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KI
Historical Findings (f/f)
by
Kid Indy
“So your high-school history teachers were right to tell you that the French and Indian War is the name of the alliance between the French and the tribes, but what gets a little more complicated is that tribes were divided in their alliances, and this really represents the last time that they had any chance of banding together to drive out European settlers entirely.”
A hand went up, and Cassie Meyers gestured towards the student. “Didn’t anyone realize that whoever won would become too powerful to beat after that?”
Cassie smiled at the insight emerging. “I can imagine that some voices in the tribes were making that argument, but ultimately the Hurons and the Cherokee wanted to defeat each other more than either one wanted to beat the Europeans.”
Another hand. “How famous did George Washington get during this conflict?”
Cassie nodded to acknowledge the question. “In the moment not many knew that name, but twenty years later, when Washington was the undisputed military champion of the American states, this conflict got rewritten in ways that were just as legendary as they were historical.”
“Really, Cassie? You’re giving them that out-of-date account of Washington’s rise?” Cassie pivoted towards the classroom door and clenched her teeth. There stood her dissertation director and the woman who most terrified her, Dr. Elizabeth Jameson. “Historians who keep up with the scholarship know that newspaper accounts of the war had already elevated Washington almost to a demigod long before the American colonists started looking for a champion to throw off the yoke of Britain. He would have been a British hero had the colonies not revolted.”
“Yes, Dr. Jameson, that is one account of things that is ascendant in current–”
“Ascendant? It’s right there in the newspapers, Cassie! You’re doing these students a disservice with all that business about retroactive myth-making!”
One of the students overcame the shock of the intrusion into the classroom for just a moment. “Dr. Jameson, don’t you think that Ms. Meyers is just presenting another theory?”
Jameson smirked. “Cassie” (hearing her first name in front of her students this time made Meyers scowl) “is not presenting you a theory that any serious historian takes seriously any more, and as she well knows, the College of William and Mary is looking for serious historians to carry the title of Ph.D out into the academic world, not pedlars of outdated mush.”
Cassie breathed in slowly through her nose and spoke as levelly as her boiling blood would let her. “Thank you, Dr. Jameson. I’ll be sure to proceed with the more-current version of Washington’s public reputation.”
Jameson was now all teeth and sparkling eyes. “You do that, Cassie. We wouldn’t want your own public reputation to suffer from bad scholarship!” With that Jameson turned on the heel of her infamous black boots, whose heels echoed down the halls of the history department from late-summer to late-spring every year, no matter how hot the weather and no matter which graduate student she sought to humiliate.
Flustered, Cassie Meyers tried to regain control of her American History Survey class and finish the hour.
* * * * * * *
Another Friday night of paper-grading and loneliness stretched out in front of Cassie. At 27 she was about the average age for a doctoral candidate in history, and she wasn’t much younger than Jameson’s other TA, but it seemed that every time grading stacked up, Cassie, and not Pete Blankenshipp, would be the one who ended up at the office marking essays. Cassie moved another paper from the not-graded to the graded stack and sighed.
Twelve essays, some YouTube videos, and a walk up and down the abandoned history-building hallway later, Cassie was ready to start entering scores into the course’s CMS. She clicked the ouse on the TA computer and saw that Pete had left himself logged in. Cassie shrugged; why waste the time logging him out and herself in? They had access to the same classes, and Jameson wasn’t going to be checking activity logs. So she started entering scores into the relevant column.
She double-checked the scores against the marks she had left and moved the mouse up the left side of the screen to log out when she saw that Pete had a draft message in the onboard email program. “I wonder if he’s writing to ask me to cover another of his breakout sessions?” she thought to herself, and she clicked half-absent-mindedly, thinking to herself that she could update her calendar tonight instead of getting ambushed Monday morning.
The message draft opened, and Cassie’s eyes widened as the scroll-bar in the right margin shrank under the size of the re-populating draft. This was no brief request to take the afternoon off and stick Cassie with more teaching work; as Cassie began to scroll down, she saw that the draft message was a dialogue. Pete was one of the writers, and the other started out inviting Pete to have a drink, then offered him assurances that nobody would find out, then justified things that had already happened, telling him that teachers and students had been lovers since before Plato’s Symposium, and went on for screens and screens after that. Whoever was writing to Pete knew the university’s absolute prohibition against romantic relationships between professors and currently-enrolled students and carefully traced out ways to avoid discovery.
Who was she kidding? Cassie knew full well that only two people could log into Pete’s messages on the CMS: Pete Blankenshipp and Dr. Elizabeth Jameson. And if nobody sent the message, almost nobody would look in a graduate student’s drafts folder unless they were actively investigating something. And if Pete caught wind, he could delete the draft without leaving a sent-message record.
Reaching the bottom of the draft message, Cassie read, “Diplomat Inn. 9:00 tonight.”
Cassie looked at the time-date stamp. The draft had last been edited at 1:37 that afternoon. Her eyes tracked down to the monitor’s lower-right corner. 9:15 PM. This was just too perfect. Cassie flew to the door, locked it behind her, and ran for her car.
* * * * * * *
Cassie Meyers felt like a private investigator in a Netflix series sitting in the parking lot of the roadside motel, the telephoto SLR camera that her parents had given her as a Christmas gift years ago in her hands. (She congratulated herself on keeping it in her apartment well after she dropped the idea of becoming running a side business as a photographer.) Two automobiles that she had seen a hundred times before, usually in different parking lots, sat outside the ground-level doors and confirmed that Cassie was not waiting in vain. She waited patiently beside a dumpster, having parked her own car two blocks away.
She stretched her legs and rubbed her eyes and waited patiently for a door nearby Jameson’s and Blankenshipp’s cars to open. The motel’s sign glowed and hummed in the darkness.
At 10:54 PM Cassie Meyers hit the jackpot. The door to room 17 opened, and Cassie’s dissertation director and fellow TA stepped out onto the motel’s sidewalk, illuminated by fluorescent lights. Cassie crouched next to the dumpster, obscured by shadows. In silent mode (Cassie had checked that half a dozen times), the digital camera made pictures as fast as Cassie’s finger could press the exposure button as professor and student exchanged one final–and gloriously policy-violating– kiss and walked towards their cars. When the cars started up, Cassie crouched in the shadows again, waited for their tires to depart the gravel parking lot and pull onto the highway, and started walking towards her own car.
