The Baby Machine

by Ashley B. D. Zacharias

Part 1: Mindy at 16

Chapter 1: Biology Rules

Mr. Crane.

I’m stuffing my sixth period mid-semester exam papers into my briefcase when Mindy comes into my office. I don’t have her this year but I know her from my tenth-grade Introduction to Biology class last year. I will remember her for the rest of my career. She'd not only been the top student in her class last year, she’s unquestionably the sharpest student that I've had during the entire fifteen years that I've been teaching high school biology. Last year, on the rare occasion when she'd missed an exam question, I learned to go back and look the question again. Invariably, I had found that either the question was badly-worded or my rubric had been wrong. Given a reasonable interpretation of the question, her answer was always right. Always. This year, my students are getting better exams because Mindy forced me to correct so many of my questions last year.

But, this time, when she walks into my office, she floors me like no other student ever had or probably ever will again. She closes the door, sits down and says, in a clear, simple voice, “I want you to marry me.”

“What?” I ask, inanely.

“I want you to marry me.”

“To who?”

“To you. I want to be married to you.”

I have to sit down; my knees are about to buckle from shock.

“I can't marry you,” I say, trying to sound reasonable. “You're a student.”

“I won't be a student when we get married. I'm going to turn sixteen next month. On my birthday, I'm going to drop out of school. In this state, sixteen year olds don't need their parents' permission to get married, so we can go to the justice of the peace after your last class and you can marry me.”

It takes me a minute to regain my composure. Then I say, “Look, Mindy. You're a terrific kid. You're smart as a whip. More than smart. You're a genius. No question about it. But you're still a teenager. You've got your whole life ahead of you. You don't need to get married to a middle-aged high-school biology teacher. You need to go to university. You should get your doctorate and become a professor. Hell. You're more likely to win a Nobel Prize than any student I've ever had. You're going to have a brilliant future. And, when you do get married, you're going to find a man near your own age who's perfect for you and will make you happy for the rest of your life.”

“That isn't what I want to do with my life. I don't want to have a career or be a professor. I want to have babies. Starting right now.”

“There's no hurry for that. You're a lovely girl. You'll have lots of men proposing to you. You can have babies after you find a proper husband. Wait until you've graduated from university and then find a good, caring man who wants to have children. Marry him.”

“No. I'm already wasting my childbearing years. I'm not going to waste any more. I started having my period two years ago. I should have had two babies by now and be pregnant with my third. Instead, from a biological point of view, I'm sitting around producing nothing. I'm not going to waste any more years. Or eggs.”

“I don't understand what you're saying. You aren't wasting years of child bearing. You can wait until you are twenty-three or twenty-four before you have your first baby and you'll still have lots of time to have as many more as you want. You can have a dozen children if you want.”

“I want more than a dozen babies. I want lots and lots.”

I stare at her for a long time. She stares back with her big, innocent, teenaged eyes. Finally, I say, “How many babies do you want?” My voice is pitched low; it sounds strangled in my ears.

“I want as many as possible. At least two dozen. I might manage two and a half dozen before I reach menopause.”

I gape at her. Thirty babies? Is that even possible? I know that it is. Every year in my lecture on human reproduction, I mention that the world record is sixty-seven babies to one Russian mother. Of course, that includes an astonishing number of twins and triplets. But even without the multiple births, half that number is possible. Except that I can't imagine someone wanting to do it. Especially not someone with a future that is as bright as Mindy's. It’s inconceivable. She wants to be able to fill my whole classroom with her own children. “Why?”

“Biology,” she answers with a puzzled frown, as though the answer is too obvious to need stating. “That's the most important lesson that you taught me last year. You said that, from the perspective of evolution, the only purpose of a human being is to pass his or her genetic complement on to as many offspring as possible. I've been thinking about that for a year and I've decided that you're right. Evolution is right. The most important thing that I can do with my life is to have as many babies as I can. I intend to have at least one baby every year from now until menopause. With reasonable luck, on average it’ll be more than one per year. Like you said, I'm smart. I've got great genes. I’ll pass my them on to more than two dozen babies. That's the most important contribution that I can make to the world. I'm going to dedicate my life to passing my genome down to as many members of the next generation as possible.”

I am speechless. I stare at her for the longest time. She sits there waiting for me to comprehend what she has said. She has the saintly air of a person who knows without a doubt that she’s on a holy mission. At first I think that she’s playing a joke on me but the expression on her face dispels that thought. She looks as sincere as Mother Teresa. But a whole lot more beautiful. “You...” I pause to organize my thoughts a little better. There were many things that I could say, but I have to try to think like a fifteen-year-old genius because I have to figure out how to make her understand that her interpretation of my biology lessons is terribly wrong. Eventually, I decide that the best argument is pure practicality. “You can't take care of that many babies. The way human evolution works is that mothers do not just have the babies, they dedicate time and effort to raising them. Extended nurturing is what gives the babies the optimal chance of success. That's why human babies have such a long period of dependency compared to other animals. We have fewer offspring but each of our children is more likely to survive and reproduce successfully because we teach it how. That takes a mother's time.”

“No problem,” she snapped back immediately. “I'm not taking care of any babies. As soon as each one is born, we're going to put it up for adoption to a good home. You can sell a baby for a lot of money. That’s the correct thing to do from an evolutionary perspective. The people who can afford to pay a lot for a baby are the ones who are most likely to give it a good home and raise it properly. Besides, if you charge as much as you can for each adoption, it’ll help defray the cost of being married to me. In fact, you should be able to make a considerable profit. I've worked the numbers. I can show you the spreadsheets.”

I stare at her. I’m not as good at thinking like a fifteen-year-old genius as I had hoped. She’s way ahead of me at every step.

She continues pressing her terrible, inexorable logic. “Besides, the quicker we get rid of one baby, the quicker I can get pregnant with the next one. It's possible for a woman to give birth to a second baby less than a year after the first is born, you know.”

I feel my ears begin to burn. I’m going to have to explain something that I never reveal to my students or colleagues. Ever. But this is an exceptional circumstance and I'm suddenly feeling desperate. I'm going to have to confess my dark secret. “Look. Mindy. There's something that you don't know about me. Something that nobody at this school knows. There's a reason why I can never be the father of your children–”

“You mean because you're gay? I hate to break it to you, Mr. Warren, but everybody in the school knows that. You wear queer like a coat of pink paint. Your gender orientation is exactly why you’ll be the perfect husband for me. Besides, it'll be fun when we're married and I start having one baby after another. Everyone is going to think that they made an awful mistake. They'll think that you're straight after all. In fact, I'm going to have so many babies that they're going to think that you're the greatest stud in the country.”

I am flabbergasted. She can't be that ignorant. She aced my biology class. “Do you know what homosexual means? Do you know how babies are made? How in hell do you think that you're going to get pregnant if you're married to me? I'm not bisexual. I have no interest in women at all. If you marry me, you're not going to have a single baby. You're going to die a virgin.”

“I read Dawkins' Selfish Gene last spring and then all E. O. Wilson's stuff over the summer and it makes perfect genetic sense for you to marry me. You have to take off your cultural blinders and see what our marriage is going to be like in reality. When you're my husband, you won't be impregnating me. You'll be arranging for other men to impregnate me. Lots of other men. Your genetic contribution will be indirect, just like sterile worker bees. You and I have a similar nationality so almost all of our genetic material is the same. We have way over ninety-nine percent of our genes in common. You’ll be ensuring that the genes that you and I share will be propagated by helping me have a lot of children with other men. That's how homosexuality works in evolutionary theory. You have more biological motivation to keep me pregnant than a husband who would be trying to impregnate me by himself and then be burdened with raising his own children.”

“Now wait a minute! What are you saying? You think that I'm going to marry you and then find other men to have sex with you? Like I'm your pimp? Are you nuts?” I’m losing it but I don't care. In this ridiculous situation, losing it is the right response.

She is not losing her patience. She explains in a calm voice, “No. It's simple science, just like you taught us. It's logical for you to help propagate the species by helping me get pregnant. Besides, it's practical, too. After you marry me, you can have as many gay lovers as you want. I won't complain like any other wife would. I think it's called being your 'gay beard.' I'll be happy to help you with your love life, just like you'll be helping me with mine. As long as you keep sending men to keep me pregnant, you can live whatever kind of life you want. We're going to have the perfect marriage, even if it’ll be unconventional.”

“Where am I going to get all these men for your bed? You think I'm going to be cruising bars, asking strangers if they want to sleep with my wife? Or maybe put an ad on the Internet that says, 'Come on over and impregnate my wife for me?' Hell no!” Usually I don't swear in front of students, but Mindy is driving me half crazy with her ridiculous proposition.

