The Virginity Game

Chapter Three

On Sunday Jamie went home for church and spent the day alternatively twitching with embarrassment from his panic attack, berating himself for rudeness and praying for strength to handle being around Agnes Brightly.

He spent the week desperately hoping he'd see Agnes again. He imagined he saw her all over campus. A woman's curved rear as she bent over in the library stacks looked exactly as hers had. A glimpse of reddish-brown hair in line for coffee made his heart skip a beat. That turned out to be a slight, bedraggled looking young man.

He was losing his mind, and his usual avoidance mechanisms weren't helping. He'd run twenty miles since that day— a new PR, but one that didn't change a single thing. 

He'd taken himself in hand daily. That was bad enough. Normally, he could withstand the need to do that, and save it as a last resort, or at least not picture anyone specific when he did do it. Usually he could convince himself that it couldn't be lust if he wasn't lusting after an actual woman. But this week Agnes had slipped into his imaginings and refused to go away. 

Even when he tried to work, she was at the edge of his brain. He sat in his office and thought about her while he should have been skimming Religions of the Ancient World for his next Religions 121 lecture.

"Jamie. Come in. Jamie, do you read me?" a robotic sounding voice jerked him away from thinking about her.

"What? Sorry?" he asked, looking up from his open textbook and realizing it was Gretchen, his office mate, doing her best radio-comms impression.

"Where'd you go, dude?" she asked him when he'd spun around to face her. "No, never mind. I don't want to know. Probably deciphering some scrap of parchment that says all women should walk on their hands or they're not pure enough or something." Gretchen rolled her eyes, laughing as she did. Jamie smiled.

"You were trying to get my attention for something?" he asked.

"Yeah. I'd like your help."

Two years ago, when they'd been assigned this small office in the Humanities building, he wouldn't have thought he'd still be sharing an office with a bleached blonde, spiky haired lesbian with sleeves of tattoos who swore violently at her computer with disturbing regularity. 

She was a Early Modern British historian specializing in the cultural shifts before and after the English civil war with a focus on women writers and thinkers. He was a sheltered Scriptures scholar from a fundamentalist background who'd been taught that homosexuality was a sin against God. They were very different. And yet, somehow, they'd become friends. 

He still didn't know how Gretchen had put up with him that first year. She liked to say he was a freshly starched graduate of one of the strictest Christian universities in the country and she was a hot dyke from Sin City, California. Jamie would have put it in different words, but she was right. They had nothing in common, and yet, she was his closest— no, his only— friend in grad school.

"What is it?"

"I need you to read something for me."

"Sure, of course. But why not ask Erica?" Gretchen's girlfriend did most of her proofreading.

"It's not the kind of thing she could give much useful feedback on yet. I need someone who has some kind of background in religious history."

"Uh, the 17th century history part isn't really my area."

"I know. But I trust your opinion. And I know you know something about Protestant history."

"What's it about?" Jamie asked, curious now. He and Gretchen occasionally talked about their areas of research but he wasn't sure what she was working on specifically.