Chapter 2: The decision

Sharon came into breakfast Tuesday glad that her time on the graveyard shift was ending. Thursday morning, she’d be back working 6 to 2, and she would need to shift her sleep schedule accordingly. Well, she was used to it, and the Crew were a hell of a lot more accommodating than some of her friends’ families were.

“I’m going back on days,” she announced when everybody was at the table. I’m on washing whites this week, and I’ll do them this morning if nobody minds.”

That meant that everybody had to strip their beds. They should have done so last night, but she noticed that Val and all the guys headed upstairs after the meal was over. She shared a shrug with Gayle.

“Never put off to tomorrow what you can put off to the day after,” Gayle said.

“Well, you and I have taught them something. I swear that four of those guys thought that gastronomy was ordering out Thai instead of pizza when we moved up here.”

When the clattering on the stairs told that most had come down and Wayne came into the dining room to clear and load the dishwasher, she started up. The sheets from nine beds and the white clothes worn by nine people would fill several laundry bags. The white clothes wouldn’t be too much in this weather, her own excepted. The sheets and pillow cases from six twin beds and three queen-sized ones, on the other hand, would be several loads by themselves.

As she headed up, she passed Trent coming down with two laundry bags on his shoulders.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Well, it’s no problem. I lift weights; why should I let a delicate little thing like you lift these when I need the exercise.”

She was a 5’ 5” registered nurse who could lift an obese patient back into bed. She was nobody’s ‘delicate little thing.’ Well, nobody but the 6’ 5” Trent.

She filled a laundry bag with her own stuff and Val’s. She put everything from Gayle’s room in a bag and went into the guys’ den to get their white clothes. Brent had taken those with the sheets. She tossed the half-full bag down the main stairs and then dragged the full one down the stairs. She was lifting it to her shoulder when Trent took it from her.

She started to say that he didn’t have to do that, but she’d already said it. They went the length of the house and down to the basement together. She put soap into the first machine, and then dumped what she considered Gayle’s bag on top. She got enough out of the second bag to fill the washer.

When the first dryers were done, Sharon emptied one onto the sorting table. She reloaded the dryer, reloaded the washer she had emptied, and then began sorting. The table was 4 ft by 24 feet. Bed clothes went to the right, and clothes went to the left. She sorted clothes into hers, Gayle’s, Val’s, and men’s. The men would sort their own later. Bed clothes were queen top, queen bottom, twin top, twin bottom, and pillow cases. The pillow cases were the easy ones. She didn’t get the second dryer sorted before the first one had run out again,

Sorting was one hell of a lot of work, but it beat each of them doing her own wash. Besides, this way the men’s beds were changed each week.

The person doing the sorting was also in charge of folding the sheets. They’d got new queen-sized sheets when they’d moved in, and they were mostly still in good shape. The guys, Gayle, and Val had all contributed twin sheets to the pool, (She had left hers with Jane, her roommate in Chicago.) All of them had been worn to some extent, and a lot of the bottom sheets had needed replacement, despite only being used for sleeping.

The sorting hadn’t started from anything like randomness. Most of Gayle’s clothes had been in the second dryer, and most of hers and Val’s had been in the first. The sorting table had one pile for not-dry-enough, and more than half the weight there had been a bunch of white sweat shirts that Bill wore. These went into one last dryer load. Then she went to folding sheets. Occasionally, that revealed some clothes hidden in the tangles. She was done, however, soon after the last dryer was. She took upstairs a laundry bag -- these had been washed as well -- each of her clothes, Val’s clothes, and Gayle’s clothes. She dumped the clothes on her bed and on Gayle’s bed. Val’s door was closed and closed doors were to be respected. She left the bag at her doorway.

She had Trent’s help for the next trip, and she loaded his arms with the bed clothes. She took the bag of the men’s clothes and left it at their door. Then she unloaded Trent and got the sheets into the right piles.

“Want to join me after lunch,” she asked.

“I didn’t do this for that.”

“I know. You did it ‘cause you’re a nice guy.”

“I did it,” he said, “because another hour at the computer would have driven me blind.”

