Chapter 2: Toga Party

I slowly and reluctantly accepted Mel’s unique philosophy about dating. Her unusual approach was at least consistent with all the other parts of her non-conforming life style and thinking.

Mel had me read some fictional stories on the Internet about men and women forming polyamorous relationships, and then talking about how they worked and the philosophy behind them. I started from scratch because I had no idea what ‘polyamory’ was. She explained it.

We had some long discussions that were learning experiences for me, and I tried to internalize that concept. I’d only ever know a monogamous, exclusive couple in a relationship. I rapidly learned about other models.

The fraternity had a toga party two weekends later – our first real blast of the school year. We were famous on campus for this annual party. The reputation was well deserved and had the word ‘wild’ in it. The Pixie and I planned our costumes and even visited a couple of stores to get just the right laurel wreath crowns and sandals to go with our toga sheets.

The frat party was a scene right out of the movie ‘Animal House’. The Pixie threw herself into the whole scene and late in the evening became the party’s focus. As the drinking escalated and the live band got louder and raunchier, various female ‘guests’ dropped their tops or abandoned their togas all-together. While none went completely nude, the sight of several dozen naked gyrating breasts on the dance floor became a scene locked in my memory forever.

The Pixie decided not to exclude our fellow revelers from the sight of her own spectacular breasts. Thus, as the band rolled into the thirty-fourth verse of ‘Louie Louie’, Mel slipped the top of her toga off her shoulder exposing her luscious taut breasts to the other dancers. She was in front of the band and there was a sudden lull in the music before the beat was re-established. The pause made everyone look to the dance floor to see what was happening.

Mel swung her long blonde hair and body around the dance floor. She showed complete abandon as we danced – hands in the air, body gyrating, and boobs swinging around like dangerous weapons. Various eyeballs started to pop out of their sockets from all the guys and even the gals around us and soon the dance area was packed with my fraternity brothers not to mention their dates. Everyone cheered and applauded as Mel shimmied and shook her ‘pair’. She was onstage and loved it. No other female could even begin to compare to the spectacular tits Mel had revealed.

More than one brother patted me on the back and told me I was the luckiest guy in the world to have access to such wonders. In the meantime, Mel continued to dance wildly allowing hand after hand to stroke her breasts so long as it didn’t upset her dance routine. I rocked along beside her if only to keep her going rather than becoming a solo act that I feared would make her stop. I was clearly a superfluous body in the throbbing throng of dancers.

Later, Mel pulled me off the dance floor and up to my study room in the frat house. We made out for a while, I sucked on and made love to her breasts, and she gave me another hand job. After we cooled down, I walked her back to the freshman dorm and we promised to see each other the next afternoon.

I did not live in the fraternity house, but I had a desk there. I had a small apartment adjacent to the campus. I told Mel that when she was ready to see it, we could go there. She told me that she’d be tempted to do things she’d regret, so that ceased to be an option of places to go for us.

Sunday afternoon, I picked Mel up and took her off campus to a mall where we had lunch and walked around shopping. We held hands.

Mel finally asked with a licentious grin, “Did it bother you seeing me dance half naked at the party last night?”

I thought for a bit and answered, “No, but you took me by surprise. I was a bit fogged last night from the beer, but even this morning I think of the whole night as exciting and sexy. You were the peak of that excitement, as you always are for me. I hope you aren’t having regrets? You sure were entertaining.” I laughed at my understatement.

“No, not at all. I was afraid that today you might think less of me. Personally, I thought it was a rush. Besides so many other girls were going topless. You know I danced topless, even naked, in Africa many times when I lived there. It’s fun. There it was tribal and I was unique in many ways, but tried to fit in.”

“I thought seeing you do that in public was a rush too. I guess I like having an exhibitionist girlfriend and certainly one that is as gorgeous and as ‘different’ as you are.”

“Oh goody,” the Pixie said with certainty, “I’ll do some more ‘displays’ of my body sometime.” She pushed herself up into my face and kissed me wantonly. The PDA in the mall was just her cup of tea for that moment.

I went on more seriously, “I have question for you, Pixie. I’m really falling for you and I’d like to go steady - to give you my fraternity pin. This would make us, well, engaged to be engaged. I think you’re the most fabulous person I’ve ever met and ... well, I can’t imagine my life without you.”

