Chapter 75: New Friends and Final Grades

The end of the semester suddenly arrived on my time horizon. In all three of my classes I asked for final papers to be submitted a week before final exams actually began. I was buying some time to actually read them and do an equitable job of grading them, rather than dealing with 26 undergrad and seven graduate student papers, plus the eight from my seminar. All dealt with creative writing in some way.

I did do something unique for the nine Extended Family members that were in my undergraduate class. They got a special assignment to write an erotic story based on the various precepts and principles that we’d talked about during my class.

My thinking was that if I had to read thirty-seven boring stories, I’d expire. Instead, I’d just as soon have a few of them be sexually spicy. I promised the group that I’d grad them on the same curve as the rest of the class, but told them about my perverted desire to have something interesting to read than an essay on some old teacher or someone’s great summer job the year before.

Thus, on the Thursday before final exams started, I had forty-one stories show up in my campus e-mail inbox. I downloaded them all to my computer. I would review each one in the ‘Review’ mode on my word processor so I could make comments and edits on my way through each one.

I sat in the living room beside the Christmas tree that we’d put up. Lynn and Karen had also decorated other areas of the house with holiday lights, pine boughs, candles, and ornaments. The place looked the most festive since a year or two before Nancy passed away.

In grading the papers, there were some key features I was looking for that were characteristic of creative writing. I sought realistic characters and at least one hero or luminary; I wanted to feel drawn into a unique plot or setting; sense some drama, conflict, and resolution – some major theme; be reading good English with verbs that avoided a passive voice; enjoy relatively short paragraphs; ride at some rapid pace through the piece; not feel I was reading irrelevant passages to the main purpose of the piece; and be learning something, if possible.

I picked one of the seven grad students to start with – Carla Cruz. She’d entitled the piece ‘The Most Influential Person In My Life ... So Far’. The eight-page story started with her at university looking for direction in her life. She meets a charismatic faculty member who takes her under his wing, and guides her with his wisdom and experience. In the end, she has found her calling, specifically writing women’s fiction that lead them to independence and leadership positions.

In her essay, I found it transparent that I was her ‘hero’. She’d even quoted me several times, and recounted a particular classroom session when I’d had a dialogue with her about one of the stories we’d read as a good example.

I didn’t assign a grade to her paper just yet. I wanted to see how some of the others had done. I also wondered about the obvious other agenda that Carla had. I was left with the impression after reading her paper that this was one step in a not so subtle seduction.

I read Amber’s story next – a fictional piece about a women her age that had vivid but sexual dreams, even with evidence of the sex appearing despite her being in a secure apartment. She’d entitled the piece ‘Dreams’ and I liked the character, the erotic theme, and how she ended the story with the character falling in love with her Dream Lover. The story had an emotional undercurrent about love and lust that carried the reader along.

I read Mark’s essay next. He wrote about Edison and the discovery of the light bulb. The theme was that errors and mistakes were good; he dwelled at length on Edison’s quote about knowing ten-thousand ways not to make a light bulb. The piece seemed long, dense, and too pedantic to hold my interest.

The morning continued and I was a little cross-eyed by lunch time. I was also having trouble staying awake. Most of the non-erotic stories were pretty boring. The ones that weren’t belonged to my nine Family members.

I baited myself with their stories. I’d read four of the other stories, making comments and editing, and then read one of erotic ones. That would perk me up. I was spending about twenty minutes on each story. With Electronic Post-It notes, I went back and assigned letter grades. If I were to discover a tilt in my grading curve that I didn’t like I could go back and review the grades I’d assigned.

I went Christmas shopping in the afternoon. Despite my dislike for shopping, it was better than reading mostly boring essays. When I got home, I spent an hour and read three more papers. On one of them, I wondered whether the student had even been awake during any of the class modules.

About three-thirty I headed to the nearby dojo where I’d been taking martial arts classes since the start of the semester. Jake had urged me to sign up. Originally, I’d planned to go twice a week, but then events in my life got in the way, so it was once a week. I felt I was going more for the discipline of learning something new than learning anything that was useable in self-protection.

Perhaps it was noteworthy that I had remained a white belt for thirteen weeks, while the rest of the martial arts students that started about when I had, had advanced one level beyond me. I wasn’t keeping up. Of course, the others in the class were between eight and sixteen years of age.

I made a New Year’s resolution to devote more time to the discipline.

I got back to the house about five p.m. from my lesson. I was still in my white gi, and only wearing thongs on my feet. The house was still pretty empty and no one had yet shown up for the cocktail hour before dinner. This was a weekday, too, so attendance was often only those in the house.

I went up to my bedroom to shower and change clothes. In the middle of the extra-large king-size bed in my bedroom lay a sexy mature woman – Paula. She was naked and slowly stroking her slit with a bumpy glass or acrylic dildo that looked sinful.

