I must be an easy man to manipulate.
Think about it, I didn't raise a fuss when I had three of my co-workers move into my house when I only really offered it to one. These women were people I was quite fond of and cared for, so I let it go by. Even without any expectation of sexual contact, I accepted this.
So I am an easy man to manipulate. Give me a little bit of attention and even a tiny bit of affection and I roll over like a puppy.
Then I was seduced by them, even though I couldn't (at first) "do the deed". They each took their turns with me and got me walking around my own house in the nude. My whole world had been turned upside down by these women.
I'm a real sucker for an attentive woman. I'm a techie so my experiential baseline was limited, despite having been married before.
Seriously, any one of the single women in the team at work could have talked me into marriage simply because we'd all worked so closely together that we were a lot like siblings; Just one more aid to Carla and Kenny getting together. They looked well on their way to tying the knot, even before I acquired boarders. I'd not thought of pursuit since there was (until recently) no ability to follow thought with action. After that wonderful week-end, I was teased by the five who weren't now living with me. It was a matter of some whispers and I could sense a re-alignment taking place around me. I didn't know what was really going on; all I could tell was that I was getting strange looks from Kenny, Carla, Sandy and Holly despite my own attention being most on Silva. Given how grievously she'd been savaged before she could become a woman, I was (if possible) more attentive to her moods and felt so good when I helped her smile.
Despite the paperwork and blood tests, we were married within the week; The rest of the gang of nine joined us at lunch on Friday to see us wed; even Robyn's husband Mark and Holly's Jeff arranged to attend. I had Kenny stand as best man, not having many deep friends outside my workplace. (All right, all right, I had NO deep friends outside of work.) Silva wished all of the women could be her Maid of Honor; Robyn pulled rank (age) and stood up for her as her Matron of Honor.
It was a nice civil ceremony and we returned to work that Friday afternoon as if returning from lunch. We didn't worry about consummating this "new" relationship immediately since we'd already taken care of that several times already.
In our first two months of wedded bliss we were untroubled, despite some rumbling from the INS (given her national origins) but these were not completely unexpected.
Silva understood my problems facing her mutilated and missing womanhood and did her best to express her happiness in me as her husband. She also coordinated my times with Neelam or Patti when the effects of her hurt weighed heavily on me. While those interludes were helpful to recharge my ego, it did nothing for the outrage over how easily someone could escape retribution despite the mutilation of one I cared for and loved so deeply. It was, at times, like a rat gnawing away at my soul. I still wanted to hurt those responsible.
Silva, Neelam and Patti had emotionally bonded together well enough that they were like sisters in some ways, reducing the sense of competition that could have formed and torn us all apart; I didn't realize why this was working so well.
Silva and I had maintained a low profile at work, though all of us in our "gang of nine" were quite aware of our status. We did take care of the paperwork for the next of kin and insurance with what passed for an HR department and the fact that we were married to each other was not done in an obvious way (we dealt with the paperwork changes more than two weeks apart; given the turnover of other sections in the company, the two people handling the paperwork were usually swamped). While Silva did change her marital status on her driver's license, she retained her maiden name for the company and taxes though still indicating the change in her marital status.
We certainly didn't pass that kind of information off to Doug. The nine of us were a very close-knit group. As a team we managed to work well together and sharing knowledge was well handled.
With our rising workload (we ended up fielding extra development needed to handle transactions between our clinical application and the other ancillary systems within a hospital) we got a new team member, another holder of an H-1B visa, this time from Korea. Everyone knew her as Kim- and we've never adequately understood why it seemed like everyone from there was named "Kim".
OK, so she thought our names sounded funny too.
Even with her background it took her a little bit to catch on to why we didn't use a database engine for our application; We finally oriented her to dealing with the way we linked records together to form a reverse- chronological list of events in the main repository. She had some fun working with the database forwarding agent, one of the lower priority projects. She fit well enough into our team for us to be the "gang of ten" or (as Patti called us once, making me wince, "the Terrific Team of Ten"). She and Sandy actually ended up moving and sharing an apartment. (I had to grant that this young woman was quite attractive but I already had my hands full, so I paid her little additional attention.)
