Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam: Aisling's Antics - Ch. 4 (Alpha)
🕑 Added 2023-07-23 06:57:44 +0000 UTCPart Four – “You and me”
December 11th, 2020
They were on their break walking around the basement when Aisling dropped a bombshell on Fiona. “I take it the next part of your story’s going to be about Lauren,” Fiona said as they stopped to pet Muninn, who’d begrudgingly settled down long enough for Fiona to stroke his back a few times.
“Nah, not really,” Aisling said. “I know none of this is going into the book, especially since we’re talking away from the tape recorder, but I sort of knew right away that Andy and Lauren were never going to really be on the same emotional level as me and Andy are. That isn’t to say he doesn’t love her, because he absolutely does, or that she doesn’t love him, because she absolutely does as well. But Lauren and Taylor have always been each other’s Big Love, and as much as Lauren’s biologically tied to Andy, her heart belongs elsewhere. I mean, c’mon, you’ve had to notice that for most of the last month, Taylor and Lauren have always tag-teamed him rather than going one at a time.”
“Of course I’d noticed, but I’d wondered how much of that was down to Lauren and Taylor just fully recommitting to their relationship,” Fiona said with a giggle. “I remember when me and Moira reconnected, and let me tell you, that was an intense couple of months. We didn't get out of the house most days."
“Well, as soon as Taylor showed up, Lauren’s hesitation with Andy made total sense. It wasn’t like she was holding back with him, but I think both Andy and I could tell she wasn’t going all in the same way I was,” Ash said. “And that was fine. It was early days when she showed up – they were just starting the Oracle program and didn’t have anywhere near as large a pool of candidates. I had a few days to establish me and him first before she showed up, but I think once she landed on our doorstep, that was when we knew things were going to get a little crazy. I’ve talked to Phil a little bit about it, and he told me there was just an effort to quickly double down on the people who’d said they were open to polyamory, like a backup plan.”
They made their way to the small little lounge area downstairs where Nicolette had left them some tea and fruit, and based on how warm the tea was, they must have just missed her, only convincing Fiona even further that Nicolette was some kind of super ninja.
“I’d sort of wondered if she was feeling bad about not being asked to marry Andy, but…”
“Oh, they worked it out without much conversation, really. It was pretty amicable between the two of them, what with Lauren and Taylor talking about getting married to each other at some point in the future. They’re both still likely going to bear Andy’s children, but that’s just the way of the world now. If this family was a pyramid scheme, Lauren’s tier two.”
Both Fi and Ash had a good giggle about that. They needed to take a break, so the two of them stepped into the backyard, stripped down to nothing and then slipped into the hot tub for a little cool down. Neither was used to having their own hot tub on demand still, so they were doing everything they could to get used to the new home. It had really been a massive adjustment, and even now, the whole layout still hadn’t fully settled in almost anyone’s mind. There were simply so many rooms, so many corridors, so many things to keep straight. Ash had joked around that they should have the layout on a map in their dosing app, but Niko and Lexi had immediately put their foot down, saying that it was “sensitive information” and that there was no way they were making that information accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
They’d been in the hot tub for about five minutes, sitting mostly in silence, enjoying the warm water, before Ash spoke. “Do you think I should start carrying a gun?”
Fi turned her head in surprise. “Where’s this coming from?”
“Just a little bit ago, you were saying that you were disappointed Andy wouldn’t carry a gun himself. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I should reconsider Lexi’s offer to train me into shooting. Andy’s the love of my life, but he’s… he can definitely be too optimistic, too trusting of people. I know basically Niko or Lexi are going to be around looking out for his well-being any time we’re out in public, but…” She sighed. “I dunno. Maybe I’m just wonderin’ if that’s not going to be enough. Maybe we should insist all the wives are packing.”
