You Could Go Home Again, part 10 of 16

Printer-friendly version

“How far do you think you want to go this time?”

 

“I still can’t have sex,” I said. “But... I wouldn’t mind if Larry put his hands on me, in some more exciting places than my hands and shoulders... and I’d like to touch him more too...?”


You Could Go Home Again

part 10 of 16

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.

Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.



Late the next morning I was sitting at my desk, doing calculus homework, when Bill called. (Amy was out.)

“Hi, Bill.”

“Hi, Joel. You said you’d like to go out with us again; how about next Saturday? The Witherspoon Cinema is showing Carrot and Stick at four, six and eight; we could go to whichever showing suits you best, and have dinner before or afterward.” That was the movie theater in the student center. I’d heard of Carrot and Stick, but hadn’t seen it; it was a science fiction movie filmed in Raleigh.

“That would be cool,” I said. “Any of the showings should work for me... maybe let’s see the movie at six, and eat afterward?”

“All right, we’ll see you in the lobby of your dorm at five-thirty next Saturday. And I hope we’ll see you at the sf society meeting too?”

“Probably; it depends on whether I feel ready for Friday’s tests before Thursday evening.”

I studied for a while longer and was about to go to lunch when I heard a knock at the door. I got up and answered the door; there were Rob and Sarah.

“We were just about to go to lunch,” Rob said. “Want to come with?”

I walked with them, a little faster and easier than I would have a few weeks earlier. My hip was bothering me less since I’d stopped growing; the problem wouldn’t ever go away, but it wasn’t any worse now than it was during the years when I wasn’t growing any.

“So,” Rob said, “Radhika told me you’d decided to start dating.”

“Yeah... I went out with Larry and Bill last night. Do you know them?”

“What, already?” Sarah said. “You don’t waste any time once you make up your mind.”

“I don’t think I know them,” Rob said.

“Bill went to the same high school you did — she said she knew your sister Greg.”

“Oh.” Her brow furrowed and the tips of her ears bent slightly in concentration. “Yeah, there were several people named Bill at my high school, but I can’t remember Greg being friends with any of them.”

“She didn’t say they were close friends, just that she knew her. Anyway, we went out to dinner and talked, and then they brought me back to the dorm.”

“Did he kiss you or anything?” Rob asked.

“He kissed me twice, near the end... nothing else, except he held my arm, and Bill’s, when we were walking in and out of the restaurant.”

“Good for you,” Sarah said.

Rob didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said: “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I was planning to ask you if you wanted to join us and Rico for dinner sometime, after you decided you were ready to start dating... I hope it works out with Larry and Bill, but let me know if it doesn’t.”

“Um, no thanks. I like you two, but I’d rather not spend any more time with Rico than I can help, and I definitely don’t want to go on a date with him.”

“Why not?” Rob asked, surprised.

“You remember last fall when he was always calling me ‘kid’?”

“Oh. — Yeah, I guess that could be pretty annoying.”

“And it’s not just that, but that’s the main thing I can articulate. He just rubs me the wrong way.”

“Too bad. I would have liked it if we could be co-girlfriends, but if you can’t get along with Rico, it wouldn’t work.”

During lunch, they pumped me for more details of my date with Larry and Bill, and I told them pretty much everything I could remember, including Amy’s speculation that Bill and Larry used hand signals to say that I wanted Larry to kiss me and not much else. Sarah and Rob looked at each other.

“We should totally do that, next time we go out with somebody new,” Sarah said.

“Let’s see, maybe this means kissing,” making a gesture like a not very tight fist, the thumb flexing out away from the index finger, “and this means touching your breasts and this means thighs,” Rob nattered.

“Do you really want to have another co-girlfriend?” I asked. “I’d think sharing a boy with one other girl would be enough.”

“It depends on if we can be friends with the girl, and things like that,” Sarah said. “Since the three of us have been together we’ve gone out with a third girl twice, but it hasn’t worked out yet.”

“And sometimes Rico wanted to ask somebody out but we nixed it,” Rob said, “and once we wanted to ask somebody but he wasn’t interested. A couple of months ago I asked him if I could ask you out once you were grown up and ready to start dating, and he said go for it.”

“Did he.”

“He likes you a lot more than you like him. Maybe you should give him another chance?”

“I’ll think about it. But I’ve got another date with Larry and Bill next Saturday.”

“Have fun,” Sarah said.


I went back to the dorm and finished my calculus homework, then studied for little a while longer and rewarded myself with watching the new episode of “Shifting Alliances.” Amy came in when it was about over, and I paused it.

“I’m just about done with this, if you want to do something together,” I said. “I’ve finished my weekend homework.”

“Alas, I have devoted the morning to fun and must now plunge into study and homework,” she said. She looked happy.

“What did you do?”

