Chapter 31

November 14^th, 2020

Before they even took the blindfold off, Andy knew exactly who was pressed against his left and right sides, even if he hadn’t seen either of them in person in over a decade. Emily pulled the blindfold off him, and he looked to his right, seeing Fiona’s smiling face resting against his shoulder.

She was older, certainly, but the years had been far kinder to her than they had any right to be, and if DC had put her through any sort of hell, she certainly didn’t wear it on her face. Mostly, she looked just like she had on their final night together, right before he’d moved west to California, and while that warmed his heart, he also felt a bit nervous about it. He’d put on some weight over the years, and the skin around his eyes was definitely showing initial wrinkles. The years hadn’t been nearly as kind to him as they had to her.

Then it occurred to him that she’d had several minutes to watch him, blindfolded and splayed out, time in which she could have changed her mind, and didn’t, so it meant that she knew what she wanted, and, for all his flaws and mistakes, he was it.

So, then he decided to look to his left, and the face there certainly had aged, but mostly because she’d barely been more than a girl last time he’d seen her, then eighteen and full of life, now thirty-three and much more wizened.

Moira.

She bore a tiny nose stud now, a diamond he thought, which was new, but the explosion of her crimson curls was as gloriously unruly as ever. She had some tattoos now, although he couldn’t see them too clearly this close up. Also, he could feel her small breasts were capped with pierced nipples, and that was also definitely a change.

So much had changed about Moira over a decade and a half, and yet, that mischievous little smile of hers was exactly as he’d remembered it. It wasn’t the only thing, though. She was still slender and lithe, willowy in frame but also short in stature. Many differences and yet, somehow, still fundamentally the same Moira he’d met a decade and a half ago.

But how the hell had she come to be here? His mind was filled with endless questions, and he found himself slightly annoyed that he wasn’t going to get real answers until tomorrow.

CLICK! went the sound of a cell phone camera as the tiny LED flash bulb lit him up, and he looked to see Niko holding a phone there, taking a handful of pictures as Emily moved to remove the restraints from his left arm, Sarah getting his right, Lauren getting his left leg and Hannah getting his right leg, all four of them moving quickly to make sure he wasn’t imprisoned any longer.

“Remember what I said,” Ash said, as she helped him slide out from between the two slumbering bodies. “Say thank you when you’re given a gift.”

He grinned, rolling his eyes in amusement. “Yes, well, I’ll have to wait until they’re both conscious before I can tell them thank you, now, won’t I?” He slipped back onto the bed so he could pull the covers over the two of them, making sure they were settled well into the bed. He made sure to put not only the sheet on them but also the comforter, so that they would awake warm and toasty in the bed. Of course, he realized, considering how early it was the morning, the rest of them were likely to be back in this bed before either of them woke up from the imprinting process. After getting them tucked in, he slid back to sit on the edge of the bed, seeing the girls were standing around him, all eager for a story, to explain how they’d come to this.

“I asked Fiona if she was sure you’d be okay with Moira, and asked Moira if she was sure she wanted this, and Moira told me she was very excited to see you again, so clearly you two have some kind of history,” Niko said, stepping close to rub her hand along Andy’s shoulder. “Fi said you’d be anxious for about five minutes and then exuberant after that.”

Andy chuckled. “I think the five minutes has passed, and now I’m mostly just full of questions about what happened between then and now. We don’t have to worry about waking them, but maybe we should go sit in one of the living rooms so everyone has a place to sit.”

While Andy grabbed a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, the girls all did the same, pillaging his t-shirt collection so that each of them was wearing one of his shirts as well as panties or boxers. Once all of them had some clothing on, they moved out of the bedroom and down the hall to the second story living room, filled with couches and chairs.

He hopped onto a couch, as Sarah and Aisling immediately closed in on either side of him, as the rest of the girls gathered around, finding seats where they could all watch Andy, eager for him to spill the details they’d been unable to get from Fiona or Moira.

“I’m guessing you got to spend the most time with them, Niko,” he said with a sly smile. “What did they tell you at the base? How much do you already know?”