We went to lunches, we worked late and had dinners either fetched or delivered, none of us were outsiders. Both Robyn's and Holly's husbands would visit the office when we had to work late and we all got along pretty well.
Until ... Well, I heard it. Every denizen of our cubicle farm heard it. A lot of heads popped up over the cubicle walls, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. (I'm told this is "prairie dogging" or some such.)
I could tell that it was my Silva making the noise, up-chucking her whole breakfast (we'd gotten it on the way in) into her wastebasket. I didn't even hesitate despite us eating identically that morning; I was up and running to her side.
Kneeling at her wastebasket, she looked up at me offering a sheepish look. Despite the odor of her wastebasket I hustled her off to the bathrooms, Neelam with us, to get her inside the ladies' room while I'd do what I could to clean the wastebasket out. (It was a good thing the can had a liner; I dumped the liner contents into a toilet, flushed and then rinsed the liner out to keep the smell down. It was pretty awful.)
I awaited Silva and Neelam; Sandy walked in there as I "stood guard", nodding to me as she pushed through the door. I was really worried; I hoped she wasn't hurting badly.
Sandy came out first and smiled at me, a funny kind of smile.
"Is she all right? She was pretty shaky when she went in. Why are you smiling like that?"
If possible, she smiled even wider given my question. I was confused by this; What was so damn funny?
"Jack, don't worry, she'll be fine." She was almost skipping as she stepped away. She seemed pretty damn pleased about something.
It wasn't much longer before Neelam brought Silva out; I put the trash-can down and wrapped my arms around her, more worried about her than of anyone walking by and realizing our relationship. Silva's expression seemed to jump back and forth between a smile and a look of fear several times. Neelam was wearing a big grin, I could almost see the feathers hanging from her mouth.
Finally regaining my voice, "Are you all right? I was so worried..."
She nodded against me, "I'm fine, though there's a problem..."
I squeezed her tighter, "I love you. What's wrong?"
She was squeezing me and started to cry. "I think I'm going to have a baby."
Whoa.
I mean, WHOA!
"Wow... Are you sure?"
"No, we'll need to get a pregnancy test. I'm sorry. I didn't want to mess up your life ... " Her crying continued against my chest as I cradled her in my arms.
She was apologizing? What ever FOR? I had to tell her ... "No, sweetheart, it's me who should be sorry being so unthinking and taking no efforts to avoid conception, I really don't want to see you hurt. Having a baby will be tough on you. I love you. What will you want to do?"
She was still crying a bit when she looked up at me with "You're not upset? That I'd make a mistake like this?"
A mistake? We'd not discussed having children yet but a part of me was cheering. I kissed her. I didn't care any more who saw us.
"Of course I'm not upset, I don't see any kind of mistake. I love you. I'm happy with you."
We stood there for an eternity (Neelam tells me it was less than three minutes) holding and rocking each other before we held hands and walked back to our cubicle zone, probably looking like happy children. Neelam was kind enough to bring the forgotten wastebasket.
Everybody took turns hugging Silva and I. We didn't get much work done until after a celebratory lunch at a nice restaurant this time. We'd stopped for an EPT on the way that wouldn't require morning urine; Silva used it in the restaurant's ladies room and confirmed that she was going to be a mother and I a father. A part of me was fearful but a larger part was proud, pleased and flattered that a woman of such intelligence would choose me as the father of her child. For me this was a completely new feeling.
We started planning for a baby. The car-pool that afternoon was rife with discussions that I was often discouraged from getting involved in.
Women are crazy, did you know that? Not only crazy but they carry a lot of insanity too.
While Silva and I went away on a week's vacation to a conference (OK, so it was a working vacation and honeymoon, paid out of our own pockets) in Orlando the others were busy. We came back to find the little bedroom done up as a nursery and Neelam and Patti together in the other bedroom. They'd also acquired a queen-sized bed, too.
