Keep Me If You Can (If You Can #3)

1. The Pussy Cat Caper

Chapter one

The Pussy Cat Caper

It wasn’t my fault I didn’t finish my weekly Forensic Science and Law case study.

That was the fault of whoever thought I was the right person to lead an orientation group without considering the likelihood of me getting distracted by giving sex tips to a library table full of wannabe freshman sluts.

And that was sluts ( affectionate ), not sluts ( derogatory ), which was lesson one. Well, lesson one of the Nellie branch of the orientation, since lesson one of the actual orientation had been about balancing school life and social life. But that had quickly devolved into the whole “Okay, listen up, sluts, here’s how to fuck around without finding out,” because good God , they weren’t teaching kids anything these days.

Not that they taught kids anything in my day either, considering I was barely four years older than most of these kids. I mean, I was an entirely self-taught slut. Which meant these students had a unique opportunity to speak with the campus expert about how to embrace their sexuality in a fun and safe way.

Or some bullshit like that.

Look, the point was, someone brought up sex—probably me—and they had questions, so instead of blandly reading out the orientation advice that none of them were going to follow anyway, I gave them my most useful tips.

“Take your socks off,” I said.

“Because it’s not sexy?” asked one girl.

“Because your feet probably smell,” I said.

A girl with thick brown hair and freckled white skin named Katelyn frowned. “You think he’d notice that?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. That’s not your problem. But if he gets you on your back and puts your legs up on his shoulders so he can start really pounding away, your feet end up pretty close to your own face and then it’s your problem.”

“What about hand jobs?” asked a blonde girl who’d definitely given more than one hand job before.

“What about them?” I asked.

“What’s, like, your top tip for giving a hand job?”

“Put it in your mouth,” I said. “Next question?”

“How do you make anal hurt less?” asked a person with shaggy black hair and dimples in their cheeks who’d introduced themself as Ridley.

“Take your time and use lots of lube,” I said.

“Lube?” they repeated, blinking in confusion. “My boyfriend said we don’t need that.”

“Oh, honey.” I shook my head. “Dump him.”

“But—”

“Sort of related to that,” piped up Sierra, a skinny girl with fair white skin who was wearing foundation meant for medium white skin. “He’s not doing it on purpose—like I think maybe his aim is bad—but what if he keeps trying to put it in the wrong hole?”

“Which wrong hole?” I asked.

“The…” She glanced around the table. “The wrong one.”

“Yes, but which hole is the wrong one?”

She scoffed. “The ass , obviously. What else would it be? It’s not like there are guys out there trying to put it in your belly button.”

Mentally, I flashed back to the dingy mattress I’d told my best friend, Anne-Marie, I’d lost my virginity on, and the nameless guy I’d told her I lost my virginity to so that I didn’t have to tell her I’d fucked her brother earlier that day. Emotionally, I suppressed a shudder at the memory of him trying to stick his tip into my belly button. Physically, I just shook my head.

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “And anyway, the asshole isn’t the wrong hole if that’s the hole you’re aiming for. If it’s not the hole you’re aiming for and you think he’s legitimately got depth perception issues, turn the lights on so he can see better.”

“But what if it’s, like… you know… um…” asked Zara, a pretty eighteen-year-old with brown eyes so dark they were almost black and light brown skin marked by the occasional acne scar. “Like… too big ?”

“Too big for what?” I asked.

Her eyes darted to the side. “Like, to… you know. Fit .”

One of the other girls at the table giggled, but I waved a hand to shut her up. “I mean, it’s possible, but not all dicks are like the ones you see in porn, no matter what people claim their measurement is. Some men don’t seem to realize that from an evolutionary perspective, it makes zero sense for the average dick size to be double what the average vagina can accommodate.” I tapped my finger to my temple. “That’s fuckin’ science.”

“Okay, but won’t it, like… stretch?” asked Madison, who had large blue eyes that peered out from beneath the fringe of her warm brown hair, giving her an angelically innocent sort of look.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a vagina. It’s supposed to stretch.”

“But it never goes back to the same size,” she said. “That’s why women’s hips get wider after sex.”

“After birth , maybe,” I said. “God, did you go to Catholic school or something?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Right.” I shook my head. “Look, if it feels like it’s so big that it hurts, it’s one of three things. One, you’re not turned on enough and need more foreplay. Tell him to put his mouth to use. Two, you’re turned on enough, but you need lube or something because sometimes things don’t get wet enough on their own. If that happens, don’t worry. It’s normal. Or three, it’s actually too big and you can find something else to do.”

“What if he doesn’t want to do something else?” asked Connor, who was the only guy at the table, but who had quietly assured everyone he was gay after Sierra had looked at him nervously.

