Charlie and Mindy Bk. 04 Ch. 04

And that opportunity turned out in the end to be even better for George than any of us suspected. Tom Cech, the man George wanted to study under, would share the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on the chemistry of RNA.

That evening, George and I went to Sarge's a little earlier than usual and stayed a little longer than usual—drinking up four pitchers of beer: Two to mourn our coming separation, followed by two to celebrate George's good fortune.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I barely made it to my eleven o'clock economics class that morning. And I wasn't in top form, either—as anyone who's consumed two full pitchers of beer in one evening will probably understand.

After Econ, I found Mindy on her way back to Bussey Hall from her Western Civ. class. She could see that I was still not in top form, and she was not amused. But when I gave her the news, as we headed for her dining hall in Bussey Hall to get lunch, about George and the consequences for the house, she grinned at me. "You're forgiven for your bender, " she said. "I'd really like it if we could share a house with Steph and Buck."

As we left the dining hall for our respective early afternoon classes, I explained that I wanted to talk to Buck and Steph before I saw Ken, but that I would try to get both chores done that afternoon after my history class. That we now had Mom's car would make life a lot easier. It was still parked in front of the twins' place, and I could take it from there to get to the lumberyard, a few miles away, where Ken worked.

Everything worked as planned. Buck and Steph were both home when I got there after my one-o'clock history class. They were, as I'd thought, worried about how much the rent might be. They couldn't afford much more than they were already paying—which turned out to be $10 more each month than what Ken was charging for a single floor of our house. But they really liked the idea. This would save them a little money, and they wanted to go along.

Ken was on his break when I found him. I paid him what I owed for April and inquired about availability for the next academic year. He hadn't yet made arrangements for either floor, and he was interested in locking in residents for the coming year, because doing so meant he wouldn't have to worry about finding someone near the end of the spring semester, or, worse, at the beginning of the fall semester.

At first, he was a little leery of having two young men and two young women share the house. He loosened up on that point when he learned that the four of us were two brother-sister pairs.

Then he said that he needed to raise the rent for the coming year. I was about to kiss the idea good-bye, when it occurred to me that he expected to have the house completely empty, producing no revenue, during the summers—while the twins needed a place year-round. When I promised him that all four of us would rent without interruption for the next two years, he even lowered the monthly rent for each pair of us to less than George and I were currently paying.

The twins were overjoyed. They liked their bungalow, but moving would save them a few hundred dollars over the next two years. And they, too, loved the idea of sharing a house with Mindy and me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The remainder of that spring semester was a busy one. Mindy and I both had to catch up on the coursework we'd missed. Steph and Buck were busy, too—though not as busy as we were. They were good students, who worked as hard as Mindy ever had at it, and they got A's and B's.

As that spring passed, our friendship—already deep—with Buck and Steph deepened even further. Each pair of siblings came to depend more and more on the other. As the semester wore on, we shared our triumphs, our defeats, our joys, and our sorrows with each other. We came to trust them, we found, almost as much as we trusted each other. And we believed that they returned our trust.

A couple of weeks after our return, the four of us spent a weekend evening over a couple of bottles of wine, talking about where our relationships with each other—both as couples and as individuals—were going. Each of us admitted candidly that we found the opposite-sex member of the other pair of siblings enormously attractive. I still remember how Steph looked me in the eye and told me how much she wanted me. I told her how attractive I found her, and I gave her a look of my own. Nor was I the least surprised or offended when Buck and Mindy made similar admissions about each other and similar looks passed between them.

But we also agreed that, much as we all wanted to allow nature to follow its course, each of us was already happily committed, and that those commitments forbade new physical liaisons—however much we all wanted them and however forgiving our established lovers might be. We had, we decided, reached the limits of sharing, and it would be unwise to go beyond those limits. Intimate hugs, kisses, a tease or two, an occasional feel—all these were entertaining and acceptable; these activities got us randy for our real partners. And I still remember the adoration in Mindy's eyes as she and I recommitted ourselves to each other. It was a look I did my best to return.

We registered for fall classes during the first week of May. The college had, during this academic year, decided to alter its scheduling; classes would begin for the fall in mid-August. We weren't sure whether we liked that or not. We'd have a shorter summer this year, which we didn't like a lot. But it would mean more time in which final exams could be spread out and getting out of school earlier in December. We approved of those possibilities.

The first Friday of May was the last day of classes for the spring semester; the following week was devoted to final exams. By then, Mindy and I were spending just over half of our nights with each other in the twins' spare bedroom. In that respect, then, we were much better off than we'd been when we'd had to live separately the previous fall.

The fiction that each of us was lover to one of the twins served the four of us well, and prevented people from developing suspicions we didn't want to have to deal with. And it was a fiction that we did everything we could to promote—by behaving naughtily with our putative matches when we were together in public.

(To be continued)

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—CarlusMagnus