Quaranteam: Wishing For Second Chances

(part of the QT "Wishlist" challenge of 2025)

By Devin McTaggart

November 20 ^th, 2020

Well, fuck.

I remember thinking that when the President had scheduled to come on television and address the nation, we, the people, were finally going to find out what the fuck was going on with this country of ours and the quarantine we'd all been living under for almost a year, but whatever I expected her to say, it certainly wasn't that.

Even the most thick-headed American, I'd thought, had to have guessed things were going bad when both President Trump and Vice-President Pence had died within days of each other, and Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, had been appointed President (because everything had happened so fast, Pence hadn't even been sworn in, much less picked a new VP), but I don't think anybody who wasn't in the know would've guessed just how bad it really was.

Everyone between the ages of 11 and 17 - dead.

The worldwide male population - reduced by somewhere between 60-80%.

These were end-of-the-world numbers, dire straits to even the most optimistic of souls, none of which applied to me. I'd survived, but only because of two major factors - I'm curmudgeonly, and Iowa City was something of a ghost town while the University was basically shuttered, so I'd been able to quarantine remarkably well, even if I was going out of my goddamn mind.

But then came the interesting part of President Pelosi's message - help was on the way. The longer she talked about this Quaranteam serum they'd devised to combat this DuoHalo plague, the more convinced I'd become that I'd fallen and hit my head on the bathroom countertop and was simply bleeding out and hallucinating, other than any of this being real.

And yet, the President carried on, telling us surviving men to go to a website and fill out a form, telling them who we were, where we were, and what we wanted in terms of sexual partners, and that help would be imminent.

The website, of course, kept falling over, so I decided to call my oldest friend, Will, during the break between the President's speech and the 60 Minutes special that was going to go into more detail.

"Hey Rick, what's happening?" Will said to me over FaceTime from his house in Kansas City.

"You think any of this is real?" I asked him.

"Oh, I know it, man. Sorry I couldn't tell you. I got brought into the program about four weeks ago, but I was under strict NDA until the President's speech not to talk about it," he said with a laugh. "Me and Alice, we've got six more women living with us now, so yeah, I assure you, the whole thing's as real as it gets. I'm surprised they didn't get to your area already. Iowa City isn't that small."

"Yeah, well, you know the campus area's basically nothing since the University's been closed," I grumbled. "They had me finish teaching last semester remotely, but this fall semester, they weren't even doing admissions or letting new students on campus. Even with all this, I can't imagine we're going to have a spring semester. It probably won't be until next fall before I've got students again, and, what with this Death Zone they're talking about, who the hell knows what level of students we're even going to get? There won't be kids in high school for nearly a decade."

"I'm sure they'll figure out something to do with you, Rick," Will laughed. "You filled out the form yet?"

"I keep hitting refresh, but the website keeps failing to connect."

"Wait like four or five hours and then do it, is my suggestion. Think of it like buying Taylor Swift tickets."

"I'd rather not."

"Well, just don't sleep on it too long. Otherwise, you may not get any of your requests in."

"Requests?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said to me. "Once you get through the whole questionnaire section which, by the way, should tax that writer's brain of yours a bit, you'll get to a bit where you're allowed to 'send requests' to anyone who you think might want to be partnered up with you. They don't send rejections if they don't want to, or if they're already paired up, so it doesn't hurt to just list anyone you might want to get paired up with. Alice always had a crush on one of the local meteorologists, Jenny With The Weather, so she asked me to put in a request for her, and she's part of my Team now."

"What, you can just ask for anybody?"

"Seems like it," Will laughed. "Of course, I also put down that I wanted to get paired up with Kate Beckinsale, but I never heard back on that one."

"You and your damn vampire crush," I laughed, shaking my head.

"Obviously, you probably don't want to request married folks, but hey, the whole system's being done by automation anyway, so it doesn't hurt to just put down anyone you're interested in. Oh shit, the special's about to start. Gimme a call afterwards."

He hung up and I went back to sit on the couch again with my Huskie Julius by my side. My massive and loyal dog companion had been really the only living creature I'd had daily contact with since the shutdown.

Over the course of the next sixty minutes, I took in even more information about this serum of theirs and how much it was changing society. And I had to resist throwing a remote control at my television several times when that smug jerk Andy Rook appeared on screen.

It wasn't that I hated Rook; I just resented that his books had done well enough that people kept buying them, especially after the travesty that was "The Trouble With Werebears." As a Doctor of English and one of the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I found his books to be fine, I supposed, if somewhat bland and simplistic, at least the early ones, and "The Trouble With Werebears" might as well have been subtitled "How to kill one's literary aspirations," it was so appallingly amateurish.

A number of my students have said the most recent ones, particularly "The Dragon's Last Offer," had shown immense growth and progression in style and narrative control. And the damn guy won a Hugo for the book right after "Werebears," beating several much better and more interesting books. One of which was mine, a frontier space epic called "Tomorrow's Horizon." I'd spent the better part of ten years crafting my magnum opus, only for Rook to beat me with a book he knocked out in less than a year. He'd even been so damn nice at the awards ceremony that it had been difficult to be mad at him. He generally seemed like a decent enough human being - I just didn't care for his approach to writing.

All that said, I did my best to listen and take in all the information that was being relayed to us via the special, even if it did include that Andy Rook was now partnered up with, among other people, Emily Stevens, the teenage crush of many Millennial geek guy, and that it had happened incidentally as he'd gotten paired up with another Hollywood A-lister, Sarah Washington. Talk about being born on third base and tripping your way to home plate.

