The Highest Learning

Chapter 30-Getting to Really Know Each Other

They spend the next few hours talking and giggling wrapped in each other's arms, discussing the things that couples usually do on their first few dates...their middle names, what their families were like, etc. They talk about how the act of sex is pretty funny if you stop to think about it. They tell each other embarrassing things about one another.

They even find that out that they both had a dog named "Tang" during roughly the same time period, and how each of them enjoyed smelling their respective dog's paws, because they smelled like cornflakes.

She named her dog Tang as a little girl after a drink she liked, because she heard the astronauts drank Tang in space. As a little girl, she briefly considered being a female astronaut. People looked up to astronauts and she was empowered to think she could be anything she wanted to be. She probably could have been an astronaut if she decided to pursue that path.

She, of course, won't drink Tang anymore, because her body is a temple. She wouldn't let the sugary crap in her temple...Not even the sugar free kind because it's sweetened with aspartame, and she's convinced that one sip of that will give her cancer.

He tells people he named his dog Tang because he was such a fan of the hip hop group The Wu-tang Clan, which he was. He admits to her though that he really named the dog Tang as nod to poontang. He got the dog in college. Because it was such a cute dog, he figured that it would help him pick up chicks, like a poontang magnet. He had only ever admitted this before to a few of his male friends.

She is only mildly repulsed by that immature story and laughs at his foolishness. She even suggests that "Tang" should be their "safe word" should either of them ever need it, when they might later push each other's limits too far.

Time out!...that's what Zach Morris would say when he wanted to freeze the action in the show Saved by The Bell to break the 4th wall and explain something to the audience, so....Time out! A safe word is used by couples when one of them feels uncomfortable doing something, usually sexually. It's a way to say "stop", without having to use the word "stop". Ok, back to our lovers...Time In! as Zach would say when he wanted the action to resume.

They're hesitant to get up as they don't want to leave each other's embrace, but at this point, hours, or even weeks may have passed and they have to continue on with their lives, temporarily separate. Neither wants to wash the other off of them.

As they're getting dressed she realizes she has no panties, only yoga pants with a giant hole in the crotch. She can't leave with that on. He's thinking as fast as he can. The storage closet!

There is a small storage closet connected to his classroom where the he had supplies, mostly for dissections, such as scalpels, scissors, trays, gloves, probes, newspapers, and of course...fetal pigs. It smelled like shit back there...Well, not shit, more like chemicals due to the formaldehyde that penetrated everything in the room, but it didn't smell good.

He remembers there is a long lab coat he always had for dissections stored in there and he runs back to get it. It isn't usual for a student to be walking to their car in a crusty, formaldehyde and fetal pig guts soaked lab coat, but most people are so self-absorbed, they probably won't notice.

She's also hoping no one notices the disheveled look of a woman who just had sex. Luckily the coat is plenty long enough to cover the area in her pants that is ripped open, and she can return the coat another time, once she's had time to change into non-ripped pants.

They held hands as they walked to the door, reminded by the deadbolt that was turned to the locked position that this was not allowed outside the sanctity of their classroom. They reluctantly separate, as they leave the classroom, but probably still walk a little too close to one another. They meet at his car and drive to get the day after pill, before he returns her back to her car. It seems, again, as if they haven't been caught.

They get in their respective cars, neither one wanting or ready to leave the other quite yet. As they drive home, they see a storm is brewing, and they were going to feel the impact of it sometime in the not so distant future.