Anne and Mary

by Robin Pentecost

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

3 Mary

When Anne went to take a shower, she didn´t take any clean clothes with her. I wondered what would happen when she came out. When she did, she wasn´t wearing a towel or anything else. Naked. Said she forgot. Maybe, but no problem.

She´s a great-looking woman. About 5´ 6” or 7”. Broad shoulders, good legs, breasts all over her chest, but not huge or flabby. None of her is flabby. Tan everywhere but where the bottom of her little bathing suit was. Square face and jaw, full lips, dark brown eyes that see everything. Brown hair cut square to shoulder length, not frizzy or anything. Simple. No paint. Knotted gold studs in her ears. No hair on her crotch; think I´ll let that ride for a while.

She didn´t mind that I looked her over like I´d look over a filly. I´m starting to like her.

On the way out for food, I looked over the rooms as I closed the door. You can see the fields out the windows – incredibly green for August. But this is the Mid-West. They have rain here in the summer. The rooms are good – will be better when we get things set up right.

In the pizza joint, we got a big one, lots of stuff on it.

“Now,” she said, “Tell me where you´re from in Colorado, and all that.”

“Fairplay, they call it. Up in the mountains, mostly cattle country, lots of sagebrush, some mining. Cold winters, hot, dry summers. Windy. What about you?”

She told me the name of her home town, but of course, I´d never heard of it, any more than she knows Fairplay. She´s here to study Retail Marketing, she said. My game is more like Financial Planning.

“How´d you do in high school?” I asked.

She looked me straight in the eye. “I was number three in my class of 800. I decided I didn´t want to have to give a speech on Graduation Day, so I fiddled an exam or two so I wouldn´t be any higher. And you?”

I looked back. “I was top in my class of 200. When they asked me to do a valedictory, I told them if I had to, I just wouldn´t show up for graduation. So they stuck someone else with it.”

She smiled that smile of hers that sort of makes her glow.

“I plan to be pretty close to the top when I get out of here, too, you know,” she said.

“I hope you are, if that´s what you want. I want to learn what I need to know. If I get good marks, so much the better. But I guess that´s not too much different...”

“Well, yeah. You´re right about learning what you need. But well, I guess I´ve got this thing about excellence. I really want to excel. And I want my life to have beauty in it. But I also want to have fun...”

I got right back in. “That´s sort of what I was getting at before, about guys. I like guys, but I want to find some who care about more than beer and sex.”

“Uh, didn´t mean to get high and mighty, there...” Anne said. She looked a little concerned, as though she might have turned me off. She hadn´t. And then she smiled that smile again. “I like beer. And I like sex. But, yes, I´ve seen too many guys who stop right there. The problem is finding guys – and girls – who like other things, too. Love is important, but I really worry about what some people call love. I don´t know what to make of it some days.”

“Well, anyway, it sounds like we have our work cut out for us. Good marks, good guys, a mix of beer and beauty, sex and love. That´s some agenda.”

“We´ll manage. I´ve been lucky so far. But you make a lot of your own luck. It´ll hold.”

“I like you,” I said. “I like that you think about the same things I do. I think we´re going to be all right.”

Back at the dorm, we headed upstairs. There was a crowd of guys hanging out on the steps, and we talked to them as we went in. Several wanted to know if we wanted company, and we just let it go by. Up in the room, we suddenly realized the only lights were the ones on the ceiling. “Better put some lamps on the Salvation Army list,” Anne said and made a note in a little book. “I guess I can cross off the wastebasket I was going to get.”

“Unless we want another one.”

It was still early, and we sat and talked for a while about the next few days. Registration, courses, books, where to eat, what it costs. Laundry. Telephone – we had a small debate about cell phones, then decided to use them just for long distance; we´d get a land line for local calls.

“You leave any boyfriends at home?” I asked.

“No. That is, I have boyfriends at home, but I´m not going to miss any of them too much. I enjoy being with them when I´m there, but while I´m here, I´m going to find some fellows I can share this life with. I figure I´ll see who´s in my classes and see if I can put a study group together.”

“What do you mean, a study group?”

