Chapter 12

Andrew didn’t have a good sleep and was awake early. He was home from an hour of swimming by 8.15 and after showering left to go to the office. He was not a very attentive investor that day. There was a full day of meetings and he voted for everything that Leslie suggested, but what he voted for? Who knows. She sent Julian to collect Suzanne, Maggie and Tony and the dinner and they walked back to their house.

“That bad?”

Andrew wasn’t even upset any more, He was disappointed and weary of it all. He told Leslie about the conversation and she took his hand.

“This has been coming for a while.”

“Maybe but while we never met we could maintain the fiction that there was a way back. And I don’t care about myself or them but this is going to upset Grandma a lot. But I don’t think there is a coming back from this. The two of them have got themselves all twisted up into a jealous and bitter little ball. Wednesday is going to be a shitshow of epic proportions.”

“What are you going to do? Go to Nikki and Fran’s?”

“I will ask them. I have not spoken to them yet and I know they will say yes, even if it disrupts their own plans. I will ask Suzanne tonight if she knows what they are doing before I call them.”

They beat the other four back to the house and so had the wine open and the beers ready when they finally arrived with the take out.

“Sorry we are late, everyone had the same idea. Place was heaving.”

It was good to catch up with his friends, sit and listen to the tales, get a ration of shit, just for being himself, but it was relaxed and welcoming. And three of the five of them were working hard to keep Andrew cheerful. The funniest part of the evening was listening to Leslie and Julian talk about their efforts to widen their social circle. They had talked about this two weeks earlier but the actual activities had been glossed over.

“So we tried dance lessons.”

Just that one sentence had Andrew smiling. He was going to enjoy this.

“That didn’t last long. And the reason will become clear. After that we tried 10 pin bowling but the only lanes are way over in Portobello. Then we tried a bridge club, which was worse than the golf club. We were the youngest there by a minimum of 20 years. We looked into seeing what was happening in the local area and that was both funny and annoying. Funny because it was full of old people like everything else and annoying as they either patronised us or chided us. Mild mannered Julian Strong nearly got into a fight with some bolshie old guy over. Who the hell knows what it was about. If you didn’t have a pension you weren’t welcome. We even looked at charity work, not volunteering in a shop or warehouse like you did but running a charity, fundraising, stuff like that. Exactly the same issue.”

Leslie drew breath, and Julian took over.

“We didn’t have high hopes for any of those to be honest but we forced ourselves to try them. There is one standard thing that is good at bringing people together, sport, but neither of us are very sporty, or interested in being sporty. So that one is still available but is not really in either of our natures. But we found something that surprised us, especially in how welcoming they have been. There is a historic Jaguar Club covering the East coast, and there are two others, one based in Glasgow and the other in Aberdeen. I saw a little flyer for them when I was over at the Jaguar garage collecting a part. They have been really good and although we are the youngest ones there it has not been that awkward. The cars are the common bond. So we actually have things do next year, once a month or so, and it is good. We are still struggling with connecting with contemporaries but we will keep trying to find something. If all else fails then we may have to take up sports. Maggie and Tony are trying to get us out on the hills. We will give it a try once the worst of the weather is over.”

Julian made this sound like a fate worse than death. But it was interesting to hear them talk about the issues they were facing. In 18 months it would be Andrew.

“It takes time to find something you like.”

This was Tony.

“I worked most weekends so actually taking time off, it felt like I had to learn to not work. We stumbled across hill walking by accident. In fact it was photography that got us out into the hills at first.”

Maggie and Andrew both winked at each other at the same time and had to stifle their giggles. Once they were back in the flat Andrew told Suzanne about the previous day, or at least the short version, while they were sitting in the living room. She listened but other than shaking her head several times she didn’t really say much. There was nothing to say, so it was the perfect reaction. She also mentioned that Nikki and Fran were going to be away for Christmas. Andrew sat in silence for a while before getting up to head to bed.

“Would you come and sleep with me tonight, I would very much like to hug you.”

“Of course. Come on.”

