My Summer with Nora Ch. 09

This is about the end of the affair between Paul and his first girlfriend, Nora, at the City College of New York in October of 1974. I decided to put it in Non-Erotic because it doesn't seem to fit in any other category. Erotic activity is described but not depicted here. Chapter 8 gives some clues about why she left him.

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At the beginning of my sophomore year in college, I thought I had resolved all of my romantic and sexual disappointments from earlier in my life, especially those from my freshman year. Since June, I had what seemed like an ideal relationship with a fellow student, a young woman my age named Nora Meara.

Maybe not everybody would consider her as ideal, because she had spent much of her freshman year as an ad hoc, freelance hooker. She found almost all her customers at the school, but she often had them come out to her house in Maspeth, Queens, when her uncle was at his job during the day. Yet she had quit that gig right after I had met her in June, and I told none of my friends or family the truth about her recent past.

To me, her checkered career made her seem more interesting, sexier even, than my other 4,000 female classmates who had ignored me for ten months. Maybe I was more tolerant of her because she did not allow any vaginal penetration from her customers.

Somehow I rationalized that as a way of seeing her as both "dirty" and "pure" at the same time. Then there was the contradiction that she had done anal occasionally, although she had charged a hefty fee for that. I had never done that with her, even though I had asked about it once. She never did offer it, but it wasn't an important issue to me.

Anyway, Nora seemed to have flair even though she admitted that she had made a mistake by getting involved with amateur hooking in the first place. That sophomore semester, she finally started concentrating on her formerly neglected studies.

In a burst of optimism, I invited her to join my rather offbeat college newspaper, The Salient. She immediately took to that new activity and did very well there.

I was doing very well too because suddenly I was no longer one of the paper's professional male virgins. Rather, I now had an impressive new girlfriend to show off. My colleagues there were amazed that I had been able to pull off a relationship like that after seeing me go for months without a single date. I think some of the male staffers were envious of me.

Nora changed her appearance during that period too. She replaced her "bad girl" outfits with more adult clothing, and she had re-done her dark blonde hair to a new, shorter bob-cut hairdo. Usually, she came in much better dressed than most of the other female students at C.C.N.Y.

We were having a great time together and I was a bit too impressed with my own good fortune. I wasn't aware of my naiveté, and I had no understanding of how unstable gender relations had become in the 1970's.

Probably in the back of my mind, I was thinking of the eras when my parents had met (the late 1940's) and also my grandparents (the early 1920's). To me, the best thing about the present was that it was no longer necessary to get engaged to a girl to have sexual access to her.

Thus I was surprised by how quickly my affair with Nora ended. Or rather, she ended it without telling me. The first thing I noticed was that she was no longer coming into The Salient newspaper office. Usually, we both would be in the office on most days, and then we might go out for a late lunch or drinks later.

Often she brought her 1970 Mustang up to school and parked it in a garage, so we often went somewhere in her car. Of course, I knew how she had raised the money to buy her dark-green Ford, but it was all good to my mind.

For the first three days or so, I didn't think much of her absence from the paper. Often we'd call each other on the phone, but I didn't hear from her either. On the fourth day, I called her at home during the day, but there was no answer.

I could have called her house in the evening, but I probably would have gotten her uncle on the line. He seemed to have a favorable opinion of me recently, crediting me with getting Nora onto a straight path, which may have been partially true. But I had never left a message for her through him, and I didn't want to start now.

I also knew in which rooms she was taking two of her classes, one in Wagner Hall and the other in Mott. I didn't want to look too overeager by waiting for her outside her classrooms. If she wants to see me, she knows where to find me.

By the seventh day, a Monday, other Salient staffers were asking me about her whereabouts. Story assignments were being handed out for the third issue of the semester, and Nora had contributed to the first two. I tried to be as vague as possible, and I promised that I would check in with her.

During the second week, I started to get worried. I hoped I would run into her by coincidence somewhere on campus. That way I would have an excuse to talk to her without looking desperate. Ever since I had met Nora, I understood that it was a bad idea to come off as emotionally needy with her or any other woman.

Yet after four months, I also believed that romantic and sexual satisfaction was somehow owed to me and I was getting my rightful share of it. I wasn't prepared for a letdown so soon after meeting her, although I should have known better.

On the Monday that began the third week, I finally found Nora. I was walking up the east side of Convent Avenue towards 135th Street when a car, a Triumph Stag convertible, pulled up to the curb. The top was up, so I couldn't see the driver that well. He seemed to be older than I was, perhaps in his late twenties.

Nora was in the passenger seat, and she immediately saw me through the open window. For a moment it seemed that the light glinted off the lenses of her steel-rimmed glasses. Then she put a finger up to her lips to make a "shushing" gesture. I didn't attempt any response; I just leaned against the stone wall surrounding the South Campus and looked at her.

