Chapter Thirty-Seven
July 17 th, 2021
"It's so fire to think we're both gonna be here in just a couple of months," Hannah said to him. The busty Asian woman was wearing one of his Ned's Atomic Dustbin t-shirts that she'd basically commandeered, even though it hung down nearly to her knees, and a pair of denim shorts that virtually disappeared under the shirt. The swell of her massive chest helped keep the band's logo front and center, catching all the eyes. Andy hadn't felt comfortable asking, but he was fairly certain she'd gained a cup size since joining the family late last year.
"Sick, innit?" Asha shot back with a grin.
They were taking a walking tour of Stanford campus, the place where both Asha and Hannah would be starting classes in just a few months, some place Hannah was intimately familiar with, but Asha had only really heard talked about before now. Hannah had originally planned to start classes last year, but the lockdown and pandemic had put a serious crimp in that. But now, as the country was closing in on 100% vaccination, they were planning to open things back up again. Stanford's classes would begin in the middle of September, a little bit later than most other institutions across the US, the ones that were opening, anyway.
About one in four college campuses were simply not going to open for the time being. Consolidation had been the watchword, and as such, a number of campuses just didn't have the demand to keep them open, even with the launch of TAP.
TAP, or the Train America Program, was part of the initiative to get as many people skilled up to fill some job fields that were just massively lacking as quickly as possible. As such, anyone who wanted to could enroll in college classes set to train them towards a specific profession that the country was in high need of, and pay a highly discounted rate. To get access to the program, they needed to set and declare a profession upon enrollment and not deviate from that plan. If they did, they would need to repay the percentage that the government had footed the bill for.
Neither Asha nor Hannah was part of the TAP program. Andy had money now, and insisted on paying his fair share, and not taking away from people who needed assistance. Asha was entirely uncertain of what she was going to do but was starting to lean towards journalism. Hannah, on the other hand, was adamant that she was sticking to her pre-med plan.
The two of them were getting a dorm room together and would be staying on campus five days a week, coming back to New Eden on Friday afternoons and heading back to campus on Sunday nights, which would make sure they could always have time to get regularly topped up, while still allowing them to focus on their schoolwork without the constant crying of newborns to keep them awake.
Andy had been happy to bring both Niko and Ash (and both their son and their twin daughters) to campus for the tour, as Niko and Aisling had both been yearning to get out of the house some. Ash was pushing a double stroller and Jade was pushing little Matty, letting Niko move around more freely. Niko had fallen back into her defensive posturing almost immediately, and while she wasn't officially part of the security team Alexis headed, she thought of herself as a last line of defense for Andy's personal safety.
The two could've really picked from almost any building they wanted, but they'd chosen to be in Lantana Hall, which was just for freshman, which meant that Hannah and Asha would be around girls their own age, people who'd been above the Kill Zone and had missed what was supposed to be their standard freshman year by being locked at home and staying safe. There would also be a lot of people in their early-to-mid twenties who hadn't originally planned to go to college who were now taking advantage of TAP.
Hannah and Asha had become such good friends that they'd insisted on getting a double room, not wanting to have it split. The two were practically inseparable, and they were both eager to have the traditional college experience, or as close as they could get to in this new world. In fact, it was starting to seem like they were more 'girlfriends' than friends, and the start of their blossoming relationship seemed pretty evident to most of the house, who were happy enough to encourage it. The duo always wanted their time with Andy to be together, and they'd gotten up to plenty of sexual escapades without him around as well. He knew, however, that if Hannah was intent on eventually getting pregnant with his child, they'd have to talk to Asha about it, what with the Gemini effect, and how it might make her have a sudden flareup to join Hannah in pregnancy.
"What do you think of the campus?" Niko asked them. "It seems empty now but just imagine it in a couple of months' time, when it'll be swarming with students."
"I can't wait," Hannah said. "No offense, Andy, but I was very much looking forward to having all the classic college experiences."
"Well, now you'll get, say, 2/3rds of them," Asha said, nudging her friend and partner in crime. Asha was wearing a Stanford t-shirt, simply because she hadn't found anything out of Andy's deep collection of band t-shirts that she liked. She was, however, wearing Andy's high school class ring on a chain around her neck. She'd found it when she was going through Andy's old things, trying to learn more about Andy's history.
