When you grow up in a small town in the South, it's not like growing up anywhere else. The South tends to be conservative anyway, and small towns take conservatism to the extreme. Most of the people in small, southern towns go to church on Sunday morning if not Sunday night and Wednesday night too. Most of the people in small, southern towns have a strict moral code and are quick to judge anyone who doesn't uphold that moral code.
That always seemed to be hypocritical to me. When I was a kid, we went to Church three times a week, and what I heard the preacher say was you shouldn't judge other people. That seemed like a good way to live, to me anyway, but even after church, I'd hear the preacher's wife talking to the other women about something some other woman did that they thought was scandalous.
Usually, that something wasn't really all that bad. It would be something like Mary Hastings wearing a dress that was what they considered too short for a woman of fifty. Sometimes it was worse, like when Julie Adams let herself get pregnant by Billy Joe Thompson and they had to get married instead of going to junior college that fall, but usually, it was just how some woman dressed or how she acted that set their tongues to wagging.
Unlike most of the guys in my class, I didn't get a job as soon as I graduated and settle down to a life with a wife and kids. Mom and Dad wanted me to make something of myself besides working construction or working in a factory for the next fifty years so I'd planned on going to college, but when I saw how much it was going to cost, I was pretty shocked.
The only way I could see to make it through college was to find a job where I could work full time but still have time for classes and to study. Mom and Dad said they'd help, but I was pretty sure they couldn't really afford to. Mom didn't work and while Dad's wages let us live comfortably, we weren't rolling in cash. They'd have borrowed the money and would still be paying the bank back after I graduated.
The job I found was working as a janitor for a contractor that cleaned office buildings after hours. It didn't pay much more than minimum, but the hours were six to eleven, five days a week, and eight to seven on Sunday. That schedule worked as long as I could schedule my classes for late morning to early afternoon. There was no way I could do that and carry a full time class load, so I ended up taking six years to graduate instead of four.
College was interesting, but still frustrating. I liked the engineering classes, so I did well. The other classes caused me to study hard, but I did well in them too. I didn't do so well with the girls. I didn't understand the whole women's liberation thing, and while I'd heard about lesbians, I'd never met one until I asked Patty if she'd like to have coffee sometime.
Patty gave me a patronizing smile, and said I really didn't have the right equipment. Well, I didn't understand that either, so I asked her what she meant. Patty frowned at me then and shook her head.
"Troy, haven't you ever heard that some girls like other girls?"
I said I had, but I always thought they tried to look like men. Patty just laughed.
"You must really be from back in the sticks then."
Well, that kind of made me leery of asking another girl out and I really couldn't afford to date anyway, so I concentrated on studying instead of girls and it looked like I was going to graduate still a virgin.
I did make a good friend on my job my last semester. The janitorial service changed management, and the new supervisor of my crew was Liz Bowman, a woman about forty. She'd get us started and then walk around inspecting what we'd done. If we'd missed something, she'd make us do it over.
Janitorial work wasn't hard but it was boring as hell. We swept and dusted the same rooms in the same offices every night, and after a week of that, I knew every crack in the walls and every spot that wouldn't come clean.
Liz understood that, so sometimes she'd talk to us, and she seemed to like talking to me the most. It was a rare night that she didn't spend at least half an hour with me. At first, I just thought since she was new, she was making sure I did everything like I was supposed to. The night she started talking about how she'd been divorced for two years and really missed having a man around started me thinking maybe it was more. It did turn out to be more, more than I'd ever even dreamed.
We finished up one night about ten til ten, and Liz sent everybody home except me. She said she wanted to make one last check of the last room I'd done. When I followed her into that room, Liz looked around for all of two seconds and then asked if I'd like to have a cup of coffee before I went back to my apartment.
I thought we'd go to the coffee shop on campus where everybody else went. Liz drove right past it and headed away from campus. Since I was in her car, there wasn't much I could do other than ask her what restaurant we were going to.
Liz looked over at me and smiled.
"I make better coffee than any restaurant or coffee shop, so we're going to my house."
I didn't think much about that until Liz closed the door to her house behind us. She scared me to death when she smiled and put her arms around my neck though.
"Troy, I brought you home with me because I want this to be more than coffee. If you don't want to, I understand. I'm not twenty anymore. We'll just have a cup and then I'll take you back to your apartment, but I was hoping since it's Friday, you'd spend the night with me."
Well, like I said, I was scared, not scared of Liz or because I didn't want to do it, but scared of the fact that I didn't have a clue about how to do it other than what my dad had told me. All he said was stroke her breasts, stick a finger in her entrance, and then stick in your cock and pump away. He didn't use those exact words and he hemmed and hawed a lot, but that's basically what he was saying.
I liked Liz, and I didn't want to make her feel bad about herself.
"Liz, it isn't that I don't want to, but as much as I hate to admit it, I've never...well, you'd be the first and I don't want to disappoint you."
Liz just grinned then.
"You can follow directions, can't you?"
That first night, Liz gave me a lot of directions. The directions got shorter and pretty breathy as we went along, and at the end, she was just saying a couple words at a time. For my part, I was discovering all the things women liked that Dad had never told me.
