Double Time
Chapter 89
“I don't want to hide. I want to slow dance with you again. I want to dance with you forever.”
—Sarah Black, Border Roads
4 FEBRUARY 2020
I’ve read quite a lot. Well, the old man in me read all the time. I have to watch myself. Sometimes we have an assignment in English and I say ‘Oh, I read that before.’ Brittany looks at me strangely and asks if I’ve read everything for the class already. No. There are a few works on the schedule the old man never heard of.
I like science fiction, which is one of the reasons I want to write in that genre. And thanks to some of the less mainstream things I’ve read, I like time travel stories. There’s one I read, don’t remember the author, that included a long debate on whether your actions in the past could change the future. They tried to stop the assassination of Lincoln, for example, but discovered they couldn’t change something in the past that had already been recorded in their present. Still, it seems like a bunch of stuff that has some guy going back into the past, he changes some little thing he did in the past and the whole world is different when he gets to his own time again.
And still, we never stop to consider how one little thing we do today can change the future. I can write a dozen different scenarios about what next year or the next ten years could bring. Or in the case of my space opera, a thousand years. But it’s the one little thing I do today that can affect that future.
That’s how I feel about making love to Nanette. I somehow think we’ve just changed the future of our pod. I didn’t have that profound sense of change when Brittany and I ravished Sophie. It was like that was peripheral. Somehow, Nanette is central. The calmness she brings. The dedication to both running and her job as a physical therapist. Introducing this degree of maturity to our group is going to change things.
I hope for the better.
Getting back to school with the snow melting fast in typical Indiana fashion on Tuesday was a chaotic time. It was testing week. Well, practice testing. The real tests were still three weeks away. What a zoo.
V1 was all over the map on this one. First, it was about educators not being held responsible for the quality of education. Then, it was no child should be left behind. Then, it was bring back shop classes in school and teach kids practical skills and make kids proud of manual labor and not just college. And finally, teachers just teach the tests and kids don’t remember anything past the day they take it. You name it. If there was something to gripe about with education, I’d done so. V3 had a whole new list.
I recognized a big lumbering ox of a kid in the hall who V1 knew. Lonnie White. I had no classes with him this time around. He was one of the ‘slow kids.’ He wasn’t a bad guy but he always seemed to be in some kind of trouble. He slept in class a lot. He ran into other people—maybe on purpose and maybe just because he was clumsy. He just didn’t seem to care about anything.
Except shop class. It was like Lonnie’s hands were magically transformed in shop class. In wood shop, he was one of the first to put a bowling pin on the wood lathe and turn it into a lamp. But where he really shone was in auto shop. He learned everything there was to know about tearing down and rebuilding a car. He got a job down at a local garage and when he turned sixteen, he just never showed up at school again. I threw a rod in my first car and Lonnie rebuilt the engine for me so well that I drove that Hawk for the next ten years.
He still wasn’t a very social guy, didn’t talk clearly, and kept bumping into people. But he was a fine mechanic.
I wondered what was about to come of him here. We didn’t have shop class at Mad Anthony High School. We were an academic school. There was a program, though, where juniors could transfer to the tech college and train for a non-academic career. That was new since the ISTEP had been rescinded. That was a standardized test that supposedly determined if you were learning what you should in high school in order to graduate. It was given during the sophomore year to help counselors decide if you needed special classes because you were not, by golly, getting out of this school without passing those tests.
Mad Anthony was a gold star school with over ninety-five percent of its seniors passing the final graduation exams. I later found out that number didn’t include the students who dropped out before the end of senior year. Fudging the numbers.
Anyway, ISTEP had been rescinded but they couldn’t go without testing, so a new test was instituted: The NSRE, National Service Readiness Exam. It had most of the same content as the old ISTEP but results of this test went straight to the National Service and they judged the school on whether students were ready for National Service instead of whether they were ready for college. I began to realize that the Service wasn’t concerned with whether you graduated. It was concerned with how it could use you when you turned eighteen.
Since this was now how teachers were evaluated, of course it was the new exam that was taught. Pass at all costs. Including three days of taking a practice exam so we’d be ready for the real exam in three weeks.
Suffice it to say, the week sucked.
