It was my turn to wag a finger at her. "If we have to watch TV, I'm taking your Pouilly Fuisse and giving you Ripple!"
She smiled at me over her glass. "Well, this is too nice for that. Would you hold my glass for a moment? Thank you." I took her glass, and she reached behind her back, and I heard the zipper on the dress come down. Then, as she stood there and smiled at me silently, she undid the clasp on the halter top. Her gown slipped to the floor pooling around her feet. My heart almost stopped, seeing her standing there. I knew she had to have been without a bra, since the halter top pretty much precluded that. What I hadn't expected was that Jeana was wearing sheer stockings, and not pantyhose, and that she had skipped on the panties. Now she simply stood there in her stockings and three inch heels, and calmly sipped wine with me.
"Oh my God!", I exclaimed. Suddenly my mouth was dry and I felt a flush hit my face.
"I'm not overdressed am I?", she asked with a smirk.
"No, the look is perfect for you." I cleared my throat. "Uh, would you mind if I took off my jacket?" And everything else?!
Jeana sat down and settled back against one arm of the couch. I didn't strip down completely, but I did kick off my shoes and took off the jacket and vest and bow tie. "I have to tell you, honey, the gown was gorgeous, but this definitely is better."
She laughed. "I thought you might like it!"
"Oh?"
"I've seen your Playboy magazines. I know what guys like."
I blushed at that. Now that I was living on my own, with a PO Box as an address, I could get Playboy delivered to me. I was too young to be able to buy it in a store. High heels, stockings, and a smile were perennial favorites. Jeana had seen it every once in a while on an end table, but I never knew she had actually looked through it. "Hey, I read it for the articles."
"So I should get dressed again?"
"I don't only read it for the articles." I finished my glass of wine and set it down and moved closer to Jeana. She simply smiled, finished her glass, and set it aside herself. She made short order of my remaining clothing, and then we made love right there on the couch, with her arms wrapped around my neck, and those unbelievable stocking clad legs wrapped around my waist, and her heels urging me on from time to time.
Afterwards, we went into the bedroom. I pulled her hair loose, but kept her stockings and heels on, and she got on top for the next go, and then we did our final set missionary position again. It was the most incredible way to finish the school year.
Chapter 21: Senior Year
Tuesday, November 7, 1972
It was about halfway through the fall semester of my senior year. All sorts of things were going on. Today was the day Tricky Dick was reelected President of these United States. The man was a seriously flawed but seriously underestimated man. Nixon probably had the finest mind for foreign policy of any President since the end of the Second World War. He also, very surprisingly considering he was a hard core Republican, signed into law a plethora of domestic regulation legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the EPA, the war on cancer, and the Title IX reforms that increased women's presence in sports, all of which his future Republican successors would blame on the Democrats as socialism. He was also incredibly paranoid and committed any number of crimes as the President. Angel or demon? I've been following politics since his time and I still don't have the answer. He was certainly no worse than some of the buffoons who followed him.
Today was also the day I received my early admission notice to Rensselaer, along with a big packet related to financial aid. I shitcanned that. I wasn't going to get anything in financial aid through the college. For one thing, looking through the FAFSA financial aid forms I noticed that it required a list of my assets. The average student at the time might have been able to save up anywhere from a few hundred bucks up to a grand; I had over seventy grand in the brokerage. No need based scholarships for this student.
There were a couple of different alternatives. One was that I was way, way up in the class standings. Apparently A grades at a college counted extra in the class rankings calculations. The odds were good that I would get some scholarships given simply to the top student in a field, probably math. However the scholarship I was really banking on was different. I was applying for a ROTC scholarship.
I had given this a fair bit of thought, both this time and the first time around. I skipped it then. Back when I was choosing colleges and trying to figure things out, we were still involved in Viet Nam, and despite the glowing reviews of the beauty of Southeast Asia given by the recruiters, that was an insane and stupid war. My parents wouldn't have stopped me from joining, but they wouldn't have helped me along either. While I could join the army at seventeen, I would need their signatures to do it, and there was no way in the world they would sign off on me quitting high school to do that. I could get a military scholarship or drop out of college and join.
That brought me to a second reason I didn't do it way back when. I went to school as a chemistry major, and the BIG topic in military science in the Seventies was something called binary nerve agents - nerve gas. Now, mind you, I was always a good lab chemist. I had excellent technique and routinely handled toxic and carcinogenic materials with ease. Nerve gas scared the bejeezus out of me! Forget about getting it on you in any way - just looking at it funny is enough to make you twitchy the rest of your life! I knew that if I got out of a high end technical college like RPI with a chemistry degree, my duty station was going to be Dugway Proving Ground, hoping like hell the wind didn't shift and spread gaseous hell all over me. No thanks!
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I knew the Army could actually be done safely. After we got out of Viet Nam, the Army saw relatively little action for about another decade. Grenada was in '83 and fairly small, and Panama was in '89 and not much bigger. Things didn't start getting dicey again until the '90s. If I got out of RPI with a math degree or two, I would almost certainly be assigned to a nice warm non-chemical lab somewhere.
Furthermore, the military is actually something of a family business for the Buckmans. We've been here since the 1750s, and while we managed to avoid the Revolution, every generation of Buckmans since has served in some form of the military, right from the second generation, which served in the Maryland Militia during the War of 1812. (That might not be the best of examples, considering the Maryland Militia led the retreat at the Battle of Bladensburg. A Buckman probably led the way. We gloss over those details.) Mind you, we've never been movers and shakers, and I don't think anybody got much higher than a sergeant or lieutenant, but we always served.
We actually had a wall in the family room with photos of family members in uniform that I can remember from when I was little; my mother laughingly called it the 'Wall of Heroes.' There's a photo of my grandfather (Dad's dad, who I'm named after) in his army uniform from World War I, complete to campaign hat and puttees. There were several photos of Dad in his naval uniform during World War II. Over the years it would include Hamilton in his army uniform when he joined the Maryland National Guard, and Suzie's husband and two of her sons, who were in the Marines, and Parker, who went Navy. I was actually just about the only family member who never served. There was never any pressure on us, but we always knew it was an honorable choice to make, and one which would be approved of. After Mom passed away, Suzie took over the wall and mounted it in her house; it will probably pass down to one of her boys.