Chapter 30

Haley’s turn:

I suppose that if I talked to MOST people, I’d come off as badly deluded, evil, or just plain wrong.

I’d say I don’t care, but I DO care about how people think of me and my family, and right now my immediate family is me and my Bill and my Deena.

I just got back into bed. I shouldn’t have drunk that glass of water that close to bedtime, but right now, in the dim light of the darkened room, I see my Bill and my Deena asleep together, and it’s beautiful. I imagine that if I was in bed right now, one of them would look at me with the love I’m feeling. They’re beautiful. Bill was on his side facing me, Deena close behind him, her arm drawn up between them.

Poor Bill may never get a chance to stretch out by himself again. I gently crawl back into bed, back up into him, making a Bill sandwich. I reach behind me, find his right hand, pull it around me. This is my safe place.

Let others say it’s wrong. I am Haley Simon, and this is Bill Simon, my husband, and Deena Simon, my sister and wife, and there’s love wrapped all the way around the three of us. I chose Bill. Bill chose me. Deena’s just entwined all around and in between and through us, my best friend. My fellow student. Bill’s daughter, or so we thought, and now, our mate.

That last wiggle, I sort of struck paydirt. I feel him soft, gently pressing against me. If the poor thing didn’t have to go to work, if it was Saturday or Sunday, I just might turn around and get something started. Middle of the night ones are good.

They’ve disappeared. Since it became me ‘n’ Bill ‘n’ Deena instead of just me ‘n’ Bill, we’ve just been TOO satisfied, I guess. I’m waiting for this coming weekend to see. Gonna run some experiments.

“How much is the MOST y’all did it in twenty-four hours?” Deena asked me.

“I think I got HIM five, maybe six times...” I smiled, got those twinges in my pussy thinking about that happening, not just once, for the record book, but several times, just because we REALLY like sex with each other.

“What about you?” Deena pushed.

“Me?!? I lost count. Really. Passed out. Might’ve had ‘em while I was unconscious, for all I know...”

“You ‘n’ me,” she giggled. “We did pretty good...”

“We’re female. Different...”

“I know. I looked...”

“Poor Bill. He’s got limitations. I had to really work to get that last one out of ‘im.”

“I love that you put yourself out for ‘im,” she laughed.

“I think we had blisters.”

But this is still a weeknight and it’s for sleeping.

The next morning, Bill’s off to the office, me and Deena hang back, domesticize for a bit before heading onto campus. They’re starting to get used to us there.

History professor. “Doctor Hanks, I wanna test out of the rest of this.” ‘This’ being American History since 1877.

“Honestly, Haley, you feel you’ve mastered this book?”

“I’ve run through this book...”

“Run through. Not ‘read’.” He caught that.

“I’m more than passably familiar with the course matter.”

“Okay, let’s do a little discussion,” he said. “What can you tell me about the Teapot Dome scandal?”

“First,” I sighed, “government intrusion into energy markets today makes Teapot Dome look like a snatch and grab at the corner convenience store, but...” and I gave him a high altitude overview.

“Okay. Pre-World War II American policies toward Japan...”

“Got that.”

“Isolationism pre World War I.”

He hit me with a few more.

“Okay ... Come in Monday, early. I’ll give you the end-of-course test. Now, how do you DO this?”

“That’s just a gift I have. I read copiously and I retain a lot. I looked at this book and said, ‘Now, what am I supposed to get out of this thing?’ and that’s my approach to most of the peripheral coursework.”

“History is peripheral? That hurts.” His eyes sent a separate message from the sad words.

“I LOVE history,” I said. “But engineering is going to pay the bills. Might still entertain the idea of being a bit of a historian, though.”

“How so?”

“My husband tells me of the things he sees as technology marches on. For instance, EVERYBODY knows somebody who restores old cars. How many people are making the effort to keep an old truck going? And that’s just things on the road. Industrial equipment of marvelous construction and capability just disappears from the earth when it’s superseded.”

He leaned back in his chair, put an index finger to his chin. “And you see that as important?”

“The men, the equipment, the processes that make life possible, they come on the scene, do their jobs quietly and just as quietly disappear.”

“Interesting.”

“History,” I said. “In a different perspective. Like the difference between a jetski, all fun and wet and happy, and a shrimpboat, just grey and ugly and plodding along, going out in the morning, coming back in the evening, putting food on the table in several different ways.”

“Dammit, Haley, you’re playing me. Sounding like a historian.”

I smiled, knowing I’d achieved more results this morning than I’d planned. “Just not going to be a person that drifts along on the tides of time and doesn’t see what’s behind me.”

“More interesting...”

“Things disappear. My husband has a wooden bucket. We bought it at one of those craftsy stores. It’s real. It’s old. They sold it as an accent or a decoration feature. Bill bought it because he saw the tie to a change in the world.”

“How so?”

“Bill showed me the tool-marks. That bucket was made by a man who had hand tools, steel, probably made by a local blacksmith. The bucket had a pair of steel bands, also by that blacksmith. The bucket was wood, harvested by hand from a forest, each piece formed and fitted, assembled, by people who could, given a few natural resources and a lot of local knowledge, have made the iron for the tools, as well. Now it’s replaced.”