After they had finished up in the bathroom Suzanne came to bed. She was gloriously naked, just an arresting vision. She smiled and spooned in against him. The sense of calm, her presence in his arms, it was all Andrew wanted and more. He fell asleep stabbing her arse, holding her close.

The days when Andrew slept in were not many. He was a creature of routine and even without an alarm tended to wake at the same time every day. But all the travel and then the family stuff had caught up to him and he slept soundly until much later in the morning than usual. But it was clear that he needed it. Suzanne was awake already when Andrew finally opened his eyes and they kissed for a long time, morning breath be damned. Before he even knew what he was doing he had rolled her onto her back and slid down her body. Here was the body with which he was most familiar, the woman who he loved to make writhe and convulse under him. Kisses on her pale thighs, just small simple things, the memories came flooding back. Andrew felt a powerful urge to devour Suzanne, drive her wild, make her his.

The first full lick, the familiar taste, the knowledge that she was as turned on as he was, it all was wonderful. With Suzanne, eating her was always a physical act. She was strong with well-developed muscles in her thighs and arse and across her stomach. Pussy eating is a sexual act, it is your mouth against a woman’s sex organs, but it so much more. You taste a woman’s excitement, you hear a woman’s excitement, but feeling it is always the thing that pushed it over the top for Andrew. There was a part of him that wanted to take it beyond pleasure to torment. The whole scenario of having a woman beg him to make her come to minutes later demanding that he leave her alone. The power to make a woman’s body betray her, that was something that Andrew knew he had earned. He did not tease or torment Suzanne that morning; it was not a rush to get her off but he didn’t drag the process out either. With most women, stimulation of both the g-spot and clit at the same time is very powerful. And so it was with Suzanne that morning. But the physiological responses are what he remembered, the arching of the back and the attempt to close her legs, stymied by his head.

Andrew’s dick slid into Suzanne with ease and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him close. The sensation of condom free sex was so different and something that was unique with Suzanne. They fucked with passion and abandon, words easy to say but in this case true. You cannot fake a connection but the less common counterpart is you cannot hide a connection either. Sex between Suzanne and him was something that they were good at, and both knew how to bring out the best in each other. Five minutes later Suzanne was lying on him their combined fluids running out of her, over him and creating laundry as usual. But they were both calmer if a little breathless. She smiled down at him.

“If you need me to be selfless and help comfort you further, please let me know.”

He laughed at her innocent expression.

“Your willingness to sacrifice yourself for me is duly noted.”

Andrew ran his hands over her arse and Suzanne purred like a cat. She turned serious.

“All joking aside how are you doing?”

“Worried about telling Grandma, and how she will react. Mum and Dad are supposed to be hosting the family on Christmas Day and I have no idea how or perhaps more importantly when I am going to tell her. I don’t know how she is going to react, and what she might say to Mum and Dad. They feel the family are all on my side. It is just a mess.”

“Are you going to take her to church on Sunday?”

“I will have to think about it. I just don’t know.”

“What does it mean long term?”

“I don’t know when I will see them again. I will see the family less often, the extended family I mean, and I will worry more about Grandma. I don’t think this will be good for her.”

He smiled at Suzanne.

“I am glad you are here, and thank you for letting me hold you last night.”

Suzanne looked like she was going to make a flippant comment but instead merely kissed him.

“Are you down at the office again today?”

“Yes, it is a morning where we deal with all the odds and ends and then Julian wants to talk through some of his new project with me.”

“Do you think I can use the car today? I was going to go shopping with Vanessa in Glasgow.”

“Sure. I was going to call Pete and see if he wanted to go and see if there was anyone good playing at one of the clubs. So you can stay late if you want.”

So it was agreed. While Suzanne showered Andrew completed his exercises but other than them it was a rare day of neither running nor swimming. He was more switched on than the previous day, maybe driven by the fact it was lots of small items. None of them were individually significant other than one which at the time was merely administrative. The ramifications would be felt from that one decision for years to come starting the following spring. The rest of the morning was spent with Julian and his two employees, Kenny and Aiden. They were unsure about Andrew at first, Kenny even tested him to see whether he had credibility and knew his stuff. Julian looked at Andrew and laughed.

