Page 34 Hidden Assets

                                    HIDDEN ASSETS.                                                             5-3-10

                                                                       ROY GARDE.

 When their parents were killed, along with everybody else, on the bus that was taking them on a tour of Central America – they’d gone on the tour to celebrate their thirty five years of marriage – it meant that Aden Harris who was twenty four years old and his two sisters, Sandra, who was three years older than he was and had been divorced, and Irene, who was two years younger and was unmarried, had to take over the running of their father’s air conditioning installation and maintenance company themselves. Their father had modestly stuck to dealing with domestic, individually mounted units because working with the central, industrial types needed mechanics who, between them, had to have three licenses. He hadn’t had them himself nor did he want to go to the expense of hiring men who did have them nor did he entertain for a minute the thought of going through all the rigmarole that was called for to apply for them and then study for them and then take the tests.

Aden wasn’t much bothered by any of that because although he was well versed technically, and was confident that he could pass the tests, he definitely didn’t want to have to compete for contracts in that field, and then employ mechanics to do the work and then cope with the enormous amount of paperwork that having employees entails, because that would have kept him from his preferred occupation which was rehearsing soft rock with his band in the basement of Elian Phillips who was their drummer.

Unfortunately the single unit air-conditioning business had gotten into hard times some years earlier due to the large amount of competition and to the vastly improved reliability of the product and to its cheapness which encouraged replacement rather than paying for the repair of malfunctioning ones. Also, the fact that the manufacturers had built easy installation into all of their models encouraged owners to do it themselves.

When his father had been running the place he’d generously done most of the work himself to let Aden go off and get some practicing in but now that he wasn’t around Aden, if he wanted to pay the mortgage and the grocery bills, had to do all the work himself and work from seven in the morning to seven at night.

He got his own breakfast every morning, which never varied from two fried eggs with bacon and toast and coffee, and he bought his lunch at whatever diner or restaurant was convenient that day. He’d often mentioned how much he liked spaghetti so Irene – the newly designated chef – gave it to him every night with either canned meat sauce or canned fish sauce. Sandra was the designated cleaner and she passed the vacuum once a month or so whether it was needed or not.

After several months of having to put in twelve hour work days and still only barely earning enough to pay the bills, and, on top of that, coming home every night to hardly varying food dishes, one evening, after finishing his meal of spaghetti with canned meat sauce he called a family meeting and he told his sisters that he’d had enough and that they both had to find jobs if they wanted to keep on living in the house.

Neither of them could believe what they heard and their protests came at him vigorously – after a pause that they’d needed to collect their wits – and because he was both outnumbered and out-shouted he quickly left the kitchen and went to a rehearsal but before he went out the door he told them that they had one week to come up with something.

He knew that it was tough for them because although they’d both found jobs in Sears or Kmart, or some such, when they’d graduated from high school one thing or another had made them quit after a few weeks or months of struggling to keep doing something that they hated and both of them had sworn to never return to it unless and until hunger was staring them in the face. But that was then and this was now.

 When the week was up he called them together again and asked them what were they going to do to help him pay the bills.

The best that they could do was to offer to take over the accounting end of the business.

“What! Both of you to do something that takes me about a half of an hour every week to do on my own? Puh-lease! Listen, one of the first things that I did after taking over was to set up a Small Business Accounting system on the PC in the office so that all that I’ve got to do, as long as it’s only me working there, is to punch in the numbers every Friday and then it does everything on its own. No. Sorry, but you’ve got to come up with something better than that.”

“Well. That’s all we have,” said Sandra, the oldest. “Why don’t you think of something if you don’t like it?”

“Whoa! Now hold on there. You want to keep on eating don’t you? It’s up to you to find jobs not me.”

“We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it already,” said Irene, “and we don’t want to get a boring, starting-at-the-bottom job at minimum wages again so we want you to find us a job in what, I want to remind you, is the family business.”

“You want me to teach you the ins and outs of air-conditioning?”

“Ahhh! No way! That would mean getting our hands dirty like yours or doing heavy lifting. Think of something better suited to girls.”

“Girls! You’re both over twenty-one so ‘girls’ is not the word to use anymore. You’re women and I want you to begin to act like women and get regular paying jobs no matter how low the wages are to start.”

“You’re not our father so please stop giving us orders.”

“All right, I’ll give you an ultimatum instead. Here it is. Either start looking for jobs or start looking for some place else to live. There. How do you like that? Now, I’m going to Elian’s place to practice so I suggest that you stay right here and think about what I just said.”

When he came home late that night he poured himself a beer and took it up to his room and two minutes later there was a tap on the door.

When he opened it he found Sandra standing there.

He grunted hello and she pushed past him and then turned to face him.

“You know what Aden? You’re being very mean to us. You’ve got us really worried with your ultimatum and your threats and Irene and I want to remind you that the whole – uh – estate, including this house and Dad’s business assets and the personal bank account that he and Mom had, belongs to us all and, on top of that, the two of us are in the majority seeing that by law we own two thirds of everything and so you don’t have the right to threaten us and order us around.”

“Yes. You’re right about that but you do know, don’t you, that two thirds of nothing is nothing? There’s only enough money in the family’s ‘personal bank account’ to keep it active and there’s only enough in the business’s bank account for working capitol – a few hundred at most – and you’ll be sorry to learn that we don’t even own this house! Not nearly. The bank owes most of it because Pop took out a hundred thousand dollar loan on it three years ago to pay the hospital bills when Mom was sick. Remember? So, what that means is that what you two actually own is two thirds of the two mortgages and if we don’t keep paying the combined $2,187 monthly payments for them along with the taxes and the grocery and gas and electricity and telephone bills we’ll be thrown out on our ears in short order. It’s called ‘foreclosure’ and it’s just as ugly as it sounds.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re lying to frighten us.”

“Jeeeesus! ‘Lying’ am I? Well, Missy, why don’t you come with me right now and see for yourself?”

“Where to?”

“Down to the desk in the living room. That’s where all the family papers are – our checkbook and the monthly statements from the bank and the mortgages and the monthly bills and all the rest of it. I’ll show you exactly what that ‘whole estate’ of yours is worth right now and if you come to the office tomorrow I’ll show you the books and the accounts and the bank balance there too.”

