Islands
Alone
December 2, 2010 Capitals 1 @ Stars 2
December 4, 2010 Thrashers 3 @ Capitals 1
December 6, 2010 Leafs 5 @ Capitals 4 (SO)
December 9, 2010 Panthers 3 @ Capitals 0
December 11, 2010 Avalanche 3 @ Capitals 2
December 12, 2010 Capitals 0 @ Rangers 7
December 15, 2010 Ducks 2 @ Capitals 1(OT)
December 18, 2010 Capitals 2 @ Bruins 3
December 19, 2010 Capitals 3 @ Senators 2
December 21, 2010 Devils 1@ Capitals 5
The door to my dorm room opened with a creak. It made the same creak shutting behind Nicky. I walked the short distance to the desk, feeling around for the switch on the desk lamp instead of turning on the bright fluorescent overhead light. It wasn’t too much of a struggle as the room wasn’t pitch black, illuminated by the lights on the walkways outside. Once I had the lamp on, I turned back to Nicky who was looking at the things pinned down to my corkboard.
“Well this is it.” I held my hands out in the air, gesturing at the room. “We’re alone.”
Nicky took a step toward me and eyed the posters on the wall above my bed. “I like your room,” he answered simply.
“Thanks,” I returned, dropping my keys on the desk. “I like it, too.”
Even though I had already collected room keys and all my freshmen had left for the holidays, the dorms weren’t going to be on lockdown until noon on the day of Christmas Eve. Technically there was still one day allotted for final exams left on Georgetown’s academic calendar. If there was still a day of finals left officially, then the dorms had to be accessible until sometime after that. Official didn’t mean actual though. Professors didn’t want to be at the university so close to the holidays any more than the students did, which was why more often than not they held their finals on the last day of class or in the early days of examination time.
I’d never been in the dorms three days before Christmas. Two days actually, because it was past midnight. Truly, Nicky and I were alone in my room, on my floor, maybe even in the whole building. When we parked in the underground structure, the only vehicles I saw were the golf carts that university employees used to get around campus.
“What’s this?” Nicky moved to the built in dresser and was pointing at the turntable and speaker set placed on top. “Do you…DJ?”
“No,” I laughed. “I just use it to play records.”
“You don’t like an iPod?”
“I have an iPod. But it’s nice to listen to albums on vinyl too,” I answered. “The music sounds warmer. I don’t really know how to explain it.”
He looked at me curiously, unconvinced and oblivious to what I meant. I moved the chair from the desk and fell to my knees, reaching for the milk crate I had that stored all the records I had in DC.
“Here,” I held the heavy crate in the space between us until Nicky grabbed it from me. “Pick something and I’ll show you what I mean.”
I stood up and returned the chair to its place, tucking it into the desk. When I sat down on the far side of the bed, Nicky set the milk crate on top of the desk. I unzipped my ankle boots, kicking them off and leaving them wherever they fell. Nicky started flipping through my vinyl music collection and I leaned back against the sliding door of my closet. Since I was an R.A., I automatically got a single room that I didn’t have to share. Single rooms were quite a bit smaller than double rooms though, and I’d arranged mine in such a way that the end of the bed was right up against the closet. I could only open my closet on one side, and even then the bed blocked almost a foot of the opening.
“I don’t know any of these,” Nicky told me.
There were a few classics in the stack, but most were releases from the last decade. However, the records I owned were of the indie rock and alternative variety. Probably not anything Nicky would have heard on the radio or in the locker room before a game.
I moved my legs onto my bed and pulled my knees up to my chin, shifting so that my back was to the closet and I was facing the window, facing Nicky. “Just pick a cover you think looks nice.”
Judge a book by its cover.
Nicky extracted a record from the stack and stared at it for a moment, then turned it over to check out the back. In the dim light, I couldn’t see what record he was holding. It was just a flat, square object and I couldn’t comment on whether he’d chosen something that would be mood music or air drumming music. He stopped his search and went to the turntable on top of the dresser, beside the door.
“Uh, how do I…” he trailed off, shrugging at me.
