Quaranteam: Aisling's Antics - Ch. 4 & 5 (Patreon)

(UPDATE: Apparently I didn't actually post the Ch.4 update to all patrons when I thought I did. I swear to you, I had a post set up to post while I was away on vacation, and it didn't go through. As such, I have edited this post to include both chapters 4 & 5 of Aisling's Antics, and we apologize for the confusion. -Mgmt)

Part Four – “You and me”

December 11th, 2020

They were on their break walking around the basement when Aisling dropped a bombshell on Fiona. “I take it the next part of your story’s going to be about Lauren,” Fiona said as they stopped to pet Muninn, who’d begrudgingly settled down long enough for Fiona to stroke his back a few times.

“Nah, not really,” Aisling said. “I know none of this is going into the book, especially since we’re talking away from the tape recorder, but I sort of knew right away that Andy and Lauren were never going to really be on the same emotional level as me and Andy are. That isn’t to say he doesn’t love her, because he absolutely does, or that she doesn’t love him, because she absolutely does as well. But Lauren and Taylor have always been each other’s Big Love, and as much as Lauren’s biologically tied to Andy, her heart belongs elsewhere. I mean, c’mon, you’ve had to notice that for most of the last month, Taylor and Lauren have always tag-teamed him rather than going one at a time.”

“Of course I’d noticed, but I’d wondered how much of that was down to Lauren and Taylor just fully recommitting to their relationship,” Fiona said with a giggle. “I remember when me and Moira reconnected, and let me tell you, that was an intense couple of months. We didn’t get out of the house most nights.”

“Well, as soon as Taylor showed up, Lauren’s hesitation with Andy made total sense. It wasn’t like she was holding back with him, but I think both Andy and I could tell she wasn’t going all in the same way I was,” Ash said. “And that was fine. It was early days when she showed up – they were just starting the Oracle program and didn’t have anywhere near as large a pool of candidates. I had a few days to establish me and him first before she showed up, but I think once she landed on our doorstep, that was when we knew things were going to get a little crazy. I’ve talked to Phil a little bit about it, and he told me there was just an effort to quickly double down on the people who’d said they were open to polyamory, like a backup plan.”

They made their way to the small little lounge area downstairs where Nicolette had left them some tea and fruit, and based on how warm the tea was, they must have just missed her, only convincing Fiona even further that Nicolette was some kind of super ninja.

“I’d sort of wondered if she was feeling bad about not being asked to marry Andy, but…”

“Oh, they worked it out without much conversation, really. It was pretty amicable between the two of them, what with Lauren and Taylor talking about getting married to each other at some point in the future. They’re both still likely going to bear Andy’s children, but that’s just the way of the world now. If this family was a pyramid scheme, Lauren’s tier two.”

Both Fi and Ash had a good giggle about that. They needed to take a break, so the two of them stepped into the backyard, stripped down to nothing and then slipped into the hot tub for a little cool down. Neither was used to having their own hot tub on demand still, so they were doing everything they could to get used to the new home. It had really been a massive adjustment, and even now, the whole layout still hadn’t fully settled in almost anyone’s mind. There were simply so many rooms, so many corridors, so many things to keep straight. Ash had joked around that they should have the layout on a map in their dosing app, but Niko and Lexi had immediately put their foot down, saying that it was “sensitive information” and that there was no way they were making that information accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

They’d been in the hot tub for about five minutes, sitting mostly in silence, enjoying the warm water, before Ash spoke. “Do you think I should start carrying a gun?”

Fi turned her head in surprise. “Where’s this coming from?”

“Just a little bit ago, you were saying that you were disappointed Andy wouldn’t carry a gun himself. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I should reconsider Lexi’s offer to train me into shooting. Andy’s the love of my life, but he’s… he can definitely be too optimistic, too trusting of people. I know basically Niko or Lexi are going to be around looking out for his well-being any time we’re out in public, but…” She sighed. “I dunno. Maybe I’m just wonderin’ if that’s not going to be enough. Maybe we should insist all the wives are packing.”

“If you want to have a gun on you, Ash,” Fiona said, “I can respect that, but I’m not keen on the idea of having one on me all the time. There’s always the chance of the weapon going off, or of you shooting yourself instead of your attacker. Eventually I’m sure they’ll convince me to learn how to shoot, how not to be a complete klutz with it, but having one around all the time? I’m just not up for that. I think each girl should decide for herself, but I just wouldn’t feel safe having a gun on me all the time. Leave the weapons to those completely trained to handle them, you know?”

“Mmmm,” Ash said. “I can respect that. But I also feel like maybe two armed guards around Andy isn’t quite enough and having a few more wouldn’t do anyone any harm. Besides, I’d look like a bad ass with a gun in my hands.”

“That you probably would, Ash,” Fi said. “I think I’d look like a soccer mom trying to front and fail on every level.”

“Nah, you’d look like that actress you look like in the film where she loses her memory and fucks shit up with Sam Jackson,” Ash teased. “But if you don’t want to carry a piece, nobody’s going to tell you that you have to.”

“That’s good,” Fi said, before the two sat in the silence of the hot tub for a couple more minutes. Eventually, however, Fi broke the silence again. “You really think I look like her?”

“Want me to prove it?” Ash giggled. “Say ‘chefs do that.’”

Both women devolved into laughs before grabbing towels, drying off as they headed back into the hidden basement of the building. When they got back to Ash’s studio, they found that Nicolette had left lunch for both of them, as well as a couple of cocktails. “How does she know everything in the house that needs doing, and do it with nobody seeing?”

“It’s the mark of a really great housekeeper.”

* * * * *

Like I said, there isn’t all that much to talk about with me and Lauren. We got along fine, but even from the onset, I could tell there was someone else in the picture who would figure into things later. Yeah, I wouldn’t know Taylor’s name for months, but her presence? Sure, she figured into that time like you wouldn’t believe.

We had fun with expanding Andy’s mind a little bit, though. I’d figured out we weren’t his first threesome early on, but when he told me it’d been a long while since he’d gotten laid, I knew we had some major rebuilding of confidence to do, and Lauren, bless her heart, hadn’t really been with men much, despite going both ways, so I sort of had to do the overselling for both of us.

It wasn’t too hard, convincing Andy that he was a sort of sex god. I mean, in most ways, I’m not really exaggerating with that. He wasn’t exceptional at first, but he was still good, damn good, and his willingness to learn made up for any shortcomings he might have had at first. You know that about Andy – if you give him a task and tell him it’s important, he will do absolutely anything to get good at it, as good as he can be.

I mean, the man already ate pussy like a champ, but everything else? We got there soon enough. He was a very eager student, and each time, whether it was the vaccine running through my veins mixed with his DNA or just the fact that he was hellbent on learning everything he could about both me and Lauren meant we both felt pretty loved up early on.

