Chapter 31: Waiting

The rest of the week was a non-event as far as my part of the case went. I made a conscious effort to just relax and let Rebecca do her job. Between school, cross country practice, working on PR ideas for Mr. Dennis and the goon squad, homework etcetera, I felt I had plenty on my plate to keep me busy. Not too mention keeping my two girlfriends happy. It all kept me pretty busy. In fact I wished I could find a few spare hours to do some research on a subject I really wanted to look into. Both Shannon and Allison had made it clear that at the earliest opportunity 'oral exams' were going to commence. Allison was showing clear signs of getting frustrated at the wait, but she had promised Shannon. The only reason that Allison and Shannon hadn't tried to move to the 'next lesson' as it were is that Shannon hadn't been able to come over when we could be alone. We were being very careful not to attract any attention. That meant that besides the odd afternoon we didn't have a lot of quality time alone to explore new territory. And I still didn't have a clue.

Wednesday I finally got my chance. The girls had gone to Shannon's after school instead of coming to our house. I got home from Cross Country practice and had about thirty minutes to myself, so I fired up my computer and headed out onto the web. Surely there must be something out there. After all, that's were the girls said they found their information, but where to begin? No matter what I did I was going to get bombarded with porn sites, but how to narrow the search. Okay, there's a good place to start. Search, don't be random, be specific. I pulled up my browser of choice, I use Mozilla as it is easily customizable and has built in features the other major browser 'who shall remain nameless at this time' just couldn't offer. I cleared my cache, zeroed it out so it wouldn't store any pages, shut off all cookies, pop-ups, etc and headed over to 'Google'. The guys who came up with Google deserve every penny it has made them. I clicked for an advanced search and then entered 'how to eat pussy' in the field for an exact phrase search. I figured that would be specific enough to start with. I know the polite and correct term is something with a 'C' but I couldn't even pronounce it, much less spell it. Holy Crap! I got over 83,000 hits! Fortunately, out of the first 10 only two were to graphic porn sites. The descriptions on the others all actually seemed to be 'how to' articles. One caught my eye. Written by three women! Score! I copied the text into a document and then closed my browser and disconnected from the Internet. I manually cleared both the cache and the history records of the search. Then I re-opened my stored document to see what I had.

Women have been called many things, most of them hinting at soft, sweet, gentile, and such. There was no hint of that in this article. Talk about cutting to the chase! No soft sell here. Do this, don't do that. They had all but numbered the steps. I mean it was informative, but then, so was a phone book. They pretty much took any concept of romance out of the picture. They also seemed to take for granted that whoever was reading it had an awful lot of experience with women. Oh well, at least it was informative. I read it through twice just to give myself a general idea of what was what and where it was located and what to expect. Then I deleted the whole thing, re-started my computer and opened seven other documents to make sure the title didn't stay in record anywhere. I even cleared the 'recent' folder in Windows just in case. By now it was getting towards time for people to start showing up so I drug out my books to set up for handling my homework later and went out to set the table for dinner. Mom had picked up Allison on her way home so they arrived together.

The discussion as they came out of the garage was the weekend activities at the coach's house. Apparently Shannon and Allison were broadening their horizons.

"I can understand Shannon's interest dear; it's pretty obvious that she is going to be tall. You, on the other hand, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, sweetie, but there are no tall women on either side of the family going back several generations. I'm 5'6" and I'm the tallest. You will be lucky if you make it this far. I don't know that you have much of a future in basketball or volleyball."

"Mom, you don't have to be 8 feet tall to play women's sports. Even men's basketball has short guys playing in the NBA. Look at Spud Web. Okay, I know. I'll never have his talent but that's not the point. And that's one more reason to try volleyball. Most of the 'setters' are short. And they are the key players! They are the ones who make the rest of it all possible. I know I'm never going to be a hitter. I don't need to be. Shannon and I are going to be a team. I set 'em up, and she knocks 'em down! So we want to give it a try. Anyway, coach wants you to call and give it your okay."

"Why do we need to call? Miss Hewitt knows we support you in your sports. She's been your coach before now."

"Mom, that's organized, public stuff, at the school, or at the rec center. This is private, at her home. She's gay and lives with her partner. They are both very insistent, everything has to be 100% open and approved or it doesn't happen. In fact, Jimmy," she said and turned to me, "Are you busy this weekend?"

"Not really, what's up?"

"Shannon and I are going to go over to Coach Hewitt's for some private instruction. We're trying out for volleyball and she and Miss Jenkins have agreed to help us get ready. But they will only do it if we have a chaperone. You know, the whole above suspicion, beyond reproach, appearance thing. So what do you say? Will you come along and protect them from us?"

I had to laugh at that. Even Mom did. "Sure, sis, I'll come along and make sure you two behave yourselves and don't take advantage of those poor defenseless older women. If it's okay with Mom and Karen that is."

Mom just rolled her eyes. "You two! I swear. It's fine with me and I am quite sure that Karen will be all for it. Who knows, a college scholarship? Maybe two..."

"You think?"

Now it was my turn. "As competitive as you two are? I think if you like it and can get the right coaching you have as good a chance as anyone. Maybe not a full scholarship, there's a lot of competition out there, girls who have been playing since they could walk, but I wouldn't write either of you off. And I think Mom is right, Shannon is going to be tall. In fact, I think I saw her future at my school."

The both looked at me puzzled. "I don't get it," Allison finally said.

"Angela Osborne. You remember me mentioning Tim Osborne, one of the guys on my team? His older sister, she's a senior, tall, beautiful, and some kind of an athlete. Bob had Tim and me run with her for evaluation the second day of try-outs. Cheetahs may run with that girl but not for very long. She is just plain awesome; totally blew us away. The only good thing about the whole experience was the view. If I have to run behind someone, she would be in my top ten. Ow!" I said as Allison hit me in the arm. "Anyway, she's trying out for the Olympic track team this summer. I took one look at her and the first thing that popped into my head was, 'That's Shannon in four years.'"

"Wow," Mom said, "sounds like quite a girl."

"Well, she's no Allison Matthews, but yeah, she's quite a girl."

Mom rolled her eyes again and mimed gagging on her finger but it did get me a kiss from Allison. "Nice recovery. I think I'll forgive you."

"All right you two. Don't start that now. Your father will be home any minute. How about tossing a salad for me, hot shot? Allison, you can 'set' some water on to boil and heat up the left over spaghetti sauce."

"Very 'Pun-y, ' Mom." I groaned.

Dinner was a fun event. We brought Dad up to speed on the weekend plans. He liked the idea of a possible scholarship in the future. It also gave him some other ideas.

"Sounds like you kids have a full schedule and are going to be well supervised. Cynthia dearest, what would you say to a nice relaxing weekend in San Diego?"

"You mean it? Don't you dare tease me, mister; I swear I'll make you regret it."

"Tease? Moi? No, I'm very serious. I think the kids can handle a couple nights without us to watch over them. And it's been a while since we had the chance to get away by ourselves."

Allison interrupted, "Uh, that sounds wonderful and I think it would be great for you to get away, but how will we get over to Miss Hewitt's?"

My turn. "I'm sure Karen would drive. Shannon's going anyway. Heck, Coach Jenkins would probably pick us up if I asked her."

"Okay, that settles it then," Dad said, gaveling the table with his hand. "I will expect you packed and ready to go by the time I get home. Any chance you can get off early?"