Becoming the Storm
66 Victory and Defeat
DOREEN WAS SPENDING WEEKENDS at Casa del Fuego and weeknights at Casa del Agua. How strangely things worked out. Fire and Water. Yet, as I cuddled her to me Saturday night, there was no question about the union of the two in the child growing within her. She’d just entered the third trimester. I petted, cuddled, and played tag with our daughter. Doreen was convinced we were also having a girl. I don’t know what I was going to do if it turned out we had a boy.
I slowly entered her from behind, a position that we had always enjoyed, but especially liked when she was pregnant. Danielle pressed herself against my back. Her hips rocked forward and back with mine. I loved being sandwiched between the mothers of my children.
Dani had been reluctant to rejoin the casa in the big bedroom. She was afraid that Xan would wake others up in the middle of the night and she didn’t want to cost anyone sleep they needed before classes. To some extent, she was justified in her concerns. It seemed, though, that there was always someone moving about upstairs and we were all able to sleep through that. The women loved to get up to comfort Xan, bring her to Dani to feed, dance with her, burp her, and even sleep with her.
I remembered the first time Doreen had crawled into bed with me before Betts got married. We’d talked while I held her in ‘spoons.’ Her butt had gently rocked against me and I was hard as a rock. It was like this… except now I was buried to the root in her pussy as we spooned together. And my hand was petting the smooth round belly where my daughter was growing. And Dani was rocking against my butt the same as I was rocking against Doreen’s.
“Have you thought about naming our baby?” Doreen asked. “I didn’t give you much choice with Matthew.”
“And that worked out perfectly,” I said. “I think you do a great job of picking names. Especially if we’re having a girl.”
“But? If we’re having another boy? You have an opinion.”
“Yes. And it would only ever be used if the two of us have another son,” I said.
“What?”
“Darnell Hayden Swift,” I said. Doreen twisted toward me so far, I almost popped out of her. She pushed back so that I was reseated where I should be.
“How do you know about Darnell?” she whispered.
“He was my dad’s best friend,” I said. “He invented the kit.”
“I never met him. He was gone before I was born,” Doreen sighed. “It’s Doug’s middle name, but I don’t think he has any idea where it came from. I wouldn’t even have known about him if I hadn’t found some things when we were packing to move down here. I found his picture and letters home to Dad.”
“Do you think your dad would be hurt if we named our son that?” I asked.
“No. I think he would be very proud. I could tell from the letters that Darnell really loved Dad as his brother. I’m sad that I never knew him.”
“Another week,” Dani said. “I suppose we will have to use a condom, but I’m okay if we don’t… I mean if you want another baby. The doctor has no idea how my body will respond in becoming fertile again. She has a theory that our bodies react to external trauma by sending out the message to fertilize. She said Xan might not have actually begun until after I was shot. It’s the body screaming, ‘They’re going to kill us. Quick! Reproduce.’ But now that we’ve been making love, I miss feeling you inside me. Next week will be six weeks and the doctor said it would be fine to have intercourse again.”
I rolled toward Dani and the roles were reversed. Doreen spooned behind me. She was not yet so big that she couldn’t face me while we lay on our sides.
“Danielle, I love you. I can’t wait to be inside you again. But I don’t want to turn you into a baby-making machine. We’ll take reasonable precautions. If an accident happens, we’ll embrace it.”
“I love you, Brian. I don’t think the doctor restricted touching me, lover.”
Sunday the thirteenth was a day to go down in history for us. Well, for Whitney, especially. The Lady Hoosiers were playing at home against number 1 ranked Penn State. The game went back and forth through most of the first three quarters before the Nittany Lions started to pull away. But two minutes into the fourth quarter, Whitney hit her fourth three-pointer of the night. The next time play stopped, there was a buzzer and officials called timeout. Then an announcement came over the loudspeakers.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, at two minutes twenty-seven seconds into the fourth quarter, Point Guard Whitney Anderson of the Indiana University Lady Hoosiers hit her fourth three-point shot of the evening. This brings Ms. Anderson to a Big Ten Career Record 202 three-point field goals.” We all went crazy cheering as Whitney just stood in the middle of the court with her mouth open. Both teams came off the bench and filed by to congratulate her.