“No! I don’t want to because you know that I’m not good at these things and you could easily trick me.”

“Ha! Thanks for your trust in me. All right then, think of someone who you do trust and I’ll show it to him or her whenever you’re ready. – – – Now, do you mind if I get some sleep seeing that I’ve got to get up for work in about five hours. Yes, I said ‘work’ – you remember what that is, don’t you?  Oh, but of course you do, you and your sister did it once, way back, for about a month. Right?

“Uh, listen to this, before you go and I want you to pay careful attention to it and please pass it on to Irene: Nothing’s keeping me here and if there’s no positive change soon I might well just say, ‘Fuck it all,’ and go away somewhere and start over all alone. You hear me? I’ve had it up to here with supporting two able-bodied, grown women who are bone lazy even if they are my sisters.”

Sandra went to her sister’s room and told her what had been said and neither of them slept well that night.

In the morning, long after Aden had gone to work, Sandra came into the kitchen and found her sister drinking coffee and she burst out with, “I think I’ve come up with something. How about you?”

“Nope. Nothing. So lets hear what you’ve got.”

“Well,” she said, keeping her eyes on the floor, “you might not like it but here goes. I got to thinking about the history of Aden’s pathetic love life and I think that he might well be a virgin still – like you – because I could only come up with two possible girl friends in his whole life and one of them was when he was about fourteen years old and started writing love letters and poems to that Ellie Coggins girl, the one who’s the town skank now, and after a while she sent a friend of hers to tell him that he was to ‘stop bothering her with your stupid poems because she doesn’t like you.’ That slowed him down for years, remember? Then the other one was about three years ago when he got all excited about a movie date with Peggy Scanlon and she didn’t show up and left him standing outside in the rain! Ever since then he’s spent all of his time with that stupid band of his and I checked it out and found that it can’t even get real bookings no matter about having groupies. Well – – – uh, d’you see where I’m going with this yet?

“Can’t say that I do.”

“No! Hmmm. Well let me spell it out for you. He says that nothing’s keeping him here, right? Didn’t he? Yes, he did and I think he’s shaping up to walk out on us and please tell me how long we could go on paying over $2,000 dollars a month just for the mortgage without him here? So, this is really serious shit that we’re in, right? You do understand that bit, right? – – – Yes? – – Say it!”

“Yes, it’s really serious all right. I know it.”

“Yes, damn right it is. We could get kicked out of here and where could we go? So, here’s what I’m saying – it came to me when I was lying in bed this morning which is why I’m late ‘cos I had to go over it in my mind a lot – I truly believe that we have to combine forces to give him something really nice to stick around for.”

“What do you mean – ‘something  nice’?”

“Something really nice that he really, really needs. Something that all men need.”

“What are you sa – – – No! No. No. I can’t believe I’m hearing properly. Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Naw. Can’t be.”

“Yes. I’m saying exactly that. I’ll spell it out for you. Let’s offer him some nice, sweet pussy. God knows that neither of us are using ours right now, nor, come to that, does anybody else want to use them, and, as far as I can see, there’s no prospect of that changing any time soon.

“Well, don’t look so shocked. What else is there? – – – Exactly. So – – – tell me why not? Sure, I wouldn’t let him near me ordinarily, what with the insist aspect – ”

“That’s ‘incest’ not ‘insist,’ dummy.”

“Ah yes, you’re right. Thanks, the ‘incest aspect.’ But we’re all adults aren’t we so let’s remember that we’re in a crisis here and that we could well be homeless a few months from now and so we’ve got to do something drastic, and soon, to keep him from leaving. Wow, what’s the matter? All the color has gone from your face.”

“I can believe it. I was trying to visualize the scene – getting undressed and lying down and offering myself – – – God, in heaven! – – – Never! – – And listen, besides that part, have you bothered to consider that our offering it to him might make him run screaming from the house two seconds after he gets to understand what we’re talking about?”

“I don’t think so. No way if it’s handled right.”

She drank some coffee and then said, “Listen to me, sis, I know more about these things than you do and I want to tell you something important that will help us a lot. I doubt if he’s ever had any good loving from a woman and, because of that, when we let him have some he’ll get to know how good it is and he’ll be so grateful that he’ll never want to go away, ever. Also, because of that, when it’s established, if we hold back sometimes and not let him have any we’ll be able to train him to – uh – be a good boy and not demand too much from us and do what we want him to do. Right? It’s what all wives do as a matter of course once the honeymoon period is over. – – – Well? – – – Aw, come on now, don’t look so disgusted. If you’ve got a better idea let me hear it – – – No? – – – No. So what’s so wrong with my idea? After all, he does that weight-lifting stuff regularly and so he’s got a nice body with big muscles and he’s not bad looking, right? And he’s clean in his habits, except for his nails sometimes, and he can keep a secret, which is something that we know for sure. Remember that time in the principal’s office when you called me instead of Mom? Remember what he did for you after that?”

“Yes, I remember it all right and I’ll never stop being grateful to him – – – Well, I agree with all that you say and I admit that I can’t come up with anything better but you’re forgetting something in my case. I don’t want my first time to be with my own brother, for chrisake. Now do I? Would you have?”

“You’ve got a good point there and there are dozens of other good reasons that we shouldn’t do this but, unfortunately, there’s no alternative, is there? You must see that, right? – – – Listen, Irene, it’s very important for both of our futures that you agree with me on this. Yes? Think on it again, where will we go if we have to leave this house? – – – Right. So, are you with me or not? Oh, but wait. Hold on a minute before you answer. I’ll make it a bit easier for you. I’ll be first and I’ll keep him happy for a few weeks, or a month maybe, but when he begins to flag – like all men do, unfortunately, when they’ve gotten accustomed to one woman’s body – I’ll find a way to bring you in to make a threesome and together we should be able to spice it up enough to keep him coming home to us every night for years and years and keep paying the mortgage and buying the groceries. Yes? Are you with me for the long run?”

“Well. When you put it like that I guess that I don’t have much of a choice, do I? And I don’t want you to think that I’d let you down, but listen to me Sandra, please. When the time comes I might not be able to go through with it so promise that you won’t get mad if I can’t. Please? Promise?”

