Lynn Exits and Julie Enters

This wasn't intended to be a series, but it grew as sequels were added to the original stand-alone story, The Back of Paradise. That was followed by Return to Paradise and Fun in the Back Rows.

This new story concludes the events about Lynn, but it opens up the possibility of future directions. These things take time, however, so it may be a while before I post more. All the characters in this are at least eighteen-years-old.

**********

My one summer with Lynn Kepler, the summer of 1973 between high school and college, was idyllic. At least, that's how I saw it. I had forgotten the worries I had about what would happen in September when we were attending different colleges. I would be starting at the City College of New York while she was going to Fordham University.

I started to believe that it would make little or no difference in our relationship. Fordham was less than two miles from where I lived. The subway ride between the two campuses on the D train was about forty-five minutes, including walking time.

The only downside was that both of us lived at home, and thus we had to be creative in finding a reliable venue for our sexual activities. A couple of times we accomplished stunts in a movie theater, which worked very well. We had used the back rows of the huge Paradise for those episodes. It was interesting as a novelty, but we had a better alternative that didn't require us to use the grimy floor of a theater.

I was able to borrow my dad's car about once per week, and it was a big Pontiac with a generous back seat. It had to be done in the daytime because he needed it to commute to his job on the lobster shift at a hospital downtown.

However, I had found a couple of locations, especially a back road in Van Cortlandt Park, where we could park and have a modicum of privacy. We would have liked to have a place to spend the night together, but we couldn't think of a way to make that work for us.

We both had desultory summer jobs in Manhattan -- I was a foot messenger, she worked in an office -- so our automotive escapades usually had to be done on a weekend afternoon. When we both got off work during the week -- Lynn at 5:00 PM -- we would often go to dinner and maybe a movie, then we might hang out in a bar for a while. Back then, the minimum drinking age in New York State was only eighteen, which younger people now may find hard to believe.

If we didn't have the car on a weekend, we would go on excursions to wherever we could get to by public transportation. Coney Island was very run-down by then, having fallen far from its heyday decades earlier, so that was a disappointment. The Rockaways had a small but nice amusement park, plus the ocean beach there was more pleasant than the one at Coney further west in Brooklyn.

The best amusement park was Playland in Westchester County, which we could easily reach on the MTA's New Haven Division trains. I had known about it since the days when my parents would drive our whole family up there in the 1960s.

Twice we made the trek out to Jones Beach in Nassau County, which took a long time via three different modes of transportation. But it had advantages, including the two bathhouses which both had huge swimming pools. It was one of the first projects by master builder Robert Moses, and he was a stickler for getting all the details right.

After the dateless years in high school, I was struck by my good luck at finding Lynn -- or really, she had found me -- in the final weeks of our senior year. She seemed to be exactly the girlfriend I had always hoped to find but who I had assumed I had no chance of meeting until I got a fresh start at college.

Besides being smart and witty, she was also very sexually pleasing. She had been in one of my classes for months but had never spoken to me. Then one day in May she had picked me up at a bus stop near our school, and we had gone to the Paradise Theater where we had our first sexual encounter in the back seats. On that first day, as soon as the film started, she had initiated sexual contact with me and she knew exactly how it should go.

It was all very blunt and straightforward; she didn't hesitate at all. Basically, it was mutual masturbation with her bringing me to a climax first and then having me do the same to her.

It all happened very quickly and it was a big surprise to me. At eighteen it's a very heady experience to go from utter virginity to having one's cock stroked to orgasm and then fondling a girl's pussy to enable her orgasm. Maybe ninety minutes had passed from our first meeting at the bus stop to her relaxing and holding me in our seats.

Up on the screen, Alec Guinness was emoting as Adolph Hitler, but we had lost track of the film so we left to get an early dinner. With the Soviets closing in on him, it wasn't like we didn't know the ending.

