Buck Fever

by Lubrican

Chapters : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | Epilogue

Chapter Nine

When they arrived next door, they found out why Lucy had been so insistent that they come over.  Mallory and Randy had refused to tell her anything about the trip, saying that it would take all four of them to tell the whole story.  They were very excited.  All Lucy knew at that point was that they'd gotten two deer.  Part of the venison was in her freezer already.

It was already after supper, so they gathered in the family room, and spread out to find a seat.  Bob and Lucy sat in recliners.  Sam and Randy sat on the couch.  Mallory settled into a bean bag chair, leaning back with her legs stretched out and spread apart.  Bob was sure she didn't intend to present a delectable ... fuckable ... picture, but she did.  He saw Lucy frown at her, but no admonition about sitting like a lady was forthcoming.

Things might have been entirely different had anyone known that, while Mallory was lying there in her negligent pose, her fertilized egg was in the process of implanting itself in her uterine wall.  By the next morning, she would meet the clinical, medical definition of being pregnant.  

That fact would have gone unnoticed a lot longer, except for the way things turned out that night. 

Basically, Mallory got a little too excited, and her brain mixed up some fairly critical words.

It was about half way through the story.  They hadn't gotten to the actual kill yet, and had described how Bob taught them to shoot.  Maybe it was holding back a large part of that section of the tale that discombobulated Mallory's brain.  Finally, she got to the part where she was about to announce that she was the one who shot the first deer.

"We got in the stands, and we were just sitting there, waiting.  Uncle Bob had said that would happen, but that we had to pay attention.  So I did, and suddenly there was this beautiful deer with antlers, just standing there, so I raised my gun and I shot it!"

"You shot it?"  Lucy's eyes were round, and her mouth hung open.

Mallory was, for all intents and purposes, hopped up on drugs.  They were natural ones, which her own body manufactured, but she was a little high.  On top of that, she was like many other females in western culture who were a little tired of male domination in most things.  So she wanted to play up the fact that both she and Sam had been the successful hunters, and not the men.  To do that, she bent the definition of "buck fever" to suit her needs.  She meant to use the term to identify the men as unsuccessful hunters.

All this happened in the blink of an eye, inside Mal's brain.  It was really that natural high that did her in.  She was just a little too excited to think straight.

"I sure did!  And the next morning Sam shot a doe!  It was all us girls, Mom!  Uncle Bob said we'd probably get fuck fever, but we didn't!  It was the men who got it!  They didn't shoot a single deer!"

She waited for a reaction to that.  She got one, but it wasn't anything like she expected.

Everybody else in the room just stared at her with wide eyes.  Her mother didn't gasp with impressed surprise, but a small gasp came from Samantha's mouth.

"What?" asked Lucy, leaning forward.  "What did you say?"

"Which part?" asked Mallory.  "I just said a whole lot."

"You sure did."

"Mom, I was just telling you that Sam and I did it!"

"That's not what I'm talking about.  Tell me again about this fever."

Sam leaned forward and Randy took a deep breath, but Mallory, in her eagerness to find the response she had been looking for, again spoke rapidly, before either of them could say anything.

"Uncle Bob explained that sometimes new hunters get a deer in their sights but they can't pull the trigger.  It's called buck fever.  She pronounced the words slowly and carefully, over enunciating them, as it to a child.  Then her subconscious screwed her again.  Pun intended.  "But Sam and I didn't get fuck fever.  We were able to shoot when we were supposed to!"  She ended with another smile.

There was a sudden curse as Sam was unable to contain a soft, "Ohhhh shit."  At the same time, Bob groaned, his voice making a peculiar sliding scale sort of sound as his brain tried to think of a dozen things this all meant at once.  Only Randy remained silent.  But his jaw dropped and his face assumed a hue close to that of a piece of typing paper.

Mal looked around, primarily at the people who had made the noise.  She frowned at Samantha for using that word out loud in front of the adults.  That would not be received well.  Then she glanced at her brother, who looked like he'd seen a ghost.  That didn't make sense so she looked at the adults, to see if there was any visual information available that might help her understand why things felt so tense, all of a sudden.  Bob's eyes were closed, and he looked ... worried?

Then she looked at her mother, to see what her reaction to all this was.  She found Lucy staring intently at her.

"What kind of fever did you say Bob warned you about?"

Mallory blinked.

"I just told you!" said Mallory, beginning to get angry. "Buck fever!" she said, forcefully.

"That is not what you said, young lady!"