For a moment she briefly said something to the Stag's driver, then she leaned over to give him a peck on the cheek. She got out of the car, and he drove away. Once on the sidewalk, she seemed unsure of what to do next. She wouldn't look at me, but she was glancing at a nearby gate to the South Campus. Presumably, she had a class to go to in one of the buildings there.

For a moment I noticed her clothes, which included a dark blue blazer, a tight gray skirt, and dark stockings. I briefly commented on her appearance.

"Nora, you're looking pretty good today, as usual."

She obviously didn't know how to respond to that. I understood that her main focus was to quickly get away from me. All she said was, "Well, thanks."

"You and I need to talk."

"Why? It's pretty obvious what's going on, isn't it?"

"It is, I suppose, but that's not the point. You owe me a conversation about this."

She had a mouthy side; she was rarely reticent in letting people know what she was thinking. I expected that she might say, I don't owe you a damn thing. Instead, she said, "I'll meet you outside Finley tomorrow," and she gave me a time for that. Finley Hall was the student center building on the South Campus.

"I can make that. But why not talk now?"

"Because I have to go to class."

"Then we'll go after your class. We can have a coffee or something."

"No, I want to do this tomorrow."

I almost said, so you need time to get your act together, figure out your strategy, but I didn't. She turned towards the gate, not saying goodbye or looking back at me.

Of course, I knew what was going on, but her actions had caught me unprepared too. Instead, I simply looked at her behind inside her skirt as she walked away. She's got such a wonderfully compact but round backside.

I also thought, she could use a good bare-ass spanking right now like the one I gave her before our first date last June. It didn't quite register with me yet that such events were never going to happen again.

If fact, I was numb for the next twenty-four hours and I couldn't handle the undeniable fact that I had been dumped. During that period, I tried not to think about her.

A few days earlier, I had begun masturbating at night with her as my fantasy partner. I hadn't done that since the previous semester when she had ignored me for months. Since then, I had plenty of real-life experiences to choose from when picturing her with me. As she had said a few weeks earlier, "Haven't I given you all the sex you want, and then some?"

Yes, she was the horny chick I had always wanted to meet, and she could be wild and kinky in sexual matters. I had coupled with her in some unusual places, often in the middle of the day. On such place was the roof of my building. She got down on her hands and knees as I took her from behind while I knelt there. That minimized the parts of our bodies touching the gritty asphalt roof panels.

Thirty minutes later she was downstairs having dinner with my family. They liked her because she always put on her best girl-next-door, diligent student demeanor for them.

On another occasion, we did it in one of the retired buses behind the Kingsbridge Depot up in Inwood. The buses had hard plastic seats, so I volunteered for the more uncomfortable position. It made me feel quite chivalrous.

I sat in one seat and Nora straddled me. She simply lifted her skirt, took off her panties, and then knelt on me to give me a very pleasing cowgirl-style screwing. During that episode, I remember looking down at her gray knee socks and cute brown-leather ankle boots.

During that brief interim period from Monday to Tuesday, I tried to not remember any of that. I had never considered that she was wild enough to find another lover and dump me as soon as it suited her.

****

The next day I was standing outside the front entrance of Finley Hall. I had arrived fifteen minutes early, and the reality of the situation entered my swirling thoughts.

I first pondered the guy she had been with in the Triumph convertible. Who is this guy and what does he have that I don't? The answer to that was obvious. He must have had a good job and thus more money than I did if he could afford a new car like that. I had no car at all, not even a 1964 Rambler like the one a friend owned

I know what you're doing, Nora. You're trying to improve your prospects so that you don't have to rely on part-time prostitution again [I had a notion that she might go back to it someday] plus jobs at fast-food places and temp agencies.

I remembered going to a restaurant once to tease her about her horrible brown and yellow Burger King uniform as she worked behind the counter. Later she told me she would wear thongs under her brown trousers as a way to keep her morale up.

In the longer run, I knew about her problematic bachelor's degree in history. Of course, I was studying the same thing. I was too unsure of why I was even in college to consider a new major.

Just because I understood her motives didn't mean that I had to like them. She had betrayed me, cheated on me, and dumped me for somebody else without hesitation.

As Nora walked up, I tried to control my jitters by leaning back against the stone portico of Finley. She was wearing trousers that day, tight gray ones. For a moment I perused her thighs, and a sexual image came to me. I wanted her long legs wrapped around my back as her hands gripped my bare ass. That was also the kind of event that was unlikely to ever happen again.

She had primly folded her hands in front of her. It seemed that I should speak first. "Let's go upstairs and get a soda or something."

"No, I prefer to talk to you out here."

I remembered being in that snack bar the previous June when she had made her term paper proposal to me. That led to a series of incidents in which she became my girlfriend instead of a mere customer. Yes, she would take term papers in lieu of cash.

