Chapter 1: The Beginning

It started innocently enough, at least for Don. His best friend and next door neighbor, Joe Morgan, stopped by one Friday night and asked if they could talk. He said he had a family problem, and hoped Don could help. That is, it took Joe two beers to get up the nerve to talk about it. After hemming and hawing half an hour he finally got to the point. His problem was, Joe was firing blanks in bed.

Don had known Joe and Jenny were trying to have kids. It seemed to be the only thing Jenny and Don's wife Diane could talk about. Anyway that was all Diane reported to Don. No man could be privy to all two lifelong best girlfriends talked about. Jenny getting pregnant had been a prime objective for over a year now, and the Jenny was getting pretty depressed.

After the third beer, Joe confessed to Don that he had gone to a Doctor and checked his own ability to have kids. Bluntly, if he was expected to father a child, the best they could hope for was another divine conception. Joe had a ridiculously low sperm count. It was so low, the Doctor called it a negative count. It could have been from one of several things that had happened to him as a teenager. But the exact cause wasn't important. The bald truth was he wasn't going to give any woman a kid.

He loved Jenny, and she was getting desperate to be a mother. Joe was afraid when she learned about his being sterile, Jenny might be so despondent and desperate she would consider leaving him. Jenny tested fertile. She tested very fertile. And she wasn't stupid, so she already suspected the problem had to be with her man.

Joe and Jenny had discussed, talked over lots of solutions. Adoption was one, which was Ok for Jenny, but Joe wanted any kid of theirs to have at least one of their genes. Artificial insemination was way beyond their means, so Joe had started thinking of -alternatives.

"Don," Joe finally said, turning to his buddy, "this is going to be hard to say, and you've got to think of all the aspects. I have a proposition for you, and if you get cute and joke about this you and I may have some serious trouble. But I read about this on the net, on one of those sex sites. Some guy had the same problem I have and he asked his best friend to put a kid in the guy's wife. They had a real sneaky way of going about it, and neither wife knew what was going on. It started me thinking, and damned if it didn't make a kind of sense."

Joe wiped the wet off the can and then popped the top off another beer then continued, "You and I are pretty alike. I'm taller, but our coloring is pretty much the same and people are always joking about how we look like brothers. I think it would work, and I know I could trust you. But there could be some problems, if you did it. For one, you'd know the kid was yours. 'Course your son thinks I'm his second daddy anyway, and I figured any kids I had would feel the same way about you anyway. All I ask is for you to think about it. Let me know next week. Jenny and I are heading over to her folks tomorrow for the weekend, so think it over and let's talk about it next Saturday."

Don sputtered a bit. He had choked on a mouthful of beer when Joe told him what his solution was. They talked for a bit, until Joe figured the best thing was for him to leave and let Don think it over. They could rehash it next weekend. He was pretty sure Don would say yes. He knew his buddy would never make a move on Jenny, but she was a stone fox. And guys were guys, after all.

And Don did think about it. Jenny was a fox, almost as much as his Diane. Like happens in all marriages sometimes, Diane and he were in one of the down phases right then. They had known one another for ages, dating all through high school and married now for eight years. They had gone through spots before where they found one another less exciting, but something always happened and the thrills came back. He knew that, so wasn't worried that the fun had left their marriage. It was just that they were going through the motions in bed the last few months. Working too many hours, a couple of things had come up around the house, all straightened out now. It would just take time, but eventually they would be salivating after one another again.

Another thing, he wasn't sure how his conscience would rest if he made it with another gal. He supposed it would work out OK under the circumstances but he couldn't be sure. He didn't want to do it and then find out he had screwed his marriage in addition to Jenny. Another problem was how he would be able to behave to Jenny, knowing he'd stupped her. The biggest problem, maybe, how would he handle knowing Joe's kid was really his. The thing was, they were next door neighbors and it was true David, his son, while loving him as his daddy, treated Joe like a second father. It gave the kid an advantage over the other kids in the neighborhood because Joe was around to help when Don couldn't be. No matter who knocked Jenny up, he knew he would be almost as close to Joe's kids as Joe was. So maybe that wouldn't be that much of a problem.