Chapter 1: The Bridge Club

“Cullie, can you set up the bridge table? Thank you. You’re a dear!”

Cullum Doyle rolled his eyes at his mother’s request. Alison Doyle hadn’t really been asking. It had been more of a very polite order. It was the third Friday of the month, and it was her night to host the bridge club. She was running late, as always, and needed the living room set up.

Alison left her nineteen-year-old son in their living room and headed into her bedroom to change. He knew the routine from previous bridge matches. Cullie pulled the folding table from the back of the guest closet and unfolded it in the living room, and then followed with four folding chairs. Those got seat cushions because his Aunt Amanda had said, “We need cushions for our cushions!” That had gotten a fair bit of laughter, but Cullie figured it was because the women had all been drinking punch at the time.

A second folding table came out for snacks and punch. He went to the kitchen and pulled out the makings of rum punch. It was simple and powerful, orange juice, pineapple juice, grenadine, Seven-Up, and a bottle of rum. He sampled it and found it acceptable, and then began filling some large bowls with chips, crackers, and cheesy poofs. He took it all out to the living room, just in time for the doorbell to ring and the door to open.

“Hi, Cullie. Where’s your mom?” It was ‘Aunt’ June Howard, his mother’s oldest and closest friend. She wasn’t one to wait for the door to be opened. June was forty-one, the same age as Alison, but much smaller. She was barely five-foot-one and slender, with short brown hair and blue eyes. That was a marked contrast to Alison, who was five-foot-six, blonde and blue-eyed, and was at least thirty pounds heavier. June was wearing skin-tight slacks and a bright red top.

Cullie hooked a thumb towards the master bedroom. “Mom’s running late.”

“Alison was probably born late, too,” replied June. “I’ll go roust her out.” She went towards the bedroom and barged in, eliciting a squeal of outrage that made Cullie laugh.

The next two members of the bridge club arrived together. The doorbell rang and Cullie opened it to find Janet Baker and Amanda Winslow standing there. Cullie looked in the driveway and only saw four cars, his, his mother’s, Aunt June’s, and a fourth. “Come on in. Whose car is that?”

“Mine,” said Janet. “I just picked it up on Monday and gave Amanda a lift.”

“Cool.”

Both women kissed his cheek as they passed through. Janet was forty-two, five-foot-five, with shoulder-length blonde hair, brown eyes, and a very nicely shaped body that she had admitted to the club was courtesy of plastic surgery. Her husband had paid for it all but spent almost all his time traveling for business. Amanda was his actual aunt, his mother’s younger sister, thirty-eight, with auburn hair and brown eyes, and was the tallest of the group at five-foot-seven. She was also nicely shaped, though she swore her figure was still original equipment. Both women were wearing skinny jeans and tank tops.

Alison followed June into the living room. She had changed from the old shorts and t-shirt she had cleaned the house in into a tight pair of slacks and a sleeveless cardigan that was also tight. “Cullie! Thank you! Everything looks wonderful!”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Are you sticking around or were you going out?”

“Nothing planned. Maybe once school starts, and I can meet some new people.”

“Excellent! We have our slave labor for the night!” exclaimed Amanda.

“You make that so appealing,” the teen replied.

That just got him some laughs. He excused himself and went up to his room to retrieve his laptop. He took it downstairs and stashed himself in a corner of the living room.

The Doyles lived in what had begun as a two-bedroom Cape Cod house with an attached garage in Guilderland. Cape Cods were a popular style in upstate New York, since the steep roof shed heavy snow efficiently. Like most such homes, the public rooms - the living room, kitchen, dining room, laundry, and a half-bath - were downstairs; upstairs were the private rooms - two bedrooms and a full bath. Five years ago, Alison and her husband Joe had done an extensive remodeling of the house. The garage, attached at the gable end off the kitchen and laundry room, was gutted and converted to a master suite, with a large bedroom and a deluxe master bath.

When they moved down to the master suite, they decided to convert the upstairs into an apartment. Cullie was fourteen and would be going off to college in a few years. Even if he went to Albany State and lived at home, four years later he would be graduating and moving out. Then they could rent out the upstairs, or if they sold the house, they could sell it as a duplex. Their old bedroom was converted to a small living-room/dining-room/kitchenette combo. They even had a covered set of stairs built up the gable end of the house to allow entrance without going through the house. Some of the changes weren’t done with a building permit or zoning approval, but none of the residents planned to call the codes officer to mention it.