It would have been better if we’d won the game, I suppose, but after the brief break, Penn State opened their lead to 70-65 to keep the number one spot. Whitney’s record, though, was one that would stand for a long time.
Nikki got home Saturday for her mid-winter break. We got Monday off for President’s Day, so I couldn’t complain too much about the fact she got one more day than we did. I’d been carrying around a new idea for a while and wanted to float it by her, so while most of the family was gathered by the fireplace Sunday afternoon, I pulled her into my arms in the big chair.
“What would you think of a men’s show similar to Elaine’s Chick Chat?” I asked. “One of our audience members a few weeks ago suggested it. It’s been rattling around in my head ever since.” Nikki frowned at me.
“Who’d watch it?”
“Um… young men, I suppose,” I said. “It was suggested by a young man.”
“What would you talk about?”
“Well, I was thinking about a kind of expanded agreement as a basis,” I said. “We did some pretty remarkable things with that little slip of paper. I’m thinking we could get the concept out to more people.”
“You want to become a televangelist?” Cassie asked. She had a look of extreme distaste on her face.
“I wasn’t thinking of trying to convince anyone,” I said. “Just getting the concepts out there and showing how they work.” Everyone looked at me. I nodded. “Yeah. Sounds like a televangelist, doesn’t it?”
“Not that it’s a bad idea, though,” Hannah said. “I just don’t know who would watch it. I mean, look at the clan. Thirty-five women and seventeen men, not including the babies. And of the men, five are gay and two are bi. We can’t even field a full audience of straight men.”
“I think there’s something there,” Elaine put in. “Granted, I think we’d have to work out a lot of details, but the concept is good.”
“As soon as we have a real concept, I’ll get you a writer,” Nikki said.
“Get me a writer?”
“Who do you think could possibly host such a show? If there’s going to be a televangelist in the family, you’re it,” Cassie said. Hannah got up to leave.
“I need to go talk to my sister. I hope she’s letting Lamar study for his bar exam Tuesday!”
I’d gotten it off my chest, so I forgot about it. The Hoosier men sailed into March at 19-6. The women were 17-6. We were beginning to feel like the women had a real shot at a twenty-win season and an invitation to the NCAA championships for the first time in years. It was great to see them holding their own in the Big Ten after the way they imploded last year. During the game on Sunday the 27th, one of Whitney’s teammates scored her 1,000th point for the Lady Hoosiers. They were rocking! The men weren’t quite as hot as last year, but we were approaching March Madness as the fifth ranked team in the nation.
My classes were going well on Monday and Wednesday nights. The creative management and media management classes were much more interesting than the theoretical and research classes of last semester. Creative management showed me a lot about guiding the creative process that I’d never considered before. In our kind of business, we needed fresh ideas all the time. Just looking at Elaine’s need for something new to say every single day was huge. Nikki had taken charge of actually putting together a team of writers to meet the challenge. Burnout was a real risk for everyone involved.
But it was just as important to provide a structure for creativity. There were lots of funny routines, but they weren’t all appropriate for the audience we attracted. Since Sarah had been doing focus groups on our audience demographics, we’d been able to increase viewership. Elaine wasn’t trying to appeal to every woman on the planet. She appealed primarily to older high school women through a couple years past college. Of course, Sarah could pinpoint it further.
“We are targeted directly to Midwestern women, age seventeen-and-a-half to twenty-three with a strong interest in contemporary culture and current events. They have a grade-point average of 3.2, intend to have a career and then a family, and will major in business, sociology, or women’s studies. All of the youngest in the demographic are college-bound. Those out of college are just starting their careers and will be gone from our audience by the time they are eighteen months out of college,” she’d said. I think Sarah knew how tall each viewer was, what she weighed, and whether she colored her hair or shaved her pussy. Amazing!
“It sounds like we need to expand the audience,” I suggested.
“Not so. While it sounds narrow, we are currently tapping less than 5% of our potential viewers in that demographic.”
Wow! It wasn’t just about appealing to more kinds of people, but about appealing to more of the same kind. That really threw me. But the creative management class confirmed the idea. Hannah was eating it up!