We were all going to take the fan bus to Regionals Saturday but Nanette wanted to go with us and she wasn’t a student. She ended up driving Desi. Rachel and I went in the Yaris. Joan got her Mom’s car and took Brittany and Beca. Seemed wasteful to use three cars to drive across half the state to Kokomo but that’s what we did.
Livy? Of course, she was on the team bus and stoked about heading for another state championship like the team had won last year.
It was not to be.
We screamed ourselves hoarse during the first game against Zionsville. It went into double overtime and our girls finally pulled it out 66-65. They really left it all on the court. And that was proven when we went against Hamilton Eastern in the final that evening. Our girls’ hopes of a state championship were dashed in a 57-47 loss. Sometimes life sucks.
We mixed it up on the way home. Brittany and Desi rode with Rachel, Beca moved over to Nanette’s car, and I slid into the front seat of Joan’s mom’s Audi.
“Mmm. This brings back some memories,” I said.
“Yeah. But we don’t have to use the back seat tonight,” Joan said. She glanced at me but was paying careful attention to the road. US 24 has some wicked curves on it and the weather was still unpredictable. “You want to stay the night tonight?”
“Joan, that is hardly an invitation I could pass up. Let me text Mom to let her know where I am.”
“Tell her I’ll have you home in time for your concert in the morning. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m the lover who’ll be curled up next to you while you play.”
“So, I understand there are all sorts of things lovers can do besides having sex,” Joan whispered. We were lying in her bed naked and I tried to hide my disappointment that she wanted something else.
“Would you like to learn to play cribbage?” I asked.
“Beca and I learned last weekend,” she giggled. “I want to make love, Jacob. But I want other things, too. There are times when I just want to lie here and listen to you breathe. Is that silly?”
“I think it’s sweet.”
“I just… When I’m away and alone in Service, I want to remember what it was like to be held… to be loved,” she said.
“I’m not going to stop loving you when you are away,” I said. “Neither will Beca. I haven’t stopped loving Em.”
“Will we really still be a pod when I get back? Emily, at least, will have a year with you when she gets back before you have to go into Service. You’ll be leaving just when I return. We’ll be apart for four years.”
“We won’t be apart all that time,” I said. “Em’s been home twice since she started and our family is going to San Diego over spring break to be with her. I think when more of us are in Service, we’ll set up meeting points and try to coordinate all of us getting together at the same time.”
“I love you, Jacob. Will you take care of Beca while I’m gone?”
“You bet I will. Beca is still my best friend and I’ll never abandon her.”
“She’s a little different than the rest of us. She gets turned on and is a wonderful lover, but it’s not like she’s on an instant trigger. You can’t just touch her nipples and have her ready to fuck. Like me,” Joan said.
“That’s something we’re learning about each of our partners. Different things turn us on.”
“You could do it now,” she whispered.
“Do it?”
“Touch my nipples. Make love to me.”
Track practice started Monday after school. There are separate boys’ and girls’ teams and a boys’ JV team. Three different main coaches for the teams and different assistants for track and field events. A lot of the guys who went out for track were there for the fitness conditioning after the winter. Most of the football and wrestling guys did strength sports like shot put and discus. They spent most of their time in the weight room and only a few would participate in meets. The basketball guys were still in their season and wouldn’t really join the team until the end of March. Still, they’d already signed up for the jumping events like high jump, long jump, and pole vault. Our season could be half over before they ever got a chance to compete. The soccer guys were sprinters and went after the hurdles as well. And then there were those of us who were just runners. We ran.
I’d practiced so hard with Nanette and Livy on getting my pace even and consistent that it was no problem for me to run the two miles or 3,200 meters events. But I was only down to a six-and-a-half-minute mile pace. Varsity elite runners pretty much sprinted the whole two miles at a five-minute-mile pace.
Among the freshmen and sophomores, though, my pace was good enough to keep up. I’d probably never win one of these races but if I could get my time under twelve minutes there was a good chance I’d place. So Jock said. Then he surprised me by telling me he wanted me to run the second leg of the 4x800 meter relay. That set the tone for practices. We all had weight training but we were focused on getting to our first meet. And it would be a massive one.
