55: The Letter

"I don't know what to do with her, Rose," I whispered. Rose sat wedged into the chair, partially on me and partially beside me. Curled up on top of us was Danielle, asleep on my shoulder. I'd laid aside my reading for Radical Thinking and held Danielle as I continued to run my hand over her tummy. Rose petted the leg that was thrown over her.

"I can see now how you tell them apart," Rose said. "Danielle is different. Of course, we can all tell her from the other two now, just by the way her eyes light up when she sees you."

"You might not have seen her sisters' eyes light up, too," I sighed.

"They light up with lust. But, Brian ... I don't think you should fuck them."

"I didn't intend to. I have to admit, they turn me on. I think it's just the response to women in heat, though," I said.

"Oh? Are all of us who turn you on just women in heat?" she laughed.

"No, Rose. You turn me on because you are wonderful and sexy and I love you. Even when you have PMS," I said.

"I don't have! Usually. You're right, though. Their pussies get all pink and rosy when they see you. I think any guy would get an erection. But I think it would hurt Danielle if you fucked them."

"I hadn't thought of it that way. I guess it's against the rules of whatever we have."

"Does it have rules?" Rose asked.

"I don't know."

"Is it against the rules for you to make love to her?"

"I don't know. I've never really considered it."

"Exactly. I don't think there are rules the way you have always thought of them before. Do you love her, Brian?"

"Oh, yeah. She's so sweet. Look at her, Rose. She crawls up in my lap and goes straight to sleep. I love to touch her. I love her softness and her shape. I love her weight in my lap. I love the silkiness of her hair and the little kisses she gives me on my neck before she goes to sleep." I realized I was going on and shut up.

"Still, you don't make out with her. No passionate kisses. You touch her breasts, but you don't play with her nipples or suck on them. You cup her pubic mound in your hand, but you don't probe with your fingers or try to get between her legs. And even as we talk about it, you aren't hard," she said.

"She's like a child. The thing is, she isn't childlike. I mean, she acts maturely. She studies hard. She's responsible. More and more, I've heard her reprimand her sisters when they were being foolish. Not that they don't do the same thing. I think they all help each other. But aside from cuddling up with me a couple times a week and going to sleep, she doesn't act childishly."

"No. And yes. Maybe there is a little part of all of us that wants a few minutes now and then to be held like a child. For now though, you should take her to bed."

"What's available tonight? I hate to walk back to the girls' dormitory. She didn't complain, but I don't think she really liked it there last week."

"Brian, just bring her to bed. You know that's where she's going to end up. We might as well get used to it."

"I love you, Rose."

"Brian, if only you knew how much I love you," she whispered. We kissed.

"Now that got me hard," I said.

"Good. Let's find a place to stow Dani and you can make love to me."

Thursday afternoon, I decided to take a ride on Jingo. It was in the mid-fifties after having been below twenty when we got up that morning. I needed some fresh air. Jingo was surprised, but after dancing around a little, he decided it was okay to get a saddle on when the caked mud had been brushed off.

Instead of going out through the woods, I rode through the pasture and into the extended pasture we were renting from Mr. Jacobs. Larry was managing where they were grazing and the condition of the pastures. It wasn't his full-time job. He drove into Indianapolis to go to work each day. Fortunately his job was on the south side of town, but it was still an hour commute up IN-37. I knew how Elaine hated it during rush hour.

Thinking about Mr. Jacobs, I decided to ride down to his house around the edge of the fields. He plowed and reseeded hay last fall. Larry had spent an afternoon with him, helping. It was still pretty cold and the fresh shoots hadn't emerged yet. The house was quiet, but I tied Jingo to the porch railing and knocked on the door. It took a few minutes, but Mrs. Jacobs answered. She looked a lot older than the last time I saw her. She'd done one of my shows with me last summer and shown me how to cook a real farm breakfast.

"Well, Brian Frost. How nice to see you. Come in," she said softly. "Marshall and I were just having a cup of coffee. Can I pour you one?"

"Thank you, Mrs. Jacobs." She led me to the living room where Mr. Jacobs sat, sort of staring out the window.

"Hello, Mr. Jacobs," I said.

"Saw you ride up on that big horse. He's getting old," he said.

"Yes, but he still likes a nice ride. We don't push it. Especially not when it's cold like this."

"You have a good ranch manager. That was smart. He picks up hay every two weeks. You need more horses. We have lots of hay."

