Calendar Girl

"Or just ask Mikey down there to pose with you," Erin leered. "Maybe it can be more of a trick-or-treat?"

"Knock it off," Jenn said mildly as Olivia winked at me again. I hadn't noticed her much, beyond her thick red hair. We'd only had the one class together, and she was a first-year. "Mike's being very nice to agree to this, girls. He doesn't need you to give him a hard time."

"It's fine." I spoke up not because I had anything to say, but because I thought I should. "I'm not offended."

"Get it?" Erin's eyes were glittering. "A hard time?" The table once again burst into a series of snorts, and I saw sexy little Meg Ringo looking at me with a tight-lipped smile. My cock lurched a little in my cargo shorts, and for the first time the reality came home to me: I was about to see all these girls' asses. Their legs. If the pics I'd found of the Australian calendar was any indication, I'd also see a lot of sideboob and, more than likely, a hint of mound.

Fuck. I wondered how many months would feature little Meg.

"Who's taking the pictures, Jenn?" Aimee never smiled much. She was all business, a perfect public library director. She was on her phone, and when I leaned out to see what she was glancing at I saw search images of nude calendars. "Some of these are really creative."

"The Art Department has all kinds of people who photograph nudes. I know one of the grad assistants. He said he'd hook me up with someone."

"This is legal, right?" Brandi didn't seem concerned, just curious.

Jenn nodded vigorously. "Chelsea's sister is a lawyer. We're fine as long as we shoot on private or university property and don't show anything obscene. No, like, nipples. Or vaginas." She glanced down the table at me and colored slightly. "Or, like, Mike's penis." Every head suddenly pivoted toward me, and most of the gazes looked like they were thinking. About my dick. I just blinked.

"Or his balls, it seems," Aimee observed thoughtfully, scanning once again through the Australian pics. She frowned. "There's a group in Scotland that does this, too. Also veterinary students."

"What is it about vets?" Rebecca fretted. "Are they, like, always horny?"

"No, these shots aren't really sexual." Aimee was squinting closely at her screen. She liked to be thorough, I'd always noticed. "Just... naked." She flicked her thumb, taking in the photos rapid-fire. "Underboob. Side boob. Lots of ass. Plenty of strategically placed props, blocking all the illegal bits." She brightened. "Ooh. A kilt."

The room went silent, everyone thinking about what we'd see. Margaret, a first-year, maybe the boniest person I'd ever met, looked pensively around but said nothing. Beside her, Rebecca tugged self-consciously at her bra through her shirt. "It'll be fine." Jenn consulted her notebook. "If you're uncomfortable, just sign up for February. It's a lingerie shoot, not nude."

"Can I sign up for all twelve?" Olivia grinned, and the tension ebbed a little.

"Uh, sure." Jenn shrugged. "Or none of them. No problem. We also need people to help out, do set dressing, hold onto the bathrobes, stuff like that. Everyone can help out, even if you don't want to show anything." She smiled. "I'm hoping this will be fun, ladies. And it'll sell like a motherfucker," she added emphatically, glancing around at everyone. I could only agree. Nobody at this table was ugly. "And I'll find a female photographer, Margaret. You'd asked about that last meeting?"

"Thanks." Margaret didn't talk much. She wanted to be an elementary school librarian, which staggered me. I couldn't imagine her around kids, many of them unruly.

"Whatever you don't feel like showing? No biggie. We'll just use props." Jenn scanned her notes, then looked up and smiled a little more broadly. "Should be great, right? Yeah?" She made eye contact with everyone until she got the nods she was looking for, and then shrugged. "Perfect! So Chelsea wanted me to tell you to text her all your sizes, for the February one. Lingerie. She's getting her work to donate the clothes. That'll be our first shoot, to break the ice." She nodded at me. "Mike, you don't need to be there for that."

"Come on!" Erin was grinning. "He can show up in boxers." She glanced over at me. "Or briefs? Whatever."

"I don't have anything that could possibly match up to what you guys would wear," I smiled, holding my hands up deferentially. Chelsea worked at Secret Whispers. They'd be looking like prostitutes, probably. "Count me out of that one. When's my shoot?" I asked Jenn.

She nodded toward Erin. "I'll see when the photographer's available, but the March photo is Erin's idea. So she can tell you about it before we break up here. Then, when the day comes?" She shrugged. "Just show up and, you know, get nude." That got a catcall from Olivia, but everyone else was packing their stuff up. "I just want to recognize Mike, girls," Jenn called. "He's being a very good sport about this." There was a scattering of applause, and I waved back at them as I put my stuff in my backpack. I had my next class at four, and I was hoping to boogie back to my apartment and get a quick nap.

