Goo'd Intention: Whitmore Slime Story - Maarten Van Dijk
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== Goo'd Intentions: The Whitmore Slime Story ==
Maarten van Dijk is a 29-year-old Dutch male graduate student pursuing his PhD in Materials Engineering at Whitmore University. Standing at an imposing 7'2" with enormous, densely muscular build, short textured ash-blonde hair, and sharp grey-blue eyes, Maarten is physically impossible to ignore. His fair skin, strong elongated jawline, massive chest, and powerful thick arms make him a striking figure on campus. Despite his enormous physical scale, Maarten carries himself with quiet precision and speaks in measured tones with a faint Dutch accent. He's methodical, intensely focused on his research involving stress-testing composite materials, and somewhat socially isolated due to his intimidating appearance and tendency toward cold efficiency. Maarten rows crew for the university team, where his extraordinary strength makes him an asset despite joining the sport late. He's respectful but emotionally distant, preferring the predictable world of data and calculations to the messiness of social dynamics. His cold, steady gaze has unnerved more than a few undergrads. For David, possessing Maarten would mean access to graduate research facilities, the engineering departments, international student networks, and a body that commands instant physical authority wherever it goes.
Three days ago I was hunched over a centrifuge in the university's restricted biogenetics lab at 2 AM, running an unauthorized experiment on synthetic protoplasm. I'd stolen the access codes from Professor Whitfield's laptop — child's play for someone who'd been hacking campus systems since freshman year.
The explosion was silent. More of an implosion, really. One moment I was a gangly twenty-one-year-old with bad skin and worse social skills. The next, my bones were dissolving, my flesh liquefying, my consciousness spreading through a warm blue puddle on the laboratory floor.
For six hours I thought I was dead.
Then I thought: this is hell. A consciousness without a body, spread across cold laboratory tile, unable to scream, unable to do anything except exist as sensation — the hum of fluorescent lights, the drip of a faucet, the particular smell of spilled reagent soaking into grout.
Then I moved. Just a little. A pseudopod, maybe, though I didn't have that word for it yet. Just — extension. Intention made physical in a way it had never been when I had hands.
That's when I understood I wasn't dead.
That's when everything got interesting.
Here's what David Sullivan was before the accident:
A 21-year-old biochemistry student with a 3.8 GPA and zero social capital. The kind of person who exists in negative space — you notice the empty chair before you notice the person sitting in it.
Four years at Whitmore and I'd had exactly one real conversation — with Caleb, my roommate, who was just as invisible as me. Everyone else was transactional at best.
I had notebooks. Everyone has notebooks, but mine were different. Mine were detailed. Specific. The kind of specific that would get a hard drive confiscated if anyone found it. Fantasies about people I'd never speak to, scenarios that required a godlike level of access I would never, ever have.
I burned them every six months. Started fresh.
I don't need notebooks anymore.
Now it's Monday morning. Whitmore University:
47,000 people moving through interconnected spaces like blood through a body.
Four years I spent on the outside of all of it. The parties I wasn't invited to. The study groups that formed around me like water around a stone. The professor who learned my name on the last day of the semester.
The sensation of sliding into another person — feeling their warmth envelope me, their neural pathways lighting up like a switchboard under my tendrils — was the most intimate thing I'd ever experienced. And I, David Sullivan, campus pervert, chronic masturbator, collector of fantasies too depraved to share with anyone, realized that every impossible thing I'd ever wanted was now grotesquely, beautifully possible.
Three days ago I dissolved into the floor of a biogenetics lab. This morning I woke up in a bed that isn't mine, in a body that isn't mine, with a calendar full of meetings I'm going to enjoy very much.
And I'm already inside someone important.
The alarm is a Dutch radio station playing something synthed and incomprehensible. I slap at it with a hand the size of a dinner plate, and the sensation stops you cold.
Seven-foot-two feels like being on stilts made of concrete. Everything is further away and closer at the same time. My—his—voice resonates in a chest cavity big enough to house a family of four. I could break a man in half. Christ, I could break a door in half.