But the point was clear - if a Z-list urban fantasy writer like Rook could pull that level of erudite, intelligent, resourceful and elegant of women, then any of us survivors had a shot with just about anyone.

We were all walking through women's prisons with a fistful of pardons.

The sky wasn't the limit.

It was the starting point.

I decided I needed to keep my mind distracted for a few hours, so I reluctantly bought a Kindle copy of "Behind The Darkest Sky," the book Rook had beaten me for the Hugo with, and worked my way through it with begrudging respect until a little after midnight, when I finished it. I still don't know if it's the best of the Hugo nominees that year, but I will reluctantly admit it was probably better than mine. At that point the Oracle website had managed to die down enough for me to use it without issue.

As promised, once I'd confirmed my identity, location and current status, I began taking the most complicated and exhaustive personality quiz I'd ever seen, with a focus on sexual fetishes and preferences, but also including a level of interpersonal conflict resolution analysis I hadn't expected.

Early reports had painted Oracle as a sort of 'sexual matchmaker,' but to a trained eye, I could spot the way that information was being gathered on several levels, not even all of which were evident to the user. For example, one of the things I suspected most people didn't realize was that the test was timed. I don't mean that in the sense that you had a limited amount of time to answer any given question. I mean that in the sense that the amount of time you take on any given question was information they were using as part of the algorithm. I couldn't tell what the system was doing with that information, but it was being recorded and accounted for. Once I knew that, I didn't want to seem indecisive on anything, so I made sure to answer promptly and not to linger on any question, unless it was something I didn't know the answer to, although thankfully the entire section on specialized fetishes was clearly annotated now, so that for the 98% of the population who didn't know that coulrophilia was a lust for clowns, it was spelled out as such in the notes.

(I suspected an earlier version of this program simply had all the philias simply running one after another with no annotations or explanations of what they were, and somewhere along the line, someone had said, 'let's make it easier for the end user and just put what these things are' which had sped up the process immensely. End user design was always the last thing the government people seemed to think of.)

After what felt like ten hours (but actually turned out to have been two, according to my computer's clock), I got to the end of the questionnaire, and to the point where I was allowed to put "individual requests" and I noticed the field simply said "Provide as much information about each request as possible," something I guessed was there to prevent everyone and their mother from requesting Scarlet Johansson or something. I didn't know for certain, but I suspected the more information you could provide about a given person, the higher priority your request was put into the queue.

There was a certain temptation to just put down every Hollywood star I'd ever had a crush on. Or every musician. Or even every porn star. But in the end, I decided to do the thing that made the most sense - I built a list of every woman I'd ever had a crush on in high school or college and started there. If I covered all the crushes I'd had, barring the last ten years, because I'd learned that my taste in women recently had been 'what's bad for me,' holistically speaking, and I needed to do better.

It seemed like a fool's errand at best. I was in my mid-forties - hell, our thirtieth high school reunion was coming up in a couple of years - in many cases, the last known information I had for most of these people was decades out of date. But fuck it. My relationship, five years ago, had ended in the kind of flameout that no one truly wanted to ever see repeated. In fact, all of my relationships had a sort of tumultuous, hazard, disaster area feeling about them, so I found myself rather intrigued as to what kind of partners this Oracle would even be able to find for me, if it even could. And maybe one or two of the girls I'd crushed on but never asked out in high school or college might've felt the same way.

The worst that could happen would be that none of my requests would be filled, and I would never know the reasons why, if they had turned me down, already been married or partnered, or even dead. And I could live with that. Not knowing seemed like the best option.

I was more frightened that this Oracle would turn back a big, fat goose egg, and I would be the person that the computer just started throwing random people at in an effort to try and keep alive, even against my own desires.

I remember as I headed up to bed after finishing the test, thinking to myself, "Let's see you figure me out, you daft computer program, for I am unknowable, cryptic, and ineffable."

It turned out I was most certainly f'ed.

November 21 ^st, 2020

The next day seemed like any other until the afternoon, when there came a knock at my door, and I looked outside to see a couple of women in military fatigues standing there. "Doctor Rick Wakefield? This is a wellness check. We've come by to confirm your physical condition and standing. Can we talk to you for just a minute?"

I remember thinking that it might be a bad idea to answer the door in my robe and bunny slippers, but I just couldn't help myself and did so anyway. "That's me," I said through the door. "Is it safe for me to open the door?"

"We're both completely vaccinated, Doctor," the woman in charge said. "We don't have DuoHalo, and we're basically just coming by to make sure you don't either. Once we confirm that, we can make sure you're getting prepped for partner delivery."

I figured I didn't have anything to lose, so I opened the door and ushered them in. "You want to come in?"

"Thank you, Doctor," she said. "I'm Captain Bradshaw, this is Senior Airman Kelly."

"Stick this in your mouth and rub it on the inside of your cheek for me if you would, Doctor," Kelly said to me, holding out a long swab on the end of a stick.

I took the thing and rubbed it against my gums for several seconds before I held it out to the Airman, who shoved the end in a box about the size of an old pack of cigarettes, and then gave it a good shake. Thirty seconds later, the box gave a playful chirp, and spit out a long piece of paper like a fortune cookie's contents written in binary.

