Monogamish - The Courtship

Welcome to another series. I hope you will enjoy it. This eight episode story will span decades and genres, but don't shy away, thinking it is some kind of epic. All the chapters are written, so also don't fear that they will come out too slow either.

If you finish this first chapter, you know the drill: vote, favorite, and especially comment, please. All the time-wasting BS you hear at the start of every YouTube video...

As always, I aspire to make my stories merely plausibly ridiculous, or maybe ridiculously plausible. Either way, this ain't real life, so don't lecture me on realism. I just hope that, given these two highly-improbable characters, you will feel like the ride makes some semblance of sense.

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MONOGAMISH -- The Courtship

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"Ready?" Mom asked me, her hand on the door to the garage.

I looked at my backpack one more time. This was going to be my first day at a new high school, a school to which I was transferring in the middle of my sophomore year.

Yeah. Ready was not in the cards, huh?

But the job had been too good for my dad to refuse, way too good. And so here I was, starting my whole life over in November in a whole different state.

I looked at the backpack again. I had agonized over whether I should remove the various patches I'd sewn onto it back at my old school. Patches like Wizards of the Coast and Settlers of Catan that marked me as a bit of a gamer geek.

The patches were still on my pack, despite several aborted intentions to remove them and arrive here with a new start. But I had 'gamed out' the idea, and decided that I liked games, and while I liked a lot of other things, I definitely wanted to meet the gamers at my new school, and having the patches would help me with that, more than I feared they would hurt me with the 'normal' kids who I also wanted to meet.

"Ready," I said.

*

"D&D, or Magic the Gathering?" a voice asked me in the lunch line.

I turned and saw a tall girl, as gangly as I was back then, with richly black hair that was just barely combed into order. She had a challenging smile on her face. "Your pack has a Wizards patch. D&D or Magic?" she asked again.

"Magic," I replied just a little warily.

"Good. D&D is for little kids," she said firmly. She stuck out her hand. "I guess we can be friends then. I'm Amy."

"Todd," I said, shaking her hand like I would have a guy's. If we were going to be friends, then we could talk, right? "I'll honest, I mostly like board games though." I didn't think D&D was for little kids, and had played a good bit in the past. I just preferred games where there was a winner... and that didn't take three months.

"I saw the Catan patch," Amy said. "Look, we have a group that plays all sorts of board games: railroads, merchant, even some war games. We've been short a player since last summer. Can you make it on Thursday afternoons after school, at the public library?"

"One, yes," I said, happy to have been at this new school for four hours and already encountered someone who wanted to talk to me and who played the kind of games I loved. "Two, thank you." Then I grinned. "And three, we have known each other twenty-seven seconds, and you are inviting me to join your gamer group? What if I'm a douche?"

Amy looked like she approved of my sparring response.

"You always talk in bullet points, Todd?" she asked.

"My dad lives by PowerPoint," I shrugged.

"Okay then. One, you for sure know that four is not as good a number as five for lots of the best games. Two, you did not seem to be a douche in English class this morning, even with Mr. Williams spending the whole class interrogating you." I had not even noticed her. "Thanks for taking all the heat, by the way. I hadn't done the reading," she added in an aside. "And three, if you do turn out to be a douche, we won't be shy about kicking you back out, Todd."

Maybe this new school would not be so bad after all, I thought as we worked our way through the lunch line.

But maybe it will be so bad, I thought, once I reached the actual food in the lunch line...

*

But no, Williston High turned out to be a great place for me. Amy's gamer group were awesome in many ways, and I soon was thinking of it as my group, not just theirs. Bob, Hassan, Jimmy, and Kerrie, and of course Amy, became my core group of friends. And even better, they were not loners. They all had other friends and other interests. I had other interests, and through them, I made other friends. Then I made friends through those friends. Williston was a pretty huge high school. Through it all, my gaming group was not the center of my life, but it was the touchstone.

I turned eighteen just as junior year ended. Amy turned eighteen soon after senior year began, followed in the next three months by Hassan, Kerrie, and Jimmy. Bob had skipped a grade and was still seventeen at graduation.