“I met a friend... a new friend, someone I’ve talked to online but hadn’t met before today. You remember I said, when we first met, that I’d come here because it was far enough from my parents they wouldn’t drop in all the time, but close enough to my change-region that I’d probably find a few other people of my species in town?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there aren’t any other Athens magnolias at NC State, but I found someone who goes to UNC, and had brunch with them. I enjoy hanging out with you and Radhika and George, but it was so nice to talk with someone of my own kind.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “Meeting other Raleigh rabbits after nine years in Hebron... I love my aunt and uncle and my friends back there, but it was like water in the desert. What’s this person’s name?”

“David. They’re just over a year older than me; they went to UNC for pretty much the same reason I came here, to get a good distance away from family they love but don’t want to see too often.”

I picked up on something a little odd about the way she’d spoken about David. “This David was a guy before the Divergence, right?”

“Yes, but they’re gender-fluid now. Most Athens magnolias our age or younger are some kind of non-binary; I’m kind of an outlier, identifying so strongly as female even though I was a little girl when the Divergence happened. Most of the magnolias with a strong gender identity were older teens or full-grown on Valentine’s Day.”

“I guess that makes sense. What’s David like?” Amy was the only Athens magnolia I’d ever met, though I’d done a little online research about them after she told me how they reproduce.

“They’re really smart — they took so many AP classes they started as as a sophomore, and they’re probably going to graduate in another year. They’re in pre-med, planning on specializing in nephrology in medical school.”

“Cool.”

I put on my headphones before I unpaused the latest episode of “Shifting Alliances.” Amy settled down to studying, and rather than distract her by watching another TV show or something, I went out for a walk.


Sunday, after chapel and breakfast, Radhika and I went shopping. It was the first chance I’d had to go shopping since Dr. Mathers confirmed I wasn’t growing any more, and I was excited to finally start wearing pants again. I tried on a bunch of pairs, both jeans and nicer dress pants, some tight and some loose, but I couldn’t afford as many as I wanted; I’d depleted my savings too much with buying new shirts, blouses, skirts, shoes, and a longer cane — not to mention textbooks and other basics. I bought four pairs of pants; if I wanted to go a week without washing clothes, or wearing the same thing twice without washing, I’d have to keep wearing skirts three days a week. Radhika thought I should buy some nicer shoes, but I didn’t think I could afford it; the cheapest ones that I thought looked okay would cost so much that I could have only bought two pairs of pants, and I wasn’t willing to forgo the pants.

I was wearing jeans when I went to the science fiction and fantasy society meeting Thursday evening. Larry and Bill got there a few minutes late; when they arrived I was talking with George. I waved to them as they came in, and they came over toward us.

“Hi, Joel,” Larry said, and Bill smiled at me. “I really enjoyed having dinner with you Friday night; I’m looking forward to Saturday.”

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it too,” I said. “You know George, don’t you?”

I sat with Larry and Bill while we watched a film, a first contact story where the aliens were obviously intelligent (looking at the tools they used) but didn’t use any kind of language that the various human neospecies in the explorer ship could recognize at first. When it was over and I got up to stretch my legs, I saw that Katie had come in a bit late, and I went over to talk to him.

“How are you doing? I haven’t seen you since last semester.”

“Mostly okay,” he said. “Madison and I broke up when he changed.”

“Oh! I hadn’t heard about that. When was it?”

“Right after the semester started; it took about a month, but we broke up as soon as she knew she was changing.”

I remembered what Dr. Wilson had said in her presentation at the symposium, and then what Madison had said at the Halloween party. “Madison was a boy once before, right?”

“Yeah, she was a girl for a few years, then a guy for the last three years of high school, and a girl again when she started college. That’s when we started dating.”

“So I guess he’ll adapt to it pretty quick this time.”

“Yeah, he still had plenty of guy clothes in his old bedroom at his parents' house, and most of them still fit. He told me a couple of days ago that he’s been on a couple of dates but he’s not seeing anyone regularly yet.”

“What about you?”

He looked at me speculatively. “Nobody yet. Are you offering?”

“Um, no... not right now. I’ve got a date Saturday with Larry and Bill — do you know them?”

“Yeah, they’re good people.”

We talked some about the film, and agreed we wanted to see more from the Portland studio that made it. The cast was pretty diverse; Oregon has more neospecies than some other areas of similar population, and I gathered from a couple of lines in the film that one of the neospecies in the film was kind of like Raleigh rabbits, at least in having a really unbalanced sex ratio. Katie said he was going to look them up and let me know if there were any movies about them.


Saturday, Amy left about four to go visit her friend David in Chapel Hill, and I spent some time showering and getting dressed for my date with Larry and Bill. I was ready in plenty of time, so I studied for a while before they showed up to escort me to the theater.

Carrot and Stick was a fast-moving, exciting movie, but there were a couple of plot holes I noticed soon afterward, when the adrenaline flood subsided and I could think straight again. When we went out to Larry’s car and started for the restaurant, I said: “So, I get why the time travelers framed him — they wanted to discredit him so they could change history, keep him from getting elected and making those laws they didn’t like. But if they could change one of themselves into a copy of him, why didn’t they just replace him permanently instead of framing him? They couldn’t go back to their own time, so why not all change into copies of important people and replace them, and change history that way?”