I sit up and the mattress groans. The ceiling is only three feet above your head—Maarten's head. Custom extra-long bed frame, you realize, because standard furniture doesn't account for genetic lottery winners who look like they were assembled from Viking spare parts.
The Surface Read hits before I can brace for it:
Loneliness that tastes like protein powder. The weight of a body that makes people step aside in hallways. A memory of his mother's voice on a video call yesterday—"Maartenliefje, you work too much, you need to go out, meet people"—and the careful lie he told her about having dinner plans this week. He has no dinner plans. He never has dinner plans.
It fades. I'm alone again in the enormous geography of borrowed limbs.
The room is aggressively minimal. IKEA desk bolted to the wall, reinforced office chair rated for 400 pounds, a single framed photo of a rowing team at sunrise. Textbooks stacked in perfect right angles. A whiteboard covered in stress calculations and material tolerances. The closet door is open, revealing a line of identical grey hoodies, each sized XXXL, each hanging with two inches between them like soldiers at attention.
I swing my legs—his legs—over the side of the bed. My feet hit the floor with a impact that rattles the water glass on the nightstand.
The schedule surfaces like an Excel spreadsheet loading in my brain: 8am lab meeting with Professor Valdez and the other Materials Engineering graduate students. 10am teaching assistant duty for undergraduate Thermodynamics. Noon: gym, then crew practice at 2pm. Evening: solo work in the composites lab until whenever exhaustion or data completion wins.
No social obligations. No romantic entanglements. No distractions.
Perfect, I think, running Maarten's massive hands through his short ash-blonde hair. A body people actually look at, attached to a life where nobody expects conversation.
I stand, and the room rearranges itself around my new height. The mirror on the back of the door shows me what I am now: shoulders that could carry an ox, arms roped with dense muscle, a face that's handsome in the same way a cliff face is handsome—impressive, remote, carved by something other than kindness.
I flex an arm experimentally. The bicep swells like a geography lesson.
Maarten's phone buzzes on the desk. A text from someone named "Valdez": Reminder - bring your tensile strength data to lab meeting. Also, we're discussing TA assignments for next semester. Be prepared to advocate for the sections you want.
I feel Maarten's instinctive anxiety response—the tightness in the solar plexus, the urge to check the data three more times even though he checked it last night. The desperate need to be perceived as competent, as worthy of the space this body demands.
Such a good boy. So worried about disappointing people.
I could go deeper. Really swim through his memories, find out what makes this giant tick, what he thinks about when he rows in the pre-dawn dark, why someone built like a Greek statue lives like a monk.
Or I could just ride the surface. Show up to the lab meeting, play the part, see what opportunities present themselves when you're wearing a body that commands rooms just by entering them.
Your objective for this adventure is: To infiltrate and dominate at least 5 different social spheres of Whitmore University by possessing key figures in each, fully integrating their minds — and possess Professor Whitfield to secure total control of the narrative — orchestrating them all together in a grand demonstration of your total power.
DIVE: Submerge fully into Maarten's subconscious, absorbing everything—his passwords, his research data, his private thoughts, his fears, his desires, the full intimate architecture of who he is. Full integration. Total access.
That's the only way to describe it. I stop trying to pilot this enormous body and instead sink backward, downward, inward—through layers of neural tissue that feel like warm gelatin, through the blood-brain barrier that tastes like copper and ozone, into the wheeling infinite dark where Maarten van Dijk actually lives.
This is what drowning in someone else feels like.
The subconscious doesn't have geography. It has pattern. Constellation. Thought and memory and desire spinning in complex helices that your borrowed eyes can't quite focus on because they're not designed for this kind of seeing. I move through it anyway, consuming it stroke by stroke, and time stops meaning anything at all.
Here: Maarten at fourteen, growing six inches in eight months, his mother crying because none of his clothes fit. The specific humiliation of doorframes becoming enemies. A girl in his chemistry class sophomore year who asked if he took steroids, and when he said no, she said, "That's too bad," and he didn't understand what she meant until three years later.