"How are you doing this winter, Mr. Jacobs? I haven't seen you out at all," I said.

"You don't know, do you?" he said. "I thought you were just coming late to offer your sympathy." He turned to look at me for the first time. His eyes looked sunken.

"What's wrong, Mr. Jacobs. Are you okay?" I don't know what made me do it, but I went and knelt by his chair and reached for his hand. His grip was like a vise.

"I'm sixty-nine years old, Brian. My son would have been forty-seven today." Would have been? "He died suddenly the week after New Year's. Was driving here and had a heart attack. Just died at the wheel."

I listened for an hour as Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs talked about their son and how he planned to finally come back to the farm now that he was divorced. He was going to take over this spring and now Mr. Jacobs didn't know if he could get up the energy to even cut hay when it grew.

"We'll handle the cutting and the baling, Mr. Jacobs. There are fifty-two of us in the clan now and most will be at the ranch this summer. We have people capable of baling hay," I said. "Is there anything else you need? We're your neighbors. We'll do whatever we can to help."

"Why don't you take over the farm? I could help you, but it would be yours." What emerged over the next twenty minutes was a plan for us to acquire the Jacobs farm. It was obvious that Mr. Jacobs had thought about this before and was just letting it come out of his mouth. His son was not coming to take over the farm. He had no other direct heirs. A sister and her children might be the next logical ones to inherit, but they lived in California and had no interest in farming. They hadn't visited in over ten years.

"I have to talk to our families, sir," I said. "I want you to know right now that everyone will want to do it. The question will be if we can do it. We won't commit to something we have to back out of or renege on."

"You are good, hard-working people. I might be able to help some."

"Those poor people," Liz said when I told the casa what I'd found out that night.

"We can't let them be all alone like that," Cassie said. "We need to organize help for them, however they need it. We could take them some meals. Maybe even go help Mrs. Jacobs with cleaning."

"I'll talk to Larry about what we'd need to do to take over the farming," Josh said. "Larry helped him last fall. He'll know what we need to do."

"I think we need to call my dad," Rose said. "He represents the real estate aspects of the clan and arranged the subdivision of our property. We'll need a clan meeting. Brian, we need to buy their farm and add it to our village. This could be very important."

It was the only response I expected from my casa.

Whitney's team soundly defeated Illinois Friday night with Whit as top scorer with sixteen. They lost by the same margin to Purdue on Sunday. They just couldn't seem to put together a sustained drive and their hopes for a post-season invitation were fading. On the other hand, Whitney was being scouted and she was playing well. The coach at Purdue had been named as one of the assistant coaches for the Women's National Team and she'd stopped after the game to talk to Whitney. We were all buzzing at the prospect that she'd become an Olympic athlete.

"I'm flattered that she'd talk to me, but not a chance," Whitney said. "Four college coaches coaching the national team means the national team will have women from four colleges. I don't stand a chance."

Tuesday night found me in the computer room typing up my first draft of my essay for history. The class would meet my intensive writing requirement, with the final paper of ten pages, but before we got that far there were three shorter papers due. In a way, I was glad. Our midterm was a five page paper that needed to be handed in by exam time, but there was no test.

Beside me, Courtney was working on her 'special' computer. It was constantly being torn down and rebuilt as she acquired new gizmos for it. It sat on the desk with no cover on the tower. I leaned back in my chair and just looked at my cónyuge for a minute, appreciating her curves. Of course, she was nude, as I was. We sat on the desk chairs on our towels and she seemed to realize I was looking at her and turned to face me.

"What?" she asked.

"Just looking," I said.

"At what?"

"You. Your breasts. Your nose, sticking out from under your glasses. Your butt," I said.

"Brian," she said as she blushed. Nonetheless, she opened her legs.

"Yes. Your pussy."

"What ... um ... are you thinking of?"

"Sometimes I look at you and just try to think up reasons that I need to spank your bottom." Courtney caught her breath. She turned to her keyboard, entered a few keystrokes, and the screen went blank. She turned back to me.

"What makes you think you need a reason?" she whispered. She stood and walked toward me. I spun my chair away from the computer and she lay down across my lap. "Just remember that a spanking is a promise, Brian."

"What am I promising, Courtesan?"

"You promise that when you've heated up my big round butt with your hand, you will fuck my little brown hole with your cock. My bottom's waiting for you. Can you make that promise, Brian?" I slapped her left cheek and she gasped.

