Chapter 15

Gary had started working with us. Joyce and I were using him mostly as a 'gofer' to go fetch things that we needed. The other X's used him too, to fill in for them when they needed to do something, or to help them with what they were doing. Brenda used him a lot in the kitchen, for scullery work. Brenda didn't like the mundane tasks of cleaning up after meals. Gary didn't mind, since he was still sailing on cloud nine after getting my old Cadillac, and a two hundred dollar a week summer job.

We forgot about Gary being around on the day that Joyce informed me that Ellen had fulfilled her requirements as a tutor. Gary had been gone all morning, doing something for my father, and I'd just forgotten about him. I wasn't that used to him being around yet, He walked into the bedroom, on his way to the kitchen, and caught Ellen riding on my dick. I spotted him right away, but I couldn't think of anything to do.

To say Gary looked surprised at seeing us, doesn't do it justice. He hurried right through to the kitchen, after about a two or three second pause. I don't think Ellen even knew he had walked in on us.

She had turned out to be an interesting sex partner. She liked to get started, then she'd just stop. After stopping for awhile, she'd just start back up again. She wasn't cumming any of those times she stopped. It was like she was trying to conserve her energy or something. I wanted to ask her what she was doing, but I didn't. It didn't bother me, but it did keep her from establishing any kind of good rhythm. I wondered if she'd ever cum.

We had been fucking for about twenty minutes when she suddenly went from full stop, directly into overdrive. This time, there wasn't going to be any stopping. She kept going all the way through four or five quick cums. The last two were very strong, squeezing my cock so tightly that it finally ended up making me cum into the rubber I was using. It was quite a feat making me cum when she was on top, and I had a rubber on. Only Bea had ever succeeded in doing that before, and I was very young, and inexperienced, when she had managed that.

"I've been waiting for three years to do that with you, Kenny." Ellen was breathing hard and perspiring through every pore in her body. She looked like she'd been running for hours. Her hair was soaked.

"I hope it lived up to your expectations?" I was amused that those were the first words she'd spoken since I told her to get undressed.

"Shirley said you were sensational in bed. The other three guys I've been with, they've all said they were great in the sack too. I feel like going out and finding them, then slapping them, for lying to me like they did. Is this going to be the only time I get to do this with you?"

"No. This is part of our new employee incentive program. Joyce has chosen me to be your performance reward. When we're ready to leave, in three weeks, if Joyce tells me she thinks you're ready to take over on this end, we'll go out on a date, and get ourselves a room at a hotel, for later. I'll be spending the night with you then."

"I already am ready, Kenny. You can ask her. I've been practicing sending her whatever she asks for, to her computer from ours upstairs. We have a whole list now of everything she wants, and I can send it to her in about an hour."

This was the first I'd heard about Joyce's plan for porting all the data to our house in Lawrence. It had been our intention, Dad's and mine, to have Ellen able to fill in completely for Joyce. From what Ellen had told me, this didn't sound at all like what Joyce had been actually training her for.

"Can you do everything that Joyce does, figure out what product needs to be sent where?"

"No. She isn't teaching me that. She's showing me how to do what she said she wanted. I can do that now. It isn't even that hard for me."

I got up and went to shower. Ellen came with me. From her actions in the shower, she was obviously hoping I had some more immediate designs on her body. I didn't have any right then, but I did enjoy myself for awhile, helping to get several parts of her clean.

Now that she'd cum a few times, she reminded me of Shirley. In the shower it amazed me the way she seemed so responsive to any touch from me. She seemed disappointed when I got out of the shower and started towelling myself dry.

As soon as I was dressed again, I set off looking for Joyce. I found her sitting in my Dad's office, fifteen minutes later. They were having some kind of a meeting together. Joyce had a lot of papers sitting in her lap.

"Joyce, what's going on? How come you aren't training Ellen to do your job?" I had just walked in and interrupted whatever discussion they were having. I noticed my Dad's concerned reaction before I saw Joyce react. She was too busy thinking, to show any reaction.