"He's clear," Kelly said to Bradshaw before taking the sample out of the little box and shoving it into a biohazard box inside of her satchel, which she tucked the little box into afterwards. She then took a pamphlet from the satchel and handed it to me. "I'm going to poke around, make sure the building's up to snuff, if you don't mind?"

"Have at it," I told her with a laugh. "But don't blame me for what you find if you go digging through drawers or my dirty laundry."

"Heard."

"Good news, Dr. Wakefield," Bradshaw said to me. "You don't have DuoHalo, meaning as soon as your first partner arrives in a couple of hours, you will officially be a DuoHalo survivor."

"You found somebody for me already?"

"We've got a Reservist who's come up as an 82% match, and they're going to see if she's interested in you as well, but we've gotten positive pingbacks from some of your requests, so we're in the process of cross-matching their Oracle results when combined with yours, as well as getting them relocated."

"You're kidding," I remember hearing myself say out loud. "I mean, I know we were meant to request anyone we thought we would be good matches for, but it's been quite a long time since I've seen most of those people. I don't even know if they would be good matches for me now, since I doubt I'm the same person I was back then."

"Well, Dr. Wakefield, that's one of the many reasons Oracle exists," Bradshaw told me with the eyes of a believer looking into those of a skeptic. "I know that you're probably skeptical about how something like this could exist, but believe me when I tell you, the success rate for Oracle pairings, while definitely still early days, is borderline unbelievable. There were some hiccups along the way, but the system has been learning and adapting, and improving with each iteration. The biggest development started in September, when it started working using what we're calling Team DNA these days."

"What does that mean?"

"So, originally Oracle was designed as a one-to-one person-to-person matching, but as we started having to build larger scale Teams, we realized that we needed to start matching one-to-several, as a Team was sort of its own person, in a way, with specific wants, needs, etc. Just because someone would match with you doesn't mean they would also have as high of a match when all your existing partners were taken into account."

"Well, I don't have any partners--"

"Yet, Dr. Wakefield. Yet."

"Fine, I don't have any partners yet, so that shouldn't be a consideration for me."

"Normally I'd say yes, Doctor, but it turns out quite a few of your requests have, conditionally, agreed to be paired with you, Oracle results permitting, so we're essentially having to do some group analysis," Bradshaw said to me. "So while we're in the process of prepping people for relocation, we're also doing potential Team composition analysis, to make sure we don't accidentally build a terrorist cell or, worse, a soap opera. How big is this house of yours?"

"Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, with a small one-bed, one-bath guest house that doubles as my writing retreat out in the back," I told her. "So that 'at least four wives' thing that the President said last night is--"

"One hundred percent true? Yes sir. My guess is that the average man will end up with somewhere between six to ten partners before the whole thing runs its course," Bradshaw said. "And, speaking from personal experience, it's worked out exceptionally well."

"How big is your Team, Captain?"

"I got in relatively early, so I'm number three of twelve partnered to my man, with Kelly as his eighth."

"Must be in the military then?"

Bradshaw almost snorted as she laughed at that. "Automations Engineering Manager and Designer," she said. "Thad's our little all-powerful nerdling, and he's been part of the group working on streamlining our Rapid Response Team Process. That little box we had to run your test through? When they started this in June, it was the size of a cat carrier, and it took nearly ten minutes to run a test. Now we can tell you within thirty seconds, and the thing fits in our pockets. That's one of like half a dozen improvements in the process Thad's helped with. And, most importantly, he wasn't really attached to any singular location, so we're sort of an on-the-move Team for the time being. I'm sure at some point within the next year, they'll settle us down somewhere and give us a monstrous house where we can all get pregnant and work on repopulating the species, but until then, we're constantly on the move."

"So pardon me for asking this, but what the hell are you doing in Iowa City?"

"We're in from Chicago, and it turns out there was a pretty large cluster of male survivors here in Iowa City, centered mostly on the university campus. I assume you're a professor there?"

"Doctor of English," I told her. "I teach Creative Writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and I'm with the Writer's Workshop."

"That some kind of important thing?" I was about to answer her when she raised her hand as Kelly reentered them. "We good, K?"

"Five by," she said to her partner. "Bedrooms are big enough that the building's rated for livable up to 13, assuming you're looking at delayed procreation. Also wouldn't be that hard to build on an addition, or just to connect the vacant place next door."

"Which vacant place next door?" I said. "Dwayne Masters is on my right, and the Wilsons live on my left."

"Dwayne Masters died two months ago, Doctor," Bradshaw sighed at me. "You've probably just been seeing all his automation flickering lights on and off and thought he was still around. We've been getting a lot of that."

That was a sudden, sharp punch to the kidneys. I'd liked Dwayne. He was a good guy, albeit rough around the edges and a bit simple-minded when it came to more complicated political issues, but I certainly liked him well enough, and wondered how I'd missed his passing. "How did I not know that?"

"Well, probably because the ambulance came and took him out under the cover of darkness in the middle of the night without lights or sirens," she said as her partner moved back towards my front door. "A lot of the fatal hospital intake happened that way, not just here, but all across the country."

"So why didn't anyone help him?"