Cassie’s grin almost lit up the dark Virginia night. On a secure-digital memory card, revenge and a guaranteed cakewalk to her dissertation defense and a sense of superiority to the domineering and (now that Cassie let herself think so) rather hot professor of American History waited to be copied and stored–and exploited.
* * * * * * *
Monday morning took a month to arrive. Cassie knew just when Jameson would arrive at the office–8:35 as sure as any clock would show 8:45–and she had a folder full of photographs and printouts of the draft message ready to terrorize the tyrannical professor. She watched for Jameson’s car to pull up in the parking lot, and she hid around the corner, in a vacant classroom, and waited for those black boots to click past in the hallway. One door opened and closed, then another, and she knew that Jameson would be sitting behind her desk, irritated that Cassie wasn’t at her desk when her professor arrived. And for the next fifteen minutes, when early classes released, they would be the only two in this part of the building.
Cassie was all legs and all smile as her long strides carried her towards the door. She turned the knob and opened the door wide. Dr. Jameson looked up in surprise and anger.
“You’re late for work and you don’t knock? I’m really starting do doubt how serious you are about this doctorate!”
“How serious would I have to get, Lizzie?”
The professor’s eyes flew open at this indignity: as she never tired of telling her students of all levels, she had earned her doctorate from Yale, and she insisted that her students honor it. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you this morning, but–”
“I know who’s gotten into you, Liz.” She slapped the first photo, of Pete and Jameson exiting the motel room, down on the desk between them.
“I have never–”
“But he has.” Another photo, this one of the late-night kiss.
“This is my private life!”
“Not according to university policy, Lizzie. According to that policy, if your dean gets these photos and the other evidence that I have of this affair, that’s the end of you professionally. No discipline board is going to find in your favor, and this kind of violation blows right through tenure.”
Elizabeth was out of her office chair and standing tall across the desk in a flash. “I will NOT” she stamped her booted heel “be blackmailed by a graduate student! I’ll make sure you NEVER” another stamp, with the other boot “recover from this professionally!”
Cassie put her fingertips on the desk and leaned across to smirk at the shorter and–before last night–more powerful woman at point-blank range. “Then again, if this word gets out to your enemies, this might be my ticket onto faculties that would have been completely out of league until now!”
Now Jameson was stamping like mad. “You get out of my office! I’m having you removed from the graduate school! You’re a disgrace to the profession!”
Now Cassie was just enjoying the moment. “I don’t like when you stamp your feet like that. Take off your boots, Lizzie.”
Jameson stepped backwards and shook her head, disbelief and surprise joining her rage. “What did you say?”
“Take off your boots.”
“I am not disrobing in front of a student!”
Cassie let herself laugh out loud. “You and I both know that’s not true, Lizzie! And I didn’t say take off your clothes. I just want you see those boots that you use to terrorize your students off of those little feet!”
“Get… out… of… my… office.”
“If I walk out of this office, I’m going to find some place quiet and send the entire case for your dismissal to the Dean of the Graduate School. Take off your boots.”
Jameson’s eyes darted this way and that, and Cassie’s smile broadened. “Look, Miss Meyers, I really shouldn’t do that.”
“Miss Meyers? I like the sound of that! But take them off, Lizzie. Do it now, and we can wrap this up, and you can go on with your morning.”
“I really don’t like taking off my shoes in public.”
“I know you don’t. Do you think I haven’t noticed that you wear those boots even when it’s ninety-seven and humid? Now take them off for me.”
“I’m really not comfortable with this.”
“Last chance, Lizzie. Take them off, or I’m gone, and then you’re gone.”
Jameson’s hands shook as she realized she was out of cards. Slowly she bent down and removed one boot, then the other, setting them neatly to the side next to each other. Cassie smiled as she saw the thin cotton socks underneath that so few people had ever seen.
“Now sit in the chair, Lizzie.” She did. “Now put your feet up on the desk for me.”
“Look, Miss Meyers, we can be reasonable here. You caught me off-guard, and–”
“Put them up on the desk and leave them there.” In a long, graceful arc one leg elevated, landing a socked heel on the desk, then the other did. “Now hold still.” Cassie stood up now, and the mixture of terror and fury in Dr. Elizabeth Jameson’s eyes was nothing short of intoxicating. Cassie reached out with her right hand, and with one finger she traced a slashing line from the ball to the heel of Jameson’s foot. Though she was forty-five years old, she squealed like a teenage girl, pulling her feet off the desk and standing to face Cassie again. “That’s what I wondered!”
Jameson struggled to regain her composure, to pretend that she hadn’t just made that sound when her graduate student tickled her foot. “Look, Cassie, we can work something out.”
“No, I like Miss Meyers better. Call me that.”
Another look, this time frustrated. “Miss Meyers, can we work something out so that you can get your dissertation done, and maybe I can write you a letter of recommendation?”
Cassie stood tall. Now the professor was trying to negotiate. “I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen, Lizzie. You’re going to put in a request for another grad student to work your American History course as a TA, and I’m going to get the rest of my candidacy funded for research only.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I’ll see if I can hold on to these files. Understand that. You’re going to pull strings to get me interviews for every professorship that crosses my eye, and you’re going to call in personal favors so that I go to the top of every stack.” Jameson’s fury returned to her eyes as she felt her most potent weapons depart her control, but she stood silent. “And when you talk about my dissertation with the other readers, you’re going to make sure that I pass with distinction on my first defense attempt. And you’re going to keep up your greasy little love affair with Pete Blankenshipp until I’m gone and never let him know that I have anything on you.” Jameson nodded in silent rage.
Cassie Meyers smiled in her triumph. “I’m glad we understand each other, Lizzie. I’ll cover classes this week so that you have time to get this done, but next week, my research is funded like I’m the department’s golden child that I am now.” She turned on her heel and walked out the door, slamming the door shut behind her. With the door shut, Jameson reached for her boots.
As she was pulling the first one on, the door opened again, and it was Cassie Meyers, a look of triumphant mania in her eyes. “And Lizzie? Until I’m sitting in my Assistant Professor’s office and starting work on my tenure book, you’re going to do anything I tell you to do, and you’re not going to raise any objections.”