She wrinkles her nose. “Don't be disgusting. I don't want a bunch of drunks or horny old men with awful diseases to father my children. You taught us that the most common cause of sterility in women is sexually transmitted diseases. I don't want to be sterile. That would destroy my biological value. You've got to find men who are clean. Virgin men would be best. You can do that better than anyone. You've got classrooms full of eager boys. I expect you to pick out the brightest and best, the ones with the best genetic material, and discretely tell them that they can come over to our house and have sex with me as often as they like. Tell them that the deal only lasts for as long as they don't tell anyone about it. If a boy gets an A in your course, you can give him free access to all the sex that he wants. It'll be a wonderful an incentive program for your male students. I'll bet they'll score right at the top the next time they have to take a standardized test. The boys'll drag your class averages through the stratosphere. This is a win for everybody.”

I felt like crying at her naïveté. “I'm not going to win anything. I'm going to get fired. And thrown in jail. Just talking about marrying you and giving your sexual favors to other men is grounds for immediate dismissal. I'm sure not going to mention a word about this to any teenaged students.”

“It'll be no problem if you do it right. You don't have to say anything to any students. Wait until they graduate. Then they won't be students any more. As soon as they've got their diplomas in their hot, calloused hands, you can have any kind of social relationship with them that you want. And you don't have to give me to all that many boys. It's not like you have to announce our arrangement to the whole school. I figure that if you give three or four of them an open invitation to have sex with me any time they want, then I'll be getting sperm in me at least twice a day and probably more than that. I'm betting that they'll all want to have me every day and that half of them will be able to do it twice on a lot of days. Four boys would be enough to have intercourse with me at least a half dozen times a day. Especially the sex-starved geeks who get the good grades in your class. My eggs will be drowning in sperm as soon as I ovulate. I'll get pregnant immediately. I may never have another period for the rest of my life. Of course, their privileges end as soon as my urine test is positive. But that won't be a problem. All you have to do is tell them that they've made me pregnant, but we don't want child support. As long as they don't tell anyone then you won't tell anyone. They'll run away as fast as they can and they'll never come back. Then I get nine months of pregnancy and birth before you have to find a new group of potential fathers. Of course, four is a lower limit. If you can supply a dozen boys each time, then I'll be happy to accommodate all of them. In fact, would be excellent if a dozen boys are sharing my bed. With that many, we can limit them to one visit every second day and I'll still be having sexual intercourse half a dozen times daily. I'll be receiving more mature sperm and that will make it all the more likely that I'll get pregnant immediately.”

I nod. “You're right about that.” Then I stop myself. What am I saying? This is never going to happen. I tell her so. “This is never going to happen.”

“Yes, it is,” she replies. “I know that I've sprung this on you all of a sudden, but I've thought it through and it makes perfect sense for everyone. I'm going to go away now and let you adjust to the idea. When you have time to think about it, you'll see how much sense it makes. I'll come back next month and we can start making wedding plans. Our wedding won't take much planning. We're just going to get a license and take a quick trip to the courthouse. I don't want a big ceremony or a reception or anything. No white dress and fancy cake for me. Not even a wedding present. All I want is a really busy honeymoon right here at home, starting as soon as we've exchanged our vows.”

She springs from her chair and leaves the room as abruptly as she had arrived.

I spend almost an hour sitting in shock, replaying her words in my mind, over and over. What she’s proposing can not happen. Ever. But I can not, for the life of me, think of a single logical reason why not.

From a biological perspective, she’s absolutely correct.

* * *

I do not see Mindy again for three weeks and I assume that she has forgotten our weird conversation. Teenaged girls, even astoundingly brilliant ones, are like that. They get a flood of hormones that makes them think some wild thought, then the flood ebbs and the thoughts are forgotten. If Mindy remembers what she said to me at all, it’s with a flush of embarrassment and the kindest thing for me to do is to pretend that we never spoke at all.

For me, though, the conversation can not be so easily ignored. Late at night, when I want to fall asleep, I find myself fantasizing about what my marriage to Mindy would be like. Imagine. Me married to a woman. I could bring my own lovers into a real household. Would she cook for them? Serve them drinks? Smile happily when we are physically affectionate to each other in her presence?

And then there is the other, darker side of the arrangement that she proposed. How could I troll my classes for boys to send home to my wife?

I ask myself that, not as a rhetorical or ethical question, but as a practical matter. Exactly how would I do it? I would approach a boy who aced my class and say what? “Hey, Jake. Congratulations on your graduation. You did really well in my advanced biology class last year and I'd like you to meet my wife. She's eager to get to know a young man like yourself. And, by ‘know’, I mean carnally. In the Biblical sense, if you get my drift. I'll give you her phone number and you can make arrangements to go over to my house some time when I'm not around and fuck her silly. Oh, and your friends, Jack and Pete? Bring them along. They're honor grads, right? My sweet wife would love to fuck them, too.” Yeah. Right. Like I could ever do something like that.

Except that I could. I seduce other men often enough and that’s a much trickier business. Talking a teenaged boy into hopping into bed with Mindy would be pretty easy compared to what I do most weekends. For one thing, there would be a hell of a lot of hormones working in my favor. And, for another, Mindy would be there, working away like a little trooper. All I'd have to do is put a boy in the same room with her and leave. She'd do the seduction part. The way she talks, she’d rape him if that were necessary.

I tell myself that I have to be careful. If I keep thinking like this, I'd soon be regretting that Mindy has changed her mind.

Except that she doesn't change her mind. Toward the end of the first week in February, I’m proofreading the instructions for a new lab exercise when she walks into my office. I don't notice her until she interrupts my reading with the comment, “Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm going to withdraw from school in the morning. Do you want to read my withdrawal letter?”

I drop my paper on my desk and look up. “No.”

“That's okay. It doesn't say anything important. Just that I'm sixteen and am dropping out of school because I'm going to get married.”

“Not to me.”

“Yes, to you, darling. I've decided. I've come to make you an offer that you can't refuse.”

“Are you going to put a gun to my head?”

“In a way. If you don't marry me, then I'm going to tell my parents that you've been sexually harassing me. Worse, I'm going to sit on a Coke bottle to tear my anus open and bruise it all up. I'm sure that it'll hurt like hell, but I'm tougher than I look. Then I'm going to the police and tell them that you raped me anally. You're the kind of guy that would prefer a girl’s anal orifice to her normal one. I'll say that you used a condom so there's no DNA. You'll lose your job immediately and go to prison for a long time.”

“I don't think so. It'll be your word against mine.”

“You know as well as I do that they'll believe me and not you. There's lots of people who'll believe anything I say about you just because I'm young and female and innocent and you're middle-aged and in a position of authority and queer. You know that I'm right. I'll be in that police office crying in pain – real pain; I'm serious about sitting on that coke bottle – the regular twelve ounce size, not the precious little retro one. I'm going to put my whole body weight on it. My feet right off the floor. It's going into me as deep as it can go. I’ll probably tear my intestinal wall and have to be hospitalized. Then you'll be crucified. Nobody will listen to a single word you say. They’ll nail you to the police station wall as soon as they catch you.”

I know that she's right. If she makes an accusation like that, especially if she tears her asshole up first, my life is over. Not just my job, but my whole life. Somehow I know that she'd be smart enough to put a condom over the bottle so that there'd be a little spermicidal lube in the rape kit to give her story all the weight that it’ll need. “You wouldn't do that,” I protest faintly.

“Of course I would.” Her sweet little girl voice rings like cold steel.

“If you accuse me of something like that, then I can never marry you. Nobody would let me.”

“No. But the next teacher that I ask will do it. He'll be so scared of getting his life trashed like yours that he'd do anything that I tell him to do.”

“You can't blackmail me.”

“I already have. Didn’t you hear what I said? That was blackmail, darling. Like you teach in your science classes, the world's not fair, but it's predictable. You have a simple choice. Marry me next week and I'll do everything I can to make your life a joy; jilt me and I'll destroy you utterly. I mean it about making your life a joy. I promise that I'll do everything that I can do to make our home a heaven on earth for you. You know how determined I am. I didn't ace every course I took in this school by brains alone. I know how to work my butt off. I promise you that life with me will be joyful for you, and I'm going to work harder than you can imagine to make that promise true.”

I believe her. Damn me to hell, I believe every damned word she says.

“You can take me down to the courthouse tomorrow to get a marriage license. I'll come here after your last class and bring my birth certificate and identification.” She stands up and is about to leave the room, but I stop her.

“Wait. What are you going to tell your parents?”