“Or grow hair on your palms.” There are a lot of things a guy could do at a computer.

“Oh, I wish.”

After lunch, though, Trent did go up to her room with her. After a nice kiss, she put her clothes in the closet or in her hamper. He put his on the clothes tree. She had made her bed the day before, and she moved the clean clothes from the bed to her vanity.

“You know,” he said, “seeing you do domestic stuff like that stark naked is sexy as hell.”

“If I had sorted clothes in the buff, would you have stayed to help?”

“If you had started sorting clothes like that, you wouldn’t have finished the job. But it was much too cold down there.”

“Then it’s nice we’re up here,” she said. While climbing into bed, she stopped and looked at him between her legs. Then she rolled over on her back and held out her arms. “Come here.”

He knelt on the side of the bed. While his mouth covered hers, his hand snaked down between her thighs. The kiss was arousing, but the strokes were more arousing yet. He cupped her with his large, rough-skinned hand. He withdrew his tongue, kissed her lips once, and raised his head. As he did, he spread her labia with two fingers and inserted a third.

“Yes,” she said,

As he stroked in and out along the top of her vagina, he licked her nipples, first the right one and then the left.

She felt possessed, the large hand gripping her mons seemed to own her. She felt a rush of heat. She could hear the slurping of his finger pumping her lubrication out, and every motion felt more slippery.

She felt her arousal climb, but she didn’t want to go over by his hand. He stroked her clitoris at the same time he sucked a nipple. She felt fire where his hand gripped her.

“Trent, now,” she said, “please, now!” He rolled onto feet and hands well above her. As she spread her legs, he knelt between them and lowered his torso over hers. She reached between them and placed the head of his penis in her vestibule.

Slowly, exquisitely slowly, he entered her. Trent’s penis was an impressive length, but it didn’t have the feet of length that this glacial penetration felt like. Finally, she raised her hips and finished impaling herself.

With his upper body far above hers on his straight arms, Trent pushed he down with his groin and began a withdrawal as excruciatingly slow. The fullness and the slippery friction heightened the fire within her. Three strokes later, and it seemed like hours, lightning struck. He drove down, and she writhed on the skewer pinning her to the mattress.

Trent Wilson hadn’t gone looking for sex. He had slept with Val the night before, and was no longer the teen who had needed it twice a night. Sharon, however, had invited him, and Sharon was sexy. He wouldn’t say that she was sexier than Val, but Sharon after Val was sexier than Val again. He was not only having more sex with the Crew in Wisconsin than they had ever had in Chicago, he found himself wanting more sex, too.

As Sharon climaxed under him and around him, he pressed deep. She felt marvelous squeezing around the base of his cock, but the base wasn’t the sensitive point that would bring him with her. He appreciated her grimace of come. She looked twice a sexy like that than any posed centerfold.

When she came down from her climax, he lowered himself onto his elbows. He kissed her forehead and began to stroke in and out again.

Sharon recovered from her climax to find Trent still in her, still hard, and moving again. The heat built again quickly. She began to shift under his strokes, but he had her pelvis pinned and her breasts in his large, rough-skinned hands. As she rose to meet his thrusts, she saw him smile. Moments later, she closed her eyes to free her attention to her internal senses. She felt the heat turn to fire. She felt every muscle tense. She felt the slippery friction continue although she wanted more.

The lightning struck again. While she writhed and clutched at him with hands and vagina, he withdrew through those clutches. Then he drove in as she clutched again.

Trent loved the warm clasp of Sharon’s cunt, was driven over the edge when that clasp grew tighter. He drew back, drove forward through another clasp.

Then he spurted and spurted and spurted. When he had the strength, he moved off so he was lying by Sharon’s side. He tried to gather strength to get up and go back to work.

“Don’t go,” Sharon said. Well, a gentleman couldn’t refuse that invitation. Especially since the alternative was sitting at a computer for another few hours. He rolled back and cuddled her. “Trent, when you drew the plans for the house, you put in kids’ rooms. What do you think of that, now?”

“You read science fiction?”

“I love Eve Dallas.”

“The High Frontier, ring any bells?” he asked.

“No. Should it?”