“Well, I don´t know if it will work here, but at home I had some friends – guys and girls in my class – and we´d get together and keep our homework up and study for exams and stuff. I didn´t get to be top of my class without some help, you know. Anyway, I hope I can get something like that together here. It´ll be more fun, and I think it´s less work when you do it together. You get to see things the way other people do, and that helps.”

I thought that over. “And does this study group meet in the afternoons or at nights, or on weekends?”

Anne grinned. “Depends. Depends on how much we like each other.”

I let that rest.

After a while, I got up and went into the bathroom for a shower. I pulled my hair out of the braid and washed it. It´s real long; if I don´t keep it cut, I can sit on it. The electric outlet in the bathroom didn´t seem to work, so I went into the bedroom with my hair dryer. Anne was on the bed, reading a book.

“Hi,” she said, looking me over, just as I had done to her. “You´ve got a great body.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went to work on my hair. I have to bend over and let it hang down while I dry it, and that seems to help me keep the kinks out of my back. I´m thin, with B+ breasts, small waist, long legs.

“Say, Mary,” says Anne, “If your mom freaks when you don´t wear a bra, how come you´ve got an all-over tan? I wish I had one. And you´ve got some muscles in your legs.”

“Well, some day I´ll tell you the whole story, but like I told you, mom and dad work pretty hard. So, most of my life I´ve spent my time, except evenings, on my Aunt Bessie´s ranch, helping with the cattle and chores. I ride horses all the time, mending fence, helping with the herding and the cooking. Summer time is three months in the saddle for me.”

“And what about the tan?”

“Well, all work and no play... Aunt Bessie believes in having fun, too, so there´s a swimming hole in a wash about a mile back of the ranch house. There´s a corral and a line shack, and enough trees that we can swim and lie in the sun and we don´t need clothes.”  

“Who´s ‘we´?”

“Aunt Bessie, of course, my cousin Beth, Aunt Bessie´s daughter. She´s four years older. And my other cousin, Dan. He´s two years older. They´re all serious about the ranch, but they like to take their clothes off, too.”

“So you´re both real cowgirls, you and Beth.”

“Beth and Dan are cattle people, ranchers. I am, too, in a way. That is, I know how to be one, but I don´t want to. Cattle people are hard workers, and they know a lot about horses and cattle, but that´s not for me. I want something different from riding a horse or a tractor in the sun or the snow all year. Cows are pretty stupid. You don´t have much interesting conversation when you´re riding herd. And mending fence is lonesome. In the winter, it´s just plain nasty. Try pulling a calf feet first out of a cow in the middle of a snowstorm some time.

“For some reason, Beth loves it. Dan´s going to be an engineer, but Beth´ll do a good job with the ranch when Bessie´s gone. I´m glad for them. But for me, it was just a hell of a good way to grow up. Makes you think about what you want out of life.”

By now, my hair was dry and I put the machine away in the bathroom.

“We need to get someone to fix that outlet in there,” I said, “I didn´t plan to stand out here in the buff, showing off.”

“Well, you didn´t seem to have any problem doing it, and I certainly enjoyed watching. I like pretty things,” Anne said, “But what did you mean this afternoon, when you said you don´t sleep in the buff?”

“Just that mom is pretty strict. In fact – let´s be honest – she´s a prude. I have to wear pajamas at night at home, even when I´ve spent the afternoon lying naked in the sun with Beth and Dan. Of course, mom doesn´t know about that.”

“I would have thought she´d see your body at home sometime. All that tan.”

“Oh, no. I don´t think mom has seen me naked since I got out of diapers. She simply wouldn´t think of it. I know I´ve never seen her much less than fully dressed. And I don´t think my father has either. I´m an only child and that´s the way she wants it.”

“Wow. Well, for what it´s worth, I´ve got two brothers. One is two years older, one two years younger. I can´t imagine being an ‘only´.”  

By now it was midnight and there was a lot to do the next day. I pulled the covers off the bed and slipped underneath. “I´m going to give this sleeping in the buff a try.”

Anne got up, stripped and went into the bathroom. I heard her pee and brush her teeth, and then she got into her own bed.

“Toss you for who turns out the light.”

“Shit. Sorry. Just a sec…”

“Good night.”  

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter