Becoming the Storm
11 Semicolon
MONDAY NIGHT, I was toasted with the first ‘legal’ drink, and then I was kissed—a lot. We all had homework and things to prepare for classes as we raced toward Thursday and the beginning of Fall Break. It was just a long weekend, but we were all excited for it. An unending procession of beauties snuggled naked in my lap for fifteen to twenty minutes each while we tried to study. Jessica, Amy, Maggie, and Jess had taken off early in the morning for filming in Detroit. They would be in four cities over the next two weeks before coming back for Adam’s home game against Michigan. He was getting playing time this year, but unfortunately the team wasn’t doing very well. So far, they were two and two, but Jessica would attend their game at Northwestern next weekend with her guest and things were hopeful for our second Big Ten matchup.
When Dani curled up in my lap, I finally gave up on studying any longer. It was already past eleven and my new schedule this fall included an eight o’clock class every morning. I laid my book aside and petted Dani as she squirmed in my lap a little and returned my strokes. I don’t know why, but as I petted her pretty breasts, I lifted my face, and her lips were right there next to mine, and I kissed her. In the year we’d known each other, and after countless times going to sleep with each other, we’d kissed remarkably little. The kiss in front of her parents over Labor Day was the most intense we’d ever shared.
This one outdid that. We kissed, exploring each other’s lips and tongues. Her breasts were right there under my hand and my petting became emphatically more sexual. Her nipples rose to meet my caresses. And I got hard against her hip as she sat in my lap. We were both a little breathless when we broke the kiss and looked at each other. We both blushed. There was nothing wrong with what we did. I don’t know why my face felt so hot and red, nor why that was reflected in hers.
She reached between us and lightly stroked my cock.
“Let me take you to bed,” Dani whispered. “Rose has one more birthday present for you.” She stroked me one more time and pecked me on the lips. Then we walked hand in hand to the third floor.
I’d considered driving up to Evanston for the game Friday night and watching the filming over the weekend, but Nikki flew in Friday for her fall break and there was no way I was leaving when she just got there. I got a surprise that night when we made love.
“Nikki,” I said as I kissed her rose tattoo and let my fingers drift south. “You’re bare!”
“Um… Yeah. It’s Liz’s fault.”
“Liz shaved you?”
“No. Waxed. And Liz didn’t do it. She just told me.” Nikki sighed and I lifted up to kiss her lips softly. “I was complaining because I have to have my hair touched up and my pubes grow out faster than my head. I don’t want to go to a beauty parlor and have some stranger staring up my cunt while she bleaches my pubes. Liz told me to wax it, the bitch,” she hissed.
“I was just offering a suggestion,” Liz giggled. “I never expected you to go out and do it.”
“I wouldn’t have, but that shampoo you told me I need to use is only available in a beauty supply store. When I went in, I saw they had kits, so I bought one.”
“You did it yourself?” Liz gasped. “Nikki!”
“You are the only girl I’ve ever let near my pussy,” Nikki said. “If I was going to spread my legs for some beautician, I might as well have had it bleached. I didn’t read the instructions very well. I took it all off at once. It hurt like hell!”
“Oh, my God!” Liz yelled. Dani echoed her and both girls crossed their legs with the imagined pain.
“I hope you appreciate it, lover.”
“I think I’d better get my face down there and appreciate it thoroughly,” I said. I kissed my way down her body and saw Nikki clutch both Dani and Liz to her. She held her breath and expelled it rapidly as I took my first long taste of her nether lips. “Is this a birthmark?” I said. “Wait. Nikki, what is this?”
“Um… since it already hurt like hell, I went to a tattoo artist,” she said. I pulled back and examined the new ink thoroughly.
“It looks like a semicolon,” I said.
“It is.” Nikki tugged at me to return to her face for a kiss. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Hannah and Rose had joined Liz and Dani and were petting Nikki’s hair. “A… a semicolon is where an author could have ended the sentence and instead chose to go on. I… I was so close to ending the sentence when you found me. Ending my life. It all seemed like too much for me. And you… all of you… showed me a reason to continue. I chose to put it there on my mons, because only you, my lover, and my hearthmates, and clan will ever see it and know what it means to me. I love you so much!” Elaine joined us and reached across Dani to touch Nikki tenderly. “And you,” she said, looking up at Hannah, “if you ever want to get one, I’ll hold your hand.”
I was pretty much lying on top of her, but I had to hug my anarchist. I wrapped my arms behind her.
“I love you, Nicolette,” I said.
“Would you get a condom on and make love to me, then?”
I was quick to oblige, but our hearthmates stayed with us and touched us as we joined.
We had a resounding victory against Northwestern on Saturday that we all listened to on the University radio station. Of course, Northwestern had only won one game so far this season, but the fact that it was against Purdue gave us all hope for the Old Oaken Bucket at the end of the season.
I spent some time every day working with the new horses. They were eight years old and had been well-trained. I didn’t even want to ask how much these beauties cost. Jingo was concerned, it seemed, that I was spending time with the new kids and not with him. So, I ponied him along on a ride and half way through switched to ride him back. He shook his head at Toby and then raised it proudly with a little spring in his step. When we got back to the ranch, he ambled over to the haymow and ignored me completely when I saddled Tyler.
Sunday night, the rest of the casa joined Hannah, Elaine, Nikki, and April in front of the fireplace. The four looked a little concerned.
“Spill it,” Rose said. “What is our latest crisis? Don’t tell me you’ve been nominated for another award already.” The girls giggled a little and Nikki nudged Hannah.