Insane. These two were, if possible, more enthusiastic about having a baby in the house than we were, which seemed impossible at the time. They'd done a really beautiful job on the nursery, though. I was quite impressed and I let them know. (Since they'd done all of the painting and papering of the room, along with furnishing it, I was quite happily hugging and kissing them for their work.)
Shortly after our return we attended Carla and Ken's wedding. Apparently it was a bit of a rush and they were hoping to keep their expected child un-curious enough to do any arithmetic.
I really wonder about some things; It seemed like a serious epidemic when finally Holly and then Robyn fell prey to semen injections. Within a matter of 4 months, at a rate of one per month, four of the eight women I worked so closely with were pregnant. (It is most fortunate that only one was carrying MY child.)
Needless to say that I confirmed that both Neelam and Patti were copy protected; I'm not sure but Patti almost looked upset that I'd asked. I was even worried for Sandy and Kim just on general principles. Sandy made sure that Kim was protected.
So, of the crew, half of the women were pregnant and both of the men in the team were part of the "problem".
There is something strange in being an expectant father that gets you in the ego. The fact that my wife was carrying my child, that I was worth reproducing was both a thrill and a fright. Considering Silva's fears, I made sure to reflect my own delight with our situation to her so that she knew I was pleased with the mother of my child.
My child. Wow. What a jump, from a widower to a husband and then expectant father, all in less than three months. Walking on water was no problem; I was walking on air.
Despite my previous marriage I knew nothing of children, Vivian's children being pretty much grown before I met them (and who hadn't taken too kindly to me, so Vivian's grandchildren were not shared with me). Part of my question to myself centered on whether I was good enough to be a competent father.
Playing with Silva's swelling belly was fun for me and I still like to rub the skin lotion on her abdomen (actually my hands stray into other territories which she still very noisily encourages).
Neelam visa expired so she had to leave a month before our due date; Her absence was felt as all realized how much we missed her. Mind you, I didn't miss her spicier cooking since my guts couldn't cope, but she was a good companion to all of us.
Somehow the odd Gods of human misfortune seemed to smile on her; She was back within two months. Sure, she'd be taking classes in citizenship but she was being given a chance to stay.
Vivian Sandra Lipton, my daughter, was with us at the airport to greet her aunt on her return. We weren't warned that Neelam was bringing a younger female cousin with her; Tia would be going to high school soon but took to her niece like a duck to water. This worked both ways since little Vivian was already spoiled by being surrounded by affectionate people.
Neelam was re-hired almost instantly and got her cubicle back (they'd done nothing to replace her so far, trying to see how long we could work around that hole in our skills). Silva was tele-commuting but, when we had to have big meetings, she brought in our daughter.
It's amazing how tolerant the company could be; they finally caught on to how productive we all were as a team. The R&D group couldn't compete. We took on a few of their projects and made Robyn our "official" lead. She was not exactly happy with the meetings she had to go to.
Tia was a wonderful baby-sitter; I never knew that a girl could lactate given enough stimulation until Tia proved it to me. It took some time for it to come in but she was soon able to feed Vivian directly from her own breasts. We found Tia pleased to wet nurse my daughter, though I wasn't comfortable with her around given our dress code (or lack thereof); she was an exceptionally attractive young woman and it bothered me when my body saluted her (somehow Silva was amused by this and told me not to worry about letting Tia see my response but I still felt "dirty"). She chose to sleep in Vivian's room, which did wonders for our ability to sleep. We learned the trick Tia used to make it easier for Vivian (and her) to sleep well; Tia would bring Vivian to her own bed and cuddle her there (or even with the baby on top of her). Once we learned this trick Silva and I would take Vivian into our bed too occasionally, though not always. There is a certain giddy pleasure in having your infant sleeping on your chest that helps you, as a parent, to sleep.
In all of this, my neighbors, when they spoke with me at all, were concerned about my wife and house-guests. They didn't seem to mind Patti but the darker skin-tone of my wife Silva and the even darker shade of Neelam's (and also Tia's) seemed to disturb them. It's funny how this symptom of racism ended up helping us.