Before I could go any further, Mel led me over to an out of the way bench in a side corridor of the mall. As she did, she spoke softly, “Doug, I like you – a lot – a whole lot. I really do. However, I’m not going to accept your offer and I feel I need to explain a little more about how I feel – my philosophy about life and relationships. Some of this you know because we talked about before.

“I like our times together and I want them to continue but I need to date other guys and party my pretty little ass off while I’m in college – or at least for a couple of years of it anyway. If you can humor me we can see how it all plays out. In the meantime, I don’t want either of us to feel locked into anything – ever; even after college if we’re still seeing each other. You should be doing the same thing – mess around with a lot of girls and not just me.”

She paused and studied the look on my face, “This isn’t a rejection of you and, Lord knows, it’s certainly not that I don’t have strong feelings for you. It’s the way I grew up. For me, life and love aren’t about exclusive relationships. Maybe it’s just because I’m such a contrarian. I’d probably feel at home in a commune, but that age past us by and besides, parts of that life style were too laid back for me.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever settle down and be anyone’s exclusive spouse. Maybe I’m doomed to have to live with the results of this errant way of thinking. I just can’t imagine an exclusive, monogamous relationship as something I’d ever be in.” She looked at me with large and sympathetic doe eyes that signaled to me that she loved me in her own way.

I nodded. I’d expected the rejection based on her earlier comments. I’d tried to make things go too fast. I remember thinking that in the past she’d left the door open for things to change in the future. I could have been heartbroken over her refusal, but instead I felt relief that the issue had been breached and resolved – at least temporarily.

She held my hand tightly and continued, “I like our sexy times together. I want them to not only continue but also to escalate and become more exciting and sexy for each of us. This may surprise you, given how I act sometimes, but I’m not exceptionally experienced sexually; and as you know from our talks I’m also not a virgin. That said I’ve learned a few things about good sexual relationships over the past couple of years – by doing a little and by reading a lot.” She paused and added, “And now you will too. We both will.”

“Huh?” I responded not fully understanding her last couple of sentences.

“What I’m trying to say is you need to learn how to make me happy – how to make any woman happy sexually. Put another way, if I’m going to be one of your ‘girlfriends’ then you are going to have to become one of the ‘best boyfriends’ in the world. I only deserve the best.” Mel grinned at her self-serving statement.

“What’s that mean?” I asked out of pure innocence. “Lots of practice?” I said hopefully.

“That too,” she said emphatically with a chuckle, “But it means you have another course to study this year – ‘Sex 101’ taught by yours truly, and I’ll be learning right along with you. Somehow, I think you’ll end up a winner just as I will.”

“Sounds like the best course on campus,” I teased, trying to remove any tension from the air.

She grinned and said, “It might be; however, you have some tough homework to wade through. I just bought us these books while you were buying those CDs and I want you to read them over the next couple of weeks and we’ll discuss parts of it. You’ll be tested on its content.” She grinned lecherously at me.

The Pixie shot me her warmest smile and I melted. She reached her small hand into a bag from Barnes & Nobel and pulled out a copy of Tell Me What You Want by Justin Lehmiller, and then a second book entitled 365 Sex Positions. She passed then to me. I flipped through a few of the pages, amazed at seeing several rather explicit pictures of a modern couple making love in different positions.

“Mel,” I asked cautiously, “Am I a bad lover? Have I done something wrong? Gone too fast? Too slow?” I suddenly felt a tremendous sense of inferiority wash over me. I stammered, “I have wanted to make love to you since I met you at freshmen orientation, but I’ve been taking it slow. I didn’t want to...”

“No, no, no!” she declared as she hugged me and pecked my lips. “Nothing like that. It’s just that we’re going to make love one of these days – real soon – and I want us to know what we’re doing – what we’re both doing to and for each other and why. We can bring a lot more pleasure to each other if we understand what’s in this book. I don’t want to just have sex; I want to make love and create orgasmic peaks we’ll remember forever.” She stretched out the word ‘love’ to add great emphasis.

She went on, “My parents gave me a book called The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort. That is what I used about six years ago to learn about sex. My parents had a copy and I’d read it when they went out. I think they actually left it around so I’d find it. I would have bought that, but the store didn’t have a copy. You should get a copy of that too.”

