drive-1
986026015<>2001-03-30

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Hi, I'm back, and I want to thank everyone for all of the good feedback I received about the last post. Considering that all of the responses were positive and nobody called me a "hellbound smutmonger" or threw a brick through my monitor screen, I'll take that as a cue to keep writing. So here goes. This is kind of long, so I'll probably break it up into a couple of posts.

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When I was a freshman in college, I had a friend named Samantha who was in a number of classes with me. We met in an early morning political science class, and struck up a conversation when we discovered that that we seemed to be the only two people awake in the entire classroom, including the instructor.

For two semesters Sam and I passed notes, whispered to each other during the lectures and basically ended up learning nothing at all in the classes we shared, except that we liked each other and made each other laugh. Our relationship was strictly platonic, as Sam was involved with a guy she'd been dating since high school.

Oh, I was certainly attracted to her. While not gorgeous by most standards, she had a way about her that drew people's attention. She was short and slender, and wore her hair in a brown bob. She had wide, inquisitive blue eyes and a nose that actually crinkled when she smiled. Even by her own admission, she was no slave to fashion: she abhorred makeup, and was rarely seen wearing anything other than jeans, t-shirts and Reeboks. One of my friends commented that she was small-chested, another that she looked like a boy from behind. But she was sweet, and she was smart, and she had a laugh that would set all around her to laughing. She wasn't classically beautiful. But she was classically cute.

At the time, however, I was too shy to risk my friendship with Sam by telling her about my feelings. So she and I went to the movies together, hung out in my dorm room, watched television, shared secrets and essentially did everything that two people who were "just friends" did.

Just before her sophomore year, Sam transferred to college in southern Virginia. She had decided that she wanted to be a writer, and this school had a good writing program. More importantly to her parents, it was more affordable than some of the other schools she had been accepted to.

I was sad to see her go, of course. While my attraction for her went unrequited, I knew I would miss the simple pleasures of our friendship the most: the all-night conversations, the dirty jokes, the way we she always made me feel relaxed and comfortable. Still, I helped her pack her things, and I held her close just before she climbed into her parent's car for the long trip south.

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It was a couple of months later, at winter break, when I saw Sam next. We had been in regular contact over the phone during that time, and she had filled me in on all of the details of life at her artsy little college in the mountains. Most of her conversations concerned her friend Josh.(my "replacement", as I sometimes thought of him)

Josh was the first openly gay man Sam had ever met, and she was fascinated by him. Not only was he open about his sexual orientation, but he was equally forthright about his sexual adventures. He shocked and titillated Sam with the stories he told her about his love life. Late at night, after we had been talking on the phone for hours, Sam would repeat these stories to me.

Hesitantly at first, and then with more enthusiasm, she would paint verbal pictures for me of a thin young man with long blonde hair who would casually lean over to kiss his boyfriend full on the lips at parties. Sam's voice always grew husky when she would tell me these tales. One time, she even admitted that she would love to watch Josh and his boyfriend make love, "just to see how they did it." A nervous giggle followed this confession.

Naturally, I was jealous. Here I had pined for her for over a year, only to have her fall in lust for some art student who would probably never reciprocate her feelings. At the same time, though, it aroused me to think of her being aroused by Josh's stories, to think of how Josh was uncovering a sexual depth to Sam that she had most likely been unaware of.

I didn't get to meet Josh when he gave her a ride up from school for winter break. He dropped her off on the way to his parent's house in Philadelphia. Since he was going to be staying with them for an extra week, Sam asked if I would mind driving her back when the break was over. I readily agreed. Relations between Sam and her boyfriend had cooled since she had gone away, and my 19 year old mind remained hopeful that she might want to take our relationship a couple of steps further.

That never happened. Not really. Sam and I never became the lovers I wanted us to be, and she ended up dating a number of her schoolmates over the next few semesters. But we did share an experience on the drive back to southern Virginia that I will always carry with me.

We spent most of the drive talking about Sam's new favorite subject, which was sex. What her girlfriends at school talked about, what they did and who they did it to. What she found sexy in a man. She even asked me about the things that turned me on, which she had never done before. A lot of her conversation had to do with Josh, of course. It was obvious that she had an immense crush on him, and she would frequently sidestep the issue of his sexuality in order to go on at length about his golden hair, his long fingers, the smoothness of his skin.

As was now customary when I talked to her, I experienced alternating waves of envy and arousal. My mouth went dry and I shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat for fear that she might notice the growing bulge in my pants.

The sun had just gone down behind the mountains when she broke the silence that had hung thickly between us. Her voice was low and hesitant, almost a whisper as she spoke.