“Pull the cover up and then just line the record up with the little silver piece in the middle,” I responded, not moving from my spot, and saying the stuff that was probably obvious to him first. “Make sure the power button is pressed down. Then press start and you can leave it.”
I watched as Nicky removed a black record from its jacket and protective white paper sleeve. He wasn’t careful with the vinyl, holding it like a piece of paper, his fingers spread out. I smiled at it instead of scolding him about finger oil transfer – it was obvious he didn’t have records, so how could he have known? He leaned in close to the turntable, probably trying to read the small print of the button labels. I knew he’d successfully gotten the record playing when I heard the unique tapping noise of the automatic tonearm moving. The stylus would settle on a groove near the outer edge of the record, at the beginning of Side A or B, whichever Nicky had put facing upward.
He was sitting in the middle of the bed when the sound of guitar picking at high notes came through the speakers. Nicky followed my lead and took off his dress shoes, except he didn’t kick them. His shoes were shiny and matched the suit pants he was wearing. He was still wearing parts of his game day suit: the pants and the dress shirt. He had ditched the jacket and tie back at his brother’s party.
“The one I picked, on the back there were only a few songs, but in the…the case…there were two records,” he said.
I nodded. “It’s post rock.”
“What is post rock?” he asked, leaning back against my pillows and stretching his legs out on the bed, his sock-clad ankle pressing into my hip.
“It’s instrumental music,” I replied. “It’s relaxing. I like to listen to this when I study. It helps me concentrate.”
Ironically, the album he’d chosen was probably the one I owned that had the closest connection to sports. It was an Explosions in the Sky album where most of the selections for the Friday Night Lights movie soundtrack had come from. There were only five songs on the album, each one at least eight minutes long. The songs had also become popular for use in sports montage fluff pieces, regardless of the sport.
I knew what Nicky meant about there being two records in the gatefold sleeve. It was a double LP album since there wasn’t enough space to fit that much music of that length on just a single vinyl record. There were only two songs on the side we were listening to.
“Good choice then?” Nicky wondered.
I bit my lip. The pressure of his ankle against my hip felt really nice. He was looking at me daringly. As gracefully as I could, I moved so that I was in the little space parallel to him, my hand on his chest. We were in close quarters, half of my upper body actually pressed against his. The twin bed in my dorm room was small and Nicky was not, with all of his limbs and big hockey body.
“Better than good,” I answered before I kissed him.
We didn’t talk for a long time after that and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to explain to him what I meant about music on vinyl sounding warmer. It started with the kiss and went south of PG-13 from there. When the drums kicked into the song in full force, Nicky had easily moved me so that I was on top of him, my chest pressed against his while he kissed me, his fingers on one hand lost in my chocolate hair and on the other, moving up my back underneath the shirt I was wearing. I didn’t really have anywhere to put my hands because we were so close so I just left them settled on his shoulders, waiting to touch his chest and the dips in his back when the moment came.
Our tongues were in a war when I felt my bra unclasp beneath my shirt. In the dim lighting, Nicky’s grin was evil and tight lipped when I pulled away. I was straddling him as I quickly worked on the buttons on his dress shirt, exposing his sculpted chest once I’d undone them all. My palms grazed up his chest slowly, from his hips to the middle of his ribcage. I leaned in and laid soft kisses down his neck. When I stopped, I dragged my tongue slowly across his collar bone and I thought I heard his breath hitch for a second. I could do things that would allow me to grin deviously at him, too.
It wasn’t long before his big hands were at my hip bones and he rolled so that I was flat on my back beneath him, my back to the mattress, staring up at him. Loose strands of his hair fell against my cheeks as he kissed my swollen lips again and it was my turn to run my fingers through his blond locks, moving it out of the way, my eyes closed all the while. My hips grinded up against him at the sensation of his thumb and pointer finger caressing the underside of one of my breasts.
