A Hot Day in December

This story was edited in August, 2020, to make certain plot points more plausible. Paul met Michelle first, and she is suspicious about his other girlfriend Andrea (who is described but not seen here) but she can't verify what is going on.

The characters in this story will be in different situations six months later, and they will be even more changed in twelve. Judy appears in this story; Michelle in this one.

******

Judy Weinberg was pondering her life one afternoon while sitting in a lounge at Finley Hall, the student center building for the City College of New York. It was near the end of a cold and bright day in December, 1974, just before the winter break. She had one more exam in two days and then she faced about two weeks of unstructured time for herself.

I should get a job, she thought; even when classes were in session there were plenty of hours during the week for something like that. At the very least, she thought she should do something like join one of the student papers. There was no pay involved but at least it would give her some sense of purpose beyond simply schlepping up to the campus on the subway and back again to her parent's apartment on the Upper West Side.

Her best friend Michelle Hanley, another sophomore, was managed to do both: a paid job plus the extracurricular activity on a student paper, The Salient. Her job downtown dovetailed nicely with her work on the paper. She was a typographer and paste-up artist at the same shop which produced the paper.

Michelle had put together enough money in the past eight months to rent an apartment in Long Island City, Queens, plus buy a used Dodge Coronet. Judy tried to grasp Michelle's seemingly effortless ambition. She never seemed strained by all that she was doing over the course of a busy week. Judy often felt taxed by merely attending the classes she needed in her quest for a B.A. in history, a degree to be awarded her, assuming she stayed on schedule, about two and a half years in the future. The Class of '77 would be her class but that seemed to her young self to be a long way off.

There was something else that Michelle had that Judy coveted: a boyfriend. In fact, Michelle was on her third one. Her first was somebody she started with in her last few weeks at Bayside High School in eastern Queens. By the time Judy had met her in their first weeks at college this guy was already gone. The details of the breakup seemed like the usual story of young love gone wrong story, something about him deciding on somebody else and quickly dumping Michelle.

Michelle seemed to bounce back quickly from romantic setbacks and found a freshman love affair with someone named Hank. Judy had strongly disliked him; he often went far beyond confidence into utter arrogance. His treatment of Judy ran from disagreeable to rude. He took to nicknaming her "Pudding," which seemed to be a reference to her plumpness. At one drunken party he said to her, "Hey Judy, I bet your ass tastes like butterscotch pudding. You know, all creamy on the inside and, I don't know - something on the outside."

He giggled and hiccupped, and Judy retorted - she had consumed quite a bit herself - "Hank, not only are you a jerk, you're not even an interesting jerk. Even your insults don't make any sense."

He tried to defend himself by getting extra nasty, "You little twat, why don't you suck on this?" He began to unzip his pants but Judy just left the room. Later, she wished she had stayed so she could mock whatever state of limpness he probably was in. There was some satisfaction to be had the next day when she heard what had happened when he and Michelle were taking the train back downtown. Hank had puked copiously in the middle of the subway car and the half-dozen other passengers had fled in disgust.

Michelle had put up with him for about six months when Hank himself decided to pull the trigger. He left no explanation for the breakup but Michelle handled it with her usual sangfroid. He was seen with a couple of other girls on campus during the remainder of 1974.

The summer of '74 was pleasant because Judy could get away from her parents and hang out at Michelle's new place in Queens. It was on the ground floor of an old wooden house with a factory on one side and a scrap yard on the other. Yet the interior was plain but pleasant and several subway lines provided fast access into Manhattan. On days when Michelle had to be at work, Judy could have the place for herself. And yet she sometimes felt out of sorts there, at loose ends. She read at times and listened to Michelle's record collection. Twice her friend left joints behind for her to smoke and she sat on the couch wearing headphones and tried to decipher more meanings from song lyrics than were actually there.

The neighborhood for about a mile in any direction was disappointing to her. It was a vast staging area for Manhattan, with rail yards, bridge overpasses, taxi garages and other facilities feeding the needs of more glamorous places across the river. Sometimes she would go to the coffee shop at Court Square just to have a destination and to be around other people.

