Baptist Preacher, Part Two

This is Part Two of a serial story. To read Part One, click here.

On Monday morning, the city was holding lessons where we agreed to meet, so we drove across town to Kanawha City public courts.

The competitive spirit established at the hospital continued on the court. Rob cut me no slack; he served hard, played aggressive and well. I sized him up and feigned a weak backhand to throw him off.

I had a great backhand. In fact, I was fairly evenly strong on both sides. My knees weren’t destroyed yet; I was nimble and fast. I had a decent serve and could deal either a top spin or a wicked back spin pretty much at will. At that time, at least where I played, most people did not usually execute spins.

Of course, I wore a tennis skirt. Back then, you had to have proper clothing in order to get on the court. The dress I chose that day was a buttercup yellow one-piece dress, fitted perfectly against my hourglass figure and just barely covering the bottom of my [panties]. It was sleeveless, and the straps were thick braided matching material. My skin was bronze and my hair -- down past my waist -- chestnut brown with brilliant natural new-penny-copper highlights from the hours I spent in the sun.

When you’ve played tennis for years, you learn a few different ways to retrieve balls rather than bend over a hundred times. Some people double-tap the ball with their racket, causing the ball to bounce up into the air so it can be grabbed. Some scoop the edge of the racket under the ball and flip it up. This is hard on the racket because it’s so easy to scrape it on the hard surface. There is another technique, where you use your racket to roll the ball up the outside of your ankle until it’s high enough that you can tap it with your racket, causing the ball to bounce up to waist level where you can easily grab it.

But if you’re a girl and you want to be really mean, you position yourself in such a way that you bend from the waist, keeping your legs very straight. You angle yourself just so, and retrieve the ball just fast enough that your skirt flips just a bit, revealing snow-white panties against tan thighs for just a split second. Then you turn and make eye contact with your opponent, hold that eye contact, and tuck the ball up under the side of your skirt inside the elastic of your panties (if you don’t have pockets – which I didn’t).

Psychological warfare? Why not? Males are considerably stronger than females – it’s only prudent to make the playing field as level as possible.

I could see that I had accomplished what I set out to do. Rob was a red-blooded twenty-something male. It was time for the sandbagging to end.

[Tomorrow: Part Three]