Chapter 2
Teal~
While a lot of people would argue that I took life too seriously, that wasn’t necessarily true.Yes, I took my job and the safety of the students at Robards Elementary seriously, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t know how to laugh or have a good time.Because of the nature of our jobs, teachers’ reputations were a very delicate thing, and so I always did my best to act decently and professionally.
There was also the fact that I’d been raised in a household where respect and decorum had been a big thing, and it hadn’t been due to my Asian heritage only.While my mother, Linh Cromwell, had been raised with a traditional Asian upbringing, my father, Bruce Cromwell, had been raised in a family of military men, and so even though my father hadn’t followed in their footsteps professionally, respect and decency had still come with the package.
Now, while I loved my parents very much, I couldn’t ignore the fact that they were a bit...stifling.My mother was a seamstress, and my father worked for the city in the waterworks department, and they’d always led very quiet, peaceful, unassuming lives.Since as long as I could remember, they’d always been a very simple couple, never choosing flash over substance.Solid was probably the best way to describe both of my parents, and that was a good thing, even if it did sound boring.
Nevertheless, seeing my parents so uninterested in anything outside our home had driven my thirst for knowledge and growth.I hadn’t wanted my life to be limited to the inside of my house only, and so that’s where my need to constantly learn had come from.Absorbing knowledge had become my drug, and I’d been all over it as a child.
I’d also been lucky enough to recognize the difference between real academia and the nonsense that people put on the internet.My childhood had been spent in libraries, classrooms, museums, and whenever I had gotten on the internet, I hadn’t used social media as a source for my education.Instead, I’d done real research, educating myself with facts and verified articles.
At any rate, all that dedication to detail had paid off when I had graduated from high school with a perfect GPA, earning me a full ride to several colleges.So, with education being my passion, it’d been a no-brainer to get a degree in teaching, but my focus had shifted during my junior year of college when a little girl had changed the entire trajectory of my life.
Like most college students, I’d been at the laundromat when a mother had come in with her young daughter, and while the mother had been dealing with the burden of dirty laundry, the little girl had sat down next to me, and I’d been certain that she was going to want to play or something, but that hadn’t been the case.Instead, she had asked me about the book that I’d been reading, and when I had explained that it was a textbook, she’d broken my heart by saying that she didn’t read well, but that she wished that she could because then she could live somewhere else every day.
After that encounter, I had chosen to add childhood development to my school load, and though the additional work had almost driven me insane, when it’d been all said and done, I had earned two degrees, and I currently had the job of my dreams.
I was also still friends with that little girl.After spending a couple of hours reading to her, I had gotten to know her mother, and whenever I’d needed to go to the library for something, I had taken her with me, another thing that had been a bit rough to juggle, but still manageable.Now, all these years later, I was thirty-four, and Wendy was twenty-three, having just graduated from college last year, and she had a degree in Historical Literature.
So, whenever I told people that I loved my job, I wasn’t lying.Being a support structure for children felt important to me, and I couldn’t think of anything else that I’d rather be doing.In my opinion, kids needed more than to just learn how to read or do math, and I wanted to be someone who could offer that to them.I wanted to help them grow in both intelligence and emotion, and I imagined that what I did was pretty close to raising children, though I had none of my own, nor was it a 24-hour gig.
The only downside to my job was the puritan expectation that teachers were expected to uphold.While I understood the necessity, not being able to express yourself freely really was something that so many people took for granted.For eight hours a day, I had to make sure that my professional face was always front and center, and there were days when it took a lot out of me.
Like today, for instance.
Now, while I didn’t have children of my own, that wasn’t on purpose.While I had spent my twenties establishing my career, that wasn’t to say that I hadn’t also dated, because I’d had.Like most people, I had plenty of social experiences under my belt.
Nonetheless, those relationships hadn’t lasted long, but that was because of my restlessness.While the couple of serious boyfriends in my past had been great guys, they’d been too perfect for someone as imperfect as I was.I also wasn’t putting myself down, though it could sound like that.On the contrary, this was about being honest with myself whenever I looked in the mirror.On the surface, I was the girl that any guy would be proud to take home to meet his parents.However, under the surface, I had some very dark issues, and that truth had always made it hard for any of my relationships to work out.
See, my sexual proclivities ran towards the more adventurous side of what was acceptable by society standards, and while what I was curious about wasn’t completely unheard of, it was hard to find a man that was confident and secure enough to entertain such a thing, outside paid porn actors.Sure, lots of couples were into swinging, but I was hypocritical enough to admit that I’d hate to see my boyfriend with another woman, no matter what got me off.
The truth of the matter was that I wanted to experience an airtight gangbang, but I knew enough to know that not many men would be okay with something like that.Not only would I be asking the man to watch me get railed by other men, but if I wanted him to participate, there’d be a lot of accidental touching that a lot of straight men wouldn’t be comfortable with.
So, in a bid not to ‘settle’, I dated casually, never pushing for more, and while I could enjoy the sex whenever it entered the picture, it was never enough, even if the guy made me cum.If only for one night, I wanted to experience some serious debauchery, but being a teacher had me paranoid to try it.