“Tell him it’s nice to want things, like how you want to keep his boy bits out of your hole of preference.”

“How do you get a guy to go down on you?” Katelyn asked.

“Tell him to,” I said.

“What if he says no?”

“Tell him his best friend and/or worst enemy offered to do it.”

“I have a question, but it’s not really sex related,” said Sabrina, who had goldish-brown skin and brown ringlet curls with streaky blonde highlights in it. “More relationship related.”

I shook my head. “I’m not the person to ask. I don’t do relationships. See lesson one about being a slut.”

“Oh.” She swallowed hard and nodded, not quite meeting my eyes. “That’s fair.”

A prickling of guilt ran across my chest. “But what’s it about? Maybe we can workshop this as a group.”

“Yeah,” Ridley said. “I’ve had a couple of partners before.”

“Me too,” Madison said. “Even if we didn’t, um, do it .”

Sabrina bit her lip, then nodded again.

“Okay, well… I wanted to know if anyone had advice on, like, getting something back from an ex?”

And then she started crying.

We’d talked about a couple of heavier things during my sex orientation, so it seemed like a weird question to trigger tears. But after a bit of prodding, Sabrina explained she’d followed her now-ex boyfriend to Ottawa, where he’d already been living for a year, after she graduated. She and her cat had moved in with him and his roommate a few weeks earlier.

“This is Salem,” she said, sniffling as she pulled her phone out to show us a picture.

“Salem?” repeated Zara. “Like—”

“Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” Sabrina said, smiling under her tears. “I know. I thought it was funny when I got him.”

We passed her phone around the table as she explained she’d caught her ex not only sliding into the DMs of nearly every girl in her English class, but failing spectacularly at it.

“Russell says I’m being stupid for breaking up with him because he didn’t cheat on me,” she said. “But it’s only because everyone kept turning him down. So I went to stay with the girl who told me what he was doing and now”—her face crumpled—“he won’t give me Salem back.”

“He stole your cat?” Madison said, her voice surprisingly feral.

“I’ve had him since he was a little kitten.” Sabrina started to sob again and Zara passed me the phone while the group tried to comfort Sabrina.

I looked down at the screen. Salem was a black cat, of course, with startling green eyes. He looked like a little puffball, his coat shiny and well-groomed, and he probably shed like a mother-fucker. Sighing, I put her phone on the table and dug my phone out of my pocket.

“What are his socials?” I asked.

Sabrina looked up, her eyes still wet. “What?”

“And on a scale from one to five, one being Einstein and five being a lobotomized cane toad, how objectively stupid is he?” I continued.

“Probably an eight,” muttered Connor, who had a protective arm around Sabrina’s shoulders.

She let out a shaky giggle. “I mean, objectively, he’s not stupid , but he’s also an idiot. So like, a three?”

“I can work with a three.” I unlocked my screen. “Give me his socials. We’re getting your cat back.”

Two hours later, I was sitting on the couch of a small apartment that smelled like cat pee because being slightly smarter than a lobotomized cane toad did not, in fact, mean that someone was smart enough to know how to clean a litter box.

“Oh, you have a kitty,” I called as a beautiful black cat jumped onto the couch and sidled up to me. Glancing at the kitchen to make sure Russell was still getting me a can of his finest discount beer, I winced before shying away. “What’s his name?”

“That little brat is Salem,” called Russell.

I blinked hard as my eyes started watering. “He’s adorable. How long have you had him?”

“A couple of years.” Russell returned to the living room and handed me a beer. “If he’s bothering you, you can shove him off the couch.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” I said, forcing myself to pat Salem’s head. “Besides, aren’t we, ah… heading to the bedroom right away?”

I parted my lips, hoping it wasn’t obvious that I was breathing shallowly, and fluttered my eyelashes coyly at Russell. Luckily, Russell’s three on the stupid scale had a “too horny to think” modifier on it, and he grinned before setting his barely sipped beer on the coffee table.

“If you want to get right down to business, don’t let me stop you,” he said, deepening his voice.

“I’m the one who slid into your DMs.” I put my beer down and stood up. “If you don’t like a girl who knows what she wants, I can go.”

“No!” He almost sounded panicked, which was perfect. “No, of course. I’m totally into letting you take charge.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

He nodded eagerly.

“Because if it is, I have a kinky little idea that you might be into…”

It took a bit of making out and teasing him through his jeans to get there, but ten minutes later, I had Russell’s wrists bound to his bedposts with neckties. By the time I finished blindfolding him with a third necktie, he was hard, his cock tenting the boxers I’d stripped him down to.