I felt a little bit more possessive about Andy than Lauren did, but it wasn’t obvious to him, I guess, even when I was at my worst. No, telling you about early days with Lauren, you’re not going to learn a whole lot about me and Andy and how we got along.

Which is why we’re going to skip forward a little bit and talk about the next member of our family to join, Niko. Don’t grin at me like that. You’re the one who’s going to figure out how much of what I tell you you’re going to want to include in your book. It might well be none of this whole next section, but hey, that’s for you to decide, not me.

So, the day before Niko showed up, Lauren and I got to meet Phil for the first time, although at that point, we didn’t really know how deep Phil’s ties to the whole thing went. I thought he seemed like a guy well deep in the know, but it would be months and months before we found out how much Phil had to do with the Quaranteam vaccine.

Still, during Andy and Phil’s conversation, we got a hint of the bigger picture to come, with Phil talking about maybe as many as five million people dead by the end of it, which, we both know now was a gross underestimation, but I like to think he was trying to keep Andy from losing his shit too much while still being able to talk to someone about what was going on. That was also the day that both the former President and the former Vice President collapsed, and early in the wee hours of the next morning, the Speaker of the House was sworn in as President Pro Tempore.

Later that day, there was a knock on the door and Niko was dropped onto our lap. While she wasn’t in quite as bad a state as Piper was, Niko had clearly been given her dose much earlier than her arrival on our doorstep, because she wasn’t thinking entirely clearly. Not so poorly that her judgement was impaired, but she was not in the mood to wait if you follow my meaning. She basically had her way with Andy in the common area of the tiny old condo, and we had to carry her up to bed afterwards.

In the middle of the night, she sucked Andy off, and in the early hours of the morning, she fucked him while he was still sleeping. It took three full dosages of Andy’s love before she felt like the fog around her brain was starting to clear.

The very first thing I realized about Niko was that she was quite a bit younger than Andy was. I mean, I’m a decade younger than him, and she’s half a decade younger than me, so while Niko assured us she liked older and more mature men, I also knew it was going to be one of those sticking points with Andy for a while. She was 22 at the time, but even still, that might as well have been an entire generation for Andy.

It didn’t hurt that she was insanely gorgeous either. I don’t know if she’s told you about her heritage, but she’s half Lakota, a quarter Japanese and a quarter Mexican. It gives her this exotic beauty while still making her deeply American, unlike me and Lauren. She was chill and easy-going and very approachable and friendly.

Within the first day or two, though, I was pretty sure Niko was lying to us.

I didn’t think they were big lies, or important lies – well, important to us I suppose – but I had a strong sense that she wasn’t being honest about what she did for the Air Force, or how she’d come to join our family. The last thing I wanted was for our family to built on a foundation of lies, so about a week or so after she’d joined the family, I asked Niko to go out and take a walk with me.

We’d sort of gotten the impression from Phil that as long as we stayed away from other people, now that we were vaccinated, it wouldn’t be too bad for us to take walks around the neighborhood, and I wanted to get Niko away from Andy so I could size her up and sort of lay down the law a bit.

“Sure,” Niko said. “Let’s walk for a bit. I could do with getting out of the house.”

We waited until evening, so it was cooling off and the heat wouldn’t bake us, and we took a flashlight with us, at Andy’s insistence. He offered to come with us, but I told him I wanted to have a bit of one-on-one time with the new girl.

The first couple of blocks, we sort of walked in silence, until she spoke first. “Am I in trouble, Ash?” Niko said, a wry grin on her face.

“You tell me, soldier.”

“Airman.”

“Fine,” I said, correcting myself. “You tell me, airman. Why do I get the feeling you’re not being entirely truthful with us? You said you’d read one of Andy’s books, but you said you didn’t really remember it, and I’m thinking that’s ‘cause you’d never read it at all. So why lie about that? To boost his ego up a bit?”

“To make him feel like I’m not just a stowaway dropped in his lap for him to take care of,” she sighed. “You know he’s basically got the pick of any woman on the planet that he wants, don’t you?”

I remember thinking to myself how odd that sounded at the time, and decided she was being figurative rather than literal. “You’re gorgeous, you’re smart, you’re funny – why wouldn’t he want you?”

“I’m Air Force,” she said. “Lots of guys refuse to date military girls. They say we’re too uptight, too unpredictable, too emotionally unavailable.”

“You hear Andy say any of that shit yet?”

“Not yet but—”

“And you’re not gonna,” I said to her, “because Andy doesn’t think like that. If anything, he’s embarrassed for you, that you’re stuck with him.”

“He’s a level 5, Ash. That means he’s somebody really important.”

I laughed at her, shaking my head. “He’s a fluke. He got that status by doing a random stranger a favor, and the level 5 status was his reward. I mean, I get the impression that he might have some friends with some clout, but if you’re worried about him thinking you’re uptight, you can disabuse him of that notion any time you like. I mean, didn’t you take that test we all took?”

“Yes ma’am,” Niko said to me.

“Call me ‘ma’am’ again, Niko, and I’ll stab you in your sleep,” I chuckled at her. “So how did you and Andy end up?”

“That’s just it – I don’t entirely know. I was supposed to be paired up with somebody else, but when we got to that man’s house, he was already dead. So they brought me back to the base and told me to find another option.”

I could tell there was some other part of the story she wasn’t telling, but I didn’t want to push her. Not yet.

“Do you regret being saddled with Andy?”

“Fuck no,” she told me, suddenly very worried that I’d thought she wasn’t into our shared man. “Look, Ash, Andy seems like a great guy, and I don’t regret being paired up with him at all, but I figured it was best not to tell him he wasn’t my first choice, because he’d probably get up in his head about it.”

“I doubt that he would,” I sighed, “but I suppose you’re right in that there’s nothing to be gained by telling him that information. But that’s not my biggest concern with you.”

“Oh no?” Niko asked me. “Then what is?”

“Look, right now, the whole world is in one colossal free fall. I heard you talking with Andy the other day about how the numbers we got from his friend Phil were probably underestimates, and that we were looking at loads of men being dead before this whole thing stabilized. Now, I haven’t been with Andy all that long, but I have to tell you… I would die for that man. I don’t know if it’s the drugs, or the confined spaces, or some unique biological quirk that the two of us have, but I am head over heels for him, and I intend to marry him and bear his children as soon as things have settled down a bit. He makes me feel like nobody I’ve ever known, and that means it’s my job to look out for him.”

“What about Lauren?”

“Lauren likes Andy, and she enjoys fucking him, but I wouldn’t say she’s completely in love with him. Maybe they’ll get there; probably not though. And that’s okay. It means there’s a sort of established pecking order. I’m going to end up being his wife and she’s going to end up being one of the house concubines,” I laughed, as Niko laughed with me. “And now we’ve got to figure out what to do with you.”

“Hate to say it, but I think you have to keep me,” she teased.

I smirked, rolling my eyes. “You know what I’m getting at.”

