Sadie's Progress

Sadie's Progress

         Sadie clicked her pen open and kept her eyes on the questions in front of her.
         "How many times a week do you masturbate?" Dr. Wolfe asked over his glasses. The boy across from them blinked. Sadie clicked her pen shut.
         She liked the way Dr. Wolfe phrased his questions. Nothing evasive ("Would you, could you, estimate approximately, about how many times you, ah, touch yourself during the week? Please?") or harsh ("Tell us how often you conduct in masturbatory acts per week."). Just as straightforward as he wanted their answers to be.
         Open, shut. Open, shut. Open shut. Openshut.
         The pen popped like bubble wrap in the silence. Sadie put it down and picked up her lab notebook. "Do you need the question rephrased?" Her question was supposed to be asked if the subject didn't answer in thirty seconds; she had started a mental game last week she called Stretch the Awkward.
         "Three," the boy blurted. Dark straight hair hanging in those light clear blue eyes—they could probably get him through the weekend. Three sounded about right. Dr. Wolfe's head was inclined slightly towards Sophie, as if to catch his assistant's small nod.
         "Thank you, Mr. Two-ninety-eight," said Dr. Wolfe. "Your part is done. And—" Sadie handed him a white letter envelope, which the doctor handed to #298 with a smile that asked forgiveness for its intrusive questions. "Compensation."
         The boy took his money and found his dignity as he stepped through the door. He turned to the test table and chairs and said, "Glad to be of service."
         Sadie heard his words recycle through his brain and trickle their embarrassment down to his feet as her ear traced his strides across the broad wood beam floors of the sociology building. "He was telling the truth."
         "Mmm?" Dr. Wolfe scribbled, his eyebrows hoisting themselves up in the middle. "Oh yes. Very good subject. Very skittish, but aren't we all."
         It was time to find out. "He was number two-nine-eight, Doctor."
         "Ah." His right hand came to a stop, shuffled the papers under it, and held out a sheet with filled blanks. "A step ahead of you, Miss Whitmore."
         Sadie took the survey and swapped it in her backpack for her own, which she left on the table. At the doctor's curious noise pushed through his fleshy triangle of a nose, she blushed a very little bit. She had gained a great control over that reflex.
         "McGill's class was boring," she said.
         "Well." Dr. Wolfe peered at her vertical cursive, a practice that she knew just meant he was spot-checking. "It seems we're done twenty minutes early."
         Gathering her things, Sadie stuck the pencil in the doctor's jacket pocket and the pen behind her own ear. "Excellent," she said.
         "Yes. Excellent." The lights dimmed, then hummed to darkness as the doctor passed the switch. Friday nights were always quiet enough to echo the lock like a bowling ball connection to pins. "Monday morning data sifting session, then, Miss Whitmore?"
         "Of course." One time she would find enough humor in her-their-his work to add something about it being a hot date, but.
         "Monday morning." Dr. Wolfe raised his umbrella at this declaration and blustered through a side exit.
         Sadie never fully realized the rain spotting her coat as she left to fulfill her self-reported statistics.

         Her mother hated her work.
         "How's your work with Dr. Wolfe?" is what she always asked Sadie, who noticed the question came out almost completely smooth by now.
         "Going pretty well." Sadie lay in her office chair, the one that reared over her head and buried her in pleather every time she sat in it. "Some of our subjects were a little embarrassed—"
         "Well, goodness, no wonder..." It came out in a dithering murmur, an affection that so angered Sadie's hate of clichés that she usually started spouting phrases like MASTURBATION IS A PERFECTLY HEALTHY OUTLET and PENIS IS A BIOLOGICAL TERM and, her favorite, THEY VOLUNTEER ALL OF THIS INFORMATION. Tonight, Sadie was too tired.
         "—but I think we got what we needed."
         "How are your other classes, dear?"
         "Fine, Mom. I mean—fine."
         "Good, good."
         Sadie stretched out her toes freed of socks and sneakers and rain boots. "Yeah. Thanks for calling, Mom."
         "Plans tonight?"
         Noticing a fleck of green in a corner, Sadie took a paperclip off her desk and dug the gunk out of her toenail. "Oh yeah. Lots of people waiting on me, so I should probably go."
         Her mother was getting better at hiding relief, too. "Well, have fun—just not—too much. You know."
         "Okay. Love you."
         "Love you, too."
         And that's it, Sadie thought, leaning back. That’s why I lie to my mother. The love thing.
         Sadie's fingers rested on her jeans, which were unbuttoned with the zipper gaping and her underpants' elastic stretching. That and a prayer of thanks for her graduate student's single room privilege had been Sadie's Friday night plans before her phone rang. Her landline, the one only her mother or Dr. Wolfe used, so her mood had broken before her fingers could start to smell like ass.
         Probably a good thing, she thought as she grabbed the nearest novel and melted further into her chair.