Perhaps a wiser and more experienced guy than I would have seen her wildness, as I would call it now, as a red flag. But it all just kept getting better in the next few weeks, and I had no complaints. I felt I was very much in love with her and I told her so.

Maybe I was mistaken in being so obviously enthusiastic about her, but that never occurred to me. I had no previous experience to guide me. Possibly it appeared to her that I was taking her for granted, which back then I didn't know was not the best way to deal with a girlfriend.

In any case, as soon as we entered our respective colleges, our affair ended as quickly as it had begun. The last time I saw her was the Sunday before we were supposed to begin our new semesters.

We had always been quite casual about which one of us would initiate a phone conversation with the other. After my first two classes that day, I was home by about 3:00 PM. I figured that one of us would eventually call the other to describe our initial experiences. Around 8:00 PM I called her number. Often her older sister or her mother would answer the phone. That time I got the sister, and supposedly Lynn was not available then. I left a message for her to call me back.

It was rare that I didn't hear from her within an hour or two of a call from me. That time, I went through all of Tuesday without getting a return message. I figured that she was distracted by something at Fordham, and I didn't think much of it.

On Wednesday afternoon, I called again and got her mother on the line. I was assured that Lynn had gotten my message and she would get back to me soon.

Thursday and Friday came and went, and I still hadn't heard from Lynn. There was no texting or email in those days, so the phone was the only link I had to reach her. My decision was to wait until Monday for another attempt.

By that Sunday, the longest period ever had passed since May in which I didn't have any contact with Lynn. I admit I was starting to get worried. My anxiety was going up, and harsh thoughts were coming to my mind. Maybe she had decided over the summer that she was going to dump me and had already picked the beginning of September as the time when it would happen.

Yet I had seen no hint from her that she was dissatisfied with me or what we were doing together. I was baffled and I was growing increasingly uneasy.

I waited until Tuesday before making the third attempt. Her sister answered again, and she gave no indication that anything was amiss. Lynn supposedly knew about my calls and that I wanted her to get back to me. I even left my phone number again, although it was very unlikely that she had forgotten it.

After those three calls, I was starting to get more than a hint that she had opted out of my life. I assumed that the issue was now in Lynn's court; I wasn't going to make a pest out of myself and keep contacting her family. If she truly wanted to talk to me it was up to her to make the effort to do that.

Nothing happened for the rest of that week. A couple of my old high school friends, both of whom were then at Boston University, asked me about her and I gave the vaguest possible answers I could invent.

I had expected that Lynn and I might be visiting each other's schools by that week. It was getting increasingly unlikely that it was going to happen any time soon, if ever.

Over the weekend I tried to imagine what had gone wrong. One event I remembered was having lunch with her after our second stunt at that movie theater. That time, at the very beginning of July, we had banged twice on the dirty floor in the same back row of the Paradise. I had taken her from behind as she squatted behind the seats; then she had gotten on top of me as I lay down in the same spot.

As before, the 4,000-seat venue was virtually empty during a weekday afternoon show. Perhaps fifteen people were sitting in the rows far to the front. It was quite exciting to accomplish that kind of semi-public sex, which was far beyond anything I had hoped to do that summer. After that, we left to celebrate and have lunch at an Irish bar. On that day she had acted quite differently from the way she had during the recently ended school year. Or perhaps, she was revealing her true self to me for the first time.

While she had seemed rather modest before, that day he exhibited quite a bit of sexual brazenness from the moment I had met her at her building. One thing she did was lift her skirt and flash her panties at me as we passed through the center mall of Pelham Parkway.

Later, at the bar, she bragged that she was no longer wearing panties at all beneath her skirt. Supposedly, the ones she had started with were now soaked with the cum I shot off when I had ejaculated into her during those acts in the theater.

Then she had joked about flaunting herself and seducing some other guy. Except, I didn't find her attempt at humor to be that funny, and I told her so.