With his parents now living downstairs and with a private entrance to his apartment Cullie had a lot more privacy than his fellow high school classmates. That became very useful when he began dating. Joe and Alison told him they would allow guests, but no parties, and bad behavior would cancel the privilege. Then Joe took him down to the local Walgreens and purchased a box of condoms and said, “You can buy your own from now on.”

Cullie struggled to keep the grin off his face, and simply said, “Yes, sir.”

“And use them, too. Your mother and I don’t want to hear from either doctors or shotgun-toting fathers, understand?”

“Understood!”

Cullie was a good-looking kid, a jock at nearby Guilderland High School, on the cross-country team in the fall and the lacrosse team in the spring. He was big, too, standing six-foot-two and packing 195 pounds onto a frame that was slender except for his wide-set shoulders. He had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes that more than a few cheerleaders liked. Cullie got to test drive his new condoms a couple of weeks later when Kerry Browning invited herself over and deflowered her latest conquest. Cullie was an eager student to this new form of sex education and worked hard at learning as many lessons as he could. Once he got his driver’s license and could borrow his mother’s minivan, he had a place to take girls that didn’t involve finding a deserted place to park. The girls appreciated this immensely, especially after he upgraded his bed from a twin to a queen.

Part of what made him popular with the girls was an extensive theoretical knowledge of what was involved. While Kerry had introduced him to the wonderful practicalities, before that he had learned quite a bit from his parents. They had married young, and he had been born when they were only twenty-two, and Joe and Alison were enthusiastic in their pursuit of carnal pleasure with each other. It was a rare evening when they didn’t have sex, and they weren’t silent about it, either. Their bedroom door had a latch that frequently came open, and Cullie saw his parents screwing on more than one occasion when he headed to the bathroom.

In theory, when they moved to the downstairs bedroom, the problem should have been taken care of. Instead, they now had an entire first floor to fool around in, and a couple of times Cullie came down the back stairs to the kitchen for a snack and heard his parents getting nasty in the living room. They also had an extensive collection of porn DVDs, including a few they had made of themselves, and Cullie had snuck a few up to his room and copied them to blank DVDs. Once Kerry showed him exactly what two people could accomplish, Cullie put his theoretical knowledge to work, and his female classmates appreciated it.

The Doyles had an almost idyllic life, at least until 2020 arrived. Beginning in January, rumors of a new disease, a Chinese flu, began to sound. Within a few months the rumors of something called Covid-19 became true, and by the end of March much of New York was shut down. It had been difficult for the family, like for every other family. Cullie had to finish his senior year online, which was a disaster, but he graduated. Joe’s sales business all but collapsed. Alison still had her job in the Registrar’s office at Albany State, even though all the students were online.

Joe’s business became a moot point in mid-April when he contracted the virus. Within two days of the initial fever and cough, hazmat-suited medical people were taking him to Albany Medical Center in an ambulance. That was bad enough, but the worst was yet to come. Joe was directed to the Intensive Care Unit; two days later he was on a ventilator. Family members weren’t allowed to see him or talk to him or be with him, not even if they suited up in heavy gear. A week later Joe Doyle died in the middle of the night without even a nurse holding his hand. He was buried without any family attending.

It was devastating to the family. Joe and Alison had never been able to have any other children, so it was just Alison and Cullie. Alison went into a severe depression for several months. Cullie helped as much as possible, but it took her until August to get out of her funk and become completely functional. Cullie skipped a year of college rather than try to attend online. When vaccines were first readily available to their age group in late April of 2021, both Alison and Cullie signed up for them.

It was now mid-August of 2021 and Cullie was scheduled for the fall semester, a year after he originally planned to attend Albany State. It was barely fifteen minutes from home, so he didn’t need to live in a dorm. He had planned to try out for the cross-country team, but any hopes of a scholarship were dashed by the coronavirus. He needed to live at home, drive his father’s Corolla, and save some money. Still, having his own apartment only fifteen minutes from college wouldn’t hurt if he managed to talk a girl into a date. Given a choice between kicking a roommate out or visiting a nicely furnished apartment with a bed twice the size of the standard college dorm bed, it was a no-brainer. Then throw in that Cullie had learned how to cook, and it was Seduction Central! All he needed to do was get to school and meet a few girls.