“If you want to have a gun on you, Ash,” Fiona said, “I can respect that, but I’m not keen on the idea of having one on me all the time. There’s always the chance of the weapon going off, or of you shooting yourself instead of your attacker. Eventually I’m sure they’ll convince me to learn how to shoot, how not to be a complete klutz with it, but having one around all the time? I’m just not up for that. I think each girl should decide for herself, but I just wouldn’t feel safe having a gun on me all the time. Leave the weapons to those completely trained to handle them, you know?”
“Mmmm,” Ash said. “I can respect that. But I also feel like maybe two armed guards around Andy isn’t quite enough and having a few more wouldn’t do anyone any harm. Besides, I’d look like a bad ass with a gun in my hands.”
“That you probably would, Ash,” Fi said. “I think I’d look like a soccer mom trying to front and fail on every level.”
“Nah, you’d look like that actress you look like in the film where she loses her memory and fucks shit up with Sam Jackson,” Ash teased. “But if you don’t want to carry a piece, nobody’s going to tell you that you have to.”
“That’s good,” Fi said, before the two sat in the silence of the hot tub for a couple more minutes. Eventually, however, Fi broke the silence again. “You really think I look like her?”
“Want me to prove it?” Ash giggled. “Say ‘chefs do that.’”
Both women devolved into laughs before grabbing towels, drying off as they headed back into the hidden basement of the building. When they got back to Ash’s studio, they found that Nicolette had left lunch for both of them, as well as a couple of cocktails. “How does she know everything in the house that needs doing, and do it with nobody seeing?”
“It’s the mark of a really great housekeeper.”
* * * * *
Like I said, there isn’t all that much to talk about with me and Lauren. We got along fine, but even from the onset, I could tell there was someone else in the picture who would figure into things later. Yeah, I wouldn’t know Taylor’s name for months, but her presence? Sure, she figured into that time like you wouldn’t believe.
We had fun with expanding Andy’s mind a little bit, though. I’d figured out we weren’t his first threesome early on, but when he told me it’d been a long while since he’d gotten laid, I knew we had some major rebuilding of confidence to do, and Lauren, bless her heart, hadn’t really been with men much, despite going both ways, so I sort of had to do the overselling for both of us.
It wasn’t too hard, convincing Andy that he was a sort of sex god. I mean, in most ways, I’m not really exaggerating with that. He wasn’t exceptional at first, but he was still good, damn good, and his willingness to learn made up for any shortcomings he might have had at first. You know that about Andy – if you give him a task and tell him it’s important, he will do absolutely anything to get good at it, as good as he can be.
I mean, the man already ate pussy like a champ, but everything else? We got there soon enough. He was a very eager student, and each time, whether it was the vaccine running through my veins mixed with his DNA or just the fact that he was hellbent on learning everything he could about both me and Lauren meant we both felt pretty loved up early on.
I felt a little bit more possessive about Andy than Lauren did, but it wasn’t obvious to him, I guess, even when I was at my worst. No, telling you about early days with Lauren, you’re not going to learn a whole lot about me and Andy and how we got along.
Which is why we’re going to skip forward a little bit and talk about the next member of our family to join, Niko. Don’t grin at me like that. You’re the one who’s going to figure out how much of what I tell you you’re going to want to include in your book. It might well be none of this whole next section, but hey, that’s for you to decide, not me.
So, the day before Niko showed up, Lauren and I got to meet Phil for the first time, although at that point, we didn’t really know how deep Phil’s ties to the whole thing went. I thought he seemed like a guy well deep in the know, but it would be months and months before we found out how much Phil had to do with the Quaranteam vaccine.
Still, during Andy and Phil’s conversation, we got a hint of the bigger picture to come, with Phil talking about maybe as many as five million people dead by the end of it, which, we both know now was a gross underestimation, but I like to think he was trying to keep Andy from losing his shit too much while still being able to talk to someone about what was going on. That was also the day that both the former President and the former Vice President collapsed, and early in the wee hours of the next morning, the Speaker of the House was sworn in as President Pro Tempore.