"We can only produce the vaccine so fast, Dr. Wakefield, and we're already moving well beyond what we would've even considered possible a year ago," Bradshaw grumbled. "The nearest doses were in Chicago at that point, and Iowa City didn't have a complete outbreak at the time - just a few dozen isolated cases that the hospital knew how to safely intake and keep from spreading. Now, well, there's a lot more people with DuoHalo showing up here over the last month, so they sent us, especially since there's such a plentiful number of healthy male specimens here. I'd say Iowa City's probably only lost about 35% of its male population, which puts you folk in a pretty lucky stripe. There's a sudden sharp influx in the area right now, which is why we're testing everyone we can and getting people partnered up fast. Anyway, Mister Masters didn't have any next of kin, so if it turns out things are getting too big for you, we can see about eminent domaining his property and annexing it for you."

"If I'm going to end up with too many partners for this place, then maybe I'd better say yes now," I told her. "I'd hate to not have enough places for people and for some of my partners to feel lesser than others. How many do you think I'm personally going to end up with?"

"That's well above my pay grade, Doctor," Bradshaw said to me. "All I know is what they tell the folks like us. We sort'em, ship'em, and settle'em, but we don't handle long-term planning. Anyway, you should be good to go. We'll be back tomorrow with at least one partner, maybe two or three, although we're trying not to bring any more than that at a time, just in case you happen to luck out and get a regeneration and you wouldn't be able to imprint anyone else for a day or two. Women can get a bit squirrely if they get the injection and can't get imprinted on someone. So typically, no more than two or three at a time, if we can help it. And if the Reservist is interested, I'm gonna recommend she take you up on the option. I feel like it's a good idea for every Team to have a trained combatant protector in their ranks. Regardless, I need you to not open this front door again until tomorrow when me or someone in an Air Force uniform is outside of this door with a woman or women for you to be paired with. You follow me, Doctor?"

"Heard and acknowledged, Captain," I said to her. "I spent nine months in virtual solitude. One more day's not gonna kill me."

"Take comfort in knowing that solitude probably saved your life, Doctor. We'll see you back here tomorrow."

With that, Captain Bradshaw and Senior Airman Kelly took their leave of me, and I closed and locked up my front door, armed only with the knowledge that in a day's time, my long, dry nightmare of a streak would finally come to an end, and I'd fall asleep with someone in my bed again for the first time in years.

November 22 ^nd, 2020

While I'd fallen asleep incredibly easy, it turned out the challenge was staying asleep, and I found myself waking up every hour on the hour, basically, as my mind raced, like a child knowing that sleeping would get him closer to Christmas morning, but that sleep being unable to hold on long enough to get him there. But once I fell asleep for the sixth time at 6:30 a.m., it finally held onto me firmly enough that I didn't wake until almost noon, since it was a Sunday.

As soon as I woke up, I realized the house was still a bit of a shambles and set about making the place more presentable for when guests arrived, although I supposed they wouldn't really be guests per se so much as roommates at worst, partners at best. There was plenty to be done, so I got to it, although I also sort of made a sandwich and had lunch on the go while I did.

I started laundry, first and foremost, as I really had about half a dozen loads to do, in addition to the bedsheets, which I changed first. Then I did a quick garbage pass, which scooped up a lot more than I'd thought it might. As it turns out, living by yourself for the better part of a year will have you dropping your standards on when things need to be thrown out, and I had plenty that needed to go.

I'd gotten through enough of the cleanup work that I needed a shower, so I'd hopped into one and was just finishing drying off when I heard the doorbell ring. I grabbed the clothes I'd set out before, tossed them on, gave my hair a quick combing, and then darted downstairs to peek out my front window. Captain Bradshaw and Senior Airman Kelly were standing in front, with two women I couldn't see behind them, because of course they were. Why would I possibly get an inkling of the women I was about to be paired with without them seeing me at the exact same time? Of course, they knew who I was, and they knew exactly what they were getting when they came here.

"Captain Bradshaw," I said as I opened the door. "You actually found two people who wanted to be paired up with me?"

"You'll be surprised to learn, Dr. Wakefield, that of the ten names you put in your request list, half of them have agreed to be paired with you, including--"

"Holy shit... Terra?"

"Hey Rick," a familiar voice, albeit quite a bit older, said as she stepped out from behind Senior Airman Kelly. There stood Terra Runyon, who no less than thirty-one years ago had accidentally broken my heart, back when we were both juniors at Blue Valley High School back in Kansas City.

I'd been the scholarly little geek listening to his mix tapes while working on the yearbook; she'd been one of the bubbly cheerleaders who had the kind of academic record most people would kill for. She'd been my ride to and from school for our junior year before I started riding with Will for all of senior year. Three weeks before junior prom, around the time where people were asking people out, I'd just about screwed up the courage to ask Terra to go with me when she told one of her friends while I'd been within earshot that she was waiting for 'someone specific' to ask her to prom. I immediately knew that couldn't possibly be me, and I was right, as a few days later, I heard she was going to prom with Jeff Thompson, who would turn out to be our class valedictorian the following year, as well as Terra's boyfriend for all of senior year. I'd not kept in touch with most of the people from high school and college, so I really didn't know what had happened to her.

She looked a lot like I remembered her - a small, agile blonde barely over 5'. The years had been kind to her, and despite the fact that she was closer to fifty than forty, she still barely looked out of her thirties. Sure, there were some wrinkles around her eyes and cheeks, but for the most part, she was still staggeringly beautiful, and the smile on her face was the same brilliant girl who could do AP calculus while standing on her head but still had to rely on me to change her flat tire for her on our way home one day.

