Chapter 1

Mandy Schilling’s life should have been wonderful. She should have been happy and fulfilled. She was intelligent, in good health, and the kind of person who takes the little road bumps life gives us in stride.

And ... oh yes ... she was drop-dead gorgeous.

Actually, the drop-dead gorgeous part was the problem. That and a genetic predisposition to lie on her back with her legs spread, urging some man to fuck her long, deep, and continuous. That’s what she decided it was, anyway ... a genetic predisposition. She’d struggled to control her libido since she got slammed by puberty when she was thirteen. She entered it long before then, but that’s when it slammed her.

It was when she was thirteen that her breasts stopped being mounds with puffy, indistinct nipples and became foothills with dark brown areolas and even darker brown nipples that poked out through everything. Up to then she hadn’t had to wear a bra. After that she didn’t dare not wear one.

Another reason she thought her perpetual horny nature was genetic was that her mother had been ... let’s just call a spade a spade ... a slut. Maybe that’s not fair. Perhaps she was an undiagnosed nymphomaniac instead. Veronica Majors was always pulling her husband, Tom, into the bedroom. Mandy got to watch pretty much whatever she wanted to on TV as she grew up because on most evenings her mother and father spent their time in the bedroom, instead of interacting with or supervising their daughter. What they were doing was pretty clear, even when Mandy was nine or ten. Her mother had a potty mouth during sex and most of the curse words Mandy knew by the time she was fifteen had been learned right there at home.

Not that Veronica was a bad mother. Well, most of the time, anyway. She took care of Amanda, taught her all the things a daughter should learn from her mother, went on shopping trips with her, and even made a lot of Mandy’s clothes. Mandy got to choose the pattern and fabric and Veronica did wonders in the sewing room. But when Tom got home and dinner was finished ... well ... let’s just say she felt like it was Tom’s turn to get her attention. Ronnie was big into role playing. She made her own costumes for that, too.

Ironically, in a sense, one of those things Veronica taught her daughter was that she must not let boys go too far on dates. Her discussion about that was frank in a coded kind of adult-speak way.

“Boys want to do things, Mandy, things that make a girl excited. And that leads to situations where you don’t want to stop. And that leads to situations in which babies can be made. The key is never letting yourself get too excited, baby. You can have a little fun, but stop when it starts getting too exciting. Do you understand?”

Mandy did. She was then fourteen and had known for most of a year - ever since her boobs had exploded off her chest - that boys thought about sex most, if not all of the time.

“Yeah, Mom,” she said, dutifully.

“You have to save that excitement for marriage,” said Ronnie. “Then you can let it all out.”

That was the understatement of the century, Mandy thought.

Four hours later she had to turn the TV up to hear it over her mother’s voice coming through the walls: “No, Uncle Dan! Not in my ass! You’ll tear me apart! Nooooooo. Fuck that feels good, you fucking bull. Keep going. Don’t you dare shoot in my ass. I want to drink it tonight!”

There was no “Uncle Dan” in the family. That did explain ... sort of ... why her mother sometimes called her father “Danny boy” when she was feeling playful.

The point is that, by the time Amanda was seventeen, she was inculcated into the belief system that sex was normal, obviously fun, and that it should be engaged in as often as possible. She’d done some making out on dates, but had managed to put off the inevitable thus far, taking to heart her mother’s admonition that sex - and letting loose - was for marriage.

Then she met Matt and her defenses crumbled. He made her crazy. It was his smile, for one thing, a sort of crooked smile that only happened on one side of his mouth.

And his touch was electric. His lips tasted so good she never wanted to stop savoring them. His parents were rich and he drove a fancy car. On their third date, even though he hadn’t pressured her to do more than a lot of kissing, and a little groping, she knew she was in big trouble because all she could think about was getting naked with him.

He, of course, said he approved of that idea.

“We can’t,” she groaned. “I promised my mother I’d wait until I was married.”

