Chapter 1

I wouldn’t say I am a dialectician, per se. Yes, I had to read him (what grad student doesn’t, I feel like?), but I find Hegel tiresome and a bit of a bore, honestly. But, if I am honest, I do love a tension. Intellectually, there are few things as stimulating as watching two good ideas intermingle with one another and the related thinker or thinkers try to resolve their seeming incompatibility. In physics, it’s the search for a grand unified theory - the very big and the very small don’t make sense together, and so we invent ever-more complicated forms of mathematics to try to fit two very real parts of our world into a single conceptual unity. The fact that we don’t have one still, even after all of this time, is instructive of the difficulty of synthesizing two almost irresolvable facts of the world.

I know this makes me the biggest dork in the world, but honestly, all of this stuff also kind of makes me horny sometimes, too.

As someone prone to intellectualization of… well, everything, that’s maybe not terribly surprising. But I admit that I surprise myself sometimes with what draws me in. Tension, and by extension, contrast, are just so deliciously ripe for eroticisation. There are the basic modes of this in storytelling: enemies to lovers, country mouse and city mouse, and so on. But I like to think a little deeper. There’s physicality: Abbott and Costello, but make it horny. There’s personality: stiff and sensuous. There’s even ideology: conservative and radical. I could go on and on, but each of these interactions, and so many more, always have this way of revving my engine when I least expect it.

And I really thought I was alone in this, until I met her.

I don’t know why my brain is so cinematic, but in my head, the story starts with a narrow-lens shot of the bottom of the door the day she opened it. Two black bars tightly frame the sun-dappled tiles of my bookstore, as the bell above the door as it ‘tinged’ and her size nine and a half’s shuffled confidently underneath her into the room.

I think I was marking inventory in the front or something, probably staring off into space, when I heard the bell ring and for some reason kept my eyes on the ground before looking up.

I still can’t tell you exactly why it was her feet I noticed first and stayed fixated on, but it was.

It’s hard to know where to start other than a general comment that they were (and are) beautiful. She must have just come from a pedicure because each individual toe looked like it had been recently pampered. Daring red polish adorned each nail perfectly and framed, like a beautiful smile, the delicate, ivory slope of the front of her foot. This led up toward ankles that had clear articulations of musculature and bone but were blanketed in a beautiful softness that accentuated their perfection.

I become an unreliable narrator in my own head at this point. I know I saw her feet first, but the rest of her was so gorgeous that it’s hard to point to what part of her held the smoking gun of my attraction.

The only thing unremarkable about her height, which was middling, but this was immaterial to the otherwise entrancing beauty that oozed out of every molecule of her being.

Maybe the most obvious thing about her, if you weren’t already enraptured by her feet, was her hair. She had the most luscious, thick nappy curls of ochre hair I had ever seen. They twisted and wound individually, but acted as a coherent mass and bloomed outward from her head asymmetrically, her left side forming a wide pompadour that only added to her gravitas. Her chin-length locks were the perfect frame to the light hazel tones of her face, overlaid with a galaxy of vibrant freckles all orbiting around her vivid green eyes.

Unable to control myself as this goddess stepped further into the store, each footfall perceptibly activating the individual threads of her abductors and flexors and plantars, I looked further down to see her galactic spread of freckles extended down her elegant neck to a broad shelf of breast flesh that was happily on display.

I know I have lost all objectivity in my description at this point, but I cannot stress how accurate I am when I say her breasts were perfect, truly perfect. Each mound rounded out from her chest with a calculated voluptuousness that seemed to test the limits of human anatomy in how they balanced pertness with fullness. They were substantial, the size of a decent cantaloupe, and, acting in perfect harmony with those equally beautiful feet, jiggled playfully with each step toward the counter. As if their perfection wasn’t cruel enough, she’d opted for a white see-through chiffon blouse with short sleeves and only a simple cotton tank underneath. It provided the thinnest possible semblance of modesty while alerting any viewer to the raw sex that lay a few millimeters beneath.