"Of course it is!" grated Mallory, who had completely missed her egregious verbal slips.

Bob couldn't think of anything to say to help the girl.  And if he tried, and said the wrong thing, or Lucy sensed he was BS-ing, things would only get worse.

Sam apparently didn't feel it was dangerous to try to help, though.

"It was just a slip of the tongue," she said.

"What slip of the tongue?" complained Mal, who still didn't realize what she'd actually verbalized. 

Her mother's face caused Mallory's eyes to stop.  She'd never seen that look on her mother's face.  It was clear her mom was mad, but she still couldn't fathom why.

"What?!" she yipped, as tension burst out of her body.

Then Randy tried to help, in that fumbling, blundering way that teenage boys often think can somehow make things better.  He leaned toward his sister and, sotto voce, said, "You said fuck fever."

Mallory went rigid and her mind froze for an instant as well.  The first thing she thought of was that Randy had just said the word "fuck" in a voice that, while soft, could clearly be heard by their mother.  That was shoved to the back burner as she contemplated the accusation that she had also said it.

"No I didn't," she defended, immediately.

Sam thought repetition was the key.

"It was just a slip of the tongue," she said again.

Lucy sat up straighter.

"Once, I might accept as a slip of the tongue, but twice?  You do not say that word twice by accident."

Bob knew he should do something, even if he didn't want to.  Leaving it to the teens obviously wasn't going to work.  Plus, an idea popped into his head.  That idea, even if developed in a split second, was at least rationally based.

"I bet I know what happened," he said. "You know how you say a tongue twister and it gets all messed up?  It was just alliteration.  She knew she was going to say fever, and her unconscious mind put an F on the front of the other word too, to match the first letter.  You know.  Sally sells sea shells?"

Through it all, Lucy's unconscious mind had been assessing the behavior, the body language, if you will, of the others in the room.  Now that unconscious part of her mind decided its conclusions were important enough to kick up to a conscious level.  Lucy looked around, and the fact that all three of them looked guilty, rather than only her potty-mouthed daughter, impacted her much harder than that simple filthy word that had spilled from said daughter's mouth ... twice.

"What's going on here?" she asked, her voice conveying curiosity now, rather than anger.

"Nothing!" said Sam and Randy at the same time.  It was such a typical young person response that it might have been humorous in other circumstances.  The problem was that "Nothing!” delivered in that voice meant the exact opposite, and every parent learned that within the three or four years of parenthood.

Oddly, the person in the room who was most calm at that moment was Mallory.  Everybody was all upset and that went counter to the purpose of this gathering, which had been to celebrate the admittedly unexpected triumph of the girls.  She still didn't believe she'd uttered the phrase that seemed to be responsible for all this uproar but she tried the time honored tactic of complete and utter submission, accompanied by as sincere apology as she could produce.

"I'm really sorry, Mom.  It was a mistake. I don't know how that happened."

Lucy responded with the time honored parental stance.

"You said that vile utterance twice, and twice is no mistake!"  Lucy said, and then looked around.  "Does somebody want to explain to me why my daughter developed a filthy mouth on a simple hunting trip?"

Had anybody had any sort of answer for her, Lucy might have bought it.

But all anyone did was stare at her with guilty looks.

She looked over at Bob, who was sitting very still.  "Bob?  What the hell is going on here?"

Bob had no plan of any kind.

Lucy's eyes narrowed.  He'd been right when he told the teens she could read him like a book.  She did that now.

"Bob?"  Her voice sounded puzzled.  "Why do you look so nervous?  And why are you sweating?"

"I don't feel good," he said, his voice still weak.  "I think I'd better go."

"I think you'd better stay," said Lucy, her voice now stern.  "What the fuck happened on this camping trip?"

All three teens gasped as one.  It was the first time any of them had heard a word harsher than "Darn!" issue from Lucy's lips.  She wasn't a prude, or Puritanical in her outlook on life, but she had always preached that the use of curse words suggested a lack of education and intelligence in the speaker.  It's possible that this expletive, coming from her mouth, was more unnerving than trying to deal with the same word popping out of Mal's.  It never occurred to any of them that her use of the same word that had gotten things all out of whack might have been intentional ... designed to produce data she could then read with her eyes.

Nobody said anything now, and the silence dragged on until it was broken by Lucy, whose eyes had indeed been rewarded with signs of guilt.  The problem was that all four of them looked guilty, not just Mallory.

"Well?"

