Twenty years ago. The turn of the current century. Setting: The United States of America. Place: The Deep South.
No broadband internet connections. No text messages. No Amazon empire. No pandemic. No smartphones. No iPhones. No 5G. No Kayne West or Beyonce. No Metoo Movement or Black Lives Matter. No Barack Obama. No Trump Administration. No Capitol riot. No cancel culture. No emphasis on white supremacy. No removal of Confederate statues.
For a time, a brief time in hindsight, young adults met each other inside AOL chatrooms. America Online had an almost-monopoly over the-then nascent Internet. Because it had no competition, it could charge whatever it wanted, and many people, including myself, ran up huge bills that, as poor college students, our parents had no choice but to pay. It was also an excellent way for lonely older teenagers like me to find fast friends and develop long distance relationships. Some were purely romantic, some both romantic and sexual, and some merely platonic.
We met each other at the age of eighteen. We were both in college, living at home at the time. She was six months older than me. We were both very intelligent but cursed with bipolar disorder. Our attraction was immediate and heavily passionate. We would spend hours talking on the phone or online to each other, which quickly morphed to phone sex. She lived on the West Coast, and me a full 3,000 miles due East. But what we felt for each other was very real, no matter what the nay-sayers said.
She'd never had a boyfriend before. Her body image was not especially supple and secure, because she was several pounds overweight and hated herself for it. The fact never bothered me, but it tormented her. Though we confided everything to ourselves, her defenses were always higher than perhaps they needed to be. We should have slept together long before we did. She made me wait three long years before we met in person. Distance was always stated as the reason why, but we'd both had plenty of money, more than enough to make it happen.
I will always remember seeing her walk off of the plane, clumsily bumping into the next person to follow her down the stairs, apologizing gracefully to him, then in the next breath identifying me as her lover, and embracing me with great force, whereupon we kissed for several moments. She knew who I was instantaneously, as I was deeply in love with her, and my eyes followed every move she made. I have rarely felt such joy as I did in that moment.
We chatted energetically, as we made our way from the inside of the airport to the outside parking garage. It was a typically humid, hell-hot August day, and the two of us couldn't wait to escape the high heat by means of the car's air conditioning. On my person, I had a small amount of pot for us to enjoy once we checked into the hotel room for which she had made reservations some weeks before. I'd made sure to tell her to get a room where smoking was allowed.
Neither of us could keep our hands off of each other. There had been so much build-up, so many fantasies unfulfilled. We were headed straight for the bedroom and might well have spent days making love. We entered our hotel room and began making out. We hastily began dry humping and feeling each up through our clothing. Seeing and sensing my erection, she cupped my cock and balls in her hands as I vigorously pushed the palms of my hands against her C-cup breasts.
We didn't want to wear each other out too quickly, so we took a quick smoke break. I realized, to my dismay, that the pot I'd been sold wasn't terrible strong. But it was the only disappointing thing about the whole day. I got a little paranoid that we might be detected, but she told me, gently, that I had nothing to worry about. Her attitude removed my fears, and we resumed making love.
As we made out, she had a piece of hard candy. She thought she would try to be smooth and slide it sensuously into my mouth. Not anticipating it, it entered my mouth, whereupon I almost choked. We both couldn't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation.