The door shut again.
Dr. Elizabeth Jameson growled quietly as she pulled on her other boot.
* * * * * * *
Professor Elizabeth Jameson of the College of William and Mary detested history-tourism, and year to year she loathed few things more than the times when the college would ask history faculty to give special talks to the tourists around Williamsburg. As she looked out at the sea of blue-jeans and sneakers and mid-October jackets, she couldn’t help but look down at her watch and console herself, noting that her talk only needed to be thirty minutes–the morons on the benches would likely be playing with their phones in five–and then she could return to serious work again.
The emcee, in modern rather than colonial apparel so that she wouldn’t have to break character, finished up the introduction. “And now Colonial Williamsburg is delighted to welcome Doctor Elizabeth Jameson of William and Mary College!” Jameson’s boot heels tapped out a dignified march to the center of the outdoor stage to a round of polite applause, took the microphone from the emcee and faked a smile at the audience.
“Thank you. Thank you. Every time a new community begins, one of the first concerns is always the education of the young, the systems that will allow the community to pass its ways on after the first generation passes on.” She loathed and she needed the knowing nods from the audience–they really ate up that kind of simplistic play on words. “So in Williamsburg, in addition to farmers and smiths and carpenters and coopers, they were sure to retain teachers so that the young could learn to read their Bibles and do the math that they needed farmers and shopkeepers to know and–”
“Lady Elizabeth Jameson! You’re under arrest by order of the governor of the Virginia Colony!”
Ballcap-clad heads turned as two large men and one medium-tall woman approached the stage. The woman led the way, dressed as a town crier, and the men wheeled a large wooden construction across the grass and onto the wooden stage. Jameson’s eyes widened as she recognized Cassie Meyers approaching her.
Jameson tried to make a play. “I’m sorry, Madam Crier, but you seem to be in the wrong century!” Dumb joke, but the audience ate it up.
“And you, Lady Jameson, are wearing pants! And for such indecent raiment, the penalty is to be stocked here in the town square!” She turned to the crowds. “What say ye, townspeople?” The people, who thought they were in for half an hour of dry history but suddenly got to watch a show with a twist like that, burst into applause.
Jameson tried one more time to counter. “But Madam Crier, these people still need to learn about the schools here in Williamsburg!”
Cassie put her hand on Jameson’s, then grabbed with both hands, then relieved her of the microphone. She held it to her own face so that Jameson and the people would hear what she heard next: “Lady Jameson, you know the penalty for resisting a magistrate of the governor!”
Jameson could scarcely conceal her rage, but she heard the message loud and clear. Setting aside her notebook, she approached the stocks that the men had rolled up. Part of her historian’s mind enjoyed a brief moment of superiority as she noted that the seat and the cuffs had both been retrofitted with padding, something that was entirely out of character for a seventeenth-century punishment device. But as she sat down and the men fastened her ankles and locked the device, she had to wonder why Cassie had done so.
Cassie, still with the microphone, turned to the crowd again. “Now in colonial times, Lady Jameson would be left here overnight to be abused with rotten fruit, verbal taunts, and all kinds of humiliation. But since she needs to get back to her work at the university later this afternoon, we’re just going to have a few laughs together, then let you good people enjoy some more of Williamsburg before lunch. What do you say to that?”
The crowd applauded again. Jameson panicked. Did she say “a few laughs”?
Cassie handed her microphone to one of the big cosplayer volunteers, turned towards her dissertation director, and leered as she put hands on one boot and began to tug.
“No! You can’t do this!”
“And you can’t interrupt my class to ridicule me in front of my students! But here we are, aren’t we?” The boot came free, and Cassie tossed it playfully to the side. The other boot came off without much more of a struggle. Then Cassie’s long fingers pinched the top of Jameson’s sock.
Jameson hissed under the crowd’s laughter and applause. “I don’t even take off my socks when…”
Cassie waited for the sentence to finish as the crowds hooted behind her. “When what?” She pulled slightly harder on the sock.
Jameson’s voice cracked in her despair. “Just do what you’re going to do!” Cassie plucked both socks from her feet and tossed them to the ground, then gestured to the professor’s bare feet with a game-show flourish. The crowd roared in anticipation.
“I’ve been looking forward to this, Lizzie.” Cassie’s hands turned palms-up, and eight fingertips approached the established professor’s bare soles. Jameson’s hands gripped the padded bench hard as she anticipated the touches to come.
When Cassie made contact, the shriek that the professor let out startled her, then ignited her appetite for more. When Cassie had been planning this, the imagined encounter passed through a long scene of heroic resistance as her humiliated mentor tried not to laugh, but nothing like that was happening here: those terrible boots had all these years concealed skin that instantly stripped the middle-aged professor of her defiance. The crowds whooped as Professor Elizabeth Jameson cackled in ticklish agony, her laughter soaring through the air even without amplification.
Cassie changed angles, pinching one of Jameson’s big toes, pulling it backwards, and using all five digits from the other hand to torment the taut skin of her sole. The professor’s laughter sublimated into a load moan of frustration as the graduate student forced her to laugh and squeal. Cassie kept hold of the toe and pulled another direction, separating the toes, then began to scratch between the toes with one fingernail. The professor’s curly black hair tossed as her neck thrashed at the unstoppable, unbearable ticklish sensations, and Cassie, who before had only experimented, felt herself suddenly fascinated, insatiable for more of this terrifying woman’s powerless, overwhelming laughter.
She kept scratching at the stems of Jameson’s toes, and the professor slumped to one side, clutching at the bench and screaming at the unbearable touches of the young woman who once cowered at the very sound of her boots on the hallway floor. She sat up again as Cassie scratched at her heel and started taunting her under the mounting roar of the tourists. “Is this all it would have taken, Lizzie? Is this what the big, bad professor needed to play nice?”
Cassie stopped tickling, and Jameson panted as she watched her call for the microphone and turn to the crowd again. “We want to thank you for visiting Williamsburg, and as we wrap up today, since we can’t leave Lady Jameson here overnight, my assistant constables here are going to write the Ten Commandments on each of Lady Jameson’s feet, and all of you are free to stay to the end of her punishment or go enjoy some more of the town!”
