After last night's and this morning shenanigans, I started to worry a little bit. Oh, I didn't care that the seven guys in the dorm suite across the hall were all watching me shower and chatting me up while I was naked in their bathroom; most of them were showing off a bit, too, doubtlessly hoping to get lucky, but none of them did. The problem was Jim. He had seen me naked in my own dorm suite, when I walked to my room from the bathroom after a shower, which turned me on a bit, and he, and everyone else, had seen me nude at the Phi Sig party, but everyone wound up naked there. That included Larry, the chapter President, and my now former boyfriend, who seemed to enjoy the party but had a problem with a show-off girlfriend in the aftermath. But Jim had been seeing Jamie, one of my suite mates, and while I'm not sure just how close they are, it didn't seem like too good an idea to show off in front of a friend's boyfriend. I didn't want to do anything to mess over Jamie, and I wasn't interested in Jim as a boyfriend either. Sleeping over in Butch's bed while Butch was sleeping with Annette, my roommate, seemed like a practical and fun solution, but maybe I shouldn't have carried it as far as I did.
The trouble is that I liked being naked and I liked showing off. Prior to the story about Danielle Keaton, the girl at Coachella University out in California who just decided to start going to college naked, I had shown off a little. My boobs were small, a-cups, and I didn't need a bra for anything other than sports. My wardrobe consisted of a lot of tank tops and sleeveless shirts with large armholes, and more than a few people at York College had caught a little sideboob -- pun most definitely intended -- on me. Going braless meant that the outline of my nips usually stood out from my shirts, at least before cold weather set in and sweaters and sweatshirts became my norm. Once the Danielle story came out, Butch used it to challenge me to go further, and my suite mates pushed me just as hard as the guys did.
And I found out that I really liked it. The news stories about Danielle didn't say a thing about her having a sexual reason for what she was doing, and all that she said was that it was an expression of freedom. On her interview with John Stossel, she said that she was still a virgin, so maybe there wasn't much sexual in it for her. Yeah, I agreed with that, and wished that I could do what she was doing, but she was in California, and York College was a private school in Pennsylvania. I'd get expelled if I tried that here!
Thing is, whatever Danielle's motivations were, mine were just plain sexual. I was getting a charge out of showing off, a lot more than I was before, and I tried to hide it but I was just plain turned on by standing there naked in the guys' bathroom, talking with them as normally as anything. It reminded me of the shower scene in Paul Verhoeven's version of
Starship Troopers,
where all of the recruits, male and female, shared the same gang-shower. When I was in Basic at Fort Jackson, there was none of that! The Drill Sergeants made sure that the males and females didn't have the free time together for any non-scheduled activities, and kept us too tired to think (much) about sex. The male Drill Sergeants were actually fairly cool, but the females could be monsters out of Hell; it was classic overcompensation.
So, what could I do? I'd have loved to "have" to spend a couple of nights a week in the guy's suite because Butch was sleeping with Annette in my dorm room, but as long as Jim was there, it just wasn't a good idea; last night and this morning needed to be a one-and-done for me.
Then came a potential surprise solution: Clayton, who was Jim's roommate in the suite, came over to our suite and asked me if I wanted to have lunch with him. If there was anyone I'd never have expected to ask me out, it would have been Clay. He's pretty muscular, which is nice, but he can't be more than 5'6" or 5'7" tall. That's a bit shorter than average for a guy, but I'm
way
tall for a girl, standing 6'2". It was obvious that he was trying to impress me, because even though it was only in the mid-fifties outside, he was wearing a muscle shirt. The man had solid arms. He's cute enough, but I had never thought of him as a potential date. Still, it was only lunch, and I said that sure, I'd love to,
Since Clay was wearing jeans and a muscle shirt, what I already had on was good enough, a dark blue York College t-shirt and what were rapidly becoming my favorite jeans, the one with the one inch slit in the butt. I had made that slit a few weeks ago, and after several washings let the edges fray, the slit was open enough to let a bit of my bare butt show through. They were the deliberately ripped kind of jeans that girls buy at the store, but I had added the butt slit myself.
"Where to? I asked.
"There's a little diner down Market Street, a pretty good one, if that's OK. It's in walking distance." For me, walking distance could be five miles, but Clay probably didn't know that. Still, neither of us had a car at college, so we were kind of restricted to the area. Even though Clay had asked me out, I grabbed my small purse, one which I could wear over my shoulder, and made sure that I had my own money with me. He hadn't said anything about Dutch treat, and it's convention that the person asking pays, but I still didn't know that much about him. I grabbed my insulated vest, but Clay stuck with just the muscle shirt. Yeah, he was definitely trying to impress me! I noticed that he was wearing some athletic shoes that were a good inch thick at the heel, and I had just worn some thin ballet flats, so that cut the height difference down just a shade.
Lunch at the diner was really good. It wasn't anything fancy, but the food was prepared wonderfully, and the prices were remarkably low for a college town. Clay and I started out with small talk, but he moved the conversation toward trying to find out more about me, and naturally I used that to find out more about him. He was majoring in computer science, and inwardly I thought that that was a short man's major. Then I realized just how much I had unfairly stereotyped him on that. Yeah, he was short, but he obviously worked out, and he had the guts to ask out a girl more than half a foot taller. He was smart, and good looking as well. I could tell that he was trying to figure out a way to extend the date, and ask me out again, so I decided to help him there: seeing that he worked out, I asked him if he wanted to hit the gym with me that afternoon. It was the right move, because his eyes lit up and he was very happy to say yes. He knew, now, that I ran to stay in shape, but didn't know that I used the gym as well, so I guess he was surprised. I told him that I was in ROTC, and that meant staying in shape. York doesn't have an ROTC program of its own, but ROTC students use the Dickenson College program; we get bused to Dickensen on Tuesday afternoons, and have a smaller meeting on Thursdays, which means more effort to keep in shape on our own. He asked about the Purple Heart tattoo on my shoulder, and seemed duly impressed that I had actually been in a combat firefight and wounded (slightly) in Afghanistan.
We had an extra cup of coffee after lunch, mostly just to keep talking together, but after dragging out lunch a bit, we eventually had to head back to York. We were about half way back, and I decided to hold hands with him on the walk back. I know that we looked like an odd couple, and attracted a couple of second looks, but Clay was smiling from ear-to-ear. Hand holding isn't exactly the most erotic thing a woman can do, but it can let a new guy know that you like him and are proud to be seen with him.