Chapter 1: Harry

"No, goddamn it, I will not be reasonable about this," Harry said, just shy of putting his hands on his hips in the age old gesture of exasperation. "Bad enough the only option left to me is to bury myself in the back of this fucking Cold War relic of a bunker, but I've tried it for a week your way, Carol my love, and it ... isn't ... working!"

Carol stood in front of her husband, trying her best to avoid backing down as her submissive side craved.

"I want solitude," Harry said. "Having three lovely women in the room with me isn't solitude." He struggled to bring his temper further under control. "It's a dream any hetero male on the planet would kill to have come true, but it isn't solitude. I can't turn around without bumping into one of you. The three of you are moving into the bunk room down the hall, and I am damn well keeping this one all to myself. Period. End of statement."

Carol considered the "quivering lip and puppy dog eyes", and realized at this point, Harry was immune. She considered physically chaining Camille to her husband and destroying the key, but realized Harry was likely to cut off a limb at this point. Carol thought of having Candy enforce Carol's will, but that was likely to end up with Harry hurt, and she'd just gotten him to agree to allowing Helen in for his physical therapy.

"All right, Harry," she said. "You win. We'll move." She bit back several other, unhelpful comments. "Ladies, moving day."

The room had originally held four double bunks, with small tables and footlockers for each, with a private bathroom and shower, but one of the double bunks had been moved, along with a couple of tables and footlockers, to make room for Harry's office.

He wished he could go into the offices of G&P without it becoming a major security issue – one driver/guard was more than enough. Not so in the eyes of his spouses, and the house's security people. [

So, fine, he worked from home, buried in the bunker.

His heart wasn't in it, and it was leaving Karen to pick up his slack yet again. Harry missed carpooling to work with her, having the drive-time to rough out the day's efforts. He missed the people he worked with, he even missed the very people he was hiding out from – his family and spouses.

But Harry was dealing with a head full of screaming-mad poo-flinging monkeys, all of them gibbering at him, trying to put the events of the past weeks into some kind of narrative that made sense ... and he couldn't. And any and every body around him just added more poo to the fling-fest.

Dr. Lowenstein was coming out twice a week for the day, sessions for a lot of the family, an hour of which she spent with him.

It was unfair to say it wasn't working, after only two sessions, but he and his family needed it to be working much faster. He didn't want to be away from them, even while he did, and he was pretty sure they needed him back more than they were saying.

Everything seemed poisoned to him, and there was no joy for him in anyone's company, and it was all so wrong and fucked up and twisted...

And at the end of every day, Minerva was still dead, the last home he and Nicki had shared with their parents had been maliciously burned to the ground, and Melvin was still dead, and what should have been a fun game between adults had somehow become deadly and he hated it all, hated them all, hated himself...

You need to take hold of yourself, Master Grimes, and cease acting as a child who expects life to be fair.

Harry looked around the room in shock, before realizing Minerva wasn't standing there giving him one of 'those' looks.

"Great, now I'm hallucinating," he said, shrugging off his clothes and grabbing a towel, his cane, and his robe.

Chapter 2 »