Chapter 15

Bobby looked at the circle of women ... at the five pairs of eyes staring at him. He noticed how quiet it was in the house, almost as if he had gone deaf. Mavis shifted in her seat, and the rustle of her skirts and creak of the chair came as a remarkably welcome sound.

There wasn't anything to do but sit in that empty chair waiting for him. Bobby didn't want to do that. But he knew he had to. He owed that to them, at a minimum. And he knew he'd tell the truth. He owed them that too.

Feeling tense, like when he knew he'd get a beating, he sat. No one noticed the irony of the fact that he didn't speak until spoken to.

That ... conversation, to put it gently, would make a story all by itself. There developed, during the hour that they bombarded him with questions, the full range of emotions that women are capable of. There was anger, and disappointment, and curiosity. Remembered incidents were discussed, sometimes as if he weren't even there any more. Donna's participation with Bobby at Prudence's house came out in the process and, red faced, she defended her actions by pointing out the actions of the rest.

The women wanted to be angry. In their minds they had the right to be angry... should be angry. And being duped was the least of what Bobby had done to them. There were, in a sense, eleven people in the room. Five of them were nestled deep inside five of the others, floating, unconcerned, warm and safe. The women carrying them, though, were not so serene, and they wanted to blame their condition on Bobby.

But try as they could to be angry with him for his deception, all of those women had loved him on some level, and been loved back, and his answers about why he had done what he had done did nothing to suggest that he had preyed upon them. They questioned him closely about his life before Milleson House, and his experience with women before he came there, half expecting that he was some Lothario who had taken advantage of them. It became clear, however, as all their sexual exploits were finally aired publicly, that the opposite was true.

They had exploited him. Not that he had cared. Quite the opposite in fact, but it was clear that the only reason they were all pregnant with his babies was because of their emotional needs, and his willingness to meet them.

Finally Mavis told him to go on to bed.

"Are you going to send me away?" he asked, standing. At this point he expected that ... feared that ... but also felt like he deserved it.

Mavis snorted. "You'll be seventeen in what, two months? I couldn't get the paperwork through in that time."

Her comment did not suggest that he was still welcome.

"I could just go on the road," he said. "If that would make things better."

"No!" said Sally firmly. "You'll not go off and leave us all here alone." It wasn't clear exactly what she meant by that. There was some muttering, but Bobby couldn't understand the words.

"Off to bed," ordered Mavis. "We have more talking to do."

Bobby went to bed, but he couldn't get to sleep right away, even though he felt very lucky to still have a soft, warm place to sleep. He could still hear the occasional muttering voices of the women down below. More than once those voices rose to a scale where he could hear a word or two clearly.

He stared at the ceiling in the dark, trying not to listen.

He had finally nodded off when the door to his room opened. Someone came in. She smelled like Sally. There was the rustle of clothing, and a naked body climbed into bed with him. He was right. It was Sally.

He was, to put it mildly, astonished.

He was still wearing his night shirt, and her hand snaked down, and under it, to slid up to his chest, passing by his flaccid penis. She felt warm against him.

"You can't go off and leave me alone," she said to his cheek. "No one has ever made me feel like you do." She snuggled more, and her hand played with his skin. "I'd curl up and die if you left," she said.

"I don't want to leave," he said into her hair.

"It's still so strange to hear your voice," she said. "Will you make love to me?"

"Yes," he said.

She tugged and pulled at his shirt, getting it off of him, and melted against him. Their lovemaking was slow and gentle, with her starting on top and then pulling him over on top of her.

"We won't be able to do this much longer," she said from under him. "I'm going to get too big for you to be on top."

"I wish I could marry you," murmured Bobby. "Then we could do this forever."

Sally's hands, which had been on his chest, holding him up off of her swelling belly clenched his skin, almost painfully as she froze and she gasped.

"What's wrong?" he asked, glad that he could voice his question.

"You'd marry me?" she said in a tiny reedy voice.

"They'd never let me marry you," he sighed.

It was a frozen tableau in the dark as silence stretched. Her fingers still gripped his skin painfully, but he didn't care.

"Why not Bobby?" she asked.

He thought about that. "I guess I just thought I'd always be an orphan," he said. "I'm not used to thinking about making my own decisions." Her knees came up and hugged his sides as her pussy squeezed at his prick. "If I could ... would you marry me?" he asked, his heart in his throat.

There was another agonizing moment of frozen silence and then he felt her body go limp as she drew in a lungful of air.

"Yes!!" she screamed. "Oh yes, Bobby, yes!"

There was the thump of feet hitting the floor next door in Meg's room, then the sound of the door opening, the hinges squeaking lightly. Bobby's door opened again and Meg was standing there.

"Bobby?" she asked. "Sally? What's going on?"

Sally clutched Bobby to her.