She was fiddling with something in her purse at that point I think, so, her bare arms brushed against her bust several times. The same cosmic freckles spiraled out across her arms, each plush and perfectly comfortable out in the open, breathtaking when mashed against the gooiness of her breasts.

Beneath the most obviously attractive parts of her to most, were where I thought – before I saw her feet - I would have most been drawn: her belly. Just like the rest of her, it was perfect. There was an obvious softness to it, a creaminess that dripped with sex, but it still had heft, too, and rounded outward in a bottom-heavy oval shape. It was the kind of belly that even a normie would take a second look at; the raw, sensuous fertility it represented stirred a primal desire, envy, or both, in almost anyone. The way it jiggled ever so slightly if she moved too quickly almost made me fall over as soon as I saw it.

In the way that some women are miraculously blessed, her belly did not take away from her pronounced hourglass shape; it simply accentuated it. Its bulging forward was a rousing three-dimensional addition to the rounded, meaty hips that curved out perfectly from the sinch of her waist at an angle that ranged on jagged. Poured into a pair of Daisy Dukes, the fat of her thighs squeezed right out of the hem, red marks occasionally visible from where the ill-fitting clothes tried to hold back a body that was not built to be contained.

I’m also not a physicist, but I do know that old Albert Einstein quote about “sitting with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute,” but when you sit on a hot stove, it “feels like an hour.” I can attest that, at that moment, and pretty much any moment when I was with her thereafter, was proof-positive of that assertion. Cinematic mind ablaze, I’m sure I gaped the entire ten seconds it took her to walk up to the counter. It was only a playful “Hi?” that clicked me out of my relativistic thinking.

“Uh, hi.” I smiled, trying my hardest to recover from my brief foray into general relativity.

“How can I help you?”

I realized at that moment I hadn’t had a chance to see her smile, and that was probably for the best, I am not sure I would have survived the initial blast of its shine. I know, I know, I sound so overwrought. But you have to understand, I was a nerdy baby queer working in a cooperative bookstore, it was rare that I got as close to beauty as this. Most of my customers were beloved but utterly crusty Marxist academics who were perfectly happy to somehow leer and dismiss me all at once. That a creature this beautiful could wander into such a place was simply unthinkable.

Shit, I thought, I had missed what she was saying again.

“...anyway, the class isn’t that exciting, but it did really turn me onto Chakrabarty’s work.”

Doing my absolute damndest to recover from my repeated beauty-induced-confusions, I desperately forged ahead.

“I’m so sorry, I slept terribly last night and I’m a little spacey - which of his works was it you were looking for again?”

She smiled somehow even more kindly now.

“Oh, no problem. I’m normally a total night owl, so, I know what it’s like to be a zombie the next day.”

Amidst those magnificent breasts, she briefly fiddled with a small gold necklace that had what looked like stylized Arabic text on it.

“I wondered if you had his Habitations of Modernity… I can’t fully remember the subtitle but it had something about subaltern studies. It came out sometime around two thousand I think.”

By necessity I was fully disassociating; that someone this beautiful wanted to get into something as crunchy as my regular clients would have fully shut me down in a paralysis of attraction-overload, so, I simply became a robot and acted as if she was one of my beloved disaffected, entitled old Marxists.

“Oh, okay, yeah.”

Really smooth.

I stared down at my computer and wasn’t sure how long I had been staring at the keys and hadn’t typed anything.

I pushed enter for good measure, and then, key by key, I started the mechanical process of searching for my presumptive customer’s need.

“Okay, I don’t see it in our catalogue, but let’s just go check the shelves to make sure.”

I walked over to the history section with stiff joints and a thousand-yard stare. There’s no straight line you can draw between education and intelligence – I knew plenty of people who had PhD’s whose only defining intellectual attribute was masochism – but as I neared the end of my master’s and having engaged with a meaningful chunk of Williams’ lefty academics, I could usually smell out someone who was interested in something for its own sake, versus someone going through the motions. This woman, inexplicably for her attractiveness, seemed to be in the former category.

