Chapter 1: Oh What Stories We Do Tell

I met Tom through the college sailing club. It started off weird. We resemble each other, tall, blond hair, beards, lean muscles, liked to party and sail boats. At a club party, a female guest mistook me for Tom and started to give me a hard time. She said a blond guy with a beard groped her friend. Leaping to my defense one of my buddies said. "Hey, there's a guy here that looks like you." So it began. Not the best introduction.

Anyway, we met. Tom started to find reasons to meet up or visit with me. Lord knows he wasn't gay. Tom brought girls along like flies. His most frequent girlfriend, Ann often tagged along with him. As to the groping incident, Tom said, "It couldn't have been me. I was with Ann at the party." As it turned out later, it probably was him.

Tom tried to ingratiate himself with me by volunteering to help me with projects like boat and car repairs. He wasn't very handy, mostly useful for extra muscle which came in handy if you needed to move something. It was Ann who I really hit it off with intellectually. We could talk for hours. When my housemates graduated and split for Alaska and California, Tom tried to fill the space. I had sized him up as a tolerable party jerk ass but not someone I'd want to share my house. So I moved in with other friends and Tom wound up in a lease somewhere else. I breathed a sigh of relief.

My new place landed me back in familiar shabby hillbilly slum elegance, next door to where I used to live. I shared a three bedroom townhouse with two close friends, a girl/guy couple who had just graduated. I'm still in grad school. Marci was teaching special-Ed in an inner city school. (Read – she deserved combat pay.) Dan had a job as an industrial sales rep. We were all trying to live cheap and save money.

The townhouse was quite fancy one hundred years ago. Now the perfect 1890's neighborhood had gone downhill. Way downhill. On this block there are two rows of townhouses with original woodwork, kitchens, wiring and furnaces. With our landlord, it's do it yourself maintenance and decorating, but the rent is very low. Fantastically cheap split three ways.

Before we moved in, we sanded and varnished the floors, repaired plaster, painted walls, repaired windows to fit tight and tuned the furnace for better performance. Tom volunteered to help. We even added a window box fan over the furnace return register so the hundred year old monster gravity furnace had a make-do forced air heat. Outside it's a slum. Inside, pretty nice.

We joked about the neighborhood being so poor; we were the only house on the street with a book. No one had anything to steal, so the neighborhood was pretty safe.

Nine months later, my new place had a big vacancy. When the school year ended Marci and Dan split for San Francisco. This time Tom suggested that Ann take the open bedroom in my hillbilly heaven townhouse. I didn't have any illusion that I was gaining a girlfriend. Ann was just another of a long line of female housemates for me. Some had been lovers, most of them had not. Their sisterhood had educated me about women at many levels, introducing me to many of my intimate female friends. Truth is, women know women and will introduce a good guy to their friends. Ann had already fixed me up with a series of her friends. Many of Ann's friends wound up in my bed. It was just Tom's girlfriend introducing her friends. Friends helping friends. Right?

Over the time I'd known Tom, Ann and I had built a friendship. We found many things to talk about. We both enjoyed trips into the woods. I knew the local geography, Ann knew the local botany. But we were just arranging group outings. After all she was Tom's girlfriend. Wasn't she?

It was OK. At least I told myself that. Most of my friends think I'm just a hippy stoner engineer. A nerd. They see me fixing stuff so it runs well. That's really just a cover.

Ann knew, I'm really a suffering romantic with after-burn from the disastrous end of an intense relationship. The breakup left me feeling like a failure at love. I tried starting simply nurturing a house plant. Plants were Ann's thing. I asked her to keep her hands off my plant; I wanted to care for it. She asked why. I said. "How can I expect to be able to keep love alive, if I can't even keep a plant alive?"

Ann hugged me for the longest time and said, "Dave, you deserve to be happy."

I guess she likes me. It's OK even though she is Tom's girlfriend. Yeah, it's OK. I tell that to myself, often.

So I sublimated my hunger for love into rebuilding a wreck of an old Schwinn bike. Now I ride it to class. I keep my twenty plus year old Cadillac and Ann's wreck of a car running fine. I focused some of my frustration into exercise. Now I do a hundred sit-ups and fifty pushups every couple of hours as a break while studying. I can even do a horizontal plank handstand.

Despite Ann's efforts with introductions to women, I'm not getting past just hanging out with friends. Some of those friends happen to be women. A number became intimates, just not serious romances. I do take time to say, "Thanks, Ann." I guess she does want me to be happy.