Life was hell when you started with a metaphor and the other party didn’t get the reference. “I had a friend in college who argued about the idea of living in orbit and having industry up there. ‘Yes, such a society might be able to support itself,’ he said. ‘Now, calculate how we get there from here?’ We’re in sort of the same boat,”

“How?” she asked. “Maybe, ‘what is the boat?’”

“Well, it’s easy to see the Crew with six little crewmates. We feed them, send them off to school, and still fuck, maybe more discretely. Maybe, instead of us guys sleeping in your beds, we have sex mostly during school hours.”

“Sounds like a plan. Except I’m mostly gone during school hours.”

“Well, that could be worked around,” he said. “Maybe we have sex evenings after the kiddies are asleep and we go back to our own beds before morning. Maybe we keep early hours, and we all get up before the little darlings do. Anyway, that could easily be worked out. The hard part is the road from now to then.”

“You wouldn’t like a Crew with some of the women unavailable some of the time.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. I was just thinking how having sex with Val and then with you was better than having sex with Val and then with Val. To be perfectly honest, it was sexier than having sex with you and then with you would have been.”

“I can understand that,” she said. “I’m glad that you guys still take me on when Val’s available.”

“That’s not what I said, and it’s certainly not what I mean. What is sexy is the variety. I’m like a pasha, and that I’m only one of six pashas doesn’t diminish the feeling much, Anyway... “ He was feeling that this was a losing topic, and that made the first topic much more attractive. “Anyway, the other problem is birth order. Somewhere in this process, there are going to be a lot fewer than six kids. But there will still be six guys.”

“You guys are weird! The reason that we’re not having kids is that you don’t want to be the second in the fatherhood line. So, you won’t get in line at all.”

“Well, it’s not quite like that,” he said, thinking that it was a lot like that. He could easily put up with a situation which got him regularly laid but never led to parenthood. He was less certain that he’d be happy in a situation where he was in the lower class of guys. He wouldn’t mind Steve being first and Greg being second. If somebody like Wayne or Bruce got ahead of him, he’d feel unmanned. “It’s just that ‘Who’ll go first?’ is the sort of question that would break us apart. So we don’t want to ask that question.”

“Just cuddle me for a minute,” Sharon said. He did for only a few minutes. When she was sound asleep, he left her. He got clean underwear from his room and took a fast shower.

Trent thought he’d taken more than his share of free time that day, and he stuck to his chair the next day. Late that day, he got a draft to Greg. Greg never mentioned his previous day’s dereliction. Trent couldn’t decide whether that was because: 1) Greg figured that the second day’s production demonstrated that Trent had needed the time off, 2) Greg was so used to allowing Trent, Bill, and (even more) Gayle the time off for their other house duties that he hadn’t noticed that Trent hadn’t been doing anything handy-manish that day. 3) Greg was merely being the low-pressure manager who didn’t ride herd on his subordinates’ work times, or 4) Trent’s production was so uneven and useless anyway that Greg didn’t care whether he worked or not.

That night, whatever Greg thought or didn’t think, Trent was satisfied with his own production. When they left the table, he walked beside Gayle.

“I hope you don’t have a date for tonight,” he said. She shook her head. “Could I spend the night with you?”

“Sure. Want to go up now? I’m feeling a little tired.”

Trent took a detour to the guys’ room to get a robe, towel, toothpaste, and change of clothes. While he was there, he removed his shoes and socks and put on a pair of flip-flops. He stopped in the john for a piss and to brush his teeth and in the shower room to spray his feet.

“Sorry,” he said when he got to Gayle’s room. He locked the door behind him. They were shit locks; he’d opened them with a dime. Nevertheless, they were a do-not-disturb sign. Gayle had taken off her own shoes, but left the rest of the undressing for him.

He lifted her up to stand on one of the chairs in that room. That put her head above him, and she bent down for the kiss. While their tongues played tag, he took off her blouse so he could kiss at his own level.

“Oh, yes,” he said when he got her bra off. Gayle had boobs. Women did, of course; Sharon and Val certainly did. But nobody had as much boob as Gayle did. They overflowed his hands as he lifted them up and kissed their tips.