"I promise."

I fulfilled my promise after I'd carried Courtney, with a glowing bottom and dripping pussy, upstairs to the master bedroom, and proceeded to go around the world with her, coming in her mouth, her pussy, and her butt.

"Did I take you away from an important class project?" I asked as we lay soaked in our own sweat on the master bed.

"No. Not exactly. Don Randall wants me to put together my development notes, complete with the list of equipment I used to write my little code. He believes the university will back down pretty quickly when accused of theft of intellectual property and will 'accept' a non-exclusive license to use the software. My code is protected by copyright, simply because I wrote it. So the code itself is not subject to the school being able to simply take it. It falls under the same category as poetry written by a student in fulfillment of a class credit, or of term papers. The author owns it," Courtney said.

"That's great," I said. "Do you think it is marketable?"

"That's the other part of the problem. The functionality of the code can only be protected by patent. That's a long and expensive process. And patents filed by students and professors are often considered the property of the laboratory or the school where it was invented. It's further complicated by whether or not a patent would be termed valid because the function has been disclosed or made public through its use in the class. Brian, I am going to have headaches over this process for days. In general, it means that a smart programmer, like Dr. Hanratty, could rewrite my software using Fortran instead of C and there is nothing I could do about it. Fortunately, he couldn't patent it either, since the functionality has already been disclosed."

"Christ, Courtney! What a fucking runaround. Are you going to get anything out of this at all?" I asked.

"I doubt it. However, it taught me a very significant lesson. My video editing software will be completely secret until Don has filed both copyright and patents on it. And when it is released, we'll do some kind of copy protection or encryption that prevents the code from being decompiled," she said. "The truth is, the worm is a hacker tool. I did not expose my firewall, so that is protectable. I never gave him the code for that. And I plan to sell it to the school. For a lot of money."

"You are phenomenal!" I said. I got my cooling lotion and began rubbing it into Courtney's butt cheeks. I enjoyed this process almost as much as spanking and fucking her. This was another lotion Theresa recommended to me. It had aloe and peppermint in it. Courtney liked the sensation.

"I suppose we should go to bed," she sighed.

"We're in bed. Don't you want to stay with me?" I asked.

"Here? In the master bedroom? With just you? Do you mean it, Brian?"

"Why did you think I brought you here, my love?"

"Well. I know that butt play kind of squicks out a couple of our hearthmates," she said. "I just assumed you brought me here so we'd have privacy to fulfill my perversions and then we'd go upstairs to join everyone."

"Is that what you want, Courtesan? Let me say clearly, that I want you to spend the night with me in this bed. Just the two of us, lovingly entwined in each other's arms. And perhaps in the morning, we can make love again," I said.

"I love you, Brian. Over and over again I say, I love you. Hold me, darling."

We decided not to have a special Valentine's Day party on Friday the fourteenth. We were thinking of doing something special to celebrate leap year. Instead, Whitney's team dominated Minnesota 73-67. Unfortunately, they got handed another loss by Iowa on Sunday on a last second tip-in, 57-59. I was beginning to think Sundays just weren't when our team should be playing.

Danielle was continuing to show up on Wednesday and Saturday nights, undress, curl up in my lap, and go to sleep while I ran my hands all over her body. There was no question that she was sleeping in our room now, or wherever I was. Once or twice, I awoke in the night to find her curled up back to back with me as I cuddled another girlfriend in front of me. Once I saw her in a similar position with Rose. Mostly, she was unobtrusive. She woke up after our cuddle and often studied until bed time. Then she just went upstairs with us. If I stayed up late, she stayed up late, usually studying or sometimes napping on the sofa.

The way the other girls were responding to her was evolving, too. I noticed it first when Whitney came in after basketball practice on a Wednesday night and wiggled into my lap with Danielle. I was glad I managed to find such a big chair. Two girls in my lap who were over six feet tall was a challenge, even then. But Danielle had no difficulty making room for Whitney as she moved over and gave my cónyuge space. She smiled and leaned over to kiss Whitney's cheek, then settled back in to nap. Whitney didn't try to push her away, but as we kissed, she, too, let her hands gently stroke Dani's front, including gliding over her breasts. I had a feeling that if that had been Debbie in the chair, we'd have either ended up in a vicious fight or a daisy chain. Or both.