Doing it all Over Again... My Greatest Wish

[whiskynaam]

"No!" I yelled, slapping her hand away from my crotch a little sharper than I'd intended. I jerked my other hand free of her tit and stepped away from her.
The look in her eyes would haunt me. It was anger, hurt, and desperation. "Please?" she pleaded.
"I have to go, Anita," I told her. "I'm sorry for everything."
I opened her bedroom door and headed for the living room. As I left she called my name again. I looked back at her.
"I'll be here for you when you want to come back," she said. "I'll always be here for you."
I swallowed nervously. "Goodbye, Anita," I finally said. "And I'm sorry."
She remained in her bedroom as I made my way out of her house. The children gave me worried looks as I left. As I closed the door behind me I could hear the sound of her sobs coming from the bedroom.
________________________________________
I only picked at my dinner that night, scraping much of it down the garbage disposal when I did the dishes. My mother expressed concern but I explained my loss of appetite away by proclaiming I felt like I was coming down with something. She felt my forehead, in the way of mothers, and told me she hoped I felt better soon.
"Me too," I said sincerely.
After the last dish was done I went upstairs to my room. I opened my closet and removed a copy of the World Almanac, that great repository of usually useless but occasionally helpful factoids. I paged through the index until I found the page for the section I wanted. I turned to the page. UNITED STATES AREA CODES read the heading. They were arranged alphabetically by state. I flipped to California and scanned down the column until I saw Berkeley. 415 was the code. I memorized this information, carefully put the book away, and then headed downstairs.
Mom and Dad were both watching television, or at least sitting in front of it. Dad was correcting some papers for his classes at school. Mom was working on some paperwork for her job. I figured they were well occupied so I headed for Dad's den. I called information for the 415 area code and asked for the phone number for the UC Berkeley bookstore. This was the first time I'd called information after being recycled and it startled me a little when the operator actually read off the number to me instead of having a computer do it.
"Did you get that, sir?" she asked.
"Uh, yes," I said. "Thank you very much."
"You're welcome," she said cheerily. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"No, thank you."
She hung up and I dialed the number she'd given me. A man with a decidedly feminine voice and trouble pronouncing the letter S answered the phone. Ah, California.
"Bookstore, can I help you?" he chirped.
I asked for Tracy.
"Just a minute."
The phone clunked down and, instead of being placed on hold, I heard the low murmur of conversations drifting into my ear and the sound of the man who'd answered yelling for Tracy. A few moments later I heard the phone being picked back up.
"Hello?" came my sister's voice, a tinge of nervousness in it. She was probably not accustomed to receiving phone calls at work.
"Tracy, its Bill," I said.
"Bill?" More worry now. "What's wrong? Are Mom and Dad okay?"
"They're fine," I assured her. "It's you I need to talk to."
"Me?" she said. "How come? And how did you get this number? I'm not supposed to be getting phone calls at work unless it's an emergency."
"The number's a matter of public record, Tracy," I told her. "And it's the only way I could think of to get hold of you. Sorry I had to bother you at work."
"That's okay," she said. "But what's wrong?"
"It's nothing immediate," I said. "But I think that there's a chance you might be in, well, in some danger."
"Danger?" she asked, alarmed. "What do you mean?"
"It's probably not a good idea to talk about this while you're at work," I replied. "And like I said, it's nothing immediate. But can you call me tonight when you get off work? Give me a time and I'll stay by the phone."
"Bill?" she asked. "I don't understand. What do you mean I'm in danger? You're in Washington and I'm in California. How could you know anything from there?"
"Tracy, I'll explain everything when you call. Or at least as much as I can. Will you please do it?"
A sigh. "Yes, Bill," she answered. "Be by the phone at nine tonight."
"I will," I told her. "Thanks, Tracy."
At nine o'clock sharp I was positioned by the phone in the den. When it rang I picked it up before it had a chance to get half a second into the first ring.
"Hello?" I said.
The operator told me I had a collect call from Tracy and asked if I would accept the charges. I told her I would.
"Okay, Bill," Tracy said to me. In the background I could hear music and the squeal and giggles of many girls. I concluded she must be on the payphone in the dorm. "Tell me what this is all about."
"Well," I said, "do you remember when I told you before that you should not get into a car with a certain person on a certain day?"
"Yes," she answered quietly. I could almost hear the shudder in her voice.
"Some disturbing things have happened lately," I went on. "Some things that lead me to believe you are not exactly out of danger from that."
"What do you mean?" she asked. "I didn't get in that car that night and what you said was going to happen happened without me. How could I still be in danger from that? Believe me, I'm still not going to get into a car with David Mitchell."
"That's the thing, Tracy," I told her. "You didn't get into the car that night and Barbie Langston did. But Barbie didn't die in the accident. She's still alive."
"So?" Tracy, obviously uncomfortable with the discussion, asked.
"So," I told her, "some other things have happened that make me think-well this is going to sound crazy-that you were supposed to die in that car and that since you didn't, things are trying to re-align themselves the way they are supposed to be."
"Billy," she said angrily, "that is nuts. That's absolutely insane! What do you mean I was supposed to die? I didn't. And I'm not going to die."
"Just promise me something, Tracy," I asked her.
"What?"
"Promise me you will never get into any car with anyone who's been drinking. Especially not your boyfriend's. Are you still seeing him?"
"Yes I'm still seeing him!" she barked at me. "What does that have to do with anything? And I never get into a car with someone who's been drinking. You should know that."
"I know, Tracy," I said. "And that's what worries me. I don't know if the drinking part is a pre-determined factor in this. I don't know much of anything about the rules. I'm not even sure there are any rules."
"Rules to what?" she asked. "Where do you come up with these things, Bill? You scare me sometimes."
"It's a long story," I answered. "A very long one. Does your boyfriend drink?"
"What?"
"Does he drink?"
"Yes," she said. "He's a college student. We all drink."
"What kind of car does he drive?" I asked next.
"A Corvette," she answered. This should have made me feel better. But it didn't. "Why are you worried about Darren? What does his car and whether or not he drinks have to do with anything? I didn't die that day, Bill. Somehow, some way you knew about that. I don't know how. But it's over now. I'm still alive and nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing!"
"Tracy," I pleaded, "just promise me you won't ever get in the car with him after he's been drinking. Promise me."
"Yes, Bill," she recited. "I promise. Is there anything else you want to talk about?"
Actually there was. I wanted to talk about Nina to her, get her feelings on the matter, get advice from her, tell her that she was right and I was wrong. But she didn't seem in the mood for it just then. It would have to wait.
"No, Tracy," I answered. "I just want you to be careful. I worry about you."
"I can take care of myself, Bill," she said shortly. "I've gotta go."
"Goodbye," I said. "Thanks for talking to me."
"Goodbye, Bill," she answered. A second later there was a click in the earpiece.
I hung up Dad's phone and sat there for a few moments. I could only hope I'd done some good. Because there was nothing else I could do.

[whiskynaam]