Then he got carried away with the magnificent abundance. He kissed the center of her cleavage and held then against the sides of his face with his hands. For a moment, he was drowning in boob. “Sorry,” he said when he pulled back, “that couldn’t have done anything for you.”

Gayle said, “That’s fine.” She pulled at his sweat shirt. When he dragged it off, she pulled his head between her breasts again. Trent could be depended on to bring her off; any of the guys could. The feeling that they appreciated her overweight body when they could have Val’s trimness was a rarer experience.

While kissing her breasts, Trent finished taking off her clothes and then his own. He helped her off the chair, and then she slithered down his body. He helped her into bed.

Then he kissed up the inside of her leg beginning at the ankle. As his mouth inched toward her pussy, the heat in her belly expanded to meet it. Her pussy was weeping for joy.

“Hmmm,” he said at his first taste of her. A few strokes of his tongue over her clit, and her entire body tensed with the approaching orgasm. Then he went back to her ankle -- the right one this time. By the time he got back to the top, her body was beginning to ache from the tension.

“Trent, please,” she said. He had been everywhere around her clit, but never on it. When he finally put his lips around it, a bolt shot through her. She moaned, and every time he sucks she moans again.

Finally, she collapses. When she recovers consciousness, he is poised at her entrance.

“Now,” he says.

“Now.”

He pushed slowly inside. It seemed to take forever, and she felt full. He pushed a last little bit; she felt fuller, and his groin pressed against her lips.

She felt him rub against her as he shifts. Then his hands held the tips of her breasts, and his thumbs rubbed her nipples.

As he stroked in and out, the heat built again. She couldn’t stand the tension so soon after the last time. She ran her hands up his arms to his shoulders. Then she dug her nails in. He merely grunted, but he did increase his pace.

A minute later, he was pounding in and out of her. Her excitement spiraled up.

Then she explodes.

He drives in and out through the spasms of her pussy. Then he pounds in twice as hard, and she can feel him twitch deep within.

When he fell to his side, he came out.

They lay inches apart while he dripped out of her. “You get the light,” she said. The lamp clicked off.

Then he drew her onto her side and up against him in a spoon. He did a little adjusting, and his limp cock was lying against her pussy lips. She felt satisfied, but not yet sleepy. Well, she thought that it might be the time to ask one more guy about her idea.

“Bill’s ceremony?” she asked.

“Uh, huh. Didn’t we agree about that?”

“What if I went off the Pill first? What if I were fertile for the fertility ceremony?”

“If you’ve been talking with Sharon,” he said, “you haven’t coordinated on victims. She talked to me about it.”

“About what?”

“About what it would take to start having kids.”

“I really didn’t have to talk to Sharon,” she said. “I might not be a nurse, but I know where kids come from.

“Well, we all know what it would take biologically to start some kids. That’s why the gals have all been so carefully taking those Pills. The problem is social. Who gets to be daddy first? Which woman with which man?”

“How about we let chance decide? All of you play equally. Each gets to fuck me during the ceremony, and the winning sperm picks the daddy?”

“That might work,” he said. “We could add another level of chance. If the first spurt is likeliest to inseminate you before the last one is even out of the gate, then we deal with some lottery to choose who goes first.”

“Think about it,” she said. She would, but later. She rolled over and went to sleep.

Steve Kosinsky was on dinner prep. It was meat loaf, and he’d made it before. Gayle watched him, but only corrected him twice. The meal tasted good, and others seem to have enjoyed it, too.

“Well, Val,” Trent asked when they were in the middle of eating, “is this bit about having some kids on all the women’s minds? Are you thinking about it, too?”

Steve’s mind jumped to attention. Trent sounded as if the idea of kids had gone from ‘in the sweet bye and bye’ to ‘maybe next week.’ Well, it couldn’t be next week; it couldn’t be in the next eight months. It sounded like Trent thought it could be in the next year, though, and they weren’t ready. They weren’t stable enough.

“I’m not sure I’m ready,” said Val. “Frankly, I always thought Gayle would be first. She’s sort of the mother type right now.”

