My very first erotic novel, LIBRARY GIRL, has landed. It is available on Amazon. In celebration, I figured I’d throw out chapter one for free.

I went to college because all the movies I’d ever seen about it promised me there would be sex. From Van Wilder to Revenge of the Nerds to Real Genius–sex was a large part of the plot. Either they were trying to get it, they were constantly having it, or they were spending a large part of the film talking about it. Hell, even Rodney Dangerfield scored with Sally Kellerman in Back to School. Hollywood made it seem like college was a never-ending orgy of writhing bodies awash in a sea of ecstasy, animalistic abandonment, and bodily fluids. And I wanted to be a part of it.

Hollywood lied.

There is something frustrating about college if you’re not one of those people. You know what I mean– one of the pretty people, the successful people, the people who somehow never work or study, yet always have the means to party. I never understood how to be one of those people. Perhaps that’s the part of life that no one ever tells you: You’re either one of those people or you’re not. And if you’re not, you’re destined for the mundane.

I was, am, and shall ever be destined for such a fate.

It really couldn’t be helped. I am the very definition of average. I am of average height and average weight. I have brown hair of an average length. I have average features, as being the product of Irish, English, German, and Dutch backgrounds will give you. I don’t do any one thing well enough to be considered above average. I’m no slouch, but it’s it’s not as if I’m being picked first for any team. When I look into the mirror, I see a man who will forever be stuck in the bowels of middle management, a bad mortgage, and family sedans that I will buy from a reputable used car dealer. When you look around at Middle America and see the pasty white mass of potato-faced dullards that make up the useless majority of this great nation, know that I will be in the middle of them, a perfect example of a no one who will never do anything.

It depresses me to think about it.

I have spent too much time in the library, I think. College seniors tend to do that. Well, at least I do that. That’s where I spent most of my time in college. I’m not a good enough student to skirt by on natural knowledge and charm like some, and I’m determined to graduate with decent grades, so I must put in the hours of book-learning and drill that facilitate those grades.

The library is a nice enough place, though. I’ve spent countless hours in it. I usually retreat to the fifth floor, the top floor. After five at night, it’s a morgue. There is usually only me, a few of the really studious Asian students, and the occasional pass-through by a work-study student librarian on a mission for some odd book.

I like to sequester myself in the carrels by the long row of windows in the front of the library. They look out over the busy campus, and I enjoy the view. Usually I hunch there with my books, notebooks, and my trusty Macbook Pro. I have a pair of headphones on, the line connecting to the Mac. I listen to music most nights, progressive rock from obscure bands like Haken or Porcupine Tree. My music selection may be the only un-average thing about me, but it puts me square in the middle of a coolness void that seems to repel women. Girls like pop or club music, something that will make them dance. No one can dance to emphatic, bombastic keyboard riffs over changing time signatures, and let’s not even begin on the woman-repelling power of Geddy Lee’s voice.

The campus was in rare form on Friday evening. There was some event on a small stage outside the student center a block away. I can see a mass of students gathered there. The library is more morgue-like and still than normal. The only other person on the fifth floor is Huang, a stubby Korean kid with thick glasses who I’ve only ever seen wear Oxford shirts buttoned to the last button and khakis. He is some sort of math major, I think, or maybe pre-med. I glanced at his homework once as I passed by him and it looked like he was trying to break the Enigma code or something. It was far beyond me.

I was dealing with some reading for a history class. The reading was about the cultural influence of the Silk Road on ancient Greece. It wasn’t exactly riveting stuff. Blah, blah India, blah, blah China, blah, blah exchanges of goods.

I was enjoying the view more. My eyes kept drifting back to the goings-on in the center of campus. If I’d been more than an average Joe, perhaps I would have been there watching some mediocre up-and-coming band that the Campus Activities Board had conned into playing. Perhaps I would have been there flirting with some pretty brunette in a flannel shirt and tight jeans. Perhaps that flirting would have lead to drinks, and perhaps those drinks would have lead to some drunken fumbling. Maybe second base. Third, if I was lucky. Maybe she would have blown me. Maybe.

Most likely not, though. I’d attempted flirting enough to know I wasn’t good at it. I’d been shot down by enough girls to know that it’s not a few select girls–it’s something I do wrong. I’m not inexperienced, mind you. Just grossly under-experienced. That’s how I like to think about it.

