Chapter 6: Saying it

Presenting herself to Bret in an invitation to doggie-style sex hadn’t changed them into an enactment of the Kama Sutra. For one thing, the apartment wasn’t that well heated, and she was cold without either clothes or a blanket. For another, their old pattern was satisfying. For yet another, they were busy; she and he spent more time studying in different rooms than they did screwing.

It did, however, free her up to express her desires. She had invited him sexually, and the world hadn’t come to an immediate end. (And when the world did end, it was such a pleasant ending.)

Mostly, she was his goal, and he enticed her. When she wanted a change, she could entice him; she could even demand things from him.

One Tuesday night, she definitely wanted a change. He’d had climaxes on Sunday morning and Monday night, and he was acting as though her climaxes were the only goal. That was a pleasant goal, and they had been pleasant climaxes, but this night she wanted more, she wanted,

“In me, Bret! I want your cock in me now!” She was nearly shouting. He moved up her body, and opened her with his fingers. She grabbed his cock and guided it in.

He started a slow, driving pace, but she dug her fingernails into his butt. She threw herself up into him when he drove down. The bed shook under them. For all the speed and power of his strokes, Bret took a satisfyingly long time.

The fire broke and convulsed her. “Bret!” she cried. He drove into her even more forcefully. The bed hit against the wall.

“Mandy!” he shouted. She felt him pulse within her contractions. He fell on top of her, and they gasped in different rhythms.

Some time later, he was still lying on her when his cell beeped a new ring tone from the night stand.

He rolled off her, taking the covers, and grabbed the phone.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be a minute or two.” He got out of bed and tossed the covers over her. “We’re off to the hospital. The baby’s making her debut.”

Bret stopped in the john, and she was able to dress enough to follow him out the door. Rick and Lisette were in the entryway with a small suitcase.

“You stay here,” Bret said. “I’ll bring the car around.”

The next morning, when they got into the Sociology lecture hall, Bret steered her up into the back. Half way through the lecture, he pulled out his cell phone and put it to his ear.

“Congratulations,” he finally said. “Give both your girls my love.” By this time, Prof. Andrews had stopped in his lecture and was making an ostentatious note in his grade book.

“Melissa,” Bret wrote on top of his page of notes and showed to her, “7 lbs 9 oz.”

“Meet you outside,” Bret said when the lecture was finally over.

“Really,” Andrews said as Bret walked out.

“Professor, my downstairs neighbors had a baby this morning, I drove them to the hospital last night. It won’t happen again. If they started now, not medically advisable, I’d be graduated long before another baby was born.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain of graduation. Do you need this course? You certainly delayed taking what is actually a threshold course.”

“I’m graduating in December. I have enough credits and all my distribution. I got a B on the first exam.”

“I can’t see what use one quarter of the course will be to you,” Andrews said.

Bret left without another word, strode down the hall, and turned a corner. When she followed him, he was stopped not long after the corner.

“Sorry,” Bret said, “I didn’t want him associating us with each other. You need this course.”

“Andrews is a prick, but he’s not that much of a prick. He’ll cut your grade, but not mine.”

“He can’t see what use one quarter of the course will be. I can’t see what use the entire course, the entire field of sociology could possibly be. There’s the Winter Olympics, and there’s the Summer Olympics. Then there’s the Special Olympics.”

“Hardly the same,” she said.

“There is Physical Science, and there’s Biological Science. Then there’s Social Science.”

“You’re nasty.” But he was funny, too.

Before leaving campus, they visited Rick and Melissa. She was behind glass with a bunch of other babies.

They sat apart for the next two Sociology lectures, but Andrews had apparently used up his rancor towards Bret.

When Melissa came home, Brett drove again. They each got to hold her, and Bret seemed comfortable with a baby on his arm.

The quarter had moved past the middle, and the weather turned real cold. Bret had once told her that he had his winter clothes in the apartment. His clothes were the same, but he had more layers. He had three hand-knit sweaters, one of which he’d long outgrown, he had several scarves, all hand-knit, he had a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, and a parka.

There was a closet in the living room as well as the one in the bedroom. Even with her outer stuff in it with his, it wasn’t crowded.

The furnace worked overtime to keep the building warm, but it sometimes lost. Bret put her blanket on the bed with his, and sometimes they wore sweaters when they ate meals at home.

One Thursday night, she shivered when Bret went down the bed to take care of her.

“You’re letting too much air in.”

“I’m not letting enough air in,” he answered her. “I have to breathe down here.”