The next day at school I was met first thing in the morning by some of Mike's fabrications and exaggerations. I can't begin to tell you how glad I was to hear them.
"Dude," he said excitedly to me. "Guess what?"
"Hey, Mike," I greeted. "Suspension's over?"
"Yeah," he said. "But that's not all. I'm back in ROP."
I breathed a silent sigh of thanks to Mrs. Compleigh. "Really?" I asked. "That's cool. How'd that happen?" I was actually sort of curious to see how it had transpired.
"Well, I guess the battalion chief over at the fire department really racked that asshole captain's ass for yelling at me and kicking me out of there. The chief told the counselor that he wanted me back like yesterday." He gave a self-satisfied grin. "At least he knows what he's got going with me on the department."
"I guess so," I agreed.
"So anyway, they want me to go talk to the BC today and they're going to reassign me to a different station. Station 2 this time. They got a truck and an engine running out of there."
"No shit?" I said, gaining a lot of information from what he was saying despite his embellishments. Station 2, another downtown station, did indeed deploy a truck and an engine. It also was the home, at least in my when, of the battalion chief for that battalion. I figured they had probably decided to move Mike there so that more people, including the boss, could keep an eye on him. He wouldn't be trusted for a while, would in fact face a long, hard road in that endeavor. But at least he was back in.
"Yeah," he strutted. "I hear they're gonna bust that captain back down to engineer for all of this."
"Well," I answered, "that may be so, Mike, but if I was you, I'd lay off the buds while I was at the work site. I don't think they'll let you back in if they catch you doing that again. Or even if they think you're doing it again."
"Yeah, I know," he said dismissively. "That's what the counselor told me too. I guess I can wait until I get home. So anyway, they tossed out the application for independent study. So I guess I'll hang out for the rest of the year after all."
"Glad it worked out, Mike," I told him. "And if you want to keep coming over to have me help with your homework, I'm home the same hours."
"I'll be there."
As I headed to my first class of the day I had a careful smile on my face. At least I'd steered Mike back to where he'd been. The rest would be up to him and if he blew it again I would be forced to concede the inevitability of his loser status. But for now he was back on track. Or back off track if you prefer.
________________________________________
When my alarm clock woke me up the next morning the first sound I heard upon shutting it off was the patter of rain against my window. I sighed as I pondered walking to school in a downpour again. As I listened to the precipitation against the glass I came to a decision on a matter I'd been mulling over for some time.
After showering I went down to breakfast and picked up the business section as usual.
"How are the stocks doing today?" Dad asked from behind the sports page.
"Up a little again," I told him, doing some quick calculations in my head based on some figures I'd added up a few days before. The latex industry was slowly climbing at this point but had yet to do anything dramatic. It would before too much longer went by. But in the meantime I was funneling all of my spare income into those stocks. The added capital plus the gains in the price added up to more than two thousand dollars of available income. Not a fortune, but not bad either.
I flipped through the business section and found the classified ads. After five minutes of perusal I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking at.
"Dad," I said, "can you cash out six hundred dollars worth of my stocks today? Three hundred from each company?"
He slid his paper down and looked at me. "What for?" he asked.
"I need to buy a car," I told him. "I refuse to walk to school in the rain anymore."
We talked that matter over for a few minutes, as fathers like to do with their sons. He agreed to cash out the stock but made me promise to take him with me when I went out looking so he could keep me from being screwed. Knowing that I didn't really need his help to keep from getting screwed but also knowing that buying the first car was one of those things father's lived for, I agreed.
I was very excited about the prospect of going out car shopping on Saturday. Excited enough to dampen the depression the rain had brought. But my mood was changed in an instant when Mom came into the living room.
Casually, she said to me, "Oh, Billy, Anita called last night."
"Anita?" I said as tonelessly as I could manage.
"Yes, she wanted to know if you could swing by after school today and help her change the oil on her car before you go to work. I told her you probably wouldn't mind doing that."
"You did?" I said.
Mom gave me a strange look. "That's okay, isn't it?" she asked. "You're usually able to help her out when she asks."
"Uh..." I stammered, my mind whirring. "... well actually I have a lot of homework to catch up on today."
"Bill, its Friday," she told me. "Can't it wait?"
"No." I shook my head. "It's chemistry. If I don't do it right after school I... uh... forget all of the formulas and stuff."
Mom looked at me for a minute, her mother instinct probably being jigged by my words. But finally she shrugged. "Okay," she said. "But will you try to do it this weekend sometime?"
"I'll uh, see what I can do, Mom," I said carefully.
"Thank you, Billy," she answered, looking at me with a troubled expression.
Had I really believed that Anita was going to fade away that easily? I guess I had.
________________________________________
That night when I went to bed my testosterone got the better of me. There was only one way to relieve it and manage some sleep. I took myself in hand and began stroking, an action I'd performed thousands upon thousands of times before in my two lives. I thought of Nina as I did it, almost against my will. Never had a fantasy been so vivid, so real to me. It only took a minute or so before my fantasy Nina's job was complete and I was drifting off into a troubled slumber.
________________________________________
The next day, Saturday, Dad and I spent the late morning and early afternoon driving from place to place and looking at used cars. Dad showed me how to negotiate and how to check out a vehicle that you might buy. To my surprise he actually taught me a few things that I didn't already know. I was pleased with the vehicle we eventually settled upon. It was a 1976 Datsun B-210 with seventy thousand miles on it. The engine was in reasonably good shape although the paint job and the interior were in bad need of an overhaul. I paid five hundred cash for it and drove it home that day. That evening I took it to work with me. No matter what else happened, there would be no more walking to school in the rain or the snow.
A week went by and then another. Nothing changed between Nina and I. She continued to ignore me in class and to eat lunch by herself. I tried to talk to her a few times without any measure of success. I tried to tell her I missed her but she didn't listen. My hope for any future relationship began to dwindle. During this period I maintained my habit of jacking off once a day on average. I simply couldn't help it. Nina was always featured in these fantasies and most of them were not even about sex. Most of them just involved being in an intimate place with her, being together with her.
Anita continued to be a problem. She continually called my mother asking if I could come over to do little chores for her. I was fast running out of excuses for why I couldn't do what she asked and my mother, now quite plainly sensing that something was wrong, was running out of look-the-other-way-so-you-don't-have-to-address-an-unpleasant-truth. I knew I was going to have to have another talk with Anita but I wasn't up for it yet. The memory of our first talk was still too fresh in my mind. I'd experienced emotions during that talk that I'd never felt before, not even during the divorce with my wife in my previous life.
On the following Friday night, while I was adding up my stock holdings after receiving my latest paycheck from the pizza joint, the phone rang. Dad answered it, listened for a minute, and then yelled my name. I walked into the kitchen and took it from him, figuring it was probably Mike.

"Hey, Billy-Boy!" a familiar female voice haled. "How you been?"

Cindy! In all of the turmoil of the recent past Cindy had completely slipped my mind. Our album sessions had dwindled once she'd started college and had all but disappeared in the last two months. I hadn't seen or heard from her since then.

[whiskynaam]

"No!" I yelled, slapping her hand away from my crotch a little sharper than I'd intended. I jerked my other hand free of her tit and stepped away from her.
The look in her eyes would haunt me. It was anger, hurt, and desperation. "Please?" she pleaded.
"I have to go, Anita," I told her. "I'm sorry for everything."
I opened her bedroom door and headed for the living room. As I left she called my name again. I looked back at her.
"I'll be here for you when you want to come back," she said. "I'll always be here for you."
I swallowed nervously. "Goodbye, Anita," I finally said. "And I'm sorry."
She remained in her bedroom as I made my way out of her house. The children gave me worried looks as I left. As I closed the door behind me I could hear the sound of her sobs coming from the bedroom.
________________________________________
I only picked at my dinner that night, scraping much of it down the garbage disposal when I did the dishes. My mother expressed concern but I explained my loss of appetite away by proclaiming I felt like I was coming down with something. She felt my forehead, in the way of mothers, and told me she hoped I felt better soon.
"Me too," I said sincerely.
After the last dish was done I went upstairs to my room. I opened my closet and removed a copy of the World Almanac, that great repository of usually useless but occasionally helpful factoids. I paged through the index until I found the page for the section I wanted. I turned to the page. UNITED STATES AREA CODES read the heading. They were arranged alphabetically by state. I flipped to California and scanned down the column until I saw Berkeley. 415 was the code. I memorized this information, carefully put the book away, and then headed downstairs.
Mom and Dad were both watching television, or at least sitting in front of it. Dad was correcting some papers for his classes at school. Mom was working on some paperwork for her job. I figured they were well occupied so I headed for Dad's den. I called information for the 415 area code and asked for the phone number for the UC Berkeley bookstore. This was the first time I'd called information after being recycled and it startled me a little when the operator actually read off the number to me instead of having a computer do it.
"Did you get that, sir?" she asked.
"Uh, yes," I said. "Thank you very much."
"You're welcome," she said cheerily. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"No, thank you."
She hung up and I dialed the number she'd given me. A man with a decidedly feminine voice and trouble pronouncing the letter S answered the phone. Ah, California.
"Bookstore, can I help you?" he chirped.
I asked for Tracy.
"Just a minute."
The phone clunked down and, instead of being placed on hold, I heard the low murmur of conversations drifting into my ear and the sound of the man who'd answered yelling for Tracy. A few moments later I heard the phone being picked back up.
"Hello?" came my sister's voice, a tinge of nervousness in it. She was probably not accustomed to receiving phone calls at work.
"Tracy, its Bill," I said.
"Bill?" More worry now. "What's wrong? Are Mom and Dad okay?"
"They're fine," I assured her. "It's you I need to talk to."
"Me?" she said. "How come? And how did you get this number? I'm not supposed to be getting phone calls at work unless it's an emergency."
"The number's a matter of public record, Tracy," I told her. "And it's the only way I could think of to get hold of you. Sorry I had to bother you at work."
"That's okay," she said. "But what's wrong?"
"It's nothing immediate," I said. "But I think that there's a chance you might be in, well, in some danger."
"Danger?" she asked, alarmed. "What do you mean?"
"It's probably not a good idea to talk about this while you're at work," I replied. "And like I said, it's nothing immediate. But can you call me tonight when you get off work? Give me a time and I'll stay by the phone."
"Bill?" she asked. "I don't understand. What do you mean I'm in danger? You're in Washington and I'm in California. How could you know anything from there?"
"Tracy, I'll explain everything when you call. Or at least as much as I can. Will you please do it?"
A sigh. "Yes, Bill," she answered. "Be by the phone at nine tonight."
"I will," I told her. "Thanks, Tracy."
At nine o'clock sharp I was positioned by the phone in the den. When it rang I picked it up before it had a chance to get half a second into the first ring.
"Hello?" I said.
The operator told me I had a collect call from Tracy and asked if I would accept the charges. I told her I would.
"Okay, Bill," Tracy said to me. In the background I could hear music and the squeal and giggles of many girls. I concluded she must be on the payphone in the dorm. "Tell me what this is all about."
"Well," I said, "do you remember when I told you before that you should not get into a car with a certain person on a certain day?"
"Yes," she answered quietly. I could almost hear the shudder in her voice.
"Some disturbing things have happened lately," I went on. "Some things that lead me to believe you are not exactly out of danger from that."
"What do you mean?" she asked. "I didn't get in that car that night and what you said was going to happen happened without me. How could I still be in danger from that? Believe me, I'm still not going to get into a car with David Mitchell."
"That's the thing, Tracy," I told her. "You didn't get into the car that night and Barbie Langston did. But Barbie didn't die in the accident. She's still alive."
"So?" Tracy, obviously uncomfortable with the discussion, asked.
"So," I told her, "some other things have happened that make me think-well this is going to sound crazy-that you were supposed to die in that car and that since you didn't, things are trying to re-align themselves the way they are supposed to be."
"Billy," she said angrily, "that is nuts. That's absolutely insane! What do you mean I was supposed to die? I didn't. And I'm not going to die."
"Just promise me something, Tracy," I asked her.
"What?"
"Promise me you will never get into any car with anyone who's been drinking. Especially not your boyfriend's. Are you still seeing him?"
"Yes I'm still seeing him!" she barked at me. "What does that have to do with anything? And I never get into a car with someone who's been drinking. You should know that."
"I know, Tracy," I said. "And that's what worries me. I don't know if the drinking part is a pre-determined factor in this. I don't know much of anything about the rules. I'm not even sure there are any rules."
"Rules to what?" she asked. "Where do you come up with these things, Bill? You scare me sometimes."
"It's a long story," I answered. "A very long one. Does your boyfriend drink?"

