I didn’t see Carol at lunch the next day, though I waited until nearly closing time. When she didn’t come to dinner, I casually asked a classmate of hers if she’d seen Carol, and she told me Carol hadn’t been at her classes that day. It was pretty obvious that Carol was upset about last night and was too embarrassed to show her face in public. Or at least where she might run into me. This needed to be dealt with. I sat do...

The next time I saw Carol was at lunchtime the next day. We were both heading from different directions towards the entrance to the dining-hall next to her dormitory. I had been thinking about something else and so looked right past her at first. She saw me, however, and thought I was ignoring her and that she was the victim of a one-night stand. I noticed her just as her face turned sad and she began to walk away from me...

It was definitely getting colder as the evening darkened around us, and we walked with our arms around each other’s waists as we made out way back to the campus dormitory where she lived. I wanted to ask her what she was feeling about what we had just done, but I had the sense that she didn’t want to discuss it, was perhaps ashamed of her part in it. So we talked of other things, as if we were still just two people who ha...

It was dusk, nearly dark. A warm, late-September evening. Carol and I were sitting on top of a picnic table near the reservoir, she in the center, her feet on the bench, and I behind her with my legs on either side of her as I massaged her shoulders.  We didn’t know each other that well, but there had been a slow flirtation going on and we had somehow decided to take a walk together and wound up here. She was small and da...