“Almost nothing!” she huffed in mock indignation, although the smile on her face made it clear it was simply a ploy. “Fiona’s a troublemaker, and I kinda love her already. She said you’d slept with Moira before, and you hadn’t complained when it happened, so that you would be okay with it happening again on a more regular basis.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, I asked Moira to tell me something she knew about you sexually to prove that she’d really slept with you before,” Niko giggled, “and she said you loved that she had a foul mouth, so I knew she really had.”

Andy’s eyebrows hopped in amusement as he nodded. “Yes. Well. I suppose I have to tell the story now, don’t I?”

“I mean, you don’t,” Sarah said, leaning in firmly against his right side, “but I think if you don’t, you should be worried about all of us fucking dogpiling on you and tickling you until you can’t breathe, and we all know how much you hate being tickled, so...”

“Absolutely!” Emily giggled, tenting her fingertips like she was getting ready to tickle him. “Tea! Spill it!”

“I can’t tell if this story’s going to be better or worse than you expected, but okay, here goes,” he said, feeling Ash’s fingertips stroking along the back of his head, trying to keep him at ease. “So in the fall of 2005, during Fi and my’s last year of college, her older brother, Julian, got married to a Scottish girl named Alana. Naturally, Fi and I were invited to the wedding – we were pretty established into our coupledom back then – so even though the wedding was in Scotland, I knew it was important enough for her that we went. The two of us took a week off of classes to fly out to Aberdeen, as the wedding was in a little villa called Newburgh, just to the north of it.”

“Scottish weather in the fall is no great picnic, especially that far north,” Emily said. “I’m surprised they didn’t wait until the spring or summer.”

“The plan had been to hold the wedding the following year, actually, but Alana’s mother had been diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, and they didn’t think she had that long, so the timetable was pushed up. Thankfully, Newburgh isn’t a particularly large village, so making the accommodations wasn’t tricky. It just meant that we had to move the timetable of our trip up by a lot.”

“Always tricky,” Piper said.

“Any massive problems?” Hannah asked.

“Well, we were a little worried that my passport wasn’t going to arrive in time, but you girls know me, I prepare for everything a billion years in advance, so it showed up about two weeks before we were scheduled to leave. I’d never been out of the country before, whereas Fiona’s passport had more stamps in it than library book.”

“They stamp library books?” Asha asked.

Andy decided to let that slide. “I’d also never been someone’s date to a wedding before either, so I didn’t realize quite how much conversation there was going to be from her family about our future, whether we should get married, if either of us wanted children, the whole nine yards. And remember, we spent basically a full day just getting there, and another full day just getting back, so a lot of that conversation was had between the two of us before we’d gotten there. We were close and serious, but I hadn’t realized that the possibility of marriage was on Fi’s mind until we were on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic and I didn’t have anywhere to run.”

He chuckled a little, as the girls all shot him some degree of dirty looks.

“I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but I just didn’t think she’d felt that attached to me, really. We’d already started having some of the conversations about how I wanted to go west, and she wanted to go to DC, and I knew that was going to be a loggerhead we were going to come to at some point.”

“You’re getting off topic, love,” Emily chided. “You were getting to Moira.”

“Are you going to tell me how to tell a story, Em?” he countered, which made her snicker. “Anyway, marriage wasn’t the only thing we talked about on the way up. We had a short taxi ride from Aberdeen to Newburgh where Fi thanked me for coming along, because she knew I’m not a big party person. I told her that of course I was going to come, since she was a bridesmaid and we’d been together as a couple for a few years at that point. Her whole family was going to be there, and it would’ve looked terrible if her boyfriend hadn’t come along to her brother’s wedding, no matter how he felt about it.”

“You’ve never seemed anti-party at any of our parties,” Ash said.

“Well, no,” he admitted, “but that’s because I know everyone at our parties. I don’t do quite as well in large social situations where there’s a hundred people introducing themselves and you’re expected to keep a dozen different conversations spinning in your head for hours on end. Those things I don’t do as well with.”

“Just imagine how much fucking fun you’re going to have meeting all our families and friends,” Sarah teased. “Shit, our wedding’s gonna be a small city.”

“Yes yes,” Andy laughed, “we’ll rent out the Fox Theatre in Oakland. It fits 2,800 people and if that isn’t enough for you ladies, then the wedding’s off.” He tossed his hand into the air at the end for comic effect.

All the girls giggled a little bit at that.