“Then marry me,” he said, nuzzling her neck.

Oddly - at least at this point in the story - he meant it. He refrained from pressing his advantage and her virginity was intact when he took her home that night. He honored her wishes on the next dozen dates, too, and she was a wreck. She had to masturbate three times a day and she even stooped to stealing one of her mother’s vibrators.

That wasn’t as risky as it sounds. Veronica had at least fifteen of them, in all shapes, colors, and sizes.

On graduation night he made good on his promise and did, in fact, marry her. They eloped, of course, because his parents would never have agreed to let their only son, the inheritor of the family business, marry some trash from the other side of town. Even if the ‘town’ held three million people.

He took her to Vegas. It was her wedding night. She could finally let loose. And she tried to.

She’d spent so much time not thinking about sex while her parents were having it on the other side of the wall that she didn’t actually know what to expect. That was good, because while Matt managed to divest her of her virginity, it happened so quickly and was over so abruptly that she was still ramping up emotionally when he rolled off of her and put his hands over his face.

It sounded like he was crying. Mandy, however, could think only of the fact that if she didn’t cum she’d just explode. So she reached for her clitty and rubbed the crap out of it while her new husband cried softly in the bed beside her.

He was crying because it turned out Matt was gay. He’d thought Mandy could “cure” him. He really did love her ... but having sex with her just made him feel ... icky. He’d managed to stay hard long enough to have sex with his very first girl, but he knew beyond a doubt that all those things he’d been feeling for other males were real. He knew he couldn’t cum and his cock went soft.

The honeymoon only lasted another day as they talked about all this and tried to decide what to do. Mandy loved him, too, regardless of his sexual identity. Maybe she thought she could eventually cure him, too. In any case, they went back home and play-acted at being the normal couple. His parents blew their stacks and demanded the marriage be annulled, but Matt stood his ground. That was because he knew he could never marry another woman. He loved Mandy, and she loved him, even if it had to be the kind of love friends share, rather than spouses. He bowed to his mother’s wishes only in that there was another wedding, a formal one, with all the bells and whistles, one to which all the relatives and important friends could be invited. Mandy got to help plan it, and it helped convince her that she could “fix” her husband.

At that point, of course, Mandy had never had good sex. She had actually only had thirty seconds of sex, so she didn’t really know what she was missing. And Matt was rich. Not that she was mercenary about it. Her family had gotten by okay, but there hadn’t been a lot of luxuries.

Her marriage to Matt lasted three years. By the time she could take her first legal drink of scotch, it was to mourn the fact that she’d had to let Matt be Matt. He deserved to have real love in his life and he’d met a man he felt like he could love like a husband is supposed to love his spouse.

It was an amicable breakup. Mandy estimated it would take about a hundred grand for her to find someplace to live and get by on until she found a job. Matt gave her two million, and said, “Mandy, honey, you have no job skills and it would kill me to see you flipping hamburgers. Go back to school and get a degree.”

They kissed a final time - kissing her didn’t feel icky - and he patted her on the ass he’d fucked two or three times in three years. They’d thought that might work out for him but it hadn’t. Blow jobs had been better, because he could close his eyes and imagine she was whatever man he was currently attracted to. Taking her from behind, though, wasn’t like that. There was no way he could imagine her hips were a man’s. Still, that last kiss was a warm and loving one.

Then Matt went off to come out to his parents and Mandy drove to the local technical college to see what kind of courses they offered.

She still got a Christmas card every year from Matt’s mother who, no doubt, had thought long and hard about what Mandy had “tried to do” for her son, all those years.

Two years later Mandy had an associate’s degree in fire science, of all things. She’d decided that becoming a fireman - or firewoman - would be a change of pace and shake her out of her doldrums.