While sitting in that bar, I also had some other thoughts that I didn't tell her about. For one thing, I wondered about her past which she had been quite vague about. Was she truly a virgin when she met me, as she had suggested but never confirmed, or were there one or more old boyfriends that I didn't know anything about? Did any of those guys return and make a play for her over the summer?

It was also the first time that I worried about her attending a different university than I was. I would have no idea what she was doing or who she was with during the day there. And yet after that, the summer months had gone so well that I had forgotten my worries and simply enjoyed what I had.

*******

On a Monday, just two weeks after I had started the semester, an intense loneliness overcame me. For one thing, I hardly knew anyone at the new school. That day I had a morning class, and then two hours to kill until I had one in the afternoon. That period of being at loose ends was the most difficult one for me to handle. I tried to distract myself by walking up to the North Campus and sitting outside reading a newspaper.

I was also discovering something else about the nature of a break-up. Images and memories of Lynn came back to me all the time, and not just when I was alone in my bed at night. I could picture her dark hair and slim body. And that body had been so pale in May, but over the summer she had developed pronounced tan lines from her two-piece bathing suit.

Almost every guy loves feminine tan lines, and I was no different. But those on Lynn came to represent my sexual bereftness. For years, I had no outlet for my desires, and then she appeared and within an hour she had generously offered her body to me. Then, just as quickly, she was gone.

I especially liked the contrast between her tight little white ass and the rest of her tanned body. At night I would imagine her presenting her rear-end for me to couple with; she'd be nude except for a pair of beach sandals. I would need to masturbate a couple of times to relieve the pressure from that fantasy.

In late May I had thought, this is all almost too good to be true. In September, I realized how accurate I had been.

*******

I knew where Lynn lived and where she went to school. The bus ride between the two places was quite short, maybe two miles or so. I felt that she owed me an explanation for leaving me. Thus I fell into the habit, perhaps twice per week, of trying to find her somewhere in that area between the two places. I knew it was a long shot -- I didn't know anything about her schedule -- but I thought that it was possible I'd eventually run into her.

I was barely aware of the stalker-like nature of what I was doing. Sometimes I'd go to her apartment building on Wallace Avenue. I felt some temptation, but I knew it would be a very bad idea to go into the lobby and push the intercom button.

Perhaps I retained some self-control because I wasn't willing to spend hours outside her building waiting for her to either enter or leave the place. Fifteen minutes or so was about my limit for hanging around on her block.

The Fordham campus itself had tighter security than the wide-open City College did. It was practically impossible for me to enter the place without a student ID. Nevertheless, I would sometimes walk along the sidewalk outside the southern perimeter where most of the students came and went.

On some days I would visit both her home and her school, riding the bus with the faint hope that I might see her during a couple of round trips between the two locations. I would also glance into the various pizza shops and diners along Fordham Road, or into the stores and restaurants around Lydig Avenue and White Plains Road.

I had to resist making a fourth phone call to her number; it was tempting to do that but I knew it was futile.

That autumn I knew it was going to take a while to get over her. So why didn't I, as the expression goes, "get back on the horse that threw me?" In other words, find some other girl among the 4,000 or so of them at City College. (Nowadays the expression would be "nexting" Lynn, i.e., finding the next girlfriend.)

It turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. It was strictly a commuter school, and most students went to class and then went home or to jobs. Meeting a woman in a class was not that easy. Most of them got up and left as soon as the session ended.

Perhaps that all was mostly an excuse on my part. I knew I should put some effort into it but, as in high school, I didn't

In late October I joined, along with an acquaintance from high school, one of the college newspapers. That gave me a social life at the school, but there were very few female staffers at any one time. Usually, most of them were attached to other guys on the paper.

*******

The next spring, quite by accident, I finally saw Lynn. I also, at the same time, saw her new boyfriend.

In the first week of April, I was heading east on Fordham, heading down the hill in front of the UA Valentine theater. I noted that I had seen a movie there the previous summer with her, but we hadn't done any fooling around in that place.