[whiskynaam]

"What?"
"Does he drink?"
"Yes," she said. "He's a college student. We all drink."
"What kind of car does he drive?" I asked next.
"A Corvette," she answered. This should have made me feel better. But it didn't. "Why are you worried about Darren? What does his car and whether or not he drinks have to do with anything? I didn't die that day, Bill. Somehow, some way you knew about that. I don't know how. But it's over now. I'm still alive and nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing!"
"Tracy," I pleaded, "just promise me you won't ever get in the car with him after he's been drinking. Promise me."
"Yes, Bill," she recited. "I promise. Is there anything else you want to talk about?"
Actually there was. I wanted to talk about Nina to her, get her feelings on the matter, get advice from her, tell her that she was right and I was wrong. But she didn't seem in the mood for it just then. It would have to wait.
"No, Tracy," I answered. "I just want you to be careful. I worry about you."
"I can take care of myself, Bill," she said shortly. "I've gotta go."
"Goodbye," I said. "Thanks for talking to me."
"Goodbye, Bill," she answered. A second later there was a click in the earpiece.
I hung up Dad's phone and sat there for a few moments. I could only hope I'd done some good. Because there was nothing else I could do.
________________________________________
The next day at school I was met first thing in the morning by some of Mike's fabrications and exaggerations. I can't begin to tell you how glad I was to hear them.
"Dude," he said excitedly to me. "Guess what?"
"Hey, Mike," I greeted. "Suspension's over?"
"Yeah," he said. "But that's not all. I'm back in ROP."
I breathed a silent sigh of thanks to Mrs. Compleigh. "Really?" I asked. "That's cool. How'd that happen?" I was actually sort of curious to see how it had transpired.
"Well, I guess the battalion chief over at the fire department really racked that asshole captain's ass for yelling at me and kicking me out of there. The chief told the counselor that he wanted me back like yesterday." He gave a self-satisfied grin. "At least he knows what he's got going with me on the department."
"I guess so," I agreed.
"So anyway, they want me to go talk to the BC today and they're going to reassign me to a different station. Station 2 this time. They got a truck and an engine running out of there."
"No shit?" I said, gaining a lot of information from what he was saying despite his embellishments. Station 2, another downtown station, did indeed deploy a truck and an engine. It also was the home, at least in my when, of the battalion chief for that battalion. I figured they had probably decided to move Mike there so that more people, including the boss, could keep an eye on him. He wouldn't be trusted for a while, would in fact face a long, hard road in that endeavor. But at least he was back in.
"Yeah," he strutted. "I hear they're gonna bust that captain back down to engineer for all of this."
"Well," I answered, "that may be so, Mike, but if I was you, I'd lay off the buds while I was at the work site. I don't think they'll let you back in if they catch you doing that again. Or even if they think you're doing it again."
"Yeah, I know," he said dismissively. "That's what the counselor told me too. I guess I can wait until I get home. So anyway, they tossed out the application for independent study. So I guess I'll hang out for the rest of the year after all."
"Glad it worked out, Mike," I told him. "And if you want to keep coming over to have me help with your homework, I'm home the same hours."
"I'll be there."
As I headed to my first class of the day I had a careful smile on my face. At least I'd steered Mike back to where he'd been. The rest would be up to him and if he blew it again I would be forced to concede the inevitability of his loser status. But for now he was back on track. Or back off track if you prefer.
________________________________________
When my alarm clock woke me up the next morning the first sound I heard upon shutting it off was the patter of rain against my window. I sighed as I pondered walking to school in a downpour again. As I listened to the precipitation against the glass I came to a decision on a matter I'd been mulling over for some time.
After showering I went down to breakfast and picked up the business section as usual.
"How are the stocks doing today?" Dad asked from behind the sports page.
"Up a little again," I told him, doing some quick calculations in my head based on some figures I'd added up a few days before. The latex industry was slowly climbing at this point but had yet to do anything dramatic. It would before too much longer went by. But in the meantime I was funneling all of my spare income into those stocks. The added capital plus the gains in the price added up to more than two thousand dollars of available income. Not a fortune, but not bad either.
I flipped through the business section and found the classified ads. After five minutes of perusal I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking at.
"Dad," I said, "can you cash out six hundred dollars worth of my stocks today? Three hundred from each company?"
He slid his paper down and looked at me. "What for?" he asked.
"I need to buy a car," I told him. "I refuse to walk to school in the rain anymore."
We talked that matter over for a few minutes, as fathers like to do with their sons. He agreed to cash out the stock but made me promise to take him with me when I went out looking so he could keep me from being screwed. Knowing that I didn't really need his help to keep from getting screwed but also knowing that buying the first car was one of those things father's lived for, I agreed.
I was very excited about the prospect of going out car shopping on Saturday. Excited enough to dampen the depression the rain had brought. But my mood was changed in an instant when Mom came into the living room.
Casually, she said to me, "Oh, Billy, Anita called last night."
"Anita?" I said as tonelessly as I could manage.
"Yes, she wanted to know if you could swing by after school today and help her change the oil on her car before you go to work. I told her you probably wouldn't mind doing that."
"You did?" I said.
Mom gave me a strange look. "That's okay, isn't it?" she asked. "You're usually able to help her out when she asks."
"Uh..." I stammered, my mind whirring. "... well actually I have a lot of homework to catch up on today."
"Bill, its Friday," she told me. "Can't it wait?"
"No." I shook my head. "It's chemistry. If I don't do it right after school I... uh... forget all of the formulas and stuff."
Mom looked at me for a minute, her mother instinct probably being jigged by my words. But finally she shrugged. "Okay," she said. "But will you try to do it this weekend sometime?"
"I'll uh, see what I can do, Mom," I said carefully.
"Thank you, Billy," she answered, looking at me with a troubled expression.
Had I really believed that Anita was going to fade away that easily? I guess I had.

[whiskynaam]