                                           //                                                                               //

Like their brother’s, the full histories of the sisters’ love lives up to then made sad reading.

Sandra and her brother had inherited their mother’s good looks and she was popular with the boys until they discovered her secret which was that when she was eight years old she’d been thrown off a round-about and had landed on a sharp piece of broken concrete that had cut into her chest and it had damaged some nerves. When she entered puberty her left breast didn’t develop properly and so she had to wear a prosthetic bra for balance and to fill out her clothes.

She didn’t have much trouble with being asked out on dates but when it became obvious to each guy – after he’d put in a lot of work to get to sneak a feel of the breast that she’d tried to get him to stay away from and had at last succeeded – that he was holding cotton-stuffing rather than soft flesh he wouldn’t be able to cope with it and he’d suddenly remember that he had to be someplace else. It got to be that the only way that she could get one of them to stick around and ask her for a second date was if she promised to put out for him on that one.

The first time that she had to follow through on that she was in the back seat of a guy’s father’s car and letting him do it to her hurt her but that was next to nothing compared to the anguish she felt when she got to see that in the two minutes that went by, after he’d pulled out, he’d tied a knot in the condom and had thrown it out the window and he had ‘adjusted his clothing’ and had gone up front to the driver’s seat and had started the car and was taking her home.

The second time that she had to honor her promise just about the same thing happened to her and on the drive home, in silence, her heart sank as she was forced to come to terms with the banality that was involved with having casual sex and the turmoil that it caused in her and its messiness and its sad inefficacy.

After the second time she made some resolutions and one of them was that although she was reasonably sure that neither of the two guys would spread the word on her she shouldn’t do it again with anyone from her town, or with anyone who knew who she was, because she didn’t want to get the reputation of having round heels.

She tried to stay away from all entanglements but every few months her libido would rise up and swamp that decision so she’d be forced to try again but always with the same result except for the time that she let herself be picked up by an older man. She found out from him that they had the money to take her to a motel and, once there with the door closed, weren’t too disappointed when she told them that she had only the one breast because they were sophisticated enough to simply ask her to keep her bra on knowing that they could transfer their attentions to other choice parts of her sweet young body.

Naturally she learned to prefer older men but if she was asked out by a guy who was around her own age who she liked she’d always stipulate that if t’were done t’were better that t’were done in a nice motel where they could lie down and she could put some of the techniques that she’d learned from her more experienced lovers. Again, most of the younger ones who could pay for a room were adamant about having some tit to squeeze before getting on with it and so she’d try hard to keep the guy’s hand on her right one but if he irrationally persisted on getting to make the acquaintance of both of them – she began to believe that that is a universal need in all adolescent males – she’d eventually have to give up and when he found that he had more flesh under his own nipple than she did on that side he’d do some cussing but wouldn’t leave at once because he’d be hard, of course – and would have already paid for the room – and that gave him the incentive to fight through his disappointment and he’d explore her other parts and do some kissing and licking and then he’d mount her but as soon as he came he’d invariably lose all interest in her, and in her body, and he’d disengage as soon as was possible and if the hour was still reasonable he’d use the bathroom and then get dressed and leave but if it was too late for that he’d get back into bed and would refuse to cuddle up and he’d say ‘Goodnight’ and turn away and go to sleep. She’d hope that he’d want some more in the morning but when she’d wake up the guy was either gone already or was taking a shower and when he came out of the bathroom he’d get dressed and go out the door after grunting goodbye.

After one too many of those episodes she decided, to avoid disappointment and shame, to go out only with older men from then on and one night, in a party, she met Edgar Humphries who was thirty-five.

They found that there was a mutual attraction and they eased away from the other people and then, a little later when they were sure, they left the party and found a quiet bar where they could talk and hold hands.

They got on so well that they met up regularly from then on.

He had a nice apartment and she took to spending a lot of time in it with him – once they’d established that they were compatible in bed too – and finding out that she came with one too few of the standard number of breasts didn’t faze him much, if at all.

They married a year or so after they’d met and everything went well for two more years but they divorced before the third one had gone by.

What happened was that although he’d always been partial to paying a lot of attention to one of her secondary sexual characteristics, viz: her bottom, after two years it got to be that he became obsessed with it and he ‘visited’ with her prime one less and less often and then only to use it, savagely, for its prime reason for existing.

If that had been their only problem she’d have learned to live with it but as time went by he found that he couldn’t get a hard enough erection until he’d pleaded, always successfully, with her to help him with her mouth. From the beginning of their relationship she’d willingly gotten on with doing that for him but only in the sixty-nine position and only after the action down at his end had put her well into the mood but now he was asking her to get on with it cold, as it were, and she didn’t like doing it one little bit.

However, through all this, she remembered reading somewhere that the vast majority of couples have one or two aberrations in their personal sexual get-togethers that they’d rather not be known generally and so she bravely and stoically got on with it for him every time that he asked her to which soon got to be far too often.

She cooked simple breakfasts for them both and she could prepare light lunches to his satisfaction but he was a gourmand and so he insisted that they go out every night for dinner.

One of his favorite restaurants was within easy walking distance and so they usually headed there.

The waiter, whose table they always sat at, was a vaguely effeminate man called Harold – never ‘Harry’ – who was both efficient and conscientious.

One night, after putting her entrée in front of her, he leaned over to put his mouth close to her husband’s ear and she heard him begin, “Edgar darling – – ” just before he moved his hand to block the rest of what he was saying from her and when she saw that her husband merely listened to what he was whispering, instead of protesting or punching him in the face, she realized why she was being forced to help him so much in their bed and then other ramifications came to her and with a great deal of revulsion she knew, there and then, that she’d never, ever, let his member get to be anywhere near her body again no matter about taking it in her mouth.

When they got home she told him about hearing him being addressed as “Edgar darling” and – he said later that he was happy that it was out in the open at last – he had no alternative but to confess that he’d long passed over into Somerset Maugham territory in that, “I always thought that I was seventy percent straight and only thirty per cent gay but I now find that it’s the other way around.”

   Her love for him wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to deal with that and so she moved out and went home to Mommy.