Ann's not a classic beauty, but she is sexy. A five foot two red head with long curly tresses. She has never been skinny, never been fat, just a regular small town girl making it in the big city. She is wide hipped and small breasted. I've never known her to wear a bra or shave her body; she has a distinctly feminist earth mother attitude. Her Irish heritage splashes freckles across her pale face and shoulders even in the dead of winter. Why is she sexy? Well, she just loves sex. Sexy seems to come out of her pores. I can hear her happy fuck cries through the walls of our house. She makes me crazy. So I just call one of her friends and make noise in my room. Just trying to stay happy.

Neither of us was ever very body conscious around the house. We had both seen each other naked. An 'oops sorry' kind of walk into the bath on each other. A flashed naked beaver under a long t-shirt. Dick and balls hanging out of gym shorts. I knew her little tits had just a little crease underneath, not a fold. Thinking about her made me stiffen. Kind of like siblings. Horny fucking siblings. We went group skinny dipping with Tom and some others at a farm pond way out in a cornfield. It was just fun, squishy mud bottom, friendly fish nibbling, cooling off on a hot day, no sex fun.

If Ann isn't fucking she thinks about sex. How do I know? Whenever she can, she talks about sex. She encourages other people to have sex with each other. How do I know? She sets me up to fuck her women friends. She gets naked as often as she can. It's OK, she's just comfortable around me or so I thought. After all she was Tom's girlfriend. Wasn't she?

The daughter of a doctor, Ann got the birds and the bees details at an early age. Daddy gave her condoms, taught her to be careful. With her parents approval she has been happily sexually active from her early teen years. For her sixteenth birthday she got a car and an IUD. She likes sex.

Somewhere along the way, Tom decided some fresh pussy was just what he needed. Maybe it was watching the line of Ann's women friends moving through my bedroom. Maybe it was just restless dick syndrome. Anyway, Ann retaliated by upping her own quest for new dick. Now Ann and I are both dating, but not each other. I have plenty of women friends in my bed. Interestingly, Ann made sure my dance card was full.

Sometimes Tom's orbit swung close around Ann, but more often he's off chasing strange new pussy. One evening, Tom came by saying he wanted to talk with me. Ann wasn't home, so the two of us settled in for a talk. Tom seemed to be going nuts with not knowing where Ann was. I got a text from her, "saw t car no wan see t txt me wn gone." I told Tom it was Ann. She was going to be late if she came home at all. We drank some beers and Tom paced. I felt a devilish satisfaction by vexing him. I realized, I like Ann a lot more than Tom. Between hits he admitted his hunt for casual pussy wasn't going well. He asked enviously how I met so many women.

"The answer's simple. Ann. Without her making introductions it would be a lot harder. I swear, good women friends introduce you to their women friends." I got another text from Ann asking if he was still there. I tell Tom, she's not coming home tonight. Before too long he heads out to continue his frustrated pussy quest. I realize he was hoping to tap her that evening. I text her back saying, "t gone." Minutes later she came through the door.

She took a seat straddling my lap and began to interrogate me about my visit with Tom. She beat me into submission with her boobs, snuggling into my arms before I came clean. I told her of Tom's frustrated pussy quest. That got her giggling and snuggling even more. My dick threatened to burst through my jeans. Her hot panty covered pussy took my measure. I told her, I was thankful she is my friend. Especially introducing me to her friends. We wound up necking, groping each other and kissing. We stayed fully dressed but we were necking like naive high school kids. Then we went to bed alone. Yes, I did hear the sound of her orgasm through the walls. I don't know if she heard me grunt as I was shooting mine.

Ann was getting plenty of sex, just on her own terms, which occasionally included Tom. She brought a steady stream of lovers in overnight. Sometimes she stayed away for days. Sex was a frequent subject of Ann's conversations. Her sexy talk hooked guy's attention like nothing else.

She wanted to know all about everyone's sex life. She asked questions and demanded details. There was no 'what happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors' with Ann. In a noisy bar she would ask a stranger in a loud voice, "Do you like to fuck?"

If they didn't run away, she would ask, "How old were you when you lost your virginity? How was it? Did you like it? Who'd you fuck?" It didn't matter male or female. She could work a crowd into a frenzy. It sounded like a porn interview. On a roll, she would ask, "When did you last have sex?" Then follow up with, "How often do you masturbate?" How did I know about this? Well, she had pumped me with all the same questions right in front of Tom. I'd seen her work people at parties too.

In a big crowd she just asked for simple facts. She definitely worked the shock factor, way beyond Howard Stern or Amy Schumer. With friends she wanted every freaking intimate detail. One on one the questioning can be intense; "How many different people have you fucked in a day? Have you done it with more than one person at a time? What makes you orgasm fastest? What was your best fuck? Tell me what it feels like when you cum. Who do you want to fuck? How big is your dick? Really? Can I see? How big are your tits? Really? Can I see? Ever done girl/girl or guy/guy? Do you want to?