“By...” he led me on.

“By cheap plastic buckets that don’t leak at the seams, don’t harbor strange life-forms in porous surfaces, brought into the village by the dozens after coming from a factory where they’re churned out by the thousands – hundreds an hour, instead of old Wang in his cooperage, knocking out one or two wooden buckets a day.”

“And you got that lesson from a wooden bucket.”

“Wooden bucket’s representative of the grand sweep of history and civilization.”

“Oh, just go ahead, Haley ... You should be lecturing here. Bring your bucket...” he smiled wistfully. “Sadly, YOU get it. I have lecture halls full of people who won’t.”

“You and I – we have to be the keepers. You, professionally, me, because in a little way, I love it. And I’d rather think about Wang, the cooper, than a bunch of business-suited politicians trading influences for dollars. Those facts get recorded in newspapers and magazines and scholarly books. Wang the cooper lives on through the work of his hands. Wang’s gone, the bucket’s a rustic bit of decoration, and who is going to find the soul of a civilization in an injection molding machine?’

“Okay, Haley. You keep talking, I’m gonna tell you to write this down and give you credit for one of our 601 courses.”

“You can do that?”

“I’m the department head. I can give credit. 601 is special topics in history, and if you turn me in about twenty pages of Wang the cooper and industrial history, you get three credit hours. If you do another one, I’m liable to give you three more. Third one, you get a lecture hall to yourself.”

“Now if you think that’s unprecedented,” I said. “My friend in Alabama was lecturing on math at Auburn when she was fifteen...”

“I’d like to meet that one. Much as I question math majors...”

“Oh, she’s not a math major. She’s an engineer. With a PhD in physics. Next time she flies in, I’ll bring ‘er here.”

“I’d enjoy the opportunity,” he said.

So I walked out of that office with a positive result. Next one was one of the engineering profs.

“Good morning Doctor Lan,” I said.

“Haley, how pleasant to see you,” he said. Doctor Lan Hwi is third generation American. His English is perfect almost to a fault, belying his strictly Chinese demeanor. He’s older, very pleasant to deal with, and amused by both me and Deena.

After forty minutes in his office, he hands me off to a teaching assistant and I’m off to take a test.

I’m late for lunch, but I have an engineering course behind me when I finally answer Deena’s text. We meet for lunch, bringing along a couple of other students who jump at the chance to get off-campus. Quick lunch, though, because we all have to meet the clock back on campus.

At the end of the day, Deena and I meet again, walking back to the student parking lot.

“Worst part of college,” she said. “The walking back to the parking lot.”

“Well, if I do that history lecturer thing, I’m gonna hold out for a campus parking pass,” I said.

Giggle. “I may try that. Doctor Hanks doesn’t think I’m real anyway.”

“I kinda got lucky. Bill and I had several discussions about saving industrial history, so it was an easy shot for me.”

Speaking of easy shots,” she said, “what if we got ‘im to take off with us for a couple of nights out of town? Restaurants. Hotel room.”

“Thai restaurant. Don’t have one here in town,” I returned.

“That’s the excuse we’ll use,” she laughed. “Don’t want him to think it’s all about sex...”

“It isn’t, but that part’s soooo good, huh?”

“Yeah, but see, I did it different than you.”

“How?”

“First time I made love, it was to you. You’re female...”

“Uh-huh. I checked.”

“And then Dad ... But you did Dad first, then me. Haley, I love both of ‘em. Yours. His.”

“His what?”

“Everything. Really do. But that thing inside me...”

“I know ... I could never be exclusively ... Aside from being totally in love with him, that thing ... You and me? We have fun, but when that thing goes in...”

She smiled. “Nothing like it. Truth, though...”

“Always,” I said.

“Is it BETTER with the three of us? I mean, when he’s in you, I just can’t leave y’all alone.”

“We’re still learning, you know,” I said. “But I think it’s better.”

“I dunno. I’ve never had ‘im to myself.”

“You want that?” I asked.

“I dunno...”

“I could make sure that I’m not there when he gets home, or go run an errand ... But we have to ask him.”

“Ask ‘im?”

‘Yeah. I think that the main thing that keeps this from coming apart is that when it started, he didn’t ... I guess he was able to build a case in his mind that me and him were still ... not quite exclusive, maybe.” I paused. “Or maybe he does see it that way.”

“I’m an accessory?”

“Not exactly. But I think he sees it as an ‘us’ – the three of us, and I know it’s crazy, but if he just did you without me around, that’s different.”

“Complicated, in other words...”

“Yeah. Complicated.”

“I don’t wanna get thrown out of the house.”

“You’ll never get thrown out, Deena. I want you, Bill wants you. It’s just, well, he’s still trying to deal with that ‘daughter’ thing.”

“I know ... I guess it doesn’t help that I keep callin’ ‘im ‘dad’.”

“Yeah, but...” I giggled as we got into the car, “I was suckin’ ‘im last night when you said ‘Daddy’ and I felt a definite pulse...”

“Kinky,” she said as she buckled in. “Maybe we can play with that.”