That was Sandra’s history of love making and Irene’s was bleaker by far. In fact it was non-existent! She had a nice figure but her face was very angular and she had a bone-blade for a nose, very like her father, and so no boy or man ever approached her for a date and so she remained a virgin. At eighteen, rife with untoward urges, she regretted that fact very much every day and was constantly on the lookout for a bed partner but it never happened and by the time that she got to be twenty she’d almost managed to convince herself that she was still intact only because she’d always wanted it that way.

 There you have both sisters’ whole, sad stories.

                                              //                                                                      //

When Irene got to be reconciled with her sister’s plan they went into details and in the course of that Sandra had to explain many things to her like, “No. We won’t have to buy condoms by the gross. In fact, we won’t use any at all because taking the pill will protect us from getting pregnant and, because a condom’s main raison d’etre is as a prophylactic, seeing that it’s impossible for Aden to have contracted an STD we won’t need them for that either. Besides, which,” she went on, “all men hate having to wear them, which I can understand perfectly, and we really do want him to get the maximum amount of pleasure that there is, right?”

They both agreed that it should be done ASAP and to that end it would be best if Sandra ‘let’ herself be seduced that very evening. They knew that she’d have to provide some provocation to get it to happen and that the, ‘You Tarzan, me Jane so let’s get it on,’ approach wouldn’t work but that the closely related, ‘You men are so big and strong and we women are so small and delicate and do you know if there’s a way to halp us find a balance?’ one might. They took time to think about the best approach and after a while Sandra said that she might know of a method that could work and she went on to tell her sister that the reason that she wore T-shirts and pants suits most of the time was because having only one breast had made her self-conscious not only about having guys looking at her cleavage but also from not liking to be treated like an object when they angled to catch a glimpse of thigh when she sat down or got out of a car when wearing a skirt. She said that they could use that built in weakness in men to attract Aden in spite of his, also built in, natural reluctance due to familiarity with her over the years and, of couse, the ‘insist aspect.’

They passed ideas back and fore and what they came up with was that Sandra should wear one of the ‘baby-doll’ night gowns that she owned, and no panties, and if she somehow managed to let it flounce up he’d be able to catch a tantalizing glimpse of all that she had ‘down there.’

Sandra asked Irene to let her practice on her and she went to her room and returned wearing one of her lacy nightgowns with nothing underneath it.

Irene, taking the part of Aden, sat up straight and tried to look stern and when Sandra sat down in front of her in a way that let her dress ride up it allowed Irene to see her bunch of pubic hair immediately and so she didn’t let her sister get on with her spiel because she thought that the amount of ‘black and curlys’ that were on display didn’t fit the petite image that she’d said she wanted to use on him.

Sandra saw the point at once and wanted to go for a Brazilian cut but Irene thought that total baldness might be the best the way to go and she helped her sister to shave it all off.

The second time around, after she’d ‘inadvertently’ flashed her sister again, Irene said that it was a thousand times better and that, although for the life of her she didn’t understand why men got so obsessed about it – to her it was a case of, ‘there’s-nothing-much-to-see-down-there-compared-to-what-they-have,’ – by being able to see all of it at first glance just had to help.

They then moved on to think up what would be the best things for Sandra to say to Aden to get him to make the next move which, they knew, was crucial because if he didn’t react properly and seize the chance to get himself some of what was being offered freely it was doubtful if he ever would and they agreed that a clumsy, over-blatant approach could well make him quit in disgust right then and storm out of the house and never be their bread-winner again.

It was difficult for them to come up with something that would do the job in spite of all possible ramifications and so eventually they gave up and decided to leave it and hope that the visual inducement would work decisively and if not then Sandra would have to come up with something extemporaneously.

As Sandra was leaving to go and change back into sensible clothes she wasn’t at all happy with this ‘extemporaneous’ stuff so, hoping that another idea would come to her, she turned around and asked Irene to come with her up to their brother’s room where they could practice on site.

Irene sat on the bed and when Sandra looked around for a suitable chair to operate from she saw that the only one there was his elaborate Aaron that he’d brought home from the office because there’d been two of them. As soon as she saw it she knew what the answer to her problem was as far as the logistics of the thing was concerned because she’d often seen her brother scooting around the room on it as he went from his desk to his guitar-stand to his bed, where he always laid out his sheet music, and he ‘powered’ the chair by putting his feet on the nearest upright firm surface and use it to push off in the required direction.

She asked her sister to hand her a cushion which she put under herself – Aden was four inches taller than she was – and then she asked her to sit on the bed, front and center, and started practicing scooting around the room using her feet and legs to push herself off the various stationary furniture. She kept up a stream of meaningless verbiage that puzzled her sister but when she arrived directly in front of her and then put her feet onto the mattress frame on either side of her and then pushed herself away again with them it became obvious why she she’d done it and Irene applauded and said, “Wow! Consider it done, Sis! My, aren’t you the clever one?”

When Aden got home he saw at once that the kitchen had been cleaned up and he was told that there’d be steak and French fries with mushrooms for his dinner – his favorite meal – and when he’d washed up and was sitting at the table Irene served it for him and poured him a beer.

“Wow! This is great,” he said. “But why? What’s the occasion?”

“Oh, just because I felt like making you something special,” she answered. “You want to know something, bro? Things are going to be different around here from now on. I’m going to start collecting recipes and I’ll try a new one everyday. This here is a piece of prime filet but in future I’m going to find ways to prepare the cheapest cuts so that they all taste as good as this.”

“Wow, that’s good to hear. Thank you.”

“Hah, don’t mention it. Well, I’ll let you get on with it and if you need anything else just holler, you hear me, bro?”

He went up to his room afterwards to change and get ready to go out to practice but soon after he got there he heard a knock on his door and when he opened it he saw that once again Sandra was standing there and that she was wearing a short, frilly dress and no shoes.

She breezed on in past him and then she asked him to sit down on his bed and then she sat on the Aaron chair, which was in front of his desk.

She turned towards him and said, “You know, Aden, I’ve been thinking about how you mocked me the other day when we talked about coming to work with you at the workshop. Well, I really do want to do it and I’ll try as hard as I can but first I want to know if you fully understand something.