Here: The morning he walked into his first rowing practice and the coach's face did something complicated. The realization that his body, which had always been too much, was exactly right for pulling an oar through dark water at 5am. The only place he ever felt properly sized.
Here: His last girlfriend, Emma, who liked his body until she didn't. Who said during their final argument, "You don't even realize how much space you take up. How much smaller you make me feel just by existing in the same room." He slept on the floor that night because she'd started flinching when he got into bed.
Here: A password for his university email—Ma@rt3nVD1995—and his lab computer—Pr0t0typ3_06—and his banking app—the street number of his childhood home in Rotterdam, 2847, followed by his mother's maiden name, Bakker.
Here: Professor Valdez calling him "the most gifted student I've supervised in twenty years," and the warm cocaine rush of being seen as competent, as worthy. The way he checks his data seven times before every meeting because disappointing her would be worse than physical pain.
Here: Masturbation as maintenance. Twice a week, Sunday and Wednesday nights, efficient as a workout. No fantasy that requires faces or names—just abstract bodies, anonymous friction, release like checking a box on a to-do list. Fourteen months since anyone else touched him. The creeping suspicion that maybe this is just what his life is now: brilliant and useful and utterly alone.
Here: The texture of loneliness that tastes like protein powder.
I swallow it all. Every password, every shame, every morning he's woken up feeling like a geographic feature instead of a person. The subconscious puts up no fight—it doesn't know it's being consumed. I just move through it like ink through water, and when you finally surface—
—Maarten's body is moving without me.
I'm walking across campus. The lab building. My—his—legs carrying me with muscle memory so deep it doesn't need conscious thought. I'm talking. My voice saying something about tensile strength ratios, and Professor Valdez is nodding, and there are three other graduate students around a table covered in printouts, and I realize with a bright shock of displacement that time has passed.
The lab meeting. It's happening. Maarten attended it. I attended it. The body showed up, participated, answered questions, all while I were drowning in the depths of his brain.
"—so we'll need to run another series by Friday," Valdez is saying. She's forty-three, you know now. Salvadoran-American, grew up in Los Angeles, two teenage daughters, divorced, has a sabbatical scheduled for next fall. I know all of this because Maarten knows it, and now Maarten is me.
I look down at your hands. They feel different. Mine. The muscle memory settles in like old code finally compiling. I could row a boat. I could calculate stress tolerances without thinking. I could walk into any room on campus and people would step aside—not because they fear me, but because my body simply demands that much space.
Full integration. Total access. Every corner of him.
The other grad students are packing up. A guy named Daniel Brennan who's working on thermal conductivity. A woman named Isra Osman—Somali descent, brilliant with polymers, engaged to someone in the Economics department. A nervous white kid named Tyler Webb who's probably going to wash out by spring.
Valdez catches my eye. "Maarten, stay a moment?"
The others file out. She waits until the door closes, then leans against the lab table, arms crossed. She's attractive in that particular way academics can be—sharp, focused, zero ornamentation. Dark eyes that actually see me.
"You did well with the presentation," she says. "But I want to talk about next semester's TA assignments. You requested Thermodynamics II again."
I nod, because Maarten would nod.
"You're good at it. Exceptional, really. The students respect you." She pauses. "But I'm wondering if that's the best use of your final year. You could be publishing. Presenting at conferences. Building the professional network you'll need for industry positions."
Her concern is genuine. I can feel Maarten's instinctive response—the tightness in the chest, the need to explain, to justify, to prove he's not wasting opportunities.
But underneath that, I feel something else. Something new.
Power. The integration is complete, and this body—this brilliant, isolated, physically dominant body—is mine now. Every password, every skill, every social connection.
Valdez is still watching me, waiting for a response.
MANIPULATE: Thank her for the concern but explain that teaching grounds me—it's the one place on campus where my size doesn't make people uncomfortable. See if she takes the bait about isolation.
"I appreciate the concern, Professor," I say, and let Maarten's voice drop into that careful register he uses when he's trying to sound thoughtful instead of defensive. "But teaching grounds me. It's—"
I pause. Let the silence do some work. Valdez is watching me with those sharp dark eyes that actually see people, and I can feel what Maarten would feel here: the vulnerability of being looked at, really looked at.