“What are you gonna do now?” he asked, his words breathless with excitement.

“Oh, I was thinking of playing with my pussy a little,” I said, glancing around the room.

“But I can’t even see you, baby.”

“You know what they say about anticipation.”

“What do they say?” he asked.

I tried not to roll my eyes, then stepped forward and patted his head. “I’ll tell you when I get back from the bathroom, cutie.”

He jumped at the contact, not realizing I was that close. “I see how it is. You’re making me wait.”

“Imagine that,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere, now.”

“I couldn’t if I tried,” he said.

Which was bullshit. He wasn’t tied that tightly to the bedframe. Russell might be a cat-stealing asshole, but I wasn’t going to put him in danger. And as soon as I grabbed Salem off the couch and got downstairs to Madison’s car, where Sabrina was sitting in the back seat with Ridley and Connor, I grabbed Sabrina’s phone and sent the pre-typed text to Russell’s roommate telling him to go untie Russell.

“…and he did,” I finished. “And that’s the whole tale of the Great Pussy Cat Caper of OttawaTech.”

“Wow,” said Glitch.

“Right?”

My TA shook their head in disbelief. “I mean, that story had everything.”

“I know. Theft. Sex. A guy learning a valuable lesson about not letting strange women tie him up. Drugs.”

They cocked an eyebrow. “Drugs?”

“Yeah. I took an unholy amount of Claritin after Madison dropped me off in the hopes I could breathe again. I’m super allergic to cats.”

Glitch leaned forward, putting their elbows on their desk and resting their head in their hands. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve said they were exasperated. But not only were their shoulders shaking with laughter, I also did know better.

The best way I could describe Glitch was chaos, which they both knew and owned. Even that day during what were supposed to be their professional office hours, they gave off a sort of “stoner chic” air. They were wearing a tight T-shirt with the words “My Pronouns Are May/Hem” on the front tucked into a belted pair of cargo pants. Their waist-length brown hair was pinned back on the sides with one long braid trailing over their left shoulder and they had drawn dark brown freckles on their warm beige-white skin.

Glitch was the coolest TA I’d ever had, which wasn’t saying much. But they were also one of the coolest people I’d ever met, and that was saying a lot since they were a law student. They were the TA for my Forensic Science and Law class, which was bad enough, but it was also taught by a stuck-up lawyer named Bruce Shelby. If it wasn’t for Glitch, me failing the class would’ve been a near certainty considering there was a worrying amount of potential for that to happen anyway.

“Look, it’s an epic story, Nellie,” Glitch said. “And kudos to you for putting your actual health on the line for this girl you just met.”

“Well, and to get payback on a dirty cheater,” I said. “Don’t forget the justice aspect of it. Which directly relates to this class, doesn’t it?”

They tried not to laugh again. “The thing is, I don’t see how you stealing a cat last night caused you to miss class and not be able to hand in your case study today .”

“I took Claritin last night and it makes me drowsy,” I said. “So I overslept.”

“The class starts at eleven.”

“It was a lot of Claritin.”

Glitch failed at holding their laugh in. “Look, best I can do is give you the ten point deduction for submitting a late assignment if you give it to me now.”

I shrugged and opened my backpack, pulling out the case study sheet. “Fair’s fair, I guess.”

Glitch took the paper from me and glanced down at it. “This isn’t even complete.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “I was volun-told to do the orientation sessions and then got busy stealing a cat last night.”

They shook their head, even though they were smiling, and handed my case study back. “Nice try, but you know Shelby will eat you alive if you hand in an incomplete assignment. No dice, kiddo.”

I sighed and took the paper from them. “It was worth a try, I guess.”

“Totally, but the answer’s no.” They drummed their fingers on their desk, then looked at the door before turning to their laptop. “But look, I think your case study list had a typo on it or something, because it seems to me”—they typed quickly, then hit enter with a flourish—“that this case is next week’s topic. So maybe if you go to the library now, I can pretend I didn’t see anything and you can submit it for your next one.”

“You rock,” I said, putting my paper back in my bag.

“I know. Don’t make me regret it.” They waved a stern finger at me. “Seriously. Get your shit together.”

I raised my eyebrows, but they’d barely moved before Glitch’s face cracked and they started laughing.

“You can’t even say that with a straight face,” I said.

They snorted. “There’s no hope for you if you think anything about me is capable of being straight.”

“Your hair?” I suggested.

They rolled their eyes. “Go to the library and finish your case study, slacker.”

“Alright, alright,” I said. “I’m going.”

“To the library?” they pressed.

“I’m going to the library,” I said. “I’m on my way. Right now. Ready to spend my Friday night surrounded by books.”??