Somewhere along the line, probably in high school, when the other kids were experimenting with blowjobs and fingering, I was stuck on the family farm, milking cows and furiously masturbating to a yellowed Victorian erotica novel that I’d found in a box of books that I’d bought at an estate auction. I understood the principles of sex, mind you, but my terminology was quite different than those of my peers because I wasn’t reading Penthouse Letters or watching porn. My father didn’t believe in the internet, aged dairy farmer that he was. We had dial-up internet for business purposes, but that was it. Ever try to download a sixty-second QuickTime movie on dial-up? Bring a cot; it will take a while.

All my teenage frustrations had therefore been excised with the stories in that stupid novel. It was all I could get my hands on. I read over and over again tales of Mr. Baringshire taking the maid roughly in the pantry while Mrs. Baringshire was upstairs with the grotesquely well-hung gardener. The men often used their rigid members to plow the women’s fevre’d creases. Or the women would frig themselves into a stupor while watching the laundry girl perform fellatio on their husband’s rock-hard priapus.

It wasn’t exactly crotch-melting reading. I had to imagine a lot back in those days. I had to substitute the common sexual terms of the day for the hundred-year-old euphemisms bandied about in the book. Of course, being as average as I was (and still am), I didn’t quite know what terms would make girls want to engulf my turgid phallus, so my attempts were often cringe-worthy and sad.

I never did get laid in high school. I somehow blindly stumbled my way into second base a few times. Once at McKenzie Strathmore’s Sweet Sixteen, I ended up making out with Melissa Dupree in a dark corner of the Strathmore family basement, possibly because she’d had a few slugs of Jack Daniels from someone’s hip flask, and I ended up getting a few good gropes of her boobs. They were average, of course. Lovely, but average. This is an ongoing theme in my life.

I never saw third base until my freshman year of college. That would have been with Karen Pulaski. She was a pretty, if a bit nerdy, girl from my dorm. When everyone else went home for Easter weekend, I stayed because I had no desire to eat ham with my family, and she stayed because her family lived in another state and the Easter weekend was only three days. On Saturday night, I’d had my door open and music playing, and Karen had walked into my room to tell me that we were pretty much the only people left in the dorm. She asked if I wanted to watch a movie with her. I agreed, and we watched about half of The Breakfast Club before we started making out.

We weren’t especially connected to each other. We’d been friends– actually more like acquaintances– and if it hadn’t been for the lack of other signs of human life that weekend, we would most likely never would have had any form of physical contact with each other. Call it a casual burst of hormones and proximity. As it was, for three hours on a Saturday night, we kissed like impassioned wolverines. I got her shirt and bra off with little problem. When it came to her pants, she rejected my advances for a frontal assault three times, but I eventually was able to snake my hand down the back. She had no issues with that. My groping of her firm, round ass lead me to drop my hand a little farther and curl my fingertips into her pussy from behind. I felt the fine, wiry hair and the wetness. I got my middle finger into her crease just enough to make her tense and increase her throaty breathing, but given the angle and the average length of my arms, that was the best I could do. She seemed to enjoy it though, and she ground her pelvis into my cock with force. Given that my penis was pressed left across my lower abdomen and straining to break out of my jeans, having her suddenly press into it was both agonizing and incredible. It was painful, but it was a good kind of painful. That pain was probably the only thing that kept me from exploding all over my own hip.

But that was it. Three hours of hot dry-humping and groping and we never did it again. Not for my lack of trying. I thought about her a lot in the weeks following, even asked her out once. She kind of shrugged off my request and said that she was busy. A week after that, she started dating another guy from the residence hall, a sophomore who lived on the fourth floor whom I didn’t really know. If you walked past his room on the weekends though, you could often hear them engaged in loud, breathy, and probably acrobatic sex.

I took a break from my window-gazing and looked over at Huang. He never wore headphones or listened to music on his computer. His face was a mask of perpetual concentration.

“Hey Huang,” I said. My voice shattered the silence. He glanced at me, annoyed. “We’re really living the dream, aren’t we?” He ignored me and returned to his studies. I smiled at him. He didn’t look back at me. How could one man have so much focus? Maybe it was some sort of Korean thing.

I took my ear buds out and tossed them onto the carrel desk. I stretched. I needed to stand and move around. I’d been sitting too long. I headed down to the first floor where the vending machines were and bought a bottle of Coke and a bag of Cheetos, an average snack dinner for an average student.