This was leap year and our official first meet of the season would be the Hoosier State Relays Qualifier at Wesleyan University down in Marion on February 29. It would pretty much take all day as there would be twenty-five schools competing with boys’, girls’, and JV teams in each event. One thing I had to get out of my head was that the fact that it was called ‘relays’ didn’t mean it was only relay races. It was a qualifier event for getting into later competitions. As the first event of the season, it was the only one that had all three teams from a school participating.
Since it was an indoor meet, it also didn’t have the full range of races. Individual races were the 60-meter dash, 60-meter hurdles, and 3200-meter run. 4x800, 4x200, and 4x400 meter relays would balance things out. The races would be run in heats and results based on times. There wouldn’t be prelims and finals. We could enter up to three persons per race, one team per relay, and two competitors per field event. With the meet starting at 10:00 in the morning, there was a chance we’d get out by dinner time.
The sum was that I was running and Jock wanted me to run sprints as well as long distance. I was glad it was a four-day week.
This year—unlike last year—some genius had actually looked at a calendar before he set the school schedule. Friday was Valentine’s Day. It also happened to be Teacher In-Service Training Day, so there was no school. The Valentine Dance was scheduled for Friday night. And then Monday was President’s Day. We had two consecutive four-day school weeks with a four-day weekend between. Brilliant.
All the girls wanted to go to the dance and that was cool except that Nanette wasn’t in high school and couldn’t go. So, we went to Plan B. Those of us who could go and wanted to go to the Friday night dance would. But all of us would gather for a Sweetheart Party on Saturday at Joan’s house. All except Em and Sophie, of course. We were going to have a major discussion about how to keep them in the family during separation.
As it turned out, only Rachel, Livy, and Desi really wanted to go to the dance. Brittany, Joan, and Beca were content to wait for Nanette to join us on Saturday.
“Is this the way you all planned it?” I asked when the four of us had arrived at the dance. I’d picked up Desi and Rachel picked up Livy. It was apparent just from looking at them that we were at the dance as two couples, not a foursome. Livy was dressed in a sleek suit. It was sexy as hell and you couldn’t mistake her for a man—not with the neckline plunging so far that you could tell there was no shirt under the jacket. But on her arm was Rachel, looking about the most feminine and girlish I’d ever seen her in a pink taffeta dress that only hit about mid-thigh. Even with the suit, Livy wore heels, so she still towered over Rachel and held her hand securely.
Desi and I looked more like Gomez and Morticia. By intent. I didn’t realize how much my charcoal pinstripe suit resembled his. Desi was in a long, form-fitting black dress with a plunging neckline every bit as deep as Livy’s. I thought she was rather conservatively dressed until she spun and I saw the slit up the side from the floor almost to her waist.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “I wanted a nice date with my best girl, after which I plan to let her take my body in any way she pleases.”
“And I please to take it naked and often,” Livy said. “Besides, you and Desi haven’t had much time together lately. You need to connect.”
“And by connect, she means put your cock in my lonely pussy,” Desi giggled. “Do you mind, Jacob?”
“Not at all. Do you want to stay for the dance or should we head straight for your bed?” I asked. I used one finger to stroke almost from her chin to her navel.
“Mmm. I want to dance with my lover,” she purred. “Vertically first. Horizontally later.”
I led her to the dance floor and took her in my arms.
I woke up in Desi’s arms in her bed. Not only did we dance the night before, we danced right up till the last song played. We chatted with Livy and Rachel when we came off the floor, of course, but there was no doubt Desi was my date—my Valentine.
When we got to her house we went straight to her room and I helped her out of that lovely black gown. I’d been wanting to slide my fingers inside all evening. When it fell to the floor, Desi was still in her heels, stockings, and garter belt. And nothing else. I didn’t bother to take any of the rest off. I led her to the bed and got in a position where I could feast on her pussy and bring her to a powerful climax. Then, without doing more than dropping my pants, I leaned into her and plunged deep inside.
It had taken us a while before we finally were naked and ready for bed. We fell asleep spooned and I woke up with my hard-on rubbing between her cheeks. It didn’t take long to get it fit back inside and we rode out the morning making love.
It was mid-afternoon when we showed up at Joan’s house. We hadn’t spent all the time in bed. In fact, Riko and Riley wanted us in the workshop to talk about the spring and summer shows. It was an intriguing possibility. They were proposing that I travel to all the shows they did this summer. I was about to object that I planned to spend time with Em when Desi mentioned that the shows included San Diego ComicCon, one of the biggest in the country and that I would have time on both sides of the show to see Em.
