Julie here with another story from my time as a cadet at a Senior Military College in the US. So this one jumps ahead a bit in my cadetship, but I wanted to share since one of you guys asked to hear this story...how I went from getting yelled at by my Cadre corporal to sleeping with him at his Ring Figure.
Before we get started, Ring Figure is a huge deal for us. It takes place in the fall of your junior year right around Thanksgiving, and is a super formal, traditional southern ball. Girls wear floor length white gowns (unless you're a female cadet), and male dates wear tuxedos. All the cadets wear starched white pants or long white skirts along with the grey wool jackets with gold buttons and embroidery that you see when you think traditional Military College uniforms. There's a dinner with your class on Thursday night, Friday you get your Ring in a formal ceremony, Friday night there's the ball, football game Saturday afternoon and a
pretty wild party Saturday night. All in all a crazy weekend to celebrate a huge milestone in your cadetship.
All throughout the first half of my freshman year, Corporal Hayes was the bane of my existence. He was my squad leader, my room inspector, the guy who yelled at me about my rifle drill and nitpicked every out of place piece of my uniform. He was also in my major, and thanks to a fair bit of AP credit on my part, was in most of my classes. There was no escape from his scrutinizing eye. But in moments of class I got to see behind the serious Cadre mask and saw a guy that talked about hiking on weekends, shooting guns back home, and being a pretty fun guy...not that this was in conversation directly with me, but what you hear in his conversations and when he talked to the whole class, he just seemed pretty down to earth.
Just after Christmas freshman year, you
finish up the initial training and become a full fledged member of the corps of cadets. Your Cadre go from mean instructors to chill dudes that take accountability at formation. Corporal Hayes became Nate from calculus overnight. There's still restrictions about freshmen and upperclassmen relationships, but I was quickly part of his study group and on Facebook we started to get to see parts of eachother's lives that were a mystery before.
We kept in touch over the summer, talking a few times a week about vacations, summer jobs and just random selfies, being goofy kids, not serious military cadets, and by August, I was actually pretty excited to see Nate and out friend group from our major. Yes, Taylor and I were intimate with eachother by this point, but neither of us were looking to be "out" or in anything committed. So returning to school to a handsome guy that could either be a great friend or a romantic interest turned into an exciting
prospect for me.
Nate's family had been attending our school for generations. It's just what they did. Graduate highschool, go to our school, go into business in VA and sometimes into local and state politics. Nate's family owned a little cabin/bunkhouse outside of town on a decent sized plot of woods with a stream out back. It was little more than 2 bunk rooms and small master bedroom, with an open common area that flowed into a kitchen and bathroom on the end, but it became our go to hang out spot to get away on weekends, especially after football games when his parents would come up and take us all out to dinner and then spend time st the cabin until curfew called us back.
Around late September, Nate the topic of Ring Figure dates became a frequent topic of conversation in our group, as the boys all tried to find girls to go to the ball with them (it's not that difficult, but they're someone
that will be in all your ring figure photos forever so you don't want a random girl off the street). One night working on homework, Nate asked me if I had any friends at other colleges that would be willing to go with him (I'd already hooked up 2 guys I was in ROTC with with friends I went to highschool with). I told him that unfortunately I didn't, but as I was a sophomore not a junior, I didn't have any plans that night.