“It’s Elaine’s fault!” Hannah burst out. “She’s too popular.”
“It’s not me!” Elaine said. “It’s the writing.”
“Sure, blame it on the dumb blonde,” Nikki said.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “As long as you’re blaming people, why don’t you include the cameraman?” April glared at me. “This is silly. What’s the problem? How can she be too popular?”
“We’re getting mail and phone calls from the entire syndicate,” Hannah explained. “They understand that they have a full season of daily shows and that we are recording almost every day, but they want Elaine live. Or at least in a delayed broadcast on the day of taping.”
“Well, that’s impossible. We don’t have a broadcast studio that we could push to them,” I said. End of problem. We can’t. Rose huffed at me and Dani settled into my lap.
“Brian, do you think they’d bring up a problem just to hear you shoot down their ideas?” Rose asked.
“Shit! I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m jumping to conclusions again. Talk it out and I’ll shut up.”
“We don’t want you to shut up, lover,” Hannah said. “We just want you to help decide the best course of action.” I nodded. “Our first alternative would be to find a broadcast studio that would be interested in picking up our show and providing the feed for everyone else. Like Miss Polly has in South Bend. I’m sure Harvey would love for us to move up there and even use the same or a similar set as Miss Polly. That’s a long way away, but with some shopping, I bet we could find the same setup in Indianapolis or Louisville. Maybe even Evansville. We have syndicate affiliates in each of those markets.”
“Indianapolis would certainly be the easiest commute, but does that mean we wouldn’t be taping in our studio again?” I asked.
“We wouldn’t tape Chick Chat there,” Hannah said. “We won’t find another station close enough for a commute for Young Cooking. It would have to stay here. The advantage of moving to a bigger market is that we’d have more audiences to pull from. We’ve been through every sorority and club at IU so far and have received several requests from farther away, but it always comes down to distance to travel. People coming here from Louisville for a taping have the same commute problem we’d have going there.”
“Okay, it sounds like there’s an advantage to having a larger MMA,” Jennifer said. “We’ve been doing a lot of study on Metropolitan Market Areas. What you are saying is that Bloomington is too small to get an audience from those areas.”
“Partially,” Hannah said. “We could probably draw the audiences here if we had immediate results. The problem now is that we try to inform our audiences when their show will air, but it’s not the same as saying, ‘Watch me on Chick Chat tonight,’ when they come in to record. Six months later, they’ve all but forgotten they were ever here. The big problem is that we might have to move to the market during the week in order to not be too exhausted to perform. And there’s the issue of controlling the cameras and cameramen. I’m not willing to give up April on this show. Or Jason.”
“Move?” I said. That was alarming and was the only thing I heard from that last speech.
“Just during the week. Like I did when I was in school. Drive up to Indy on Monday morning and back on Friday afternoon,” Elaine said. “We’d have to get an apartment up there. Or wherever.” That sort of made my stomach quiver.
“There’s an alternative, though,” Hannah said. “It requires some manipulation of our agreements, but WIUB-TV has the ability to generate the feed. We would be pressed a little harder than we are now, but we’d host the show here at ten, edit and polish, then deliver the tapes to WIUB for broadcast at three. We’d be frantic and I’d have to employ Joyce full-time. I think she’d be willing, but editing, refining, and producing the finished product would merit the investment. We’d have to have a rigid schedule. We would be managing a larger audience and show time would be exact. It would be like Charles Knight was. Recording is done and tape gets edited. Then we broadcast with feeds for the Eastern U.S. and two hours later for the Western U.S. I’m pretty sure WIUB would want some compensation other than just having first broadcast rights. They run on donations, not advertising.”
“Wow!” I said. “This is intense.”
“We’re grownups now and need to act like it,” Elaine said. “The industry and the audience expect us to be more current with our broadcasts and to be more relevant. And Nikki needs help.” Nikki cringed.
“What is it, sweetie?” I asked.
“I’m running dry,” Nikki said. “I can’t continue to produce funny sketches at the rate we’re using them. Oh, I don’t write everything. Elaine still does a huge amount of her own material.”
“Which I send to you and you edit and refine,” Elaine said.
“That’s true, but you must be feeling the strain, too.” Elaine nodded. “This fall I’ve held some writing competitions at Brown. We haven’t had time to do all the judging, but we’ve already accepted six monologues that need a little work but have potential. The sum is that I need more writers. I’m trying to do my fucking degrees. Somewhere along the line I still have to write my novel!”
“Wow! You guys really have been turning out a bunch of material. I know what it’s like to face the burnout. If I didn’t have Mary and the Woods and Angela working on planning recipes and shows, I’d have run out long ago,” I said.
“We need to decide what to do about you, too,” Hannah said.
“What?”
“As soon as we go with same day delayed broadcast, there will be pressure to make Young Cooking go the same way. Just like there is already pressure to move Elaine to a full hour instead of half an hour,” Hannah said. “I know you have to focus on your degree and we are tied into using Lonnie’s classes as interns for the rest of this year. Next year, we might need to think of taking you daily. The audience is there.”
“Holy crap.”
We talked for a long time Sunday evening—the whole casa. Louise and Brenda came over and Louise talked about the financial implications. With Redress included in the mix, we were looking at $1.2 million in gross revenue in the next twelve months. It boggled the mind. Of course, we had over half a mil in expenses, but it was still mind-blowing. Each time I tensed up, Dani kissed my head and pulled my hands to pet her. I relaxed. Ultimately, so much so that I was dozing off. Dani led me up to the shower and then into bed amidst Nikki, Elaine, Hannah, and April. Each got a little loving.
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