That night when I went to bed my testosterone got the better of me. There was only one way to relieve it and manage some sleep. I took myself in hand and began stroking, an action I'd performed thousands upon thousands of times before in my two lives. I thought of Nina as I did it, almost against my will. Never had a fantasy been so vivid, so real to me. It only took a minute or so before my fantasy Nina's job was complete and I was drifting off into a troubled slumber.
________________________________________
The next day, Saturday, Dad and I spent the late morning and early afternoon driving from place to place and looking at used cars. Dad showed me how to negotiate and how to check out a vehicle that you might buy. To my surprise he actually taught me a few things that I didn't already know. I was pleased with the vehicle we eventually settled upon. It was a 1976 Datsun B-210 with seventy thousand miles on it. The engine was in reasonably good shape although the paint job and the interior were in bad need of an overhaul. I paid five hundred cash for it and drove it home that day. That evening I took it to work with me. No matter what else happened, there would be no more walking to school in the rain or the snow.
A week went by and then another. Nothing changed between Nina and I. She continued to ignore me in class and to eat lunch by herself. I tried to talk to her a few times without any measure of success. I tried to tell her I missed her but she didn't listen. My hope for any future relationship began to dwindle. During this period I maintained my habit of jacking off once a day on average. I simply couldn't help it. Nina was always featured in these fantasies and most of them were not even about sex. Most of them just involved being in an intimate place with her, being together with her.
Anita continued to be a problem. She continually called my mother asking if I could come over to do little chores for her. I was fast running out of excuses for why I couldn't do what she asked and my mother, now quite plainly sensing that something was wrong, was running out of look-the-other-way-so-you-don't-have-to-address-an-unpleasant-truth. I knew I was going to have to have another talk with Anita but I wasn't up for it yet. The memory of our first talk was still too fresh in my mind. I'd experienced emotions during that talk that I'd never felt before, not even during the divorce with my wife in my previous life.
On the following Friday night, while I was adding up my stock holdings after receiving my latest paycheck from the pizza joint, the phone rang. Dad answered it, listened for a minute, and then yelled my name. I walked into the kitchen and took it from him, figuring it was probably Mike.
"Hey, Billy-Boy!" a familiar female voice haled. "How you been?"
Cindy! In all of the turmoil of the recent past Cindy had completely slipped my mind. Our album sessions had dwindled once she'd started college and had all but disappeared in the last two months. I hadn't seen or heard from her since then.
"Hi, Cindy," I said carefully. If I'd learned nothing else over the past few weeks I'd learned that females you thought you were having a casual relationship with were often not under the same impression. Was another bomb about to drop on me? Had I screwed up Cindy's life as I had Anita's? I honestly didn't know. In my previous life I'd lost track of Cindy after her and Tracy had stopped hanging out together. The last time I'd seen her had been at Tracy's funeral where she'd given me a sympathetic hug and had disappeared from my life forever.
"What's up?" she asked me.
We chatted for a few minutes. She apologized for not having contacted me lately and I assured her it was okay. She told me she had a new love interest and I was very glad to hear that. Even when she mentioned that he was a professor at her college who was 'kind of married', I maintained my delight.
"That's just great, Cindy," I told her. "I hope things work out for you."
"Oh they will," she assured me. "They will. I'll see to it."
"I'm sure you will."
"Listen," she said, "the reason I called is that Maggie and I are moving into an apartment together. You remember Maggie, don't you?"
How could I forget her? She was Cindy's brunette friend who used to come over to 'study' with me on days that Cindy could not. Like with Cindy, I hadn't seen Maggie in quite a while. Was Maggie going to be the latest bomb? "Yes," I said. "I'm familiar with Maggie."
Cindy giggled. "I'm sure you are," she said. "Maggie knows your album collection almost as well as I do. Anyway, we really need someone to help us move tomorrow. We have a truck but we need help getting our shit out of our parent's house and into ours. Could you be a sweetheart and give us a hand?"
"Is anybody else going to be there?" I asked.
"Just me and Maggie," she told me. "Everyone else is busy on short notice. And if you help us out, we might give you a real special reward."
"Special reward?" I said quietly.
"Real special," she assured me. "So what do you say?"
I'd told myself that I was past my previous ways, that my days of fucking anything with a pussy were gone. I knew I should offer a sincere apology to Cindy and tell her I was busy. But I hadn't released my daily load for the day and I was feeling quite horny. The thought of Maggie and Cindy, of their tight, youthful bodies wormed its way into my mind and stuck there. I found my mouth opening and the words, "What time should I be there?" leaving my lips.
"My house," Cindy said. "Ten o'clock sharp."
"You got it," I told her.
"We'll be looking forward to it."
I hung up the phone feeling guilty about my actions. But I also did not have the willpower to call Cindy back and tell her I couldn't make it. I told myself that I would just help them move and that nothing else would happen. And I knew that I was lying to myself.
________________________________________
It was overcast the next day but not raining. I drove to Cindy's house, arriving promptly at ten, and met the two girls standing next to a medium sized U-Haul truck. They both gave me hugs for greeting and both gave my ass a discreet squeeze, making my dick, which I'd just relieved only twelve hours before, pulsate in my pants. My morals wavered.
We spent about an hour moving boxes from Cindy's bedroom in her parent's house into the U-haul. We then caravanned to Maggie's house, where I'd never been before. It took an hour and a half to move Maggie's boxes from her room. Once the U-Haul was full we drove to a large apartment complex near the college.
Like Raisin's apartment complex, I knew this one from my previous life as a paramedic. We used to go to calls to it frequently, not because it was scummy, although there was a little bit of that, but because it was huge and because it was filled with college students. College students like to drink and take strange drugs and get into fights over things like parking space ownership and who drank the last beer. I'd been here for overdoses, for life-threatening alcohol ingestion, for countless assaults, for people on acid who'd convinced themselves that they'd forgotten how to breathe, and for the occasional stabbing or shooting. I remembered it mostly because each trip into its bowels was an exercise in celestial navigation. There were no maps in the front. The buildings had no numbers on them. Even the apartment numbers themselves were marked only with a four-inch set of black numbers on the brown background of the doors. I remembered driving around in the place for fifteen or twenty minutes looking for the right apartment every time I came, and receiving angry rebuffs from the drunken college students when I finally stumbled across the right one, as to why it had taken me so long to get there. I remembered thinking that there should be a law against places such as this.
Thankfully Cindy and Maggie had been to their apartment before. They found it after only ten minutes of driving around. The U-Haul was parked illegally in a red zone and the ramp was extended. The apartment was opened up and we began picking up boxes, each of which was marked either with a C or an M or an LR or a K, into the two-bedroom living quarters. Forty minutes later the U-Haul was empty.
We sat down on boxes in the cluttered living room and Cindy opened up an ice chest, distributing wine coolers to all of us. I popped mine open and took a long swallow, feeling the fruity, sweet beverage pass my gullet. Cindy then produced a joint that we all smoked from, getting us pleasantly stoned. With each sip of wine cooler, with each +++e from the joint, thoughts of Nina and fate and Julie and Anita went further and further to the back of my mind. By the time the roach was nestled safely in an ashtray and Maggie was plugging in a boom box and putting on some tunes, my dick was stiff from looking at the two girls.
Cindy made the first move. She came over and sat next to me, her left hand dropping down to the crotch of my jeans where her fingers began making sensual patterns across the bulge of my cock. "I've missed this," she said, looking down at the unnatural tightness of the denim. "That's one thing about the professor, he may be a nice guy and he sure knows how to treat me, but he doesn't know how to operate his piston very well."
"Maybe you should teach him," I said, with a voice that wasn't quite steady.

[whiskynaam]

She popped the top button slowly and then gave a sharp yank, opening all the others. "Maybe I should," she said. "If he wants to keep me around he's going to have to learn a few basic skills anyway." She smiled. A smile I was very familiar with. "Maybe I should refine my teaching techniques a little."
"I'm happy," I said, watching her fingers fish through my underwear, seeking my cock, "to offer my services as a learning tool."
"Good," she said, sliding off the box and sinking to her knees before me.
She tugged at my waistline and my jeans came down, allowing my hard cock to pop out into the light. With a quick glance at Maggie, who was sitting ten feet away and watching the developments, she lowered her head and took me into her mouth. Cindy hadn't forgotten a thing about cock sucking. She bobbed up and down, teasing and sucking at the same time. I sighed as I felt her talented mouth go to work on me.
Across the room Maggie watched us and I saw a familiar shine in her eyes. Her nipples began to poke out through her sweater and she began to rub her legs together. Finally she stood up and walked over to us.
"I must say," she said, grabbing the hem of her sweater, "this is very arousing. I never thought I'd get turned on watching Cindy suck someone's cock but it's strangely alluring all the same."
"Yeah?" I said, looking at her. She was a little chunkier than Cindy was but still very attractive. She looked like a future librarian, glasses and all. She was also, I knew from previous dealings, very well read and possessed a large vocabulary that she liked to show off. Maybe she would be a writer some day. Maybe she would write about his.
"Yeah," she said, lifting her sweater up and off, revealing her bra-clad tits.
While Cindy continued to work on my cock I pulled her to me, reaching up for the clasp on her bra. In a half second it was released and the bra dropped to the floor. She stepped forward, sticking her left tit into my mouth. I began to suckle the nipple while my hand stroked up and down the smooth flesh of her stomach. My other hand was in Cindy's blonde hair while Cindy's head continued to work my dick.
After a moment Cindy pulled herself free from me and stood up. "Switch!" she told Maggie.
Maggie slipped her tit out of my mouth and dropped down between my spread knees. A second later my cock disappeared into her mouth. Cindy pulled off her own sweater and then quickly dropped her bra. While I reached out and took a tit into each hand, feeling the flesh and the nipples, she kicked her shoes across the room and unbuttoned her pants. With a quick push of her hands she was naked, her blonde bush open for my perusal.
"Did you miss this?" Cindy asked, spreading herself open and gyrating her hips.
"Yes," I lied.
"I want to sit on your face," she told me. "Maggie, let the man up."
"Mmmmm. He is up," Maggie said from around my cock.
The two girls giggled. While I shucked my pants the rest of the way and tossed off my shirt, Maggie did the same with her pants. A minute later I was naked and looking at four tits and two bushes, one blonde, one black as night. My dick was twitching with arousal. In all of the encounters I'd had since recycling and in all of the encounters I'd had before recycling I'd never had two girls at one time. I don't believe I could have resisted this is Nina had walked through the door at that very moment.
I lay on my back on the floor and Maggie dropped down again, taking my cock into her mouth. Her sucking continued while her hands fondled my balls. Her tits rubbed against my upper thighs. Cindy, her back to Maggie, eased herself down over my face, allowing her wet, juicy pussy to descend upon my mouth. I stuck out my tongue to meet it, tasting her tangy secretions and plunging in. Her pubic hair pushed into my nose as I lapped away at her, first plunging in and then going for the clit.
Meanwhile Maggie was trying her damnedest to suck a load from my cock. She drove her head up and down, sucking all the while, her hands frantically jacking. Maggie I knew, loved the taste of come in her mouth. She'd been known to come over just to give me a head job. Not that I ever complained about this of course.
About the time that Cindy began gyrating uncontrollably upon my face, drenching me with her secretions, I felt my own orgasm approaching quickly.
"Yesss!" Cindy moaned above me.
"Mmmmm!" Maggie moaned from between my legs as I began to shoot my come into her throat.
"Ahhhh!" I moaned, on sensory overload from all the female fresh pressing into me.
Maggie licked my dick and balls clean, giving me the beginnings of a new hard-on. Cindy climbed off of my face and tapped her naked friend on the shoulder.
"I'll take over here," Cindy said. "Get yourself up there and get some tongue."
Maggie smiled. "If you insist," she answered, raising her head from my crotch.
She positioned herself as Cindy had, lowering her black bush and wet lips onto my face. I began eating her, both tasting and smelling the contrast between the two girls' juices. Maggie's clit was already hard so after only a brief period of licking and sucking her lips, I attacked it. Meanwhile Cindy continued to suck and slurp on my cock, bringing it back to full hardness.
Of course I couldn't see anything with Maggie's body perched on my face but soon I felt Cindy's mouth pull itself off of my cock. This was followed a moment later by the feel of her inner thighs straddling my outer thighs and the head of my dick being tickled by a nest of hair. Her hand grasped me and I felt myself moved through wet hair and into a warm set of lips. She rubbed me against her clit for a minute and then suddenly, without warning, I was engulfed in her tight body as she sank down on me.
"Ahhhhhhhh!" I moaned into Maggie's pussy.
"Keep eating me!" Maggie panted from above. "I'm almost there!"
I dove back into her pussy, sucking her clit into my mouth once again and savaging it with my tongue. Maggie verbally registered her approval while Cindy began moving up and down on my cock, gripping it in that way of hers.
Maggie was both more violent when she came and more verbal. She screamed her orgasm out to the room using gutter profanity while her pubis battered my face until I was dazed. Cindy came again at the same time, dripping a stream of juices down to my balls.
Maggie got off my face and turned around to face Cindy, who was still bouncing away, her pretty tits jiggling up and down.
"My turn with the cock," Maggie proclaimed.
"Ohhh," Cindy whined, but she pulled herself off anyway.
Maggie lay down on the carpet next to me on her back, spreading her legs wide. "I like it this way," she told me. "Climb aboard."
I rolled over on top of her and sank into her flesh. While I fucked her Cindy sat in front of us, watching with a shine in her eyes and idly stroking her pussy with one hand. In all of my fantasies that involved two women at the same time, the two women always decided to try a little girl on girl action during the event. Apparently reality wasn't the same as fantasy. The two girls seemed to go to great lengths to avoid actually touching each other. But that was fine with me. It would have been nice to watch them go at each other but what I was doing now was nice enough even without it. Who was I to complain?
Maggie had another orgasm, again announcing it to the world in a much more violent manner than Cindy with screams of profanity and claws to my back. Figuring it was now safe to come again I began driving forward towards this goal. Cindy, still stroking herself, saw what I was doing and lodged a protest.
"No!" she yelled at Maggie. "You got to take the first load. I get the second one." She dropped down to the floor next to us, presenting herself in the doggy-style position. "Switch!"
Maggie, dripping with perspiration, panting, looked at me and said, "Fair is fair."
I shrugged, not really caring whose body I came into. I pulled myself out of her with a wet squish and rose up to my knees. I eased over behind Cindy and lined up. When my cock was in the right place I drove forward into her, immediately re-establishing the frantic rhythm I'd been using with Maggie.
As I fucked in and out of Cindy, using her hips for leverage, Maggie raised up to her knees and turned towards me. She leaned over and began kissing and licking the back of my neck and near my ears.
"Come in her," she whispered over and over again. "Come in her."
It didn't take long. With a cry of satisfaction I blasted my load into Cindy's hungry pussy, triggering an orgasm from her at the same time.
Satiated, I pulled my cock out of her pussy and let myself fall backward to the floor. Maggie curled up on my left side while Cindy flipped over and curled up on my right side. I put my arms around the two girls, feeling their wet, sticky skin.
"That was fun," Cindy commented, giving me a peck on the cheek. "We double-teamed you."
"I guess you did," I agreed, basking in the afterglow.
"But you got to come three times," Maggie protested lightly, aiming her comment at Cindy. "I only got to come twice."
"Not my fault," Cindy told her new roommate.
"Maybe," I suggested, "Cindy owes you an orgasm. What do you think Cindy, want to pay up?"
They both looked at me for a moment and then shook their heads.
"Don't be a pervert, Bill," Maggie said. "You've been reading too many porno mags."
I shrugged. "Can't blame a guy for trying, can you?"