It did. The only problem was that she filled the wrong kind of hose constantly ... and it wasn’t with water. She was used to being intimate with a male buddy. That’s really what Matt had been. She’d walked around naked all the time around him. He’d appreciated her for her beauty, even though he didn’t salute her with his penis. She didn’t walk around nude with her new buddies, of course. But she adopted a warm, open relationship with them. Teams like that grow close anyway. She just welcomed that closeness and thought it was normal.

Her new “buddies” were entirely different about that. When her T shirt got drenched or they had to drag her out of a burning building, erections were involved.

She got assigned as the victim a lot. Even the instructors wanted to go in and get her. She was, after all, physically perfect to be on a pinup poster of firewomen. She was five-nine, weighed a hundred and twenty-three pounds, and her measurements were 36-25-34.

If that wasn’t enough, her long hair was a deep red, with golden highlights, the color of smoldering coals.

She got the highest grades in the class and she earned them, though, to be honest, some of that might have been because her classmates were so distracted all the time they didn’t do as well as they could have. Even in the classroom a dozen sets of eyes were on her most of the time. She’d had her uniform shirts tailored. She didn’t do that to tease the boys. You just did that. She didn’t want to look slovenly. And, because they were her buddies, she didn’t tend to think of any of them as potential amorous partners or husband material. It was for that reason that she gently rebuffed the dozens of attempts they made to get her to go out on a date with any of them. She’d party with them, drink with them, dance with them, but only in a crowd.

“I can’t go out with you,” she’d say. “That would be like going on a date with my brother.”

She didn’t, in fact, let her guard down until their graduation party. It happened at McGee’s, the bar that they and countless past classes had adopted as “their” bar. She got roaring drunk and somehow her shirt came off. She danced in her bra until that, too somehow got loose. Every group has an alpha male in it. In this situation there were maybe six who wanted to be the alpha male, but in the end only one will win out. That’s assuming it doesn’t turn into a gang rape. But these guys loved their “little sister”, even though she drove them bat-shit crazy. The alpha male turned out to be a guy named Tony, who was from a proudly Italian family.

She wasn’t so drunk that, when Tony climbed on top of her in the back room of McGee’s, she didn’t know what was happening. She’d worn out two vibrators since getting her divorce and her attitude about this was, “What the hell. Maybe it will be fun.” It helped that she liked Tony. He was macho and funny and had helped her learn how to carry a man twice her weight out of a burning building.

It was only her second time. It was probably Tony’s thousandth time, and he took pride in what he called his “three to one ratio.” That meant that the woman had three orgasms to every one of his. Tony came twice that night and Mandy found out just how good sex can be. By the time they were finished she was mostly sober again and she’d decided maybe it was time to look for another husband. Tony wasn’t that guy, but she was never sorry he dragged her into that back room.

Being a firewoman was great, but fending off the men wasn’t. The sexism she experienced in her first job in a firehouse soon made her decide to go back to college to seek a degree that would get her higher on the fire science ladder. If she got a degree in administration, or one in engineering, she’d be wearing a white helmet, rather than a yellow one. Even better, she’d work in an office most of the time instead of living with a bunch of horny guys.

It was while she was engaged in that pursuit that she met Steve. He had served six years in the Army, doing things he wasn’t allowed to talk about. He was going to college on the GI Bill. They met in class and the chemistry was immediate. Their first date was a study date and then he invited her to work out with him at the gym. He taught her some self-defense moves and explained the theory of working out. A month later she went to bed with him and the fireworks were breath-taking. She wore him out.

The love she had fallen into was glorious and life was good. They got married on September fifth, 2001.

He got called back on active duty fifteen days later and she saw him a grand total of thirty-six times between then and March of 2003. Unknown to her (and just about every other American) he was inside Iraq in late February, 2002. He was also one of the first American soldiers killed in action when Operation Iraqi Freedom got fully under way.

Grief can do gruesome things to a person. It is commonly said the five stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Mandy went out of order and combined a couple of stages. Her denial was married to the bargaining stage. She held out hope that there had been some terrible mistake until she got Steve’s body back. Then she was angry until that exhausted her and depression crept in under the radar.