"Thank me later," came a voice from just above me, and when I looked up I saw Erin looking gleefully back down at me. "I got you involved in this bullshit." Erin was a big girl, not especially beautiful, but sexy in that raw and earthy way that some confident girls are sexy.

"Yeah," I shot back. I'd always liked Erin, even though she was nothing like me. "Thanks for putting my ass out there for the world to see." Something else occurred to me. "This is going to show up on the internet eventually, too. My mom will see it."

"She's seen your ass before," she laughed, pulling out the chair next to me. Erin's enthusiasm always made me smile. She was tall, and she liked to wear low-cut shirts that showed off her impressive cleavage. She had just as much ass, and usually framed it in a tight pair of jeans. "It'll be fine, Mikey. Nothing scandalous."

'Yeah." Olivia plunked herself down in the next seat, then flung her feet up onto the table in place of mine. "Totally classy," she giggled.

I smiled at her. She had a reputation for going batshit crazy at bars on weekends, though I'd never seen it. "Except for the boobs." Hers were small; I smiled gamely to make sure she wouldn't be offended, but I needn't have bothered.

"These?" she asked innocently, arching her back to what had to be a painful degree. "You don't think these are classy?"

"Well," I shrugged, "I'm sure my girlfriend won't think so." I joined in her laugh. "She's probably going to come to the shoot to make sure I don't do anything stupid."

"Like strip your clothes off and pose with us?" Erin seemed unimpressed. "It's a charity calendar. We're raising money for library therapy dogs. She'll be fine." She glanced over at Olivia. "So, our idea is a play on that song, the old one. You know, 'anything you can do, I can do better?' You know that song?"

"Of course. I'm not a total idiot." I nodded. "Irving Berlin."

"Who?"

I blinked. "Uh, the composer."

"Oh." Erin fluttered her fingers dismissively. "Well, our picture is sort of a pun on that. The caption is going to be Spring cleaning in the library, and some people carry more books than others."

"We're going to, like, subvert gender roles," Olivia piped in, with the unconsciously exasperating ivory-tower language grad students love. "We'll all be in a library, moving books. Like, how women always need to ask guys to move books? Right?"

"Sure." It sounded like a dumb picture, but I wasn't going to say so.

"Right. Well, the idea is that Erin asks you to help her by schlepping some books, and you do it, but then I come along with, like, a bigger pile of books. And you look all ashamed because I'm showing you up." Olivia's smile threatened to crack her cheeks. "It'll be so fucking cool!"

"I see." The joke, clearly, was that Olivia Brewer was barely five feet tall. I'm over six. "So how many books am I carrying?

"Enough to cover your junk," Erin chimed in pleasantly, glancing down at my lap.

"Ah." I swallowed. "And Olivia?"

"Enough to cover mine," the redhead winked again. "Top and bottom, right? So, that many more books." I nodded.

"It'll be up to the photographer to, you know, position everything so that the whole fucking world will know you're naked," Erin finished. "Easy-peasy."

I cleared my throat. "Cool," I managed. This all seemed surprisingly simple. "And, uh, you? Are you in clothes, Erin?"

"Mikey," Erin explained patiently, "nobody's in clothes." She shrugged. "Everyone else's ideas seemed sort of lame, honestly," she added, much more quietly. The room was emptying slowly. "Liv and I? We wanted something more dynamic."

"We wanted a guy," Olivia snapped.

"Right, I guess," Erin giggled. "We wanted a guy."

I stood up and hitched my backpack over one shoulder. "Why not Jeff Reagan?"

"Oh," Erin shrugged, as if the answer was obvious, "we talked it over. We don't really want to be naked with Jeff." She grinned slowly at me, and I know I was bright red. And when I looked over at Olivia, she was just giving me her mischievous little smirk.

* * *

"Dude." Reagan leaned across a couple of seats a few days later in our Cataloguing class. "I heard something totally weird."

"Mmm?" I was frowning over my resume. Library science is a tiny little field, but the good jobs aren't exactly growing on trees. Especially for me, an archivist. There weren't many museums hiring, at least not locally.

"The Girls." He was watching me carefully. "They're doing, like, a calendar? For this year's fundraiser?"

I kept my eyes on my laptop screen. "Not a book fair again?"