Nicky made quick work of removing most of our clothes then. He discarded our socks to the floor with his shirt and his pants. He was down to his underwear when he threw my top and my bra in a heap with his clothes, leaving me as topless as he was. I gasped when his mouth closed around one of my nipples, his tongue flicking at it at the same time that his fingers grazed the other one. Even through my jeans I could feel him pressed against me as he worked my breasts. The arm he was using to support himself was bent at the elbow near my head and I dug my fingers into his bicep but I couldn’t get good leverage because of the muscle definition there. All I could do was squirm beneath him.
When he relented, he flicked at the button of my jeans and pulled at the zipper to reveal the front of my simple black bikini underwear before attacking my lips with his own again. I felt him through the thin material of his boxer briefs and soon he had my jeans and bikini pulled down to my knees. There was no mistaking Nicky for shy this time. He knew what he wanted.
He started nipping at my neck and I moved my legs up towards me so that I could get my remaining garments past my ankles and off. I struggled and Nicky moved his hips off me and laid on his side, watching me. When he settled back on top of me again, our legs were tangled and I was fully exposed to him. He was pressed up right against me, his underwear the only thing separating us. The music ended just as my fingers were roaming beneath his underwear, over the perfect rounds of his ass.
His kisses became torturous, slow and long, and his hands were everywhere. He wasn’t even inside me yet and I was nearly shaking. I was so lost to the sensations of what he was doing that it took a moment to register with me when he stopped. He was staring down at me, his upper body supported by his forearms on either side of me. His breathing was heavy and I could read desire in his eyes. I reached behind him and moved my fingers against his back until I could feel one of his shoulder blades, settling there and drawing small circles.
“Erin,” he finally spoke. “Are we moving too fast?”
I knew it wasn’t really his question. Not when I was pinned naked beneath him. Not when he had been the one to start undressing me. Not when I wanted him to stop teasing me with his touches and kisses, and not when I could feel how much he wanted me. We were way past ‘too fast’ or ‘just right’. But he wanted permission to continue.
“Yes,” I answered breathlessly, “but I don’t want you to stop.”
December 4, 2010 Thrashers 3 @ Capitals 1
December 6, 2010 Leafs 5 @ Capitals 4 (SO)
December 9, 2010 Panthers 3 @ Capitals 0
December 11, 2010 Avalanche 3 @ Capitals 2
December 12, 2010 Capitals 0 @ Rangers 7
December 15, 2010 Ducks 2 @ Capitals 1(OT)
December 18, 2010 Capitals 2 @ Bruins 3
December 19, 2010 Capitals 3 @ Senators 2
December 21, 2010 Devils 1@ Capitals 5
The door to my dorm room opened with a creak. It made the same creak shutting behind Nicky. I walked the short distance to the desk, feeling around for the switch on the desk lamp instead of turning on the bright fluorescent overhead light. It wasn’t too much of a struggle as the room wasn’t pitch black, illuminated by the lights on the walkways outside. Once I had the lamp on, I turned back to Nicky who was looking at the things pinned down to my corkboard.
“Well this is it.” I held my hands out in the air, gesturing at the room. “We’re alone.”
Nicky took a step toward me and eyed the posters on the wall above my bed. “I like your room,” he answered simply.
“Thanks,” I returned, dropping my keys on the desk. “I like it, too.”
Even though I had already collected room keys and all my freshmen had left for the holidays, the dorms weren’t going to be on lockdown until noon on the day of Christmas Eve. Technically there was still one day allotted for final exams left on Georgetown’s academic calendar. If there was still a day of finals left officially, then the dorms had to be accessible until sometime after that. Official didn’t mean actual though. Professors didn’t want to be at the university so close to the holidays any more than the students did, which was why more often than not they held their finals on the last day of class or in the early days of examination time.
I’d never been in the dorms three days before Christmas. Two days actually, because it was past midnight. Truly, Nicky and I were alone in my room, on my floor, maybe even in the whole building. When we parked in the underground structure, the only vehicles I saw were the golf carts that university employees used to get around campus.
“What’s this?” Nicky moved to the built in dresser and was pointing at the turntable and speaker set placed on top. “Do you…DJ?”
“No,” I laughed. “I just use it to play records.”
“You don’t like an iPod?”