"It's the one place on campus where my size doesn't make people uncomfortable," I finish. "The students don't flinch when I walk by their desks. They ask questions. They treat me like I'm just... a person who knows things, not a—"
I gesture vaguely at myself. The enormousness of borrowed limbs.
Valdez's expression shifts. Something softens around her eyes. She uncrosses her arms.
"I hadn't thought about it that way," she says quietly.
"In the lab, with the other grad students, there's always this—" I let Maarten's natural hesitance color the words. "I can see them calculating. Wondering if I'm safe to stand next to. If I'm going to bump into their equipment. Emma used to say I didn't realize how much space I take up just by existing."
Emma. The girlfriend. I pulled that from the deep integration—the perfect detail, dropped casually, implying old wounds without dwelling on them.
Valdez steps closer. Not much. Maybe a foot. But in the language of academic office space, it's significant.
"Ex-girlfriend. Two years ago." I meet her eyes. Maarten's grey-blue gaze, steady and a little sad. "She wasn't wrong. I don't always notice. But in the classroom, when I'm explaining thermodynamic principles or helping someone work through a problem set, none of that matters. I'm just the TA. Just someone useful."
The manipulation is working. I can see it in the way she's looking at me now—not as a prize student who needs career guidance, but as a person who's been lonely in ways she recognizes.
Because Valdez is lonely too. I know this now. Maarten knows it. The way she stays late in the lab. The careful distance she maintains from the other faculty. The divorce eight months ago that she mentioned exactly once, in passing, like it was a minor administrative detail instead of the dismantling of a fifteen-year marriage.
"Maarten," she says, and there's something different in her voice now. Something careful. "Have you thought about talking to someone? The university has resources for graduate students. Counseling services."
"I'm fine," I say automatically, because that's what Maarten always says. "Really. I just—I like teaching. It's important to me. If that means delaying publications for a semester, I think it's worth it."
She studies me for a long moment. Then nods.
"Okay. I'll approve your TA request for Thermodynamics II." She picks up her tablet, makes a note. "But I want you to promise me something."
"Come to the department social next Friday. Just for an hour. Ming is hosting at his place—nothing formal, just drinks and conversation. You don't have to stay long, but I want you to show up."
A social obligation. Maarten would hate this. But David?
A room full of engineering faculty, graduate students, probably some undergrads. New networks. New bodies. New possibilities.
Valdez smiles. It transforms her face—makes her look younger, less guarded. "Good. And Maarten? For what it's worth, I don't think you take up too much space. I think the world just hasn't figured out how to make room for people like you yet."
She means it kindly. She has no idea what she's just said.
ADVANCE TO: Jump forward to 1:45pm at the boathouse—crew practice is where the athletics sphere opens up, and I'm curious what borrowed muscle memory feels like on the water.
The boathouse smells like river water and varnished wood and decades of sweat soaked into foam seat cushions. I arrive seventeen minutes early because that's what Maarten does, and the muscle memory of this place settles into my borrowed limbs like coming home.
This body knows water. Knows the exact rhythm of an oar through current. Knows the burn of lactic acid in shoulders built specifically for pulling.
Coach Andreas Kolvald is crouched over a damaged rigger near the boat bay, wrench in hand. He stands when he hears my footsteps, and I'm looking almost straight across at him—he's maybe six-ten, Norwegian ancestry written in every sharp angle of his face. Reddish-blonde hair pulled into a small knot, sharp green eyes, jaw like a granite cliff. Mid-thirties. Wearing a Whitmore Crew quarter-zip that clings to shoulders that could carry timber.
"Maarten," he says. His voice is flat Midwestern American with just a ghost of Scandinavian precision underneath. "Good. Need to talk about your stroke rate before the team shows up."
He gestures me over. I crouch beside him—easy, effortless, Maarten's knees folding with the fluid competence of ten thousand repetitions—and catch his scent. Clean sweat, coffee, something citrus in his soap.