"No, man." I'd been wondering about this conversation ever since Jenn had approached me. Obviously, Reagan would find out about the calendar eventually, and just as obviously he'd see that I was in it and he wasn't. "A calendar."

"They said something to me the other day, about helping out," I shrugged. "I put in twenty bucks, but they weren't very specific."

"Twenty?" He sounded relieved. "That's it? Good. Because I don't want to be in, like, a calendar, man." I controlled my face very carefully. He obviously had no idea what kind of calendar it was.

"You're telling me." I sat awkwardly, very conscious of the text I'd gotten from Jenn just before coming into the classroom. The one telling me I should show up tomorrow at the Old Campus Library at seven in the morning, ready for my shoot. Get plenty of sleep! she'd ended, on a chipper note with a grinning emoji. I forced a smile for Reagan. "The Girls are pretty crazy, man."

* * *

Seven am came early, especially since I wanted to take a really good shower. I'd been unsure about my grooming, and I'd debated texting Jenn about it, but eventually I'd just asked Erin instead during our Ethics class the day before. She blinked. "What?"

"Like, should I shave or anything?" I was trying to be quiet, but Erin didn't seem to have "quiet" in her vocabulary. She burst out laughing, right there in the back of the room, drawing an irritated glance from the professor.

"How furry are you?" she demanded, loudly chewing a stick of gum.

"You saw me at that pool party, right?"

She scowled. "Dude, I was drunk as shit during that." She reached decisively over, right there in class, and dug her hand quickly under my shirt and up my chest, tickling me; I shrank back against the seat, but her hand just stayed there, cool on my body, her smile growing. "Nah. Feels fine to me, Mikey." She pulled her hand out, not without giving my chest hair a light tug. "I like 'em hairy."

I watched out of the corner of my eye as she calmly got her notebook out, wondering whether she could take a joke. "I can't believe you did that," I admitted. "I feel like I've been objectified. I think I might raise a complaint with the University's sexual-harassment office."

She gave me a withering glance. "Spare me, Mikey. At seven o'clock tomorrow, you're going to be pulling your package out on camera with me." She held her look to make sure she'd gotten her point across, then smirked and fingered the hem of her shirt. "You can reciprocate, if you wanna. That way, we're even-stevens."

"I never should have gotten myself involved in this," I sighed, and I felt the same way as I walked over to Old Campus in the early morning next day, all scrubbed and feeling chipper. I had wrestled my rebellious hair into a careful tousle. I'd been careful not to touch anything on the subway. As I walked I kept an eye out for Jaqui, or at least for a text from her; I'd told her when and where to meet, but seven am was very early for her.

I was half hoping she'd sleep through this.

The side door was unlocked, the one near the History department, and I slipped in to find Jenn there waiting for me. She smiled brightly when she saw me. "Hey, Mike!" She seemed relieved I'd shown up. "We're still waiting for Olivia, but the photographer is here. Come meet her."

She was in her everpresent yoga pants under a loose concert t-shirt, this one advertising a long-gone summer tour by a band I knew. I nodded down at her chest as we marched along toward the stacks. "They broke up, didn't they?"

"What?" She blinked, then followed my gaze down to her tits. "Oh! The Libertines? Kinda-sorta. I think they're back together now, but do you ever really know?" She glanced shyly at me. "Are you a fan?"

"Kinda-sorta," I smiled, and she relaxed a little. "How'd the lingerie thing go?"

"Fuck, Mike! It was so cool! The photographer is amazing." She was pointing me past the sorting carts. "Through there. I'm going to head back and wait for Liv."

"Thanks. Oh! And can you leave a sign or something? My girlfriend is planning on coming by to watch."

"No shit." She glanced unreadably over at me. "My boyfriend doesn't trust me either, even though I'm only posing with The Girls." She swiped a loose twist of hair out of her eyes, then nodded at me and headed back to the side door. "Oh!" she called back over her shoulder. "Photographer's name is Stacia. She's in charge."

"Sure thing." I smelled coffee first, even before I heard the clack of equipment and a low hum of voices, so I just followed my nose around a corner near the nonfiction section to find a short, angry woman with spiky whitened hair snapping at Rebecca.

"Look, just go stand in the corner for awhile. You're not helping." Erin was off to one side in a pink terrycloth bathrobe, sipping from a travel mug; she gave me a despondent early-morning wave, then leaned over and muttered something to the angry woman. "What?" At once I found myself skewered by her eyes, dark and snarly under black eyebrows. "Oh. The penis has arrived."