"Is this right, Joyce? I thought we'd all agreed that we needed to have a back up for you. Isn't Ellen capable of being that back up?" My Dad's tone was anxious, and bewildered. Joyce had been telling all of us that Ellen was learning what she needed to learn. We had three weeks before we had to leave. Joyce couldn't teach Ellen everything, not in the time remaining for us.

"She's able to do what I needed her to do. She can pick up anything else as we go along. A lot of it is hard to teach, because I just do it. I just know how to do it, but not how to teach it."

"That isn't acceptable, Joyce. It isn't good business to leave something as important as this in one person's hands. Whatever you're doing to manage the schedule has to have reasons and justifications for it. You need to show Ellen how you arrive at these decisions you make. You can't just leave, without first giving us the means to operate in your absence."

Joyce then told us about the system she had come up with, where she could handle all our shipping and storage from Lawrence, while allowing each of the hub points to take over actual product distributions in their area. The distribution wasn't a problem, not as long as the product all arrived where it was supposed to be, on time, and in the amounts required.

Dad and I weren't at all satisfied. Both of us communicated this to Joyce. This was the first time we'd ever had to be upset with her over a business situation. It bothered me, and I could see that it troubled Dad as well.

Joyce told us she'd try to figure out a way to do what we wanted.

When we left my father's office, Joyce changed her attitude, as soon as we were alone, and walking down the corridor, towards the stairs. She accused me of having deliberately made her look bad in front of my father. I let her continue on in that vein, until we got back to her office.

"You listen to me, Joyce. You have no right to endanger our business, just because you're afraid that someone else might learn how to do your job. Are you afraid you won't be so valuable to us if that happens? What if everybody else was worried about that? If you can't get Ellen up to speed, before school starts, we're not leaving here. We aren't going anywhere until she knows how to do everything having to do with shipping, scheduling, and storage. This is too big a business to have everybody's job depending on the whim of one insecure woman. I can't believe you'd pull such a selfish stunt on all of us."

"It wasn't like that. You don't know how complicated what I do is. I don't even understand how I do it myself, half the time. I just seem to have this ability to keep it all straight in my head. I know where things all fit in, and then I just schedule product shipments where I know they'll be needed." Joyce was upset that I thought she had failed to train Ellen, for purely selfish reasons. I had accused her of that because it was the only thing I could thing of as a reason for her doing that. I needed to think about what she was saying. I had watched her doing these things, and I couldn't keep up with a third of what she was juggling in her head. I'd tried. She had a mind like a computer. Every detail was in there, and she could call it up at will, anytime, just like Ellen could call things up on Joyce's computer.

Of course, thinking of it that way, the light bulb finally went off in my own head.

I picked up the phone and called my father. I asked him to send up our computer guy. He came up about fifteen minutes later. I'd seen this guy around a lot, but he wasn't much of a small talk kind of a guy. He ate, slept, and breathed computers. It was all he was interested in. His name was Aaron, and he was about twenty five years old. I knew we had spent an awful lot of money on computer things, at his direction, and that we were now getting several of our departments set up to be doing things with computers. He was also doing things with the automation of our new plant up in Omaha.

"We have a problem. We need to find out how my wife does what she does with the company's shipping and delivery schedules. She does it, but she isn't sure about how she makes all her choices.

"Decision tree. Simple to set it up." I looked at him. I wasn't sure how much we were paying him, but if it was by the word, it was way too much.

"Set it up then."

"Which one is your wife?" I pointed at Joyce. He seemed relieved it was her. I knew Joyce had used his expertise to set up her own modem thing on her computer.

Aaron sat down at Joyce's desk and started typing things into Joyce's computer. It took him about a minute, but then he had something up on the screen that I'd never seen before. He started asking Joyce questions about what she needed to make decisions about. When she said shipping, he hit some keystrokes and a bunch of lines came up with numbers and letters on them. I went over to get Ellen from her office so she could watch. I was already lost as soon as he started talking about setting up a "gooey". I was glad when Joyce asked him what it was, but when he said it was a graphical user interface and mentioned something called windows 101, I left Joyce's office.