I needed to talk to the rest of the pod to see what everyone had on their schedules. And if I wasn’t back by August first to start cross country practice, there’d be hell to pay.
“Are you two caught up?” Beca asked as she stood on tiptoe to give me a kiss and then turned to Desi.
“Oh, for now,” Desi said. “Sometimes a girl just needs a reminder that she still has that certain something.”
“Believe me, you’ve got them both,” Beca laughed as she squeezed Desi’s boobs. Desi squealed and we laughed all the way down to the TV room where the Sweetheart Party was beginning.
“So, what makes this a Sweetheart Party?” I asked. “Other than the fact that almost all my sweethearts are gathered here.”
“I think that would be enough,” Joan said.
“But it would be sweeter if we were all naked,” Brittany said.
“I don’t think ‘sweetheart’ and ‘orgy’ are synonyms,” I laughed.
“Poo!” That girl could really be a brat sometimes. Not that I didn’t love her for it but if we got naked together again, I wouldn’t be vouching for her virginity.
“First item is to welcome Nanette with all of us here,” Rachel said. “We get a little crazy sometimes, Nan, but we want you to know how excited we all are that you’ve joined our pod. I know we haven’t made formal declarations about what that means because we haven’t really figured it all out yet. The important part is that we want you to be a part of figuring it out. We’ve already all begun to fall in love with you and I don’t see that doing anything but getting deeper.”
“I met with each of you, sometimes with more than one, before I decided to take the plunge,” Nanette said. “Or to let Jacob take the plunge, as the case may be. I’m excited and I’m willing. I want my love for each of you to grow.”
“Yeah,” Beca said. “Me, too. So, having leaned on Rachel to do the algebra, we’ve determined there are twenty-eight possible unique couples with all eight of us present. Sounds like a lot, but if Emily and Sophie were with us, the total would be 45! Ask Rachel if you want to know the formula for computing that.”
“And don’t ask me to figure out how many unique triples there are,” Rachel said. “I’m not a computer.”
“Oh, you’d be the cutest computer on the block!” Livy giggled.
“Back to the point,” Beca said. “If we all pair up and rotate, we could each be with each of the others in seven pairings. We get five minutes with each of our pod mates to tell each other what makes them special to us and why we’re glad they are in the pod. So, we’ll do it like a game. Line up in two rows facing each other.” Nanette faced me. “Jacob will be our anchor and after each round, everyone else will move one position to the left. We’re starting with Jacob/Nanette, Rachel/Livy, Joan/Beca, and Brittany/Desi. We’ll set the little kitchen timer to make sure we don’t go over. Don’t forget that you have to tell each other, you can’t hog all the time for yourself.”
She set the timer and we were off. I won’t recap everything but it’s really an experience to look into the eyes of a girl you’re dating, maybe making love to, and tell her why you are happy she is with you. And then listen to her tell you why she’s happy you’re with her. Even though the timer only accounted for five minutes for each pairing, it took well over an hour by the time we’d given our partners a nice kiss and thank you before we got paired up with the next person on the list. There were a lot of moist eyes and a couple of runny noses by the time we were done.
The rest of the afternoon was pretty low-key as we tried to put into practice some of the things we’d learned about not just having sex. Oh, we fooled around plenty but we didn’t just get naked and have a grope fest. At one point I thought we’d reached a crisis point.
“Don’t try to dominate me, little minx,” Nanette said. Brittany was stalled in front of her. Nanette had a thumb strategically placed in the center of Britt’s breastbone. “It remains to be seen if we’ll even have a physical relationship when you turn sixteen. It’s not required. Until then, you are off limits.”
“I just wanted a little kiss,” Brittany whined.
“What you’ll get is your little round bottom spanked soundly,” Nanette said. “No court in the country would convict me for that.”
Brittany sighed and backed off. Nanette stepped up to her and touched her cheek. “It probably sounds childish to you, but a kiss on the cheek is the most I can offer you. It’s not because I don’t like you.” She followed through with the little peck and Brittany beamed.
“I wish I was older,” Brittany sighed.
“It’s good practice in case we get anyone younger in the pod,” Rachel said.
Who could she be talking about?
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