Prologue

-- THE YEAR 2027 --

“Hey Dad?”

I pushed my chair back from the desk in my home office, rotating it as I saw my son at the door. Smiling, I waved to him and said, “Come on in. What’s on your mind?”

“Uh, it’s kind of that thing we talked about,” he muttered with a sheepish smile. BJ was now 21, still an awkward young adult even if he felt like he had fully matured. His reply had been typically vague, as detailed communication had never been a strong suit of anyone his age. I certainly had endured my own share of misunderstandings due to similarly vague statements when I was 21 and younger.

I had an idea what he meant, but perpetually seeking to teach him to be more precise with his statements, I just arched an eyebrow and stated, “Well, we’ve talked about a lot of different things. Specifics, specifics, -”

“-Specifics,” he recited with me just as I was repeating the word for the third time. Slightly nervous, BJ nodded and explained, “Today’s my birthday. You promised me that when I was 21 you’d finally tell me the story of how you met Mom.”

I leaned back in my chair, taking a deep breath. I was impressed BJ had managed to wait this long. He’d been asking me the question ever since he was thirteen. I kept putting him off, explaining only that I’d met his mother while I was in college. It didn’t matter that she and I weren’t married to each other. All that mattered was that we both loved him, and that we both were part of his life. It didn’t hurt that she and I were still wonderful friends, and when BJ was sixteen he’d figured out that we were still lovers as well. He also had half-siblings and plenty of cousins to grow up with, and all together we were really one big happy family.

But even though he accepted that his mother and I both dearly loved him, and also loved each other on some level, he was always curious to know just how I ended up fathering a child while I was still a college student and didn’t end up marrying his mom. He started to understand my hesitance to explain when he turned 18, having been sexually active himself for a couple of years by then and starting to understand just how... complicated ... sexual relationships can be. But he then made me promise that when he turned 21, I would finally tell him the whole story. He assured me that by then he would be the same age as I’d been when I’d fathered him, and therefore he would be able to at least comprehend the decisions I’d made.

“Well, a promise is a promise, and you don’t break promises to family,” I sighed, steadying myself for what was to come. I’d known this day – and this specific talk – would be coming. I’d actually prepared in my head what I would finally say. And as I thought about everything that happened more than twenty years ago, I marveled at just how ... complicated ... my college life had been.

BJ sat down on the couch when I waved him over to it. Taking a deep breath, he got comfortable and watched me with rapt attention. He looked eager, really eager.

“I’m going to disappoint you a bit,” I began, watching as his face fell. “You’re probably hoping I’ll just lay out the gory details in a nice, short explanation, but that’s not going to happen. You’ll forgive your old man for becoming a little verbose in his advanced age. There’s a lot of detail floating around in the back of my mind, but it would take all day – probably several days – to explain it all to you. I’m not doing that, either. So you’re going to get an explanation that’s somewhere in the middle.”

“Fine. Whatever,” BJ agreed, albeit impatiently.

“I’m going to start after finishing my Sophomore Year at Cal. You already know that a good chunk of my early life was spent romancing your Aunt Adrienne and Aunt Dawn. As this story starts, a lot of it is going to be about them too. But there are other people – important people – who began to enter my life over my Junior Year. And understanding what happened with all of them will help you understand how your mother and I ended up where we did. So here’s that story.”

Chapter 1 »