Chapter 2

It was two years later, almost to the day, when I woke up in bed. I found myself spooned against Marty’s lovely back. I was lying on my right side and my left arm was around her body with my left hand cupping her perfect tit.

Lazily I reflected on the previous two years.

First, the demolition and reconstruction of the house had taken almost 18 months. About all that was left of the original structure was the façade and the two sides of the house — everything that could be seen from the street. The entire structure had been rebuilt with structural steel and reinforced concrete although no one could tell the difference to look at it.

For example, the entrance hall and the curved staircase across from the door appeared to duplicate what had originally been there. Although the floor of the entrance hall was hardwood beautifully laid in a herringbone pattern — it was both the original design and the original flooring — it had been reconstructed like a professional basketball court. The flooring was not actually attached to the floor. Instead, it sat on a reinforced-concrete floor with the wood separated from the concrete by thousands of tiny rubber feet. The result was a resilience when walking that was far better than the original hardwood while maintaining the incredibly deep and rich wood finish. There’s something about old wood (and flooring) that even today’s technology cannot duplicate. And with the sweep of the curved staircase the restored portraits of my ancestors, and the priceless oriental rug centered on the floor, the entry was magnificent ... if I do say so myself.

The house originally had high ceilings because of the correctly-perceived need to do something about the summer’s heat. The ceilings are still high — although not quite as high — to conceal an incredibly elaborate system of heating and cooling ducts that now run throughout the house. Although there is no audible sound, the air in the house is changed and run through a complex series of filters at least six times an hour. And if there were to be a crowd in the house — a party, for example — the controls automatically speed up the air exchangers to compensate. It’s really pretty neat.

Electric power? Oh, yeah. That’s a funny one. Originally Marty intended to use regular electric power with an emergency diesel generator for backup. But then she had an idea. As a result, a well was drilled in the back corner of my land where the emergency generator was to be spotted, and guess what? We found a small pool of natural gas! Not nearly enough for commercial use, but enough to keep us going for a few hundred years. The gas powers two gas-turbine generators, each of which could handle at least double our electric power requirements. But we have two so one can be down for maintenance and that other good stuff. Electric power consumption? I really don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we use more every hour than I used to use in a month.

One more thing: We also use our own gas for cooking, water heating, and as a heating-system backup to the array of heat pumps we have. Honestly, I’ve never bothered to count how many heat pump units we have, but the answer is lots. The only things we get from the street are water and sewer connections. Although we even have our own emergency supply of water: our swimming pool. It’s an Olympic short-course pool — 25 meters by 8 lanes — and is about 2 meters deep, end to end. And you know what? That’s really a lot of water. Moreover, it was filled by tank trucks coming down from Maine with spring water. And there’s a huge underground water tank that holds the makeup water used to maintain the water level in the face of evaporation. Then, of course, the pool is heated to extend its use, and there is also massive refrigeration machinery to cool it in the summer to keep the pool from feeling like a warm bath.

When the contractors started clearing the land, I was amazed at how large the lot turned out to be. We recovered a great expanse of land just by taking out overgrown shrubbery in the back of the property.

Remember our driveway? The one I was afraid to allow a taxi to drive on? It was completely rebuilt in a fashion that looked to me like they were building a piece of the interstate highway system. The contractor dug out the original driveway ... and kept digging. I don’t know how deep they went, but it was deep. Then they just dumped load after load of crushed stone while a highway-sized roller kept compacting it as it was dumped. Finally it was surfaced with crushed gravel and rolled and compacted and rolled and compacted... ad infinitum. The end result was a very smooth but porous surface that’s a pleasure to drive on — a car’s tires don’t even leave an impression — and not even too bad to walk on barefoot.

It turned out that Martha has capabilities in areas beyond belief. In addition, though, when she doesn’t know something, she invariably has a friend or acquaintance who does. Indeed, an individual who is world-class on the subject, whatever the subject might be.

Oh, yeah ... us. Why, you may wonder, did I wake up spooned up against Marty with my hand cupping her tit? That goes back to getting me in shape. It all started almost two years earlier, beginning at a health club close to Marty’s old apartment. She decided almost the very first day that I needed to get in shape. (What’s “get in shape” mean? I remember wondering when she brought the subject up.) Well, now I know ... I really know! She started me working out on machines at the club, and it hasn’t stopped yet. We have more and better equipment downstairs in our fitness room than the club had. It’s pretty nice, too.

One of the things that we did was to reconfigure the land contours somewhat. The house was raised a bit so it now sits higher than it used to, although not enough higher to be noticeable. At the same time, the land level at the rear of the house was lowered enough so that our exercise room opens on the pool patio, as does our game room. It’s pretty nice.