The body language of all four of them caused the flickering flame of suspicion to burst into a roaring inferno.  That part was just a reaction to what she was seeing, her own body responding unconsciously to the unspoken messages being received from the others.  The problem was that her conscious mind couldn't imagine any reason for all this guilt that was clearly displayed on the faces of the others.  Her frustration about that demanded to be alleviated.

She stood, suddenly, facing Bob.

"Bob, I think you and I need to have a little talk ... in private."

Bob stared up at her and he was almost overcome with the lunacy of the fact that his eyes were drawn to her breasts, which pushed her blouse away from her chest in a way that he couldn't help comparing to her daughter's breasts doing the same thing.

"Bob!" barked Lucy, her voice now loud.  All four of the others jumped.

"Okay," he said, levering himself up on weak knees to a standing position that looked slumped ... defeated.  Once up, though, he didn't move.

"Bob!" screamed Lucy.

"Okay!" he yelped in return.

He started moving and Lucy reached to grip his elbow in her hand.

"Daddy?"  Sam's voice held both fear and warning.

"You three stay right here," ordered Lucy, looking over her shoulder.  "Do not move from this spot!"

Then she dragged Bob toward her bedroom, perhaps because she thought of that as the most private place she could interrogate her brother-in-law about this peculiar state of affairs.

"What the fuck do we do now?" whispered Randy.

"Please do not use that word," groaned Sam.

"What word?"

"The same word that got us into this mess," hissed Sam.  "The word your sister blurted out!"  She glared at Mallory.

"Did I really say that?" asked Mal, a look of horror on her face. Her head tilted, as if she was puzzled. "I actually said ... fuck fever?"

"Oh, it wasn't so bad," said Sam, sarcastically.  "You only said it twice!"

"I don't understand," moaned Mallory.  "How could that happen?"

"Because you're a slut!" barked Sam, her comment fueled by anger now, rather than teasing conviviality.  Her voice sounded harsh, ugly.

A flicker of sudden movement in the peripheral vision of the teenagers caused them all to look toward the hallway Lucy and Bob had disappeared into.  To their consternation, Lucy stood there, her face white and tight.

"And why is she such a slut, Samantha?" she growled.

Sam panicked.

"I thought you were talking to Daddy," she gasped.

"You haven't answered my question," said Lucy.

"It's just something I call her sometimes," squeaked Sam.

"And why do you sometimes just call my daughter a slut?" Lucy stepped further into the room.  Bob followed, looking a little panicked himself.  She unconsciously put a hand behind her and pushed him back toward the hallway. 

"It's just a word," whimpered Sam.

"A word like fuck?"  All three teens winced.  "That's what sluts do, isn't it?  Fuck?"  Thunder came over Lucy's face.  "Is that what you're saying?  Are you saying my daughter has sex?  That she's literally a fucking slut?"

"No!" squealed Sam.  "That's not what I meant."  Sheer terror ripped what she said next from her throat. "We didn't mean for it to happen!  We didn't plan it!"

Her hands came up to cover her face as she realized the import of what she'd just said.  She fell sideways on the couch.  Her pony tail flopped onto Randy's thigh.

Lucy turned around to face Bob again.

All she did was shove him with both hands towards her bedroom.

A lot happened in Bob's mind on the twenty foot journey to Lucy's room.  He had heard the same thing Lucy had, when she stopped and eavesdropped on what the kids would say once they thought the adults were out of hearing.  He understood completely how Lucy could have intuited the truth from the events that had taken only two or three minutes, but seemed to have lasted for hours.  Basically, he knew the jig was up.  And so, based on the fact that he had no shred of an explanation as to how this could have happened under circumstances she might accept as chance, error, mistake or even serendipity, his brain was prepared only to divulge the truth.

The problem was that he had no idea just how to phrase the truth.

He was willing to take the blame, because he felt he was the one who had stepped over the line.  And that willingness caused him to stop thinking about creative ways in which to explain the situation.

Once in Lucy's bedroom, he looked at everything in it except his sister-in-law. 

"Sit!" she barked.

His mind tilted as some part of it tried to understand why sitting was necessary.  While his mind distracted him from the real issue, he sat.  She came to stand in front of him.  He couldn't look her in the face, and was horrified to find his eyes pinned on her breasts again.  He jerked them to one side.

"Did you have sex with my daughter?" Her voice was low, breathy, but void of any discernible emotion.

"It really was sort of an accident," he said, admitting the truth of her suspicion.