Jameson tugged frantically and futilely at her ankles as she saw the two men approach, each with an inkpot and a quill pen. “No! You can’t do this!”
Cassie smirked and cast a glance over her shoulder. Nobody was leaving. She strolled behind Jameson, lowered her bodyweight so that their heads were level, and whispered in her ear. “I’m going to do this and more until I’m a professor somewhere. Get used to this until you can make that happen.”
The pens began to write out Holy Writ on Jameson’s excited nerves, and the professor screamed at the terrible, focused, ticklish paths that the pens traced. Meanwhile Cassie’s hands found their way under Jameson’s arms. The professor flailed her arms at first, then tried to clamp her elbows down to her sides, but Cassie had not only leverage and positional advantage but years of pent-up revenge fantasies to start living out. The professor had no chance.
For the next several minutes the men made a Bible of Jameson’s soles while Cassie made her upper body squirm, pinching and kneading and scratching and poking and drinking in the terrified, ticklish laughter of her former terror.
Eventually the crowds started to leave, and eventually all ten commandments read forth in shaky English script on each of Professor Elizabeth Jameson’s feet, and eventually even Cassie stopped tormenting her ribs and sides and underarms. Cassie tipped each of the men with a twenty-dollar bill that neither one really needed after this morning’s session.
Jameson never looked up at the diminishing crowd as she pulled her socks on over the black ink and looked for her boots.
* * * * * * *
A wooden door opened in the dark of night. “I’m here, Miss Meyers.”
“I’ve decided that you’re going to call me Doctor Meyers now.”
A moment of silent, stifled ire. “You haven’t even drafted all of your dissertation chapters, Cassie.”
“Doctor Meyers or the files go to the Dean.”
Another long, delicious silence. “Doctor Meyers, I’m here at your pleasure.”
“Take your boots off, Lizzie.”
These weekly late-night visits to the office had not become routine, and Professor Elizabeth Jameson of the College of William and Mary hoped that they would end before she became accustomed to them. Nonetheless she bent down, removed one boot, then the other, placing them neatly to one side next to each other.
“The socks too.”
Exposing her bare feet was still a terror, but the ritual politeness rivaled it for the existential indignity. Jameson sat in Pete Blankenshipp’s rolling chair, paused, then began taking off one cotton sock, then the other. She draped them across the tops of her boots. The office’s cool air on her smooth feet still filled her with a sense of dread.
“Put your feet in my lap, Lizzie.” Jameson put the balls of her feet on the office’s carpeting and gripped the office chair’s handrests and scooted herself deliberately towards Cassie Meyers. She kept her grip on the arm-rests as she lifted her feet and put them across the grad student’s lap. She felt Cassie lay one lazy finger on the ball of one foot, and she closed her eyes and braced herself. “I’m making good progress on chapter three, Lizzie.” The professor’s eyes opened and glared at her graduate student, her resentment at the intimacy of this scene filling the air. “I thought you might want to know that.” The fingertip started a slow zig-zag down Jameson’s sole, and Jameson could not completely stifle a moan of tickled protest at the sensation.
The hand lifted from Jameson’s sole and started again on the other foot, this time drawing a single, straight line right down the middle, all the way to the center of her heel. This time the middle-aged professor giggled out loud. “I wish you would just finish this damn dissertation so you can get out of my life.”
Cassie’s head turned to the side, and she shot Jameson a look of mock-offense. She also engaged both hands now, one grabbing one of the professor’s ankles while the other scratched with five fingers around the heel, fingertips rapidly swiping from the periphery to the center, as quickly as the grad student’s fingers would move. Jameson gripped the armrests and threw her head backwards, a yelp giving way to bouncing, musical laughter that would have drawn the attention of anyone in the building if the two women weren’t completely alone. Cassie’s fingers roamed and feasted and tortured, and even though no restraints stronger than a woman’s hand held Lizzie where she was, the professor let the indignity and the torture and her own laughter continue as long as Cassie Meyes–she would never let herself think the name Doctor Meyers–wanted.
When the grad student stopped tickling, the professor looked at a clock on the wall and saw that she had only been in her office for six minutes. Meyers spoke in a calm voice: “You can play mad with me, Lizzie, but I think secretly you hope it’ll take a good long time for me to finish that dissertation. I think you’re enjoying these meetings.”
Jameson would not let that stand. “I hope some day you slip up, Cassie Meyers, and I hope you know some day what it is for someone to exploit your position in an institution. I’m not your girlfriend, you pervert–I’m only here until I can get you out of here!”
Meyers once again ran a single finger from Lizzie’s heel to the base of her toes, and the professor’s giggle, unstoppable now that the grad student had gotten her all ticklish, broke up her defiant pose. “Speaking of girlfriends, how is Pete doing these days? I don’t see him very often now that I do all my work in the library.” Jameson scowled, knowing that Meyers had the power to break the scowl at the flick of her fingertips but scowling nonetheless.
Meyers smiled a predator’s grin. “You’ve got to tell me–does he tickle you?” Jameson looked away–she couldn’t stand having this woman’s hands on her feet, but her attempts to get inside her mind were even worse. The fingertip started tracing a slow line along the professor’s instep, and she tried to breathe slowly but felt the giggle escape her before she could think of how to suppress it. “Lizzie! Does Pete tickle you, or do you just let him have boring sex and then send him home with a cookie?”
“He’s gone as soon as you are, dissertation finished or not.”
“Oh, that’s too bad for pretty Pete. So tell me the truth, Lizzie. Are you getting tired of boring sex with pretty Pete because you like meeting with me so much?” Meyers’s fingers shifted into full-speed tickling, and Jameson couldn’t even attempt to insist on her dignity as her laughter grew louder, arching through the silence of the office as Cassandra Meyers, her secret protege and the woman she hated most in the world, made her laugh with her pervert’s fingers.
In years to come, long after Doctor Cassandra Meyers had departed to become professor of American History at Franklin College in Indiana, the janitors who cleaned the history building at the College of William and Mary would tell stories about the strange love affairs of Professor Elizabeth Jameson of the History Department.