“I do, Ash,” Niko sighed. “And I hate to say it, but I think I’m more on your side of things than Lauren’s.”

I stopped walking for a moment, the two of us on a foot bridge that crossed over the nearby freeway. “Why do you hate to say that?”

“Because it puts us in conflict, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?” I asked.

“He can’t have two wives, now, can he?”

“Why not?” I asked her.

“I’m pretty sure it’s against the law,” Niko said with a soft laugh.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be against the law before the end of the year,” I told her.

“You think?”

“Men are falling like dominos, and the only workable solution they have is a vaccine that doubles as a sexually transmitted disease. They’re going to need to repopulate the country, and if they’re saddling all these women up with so few men, laws are going to have to change,” I told her, tugging on the top of my workout pants, making sure they were above my ass crack. “Do you want to be his wife?”

She looked down at the freeway, completely empty as it was, and tapped her palm against the fence awning covering the bridge. “I think I do. You know in the first day of getting to know him, I basically had to tell him to stop asking questions so I could get a few of my own in edgewise. He was completely invested in getting to know me, and learning what it would take to make me happy in our new arrangement. Can you believe th—well, of course you can believe that. You’ve probably gotten used to it.”

“Andy’s focus is a hard thing to get used to, but you’ll get there eventually. And you’ll learn that he’s a hell of a storyteller, once you find the right buttons to push and the right knobs to twist to coax them out of him. It’s not that he’s unwilling to talk about himself; he’d just rather get to know you for a while until it feels like you’re genuinely interested in learning more about him for a change.”

“I’m interested in learning more about him now,” she said to me. “Are his books any good? Would I like them?”

“They’re not for everyone, but I’ve come around to them. Of course, my older brother is a fiend for them, and he’s been trying to get me to read them forever, but you’ll know pretty early on whether or not there’s any appeal to you or not.”

“If there isn’t, is he going to be mad?”

“Mad?” I giggled a little bit, shaking my head. “No, he’s not going to be mad. A little disappointed, maybe, but not as mad as he’s going to be if you lie to him about liking them when you don’t. Give’em a read, and don’t let me make up your mind for you. And give it a few books. You can tell with the early ones that he’s still sort of finding his footing in long form storytelling, but there’s potential all over the place. But that’s not the only thing you’re hiding from us, is it, Niko?”

Niko looked at me with a wry smile that made her seem much older than her 22 years. “You’re very good at reading people, aren’t you, Ash?”

“When I started to realize we were going to be getting more women in this house, I realized that Andy’s going to need someone looking out for him, making sure nobody’s taking advantage of him. His own best friend told me to protect him, so that’s what I’m going to do. That means I need to know what’s going on here, Niko.”

She sighed, and we started walking again. “What I’m about to tell you, I want you to very closely think about keeping to yourself, at least for the time being, okay?”

“Niko, we’re both bonded to Andy, which means we’re bonded to each other as well. I’m not about to break that trust lightly.”

“With men dying off so much, it means existing men are going to become, well, a resource. That means they’re now in high risk of being kidnapped, like, all the time. As such, it means men are going to need someone who are, essentially, bodyguards. That’s me. I’m going to be Andy’s bodyguard.”

“Quite the self-imposed role you’ve got there.”

“Not entirely self-imposed,” Niko said. “The Air Force is starting to think about these things now, and like you told me, Andy’s got friends in high places, so I don’t think you’d be surprised to learn that maybe one of his friends gave me a nudge in his direction.”

“You know what it’s going to mean, being his bodyguard? There might come a point where you’re going to have to choose between being his wife and being his protector.”

Niko shook her head. “It’s not even a choice – the results are the same. If he’s not alive, neither are any of us. So Operation: Protect Your Man is always going to be at the top of my priority list. But I don’t think calling attention to that in Andy’s eyes is going to do anyone any favors, do you?”

“Doesn’t he deserve to know?”

Niko sighed at me. “I don’t think he should know. Look, we’re probably going to have to add a bunch more women to this little pod of ours, and maybe one of them will eventually be more focused on being his bodyguard than his partner, but until then, I have to do both, but I don’t want him losing sleep over it. I made my choice. The person who nudged me this way, they’ve had more on their plate than I think anyone I’ve ever met in my life, but they still wanted to look out for their friends, to make sure that even in this whirlwind of chaos and madness, they could still try and keep a few people important to them safe. But I don’t want to burden Andy with that knowledge when there’s nothing he can really do about it. Let him enjoy his life, and enjoy us, y’know? So we can enjoy him.”

I nodded. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt not telling him. I can understand your reasoning, not wanting to worry him about these things.”

“What about you?” she said. “What are you hiding from me that I ought to know?”

I laughed, rolling my eyes at her. “I’m not hiding anything.”

“Everybody’s hiding something, Ash.”

“Just checking, you’re into girls as well, right?”

Niko licked her lips with a wicked little grin. “We’re not doing it in public, but yeah, I am, and I will make you squirm so hard, your freckles start blushing.”

“You think Andy can handle three women at once?”

She slapped me on the ass, and I remember squeaking when she did. “If he can’t, we’ll have to get him there pretty fast,” she told me. “We’re probably going to get a little bit of a break, but pretty soon, they’re going to unleash the floodgates, and then Andy’s gonna have women all fucking over him.”

“Here’s the thing, though, Niko. We’re gonna need to make sure we’re collectively watching out for our guy, naïve and kindhearted as he can be.”

We were walking through what should’ve been a lush green park but was instead mostly just brown and tan dried out grass, the drought having done a real number on the local flora. “What are we talking about, Ash?”

“I’m talking a pact, you and me, always agreeing to be completely honest and open with each other, never lying to one another, telling each other everything, and together making sure our man doesn’t leap before either he or we look,” I told her. “But that means we have to have zero secrets between the two of us.” We walked down the path a little further before I continued. “Look, I like you, Niko. You’re a straight-shooter who speaks her mind, and yeah, you’re way younger than Andy probably would’ve picked on his own, but that’s probably good for him. He’s going to need that youthful energy around him to keep him going when things get truly bleak, and I’m pretty sure we’re not too far from those days.”

“How do you figure?”

“Indirectly, we know a few people who have died, but directly, it hasn’t hit us yet,” I told her. “We’re not going to remain that lucky forever. This plague’s gonna take someone important to one of us sooner or later. My dad, one of my brothers, Andy’s best friend… even with all of us being as careful as we can, someone somewhere’s going to slip, and then…” I snapped my fingers. “Like that, the whole world’s going to change. I don’t know who it is we’re going to lose, but we’re going to lose somebody. And we’re going to have to hold together more than we’ve ever done in our entire lives, because whoever it is, that person’s just going to want to give up, and it’s our job not to let that happen.”

Niko let out a slight whistle of admiration. “You’ve been thinking about all of this a lot, haven’t you?”