"Hey, you wanna hear what Josh and I did on the drive up?"

Inwardly I rolled my eyes. Sure, I thought. Let's hear another story about Josh. That'll be new.

"Um, sure," was what I said.

"Well, we were driving up, and it was getting dark like this, and Josh all of a sudden says, 'I dare you to take off your shirt.'"

"He what?"

"Yeah, can you believe it? I was like, 'what the fuck? Are you crazy?' But he was like, 'oh, c'mon. There's no one out on the road with us right now. I dare you.' And he was just smiling at me and looking at me out of the corner of his eye."

"Uh. Wha, what did you do?" I asked, my voice catching.

"I just laughed. I thought he was totally kidding. I was like, 'fine, let's see you take off your shirt and pants, and then I'll think about it!'"

"And?"

"Wait till you hear this. He's like, 'okay,' and he pulls off to the side of the road and gets out. I thought I was going to die when he started taking off his sweater and t-shirt. He was looking around all the time to make sure that there were no cars, and then he starts unbuttoning his pants! I couldn't stop laughing, I was like, 'Josh, you idiot, what the fuck do you think you're doing?'"

I'm not an easily surprised person. But I have to admit that I was just a little taken aback. "No way!" I said. "So he just, what, climbed back into the car naked?"

Sam was laughing now as she remembered. "No, he had his boxers on, and his socks. He had to crank up the heat because it was so cold. Both of us were laughing like lunatics. When we were on our way again, he calmed down a bit and turned to me and said, 'okay, Sam. Your turn!' That sent us over the edge again, and we started busting up all over again. I was worried that we were going to totally drive off the highway, we were laughing so hard."

I chuckled along with her at the improbable image of a young man driving through the hills of Virginia at the beginning of winter, dressed only in his boxers and a pair of socks.

"So was that it?" I asked. "Did he drive that way all the way up to Pennsylvania?"

Sam snorted at the thought. "No," she said, "we put our clothes back on before we got into civilization."

I thought my heart would stop. Though I tried to affect nonchalance, I was conscious of how short of breath I suddenly seemed to be.

"Uh...we?" I stammered.

She had stopped laughing now. Sam only smiled at me enigmatically, as if amused by my discomfiture.

"Yep," she replied.

I kept my composure for as long as I could before bursting out, "I'm going to kill you if you don't tell me the rest of it!"

That got a laugh from her. "Well, I figured that since he had taken me up on my dare, it was only fair that I return the favor. So I took off my jacket and my t-shirt. I was totally afraid that some trucker or whoever would see me, so I grabbed a blanket from the back seat and spread it over me. Then Josh says, 'as long as you've started, why don't you go ahead and take your pants off, too?'"

I struggled to keep my eyes on the road. "And did you?"

With the same little Mona Lisa smile, she nodded her head. "It was so wild! There we were, driving through the mountains at twilight with the heat blasting, and the two of us in our underwear. It was weird, but it was the wildest feeling I've ever had."

I didn't know what to say. We drove in silence for a while before she spoke again. "That's not all, you know."

"Oh?" I tried to sound as unaffected as possible.

"Yeah, I, um. I cant believe I did this. I was sitting there with the blanket over me, you know, like, feeling it against my skin? And then I, uh. I took off my bra."

My face felt flushed. I kept swallowing convulsively. "Wow. You did?"

Again, Sam nodded slightly. For the first time, I noticed that telling me this story had made her excited. I thought about my friend becoming aroused, I thought of her becoming damp and hot, and I blew out my breath in a short, frustrated puff.

"Josh couldn't believe I did that," she went on. She was staring at the road now, watching the events unfold in her mind's eye. "He saw me bring out my bra from under the blanket, and he was like, 'whoa!' Then he dared me to take my panties off, too."

I glanced at Sam out of the corner of my eye, waiting for the rest of it. She waited for a few expectant heartbeats before continuing.

"So I ... reached under the blanket again and took my panties off and showed them to him. And I was like, 'okay, mister, your turn.' So he pulls over to the side of the road again and takes his underwear off. I was, uh, really surprised, because I noticed that he was ... you know ..." She made vague gestures above her lap with her hand.

"Hard as Chinese algebra?" I finished for her.

She giggled at the crudeness of the expression, and for a moment she was once again the Sam I knew so well. "Geez, that's one way of putting it!" she exclaimed.

I smiled back at her, happy that some of the tension of the past few minutes had been broken. "And how did that make you feel, Sam?" I asked her coyly.

She took a long moment before answering.

"Really. Really. Turned on."

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TO BE CONTINUED

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