Carla's son Kenny arrived within a week of Neelam's return. The house next door went up for sale less than two weeks later and it seems they weren't exactly pressing for top dollar, either, as Kenny and Carla quickly learned. We still got along very well; If possible our children got along even better. Kenny Jr (KJ) and Vivian were soon sharing a playpen and napped well together. Tia was fully engaged in the afternoon as a babysitter; all her own choice, and we caught her sitting blissed-out with a baby on each teat. We tried to get her to socialize more at school but she enjoyed being with the children and learning computer technology from us.
Both of my neighbors directly behind my house were related and decided to bail from the neighborhood together; soon Robyn and Mark moved into one shortly before Marcia's arrival. Holly and Jeff also jumped from their rented apartment into the other house. It's surprising how they managed to get financing, but it all worked out. I also found out that having Neelam or Tia in my backyard when the houses were being shown helped keep the prices down. Racism, as stupid as I'd always felt it was, seems to be useful when you can manipulate the idiots who subscribe to it.
My co-workers had become my neighbors. We shared the child-rearing and pooled a lot together. It was the weirdest kind of extended family, sharing our work along with our children. It was easy to car-pool as well (we even bought a used passenger van to help with the commute).
Vivian, Kenny, Marcia and Holly's son Chris spent a lot of time sleeping and playing together. This next generation was going to be interesting as they sorted out their own families.
While I will admit that I was very happy as a father, I requested that Silva and I put off trying to have another baby for up to a year. "I don't want to stress you, and I do want more children by you, but I'm selfish, I want a lot of your time for a while. You're a wonderful mother and I think you make beautiful babies."
Silva agreed with me, especially the part about me being possessive and selfish. At least she smiled.
During the next summer (all of these children were born in early spring) we pooled together for backyard barbecues (we'd opened up gates in the few fences between the yards) which proved quite popular with us. Sandy and Kim would come by and spend a lot of time with all of us and would crash in Robyn's house (which was actually a little bigger than mine).
I also noticed on these occasions Patti often seemed to compete with Tia to hold Vivian and spent a lot of time with a sad look on her face. While her melancholy mood bothered me I couldn't get a good answer from her over what was wrong. It hurt me to see her sad.
I listen to my wife. It had been a while since I'd last given either Patti or Neelam any attention and one afternoon she told me that she wanted to hear them squeal. That night. Both of them.
She arranged it, all in plain sight, for me to go down on each of them in order on our bed.
Who am I to disobey my wife?
I cuddled Patti a bit since she seemed upset but she wouldn't tell me why. Otherwise it was a fairly nice evening.
So it was only about seven months after Vivian was born that Patti and I had to fly out to San Francisco to deal with a complex install that would require tweaking; The install tech that was out there couldn't deal with the ancillary system interfaces protocol failure. I had to be prepared to make source code changes to support this protocol.
The flight was a redeye that only exhaustion allowed me to sleep, albeit fitfully. I was envious of Patti's sound sleep until she told me (later) that it was a side effect of her anti-seizure medication. I rented the car for us and we headed to the hotel, Patti preceeding me into the lobby as I went to park the car. When I caught up with her I found our luggage on the cart and her holding two plastic key cards, waving for me to follow her.
I found out we were now sharing a room- with a single kind-size bed. Uh oh. I hoped Silva wouldn't be upset.
She went through her bags to find her morning meds and discovered that she hadn't packed them. Uh oh. She was frantic. We called home- yes, she'd left them where they could be found so Silva was getting Fed-Ex lined up, finally adding (for me) "And, Jack, I know about her plan to share a room and a bed with you. You be good for and to her, all right?"
What could I reply? "Yes, dear. I love you and I already miss you."
"I love you and miss you too. Make sure Patti doesn't."
Patti's neurologist was called and an emergency prescription was being sent to a local pharmacy. Before we got to leave for the pharmacy, though, Patti had a seizure, probably brought on by the stress she'd built up arranging for her medication.
We'd seen her suffer seizures before, despite the medication. Her medication reduced the frequency but she'd have been rendered dopey at levels that would have done more to guarantee no seizures. So she would, when stressed (or short on sleep, or when her blood sugar was low) occasionally have a seizure. It was a good thing there were so many of us around her.
