Chapter 17

I really liked the sexual freedom I felt when I was with Roger. Roger was totally co-operative and non-aggressive, both very non-masculine traits. Of course, he was two years younger than I was, but even so he had willingly followed my lead. Alone in his room with hours of time to play around, I began to discover what sensual sex was like. What it was like to snuggle up against my lover with my bare breasts against his warm back, holding him naked in my arms until we fell asleep. My sexual prior experiences had usually been rushed and were sometimes uncomfortable, so this was a discovery of a gentle, comfortable side of sex, and I liked it very much. Unfortunately, Roger was going to be out of town for the next month visiting his cousins, and I was going to have to find some other means of sexual satisfaction for a while.

Gary, on the other hand, was definitely going to be around. While I was pretty interested in Gary, he had become totally and completely infatuated with me. Who could blame him? I was the only girl he had ever seen naked. I was the only girl he knew who was totally sex-crazed and liked to masturbate in public. I was the only girl he knew who would strip naked and masturbate for him. Why wouldn't he be totally infatuated with me? The only problem was that our relationship had started out exactly backward. Usually, a boy and a girl got to know each other fairly well before any sex started. In our case, Gary had seen my tits before he knew my first name. Before he knew my last name, or where I went to school, Gary had listened to me outside the door while I had masturbated naked in a public bathroom. Other than the most intimate details of our sex lives, we knew almost nothing about each other.

At that time in my life, I was struggling to find a way to reconcile two opposite goals: having a satisfying sex life and staying a virgin. I was pleased that Gary had followed my instructions to keep his hands off of me, even in some very hot situations, but I really wasn't too confident that he would not turn into another latent rapist like Bob. And while I really wanted the security of a steady boyfriend, I was not about to give up control of my life, as I had during my infatuation with Bob. I was determined to set my own course, whether or not that included Gary.

After his exams were over, Gary called me all the time, and we spent hours and hours on the phone talking about a lot of stuff other than sex. I found that if I asked direct questions, Gary would answer equally directly, and apparently truthfully. Although we did talk some about our library adventures, I tried to keep the topics of conversation away from sex. I was concentrating on getting to know Gary, and finding out what kind of person he was. What he didn't know was that I was fingering myself during a lot of those long phone calls, concentrating on my memory of him jerking off in the library.

The first few times he came over to my house was mostly an opportunity for my parents to meet Gary. There was little privacy, but we did sneak in a few hugs and kisses here and there. I was trying to keep things non-sexual for the moment, and that seemed OK with Gary. I guess he knew me well enough to know that sooner or later my other, more sexual, side would emerge.

Gary was 16 (a year older than I was) and had just finished his sophomore year at Bob's school. He claimed not to know Bob, who had just graduated. (It was a big school, about 1200 students, so that turned out to be true.) We had gone to different elementary and junior high schools, and lived on opposite sides of town. I was Catholic and he was Baptist. He knew a couple of girls from my school through the debating team, but we didn't seem to have any close friends in common. What we did have in common was music: The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane. Our musical tastes were very compatible, and would later be very important to us. But in those first weeks, we spent a lot of time talking on the phone, getting to know each other in the ordinary ways, and mostly avoiding talking about what had brought us together in the first place: sex.