Later that day, there was a knock on the door and Niko was dropped onto our lap. While she wasn’t in quite as bad a state as Piper was, Niko had clearly been given her dose much earlier than her arrival on our doorstep, because she wasn’t thinking entirely clearly. Not so poorly that her judgement was impaired, but she was not in the mood to wait if you follow my meaning. She basically had her way with Andy in the common area of the tiny old condo, and we had to carry her up to bed afterwards.
In the middle of the night, she sucked Andy off, and in the early hours of the morning, she fucked him while he was still sleeping. It took three full dosages of Andy’s love before she felt like the fog around her brain was starting to clear.
The very first thing I realized about Niko was that she was quite a bit younger than Andy was. I mean, I’m a decade younger than him, and she’s half a decade younger than me, so while Niko assured us she liked older and more mature men, I also knew it was going to be one of those sticking points with Andy for a while. She was 22 at the time, but even still, that might as well have been an entire generation for Andy.
It didn’t hurt that she was insanely gorgeous either. I don’t know if she’s told you about her heritage, but she’s half Lakota, a quarter Japanese and a quarter Mexican. It gives her this exotic beauty while still making her deeply American, unlike me and Lauren. She was chill and easy-going and very approachable and friendly.
Within the first day or two, though, I was pretty sure Niko was lying to us.
I didn’t think they were big lies, or important lies – well, important to us I suppose – but I had a strong sense that she wasn’t being honest about what she did for the Air Force, or how she’d come to join our family. The last thing I wanted was for our family to built on a foundation of lies, so about a week or so after she’d joined the family, I asked Niko to go out and take a walk with me.
We’d sort of gotten the impression from Phil that as long as we stayed away from other people, now that we were vaccinated, it wouldn’t be too bad for us to take walks around the neighborhood, and I wanted to get Niko away from Andy so I could size her up and sort of lay down the law a bit.
“Sure,” Niko said. “Let’s walk for a bit. I could do with getting out of the house.”
We waited until evening, so it was cooling off and the heat wouldn’t bake us, and we took a flashlight with us, at Andy’s insistence. He offered to come with us, but I told him I wanted to have a bit of one-on-one time with the new girl.
The first couple of blocks, we sort of walked in silence, until she spoke first. “Am I in trouble, Ash?” Niko said, a wry grin on her face.
“You tell me, soldier.”
“Airman.”
“Fine,” I said, correcting myself. “You tell me, airman. Why do I get the feeling you’re not being entirely truthful with us? You said you’d read one of Andy’s books, but you said you didn’t really remember it, and I’m thinking that’s ‘cause you’d never read it at all. So why lie about that? To boost his ego up a bit?”
“To make him feel like I’m not just a stowaway dropped in his lap for him to take care of,” she sighed. “You know he’s basically got the pick of any woman on the planet that he wants, don’t you?”
I remember thinking to myself how odd that sounded at the time, and decided she was being figurative rather than literal. “You’re gorgeous, you’re smart, you’re funny – why wouldn’t he want you?”
“I’m Air Force,” she said. “Lots of guys refuse to date military girls. They say we’re too uptight, too unpredictable, too emotionally unavailable.”
“You hear Andy say any of that shit yet?”
“Not yet but—”
“And you’re not gonna,” I said to her, “because Andy doesn’t think like that. If anything, he’s embarrassed for you, that you’re stuck with him.”
“He’s a level 5, Ash. That means he’s somebody really important.”
I laughed at her, shaking my head. “He’s a fluke. He got that status by doing a random stranger a favor, and the level 5 status was his reward. I mean, I get the impression that he might have some friends with some clout, but if you’re worried about him thinking you’re uptight, you can disabuse him of that notion any time you like. I mean, didn’t you take that test we all took?”
“Yes ma’am,” Niko said to me.
“Call me ‘ma’am’ again, Niko, and I’ll stab you in your sleep,” I chuckled at her. “So how did you and Andy end up?”
“That’s just it – I don’t entirely know. I was supposed to be paired up with somebody else, but when we got to that man’s house, he was already dead. So they brought me back to the base and told me to find another option.”
I could tell there was some other part of the story she wasn’t telling, but I didn’t want to push her. Not yet.