The truth was that she was feeling quite lonely. For one thing, she believed it would be very nice to share this summer with a boyfriend, but she had never had one. From what she had seen of her friend's experiences in the last year, going out with guys had some downsides. But, she reasoned, there had to be decent ones around - say, among the 5,000 men at City College.

She got some new information to consider when Michelle picked up her third boyfriend -- or maybe he had picked her in the grungy Finley Hall cafeteria. Judy thought to herself, how does she pull off these things? It was notable that this latest catch seemed to be polite and actually spoke to Judy as if she had something interesting to say. This became more galling than the Hank situation. Why can't I have somebody like that for myself?

Michelle had gotten suspicious that he had another girlfriend at the school. She had actually seen her a couple of times when he brought her into The Salient office.

When Judy heard Michelle mention this, she said, "Yeah, I've seen her too. She's dark-haired, her name is Andrea I think."

"She's nice and zaftig." Michelle thought, oops, Judy is kind of zaftig too.

Judy hadn't noticed, "How can you put up with this?"

"First of all, I can't verify anything now. Second, haven't you heard of open relationships?"

Judy wasn't sure if her friend was being tongue-in-cheek or not. She certainly didn't seem to be brooding about it. Judy still thought, if it's true, I would never accept that, but she didn't say it. She assumed her virginity didn't give her the credibility to voice an opinion about these matters.

So during the fall of 1974, she watched what happened with the people around her. Michelle was invited to join one of the student papers by Paul. Judy expected some kind of soap-operatic event to happen because of the other possible girlfriend, but it never did. Harmony seemed to be the order with Michelle. Judy had secretly anticipated the schadenfreude of seeing her friend pay a romantic price for her fecklessness. Instead, Michelle's life seemed to in balance for the moment.

Judy thought about being into her sophomore year and her own lack of progress. Or sometimes she didn't want to think about it because it was too painful. All right, she thought, hardly anybody actually gets laid in high school (although she had little data to prove that). Hunter College High School, a specialized school, was sort of a nerdy place anyway.

But now she was past her nineteenth birthday, and she had never been kissed, felt up, or even been on an afternoon coffee date. She was beginning to understand that she was going have to be more proactive, that she had to rely on herself if she was going to make any headway on this. What exactly the specifics were eluded her.

She was aware of the physical side of her frustration, the sexual desire that was intruding on her thoughts. If she was alone and had the opportunity, her fingers would often be between her legs, or she would be straddling a pillow, or she would have the handle of a hairbrush inserted into her cunt. She was able to decisively prove the reality of female multiple orgasms by inducing them in herself almost at will. At least I'm not frigid, she thought.

Judy's masturbation fantasies could be quite elaborate. For a while, she was fascinated with Bonnie and Clyde, but more with the real ones rather than the movie versions. She definitely couldn't identify with Faye Dunaway, that was for sure. The real Bonnie had been short and red-haired, although she was also thin and wiry which Judy was not.

Nevertheless, she was excited by her own version of the story. Somehow a girl from the West Side of Manhattan could be a gun moll. She would wear a beret, she would have garters and straps holding up her stockings and those old-fashioned underpants called step-ins. She would drive fast all over Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri (she'd have to learn to use a stick-shift) with a hot wind blowing through the windows. Whenever she got the urge she would fuck her bad-boy gangster lover, screwing him every which way in a stolen Ford V-8.

*********

Michelle was the only person she could confide in. One day at the Long Island City apartment, Judy said to her, "I'm wondering, is this normal, I guess? I just can't keep myself out of my own pants. I feel like the female Portnoy."

Michelle laughed at that, "I've read that book too. Those poor guys, boo-hoo, they think they're the only ones who get horny. They don't want to consider what women are capable of, probably because they couldn't keep up."

"But when you've had boyfriends, you haven't had to, you know . . ."