“Nothing. Not a single thing about you and me, anyway. I'm going to tell them that I'm emancipating myself and that I'm moving out and that I don't want to see them again. Not ever again. They'll understand why. They won't like it, but they won't try to stop me and they won't try to find me again. Some day I might tell you all about it but that’ll have to wait until we know each other better. For now, you can trust me when I say that my parents are the least of our worries.”

She leaves the room. Her mind is made up and I have no choice but to do what she demands.

I looked at my grade book for my fourth year advanced biology class and begin thinking about which boys should be invited to spend my wedding night with my new bride.

She might promise to make my life heavenly, but I resent like hell being forced to do something that I don't want to do. My class list includes some boys who might make her ask for an annulment before our honeymoon is over.

I will choose her first set of lovers with care.

Chapter 2: First Comes Marriage

Mr. Crane.

Once again, Mindy is a step ahead of me. Walking out of the city records office with our freshly notarized marriage license, I suggest that we celebrate our impending wedding with a meal at a little Italian trattoria that I know. She smiles and says that she’d like that. A few minutes later, looking across a white linen tablecloth, she drops a bombshell on me.

“I’d like to get married on Valentine's Day,” she says. “We could get married tomorrow if you want, but I don't mind waiting a few extra days.” I don't realize that she’s aiming her bombsight.

“Okay,” I reply. “That works for me.” I wonder if she’s getting sentimental about our nuptials. Valentine's Day is a celebration of romantic love and, as nearly as I can see, our marriage is all about biology. Love doesn’t enter into Mindy's calculations anywhere.

“That’ll give you a few days to find the right boys for our wedding night.” She’s on her final approach to her target.

“Okay.” I’m less enthusiastic about that chore, but have resigned myself to finding someone to send to Mindy's room once we’re married. In fact, I’ve already selected three likely candidates, though I haven’t approached any of them yet.

“There's just one thing.” Her finger is on the bomb release trigger.

“Yeah?” I ask tentatively.

“I don't want to know who they are.” The bomb is flying straight at my head but I don't recognize it yet.

I’m puzzled. “You know that they’re going to be students from your high school. You suggested that. You're going to recognize them, even if you don't know their names.”

“Well,” she says, “that's the thing. I never want to know who’s fathering my children. Not ever. I don't want to know what they look like. I don't want to know what color skin they have. Nothing.”

“Why?” is the most obvious question to ask.

“I don't want to form any possible attachment to the boys or any attachment to my babies because of the boys. You can know who they are, but you must never, ever tell me.”

Though perverse, I can understand her logic. But there’s a practical problem. “That's not going to be possible. Like I said, you're going to see them and you're sure to recognize them.”

Her bombshell explodes, “Not if I'm blindfolded.”

I am left shell-shocked. “What?”

“I want you to blindfold me before you give me to men for their sexual use. Every time. I expect that I'll have intercourse with dozens or even hundreds of men during my fertile years, but I never want to see a single face or hear a single name.”

I sit staring at her for a long time. This destroys my cunning plan. I was going to select the two homeliest boys in my class – bright boys, but with faces and bodies that even their mothers would find hard to love – to introduce her to the married life that she has chosen. They would give her an incentive to file for an immediate annulment. But if she can't see her lovers, then it doesn't matter if I send the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Frankenstein's Monster into her nuptial bed. For all she will know, she could be making love to the class president and captain of the football team. The third boy in my plan would be African-American in the hope that she’s a closet racist. But the boy speaks well and clearly. He's no gangsta, and she’ll never guess his race if she’s blindfolded.

She adds, “You should tell them that they can give me instructions, but they must not talk about themselves at all. That's the deal that will keep me out of the police station and keep your reputation intact. As well as my anus.”

“I can't control what they say to you.”

“Just tell them to say as little as possible and I'll make sure that they comply. They'll be silent as a tomb if I tell them that they'll only be welcome back if they don't talk.”

The waiter delivers our food and we eat in silence. I order wine for myself but my fiancée won’t be old enough to drink legally for another five years. Half a decade. God save me, she’s such a young thing. A young, female, American Machiavelli.

I fear her more than I love her.

As we near the end of the meal, she speaks again. “I think we've covered everything that we need to discuss at this point. I'm looking forward to a very active sex life over the next couple of months. Don't let me down. The only limit on how many boys I can handle is how many hours there are in a day. You supply as many men as you can and I'll make myself available to all of them. Don't worry about that.”

I can’t suppress my emotional reaction to her blatant offer to make herself available to one and all. But, to my amazement, my emotional reaction is more lust than disgust. She’s making me hungry for a man of my own. I’m going to have to go cruising after I drop her off tonight.

* * *

A box addressed to “Mindy Crane” arrives at my house three days later. She must have ordered something the very day that we signed our marriage license.

It’s a shock to see her first name followed by my last name. Even seeing our names together on the marriage license wasn’t as jarring as this parcel. The marriage license seemed fantastic. This is gritty reality.

The parcel is the size and shape of a short pile of textbooks but not nearly as heavy. It’s wrapped in plain brown paper with a nondescript return address somewhere in Los Angeles. It doesn’t rattle when I shake it. I’m sorely tempted to open it, but don’t. It's her parcel and opening it would feel like an intimate act. The act of a husband.

But I can't give it to her now. She’s no longer attending school and I have no interest in going to her parent's house. I don’t see her again until Valentine's Day. Our wedding day.

As promised, she shows up after my last class and says, “Okay. Let's go get married. We have a four o'clock appointment with a justice of the peace. We'll be man and wife by ten after four. I'm so excited that I feel like I'm going to explode.”

She sounds more scared than excited. I can hardly blame her. She’s about to embark on the most foolish endeavor that I can imagine. Marrying a gay man who’s more than twice her age? Demanding that he send as many horny young boys to her bed as possible? Madness! And in the long term? Planning to wrack her body with one pregnancy after another until she’s middle-aged? Pure masochism! She should rebel like other sixteen-year-old children. Dye her hair green, get an ugly tattoo on her lower back, and pierce every part of her face that will support a stud or ring. That's the sensible way to stick it to her parents. Get in their face and show them what you think of their awful parenting. Don't run away to a life of whoredom.

“Don't do this,” I say. “Change your mind. You've only missed one week of school. Come back tomorrow and start going to class again. If you can't stand to live with your parents, then I'll let you live in my spare bedroom until you graduate. You don't have to marry me. I can be your unofficial step father. I'll let you live your life however you want. No rules. No curfew. Just don't tell anyone where you're living and you can stay for as long as you like. Until you finish college, even. I'll give you money for tuition and books.”

“Darling,” she says, “let's stop all this foolish talk and go get married. I want the honeymoon to begin as soon as possible. Did you rent a hotel room for tonight or will we be using your place?”

“I reserved a hotel room,” I admit. “The honeymoon suite at the Marriott.”

“How sweet. When will the boys arrive?” She looks at me with a piercing stare. This is the keystone of her dark fantasy castle.

I dare not disappoint or she will make good on her threat to destroy my life. That was the only fact that I knew for certain. I can practically see that bottle ripping into her asshole. “I told one boy to arrive at seven; a second to arrive at eight-thirty; and the third to arrive at ten. It's going to be up to you to get rid of each before the next arrives. Or, if you want, you can let them all meet each other and spend the night together.”

She laughs in delight. “I'm going to have to send them away. If these are high school boys, then they're going to end up in fistfights if they run into each other.”

“They're high school boys. They're all seniors, due to graduate in June.”

“Come on, then. Let's get married. We'll have time for a nice first meal as man and wife before I have to show up to be guest of honor at my first orgy and serial deflowering.”

“You know that these boys are probably all virgins, right? They're not the kind who've had a lot of dates.”

“Exactly what I want. No risk of STDs.”

“Do you know what to do with a virgin boy?”

“I've been reading about it. It's no big deal. And if it doesn't work out tonight, we'll just try again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. I don't know what you told them, but I'm going to make it pretty clear to them that we're going to be having sex a lot so it doesn't matter if it's not perfect the first time. No pressure. Just play. Day after day of sex play. Think they'll like that?” She laughs again. She has a delightful laugh.

I hope she still remembers how to laugh when we celebrate our first anniversary. When she's already pregnant with her second child. When she's just turned seventeen.

“A box arrived for you at my house,” I say.

“I know. I had it sent by courier and I've been tracking it online. Be sure to bring it to the hotel room tonight.”

“What's in it?”

“Didn't you open it? How sweet. It's a leather half hood. I told you that I have to be blindfolded. It locks on so that the boys can't take it off without my permission. If you didn't bring it with you, then we'll have to stop by our house and get it. You have to lock it on me and keep the key. It's going to be an interesting challenge, learning to have sex with boys without being able to see what I'm doing, but blind people do it so it must be possible. I bet the boys're going to like it when I have to feel my way around them.” She giggles. “I've got nice hands for that kind of work, don't you think?” She holds her delicate white hands in front of her face.

