Chapter 21

Looking back on it, it would have been obvious to a blind man that Danni would show up too. I mean four of the five were already there. And under circumstances that suggested they might live there together for some time. And they had even told me there was "a plan". Of course I thought that plan was short termed, and ended when I joined the Marines.

I was wrong.

I found out about the plan not from Phee, who I was closer to than any of them. And who, let me just mention, was the actual author of the plan.

No, I found the plan out from Danni, who called one night to talk to all her friends. She knew they were all there, of course. They had kept her up to date on things. She talked to each of them, and then to Jake, and finally to me.

"I need to ask you a question," she said.

"Shoot."

"Do you love me?"

I could hear a serious note in her voice. It bothered me, because Danni wasn't serious very often.

"Have you met a man?" I asked.

"Answer the question, Tut," she said.

"I don't want to make anything difficult for you," I said.

"Answer the fucking question, Tut!" she barked.

"Yes!" I shouted. I calmed down, almost instantly. "There. Are you happy now?"

"Not yet," she said. "But I hope to be."

"What's going on, Danni?" I asked.

"I'm the one who's supposed to marry you," she said.

I was shocked into silence.

"The plan was for me to marry you, and then share you with all the others."

"You're kidding," I said.

"Nope," she said.

"You're serious?"

"As a heart attack."

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.

"Because they keep fucking up the plan," she said. "I was supposed to have the first baby. Then the others could have theirs. But Frankie screwed the pooch on that one. And now I hear Phee's knocked up, and Denise won't answer me when I ask if she and Beth are still on the pill. They're not waiting for me, Tut. It isn't fair."

"This is a plan you made when you were thirteen," I reminded her.

"And a plan we have voted to continue on every year since then," she said.

"You have got to be kidding me," I groaned.

"No I don't."

"So you actually want to marry me?"

"I do, and I accept," she said into the phone.

"You accept?"

"Your proposal. I accept. Yes, I'll marry you."

I was silent for long enough that she said, "Hello?"

"Okay," I said. "When can you get here?"

"The polls close in three hours," she said. "I can leave any time after that."

"Aren't you going to hang around and see if your guy won?"

"I'm not marrying my guy," she said. "I'm marrying you."

"Then screw the polls," I said. "Leave now."

"Yes sir," she said. "And make sure there's no conniving, plan-breaking wench in my bed when I get there."

"You mean my bed," I said.

"That's what I said," she retorted. "Now, let me talk to Phee again."

"I'd be happy to tell her about the news," I said.

"No. I want to rub it in. When we were fifteen, she was all over the internet trying to find some country where a sister could marry her brother. She might still be at it."

I laughed.

And handed the phone to Phee.

There seemed to settle over the house an air of expectation as we awaited Danni's arrival. It was different than it had ever been before, and it struck me deep in the pit of my stomach. Intuitively, I knew this meant something I didn't yet understand, but which was very important.

I was used to the women being important in my life, obviously. Those circumstances had been in effect since I was seventeen, earlier if you include my most early fantasies about them.

But I'd always been an outsider in some way that I couldn't actually identify. Oh, I knew I was welcome as a lover. Each of them made that crystal clear. But there had always been something in the air that excluded me in some indefinable way when they were all together.

Now, as one of them passed me, and stopped to get a hug, and maybe a little smooch, there was an overall atmosphere almost of ... sadness!

Beth seemed especially affected. Her hugs were a little more clinging, and her kisses a little more drawn out and hungry. Their days of making up schedules seemed to have gone by the wayside. A woman came through my bedroom door every night, but I was never sure who it would be. When it was Beth, though, I knew I was in for a workout, and that it was likely our skin would touch from the moment she got into bed, to the moment she got out. I even asked her about it in a round-about way one night.

"You okay?"

"Mm hm," she murmured into my shoulder.

"You seem sad, somehow."

She pulled her face out of my neck and looked at me. "Sad that it took this long to be able to do this, maybe."

That made no sense. She'd been doing this for years. Maybe not with the frequency we had now, but it had been happening since she was sixteen.

It was that very night, in fact, that I found out what was, indeed wrong. I had been slowly riding her, going in deep and then rubbing my loins in circles as she moaned her way through orgasms, when she suddenly wrapped her arms and legs around me and growled, "Fuck me, Tut. Cum hard in me, baby. I need your cum tonight."

