Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 114: Tours, Friends, and Responsibilities
Tuesday, March 18, 1986
We rushed breakfast a bit and were at the airboat place by nine. The plan was to sightsee for a few hours, have lunch, sightsee for a few more, then return here. They provided water, snacks, binoculars, and a lot of narration.
Also hearing protection. Airboats are loud! The earphones let the driver narrate, but we couldn’t talk to each other with the boat running. They stopped a fair number of times to let us talk, though.
The whole thing was pretty cool. I’m not sure how far we traveled, but it was quite a way. People lived in what seemed like the most unlikely places out in the swamps. Every so often, we would find a cabin that was only accessible by boat, sitting well above the waterline and looking in very good repair. I had no idea how they had been built in the first place, but the driver said some of them dated back a hundred years or more.
At other times, there was nothing visible for miles that spoke of human habitation. It was easy to imagine this swampland being here for centuries, millennia, or more, and looking just the same then as now. As much as humans had left their mark on so much of the world, and our country, there were still places within a short distance of some major cities where you couldn’t see that mark, even if it was there.
Lunch turned out to be as good as advertised. Tasty, spicy, and plenty of it! As with many vacations, we would need to exercise when we got back. Or even tomorrow!
We didn’t skip dinner entirely, but we had a fairly light one. When we got back to the hotel, there was a message from Marshall inviting us to come tour Tulane with him and Sandra tomorrow. That sounded like a lot of fun. We called him back and set a ten o’clock meeting near the streetcar line, right on the edge of the campus. It would, at least, get us a lot of walking!
Tonight was a bit of a hanging-out night. We played poker, first normally and then strip. Jas went out fairly quickly, I took a bit longer, and Paige finally defeated Angie.
We had to get dressed to head to bed, but at least Paige put on the clothes she planned to wear tomorrow. Once we were in my room, Paige and I kissed, then kissed some more, before getting naked again.
She giggled and said, “I’m getting spoiled by all of this, you know?”
“You?” I said. “Think about me!”
“Um ... so. Yeah. That’s fair!” she said, giggling. “I love you.”
“And I love you, too.”
We kissed a bit more, then headed to bed.
“I heard about the silk scarves,” she said. “Did you bring any?”
“Not this time. Besides...”
I gestured at the headboard.
“Coulda just tied my arms behind my back. No matter! We’ll get to it. The whole thing sounds fun. As long as it’s with people I trust with my life! Fortunately, I have some of those.”
I chuckled and nodded.
“I think I’m not a fan of being tied, but ... well, who knows? Seems unlikely.”
“We’ll give it a try, sometime. For now...”
‘For now’ turned out to be a lot of fun. Good, old-fashioned fun, pretty much. No teasing about babies (however adorable), no tying anyone up, no spankings, and much more ‘making love’ than ‘pounding’ (though there was some of that).
There was one little bit of naughtiness, though. And a brand new sort.
After we’d finished, Paige grinned, winked, took her ring off, and set it in the nightstand drawer.
“There!” she said. “Now I’ve officially had sex with someone not my fiancée while wearing my engagement ring!”
“Jas didn’t let you?” I said.
She giggled and said, “I forgot! We’ll get to that very soon!”
“Might be Angie’s first time, too.”
“We can hope!”
Laughing, we kissed a few more times, then went to sleep.
Wednesday, March 19, 1986
We had a much heartier breakfast today, then got out our rain gear. This was one of those days that looked like it was just going to be a mess. We had umbrellas and jackets, though, and we weren’t made of sugar, nor were we wicked witches. We could undoubtedly survive.
Properly equipped, we arrived at Tulane a few minutes early. Marshall and Sandra waved when we got off the streetcar, then greeted us with hugs once we reached them.
From that point on, we were in their hands. Angie and Paige had seen a fair bit of this, but not all of it, while it was all new to Jas and me. As they had, we got to see the inside of the locker room, including Marshall’s little space. He let us pick up the pads he wore. Just wearing those would be a workout!
Their exercise room was, by 1980s standards, excellent, or at least I thought it was. I was nearly certain the entire field of athletic training was going to be massively updated over the next few years, but Tulane could afford to stay relatively current right now.
I remembered a story from the early 2000s. At one point (really, about now!), A&M had had state-of-the-art workout facilities. Within a couple of decades, they were far behind many schools. They hadn’t updated enough, and a lot of things had broken and not been fixed. They went through a major effort to update all of their equipment, and it had made a fairly big difference in their gameday performance.
Marshall walked us through some of the standard exercises he did. They were all tailored toward building strength without reducing speed or explosiveness. Much of what he did happened very quickly, and being able to move into position a tenth of a second faster easily trumped being a little bit stronger.
Sandra was paying close attention to all of this. I was certain it wasn’t new to her, but I think it was a reminder of what she already knew: football was as much mental as physical to Marshall and people like him. He was a big, strong guy who, from a certain perspective, ‘hit people really hard.’ That’s what people think of when they watch linebackers.
What they miss is that great linebackers are thinking constantly, looking for clues about what’s about to happen and trying to not just react to where the ball is but where it’s going to be. A good linebacker stops a play with a short gain. A great linebacker stops it for a loss. Not every play, but enough of them to matter, anyway.
Linemen and linebackers tend to be a lot smarter than people think. Not necessarily ‘brainiacs,’ but there are more examples of ‘dumb as a post’ running backs and receivers than people who play in the trenches. Heck, there might be as many ‘dumb as a post’ quarterbacks (normally considered a pretty cerebral position) as dumb linemen and linebackers.
Marshall showed us some of the defensive playbook, though he joked he would have to kill us afterward, and then the film room. He loved the film room! It was exactly his sort of thing: watching what an opponent did so he could figure out how to spot it and counter it, and watching himself make mistakes and learning from them.
I could see the pride on Sandra’s face during part of it. She’d come a long way from thinking he was a dumb jock.
If, in fact, she ever had. That might have just been a story. It had the ring of truth to it, though.
We had lunch at their student center, then toured the classroom buildings a bit. Over lunch, we got more of a feel for Sandra. At Memorial, she might have been one of the ‘brainy socialites.’ Her parents were sixth-generation residents of New Orleans, and her father was a well-regarded attorney. Her mother had been a stay-at-home mother, but now that Sandra and her older brother were out of the house, she’d gone back to working as a paralegal. Not for her dad, though. They apparently loved each other very much but had trouble working together.
In short: Sandra came from money and Marshall didn’t. Brains bridged the gap. Marshall might have been poor, but he didn’t act or live like a poor person, and he clearly wasn’t going to stay poor. Nor was Amelia, if Marshall had anything to do about it!
From what she said, I knew Marshall had already met her mother and father, and it seemed clear he’d passed that test with flying colors. If so, that left only the biggest thing about an engagement: making sure the other person was ‘the one.’ They were almost certainly not there yet, but it felt like they were moving in the right direction, and quickly.
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