sound and he was spotless.
She looked up at him. Held his eyes. Let her mouth curl.
He gave her a single, slow, approving nod, and it landed somewhere under her ribs like a grade she'd never gotten from any classroom on the first floor.
"Sorensen, Marchetti, Bennett." Voss's voice came from above them, dry as chalk. "Turn your heads. Show the class. Then write me a third report, all twelve of you, on volume, taste, trajectory, and recovery time, and I want speculation in the final paragraph. What would you do differently?"
Chloe turned her face to the room, cum cooling on her chin and in the corner of her smile, and thirty-odd eyes looked back at her. On the front row, Marguerite was staring at her mouth with an expression Chloe recognized from an alcove on Monday night.
Voss crouched down beside her, pale blue eyes level, and spoke just loudly enough for the front row to hear.
"Why did you clean him off, Bennett? Nobody asked you to."
"Because it was mine to do," Chloe said. "And he'll remember it."
Voss looked at her for three full seconds, then stood and smiled at the room like a cat at a full bowl.
"Class," she said, "write that down too."