Chapter 102: The New Guy. Tori’s Prom Dates

Mark

Sheila sat in one of the chairs in front of my immense desk. Why someone thought I needed an ‘Executive Desk’ that more closely resembled the deck on an aircraft carrier was beside me. To move papers across it to someone, I had to almost throw them and hope for a tailwind.

The two of us had been going over the chart of accounts for our family finances. She normally handled all the bill paying and home financial things for me, but once in a while she’d give me an update. We were meeting about setting up a budget for the family for the coming year and I was looking at each budget line item and what we’d spent in each of the last five years. The minor issue at hand was how much cash to move into which accounts to fund the next twelve months or so. We were looking back at the past few years for each account to see the trends.

I observed, “Boy, you can sure tell when I met Elsa and Cindy, and put my life on a different track. I don’t begrudge any of these expenses, but the trip to Mexico and all the things going on in St. Croix sure show up as large blips.”

Sheila smiled, “And they keep escalating after that. Do you care?”

“No, I don’t care a bit; quite the opposite. It’s all good. Why did my restaurant bills take such a large jump?” I posed.

Sheila laughed, “Instead of eating three meals at your desk, you keep taking the entire family and any friends that are around to the French restaurant down the street or other places to eat. Each time you order expensive wine, and that usually pushes the bill for each dinner up to over a thousand. Before you started to host all of us, you ate alone a lot. Oh, you also stocked up the wine cellar both here at the condo and at The Meadows; I think that was thirty thousand about three years ago. You’re due to do that again.”

Melanie came in and stood in front of my immense office desk and waited for me to stop my concentration on the spreadsheet in front of me. She asked in a teasing tone, “Do we need to cut back and start paying for some of our own bills – like pay you rent for our share of the condo?”

“NO!” I said sharply as I jerked my head up to look at her. I knew she liked to tease me about my insistence to pay for everything regarding the people I loved. I had eased up a little, especially with the guys so they could save face and feel like they were contributing to the family. I scratched out a quick note to talk to Sheila more about that after Mel asked her question.

I looked at Melanie with a kinder expression, “Question?”

“Yes. Elsa called and she’d like to invite a nice man she knows to our next party. He’d fit in, so to speak.” She assumed a lascivious grin and lightly passed a hand over her groin. “Elsa, Sheila, Cindy, KC, Izzy and I have all met him and fit him in too. I should say, ‘Enjoyed time with him.’”

Sheila nodded enthusiastically. She apparently knew exactly who was being proposed. She said, “Matt is really nice; professional and not at all full of himself. You’d like him.”

Melanie gave me a thumbnail sketch about him, “About forty, handsome, well spoken, well educated, and can fuck like a male mink but in a way that gives his partners copious quantities of orgasms. He also likes to cuddle the people he’s made love to afterwards.”

I shook his head, “You are ever the master of the metaphor. Of course, invite him. Is this the guy you guys met at the club a couple of years ago?”

“Yes, same man. Became single recently. His ex-wife did an ego-destroying number on him. She’d been cheating on him their entire twenty-one year marriage with her high school sweetheart; very two faced.”

“Too bad. Is there an ulterior motive, besides the sex, I mean?”

Melanie twisted her mouth around as she thought for a few seconds, “Yeah, I guess we do. We were talking last night after we parted company with him and think he’d be a nice addition to the family, but it’s a little early to tell for sure. Personally, I’d like him to start to hang out with us and I know Elsa does too.” She looked to Sheila for verification.

Sheila nodded, “It’s funny, but last night as he held us, I was thinking the same thing. He’d be easy to have around all the time – another nice husband.”

I asked, “What luggage does he come with?”

“Besides needing a bit of TLC and some trust in women since he just got screwed over? He’s got two kids in college, only he told me he was having DNA tests run on the kids to be sure they’re his. He loves them, but plans to go after his wife’s lover for arrears in financial support if it proves out that he’s not the father. The kids are on his side. Apparently, he’s got a real shark for a lawyer; she knows her stuff and is guiding him along.”

“Geeze, what a can of worms. Anything else?”

“Not that I know of? Sheila, did you see anything?”

“No. He’s an engineer working for a small company doing robotics. I got the feeling he was very creative and innovative. He describes himself as a ‘techy entrepreneur.’”

“Ah, now you’ve baited me. I want to meet the man. Don’t wait for a party to bring him around. Invite him for dinner at the condo so we can go down the street.” I cast a glance at Sheila and added with a chuckle, “My treat.” Since we’d just been discussing my meals budget item I thought she’d react but she didn’t say anything.

Matthew Henderson was exactly as Elsa, Melanie, and Sheila described him, although I couldn’t attest to his mink-like tendencies at that point. I’d leave that to the girls. We sat opposite each other at our favorite French restaurant with some of the other guys and girls in the family scattered around. There were enough of us that we had to break apart and sit at three different tables. Elsa and Sheila sat on either side of Matt; Melanie and KC on either side of me. Matt was cordial and seemed at ease in meeting me without genuflection or obsequious behavior.

