Chapter 179

“I have been to the speed of God, sir ... and I discommend it.”
—John Ringo, A Hymn Before Battle

We practiced all day Sunday, focused on the program. Sophie and Brittany were with us as well as the six of us playing instruments or singing. Donna was making notes in a score to work with the tech crew. Nanette, Emily, and Beca just kept us fed and hydrated.

I ran Monday and Tuesday mornings so we could rehearse in the afternoon right after school. Monday night we rehearsed until after ten and then crashed. Tuesday, we quit at dinner. We don’t go in for a lot of gifts and such, but Tuesday was Em’s twenty-first birthday. Mom and Dad came out to the farm to join us and we had to remind Andy and David that we had guests and wouldn’t be running around naked.

Until after Mom and Dad left.

Then, I took Emily to my room and made love to her for a couple of hours before she was collected by my other girlfriends and led away to be feted by the females.

“Aren’t you joining the others?” I asked.

“I like Emily, but I’d rather spend the night with you,” Cindy said. “Is that okay?”

“You know it’s always okay to me for you to sleep with me, Piper,” I said.

“Especially since ... we have sex now!”

“Yeah. We sure do.”

“Do you still want to have vaginal sex with me?” she asked.

“Piper, I want to make love to you in every way possible. But we don’t need to rush to anything you aren’t ready for.”

“What if I’m never ready?”

“Do you think that’s possible? I mean, it’s okay if that’s the way you feel. It would just surprise me.”

“I mean, what if I can’t tell you I’m ready? Maybe you should just decide when and fuck me. I’ll be surprised,” she said.

“I’m not sure I could do that, Cindy. I would always wonder if it was what you really wanted. Maybe you should talk to one of the other girls about it. Maybe Donna or Nanette.”

“Nanette’s as old as my mother. I don’t know if I could talk to her.”

“Nanette loves you like a lover, though. That’s a lot different.”

“For tonight, could you maybe just hold me? I mean and kiss and stuff? But not fuck. In my pussy.”

“Anything for you, Piper,” I laughed.

Wednesday I did a light run and as soon as everyone was up, we started rehearsing. We scooted all the furniture in the sunroom back against the walls and set ourselves up at the end by the fireplace. Our pod mates got on the furniture and pulled their legs up. Brittany and Sophie did their dances as we played the music. Donna and Beca were making notes on everything. Em and Nanette fixed food. It was a hard day for about six hours.

At three, we closed everything up, gave hugs to Andy and David and took them to the airport.

“Aren’t you joining family for Thanksgiving?” I asked Remas.

“I negotiated a late Thanksgiving. You all are heading to Bloomington Friday for your big race Saturday. So, I’ll fly home on Friday when you leave. I’ll be back in DC on Sunday,” she said.

“Believe me, I’m not trying to get rid of you,” I laughed. “I like having you around.”

“Want to spend the night liking me?”

“Yeah. I’d like that a lot.”

Before that happened, though, we watched Rachel and Livy come out of the gate area and rush to us. There was a lot of loving waiting to happen yet that day.

Remas got passed from lover to lover most of the afternoon, as I got intimately reacquainted with Rachel and Livy. Eventually, Remas ended up in my bed while Rachel slept with Donna and Cindy. Livy was taken by Nanette and Emily. Beca dragged Joan, who drove in about nine-thirty, off to the game room Divine Love had occupied and the last bedroom got Desi, Brittany, and Sophie.

I explored Remas, kissed her, loved her, tasted her, and sank into her body like it was home. I watched her enter that state of bliss when I filled her and marveled at how smoothly she integrated into our pod. I wasn’t sure when we’d recognize her as truly a member, but I figured when we moved to Washington, she’d move in with us.

On Thanksgiving, everyone was up early. We got turkeys in the ovens. Everyone pitched in cleaning and setting up tables. By noon, when all our families arrived, we were in full party mode. Ray and Debbie drove down from Chicago. Sharon and her boyfriend Alex were there. We had all our pod, pod parents, and sibs. Pod two’s newest member, Kate Stevens, couldn’t join us for dinner because she had a family meal, but we invited her and her family to come later in the day.

We sat to eat at two-thirty and enjoyed the food and company. The parents were all very interested in Remas, though a few had met her before. She didn’t wear the hijab, so they were mostly interested in her music.

And there was no drama. No presidential announcements interrupted the football games. No dire emergencies tugged at us. I looked around the table and wondered how many times we would all be together. Even now, there was an empty spot in my heart that I knew was shared by my sister, parents, and pod two. That empty space that would have been filled by Pey.