“The way I think about it is like this – right now, if you think about it like a hierarchy of needs, Andy’s worrying about the base – making sure we’ve got food, got toilet paper, a safe place to sleep, that kind of thing. That means we have to worry about the higher-level stuff – his safety, our collective sense of family and intimacy, his confidence, with Andy taking care of the very top end as well, the sense of trying to do the best in the world that we can. I like to think of Andy as a great big Boy Scout – he’s always looking to see the best in people, but sometimes that means people with less than noble intentions can get the better of him. He tell you the story of how he got the two cats yet?”

Niko laughed and shook her head. “There’s a story there?”

“So this is several years back, and I’m sure he tells the story much better than I do, but he was considering getting a cat again. He’d had a cat back in college, but it had died just after he’d moved out to California, and he’d been without a cat for a few years, so he was planning on getting a new one, when Lesser Phil calls him—”

“Wait, Lesser Phil?”

I giggled. “Andy’s got two friends out here both named Phil, but they can’t both be called Phil, otherwise how the hell would anyone know which one he was talking about? So the one Andy hangs out with the most gets to just be Phil, and the other one is Phil the Younger which devolved into Phil the Lesser which devolved into Lesser Phil.”

“Oh my god,” Niko said, holding her hand to her mouth to try and quell her giggles. “Even his stories have stories!”

“Anyway, Lesser Phil calls Andy up and says, ‘Hey, we found a couple of motherless kittens in our backyard. Do you want to just take them in?’ And Andy, big heart that he is, says sure, he’ll be right over.”

“That’s not much of a story.”

I held up my hand. “Patience, young one. When Andy gets over there, he asks Lesser Phil where the kittens are, and LP says they’re in the backyard, curled up near the patio deck.”

“Let me guess – not there when Andy goes to look for them?”

“Nope, and what’s worse, he can hear the most pathetic mewling coming from underneath the deck.”

“Oh no!” Niko said.

“So Andy says they can’t just leave the kittens under there, so he pries a few boards off LP’s deck and crawls underneath. This is the part I wish Andy was telling you the story, because the way he spins it, it sounds like he’s crawling through the fields of the dead under that deck, with racoon skeletons and wasp nests and what the hell else was down there, but eventually, after crawling on his belly like twenty feet, he comes across these two tiny little kittens, huddled together, pressed up against the foundation of the house. He grabs them one at a time, tucks them inside of his shirt so they’re warm and nestled up against his chest, and he slowly crawls his way back out from under the deck.”

“Awwww!”

“As soon as he gets out, Lesser Phil asks him if he’s gonna fix the damage Andy’s just done to the deck by prying a couple of boards off.”

“He didn’t!”

“And Andy, man that he is, sighs, tells Lesser Phil to go and get him a box and a towel to put the kittens in, as well as a saucer full of milk, and while the kittens are getting comfortable in the box, Andy spends another half an hour prying out the bent nails, lining up the wooden planks, renailing them to the frame work and applying sealant over the new nails. Then he takes the box and heads home to adopt his two new kittens. And that’s how he adopted Muninn and Huginn. But here’s the thing – when Andy told it to me, he admitted he was pretty sure the kittens were under the deck when Lesser Phil called him, and that LP just didn’t want to do what it took to get them out himself. But Andy wasn’t mad, because he got two wonderfully loving cats in the end. Me? If Lesser Phil had asked me to fix his deck after getting the kittens out from under it, I’d have probably smacked him in the face with the board.”

“Yeah, I don’t blame you one bit.”

We stopped over by a dried up creek bed and I stepped close for a moment, sliding my hand along the back of her head, pulling her lips to mine as I kissed her, trying to put on my best boss bitch attitude, and sure enough, I felt her sort of melt in a little bit into me, her tits pressed up against mine, and before I knew it, her hand was on my ass and we were trading tongues.

It was our first kiss, hers and mine, and the heat level… whew. I’m getting a little flustered now just thinking about it. The initial chemistry was somewhere a million miles off the charts and when we pulled back from each other, we both started giggling like we were a couple of teenagers who were afraid their parents might catch them.

“Wow!” Niko said to me, her hands still holding onto my hips. “I, uh, my relationship history is very short, but between you and Andy… I feel like all of this is fucking next level. I was actually more worried about you not liking me than Andy. With him, at least I knew I was baseline compatible, but you were a shot in the dark, and… well, you’re fucking hot, Ash.”

I remember blushing just a little bit. I’d fooled around some with girls at uni, but I’d never had a real relationship with a woman before, and here I was, about to enter into the partnership of a lifetime.

“You and me, Niko, we make a pact right here,” I told her. “You and me, we’re going to be everything Andy ever needs, so anyone else who comes along, that’s just gravy, but you and me, we’re going to the bedrock of this man’s heart and soul. That means we’re gonna have to be better than best friends; we’re gonna have to be soulmates, as much as we are with Andy. That means even if we’re keeping things from Andy for his own good, you and I never have any secrets from each other. We’ll keep each other in check, and we’ll be the backbone our man’s gonna need to make it through the rest of this crisis. One of us stumbles, the other one’ll be there to pick her up. You and me, Niko. The first two wives.”

She hugged me close and laughed softly. “Which secret do you want to talk about first, that it was Phil Marcos who nudged me to Andy, that you were only the second girl I’ve ever kissed, or that Andy was only the second guy I’ve ever fucked?”

I giggled a little bit. “I knew I liked Phil for some reason. Now that I think about it, I bet he’s the guy the doctor was telling me about.”

“What doctor?” she asked.

* * * * *

“She and I walked around for a couple of hours, and I told her the story about Dr. McKenna and how he’d told me that one of Andy’s friends was looking out for him, but that any of the women assigned to him were going to have to get used to being a bit more aggressive and reassuring than they’d been before,” Ash said as she stepped away from the canvas again. “You can stretch again. Break time.”

“You and Niko against the world, huh?” Fiona asked her.

Ash smiled and shrugged a little. “I think we both knew there were going to be other wives to add into the mix eventually, but I wanted to set things straight with Niko first. To make sure she had Andy’s best interests at heart, I needed to give her someone to unburden her conscience to. Besides, you knew Andy longer than any of us. Was Phil wrong?”

Fiona shook her head. “Not in the least. In fact, that piece of advice Dr. McKenna gave you probably was the best piece of advice anyone could’ve ever given you in dealing with our man Andy. Back when we were in college, I was always fond of telling Andy, ‘You always believe the best about everyone but yourself.’ I’d hoped he’d grow out of it, but I think at this point, I just have to accept that it’s part of who Andy is.”

“It’s not so bad,” Ash said. “He stays remarkably humble and that’s a wonderful thing to have in a partner.”

“You going to include me and the rest of the fiancées in the Ride or Die club?”

“If I wasn’t, bitch, do you think I would’ve told you about it? What kind of dopey bitch do you take me for?”

The two women shared a good laugh over that.