Suddenly I heard the mistakable dull ‘thwump’ of one book, and then several more, hitting the ground.

I turned around to see my charge red-faced, preparing to bend over and pick up books I realized her wide hips had partially knocked. I was prone to leaving a precarious stack when I didn’t have time to reshelve, but this was an as-of-yet unique experience for one of my clients to be hippy enough to knock it over.

I was trying to guffaw at her to ease the embarrassment and dissuade her from picking them up, but she was too quick and bent over completely to grab them. I caught my first view of her back and, I swear to you, almost fainted right then and there. Her shirt was pulled taught across her entire back and I could see the small sweat marks across where her belt met her blouse; she’d either been sitting somewhere hot or wearing a backpack. More importantly, however, I could see the full, generous shelf of her ass sticking out behind her.

I squeezed the side of the bookcase and tried to find my voice.

“Please, please, it’s okay. You can just leave them on the side.”

I tried another awkward laugh but it came out as more of a squeak.

She pulled herself back up with a less-than-ladylike grunt and I could see her face was blotchy and red from the exertion. She flipped her hair backward and, through a strained breath, tried to regain her cool with a dazzling smile that, in an instant, practically wiped my memory.

Trying to move quickly past the moment, I turned around and led her through the shelves further, still able to hear her laboured breathing behind me.

Once we got to history, my professional expertise in “old shit mostly old people wanted” kicked in and I was able to quickly locate Chakrabarty. Two of his newer works, Provincializing Europe and The Climate of History, but not what she was looking for. A sad robot, I looked up at her with apologetic eyes.

“I’m really sorry, but it looks like we don’t have it right now. I can definitely order it, though.”

Blessedly, she smiled warmly and said it was not a problem.

“Yes, that’d be great.”

I smiled weakly back at her, whatever remained of my intelligence slowly dripping out of my ears as I looked at this woman, entirely under the sway of her radiating beauty.

“Okay, let’s get you all set up then.”

Every muscle in my body tensed as I prepared to head back to the front counter until I realized that I was hemmed in by my customer in the cul-de-sac that was the history section.

It took a joyous few seconds, during which I was able to simply leisurely stare at her. I noticed that her freckles had a radiative pattern, bunched together most intensively at the bridge of her nose, and then exploding outward. Her green eyes felt somewhat guarded, I realized – their intensity was so immediate, she almost seemed careful to make eye contact too vividly, lest she drive someone to distraction. Whoops.

The slight twitch of my feet must have broken her concentration, too, and she realized she was in the way.

“Oh, hah, so silly. I guess I need to move, huh?”

I nodded weakly.

She began the process of turning around in the tight contours of our overloaded aisles. As I watched her execute a human K-turn, I was almost disappointed that she didn’t have her own backup sound.

With abject, unmitigated arousal, I dumbly heard beep, beep, beep in my head as my eyes burned into that beautiful, meaty ass.

It was even more arresting when she walked. Each of her globular buttcheeks had such fantastic heft to it that her glutes would jerk up a juicy chunk of ass-flesh to the small of her back, spectacularly compressing the waist of her jeans into her blouse into a tangle of fat and sweat-soaked fabric.

I had to wipe the drool from the corner of my mouth as we broke free of the narrow aisle and back into the centre of the store. My entire body seethed with desire at this point, a thin layer of sweat radiating out from between my legs. I tried to veer into intellectual pursuits to keep things PG and focus on the task at hand.

I walked up to the computer and immediately put my head down, completely ignoring any visual contact with her while I tried to perform the barest minimum of customer service.

“Okaaaaaay, it looks like I can get this in by the end of the month. Is that going to be too late?”

Unable to make eye contact and only take in auditory stimuli from her, it was now I noticed how melodic and resonant her voice was. Those breasts must have hidden a decent set of lungs and she spoke with enough variation in timbre that I had to focus in to enjoy the subtle and entertaining move between each phoneme.