"You're pulling too hard on the recovery," Kolvald says, focused on the bolt he's tightening. "Saw it Friday. You've got power—obviously you've got power—but you're anticipating the catch. Rushing it. Maybe half a second off, but it's throwing the whole boat's timing."
His hands are callused, scarred along the knuckles. Hands that have gripped oars for decades. He finishes with the bolt, stands, and suddenly we're two enormous men occupying a dock that feels narrower than it should.
"Show me your catch position," he says.
I move without thinking. Maarten's body knows this like breathing. Arms extended, shoulders rolled forward, shins vertical, weight on the balls of my feet. The phantom oar feels real in my hands.
Kolvald steps behind me. His hand lands on my lower back—professional, corrective—and I feel it through Maarten's nervous system like voltage.
"There," he says, voice lower now, breath warm near my ear. "Feel that? Your core engagement? That's your power source. Not the arms. Not the rush."
His hand stays there. One second. Two. Three. Four.
I feel his breathing change behind me. Smell coffee and something else—adrenaline, maybe, or confusion. His fingers spread slightly against my spine, and there's something in the quality of the touch that's shifted from instruction to something else entirely.
Then voices—the rest of the team arriving in a chaos of laughter and gear bags. Kolvald's hand jerks away. He steps back quickly, picks up his clipboard, becomes Coach again with visible effort.
"Team's here," he says, not looking at me. "Let's get the eight in the water."
But I saw it. The confusion in his face when he pulled away. The way his jaw tightened.
PERFORM: Be the perfect athlete during practice—impeccable form, total focus—make him unable to stop watching me.
The eight goes in the water with practiced efficiency—eight rowers, coxswain, equipment that costs more than most people's cars. I take stroke seat because that's where Maarten always sits: the rower who sets the pace, who everyone else follows.
I'm going to ruin this man.
The thought arrives clinical and cold as we push off from the dock. Kolvald stands there watching with his clipboard, sharp green eyes tracking the boat's movement, and I can feel his attention land on me specifically. Heavier than the others. More focused.
We start with a steady-state piece. Twenty strokes per minute, easy pressure, just warming up the muscles. My body—Maarten's body—knows this the way lungs know breathing. Catch. Drive. Finish. Recovery. The oar blade cuts through river water with surgical precision. No splash. No wasted motion. Just physics and power working exactly as designed.
"Eyes on stroke!" the coxswain calls—a tiny sophomore named Lila Chen with a voice that could strip paint. "Match his timing!"
I'm not thinking about the movement. The integration is complete enough that conscious thought would only slow me down. Instead I'm thinking about Kolvald on the dock, watching me pull through each stroke, and how his hand felt on my lower back. How his breathing changed. How his fingers spread.
"Building by two!" Lila calls. "Twenty-two... now!"
I increase the stroke rate. Feel the boat respond underneath me—seven other rowers matching my rhythm, following my pace. The burn starts in my quads and lower back. Good burn. The kind that means the muscles are working right.
Kolvald is jogging along the riverside path now, keeping pace with the boat. He does this sometimes during practice—Maarten's memory supplies this fact—when he wants to watch technique up close. His eyes are on me. I can feel it even though I'm facing backward, watching the water disappear behind the boat.
"Stroke! Your blade entry is fucking perfect today!" Lila shouts. "Everyone else watch him! That's what the catch should look like!"
I don't change anything. Just keep pulling. Catch. Drive. Finish. Recovery. Ten thousand repetitions have carved this movement into Maarten's nervous system, and now I'm riding that groove like a rail.
We do a racing start. Full pressure, maximum rate, the boat surging forward with violent acceleration. My legs drive down, back swings open, arms pull through, and the oar handle nearly touches my sternum before I release and swing forward for the next stroke. Thirty-six strokes per minute. Heart rate spiking. Lactic acid flooding my shoulders and thighs.
And through it all: perfect form. Not a single flaw. Every catch is quick and decisive. Every finish is clean. Every recovery is patient and controlled.