“You men are built for hard work and, on top of that, you have testosterone factories that pour it into your systems all day and night and that gives you the motivation to do strenuous and difficult things whereas we women don’t get any testosterone from anywhere. Right?”

Here she pushed herself across the room towards his chest of drawers.

“All that we girls have is estrogen and that can’t possibly contribute anything to build up our muscles or give us the drive to tackle hard things, right? Physically speaking, we’ve got to learn to accept the fact that we’re non-starters as far as ‘macho-ness’ is concerned and that we are only going to be receivers all of our lives. True?”

She then pushed herself away from the chest of drawers and towards his bed.

“So. Well. Much as I don’t like being a non-producer I – Oh! Wait a minute, Aden – I want to show something that I’ve left on your desk so wait right there while I get it. It’s an article that I read and it’ll really interest you. I know it will.”

She’d seen to it that her dress had ridden up nicely when she’d first sat down and she put her feet up against the frame of the bed on either side of his body and she bent her legs preparatory to pushing herself off with them and then she paused for a minute as if she was considering something else and then she gathered her strength to push off but, just before she did that, she sneaked a glance at his face and she saw that his mouth had fallen open and his eyes were staring and then his tongue was licking his suddenly dry lips so she waited some more as she mouthed more inanities that, in his present condition, couldn’t possibly register with him like, “So, when you’ve read it maybe you’ll be able to tell me how can we poor, weak women produce anything of value compared to you big, strong men?”

She could see that she’d already won the battle so she gave up on all thought of pushing away from him and she opened up some more and slid her bottom to the edge of the chair and that enhanced the spectacle so much that it overwhelmed him and two seconds later he was on his knees with palpable lust on his face and nothing on his brain except one thing which was to close with the mysterious, divine, all-powerful object that had been long known to him in porn magazines and XXX films and on the internet but had been frustratingly unknown to him in the living flesh, as it were, up until that moment.

The only practicing that he did that night were the techniques that she taught him that would prolong his pleasure and, not a bit incidentally, hers too.

He didn’t even remember that she only had one breast until he’d transferred large quantities of seminal fluid into her, twice with a short interval but without disengaging, and had then rested up enough to want to do some exploring.

He was disappointed with being half-cheated out of being able to feel and kiss two of them but not too much because being allowed total access to one of them, for the first time, was delightful.

The two of them spent a good deal of horizontal time together from then on and he was reluctant to leave her to go to work and as soon as he got home he’d want her to get undressed and stay with him at all times until it was time for him to go to work again. All through that time he’d whine like an infant if she took herself out of his sight.

She thought that that it was all a bit excessive so they took time to find out why he had such an obsessive zeal for it and they eventually agreed that it was probably because he’d been deprived of it for all of his twenty-four years and his body – along with the base of his brain, “whatever it’s called,” “I don’t remember either,” – was not only very grateful for having one come alongside, at last, but it was also trying to catch up on the wasted years.

Sandra was very wrong about thinking and saying that Aden was going to tire of her “in a matter of weeks, at best,” and, in fact, it was she who got tired of getting so much attention. She was losing a lot of sleep and was being used in one way or another so often that all of her central area was sore at all times and lathering herself with salve as soon as he left the house didn’t help her much.

So, it wasn’t long before she brought up the idea of having threesomes and was very surprised when he showed little enthusiasm for it. When she pressed him about it he thought for a minute and then told her that while having access to her was now essential to his health, and to his mental balance, having another woman in his bed wasn’t high on his priority list because; “I can’t use two of you at the same time and I fail to see how a second one can increase the amount of pleasure that I get from you because it’s already nothing short of marvelous every time.”

So, he kept on using her, and only her, to excess and consequently she continued to be hurting all day and night and so she made a veiled threat about giving him restricted hours and she saw panic come into his eyes as he was forced to contemplate having that horror imposed on him and so he agreed to let Irene join them, “on a trial basis.”

He did, however, get more enthusiastic about it when Sandra told him that Irene was a virgin and so not only would it be satisfying, to say the least, for him to be her first one but, here she clinched the deal, by being the first one – and for as long as he remained the only one – he would have the distinct luxury of having access to a woman who was a custom-sized fit for him whenever he wished.

As for Irene: she’d gone from being anxious for a week or so about having to go to his bed to being resentful about the number of weeks that were going by and still not being allowed to go to his bed.

Also, having to listen to the two of them going at it almost constantly after he got home from work, and over the weekends, didn’t help her one little bit and so, especially on Sunday mornings, she went for long walks to get away from the sound of complaining bed-springs and cursing and/or exalting voices and because she didn’t much care for nature nor for walking aimlessly she was relieved in more ways than one when she got the call and she was apprehensive and scared but happy when she ‘reported for duty.’

Aden was delighted with her body, so much so that he didn’t de-flower her for more than a week after she’d joined in the love fest, and he remained content with having her near before, and during, the times when he was with Sandra.

The sisters rebelled, Sandra stayed being almost as sore as ever and Irene was getting more and more frustrated, and so they set a date and again threatened to withdraw benefits if he didn’t agree to it and, when he’d reluctantly done so, they decided to hold a little ceremony before getting down to doing it.

When Sandra had escorted her sister to His Lordship’s presence and had pulled the veils (two curtains taken down from the kitchen windows) from her otherwise naked body she got on with lighting the candles and then, with her back to them, she chanted some gibberish to Venus and Priapus but stopped when she heard the bedsprings tell her that the deed was already being done.

She turned to watch and although poor Irene was crying, and was pushing at Aden’s hips with her hands to try to make him stop hurting her, his ass soon became a pinkish blur as the amount and the intensity of the pleasure that he was getting made him strive to break all records in the change-a-girl-into-being-a-woman contest.

Sandra stood and watched as he got on with cussing and crying out nonsense until he screamed to signal completion and then he collapsed in a heap and went completely limp. The women combined their efforts to push him to the side of the bed and Sandra then used her fingers to surreptitiously dab some of Irene’s blood onto his belly and thighs to make sure that he’d be made fully aware of the severity of what he’d done – and of Irene’s noble sacrifice – when he was compos mentis again and had recovered enough to go and wash up. She saw that there was a whole lot of blood on the bottom sheet and so she arranged the covers so that he’d have to see that too then she helped the still crying Irene to the downstairs bathroom where she tended to her.

