Living with her Ex-Boyfriend

Michelle Carlson was going braless today.

Just because she could.

She’d gotten up at six thirty as usual, taken a quick shower, and then stood staring down into her top dresser drawer for a couple of minutes, sifting through the random mix of bras and panties. She had a few sets of sexy underwear that she almost never wore. Then she had some midlevel stuff that was pretty and flattering but still wearable. She also had a lot of basic cotton panties in various colors, and she grabbed a pair of blue ones and pulled them on.

No one was going to see her without clothes today. Or anytime in the foreseeable future. She didn’t want to exert the extra effort it required to wear something other than cotton.

But bras were never comfortable. She picked out her oldest one, worn thin from use over the years. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t have underwire. The straps were so stretched they tended to slip off her shoulders.

But she didn’t even feel like putting that one on today, so she dropped it back in with the others, closed the drawer, and reached for an oversized black T-shirt.

She wore B-cup bras (and never threatened to spill out of them), so she wasn’t particularly large. When she checked herself out in the long mirror on the wall, she was pleased that the black shirt did a lot to hide her boob situation. When she pulled on a pair of thick black leggings, her breasts jiggled in the mirror, but it wasn’t particularly noticeable.

She normally kept a sweatshirt on all day anyway because the classrooms and labs on campus were always cold.

Feeling a silly thrill of rebellion, she pulled a sweatshirt on over her head.

There.

No one could see anything beneath the heavy fabric. There was absolutely no way even the most obnoxiously sexist guys in her program could tell what was happening beneath it.

She was going braless today.

Maybe other women took risks like this regularly, but Michelle never had. She hadn’t gone out in public without a bra since she’d started wearing them. She was boring that way. A rule follower. A good girl. She kept her boobs properly holstered and her voice pleasantly soft.

She was raised that way, and it came naturally to her. The only time she’d fallen off the good-girl pedestal was during the spring semester of her freshman year, when she’d started dating the wrong guy and had ended up failing all her classes. It had taken her two years to recover from that humiliation, and she still cringed when she remembered how mortifying it had been to disappoint everyone who believed in her. She’d had to move back home and live with her parents in Richmond. She’d had to take a waitressing job at a local restaurant because they expected her to help pay for her expenses. Her father had been forced to call on every contact he had at Virginia Tech so she could return to school a year later, but he’d insisted she change her major.

No more playing around with an education degree, which was nothing but useless fluff (his words) and wouldn’t lead her to a good job in the future.

She had to do something worthwhile now. Take life and college seriously. Electrical engineering (the same program he’d done himself). Work hard and be the good girl her parents had raised her to be.

She was twenty-four now and had moved on to the master’s program. She had to work eighty hours a week to keep up with her studies, and she hated every minute of it.

She’d wanted to be a math teacher. She didn’t want to be an electrical engineer.

She knew she should want to complete her degree. It sounded like a brave, boundary-pushing discipline for a woman. She wanted to be strong and smart and succeed in a field that wasn’t welcoming to women. Her family, friends, and professors were all depending on her to make it through and begin an impressive career.

She hated it though. Her dream had always been to teach math in high school.

But it was too late to change it now. After she finished this semester, she’d have only one more year left in her program. She’d be able to get a really good job. She’d make plenty of money.

She’d be the person everyone expected her to be. She wouldn’t disappoint them again.

Her whole life had shifted because of one stupid semester, one stupid relationship. And now her one act of rebellion was safely hidden from the world beneath a long, thick gray sweatshirt.

When she stepped out of her bedroom and into the short hallway of the large loft apartment she shared with three others, she paused, hearing something she couldn’t immediately identify.

Some sort of thumping.

Michelle always got up earliest since she was naturally an early riser and she was always afraid of getting behind on her work. The two other bedroom doors off the hallway were closed, and the lights in the large common room—living room, dining room, and kitchen combined—were still off. No one else was up yet.

But that thumping.

She stood, her hand still on the doorknob, and tried to place where it was coming from.

When she’d figured it out, she flushed hot.