Terra was wearing a silken blouse that she filled out even better than she used to, a big overcoat over that, and some black slacks that showed she was still damn fit. She had a large suitcase with her, as well as one of the biggest purses I'd ever seen.

"Holy shit! Terra, is that really you?" I said, rubbing my eyes a little. "You and I scored high enough that we're worth pursuing?"

She stepped forward and threw her arms around me, hugging me tightly. "I'm not the same stupid little girl I was back in high school, Rick," she told me as she buried her face in the nape of my neck, and I could feel tears running down her face. "I learned a lot over my marriage to Jeff, and even more from our divorce, when I caught him cheating on me with that dumb neighbor bitch of ours a few years ago. So when the Air Force came by yesterday and asked me if I wanted to be paired up with you, I asked them to show me what our match percentage was, because I figured it was higher than 60%, I'd do it. You were always so nice to me when we were younger."

"What did we--"

"90.3%," Bradshaw said to me. "That's what she told us on the ride over. Remarkably high and well within the margin of error, so we encouraged her to go for it, and here she is. This, whom you haven't met, is Tech Sergeant Hailey Yang, who scored the 82% I was telling you about yesterday. She's quite a bit younger than you, but like I was telling you, it's good for each Team to have a protector, so when she said she was interested in you, we figured we'd bring her here, and as long as you don't object, she'll just join your Team as well."

The woman behind Bradshaw, an Asian woman who looked barely old enough to legally drink, dressed in camo, with a big duffle bag, her black hair up in a bun beneath the cap she had on, as she offered me a confident smile. "Doctor," she said to me.

"Honestly, Tech Sergeant, how about I just call you Hailey and you just call me Rick, especially if we're going to be fucking for the rest of our lives, hm?" I said to her with a soft laugh as she grinned back at me impishly.

"Deal, as long as we make one more agreement while we're at it - you go easy on the 'you're so young' jokes, and in exchange, I'll mostly lay off the 'you're so old' jokes. Fair?"

"I like her," Terra giggled. "We can keep her, Rick."

"I haven't decided if I'm keeping you yet, Terra, much less her," I teased back.

"Rick. Rick. I knew the way you looked at me in high school. I encouraged it, because I hoped you'd ask me out one day, but Jeff got there first," she said to me, her arm around my waist, her hips rubbing gently against mine. "Now Jeff's partnered up with that bimbo from our apartment building, and I'm getting a second chance to make the decision I should've gotten right the first time. You're keeping me, no matter what I have to do to convince you to let me stay. Because I'll do some pretty out there shit to make sure we keep each other happy."

"I think she means butt stuff," Hailey said with a laugh.

"She doesn't mean butt stuff, Hailey," I said to the younger woman.

"No, I don't only mean butt stuff," Terra said. "But butt stuff is definitely on the table."

"On the table's pretty messy," Hailey countered. "Maybe we could ask you to keep that to the bedroom, at least? Anyway, where can I store my shit?"

"Doctor Wakefield, I just need you to sign that you're accepting these two on these forms here, and then I'll be out of your hair, and you can get down to whatever catching up you need to do before you settle with these two wonderful women here," Bradshaw said to me, holding out an iPad encased in plastic.

"Thanks, Captain," I said as I took the tablet from her and used my fingertip to sign my name twice before handing it back to her. "How soon should I expect to see you again?"

"Back here in two days at the latest, Doctor, with the next two, although if you're awake tomorrow morning and ready for more, you let me know, and we can probably get them here then. The faster we're moving, the safer you are," she said with a friendly wave as she and Kelly walked back towards the HumVee.

That just left me my two partners - my high school crush, who I hadn't seen in nearly thirty years, and my bodyguard partner, who hadn't even been alive that long.

"Well, why don't you both come in, and I can give you the tour," I said to them with a laugh, as I moved over to grab Terra's suitcase. "There's plenty of bedrooms, a couple with guest beds even, if you'd rather--"

"We're sleeping with you," both women said simultaneously, then started giggling.

"Put the stuff in your bedroom, Rick," Terra said, "then we can sit in the living room and talk about how we wanna do all this."

"All this?"

"She means what order you're gonna fuck us in," Hailey said with a grin. "It's okay, age before beauty."

"I thought you said you weren't going to do any old jokes," Terra said with a playful scowl.

"Oh, you misunderstood," Hailey laughed as I led them upstairs to the bedroom, tossing Terra's suitcase down next to my dresser. "I'm not going to do any old jokes at his expense. You and I, on the other hand, seem like fair game, don't you think?"

"Game on," Terra said as we moved downstairs. "And I appreciate you letting me go first, regardless of the reason."

The three of us sat down on my couch, with Terra on my left and Hailey on my right, although after a second, I got up, turned around, and sat down on my coffee table. "So, let me start with--"

"You were the high school sweethearts who never were," Hailey said, smirking. "We had, like, a forty-five-minute car ride over here, dude. We talked quite a bit, and I got the basics."

"Well, we were close, but she ended up dating a guy she ended up marrying while she was in college," I said. "That's where my knowledge ends."

"Jeff and I went to post-grad education, him for law, me for medicine, and after we both graduated from our various finishing schools, we bought a nice house in the Chicago suburbs, he opened a small law practice, I went to work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital as a trauma surgeon and I thought our life was on track to be perfect," she said with a sigh. "Which meant while we were saving up to buy a great house and living in a spacious two-bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago, he was banging the rich and beautiful day trader who lived at the end of the hall in our skyrise. It was about two years before I and the woman's husband found out, but she'd made her husband sign a prenup, and I, well, I was a dumb girl in love who trusted her high school sweetheart not to dick her over if there came a reason for us to split."