Part Five – “Giggling Deranged Lunatics”

December 11th, 2020

“How long is this painting of yours going to take?” Fiona asked Ash as they began to get settled for the next section of painting. “I swear, we’ve been at this for hours and hours.”

“It takes as long as it takes,” Aisling shot back. “You want me to accidentally paint your ass too big because you moved funny while I was working on painting it?”

“I’ll have you know; I have an amazing ass for a woman my age,” Fiona sniffed, sounding perhaps a little hurt.

“You have any amazing ass for a woman of any age, Fi, so don’t get your panties in twist over it.”

“I’m not wearing—”

“Yeah yeah yeah, you know what I meant,” Ash laughed. “I have to ask. Was this about what you expected when Andy invited you to come out and join him? A giant harem of beautiful and witty women, all of whom love Andy but all of whom are totally doing their own thing a lot of the time?”

“I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, y’know?” Fi sighed. “I don’t think I ever stopped being in love with Andy, no matter what I tried to tell myself when he and I weren’t speaking to one another. He was being dumb, I was being dumber, and neither one of us wanted to be the one who flinched and admitted it. I tried dating a cop for a while.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Didn’t,” Fi said. “He wasn’t a bad man, but he was… he was sort of the inverse Andy, I guess. He was used to looking for the bad in everyone and everything, convinced that everything everywhere was just one bad minute away from turning sour and going wrong. He was the most pessimistic man I ever met. Good heart, but just always prepping for the worst in everyone, and… that just gets… it gets fucking boring. So, one night while we’re out at dinner, and Tim, that was the cop’s name, he’s telling me how he thinks our waiter’s probably high on coke or something because of how he was acting, and I just up and decide I’m done with him, so I put the key to his apartment on the table between us, I get up and I walk out, not even saying a word as I go.”

“Damn, Fi, that sounds pretty cold.”

“It was,” she chuckled. “But I think he actually appreciated me finally living up to his expectations. Anyway, we’re not talking about me…”

“We are, actually,” Aisling said. “I want to get at least a little bit of information about you in exchange for me telling you all this stuff about me. And you didn’t really answer my question – what did you expect when you got the invite from Andy?”

“I knew a bit about DuoHalo and I’d heard about the Quaranteam serum from a confidential informant inside the Chiefs of Staff, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with what was going on, even if it seemed a little bit science-fiction-y,” Fiona said. “But Andy explained himself pretty well in the message. I mean, did he show you the invite video he sent me?”

“No! I’d love to see that if you’ve still got it.”

“Hang on a second, lemme see if it’s still in my email,” Fiona said, moving over to pick up her phone. “I bet it is. I’m kind of a pack rat about these kinds of things. Ah! Here it is. Turn on the TV in here and I’ll throw it to that screen so you’re not watching on my tiny ass phone.”

A few seconds later, the television in Aisling’s studio had sprung to life, connected to Fiona’s phone and had an image of Andy sitting in his writer’s room upstairs, long before they’d discovered the hidden extra floor. It was only recorded a month and change ago, but it felt like it had been an eternity instead. He looked a little disheveled, and it made Fi grin a little, knowing now that he’d been more nervous about recording this video than any of the other ones.

“Hey Fi. Long time no talk.” He sighed, looking down at his hands before looking back up at the camera on his laptop. “How do I even start this? Where can I possibly begin? I’m sorry, okay? I can’t even remember what it was we were fighting about, but I miss you, and I’ve been too fucking stupid and too fucking proud to get over myself and just call you, even after you sent me that Facebook friend invite. You know me, I hate confrontation. Heh. And yet, here I am, reaching out, out of the blue. I don’t know how much you know about this whole DuoHalo virus, but the government has a solution for it. It doesn’t work the way you would expect it to, though. It’s… it’s like a sexually transmitted disease that links women to one man, and I know how ridiculous and crazy that sounds, but here we are. I know it’s real, because I’m already paired up with a handful of women.

“Now, I don’t know what your situation is, so maybe you’re married, or maybe you’ve got a boyfriend, or maybe you just don’t want to leave D.C. still, but maybe, I guess, maybe there’s a chance we could try and rekindle what we used to have. I can’t promise you exclusivity, but I guess nobody can really do that anymore, because it sounds like the new status quo is going to be one man to a dozen or so women, and, yes, I know exactly how ridiculous all that sounds. I’ve been trying to be smart and adept about the women I let into my life, although this Oracle system they have is apparently very helpful too. I think you’d like all the women I’m in relationships with now.

“Fuck, what am I trying to say here? This is, like, my fourth attempt to record this, and I’m still just fucking it up like I have every other version. Look. I still have feelings for you, shit, I’m probably still in love with you, if I’m being candid, and the idea that I could help keep you safe but that my own personal pride stopped me from doing it? That’s ridiculous and I’d be ashamed of myself if I let it stay that way. But I need you to know there’s other women here that I love too, and while I get that it’s super weird, it’s where we are. That’s where society is. But I want to make sure you’re safe. That’s important to me, okay? Regardless of all the other shit, you’re important to me. Your safety. That’s important.

“So, if you want to, the Air Force will relocate you from D.C. here to northern California, where you and I could be partnered. Maybe you’re tired of Washington. I know your reporting for the last few years has certainly felt that way, at least a little bit. It’s a lot to take in. I’m sure the whole thing actually feels a little bit insane, and I get that, but please, please, please take it seriously, okay? If you think there’s a chance we could work on a long-term scale, and you’re not with some other man, consider what I’m offering. I know it means having to put up with me for the rest of your life, or at least the foreseeable future, but…

“… I think a lot about our time together back in college, Fi. And you really were my first true love. I’ve got some other women I’m in love with now too, and I get that that’s going to seem weird. Shit, think of how weird it is for me. I went like a decade with nobody wanting to fuck me, and now a bunch of women fuck me not only for their survival, but also saying that I’m the best fuck of their lives.”

Andy laughed on the screen looking down at his hands.

“You remember that one song that was stupidly popular when we were younger? The one about sunscreen? There’s a line in that, and I don’t remember exactly how it goes, but it’s about how as you get older, the more important it becomes to hang onto people who remember you when you were young.”

He looked back up at the camera again.

“I remember when we were young and invincible, a couple of kids convinced we were going to take on the world and win. I remember us sitting on the roof of that house you’d rented, watching the stars until they set and the sun began to rise up on us, just because we’d never done it before. I remember how much you laughed when I tried to play ‘Jack & Diane’ for the first time on guitar, and how you told me I shouldn’t give up my day job. And I remember the time we sat and read each other’s work, my short story and your in-depth article, and how impressed I was by your writing, and all the kind things you had to say about my silly little story.

“Come. Don’t come. Just let me know you’re safe and sound from this horrible virus, Fi, and know that if the only thing stopping you from coming is me not asking you to come, well, I’m asking, okay? I’m not so proud that I can’t admit I was wrong, I was wrong, and I should’ve reached out, and it shouldn’t have taken a once-in-a-lifetime epidemic to get me to swallow my pride, but here we are. So, uh, be safe, and maybe I’ll see you soon. Still love you. Bye.”