Andy had been forced to get used to that a lot over the last year, members of his new family wanting to dig as deep into his past as he would let them, and he found that no detail of his life went unturned. His high school, his college, his books, his travels, his jobs - no section of his past had gone without some serious scrutiny.
They'd gone through his library, watched loads of his movies with him and raided his music collection like it was going out of fashion. Each week, he'd made a playlist for each of his partners. It was a tradition he'd started with Aisling when she'd shown up. Her music tastes had been... well, spartan, at best. She'd liked a few things before meeting him, but for the most part, she didn't know what she didn't know, as Fiona liked to always tell him.
He'd started wide - trying to narrow in what she liked and what she didn't. He'd given her a wide selection to start with, and then slowly helped her narrow down what she liked and what she didn't, working through whole genres, letting her tell him what sparked joy for her. As it turned out, she'd enjoyed a lot of the same things he did, although she'd gotten a love for R&B that he couldn't really match.
Andy had used a similar pattern with all his other partners, with one major change - he'd made what he'd called his 'first, best, last guess' on ten songs that he thought would appeal to each partner, sight unseen, before they'd even really started talking music, and his success rate was uncanny, with only a few major missteps over the massive family.
(It still bugged him that Jade hadn't liked Ride, but it turned out the entire shoegaze genre had just bounced off her hard. He'd figured their more pop-y sensibilities could overcome the noisiness for her, but he couldn't get everything right.)
Most of the girls had one or two of Andy's things that they could wear whenever they wanted to. Usually it was a T-shirt, but others had gone for bits of his old jewelry or pins from the collection of them he'd sort of inadvertently gathered over the years. He considered it flattering, but it meant he'd had to rebuy a lot of his old band T-shirts, just so he still had them to wear.
"I better not get reports of you two getting hammered until you're old enough," Andy said cautiously. "I know we've been a little lax about it around the house, but until you two are twenty-one, remember that you're below the legal age for drinking, and if campus police busts you, I'm going to leave you in jail for a day or two."
"What he's saying is, 'don't get caught,' not 'don't do it,'" Aisling joked.
"That's not what I'm saying," Andy chided. "But it's also not what I'm not saying."
Asha looked at him in confusion while Hannah grinned and nodded.
"It'll be good to be around a lot of people who aren't banging the same guy we are," Hannah said. "We can make new friends, go to parties, gossip about what we like and don't about the sex we're having... it'll be fun!"
"Teenagers gossiping again," Niko said, leaning her head against Andy's shoulder with a sly smirk. "Nature is healing."
"Anything else you girls need to do while we're here?" Andy asked them. "You've seen your room, gotten your books and your schedules, gotten your student IDs, even picked up a parking permit, so you two can share a car over here."
"One of the nice ones?"
"You'll get one of the cheaper Model 3s and you'll like it."
Over the last few months, there had been some changes in the cars over at the Rook household. With the addition of the three newborns (and more on the way), the Model Y's had become terrible options for transport, and as such, they'd been replaced with Rivian R1S's, which comfortably seated seven, as opposed to the Model Y's 5.
There'd also been talks in the house about moving over to the Ioniq's as well for the rest of their fleet, just because Elon Musk, who'd managed to survive DuoHalo, had started chiming in on the Men's Protection Act in ways that Andy hadn't agreed with. Like demanding that half of all people in the Senate and House of Representatives be guaranteed to be male, even though they no longer made up even close to half of the population. (Andy's point was that hadn't been at all a concern for the man before 2020, when women didn't make up even close to half of either chamber, so why was it so suddenly important now that his representation wasn't up to snuff?)
The Men's Protection Act was dominating much of the news cycles these days, with protests ramping up all across the country, in a way Andy had to admit he found ironic. Just a few years ago, he'd seen people protesting a woman's right to choose, whether or not abortion should be legal, and the rhetoric behind men attempting to dictate what was and wasn't legal had flipped entirely. Now women were starting to argue that any man who was making a semen deposit anywhere other than his partner's vaginas might be engaged in criminal activity, as 'the survival of the species depended on them.'
Andy wasn't thrilled by anyone who wanted to tell him how and where he could love, but it started to seem like that was all people wanted to talk about in terms of politics these days.
While the Men's Protection Act had gone into effect on July 1st just a few weeks earlier, there were already a dozen challenges being brought before local courts, but there were also members of Congress trying to push things further.
