They spent another couple of hours at Thousand Oaks that evening. Agnes, just as Marcia had predicted, spent a few minutes flirting with the guitar player, and not long after Vic looked up to find her pinned against the wall, the musician necking her with his salt-and-pepper beard while holding up one of her legs just under the thigh. Then at one point they disappeared, and then Agnes came back from the washroom, not adjusting her skirt, but wiping her mouth.

“How was it?” Marcia asked as Agnes sat back at their table.

“Just get me a beer okay,” she said, trying to sound a bit bored but Vic thought he did see a twinkle of satisfaction in her eyes.

Two other girls from Dampgate came to say ‘hi’ to Vic, Amanda and Evelyn, and both were rebuffed in the same non-comital way as Devi was, but did cause Owen to say that Vic was a ‘hot commodity’.

At the end of the night, they piled out of Thousand Soaks, not quite the last of its student patrons to get out, and made their leisurely way up the street that was now illuminated with the cool blue glow of its streetlights that competed with the orange cast by the Watchtower. There were no lights though on the final walk through the forest to Dampgate, and somebody had to be on flashlight duty.

“Damn it, Owen, you said you were going to bring them today,” Agnes said.

“I did, I said just that, but I guess it slipped my mind,” Owen said breezily, taking bold confident steps into the darkness between the trees.

“Owen, I’m literally going to kill you, you know how much this scares the crap out of me,” Agnes said.

Owen laughed again. “I’m kidding! I’m kidding! Here.” He pulled out two flashlights from his pockets, turned one on and tossed the other one to Liz, who passed it to Bailey.

It was a pleasant if chilly evening, the cloudy sky still contemplating rain, and the girls with their skirts did wrap their own arms around themselves to stay warm. They reached Dampgate without further incidents, and despite the general spookiness of the forest, Vic was assured that it was perfectly safe. At the front gates of the building, they said their goodnights, splitting off into their respective dorms, except for Bailey, who followed Liz to the girl’s dorm.

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With Friday now almost nearly over, Vic was just about ready to put the lid on his first full week at Dampgate and wanted nothing more than to collapse into his bed.

When he opened the door to his dorm room, he was greeted by the sight of his roommate Marek’s bare ass, moving rhythmically up and down on the bed right across from Vic’s. Wrapped around Marek’s pasty and somewhat hairy back were two dark-skinned legs that ended in high heels that Vic had recognized to have been Devi’s.

Marek was grunting like he was trying to loosen a very stubborn bolt and Devi was quite sonorant in her shows of pleasure.

As Vic climbed into his own bed, he considered how that could have been how his night had ended – pinning Devi under him as she grabbed onto the sheets of his own bed, and somehow he was okay with that. What he was not okay with was when Devi and Marek changed positions and then he ended up behind her and used the opportunity to slap her ass every couple of thrusts. Between the sound of Marek’s hand slapping Devi’s bare butt cheek, and the sound Devi made when he did it, Vic decided that he would take up Marcia on an offer he thought he would never consider, so he scooped up his pillow and blanket, and made a slow shuffling trek across Dampgate to the girl’s dormitory.

The girl’s dormitory at Dampgate was pretty much identical to the boys’ dormitory, except that it smelled and sounded better. Most of its residents were asleep, but he did bump into one girl whose name he had not yet known and asked for directions to Marcia’s room. She gave them to him and smiled knowingly, though he waved his hands in denial and then quickly went to his destination.

He gave the door a courtesy knock before opening it.

“Huh? Vic? Is that you?” he heard Marcia ask from the dark. She was already asleep and as she had promised, the other bed was empty.

“Hey, sorry for waking you. You have room to spare?”

There was a brief silence and he thought she might’ve fallen back to sleep but then she said. “Oh yeah, sure come in.” She lifted herself slightly up in bed and he could see that to sleep she wore a loose-fitting t-shirt and comfortable pajama pants. “Make yourself at home,” Marcia said groggily, pointing to her roommate’s empty bed.

That was the last thing she said to him, because this time she did go back to sleep and left him to settle into the bed across from her. At first, he lay down facing her, but then he noticed that she had stuck her foot out from under the covers as she slept. Unable to close his eyes because he was studying the sole of her foot and her toes, the nails painted a dark pink colour, he forced himself to turn around and face the wall, putting the pillow over his head and finally going to sleep himself.