“And if I do this it will make you happy?” I asked tentatively looking deep in her blue eyes. My emotions were all a tumble at the moment. After all, Mel had just practically guaranteed that we’d make love soon, yet signaled me that she expected me to be inadequate without some major improvements to my education.

“Yes,” she said with emphasis. She looked around to be sure no one could see us, then pulled her loose top down to expose one breast to me for a second. She gave me a lecherous grin.

“Then I’ll definitely do it.” I paused and reached for the breast that quickly disappeared before my hand got to it. Mel swatted my hand away with a wicked little laugh. I told her, “I’ll do it because I love you and want good things to happen between us – for a long time, like forever.”

I guess that was the right thing to say because Mel jumped into my arms and we created a further noteworthy public display of affection right there in the mall. No one seemed to mind as we hugged and kissed each other. We did manage to keep our clothes on.

I did resolve that afternoon to become the best lover that Mel could possibly find. I wasn’t a virgin, but intuitively I knew I was probably like most other chumps when it came to fucking. I would be different. I would become so different that I’d be her lover of choice. If she dated and had sex with some other man, she’d find him woefully inadequate compared to what I could deliver to her.

That was a high bar that I was setting for myself, but there was no doubt but that if I wanted the Pixie, then this was one more route to her heart.

My feelings for Mel might have been tempered by the fact that I was irrationally falling in love and had subconsciously adopted the position that she could do no wrong. Yet, I carefully examined Mel’s philosophy about relationships and tested over and over again whether I could live with them.

Once home, I read more about polyamorous relationships and the underlying tenets that had to be in place to have them work well. I guess we’d find out how adaptable I could become.

I called my sister Kara and talked to her about Mel’s philosophy. She was Mel’s age yet had been raised in the same conservative home as I was. Kara brushed the whole thing off, declaring it just part of the ‘any philosophy goes’ part of kids our age. Thus, in the end, I decided I’d try to adapt to whatever situation and philosophy that Mel conjured up.

I read the books from cover to cover over the next three days – some parts twice or even three times. I also had a mail-order copy of The Joy of Sex sent to me. Each day, I read or re-read a chapter in each of the books she gave me. I’d also study a few pages in the sex positions book, carefully noting the pros and cons of each.

Of course, I also had to read some textbook chapters in social psychology, master fifty new Spanish words and verb conjugations, as well and do a term paper explaining activity-based cost accounting principles. I found myself operating in a high-performance mode I didn’t know I was capable of thanks to Mel.

I didn’t see Mel during the week but we talked by phone a couple of days and made a date to spend Saturday together. Thursday when we talked on the telephone she suggested that we stay together overnight into Sunday at a ‘nice’ place but not my apartment. Her tone of voice and innuendo to our conversation left no doubt about the wild sexual activities we’d be engaged in every moment we’d be together overnight. I started sporting a perpetual hard-on because I couldn’t stop thinking about the coming weekend. I was thinking of sex all the time, not just once every five seconds.

I smacked myself on the head a few times, reminding myself of the old adage, ‘Men think of sex, and women think of love’. Thus, I adjusted my thinking to be Mel’s ‘lover’ rather than merely her ‘sex partner’.

I had never ‘shacked up’ with anyone before. I wasn’t a virgin yet I’d had few opportunities to copulate in my short, happy life. The previous summer I’d had steady sex for a month with an old high school girlfriend while her parents were in Europe. She had a boyfriend a thousand miles away near where she was going to college so didn’t want to get serious, so we became ‘fuck buddies’ for the month before she left to go back to college. Prior to that month I could have counted the times I’d had intercourse on fingers and toes – mostly fingers.

I looked around for a motel that would be an economic compromise between the Ritz Carlton and the ‘No-Tel Motel’ that specialized in the hot sheet trade. I couldn’t afford the former, by far, and worried that the latter would make Mel feel cheap and unappreciated. Thus, I settled on an acceptable Holiday Inn out by the Interstate. Saturday morning I drove out, registered and got our room keys. I got us a room adjacent to their pool. I also left a couple of little presents for Mel on the pillow of the king-size bed in the room. Not only did the Holiday Inn have a nice room but also a heated pool, exercise room and a nice restaurant.