In mid-December, I took Angela to her high school winter formal, and as we were sitting outside her parents’ house afterward in the car I had borrowed from my roommate for the evening, and doing a bit more than just talking, before I walked her to the door to say “goodnight,” she asked me what my fantasy was. I knew that she meant sexual fantasy, and I responded that it probably involved taking a hot bath with the woman I loved. A few days later, she arranged to come over to my apartment to spend some time with me. As our winter break had just started, none of my roommates was there at the time. Shortly after Angela arrived, she excused herself to go to the bathroom and asked me to wait for her to finish. Not suspecting anything, I said “Sure, I’m not going anywhere,” and waited. A few minutes later, I started hearing the sound of running water, and Angela cracked open the bathroom door, stuck her head out, and motioned for me to come in. As I went in, I could see that she’d started drawing a bath in the tub, and that she’d lit a candle that was sitting on the side of it. She closed the door behind me, locked it, and proceeded to disrobe down to her panties while telling me to go ahead and get into the bath, which I did, and she immediately joined me in it. That was it, I simply could not resist any longer. Before me was the very hot young woman, albeit a bit too young, who I loved, and she was essentially offering me everything that I’d ever dreamed of sexually. Of course, neither of us had any protection, but I rounded third and slid home anyway, with a little assistance. She knew she had just sealed the deal with me as my moral code would not let me easily walk away from her now that I’d just taken her virginity. And, the lack of familiarity with the female anatomy I demonstrated in the process undoubtedly reassured her that she’d just taken mine. When I told her how much I loved her, and how excited I was to marry her the next Summer, she knew that she now had me hook, line and sinker! ANOTHER BIG SMACK TO ME! I had just given her complete certainty in our relationship.

Based on things I’ve since learned, I’m not entirely sure that she actually was a virgin at that point, as she’d led me to believe. Things may have gone a bit too easily. But, I had no doubt at the time based on my more limited knowledge of things then. If she wasn’t, she did a pretty good job of faking it.

Also, although I had been aware of the old saying that “15 will get you 20” for a few years by then, I later learned that I was just enough older than her that I might have been prosecuted for something like “contributing to the delinquency” under our state’s laws. Apparently, 16 wasn’t the bright line that I had always thought.

Once the passion had died down, we agreed that we needed to put a lid on it until after we were married. . . . But, that didn’t work out very well, as, despite what I thought were our best intentions, we didn’t seem to be able to keep our hands off each other. We kept seeing each other at least once a week, and kept doing the deed, without protection. YEAH, ANOTHER GREAT BIG SMACK TO ME! But, I’d made it to that point in my life, and I kept thinking that I had it under control, but I simply could not resist her. After all, I intended to marry her in a few months, and by all appearances she was very much in love with me.

Until, one night in February, when Angela was supposed to come to my apartment to spend time with me, but didn’t show up at the expected time. It started snowing pretty hard, and I waited and waited, and started to get more and more worried about her. I had this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was going terribly wrong with her that night, and started imagining her off in a ditch somewhere wrecked in her little car. Trust your gut! Eventually, at about 2 o’clock in the morning, she pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building, I went out to her car, got in and sat, and we talked for a couple of minutes. I told her how worried I’d been about her, and asked what had happened. She seemed a bit distant as she explained that she’d gone to a nearby town to visit a friend who was sick in the hospital, and had trouble getting back in the snowstorm. As it was really late and there didn’t seem to be much more that needed to be discussed that night, I leaned over, gave her a short goodnight kiss, and told her to be careful going home. But, something about that night continued to haunt me. Especially as it seemed that Angela was again growing distant from me over the next several days.

A couple of weeks later, when I was starting to think that Angela was getting ready to break up with me, I got a call from her, she wanted to come over and talk. Of course, I agreed. When she got there, she took me to a private spot, where we wouldn’t be overheard, and told me that she thought she was pregnant; that she had made an appointment for a pregnancy test at Planned Parenthood, for the next day; and asked me if I would go with her. I was a bit stunned, but of course I said “yes.” I don’t remember a lot about the visit the next day, although they offered to discuss “alternatives to pregnancy” with her, and looked at me like they thought I was going to be supportive of that. Angela already knew that I would never be in favor of such a course of action, and politely declined their invitation. She said she was just there to find out if she was pregnant, as she was too embarrassed to see her family doctor about it, which would almost certainly get back to her parents. (Store-bought pregnancy tests had not yet come out.) I’m sure that she also wanted to gauge my level of commitment to her. Within a day or two, Angela called and came over, and told me that her pregnancy test had come back positive, and asked what I thought we should do. Of course, I told her that we should get married right away as she wouldn’t want to be showing during a late-summer wedding. She seemed genuinely happy with my response, although she already knew what it would be.

The next few days were a flurry of activity. I quickly bought a rather nice, although not a very expensive, wedding and engagement ring set from one of my roommates, whose fiancé had recently broken off their engagement, and he needed to salvage what he could from his investment. I spent virtually everything that I had at the time on it. I also secured a place for us in married student housing, which would cost a fair amount more than my roommate situation, and arranged to start working more hours at my part-time job to pay for it. We put together a small quickie late-March wedding in a local chapel that was officiated by the pastor of the student congregation I had been attending. He was surprisingly understanding of our situation, and it turned out that he already knew Angela’s family. Although they recognized that it wasn’t occurring under optimal circumstances, everyone in my family showed up, pitched in and tried to make it a nice occasion for us. Angela’s family wasn’t quite as pleasant about it. Her mother even wore black. But, her father signed for the marriage license, as Angela was still about four months shy of her 18th birthday, and was a pretty good sport about it. I suspect that he had a somewhat better grasp of the actual circumstances than Angela’s mother did, who was understandably a bit grumpy about things and how they would look to her church friends, etc. But, it didn’t take too long for me to convince her of my good intentions.

The honeymoon was short, but interesting, as Angela tried something new on me while I was driving us to our hotel in another town. Not anything that I had ever experienced before. It got to the point that I had to ask her to stop for fear that I was going to crash the car. We soon settled in to our life as newlyweds. Between working nearly full-time and still carrying a full load of courses at school, I was maxed out, and Angela soon got not-just-morning sickness from being pregnant. There was lots of puking, at all hours of the day and night, but I was happy, and she seemed happy, except for the puking.

As I recall, I went to all of her prenatal appointments, at least all the important ones, like the one where they showed us ultrasound images that they told us meant we were having a boy. I didn’t really see much in that regard, but, hey, they were the experts. In October, Angela went into premature labor, but eventually gave birth to a pretty healthy baby boy. His weight was definitely on the low side, but he was rather long for a baby who was supposedly 4-6 weeks premature. After a few days, they let us take him home, and we seemed to be a happy little family. Poor, but happy, or so I thought.