Becoming the Storm
31 A Crowded Room
ROSE AND I GOT BACK HOME in time to help celebrate Elaine’s twenty-fourth birthday. We were all excited about her upcoming comedy special. It was a little more than two months away and everything seemed to be accelerating toward it. Nikki would be home in less than two weeks and Hannah had cleared rehearsal time at the theater in Indianapolis that would take up most of the week. Three other comedians were also scheduled to perform that night to make it a two-hour special. Elaine would be last and would be the only part of the show that was broadcast live. Tickets were being sold already!
I took Elaine to my private quarters and was amused when she grabbed Dani’s hand to drag her along with us.
“Do you mind being with us while I ravish our cónyuge?” Elaine asked Dani. “I just love having you with us and I’ll feel so much better if you are here.” Dani kissed Elaine and then settled back on the bed.
“I’ll be the clean-up crew,” Dani laughed. “But Elaine, I’m not a cónyuge. I’m just a hearthmate. Brian and I haven’t gotten around to that stuff yet.” I spooned behind Elaine while she looked into Dani’s eyes. Her hands were busy exploring the tall triplet. Face, hair, breasts… It was like we were all blind in Dani’s presence and had to use our hands to see her.
“You are our cónyuge, Danielle,” Elaine whispered. “Everyone in the casa. Even without sex, we have a more intimate relationship with you than anyone else. We love you and we know you love us. You’re inside us. We’ve all come to realize that being a cónyuge isn’t about sex or a ritual at the bonfire. It truly is expressed in the long-term intimate commitment of people who love each other. Please say you will be our cónyuge.”
I caught my breath. Yes, certainly I’d felt the commitment and the intimacy almost from the day I met Dani. But to hear it expressed like that. To hear Elaine claim her on behalf of the entire casa. It was something I’d never imagined.
“I love you, cónyuge,” Dani said softly. She kissed Elaine on the nose. “Now roll over and make love to our cónyuge.”
We all went up to Indianapolis Friday to watch Lionel and the Hoosier team beat Wright State 97-54 in the first round of the NCAA tournament. It was a blast to watch Lionel anchor the center spot in the arena where we’d watched him and Lamar when we were freshmen in high school. Of course, there was something else different about being there. When we’d all lain down in the church basement seven years ago, Renee was with Lamar and Elaine was with Lionel. At this game, Sugar bounced Lionel’s son on her lap as she screamed her lungs out and Sarah was glued to Lamar’s side.
In his typical easy-going way, I don’t think Lamar had put any pressure on her at all. As emotional and loving as Sarah was, she didn’t rush off to bed with Lamar, even after her heart-rending confession to me. If she was in town, she stayed with our casa. That all changed Saturday night.
It was Sarah’s twenty-third birthday. Sarah didn’t want anyone to make a big deal out of her birthday, but it was a casa celebration. Hannah was not going to allow her sister to have a birthday without a party. The only people we invited from outside the casa, though, were Maggie, April, Jess, and Lamar. Jessica called late in the afternoon to wish her friend a happy birthday. She couldn’t be with us because she and Adam were in Paris doing a joint shoot. Some French designer had jumped all over the idea of a gay guy and a straight woman in a relationship and were doing a whole campaign around the two of them. They’d be back Sunday night so Adam could get back to class and the production crew would head out again on Wednesday.
After our little party and celebration, Sarah left with Lamar and they went to his loft in the barn duplex. She never came back to the big bedroom.
We were back in the swing of things when classes resumed on Monday. Then all of a sudden, the shit got real. Jennifer, Courtney, Angela, Sora, and the triplets met me after my last class on Monday and we went to the Union to get measured for our commencement gowns. The rest of my high school class wouldn’t graduate until next year, but between my extra classes in high school and heavy schedule since I’d moved to Bloomington, I had enough credit to graduate a year early. Now that it looked imminent, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
For the first time since I was ten, I was no longer sure of my career path.
Dr. Morris, my advisor, told me that acceptance into grad school was a given and he even had a possible teaching assistantship for me. But ultimately, I didn’t know of any place that I would actually want to work that could even begin to match what I was earning or the fun I was having in television. I was reaching the point where I would have to change the focus of the show. I was twenty-one and I wasn’t sure at what age it would cease to be ‘young’ cooking. I was thinking that I could get a younger star to take over that show and start a new show that could attract a new audience or retain my previous audience as it got older. I needed to get Sarah to do a few focus groups to see what format would be preferred.
And the law suit was going to take some time. LWN had fought the voiding of the C&D, but now they were gearing up a campaign to just wear us down. We could spend a year defending ourselves. The only people who stood a chance of making money off this was the lawyers. We needed more programming and Hannah was really wrapped up with Elaine now. They planned to move to a daily live show of Chick Chat next fall.