"Let me guess," I said. "He did anyway."

"He did anyway," she agreed, nodding a little bit. "So, I found myself just past forty, divorced, mostly broke and too angry to even consider dating again, despite what my friends said. I threw myself into my work, which wasn't healthy, and about four years ago, I started going to therapy, and I learned to forgive myself for the mistakes I'd made with Jeff, and then I considered what my next move was going to be."

"You didn't have to give up your dreams for me, Terra," I said, taking her hands in mine, seeing her tear up a little bit.

"That's just it, Rick," she sobbed with a warm smile. "I'm tired. I don't want to be working in an ER anymore. I'm happy just to be a GP or even just a local surgeon, if that's what it takes. And my skills are strong enough that I'm pretty sure I can just walk into the Health Care center at the University you work at, and they'll give me a job. So believe me, I've thought about it. And, y'know, every now and again, over the last thirty years, I've thought about you too. How I tried to drop as many hints as I could that I wanted you to take me out for dinner and a movie, and yet you seemed to miss every single one. I was one step away from just telling Will to set you and me up, but I thought you might have been annoyed by that."

"I would've loved that," I told her, bringing her hands to my lips, kissing them. "But we're here, now. You know all that's involved in this, right? I'm sure you do, but I'm real big on making sure I've got explicit consent after, well, I had a partner who I should've known she was too drunk to make a real judgment call, but she was very insistent, and I was pretty drunk myself, and then the morning after, she said it was rape, so I'm never making that mistake again."

"Wait, there's sex involved with this?" Terra said, mocking an outraged and shocked look as she clutched at imaginary pearls, before her expression softened back to a smile. "I saw the same special you did, Rick. I probably even saw it earlier than you did, and I've been waiting longer. I want to be completely honest with you. I was originally going to be paired up to some stranger in Chicago, but just before they were going to inject me, they got word the guy died. So they kept me on the base, and I started reviewing other options. I picked a second guy, and he also died before they could inject me. I was starting to have to expand my radius - I'd originally said I wanted to stay in Chicago - when your request popped up in the system, and it was sent my way, and my heart lit up. I figured you'd have been married with three kids or something by now. I also wasn't even sure you'd be living in the country. I thought you might have moved to Spain or England or Australia, or somewhere exotic. But seeing that you, you requested me? That warmed my heart, and I started to cry and put the whole thing into motion. So yeah, I know exactly what's expected of me, because I've spent the last week basically in isolation at a military base, waiting to have someone to love me."

I couldn't help it. That was my cue.

I leaned in and pressed my lips against Terra's, and it was like I was seventeen again, a shy, gangly kid who'd just taken the headphones to his Discman off and was having a first kiss with a girl way out of his league, who was just as into it as I was. We locked lips for what felt like years, but couldn't be more than ten or fifteen seconds before breaking, as we both looked sheepishly over at Hailey, who was grinning from ear-to-fucking-ear.

"You two are adorbs," she giggled. "Don't worry, my story's real short. I grew up in Peoria, joined the National Guard to help pay for my education, graduated with a Master's Degree in Chemical Engineering, so I'll probably just head over to Procter & Gamble's offices and get a job there working for them. I had a couple of boyfriends in high school, and a couple in college, but I learned a couple years back that I, ahem, prefer older men." I realized she had her left hand on my knee, and her right hand was folding on top of mine holding Terra's. "They're smarter, less prone to dumb shit, and have gotten all that stupid youth out of their systems. So I looked through my options, came across you, and decided, yep, that's the one for me. You're a writer, although I haven't read either of your two books, but you're also a teacher, and there's something so fucking noble about that, willing to work for less because you want to help the next generation get better. I respect the shit out of that."

For the next couple of hours, we talked, just talked, alternating between me and Terra getting caught up, and us learning about Hailey, who struck me as a remarkable and capable young woman. I wanted to get to know them as well as I could, but as time passed, they were getting surprisingly more handsy, more touchy-feely, and by the three-hour mark, they almost seemed like they were going to crawl right into my lap. I'd read about the sort of "impending need" that accompanied the initial injection, and how the longer someone went between injection and imprinting, the more sexually aggressive they would become.

"We need to get upstai--"

"FUCK yes," Terra said as she and Hailey both stood up, pulling me to my feet, each of them sliding an arm around me as they practically yanked me upstairs. "I don't mind you being around while he's going at me, Hailey, as long as you don't interrupt."

"I'll wait my turn, Terra, relax."

"Good, because I've never needed to be fucked so goddamn badly in my entire life," Terra said as soon as we made it into the bedroom. She practically yanked my shirt over my head before she and Hailey pushed me back onto the bed, the two of them reaching to undo my pants. "Sorry to sort of be so forceful about this, Rick, but I think if we wait too much longer, I'm going to get even more feral about it."

"It's fine, Terra."

"Oh, good, I'm glad, because even if it wasn't," she said, pulling her shirt and sports bra up and over her head, revealing a perfectly plump pair of slightly saggy breasts that still looked majestic. "I don't really give much of a fuck at this point. You've got my cock, and I'm done with waiting. Gimme this fucking thing!"

