Heavily autobiographical.
This all took place a long time ago, at the tail end of the hippie era. I was so young. Looking back many decades later, I am astounded at the naivete and inexperience I embodied at that time. The "summer of love" had managed to elude me in my small town New England home, my love-life far more barren than I had hoped.
But I was in college now, nineteen years old and I had made a new sweetie a few months previously. Melissa was a class ahead of me (although unfortunately at a different college) and two inches taller. Things on the intimacies front, while still moving far too slowly for me, were looking up.
It was beastly hot in Boston. I had begun to wonder why we had made this trip. That summer Melissa and I were working at an Atlantic seaside resort town, her hometown, but had driven in to Boston on a sweltering August Friday afternoon to catch a concert on the city green, Bonnie Raitt along with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. We had bummed a ride from Hal and Erin, vague friends in town and also a couple, and we would be staying at their friend John's flat in Brookline.
On the drive to Boston, windows wide open to catch whatever breeze we could, we saw streams of city dwellers in their cars emptying out of town to the coast, which we had just left. They were far more sensible than us. The roads were clogged with grumpy drivers anxious for some relief away from the city, and the further we got into Boston, the hotter it got, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the heat back on to the streets. People walking on the sidewalks looked exhausted and dispirited, their wet clothes sticking to their overheated bodies.
One bank sign we had passed indicated the temperature was 104. Melissa and I looked at each other. No wonder we were sweating like pigs. Boston never got this hot, did it?
She had her dark hair pulled back in a pony-tail due to the heat. Her hair was perhaps her most striking feature, long and thick, and when she wore it braided down her back, the top-most part of the braid was as thick as my wrist.
Hal and Erin looked just as hot up front in the car. Hal was a skinny surfer-dude type, long dirty-blond hair and slender shoulders and hips. Erin had pale Irish skin and freckles, handsome curly red hair and a big chest for her short size. Flashing eyes and a saucy smile graced her face charmingly and often. The back and armpit portions of Hal's tee-shirt were dark with sweat.
Concert was great, but it was still oppressively hot when close to midnight we got back to John's. Weary, we went to bed straight away, John in his own bedroom at the front of the long narrow flat, Hal and Erin in the empty spare bedroom in the middle.
Melissa and I were on the overstuffed, beat-up couch in the room between the bedrooms and the bathroom. There was no doorway between that bedroom and our room, just an open gap where a pair of french doors had once been. Everyone would have to go through our space to get to the kitchen or the toilet. Standard, cheap college-age digs.
All the windows were open, but no air moved. Lying there you didn't even contemplate getting up to fetch some iced water out of the fridge -- it was more effort than you wanted to expend. Melissa and I were keeping as far away from each other as possible on the couch, so our sweaty bodies wouldn't touch and create more heat. This was totally frustrating because we had been looking forward to this weekend not only for the concert, but because we might have a chance for some extended intimacies, problematic to us due to our separate, overly-supervised, summer living situations.
So here we were, with a golden sexual opportunity, and it just was too damn hot to even want to do anything fun. I had on a pair of briefs, Melissa in a tee-shirt and panties, her thick prominent nipples exceedingly arousing as they poked at the fabric covering them. Altogether still too much clothes for comfort.
Melissa was tall and almost too thin, her chest almost nonexistent to her great regret. She said her breasts looked like "pancakes" plastered to her chest. Her thick dark nipples were entirely compensating to my mind. I had to spend a lot of time reassuring her that I thought she was beautiful, her chest entirely handsome, and that boob-size mattered nothing to me in a girlfriend (almost true.) My high school time spent on the wrestling team and in the weight room meant my own pectorals were rounded, pronounced, and hard.
One day Melissa's sister had stared at both of us at the beach, me shirtless and Melissa in her bikini, and said, pointing at me, "He's got a bigger chest than you do!" Thanks Sandy. She made each of us squeeze our pectorals together and I could produce more cleavage than Melissa. She laughed but I know it bugged her.
I was not finding it easy to get to sleep. Streetlight came in dimly from the wide open windows and around 1 AM, it was dark, airless, and depressing. Melissa's breathing had grown heavy. Uncharacteristically she had drifted into unconsciousness before me. My thoughts wandered.