The image of Andy tapping the stop button on his laptop hung on the screen for a minute before Fiona wiped it away, letting the screen turn black, hoping it would distract a little from the single tear she was trying to wipe away and hide. But when she glanced over, the smile on Aisling’s face told her that she’d seen it, so Fi offered a little smile. “Sorry. I haven’t watched that since I was on the plane flying to California with Moira in tow. I’d forgotten how eloquent he can be when he’s trying, and especially when he’s scared.”

“I keep telling you, Fi,” Ash said, wiping her own eyes, finding them a little damp. “You’re basically the only member of the entire family whom he chose, no strings or conditions attached, no outside forces influencing him, or even other girls in the family. That puts you in a league entirely on your own.”

“I don’t think I’m any better than you, Ash,” Fiona laughed. “Just a little bit older.”

“You think he loves one of us more than the other? I don’t. I don’t think he’s capable of that, differentiating levels of love, not consciously at least,” Ash said. “He’s just following his feelings. I don’t feel any lesser than you. Never have. Don’t expect I ever will.”

“Good, because if he ever thought one of us thought we were better than any of the rest of us, you know we’d never hear the end of it from him.”

“So, if I’m First Among Equals, you’re Most Senior Among Equals.”

Fiona laughed, moving to get back into place. “Something like that. You ready to keep going?”

* * * * * * * *

When we heard we were being relocated, none of us were quite sure what to make of it. The word had come from Phil that they knew we were going to need more space, so they were relocating us to someplace bigger. I think around that time, at least I’d figured out things were way worse than Phil was letting on. I’m pretty sure Andy knew too, but we were putting on brave faces, clinging to the notion that if we stuck together, we’d get through it together. I tried not to ask Niko about it, because Niko had promised to tell me everything and I… I didn’t think I was ready to know just how badly fucked we were just yet.

But Phil had come by and told us to be prepared to move, and so in typical Andy fashion, we went home and figured out everything we would possibly need if we were to move and got to packing. It was late August, and with the news that we were being moved, Phil had upped how bad he was describing things, making it sound like we were looking at nearly half the male US population being dead.

He was still underselling it.

When Niko and Andy came back from their meeting with Phil, Niko told me that Andy had figured out she and Phil knew each other. I asked her what the giveaway was, and she said it was the fact that Phil had let her call him Mister Marcos without correcting her, even though she worked at the research lab. That was all it took for her charade to come tumbling down. She was surprised Andy wasn’t mad at her; I wasn’t. I’d even told her that he wouldn’t be.

Phil had made it sound like they were just going to come get us immediately that day in August, but it turned out it was a few weeks later, in September, when they finally showed up to relocate us. Us girls had basically just packed our suitcases back up and some of the other stuff we’d brought with us, and Andy had thrown most of his stuff into his large suitcase, as well as breaking down his desktop computer, and packing up food, water and litter for the cats. We had some excess stuff that we had to load into Eric’s car, but it was just him, Lily and Jenny at that point, so there was room for a bit of Andy’s things in Eric’s car that Andy just couldn’t bear to leave. Like, you’d better believe he brought that box of advance reader copies with him, ha ha. If just one of them got him all this? Can you imagine what an entire box must be worth?

We got into Andy’s car and drove up 680 past Pleasanton, Dublin and San Ramon, and I remember laughing that there was a Dublin in California, which I’d never really noticed, since I’d been more of a peninsula girl rather than living out on the eastern side of the Bay. A little bit north of San Ramon, we turned west and started headed up Bollinger Canyon Road, heading up into the hills until we turned onto Bear Tree Road, which eventually brought us to the entrance point of New Eden.

Even at the time, I realized that the pavement on Bear Tree Road was very new, and almost all the buildings behind the military checkpoint gate screamed recent development. Nothing in the area felt like it could be more than a decade or so old, and even then, that was being generous. I haven’t really been able to dig into it that much, but the satellite data on Google Maps for the area when I last looked was marked 2017, and it only had about three mansions in the area, with the little single building off to the side that I know now is the Quaranteam lab. It was all still technically San Ramon land, I guess, up until it was finally zoned as New Eden in September or October.

You’ve seen the drive it takes to get up here now. We’re nestled in obscurity, completely off the beaten path, and yet, not really that far from anything. It’s only an hour and change to San Francisco if the traffic is cooperating. I’m not surprised nobody knew it was going up, even before people were locked in their homes. Once it needed to expand, construction happened at warp speed, because the workers were given immunity from DuoHalo themselves just to make sure everything zipped along nonstop.

It's amazing how much incentive it is to cut to the front of the line when your life’s on the line. And with New Eden, they built Little Eden, the sort of adjunct area for support staff and local services, not quite mansions but great houses nonetheless. I’ve asked Phil about it, and almost all the manors of New Eden were like 70-80% of the way done, but all work had stopped because of Covid and DuoHalo. But the idea of making the staff commute further meant the people working on Quaranteam would be at risk, and so the Air Force bundled them up nice and tight.

I remember driving up to the mansion thinking it was insane, that even split between the two households – Andy’s and Eric’s – the place had more than enough space, and I remember suspecting that they were going to add two or three more households to the mansion, because it was way too much space for just us. That was around the point when Eric made a joke about how the place clearly wasn’t big enough for our two households. And then we found out Eric wasn’t staying with us, but, in fact, had the mansion next door, which sort of blew everyone’s minds.

Now, keep in mind, I think we were all sort of expecting someone to jump out and yell “Ha ha! Fooled you!” at any minute while we were being given the tour, but that never happened. In fact, Andy and I split our attention during the tour a little bit, because while I was busy reveling in the fact that the house came with its own pool and hot tub, Andy was doing math and not liking the numbers he was coming up with. Major Peters, our tour guide, had told him that there twelve bedrooms in the house, so not enough that every woman he would eventually have could have her own bedroom, which I had totally glossed over, but Andy was already starting to panic a little bit, thinking about how many women he was going to be sallied up with.

A little bit later into the tour, Major Peters told Andy that men were being paired up with between twelve and fifteen women, but that more was definitely an option. We were also told that once we’d passed our ‘induction quarantine,’ we would be free to move about New Eden as much as we wanted, and without any sort of protective or safety gear. There were restaurants, a movie theater, a bookstore… we were eager as hell to get out of the house but were told it was going to be three weeks of isolating inside the mansion. In fact, food would be delivered to us, so even the staff – Jenny, Katie and Nicolette – weren’t allowed to leave the grounds either. I’ve never been entirely sure of the reasoning for it, but I think I heard Phil say at one point it was to ensure we weren’t spreading Covid instead of DuoHalo.