Then, coming up from the opposite direction, was Lynn with her new beau. It was obvious that they were an item because they were holding hands. At that point, I decided that I would let her see me but I wouldn't say anything unless she spoke first.

They were less than half a block away, so I slowly continued my course so that I would pass right by them. For a moment, I took stock of what I was dealing with. Lynn was quite modestly dressed. The guy she was with -- well, he seemed a bit older than I was but he could have been a student too.

The most notable thing about him was his height. I'm only about five-eight, but this person was more like six-foot-one. From his build, I guessed that he might be an athlete of some kind although probably not a football player. (Fordham had a team but CCNY had ended its program years earlier.) Perhaps he just worked out a lot.

In any case, I had my answer about why Lynn had left me. She had landed a rather good-looking older male for herself. Of course, I didn't know what his major was although I wondered about it.

As I approached the pair, I made sure I was looking directly at Lynn. I definitely wanted her to see me. The two of them were talking to each other, and when I was about ten yards away she noticed me approaching. I suppose that she was a bit surprised, but the only thing she did was raise a finger and wave it back and forth. No, no, don't say anything to me. Mister Lynn didn't notice anything wrong.

It was pointless for me to interfere with them, so I stepped aside and let them pass. As they continued up the hill, Lynn did not look back at me.

It wasn't until I was home later on that a wave of anger hit me. Why had she given me no warning of what she had been thinking the previous summer? Why hadn't she returned my phone calls? It took me a while to realize that none of that mattered.

*******

After another week of self-pity, I said to myself, the hell with Lynn; this is my problem to solve.,

I thought about whatever women at the school even knew I existed. Then I remembered one of my classmates in my political science class who was named Julie Kirschbaum. She was short, a bit plump, and she had glasses and somewhat unruly medium brown hair. Yet a couple of times she had talked to me as we stood in the driveway in front of Wagner Hall. I knew she was a freshman too, so she had to be eighteen or nineteen as I was.

I resolved on what I was going to do when the next class came around. It was then a Tuesday, and the next class was on the following day. I suddenly felt calm because I didn't really care what happened then. If Julie wasn't interested, then I'd find someone else.

When that class was over, everyone stood up to leave. Julie was only two rows over, so I went to her as she was getting her book bag together. I said, "Hi, Julie, please come downstairs with me. I want to talk to you about something."

She could have said, about what? Instead, I heard, "Sure, let's walk down together."

Once we were standing there, I gave myself about three minutes to chat with her about, whatever. It probably had something to do with the class, the term papers, our majors -- it didn't matter. In the last couple of months, I had gotten the impression that she was a bit on the quiet side, but she seemed to like me.

Then, I casually said, "I'd like to have a drink with you. We should go to the West End down by Columbia." That was at 113th and Broadway.

I saw her blink her eyes behind her glasses and her mouth opened slightly. I used the next couple of seconds to assess her looks, and I made sure she noticed what I was doing.

I started at her shoes. Then I saw her round thighs inside her tight jeans. It was a warm April day, and her jacket was open. I noted her breasts pushing against the cloth of her blouse. Nice juicy little body she's got, ripe and round.

All of that only took a couple of seconds, and when I was looking at her face again she was ready to answer me. "All right, that seems like a good idea. Ah, when do you want to go?"

There was something tentative about her answer but I felt it wasn't about me personally. Has this chick ever been on a date? I guessed, from her slightly shy demeanor that maybe she hadn't. By then I was learning that a lot of young students, despite the public perception that we were all sexually promiscuous, were struggling to put together some kind of romantic lives for themselves

I made my case, "Right now would be fine."

She said, "Well, I'm not doing anything right now -- yeah, let's go."

I didn't have enough money for cab fare, but I didn't bother to apologize for that or even mention it. "Then the Convent Avenue bus is right here for us." She agreed to that too. Man, that was so easy. It had taken me about a minute to convince her to go with me.