"Judy honey, you're a bit naive. It just ain't so. I've had mornings when I've been banged thoroughly and two hours later, when whoever has left . . ." She wiggled her fingers in the air and started singing, " 'The hills are alive, with the sound of music.' I bet that's why those nuns threw Maria out of the convent. If they didn't tie mittens on her hands, she'd whack off every night. No, then she'd just whack off with the mittens. How do you solve a problem like Maria, indeed?"

Michelle continued, "We should invest in a vibrator, have one we can share. Well, no, we'd each need our own."

Judy thought but didn't say, I don't want a vibrator, I want a lover.

"Anyway, forget about vibrators. In a fair world, we'd experiment with polyandry. I'd try my own harem - like, 'Todd, get me some grapes and feed me by hand, Jason, please give me a pedicure, and tonight I'll decide which one of you schlubs is allowed into the empress's boudoir.'"

"You'd like to be an empress?"

"Why not, like Theodora of Byzantium, or Cleopatra? I'd be the queen of the Nile and also Newton Creek." The latter was the industry-clogged waterway between Queens and Brooklyn. "That will fly. I was the princess of Bayside, now I'm the Queen of Queens. What an aptly named place."

Judy thought all this was typical of her friend: make jokes about everything but miss the tougher issues. She would have liked to ask her for some specific advice, some information about handling 1970s style dating - or maybe just screwing - but a combination of uneasiness and pride held her back.

That semester Judy found herself having some very explicit feelings for Michelle. She thought, no big deal, it's just a girl-crush. But she suspected it went beyond that. As an experiment, she masturbated while imagining Michelle licking her. Michelle would know exactly what to do with her lips and tongue on Judy's clitoris. The experiment was successful, and then Judy lay in her bed considering the results.

I guess I'm not a lesbian but maybe I'm somewhat bisexual. Didn't Kinsey say that most people are to some degree? Perhaps some female lovers could be worked into her life. Yet she knew that wouldn't be enough. There's no way around it, I'd like to be fucked hard by a man.

The only man she knew beyond her classroom acquaintanceships was Michelle's boyfriend Paul. He did seem like someone she could deal with. Almost inevitably she speculated about how she could get him for herself. Would that destroy her friendship with Michelle?

Maybe, but maybe it would be also be possible to secretly work herself into the situation. Maybe she could join the paper and have some room for romantic maneuvering while there. It wasn't the ideal that she wanted, of course; she wanted someone for herself. However, it could be okay for a while and it was a plausible way to get started. After all, this was only college and she was still young. As Michelle had stated, have fun and worry about the future later.

Judy knew, or perhaps feared, that this wasn't a real plan or even an aspiration but merely a fantasy. The logistics of it seemed daunting. Then in November came the news that an old flame of Andrea's -- an ex-fiancé if that could be believed -- had won her back. She seemed to have dumped Paul. Somehow, Michelle knew about it from friends of friends, but she wasn't perturbed about it. Judy wondered how this would change whatever her own prospects were for the coming year.

******

This was the condition of Judy's life as she sat in the student center on that December afternoon. She was listless and at loose ends but she didn't want to go home just yet. Michelle and Paul were not on campus but she had not received an invitation to go to Long Island City. Those two are probably out there now having some exam-period sex in her bed or on her living room couch. She tried to imagine the scene and felt a sense of resentment and excitement at the same time. Maybe I should get off my slothful ass and get a job and an apartment for myself. Some effort in that direction might give her some new leverage in getting her life going.

On an impulse, she got up, got her possessions together, and went across the way to Wagner Hall, a classroom building that was very quiet right now. She went up to the ladies' room on the third floor and stood in front of a mirror assessing herself. She thought of something she had blurted out to Michelle a few weeks earlier, "I wish I was as pretty as you are."

Michelle had scoffed, "Ok, I don't stop clocks, but I'm just your basic Irish-Polish mutt."

Michelle perhaps had been going for some false modesty, what is now called humble-bragging. She was taller, about five-seven to Judy's five-three. Her straight brown hair was always cut neatly down to her shoulders, and she usually had bangs. Judy's reddish-brown hair always seemed to be unruly and she never could figure out the best way to style what she had.