“I have an iPod. But it’s nice to listen to albums on vinyl too,” I answered. “The music sounds warmer. I don’t really know how to explain it.”
He looked at me curiously, unconvinced and oblivious to what I meant. I moved the chair from the desk and fell to my knees, reaching for the milk crate I had that stored all the records I had in DC.
“Here,” I held the heavy crate in the space between us until Nicky grabbed it from me. “Pick something and I’ll show you what I mean.”
I stood up and returned the chair to its place, tucking it into the desk. When I sat down on the far side of the bed, Nicky set the milk crate on top of the desk. I unzipped my ankle boots, kicking them off and leaving them wherever they fell. Nicky started flipping through my vinyl music collection and I leaned back against the sliding door of my closet. Since I was an R.A., I automatically got a single room that I didn’t have to share. Single rooms were quite a bit smaller than double rooms though, and I’d arranged mine in such a way that the end of the bed was right up against the closet. I could only open my closet on one side, and even then the bed blocked almost a foot of the opening.
“I don’t know any of these,” Nicky told me.
There were a few classics in the stack, but most were releases from the last decade. However, the records I owned were of the indie rock and alternative variety. Probably not anything Nicky would have heard on the radio or in the locker room before a game.
I moved my legs onto my bed and pulled my knees up to my chin, shifting so that my back was to the closet and I was facing the window, facing Nicky. “Just pick a cover you think looks nice.”
Judge a book by its cover.
Nicky extracted a record from the stack and stared at it for a moment, then turned it over to check out the back. In the dim light, I couldn’t see what record he was holding. It was just a flat, square object and I couldn’t comment on whether he’d chosen something that would be mood music or air drumming music. He stopped his search and went to the turntable on top of the dresser, beside the door.
“Uh, how do I…” he trailed off, shrugging at me.
“Pull the cover up and then just line the record up with the little silver piece in the middle,” I responded, not moving from my spot, and saying the stuff that was probably obvious to him first. “Make sure the power button is pressed down. Then press start and you can leave it.”
I watched as Nicky removed a black record from its jacket and protective white paper sleeve. He wasn’t careful with the vinyl, holding it like a piece of paper, his fingers spread out. I smiled at it instead of scolding him about finger oil transfer – it was obvious he didn’t have records, so how could he have known? He leaned in close to the turntable, probably trying to read the small print of the button labels. I knew he’d successfully gotten the record playing when I heard the unique tapping noise of the automatic tonearm moving. The stylus would settle on a groove near the outer edge of the record, at the beginning of Side A or B, whichever Nicky had put facing upward.
He was sitting in the middle of the bed when the sound of guitar picking at high notes came through the speakers. Nicky followed my lead and took off his dress shoes, except he didn’t kick them. His shoes were shiny and matched the suit pants he was wearing. He was still wearing parts of his game day suit: the pants and the dress shirt. He had ditched the jacket and tie back at his brother’s party.
“The one I picked, on the back there were only a few songs, but in the…the case…there were two records,” he said.
I nodded. “It’s post rock.”
“What is post rock?” he asked, leaning back against my pillows and stretching his legs out on the bed, his sock-clad ankle pressing into my hip.
“It’s instrumental music,” I replied. “It’s relaxing. I like to listen to this when I study. It helps me concentrate.”
Ironically, the album he’d chosen was probably the one I owned that had the closest connection to sports. It was an Explosions in the Sky album where most of the selections for the Friday Night Lights movie soundtrack had come from. There were only five songs on the album, each one at least eight minutes long. The songs had also become popular for use in sports montage fluff pieces, regardless of the sport.
I knew what Nicky meant about there being two records in the gatefold sleeve. It was a double LP album since there wasn’t enough space to fit that much music of that length on just a single vinyl record. There were only two songs on the side we were listening to.
“Good choice then?” Nicky wondered.
I bit my lip. The pressure of his ankle against my hip felt really nice. He was looking at me daringly. As gracefully as I could, I moved so that I was in the little space parallel to him, my hand on his chest. We were in close quarters, half of my upper body actually pressed against his. The twin bed in my dorm room was small and Nicky was not, with all of his limbs and big hockey body.