Hailey had done a good job of getting my dick out of my pants, and her fingers curled around the base of it to give it a couple of strokes, a good dollop of precum leaking from the tip of it as Terra lowered her face down and wrapped her lips around it. As I felt her tongue engulf that bit of me, I saw her entire body give an intense shudder as she moaned more erotically than any porn I'd ever seen before.

Terra lifted one of her hands from the top of the bed, balled it into a fist, and I swear to you, she punched my fucking mattress, as if to try and help her get through the sensations that were threatening to overwhelm her. She popped her head off and was panting like she'd just run a marathon, as she looked up at Hailey with an almost demented smile on her face. "That shit about the priming orgasm being more intense than anything we'd ever given ourselves?"

"Yeah?"

"They were Not. Fucking. Around." Terra moved to stand up and shimmied out of the rest of her clothes while Hailey also started stripping, taking off the camo overcoat. "If he doesn't pass out after I'm done with him, you get yours as soon as possible, you hear me?"

"Yes ma'am," Hailey said with a little salute as she pulled off her white muscle t-shirt, exposing an expanse of tan flesh, her breasts smaller than Terra's, and capped with brown nipples instead of pink, but also an incredibly fit tummy. Hailey was sliding out of her pants and panties when I felt the bed sink a little and realized Terra was climbing on top of me.

"You know, you don't always get to be on top," I said to Terra as she giggled and grinned down at me.

"Sure. But I do this time," she said, "because I want to be on top, because I need you to be looking at me the whole time, so we both know this is real." Her legs straddled my waist, and she slowly lowered herself down onto my cock as she leaned her head back to look up at my crummy ceiling as a wonderfully sultry moan rippled from her lips. "I so made the wrong fucking call all those years ago."

Her body started undulating atop of mine, her hips whipping back and forth in a serpentine pattern as she bounced up and down on my shaft, her hands resting on my shoulders, holding me in place, all the while, Hailey watched on, one of her hands stroking along Terra's back, the other running through my hair. The younger woman leaned up and got her face close to Terra's, as if she was nervously propositioning her for a kiss, which Terra happily granted as she leaned over and locked lips with the young Tech Sergeant, a sight that only stoked my lusts even further.

I'd love to tell you that I was a stud, and that I lasted half an hour, but I hadn't gotten laid in over six years, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm proud I lasted the four or so minutes we went before I couldn't hold back any further and spent my load inside of her, which set off an orgasm of such intensity, I was almost afraid for my life. As soon as my orgasm hit, so too did hers, and she flopped forward on top of me, her body flapping like a trout out of water. Hailey slowly helped roll her gently off of me and onto the bed next to me, as the unconscious woman repeated the word "imprinting" over and over again, as I'd been told she would.

"No matter how many times I see that," Hailey said, "that shit never fails to amaze me." I glanced over at her with a curious look on my face. "Sorry, I was on protective duty for the last month, making sure we got people paired together in hospitals on urgent care, and so I've probably seen hundreds, if not thousands, of people getting imprinted over the past thirty days. It's such a wild bit of science, and I don't think it's going to get any less wild now that I'm going to get to feel on my own right fucking now."

"I hate to say this, soldier, but you may be waiting a bit," I laughed. "I'm sure you're used to young guys who can turn around and pop off a second load at the drop of a hat, but I'm a somewhat older man, and these things don't happen quite as quickly as you might like."

"No offense, Rick," Hailey giggled at me as her fingers started cleaning off my cock with some tissues, getting it ready for her turn, "but I'm going to find whatever trips your trigger and gets you hard faster than you think I am, because I'm done waiting. I'm sure you've got some fantasy rolling around in your head you'd never dared tell anyone. It's fine. I'm fine with it. Next door neighbor's hot daughter?" She glanced down and saw my cock hadn't hardened. "Nope. Stripper in the club willing to take it too far?" Another glance. "Nope. Hmmm. You're a professor. Maybe the ol' coed trying to get her grade up?" She glanced down, and as much as I tried to prevent it, I felt my cock throbbing back to life. "Aw, c'mon, babe, I promised you no judgment, and I meant it. And it's nice to know that my youth lets me compete with someone you've got such history with. I'm a total fucking romantic at heart, and the high school sweethearts getting back together again? I'm eating that shit up! But if the idea of me being a dirty little coed who's willing to do anything, and I do mean anything, to get you to pass her in your class turns you on, I'm happy to--"

At that point, I grabbed the back of her neck with both hands and kissed her hard, which she giggled into at first, but quickly turned into moans as I slowly crawled on top of her, pushing her thighs open. Sure, I'd had the coed fantasy loads of times over the years, and even had a few partners who particularly liked playing into it, but I was more turned on by the fact that this young woman was looking at me with lust in her eyes.

Me.

That's all I needed, really, and before I knew it, I had lined my shaft up with Hailey's slit and pushed myself inside of her as her pupils dilated and her mouth hung slack and open, an expression of total shock and astonishment on her lips as the priming orgasm hit her and her fingers clenched hard enough into my upper arms that I thought she might draw blood, so I held still and gave her a moment until I saw reason falling back into place behind her eyes. "You good, Hailey?"

"That would be the understatement of a lifetime," she laughed up at me as she licked her lips, her tan, toned thighs squeezing firmly on my hips as her feet moved to fold behind the small of my back, trapping me inside of her. "Even seeing that as much as I did didn't prepare me for actually fucking feeling it. Holy motherfucking shitballs on a motherfucking stick! Get to it, professor!"

