One lazy Saturday afternoon over two years ago, I was browsing through an old college acquaintance's
page, when I spotted one of his "friends," a woman I knew well when I was in school nearly three decades ago. Though we weren't together for long, I was head-over-heels in love with her.
She ended up only spending one year at EDSU, then transferred to a women's college in Texas. But just a few weeks before the end of that year, we spent one unforgettable, bizarre, and hazy evening together. Seeing her name again after all those years brought memories of that night flooding back. I was both intrigued and excited thinking about her.
Suzette Pearce was a shapely, Irish Catholic girl that I met through my roommate and best friend. Jack. She was from Jack's hometown, and Jack had graduated from high school with Suzette's sister Deanna, who married one of his good friends and another high school classmate Jon Jewell.
Suzette's parents owned a cattle ranch, and were extremely conservative Catholics, especially her father. Luckily, in her huge family, only two of her 11 siblings were female. As is too often the case in girls, the repressive effects of a conservative upbringing can give rise to rebelliousness and an aversion to being perceived as a "good girl." In Suzette's case, she had developed a reputation for being easy.
I was no doubt well aware of that reputation when Suzette started hanging around our house during my sophomore year of school. Suzette was a freshman, a year younger than I was, and she lived in the dorms. I guess I understood that the constraints of those living arrangements put a crimp in her lifestyle, so it was understandable when she soon started partying at our place several nights a week. We had a lot of parties, and Suzette liked to party.
Jack had introduced her around to a number of our friends, including Malcolm, a handsome black buck, who was the starting point guard on our school's basketball team. Coincidentally, years later, Malcolm actually had a tryout with the
Los Angeles Lakers
.
Malcolm had carefully honed his own reputation: as an incorrigible horndog, who took great pride and pleasure in corrupting white girls. He was a master at maneuvering himself into one night stands or parts of one night stands with them. Malcolm didn't so much try to bed girls -- there were too many complications involved in that -- as he contrived to get them to play his "skin flute."
Malcolm claimed his personal record was three flautists in one evening, and I, for one, believed him. According to Malcolm, Suzette had "played a little tune for him" in the janitor's closet of the dorm in which they both lived.
Now Suzette was at our house several nights a week, and I couldn't help but assume that her amorous interests were being directed
my
way.
Jack was a notorious ladies man, but he had a serious girlfriend at the time -- Beth who, for all intents and purposes, lived at our house. I had to believe that for that reason Suzette would have regarded Jack as off limits. Besides, if she took up with him, her family and most of her hometown would have heard about it.
My other roommate, T.O., a Music major, who worked at the college radio station, was hardly ever around. When he was, girls just didn't gravitate toward him, and vice versa. Not that he was ugly or defective in any way, and he certainly wasn't gay, but at the time, T.O. was more infatuated with jazz records and a quixotic desire to transform himself from a novice saxophonist into the next Sonny Rollins than he was with girls.
You would have thought that if any woman could have gotten T.O.'s attention it would have been Suzette, what with her proclivity for "woodwinds." But she didn't. Interestingly, T.O.'s first instrument was actually the flute!
That left, according to my math,
me
. We started flirting with each other a lot, and occasionally making out, so I knew that Suzette liked me, but whenever things might have started to get interesting, she always had to catch a ride back to the dorms, according to her, while "a ride was still being proffered."
That's how she always got to our parties -- she'd beg one of her girlfriends from the dorm to give her a ride over to our place, promising a kickass soirée. I was not very aggressive, nor was I all that experienced in romancing girls, so when it came to proposing an alternative to the ride from one of her friends -- namely spending the night with me -- I was too shy or too polite to say anything.
Besides, if she had decided to spend the night with me, I would have been too embarrassed to purse any romance until our privacy was completely assured. You see, my bedroom was ostensibly the house's dining room, a vestibule off the main living area. In some ways I couldn't complain, because it was the biggest room in the home.
But it was separated from the rest of the house, not by a door, but by an archway from which I hung a huge tapestry, the only source of privacy that I had and an inadequate one when we hosted parties centered in the living room, five feet from my bed.
As a result of this architectural impediment and my bashfulness, my only chance for sexual antics was to find a willing partner who was still awake after everyone else had gone home or gone to bed. Suzette might have been a lot of things, but she wasn't a hanger-on. The bottom line was that the extent of my physical relationship with Suzette was confined to some playful kissing on the couch in the presence of 50 other people or some heaving petting in my car parked in the backyard.
Not that I wasn't extremely attracted to Suzette. She was stunning. She had a beautiful face -- a cute chin, soft, sensual lips, a delicate nose, piercing hazel eyes, a flawless complexion, and shining, shoulder-length brunette locks.
And her body -- my god! Her ample breasts gave way to a slender waist and a tight, sturdy ass. But Suzette's good looks and hourglass figure belied some serious strength. Though she wasn't particularly tall, she had wide shoulders, and extremely strong arms and legs.
I found this out one night when Suzette and I were talking and drinking beers at our kitchen table. Get this -- she challenged me to an arm-wrestling contest! I demurred. It was a lose-lose proposition, no matter how you looked at it. If I agreed to join in and won, I was an asshole who was proud that