Chapter 127

“The only way to be free from the fear of surveillance is to be absolutely harmless”
—Claire North, The Sudden Appearance of Hope

I HARDLY NOTICED Election Day come and go. At sixteen, I couldn’t vote. Livy did. Rachel was mad because she wouldn’t have the vote for another five days. A woman got elected president, so they were all happy. I tried to pay more attention to the politics but the differences between the candidates seemed so slight that it was a toss-up as far as I could see. The big thing she campaigned on was normalizing relations with our southern neighbors. It seemed that normal at the moment included Texas ranchers trading shots with Mexican hombres manning the wall.

The International Court of Public Opinion still held the US to blame for the border hostilities and the liberal media kept ranting about Mexico having a right to defend its border against aggressive US Imperialists. It sounded so much like Vietnam era rhetoric I expected the Mexican president to be named Nguyen.

Friday night, Rachel and I had our date to go see Desi in The Fishbowl. All right. We all went. But I sat next to Rachel and held her hand while we laughed ourselves silly at the ‘Hoosier farce.’ I thought about how the play would have been received in V1’s world and looked around to see if there were any armed protesters. Didn’t see anyone.

The play took place in a small town in Indiana where a new minister had just arrived to take over the local congregation leadership. He was a recent seminary graduate and wore a clerical collar. The whole farce was based around his wife, actor friend, and helpful neighbors, all thinking it was funny that he would dress so formally and teasing him by dressing in clerical collars as well. A constant state of confusion ensued as none of the characters knew the others were playing this game and compromising situations developed as a minister exited stage left and another entered stage right.

Add an old man who showed up on Saturday nights to drink with the preacher and argue about Daylight Saving Time, and an unexplained woman in a hijab who kept wandering through and looking in windows as if she was waiting for her cue. Which never came.

I could see churches protesting, mosques protesting, alcoholics protesting, and homophobes protesting if this had taken place in V1’s reality. Someone would have started shooting. There was even a scene when the old man is looking in the preacher’s desk for his bottle of whiskey when you think he was planting a bomb.

They didn’t miss many opportunities to poke fun at people and it was just ridiculous enough that we couldn’t stop laughing.

After the show, we all got to kiss Desi and she chose Sophie to go with her to the cast party while the rest of us went out for burgers.

I took Rachel to a motel.

Stupid, right? Neither her parents nor my parents objected to us sleeping together in each other’s bed. Either Nanette or Donna would have given us a room in their homes. I still had the bed made up in the back of the truck. Five beds to choose from and I took her to a motel.

I’d done some investigating and discovered a decent place I could afford that had a pool, room service, and a bridal suite. I picked her up at the door to our room and carried her inside at midnight.

“Happy eighteenth birthday to you, my love!” I said. She was giggling so hard she could hardly breathe but kept a firm hold of my neck as she planted rows of kisses up my jaw.

“You’re crazy and I love you! For three weeks, I’ve felt like we were the same age and now I’m a cradle-robber again,” she laughed.

“I’m going to rock your cradle,” I said, carrying her to the bed. “And if I can, I’ll rock your world.”

“Big talk for a guy who still has his clothes on!” she said. She rolled away from me and began stripping off her clothing as quickly as possible. I joined her in undressing and, in a minute, we were naked and crawling across the bed to meet each other in the middle.

“I thought about stealing a couple of those clerical collars after the show to see if that was all it took for an effective disguise.”

“It must be. I didn’t even notice the preacher was white and his best friend the actor was black. They looked just the same.”

“And the short Mexican woman next door looked just as tall as the men,” I laughed. “You would never have known who was in bed with you.”

Rachel reached down and stroked my cock as we kissed.

“Somehow, I think I could tell,” she whispered. “I love you, Jacob.” We got down to some serious kissing as we lay back on the fifty or so pillows on the bed.

“I wonder if I could ever have loved you like this without the old man’s memories of you in his life. He was so filled with regrets.”

“Do you struggle to keep your lives separate? Having someone else’s memories of a different time must be confusing. I want you to know that I don’t care who he was or what he did. All I care about is what’s in here and here.” She pointed at my head and heart. Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? In my head, I still had the old man rattling around trying to spoil everyone’s fun. I argued with myself all the time, even struggling not to feel guilty about renting a motel room. In my heart, I was seventeen and in love. And in love. And in love.

“The biggest thing that I struggle with is feeling like I’m cheating on you when I’m with Donna or Desi. Or any of the others,” I said. “The old man would have been horrified that I would mess around with someone else when I’m so deeply in love with you.”

“Jacob, I love you, but you must understand that I’m not about to give up those yummy pussies to be exclusively with you. Have you tasted Nanette after a run? Put your cock in me, I just spritzed.” I slid smoothly into Rachel’s steamy core and she sighed. “I know you love me, darling. I know I love you. And I know we both love all our girlfriends and would never do anything to hurt one of them—even the ones we don’t have sex with, like Cindy. Yet.”

“No. Not gonna happen.”

“Not yet. She and all the rest of us know she’s not ready for intimacy. She’s physically maturing rapidly. But emotionally, she’s at least a year behind where any of the others in our group are. Maybe more. It comes from leading such a sheltered and isolated life with her music,” Rachel said. I continued slow even movements in and out of her pussy. When we really made love, it wasn’t an act of just our genitals. We engaged intellectually and philosophically. The sensations coming from our middle served to heighten the experience instead of overwhelm it. “But you have to admit, she already has a crush on you. You are her defender. You established that at the cast party after Masque last year. And she trusts you not to try anything she’s not ready for. But one day, my love, you will turn around and discover you are naked in her arms and she’s become a woman.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to complicate Cindy’s life or that of any of my pod mates. Turn around and discover I’m naked in her arms? I suppose. One day I turned around and discovered she was a member of our pod. Everything is possible.

The intense possibility of an orgasm was now making its presence known. Rachel and I kissed as I kept the even tempo of our joining that she liked so much. At this pace, we could both feel the pressure steadily building toward our release and if possible, we’d keep the tempo all the way through our orgasm.

“I love making love like this,” I whispered. “You are the only one who I connect to in this way.”

“Yes. I can feel you swelling and getting ready to come in me. I know that when your first spurt touches my cervix, I’ll be unable to restrain myself and everything will flow over in my love for you. Where we are now is where we belong. Fill me, Jacob. I’m yours.”

We lost the ability for words for a few minutes as both our bodies contracted and then expanded in orgasmic bliss.

Rachel took her NSAT—required within thirty days of her eighteenth birthday—the following Friday. She felt comfortable with the testing and was certain she’d be on an accounting track. She didn’t hide her ability with numbers, even though she wasn’t taking Calculus. But it was her analytical mind that could cut through a myriad of data to get the essentials that would make her invaluable in an accounting office. She was already handling all the accounts for Marvel and Hopkins, including now paying a small fee to John for his services. We were up to nearly a thousand dollars a month in subscriptions.

Livy was creating a lot of organizational structure for us. She’d taken my elementary plan from when I took Intro to Entrepreneurship to Mr. Bryce and discussed the realities now that we actually had a product and were selling it. He was guiding her through the thought process of integrating all the new features into the business plan and formalizing a corporate entity.

And Betty was working with Donna. That was a bit of a surprise when she showed up at our pod gathering Saturday and actually asked how Donna wanted to handle requests for us to perform. That took us all back a step. The only live performances Cindy and I had planned were playing with the high school orchestra. She also played with the community orchestra but we weren’t together on that. Maestro Sokolov had no desire to add a guitar to his orchestra as he had a perfectly wonderful harpist.