He came up the bed and hugged her. They shivered in each others’ arms. Well, she loved his mouth, but it wouldn’t be any use if he suffocated. She kissed him, and led his hand to her vulva.

“Oh, darling,” he said. He opened the drawer in his night stand, and she knew he was getting the Vaseline. His hand was cold when it went between her legs, and the lubricated finger was colder.

Soon, though, it brought heat into her depths. They were kissing deeply when the fire shook her. He didn’t stop, and she didn’t want him to stop until she had come two more times. She pulled the nightie down, and he tucked the covers around her shoulders and under her chin. Wrapped in the blankets and in him, she slept warm that night.

Before bed the next night, she put a paper towel on the night stand beneath the Vaseline jar.

“Just hug me for a minute,” she said when they got into bed. They cuddled, and the heat of their bodies warmed the covers. Bret got the Vaseline on his finger, and she lay down and raised her nightie. He stopped with his hand above her -- though not far enough above her. When he touched her, she shivered. This time it was from the cold. Still, he was careful, and she soon felt heated, not cooled, by his finger. The fire struck, and it shook her. His finger was warm, now. He put it in her entryway and moved it all around. With the new lubrication, he went back to her clit.

She wanted more, though, and his finger wasn’t going to give her enough. She rolled onto her side, and got cooler sheets. She pressed back against him and readjusted the covers. Then she reached behind her and grasped his cock.

“Mandy,” he said.

“Unh huh.” They adjusted, and he slid right in. She moved her right leg over his, opening her wide. He fingered her again, and it felt even better with his cock occupying her.

He stroked her bristles. He moved slightly and slowly out, then more slowly in. He rested behind her with only his hand moving. It moved up to her breast. He moved in and out and then rested again.

“Am I moving too slowly?” he asked.

“Just right.” The motions, the being filled, the relaxation and the warmth were “Delicious.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “This is lovely. This is cuddly sex. We can have the explosions, and the explosions are grand. This, too, though is grand. Loving you in my arms, your loving me in your cunt. We can have this cuddly sex sometimes. Even when we’re married, we’ll have both.” She heard it just before he did, and when he heard it, all the wrong parts of his body went stiff.

His hand went down from her breasts. The finger stroked her vigorously, almost punishingly. He began thrusting in and out. She’d been too close when he started. Inartful as the stimulation was, and she’d never thought his stimulation inartful before, she crested after less than a minute. She shook.

Bret left her clit and grasped her hipbone painfully. He pounded in and out twice more, and she could feel him twitching at her entrance.

A little later, he rolled over and wiped his finger on the paper towel. She tugged down her nightie, and he tucked her in again.

Whatever the actions, she didn’t feel as warm as the night before.

They ate breakfast fully dressed and in painful silence. Finally, she’d had enough.

“Was I dreaming last night, or did I hear a proposal?”

“No! When I propose to you, Mandy, it isn’t going to be in a subjunctive clause. I’ll cook hamburgers for lunch, and we’ll talk then. Go to your classes. Do you want me to go out and start the car?” That would save her a little cold at the price of his suffering more.

Instead, she went out and started the car herself. On the way, she reflected. He’d said, “WHEN” he would propose. For that matter, he’d said, “When we’re married.” Did she want that? Aside from that it would overjoy Mom and prove Mom totally wrong and that she was fighting Mom right now, did she want that?

Well, “When we’re married” sounded awfully like taking her for granted. On the other hand, she’d got used to Bret, and giving up his love-making would be giving up a lot. And what did he mean by marriage? That seemed like a silly question, but it really wasn’t. Mom and Dad had a marriage; Rick and Lisette had a marriage. They were different things. His parents had had a marriage, and now they didn’t.

She noted to herself that Bret seemed to think his hamburgers were the food for critical moments. She cooked lima beans and cut two chunks of lettuce to go along.

They weren’t far into the meal when he said, “Well, I had to have been thinking of marriage. You had to see that I was thinking of marriage.”

“Maybe it was obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“The two sources of most marital arguments are sex and money.” That sounded right, but first comes the marriage, and then the marital arguments. “However stupid I was to say it, what I said wasn’t stupid. We have good sex, and we have several kinds of good sex. If you want something different, you only have to ask.”

He’d already forgotten the night before. If she wanted something different, she only had to grab his cock. Asking seemed somehow superfluous. “Bret, I have better sex with you than I have ever had, than I ever dreamed of having. Last night isn’t an example of that.”

“Well, Last night was my fault. Y’know cunnilingus, even if it is a warm-weather sport, has one advantage. I never say the wrong thing then.” She laughed, “That leaves money. I have a hundred thirty-eight in savings.” All that she could think was that she had ASKED him for a budget. She had more than $138 on her own, a lot more. She didn’t have enough to support them.