It was another good thing that this was caused by an injury as a child, so it wasn't a genetic issue. Her children were unlikely to inherit this trait.
I managed to get her to the bed and held her as her face lost all of her personality when her muscles went slack. Patti was one of the fortunate ones, only suffering from absent seizures (formerly "petit mal") instead of the more frightening grand mal. I held her, even though she wasn't there, for more than five minutes, stroking her hair. While she wasn't feeling any pain, this just becoming a blank spot in her life, I felt pain for her. Stupid of me, of course, but I worry about my young lover.
Her breathing finally got deeper and her muscle tone was coming back just as her eyes popped open. She looked dazed as she saw me and I could watch the light of recognition flow into them, so I leaned down and kissed her gently, still comforting her. There were some tears in my eyes as I whispered to her, "This is a good reason to share a room. A very good, smart move, honey. I love you."
She smiled up and hugged me back, pulling herself up and kissing me. "I love you too, Jack."
We shared the shower to freshen up, dressed up for the customer (I got to zip up her dress) and stepped out. First stop was her medication, then on to the hospital.
Now Patti is a whiz with TCP/IP and LAN/WAN work in general, and I had ended up learning a lot from her in the past. This interfacing problem, however, was in MY camp, right in my world of asynchronous serial communications via an RS-232 port. Here I was old enough to have the experience to crush all comers. Before playing with the cables I flipped to the data monitor screen on the system to watch the flow and pulled out my protocol writeup.
Since this customer of ours used a mainframe-class machine as their ADT (Admission/Discharge/Transfer) system we were reduced to using a terminal emulation box that would have allowed the attachment of a "regular" ASCII async terminal to take the place of a regular buffered display.
My interface code processed the escape sequences and maintained the contents of a "buffer" mimicking a terminal's display; The data collected there would be recognized as a transaction by the toggling of specific characters on the screen.
We met with their programmer and went over the protocol specification I wrote, when he pointed to a section and said "that doesn't look right". He came back with his copy and we compared them side by side.
Someone had changed my spec before it got to the customer but hadn't bothered to let me know. I'd coded against the wrong spec!
On top of that simple organization problem, these changes didn't make sense to me given the throughput requirements (and lack of any guarantee of sequencing during a screen paint) and would actually impact response times seriously. We discussed who would need to make changes and I realized that we'd need to take this change in the shorts. We'd lose performance but Dan B's changes were what the customer saw.
I got to work. This wasn't going to be simple as I pulled the source from my copy of our repository on my notebook computer and started on it.
Patti and I both eye-balled what we needed and worked out the quickest set of changes so that we'd still get useful performance on it and I went to work keyboarding. She put music on her iBook (wow, she even brought speakers) and she acted as an apprentice (her questions kept me from going too far wrong, too) so we got the first cut together around 3PM local time. I did the compile and uploaded the changes to the production system (which wasn't producing) and restarted the ADT interface.
The occasional neck and shoulder rubs from Patti did nothing to hurt my concentration though I often took one of her hands and squeezed it affectionately.
As soon as the host system's interface was restarted we began to get our data and we were able to check the data being delivered to ensure that there were no boundary/field issues.
We lucked out. The interface wasn't very fast but the production system was able to import the census data correctly. We knew we'd be there the next day so we escaped, had a quiet dinner, and headed for the hotel. We made our calls home before heading for bed. The time zone change had scorched us but good.
I crashed. Hard. I fell asleep almost as soon as she cuddled into my arms (we were both quite naked under the covers), only having time for a couple of gentle "thank yous" and "I love yous" before passing out.
And it seemed I'd not slept long at all, hearing the woman in my arms crying, until I looked at the clock. 1AM, Patti must be upset about something, I squeezed her and kissed the back of her neck and gently, as if to avoid awakening her if she was crying in her sleep, asked "Are you all right, sweetheart?".
Her teary voice answered me, with "No, I'm not... I'm so alone, I'll never have children, I'm not much of a woman, I ..."