"Bobby just asked me to marry him," she said in a completely normal voice. "And I said yes!" She yelled the last word.

"Shhhh, " scolded Meg. Then "What?! Did you say marry you?"

"Yes!" yelled Sally again, joyously.

Meg felt a rush of emotions run through her body. It seemed as if the baby jumped in her womb, even though it was too early for that to be happening. She felt jealousy, then joy, then worry, all in a rush. She wanted to be elated for her friend, but she wasn't sure she should be.

"Quiet down!" she scolded. "You're going to wake up everybody in the house!"

"I'll be good," said Sally in a quiet voice that sounded more like one of her small female charges than an adult. Then she started giggling, and then laughing until she covered her mouth with both hands.

Meg closed the door and stood, listening, not so much to Bobby and Sally, but to see if any of the children had gotten up, or if Mavis had heard Sally's shouts and was coming up to investigate. When she heard nothing she shook her head. The bedsprings in Bobby's room were making a racket now. As she went back to her room she found her hands molded to the swell of her own belly, holding her baby ... Bobby's baby. She wished more than anything that Jimmy was here, so he could make her bedsprings sing too.

In the morning Sally took the first opportunity to face Mavis and announce that she couldn't make Bobby leave, because she was going to marry him.

Mavis passed through the shock of the announcement almost instantly as the sense of that hit her. Why hadn't she thought about that? Oh, there had been that one time, when she and Meg had talked of marriage, but that was in the abstract. Why hadn't any of the women seriously thought about that? She thought about herself, being wed to a seventeen year old, and wanted to giggle. That wouldn't work. Not for her anyway. But it was perfect for Sally. And Bobby would get to stay. No one could gainsay him if he were a married man, with a job. She slumped as she realized that, of them all, she was the only one likely to end up as an unwed mother. In her own self pity she forgot about Donna.

Sally had watched Mavis' face closely as all that flitted through her mind. She knew her employer well, and she saw that slump for what it was.

"You can still see him," she said, clutching Mavis' sleeve. "I'll still share."

"You must be joking," said Mavis, shocked.

"Not at all," said Sally, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to say in 1945. "If it weren't for you, Bobby would never have come here. You let him stay. You and I both know I'd have ended up as an old maid. Now I have a baby on the way, and I'm going to have a husband, and my life is going to be full of joy. All because of you. I couldn't do anything else but share him with you."

"That's crazy," said Mavis. But at the same time her heart leapt. When she was with Bobby in bed she was happier than at almost any other time.

"And if you want to have more babies, you can," said Sally. "I know I'm going to. I'm going to have as many as I can!"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves here," cautioned Mavis. "Bobby may have something to say about this."

"Bobby loves us all," said Sally firmly. "We talked last night, in bed." She didn't blush at her admission, which she would have before. Her self confidence was as high as it had ever been in her life. "He's worried because he loves all of us, and he's afraid we all hate him now."

Sally's eyes looked startled for an instant as she reflected on what she'd just said.

"Well, not me. He knows I love him. I made that clear." Now she did blush.

"I don't think any of us hate him," said Mavis. "We might be perturbed with him, but nobody hates him."

"Well, nobody told him that last night," said Sally. "We talked for hours. He was still afraid you'd send him away. But you can't. He's my fiancé now."

"I wasn't going to send him anywhere," snorted Mavis. "He's almost a man. He's got a job, and he made a whole lot of babies around here. He needs to be here. This is where he belongs."

Then her eyes got round as the full impact of everything that had been said hit her. He could stay... would stay ... and she'd still get to be with him sometimes. She hugged Sally tightly. "I'm so happy for you," she said.

The mood in the house improved markedly that day. To those of us in this modern day it seemes inconcievable that Sally would do what she did, but remember that these women had been through years and years of self denial, and sacrifice, and times so hard we have no concept of what that was like. Sally went to each woman, explaining that, while she was going to marry Bobby when he turned seventeen, on the 5th of August, 1945, until then, and quite possibly after then, the women would have access to Bobby if they so desired. She didn't exactly encourage that. She simply stated it, and told the women that Bobby loved them all. After lunch she went to see Rachel, who, when she was finally able to unburden herself to somebody about whose baby she was carrying, cried with relief. Sally hugged her, suggesting that now they were sisters ... all of them.

The wedding caused a sensation in town. Many people had tried to figure out how all those women at the Milleson House could turn up pregnant, more or less within the same time frame. Many just believed that the soldiers had caused it when they spread their wild oats before being shipped out again. But when people found out that one of the women was going to marry the orphan boy - the one who couldn't talk, but then who experienced some kind of miraculous cure and, all of a sudden, could talk - minds began looking at things another way. Suspicion abounded, and that was probably one reason why Sally's wedding was the best attended wedding in Hampstead history.