[d7uncan]

Leah and I both had early-summer birthdays and protective parents. It made for some challenges in school. For me, a smart kid and band nerd, it meant more aggravation than usual over the immaturity of some of my classmates (and some of the abuse they aimed my way). For Leah, it meant that there was more focus on her ripening body than her brains and opinions. Maybe that's one of the things that made for our ending up as boyfriend and girlfriend - feeling like we had outgrown the boundaries of small town life in rural Pennsylvania in 1974. For those from that time and background, welcome -- you get the full picture. For everybody else, let me just say that they don't call it "Pennsitucky" for nothing. Think redneck, Bible-belt farm country where the culture was more like the 1950's than the 1970's. We kept hearing about the social changes in other regions, but they were just starting to chip away at the status quo.
So there we were, both just turned 18 and still in high school, starting our senior year. My first serious girlfriend had been in a very religious family and I was still influenced by the Bible-thumping culture that I had encountered then. It was an odd, fence-straddling existence, bouncing between the stolen Playboy and Penthouse magazines and the fierce masturbation sessions spent with them and the opportunities to experiment with girls where I chose to be the "gentleman" and limit myself to French kissing (hours of it sometimes) and, in moments of weakness, a titty-grab here and there. I wasn't a virgin but the single event that had occurred had been years earlier and not appropriate to describe here for multiple reasons. Leah was a virgin and also from a fairly religious background. I found in her a kindred spirit of sorts, too smart to overlook the inconsistency of the rules that we were trying to live by but not willing to throw it all in the trash. Like many of our peers, we found a way to talk ourselves into a compromise: we decided we were going to end up married some day AND we decided we would not have actual intercourse at that point in our lives.
I might make this sound like it was a quick process to get to that mind-set. It wasn't like we laid all that out during our first make-out session. On the other hand, it didn't take more than a couple of dates for us to construct that combination of loopholes to justify the stuff that we both wanted to try. Young love, raging hormones and minds capable of absorbing scripture and looking for the ambiguities makes for a potent mix (and still gets me hard 40+ years later).
[That's all I have time for now, I'll write more next time. I would apologize for the slow start except that it's my story and I'll tell it my way. For those that like a more direct dive into the erotic, please check out my previous story posts and let me know what you think.]