I notice that she referred to my house as “ours.” Damn. I'm going to lose all my privacy.

“Look,” I say, making one last stab at being practical. “I can't afford to let students come to my house. I have to keep this bizarre arrangement as secret as possible.”

“I've thought about that.” Of course she had; she thinks of everything. “I put a deposit on a two-room apartment a couple of miles from the school. It'll cost something to keep a second residence, but it's as small and as cheap as I could find. By this time next year, we'll have sold my first baby and that will more than pay for the apartment. In fact, you should find someone to adopt the baby as soon as I'm pregnant and tell them that they have to pay my living and medical expenses. I read that people do that. With luck, you'll only have to pay for the apartment out of your own salary for a couple of months. It'll work out fine. You'll see.”

I shrug. My life is spinning out of control faster than I could have believed possible. I have no fight left.

“Let's get going,” she says. “We have to make our four o'clock appointment and I'd like to get there a little early just to make sure.”

An hour later, she is Mrs. Mindy Crane and I’m Mr. Freaked Out. What have I done? What has she made me do?

Mindy is correct that everything that we are doing is legal but she’s too naive to realize that legal doesn't matter. Vigilante mobs don't consult law books. She's obviously never seen a PTA meeting. A room full of soccer moms is first cousin to a raging mob. When all that estrogen flows, those women shriek like harpies about whether it would be better to make cookies or cupcakes for the next bake sale. What is going to happen when they find out that one of their darlings has dropped out of school to marry her gay, middle-aged biology teacher? And that he's offering her sexual services to any boy who scores an A in his course? That she's having all that sex without any protection? And that when she gets pregnant, he is going to sell her baby to the highest bidder?

Word is going to get out. Make no mistake about that. Three boys are getting ready to consummate my wedding night and they won’t resist bragging about their wild sex adventure to their buddies tomorrow.

There'll be torches and pitchforks aplenty filling Apple Blossom Lane tomorrow night. I'm going to be burned at the stake. After they drawn and quartered me. I'm going to die a painful, humiliating death.

Mindy is oblivious. “Let's go eat,” she says brightly. “I'm famished and I've got a big night ahead of me.”

I want to cry like a little girl.

Chapter 3: The Pain of Getting Deflowered

Mindy.

I'm married! I'm Mrs. Mindy Crane! I can't wait to sign my name to something! I'm so excited, I could bust! I bet I get pregnant tonight! I can feel it in my gut! In the baby-making part of my gut! I want to have a boy spurting inside me so bad, I can barely stand it!

I wonder if it's going to hurt bad when I get my cherry busted? That's what the boys call it when they make a girl into a woman. Busting her cherry. I guess they call it that because they bust into her down there and the blood is cherry red. I don't care if it hurts. It can't be worse than a vaccination, can it? I mean, if it's worse than that, then women would stay virgins forever. Nobody would ever get pregnant and there'd be no people left in the world.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm going to be blindfolded and helpless and the first boy who comes at me can to do whatever he wants. I mean, I can't really make him go away if I can't see him, can I?

Maybe I should have bought the full hood with the zipper over the mouth. Then I wouldn't be able to tell the boy to stop if I get afraid. And I could have gotten handcuffs, too. If I were blindfolded and gagged and handcuffed, I'd be really certain that I wouldn't be able to stop the boy from busting my cherry and making me pregnant.

But, really, I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about the other thing. What if the boy doesn't want me? What if I take my clothes off and he looks at me and thinks that I'm too ugly and doesn't want to do it to me? I think I'm pretty, but my butt is kind of fat and my stomach bulges a little. I'm going to have to remember to keep my stomach sucked in. I won't be able to see myself so I won't know if I'm letting myself bulge out. My stomach is going to get tired if I have to keep it sucked in all the time. Mr. Crane said that he's got three boys coming tonight so that would be a lot of sucking-in time. I don't know if I can hold my stomach in for long enough.

And even if the boy wants me, what if he doesn't know what to do with me? I mean, Mr. Crane is giving me to boys who've never done it before. If they don't know what to do and I don't know what to do, then how are we going to do it right? The boy's penis is supposed to get hard, but I've been reading about it and the books say that sometimes it doesn’t work. Then the woman is supposed to help him get hard. I might have to touch a man's penis. What is it going to feel like? Sometimes they call it a woody. Is it going to feel like wood? I read that sometimes women even put it in their mouth to make it hard. I don't know if I can do that. I think I might throw up if I try.

No! I won't throw up! I can do it! I can do whatever it takes to get pregnant. I'll just close my eyes and try not to taste anything and lick and suck it like a popsicle until it's as hard as a rock. I just said 'close my eyes' to myself. Isn't that funny? I'm not going to have to close my eyes. I'm going to be blindfolded. I'm not going to be able to see the boy's penis. I'm always going to be blindfolded. I'm going to have dozens of babies and I'm never going to see a man's penis in my whole life. Maybe that's good. Maybe it would turn me off to see a man's penis. But what if I want to see one? I guess I can ask Mr. Crane to show me his. I mean, he is my husband, after all. I know that he won't get hard, even if he sees my breasts, but that's okay. I don't want him to have sex with me. I just want him to be my husband. A friend kind of husband, not a sex kind of husband. The boys will do the sex part. In an hour, we'll go up there and I'll get undressed and blindfolded and wait for the first boy to come in and bust my cherry. God! This is so exciting! I'm almost peeing myself!

God! I'm going to be doing it in a hotel room! That's fancy. I didn't think Mr. Crane would really do that. I thought that I'd have to use his house. I don't think he wants me there. He looked real strange when I mentioned it. I'm so, so, so glad that I rented that little apartment to get pregnant in. I didn't tell him that we can't use it for another two weeks. The lease won't start until March. I don't know if he's going to want to keep me in the hotel for all that time or let me use his house after tomorrow. I don't know how much the hotel costs but I bet that two weeks would be thousands of dollars. I hope he has that much money because I'm sure not going to wait until March to get pregnant. I'm going to have sex somewhere every day. If it's not in a motel, then it'll have to be in Mr. Crane's house. My honeymoon starts tonight and doesn't end until the pee stick turns pink. Or whatever color it turns when you're pregnant. Maybe it turns pink for a girl and blue for a boy? I don't think so. I think women are surprised when they give birth.

God, I've got so much to learn.

But I'm going to have years to learn it all. Years and years. And hundreds of men. Mr. Crane is going to send hundreds of men to have sex with me over the years. That's the deal and I'm going to make sure that he sticks to it.

* * *

The hotel room is so fancy! They have credit card thingies to unlock the door. I don't even need a key. The clerk downstairs sure looked funny at Mr. Crane, but he was cool. He just said that he had a reservation and acted like there was nothing strange about being with a wife who was only as tall as his chest. And then, when the clerk asked about luggage and Mr. Crane said that we didn't have any, the clerk looked real disgusted. I thought that hotel clerks were supposed to be all cool and professional. Didn't he see our wedding rings? Did I mention that? Mr. Crane had wedding rings for me and him at our marriage ceremony and we put them on each other to show that we're really married, legally and all.

The only luggage that we have is the box with my hood in it and Mr. Crane carried it up to the room himself. It's still wrapped up. I don't think that he's opened it yet. I wish he had so that we could be sure that everything is there. There's supposed to be the hood and a lock with two keys. I hope they remembered to put the lock in the box. I wouldn't take the hood off, I'm sure about that, but I don't trust the boys. They might want to see my face first to see if I'm pretty enough to have sex with. I think I am. Everyone says that I'm a pretty girl. But you can never tell about boys. If they don't want me, they might tell me that I'm dog ugly just to be mean and then walk out of the room.

When the hood is locked on, they won't be able to use that excuse because they won't be able to see my face. At least, they won't see most of it. The hood only goes over my head as far as the bottom of my nose. It doesn't cover my mouth. That's in case I have to suck a boy's penis and make it hard. But there's a strap that goes under my chin and locks with a little lock so that nobody can take it off unless they have a key. Even I won't have the key. Only Mr. Crane will have it and he won't come back to unlock me until midnight. That's how it's going to work. I'm going to have the hood locked on me for more than five hours. I hope it fits.

It's six-thirty already. The first boy is supposed to be here in half an hour. God! He could be having sex with me in thirty-five minutes. In thirty-five minutes, I won't be a virgin any more! I'll have my cherry busted and I'll be a woman and I'll know what it's like to have sex with a man.

What a night!

Mr. Crane is talking to me, now. “Are you sure you want to do this? It's not too late. I don't have to give the keycard to anyone. You can just sleep here by yourself and tomorrow, come and live at my place and go back to school.”