“Ken, Andrew and I started coding six years ago and developed and sold multiple programs. The man is my best friend and it was with him that I came up with the traffic light idea. Shut up and show him what you have done so far.”

All that brainstorming before Andrew left for Cambridge? It was more about the idea than about how to code the program. The thing that had worked for them in the past was high volume low price. So he and Julian had sat and thought about modern life and items or things that were everywhere and whether they could be computerised. The first of the two ideas was traffic lights. So Kenny was working out the design and some initial code for a control system for traffic lights. The other idea that Julian was playing with was process control software. Nothing that was going to be retail or well-known but rather generic software that could be used, or tailored for a multitude of purposes. The modem software that they originally developed for the bookies had morphed to over 70 different versions across a range of industries. ComputerCom were brilliant at developing markets that had a need for the same thing, control. This was where having Leslie involved in all the discussions had made a difference. And it was even more than that; having listened to Leslie and her dad and Julian’s dad and Doug Somers and tens of other people, both Julian and Andrew thought like businessmen. It had been back in the summer when they had been surprised when they said it out loud to themselves but it was true. The 14 year old and the 16 year old that started coding as a geeky hobby, well more than six years later they were still geeky but had learned so much about not just designing software but designing software with a purpose – selling it. They were not thinking about games anymore. Most of the games being developed when Julian and Andrew were at school were for games consoles like the Atari. The whole market had gone belly up in 1983 and 1984 so their perpetual goal of the next great game that had initially inspired them was not just dormant but extinct. They had never returned to the game that was still stored on a series of 5.25” floppy discs in both their houses. They had found a niche with software that was unglamorous but effective and Julian was working on doing the same thing again.

So the ideas had been batted around and talked about endlessly. Now it was time to design something. Julian and Andrew spent several hours reviewing code, talking about routines, going through everything for ways to reduce the code to the most elegant possible. Processing power and memory was constantly expanding and Julian had taken the time to show the increase in both since 1979. In six years it was beyond recognition. The first IBM PC that they got, the one Julian’s dad shipped back from the US for them, it did not even have an internal hard drive. And that was standard. By late 1985 Julian had bought three of the new AT versions of the PC which had a 30MB hard drive as standard. Just that alone shows you how much things had changed over the time they had been coding. What Julian was able to program was very different to what they had learned on. The progress he had made was impressive and with Aiden now helping him the software would start to take shape. But the time was fun, an immersive revisit to the endless weekends of coding. And as with those weekends the time flew by.

After a late lunch Andrew headed down to Tony’s shop. Elspeth grabbed him and they went upstairs to her office between the two new studios.

“Guess what Donnie and I did on Sunday morning? I developed the pictures yesterday and took them home last night. It made us feel like naughty teenagers again, fooling around behind our parent’s backs. Not that we were like that when we were younger.”

Andrew laughed at her expression.

“Well okay, maybe a little. Thank you for the idea. It can be a nice standby for the times we are out of ideas. There is always another room in her house.”

She settled down and smiled over at him.

“It was good to spend some time with you at the reception. Donnie was pleased to meet you, be able to see what I mean when I talk about you. We were talking about it in bed the following week, how normal it was to meet someone who had photographed me naked several times over the last couple of years. I mentioned to him how Stacey didn’t introduce you to Hamish.”

“We call all these shoots fantasies for the woman. For most women it is a one-time thing, they have the fantasy of being a model but once they have done the shoot, it is out of their system. But for a few, it is like a drug. No, that is too dramatic, it makes it sound like it is dangerous. I think there are quite a few people who are show-offs, they like the idea of being the centre of attention. Obviously nude modelling is the ultimate show off. And with you and Donnie it is a mutual thing. He likes the idea of you being a model and so you have the chance to keep posing if you want.”