With her legs pinning me as tightly as they did, I couldn't move too much, but that almost gave everything a sense of rush and frantic hurriedness, like we were a couple of teenagers afraid our parents would walk in on us, and that made the whole thing have an extra edge to it. My thrusts were short and fast, as she mostly kept me buried inside of her tight young cunt, her mouth on my ear, constantly encouraging me to pump into her faster, harder, deeper, to claim her, to fill her up.

While I'd gained a bit of endurance because I'd just popped off a bit ago, that endurance wasn't long-lived and ten or fifteen minutes later, I found myself popping off and filling Hailey's pussy up, just as I had Terra's, and just as my high school crush had done, she slumped back and started muttering "imprinting" over and over again.

But then the strangest thing happened. I felt my eyes growing incredibly heavy, so I rolled myself off of Hailey and situated myself between the two women before making a sudden, desperate lunge to pull the comforter over the three of us before my body became almost immobilized, and I leaned back, slid one arm beneath each of my two partners, and then passed out into sweet, merciful oblivion.

November 24 ^th, 2020

When I awoke to an empty bed, for the first few moments I thought perhaps it had all just been some kind of a dream, but by the time I'd gathered enough of my wits to stand up, I realized that there was no possible way it could've been a dream, because I saw the suitcase and the duffle bag, now both empty, tucked over into one corner for a room.

It was about the point I was realizing that I must've fallen asleep with my contacts in, that I saw Hailey's face peeking in from the doorway. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty finally woke up!" she hollered downstairs before running into the room and hopping on the bed with me. "How're you feeling, Rick?"

"Did... did you guys somehow take my contacts out while I was sleeping? And if you did, how can I see so well?"

"You lucked into a regeneration with your second partnering, Doc," she said with a grin, flopping down to rest her head in my lap, looking up at me. "Nothing too major, but enough to fix your eyesight and some kind of bone repair, we think. You ever break your leg real bad?"

"I've got a couple of titanium screws in my left leg from when I snapped the bone in a skiing accident. Why?"

She held up her hand to show me the two screws that I'm sure had been in my leg just a few days earlier. "Not anymore. Your leg's healed up, too. Might've done some other stuff while it was at it, but nothing we could see from the outside. Anyhow, you've been out for about two days now, so you're probably hungry like the wolf and thirsty beyond belief. We've got sandwiches waiting for you in the fridge, and if you give us like ten minutes, we'll get something cooked up for you as well. But definitely drink that whole bottle of water right there."

I saw there was a bottle of water on the nightstand, which I immediately cracked open and drank the entirety of without breaking to pause. "Thanks, Duran Duran. Jesus wept," I said. "I don't think I've ever been so thirsty, or hungry. Yeah, let's get downstairs and get some food in me before I start eating the sheets."

"Good," she said, sliding off the bed before helping me to my feet, my legs feeling stronger than I remember them being. "I need to call Captain Bradshaw and let her know she can start the gravy train rolling again. Me and Terra woke up yesterday to find you zonked out in a regeneration sleep, so we told the Captain to wait until you were awake again to start sending people, even if she had them on base."

"Don't I get to approve them?"

"You already did, babe. They're on your request list."

"How many people off my request list said yes?"

"Well, we've got three women who say they're 'the Mystery Roses Club' you went to college with, where you left a rose taped to each of their dorm rooms on one Valentine's Day morning?"

"Holy shit, Holly, Franchesca, and Gwen all said yes?"

"They did."

"I was attracted to all three, but didn't have the stomach to ask any of them out. I figured they were not interested, because nobody ever said anything about it to me."

"What might have seemed a little creepy back then might seem a lot more romantic now that they've lived a bit more life. In fact, it seems like just about everybody you had on your wish list got divorced over the last few years and was looking for a second chance on life," Hailey said, stroking a finger over my cheek. "They were just going to go with whatever Oracle suggested for them, but then you came along, and they wanted to see what you have to offer."

"They still ran us against each other in the Oracle system, right?" I asked her. "I'd love to think I was lusting after all the right girls out of the ones I'd ever met, but--"

"No need to worry, they've all been cross vetted, and nobody's showing up lower than a 72%, and most of them are in the 80s. Captain's never seen anything like it," Hailey giggled as she kissed me. "You knew what was right for you, but it seems like they just had a bit of growing to do before they were ready for you."

"So who's next on my dance card?"

"Franchesca's apparently very impatient, and threatened to come over and sit at the foot of the bed and wait for you, so maybe she should be over first," Hailey laughed as I pulled on a shirt and some sweatpants. "I don't know why you're bothering to get dressed. As soon as the Captain knows you're up, she'll have another pair over here before you know."

"Not before I eat something first," I told her as my stomach made an unhappy gurgling noise. "I've never felt this hungry in my entire life before."

As we started heading downstairs, I started laughing as we got to the kitchen, especially when I found Terra there, making me some scrambled eggs and bacon. "What's so funny, Mister?" Terra asked with a keen, glaring grin. "If this is about me playing Suzie Homemaker, I'm just doing it because we were told how hungry you might be."

"That's not it at all," I said, as I grabbed my cell phone from the kitchen table where I'd apparently left it a few days ago, and turned on the Bluetooth speaker in the living room as I queued up a single Frank Sinatra song and put it on repeat. "I was just thinking how right Frankie was..."

"How so?"

"Just listen... 'Love is lovelier the second time around...'"