“I'm sure,” I say. I'm annoyed that he keeps trying to make me back out, like I don't really know what I want. I know what I want for sure. I've been sure since I first started thinking about my duty to evolution. I have to make as many babies as possible. That's simple biology. I don't know why Mr. Crane has such a hard time accepting it. He taught it to me. “I want the first boy to come here soon. When will he get here? Will he knock on the door?”

“No. I'm going to wait in the lobby. When I see him, I'll give him the keycard and room number. After that, it's up to you. You can send him away any time, you know. Even after he comes into the room, you can tell him that you've changed your mind and tell him to go away.”

“I'm not going to change my mind.”

“Okay. I'm going down to the lobby now. The boy might be early.”

“Wait. You have to put the hood on me and take the key with you.”

“I think the blindfold is a real bad idea. You won't know what's happening around you. You'll be helpless if something goes wrong. If you're going to go through with this, you have to do it with your eyes open.”

“No! I told you. I don’t ever want to see the men who are going to be the fathers of my babies. Never. Even turning off the lights wouldn't be good enough. I have to be blindfolded. That's the deal.” I take the box off the bed and tear the wrapping off. It takes a minute, but I finally get it out. The hood takes my breath away. It's perfect. Absolutely perfect. Black and shiny and heavy. It's not a toy. When it's in my hands, it feels like it means business. My impending cherry busting suddenly feels more real than it's ever felt before. It's not just an idea now. It's the weight of the hood in my hands.

My hands are shaking as I raise it over my head. I push my hair back away from my face and then slip it on. It's a little loose but that's all right. I can force my eyes open a little and I can't see anything, hardly. There's a little light leaking around the nose part and that's about all. I'm a little disappointed but it's okay; I can't see enough down there to matter. I feel around for the ends of the chin straps and then fumble for a minute to get it buckled. Mr. Crane doesn't lift a finger to help me. He's making it plain that he doesn't like this. Tough. It's my wedding night and I'm going to get deflowered the way I want. Blindfolded and helpless.

When I get it strapped snugly under my chin, the parts beside my nose are pulled closer to my cheeks because the straps put a little more pressure there. Now it's completely dark. There's not even a speck of light getting to my eyes. I'm blind as a bat. This is great! “Lock it, please,” I tell Mr. Crane.

I hear him sigh, then feel him touch my neck by the strap under my chin. A little click tells me that I'm now locked into the hood. “Thank you. I'll wait here for the first boy.”

“He should be up in a few minutes, but if he's late, you might have to wait for a while. It'll be pretty boring.”

“Believe me, I'm not going to be bored. I'm so excited that I can hardly sit still.”

“Yeah.” He sounds sarcastic.

“Wait!”

“Yeah?” he asks, sounding hopeful.

“Do you think that I should take my clothes off now, or should I wait and let the boy undress me?”

“Let the boy peel the tomato,” he says. “It'll help him get into the mood. In fact, if I were you, I'd get dressed between boys so that each one feels like he's getting fresh fruit.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.” Sarcastic again.

“Come back in an hour and knock on the door. That's the only way that I'll know that it's time to send the boy away and get dressed for the next one.”

There's no reply. I hear the door click closed. I feel around for the bed, then sit down and wait for my maker to come. I think of him as my maker because he's going to make me a woman. God made men but men make women.

I don't believe in God. I just say that to myself because it's funny. God made men but men make woman. Ha-ha.

* * *

The door clicks open. I don't know how long I've been waiting, but it doesn't feel like long. I bet the boy is early. An eager beaver. But aren't I the eager beaver? That's what they call a woman's parts sometimes, you know. A beaver. And my beaver is eager.

“Hello?” The hood muffles the sound a little bit because it covers my ears but I can hear the nervous quaver in the boy's voice.

He sounds as nervous as I feel. “Come in and close the door,” I say, trying to keep that same quaver out of my voice. One of us has to sound like we know what we are doing.

“It's closed. Are you sure this is all right?”

“Don't talk. Don't say a single word unless you have to. I'll talk.” I stand up and let my hands hang by my sides. “I can't see you, so you're going to have to come to me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well. Come on.”

“I'm here.” The voice is right in front of me but the boy hasn't touched me.

I raise my arm. My fingers brush against soft fabric. “Take my hand.”

When a damp hand gingerly takes mine, I pull us together until my breasts are pressing against him. I put my arms around his body and hold him firmly against me. He is taller than me so I have to tilt my head up. “Kiss me,” I say softly.

It's not the first time that I've been kissed, but I'm no expert at it. Neither is he. When he pushes his lips against mine, his mouth is closed tight. I don't think that he's ever kissed a girl before. And he has to leave in an hour. I'm going to have to work hard to get him to deflower me before his time is up.

He pulls away after a few seconds. I don't say anything about his kissing. During our kiss, he automatically wrapped his arms around me to hold me loosely. I slide my hand up behind his head and push him down lightly while I brush my lips against his. “You taste nice,” I say, trying to murmur seductively. It must have worked because he relaxes his mouth a little and we manage a halfway decent kiss this time.

I let him kiss me again, trying not to rush him. I squeeze him tight and then murmur, “I'd like it if you felt my breasts. Would you like to feel them?”

He didn't need to be asked twice. As soon as the words leave my mouth, his hands slip around to my chest and begin kneading my mammaries through my blouse and bra. He’s a little rough, but not too bad. I put up with it for a minute, then murmur, “If you take my top off it’ll feel better for both of us.”

He begins fumbling with my buttons. I’m going to help him – I could get my top off in a fraction of the time that he is taking – but then I remember what Mr. Crane said. Letting the boy peel the tomato will help get him into the mood.

My hands feel funny just dangling while he's trying to push buttons through the button holes so I begin caressing his arms and chest. Then I feel his buttons and realize that I should be taking his shirt off, too. He has a head start, but I get all his buttons undone before he gets down to my last two. And I'm handicapped by my blindfold. If this is a race, I'm the clear winner. Three cheers for Miss Nimble Fingers! Mrs. Nimble Fingers, I should say. Mrs. Nimble Fingers Crane.

I'm a married woman and I'm cheating on my husband with another man. My, that makes me feel all grown up.

As soon as my blouse is unbuttoned, I slip it off my shoulders and let it fall to the floor.

He reaches behind my back and begins fumbling with my bra strap. Usually I slip my arms out of the straps and turn the bra around to work the hooks in the front where I can see them. This time, I almost do it out of habit, then stop myself. It’ll be sexier for him to figure it out himself. A little frustration can increase the sexual tension all out of proportion. I don’t know how I know that, but I’m sure of it. Maybe it’s my womanly instinct.

He's a smart boy, it only takes him a couple of tries before I feel the straps relax around my chest and my breasts loosen in the cups. I'm not huge, but I'm better endowed than a lot of the girls in  school, even the seniors. When I walk down the school corridors, I catch boys staring at my chest all the time. Chances are, this boy has been ogling my boobs since they began developing in earnest two years ago.

I hope he feels like his dreams are coming true as my bra slips to the floor.

He caresses me gently. Much more gently now than when my breasts were covered by layers of fabric.

He speaks, his voice tinged with awe, “My hands feel like they're tingling.”

My body has a magical power that I never imagined. “Shh,” I say as I lean forward and tilt up to kiss his lips. Then I say, “You can kiss my breasts if you want.”

He wants. I feel his head slide down my body, then his lips and tongue suck and lick my nipples, first left, then right, then left again. They’re tingling and I know that they’re hard and sticking straight out. I decide that I like sex.

After a couple of minutes, I say, “Why don't you finish undressing me?”

Why not, indeed? He immediately reaches for the waistband on my skirt.

He fumbles with it for a long time before I realize that he's not going to get it undone. I put my hands over his to still his frantic efforts and say, “Wait. Let me get you started.” It’s the work of a second for me to unbutton my own waistband and slide the zipper down. Now it's no problem for him to slide my skirt over my hips to join my blouse on the floor. I step out of it and kick the discarded garments aside. Then I remove my pantyhose myself. I chide myself for wearing pantyhose. It's not sexy. I should have left my legs bare. But I make them bare soon enough. I don't wear shoes in the hotel room so I don't have to worry about taking them off first. I just sit on the bed and pull the pantyhose over my feet. Now I'm wearing only my panties – clean white lacy ones, I got that right – so I flop back on the bed and then scoot up until my head is on the pillow. I wait there for the boy to catch up to me.

I’m as blind as a bat in my hood, but, while I’m waiting, I can feel his eyes looking at every part of my body: stomach, thighs, calves, breasts, and, most important of all, crotch still hidden behind its lacy veil.

“Look at me as much as you like, dear. Then, when you're ready, you can lie down here beside me and let your hands do some looking, too.”