As always, once you've read, leave a comment, and then read someone else's story and leave that writer a comment!
KI
Historical Findings (f/f)
by
Kid Indy
“So your high-school history teachers were right to tell you that the French and Indian War is the name of the alliance between the French and the tribes, but what gets a little more complicated is that tribes were divided in their alliances, and this really represents the last time that they had any chance of banding together to drive out European settlers entirely.”
A hand went up, and Cassie Meyers gestured towards the student. “Didn’t anyone realize that whoever won would become too powerful to beat after that?”
Cassie smiled at the insight emerging. “I can imagine that some voices in the tribes were making that argument, but ultimately the Hurons and the Cherokee wanted to defeat each other more than either one wanted to beat the Europeans.”
Another hand. “How famous did George Washington get during this conflict?”
Cassie nodded to acknowledge the question. “In the moment not many knew that name, but twenty years later, when Washington was the undisputed military champion of the American states, this conflict got rewritten in ways that were just as legendary as they were historical.”
“Really, Cassie? You’re giving them that out-of-date account of Washington’s rise?” Cassie pivoted towards the classroom door and clenched her teeth. There stood her dissertation director and the woman who most terrified her, Dr. Elizabeth Jameson. “Historians who keep up with the scholarship know that newspaper accounts of the war had already elevated Washington almost to a demigod long before the American colonists started looking for a champion to throw off the yoke of Britain. He would have been a British hero had the colonies not revolted.”
“Yes, Dr. Jameson, that is one account of things that is ascendant in current–”
“Ascendant? It’s right there in the newspapers, Cassie! You’re doing these students a disservice with all that business about retroactive myth-making!”
One of the students overcame the shock of the intrusion into the classroom for just a moment. “Dr. Jameson, don’t you think that Ms. Meyers is just presenting another theory?”
Jameson smirked. “Cassie” (hearing her first name in front of her students this time made Meyers scowl) “is not presenting you a theory that any serious historian takes seriously any more, and as she well knows, the College of William and Mary is looking for serious historians to carry the title of Ph.D out into the academic world, not pedlars of outdated mush.”
Cassie breathed in slowly through her nose and spoke as levelly as her boiling blood would let her. “Thank you, Dr. Jameson. I’ll be sure to proceed with the more-current version of Washington’s public reputation.”
Jameson was now all teeth and sparkling eyes. “You do that, Cassie. We wouldn’t want your own public reputation to suffer from bad scholarship!” With that Jameson turned on the heel of her infamous black boots, whose heels echoed down the halls of the history department from late-summer to late-spring every year, no matter how hot the weather and no matter which graduate student she sought to humiliate.
Flustered, Cassie Meyers tried to regain control of her American History Survey class and finish the hour.
* * * * * * *
Another Friday night of paper-grading and loneliness stretched out in front of Cassie. At 27 she was about the average age for a doctoral candidate in history, and she wasn’t much younger than Jameson’s other TA, but it seemed that every time grading stacked up, Cassie, and not Pete Blankenshipp, would be the one who ended up at the office marking essays. Cassie moved another paper from the not-graded to the graded stack and sighed.
Twelve essays, some YouTube videos, and a walk up and down the abandoned history-building hallway later, Cassie was ready to start entering scores into the course’s CMS. She clicked the ouse on the TA computer and saw that Pete had left himself logged in. Cassie shrugged; why waste the time logging him out and herself in? They had access to the same classes, and Jameson wasn’t going to be checking activity logs. So she started entering scores into the relevant column.
She double-checked the scores against the marks she had left and moved the mouse up the left side of the screen to log out when she saw that Pete had a draft message in the onboard email program. “I wonder if he’s writing to ask me to cover another of his breakout sessions?” she thought to herself, and she clicked half-absent-mindedly, thinking to herself that she could update her calendar tonight instead of getting ambushed Monday morning.
The message draft opened, and Cassie’s eyes widened as the scroll-bar in the right margin shrank under the size of the re-populating draft. This was no brief request to take the afternoon off and stick Cassie with more teaching work; as Cassie began to scroll down, she saw that the draft message was a dialogue. Pete was one of the writers, and the other started out inviting Pete to have a drink, then offered him assurances that nobody would find out, then justified things that had already happened, telling him that teachers and students had been lovers since before Plato’s Symposium, and went on for screens and screens after that. Whoever was writing to Pete knew the university’s absolute prohibition against romantic relationships between professors and currently-enrolled students and carefully traced out ways to avoid discovery.
Who was she kidding? Cassie knew full well that only two people could log into Pete’s messages on the CMS: Pete Blankenshipp and Dr. Elizabeth Jameson. And if nobody sent the message, almost nobody would look in a graduate student’s drafts folder unless they were actively investigating something. And if Pete caught wind, he could delete the draft without leaving a sent-message record.
Reaching the bottom of the draft message, Cassie read, “Diplomat Inn. 9:00 tonight.”
Cassie looked at the time-date stamp. The draft had last been edited at 1:37 that afternoon. Her eyes tracked down to the monitor’s lower-right corner. 9:15 PM. This was just too perfect. Cassie flew to the door, locked it behind her, and ran for her car.
* * * * * * *
Cassie Meyers felt like a private investigator in a Netflix series sitting in the parking lot of the roadside motel, the telephoto SLR camera that her parents had given her as a Christmas gift years ago in her hands. (She congratulated herself on keeping it in her apartment well after she dropped the idea of becoming running a side business as a photographer.) Two automobiles that she had seen a hundred times before, usually in different parking lots, sat outside the ground-level doors and confirmed that Cassie was not waiting in vain. She waited patiently beside a dumpster, having parked her own car two blocks away.
She stretched her legs and rubbed her eyes and waited patiently for a door nearby Jameson’s and Blankenshipp’s cars to open. The motel’s sign glowed and hummed in the darkness.
At 10:54 PM Cassie Meyers hit the jackpot. The door to room 17 opened, and Cassie’s dissertation director and fellow TA stepped out onto the motel’s sidewalk, illuminated by fluorescent lights. Cassie crouched next to the dumpster, obscured by shadows. In silent mode (Cassie had checked that half a dozen times), the digital camera made pictures as fast as Cassie’s finger could press the exposure button as professor and student exchanged one final–and gloriously policy-violating– kiss and walked towards their cars. When the cars started up, Cassie crouched in the shadows again, waited for their tires to depart the gravel parking lot and pull onto the highway, and started walking towards her own car.