I waited for the elevator, yawning as I did. There was almost no one in the library. A bored-looking student manned the front desk. A couple of students milled around the computers doing research. That was it. The smell of old books was heavy in the air, and silence was reigning supreme.

The elevator seemed to be stuck between floors. It wasn’t moving. I had heard rumors that you could jam the elevator between the third and fourth floor for a few minutes, just long enough for a frenzied fuck. The rumor was that there were more DNA traces in that cube than in the entire Life Sciences building.

I sighed. The stairs were right next to the elevator. I wasn’t a fan of unnecessary exercise, but moving beats waiting. I walked it. It took longer than I thought it would.

When I got to the fifth floor, I heard the elevator door sound its arrival ding. I’d heard that sound countless times over the years. I peeked my head out of the stairwell in time to watch two young co-eds exit the car. They were stifling giggles. One was a thin, lithe brunette in a short, gray skirt and a tight, black short-sleeved top with a scoop neck. She wasn’t packing a lot of heat upstairs, but her ass was incredible. The other girl was a little thicker, but not much. She had on jeans and a black t-shirt with some sort of death metal band’s logo on the front. She had facial piercings and darker makeup, as well.

The girl in the death metal shirt pulled the smaller brunette toward her and they kissed, a passionate tongue-entwining kiss. The smaller girl pulled her friend toward the book stacks, away from the windows where Huang and I were anchored.

The stacks were dimly lit and musty, long corridors of ancient tomes, most of which hadn’t been touched in years, thanks to the internet. Most of the time, if I ever went back there, that opening scene from Ghostbusters played in my head and I kept expecting books to float off the shelves around me. The library, while lit well in the front of the building by five stories of glass windows, was windowless on three sides and lit by aging fluorescent lighting. On the fifth floor, at least half the bulbs were burned out and there was a dark pall on the rows and rows of books in the back half. Somehow, I think that was what the girls wanted. They skulked to the farthest recess of the top floor, moving back to the far wall. They ducked down the stack and to the corner.

Not being an idiot, I ditched my Coke and Cheetos at my carrel and followed silently after them, a hunter of perversions stalking his prey. I ducked down the second-to-last stack and traveled down to the end. I took a knee and found an angle where I could see through the open part of the stacks to the other side and at least look up at them. When I saw them, I’m not ashamed to admit that I went to full mast.

In four years of college, I’d heard fables of bisexual experimentation between curious young girls, but I’d never witnessed it. A lot of the time, it seemed to happen minutes after I left a party. The next day, someone who was there would fill me on the Roman orgy that occurred as soon as I shut the door and went home. I was beginning to believe it was all hype, a fancy lie to trick morons like myself into paying tuition. It was a siren song, a beautiful thing that lead you smiling into the rocks of a lifetime of student loan payments.

But suddenly, right there in the stacks on a sleepy Friday night in the Wallace E. Chelsea Library at Wilson Prince College, I was witnessing the Loch Ness Monster of girl-on-girl. I was without camera to take a blurry picture, no one would believe me. This was a new experience.

I watched as Death Metal, clearly the butch in the relationship, pushed the tiny brunette back into the corner. She grabbed her hair in a messy fist and forced her head back. The brunette met Death Metal’s mouth with eager kisses, their tongues swirling each other. Death Metal’s hands groped Brunette’s chest, squeezing her breasts roughly. Death Metal’s hands slid down to her partner’s ass, squeezing it until Brunette squealed with pain.

Death Metal yanked up the Brunette’s skirt. She was wearing a tiny black thong trimmed with lace. In another half-second, Death Metal had those undies around Brunette’s ankles. From my vantage point, I was staring right at one of the most beautiful shaved pussies I’d ever seen. It was perfect, round and pouty with a smooth slit, like something out of a glossy adult magazine.

“Do it,” Brunette gasped. She put her hands on Death Metal’s shoulders and pushed her to her knees. DM wasted no time. She buried her face in Brunette’s snatch. I watched as the smaller girl’s eyes practically rolled out of her head in bliss. The butch girl lapped away at the Brunette’s crotch with a practiced tongue. She moved her hand up to the exposed slit and began sliding a single finger in and out of her girlfriend. The brunette’s knees began to tremble. She grabbed DM by the back of her head and ground her pussy hard into DM’s face.

I watched as DM withdrew one finger, glossy and slick with the brunette’s arousal, and pushed two fingers into her, pistoning her fist up and down. The brunette began to fail in her attempt to muffle her moans.