“Better than good,” I answered before I kissed him.
We didn’t talk for a long time after that and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to explain to him what I meant about music on vinyl sounding warmer. It started with the kiss and went south of PG-13 from there. When the drums kicked into the song in full force, Nicky had easily moved me so that I was on top of him, my chest pressed against his while he kissed me, his fingers on one hand lost in my chocolate hair and on the other, moving up my back underneath the shirt I was wearing. I didn’t really have anywhere to put my hands because we were so close so I just left them settled on his shoulders, waiting to touch his chest and the dips in his back when the moment came.
Our tongues were in a war when I felt my bra unclasp beneath my shirt. In the dim lighting, Nicky’s grin was evil and tight lipped when I pulled away. I was straddling him as I quickly worked on the buttons on his dress shirt, exposing his sculpted chest once I’d undone them all. My palms grazed up his chest slowly, from his hips to the middle of his ribcage. I leaned in and laid soft kisses down his neck. When I stopped, I dragged my tongue slowly across his collar bone and I thought I heard his breath hitch for a second. I could do things that would allow me to grin deviously at him, too.
It wasn’t long before his big hands were at my hip bones and he rolled so that I was flat on my back beneath him, my back to the mattress, staring up at him. Loose strands of his hair fell against my cheeks as he kissed my swollen lips again and it was my turn to run my fingers through his blond locks, moving it out of the way, my eyes closed all the while. My hips grinded up against him at the sensation of his thumb and pointer finger caressing the underside of one of my breasts.
Nicky made quick work of removing most of our clothes then. He discarded our socks to the floor with his shirt and his pants. He was down to his underwear when he threw my top and my bra in a heap with his clothes, leaving me as topless as he was. I gasped when his mouth closed around one of my nipples, his tongue flicking at it at the same time that his fingers grazed the other one. Even through my jeans I could feel him pressed against me as he worked my breasts. The arm he was using to support himself was bent at the elbow near my head and I dug my fingers into his bicep but I couldn’t get good leverage because of the muscle definition there. All I could do was squirm beneath him.
When he relented, he flicked at the button of my jeans and pulled at the zipper to reveal the front of my simple black bikini underwear before attacking my lips with his own again. I felt him through the thin material of his boxer briefs and soon he had my jeans and bikini pulled down to my knees. There was no mistaking Nicky for shy this time. He knew what he wanted.
He started nipping at my neck and I moved my legs up towards me so that I could get my remaining garments past my ankles and off. I struggled and Nicky moved his hips off me and laid on his side, watching me. When he settled back on top of me again, our legs were tangled and I was fully exposed to him. He was pressed up right against me, his underwear the only thing separating us. The music ended just as my fingers were roaming beneath his underwear, over the perfect rounds of his ass.
His kisses became torturous, slow and long, and his hands were everywhere. He wasn’t even inside me yet and I was nearly shaking. I was so lost to the sensations of what he was doing that it took a moment to register with me when he stopped. He was staring down at me, his upper body supported by his forearms on either side of me. His breathing was heavy and I could read desire in his eyes. I reached behind him and moved my fingers against his back until I could feel one of his shoulder blades, settling there and drawing small circles.
“Erin,” he finally spoke. “Are we moving too fast?”
I knew it wasn’t really his question. Not when I was pinned naked beneath him. Not when he had been the one to start undressing me. Not when I wanted him to stop teasing me with his touches and kisses, and not when I could feel how much he wanted me. We were way past ‘too fast’ or ‘just right’. But he wanted permission to continue.
“Yes,” I answered breathlessly, “but I don’t want you to stop.”
Notes
I actually took a look at Georgetown’s academic calendar to make sure this was going to work and a professional athlete wasn’t going to be breaking into a residence hall. According to the 2010-2011 calendar, their finals were held from December 14 to December 22. I’ve never heard of any university having finals week three days before Christmas, but apparently one does exist?You can listen to the song that Erin references without directly naming by clicking here, if you are so inclined.
Great story!
11/16/18