This needed commemorating. I called John and asked if he would take a few minutes to come out to the farm and photograph all of us together. Kate and her parents arrived just a few minutes before we gathered in the waning sunlight of Thanksgiving Day and managed to get all forty-one of us in one picture.

Epic.

It had taken Em some work at the school district transportation office to get them to agree that we needed to take a bus to Bloomington for the race. Her logic was that even though there was just the driver, coach, trainer, and one athlete, there were fans who wanted to go watch the race. The school finally agreed that if there were ten fans who paid $5 each, we could take a bus. No problem. Nine fans were in our pod. Mom and Dad decided they’d like to come and watch my last high school race. It turned out that Lacie and her entire pod wanted to cheer me on since I’d helped Lacie with her 10k. Jock’s wife joined him and I discovered he had a little baby girl. They were cute together.

We dropped Remas off at the airport and boarded the bus to the Hoosier Classic. Of course, we all had rooms at a local Days Inn and invaded Olive Garden for dinner. Nanette and I got carbed up.

The rooms at Days Inn just weren’t big enough for all twelve of us. We ended up with three rooms and were really cozy. Even at the farm we were usually spread around four bedrooms and now, sometimes five. Nanette and I cuddled together in one bed in our room with Livy and Rachel in the other. We did some kissing and petting, but didn’t make love. We’d need all our energy in the morning.

We got to the starting line at seven, an hour before the race started. What a zoo! Fifteen hundred participants, half of whom were running the 5k, leaving 735 runners in the half marathon. Everyone started together at 8:00. The first mile and three-quarters was run together through city streets. Then the 5k split off one direction and the half marathon continued onto the Indiana University campus. That’s a beautiful campus to run through. I’d done the 10k here last year when Nanette did a full marathon. With the increasing popularity of distance running, the shape of races had changed this year. We were seeing more events and more specialized events. Of course, the seventy-two high school runners competing for the state championship were featured in the event, but the race was a big competition among the sororities and fraternities on campus, too.

I gave Nan a hug and kiss as we split to go to our separate start zones. Jock accompanied me to the high school competition zone where all the contenders were given starting instructions and our timers were checked. With this many starters, it could be a couple of minutes before you even reached the starting line. The judge, however, lined up the racers and called ten runners to the front. He explained that we had the fastest qualifying times in the state and would be first at the starting line. I recognized a couple of the guys from races I’d run. The other sixty-plus runners crowded behind us.

Next to us were the elite men and women of all ages. These were men who qualified at under 1:15:00 and women who qualified under 1:40:00. Nanette had only managed 1:45 in the Covered Bridge race, so she was back in the crowd a bit with the remaining 625 half marathoners. On the far side—what would be the inside of the left-turning course—were the 750 or so 5k runners. I assumed there was some division among them that pushed elite runners to the front as well.

At 8:00 sharp, the starter’s gun fired and we were off. This was a street run and the first part was west from campus, south a mile, then back east onto campus. Before the second mile we were running through the beautiful old campus. The weather was sunny and crisp—perfect for running. The only part where the race narrowed to paths instead of streets was through the arboretum but by then the runners were stretched out for nearly a mile. Maybe fifty of us were running at the front of the pack.

A little before the four-mile marker, we turned onto Jordan Avenue—Greek Row. Every fraternity and sorority had people parked on their lawns, cheering on their favorite runners and waving beer bottles. Before 8:30 in the morning. That’s college life, I guess. One of the curious things was that the average age on campus was twenty-two now. Before National Service, the average age on college campuses was twenty. That also meant the college athletes running were in their prime at twenty-three and twenty-four years old.

I’d asked Livy if she was going to run with us. I was pretty sure she’d be considered an elite runner after the training she’d been undergoing. She said there would definitely be National Service Corps members in the race, but she was restricted from running independent races while she was in training for team USA. The Hoosier Classic hadn’t been certified by the USATF this year.

Just south of Greek Row, we left the campus to run on city streets. It was about mile six the race got hairy. That’s where we turned south again for four miles of twisting, turning, hilly running. I’d set a pretty good pace and was still running near the back of the first pack. By the sounds of people cheering in the distance, I could tell that the real leaders in this race were a mile or more ahead of us and running at a sub-six-minute pace. Once we hit the hills, people staggered. They weren’t incredibly steep hills like we had at Pokagon, but they were long enough that it really took the wind out of a lot of runners. I’d learned a lot about running hills at Parke County and Pokagon. Instead of slowing down and trying to keep the same stride length, I shortened my stride and kept the same rhythm. Yes, it meant I took half again as many steps going uphill and I moved slower, but it also meant I wasn’t stressing my legs as much with each stride. Then, when the road opened up to a downhill section, I lengthened stride to even longer than my normal stride, and really sailed.