“So how was Fiona’s brother’s wedding?” Sheridan asked.

“Relatively small and intimate, to my shock. Fi’s family isn’t that big, and it seemed like Alana’s wasn’t either, although both sides had a smattering of friends who had flown or driven in. Alana’s side was certainly fuller, as Newburgh was her hometown. Julian had gotten into international finance and was working out of London, helping manage some hedge fund, which is where he’d met Alana. For all of her friends, it was just a couple of hours. For his family and most of his older friends, it was a transatlantic voyage. But we came anyway, and I think there were about fifty people at the wedding, so it wasn’t as overwhelming as I expected, and Fiona looked amazing in the bridesmaid’s dress.”

“Keep going,” Piper prompted.

“Well, Moira was one of the other bridesmaids, a childhood friend of Alana’s, well, someone Alana had babysat growing up, actually. I was 23, Fiona was 22, Julian was 27, Alana was 25 and Moira was 18, but only just. Alana and Moira were still tight friends even all the years later, and so when she’d decided to get married, she’d asked her two sisters, Julian’s sister, her best friend and Moira to be in her wedding party.”

“Here’s where the plot thickens, I reckon,” Lauren said.

“Wait,” Sarah said. “The threesome you were telling Jade about?”

“Can I tell my story or do you girls want to continue jumping to any conclusion you can get your hands on?” he said, trying to put as much ‘disappointed parent’ as he could into his tone, placing his hands on his hips in exasperation.

“Sorry baby,” Sarah replied, kissing his cheek. “Carry on.”

“Thank you,” he sighed, although he wasn’t genuinely annoyed. It was simply fun keeping the girls in the dark a little longer, since they’d enjoyed having him blindfolded so much. “So, the wedding itself was nice, mostly a low-key affair. One thing I’d told Fiona was that the heavy Scottish accents were crazy hard to understand, especially as we were all starting to have more than a few drinks at the reception. I dunno if any of you ladies have been drinking with Scots before...” Emily cleared her throat and he shot her a wink. “ ... but for those of you who haven’t, heavens, you can’t tell if you’re way more drunk than you thought, or if their language has just devolved into raw sounds.”

“Usually a bit of both,” Emily said as she nodded. “It’s true – I’ve grown up hearing Scottish voices now and again, and even I have trouble making out what they’re saying after they’ve a few pints in them.”

“Picture that, me at a wedding reception, a little tipsy, unable to hold a conversation with at least half of the people in the building, and Fi pulls me out onto the dance floor, where I am just drunk enough that I don’t give a shit of how badly I’m dancing.”

“You aren’t that awkward, love,” Ash teased.

“You’re fibbing, love, but I’ll let it slide. Anyway, Fi and I are out there dancing on the floor, and the DJ puts on a slower song, some Robbie Williams number I think, but basically all that sort of stuff blends together for me. And while we’re there slow dancing, Fi whispers into my ear and asks me if I’ve ever considered a threesome.”

“I fucking knew it!” Sarah said, shoving her fist into the air, before realizing everyone was staring at her, and she giggled furiously, burying her face in Andy’s neck for a second. “Sorry, sorry, carry on. Just super fucking proud of myself for figuring it out.”

“I told Fi that she was all the woman I needed, and the idea of sharing her with another man was enough to make me soft. She giggled, said she didn’t want another man, and that she didn’t want us to have Miss Forever, but that we were at a wedding, so there wasn’t any shame in having fun with Miss Right Now.”

“That little minx,” Niko mumbled.

“She even had someone in mind, and pointed out Moira, who was dancing by herself in the center of the room, slow dancing alone like nobody was watching, having shrugged off a couple of Julian’s friends from London. She didn’t have the nose stud back then, but she certainly had the long curly dark red hair. It had been up for the ceremony, but as soon as she’d gotten to the reception, she’d let her hair down, both figuratively and literally.”

“You certainly do have a fucking type, Andy,” Sarah teased, poking him in the ribs.

Andy blushed a little bit, looking down at his lap for a moment before looking back up again. “Moira was actually my first redhead, and I didn’t have another in my life until I met Ash. Most of the time, before and after Fi, I dated blondes, actually. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that Moira certainly went a long way into shaping my sexual tastes.”