I had to silence this, I squeezed her some more and kissed her shoulder, "Of course you'll be able to have children, and, really, you should, the world needs more smart kids, and yours will be wonderful. I admit to thinking it'll be difficult for you, I want your husband to be someone really great, you do deserve the best. You're way too good for the majority of men, I'm sorry I'm so picky."
She'd rolled over to face me, rubbing her breasts on me, "Love me, please. Make love to me again. I need to feel it..."
I cuddled and rocked her, kissed her forehead, and talked to her, telling her how beautiful she was (I'm a techie, we're not really any good at flattery unless we're telling the truth) and working my way to kissing her lips, my hands running up and down her back, pausing on her buttocks to squeeze them.
She started growling and the next thing I knew was that I was laying on my back getting ridden by an extremely aggressive young woman. I think she would have killed me if she hadn't been orgasming so often; she was finally spent when I fired into her, both of us reaching the pinnacle. She stayed on top of me, laying down on top of me and we returned to kissing. She soon fell asleep, still on top of me, which felt so good, but I slid her to my right side as I faded out.
The morning for us was only another three hours away; We were usually up by 6:30 so we awakened again at 3:30- and promptly went at it again like crazed weasels. Despite my age, that morning I actually managed to fill her twice more.
Once we cleaned up I saw no trace of the somber Patti I'd been seeing for the last few months; It was like a switch had been thrown, she was lively, energetic, bouncy and affectionate.
And, if anything, she was even mentally sharper. I was quite intimidated.
Her meds in the morning weren't much of a problem and we soon left for breakfast and another workday.
The customer was ecstatic over having been able to get their whole census through to our system over night and that all subsequent transactions were posting. We ensured that the changed code had been properly ifdef'd and uploaded to our source repository. Some of the comments we put on our code check-ins were unflattering towards the R&D group.
Lunch with Patti was nice again, especially with all of the critical tension off from yesterday. We did some clean-up and ensured that the customer was comfortable with the communications interface.
We'd be there another night, so we closed out for the day and headed to some place simple for dinner before going back to our hotel room and jumped in bed together again.
I wondered why she seemed so satisfied while cuddling up to me when the phone rang. It was Silva. Her first question on my answering the phone (right after her saying "I love you") "Did you make love to my little Patti?"
Hearing a question phrased like that is confusing, even within our extended family. Silva sounded happy and pleased, and sounded even more pleased when I replied in the affirmative. She asked to talk to Patti.
I have no idea what questions Patti was answering; The answers tended to be yeses and she was in a very good mood. I was getting a little suspicious, but when asked, neither would talk. I spent a lot of time like a deer caught in the megawatt smile Patti threw at me now and then while she spoke to Silva.
Patti's smile was getting a little unnerving but I put it out of my mind as we finally curled up with each other early and faded out.
We awakened early (of course, we'd not completely made the jump to Pacific Time from Eastern) so we took advantage of the time to fool around. We even had fun in the shower. It was quite pleasant.
By 7 AM we were packed up and ready to leave, so we had a nice relaxed breakfast and checked out by 8:30 for our run to the airport.
I hate the new security check. We didn't have any problems (though there was some funny looks from the security folks going through Patti's bag over her medications) and we flew out.
The flight was long but Patti didn't have much of a problem sleeping again. We were lucky that this airliner had seat arms that could be raised; I was able to cuddle Patti which was very relaxing to me (I was actually able to sleep some more).
We got into Newark to find Silva and Neelam waiting for us at baggage pickup. They both seemed very happy to see us; There were quite a few embraces between the women and they were giving me the kind of look that told me something was up. This worried me.
Once we were on the road heading home with Neelam driving, I was cuddled up to my wife and any fears or worries I carried quickly dissolved.
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Sex in Adjacent Cubicles: Roles & Responsibilities Part: 2/3 Universe: SiAC Summary: Life and Work challenges Keywords: ROM MF+ (some codes reserved to retain surprise) Revision: $Revision: 1.6 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: adjacent02.x,v 1.6 2003/03/15 16:33:29 jcl Exp $