A long while later the bed creaks and shifts and I feel the boy join me on the bed. I lay on my back with my hands at my side and let him explore my body however he wishes. He massages my breasts again for a time, presumably finding out if they feel different lying flat on my chest than they did when they were hanging free, then runs his hands down over my stomach to my crotch. He doesn’t try to slip his hands inside my panties, but is contented with feeling me up through the fabric. He treats my panty-covered crotch more gently than he had handled my breasts when they were covered with my bra but he’s still a little rougher than I would have liked.

I'm breathing hard. I can feel my chest heaving up and down. He leans over me and begins kissing my nipples again while he continues to massage my vulva. That's what they call it in the books I read. A vulva. I like that word. There's a spot that’s real sensitive, but he doesn't know where it’s at and doesn't touch it much. I could show him where it is but I decide that I don't want him poking me there right now.

He's breathing harder than I am – he's practically panting – and I revel in the power of my sex over him.

This feeling of power is new to me and I like it. I see the irony in feeling at my most powerful ever when I’m blind and helpless, submitting to whatever this stumbling boy desires.

I reach out and begin caressing his chest. There's quite a bit of hair there. Is he a hairy guy? I have no way of knowing if I’m feeling an excessive amount of chest hair because I have no standard to judge against. What does a really hairy chest feel like? I try to recall the feeling of my own pubic thatch when I touch it, but I don't really remember. I don't spend much time feeling that part of myself. I think that his chest feels a lot less hairy than my pubes, but I can't be sure. I know that my crotch doesn't feel as hairy as the top of my head, yet my crotch looks hairy enough in the mirror. I decide that he probably looks pretty hairy. I don’t know if I like that. Then I decide that it doesn't matter what I like. This is what I have whether like it or not.

As I move my hands over his maybe-probably-hairy chest, I feel his nipples. Does a man like it when a woman plays with his nipples? The boy sounds excited when I touch him there, but he sounded excited before, too, and I can't tell if he's sounding more excited or less. I brush my hand down across his stomach to his waist and feel his belt. I'm almost nude, but he’s only removed his shirt. Is he shy about being naked in front of me? How can he be shy? I'm wearing a blindfold. Surely he realizes that I can't look at him. And surely he realizes that we can't have sex when he is wearing his pants. I'm going to have to do something about that soon.

I try to unbuckle his belt but have no luck. Like the waistband of my skirt, it’s too tight to undo by feel alone. He's going to have to help. I struggle for a while, hoping that he’ll get the message but he’s too busy caressing me all over.

And then there's a firm rap on the door. Have we taken that long? I know that we’ve been going slowly, but it only feels like it’s been a few minutes. Surely we couldn’t have been petting and kissing for a whole hour. Maybe the boy waited outside for a while before he steeled his nerves to come into the room.

The boy's whole body stiffens like a board. “What?” he asks in a strangled whisper.

I grab him and pulled him close on top of me. “It's all right. But you're going to have to leave now. We don't have any more time.”

He groans.

“It's all right. Let me tell you what I want you to do. I want you to leave now and come back tomorrow. We're going to finish this tomorrow. And not just tomorrow. You're going to come back to my bed a lot in the next few weeks. Do you understand? I want to have sex with you again and again. But we don't have time to finish it tonight. We'll finish it tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay.”

His voice sounds more relieved than frustrated.

“This has been really nice for me,” I say. “I want to do it again tomorrow when we have more time. You'll call me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you have a pen?”

“No.” He pauses and the bed creaks, then he says, “Yes. There's one on the desk. I'll get it.”

I feel him leave the bed.

“Okay.”

I recite my cell phone number. “You got that?”

“Yes.” He recites it back.

“That's my cell phone. Call me tomorrow. Any time after like ten in the morning, and we'll get together again. I want you, so you be sure to call. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We'll have fun tomorrow. Now you have to get dressed and go.”

There is another knock on the door. I call out, “Just a minute. He'll be right out.”

I stay on the bed while I hear the boy dress and then walk to the door. There is a long pause before he opens it and I knew that he has stopped to look at my nearly naked body. I’d be embarrassed if I could see him staring at me, judging me, but being blindfolded solves that problem. Instead, it feels good knowing that he’s probably drooling as he stares at my tits. I hope his whole shirt is getting soaked with drool. I stick my tits out a little more so that he'll be more eager to call back tomorrow.

One boy down and I'm not pregnant yet. In fact, I'm still a virgin. Who would have guessed that an hour could pass so quickly?

“Are you all right?” It’s Mr. Crane's voice. He is in the room now.

“Yes. I'm just fine,” I reply.

“Do you want me to take your hood off so that you can see for a few minutes?”

“No. I can get dressed again by feel. You can send the next boy up as soon as he gets here.”

“You don't have to do this, you know.”

“I want it.”

“Okay.”

Maybe I'm imagining it, but Mr. Crane sounds a little more relaxed than before. Maybe seeing that nothing terrible has happened to me yet makes him think that I'm going to be all right tonight. But, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not all right as long as I'm still a virgin. I'm no Mary Madonna. I'm not going to have any babies by immaculate conception. So far, I'm a failure as a future mother.

I hear the door close and feel alone again. I slide off the bed and feel around until I find my bra, skirt, and blouse. I'm not going to bother with pantyhose this time. No sense wasting precious time taking them off.

* * *

There's an itch on my head but I can't scratch it through the leather and it's driving me crazy.

“Holy shit! Crane wasn't shitting me! There's a fucking girl up here! She's wearing a fucking hood!”

“Hello?” I say, annoyed that someone is talking about me like I'm not really here. Who’s he talking to? Is there just one boy in the room or is he talking to a friend? Maybe Mr. Crane sent the other two boys up here together. My stomach clenches at the thought. I'm not ready for something like that. I really wouldn't know what to do with two boys at once. I only have one vagina and a don’t think that there’s any way to get both of them inside at the same time.

“Can you see anything with that thing on your head?”

At least now he's talking to me. “No. I'm completely blind when I'm wearing it.” Suddenly I feel a hand grab my left breast. Hard. It hurts a little.

“Holy shit! You're a real girl! I'm already at second base! Holy shit!”

A hand slides up my inner thigh without warning. I part my knees so that the boy can keep sliding upward. He pokes his fingers roughly into my crotch.

“Holy shit! Third base! Hot damn! Or is this second base if you're still wearing your panties?”

“I don't know.” I don't care.

“Can you take them off? Then it'll be third base for sure!” He doesn't wait for me to answer, but immediately pushes his fingers further up my skirt and grabs at the waistband of my panties.

“Wait,” I say, pushing hard against his hand. “Don't tear them. Let me take them off myself.” This guy is sure different than the last one. The way he's poking and grabbing at me as fast as he can, I'm going to lose my virginity before I get my skirt off. I want to lose my virginity tonight, but I had expected it to be a little less humiliating than this.

“Okay. Okay. You take them off yourself. Holy shit! Are you really going to show me your pussy? I never saw a girl's pussy before! I mean I've seen lots of pussy on the Internet – lots and lots – but not in real life! Holy shit! I can't believe that this his happening to me.”

God! Is this the best that Mr. Crane can do? This is one of his best students? I stand up and slide my panties onto the floor. What do I do now? I raise my skirt myself so that he can see me nude from the waist down. If I'm going to be humiliated, I may as well humiliate myself rather than waiting for this dork to do it to me. I shift my feet to part my legs a little and feel a draft on my bare, wet vulva. He starts pawing at me between my legs so I spread them more to give him easier access. Then I decide, what the hell? I may as well go for the full monty. That’s what I’m here for. I unbutton the waistband of my skirt, lower the zipper and then push his sweaty hand aside for a few seconds so that I can let it drop to the floor. A few seconds after that, I drop my blouse and bra as well. Now I'm fully naked, still standing with my legs apart a couple of feet, and I earn another round of “Holy shits” and “I can't believe this's”. I push his hands away from my breasts and crotch again and scoot onto the bed until I'm lying on my back. There's another heartfelt, “Holy shit,” when I spread my legs wide for his viewing pleasure.

“Okay,” I say. “Come here and put your penis in me.”

There is a frantic rustling of cloth and zipping of zippers. I may be blind but I can tell when I hear a boy stripping off as fast as he can. There's a rattle against the dresser beside the bed. I think he popped a button right off his shirt. If this were a cool guy, I'd be flattered that he was so desperate for me. Sadly, I know that this guy is desperate for anything with two breasts and a pussy. If there was a willing chimpanzee in the room, he'd have sex with it just as quick as he's going to have sex with me.