“Do you regret being saddled with Andy?”
“Fuck no,” she told me, suddenly very worried that I’d thought she wasn’t into our shared man. “Look, Ash, Andy seems like a great guy, and I don’t regret being paired up with him at all, but I figured it was best not to tell him he wasn’t my first choice, because he’d probably get up in his head about it.”
“I doubt that he would,” I sighed, “but I suppose you’re right in that there’s nothing to be gained by telling him that information. But that’s not my biggest concern with you.”
“Oh no?” Niko asked me. “Then what is?”
“Look, right now, the whole world is in one colossal free fall. I heard you talking with Andy the other day about how the numbers we got from his friend Phil were probably underestimates, and that we were looking at loads of men being dead before this whole thing stabilized. Now, I haven’t been with Andy all that long, but I have to tell you… I would die for that man. I don’t know if it’s the drugs, or the confined spaces, or some unique biological quirk that the two of us have, but I am head over heels for him, and I intend to marry him and bear his children as soon as things have settled down a bit. He makes me feel like nobody I’ve ever known, and that means it’s my job to look out for him.”
“What about Lauren?”
“Lauren likes Andy, and she enjoys fucking him, but I wouldn’t say she’s completely in love with him. Maybe they’ll get there; probably not though. And that’s okay. It means there’s a sort of established pecking order. I’m going to end up being his wife and she’s going to end up being one of the house concubines,” I laughed, as Niko laughed with me. “And now we’ve got to figure out what to do with you.”
“Hate to say it, but I think you have to keep me,” she teased.
I smirked, rolling my eyes. “You know what I’m getting at.”
“I do, Ash,” Niko sighed. “And I hate to say it, but I think I’m more on your side of things than Lauren’s.”
I stopped walking for a moment, the two of us on a foot bridge that crossed over the nearby freeway. “Why do you hate to say that?”
“Because it puts us in conflict, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?” I asked.
“He can’t have two wives, now, can he?”
“Why not?” I asked her.
“I’m pretty sure it’s against the law,” Niko said with a soft laugh.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be against the law before the end of the year,” I told her.
“You think?”
“Men are falling like dominos, and the only workable solution they have is a vaccine that doubles as a sexually transmitted disease. They’re going to need to repopulate the country, and if they’re saddling all these women up with so few men, laws are going to have to change,” I told her, tugging on the top of my workout pants, making sure they were above my ass crack. “Do you want to be his wife?”
She looked down at the freeway, completely empty as it was, and tapped her palm against the fence awning covering the bridge. “I think I do. You know in the first day of getting to know him, I basically had to tell him to stop asking questions so I could get a few of my own in edgewise. He was completely invested in getting to know me, and learning what it would take to make me happy in our new arrangement. Can you believe th—well, of course you can believe that. You’ve probably gotten used to it.”
“Andy’s focus is a hard thing to get used to, but you’ll get there eventually. And you’ll learn that he’s a hell of a storyteller, once you find the right buttons to push and the right knobs to twist to coax them out of him. It’s not that he’s unwilling to talk about himself; he’d just rather get to know you for a while until it feels like you’re genuinely interested in learning more about him for a change.”
“I’m interested in learning more about him now,” she said to me. “Are his books any good? Would I like them?”
“They’re not for everyone, but I’ve come around to them. Of course, my older brother is a fiend for them, and he’s been trying to get me to read them forever, but you’ll know pretty early on whether or not there’s any appeal to you or not.”
“If there isn’t, is he going to be mad?”
“Mad?” I giggled a little bit, shaking my head. “No, he’s not going to be mad. A little disappointed, maybe, but not as mad as he’s going to be if you lie to him about liking them when you don’t. Give’em a read, and don’t let me make up your mind for you. And give it a few books. You can tell with the early ones that he’s still sort of finding his footing in long form storytelling, but there’s potential all over the place. But that’s not the only thing you’re hiding from us, is it, Niko?”
Niko looked at me with a wry smile that made her seem much older than her 22 years. “You’re very good at reading people, aren’t you, Ash?”