Increasingly, as our last year of high school progressed, the talk around the gaming table turned to who was dating whom, and (in circumloquacious terms) what they were doing on and after those dates.

Amy lost her virginity first, to Dak Preston, a friend of mine that I had introduced to her. She didn't tell the group as a whole, though everybody figured it out eventually, but she did tell me while we were in a movie theater, waiting for the trailers to begin. Amy was a girl (and increasingly obviously so), so I wasn't about to ask her any details of how it went down, but I did press her on how she felt about it.

Inwardly, I was a little upset. Not because I was jealous of Dak, but because, despite having put them together, I kinda thought Amy could have done better. Her opinion was otherwise. Amy, it turned out, thought sex was awesome.

When I lost my virginity a month later, to a girl I met all on my own, thank you, I found that I agreed with her wholeheartedly. Mary Sue O'Reilly was sex on stilts, as far as I was concerned, and over the month we were together, we must have had sex in some form or forms six times.

Then I got bored with Mary Sue's seeming need for me to text her three times a day, and after a few days of my resisting that requirement, she moved on.

The group was sympathetic about the end of my deathless romance, just as we had been when Amy and Dak had parted ways. Everyone agreed that Mary Sue was not worth it...

Except for Hassan, who had the good graces to wait two whole weeks before he told me that he was going to ask her out. He didn't ask me, he told me, but honestly, I was okay with it. But for the next month, on gaming day, whenever I had a choice of who to screw over in whatever game we were playing, Hassan was always my victim. He lasted barely a week longer with Mary Sue than I had. After, he and I quietly agreed that the girl probably kept an actual written log of the quality and frequency of texts her boyfriends sent...

Both Amy and I sampled several people over the rest of the year. In both cases, we sampled a few very extensively, but we both avoided anything that looked much like a relationship. As a counter-example, Jimmy had a girlfriend almost the entire year.

One day I heard some guy talking shit about Amy and her alleged 'sluttiness', a guy I knew that she had dated but once, and who had not been deemed Worthy. I rounded up the guys in the group and we had an extensive talk with the douchebag.

If you are wondering at how a group of gamer nerds like us all had such a good social life in high school, well... In addition to board games, I was the starting varsity right fielder, and I had also taken up wrestling when we moved to this new school. Hassan was the middle linebacker. Bob played basketball (JV, but he was tall). And Jimmy's dad owned a Karate dojo. Our talk was thus productive, and word got around that being judgmental about Amy (or Kerrie) was... unhealthy.

Kerrie and I went out on one date. It started out with a great dinner, but when we took a walk in the park after, in the dusk, we found ourselves in a deserted area of the park. She looked at me nervously, but stood closer.

"This has been fun hanging out, just the two of us, hasn't it?" I asked, happy at her chosen proximity.

"Yeah," she smiled. We kept walking. I was beginning to feel a little awkward. I finally put my arm around her as we went, but on a date with most other girls, I would have explored whether more than that was welcome long before this point. She just leaned tentatively against me and we kept walking, talking about the new game Amy had brought to the group the prior Thursday, and whether we wanted to play it some more.

I started to slide my hand up her side a bit more, toward those breasts. Did I mention that Kerrie was in possession of one of the larger pairs in school? She'd gotten them early, too. Among all my first group of friends, I'd been most awkward around Kerrie, at least until I could get used to her chest and stop looking at it all the time.

Now, my fingers were an inch from one of those same lovely orbs, and I was hesitating. Her body language wasn't warning me off either, but she was tense. Maybe she was wondering what was taking me so long. Should I try kissing her first?

No. We were friends. I was trying to be playful, to see how things went. It was all confusing.

I took a deep breath and slid my hand up further, cupping that glorious mound at last. It was just so nice and soft, and my fingers sank into its curves. Kerrie had stiffened for barely an instant when I first brushed her, and she almost immediately clasped her arm down over mine, making it clear my arm was not going anywhere other than where it was. We walked some more as I groped her, happy at last.

Until I turned my head, sure it was past time that I kissed her. Then she turned back toward me as well and we looked into each other's eyes. Hers were a deep blue, that looked almost black in the dusk, but they still managed to sparkle. We held that gaze as our mouths approached each other.

