Chapter 1

You have already started this book with an erroneous assumption. That’s because you think MILF stands for “Mother-I’d-like-to-fuck.” That falls in the category of close, but no cigar. Technically, I suppose it’s really close, so maybe I should offer you a cigarette instead of a cigar.

I know, I’m babbling. You’d probably babble too if you were in my circumstances.

You see, I’m the MILF. That’s right. I’m a guy, and I’m a MILF.

In my case, it stands for “Mother-in-law-fucker.”

See why you get the cigarette? She is a mother and I did fuck her, so she’s a MILF. But because I’m her son-in-law that makes me a MILF too.

What? You think that’s splitting hairs? Semantics? I don’t think so. Go ahead. Do a poll of a thousand guys. Ask them if “MILF” includes their mother-in-law. And before you throw the results of that in my face, I’ll argue that the two percent of guys who say, “Hell yeah, my mother-in-law is hot! I’d do her,” are what they call a “statistical anomaly.” They land squarely in the ‘abnormal’ part of the data set.

The average guy just doesn’t want to fuck his mother-in-law.

But I did.

And this book is about the story of how that happened.

First, some background on me. It’s necessary because it’s a huge part of the story.

I’m a normal guy. There’s nothing special about me at all, with maybe one exception. I’ll get to that in a second. I’m average height, with brown hair. I wear glasses. The only reason you might pick me out of a crowd is that I walk a little differently. That’s because both of my legs, below the knee, are man-made, rather than flesh and bone. I got them after a devastating injury. I had to learn to walk again. Think of it like a bicycle. Replace the normal wheels with big, round wooden ones. It still goes ... but it goes in a slightly different manner.

How I got those legs is also important. I did three tours in Afghanistan. I lost both feet and ankles in an ambush.

I’ll skip over the first five days after I got shot, during which doctors argued about how much of the legs to save. My life had already been saved, by then, but the future was unalterably changed. If you’re thinking that kind of medical problem was life-changing in the first place, you’re correct. But it didn’t just change my life. It changed the lives of my wife, and of another important woman in my little world.

Which brings me to Valerie. We met in college. She was from Arizona, which was out of state, but she had a full ride four year scholarship that included room and board, as long as she maintained a 3.75 GPA.

I was getting basic subjects out of the way and trying to decide what to do with my life. I was interested in philosophy, but pretty sure a degree in that would lead nowhere, in terms of the job market. She was enrolled in the pre-law track. We met in biology class, when we were assigned to be lab partners. It was love at first sight. Well ... it was love at first sight for me. I was devastated, robbed of any interest in other girls. All I could think about was her.

“Hi. My name is Bob. Will you go out with me?” I asked, breathlessly. It was the first thing I said to her when the professor gave us five minutes to exchange information.

“I can’t. We’re lab partners,” she said. “It’s against the rules.”

“What rules?” I said. “There are no rules about lab partners.”

“Of course there are,” she said. “It’s a conflict of interests.”

“You’re crazy.”

“And you’re a masher.”

“A what?”

“A masher,” she said, looking me in the eyes. “A man who makes unwelcome sexual advances to women. My mother warned me about men like you.”

“Now wait just a frickin’ second,” I said. “Nobody said anything about sex. I just asked if you wanted to go out.”

“Answer me this,” she said. “And tell me the truth. Isn’t it true that what you really want is for me to go out with you so you can eventually have sex with me?”

I said I was interested in philosophy. That’s because I like to think about things on a deeper level than most people. Like, for instance, those commercials where they flash words on the screen that say “Real people/customer/whatever, not actors.” That’s supposed to make you feel like whatever they say must be true because they’re not “actors.” But if you think about that on a deeper level, you realize that somebody screened the potential participants for this commercial. They chose people who looked like what they wanted, and spoke like they wanted. Somebody directed the making of that commercial, and somebody decided what the people were going to wear. And it has to be scripted, because otherwise who knows what “real people” would say. You know they rehearsed it. Maybe they had to do four or five takes before that director was satisfied. And did these “real people” do it for nothing? Did they volunteer to do all that work for free? Wasn’t there at least “reimbursement for expenses”?