The passion in her voice was different, and it shocked me. I stopped, and pushed with my arms until she was actually hanging from my body. It was like a message from another dimension came through a wormhole and got to my brain.

"You went off the pill too ... didn't you."

Her eyes glittered. "Don't you dare tell Danni," she whispered."

I stared into her eyes a little longer.

"This isn't part of the plan," I said, figuring that out just like I had figured out she was trying to get pregnant.

"The plan fell apart when Frankie got pregnant first," she hissed. "The only part of the plan left is that all of us found a way to get here, and Danni gets to marry you."

It seems that, when Phee and Danni were twelve, at one of the sleepovers that would become a tradition, they had been asking each other which celebrity they wanted to marry and have children with. When it came to Danni, she calmly announced that she was going to marry me, and have my babies. I am told that was not well received, since at that point in time I was Phee's mean big brother, who made fun of them and called them names.

But she never wavered in her resolve, and somehow, that caught the imagination of the others. Pretty soon one of the other girls would challenge Danni's authority, and say she was the one who would date me, marry me, and have my children. A complicated dynamic evolved, in which everyone sided with Danni, except the one who was challenging her. Danni's point of view was simply: "I called him first."

All of this had happened right under my nose, and the grand plan slowly developed. Danni had to agree to share me. In exchange, she got to marry me, and have the first baby. After that, I was supposed to be available to whoever was ready to have a baby next. They would all live with me, somehow, and would stay together forever.

It was a silly, almost idiotically juvenile mass hallucination, but its roots ran deep in the group. Roberta came to that game late, and wasn't invested in me at all. As silly as it sounds, that may have been one of the reasons she was never fully accepted into the group.

And as silly as it sounds ... they had somehow found a way to make most of it actually come true. I don't know. Maybe it was fate, or kismet.

Or maybe the fact that I bought the ranch rejuvenated the whole plan. Except that Frankie was the only one who had the time to come inspect it, and she couldn't resist jumping the gun on the pregnancy part of things. That was the first time anybody rebelled against Danni's will. And that was why Danni got me first when they all came to visit, and Frankie had to wait until the end.

So they were still invested in this juvenile plan of theirs ... except they weren't juveniles any more. Frankie got away with breaking the rules ... so the others wanted to break them too. Nobody was willing to marry me, though, and destroy the whole agreement. They did save that part for Danni.

You might wonder why I played along with all this. Why I would submit to the wills of so many women, and let myself be manipulated to the point where I suddenly had what amounted to five wives, and a whole tribe of people living with me.

Well, that's simple. I loved them. I couldn't resist them. If one of them crooked her finger at me, I went running. To be honest, I would have married any of them. Had it been legal, I'd have married all of them.

But all of them had broken the rule about having sex with me while they were fertile, and all of them were afraid that would be the straw that might break the whole camel's back.

That's what the sadness was about. They were worried that the dream might still fall apart, but they couldn't resist doing things that ... might make the dream fall apart.

So I was a little worried too, that day, when Tucker set up a racket that told us somebody was coming up the road, even though we couldn't hear it yet. Apparently working on a political campaign is lucrative, because she was driving a brand new SUV. We were all waiting for her, and the worry had infected us enough that we were all quiet. When she got out, she ignored all of us and knelt to ruffle Tucker's ears, cooing at him while he wagged his tail almost off. Then she stood and looked at me. I went to her and put my hands on her waist, letting my loins bump hers.

"Are you really going to marry me?" she asked softly.

I nodded. "Yes," I said.

It was only then that I realized she was worried too, because I saw that worry melt away and she relaxed. Her face transformed and she had the most beautiful smile on her face.

"I love you so much," she whispered. "I always have. They never understood how much. Maybe Phee did, but not the rest."

I stopped her with a kiss, and she gripped me so hard I had to take a step to get my balance back.

I pulled my lips back from hers. "They knew," I said. "They just loved me too."

That seemed to make something wake up inside her. Her eyes got huge.

"The twins! Where are the twins?!"

She said that part loud, and everybody heard. Frankie stepped forward holding Bart (who was already marked with the name Bad Bart because he made the most horrible messes in his diapers) and Phee approached holding Johnnie Sue. I was forgotten, and pretty soon they were all clustered around the babies.