[whiskynaam]

Originally Posted by hunter89

Damn you bro whiskynaam...... I didn't read your story for one day, and I spend my whole morning reading it until I can't complete my job.....

Keep coming !!!! A very good science-sex ficition story!!!

hehehe.... take it easy la bro...read n enjoy loh... its holiday mood mah... this week macham like whole singapore on switch off mode...

[hunter89]

Originally Posted by whiskynaam

hehehe.... take it easy la bro...read n enjoy loh... its holiday mood mah... this week macham like whole singapore on switch off mode...

Cannot switch off leh.... have been working my head off for the past 2 holidays liao.... And now my eyes are going blurry reading your post...... IT IS ALL BECAUSE OF YOU !!!!

KEEP DOING DOUBLE POST UNTIL I SO BLURR !!!!!
My fault also... follow too closely liao.....

[whiskynaam]

Originally Posted by hunter89

Cannot switch off leh.... have been working my head off for the past 2 holidays liao.... IT IS ALL BECAUSE OF YOU !!!!

KEEP DOING DOUBLE POST UNTIL I SO BLURR !!!!!
My fault also... follow too closely liao.....

Bro.. sorry about double posting. did not realise untill u tell me.. Will be more careful...

[hunter89]

Originally Posted by whiskynaam

Bro.. sorry about double posting. did not realise untill u tell me.. Will be more careful...

Bro dun stop leh...... I forget about my work liao... camping here already.....
Rain or shine will still be here....
Quick lah...... I shot post all can???? Not really interested in the sex part, but more interested as to what will happened next.

[whiskynaam]

I try i try... cut n paste till i see stars liao...

When I returned home that day I was sore and free of excessive testosterone but surprisingly and pleasantly guilt-free about my encounter with the two girls. Conversation with them afterward had assured me that neither one of them were following the path of Julie or Anita. Though I didn't know what path either of them had taken in my previous life since I'd lost track of Cindy and hadn't known Maggie at all, I received no ominous instinct that would lead me to believe I was pulling them away from their destinies. Chances are that Cindy had had an affair with her college professor before and that Maggie had moved in with her and had followed whatever path she was currently embarked upon. I was changing nothing with these two except for the occasional merger of my path with theirs.
And though I knew that Nina probably would not approve of what I'd done, would probably see it as further evidence of my assholery if she knew about it, I could not bring myself to feel guilt about this either. I wasn't supposed to be a freaking monk was I? Nina and I had no relationship at the moment to endanger. If I ever did manage to bring her around I hoped to have a more intimate relationship with her and of course I would have to refrain from having threesomes with attractive college students, but until then there was no harm being done as far as I could see.
I took a quick shower and then went to work. I sang happily along with the radio in my new car as I drove there.
I was awakened at 7:30 the next morning by Dad's pounding on my bedroom door.
"Bill?" he asked, opening the door and pushing his head through just as I was coming fully awake.
"Yeah, Dad," I said blearily. "What is it?"
"There's a girl on the phone for you," he told me. "She says she needs to talk to you right now, in private, and that it's an emergency."
That was strange enough to bring me fully awake in an instant. I had a sudden bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I looked up at Dad and saw that he was worried about this also. He was probably figuring that some girl was calling to tell me that I'd knocked her up.
"Who's the girl?" I asked Dad.
"She didn't give her name," he said. "And I've never heard her voice before."
"All right," I answered, pulling myself out of bed. I threw on a pair of sweat pants and followed Dad downstairs. "Do you mind if I use your den phone?" I asked him.
"Sure," he said, waving me towards the room.
I went in and picked up the phone. "I got it!" I yelled through the closed door. A second later I heard the click of the other extension being placed back in its cradle.
I took a deep breath and said into the mouthpiece, "This is Bill."
"Hi, Bill," a completely unfamiliar voice said to me. "My name is Linda. Your sister wants to talk to you."
"Tracy?" I said, confused. "What..."
"Hang on a sec," Linda said. A second later I heard her voice say faintly, "It's him."
"Thanks," my sister's faint voice replied.
There was a long pause and I heard the sound of a door shutting somewhere in the room where Tracy was. I figured that was Linda leaving the room to give Tracy some privacy.
At last Tracy's loud voice said, "Bill?" Her voice sounded haunted, scared. What had happened?
"Yeah," I answered. "What's going on, Trace?"
"I had Linda call for me so that Mom or Dad wouldn't know it was me," she explained.
"That's fine," I replied quickly. "What's wrong, Trace? Are you all right?"
"How did you know, Bill?" she asked, demanded. "How do you know the things you know?"
"What happened, Tracy?" I asked. "Tell me why you called."
"Last night," she said, "I went to a party with Darren in the city. A frat party. There was a keg of beer there and everyone, me included, got pretty drunk."
My mouth suddenly dried up as I heard this. "Go on," I said numbly.
"When it came time to leave Darren insisted he was okay to drive. He told me he wasn't really drunk and that he was okay. My judgment was pretty screwed up by the alcohol I guess and I believed him. I believed him! We walked out to the car and I had every intention of getting into it with him. I mean he seemed fine! He was walking okay, talking okay, everything!"
"Tracy, what happened?" I asked.
"When he went to unlock the car he had trouble getting the key into the lock. Just a little bit of trouble but he couldn't quite get it to fit in there." Her voice started to break a little. "Part of me tried to ignore this. I tried to tell myself that it didn't mean anything. But I remembered what you had said to me, how you'd warned me, and at the last second I told Darren that I didn't think he should be driving."
"And then what happened?"
"We had a fight. We yelled at each other out in the parking lot and he sounded so damn reasonable that I almost got in again. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I just couldn't! So anyway he eventually got totally pissed off and drove off without me. I caught a cab home, bitching the whole time about you and your stupid warnings, about how I was going to have to pay twenty bucks to get home when a perfectly good ride had driven off without me, shit like that."
"And?" I asked, knowing there was more or she wouldn't have called.
"I got back to the dorm safely and passed out in my bed. When I woke up this morning I was told that Darren drove his car into San Francisco Bay on his way home last night."
There was silence on the line as I digested this, as shivers went up and down my body. "Tracy, Jesus," I said. "Thank God I talked to you. What happened to Darren?"
She sniffed a little. "He's fine," she told me. "He pulled himself out of the car without any problems. Of course he got arrested for drunk driving but other than that he's fine." She paused. "But I wouldn't have been, would I?" she asked me, almost accused me.
"I don't think so, Tracy," I told her.
"What is going on here, Bill?" she demanded. "I think I deserve an explanation! Is this going to keep happening over and over until finally I die?"
"Tracy, I just don't know," I said. "All I know is that you need to be as careful as you can."
"Christ!" she told me. "You're telling me that fate has got a hard-on for me, that I'm supposed to drown in a traffic accident! How can I live a normal life if I have to worry about this all of the time? Is there any way to stop this?"
"I don't know," I said in answer to both of her questions. "I just don't know."
"Tell me what you do know!" she yelled. "I have a goddamn right to this information! Tell me!"
"Tracy, I can't."
"Why not?" she asked. "You come up with all this mystical shit, mystical shit that just happens to be true, shit you have no business knowing and you won't tell me how you're getting this information?"
She had a point there. "Are you coming home for Thanksgiving, Tracy?" I asked her.
"I don't know," she said, semi-hysterically. "Is it safe for me to fly on an airplane?"
A legitimate question. "I think so," I told her, figuring that fate wouldn't kill several hundred people just to get at my sister. "Why don't you come home then? We'll have a nice family get-together and you and I will sit down and have a talk."
"And you'll tell me what you know?"
"As much as I can," I promised, although I wasn't sure just how much 'as much as I can' encompassed.
"And in the meantime?" she asked.
"And in the meantime stay out of cars with people who have been drinking. Stay out of cars completely if you can avoid it. Fate does seem to have a hard-on for you, Tracy. So don't give it an easy mark. In a way the accident that your boyfriend had..."
"He's not my boyfriend any more," she spat. "You can bet your sweet ass on that."
"Right," I said, and then continued. "As I was saying, the accident that he had leads me to believe that certain pre-conditions have to be met. I don't know this for sure so be careful with everything you do, but it seems that the factors of a car, a drunk, and water all have to be met. Just to be safe, stay away from water too. Don't go swimming."
"And if you're wrong about these pre-conditions?" she asked.
How to answer that one? If I was wrong then Tracy was probably fucked. Fate would take her at its leisure. "Let's just hope I'm not wrong, Tracy," I finally said. "Come home for Thanksgiving and we'll see what we can figure out."
"All right, Bill," she said. "What else can I do?"