The first of April would be the official Chick Chat release of the Designed by Leonard fashion line. It had nearly been launched by accident when we did the live Valentine’s Day party on CEN. Most of the people at the party were wearing something that Leonard designed.
I must have been pretty out of it, because we were on the way back to the ranch and I couldn’t remember having ordered my gown.
“Did we do everything we were supposed to for graduation?” I asked.
“He’s alive!” Courtney laughed. “Did you just invent the next generation of Teflon or something? We could hardly get you to sign your name after they took your measurements.”
“Yeah. I mean no. I just was really out of it there for a while. Oh, well. As long as I’m not going naked to graduation,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Dani said. “The emperor has brand new clothes.”
“Good. Emperor?” Everybody laughed. Dang! I need to pay better attention. After I get my homework done.
John Clinton called me Wednesday afternoon and asked if I could stop over for a few minutes. Now. I debated dressing in a house gi and decided it would be better to go in jeans and a polo shirt. I pulled on my boots, grabbed a jacket and my cowboy hat, and walked over to my neighbor’s house. It really hadn’t warmed up much yet this spring, even though we were no longer getting snow and freezing weather. Angela had plans to work in the garden on Saturday and start planting early crops.
Mama Bea let me in when I knocked. She handed me a cup of coffee and pointed me to the dining room. John was sitting at the table with four other men and a woman. I recognized the woman. Her horse was still in our pasture. I understood that the rubble had been removed from her former home and Ron was preparing the lot for one of Rhiannon’s homes.
“Brian, have a seat,” John said. “Sorry to have not given you any notice, but we were meeting on a different issue and the committee wanted to meet you. You know Fran Leidle.”
“Hi Fran. I understand your new home is under construction. Congratulations,” I said, shaking her hand. John introduced me to the others at the table. “What’s the committee?” I asked.
“We’re the committee to elect John Clinton to the Township Board,” Fran said. I looked at John. Cassie had every registered voter in the village sign the petition to put her father’s name on the ballot. I realized she wasn’t there now because she had class on Wednesday afternoon.
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going well,” one of the men said. “We’re pretty sure he’ll have a seat on the board. This section has the highest population of any in the Township since you folks moved in.”
“I guess I didn’t quite realize that.”
“There are 311 homes in the Township. Most have two voters. Your home alone, if I understand correctly, has twenty.”
“I think we actually have sixteen registered voters. There are forty-four on the ranch if what Cassie told me was correct. A few people have not changed their official residence to here for one reason or another,” I explained.
“And here in the village, we now have six voters to add to that. And two in the farmhouse next door,” John added. “Again, a total of 52.”
“The point is, we think John will be elected. And we think the township will vote strongly to create the Village of Corazón. We just wanted to meet the person who was responsible for getting this started.” I knew who Mr. Smith was. He owned one of the two properties across the road from us and had agreed to have it included in the village limits.
“The folks down on our end of the section learned a lesson in January,” Another guy said. He nodded to Fran. “We discovered that we are too far from the fire department. And we also discovered that we weren’t very good neighbors with each other. I’ll tell you that several of us are regretting not getting included in the village limits.”
“Well, you were right, though,” I said. “There really wasn’t a service that the village could offer you that you didn’t get from the county.”
“Except for one thing,” Rick said. He’d said he lived in a different section. Sometimes it was hard to tell because the roads didn’t run down the section lines like they did up in the Mishawaka area. “Each township is supposed to provide fire services. Up to this time, the Board has chosen to contract for those services from the next township. As a result, the fire department was way too far away to do Fran and Jim any good when their house caught fire.”
“We want to propose that the Village of Corazón house a new fire station,” Fran said. “It might still have been too late to save our house because the fire was already pretty far along when the call was made. But the volunteers from here in the village were at our house almost fifteen minutes before the trucks got there. It was a wakeup call for all of us.”
“Wow. We didn’t plan for that kind of a facility here,” I said. “I can certainly see the logic in it, though. I had a few nightmares about our own house catching on fire and not having a truck nearer than eight miles.”
“Well, we just wanted to give you something to think about, Brian,” John said. “If the election in three weeks goes the way we hope, I’ll be on the Board and the Village will be an official Indiana community. One of the first things I’ve promised to do is to press for a township fire station. I think we could work something out in terms of a location here in the village.”
“You’ll have my support,” I said. “I’ll talk to the other residents and get folks started to rally around the concept. Six guys on the ranch have taken the training and are on the list of volunteer firemen. If this is a reality, we’ll be recruiting among the rest of you.” They all laughed and nodded their heads.