We’d also settled in to a pretty good routine on the shows. Debbie and Dolly were my guest hosts on Wednesdays. That gave me extra time to study for my economics and legal classes—which I desperately needed. Fridays, Elaine was off and Amber had become her permanent guest host. They’d done several shows together and Amber was proving to be funny and talented, if not quite as well trained theatrically as Elaine. I think both Elaine and I had a few pangs about seeing our babies in the hands of other people, but all three women were keeping the show on track.
The entire clan went to see Whitney’s last home game Friday night. They played Wisconsin and we screamed our lungs out. It was a good thing none of us had a show the next day. We wouldn’t have been able to talk. We were trailing by a point when Whitney dropped a trey at the buzzer to give us a 66-64 victory over Wisconsin. We were crazy!
When we got home, we were all over Whitney and she just soaked it up. She wasn’t into women sexually, but I guess there is a difference when the women’s hands were bathing her and massaging her and feeding her. In bed, I did my best to satisfy any other cravings she had and she gladly accepted Josh’s help, too. She’d never been double-teamed before and even though Josh didn’t enter her, she did have a good time stroking his cock to a spurt as I used mine to push her over the edge.
“Teammates,” she whispered.
“Teammates,” Josh responded.
Whitney went on the road with the Lady Hoosiers the next week and they got robbed of their twenty-win season by Michigan State and ended it 19-8. That Saturday night, though, we watched Lionel in his last home game as the Hoosiers trounced Wisconsin 78-65. What was great, though, was that for the first time in twenty years, both teams were headed for the NCAA tournament.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Brian?” Rose asked as I packed my bag. “I mean with no one going with you?”
“Everybody has spring break plans. This is only the second time the Lady Hoosiers have ever been invited to the NCAA tournament and it could be the last college game Whitney plays,” I said. “Rose, she was my first lover. We grew up playing basketball together. She loves the sport. And in June… She’s going into the Marines. I don’t want to miss this opportunity to see her doing what she loves.”
“I understand. It just seems… I’ve never liked the idea of you traveling alone. You have fifteen hearthmates and two children. And another on the way. We can’t help but worry about you.”
“I’ll miss everyone here, but I’m not exactly traveling alone.”
“You aren’t?”
“John thought it would be a great trip to do together. He’s had the plane out a couple of times and the landing strip is dry. They did a great job of putting it in. The drainage is incredible,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to enjoy a long, leisurely flight south.”
“In that little bitty plane? Will it even go that far?”
“We’re going to fly the 150. It’s faster than the Piper. It’s 500 miles to Oxford, Mississippi. The plane has a range of 400. But this is a leisure flight. John figures we’ll make two stops along the way to refuel and eat. If we get tired or see something interesting, we’ll stop.”
“You make it sound like you’ll just pull in to a roadside rest area. Now we’ll really be worried,” Rose said.
“Don’t be. And when Whitney calls tonight, don’t let her know. It’s a surprise.”
I was a little worried that John would be intent on flying straight through and I still wasn’t confident in my ability to pilot the plane that far. I hadn’t soloed yet and hadn’t flown since we put the planes in the hangar last fall. I needn’t have worried. John was never more relaxed than when he was flying. We ended up making our first stop at a small airport near Evansville, laughing because we’d been so excited that neither of us peed before we took off.
That proved to be the standard and we made two more stops at little airports to fuel, pee, get coffee, and eat. We got into Oxford at five. It was pretty cool. The University had its own airport and we got a lift to the Inn at Ole Miss. Everything down here was called Ole Miss. As soon as we’d eaten, it was a quick walk to the fieldhouse where the first round would be played. Of course, we were playing the home team and Ole Miss got a lead early and held it. They had about ten times the number of fans there as we did, but when Whitney hit a trey in the middle of the third quarter, I made up for any noise our numbers lacked. She’d just made her 1,000th career point. There were now ten Lady Hoosiers in history who could make that claim and two of them were on the floor.
She heard me screaming and glanced up. The look of surprise on her face was precious.
Whitney slipped out of her room late that night and into mine on the next floor.
“I can’t believe you came all the way down here to watch me play. And we lost!” she said as I wrapped her in my arms.
“You didn’t lose,” I said. “The game, sure, but you are a winner. Whitney, I’m so proud of you I could burst.”
“Well, put it someplace where I can enjoy the bursting, too!”
I did.
Repeatedly.
John was going to have to do most of the flying tomorrow because I wasn’t getting much sleep.
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