[whiskynaam]

I went with Mom and Dad to pick up Tracy at the airport on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. For any of you who have ever been to a large metropolitan area's air terminal on such a date you can appreciate the chaos that results from having five times as many people in the building as the fire code probably allows. It was wall-to-wall people pushing from one place to the next, all of them dressed in winter clothing since an early snowstorm had decided to descend upon our fair city. The noise and the crowding were suffocating and Tracy's plane arrived nearly thirty minutes late.
But when we saw her walking out of the skyway towards us it made it all worthwhile. Unlike Mom and Dad, I had not realized how much I'd missed my sister until I saw her. Being younger I beat them to her and got the first hug of greeting.
Before Mom and Dad could reach us Tracy whispered in my ear, "You promised me a talk."
"Soon," I told her. "Soon."
It was nearly eleven o'clock before we got home that night and all of us went straight to bed. There would be no talk that night. The next day relatives began to pour in from other parts of Spokane and from as far away as Sandpoint, Idaho and Moses Lake in the southern part of Washington. Mom made a huge turkey dinner that we all demolished and Tracy and I took our turns in the barrel having our cheeks pinched and being told how much we'd grown. By the time all of the relatives cleared out it was nine o'clock and we were all exhausted once more.
Mom and Dad had a long-standing tradition that they shared with another couple, the male half of which was a private pilot. Each day-after-Thanksgiving they would pile into a rented airplane and fly to Seattle to have lunch at the space needle. It was an annual event they'd participated in for as long as I could remember. They'd even continued to do it in my previous life after Tracy's death. They'd offered, halfheartedly I might add, to cancel it this year since Tracy only had a few days with us before she returned to Berkeley, but both Tracy and myself insisted they go.
"Bill and I can find something to do," Tracy told them, looking sharply at me.
"Yeah," I agreed. "We'll keep ourselves busy."
So it came to pass that Mom and Dad piled into their car at eight o'clock on Friday morning for the trip to the small municipal airport from which they would depart. Experience had taught both my sister and I that they would not return until at least six o'clock that evening.
Their car couldn't have been more than a mile from our suburban house before Tracy got off the couch and headed up to her old room. I gave her a puzzled look that grew more puzzled when she returned carrying a twelve pack of beer in her hands.
"Okay," she told me, slapping the beer down on the coffee table, "I scored us a twelver of this imported shit back in California and brought it all the way here for this talk." She ripped open the package, which was green and contained a brand of beer I'd never heard of. She pulled out two bottles and popped the tops with a bottle opener.
"Tracy, it's only eight in the morning," I protested. "I haven't even had breakfast yet."
She smiled. "Little brother," she said, "if you want to be successful when you go to college you'd better learn to drink beer first thing in the morning. It's a requirement." She handed one to me.
I took it, surprised to find it was icy cold.
"Something else you learn in college," she told me, taking a huge swallow. "If you want to keep your beer cold in the absence of a refrigerator, store it outside in the cold. I put this on the roof outside my window last night. Thank God it didn't get below freezing."
I took a swallow, finding the beer very tasty despite the early hour. "Not bad," I told her, drinking some more.
"Okay," she said. "Enough preliminaries. Let's talk."
I set my bottle down on the coffee table, struck by the strangeness of drinking a beer while still dressed in the clothes I'd slept in, my baggy sweats and a T-shirt. Tracy too was still dressed in her customary long T-shirt, this one with the University's logo on the front. Her legs were crossed Indian style on the couch, her eyes looking expectantly at me. I still had no idea what I was going to tell her, how much I should tell her.
"Why don't we start," I told her, "with what you do know and what you think is going on here. Tell me that."
"Why do you want to hear that?" she asked.
"I just want to see how this whole thing looks to someone close to me."
She thought for a second and then nodded, taking another sip of beer. "Fair enough," she said. "Here's what I know. I know that the day you told me about the accident I was scheduled to be in the first time, your personality underwent a radical change. One day you were immature little Billy, the next day you were hugging on me, telling me you loved me, and you weren't sure of the exact date. You got into a fight with a huge bully at school, something completely out of character for you, and you put him in the hospital. You came home that day and caught us smoking pot in the living room and you reamed us for it, the same way an adult would, but also different somehow. You also made Cindy's asshole boyfriend back down, and let me tell you, he doesn't back down too often.
"So I'm forced to conclude that whatever happened to you, happened on that day. Am I right?"
I nodded. "Yes. That was the first day."
"That night you came to my room and told me that creepy-ass story about the car accident. You gave me exact details, exact, about what would happen, who would be in the car, etc. You told me things you had absolutely no right knowing and they turned out to be true.
"About the same time you completely lost all of your shyness. One day I was wondering if my little brother was ever going to get himself laid and the next day you're suddenly a male slut, bagging everything left and right and apparently, if my information was correct, doing a very good job of it.
"You also developed a sudden interest in the stock market and in finding a job. Your grades improved overnight. And I even heard that you put a few teachers in their places."
"Okay," I said, surprised at the amount of information Tracy possessed. Again I was forced to wonder just how much my parents knew or suspected. "So tell me, what do you think all of this means?"
"Well obviously something very strange happened to you on that first day," she offered.
"Such as?"
"I think you had some sort of well, psychic flash. I think you had some sort of Scrooge type experience while you slept that night. Something that showed you what the future was going to be like and was realistic enough that you were unable to simply discount it as a dream. That doesn't explain everything of course, but I think that's something like what happened to you. I don't know how such a thing is possible, or why you were chosen to have this knowledge, but somehow, you were shown the future, including my death, and you were able to stop certain things and start others. Am I close?"
"Kind of," I said, taking another sip, surprised to find that the bottle was now empty. I leaned forward and grabbed another one, opening it up with the bottle opener. "You are somewhat on track here but the truth is actually a little stranger than that."
"So what is the truth?" she asked, grabbing a fresh beer of her own. "Like I said before, Bill, I think I have a right to this information."
"And you do, Tracy," I agreed. "You really do and I think that maybe with both of our minds working on some of the problems that have cropped up here, maybe something can be done. But there is one thing."
"What's that?"
"If I tell you what I know, what happened to me, you can never tell anyone else. Never. If you were to do that and word about what happened got to the wrong people the consequences could be disastrous. Mostly for me, but also for our family. There are people in the world who would literally kill in order to possess the information I have. Do you understand that?"