At this point, my cock was screaming for freedom. I glanced over my shoulder and saw no shadows, heard no sounds other than the two lesbians attacking each other. I quietly freed the button on my jeans and unzipped them as quietly as I could. My cock was rigid and practically leapt out of my boxers. I took it in my hand. Even my own touch was almost enough to send me over the edge. I could feel my heart beating like I was running a marathon.

The brunette was circling closer and closer to what I could only imagine was going to be a mind-blowing orgasm. I could see her abdominal muscles tensing and relaxing. I could see her teeth clenching. The girl in the death metal shirt pounded the brunette’s pussy with two fingers. The brunette was gasping for breath. “I’m going to come,” she whispered through a clenched jaw. Those magic words only intensified her partner’s assault. The dark-haired girl’s arm went into overdrive, thrusting into the brunette like a jackhammer.

I stroked my cock two, three times, and felt my entire sack suddenly surge. I did the only thing I could think of doing: I quickly grabbed the nearest book and stuffed my penis into it. I blasted a load somewhere in the middle of Existentialism and the Romantic Ideal, an old stuffy English text that probably hadn’t been opened since the late ‘70’s, and after I replaced it, would probably never be opened again. Especially not pages 264 and 265.

The brunette’s knees buckled and she almost fell over. If it hadn’t been for her girlfriend supporting her, she would have tumbled like a Jenga tower. She came in a shuddering, weepy scream that she stifled by biting her own wrist. She lowered herself to the floor and into the arms of her lover. They fell into a barrage of long, passionate kisses.

Meanwhile, I closed the book, slid it back into the shelf. (I apologize if you ever came in looking for that volume and tried to read it.) Then, holding my pants up, I quietly left the stack and moved to a safe distance away before putting my cock away and zipping up my jeans. I fast-walked back to my carrel and took a seat. In a few moments, the girls walked out of the stacks, arm-in-arm, and disappeared into the elevator.

I looked over at Huang. I desperately wanted to tell him what I’d just seen, although I planned to leave out the part about me using a few ropes of my own DNA as book glue. He was intently writing out math formulas that went on for pages. He never would have appreciated the story, I think. Maybe he was asexual. I’d never seen him talk to a girl, or even a guy. He only had eyes for his books. Maybe he fucked books. Maybe I’d just ruined one of his future girlfriends. The world may never know.

I saw the girls exit the library from my vantage point on the fifth floor. They were laughing and holding hands and skipping, two people in love with life. I was struck with a flash of envy.

Those two girls had been younger than I, probably sophomores, maybe juniors at best. They were treating college like the experience that it was supposed to be, a wild time of self-discovering and experimentation to target the real person you were supposed to be come. At the very least, they were living the sort of collegiate life that I’d come to expect when I watched 1980’s college movies.

What had I done in four years? Nothing. A few meaningless excursions into casual sex, a few flirtations, and a whole lot of self-abuse in the showers. Where was my semi-drunken grope-fest in the stacks of the library? Where was my experimentation? Who the fuck was I supposed to be?

“Huang,” I said. “What are we doing with our lives?” He looked at me, his face a mask of annoyance. He tried to ignore me, but I persisted. “Seriously, bro. It’s fucking Friday night. We’re both young. We’re in the prime of our lives, and what are we doing? We’re in the fucking library while there’s a concert going on in the middle of campus. There are women out there who are looking for someone to make a connection with. Why can’t that connection be with us?”

Huang was glaring daggers at me. He was too polite to look away, so I kept up the banter.

“We have to realize that there is more to life than these books and study spots and listening to streaming music services while we study. We need to go out and find pussy. We need to do shots with pretty girls until the only decisions we can possibly consider making are bad ones. What do you say, buddy? Are you with me?”

Huang inhaled sharply, paused, and said, “No.” He returned to his formulas, more determined than ever to block me out.

It didn’t matter. Watching two girls engage in frenzied cunnilingus had changed my perspective. I was determined to do more with my senior year. I wanted to be part of experiences like that, not just an observer.

I packed up my computer and my books, slung my courier bag over my shoulder, and left the library with a renewed sense of purpose.

I was determined to turn my senior year into something more memorable. I was determined to break out of my rut, to do something more with my life. I might have been average. I might always be average. If that was to be my destiny, so be it, but if I was going to be average, I was going to spend a few months desperately trying to break free of average, if only for a little while.

It was time for me to finally live.