Then we both recognized in the other's eyes the same expression. I let her breast slip from my hand and we moved apart, facing each other fully.

"It's not going to work, is it?" Kerrie asked softly.

"No, dammit," I sighed. "I'm so sorry, Ker. I mean, we were having a great time tonight, right? But I kept freaking out about starting anything. But you are so hot, I just kept trying to step up and..."

"And I was just standing around, both hoping and dreading that you would. Then you finally did, and it felt nice. You are good at that, by the way. Gentle. But when you went to kiss me, I wanted this hot guy in front of me to kiss me so bad, but I didn't want you to," she said back one in a breath.

We both burst into laughter. And then we turned and headed out of the park to get some ice cream.

"This is going make next Thursday a lot easier," Kerrie said as we walked away.

"Oh yeah. The interrogation after one of us gets lucky is sometimes pretty fun," I agreed. "But if we'd... that could have become awkward fast, if it was Amy or Hassan grilling the two of us, sitting there together!"

Yeah, I resolved. There are close friends and girlfriends. And maybe, hopefully, someday a girlfriend might morph into a close friend, but morphing a close friend into a girlfriend was a minefield best left untrod.

But I did jack off later that night to the memory of Kerrie's boob in my grasp.

*

Our gaming group clung happily together until it was time for us all to go to college, and it was time to break it up. Only Bob stayed in state, with a very nice scholarship no less. The rest of us spread out over the country. Fortunately, Amy and I, at least, had chosen schools in the same city, so we had a friendship bolt-hole if things got tough.

Things never got tough for either of us, but we still saw each other regularly. Neither of us went to many movies, but we always went together, since we virtually always wanted to see the same ones. It became our initial way to keep in touch. I always kept my hands to myself. Not heading down that minefield. And I really wasn't inclined to. Amy was my buddy.

But we saw each other more and more. As we each managed to form our own gaming groups at our own schools, we naturally fell into the role as the first sub called by the other's group. We both played more games in college than we had in high school.

Turns out we each were doing things other than gaming more in college, too.

A recent campus safety scare was affecting both colleges, and I had offered to escort Amy back to her dorm after she subbed for my group. We rode the bus most of the way, and talked.

I could not resist teasing her a little.

"So, babe, you say classes are good. How is the rest of college life treating you? Got a boyfriend?"

"Boyfriend? No..." Amy replied sadly. I started to tell her to buck up, but she suddenly grinned, "But there is so much good sex to be had, I'm really not complaining!" I grinned back at her. "I think I'm turning into a regular slut," she added, unashamedly.

"You'll never be a slut," I protested anyway.

"You're right," she said, looking at me, unperturbed by the subject. "I'm certainly not easy. But the guys all seem to be..." She winked at me, and I laughed. "How about you?"

I hung my head and let my shoulders slump. "Honestly?" I asked, letting her see me mope a little.

"Yeah," Amy said softly, getting serious.

"Well... I've been pretty easy too," I said, then ducked the blow from the back of her hand.

*

Late in our sophomore year, I heard from one of my friends about a huge new game store that had opened in the city, slightly closer to Amy's campus than mine. I barely waited until he had stopped telling me about it before I got out my phone to text Amy.

ME: Yo! Big new game store just opened out in the Corners area! Want to judge its Worthiness with me this afternoon?

It only took a few minutes to get a reply.

AMY: Yes

AMY: Last class is done at two. What is your plan?

The Corners was an area of town much closer to her college than mine. I rode the city bus over to her campus. That route ran frequently. We met up at her student union, then took a campus bus about half-way to the Corners, then decided to walk the rest of the way.

"I need a car," Amy grumbled as we hoofed it the last three-quarters of a mile to our destination.

"Me too," I said airily. "Somehow, I never seem to remember to take the funds for one out of petty cash." We shared a wry smile. Trust fund babies, we were not.

The store was both everything we wanted, and not. They wasted a lot of floor space on miniatures. Most importantly, they had a huge, varied inventory, including a new Rio Grande Games offering that we both thought looked very cool. Unfortunately, they only had one copy left, and we had to play Roshambo to see who got to buy it.