[whiskynaam]

"Yes," she said softly. "I won't tell anyone anything. You did see the future, didn't you? You do know things that are going to happen, don't you?"
"Tracy," I said, "I didn't just see the future. I lived through it."
She looked at me confused. "You mean when you had your dream or whatever it was like you'd lived through the future? Like you lived through the years while you were asleep?"
"No." I shook my head. "Like I said, it's even stranger than that. I literally lived through the future in somewhat of an alternate timeline. I'm sitting here before you looking like a sixteen going on seventeen-year-old kid. But that's not what I am, Tracy. I've actually lived almost 34 years now."
She took a moment to digest that, staring at me the whole while. "I'm not sure I'm following you, Bill," she finally said.
"Okay," I started. "You've acknowledged the fact that I know aspects of the future, right?"
"Yes, but..."
"The day I woke up with these startling changes. Think back to that day, Tracy. Do you remember how confused I seemed, how glad I was to see you, how I didn't know what day it was? And then later in the day, at school, I had to ask you what my class schedule was? Do you remember all of that?"
"Yes," she said, her eyes widening.
I took another sip. "The reason I was so confused and so glad to see you was that, from my perspective, I'd gone to bed the night before as a 32 year old man in the year 1999."
"1999?" she said, with disbelief.
"In the year 1999 I was a paramedic working for a private ambulance company. My sister Tracy had been killed on her graduation night and was sixteen years in her grave. My parents, after Tracy's death, had become victim's rights advocates. My friend Mike was a total loser, still living with his parents. That was my life when I went to bed that night. When I woke up the next morning, I was fifteen years old again, back in my parent's house, my sister still with the accident in her future, and I had all of my memories from my previous life still intact."
"That's unbelievable, Bill," she told me. "You're saying that you lived until 1999 and then were suddenly put back in 1982?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying," I affirmed. "That's what happened to me. The reason I told you about the accident that night was because, at the time, I wasn't sure if I was suddenly going to wake up back in 1999 the first time I went to sleep. I needed to try to prevent your death if that was the case. And though I did not go back to 1999 the next day, my little speech to you that night was apparently effective. Without any further interference from me you strayed off of the path that would have ended with you dumping into the Spokane River."
She shook her head in denial. "I'm not sure I can believe this," she told me. "You are saying that you lived until 1999? That you went day by day through this life and then suddenly you were put back in 1982? That's not possible."
"I wouldn't have thought so either," I answered. "What we're talking about here is time travel. And though the possibility exists that I simply dreamed this entire life that night, I don't believe that is the case. Too many things have come true. My memories of that previous life are too detailed, too complete. That is what happened, Tracy. I am nearly 34 years old and I lived seventeen of those years in an alternate life."
She took a huge drink of her beer, finishing half the bottle at a swallow. She then picked up another one. "This is way trippy," she told me. "If you lived until 1999, tell me who the Presidents will be."
I saw this as an interrogation technique to see if I was lying. She would be looking for any hesitation in my answer.
"Reagan won again this year," I said. "You already know that."
"It didn't take a psychic to figure that out," she said cynically.
"True," I allowed. "He'll serve out his term but the last year of it will be taken up by a scandal in which he gets caught selling arms to Iran in order to get hostages released and to fund rebels in Nicaragua after congress cut off aid to them. George Bush will be elected after Reagan. He'll gain immense popularity because of the way he handles an invasion of Panama early in his term and a war in the Persian Gulf at mid-term."
"A war in the Persian Gulf?" she asked.
"Iraq will invade Kuwait, a small country nobody has even heard of at this point in history but that supplies a good chunk of oil. Eventually American forces will bomb the living shit out of Iraq and then ground forces will go in and occupy the country. We'll lose less than two hundred people in the entire war and the country will love old George for it. For a while. Unfortunately for him he'll fuck up the economy so bad that even the success of the Gulf War won't get him re-elected. In 1992 Bill Clinton will win the presidency."
"Who the hell is Bill Clinton?" she asked, staring at me.
"Right now I believe he is the governor of Arkansas. He'll do a fairly good job of getting the economy back in shape, in fact he'll succeed in balancing the budget, but he'll also be mired down in sexual scandals his entire run. Apparently Bill has a little trouble keeping his dick in his pants and the Republicans will jump all over that. Despite this he'll be elected to a second term. When I was recycled back to 1982 he was still serving it although the Republicans had managed to impeach him because he got caught lying about getting a blow-job from an intern in his office."
"They impeached him because he got a blowjob?" she asked in disbelief.
"Well, what the charges actually amounted to was lying under oath. But yeah, it was because he got a blowjob. The House impeached him because there was a Republican majority but the Senate cleared him because, although they had a Republican majority also, it wasn't enough to add up to a two-thirds vote." I shook my head sadly. "I can sympathize with old Bill, let me tell you. You think you're having a casual little encounter with someone but it can sure come back to bite your ass."
"Wow," Tracy whispered. "You're telling the truth. You could not have made up all of those details off the top of your head."
"No," I said. "I couldn't."
She took another drink of beer. "But why did such a thing happen to you, Bill?" she asked. "Why were you picked to do this? Are there others?"
"This is how it happened," I said. "Like I told you, I was a paramedic. On the day before I came back I went to a call at a convalescent facility in North Spokane. My patient was an old Chinese man with cancer. He was dying fast. So I..." I told her the complete story. It took about twenty minutes. She listened with rapt attention throughout it.
"So you think he granted you a wish?" she asked when I was done.
"It would seem so," I told her. "The next morning I found myself back in 1982. Fifteen again, just like I'd asked, all memories intact, just like I'd asked. I don't know how he did it, but he did."
"Wow," she said.
"Do you believe me?" I asked her.
She looked up at me. "I don't want to," she said. "It's scary as hell to think that what you're saying is true. It changes my entire perspective on what's real and what's not, on what's possible and what's not."
"Uh huh," I agreed whole-heartedly.
"But all the same," she continued, "I am forced to believe what you say is true. When you explain it everything adds up. It's the only answer that makes sense."
"Yep," I agreed.
Tracy suddenly glared at me. "So here you are, a thirty-something year old man trapped in a child's body. And what have you been doing? You've been screwing sixteen and seventeen year olds! You're a fuckin' pervert, Bill."
"I agree," I told her.
"You do?" she asked.
"I'll be the first to admit that I made some poor decisions when I was given this gift. Yes, I had sex with high school girls, something I probably shouldn't have done. I abused a power that was given to me for my own pleasure, not just once but multiple times. I would like to say, in my own defense, that although my mind is that of a 32 year old, my body is a teenager's, through and through. I have testosterone surging through me like mad. I thought I was horny as a 32 year old but I hadn't seen anything. We forget what it's like to be in the middle of adolescence, let me tell you. That's not a very good excuse I know, but it's all I have to offer. I never once tried to screw an underage girl when I was an adult. Not a single time. But suddenly I found myself able to do it legally and with my body crying out for it. I didn't put up much of a fight but I couldn't help it."

[whiskynaam]

"Are you saying that you are not doing that anymore?" she asked.
"I'm trying not to," I said. "It's cost me a lot. I told you that Nina and I were no longer talking to each other."
"You did. I figured it had something to do with your extracurricular activities. I tried to tell you once that she loved you. And I was pretty sure that you loved her too. You didn't listen."
"I know. And you were right on both counts," I said. "Unfortunately I waited too long to realize it. I screwed around until Nina had her eyes opened to what I was like. She basically told me to fuck off and stay away from her. She won't even talk to me now."
"I'm sorry," Tracy said honestly. "I like Nina. I thought you two were perfect together. I still think that even though I now know you're actually seventeen years older than she is. Maybe she'll come around."
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe not. In any case, Nina is part of why I called you at the bookstore with that warning. Nina and Mike and some other things have made me realize that fate has a pattern to it. A pattern that it keeps trying to put things and people into. You are part of what has fallen out of pattern."
"Because I didn't die on graduation night?" she asked slowly.
"Exactly," I said. "In a way I'm glad that these other things have happened. They allowed me to see what was going on, that fate was attempting to re-align things. When I saw that, I was able to give you that second warning and you were able to heed it when fate took a second shot at you."
She shuddered. "I still get the creeps when I think about how close I was to getting in that car with Darren that night. Jesus. What other things have you seen as far as these patterns go? Maybe if I know how strong this thing is..."
"Okay," I said. "There's you first of all. As you know, in my previous life you died on graduation night. In this life I prevented that. But I also knew Nina in my previous life, in school of course but also years later, and that Nina was not a pleasant person at all."
"What do you mean?" Tracy asked.
"In my first life Nina was a doctor in one of the emergency rooms. And she was a total bitch. She was the shining example of a major inferiority complex. If anybody did anything good in front of her, she would find a way to criticize it. If anyone did anything wrong, she would jump down their throats. She was a miserable person and it was quite plain to me why she was a miserable person."
"Because of the way she was treated in school," Tracy said.
I looked at her, smiling. "You know, Tracy, you're pretty smart for a youngster."
She giggled nervously. "This is so weird," she commented. "Trying to adjust myself from thinking about you as my little brother. You've got seventeen years on me now."
I snorted. "Older doesn't necessarily mean wiser. Believe me. Anyway, when I came back I decided to eat in the cafeteria one day and I saw Nina sitting in there alone. That brought back memories of how bitchy she was as a doctor and led to the speculation as to its cause. So I, thinking I was the great superhero, the fixer of oppressed people everywhere, decided to befriend her and maybe change her personality a little."
"And she fell in love with you," Tracy said.
I nodded. "Yes. At first everything looked rosy. Nina came out of her shell, she started to socialize with people, and she lost a lot of her shyness. I figured that there was no way she could turn into a bitch after all of that. But I was wrong. She finally caught me with a girl and that opened her eyes to what I was like. The next school day, the very next one, she was back in the cafeteria, eating alone, being uncommunicative, being the Nina she'd been before I came along. I have no doubt in my mind that if things continue the way they are going, she's going to end up a bitchy doctor married to a prick neurosurgeon, making life miserable for everyone around her but especially for herself. Though the catalyst for this was of my making I was frightened to the core by the absurd ease with which she slipped right back into the pattern."
"But, Bill," Tracy protested, "it's only natural that she would react that way after catching you with another girl. As a fellow girl I can understand exactly how she would feel when the guy she loves turns out to be a..."
"An asshole?" I suggested.
"Well, yeah," she said. "But anyway, just because of that, you can't decide that fate is trying to realign itself."
"You're right, Tracy," I said. "But that's not the only thing."
I told her about Beirut and the bombing and, most importantly, of the 240 casualties in both timelines. I told her about Mike and about his fate in the previous timeline and what had happened to him in this one; how he kept trying to slip back into his pattern.
"He was smoking pot at the fire station?" she asked, seeing instantly the ramifications of that.
"Yes." I nodded. "Marijuana. The same thing that destroyed his career in my first life tried to destroy it in this one. The coincidence of that struck me as a little bit more than coincidental."
"Jesus," she said, shaking her head. "This is scary, Bill."
"I know," I told her. "But there's hope I think. Quite a bit of it."
"What do you mean?"
"First of all, when Mike got busted with the pot and the counselor signed him up for independent study once more, I went and saw the counselor."
"You did?"
"I intervened on Mike's part by talking plainly to the counselor, talking as one adult to another, something I don't like to do too much these days since it makes me feel kind of exposed. But anyway, she listened to me. She got Mike his position back at ROP and at this moment he's back in the running. I was able to pull him back out of his pattern again after he drifted back into it. Now it remains to be seen whether or not he'll go back into his old ways. I certainly can not discount that possibility, but it looks to me like he might have learned his lesson, that he might be all right."
"That was nice of you, Bill," Tracy said. "Do you really think he'll turn out okay?"
"I hope so," I said. "I've done all I can do for him and I can only hope that fate or his own personality doesn't fuck him again. It's pretty much up to him." I took a deep breath. "But there's another reason why I think fate can be thwarted."
"What's that?" she asked.
I looked up at the ceiling for a second and sighed. So far Tracy had taken all I'd said remarkably well and had been reasonably non-judgmental. But I didn't know how she was going to react to this one.
"Anita," I said softly.
Tracy looked at me puzzled. "Anita? What does she have to do with anything?"
I swallowed nervously. "In my previous life Anita met a man shortly before your graduation. By the time I left for college she had married him and moved away. She hasn't done that in this reality, or at least she hasn't begun that relationship."
"I don't understand," Tracy said. "Why hasn't she?"
"Because of me," I said.
"You?" Tracy asked. "What do you..." She stopped suddenly, staring at me in horror. "Oh my God," she whispered. "You haven't been... sleeping with Anita have you?"
I nodded shamefully.
"Anita?" Tracy repeated in disbelief. "You've been fucking Anita? Our neighbor?"
"Yes."
"Jesus, Bill," she said, shaking her head. "You are depraved. Anita? I can't believe this. I simply cannot believe it. The high school chicks are bad enough, but Anita?"
I shrugged. "It seemed like a harmless thing at the time."
"No wonder you used to spend so much time over there. Christ! How long were you doing her?"
"Do you remember the night that I offered to talk her into letting me babysit her kids instead of you?" I asked.
Her eyes widened. "Yeah."