“When I started to realize we were going to be getting more women in this house, I realized that Andy’s going to need someone looking out for him, making sure nobody’s taking advantage of him. His own best friend told me to protect him, so that’s what I’m going to do. That means I need to know what’s going on here, Niko.”
She sighed, and we started walking again. “What I’m about to tell you, I want you to very closely think about keeping to yourself, at least for the time being, okay?”
“Niko, we’re both bonded to Andy, which means we’re bonded to each other as well. I’m not about to break that trust lightly.”
“With men dying off so much, it means existing men are going to become, well, a resource. That means they’re now in high risk of being kidnapped, like, all the time. As such, it means men are going to need someone who are, essentially, bodyguards. That’s me. I’m going to be Andy’s bodyguard.”
“Quite the self-imposed role you’ve got there.”
“Not entirely self-imposed,” Niko said. “The Air Force is starting to think about these things now, and like you told me, Andy’s got friends in high places, so I don’t think you’d be surprised to learn that maybe one of his friends gave me a nudge in his direction.”
“You know what it’s going to mean, being his bodyguard? There might come a point where you’re going to have to choose between being his wife and being his protector.”
Niko shook her head. “It’s not even a choice – the results are the same. If he’s not alive, neither are any of us. So Operation: Protect Your Man is always going to be at the top of my priority list. But I don’t think calling attention to that in Andy’s eyes is going to do anyone any favors, do you?”
“Doesn’t he deserve to know?”
Niko sighed at me. “I don’t think he should know. Look, we’re probably going to have to add a bunch more women to this little pod of ours, and maybe one of them will eventually be more focused on being his bodyguard than his partner, but until then, I have to do both, but I don’t want him losing sleep over it. I made my choice. The person who nudged me this way, they’ve had more on their plate than I think anyone I’ve ever met in my life, but they still wanted to look out for their friends, to make sure that even in this whirlwind of chaos and madness, they could still try and keep a few people important to them safe. But I don’t want to burden Andy with that knowledge when there’s nothing he can really do about it. Let him enjoy his life, and enjoy us, y’know? So we can enjoy him.”
I nodded. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt not telling him. I can understand your reasoning, not wanting to worry him about these things.”
“What about you?” she said. “What are you hiding from me that I ought to know?”
I laughed, rolling my eyes at her. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“Everybody’s hiding something, Ash.”
“Just checking, you’re into girls as well, right?”
Niko licked her lips with a wicked little grin. “We’re not doing it in public, but yeah, I am, and I will make you squirm so hard, your freckles start blushing.”
“You think Andy can handle three women at once?”
She slapped me on the ass, and I remember squeaking when she did. “If he can’t, we’ll have to get him there pretty fast,” she told me. “We’re probably going to get a little bit of a break, but pretty soon, they’re going to unleash the floodgates, and then Andy’s gonna have women all fucking over him.”
“Here’s the thing, though, Niko. We’re gonna need to make sure we’re collectively watching out for our guy, naïve and kindhearted as he can be.”
We were walking through what should’ve been a lush green park but was instead mostly just brown and tan dried out grass, the drought having done a real number on the local flora. “What are we talking about, Ash?”
“I’m talking a pact, you and me, always agreeing to be completely honest and open with each other, never lying to one another, telling each other everything, and together making sure our man doesn’t leap before either he or we look,” I told her. “But that means we have to have zero secrets between the two of us.” We walked down the path a little further before I continued. “Look, I like you, Niko. You’re a straight-shooter who speaks her mind, and yeah, you’re way younger than Andy probably would’ve picked on his own, but that’s probably good for him. He’s going to need that youthful energy around him to keep him going when things get truly bleak, and I’m pretty sure we’re not too far from those days.”
“How do you figure?”
