For the Love of Peggy - He loved her, but she loved another.
A story of how unrequited young love changed with time. It takes place in the late sixties and early 1970s, a time when the flower children of the baby boomers were leaving their teens, a time before the internet, before DNA testing, before birth control pills were readily available for single women.
In those days, high school went to Grade 13. Grades 10 and 11 were designated as Junior High School, the minimum entry requirement for Trades Schools. Grades 12 and 13 were Senior High; Grade 12 for College entry, and Grade 13 for University. Note that Senior High School students were 18 and 19 years old.
*****
I'd known Peggy since our Grade 1 class. She was shy and introverted but extremely intelligent. She lived six blocks away from me in our small town. When we began high school, I would stop by her house every morning so we could begin our day together.
Our mutual love of classical music brought us close together at an early age. She played the violin and I played the piano. by the time we reached high school, I could also do a passable job on the guitar. We played a lot of duets together. She was particularly fond of Paganini and of course, like Paganini's sidekick Lignani, I ended up playing the acoustic guitar accompaniment. Not that I minded, it was my chance to be near her. I fancied myself a decent pianist and she particularly liked to listen to me play Chopin.
I was from the wrong side of the tracks, literally. My father was a blue collar worker and our social class was disdained by the upper crust from Peggy's side of town. Being the eldest of four children, there were a lot of chores to do so I wasn't able to join organized school sports. Not that my body suffered, helping my father put a lot of muscle on me.
Peggy had a beautiful athletic body and by her first senior year, she became a cheerleader on our school football team.
My nemesis was Mark, the team quarterback, the son of the largest banker in town. He was in his final year, one year ahead of us when he started paying attention to Peggy. He was popular and all the girls fawned over him. The egotistical bastard was certainly getting his share of pussy. By contrast, I was a virgin, still in my wanking stage.
It was on a fateful Saturday in the spring when I stopped by Peggy's house. Her parents were gone for the weekend and I thought we might take in a movie. When I was about to knock, I heard moans and squeals coming from within. Slowly opening the door, I witnessed what would remain with me for the rest of my life.
Peggy was on her knees on the living room rug, facing away from me, naked, with Mark's cock buried inside her. I could hear the slap/slap of flesh on flesh and the grunts and groans of the two of them. It was the most horrible shock of my young life. It was as if the love of my life had suddenly died and I never had a chance to say goodbye. The innocent girl I'd hoped to marry after graduation was gone. I quietly closed the door and retreated.
After arriving home, I sat behind my father's shed and mourned my loss... crying for hours. My father found me and with one look at my face, assessed the situation.
"Son," he said, sitting down beside me, "Believe me, I know exactly how you're feeling. When your mother got sick years ago, I thought my life was ending. She was everything to me, my whole life. But even though there was a good chance she might not make it, I found enough inner strength for both of us to keep going...
"And so will you, Matt," he continued, "Peggy's making a mistake, a young girl's mistake, but if you're patient..."
"I saw them... together... doing it," I stifled a sob.
He shook his head, a look of sorrow on his face, "I saw her and Mark walking hand in hand a few days ago. I didn't realize it had gone that far... But remember this, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Someday she'll realize her mistake..."
"No, Dad, there's no turning back," I said, my anger rising. But I knew that wasn't the way I felt. I desperately wanted things to be the way they were before.
--
Monday morning was the first time I didn't stop by Peggy's house to walk her to school. I avoided her all day. If I saw her coming, I'd duck into a doorway or a washroom or turn and briskly walk in the other direction. On the third day of school, she cornered me.
"Matt, I'm so sorry," she apologized, "I should have told you about dating Mark..."
"I saw you fucking on your living room rug," I blurted.
Her face turned crimson and her eyes looked down at my shoes.
"I'm so sorry you saw that," she stuttered, "Mark and I have fallen in love. Please don't hate me, Matt. You and I have been close friends for such a long time, it would hurt me terribly if you..."
I brushed past her and walked away, I couldn't listen to any more.
--
Afterwards, Peggy and I didn't see much of each other and when we did, we were both cool to one another. Gone were her tinkling laughs, our good natured hugs. She began to date Mark exclusively, even though that bastard was plowing other fields. I couldn't tell her that, she wouldn't have believed me anyway. She was in love with the asshole.
When Mark graduated, he went on to a university in a city 200 miles away. Peggy and I were in our final year of high school. We dated occassionally but only platonically. She would never allow me to fondle her, except for one instance... The night of our senior prom, I managed to get my fingers past her panties.
I made her wet and she mewled, "Yes, yes, Mark, make me come..."
My name is Matt, not Mark. It was another low point of my life. She never apologized for calling me Mark and we didn't date for the rest of the school year. Mark came back for the summer to work in his father's bank and they again resumed their fuckfests, though he still had a wide variety of other fuckmates.
--
My interest in mathematics and music led me into computer programming in my final year of high school. At that time, computers were in their infancy and there were no high school courses, so what I learned was self taught. Assembly language was the norm and compilers were primitive.
I didn't have enough money to go to university, so that summer I took a job with a small company that was trying to develop some computer business applications. In retrospect, it was easy to find a programming job back then. It seemed that anyone who wore a pair of sandals and knew what a subroutine was, could land a job, albeit with poor pay.
At the end of the summer, Peggy went off to university, not so coincidentally, to the same one that Mark attended. I only saw her once during the Christmas holidays. She ignored me. Gone was that clean scrubbed look. Now she wore a ton of makeup and dressed like a slut. I supposed Mark liked it that way.
Meanwhile I lost my virginity to Maryanne. She was hot after me in high school so it seemed natural that we would get together. She enjoyed it immensely, claiming I was the nicest cock she'd ever had. However, it wasn't long before I discovered mine wasn't the only one. After that, I wasn't too choosy about whom I dated. I even plowed a few young divorcees. They were good, they taught me a lot about making love and I learned how to make a woman howl with pleasure.
Peggy flunked out of her first year. She'd become Mark's party girl and neglected her studies, skipping most of her classes. It hurt her parents to realize their only child was a failure, so her father set her up in business by buying her the only music store in our town.
It did very well but Peggy spent more than it earned. With her designer clothes, fancy red sports car, and her many other expensive habits, it wasn't long before she had to borrow money from the bank to stay afloat. That bank belonged to Mark's father. She barely toned down her spending enough to pay the interest on the loan. It wasn't long before she had to borrow more, using her music store as collateral.
Again Mark was home for the summer, working in his father's bank. This time he rented an apartment. Peggy wanted to move in with him but that would have cramped his style so he refused. When he returned to school that fall, Peggy drove the 200 miles almost every weekend to visit him. Those weekends eventually became less frequent because he claimed he needed more time for his 'studies'... Yeah, sure.
Mark was Peggy's biggest fan. She subscribed to that city's newspaper and the campus rag and kept a scrapbook on him. Though it hurt her to see him pictured with other women, her love for him never wavered. Was it love? I doubted it. That arrogant asshole just happened to be the first one into her pants.
Myself? Well, after working a year trying to patch someone else's spagetti code, I rebelled. Trying to instill more documentation and structure into my boss's business programs was hopeless. Since it added more time to our projects, I was looked upon as some kind of nut. So I quit and went to work for a larger company who welcomed my ideas. It meant their programs could be more easily tailored to other customer's needs.
Within a few months, I found another guy who had the same mindset as myself so we started our own company. Our quality of work set us apart from the standard of the day and we became successful from day one. Within a year, we had an additional dozen programmers working for us. The money was rolling in.
Since I was very busy growing our company, I had little time for social activities. I ran into Peggy only a few times over that year but we said little to each other.