I cleared my throat. "Uh, hi. I'm Mike."

"Put your robe on. I want to get the show on the road." I blinked, then looked over at Erin. Who grinned back.

"Where do I get the robes?" I asked stupidly, starting to feel like a fool.

"How the fuck should I know? From behind your bathroom door, probably." She busied herself with some sort of cable, leaving me to Erin's drawl.

"Wait," she giggled. "You didn't bring a bathrobe?"

"Um."

She threw back her head and laughed, and when I looked back over at the photographer I realized her glare had worsened. "Get your clothes off," she demanded. "I want to see what I'm working with."

"Uh, I don't have a robe. I'll just undress when it's time to get the pictures."

"Yeah. Okay. Then your skin will have marks from your fucking waistband. Nope. Come on. Sooner you get your clothes off, the sooner I can shoot." Erin was grinning openly at me now, and even Rebecca was hiding a smile.

Of course nobody had told me to bring a robe. And of course I hadn't figured out I needed one. And of course I didn't even own a fucking bathrobe. Slowly, I reached for the bottom of my shirt. Stacia was nodding. "It's not like we're not all going to see you in all your glory, anyway. Come on."

I looked once more, and quite helplessly, at Erin, then sighed and started to take my shirt off. I'm not all that self-conscious about my body, but usually when I strip it's because I'm with someone I want to fuck. This? This was more like the doctor's office. With spectators.

Vaguely, as I started on my belt buckle, my brain started to wonder irrelevantly whether my cock would come out all stunted and shriveled. I thought about turning my back, or edging behind a bookshelf to get a little privacy, but Stacia was right: I'd be stark naked in front of these people for quite awhile. What was the point?

And so, with a convulsive shove at my waist, I sent my jeans and boxers crashing to the floor.

All three women stared, immediately but briefly, at my dick, then quickly looked away. I gulped and glanced down, relieved to find that I wasn't at all shriveled. In fact, I was in pretty good form down there, my balls hanging extra-low beneath a cock that was its normal self. I drew myself up and was just about to sigh with relief, when Stacia started over to stand in front of me.

"See this shit? Look down." Her finger on my skin nearly made me jump as she swiped a fingernail over the reddened, corrugated marks my boxers had made around my waist. "This'll fade in about twenty minutes. Just relax until it does." She looked frankly down at my penis, then straight into my eyes. "See? It's not so bad." And then she was marching back over to her equipment, barking at Rebecca.

This time, when I found Erin's face again, she was nodding knowingly. "Well," she said quietly, "here we are." She sucked down some more coffee. "Now if only fucking Liv would show up..."

My phone was vibrating in my jeans pocket, and I squatted down with absolutely no dignity to dig it out. As expected. "Uh, my girlfriend's on her way," I told no one in particular.

I'm not sure what I expected out of the pause that followed, but Erin's voice was very dry. "Maybe she can get naked, too."

I stood up, fighting a strong urge to keep my hand over my dick, and forced a smile. "Somehow, I doubt it. Public nudity isn't really her thing."

"There's a first time for everything." She was making sure to look at my face, I was grateful to find. "Like, this is probably the first time you've done something like this, huh?"

I was just opening my mouth to answer when I heard a voice full of laughter from behind me. "Why, look! It's a guy's butt!"

Olivia, it seemed, had arrived. Once more I felt an obscure need to cover myself as I turned around. She was in old-school sweatpants, the waistband rolled carelessly down, and a tanktop with no bra. Her nipples stared at me, and I tried not to stare back; not that she would have cared, seemingly, her eyes riveted to my penis. "Well. Hello, Mike." Her grin was crafty. Jenn stood beside her, making a big effort not to stare at me.

"Hello yourself." My voice came out even. I was proud of myself. She was already stepping out of her sandals.

"Olivia, right?" Stacia still sounded deeply pissed. "Don't be late again, okay? Get your clothes off. We're burning daylight."

"You say the sweetest things," Olivia purred in reply, but she was already stripping with an easy self-confidence that I envied. Not that she had anything at all to be ashamed of; her body was a tight, compact little bundle, all toned either from days in the gym or just the fact that she was still just twenty-two. I tried hard not to gawk as she revealed her firm little tits, the pale nipples prominent. Her vagina was a perfectly symmetrical slit below a little triangle of bright orange pubic hair, so different from what I was used to seeing on Jacqui. When I returned my gaze to her eyes, she was watching my reaction as she undressed. I felt myself redden when she put on her craftiest grin. "It's okay. You can look."