After we’d ordered, I said, “Matt, Sheila mentioned that you’re working on something about robotics? Is that anything you can talk about?”

He laughed, “Oh, sure, but once I start I may never shut up. Stop me when you’ve had enough. For starters, understand that anything that has ever been or might be done by a human is being studied to figure out how a robot can do it. We’ve had them in factory environments in limited ways for decades, and they have become more sophisticated and eliminated many repetitive and boring jobs. Most are almost task specific, such as putting an engine in a car. They’re programmed to do specific things and react in a predictable way when something outside their comfort zone occurs.

“Many people also would like a home helper robot, kind of like a combination of butler-maid-cook-valet-and-handmaiden, plus they want it to be handy around the house to do chores – mow the grass, rake leaves, take out the garbage, put gas in the car, buy groceries, do the laundry, get the dry cleaning, and so on. The sci-fi films love to promote these ideas. The more general purpose a robot becomes, the harder it is to program the beast. We effortlessly move our arms and legs, pick up something, do something with it, and set it down. We can program a robot to do mechanical things easily, but once it has to learn on the job, make judgments, weight options, and so forth, things get really sticky and the difficultly with technology platforms, software, batteries, connectivity, and so on become major hurdles. That’s where I am.”

I asked, “What kind of robots are you actually working on?”

“Because of the mass market potential, I guess the home robot, but also on robots than could assist in a health care or hospital situation. We have some prototypes, but by any standards they’re crude and works in progress.”

“How are you funded? Who pays the electric bill?”

“Oh, I thought you knew. I am a professor of bio-mechanical engineering at City University. I hold a non-teaching post, although I am the thesis advisor to a covey of masters and doctoral students working in my lab. They’re great by the way, very smart and many of them work for only some college credits or a small stipend. We have a few on assistantships too. I try to link it all together, and also get some government grants, but with the new administration we expect that source to dry up totally. We think research will be set back a decade or more.”

“What about an industry-university partnership of some kind?” Even as I asked the question, I saw Melanie break into a smile a mile wide. I was going right where she wanted me to go on this one. Years earlier she’d asked me to do something like this, and here the opportunity was sitting across the dinner table from me.

Matt grinned, “To tell the truth, that’d be fabulous. What were you thinking of?”

I spoke, “Commercializing some of the stuff, of course, but also funding some of the research and development. Melanie asked me to try to set up some kind of 10X program or a ten-to-the-ninth program, but we’ve lacked the wherewithal to do that so far. Now, you’re here with the perfect opportunity. I guess the other thing is to provide a landing zone for some of your students after they graduate. We can also provide some test beds for the stuff, and provide you some of the technology we have that you might need. Might a battery that comes close to never running out of power interest you?”

Matt lurched forward, “Hell, yes. Portable power sources are one of our biggest bugaboos. We’ve almost given up, and that’s bad because it range limits our prototypes to a fifty or hundred foot extension cord or turns them into klunkers because they have to carry a car battery. Can you really do that?”

“Close. We’ll talk. Why don’t you and Melanie talk further, get some of the legal folks from the university and here involved, and let’s put something together that’s a win for each of us in some way.”

Matt smiled broadly, “Consider it done.”

I smiled, “Now, on another front, I understand you’re coming back for some other conversation and activities after dinner. I just want you to know that I’m glad to hear that. You can meet a few of the others who weren’t home when we came to dinner. I’m sure that by now everyone has heard about you and wants to meet you.”

Elsa

I lay back as Ryan made love to me in his inimitable fashion; I had my ankles crossed behind his lower back, and was using my legs to help guide and accelerate his thrusts into me, although we were taking it real easy after a ferocious start. We were focusing more on loving than lusting. Like many of the other men in my life who I made love with, he maintained a laser-like focus on the woman he was with, bringing her great pleasure and satisfaction. None of us ever felt anything but love from this master of the feminine body.

A few feet away from me, Tori’s sleek and sexy teen body rode James, her taut teenage breasts swaying and oscillating wildly as she bounced up and down so that his shaft drove into her at a steady rate producing ecstasy for each of them. Both Tori and James were sweaty; they’d been energetically fucking for almost an hour, and I was sure they were burning a prodigious number of calories. By my count, she’d already experienced over a dozen serious and noteworthy orgasms, and half of those had been with Ryan before we swapped partners. Tori had become a near nymphomaniac about sex after her eighteenth birthday, so she fit right in with the rest of us and even recharged some of our own feelings and enthusiasm about sex.

I had checked with Kate shortly after Tori’s prom and hotel sex with Mark, and she’d said that whatever Tori wanted to do regarding sex and relationships, both short and long term, was fine with her. As her mom, she stated that she was always there for advice or to lend an interested ear, but Tori was her own woman and didn’t need a mom micromanaging her. There had been some motherly eye-rolling, however.