I heard the confessions take place. Jake was right there beside me. It was like watching one of those schools of fish in the ocean, turning and rolling, darting around trying to avoid the predators. I heard Phee say, "I'm sorry, Danni, my pills didn't work," and then Denise saying, "She's lying. I told her I quit taking mine and she quit taking hers." And then there were three of them talking at once and I heard Danni say, "You're pregnant?!" and a little later, "You're pregnant too?!" and then a sharp "You too? You bitches!" came rolling out of the crowd, and somebody said, "We saved him for you, Danni!" and it devolved into more incomprehensible hubbub.

But there was no anger. I knew that even though the words sounded mad, because neither of the babies started crying.

It took about five minutes, but finally the cluster of women relaxed, and I could actually see individual faces, and hear snippets of news being communicated. Johnnie Sue did start crying, but it was her "I'm hungry" cry so Frankie just pulled up her shirt and flipped the little door thing down on her nursing bra and let Johnnie Sue have what she wanted. Danni stared at the domestic scene for a moment, and then sighed. "I can't wait to do that."

Don't ask me how they arranged it, but every one of them turned and looked straight at me at that very moment.

Jake must have thought they were looking at us, because he said, "Sorry. Gotta go. There's things that need to be done."

Suddenly, they all had things to do.

"We'll bring your stuff in later," said Phee. "Right now, why don't you get freshened up and get some rest. You must be tired after the drive."

And then they drifted off, vanishing like smoke in the wind. Danni stood, looking at me.

"You look good," she said.

"I get lots of exercise," I replied.

She frowned. "I heard."

"I didn't know about the plan until just recently. If I'd known, I'd have beaten them all off with a stick."

She smiled sadly. "No you wouldn't. You don't even own a stick, and if you did, all you'd use it for was walking."

"Still, I wish there wasn't any sadness, and that the plan had worked out."

She looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

"The plan was insane," she said. "You know that. They did too. Nobody in their right mind would try to keep a plan like that going for more than ten minutes."

"Who says any of you are in your right mind?" I asked. "After all ... you still want to marry me."

She came and hugged me again, with her hands on my waist and her loins bumping mine.

"That part of the plan wasn't so crazy," she said.

"Actually, if I have to be completely honest, I'm astonished that as much of the plan made it as did," I said. "If, before I left for the Corps, you'd have told me we'd all be living together some day, I'd have told you to get your head examined."

"Oh, I was pretty sure that would happen too," she said. "You might notice that we all chose majors that make us employable pretty much anywhere."

"So what part of it is so crazy then?" I asked.

"Oh," she said, rubbing her loins against the front of my pants. "Only an idiot would have believed they'd all wait to have your baby until after I did."

"Freshening up" involved me, cleaning her body in the shower. "Resting" was reduced to me making sure she couldn't get out of bed by lying on top of her with my spike buried deep in her while she had orgasms. She didn't have to tell me she'd stopped taking her pills too. My balls actually hurt from trying so hard to breed her that afternoon.

It was like some magical wand had been swept over Danni. The familiar sarcasm was gone, as if it had never existed. I think that had been the product of a nagging fear that I might resist her plans for me. Once they all started planning the wedding, she was relaxed, sweet, even tempered and laid back. I saw the undeniable similarities she had with Phee that now made them seem like sisters, rather than best friends.

And that continued after the wedding too. The only people who got invited to the wedding were my students, and Danni's family, and my parents. I knew her parents, of course, having met them before I joined the Corps. They were a little stunned by the suddenness their daughter exhibited when she chose a mate and decided to marry him. Then, when they saw the ranch, and learned that all of Danni's old friends were living there, I think a bubble of innocence was broken, and her parents were suddenly exposed to a truth they had never expected. Oh, I don't think they knew that I was sleeping with them all. They simply realized that her associations in school, including college, had been much closer than they had realized. Still, while their view of the world was tilted on its side, I don't think they were too upset about it. Dazed, but not too upset.

My own parents came to the same realizations, but by a different pathway. The study of archaeology necessarily involves a lot of research into social customs, and they suddenly saw things they hadn't payed any attention to before. Once they saw the clan in this social paradigm, they looked at it as a social paradigm, which they had never done before. But the only clue I had about this was when my mother put her arm through mine after the ceremony and said, "I hope you know what the hell you're doing, Thutmose."

I noticed the two sets of parents hung together quite a bit. I thought that was natural. They had known each other for years, and were probably more comfortable with each other than they were with the members of this odd group of people who appeared to still be acting like they were in high school ... sort of.