A whole week went by before Irene could be persuaded by Sandra to go to bed with them again and when she did so she only let him do some squeezing, especially both of her breasts at the same time, and some groping but whenever he moved to mount her she’d close her legs up tight until he’d quit and had turned his attentions back to ever-ready, ever-open and still ever-sore Sandra.

When they were alone the day next Sandra asked Irene if she was still hurting and the question took her by surprise so she probed herself with a finger and found that she was completely healed and said so.

“Yes, I thought it would be, so what’s the problem? Why didn’t you let him do it to you last night and give me a break? I’m really sore, sis, it’s red raw inside and all around. Do you want to see?”

“No, no. I’ll take your word for it and anyway, I’m not a bit surprised seeing the number of times I hear you both going at it. However, what does surprise me is that you can let him do it to you even once a month no matter about several times every night and what seems to be a hundred times at the weekends. You’re a heroine.”

“How do you mean?”

“How do I mean? How do I fucking mean? You were there and you saw and you heard the agony that I went through and not to mention the blood that poured out of me. It’s torture and it should be criminalized, that’s what.”

“But – – – but – – – you can’t be thinking – – – Do you really believe that that’s what will happen to you every time? Yes? Jesus . . .

“Now you just listen to me, girl. You’ve obviously fallen out of touch with the world. If you were more aware and read some books now and again, or even some magazines other than those fashion things, you’d know that we women get a whole lot of pleasure out of having sex too –that is once the first time is over and done with. Sure, Aden was brutal to you that time and he should have gone easy but that’s the nature of men and we women have to accept it.

“You’ve got to understand that it wasn’t his, Aden’s, fault entirely because he’s just a man and because he was getting so much pleasure from doing it he lost all control and that means that he’ll remember how good it was and he’ll want to do it to you again often which is exactly what we want, right?

“We women have got to draw a veil over most of the nasty details of what being penetrated does to us and concentrate on remembering the good parts. Y’know, it helps if you try to remember that we are never treated fairly by Nature. Look at the child-bearing thing. Nine whole months growing inside us and we can’t drink coffee, no matter about anything that’s got alcohol in it, for all that time! And let’s not even think about having to push a head that’s about as big as a bowling ball out of our vaginas that normally only just let a man’s thing get in there even though most of them are only as big as a fair sized banana.

“So why do we put up with our lot? I’ll tell you why. It’s because we have to, that’s all. There’s nothing else. There’s no alternative. We’re stuck with being women and thus always receivers, always accepting, always having to open up and allow it to happen.

“But listen, there are some compensations, right? Let’s remember that. For instance: we don’t have to be soldiers and get shot at and we don’t have to do manual work if we don’t want to and, best of all, we’ve got what men have to have and, for the most part, they’ll protect us and care for us all of our lives to be able to get some whenever they want.

“Another one is, maybe the biggest one, it’s men who have to get the erections and once they’re over forty or so complications set in and they can no longer get them whenever they like. They still need it as much as ever but it gets to be iffy as to whether their equipment is going to show up ready for action when needed. We, on the other hand, being receivers, can let it happen whenever we want to do it or, more likely, when we have to and then, because of the blessed pill, if worse comes to worse, we can simply accept it and stay still while it’s going on and then go back to sleep afterwards.

“But that’s in the future as far as we’re concerned. As I said before, at our age having sex is not only pleasurable it’s also very satisfying so please believe me when I say that when you do it again you’re going to positively love it.

“Well? Do you believe me? Will you let it happen to night? . . . Listen, I promise that if you’re disappointed again, or hurt again, I’ll never ask you to be the one who accommodates him again. OK? Yes?”

“You promise that it won’t hurt any more? Yes? – – – Jesus, I’m tempted because all the hype says that you must be right. I sure do hope you’re right because – well, when I remember all that blood – – – ”

“I promise and, tell you what, I’ll see to it that he gets you to be fully ready and willing before I’ll let him get into position. OK? Good Girl.”

 As promised, Irene was delighted when she found out that not only didn’t he hurt her but, after a half dozen strokes, she wouldn’t have minded if he’d been a bit rougher with her and when he had to speed up and it actually did get rough she loved it and subsequently both of her siblings were surprised to learn that she knew so many of the really disgusting word sequences that she cried out as she was urging him on and was pulling at his end to achieve that end towards the end.

From then on threesomes became their usual mode and they slept together in the big bed, the one that had been their parent’s, with Aden in the middle always.

 One night, after a few weeks of their newly found happy arrangement, he woke them both up one night by getting out of bed and they slept fitfully the rest of the night when he didn’t return. At dawn and they went looking and found him in his old bed and fast asleep.

They went back to bed and held each other as they worried about its significance.

 When he got home that night he called to Sandra to come to the kitchen where Irene was busy preparing dinner and when she got there he took her hand and led her over to the table and he sat on one of the spare chairs that was against the wall, so that he was facing Irene, and he intimated to Sandra that she was to sit on his lap. On seeing that both sisters breathed sighs of relief because his summons could have meant that he was about to announce something nasty and disagreeably life-changing for them but if that had been his intention he wouldn’t have wanted to be that close to either of them.

Sandra knew what the routine was so she turned the other way before sitting on him – very much like a woman with poor hearing in one ear will change seats so as to have her good ear nearest to whoever wants to speak to her – and she undid some buttons as she was doing so. When she’d unclasped her prosthetic bra and he’d captured her right breast, her only breast, nicely with his left hand he let out an, “Aaaaaah!” as he always did and then, when he’d done with weighing and kneading the marvelous object that never fails to delight all men, he cupped it and then gave them his good news.

“Listen up both of you. I hereby announce that I think that, at last, my body has caught up with what it was cruelly deprived of for all those painful years.

“Well, this is how I found that out. I got woken up early this morning by a weird feeling that I couldn’t shake off and that wouldn’t let me go back to sleep. Well, maybe a minute later it got obvious to me that it had woken me up from a sound sleep to tell me that I should know, and acknowledge, the fact that I’ve changed fundamentally and that I’m an entirely different person now from what I was not long ago. It was as if a light had been switched on over a sign that said, ‘Welcome to adulthood.’