I won, so Amy had to buy it. The game was almost 70 bucks.

We had a great time at the store, but when we left, we were halfway through our walk to the bus stop before we realized there was no way we would make it there in time for the next bus. Worse, the one after that would be another hour.

"Shit, shit, shit," Amy said frustratedly. "And I don't love the neighborhood where that stop is, either."

"Yeah, nothing to do while we wait," I agreed.

"Except get mugged, maybe."

Amy poked angrily at the map program on her phone while I pondered the public trans app on mine.

"It's a hike," Amy said suddenly, "but we can still get back half an hour of our lives if we walk."

"In what universe, kemosabe?" I said. "That is a helluva long route back."

"By road, yeah," Amy said, warming to her plan. "But look here, if we walk back across these fields belonging to the Ag department, we come out right at this main line campus route. Those buses run every ten minutes!"

"Your idea is less hare-brained than many you produce," I admitted, looking at the map program which stubbornly refused to give walking directions for that route. But map programs don't do logical walking routes often, anyway.

"Done," said Amy, not hitting me very hard at all for my temerity.

We re-routed ourselves to the huge field, slipped through the measly barb-wire fence and set off across the seriously huge expanse of land, happy with our decision.

Yeah.

See, we did not know it then, but fields belonging to university agriculture departments are usually full of one of two things: Corn... or cows.

There was no corn in this field.

The cows became apparent fairly quickly. But not before we were deep into the field. And a group of them were spread out all over the place, right in our path.

"Swell, watch out for cow shit," I warned, watching my footing more closely.

"I dunno, Todd," Amy said nervously after a few more strides.

"Come on, they are cows, for crying out loud," I said dismissively. "It's cool."

You know who says things like that? People who have not been in a field with cows. Without a fence in the way. Or a vehicle to hide in.

About three steps later, I became acutely aware that the cows were not, in fact, eager and enthusiastic hosts. We were being looked at askance. And one or two moved carefully to interpose themselves between us and the calves that we now saw were present with the group.

Cows are big. It is hard to truly appreciate how big, until you trade glances with one at eye level.

"How about we go around them?" Amy suggested with the wisdom of the ancients.

We turned at a right angle and resumed moving. This was great, except one or two of the cows kept pace with us for a minute or so, which was unnerving, and sent us way the hell and gone out of our way. When they stopped at last and just watched us, we kept going sideways for a bit longer, to reassure our 'hosts'.

And then there was a whole second group of the damned things in front of us. They were even less welcoming. One or two actually started moving right toward us. We backed up a few steps, then realized that we had been driven almost to the far side of the field, where the fence was up against some thick woods.

I wanted to be on the other side of that fence from the cows, who were still ponderously approaching us, vengeance for the existence of McDonald's in their eyes. We moved quicker toward it, then we panicked and started jogging. This did not ease the cow's anxiety, and a few more of them joined in to follow us. By the time we got to the fence, we were running flat out, and so were the cows. Cows combine surprising speed with their under-rated general hugeness...

We both slipped through the wire with the welcoming committee only a few yards away.

The cows realized that we had left, or were unreachable, or whatever, and wandered back to the group, keeping a suspicious bovine eye on us as they did so.

Amy and I looked at each other, gasping for breath.

"Fuck!" We both said simultaneously, leaning against each other. We laughed in a fey manner, as befitted a close call with death. A silly, close call.

"Your crazy shortcut almost got us killed," I laughed.

"My shortcut?" Amy shot back, giving me a shove. "You were the one walking us right up to a herd of Murder Steaks, all la di da!"

"La di da? La di da?" I shot back.

A variety of remarks, such as, "Shitty Navigator!" and "Wannabe matador!" were thrown about while we wrestled, trying to each more effectively shove the other. It was the kind of horseplay that we had engaged in countless times, since early in high school. We were just burning off the fight or flight hormones.

To this day, we still argue about which one of us first turned a poke into a grope. It really isn't important, because there was barely a half-second delay before the other of us groped back in retaliation. Tit for tat, as it were, ensued.