Still looking in the mirror, she opened her coat and considered her own body as it appeared under her sweater and skirt. Well, I'm definitely not slender and willowy - very round is a phrase that would be appropriate. Did guys notice her as she went about on campus? Sometimes she tried to keep track of that, and she didn't notice any heads turning in her direction.

Michelle's body looked athletic; she ice skated in the winter and played tennis in the summer. Judy had no aptitude for those activities, but she could ride a bicycle and she was considering getting her first one since junior high school.

Michelle also had steel-rimmed glasses, and in imitation of her, Judy had traded her plastic ones for steel-rims of her own. Perhaps that looked more cool? She put her hands on her hips and pondered that what she most envied about her friend was her confidence. There were guys in the cafeterias and lounges every day; how did she manage to snag one with a few minutes of talking?

Consulting the mirror was not Judy's only purpose in coming up to this room. She looked around to confirm that all of the stalls behind her were empty. She went to the one at the end furthest from the door and hung her coat on the hook. Then she took off her boots and her green tights and then put the boots back on -- the floor in there was too cold for bare feet. For a moment she admired her new brown leather, knee-high footwear, a pair her mother had paid for just a couple of weeks ago.

Okay, so it's nice to get new stuff for this winter, but I'm old enough that I should be paying for some of it myself. Then she sighed and sat there considering her intention to masturbate in here. Doing this again? Well, why not? The right combination of explicit thoughts and nimble fingers -- and she had talent with both -- and one of life's most intense experiences could be had in this utilitarian restroom.

She pulled her skirt up over her hips and deliberated about her panties. Her decision was to just take them off and toss them aside. Off with my overcoat, off with my gloves, I have no need for underpants, I'm burning with love. The seat was not the most comfortable place to sit but Judy had been in such places before, including this very room. Then she got her hairbrush out of her purse and stuck it behind the toilet paper roll where it would be handy.

Now all she needed was a scenario to follow to a satisfying conclusion. She decided on that quite decisively. What would it be like to fuck Paul on Michelle's couch when her friend wasn't around? Stealing somebody else's boyfriend, not the nicest way to behave but it certainly seemed exciting.

The fantasy started far into a steamy make-out session. Her blouse was open and his hands were rubbing her breasts. In the Wagner bathroom, she decided to undress herself a bit more for her self-pleasuring. She reached into her sweater and unhooked her bra. Then she rubbed both her nipples for a few moments. Sex with a real person would have the advantage of an extra pair of hands to touch her various sensitive places. With masturbation, one took care of these matters by oneself as best as could be done.

She imagined what she would say, I've been thinking about you for a while now.

He'd admit, I've been thinking about you too, Judy.

That was a delicious thought, that he was her secret admirer. Was she still a virgin in the scene? Somehow that wouldn't do, there had been with other guys who had fucked her before. The details didn't matter; it was her fantasy and she could direct it as she pleased.

Now she imagined him sucking on her nipples as his hand went down to her crotch.

What would Michelle think of us now?

He'd say, well, what she doesn't know won't hurt her.

She pictured herself wearing a skirt but no stockings, and high-heeled sandals. Judy didn't actually own such sandals but they would be easy enough to obtain if she wanted them. In a few moments, he had lowered her panties and was rubbing her pussy in a delightful way.

Her own hands followed the mental images and she spread her legs to get better access. She was impressed by her own ability to get wet quickly. It was great to be so slick and primed to take in a man's shaft. She imagined undoing Paul's zipper and taking his erect cock out. Oh, it's such a nice one. That wouldn't be the most original thing to say but it would get the job done.

Judy did know from secondary sources what an erect penis looked like. The now-departed Hank had obtained hard-core porno magazines from somewhere and he would show them to the girls to appear cool or whatever he imagined about himself. One set depicted a Danish girl getting seduced by her teacher. In true porno style, it showed her getting penetrated from the front, rear, and with her on top. Judy wasn't sure if people changed positions that much in real life but it gave her a good look at the logistics of the various acts.