“A bit scary right? It was a kind of revelation, I guess. Well, I figured that I’d better go off and find somewhere private to think it out properly and so I got up – I was careful to not wake either of you – and I went to my old room and got into bed there.

“After concentrating on the revelation for awhile I realized that it really is true – my attitude to life in general has changed dramatically – and it’s happened because you two have been so – uh – so nice to me that you’ve driven my sexual tension and – uh – anguish away. By examining that from all sides I eventually came to realize that that anguish had built up over the years because of all the macho hype and nonsense that started when I was about twelve and, because I’ve never found an – uh – an outlet for it, it has built up in strength and has clouded my thinking ever since. Uh, that is up to now.

“It was a wonderful thing to happen because I saw then, and again at work later on, that it’s high time that I made all the rest of my life change for the better to match up with my splendid new love life and my vastly improved domestic life too.”

He took a look at their faces and saw that he had their full attention but that both of them were puzzled. He knew that they were well aware of the ‘new love life’ part and so he figured, wrongly, that he should spell out the second part out for them. “Well, look at what we’ve got here now.”

At that moment he had to, reluctantly, let Sandra’s breast go free because he needed his hand to gesture with. “The house is cleaner than it ever was even when Mom was here and Irene’s cooking is first class and getting better by the day – hell, I can’t hardly remember when we had spaghetti last – so please tell me, who’d have thunk just a few months ago that that, and our new – uh – happy arrangement, would ever happen?”

Sandra broke in to say, “Yes, we’re well aware of what’s happening here at home. What we want to know is what is this, ‘life change’ thing that you brought up.”

“Oh! Sorry. Well, let me tell you. When I realized all of that I not only knew that it was time to get the rest of my life together but I wanted to. I discovered that there’s a new kind of drive in me that’s telling me to get started at once on improving the life that I lead outside this house.

“Well, the first thing that I did was to come to terms with the fact that the band that I’ve poured so much time into is going nowhere and that I have to get out of it, and the music business, entirely. Well, not quite entirely yet because tonight is one of our regular practice nights at Elian’s place so I’ll go there soon but for the last and only to give the guys my guitars and my amps and all the rest of the equipment and my sheet music and all the songs and the ideas for songs that I wrote over the years.”

“You’re not going to include your Flyde in that give away, I hope?” Burst in a horrified Irene.

“Hell no. I’ll keep my Flyde, of course. I couldn’t ever part with that.

“Well, I’m going to do that tonight but listen to what I’ve already done today. This afternoon I went to the Community College and I signed up for the evening classes that start next month and I’m going to take the course for ‘Industrial Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning.’ One of the course instructors was there to give advice and he was very polite and obliging and he told me that I didn’t have to worry about my Math being rusty because they have ways to teach me all that I’ll need to know to be able to keep up with the course and that, anyway, everyone who pays the fee and is already working full time in the industry, and who attends every class on time, is practically guaranteed to pass and get a diploma. Then I asked him about the three licenses that I’ll need and he said that when I have my diploma I can sign up for three one-time-only classes that the union gives, they cost a hundred bucks each, and that although the questions in the written tests are very hard because they have to be I wasn’t to worry because the bare-bones of the answers would be already written on the blackboard at the front of the room and all that the test-takers have to do is to flesh them out in their own words. He said that that way we avoid giving the appearance of their being copied out.

“He told me that I’d get all three licenses in the mail about two weeks after the last class.

“So, what do you think? Good, huh?”

When they’d both congratulated him he went on, “Wait, there’s more. You’ll both love this bit. Well, I know I do.

“When I was leaving I saw a poster on a bulletin board that advertised a course called, ‘Yoga For Lovers.’ I searched out the right classroom and I went in and there was a small, very gentle and very brown guy in there and nobody else. He was glad to see me – to see anyone, I guess – and he offered me some ginseng tea, probably to get me to sit down and stick around.

“When I got settled he told me that Yoga – he always made the first letter of that word sound as if it has a capitol, somehow – in can not only strengthen the muscles that play a big part in the sex act but it also prepares the mind for it and he said that that’s even more important if you want it to last longer and be of higher quality and, just as good to know, if you want to do it more often.

“Well, that got my interest – although I kind of doubt that last bit. Ha! I don’t think it’s possible for us three, right? – and then he produced two brochures and the one that he showed me was the one for men. It was obviously homemade and it had about twenty pages that were stapled together but with only one staple that was near the top, not the middle, and because of that the pages weren’t – uh – anchored together properly. The first pages were of rounded out stick figures doing exercises and a half of them had a crude depiction of a male’s toggle and two and the other half were shown to be female by putting little curves that indicated breasts and buttocks and they had small inverted ‘v’s drawn between their legs.

“I wanted to quit after looking at a few pages but he, his name is ‘Jabar something,’ shook his head at me and told me to continue and when I got to the center page I saw why he’d wanted me to keep on looking and also why there was only one staple holding the pages together.

“It was a color photograph of the lower half of a brown skinned woman whose legs were as spread-eagled as a woman’s legs can be. It was as if she was doing one of those splits except that she was sitting on a mat and leaning back on her arms. The staple was pinning, and passing through, her ribs and it would have been cruel beyond belief to make someone put another one lower down because her pubic hair had been shaved off and her vulva was wide open, of course, and right there, plain as day, was her clitoris that was as big as the tip of my little finger and her labia were somehow pressed over in layers towards the sides which showed that there was an intriguing indentation between them that was about as big as a postage stamp and was about a half inch deep and was lined with ultra healthy looking pink-ish, red-ish flesh and was, obviously, the entrance to her vagina.

“Well, when I could make my eyes back-off enough to take in the whole thing I saw that it was the illustration of an exercise in which those tendons that seem to stand out on women especially, the ones that start at mid thigh and go up all the way up and disappear near your centers, were being massaged and I knew that because there was a small brown hand probing at one of them. There was also a large white hand that was resting on the other thigh.

“Jabar told me that the brown hand was his and that the other hand belonged to a student who’d been one week away from graduating.

“When he told me about it being his own hand I found myself blushing because the poster on the bulletin board said that it was ‘A family business since1995’ and if that was true then the woman in the photo could be his wife or some other close relative. Man!