She turned and paced.  For whatever reason, she put her hands in the embroidered back pockets of her jeans.  That made her breasts thrust out, and Bob groaned as he realized his eyes were on them again.  The sound caused her to turn.

"How can something like that take place ... accidentally?" she said.  Now anger had crept into her voice.

Bob actually wanted to explain.  The saying about confession being good for the soul has a lot of validity.  That has to do with forgiveness.  And the urge to seek forgiveness will drive one to confess, even when the circumstances of the situation make it irrational to expect forgiveness to actually be forthcoming.

"You know how Mal teases me and flirts with me," he said, setting the stage.

"Don't you dare blame this on her!" barked Lucy.

"I'm not," he said, his voice urgent.  "I'm just trying to explain."

She moved her hands, folding her arms under her breasts.  All that did was put them on display.  Bob looked at her belt buckle, intentionally.

"I was teaching her to shoot.  And she was cocky about it."  He was so concentrated on trying to explain why he groped her, and what that led to, that he committed the same error Mallory had.  He said something he didn't mean to say.  "And so I told her to try shooting when she was distracted, and I sort of touched her.  I didn't think she'd mind because I saw them ..."

He stopped.  His mouth closed so forcefully that his lips made a sound as they hit.

"Saw who?"  Lucy pounced on him, almost literally, moving so close to him that he could see the intricate design engraved into her belt buckle.

"Ahhhh."  Bob's mind raced, but came up with nothing.  He hadn't meant to get the others involved.  He had intended only to take the blame for Mallory and his actions.

"Saw who, Bob?" Lucy insisted.

"Them," whispered Bob.

"Who?" screamed Lucy. 

Bob jumped, but her sudden shout whisked the cobwebs of fear and confusion from his brain.  Suddenly he actually understood how all this had happened.  Now all he had to do was get Lucy to be calm enough to explain it to her.  It wouldn't make her any happier, but at least she'd know the truth.  He patted the bed beside him.

"Sit down," he said.  "I'll explain."

"Will you really?" she asked.  "Because you haven't been up to now."

"I will," he said, earnestly.  "It's going to take a little time, but I think I can tell you why what happened, happened.

"So something did happen.  Really happened."

"Yes," he said.

"Bob!" she wailed, "How could something happen?  This is insane!"

"Please," he pleaded. "Just let me talk.  Then you can shoot me or whatever you think is right."

She looked shocked. 

"Shoot you?  That's insane too, Bob."

"Maybe," he said.  "Let me talk first, and then you can decide on that."

She nodded tersely, her face pinched.  Again he patted the bed beside him.

"Please," he said.  "Sit so I don't have to stare at your ..."  He let his head fall and a soft groan finished the sentence, instead of the word that had come unbidden to his confessing mouth.

She might have been curious about what he hadn't said, but she was more interested in the other issue.  To keep him talking, she sat.

"Okay," he said, after recovering from almost screwing the pooch even harder than he already had.  "Remember those conversations we had about what to do about it when the kids got interested in sex?"

She tensed, but then nodded.  "Yes," she said.

"We talked about a lot of options, but we always decided to wait until later to do anything."

"I didn't mean we should wait until you wanted to have sex with my daughter," growled Lucy.

"Just listen!" said Bob.  "It wasn't like that.  Please, just listen."

She sat, mute.

"Okay, so we both knew they'd get interested, but I don't think either of us realized how soon that would happen.  We probably should have.  At least I probably should have, because as I look back on my own youth, I remember starting to learn about that thing when I was really young ... like twelve."

"You had sex when you were twelve?" Lucy gasped.

"No, not sex," said Bob.  "I just found out how good it felt to ... um ..."  He stalled for a few seconds and then, realizing that Lucy might finish for him, and not wanting to hear her lips say the word for some reason, he finished.  "Masturbate," he said softly.

She relaxed, visibly.

"Oh," she said.  "That's not so bad.  All boys do that."'

He felt peculiarly happy that she hadn't judged him for engaging in that behavior, and went on.

"My point is that it happened for me at twelve, and apparently it happened for them around the same age."

"Them?  You keep saying them," said Lucy.  "Who?"

"All of them," said bob, softly.  "Your kids ... and mine."

Lucy just stared at him.

"How do you know this?" she asked, finally.

Bob didn't want to tell her what he'd seen, because that meant he'd have to inform her that her son and daughter engaged in incestuous acts.  So he tried to edit things a bit.