The bed creaks and I feel a naked body rolling against me. My hand brushes something and – my God! – it's his penis. I've touched a boy's penis for the first time in my life. I snatch my hand back, then I get curious and feel down for it again. It felt hard when I knocked against it the first time. Now I wrap my fingers around the stiff thing. It really is his penis! His penis is having an erection just like the books say. Then I feel it start to move. The boy groans. Loud. Like he's suffering. Then he says, “Holy shit,” one more time, but this time low and slow. His thing pulses in my hand and then there's something sticky on my tummy. I touch it. It's warm and thick. I bring my finger to my nose. It smells like nothing that I've ever smelled before and I know what it is. It's his sperm. The boy didn't have sex with me and he didn’t shoot his sperm inside me! He put it on my tummy before we really did it! That's not how a girl gets pregnant. I may be a sixteen-year-old virgin but I know that much.

He's moaning like a wounded animal.

I scoop his stuff off my tummy and stuff it into my vagina as fast as I can. Maybe it's not too late. Maybe his little sperms aren't dead yet. Maybe they'll swim all the way up to my eggs. I know the theory but I don't know how it works in reality. But, it doesn't matter. No matter what, I'm going to give it my best shot. The quicker I can get pregnant, the quicker I can send this guy to the cornfield.

“I didn't do it,” he starts moaning. “I didn't do it. I blew it. Holy shit. I blew my wad. Damn. Damn. Damn.”

I caress his face with my sperm-coated fingers. “It's all right. Listen. It's okay. This was just our first time. We're going to do it again. You didn't blow anything. Okay? You're going to come back tomorrow and we're going to do it again. And the day after that. This isn't your last chance. It's just a trial run for the real thing.”

He stops moaning and listens to me for a minute. Then he says, “You mean it? You really mean it? You'll let me try to do it again?”

“Of course. But tomorrow, I want you to do it differently. Okay? Don't come in and just start grabbing me. Hold me a little. We'll kiss a little. We've got all the time in the world. Can you do that for me? Take some time? Because it'll make it easier for you if you take a little time to get used to being with me first.”

“That's not how they do it in the videos on the Internet!”

“That's how we're going to do it in real life. You come to me tomorrow and we’ll do it like real, not like the Internet.”

“You'll be naked again, tomorrow, too?”

“Yes. You and me are going to be naked together a lot. After a while, it won't be such a big deal.”

“Yes it will!” he contradicts me. “Yes it will! Even when we're fifty years old and we've made love thousands of times, being naked with you is still going to be a big deal. You'll see!”

No, I won't, I thought. You're not going to be with me when I'm fifty years old. You're not going to be with me after I pass a pregnancy test and that should take about a month. But aloud, I said, “We'll just think about one day at a time. Now, though, you've got to get dressed and go home and rest. I think there's a pen on the desk. Write down my cell phone number and call me when you want to have sex with me again.” I feel him bounce off the bed and I recite my cell number to him.

“I already want to make love to you again.”

I wonder if he's serious about wanting to have sex with me again already. How quickly could he get another erection? One of the books mentioned that some men can do it again in a few minutes, but I thought that it was exaggerating. This nerd sounds so horny that I'm afraid that he might be serious when he says that he's ready to go again right now. I can't let him do that. I'm supposed to have a third appointment tonight and that guy might be arriving soon.

“Not now,” I say. “Tomorrow. We'll get together and do it tomorrow.”

“This is really your number? You’re not just giving me a fake number to ditch me?”

He sounds pathetic. I can tell that people have ditched him before. Not girls. He’s never been out with a girl before. But his friends probably ditch him a lot.

“Don’t worry. That’s my real number. And I’ll answer it. And I’ll invite you over. Really.”

“I'll call you first thing in the morning.”

“Not before ten. I'm going to sleep in.”

I hear the door slam and feel myself alone again.

So here I am, still a virgin, but I do have a man's sperm inside me. Maybe a virgin birth is a possibility of after all. Maybe this is how Jesus was conceived. I laugh quietly at my blasphemous thoughts. My parents would freak if they knew what I was doing right now. What am I doing? I realize that I just gave a boy my first hand job. That's what girls are supposed to do when they don't want to get pregnant. I did it by mistake. I laugh more loudly at myself.

* * *

“That didn't take long,” Mr. Crane's voice says a minute later. “You've got more than an hour before your third date. You want to take the hood off and be comfortable for a while?”

“Yes.”

I feel Mr. Crane's fingers on the padlock at my throat and then the hood lifts free. I blink hard against the bright light. I was blindfolded for more than two hours. It's going to take a couple of minutes before the light stops hurting.

“So how is it going?” my husband asks.

My husband! I feel a thrill when I roll the word around in my mind. “Okay. I'm still a virgin but I might be pregnant.”

“How did that happen?”

I explain.

Mr. Crane laughs. “A little premature ejaculation is par for the course with teenaged boys. Be patient. He'll get it right before long. It'll only be a problem if you let it be a problem.” He looks at me for a long minute, then says, “I think you're going to be good for these boys. Better than I expected. They're lucky lads.”

“They're certainly going to get lucky. As often as they can manage from now until I know that I'm pregnant. Then they're going to have to find someone else to get lucky with.”

There is a long pause, then Mr. Crane says, “You don't have any idea how badly you're going to break their hearts, do you?”

“Whatever. They'll get over it. The world's full of girls. As soon as they find another one, they'll forget all about me.”

“I wouldn't be so sure about that.”

“Anyway, it doesn't matter. A boy gets one chance to be the father of one baby with me and that's it. I'm going to maximize the variation in phenotypes of my offspring by making sure that every baby has a different male genetic complement. That's the way to ensure the most variation in genotypes so that my children will have the best chance of evolutionary fitness.”

Mr. Crane makes a face. “You're a weird combination of teenage girl and science freak, my dear. I'm looking forward to seeing what you're like when your emotional maturity catches up with your intellectual capacity. I just hope that I can hide from the angry mob long enough to see it.”

“What you mean? What angry mob?”

“Don't worry about it. It's just a little joke.”

But Mr. Crane doesn't look like he thinks his joke is very funny. He looks kind of scared.

“Why don't you get dressed while you have your hood off? Unless you want to meet the next boy naked. Or, better yet, maybe you've decided that you've had enough fun for one night and want to call off your third date. I'd be happy to send him away. You deserve a good night's sleep after all you've been through.”

I am tempted, let me tell you. A lot has happened in one day. But I don't want to be a virgin in the morning and the only way to fix that is to make sure that the last boy busts my cherry. The advantage of being the last boy is that he won't have a deadline. If he turns out to be as slow as the first, then it won't matter. I can let him make out with me for hours before having intercourse with me. And if he shoots before he scores like the second boy, then I can wait for him to get ready to take a second try at me.

I get dressed and tell Mr. Crane, “Lock the hood back on and send the last boy up. I want to see what he can do with me.”

When he locks the hood back over my head, I can't see anything. I hear my husband leave the room.

My husband.

* * *

“So you're Mr. Crane's door prize, huh? You a hooker? How much is he paying you?”

The voice is low; the words drawl slowly like the boy thinks that the whole world is waiting just to hear what he is going to say.

“I'm not a hooker. I'm Mr. Crane's wife.”

“Yeah. Right. Like Queen Crane is going to marry some underage piece of hot snatch. Don't make me laugh. You got cooties? The clap? What's the deal?”

“I don't have anything. I'm a virgin.”

“Yeah. Right. Pull the other one.”

“I don't care if you believe me or not. I just want you to have sex with me. Are you a virgin, too?”

“Me?” the voice snorts. “No way. I've been with women before. Prettier girls than you. What's with the getup? You got like a medical problem with your head? You hiding the cooties under there? Are you like Mrs. Phantom of the Opera? All scarred and ugly?”

“No. It's just a blindfold. I don't want to see you.”

“Why not? You think I'm ugly?” His voice sounds ugly.

“No. It doesn't matter. I don't care if you're handsome or not. I just want you to have sex with me.”

“Yeah? Well, I'm handsome. You'd like getting hooked up with me better if you could see how handsome I am.”

“I don't want to see anything.”

“Well, I want to see everything. If you want me to make love to you, then you better get those clothes off. I'm not going to decide if I want to do you until after I've seen what I’d be getting. You might not be up to my standards.”

I stand up and strip off my clothes. I don't make it like a strip tease or anything, just take them off like I'm getting ready for a shower. I stand by the side of the bed, knowing that he's inspecting me.

“Yeah. You look okay. Lie down and spread your legs wide. I want to see if you've got any sores in there.”

I almost do it. I’ll do anything to get my cherry busted at last, but I change my mind. He's just jerking me around. If he didn't want to have intercourse with me, he would have already left. “No. I'm good. How about you? You got any sores on your dick?”