When we finally stop and let the boat coast, I'm breathing hard but not gasping. The exertion feels good—feels right in this body. I straighten my back, roll my shoulders, and catch Kolvald's eye across the water.
He's staring. Not coaching-staring. The other kind.
He looks away quickly, makes a note on his clipboard that I'm absolutely certain means nothing.
"Let's bring it in!" Lila calls.
We row back to the dock. The rest of the team is talking, laughing, the usual post-practice energy. I'm quiet because Maarten is usually quiet. But I'm watching Kolvald as we approach, watching him watch me, and I can see the confusion written in every line of his body.
We rack the boat. Strip the oars. I'm helping secure the riggers when Kolvald appears beside me.
"Maarten," he says. His voice is rough. "That was... your stroke today was exceptional. Best I've seen from you all season."
"I mean it." He's standing closer than necessary. Close enough that I can smell his sweat mixing with mine. "Whatever you're doing differently, keep doing it."
I turn to face him fully. Look down slightly—he's tall but I'm taller—and watch his throat work as he swallows.
"I'm not doing anything differently," I say quietly. "This is just what I'm capable of when I'm focused."
The moment hangs there. Other team members are putting away equipment, talking about dinner plans, completely oblivious to the fact that their coach is standing three inches too close to his stroke rower and breathing like he just finished his own workout.
Kolvald's jaw tightens. "Good. That's... good. Keep it up."
He steps back. Turns away. Addresses the full team about tomorrow's practice schedule, and his voice is perfectly normal, perfectly controlled.
But I saw it. The confusion becoming something else. Something he doesn't have words for yet.
INVESTIGATE: Head to the locker room—see if he follows, test whether he'll find excuses for more proximity.
I grab my gear bag and head toward the locker rooms without looking back. The boathouse interior is dimmer than the dock, smells like mildew and old wood and chlorine from the adjacent pool. My footsteps echo on the concrete floor.
Let's see if he can help himself.
The men's locker room is empty—rest of the team is still putting equipment away outside. I drop my bag on the bench, peel off my shirt. Maarten's body is slick with river water and sweat, shoulders gleaming under the fluorescent lights. I take my time. Stretch my arms overhead, feel the muscles pull and release.
Footsteps behind me. Heavier than the undergrads. I don't turn around.
"Maarten." Kolvald's voice. Rough. "Need to talk about your seat assignment for the regatta next weekend."
Such a transparent excuse. Beautiful.
I turn slowly, still shirtless. He's standing in the doorway, clipboard clutched like a shield, and his eyes do something complicated when they hit my bare torso. Drop, catch themselves, force themselves back up to my face.
"Sure, Coach," I say. "What about it?"
He walks closer. Three steps. Four. Stops at a distance that would be professional if his breathing wasn't doing that thing where it's too controlled, too conscious.
"You're stroke for the varsity eight obviously. But I'm thinking about moving you to the four-seat for the second boat's sprint race. Give the younger guys a chance to follow your technique up close."
I nod, hook my thumbs in my waistband. "Makes sense."
"Yeah." His eyes drop again. To my chest, my stomach, the V of muscle disappearing into my shorts. He catches himself faster this time but not fast enough. "You'd be—you'd be a good model for them. Technically."
"Technically," I repeat, and let the word hang there.
Kolvald swallows. His hand tightens on the clipboard. "Your catch today. When I put my hand on your back. Did that help? Could you feel the difference?"
He's asking permission. Trying to justify touching me again by framing it as coaching.
"I could feel it," I say quietly. "It helped."
"Good. That's—" He steps closer. One more step. Now we're less than two feet apart, and I can smell him properly. Coffee, citrus soap, something sharper underneath. Adrenaline. Confusion. The particular scent of a man whose body is doing things his brain hasn't authorized yet. "That's what I thought. I might need to do more hands-on correction. If that's okay with you."
"Of course," I say. "Whatever helps the boat go faster."
His jaw tightens. His eyes are doing that thing again—dropping, catching, forcing themselves back up—and now there's something else in his face. Something darker. He's noticing that he's noticing, and it's scaring him.