[whiskynaam]

"That was the first time. I went over to her house later that night and I seduced her. Well actually I led her to believe that she was seducing me. She had a little thing for teenaged boys you see, something I didn't realize my first trip through but that I'd realized as an adult. I took advantage of the situation."
"God," Tracy muttered.
"After that it became an ongoing thing. I never realized I was doing any harm. I just thought I was having fun."
"Fun?" Tracy asked. "With Anita? That's fuckin' gross!"
"Not really," I said. "She's quite good in bed. In fact, of all the sex I had in both of my lives, I have to say that she is physically the best at it."
"I'd rather not hear about that," Tracy said, making a sour face. "Are you still doing her?"
"No," I said. "I came to some hard realizations over the past month. One of them was that Anita had deviated off her path and thought she was in love with me. She did not go out with the man she was supposed to marry when he asked her the first time because she thought she was in a long-term relationship with me."
"Christ," Tracy commented. "You really do know how to fuck up people's lives, don't you?"
"I offer no excuses except selfishness and stupidity," I said. "It seems I figured that since I was a teenager there were no consequences to sexual relationships like there are when you're an adult. I was wrong. Very wrong. As soon as I realized all of this I broke off the relationship with Anita, hoping that would put her back on the path she was supposed to be on. After all, Mike, Beirut, Nina, and now you, all of you tried hard to resume your previous pattern. Why not Anita?"
"But she hasn't?"
I shook my head. "No," I said. "She hasn't. In fact she's getting out of control now. She keeps calling the house and asking Mom if I can come over to do some chore for her. And I keep making excuses why I can't. It's already plain that Mom has some suspicions. I don't know how much longer she's going to be able to keep ignoring them. In truth, I don't know what to do about Anita but I've got to do something.
"But the point of this whole Anita discussion was to make you feel better. You see, Anita is living proof that you can deviate from your path. If Anita can do it, then so can you."
Tracy finished off the last of her current beer. She immediately reached in and pulled out two more. She opened them up and handed one to me. I took it even though I still had a quarter of a bottle in my hand.
"I must say," Tracy told me, "that what you said today does make me feel better."
"It does?"
She nodded. "Fate," she said, "is trying to get me. That's true and that's something I'm going to have to accept. But if I'm to believe you then I'm already supposed to be dead, twice now. I'm living on borrowed time anyway. I'm inclined to believe that, like you said on the phone to me, certain pre-conditions need to be met for that fate to come true. It seems that if I avoid putting myself into the situation of a drunk driver and a car, than maybe, just maybe, I'll be safe. Did you ever take a philosophy class when you were in college, you know, before?"
"Yes I did," I told her. "Philosophy 1A. A general education elective."
"I'm taking it now," she told me. "I like it. They go into a lot of the stuff that I think about when I get stoned. One of those things is the nature of fate and the consequences of meddling with it."
"Really?" I said, interested. If they'd explained that in my philosophy class nearly fifteen years in my past, I certainly didn't remember it now.
"One of the things they talk about is the ramifications of changing fate. As you've pointed out, fate will try to re-align itself if you do that. The question is whether the re-alignment effort will be nodal or cascading."
"Nodal or cascading?"
"Yes," she said. "I'm hoping we're not dealing with cascading here. In cascading you would have started to stress the system starting on the night that I did not get into that car. That would be graduation night. If that is the case then my continued existence will begin to build up that stress until it is almost inevitable that a corrective action will occur. In other words, my continuing to live will be unacceptable to fate and it will not stop until it gets me, one way or the other. If that is what we're dealing with, than I might as well make out my will. I could lock myself in my room forever and still I would die."
"That's pretty depressing," I said softly.
"I know," she said. "But from all you've told me today, I'm inclined to believe that we're dealing with nodal here."
"Nodal," I replied, waiting for her to explain.
"In nodal, the stress on the system would have started on the night you told me about the accident, at the point you first took action to assist in my thwarting of fate. The stress would have begun to build that night and would have reached its peak on graduation night, the night I was supposed to have died. I think I might have chosen wisely when I simply stayed home that night instead of going out anywhere. When I think about it now, there was no real reason for me to do that. I wasn't with the people you'd named and logically, I should have been safe as long as I didn't actually engage in the circumstances you described. But instinctively I knew not to go out anywhere. I think that fate was on the prowl for me that night and might have bagged me no matter what I did, as long as I got into a car with someone. Do you follow me?"
"Yes," I said, "I do."
"So what you have here is the stress peak on that day. As more and more days go by, the stress on the system caused by my survival decreases as humanity accepts my presence here. There will of course be further attempts to right the wrong in the system. When I nearly got into that car with Darren, that was an attempt to do that. But thanks to your warning, it didn't happen. Fate was thwarted again. The fact that all of those factors needed to come together leads me to believe that the strength of these attempts will weaken over time, eventually allowing me to live a normal life; do you understand?"
"You're saying," I paraphrased, "that the longer you survive, the more likely you are to continue to survive."
"Right," she said. "Now with Mike and Nina, the stress is not related to any one particular event as it was with me. It is simply a lifestyle. If you asked Mike in his previous life, where he was thrown out of the Air Force for smoking pot, you would have found that he'd smoked pot throughout his entire career there and he'd simply had his number come up when they drug tested him. This is a broad event, not a specific one. And with Nina, she simply was responding to a lifestyle also. There would be no specific event to lock her into it. With both of them, the stress would have started the instant you changed things for them. With Mike it would have been when you talked him into firefighting as a career, with Nina it would have been the first day you talked to her in the cafeteria. For both of them the peak probably came early because of the lack of a specific event. Both of them gave into the peak and drifted back into their previous lifestyle.
"You managed to pull Mike out of it because there were no lethal consequences to his actions. Fate will continue to be stressed by this for a while and will continue to pull at him. But as time goes by and he establishes himself in this reality, it will be weaker and weaker with each passing day. If you can get him through this year, he might be all right. But I would keep an eye on him. The pull will still be strong."
"So you think he might get caught smoking pot again?" I asked.
"It's possible," Tracy said. "And the possibility is the strongest at this point in time. He is in the greatest danger of relapse right now."
"And Nina?" I asked.
"Nina," Tracy said. "She has also been pulled back in line by the short peak in the system. She has also been left alive due to no lethal event. Things are as they should be with her right now, at least in your previous reality. Here we have the curious effect that the longer she stays in the pattern the harder it will be to pull her from it. If you do manage to pull her from it somehow, than she will be like Mike and myself. She will initially be easily repulsed by your affections. One small slip up on your part in the early days and she will be right back where she started. If you do manage to win her back, you'll need to be careful." She glared at me. "Damn careful. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"And then there's Anita," Tracy said next.
"The exception to the rule."
"Actually, she's not an exception," Tracy told me. "She fits right in with the rest of it."
"How so?" I wanted to know.