The next phase was called The Sperm Reclamation Act, and it was likely going to be put forth before Congress in a bill form by September at the latest. It suggested that men who committed crimes not only be imprisoned for their own good, but they would also be forcibly restrained, and their sperm collected to fill sperm banks. Their individual health was less important than bringing up the numbers of the American Workforce, proponents of the movement said.
In addition to that, all the things that Andy had argued against that had been stripped from the Men's Protection Act before it was passed - things like mandatory doctor's appointments and restricted international travel - they were being looked at being added in with an amendment to the bill.
The far extremists were even suggesting that men who broke even the smallest part of the Men's Protection Act should be immediately confined, imprisoned even, and categorized as 'flight risks.' It wasn't even a 'three strikes' kind of thing - this was one misstep, and the rest of a man's life could be restricted to what basically constituted a private prison.
'For the good of the country' was a phrase that turned Andy's stomach as soon as he heard it.
The one he was also starting to hear a lot now was 'men can't be trusted to think big picture' and it made Andy want to start screaming at the top of his lungs. Whenever somebody started speaking for an entire group as a collective, it drove Andy nuts.
It was going to be a long time before the mess settled and some status quo was established. Until then, he was going to do everything he could to make sure nobody tried to take his rights from him or tried to paint him into a corner with no way out. He suspected it wasn't going to be an easy time, and that he'd need to have his guard up constantly.
"I think we're ready to head out, Andy," Asha said to them, as they headed back to the pair of Rivians they'd driven over to Stanford. "Are we going to be able to make it in time?"
Andy glanced at his watch and nodded. "Sure, if we take off now. It's early enough that we're well ahead of rush hour, so we can just take 101 down. But we gotta get moving now. Nothing left to do?" Despite the fact that many people were still working from home, rush hour (which typically ran about three actual hours in both the morning and the afternoon) had sprung back up again.
Some things were simply inescapable.
Nature was healing, but not always in the ways people wanted.
"Nope! We're done here! Let's go!" Hannah said, as the two girls started leading the pack of them over to the cars while Alexis shook her head.
"I remember when I was young and had that much energy," she grumbled.
"You miss it?" Niko asked.
"Sometimes, but I also know a lot more now than I did then," Lexi replied, "and I don't think I could give all that up no matter what.
"Wisdom comes at a price," Ash said, "but it's one I pay gladly."
They reached the two Rivians, and Andy got into the first with Hannah, Asha, and Lexi. The other had Melody, Jade, Aisling and Niko, plus Matty, Honor and Hope. "You know where we're headed, Lexi?"
"'Course, boss," Lexi said with a grin. "It's about time you paid Lauren a visit at work. She's been asking you to come down for months, and they're going to start games up next month, so best to see it before the crowds start coming."
"If they start coming," Asha said, as the Rivian headed out of the parking lot and started heading towards the interstate. "People are still so scared to come out of their houses, even now."
Hannah scooted in a little closer to Andy, a smile on her lips. "Hey, you mind if I scratch a fantasy off my list?"
"What's that?"
She unbuttoned his jeans, unzipping them. "Giving road head. You're not driving but it's close enough..." She didn't wait for Andy to say yes or no - Andy had learned that if he didn't immediately say no with Hannah, she took it as a yes - and she had her lips wrapped around the halfway point of his cock almost an instant later.
"Fuck," Andy groaned as he felt Hannah starting to bob her head up and down on his shaft. "You're not the first to do this in the family, you know?"
Asha giggled into his ear, running her fingertips against his chest as she whispered, "Oh no? Who was first, then? Aisling?"
Andy swallowed a breath of air and shook his head. "Fiona... back in college. We... we were driving through the middle of bumfuck nowhere... and it was late at night... I'd thought Fi had fallen asleep, but all of a sudden... she was fishing my cock out and bobbing her head on it..."
"Miss Prim and Proper Fi?" Asha giggled again. "Sucking your cock while you were driving in the dark? Fuck, that sounds hot. Was she slow and teasing about it?"
"Far from it," Andy recalled. "She was practically attacking me, like she wanted me to have to slow the car to a fucking crawl not to crash. Me and Fi, we've always been super competitive about that kind of thing, so I refused to slow down, even though it was getting harder and harder for me to focus on the road."