Back at Dad's office I told him that Aaron and Joyce were trying to set something up on her computer, something that would show Ellen how to do things. When he complained about Aaron being too valuable to be wasting his time like that, I reminded him of what happened when Joyce was having the twins. He stopped worrying about Aaron's value, or what it was costing the company, but his reaction had given me a new idea. I went back to Joyce's office and waited until Aaron was finished explaining something to Joyce and Ellen.

"Hey, Aaron, do you have anyone else that can come help you do stuff like this? Someone not as expensive as you, but who knows what he's talking about?"

"I know some people. How much were you thinking about paying them?"

"Maybe half as much as we pay you. How much do we pay you?"

"I get forty an hour, with twenty hours guaranteed per week. I've been averaging about fifty to sixty hours here every week. I can get a lot of people, good people, for twenty an hour."

"How many good people can you get for ten an hour?" He laughed and shook his head.

"Nobody any good will do consulting work for ten bucks an hour. Not unless he's desperate. Fifteen is about as low as you can go to get anybody even halfway decent."

"If we hired two guys at twenty an hour, would that cut back on the hours you're billing us for?"

"For sure. I was going to suggest something like that soon anyway. All this work I've been doing for you is starting to be a big hassle for me with my other clients. If you wanted me to do it, I could sub-contract some work with a couple of guys I know, at twenty bucks an hour. There are a lot of time consuming things I'm doing for you now, that either of them could handle just as well as me. I could then concentrate on doing the things they couldn't do, and it probably will end up costing you a lot less for the three of us, than it does for just me."

"Good. Do it. I want you working on this decision tree thing with Joyce and Ellen, until they have something they both agree they can work with. How long until you can get something like that?"

"We've got most of it now. Your wife thinks just like a computer." I'm sure he thought that was a compliment. Joyce seemed to think it was too. She was beaming at all of us.

That afternoon, Ellen rode home with Joyce and the twins. Shirley and Derek caught a lift from Emily and Brenda. I drove home alone, after trying to explain to my Dad about how we'd be saving money by having two extra computer guys running around doing stuff for us. He was skeptical. I told him that Joyce and Ellen both thought that Ellen would be fully trained and capable of doing Joyce's job, in a couple more weeks. He remained somewhat unconvinced by my words.

At home, I mentioned to Joyce, in our bedroom, that Gary had walked in on us when Ellen and I were fucking. She laughed, and then she asked me how I was coming with my plan to get Gary to help me double team Shirley. I told her it had been done already, glad that Ellen was visiting, and her presence would prevent Joyce from pursuing my answer further. I think she thought I meant I'd talked Gary into doing it sometime in the future. I didn't do anything to stop her from believing that.

At dinner, Joyce started asking Ellen questions about how she had enjoyed her prize. All the X's knew I'd fucked Ellen. No one had raised any objection when Joyce had brought it up a few days before. Brenda mentioned that I should wear a rubber, but that was the only thing mentioned by any of them about it. I think Shirley was actually excited for her friend. I would never understand the way women thought.

Sunday was normally supposed to be Joyce's day, but she had been trading days with all the X's so that I wasn't able to keep up with it. This was a Thursday, Brenda's day. I had wondered what Joyce was up to, when she invited Ellen home with us. Since they came home in Joyce's car, I had to assume that Ellen was planning on spending the night with us.

"Tonight's my night, Kenny. I traded Brenda for it. I pick you and Ellen." Joyce was smiling at me. She must have arranged with the X's so no one would object that Ellen was an outsider. I waited, just in case. Nothing.

"Did Joyce tell you what was going to happen, Ellen?" I looked at her, and she smiled and nodded that Joyce had. "You don't have any problem with doing things with Joyce?" Again Ellen nodded, this time side to side to say she didn't have any problem with it. "Have you ever done things with girls before?"