"The first night we were there, I woke up in the middle of the night.  I thought I heard something.  And when I looked out into the camper, I saw Sam and Randy ... um ..."

He paused, trying to think of some way to put a name to what he'd seen other than, "A humdinger of a hand job with a bit of oral thrown in."  He paused just long enough for Lucy to get the wrong idea.

"They were having sex?" she gasped.

"No!" said Bob.  "Not that.  She was ... um ... helping him."

"Helping him?"

Bob was verbally helpless, so he raised one hand and made the short up and down movement every male has learned at one point or another in his life.

Lucy's eyes widened.

"She was masturbating him?"

"Yes," said Bob, relieved.  He was now prepared to try to move on, past that, and somehow use that as an explanation for groping Mal's breasts.  His admittedly flawed plans took another hit almost immediately.

"And where was Mallory?" asked Lucy.

"Uh ... she was asleep," said Bob, uncomfortably.

"Really?  Let's see, Bob.  I was in that camper helping you get ready to go. There are three beds.  I'm assuming my son was on one of them.  That left two beds.  That's one for you and the other for the girls.  The biggest one is over the front, and it would be logical to think that the girls were in that one.  But that means Samantha would have to climb down out of that one to get to Randy to ... help ... him.  Now if you were in the middle bed, that means she'd have to climb over you to get to Randy.  I don’t think she’d try that, so that means Randy was in the middle bed.  And that means that, somehow, Samantha climbed down out of that tight space up there without waking Mallory up.  Except the problem with that scenario is that Mallory is a light sleeper.  In fact she's a very light sleeper, Bob.  She came to me one time complaining about a cricket that was in the next room!"

Bob leaned back at the intensity in her voice.  "Okay," he said, a little defensively.

"Bob, I do not believe if something woke you up, that thing being Samantha helping Randy, that Mallory could have slept through it."

"Okay," moaned Bob, again defensively.

"So what was she doing?" Hissed Lucy.  "Was she in your bed?"

"No!" gasped Bob.  "Not then."

Lucy got up and paced again.  She was clearly agitated.  Bob realized his attempt to mitigate things wasn't working.  It was all going to come out, sooner or later.  The urge to make that sooner, to get this over with, to rip the Band-aid off, was overpowering.

"Look," he said.  "This isn't going to make you happy."

"Gee, you think not?"  Her voice rose an octave.

"I'll just tell you, okay?" he moaned.  "You won't believe parts of it, but I'll just tell you everything just like it happened, okay?"

She kept pacing.

"I was sleeping over the cab," he said.  "I did wake up and when I looked out all three of them were at the back of the camper.  They were naked, and both girls were ... um ... helping him."  He couldn't resist using the same word they'd been using.

"Both girls," said Lucy, her voice tight.

"They've led a pretty sheltered life," said Bob.  "And we didn't confront them about the urges they'd be feeling.  I think they just did what all kids do and explored.  They just did it with each other instead of with outsiders."

"So Mallory and Randy explored, and because Samantha didn't have a brother to commit incest with, she just jumped on their bandwagon."  Sarcasm dripped from Lucy's voice.

"Maybe!" said Bob, loudly.  "It's possible.  For sure I didn't just decide to molest your daughter.  They were already experienced when that finally happened."

"So they have been having sex," said Lucy.

"No!" groaned Bob.  "Not until this trip.  Please, just let me tell you what happened."

"You're right," she said.  "I don't think this is going to make me happy at all.  But I have to hear it.  Go on."

"Okay, so I saw this during the night.  And nobody was forcing anybody else to do anything.  I didn't know what to do.  I mean it was obvious that they'd done this before.  Both girls knew what they were doing."

Lucy bowed her head and covered her eyes with one hand.  Bob went on anyway.

"And then, it was over and both girls just got back in bed.  They were in the middle one.  Randy went to sleep right away.  So did Mallory.  Sam stayed awake for a few more minutes to ... um ..."

He hadn't meant to say that part, but he was on an unconscious roll.

"Masturbate?" whispered Lucy for him.

"Uh ... yeah."

"Good grief," moaned Lucy.

"I don't know why I didn't yell at them," he said.  "I should have.  That would have fixed everything.  But I didn't.  It ... uh ... affected me."

"Just say it, Bob.  You got horny."

"I shouldn't have," he said, ashamed.

"Why do we use parental controls on all our computers?" asked Lucy.  "Because porn is everywhere.  Why is porn everywhere?  Because people love it.  It makes them horny.  I'm not stupid, Bob.  And while I didn't believe it, you are apparently as normal as any other man around."