I remember being introduced to the staff and immediately knowing there was going to be some initial weirdness we were going to have to overcome. So, first thing’s first – Phil had told Nicolette to call herself Yvette and to put on an atrocious French accent, because he wanted to see how long it would take Andy to figure it out. Nicolette was terrified we were going to be pissed at her when we found out, but we laughed about it like any reasonable people would. (You get the Clue movie reference, right? Just checking.)

And while it’s just the two of us, let me just say that if I had to pick a member our household to swap bodies with, holy shit would it be Nicolette in a fucking heartbeat. I am so fucking jealous of her tits that I don’t even want to admit it, but I can’t fucking hide it either, they’re so fucking ridiculously perfect. I’m very glad she’s cool about playing with other members of the household, because I will confess, I’ve had some fun with her more than a few times, sometimes with Andy around and a couple of times without. They’re not the biggest tits in the family – that honor, I think, is always going to go to Hannah, because, well, dayum, but I’d say that Nicolette’s are the ideal. Large but not overwhelmingly so, perfectly shaped, perfect ratio of nipple to breastflesh… they even jiggle great! I mean, fuck her, right? Heh. Anyway, getting settled in with Nicolette was easy. Even before the serum, she was the perfect definition of volunteering sexual submissive.

Andy was more than a little nervous about getting settled with Katie and Jenny, though, because he was suddenly stepping into someone else’s marriage. Katie and Jenny had been married for a couple of years at that point, I think, although I’m not entirely sure. And they’d told the government they were both bisexual, which, theoretically might not be a lie now? But it probably was at the time. Katie was a strict lesbian, and didn’t have any attraction to any man, but Jenny swung both ways, although Andy sort of figured that out immediately. That’s one of his secret superpowers – he’s so damn nice that people just tell him things. He told me he was talking to Jenny and Jenny just blurted it out at him.

Anyway, Katie got mad at Jenny, because they’d agree to hide it from Andy, and she was just going to sort of fake it or consider it a job task, but Jenny said she didn’t feel right deceiving Andy, since he was being so nice to them. Andy wasn’t mad at them about considering lying to him, and told them if they wanted to leave, he’d okay that. Of course, he also knew that they’d been injected with the Quaranteam serum about two or three days earlier, and that it was probably starting to get to them, so he just laid all his cards down on the table, gave them their options, and told them whatever they wanted, he’d endorse.

The plan, the original plan, was that he’d never deliver to one of the two women without the other, and that he’d never push them into trying anything they weren’t comfortable with. He genuinely would’ve been okay with Jenny just jerking him off into Katie’s mouth, if that’s what it took. They’d both been briefed by the government about the effects of the serum, but Andy told me Katie didn’t really believe what they’d been told, until she got that first hit from tasting his precum, and that priming orgasm rattled her to her core.

Here we are, some four months later, and I have to tell you, Fi… Katie’s not as much of a staunch lesbian as she used to be. I’ve talked to her and Jenny about this, and the way Katie feels about it is the strangest thing. She doesn’t find men attractive, at all. She’s looked at straight porn and there is nothing exciting about it in any way shape or form to her. And I’ve shown her loads of pictures of various hot guys, from the slender and heavily groomed to the big, bulky and rough around the edges, and none of them do anything for her at all.

But Andy?

Don’t tell him this, although I bet he already knows, but I’m pretty sure that before the end of the year, Katie’s going to ask him to fuck her. Like, genuinely fuck her. And I bet she’s going to love it. We’ve been starting to see that with a couple of people in the household in the inverse – women who said they strictly weren’t into women when they got here but have become a little bit more open and curious the longer they’re with the family. Even Lauren’s admitted that while she thought Andy was kind of cute at first, he wasn’t necessarily what she would’ve called “her type,” but the longer she’s in the family, the more sexually attractive and compelling he becomes to her. She used to be shy and nervous in her first couple of encounters with Andy, but as of late, she’s been voracious and ridiculously eager. Like, I don’t think it’ll ever overtake her love of Taylor, just like I don’t think Katie’s attraction to Andy will overtake her love of Jenny, but it’s interesting to see how much the serum affects us all in little ways that we’re still just beginning to learn about.

And even though they’ve all said they’re just staff, I saw that slight hint of jealousy in Nicolette’s eyes when she heard that Niko and I were pregnant, and I’m willing to bet that most, if not all, of the women on staff will eventually want to have a child with Andy. I don’t think he’ll mind. I don’t expect any of us fiancées will either.

You know what the hardest part of the move into the mansion was? Keeping tabs on the damn cats! Ha ha! I swear, Muninn and Huginn loved to find all sorts of nooks and crannies in this place long before anyone else. Shit, they even found the hidden basement, after we’d been living here for months, none of us at all the wiser. You’d have thought we’d have figured it out at some point during that period, but I think we had more than enough going to distract us.

Also, Fi, I gotta tell you – during the period of time where we were locked in the mansion, we fucked in a lot of different places. Like, it was almost like we made some sort of silent pact that if Andy hadn’t dosed somebody in a particular room of the house, it wasn’t really ours yet. So, we got around. Also, we didn’t have much of anything to decorate with, meaning for the first few weeks, it felt a lot like we were living in somebody else’s house. We didn’t think to bring pictures or posters or wall art with us, so we were stuck living in this massive space with no interior design beyond these endless white walls. That’s why we were so mad to go get everything from the old condo once they told us we could leave New Eden, and how we decorated the shit out of the house after that. I know you still think it’s a little too busy in some places, but believe me, we wanted every person in this house to feel like there was some expression of who they are somewhere on the walls of the house, and we wanted to make sure nobody got left out.

Oh! Oh! I also totally forgot to tell you about the one crazy day where I think we all nearly lost our fucking minds! It’s hilarious. We’d been in mansion lockdown for over two weeks, and out of the blue, Andy asks Katie if she’s got any paint, so that maybe he can paint the walls in a room, to add some color. She responds that yes, she’s got loads of buckets of paint in the tool shed, and though we couldn’t do the whole house, if we wanted to do a room or two, she could paint it up for us. Andy immediately told her that she wasn’t going to lift a finger and that he was going to do it, or that we were going to do it. I can’t remember which first, but I know that before the paint had made its way to one of the rooms, we’d badgered Andy into making sure all of us were going to paint it as a group.

Now Katie, clearly not trusting us giggling deranged lunatics, put down tarps, taped off kickplates, covered up windows and made sure we couldn’t do too much damage, which was smart, and then set down like three or four various buckets of paint, opening the tops of them for us, so we could pick the one we wanted to do the whole room in.

This, it turns out, was her worst idea ever.

For the next hour or so, instead of putting splotches on the wall to see what we thought of the color, we spent the time chasing each other around the room with paint-loaded paintbrushes, slapping paint on the wall like we were each trying to out Jackson Pollack the other.

Hang on, I still have a picture of it on my phone. Let me show you. Look at that! Isn’t that insane? I think that’s my tits imprinted off in blue to the side, and that’s got to be Lauren’s ass done in red paint splotches over here. I know for sure that’s Niko’s handprints up here. And that white outline over here? That was when we decided to paint like a chalk outline of Andy against the wall like he was a murder victim.

