Much to our mutual surprise, I was able to rouse myself early enough to join Kathy for breakfast the next Sunday, and we had another pleasant, relaxed conversation free from the erotic tension of the Friday before.

And so began an odd bifurcation between nights spent as would be lovers and mornings met as dispassionate friends. On date nights the final kiss became more important – and often lengthier – than the movie which proceeded it. That lighted entranceway to her apartment became the scene of our little drama as kiss followed kiss and she pressed grudgingly ever closer to me. Our bodies would wrestle like the possessed on Friday, often surprising us with what they would and wouldn’t do, and then our minds would calmly discuss it over breakfast on Sunday.

It seemed as if we were in constant physical negotiation – concessions granted one evening would be withdrawn the next. Like a dough boy whose whole world consists of one small plot of no man’s land endlessly contested over, it only made me more aware and appreciative of every inch of her.

Complicating things was the fact that, unlike most of the other college girls who wore t-shirts, jeans and as little else as possible, Kathy dressed traditionally, archaically even, adding extra challenges as I groped over, under and around various unfamiliar garments – blazers, sweaters, blouses, slips, complicated bras – which created a greater surface area, more room, more material, as it were, for sensual play, an enlargement and elongation of erotic possibility, more veils to pierce, more mysteries to solve, and beneath it all burrowed that final layer of fantastic, hungry young flesh, itself warring with the even more archaic notion that maybe she wanted to remain a virgin until she married.

It was ironic because this college relationship with all its awkward groping and slow progress through contested territory resembled what you’d expect from high school, while my actual high school fling with the equally virginal NC had been much more typical of college, where the women were just as often the aggressor, and the jump into bed that transformed friend (or even stranger) into lover casual and quick.

Unlike NC who was afraid I’d lose interest if she didn’t immediately show she was eager to go all the way, Kathy was afraid I’d drop her once we did. But they were both wrong – what’s important to me is the knowing, the sheer, intimate experiencing of another person, body and soul, not the notch on the bedpost – which isn’t to say that Kathy didn’t render me highly horny in a short period of time.

But despite any degree of frustration, I’d never do anything to a woman that I wasn’t absolutely sure she wanted me to do. I really wouldn’t have been devastated if our relationship had ended without me making love with her – but I knew that, despite her protests and evasions, SHE wouldn’t be. In her milieu and at her age it was absolutely freakish to still be a virgin, and I knew she saw me as a way to lose it with honor. We were both aware that not only wasn’t our relationship going to last forever, but that neither of us really wanted it to, so she was, in fact, as is so often the case, accusing me of wanting to do the very thing she wanted to do – consummate at last and then break up.

I wondered then how much experience she’d had, if what I wanted from her was even possible. As one of the first small wave of girls in a newly co-ed prep school you’d think Kathy would have gotten her fair share of male attention, if only from sheer force of numbers, but that was far from the case. Maybe it was the ingrained institutional habit of trolling in the nearby all girls schools or, more likely, something more complex in the male psyche, but what developed at Prep was that a few girls (like say, Virginia) went out a lot while a lot went out rarely, if at all. At the prom the number of purely Pitt Prep couples was surprisingly small, and many of those were basically platonic one shot deals. Kathy, typically, was on the Prom Committee but didn’t actually go to the prom.

Similarly, despite the fact that our college had gone co-ed only ten years earlier and still maintained a heavily unbalanced ratio of men to women, the latter were far from guaranteed male attention. Though there was much more rampant and casual fraternization there than at Prep, there were still a disproportionate number of women who were relentlessly pursued while other women were largely ignored, even by guys who weren’t that popular themselves – and in this case there weren’t any girls schools on our doorsteps, only pastures filled with farm animals.

And it’s not as if the guys in those highly hormonal days of high school were totally unaware of Kathy’s assets. After all, she’d been a cheerleader (a small talent pool granted, but why not? – even though she wasn’t the prettiest girl in school she was certainly athletic, nimble and spirited enough), her legs revealed in their glory by short skirts and high kicks, and during the gymnastics team’s annual exhibition (which more resembled a cheesy Los Vegas floor show) more than one elbow was delivered to a buddy’s ribs at the sight of the well developed rack stretching her leotard. But as she found herself juxtaposed in the chorus line between the head to toe stunner Heather and the over the top pneumatics of Ungie such revelations were soon eclipsed.

But I didn’t see things that way anymore, and not just because Virginia had so firmly put me in my place in the pecking order. It was more a question of me finally beginning to get some perspective, of being able to focus on what I’d overlooked, and learning, as Kant said, to treat a woman as an end rather than as a means.

But in that brief, golden liberal hour, the interregnum when VD had been conquered, birth control was plentiful yet AID’s had not yet reared its hideous death’s head, when the sexual revolution had seemingly been won and sexual freedom become the lingua franca, it was rare, unheard of even, for a couple to part chastely at the door with a kiss. Clearly Kathy was operating under a different set of rules. I slowly made my way back to the bar, in the grip of the sort of overwhelming thirst which seemed to afflict me frequently in those days.

I sat at my friend’s table to much hooting and hollering and some outright hostility emanating from Ungie. What the hell, UBU? She bellowed over the umpteenth rendition of Brick House. What was that? What the hell are you doing with that stuck up narco bitch?My only reply was to grab her beer and drain it, which didn’t improve her disposition any. Grosse Points Palffy, who had been my spectacularly mismatched roommate freshman year and my nemesis ever since, leaned over from the Deke table to make a few barking, dog like noises in my ear. I silently gave him the finger and he chortled and returned to his own kind.

Only Keith, my blood brother who knew me so well, understood. This is one of your things, isn’t it?

Yeah, I said, I guess it is.Ungie pouted prettily, but the beer and quaaludes soon rendered her mostly inert and she didn’t say another word.