Hannah had matched her pace to the one he'd described Fiona having, and Asha even took turns holding her girlfriend's head down, keeping as much of his cock lodged into her throat as she could, even coughing a little before drawing up to gasp for air in a giggle.
Of all of Andy's partners, Hannah certainly represented the most youthful and energetic in her approach. She was relentless and enthusiastic, and liked making sure he saw their escapades as flights of fancy, designed to keep him young at heart. She also certainly had the most exhibitionist streak of all of his partners and was always thrilled when they were at risk of being caught.
And though Andy would never admit it to another living soul, she was definitely one of the best of his partners at giving head.
They were getting close to getting off 101 when Hannah got him off, her and Asha holding him firmly in place as Hannah slurped down his release, the transfer setting off a hard orgasm of her own. She kept just enough of his semen in her mouth that when she pulled her head up and kissed Asha, the darker-skinned girl got a release of her own, her body slumping against Andy's for a second.
"Okay you three," Lexi said over her shoulder. "Make yourselves presentable. We should be there in just a couple of minutes."
"Girl's got to get her protein shake in," Hannah giggled as she tucked Andy's cock away, zipping his pants back up and rebuckling his belt.
The cars turned into the parking lot right behind Levi's Stadium, one that was only used to drop off high rollers on game days, but on days like today was the easiest place for the players and staff to park their cars. Andy, of course, had a couple of guest parking passes to use whenever he wanted. He'd been meaning to come by and check on Lauren for a while, but his life had just gotten so busy, any time he'd thought about it, he'd already basically booked himself wall-to-wall for the day. And he had a second reason to wait, one which Taylor had dismissed for him at breakfast that morning.
Lexi hopped out of the car first and then moved to let Andy, Asha and Hannah out of the back, as he walked over to help Jade, Niko and Aisling set up the strollers. Matty had been far less finnicky than Andy had expected of a newborn, but the twins, Honor and Hope, had more than made up for that. It wasn't that the two girls were more troublesome than any other newborns, more that Matty had just been uncomplicated in comparison. Andy and Niko's baby boy smiled and laughed a lot.
"I swear, these two are going to be the death of me," Aisling said, putting Honor into the stroller compartment next to Hope's. "My tits hurt from them feeding. Ma said that'd pass eventually, but it's still more sore than I would've expected."
"Probably because there's the two of them," Andy said. "Your mother never had twins."
"The Gleesons did, 'round the corner, and I don't remember Ma Gleeson complaining about it when I was growing up."
"You think she would've complained in front of you?"
Aisling narrowed her eyes at him then kissed him on the cheek. "You can be infuriating when you're being logical, you know that?"
"I'm just trying to be helpful," Andy said.
They moved to push the strollers up the ramp leading into the back entrance of Levi's Stadium, and a couple of security guards stopped to check their IDs before waving them on, letting them head into the main space down at field level.
Nearly two dozen women were running around the field, with another dozen or so timing them, tossing balls, catching balls or testing dodge skills. It certainly wasn't going to be what anyone would call 'traditional North American football,' but it was the wave of the future.
Flag football.
With the passage of the Men's Protection Act, traditional football was one of the things immediately banned for being 'too hazardous.' The number of available male athletes was already low enough, but the number of injuries that traditional football inflicted upon its players made it a complete and total no-go.
But the NFL was a business, and they weren't going to disband an entire hundred-plus-billion-dollar industry just because men weren't allowed to play anymore. The infrastructure was too entrenched, the investments were too irrevocable and, as the President had joked to Andy behind closed doors, the country needed its bread and circuses.
The people were in desperate need of entertainment.
That said, the violent sports days were in the past. So now all hard contact sports - football, rugby and hockey especially - were all being reevaluated, but the hard contact element was definitely out. It was non-negotiable, even if it was women playing and not men, and men in any form of peril were a hard no. Nobody was sure when or even if NASCAR was coming back, but if it did, it was clear, men drivers weren't going to happen again any time soon.
FIFA was already starting to gear up for relaunching their large spectacles but purely focusing on women's soccer. Even though soccer wasn't a high-contact, high-risk sport, too many men had died to field those teams, and so women's soccer was going to have to take its place, for better or worse. It sounded like the first new games would be in November or December. But the NFL would be a few months ahead of that.
The NFL had made a number of pivots to help them stabilize in the new world.