Anyway, the next morning, after about twenty minutes of laughing at what total prats we’d been the day before, we decided on a nice pine green and painted the inside of the room from top to bottom. That became Andy’s writing studio (at least until we found the basement), and we painted the room next to it in shades of oceanic blue, which was my studio, although let’s be real – I spent… well, spend most of my time in Andy’s studio with him. I feel a little antsy when he’s somewhere I can’t see him. Nothing severe, just, like, a tiny bit on edge.

We also spent loads of time on FaceTime. With my family. With Andy’s brother Matty. With Niko’s mom. With Lauren’s mom. Even spending hours talking to Eric or Lily or Jenny (Eric’s Jenny) or even Phil, just to have people to talk to.

And I’d also be remiss if I didn’t tell you there were plenty of times when we got lost in our own house. We’ve been here, what, four months now, and I think I have a pretty good handle on the whole layout of the place? But there’s still loads of points where I forget whose room is where, which is why we eventually went out of our way to put doorplates next to each door, just so that we’d remember if a particular bedroom was going to be used for something or someone. We didn’t need it right then and there, but Andy was clearly thinking about what was going to happen when new women started showing up, and he wanted to be ready, which I respected. Besides, it gave us all something to do.

During that month, Andy tried really hard to get the staff to relax a bit, but that was a push-and-pull battle the final results of which still aren’t entirely in. They all say they want to keep a completely professional working relationship split away from the sexual dynamics associated with the Quaranteam serum, but I think to some extent, we all know that’s bullshit. But there are lines they don’t want us to push them to cross – like joining the family for every meal – and it took us a bit of time to sort of wrap our heads around that rule. Sure, when there’s a big party or something, they’ll spend a little bit of time mingling, but they also go as much as they can out of their way to ensure that we never let that line of separation be completely wiped away, because at the end of the day, they have their own emotional connections and bonds that they don’t want us intruding into.

They love that we love them; they just don’t want to feel obligated to have to love us back, if that makes any sense.

We did spend a ton of time exploring the mansion, though, including each of us having sex in both the pool and the hot tub at least once. Andy found the whole idea of having a ‘pool house’ sort of ridiculous, and as soon we were walking through the place, he was already joking about having to repurpose it. I remember joking that if he wanted to, he could relocate some of my family in, only to be absolutely horrified when he took it very seriously and I had to back him down off it. Don’t get me wrong, Fi. I love my family, but no way in hell am I letting any of them live in our back yard.

* * * * * * * *

“Anyway,” Ash said. “That sort of gets you through the point where things get chaotic, and I had to really start putting my foot down.” She stepped away from the canvas, a laugh on her lips as she started to pull the sheet over it to cover it up. “The next real milestone in the house happens right around the time that they were going to let us explore New Eden, which was the arrival of Taylor, but we can talk about that tomorrow. I think we’ve done enough for one day, don’t you?”

“Yeah, we’ve covered a lot of ground today,” Fi said, “but I think I’m really starting to get a good idea of how much you’re the glue behind the scenes that holds everything together. I’m sure Andy doesn’t know half the stuff you do for him.”

“Eh, I prefer it that way, actually,” Aisling replied. “He’s got enough on his mind day-to-day without him thinking that I’m stressed out about this, that and the other th—” Her phone began to ring, playing Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” which made Ash tilt her head as she picked it up. “Niko, hey, what’s up? Something go wrong over at the base?” She paused a minute, letting the woman on the other side explain things to her. “Well, fucking finally. I was starting to wonder if Andy was just the unluckiest person ever when it came to that kind of thing. You and Piper got both him and Melody loaded up okay? Yeah, no worries. I’ll grab Fi and a couple of others and we’ll meet you out front to help. Yeah yeah, two minutes, we should be out front right as you get here.” She tapped her phone to end her call. “Andy’s finally getting his turn at a regeneration cycle. Apparently, his pairing with Melody triggered it, so it’s just Niko and Piper conscious in the car and two zonked out bodies laid down in the back. Get dressed and we’ll go help them.”

Fiona got dressed as Aisling did, wondering exactly how much Andy was going to change as part of the regeneration. She’d been reading up on it, and sometimes the effects were minor, like regrowing lost hair or fixing a trick back, but sometimes they could be incredibly strong, curing longtime ailments or regrowing missing organs. Xander’s spleen had grown back, which had taken everybody by surprise, and the scar from the surgery he’d had to remove it when he was like nine was completely gone as well.

As they were heading upstairs, Ash was already on her phone, sending a text message, and when the two of them were arriving on the front steps, Niko was pulling up in the Tesla. Just as she brought the Tesla to a halt at the bottom of the main staircase, Nicolette, Sarah and Lexi came walking out the front door. “You said you wanted extra sets of hand, Ma’am,” Nicolette said, “so I grabbed the first few people I saw. What’s up?”

“Andy’s regeneration triggered when he was imprinting Melody,” Ash said, as Niko was getting out of the car. “How’s our man?”

“Other than out like a light?” she giggled. “Perfectly normal. Heartrate, breathing, the whole nine yards. Had him entirely checked out before we left the base, and they say he’s five by five, nothing for us to be worried about.”

“Right,” Ash said, interlacing her fingers together and cracking her knuckles. “Piper, you, Sarah and Lexi carry Andy up to the master bedroom. Neeks, you and me, we’ll get Melody and take her to one of the last couple of open bedrooms. Fi, run down real quick and get a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of water to put on the nightstand. Nicolette, can you bring in both Melody’s bag and the sack Niko threw Andy’s stuff into?”

“Yes Ma’am,” Nicolette said. “Anything else we need?”

“Meet us up in the master bedroom after you’ve done that.”

A few minutes later, both Melody and Andy had been put to bed in their respective beds, Andy stripped down to nothing, and the whole house was aflutter with talk about Andy’s regeneration. In fact, nearly every woman in the house had gathered around Andy’s bed to peer down at him.

“Okay, I know everyone’s all a bunch of gossipy bitches,” Ash said, clapping her hands, “but this is no big deal, okay? Andy’s just going to go through about a day’s worth of recovery time, so we’ll keep someone stationed in the room at all times, make sure there’s cold orange juice waiting for him when he gets up, but other than that, this is no big deal, alright? Anyone who wants to can come in and check on him, and anyone who wants to sleep in bed with him can but just don’t be touching him, which, yes yes, I know it blows, but he’s regenerating, so let that happen, and we’ll just find out how much has changed tomorrow. Now scoot!”

Once the room was mostly empty, Ash put Andy’s phone on his charger on the night stand next to the bed, set his glasses next to them and then turned on the speaker to play Andy’s list of post-rock bands to give him something quiet and mellow to sleep to.

“C’mon, Fi,” Ash finally said. “Let’s go get dinner.”