“Earnings from free-lance game design, as you know, is chancy,” he went on. ‘The only certainty is the certainty of delay. I’m still getting money from the first session, though not enough money. Well, I think that I need 18 months from January to get up to speed again. That’s the July 2014 check. I think the thirty-eight is enough, combined with what I’ll get from the old games, to tide us through the 18 months.” None of this made any sense. The last was a sore point, though.

“If that is supporting US, then I, too, will be earning some money. I expect to be a high-school history teacher for half that time.”

“Yeah. And haven’t I told you that I don’t have to move to do my work? Well, I don’t have to stay put to do it either. In a little less than a year, you’ll have a job in some particular place. As long as they have reliable electricity and Internet connectivity, I can live there with you.” He was talking so fast that he’d obviously thought that all out. “Anyway, we’ll need the thirty-eight to live on. Can you see a wedding with the rings, ceremony, reception, and honeymoon on the hundred?”

That didn’t make any sense. You could probably get married on a hundred, but that sort of wedding didn’t come with a honeymoon. “Let’s slow down, here, Bret,” she said. “You have a hundred thirty-eight what?”

“One hundred. Thirty-eight. Thousand. Dollars.” He said it like it was obvious. “A little more, and the stuff in the checking, but that is mostly current, and we’re not at the end of the year, yet.” Okay, this wasn’t an immediate financial crisis. Still, while the panic had disappeared, the question was larger if anything. She knew people who could run their savings down to low triple digits before getting worried. She didn’t know anybody, well anybody else, who put more than $100,000 in savings. Dad had probably had less than that when he had 2 kids about to go to college.

“Bret, stop a minute. How did you get that much savings?”

“Well, I didn’t know it was coming in. One of the great economists of the 20th century, talking in oxymorons, answered a question. (Good question, too, people with higher incomes save a greater proportion, but as average real incomes rise, the average proportion doesn’t go up.) Anyway, the official answer is that everybody knows how much income he will get over his lifetime. He spends it as he needs to. So, he spends more when he’s young and saves it back when he’s old. Well I don’t know what my income will be next month, let alone the rest of my life. So, I figured that I had enough coming in to go back to school and live fairly carefully.

“And, then, I originally split the money coming in between a stock fund and a bond fund.” He was on a roll and just kept talking and talking. “The stock fund appreciated, went up in value. So I got more than I expected in two ways.

“Then, too, I had come out of high school wanting to be a mathematician. Mom sacrificed some of the other things she could have got in the settlement for Dad’s agreeing -- it was a legal agreement -- to pay my higher education for as long as I continued in school. Come 2008, he was going broke, all construction was going broke. He wrote me that he couldn’t afford tuition for the next year. He owed it, but he wouldn’t be able to pay it, He’d go bankrupt. His idea was that I should move in with him and get a job in his company as a carpenter. I could never get a job, however much nepotism was involved, as a carpenter. So I dropped out and wrote computer games. I didn’t know how much lead time was involved.

“When I got the income coming in, I went back to school still planning to be a mathematician. There is little math the first two years, mostly calculus and distribution. Well, the next year, I took loads of real math. I actually passed, but I discovered that I would never be one of the guys who creates the stuff. Probably, I could get a doctorate somewhere and find a job teaching calculus. That isn’t what I’d wanted. I wanted to be one of the creators. Well, I can’t create theorems, but I can create computer games.”

He sounded heartbroken about this. She didn’t dispel his illusions of being able to teach. He was the worst guy at communication that she had ever met. Math profs were a common joke, but she thought the standard was higher than that.

“And,” he continued, “I’ve kept a friendly relationship with my stepsister. She’s not responsible for what her mother did. Her mother kept close tabs on her, and I helped her set up a Facebook page. Actually, I set it up with her birthday but my birth year. Then I sent her an e-mail with the account and the password. I check in every once in a while. Dad didn’t go through personal bankruptcy, although his company went through corporate bankruptcy. (And what would that have done to my carpenter job?) Last year, my stepsister put a lot on Facebook about the trip her parents took her on to Disneyland. ‘My parents,’ when she uses it, means her mother and her stepfather, my father. He was going to get back to me when he could afford to contribute to my tuition again.”

“I would have blown up.” She would have screamed on the phone.

“Well, as I said, I like her. I’m glad she went to Disneyland, and I didn’t need the tuition help. But, first, that taught me to look to my own resources, and, second, I was telling you that I have more money because I expected to spend more time in school.”