“Errr, hello Paula. Nice of you to drop by.” Everybody in the Family knew that we never locked the house and that they were always welcome to come in, but this was a little over the top.

“I dropped by hoping for a quickie with you. You look handsome and so dangerous in that karate suit.”

I chuckled at her comment. “I would be my own worst enemy ... and before we do anything, I would kind of need some indication from Ken that he’d be fine with our having romantic interludes without him being around. I do hope to know you better, but we’ve only been together one night and that was kind of unique for everyone concerned, I believe.”

Paula’s face dropped. “But ... I thought this was kind of a free love zone I wanted a repeat of what we did a few nights ago.”

I smiled and took Paula’s free hand in mine. I gave it a kiss. “Perhaps you remember the old adage ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ I think that applies universally. Also, ‘free’ in the Extended Family also includes being responsible to each other and to ourselves – acting responsibly.

“My responsibility to both you and Ken is to be sure that you sanction each other’s romps with others – that you’ve talked over the options and scenarios and have agreed, especially when one of you is not present. I wouldn’t want any of us in the Family to be the cause of marital discord. It would also help to hear part of that discussion with him, especially whether there are any boundaries or limits, such as acting alone or away from the other.”

“I asked you a question about boundaries,” Paula said tentatively.

“You did, and I started my reply by saying ‘It depends’ as I recall. We do have limits and boundaries. For instance, I don’t want to disrespect anybody in the Family or my friends by doing something they would feel is inappropriate. With new people that want to belong to the Family, we are all somewhat timorous in how we approach and develop our relationships with them.”

Paula sat up, “Do you vote on membership or something?” I could tell from the sound of her voice that she was a little miffed.

I sat on the bed and patted the space beside me. She slid into the space and I put my arm around her naked body.

“There’s no vote, but we listen and watch how each of us interact with somebody new. Is there warmth and love there – and I don’t mean lust? I can say that I’ve heard nothing but positive comments about you and Ken after last Friday, but ... well, let me recommend that the two of you again come back for Friday’s dinner party.” I gave her a lustful look; “Now, if you’re at all interested, I need somebody to help wash my back while I clean up from my workout at the dojo.”

Paula was helpful, and we mostly didn’t engage sexually ... well, only a few kisses and lots of touching, but no penetration. I made her promise to tell Ken about the shower and our conversation.

We dressed and went downstairs together, got a couple of raised eyebrows from Lynn and Karen along with smirks, and I served us all some white wine. As usual, I took mine over a few ice cubes.

Paula left to greet her husband after saying hello to the others that had arrived home while we’d been upstairs.

I didn’t see Paula again until Friday at cocktail time. She arrived with an immense bowl of shelled and deveined shrimp and some of the spiciest cocktail sauce to go with it that I’d ever tasted. She laced a jar cocktail sauce with half a jar of horseradish. One taste and my sinuses cleared out for the rest of the year.

We set up the shrimp dish on the bar where everyone could sample. I put some small plastic cocktail plates, toothpicks, and napkins up so people could take several.

Ken carried in a case of expensive wine. He explained, “Last week we didn’t contribute that much to the meal, so we’re making up for it this week. We had such a good time.” He gave me a lecherous grin.

I opened one of the bottles from the case and poured us all a glass of wine. The wine was wonderful.

As we drank, Ken talked in a low voice to me. “Did you really turn down fucking my wife when she was throwing her body at you a couple of days ago?” He had a devilish grin, so I figured that things were all right.

I nodded. “I wasn’t sure you two were fully in harmony with the way the Extended Family operates, especially concerning spontaneous sex and lovemaking. I didn’t want to do something that you hadn’t sanctioned yet. I don’t believe in ‘ownership’ but I do believe in relationship harmony.”

I nodded my head at the other end of the patio, near the pool cabana. In the afternoon shadows beside the cabana Lincoln and Chris were locked together in the missionary position. They were naked, of course, but their lovemaking wasn’t obvious unless you knew where to look.

Ken jerked when he finally saw them. “Oh! Yeah, well ... I guess what I heard about anytime was true.”

I explained my concern to Ken and he clarified for me. He said, “Hopefully, the Family will become ‘our’ Family, too. I know that Paula and I are safe here, and I trust all of you, so please make her happy. I will never need to be around or be consulted. We make our own decisions about how we live.”

I posed, “And if you should be here sometime, and decide to be with one of the other women, how will Paula take that?”

Ken shrugged. “We talked about that. It’s not an issue. We want each other to be loved, even by others, and to have fun.” He paused, “Paula said that you talked about boundaries. We talked about the kind of boundaries that we might put in place, and none of them fit us.” He paused and grinned, “So, the bottomline, and Paula asked me to be specific with you, is that if she shows up in your bed again you are to fuck her brains out in as many ways, and as many times as you can.” He laughed.