What it boils down to is that, in reality, this whole shell game is merely the process by which some “real people” became actors. This was simply their first acting gig.

If you do this kind of thinking a lot, your brain gets used to the fleeting nature of such thoughts, and learns to process them very quickly. All that I just said about those commercials might take a whopping five or ten seconds to play out in my mind. I came to that conclusion before the commercial was even over.

So, when Val proposed her theory of my intentions, I spent a good ten seconds thinking about that on a really deep level. I came to the conclusion that, if you strip away all the politics and posturing, she was probably right.

“I’m simply following the biological imperative for our species,” I said.

“Not with me, you’re not,” she replied.

That was my introduction to the woman I eventually married.

What changed her mind would be a book within itself. To summarize, my basic mindset was like that kid who knows he wants to be a fireman when he grows up, and he doesn’t think about any other possibility. And when he does become a fireman, it just seems like it was fated from the very beginning; meant to be. I thought about Val that way. She was going to be mine some day. She didn’t know it yet, but that’s how it would be. She gave me not a single reason to believe that, but I took it on faith. The universe couldn’t be so cruel as to deny me the only woman I’d ever felt like I was willing to die for. If necessary, I mean. If it was absolutely required to save her or something.

On her side, she was confronted with a polite, helpful, somewhat goofy guy who was obviously smitten with her. There was more there, but I wouldn’t find out about that for more than a year. My continued “Want to go for coffee?” kind of comments after we finished working on something were always rebuffed. I acted like it was no big deal. I never took any other girls out or pursued any kind of relationship with a woman other than as a simple acquaintance. Why would I do that? I was saving myself for Valerie. I did spend a lot of my free time shooting pool at the union. That was cheap entertainment. Eventually it got me a reputation as being a guy who was really hard to beat, which was good for my self-esteem while Valerie chipped away at it.

What seemed odd to me was that Val didn’t go out with guys, either. At least I never got any information that suggested she dated. It didn’t matter what day or time I suggested working on our term project. She was always free. I didn’t get that. She was cute as a button, not a raving beauty, or supermodel material, but definitely good looking. She wore regular clothes, which sometimes displayed her physical charms, and sometimes didn’t. Those charms consisted of medium size breasts and an ass to die for. I know guys hit on her, but she turned them all away.

Anyway, we worked well together and after that semester, and our project was over, my suggestion of, “We work well together. We should study together sometimes,” was met with, “Okay. That might work.” You could have knocked me over with a feather, but thankfully there were no feathers around. I just stood there looking goofy.

“These won’t be dates,” she said, her voice even.

“Of course not,” I said. “I might make coffee, though. But you don’t have to drink any.”

“I drink tea,” she said.

“I’ll get some,” I said.

This was much more complicated than it looks like from reviewing that simple negotiation. We had always met in the library, or in the lab, or some other public place, but now it was assumed - without negotiation - that we would be studying at my apartment. The reason for that was less complicated. She lived in the dorm. I didn’t.

I’d played football in high school, and I’d had enough of the locker room and testosterone-filled atmospheres. I went to college to learn, not party. So I got my parents to spring for rent, with the provision that a GPA below 3 would make that money dry up. I got a smallish apartment in a complex about a mile from campus. I usually jogged to class, or wherever I needed to go. I had a car, but my insurance capped the mileage at 5,000 miles per year. If I went over that, the premiums tripled. Five thousand sounds like a lot, but the average driver goes 15,000 per year. So think of everywhere you drive, and then cut out two thirds of those trips. This was also why I didn’t go home a lot. Home was 327 miles away.

Okay, so after knowing me for one semester, she started coming to my apartment to study. And that’s all we did for two more semesters. She had to compete hard to get into law school, and she took her studies very seriously. She wanted that four-point-oh GPA and she was willing to work for it.

Of course we didn’t just study and say nothing to each other. You have to take breaks or your concentration suffers. You need to do other things. What I did was play Xbox. I liked Call of Duty - WWII. She liked to stretch. She watched me play as she stretched, folding her body into impossible shapes that made me wince sometimes. Then one night she asked if two could play.