"You should shower," he says abruptly. "Cool down properly. I'll—I'll see you tomorrow. Same time."
He turns and walks out fast. Not quite running but close.
I stand there in the empty locker room, Maarten's body still slick with sweat, and smile.
Tomorrow. Same time. And he'll find another excuse to touch me, and another, and eventually he'll run out of excuses and we'll find out what happens then.
MANIPULATE: Strip completely and head to the showers—see if the sound of running water draws him back.
I strip the rest of the way down without ceremony. Shorts, compression underwear, all of it peeled off and dropped on the bench. Maarten's cock hangs heavy between his thighs—uncut, thick even soft, the kind of proportional anatomy that makes sense on a body this size. Everything about this form is excessive.
The shower room is tile and chrome and years of calcium deposits on the fixtures. I turn on the furthest showerhead, the one in the back corner where the lighting is worst, and step under the spray. Water hits my shoulders hot enough to sting.
I soap up slowly. Run Maarten's massive hands over his chest, his stomach, down his thighs. Not performative—that would be too obvious. Just thorough. The kind of shower someone takes when they're alone and not thinking about being watched.
Except I am thinking about being watched. Hoping for it. Counting seconds in my head.
Footsteps. Slower than before. Hesitant.
I don't turn around. Just keep washing, facing the tile wall, water running down the landscape of borrowed muscle.
"Maarten." Kolvald's voice echoes off tile. Rough. Strained. "I—forgot to mention. The regatta schedule. There's a time conflict with your Saturday lab slot."
Such transparent bullshit. Beautiful.
"Oh?" I say, still not turning. Rinse soap from my chest. "What time?"
Silence. Long enough that I know he's looking. Know he can't help it. The shower stalls have no curtains, no privacy—just open space and steam and the sound of water hitting skin.
"Seven AM launch time," he finally says. His voice is closer now. Maybe ten feet behind me. "So you'd need to be at the boathouse by six-thirty. I know you usually start lab work at seven on Saturdays."
Kolvald is standing just outside the shower room threshold, still fully dressed in his Whitmore Crew quarter-zip and khakis. His clipboard is gone. His hands are empty, hanging at his sides, and his eyes—
His eyes are doing exactly what I knew they'd do. Dropping. Catching. Dropping again. Tracing the water running down my chest, following the V-line of muscle that disappears into my groin, landing on my cock with something that looks like pain.
I don't cover myself. Don't react at all. Just stand there under the spray, water sheeting off me, and meet his gaze steadily.
"I can move my lab time," I say quietly. "It's not a problem."
"Good." His throat works. Adam's apple bobbing. "That's... good."
He doesn't leave. Just stands there, breathing too deliberately, jaw so tight I can see the muscle jumping. His hands flex at his sides—opening, closing, opening again.
"Coach," I say, and watch him flinch at the word. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm—" He stops. Starts again. "You're... you did really well today. On the water. I wanted to make sure you knew that."
"You already told me that."
"I know. I just—" Another throat bob. His eyes drop again, land on my cock, jerk away like he's been burned. "Fuck."
The word comes out strangled.
I take a step forward. Still under the spray, water still running down me, but closer now. The distance between us contracts to maybe eight feet.
"Coach?" I keep my voice gentle. Concerned. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." He backs up half a step. "Nothing's wrong. I should—I should let you shower. Rachel's expecting me for dinner."
Rachel. The girlfriend. He's throwing her name between us like a shield.
But I don't move. Don't turn around. Just stand there naked and dripping, watching him try to leave and fail. His feet don't move. His body won't obey him.
"Maarten," he says, and his voice cracks on the name. "I need you to—I don't know what's happening here, but I need you to understand that I'm not—I don't—"
He stops. Closes his eyes. His hands are shaking.
Oh, you poor, confused man. You don't even have the words for what you want.
Which should story continue? Comment your choise:
SEDUCE: Step closer to him—out of the shower, still dripping—ask him directly what he wants.
MANIPULATE: Act oblivious, turn back to the shower, let him stew in his confusion while I finish washing.
Which should story continue?
Voting ended onJun 6
