Chapter 5: Nora Becomes a Jornalist
I put this in Romance because It describes a few incidents and conversations during the beginning of Paul and Nora's sophomore year in 1974. The point of this is to show how they relate to each other after their first two months together.
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One day in early September, the time came for Nora to join
The Salient
newspaper at City College. She was going to attend the first staff meeting of the new semester with me.
I had joined nearly a year earlier in the fall of my freshman year. In October they ran a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted ad. Jeff Kimmel and I -- we knew each other in high school -- discussed the ad as we waited for our art history class to begin. One line caught my attention: "If you like working with weird people,
The Salient
is for you." I thought I was a bit weird, or maybe unconventional, so at that moment I decided to join.
It styled itself as the "counter-cultural" (however that was defined) publication of the five college papers. It seemed like it might be more fun than the stodgy
The Campus
which had been around since 1907 or some such antique date. Besides, compared to high school, I found that college had a lot of unstructured time between classes to fill up.
The final factor was that
The Salient
seemed to be the place where I would finally meet some pliable girls who were willing to drop their panties for me. It turned out that there were no such girls there. There were only about a half-dozen female staffers at any one time, and they were either hooked up with other guys or completely indifferent to me.
The wild girl I was looking for was Nora Meara, the part-time campus hooker who sat right next to me in my European history course while mostly ignoring me. Then, as I described earlier, through a series of unexpected events we wound up as lovers at the end of our freshman year.
We were an unlikely couple, perhaps, but for the first time, I felt satisfied with my romantic situation. She gave me plenty of sex and, as a bonus, she was quite kinky too.
She was willing to join
The Salient
because she was also now bored and at loose ends at City College. Now that her hooking career was over, she could get serious about her studies. She had a temp job at an office downtown, but all that still left her with free time to fill.
I was looking forward to surprising everyone and showing her off to the rest of the staff.
Hey guys, look at who I met at the beginning of the summer.
Nora was willing to go along with my little game.
I hadn't asked her to wear anything in particular for the staff meeting, but when I met her on that day on the first floor of Finley Hall I saw that she had dressed up for the occasion. For the first time, she was wearing her business outfit: a dark gray suit, nylon stockings, black high heels, the whole bit.
Her skirt was tight enough that it showed off her slender but shapely ass. For a bit of color, her dark blonde hair was held down by a pink band across the front of her head. The only item I had seen before were her steel-rimmed glasses.
"I look great, don't I?"
I didn't want to compliment her too much and have it go to her head. She already had more than a touch of vanity.
"It certainly is different."
"Just different?"
I said, "You're going to drag a compliment out of me if it kills you. All right, it's intriguing."
"You said that about me before, up at Bear Mountain."
She had a very good memory. I decided to give her a couple of taps on her behind to demonstrate my approval in a nonverbal way.
"So, you like patting my fanny?"
"I've done a lot more than pat it at times."
"Oh yeah, that's definitely true!"
Then I said, "Nora, would you hold my arm as we go into the office?"
"Sure, of course, I'll do that for you."
On the third floor, we went through the open office door just as I had always imagined it. As I expected, everyone looked at us. It was mostly males there, but four of the five female staffers were present too.
It had been nearly a year since I had joined myself, and no one had seen me with a girl and I had never even talked about dating one. Now I was arriving with this well-dressed, sexy girl holding my arm. We had caught them off-guard.
I said, "Remember how I said I had found a new staff member? Well, meet Nora."
She raised a hand, "Hi guys!"
Of course, everyone had assumed I would bring in some dude. I think what went through everyone's mind was,
is he actually balling her?
Yes, people, I definitely am, sometimes in this very room.
However, no one said anything.
She broke away from me and looked around the office as if she had never seen it before. I was reminded of Bettie Davis examining some seedy dive bar. I was standing near the back of the room, enjoying her show. She was in her confident, even brash mode. Her heels made her five-foot-seven height seem even taller.
Nora sashayed over to the windows, swaying her hips inside her tight skirt. She didn't have the widest ass in the world, but it certainly looked very good at that point.
The windows were completely bare, and she put her arms akimbo and examined them. "Guys, you should think about putting some shades and curtains up here." One could see all the way to the State office building on 125th Street. There were still no responses from my fellow journalists. Then she went over to the worn-out red couch. We had had our first screw on that piece of furniture, and several more since then.
"You should also all chip in and get a new sofa."
Then Frank, one of our professional virgins (well, I had been one too), said, "I'm Frank, and I'm the business manager here..."
"Hi, Frank, nice to meet you."
"Anyway, we do have to rely on student activity fee funds."
"I didn't say that; I said you yourselves should buy it."
Jeff, another guy starved for pussy, offered, "Sofas are pretty expensive."
"Then maybe you should check a Salvation Army store."