Cassie’s grin almost lit up the dark Virginia night. On a secure-digital memory card, revenge and a guaranteed cakewalk to her dissertation defense and a sense of superiority to the domineering and (now that Cassie let herself think so) rather hot professor of American History waited to be copied and stored–and exploited.
* * * * * * *
Monday morning took a month to arrive. Cassie knew just when Jameson would arrive at the office–8:35 as sure as any clock would show 8:45–and she had a folder full of photographs and printouts of the draft message ready to terrorize the tyrannical professor. She watched for Jameson’s car to pull up in the parking lot, and she hid around the corner, in a vacant classroom, and waited for those black boots to click past in the hallway. One door opened and closed, then another, and she knew that Jameson would be sitting behind her desk, irritated that Cassie wasn’t at her desk when her professor arrived. And for the next fifteen minutes, when early classes released, they would be the only two in this part of the building.
Cassie was all legs and all smile as her long strides carried her towards the door. She turned the knob and opened the door wide. Dr. Jameson looked up in surprise and anger.
“You’re late for work and you don’t knock? I’m really starting do doubt how serious you are about this doctorate!”
“How serious would I have to get, Lizzie?”
The professor’s eyes flew open at this indignity: as she never tired of telling her students of all levels, she had earned her doctorate from Yale, and she insisted that her students honor it. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you this morning, but–”
“I know who’s gotten into you, Liz.” She slapped the first photo, of Pete and Jameson exiting the motel room, down on the desk between them.
“I have never–”
“But he has.” Another photo, this one of the late-night kiss.
“This is my private life!”
“Not according to university policy, Lizzie. According to that policy, if your dean gets these photos and the other evidence that I have of this affair, that’s the end of you professionally. No discipline board is going to find in your favor, and this kind of violation blows right through tenure.”
Elizabeth was out of her office chair and standing tall across the desk in a flash. “I will NOT” she stamped her booted heel “be blackmailed by a graduate student! I’ll make sure you NEVER” another stamp, with the other boot “recover from this professionally!”
Cassie put her fingertips on the desk and leaned across to smirk at the shorter and–before last night–more powerful woman at point-blank range. “Then again, if this word gets out to your enemies, this might be my ticket onto faculties that would have been completely out of league until now!”
Now Jameson was stamping like mad. “You get out of my office! I’m having you removed from the graduate school! You’re a disgrace to the profession!”
Now Cassie was just enjoying the moment. “I don’t like when you stamp your feet like that. Take off your boots, Lizzie.”
Jameson stepped backwards and shook her head, disbelief and surprise joining her rage. “What did you say?”
“Take off your boots.”
“I am not disrobing in front of a student!”
Cassie let herself laugh out loud. “You and I both know that’s not true, Lizzie! And I didn’t say take off your clothes. I just want you see those boots that you use to terrorize your students off of those little feet!”
“Get… out… of… my… office.”
“If I walk out of this office, I’m going to find some place quiet and send the entire case for your dismissal to the Dean of the Graduate School. Take off your boots.”
Jameson’s eyes darted this way and that, and Cassie’s smile broadened. “Look, Miss Meyers, I really shouldn’t do that.”
“Miss Meyers? I like the sound of that! But take them off, Lizzie. Do it now, and we can wrap this up, and you can go on with your morning.”
“I really don’t like taking off my shoes in public.”
“I know you don’t. Do you think I haven’t noticed that you wear those boots even when it’s ninety-seven and humid? Now take them off for me.”
“I’m really not comfortable with this.”
“Last chance, Lizzie. Take them off, or I’m gone, and then you’re gone.”
Jameson’s hands shook as she realized she was out of cards. Slowly she bent down and removed one boot, then the other, setting them neatly to the side next to each other. Cassie smiled as she saw the thin cotton socks underneath that so few people had ever seen.
“Now sit in the chair, Lizzie.” She did. “Now put your feet up on the desk for me.”
“Look, Miss Meyers, we can be reasonable here. You caught me off-guard, and–”
“Put them up on the desk and leave them there.” In a long, graceful arc one leg elevated, landing a socked heel on the desk, then the other did. “Now hold still.” Cassie stood up now, and the mixture of terror and fury in Dr. Elizabeth Jameson’s eyes was nothing short of intoxicating. Cassie reached out with her right hand, and with one finger she traced a slashing line from the ball to the heel of Jameson’s foot. Though she was forty-five years old, she squealed like a teenage girl, pulling her feet off the desk and standing to face Cassie again. “That’s what I wondered!”
Jameson struggled to regain her composure, to pretend that she hadn’t just made that sound when her graduate student tickled her foot. “Look, Cassie, we can work something out.”
“No, I like Miss Meyers better. Call me that.”
Another look, this time frustrated. “Miss Meyers, can we work something out so that you can get your dissertation done, and maybe I can write you a letter of recommendation?”
Cassie stood tall. Now the professor was trying to negotiate. “I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen, Lizzie. You’re going to put in a request for another grad student to work your American History course as a TA, and I’m going to get the rest of my candidacy funded for research only.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I’ll see if I can hold on to these files. Understand that. You’re going to pull strings to get me interviews for every professorship that crosses my eye, and you’re going to call in personal favors so that I go to the top of every stack.” Jameson’s fury returned to her eyes as she felt her most potent weapons depart her control, but she stood silent. “And when you talk about my dissertation with the other readers, you’re going to make sure that I pass with distinction on my first defense attempt. And you’re going to keep up your greasy little love affair with Pete Blankenshipp until I’m gone and never let him know that I have anything on you.” Jameson nodded in silent rage.
Cassie Meyers smiled in her triumph. “I’m glad we understand each other, Lizzie. I’ll cover classes this week so that you have time to get this done, but next week, my research is funded like I’m the department’s golden child that I am now.” She turned on her heel and walked out the door, slamming the door shut behind her. With the door shut, Jameson reached for her boots.