Her tactic was clear; she wanted to keep that meeting as brief and formal as possible. Thus she was going to talk to me standing up, outside. To sit opposite her at a table implied that there was still a chance of a reconciliation.

I wanted to keep the peace. "Okay, whatever you want." Then I launched into my concerns. "Who was that Mister Stag I saw you with yesterday?" Stag seemed like an oddly appropriate model name for a guy like that.

"That's really none of your business."

"So this guy must have the money to buy a fancy car." That was another thing I didn't have: a job. "Does he also have a bigger cock than I do?"

Despite her pose as a tough and worldly woman, Nora winced at that. "Please Paul, don't be childish."

Much later I found out that he was a former student who had driven up to the college to meet an old professor of his. He had seen Nora walking along and offered her a ride to the subway. She admitted later that she had gone a lot further with him than that. And, he did indeed work at a brokerage firm in the Financial District.

I had one more gripe to air. "You could have called or spoken to me in the last two weeks instead of just ignoring me."

Maybe Nora anticipated exactly what I would say because she evaded my statement. "Look, Paul, I don't want to talk about it. Take my advice; just let go of it, I mean everything about me."

"Your advice? How can I do that? I'm really hurting."

"I know that, but you'll get over it."

"By doing what?"

"By meeting one of the 4,000 other girls at this school, that's how. You should have the confidence now to handle that."

I couldn't grasp how to do such a thing, so I asked her something else. "Are you also quitting the paper?"

"No, I'm going back. In fact, I'm going up there this afternoon to check in."

"But I'm also going to be there. How am I going to stand having you around almost every day?"

"You'll deal with it. I mean, we can still be polite and say hello to each other."

I had one last, mostly irrelevant objection. "Everybody there is going to know that, we, ah..." I was going to say, broke up. Instead I went with, "Are not seeing each other any longer."

"Who cares what they think? That's another thing your fragile ego will be able to handle."

I was struck by how calm and collected she was. She continued, "I said I wasn't going to talk about this anymore. In a moment, I'm going to turn around, and that's going to be the end of it. One thing; I'd appreciate it if you didn't watch me go."

I was a bit juvenile about it. "I'm going to do as I please."

I almost didn't believe that she'd just turn and leave, but she did. Her ass swayed nicely inside her tight gray pants as she walked over to Wagner.

As she probably had already guessed, I had some very lewd and nasty thoughts about her. Nora, I'd like to paddle your sassy behind, and then stick my dick up your ass. I'd ejaculate into you as far up as I could get it. Wow, maybe I wasn't such a nice guy after all.

Losing her really began to hit me, and I indulged in some self-pity. That's great, it's only been, what? Maybe fourteen or fifteen weeks? My thoughts went to sex. I'm back to where I was last semester. How am I going to get laid now? I know, with my own two hands, as before.

I looked up at the sky. Lord, how could you do this to me? Nora could sometimes be strange and difficult, but in other ways, she was the most amazing girlfriend I could imagine. She gave me almost everything sexual I had ever wanted. She even came equipped with her own convertible. I had waited my whole life for somebody like her. (At nineteen one has a different sense of time.) And in an instant, it had all been snatched away from me.

It wasn't just the sex; it was the first time my heart had been broken, and I didn't know how to cope with that. We had said we loved each other. I remembered the first time that had happened: in the living room of the Maspeth house one afternoon when we were drinking vodka and tonics.

I had said it first, and I had meant it. She also had said it and she seemed to take it seriously too. But were they just convenient words for her, good only as long as needed and then stamped "invalid?"

Perhaps one of the worst aspects was that she was coming back to the paper. I'd be seeing her around all of the time, perhaps for the next three years. But it might have been more merciful if she wasn't there and she had just stayed away. And who had invited her to join in the first place? It was me of course. I thought I had been clever but outside Finley, I felt like an idiot.

I cut classes the next day and went to see a movie at a theater in Manhattan. While waiting for the film to start, I pondered more about Nora.

I felt she had never really respected me because I started out as one of her customers. Also, she became disenchanted with me because of my youth, inexperience, and relative poverty. She thought she could do better, and she grabbed the chance when that guy in the Triumph drove up.

Nora was uneasy about her past and now wanted someone who knew nothing about what she had done in her freshman year. She had felt shame and distress about her actions, but she covered those with a false sense of bravado. Now she had the opportunity to truly start fresh with someone who wasn't aware of any of that.

Of course, I was the one who had listened to her confessions, but that role for me was now completed.

Nora had been right about one thing. Within two weeks I did pick up a new girl, right in the snack bar that Nora and I had been in so often.

*****

This concludes the series, although a new one will start up when Paul meets his next girlfriend -- actually, there will be more than one -- later that season. There will also be stand-alone stories about Nora until her graduation in 1977.