Author's note:
This is a taste of college life in the late 1960s. All characters were over 18 and very real to me. Names have been changed to protect the reputation of the (now) grandmother heroine of my story.
A late-night phone call was no surprise. Ann would frequently call me after a night out with friends to regale me with the fun she had. Sometimes the wine would make her giggly-silly. It was great fun to take advantage of her 'condition' and get her laughing uncontrollably over some sarcastic remark that I'd make. This call started similarly. Ann's girlfriends were saluting several 'dead soldiers' from the Boone's farm brigade when the conversation devolved into quips about what everyone's first time was like with a man.
"You wouldn't believe what Sally did in the back seat of Jim's VW!" said Ann. "That woman is over six feet tall and it sounded like she ended up twisted like a pretzel with a leg sticking out of both sides of the car. When it was time to 'do it' Jim had his head out the sunroof and Lynn was looking at him through the back window," Ann laughed.
"Oh, that's going to make a great commercial for Volkswagen," I said jokingly.
"And Lynn got her underwear caught in the zipper of a sleeping bag on a camping trip. She and John decided to get into one bag and zip it up. When they couldn't unzip the bag past Lynn's panties, John wiggled around to Lynn's crotch and chewed a hole right at her pubes," she giggled. "Every time they have sex now, she asks Jim if he wants to
zip it
? Lynn says she's going to frame the 'holey' pair as a trophy of her first time."
Ann and I chuckled at the stories about a clumsy hammock scene and how sand from the beach can make for a raw memory...not to mention 'raw' body parts. All of these stories made her laugh... except her own story. She didn't have one. I could tell from the long pause and the shakiness in her voice that telling her friends that she was still a virgin shifted the conversation into not-so-funny comments about why that was still the case. Ann wasn't laughing. Drunk girlfriends turned into mean girls and Ann was hurt.
If tears could be detected on a phone receiver, then mine would have been soaked. The call ended rather abruptly with Ann exclaiming, "I'm coming over. I'm coming through the back door."
My room in the fraternity house was right next to the door. It was nice to have easy access to the outside but more times than I'd like to remember the noise of late-night, coming-and-goings would keep me awake. I didn't sleep all that much during active 'door times' so I learned to crank the headphone volume just a bit and make the disturbances evaporate into whatever tunes were spinning on the turntable.
Ann and I first met in one of those long class registration lines, waiting to get a computer punch card that meant an addition to our college schedules. It was a friendly meeting between two shy freshmen. Polite conversation followed with complaints about trying to find classes at the right time. That scenario repeated itself three times that same day.
It turned comical when she asked, while in the third line of students, "Are you following me around?" "Keep this up and people are going to start talking about us!" She joked.
Considering my height and how short Ann was, I responded, "No, I'm just looking for a short shoulder where I can lean and rest my elbow." Ann took no offense at my reference to her 5-foot 4-inch frame and we began a friendship that lasted our entire college careers.
Ann was a cute coed. She had warm brown eyes and a sweet smile that was framed nicely by her shoulder-length brunette hair. I loved her sense of humor. She could flirt with the best of the shy people and that matched my personality well. We both preferred comfort over style and I always thought we looked like a well-matched, Mutt and Jeff pair...me being the taller
Mutt
and Ann being the attractive, but shorter,
Jeff
.
It was after 2 am when Ann showed up at the door. I had the headphones off and had rolled on top of the waterbed, half-snoozing and wondering if Ann was just blowing steam or if she was coming over to talk.
Her knock was a familiar one from her coed visitation times to the fraternity house when she would wind her way down the hall yelling, "Girl on the hall!" It was way past visitation hours and there would be no yelling or walking down the hall...just a familiar rhythmic knock.
It wasn't all that rare for Ann to sneak in the back door. Although not frequent, it wasn't unusual for her to be in my room and for us to talk until the wee hours of the morning.