As she was pulling the first one on, the door opened again, and it was Cassie Meyers, a look of triumphant mania in her eyes. “And Lizzie? Until I’m sitting in my Assistant Professor’s office and starting work on my tenure book, you’re going to do anything I tell you to do, and you’re not going to raise any objections.”
The door shut again.
Dr. Elizabeth Jameson growled quietly as she pulled on her other boot.
* * * * * * *
Professor Elizabeth Jameson of the College of William and Mary detested history-tourism, and year to year she loathed few things more than the times when the college would ask history faculty to give special talks to the tourists around Williamsburg. As she looked out at the sea of blue-jeans and sneakers and mid-October jackets, she couldn’t help but look down at her watch and console herself, noting that her talk only needed to be thirty minutes–the morons on the benches would likely be playing with their phones in five–and then she could return to serious work again.
The emcee, in modern rather than colonial apparel so that she wouldn’t have to break character, finished up the introduction. “And now Colonial Williamsburg is delighted to welcome Doctor Elizabeth Jameson of William and Mary College!” Jameson’s boot heels tapped out a dignified march to the center of the outdoor stage to a round of polite applause, took the microphone from the emcee and faked a smile at the audience.
“Thank you. Thank you. Every time a new community begins, one of the first concerns is always the education of the young, the systems that will allow the community to pass its ways on after the first generation passes on.” She loathed and she needed the knowing nods from the audience–they really ate up that kind of simplistic play on words. “So in Williamsburg, in addition to farmers and smiths and carpenters and coopers, they were sure to retain teachers so that the young could learn to read their Bibles and do the math that they needed farmers and shopkeepers to know and–”
“Lady Elizabeth Jameson! You’re under arrest by order of the governor of the Virginia Colony!”
Ballcap-clad heads turned as two large men and one medium-tall woman approached the stage. The woman led the way, dressed as a town crier, and the men wheeled a large wooden construction across the grass and onto the wooden stage. Jameson’s eyes widened as she recognized Cassie Meyers approaching her.
Jameson tried to make a play. “I’m sorry, Madam Crier, but you seem to be in the wrong century!” Dumb joke, but the audience ate it up.
“And you, Lady Jameson, are wearing pants! And for such indecent raiment, the penalty is to be stocked here in the town square!” She turned to the crowds. “What say ye, townspeople?” The people, who thought they were in for half an hour of dry history but suddenly got to watch a show with a twist like that, burst into applause.
Jameson tried one more time to counter. “But Madam Crier, these people still need to learn about the schools here in Williamsburg!”
Cassie put her hand on Jameson’s, then grabbed with both hands, then relieved her of the microphone. She held it to her own face so that Jameson and the people would hear what she heard next: “Lady Jameson, you know the penalty for resisting a magistrate of the governor!”
Jameson could scarcely conceal her rage, but she heard the message loud and clear. Setting aside her notebook, she approached the stocks that the men had rolled up. Part of her historian’s mind enjoyed a brief moment of superiority as she noted that the seat and the cuffs had both been retrofitted with padding, something that was entirely out of character for a seventeenth-century punishment device. But as she sat down and the men fastened her ankles and locked the device, she had to wonder why Cassie had done so.
Cassie, still with the microphone, turned to the crowd again. “Now in colonial times, Lady Jameson would be left here overnight to be abused with rotten fruit, verbal taunts, and all kinds of humiliation. But since she needs to get back to her work at the university later this afternoon, we’re just going to have a few laughs together, then let you good people enjoy some more of Williamsburg before lunch. What do you say to that?”
The crowd applauded again. Jameson panicked. Did she say “a few laughs”?
Cassie handed her microphone to one of the big cosplayer volunteers, turned towards her dissertation director, and leered as she put hands on one boot and began to tug.
“No! You can’t do this!”
“And you can’t interrupt my class to ridicule me in front of my students! But here we are, aren’t we?” The boot came free, and Cassie tossed it playfully to the side. The other boot came off without much more of a struggle. Then Cassie’s long fingers pinched the top of Jameson’s sock.
Jameson hissed under the crowd’s laughter and applause. “I don’t even take off my socks when…”
Cassie waited for the sentence to finish as the crowds hooted behind her. “When what?” She pulled slightly harder on the sock.
Jameson’s voice cracked in her despair. “Just do what you’re going to do!” Cassie plucked both socks from her feet and tossed them to the ground, then gestured to the professor’s bare feet with a game-show flourish. The crowd roared in anticipation.
“I’ve been looking forward to this, Lizzie.” Cassie’s hands turned palms-up, and eight fingertips approached the established professor’s bare soles. Jameson’s hands gripped the padded bench hard as she anticipated the touches to come.
When Cassie made contact, the shriek that the professor let out startled her, then ignited her appetite for more. When Cassie had been planning this, the imagined encounter passed through a long scene of heroic resistance as her humiliated mentor tried not to laugh, but nothing like that was happening here: those terrible boots had all these years concealed skin that instantly stripped the middle-aged professor of her defiance. The crowds whooped as Professor Elizabeth Jameson cackled in ticklish agony, her laughter soaring through the air even without amplification.
Cassie changed angles, pinching one of Jameson’s big toes, pulling it backwards, and using all five digits from the other hand to torment the taut skin of her sole. The professor’s laughter sublimated into a load moan of frustration as the graduate student forced her to laugh and squeal. Cassie kept hold of the toe and pulled another direction, separating the toes, then began to scratch between the toes with one fingernail. The professor’s curly black hair tossed as her neck thrashed at the unstoppable, unbearable ticklish sensations, and Cassie, who before had only experimented, felt herself suddenly fascinated, insatiable for more of this terrifying woman’s powerless, overwhelming laughter.
She kept scratching at the stems of Jameson’s toes, and the professor slumped to one side, clutching at the bench and screaming at the unbearable touches of the young woman who once cowered at the very sound of her boots on the hallway floor. She sat up again as Cassie scratched at her heel and started taunting her under the mounting roar of the tourists. “Is this all it would have taken, Lizzie? Is this what the big, bad professor needed to play nice?”
Cassie stopped tickling, and Jameson panted as she watched her call for the microphone and turn to the crowd again. “We want to thank you for visiting Williamsburg, and as we wrap up today, since we can’t leave Lady Jameson here overnight, my assistant constables here are going to write the Ten Commandments on each of Lady Jameson’s feet, and all of you are free to stay to the end of her punishment or go enjoy some more of the town!”