“Well, because of that I tried to stop my eyes from going to the woman’s happy, happy valley because it was easily the most intriguing one that I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a whole bunch of them in videos and – – – uh, well let’s let that go, shall we? – – – anyway, as I was saying, this one was really something. Hell, if I close my eyes I can see every detail of it still.

“Well, with that photo he really got my interest and he knew it too because he then asked me for my name and address, and the rest of it, and he filled in a form and then he put it aside and he started asking intimate questions and I found myself telling him about Mom and Dad’s accident and about having you two sisters at home. He asked me how old you are and then he looked at me and asked a question with his eyes – it was THE question – and there was no way that I could lie but no way that I could admit to it either but he kept on staring at me and finally I gave him the barest of nods and that was evidently enough for him because he said, ‘Good. I’m pleased to hear it because sharing love is always the right thing to do – with Yoga instructions or without them.’

“He asked me to bring you both to his classes and I waved my hand at the brochure and shook my head in embarrassment he said something like, ‘Listen to me please. Yoga is all encompassing and so families benefit from it most if they all take lessons at the same time. Don’t feel that your circumstances are unique because Yoga allows for no barriers to love and it embraces all humans equally and so there are many thousands, hundreds of thousands, of families who stay close together because they practice it together.’

“Now,” Aden went on, “I want you two to listen to this part carefully because it’s important for us all, as you’ll see. The guy said, ‘I think that I already know you well enough to tell you some personal details and to know that you won’t repeat it outside this room, except to your sisters of course.

‘Well now, let’s take my own family for instance. My household consists of me and five women. One is my wife and one is my mother and two more are my sisters and the last one is our maid. Every night after dinner, when the maid has cleaned up and has stacked the dishes to dry, we all go up to the main bedroom and we sit in a circle on the carpet in the dark and we hold hands and chant my Mantra. I should explain that everyone has his or her own Mantra but in our sessions at night we all chant my Mantra because, of course, the intention is to boost my virility. That stands to reason, as you say, right? Well, when the time is right – no one knows how everybody in the room gets to know it at the same time – we let go of each others’ hands and soon after that I feel a touch on my shoulder and I stand up and my hand is taken and I’m led over to the bed.

‘I never know who she is – before, during or after – nor do I know how they decide which one’s turn it is. When the rest of the women have filed out of the room the two of us get undressed and then we do our favorite exercises – I’ll show you many of them before you graduate – and when we’re both ready – that is, when neither of us knows anymore who owns the fully erect instrument of love that has come to our bed – we pull apart to establish that fact and then we lie down in the conventional way, with me on top because that’s necessary to get it done. When I’m all the way inside her we lie still and the only movement that generates the essential friction comes from our coordinated breathing which pushes our diaphragms down which, in turn, compress our bellies and that lifts me up and out a fraction of an inch and then, when we breathe out, lets me sink down and thus get all the way inside her again.

‘We both go into a near-orgasmic state for what seems to last for hours or days but is actually only between fifteen and twenty minutes. When it gets to be fully-orgasmic for us both my seed transfers itself into her care and it eases out of me without any tension or pressure and when she feels it entering her she says, ‘Aaaaaah’ to acknowledge the holiness of the moment and when she’s absorbed it all, and has made it safe because it must never see the light of day nor feel cold air, we both chant her Mantra because it will be the baby’s too, that is, of course, if we’ve just started one and if we have then it shares it with its mother until it comes of age and is given one of its own.

‘I should tell you here that we are not irresponsible because all of my women have passed child bearing age so impregnation is impossible except for a miracle and – well, who can really know about such things? – the fact is that one could happen and that possibility is what lends depth and reverence and authenticity to the whole procedure.

‘Well, to get back to that union – we stay joined together until I slip out of her and then she whispers her thanks and then washes me and gives me some kisses and then goes away.

‘There! That’s it. Every night the same and I always sleep like a baby until I wake up and then I invariably spring from bed to greet the new day. Believe me, Aden, I am three times your age but I’m still a happy, potent man and, as you’ll see for yourself in our first class, all of my women are happy too and, not a bit incidentally, we all enjoy excellent good health.

‘Well, there you have it. So, Aden, to please me and to increase by tenfold your household’s karma-phala, please ask your sisters to enroll too and by the time that you have all been given a Mantra of your own – it takes time to recognize the one that’s best for each person. For instance, ‘Ommm’ is the most well known one and that’s because it is very adaptable but only time can show what is the right one for any one individual – I guarantee that the quality of your sex lives will have improved immensely and, although at your age you might not think it possible, the frequency of it will have done so too.’

“Well,” said Aden, “after that I signed up there and then and then I asked him if I could have a copy of the brochure that I’d just read and he said, ‘No. I only give out copies of it after the first class – that way you’ll pay proper attention to my instructions – but I can give you this little one right now that itemizes the courses and the meeting times and our fees.’

“Before I left I asked him if I could please take a quick look through the brochure that’s aimed at women and he smiled and said, ‘You’ll be able to do that if one of your sisters decides that it’s all right with her to let you look at her copy. However, I strongly doubt it because she’d lose far too much if she did.’ He’d say no more so after that I left and came home.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about his last statement ever since he said it – it’s what’s called ‘enigmatic,’ right? D’you agree? I think that it’s probably just a part of his hype but, well, I guess that we’ll just have to wait and see.”

He stopped looking at the floor and lifted his head to say, “Well now, that’s it. For my part, I can hardly wait for September the 17th to come around. What d’you two think?”

When Aden had gotten to the end of his story he didn’t need a free hand to gesture with anymore and so he reached over and searched out and re-captured a – that is, ‘the’ – breast that was under his immediate jurisdiction and Sandra, of course, felt it being re-arrested and Irene had seen him do it and so they both waited for, and got, his ‘Aaaaaah’ and then they blurted out:

“ “I’ I’ m m   g g o o i i n n g g   t t h h e e r r e e   t t o o m m o o r r r r o o w w   t t o o   s s i i g g n n   u u p p   a a n n d d   y y o o u’ u’ d d   b b e e t t t t e e r r   b b e e l l i i e e v v e e  i i t t,,  b b r r o’ o’..” ”