“That might have made more sense,” Bill said. “Maybe they didn’t have enough detailed knowledge of the past to effectively impersonate their target.”

“They knew exactly where he was going to be and when; the replacement followed the same schedule the original would have followed right up to the point where he shot the rival candidate at the debate. He fooled the guy’s family and everyone who knew him for two days, why not longer?”

“Maybe they wanted to get rid of both major candidates so a dark horse could win,” Larry said. “But it wasn’t very clear.”

“Supposedly they wanted to make a martyr of the other guy, so there’d be more popular support for his ideas,” Bill said. “But with that kind of technology they could have discredited their victim in any number of ways — having him get caught in bed with a prostitute or something — without killing the guy whose ideas they liked.”

“That’s how you know they’re the villains,” Larry said. “If they were reasonable time travelers, they could just show the guy some advanced technology and future history books and prove to him that his policies would have terrible consequences. Either he’d drop out of the race or he’d change his policies, and the crisis is averted without killing or kidnapping anybody.”

We ate at a slightly less fancy place than the first time, and when Larry opened the door of his car for me after dinner, he kissed me; this time he put his tongue in my mouth. I was flustered, trying to remember what I’d read, and after a moment’s hesitation I put my tongue in his. It felt weird, but kind of exciting. When they left me at my dorm a little while later, and I changed into my pajamas, I found my crotch was damp. Since Amy wasn’t back yet from her date (if that was the right word) with David, I took the opportunity to “relieve the pressure” according to Rob and Sarah’s advice, and fell asleep not long afterward.


I didn’t go out on a formal dinner date with Larry and Bill for a couple of weeks after that, because we had midterms to study for, but I started sitting with Larry and Bill at lunch and supper, and sometimes we’d hold hands — Larry’s left-handed, so Bill and I took turns sitting to his right so we could hold each other’s non-dominant hand while we ate. Sometimes, but not every meal, Larry would kiss me and Bill would hug me when we were done eating lunch and about to go off to different classes, and after supper some days they escorted me back to my dorm.

I still ate breakfast most days with Radhika and Amy. They teased me a little about dating Larry and Bill, and I teased Radhika back about Paul, but I wasn’t sure what to say to Amy about David. She’d told me once that Athens magnolias could fall in love, but they didn’t get obsessed with their lover’s body like people of species who were in heat all the time like Raleigh rabbits or Cary hyenas. Was she in love with David or was she just friends with them? I had a feeling it might be hard for an outsider to tell with Athens magnolias, even if I saw them together, which I didn’t until several weeks later.

I was definitely getting obsessed with Larry, including his body. When I first went over to their table and asked if they still wanted to go out with me, I remember thinking that he was good-looking and seemed nice, but after kissing him and holding hands with him several times, I was about ready to see and feel more of that wonderful body. But Dr. Mathers said I needed to be on the birth control medicine for several weeks longer before it would be fully effective. On Friday after my last midterm, I was walking back to my dorm with Bill — Larry had something else to do, he said. Bill said: “Do you want to go out and do something nice now that exams are over?”

“Sure — dinner, a movie, things like that?”

“I’m not particularly interested in what’s showing at the Witherspoon Cinema right now; there are a couple of semi-interesting things showing at the Regal Cinema in Garner, though. What about look up their schedule and let us know which of those movies you’d like to see?”

“Okay... I can do that as soon as I get back to the dorm.”

“Another thing. How far do you think you want to go this time?”

“I still can’t have sex,” I said. “But... I wouldn’t mind if Larry put his hands on me, in some more exciting places than my hands and shoulders... and I’d like to touch him more too...?”

She smiled knowingly. “I’ll let him know. Breasts and outer thighs, maybe? Or right close to your crotch, or on the outside of your panties, or...?”

“Um... let me think about it a minute?” I was slightly embarrassed, but not nearly as flustered as I’d been when we talked in the restroom at the Tupelo Honey Cafe. Maybe I was getting the hang of this dating stuff.

When we got to the dorm, I told her what I’d decided. We looked up the Regal’s showtimes on my tablet and decided on a movie, subject to Larry’s approval, and picked a restaurant near the theater that had good ratings.



If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors higher royalties than Amazon.

The Bailiff and the Mermaid Smashwords Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes Smashwords Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey Smashwords Amazon
A Notional Treason Smashwords Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories Smashwords Amazon
up
81 users have voted.
If you liked this post, you can leave a comment and/or a kudos! Click the "Thumbs Up!" button above to leave a Kudos

Comments

Being a humanoid rabbit, will

Being a humanoid rabbit, will she have a litter of babies like a real female rabbit does or just as humans do now, generally one, maybe two or three, and rarely four to six?