OK. We didn't always just 'talk'. At parties, we would dance to near exhaustion and retreat to my room to cool off. We did talk a lot. We also loved kissing each other...and Ann was an exceptional kisser. There were boundaries that we simply didn't cross. Caressing a breast would attract a forearm to push the offending hand away with a mild, verbal grunt of a warning accompanied by a slight head shake. I often wondered if she knew just how much her kissing aroused me and suspected from some of our more intensive lip-locks that Ann was equally aroused.
Ann moved quietly through the back door and pushed past me as I opened my door so she could get into my room undetected by others. Her thick sorority jersey draped almost to the hem of her cut-off jeans. The flip-flops, though, were a bit unusual. The 40-degree outside temperature made the total ensemble seem out of place. I had no sooner closed and locked the door when Ann wrapped her arms around my neck and said, "Will you hold me for a while?"
Those were the only words spoken by my normally chatty friend. I did not say anything and wrapped my arms around her in a familiar dance-like embrace. We stood like that for several minutes until Ann wrapped a leg around my sweatpants and whispered, "I'm a little chilled".
There was no need to draw me a picture or explain what that meant. I pulled away from the embrace long enough to reach for a blanket. Instead, Ann walked over to the edge of the bed and pull back the covers. She crawled onto the bed, pulled up the covers, adjusted the pillows beneath her head, and generally created her own little nest.
"Just make yourself at home, why don't you,? I chuckled.
"Would you turn the lights off, please?" Ann responded. That sounded like a half-request and half-demand. I obliged by turning off the overhead light and toggled the desk lamp to find myself in pitch-lack darkness.
Among the dozen thoughts that flashed through my head as I stood next to my bed, "Do I take off my sweatshirt?" "Do I take off my sweatpants?" "Do I dare assume that I should get naked?" That brain spin devolved into, "I'll sit on the edge of the bed and take my socks off."
There were flip-flops already next to the bed, so the shoes-and socks-thing seemed rational. You have to realize that not everyone in the 1960's just jumped into bed with their girlfriends...there were unwritten rules about love and sex and a bunch of procreation-contraception taboos that ruled the behavior of shy people like Ann and me. I rolled gently onto the bed in a manner that created the least amount of tsunami waves on the old waterbed.
Ann lifted the covers to invite me next to her and gave me a tug at the waist to pull me closer. Nose-to-nose, the first kiss was more like a nibble. Little nibbles around the nose and eyes were typical foreplay for when we made out, so this did not seem that far out of the ordinary. I relaxed and took a deep breath.
"You said on the phone that things didn't go well with your friends tonight. Do you want to talk about it? I whispered.
Ann was silent, but still teasing me with her little kisses.
Bodies shifted, arms wrapped into a warm embrace, and lips aligned for making out. I was familiar with this drill. Ann and I snuggled perfectly and the deep kissing that was part of this activity was something we enjoyed regularly. This did seem more than just, an "I'm a little chilled, can I borrow your jacket" kind of warming up.
My roving hand massaged beneath Ann's sweatshirt to the point where I realized she was not wearing a bra. Ann sensed my surprise and gave me a little giggle before pressing her lips back against mine and running her tongue around the inner edges of my lips. There was no defensive forearm this time and I was caught off-guard. The tongue vs tongue playfulness that followed distracted me a little but my mind and body were starting to shift gears.
In a move that both surprised me and made me squirm, Ann slid her hand down my side and slipped her fingers beneath the waistband of my sweatpants. Alarms inside my brain sounded and circulation shifted dramatically to the lower half of my body. I know it was dark, but my eyes had to be wide open as I strained to see any expression on Ann's face.
I was a little disappointed when the hand popped my waistband as it exited. But then, that same hand was wrapped onto my roving forearm and leading me down to Ann's waist. Surprise number two sent electric charges all over my skin. Those cute little cut-off jeans were MIA and my fingers were tickled by the lacy top of Ann's panties.