Chapter 90

“You need to know where you’ve come from to define where you want to go.”
—Z. Allora, The Craving

I DON’T KNOW who was most surprised Sunday morning. I’m guessing it was me. I was preparing my music for the morning concert, having not done any prep on it this week. First off, I was back in track practice after school every day, which was cutting into my music practice. And then there was Valentine’s Day Dance with Desi and the party at Joan’s. It didn’t devolve into an orgy but there was a healthy bit of play. Brittany had been a little put out about Nanette not playing with her but we were all firm that it had to be that way until she was sixteen. She looked enviously at Desi in a hot make-out session with our newest girlfriend. I couldn’t have that, so I coaxed her into my lap and spent a good bit of time coaxing her top off and then coaxing a couple of orgasms out of her. I knew from previous experience she had no hymen to interfere with our play and delighted in thrusting two fingers up inside her pussy until she wailed.

But, like I said, it wasn’t an orgy. I took Brittany home (her home) after the party and she returned the favor with a blowjob in the driveway before she went inside.

Then I went home, not having made any arrangements for a girlfriend during my concert.

I was just warming up the strings and my fingers when my bedroom door was pushed open.

“Here you are,” Mom said. “We leave for church at nine-thirty, so if we don’t see you before then, perhaps we can all have lunch together.”

“Thanks, Mary. We’ll talk about it,” Nanette answered. She walked into my room and pushed the door closed behind her. I just sat there staring at my newest lover as she looked my room over.

I haven’t mentioned too much about Nanette’s looks other than she’s thin and strong, about five-four, short brown hair, and brown eyes. But I nearly always saw her in running gear or dressed casually like she’d been yesterday. Or naked. What I’m saying is that I’d never seen her dressed up. The woman who stood in my bedroom was ... Wow!

It wouldn’t be fair to my fifteen-to-nineteen-year-old girlfriends to say she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It’s hard for any forty-year-old to maintain the fresh blush of youth that pretty much defines the beauty of a teen girl. Or guy. I knew for a fact what I looked like at forty and tried not to think about it when I looked in the mirror at my sixteen-year-old face. But there was a different kind of beauty that emanated from Nanette. She had a mature confidence that my younger girlfriends lacked and sometimes tried to make up for with a little too much makeup or clothing a bit too flashy. Nanette just had it in spades.

“I’ve never seen you in a skirt before,” I finally croaked out. The skirt was about knee-length and full, not tight. It was topped with a light blue blouse that had two buttons open at the top, revealing a simple gold chain and pendant. “And makeup!”

“Not too much, is it?” she asked nervously. “The skirt covers more than my running shorts do. And you’ve seen everything under it.” To demonstrate she flipped the front up to her waist and let it drop. Maybe I’d seen it before but I was quite willing to see it again. She had powder blue panties on that matched the blouse.

“You’re beautiful,” I said. I stood and finally managed to get my feet to work so I could walk to her and hug her to me while I kissed her.

“Don’t get too carried away,” she whispered. “We have your concert to do. First.”

Different classical guitarists have favorite positions to play in. I was taught a traditional pose when seated. I had a block I put my left foot on to raise my knee and that’s where the waist of the guitar rests with the neck pointing up at about a forty-five-degree angle. That spreads the right leg out a bit to support the lower body. Nanette encouraged me to take the classic pose in my chair. Then she grabbed one of my pillows and put it on the floor to my right. She arranged herself on it and leaned in with her head on my right thigh. She stayed low enough that she didn’t touch the guitar and I found I liked the slight pressure of her leaning against me.

“Comfy?” I asked.

“Yes. Play for me, Jacob. I’m your lover now.”

I clicked on the recorder and started in. I started with Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’ but I couldn’t tell you what I played next. And next. I know that somewhere in the mix between numbers I dropped my right hand to pet her head and then went back to playing.

“We should be good children and go out to have breakfast with your parents before you upload the recording,” she said. It was only nine and I found myself looking down at her on that pillow next to my chair as I ran my fingers through her short hair again.

We did and the first thing Mom asked was if it was uploaded already.

“We thought we’d come have breakfast with you before I upload anything,” I said. I shifted a little to conceal how ready I was to upload. Mom dished us both bowls of hot oatmeal and I watched to see how Nanette fixed hers. I like mine with butter and brown sugar. Nanette reached for the carton of half-and-half. I could live with that. At least she didn’t dump honey or strawberry preserves in it. I scowled at Pey’s fruity mixture.

Dad asked how the concert had gone and we talked about the positions and how they worked. Then my family left for church and Nanette and I cleaned up the kitchen, laughing about how normal everything seemed. We headed back to my bedroom and I focused on adding the titles and getting the file uploaded to my YouTube channel. I turned away from my computer to find Nanette stretched out on my bed.

Naked.

“I’ve never made love in my boyfriend’s bed in his parents’ house,” she whispered. “Will you fulfill my fantasy?”

I did my best.

I couldn’t just spend all weekend with my girlfriends and after lunch with my parents, Nanette went home. I had to do homework. I was counting on the holiday the next day to give me enough time to complete my US History term paper. It was due by Friday but I knew I wouldn’t have time later in the week to do a good job and this was an AP course I’d been admitted to based on my performance in Human Geography.

The assignment was to analyze a trend of government policy over the past fifty years that would show either a move toward more open markets or toward isolationism. We had to choose which we thought was the trend and defend it with policy and economic statistics over the past fifty years. But I kept getting derailed. If anything, the economy seemed to be more steady over the past fifty years than I remembered. There were still peaks and valleys, but they weren’t as pronounced as in V1. And there was something else wrong that I couldn’t put my finger on. Most of the names in congress and the presidents were what I remembered but it just didn’t jive. Normal party politics drives trends in my experience. The radical dips and climbs were caused by shifts in policy from administration to administration, each one claiming to have done a great thing for the country in reducing the debt (which always kept climbing), lowering unemployment (usually done by changing how it was computed), and reviving our country’s world leadership (which usually meant the rich were getting richer). But I wasn’t seeing the radical market corrections and policy shifts I expected.

I went down the list of presidents in V1’s life and the party swings since Vietnam. That’s when I found the anomaly. I had to adjust all my thinking. The names were the same but for the past fifty years, they had all been the same party.

Wait! Obama and Trump were the same party? Bush and Clinton were the same party? What the hell happened? There was only one political party in America.

The reason I wasn’t seeing huge trends and corrections was because a single overarching policy had been in place, modified from within instead of by external combat. The best I could tell was that the single party was fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and intensely nationalistic. Opponents in national elections had differing views but they were within the framework of a single policy. That was how such radical amendments and laws as National Service, restricted gun laws, and mandatory birth control all came about.

I looked up the current list of representatives and senators and recognized a good many of the names, but there was only one party represented. Except ... I found a total of six representatives and one senator who had no party affiliation listed. They were from exactly the places you’d expect. Vermont, Texas, Wyoming, and Indiana.