         "I don't like this trend." Dr. Wolfe frowned.
         For a minute Sadie remained so deep in layers of naked numbers that she thought he meant the stupid little knitted ponchos all her peers seemed to be wearing, as if they really stopped the cold, and almost agreed with him.
         She caught herself in time. "What trend, sir?"
         "This one." A brown wrinkled finger circled a statistic halfway down a page. "The one concerning male-to-female orgasm ratios."
         Sadie's face mirrored her professor's when it saw the number. "That does seem off."
         "We knew it would be high, but that was accounted for, was it not, in the equation."
         Every time Dr. Wolfe used an inclusive pronoun, Sadie's mind seemed to sharpen a notch. "Yes, the truth equation balanced perfectly when the stats undergrads in 220 checked them."
         "Statistics undergraduates." While he talked, his right hand scribbled figures in autonomous mode. "What is the percentage of statistics undergraduate students correctly able to test an equation used to measure research level sociological factors?"
         "Higher than the percentage of male undergrads who didn't lie to us, sir."
         "Higher?"
         "Much, sir."
         Dr. Wolfe digested the input—Sadie could almost see his cogs meshing—and finally nodded. "I believe you're right. At the very least, you have more practical experience with these—ratios."
         She felt oddly flattered enough to not bother correcting him. "Follow-ups?"
         "Yes. Best way." His glasses slid as if in reaction as he handed her a roster. "Half this and take a group. Same thing as always—less formal, not too public, no more money but I think Dr. Markavski has a bin of leftover sticky buns from his disproving psychics seminar."
         "I'm surprised. That's a big one." Sadie calculated in her one weekly lecture and the rest of her number crunching duties. "I'll be able to get most of these done by next Monday."
         "Good. Progress." Dr. Wolfe smiled at his favorite word.

         Progress, thought Sadie, letting her eyes wander through the evening sunlight gilding the trees and the bricks and the fountain and the smokers and the skateboarders and the last Thursday dinner stragglers heading to the student union. Maybe she'd just walk past all of it, straight into the neon sun before it disappeared beneath the pavement.
         But—Sadie blinked away the late afternoon's possibilities until they were only candy-colored clouds floating on the other side of a dirty glass window—right now she had a last bit of progress to make.
         She stood up from the stool she had been offered and let her high heels click once, twice on the tile floor. Five eight was all she needed most of the time, but during field work she liked to have a few more inches of intimidation ready. "Do you know what time Joe's suppose to be back?"
         A small voice from behind the laptop on the room's other desk said, "He just told me to let you in if you came—"
         "I'm here." A face with round features that she recalled from a facts sheet glanced at a couple days ago walked in and dropped a pile of books among the socks and empty Styrofoam cups. "Get lost, Neville."
         "I won't be any trouble."
         "Dude, gimme like an hour. That's all I need."
         "But—" He peered around the screen to see if he had Sadie's sympathies. She shook her head.
         "He signed a confidentiality contract," she said. "And it's only an hour."
         Neville unhooked his laptop and, clutching it to his chest, wandered out into the hall. Joe closed the door behind him and turned to face Sadie.
         "So," she said, hoping the transition would sound much more natural in the open air, "you don't seem to talk to your roommate about sex."
         "No," he said, pulling Neville's chair into the open floor space between the two bed and desk sets bolted to opposite walls and sitting down in one fluid motion. "We're not really friends. What'd you want to ask me about?"
         With her clipboard on her lap, Sadie read Dr. Wolfe's sample intro and took a second to translate it into sophomore. "The sociology department is following up the people who took the sexual behavior survey last week. We just want to make sure—"
         "That nobody was bragging about his foot-long dick that made five chicks come nine times a piece this one weekend in Vegas?"
         —that our numbers are right, she was going to say, but really, this summed it up better. "Yeah. Basically."
         "Is that even possible? I mean, physically?"
         "From the few sexual anatomy survey courses I've had to take, not even close." She reached for her pen and mentally groped for her place in the script. "To get started, please state your—"
         "I didn't lie on anything." He kinked a leg in mid-air and dropped it across his other knee. "I mean, you guys paid me. And nobody'll know my name, right?"
         "No," she said, wanting to turn her head to confirm if she really did see a Nighthawks print out of the corner of her vision, above the tiny sink. "Just a number. And we appreciate your cooperation, but—"
         "You must really like sex."
         It was abrupt and fast enough to make Sadie retreat back into the safety of Dr. Wolfe's formal dialect. "I am interested in society's effects on human sexual behavior and vice versa, yes," she said, "but that does not have any relevance at this time. Please state for verification—"
         "Heterosexual male, twenty." A hand pushed away the two feet of air between them and landed on her breast. "Caucasian. Irish, actually, except Grandpop was Scottish." The thumb unfurled and rubbed across her nipple. "Masturbate a couple times a week, more if I can't get any."
         Sadie watched, felt his hand grinding its way through three layers of material, saw the grin on his lips as he leaned closer and felt the mint on his breath as his breath sharpened in her ear. "Is that enough for you?"
         Fear and, she realized with a different shade of horror, professional curiosity paralyzed her long enough to feel a hardness that seemed to be pushing a hidden button between her legs —
         His free hand slid up her skirt and grabbed a fistful of panties. She took a clumsy, wrenching step towards the door, but he pulled her back and pinned her against the wall as he freed his penis. It jutted out from his hips like a fleshy salute and then she felt it jammed inside her, filling crevices she didn't know she had, yanking and pushing in motions that seemed completely removed from the massive itch winding itself through her, up from her toes and down from her stomach.
         Suddenly he tensed and she felt warm liquid touch the quiet, internal explosion ripping along her nerve endings, and everything was still.   
                   
         By Monday she had thrown away her skirt and panties, in the waist-high dumpster down three flights from her room so she wouldn't have to look at them as she filed her follow-up data into her backpack to deliver her progress to Dr. Wolfe and his waiting data shifting session.

THE END