But I was telling you about getting in shape. I think I mentioned that I used to be stooped over with my shoulders rolled forward. Well, I guess Marty finally got tired of constantly telling me to stand up straight. Since we spent most of our time together naked — she insists that it was the only way she can get a good look at my posture — whenever I slumped — which was almost all the time at first — she would slap my closest tit as a reminder. I guess she got tired of that, too — she claimed it was hurting her hand — so she got a crop that she would use to hit my tit rather than wasting her breath.

Was that all? For Marty? Hell, no! At some considerable cost, she made arrangements at the club for our exercise times to be private. We had the workout room to ourselves. That was to permit us to exercise nude. Furthermore, she had standards — constantly increasing, by the way — that I had to meet in terms of number of reps and total time to complete them. Ugh! The first time I got on a machine — in spite of Marty working out on it first — I thought the damned thing had been welded together into a strange sort of modern sculpture. After she adjusted the resistance to the point where there was virtually none, I was able to move it.

Thinking about it, that was when the crop first appeared. As I got close to the end of a routine, I would slow down. Marty began to use the crop on any available part of my body. It was the approach Voltaire claimed the Royal Navy used when Admiral Byng was shot. (Although he got it wrong: He claimed Byng was hung.) The British, he asserted, would periodically hang an admiral pour encourager les aûtres. Similarly, I would get whacked to encourage me to finish my reps on time.

Anyway, after a particularly tough day, I guess I was a bloody mess. She had been even more enthusiastic than usual in her application of the crop so my skin was broken in quite a number of places. It was only when we returned to her apartment that she realized the damage she had done. She began caring for me and kissing my cuts ... and then my lips ... and then my bleeding nipples.

We had been sharing a bed from the beginning — she had only a single bedroom — and she cradled me in her arms while crying. I couldn’t stand the sound of that, so I ignored my pain and hugged her tightly. And so it began. We became lovers.

At any rate, that morning I eased away from her after carefully lifting her hand that was covering mine that was cupping her breast and went into our master bathroom. It was huge. In fact, it was about the same size as the bedroom I had grown up in and used until my grandparents died. There were three sinks (I never did learn why there were three), a huge partially-sunken bathtub, a shower big enough for a party, a bidet, and even a massage table. Pretty nice.

The vanity top in which the three sinks were placed was backed by a mirror that rose to the ceiling and covered the whole wall. It’s fair to say that one could get a good look at oneself just standing there. And that’s what I did that morning.

You know, it’s true that a person seldom notices changes in herself over time. It was certainly true for me. So I just stood there in front of the mirror looking at my reflection. Wow! It was really pretty nice. In the first place, I was now automatically standing up straight with my shoulders back and my tits upthrust. I felt one and found that my nipple was like a small pebble, and just as hard. Maybe that was a result of being cropped on my nipples so often. Who knows? My body was an all-over golden tan and I even had muscle definition.

My pussy was bare. I think I mentioned that my hair was a grungy gray. Well, let me tell you, the hair on my head was lovely compared to my pubic hair. Its color was godawful! We decided that the only cure for that was to get rid of it, so we did. But it came at a cost: As a mark of solidarity with her new mother, Marty shaved off her own golden bush. But it’s really great when we go down on each other: no hair in our teeth.

Oh, yes ... One more thing: About six months into our relationship, I made arrangements to adopt Martha as my daughter. So now she’s officially Martha Stone Smith. It seems that there are a couple of guys who claim to be very distantly related to me and who had their greedy eyes on my money. Although investigators could find no trace of the brothers in our family tree going back generations, if I died without an heir, there could have been problems. So she was — and is — my beautiful daughter.

There was an oddity in my appearance, though. At the opening of my tale, my hair was a little shorter than shoulder length. Shortly after I moved in with her, Marty took me to a beauty parlor. The stylist just looked at my hair and shook her head in dismay. The result was that she cut it very short, almost a crew cut. After it had grown out a bit, we went back and it was cut again, this time taking off the remainder of my original hair. That’s when we were all surprised: the new hair was growing in silver. I don’t mean gray, or silver-gray, I mean silver. No one had ever seen hair naturally that color before. It’s really pretty neat. Since we both have blue eyes of the same brilliant blue shade, the other guys began calling us the gold and silver twins. And that’s not right. We’re not twins. As Martha takes great pains to point out to me — constantly — she’s almost a full half-inch taller than I am. She’s five-ten to my five-nine and five-eighths.