The first was female players exclusively. Men were allowed to coach, and about a third of the teams had a male coach. The referees split fifty-fifty along the genders. The camera team and the reporters were all women. The hope was the audience would still be everybody.
The second major pivot was to shift to flag football instead of full contact football. That was the bigger concern people were having, because it meant changes to rules, changes to play but the hope was that with all the changes happening at once, people would be in the same boat and be picking up from the same starting point as everybody else.
Along with that came team sizes - there was already a standardization for NFL Flag Football rules, and that was 5 on 5. They'd tried that at first, and decided it wasn't visually interesting enough, and that they needed to scale up. With limited (but not no) contact on the field, the NFL had decided to bump it up to 9 on 9, still a few people less than the 11 per side on the field in traditional football.
The last thing was that, for the time being, admission to games would be free. For the first few months, anyway. The owners wanted full stands. They wanted smiling faces. They wanted things to look like they were back to normal. They wanted, no, needed the audience to come back. The appearance of normality, that was something they desperately craved.
That, and they were still gonna charge for concessions.
It was still a business, after all.
"Hey Brickhouse!" one of the girls shouted over towards a nearby group. "Your man's here!"
A giant blonde ponytail poked up and out of the group and then started charging straight over towards Andy like a freight train, giggling loudly. "'Bout time you came to see me, Andy boy!" Lauren said, moving to wrap her arms around his body. His second partner was still half a foot taller than he was, and while they saw each other every day, she'd told Andy there wasn't much point in coming to see her at the stadium, at least until game day. But eventually, he'd realized she just wanted the time to get comfortable at playing instead of training. And so he'd talked to Taylor, told her to tell him when she thought Lauren looked like she was getting complacent at how good she was becoming. Which was why he was there.
"Why are they calling you 'Brickhouse,' Lauren?" Andy laughed.
"They're making us all pick music to have played under us, and I picked that Commodores song you love, 'Brick House.' Especially since you told me a woman wrote the lyrics to that chorus," Lauren said with a smile. "I'm mighty, mighty."
"You're certainly the biggest defensive back on the team," he said.
"I've got some of the longest reach," she agreed, taking Andy's hand and placing it squarely on her ass through the work out 49ers uniform she had on. Lauren had arrived at almost the same time as Aisling but hadn't had as immediate a connection with him. They were partners, sure, but Lauren had passed on getting married to him. "They think I should consider something more prominent, but I'm not ready for that, no matter how good my throwing arm is. I don't know enough about what you Yanks do in terms of football to be quarterback, but I'll still make sure I'm doing you proud, never you worry."
"You think you're all going to be ready? You've only got a month and change before your first game, y'know."
"You're going to be here for it, right?" Taylor asked him as she walked up to join the conversation. Unlike Lauren, Taylor had remained in support staff, and in addition to still doing player physio, she was the offensive coach's assistant. The platinum blonde had insisted she was simply too uncoordinated to be playing anything professionally, a statement Lauren agreed with.
"Of course we'll be here," Andy said. "The whole damn family, although we'll definitely need to keep the kids inside of the box, so they don't get their ears hurt from the noise levels."
"And you two will have to be watching out for them yourselves," Jade reminded Ash and Niko, "because I'm still very much on the roster for the Gold Rush, and I intend to enjoy my final year with them, before I turn into the full-time nanny for the house."
"Nobody on earth could stop you, Jade," Andy laughed.
The group of them stood around chatting for a little bit longer, and a few minutes later, a woman approached them, carrying a clipboard under one arm. Andy assumed it was someone coming to scold them, to ensure they didn't keep Lauren from practice too long.
That wasn't at all what happened next.
"Jade Dillon?" the woman said, closing the distance between them.
"That's me," Jade responded, just starting to turn and look at the woman.
Half a second later, a big brown envelope flew out of the woman's hands and bounced off of Jade's chest with a flutter, although Jade still caught it. "You've been served." The woman immediately turned and started walking away as quickly as possible, and while Andy's first question was who the woman was, Jade had already oriented the envelope and had opened it.
"What the hell was that all about?" Andy asked her.
"It's a legal summons," she said, scanning the first page very quickly. "My dad died, and my brother's taking me to court over the will." The normally unflappable blonde's cheery expression faded into a frustrated scowl. "What the fuck?!"