“Well,” Gayle said, “I sort of thought I would be first, too. I’m the oldest, if not by much. What I’ve been asking myself is Bill’s fertility ceremony. If you really want something to celebrate fertility, then being on the Pill through it seems perverse. Then, too, if the guys are going to worry about who gets the first child, well, really, the ceremony you’re talking about gives them equal chances.”

“Wait a minute,” Sharon said. “Yeah, missing a single Pill gives you a risk of getting pregnant. Still, I would think that dropping the Pill after years of taking it straight would have you off your cycle. You would probably have a much better chance if you stopped the Pill six weeks before you wanted to get pregnant. Do we have enough time?”

“Well,” Bill said, looking at his I-phone, “yeah, but not a hell of a lot. Ideal planting time is 51 days from now.”

“Well,” Gayle asked, “are you in?”

“Wait one damned second,” Steve said. “Before any man answers that question, we should be clear on what that means. First of all, this isn’t Gayle’s kid we’re talking about; it’s our kid. Of course, it’s Gayle’s in all sorts of ways. But it’s the house’s kid financially. From diapers to college tuition, the expenses are ours.”

“Well,” Greg said, “before diapers comes delivery fees. The medical insurance covers childbirth. That’s sorta Gayle’s insurance, but it’s sorta our joint expense, too.”

“And what happened to arriving at a consensus?” Wayne asked. “That sounded to me like an ukase from on high.”

“It was just a report,” Greg said. “That’s what the insurance covers. Maybe you think I should have consulted the meeting beforehand. It’s understood, though, that I manage the company so that it continues as a healthy firm. You’re covered by the insurance, too, though not for pregnancy.”

“I think his objection was to my statement, Greg, not yours.” Steve looked at Wayne who nodded. “I was just proposing something for consensus. Still, just like Greg, I was partially dealing with just what is. We’re not talking about a baby. We’re talking about a human being that will live twenty-odd years before he will be able to support himself. Now, the Crew has been a fun thing. I’ve enjoyed myself more than I can remember, and I’ve enjoyed it up here more than I did in Chicago. Still, every day, I’ve had the thought in my head, ‘How will I parachute out if this thing crashes?’ Is there anybody who hasn’t?”

“Not I,” Sharon said. “I’m working as a nurse. I could find an apartment in Madison in days.”

“We all have our way out,” Greg said. “I think that Steve is saying that Baby Tansey ain’t going to.”

“And that brings us to two questions,” Steve said. “The first is that the support for the infant depends on the Crew keeping going. Are we actually above water?”

“Well,” Greg said, “the web-page business is turning a solid profit. Some of that went to the current compensation package, including that insurance. Do you need more for the rent?”

“Not unless taxes go up or there are major repairs. Trent?”

“We’ll need a new roof in three of four years. And accidents can always happen. It’s an old place.”

“Well, we have a sinking fund for the roof,” Steve said. “Rent is okay. Are we scraping on the food budget, Gayle?”

“We’re doing fine. Bill tells me he’ll have more produce for us next year, which cuts grocery bills.”

“So,” Greg asked, “can we all live on the stipend?”

“Well,” Gayle said, “I hate to be the cry-baby after I started all this. I’m doing fairly well right now, but I don’t know how much a baby will add. He can’t eat our food for years.”

“Anyone else?” There were headshakes but no other claims of need. “Well,” Greg said, “as Steve said, the costs of a baby will be on the house. I don’t see quite how that will work out, but we don’t need to increase the stipend for seven people enough to cover a new baby for each of them. How much? Can you bring us a budget, Sharon? Doesn’t quite fit under medical knowledge, but you should have the best sources.”

“Can do,” Sharon said.

“The other half of it,” Steve said, “is that nobody who takes part in this should, however the lottery ends up, think to escape his duties as a parent. ‘Sorry, it wasn’t my genes,’ shouldn’t hack it. I’ll have more at lunch. You won’t be here, Sharon, and we won’t make any decisions without your input, but this is mostly for the guys.”

Val invited Greg to her room that night. It had only been a couple of days, but she didn’t have to keep a strict rotation, and the discussion had shaken her sense of security.