She almost dropped out of school, but school was the only structure in her life at that point, so she plodded on. Her grades suffered. She had no social life and spent hours just sitting in their ... her ... apartment, staring at the walls. Those thirty-six times he’d gotten leave to go see his wife had not resulted in a pregnancy. They’d tried ... with a vengeance ... but her womb hadn’t quickened. Much of her depression was about that. If his seed had taken root, at least she’d have some part of him still with her.

Acceptance came slowly. The “trigger” to that came when she stepped on the scale and realized she’d gained fifteen pounds.

She went back to the gym to work it off.

Working out was the first thing she’d done that felt good since Steve had died. She started at an hour a day, which was all she could manage. That shocked her, too. She worked up to four hours a day before she realized she was compensating for her loss by exhausting herself at the gym.

She dropped back to two hours a day, which was more than enough by then. She was in fabulous shape again.

She had no interest in men and her sex drive seemed to be in hibernation. She started bringing her grades back up. That was, in fact, how she met Ryan. She was paired with him for a project in her thermo-dynamics class.

Ryan was terminally happy. Nothing seemed to bother him. He was smart and capable and a good lab partner. He wasn’t handsome in the classical sense and had a bit of a beer belly, but he also didn’t objectify her, like so many other men did.

They got to know each other well enough that, one day, she reached to pinch that flab and said, “You know, I could get that off of you.”

“Why would I want to do that?” he asked, happily. “I’m fine with my body.”

“Women would find you more attractive,” she said. As far as she knew he never dated.

“Would you find me more attractive?” he asked. For once he wasn’t grinning.

“I have a lot of baggage,” she said. He knew about Steve. “I’m not looking for a man to be attracted to.”

“I suppose I’m not looking for a woman, either,” he said, lightly.

“Don’t tell me you’re gay,” she said, thinking about Matt.

“Nope,” he said, grinning again. “Women are just more trouble than they’re worth.”

“Gee, thanks a lot,” she grumped.

“Not you. You’re fine,” he said. “But when you have a girlfriend she dominates your time. You can’t look at other women. You have to remember dates and things she thinks of as anniversaries. You have to spend lots of money on her. It’s just not worth it right now, that’s all.”

“Whatever,” said Mandy. “Still, you should come to the gym with me and get into better shape. You’ll live longer.”

“Okay,” he said, surprising her with his easy acceptance.

She already knew he was endomorphic, like her. Both of them had more white muscle cells than red. So she worked him with light weights and concentrated more on cardio.

She was surprised at how quickly he was addicted and within two months they were running two miles a day.

They talked about everything as they ran, loping along around campus. One day it was overcast and on the verge of raining and he knocked on her door, asking if she was ready to run.

“Not today,” she sighed. “I’m on my period and cramping.”

“Running will loosen you up,” he said. “Activity is good for that kind of thing. You told me that yourself.”

“It’s about to rain,” she commented, arching one perfect eyebrow.

“So we get a little wet,” he said, grinning.

“It’s only fifty degrees outside,” she said. “If we get wet we’ll get hypothermia.”

“So we only run a mile and then go back into the warm,” he said.

“Why are you so hot to run today?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?” He grinned. “Running with you is the highlight of my day. Everybody sees me running with the hot chick and they think I’m a stud.”

“I’m the hot chick?” She wanted to laugh.

“Of course you are. Every guy on campus wants to get with you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed.

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” He grinned.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she growled.

“Come on. Just a mile,” he wheedled.

In the end she got dressed, putting on a hoody to combat the rain, if it started, and went out with him. They ended up doing more than a mile, and it did rain lightly, but she felt better.

He became another “buddy” she could be intimate with. They became regular study partners, meeting three times a week and continued to work out together. He got into much better shape and was aware of that.

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