I really hadn’t thought about what it was going to take to make the village function like a town instead of just as our clan. When we had an issue in the clan, we just polled everyone, talked out the differences, and had a bonfire. I knew from my State and Local Government class that wouldn’t work when the population got much over where it was now. I needed to talk to the professor more about what our options were for governance of the village.
That was one more thing on my plate. Why did I ever imagine that I’d have time to go to grad school?
The slap on my face was unexpected and startled me.
“Focus!” snapped Master Xi. Whitney barely concealed a chuckle next to me. The physical therapy and measured movements of our katas had really helped her leg. She’d been off crutches for nearly a month now. Even though she favored the leg a little, her workouts were becoming more vigorous. I knew that before long she’d want to spar. Master Xi had never even let us work at speed. Every motion was slow and deliberate. I’d spaced out again.
“I’m sorry, Master. There is so much going on in my life that I get distracted,” I complained. He slapped me again. I didn’t even see it coming.
“You cannot fight the storm,” he said. “You must become the storm.”
Our number one Hoosiers fell apart in the fourth round of the NCAA tournament in St. Louis. A season record of 31 and 4 and two of the four losses were to tenth ranked Kansas! The six-point loss meant there was no Final Four appearance for us this year. I swear it seems like sometimes we play Kansas just so they can beat someone. Pissed? Me? Oh, surely, not over something like basketball. Now Whitney, on the other hand…
I didn’t really have time to get into too deep a funk. Nikki got into town Saturday afternoon and had been waiting impatiently for ‘the boys’ to finish watching sports so she could fuck. She practically threw me on the bed and inhaled my cock.
“Oh God, Nikki! This isn’t going to take long with you going at it like that.” Nikki was really bobbing up and down and I loved the feeling of sliding over her tongue to touch her throat.
“Then you’d better get to work,” she said. She scooted around and threw a leg over my head, settling her pussy down on my mouth. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to a bare Nikki. She’d decided that as long as she’d started waxing it she wasn’t going to stop. It was very smooth but not red or raw, so I assumed she’d had it done earlier in the week. It didn’t really matter. I parted her lips and went to work with my tongue. She was extremely juicy. I had a good angle and a good view. And an impish idea. I lifted my head a little and thoroughly rimmed her asshole.
Nikki’s screech rivaled anything Jennifer had ever emitted. It was almost drowned as I started shooting into her open mouth at the same time. When we’d both settled down and were just giving each other little licks, she moved to lie beside me. We kissed for a long time.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ll just go crazy if I don’t have you soon. You can’t believe the number of times I’ve grabbed a change of clothes and headed for the airport just so I can be here for a night with you,” she said as she cuddled against me. We weren’t moving quickly to the main course now that the appetizer had calmed us down. She still wanted me to explore her body with my fingers and my mouth.
“Now I’m the one making you crazy,” I sighed. I nibbled on her earlobe and noticed she had a couple new piercings.
“Hmm. It seems to be contagious. How are you doing?”
“I seem to space out a lot because there is so much going on. I’ll be working on one thing and then think of some problem or situation someplace else that I need to do. All of a sudden somebody whacks me upside the head and tells me to wake up. Then it’s fine. Am I crazy?”
“Crazy is the new normal. It’s normal to be crazy. People who aren’t crazy, aren’t normal.”
“You know, that almost made as much sense as our master telling us to breathe in the universe.”
“Crazy.” I spent a lot of time tracing and examining her tattoos with my lips. Finally, she pulled me to her and had a condom ready. I slid into her and we looked into each other’s eyes. Having taken the edge off our passion, we were content to be connected. We moved only enough to maintain our interest level and continued talking.
“Are you ready for graduation?” she asked.
“It’s one of the distractions. Trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. How about you?”
“I’m not going to graduate.”
“Why not? I thought you were a year ahead,” I said.
“I am. But I’m on a combined undergrad/graduate program, like Rhiannon is in architecture. I’ll get my BA and MFA at the same time next year,” she answered.
“You are phenomenal,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out if I should go to grad school or just play television producer.”
“It will come to you.” She moved her hips a little more forcefully and I picked up the clue to speed up. “Will you come for me?” she whispered. “Don’t worry about me. I just want to feel you when you come. I want to… want to imagine that there’s no condom and you are getting me pregnant.”
“Really, sweetheart? Is that what you want? Do you want a baby?”
She shook her head and scowled.
“That’s not what I said. I want to imagine you are getting me pregnant. I don’t want to do it.” I laughed, but the sensations were building and before long I found myself filling the condom. Nikki tensed up. I could tell from experience with her that she was having an orgasm, but as noisy as her first was, this was quiet.
We fell asleep in each other’s arms.
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