Jameson tugged frantically and futilely at her ankles as she saw the two men approach, each with an inkpot and a quill pen. “No! You can’t do this!”
Cassie smirked and cast a glance over her shoulder. Nobody was leaving. She strolled behind Jameson, lowered her bodyweight so that their heads were level, and whispered in her ear. “I’m going to do this and more until I’m a professor somewhere. Get used to this until you can make that happen.”
The pens began to write out Holy Writ on Jameson’s excited nerves, and the professor screamed at the terrible, focused, ticklish paths that the pens traced. Meanwhile Cassie’s hands found their way under Jameson’s arms. The professor flailed her arms at first, then tried to clamp her elbows down to her sides, but Cassie had not only leverage and positional advantage but years of pent-up revenge fantasies to start living out. The professor had no chance.
For the next several minutes the men made a Bible of Jameson’s soles while Cassie made her upper body squirm, pinching and kneading and scratching and poking and drinking in the terrified, ticklish laughter of her former terror.
Eventually the crowds started to leave, and eventually all ten commandments read forth in shaky English script on each of Professor Elizabeth Jameson’s feet, and eventually even Cassie stopped tormenting her ribs and sides and underarms. Cassie tipped each of the men with a twenty-dollar bill that neither one really needed after this morning’s session.
Jameson never looked up at the diminishing crowd as she pulled her socks on over the black ink and looked for her boots.
* * * * * * *
A wooden door opened in the dark of night. “I’m here, Miss Meyers.”
“I’ve decided that you’re going to call me Doctor Meyers now.”
A moment of silent, stifled ire. “You haven’t even drafted all of your dissertation chapters, Cassie.”
“Doctor Meyers or the files go to the Dean.”
Another long, delicious silence. “Doctor Meyers, I’m here at your pleasure.”
“Take your boots off, Lizzie.”
These weekly late-night visits to the office had not become routine, and Professor Elizabeth Jameson of the College of William and Mary hoped that they would end before she became accustomed to them. Nonetheless she bent down, removed one boot, then the other, placing them neatly to one side next to each other.
“The socks too.”
Exposing her bare feet was still a terror, but the ritual politeness rivaled it for the existential indignity. Jameson sat in Pete Blankenshipp’s rolling chair, paused, then began taking off one cotton sock, then the other. She draped them across the tops of her boots. The office’s cool air on her smooth feet still filled her with a sense of dread.
“Put your feet in my lap, Lizzie.” Jameson put the balls of her feet on the office’s carpeting and gripped the office chair’s handrests and scooted herself deliberately towards Cassie Meyers. She kept her grip on the arm-rests as she lifted her feet and put them across the grad student’s lap. She felt Cassie lay one lazy finger on the ball of one foot, and she closed her eyes and braced herself. “I’m making good progress on chapter three, Lizzie.” The professor’s eyes opened and glared at her graduate student, her resentment at the intimacy of this scene filling the air. “I thought you might want to know that.” The fingertip started a slow zig-zag down Jameson’s sole, and Jameson could not completely stifle a moan of tickled protest at the sensation.
The hand lifted from Jameson’s sole and started again on the other foot, this time drawing a single, straight line right down the middle, all the way to the center of her heel. This time the middle-aged professor giggled out loud. “I wish you would just finish this damn dissertation so you can get out of my life.”
Cassie’s head turned to the side, and she shot Jameson a look of mock-offense. She also engaged both hands now, one grabbing one of the professor’s ankles while the other scratched with five fingers around the heel, fingertips rapidly swiping from the periphery to the center, as quickly as the grad student’s fingers would move. Jameson gripped the armrests and threw her head backwards, a yelp giving way to bouncing, musical laughter that would have drawn the attention of anyone in the building if the two women weren’t completely alone. Cassie’s fingers roamed and feasted and tortured, and even though no restraints stronger than a woman’s hand held Lizzie where she was, the professor let the indignity and the torture and her own laughter continue as long as Cassie Meyes–she would never let herself think the name Doctor Meyers–wanted.
When the grad student stopped tickling, the professor looked at a clock on the wall and saw that she had only been in her office for six minutes. Meyers spoke in a calm voice: “You can play mad with me, Lizzie, but I think secretly you hope it’ll take a good long time for me to finish that dissertation. I think you’re enjoying these meetings.”
Jameson would not let that stand. “I hope some day you slip up, Cassie Meyers, and I hope you know some day what it is for someone to exploit your position in an institution. I’m not your girlfriend, you pervert–I’m only here until I can get you out of here!”
Meyers once again ran a single finger from Lizzie’s heel to the base of her toes, and the professor’s giggle, unstoppable now that the grad student had gotten her all ticklish, broke up her defiant pose. “Speaking of girlfriends, how is Pete doing these days? I don’t see him very often now that I do all my work in the library.” Jameson scowled, knowing that Meyers had the power to break the scowl at the flick of her fingertips but scowling nonetheless.
Meyers smiled a predator’s grin. “You’ve got to tell me–does he tickle you?” Jameson looked away–she couldn’t stand having this woman’s hands on her feet, but her attempts to get inside her mind were even worse. The fingertip started tracing a slow line along the professor’s instep, and she tried to breathe slowly but felt the giggle escape her before she could think of how to suppress it. “Lizzie! Does Pete tickle you, or do you just let him have boring sex and then send him home with a cookie?”
“He’s gone as soon as you are, dissertation finished or not.”
“Oh, that’s too bad for pretty Pete. So tell me the truth, Lizzie. Are you getting tired of boring sex with pretty Pete because you like meeting with me so much?” Meyers’s fingers shifted into full-speed tickling, and Jameson couldn’t even attempt to insist on her dignity as her laughter grew louder, arching through the silence of the office as Cassandra Meyers, her secret protege and the woman she hated most in the world, made her laugh with her pervert’s fingers.
In years to come, long after Doctor Cassandra Meyers had departed to become professor of American History at Franklin College in Indiana, the janitors who cleaned the history building at the College of William and Mary would tell stories about the strange love affairs of Professor Elizabeth Jameson of the History Department.