“Indirectly, we know a few people who have died, but directly, it hasn’t hit us yet,” I told her. “We’re not going to remain that lucky forever. This plague’s gonna take someone important to one of us sooner or later. My dad, one of my brothers, Andy’s best friend… even with all of us being as careful as we can, someone somewhere’s going to slip, and then…” I snapped my fingers. “Like that, the whole world’s going to change. I don’t know who it is we’re going to lose, but we’re going to lose somebody. And we’re going to have to hold together more than we’ve ever done in our entire lives, because whoever it is, that person’s just going to want to give up, and it’s our job not to let that happen.”
Niko let out a slight whistle of admiration. “You’ve been thinking about all of this a lot, haven’t you?”
“The way I think about it is like this – right now, if you think about it like a hierarchy of needs, Andy’s worrying about the base – making sure we’ve got food, got toilet paper, a safe place to sleep, that kind of thing. That means we have to worry about the higher-level stuff – his safety, our collective sense of family and intimacy, his confidence, with Andy taking care of the very top end as well, the sense of trying to do the best in the world that we can. I like to think of Andy as a great big Boy Scout – he’s always looking to see the best in people, but sometimes that means people with less than noble intentions can get the better of him. He tell you the story of how he got the two cats yet?”
Niko laughed and shook her head. “There’s a story there?”
“So this is several years back, and I’m sure he tells the story much better than I do, but he was considering getting a cat again. He’d had a cat back in college, but it had died just after he’d moved out to California, and he’d been without a cat for a few years, so he was planning on getting a new one, when Lesser Phil calls him—”
“Wait, Lesser Phil?”
I giggled. “Andy’s got two friends out here both named Phil, but they can’t both be called Phil, otherwise how the hell would anyone know which one he was talking about? So the one Andy hangs out with the most gets to just be Phil, and the other one is Phil the Younger which devolved into Phil the Lesser which devolved into Lesser Phil.”
“Oh my god,” Niko said, holding her hand to her mouth to try and quell her giggles. “Even his stories have stories!”
“Anyway, Lesser Phil calls Andy up and says, ‘Hey, we found a couple of motherless kittens in our backyard. Do you want to just take them in?’ And Andy, big heart that he is, says sure, he’ll be right over.”
“That’s not much of a story.”
I held up my hand. “Patience, young one. When Andy gets over there, he asks Lesser Phil where the kittens are, and LP says they’re in the backyard, curled up near the patio deck.”
“Let me guess – not there when Andy goes to look for them?”
“Nope, and what’s worse, he can hear the most pathetic mewling coming from underneath the deck.”
“Oh no!” Niko said.
“So Andy says they can’t just leave the kittens under there, so he pries a few boards off LP’s deck and crawls underneath. This is the part I wish Andy was telling you the story, because the way he spins it, it sounds like he’s crawling through the fields of the dead under that deck, with racoon skeletons and wasp nests and what the hell else was down there, but eventually, after crawling on his belly like twenty feet, he comes across these two tiny little kittens, huddled together, pressed up against the foundation of the house. He grabs them one at a time, tucks them inside of his shirt so they’re warm and nestled up against his chest, and he slowly crawls his way back out from under the deck.”
“Awwww!”
“As soon as he gets out, Lesser Phil asks him if he’s gonna fix the damage Andy’s just done to the deck by prying a couple of boards off.”
“He didn’t!”
“And Andy, man that he is, sighs, tells Lesser Phil to go and get him a box and a towel to put the kittens in, as well as a saucer full of milk, and while the kittens are getting comfortable in the box, Andy spends another half an hour prying out the bent nails, lining up the wooden planks, renailing them to the frame work and applying sealant over the new nails. Then he takes the box and heads home to adopt his two new kittens. And that’s how he adopted Muninn and Huginn. But here’s the thing – when Andy told it to me, he admitted he was pretty sure the kittens were under the deck when Lesser Phil called him, and that LP just didn’t want to do what it took to get them out himself. But Andy wasn’t mad, because he got two wonderfully loving cats in the end. Me? If Lesser Phil had asked me to fix his deck after getting the kittens out from under it, I’d have probably smacked him in the face with the board.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you one bit.”