"Why wouldn't you believe that?" asked Bob, stung.

"Never mind," she said.  "We can get to that later, if necessary.  Go on."

"Okay.  So the next day we split up, with Sam and Randy working on a tree stand while I taught Mal to shoot.  And I kept thinking about what they'd done the night before.  I mean she looked so normal, but I knew she was somebody different than the Mallory I knew.  And she got cocky about her marksmanship, and I did something stupid to distract her.  I ... um ... reached around from behind her and sort of grabbed her boobs."

Lucy paced twice more and then returned to sit beside him.

"And how did she react to that?" she asked.

"Actually," said Bob, softly, "She moved my hands inside her shirt."

"Just like that?"

"Yeah, just like that," said Bob.  "She did say I was being naughty, but she moved them herself.  I’m not trying to blame this on her, but all I ever intended to do was cop a little feel and shake her up.  Except she didn’t react like I thought she would."

"And then what happened?"

"She made me keep my hands there while she put two more rounds right into the bull's-eye," said Bob.

"She made you."

"She put her hands on top of mine and pressed them, you know, kind of an unspoken command?"

Some of the color Lucy had lost flowed back into her cheeks.

"And then?"

"And then she told me she'd wanted to give her virginity to me since she was twelve."

Lucy was up and pacing again, clearly agitated.

"So you took her up on it," she said, breathing deeply.

"Not then," said Bob.  "Honest.  I tried to talk her out of it.  Honest, I did.  And I was able to slow things down.  At least at first."

"How, exactly were you able to slow things down?"

"Well ... um ... I guess I said she could do the same thing to me she did to Randy."

"Help you out?"  Lucy's voice was sarcastic.  "She wanted to give her virginity to you so you had her help you out?"

"It wasn't like that," groaned Bob.  "Yes, I was excited.  We both were. But I didn't want to take her virginity, so I tried to deal with that excitement in other ways."

"What other ways?" Lucy insisted.

"Does it really matter?" moaned Bob.

"This isn't Benghazi, Bob," snarled Lucy.  "This is my daughter."

"Okay, we masturbated each other," gasped Bob.

Lucy lost her color again, and sat on the bed.

"Honest, Lucy, it was just to defuse the situation so ... um ... the other thing wouldn't happen."

It was quiet for a while as Lucy reflected on what she'd learned, and Bob just took a mental rest.  Finally Lucy's head lifted.

"So that was it?  That time, I mean?"

"Yes," Bob lied. He wasn't ready to tell her about the amazing hummer Mallory had delivered, or how clear it had been that she'd done this many, many times.

"When was the next time something happened," asked Lucy.

"Well, while I was distracting Mal, I told her that I'd seen them the night before.  I forgot to tell you that part.  And as soon as we went to get the others, Mallory told them that I knew all about them.  And then she told them about what I'd done."

"Right there in front of you," suggested Lucy.

"Yes."

"Don't tell me they blackmailed you," said Lucy.

"No, of course not.  Honestly, and I'm not blaming this on Mallory, but I swear it was like Mal was just trying to move things along.  I had already told her I wasn't going to have sex with her, and that she should save that for someone special, but she was very stubborn about it.  I think she was just trying to create an atmosphere in which more could happen."

"You make her sound like Mata Hari," accused Lucy.

"She's very stubborn," said Bob.  "And there was this pact they made."

"Who made?"

"Sam and Mal.  They agreed not to have sex until the other one did. Their plan was to do things next year."

"Oh, good grief," said Lucy.  "You're telling me they planned this?"

"Actually, they sort of did," said Bob, carefully.  "I guess Randy has been telling Sam since they were kids that he was going to marry her."

"Kids do that," scoffed Lucy. "But they aren't serious.  Not really. It never comes to anything."

"Well, they took it seriously, or at least Randy and Mal did.”

"What about Sam?"

"She wasn't so excited about it," admitted Bob.  “I think she really wanted to wait another year."

Lucy studied his face.

"I think you're serious," she said.

"I am.  Mal was all gung ho about going through with the pact, which meant she was supposed to sleep with me and Sam was supposed to sleep with Randy."

He stopped long enough for Lucy to prod him.

"And that happened?"

He waited for four heartbeats before making his formal confession.

"Yes."

"Samantha slept with my son."  Her voice was flat.

"Yes.”

“And you slept with my daughter.”

“Yes,” Bob whispered.

“You bastard!” she growled.

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