We stopped over by a dried up creek bed and I stepped close for a moment, sliding my hand along the back of her head, pulling her lips to mine as I kissed her, trying to put on my best boss bitch attitude, and sure enough, I felt her sort of melt in a little bit into me, her tits pressed up against mine, and before I knew it, her hand was on my ass and we were trading tongues.
It was our first kiss, hers and mine, and the heat level… whew. I’m getting a little flustered now just thinking about it. The initial chemistry was somewhere a million miles off the charts and when we pulled back from each other, we both started giggling like we were a couple of teenagers who were afraid their parents might catch them.
“Wow!” Niko said to me, her hands still holding onto my hips. “I, uh, my relationship history is very short, but between you and Andy… I feel like all of this is fucking next level. I was actually more worried about you not liking me than Andy. With him, at least I knew I was baseline compatible, but you were a shot in the dark, and… well, you’re fucking hot, Ash.”
I remember blushing just a little bit. I’d fooled around some with girls at uni, but I’d never had a real relationship with a woman before, and here I was, about to enter into the partnership of a lifetime.
“You and me, Niko, we make a pact right here,” I told her. “You and me, we’re going to be everything Andy ever needs, so anyone else who comes along, that’s just gravy, but you and me, we’re going to the bedrock of this man’s heart and soul. That means we’re gonna have to be better than best friends; we’re gonna have to be soulmates, as much as we are with Andy. That means even if we’re keeping things from Andy for his own good, you and I never have any secrets from each other. We’ll keep each other in check, and we’ll be the backbone our man’s gonna need to make it through the rest of this crisis. One of us stumbles, the other one’ll be there to pick her up. You and me, Niko. The first two wives.”
She hugged me close and laughed softly. “Which secret do you want to talk about first, that it was Phil Marcos who nudged me to Andy, that you were only the second girl I’ve ever kissed, or that Andy was only the second guy I’ve ever fucked?”
I giggled a little bit. “I knew I liked Phil for some reason. Now that I think about it, I bet he’s the guy the doctor was telling me about.”
“What doctor?” she asked.
* * * * *
“She and I walked around for a couple of hours, and I told her the story about Dr. McKenna and how he’d told me that one of Andy’s friends was looking out for him, but that any of the women assigned to him were going to have to get used to being a bit more aggressive and reassuring than they’d been before,” Ash said as she stepped away from the canvas again. “You can stretch again. Break time.”
“You and Niko against the world, huh?” Fiona asked her.
Ash smiled and shrugged a little. “I think we both knew there were going to be other wives to add into the mix eventually, but I wanted to set things straight with Niko first. To make sure she had Andy’s best interests at heart, I needed to give her someone to unburden her conscience to. Besides, you knew Andy longer than any of us. Was Phil wrong?”
Fiona shook her head. “Not in the least. In fact, that piece of advice Dr. McKenna gave you probably was the best piece of advice anyone could’ve ever given you in dealing with our man Andy. Back when we were in college, I was always fond of telling Andy, ‘You always believe the best about everyone but yourself.’ I’d hoped he’d grow out of it, but I think at this point, I just have to accept that it’s part of who Andy is.”
“It’s not so bad,” Ash said. “He stays remarkably humble and that’s a wonderful thing to have in a partner.”
“You going to include me and the rest of the fiancées in the Ride or Die club?”
“If I wasn’t, bitch, do you think I would’ve told you about it? What kind of dopey bitch do you take me for?”
The two women shared a good laugh over that.
Comments
Corrupting Power
Now fixed. Cheers.
Stephen
“Oh my god,” Ash said, holding Pretty sure that should be Niko said, not Ash
JC
what's the Easter egg in that?
JC
bookmark
Ronan
oh, and n8ce Easter egg "that actress in that movie with Samuel L Jackson."
Corrupting Power
Now corrected, thanks.
Ronan
Great interplay between Ash and Niko. Loved the 'behind the scenes' look at things we only intuited in QT1. In the 'even his stories have stories line' shouldn't that be Niko, not Ash?