“Yeah. It's all raw and dripping pus like a leaky faucet. Too bad you got that blindfold on so you can't see it. You'd be sick to your stomach. Tell you what. Why don't you suck the pus off my dick first. Then it'll be clean and slippery when I put it in your pussy.”

“Do you want to have sex with me or not? Because I'm getting tired of all your bullshit. Either you start acting nice to me or you can leave.”

“Okay. Don't go all feminist on me. I'm just having a little fun with you. You've got to learn how to take a joke.”

“You've got to learn how to seduce a woman.”

“No, I don't. You're naked. I'm here. You’re begging. There's no seduction left. All that's left is to get it on.”

“Then stop talking and get it on.”

“Then lay down on your back and spread 'em.”

I do. A minute later, he lays on top of me. He's heavy. He shoves his penis into me without saying anything. He’s already hard. I don't have to do a thing. He pokes me a couple of times, until he finds the right hole and then he busts right in. I cry out at the pain, but not too loud. I don't want him to stop on my account.

It hurts all the time he's doing it to me, banging into me. It feels like an hour because it keeps hurting, but it's probably five minutes or so until I feel him coming inside me. It feels funny. Like a pulsing feeling. After he comes, he grunts and then rolls off me right away. The bed shifts and creaks. I think he's going straight to the bathroom to clean himself up.

I won't be able to do that until I have the hood off and can see what I'm doing.

I lay there thinking that this is how I lost my virginity at last. To the biggest asshole of the night.

That’s what happens when you accept all comers. I smile at my private little joke. Comers. Guys who come. Get it?

When I hear him come out of the bathroom and start to get dressed, I give him my phone number and tell him to call whenever he feels like having sex with me again.

He says that he'll think about it. He says that he's going to wait and see if his dick gets infected from me before he gives me a booty call.

I'm still lying naked on the bed when he leaves.

He never kissed me once. He didn't even feel my tits. At least he could have said, “Thank you,” because I gave him my virginity and that's a kind of gift, isn't it.

If I want to feel used, then I guess he's giving me exactly what I want.

Mr. Crane comes back and takes off the hood. I don't want to talk much. I just tell him, “Goodnight.”

I don't know where Mr. Crane spends the night, but it isn't in bed with his wife. I know that for sure.

Chapter 4: Honeymoon

Mr. Crane.

It’s strange to think that my wedding night is over. I've known that I’m gay since puberty so I never imagined that I would have a wedding night. At least, not one that involved a woman.

After my bride's third lover leaves, I go into her room to make sure that she's all right. There's a tablespoon of blood soaking into the bottom sheet so I know that she's no longer a virgin. That's the traditional purpose of a wedding night – to take the bride's virginity – so I guess it was a success. In this case, though, it wasn't the groom who did the deed and that's strange in anybody’s book.

Mindy seems less innocent now. And I don't mean just in a sexual way. That's a given. When I tuck her into bed, she looks subdued. Pensive. Maybe regretful.

I hope that she's plenty regretful. Regretful enough that she'll agree to an annulment tomorrow. I want this farce to end.

Or maybe she's just tired after a long day and will be her usual annoying, immature, dangerous, genius self after a good night's sleep.

If she won't give me an annulment, then hopefully she'll at least be satisfied with the three men that I sent to her bed tonight. I took terrible risks approaching them last week and then sending them up to her room tonight. They haven't graduated yet, they're still students in my class and I'm in a position of authority over them. I've already committed a serious crime asking them to service my wife. I don't dare ask any more young men to do the same.

The honeymoon suite is costing me three hundred dollars per night. I can't afford that. But I can't afford to let her come back to my house to fuck an endless parade of my students, either. But, once again, she's way ahead of me. She said that she's arranged to sublet a small two-room apartment but she can't take possession for two more weeks. She showed me the lease. I can afford it. Barely. But I have to do something with her in the interim. Tomorrow, I'm going to take her to the Day's Inn at the edge of town and set her up there. I've found Day's Inns to be clean and well-appointed when I've taken road trips so Mindy should find it acceptable. It's off season so I should be able to get a reasonable rate for a two-week period.

All things considered, it's a cheap honeymoon. On the other hand, I'm getting a lot less out of my honeymoon than most men so it's difficult to justify the expense.

In the morning, I face an odd dilemma. Do I knock on her door? She's my wife but we're still essentially strangers. And I'm not sure that I want to surprise her before she's ready to receive a visitor. On the other hand, she blindfolds herself to receive anonymous men and make love to them. How shy can she be?

I swipe the keycard and let myself in.

Mindy is still asleep. It's warm in the room and she has kicked the bedclothes to the floor at the end of the bed. She's lying nude, facedown on the sheet, her mussed light brown hair draped across the pillow that she clutches to her cheek. I take a minute to look at her body. She looks so young. She's tiny compared to the men that I usually see in my bed. Her back is narrow and only lightly muscled. It expands and contracts slowly and smoothly as she breathes. I can see a swell of full breast pressed against the sheet. Her buttocks are round and white and smooth as fine porcelain. Their valentine shape is accented by a smear of blood high on the inside of her thigh.

I hope the boy who took her virginity appreciated the precious gift that he was given.

I doubt it. Jared is a jerk to the core. The biggest asshole that I’ve taught in years. But she requested intelligent boys and he is that. Not as intelligent as Mindy – I’ve never known anyone smarter than her – but more intelligent than the other boys in my classes. Unlike Mindy, he’s completely full of himself.

Then, again, maybe Mindy is full of herself, too, just in a different, more subtle way than Jared.

When I smooth the hair from her face with a slow caress, her eyes open and she moans softly. “What time is it?”

The words are slurred with sleep but I understand her perfectly. “It's nine o'clock.”

“I'm not wearing anything. Is that all right for you?”

I have to laugh. “I think that I can handle the temptation.”

“I told the boys to phone me when they want to have sex with me again. Do you think they'll call me today?”

“I'm sure they will.”

“Good. I'm probably not pregnant yet. I need to have sex a lot more than I got last night.”

What on Earth made this girl so fixated on procreation? Surely my lectures on evolution and human reproduction aren't the only thing that motivates her. I'm not that good a teacher. Nobody is.

“Did you enjoy it?”

She looks at me quizzically. “Enjoy it?”

“Yes. Sex is supposed to be joyful. I say that in my lectures, too. It's sometimes a little painful for the woman the first time, but I hope that you found some joy in it at some level.”

She thinks for a minute. “I guess I enjoyed it as a new experience. And I enjoyed the possibility of getting pregnant. But the actual act itself was kind of... I don't know. Gritty? Earthy? Mundane? Biological? It wasn't like a magical experience. It was a chore that had to be done.”

“Poor girl. I hope that you can find the magic in making love before too long.”

“Is it magical for you?”

“You mean when I'm with a man?” She nods. I think for a minute. “Yes. Not every time, of course. Some times are better than others. But the best times are better than anything else in my life. And the worst times are still worth the effort.”

“That's about how I feel about last night. It was worth the effort.”

There was a long silence. Then she speaks again. “I'd like you to do something for me.”

“What?”

She pauses and then says, “You may not want to do it, but I need you to promise me that you'll do it anyway.”

“No. I won't make a blind promise. You tell me what you want and I'll decide if I can do it or not.”

She pauses for a longer time. Then she starts speaking slowly and carefully. “I want to get pregnant a lot. You know that.”

“You told me that.” I recognize her approach. I'm the target of another bombing run. I want to duck and cover.

“Sometimes a person wants something really badly but they can't quite bring themselves to do what it takes to get it. Like when a person really wants to stop smoking but they can't stop themselves from taking one more cigarette and then one more after that.”

She pauses and waits for me to say, “I understand that. But you don't smoke, do you?”

“No. I'm not talking about smoking. I'm afraid of something. I'm afraid that I might not want sex sometimes. I might not feel like it some days. Or I might not feel like letting some man who's not nice to me have sex with me anyway.”

She pauses again to see what I'll say. I say the obvious. “Okay. No problem. If you don't want to make love to some man, then don't. Just tell him that you don't want to do it and that he has to go away. That's the first rule of sex. No means no. If you tell a man that you don't want to do it, even if you are both already naked, then he has to honor that. He might not. He might force himself on you anyway, especially if you've said that he can make love to you and you've let him already start doing it, but if he forces you, then he is wrong and he can be arrested for it. Most men are not rapists. Most men won't force you if you are saying 'no' and pushing them away. And if one of them does rape you, don't threaten him. Don’t get angry or scared. Just tell him that it'll be all right and let him leave in peace. Don't do anything that will make him want to kill you.”

“No. That's not what I want. I want you to help me go the other way. I want you to make sure that every man that you send to me has sex with me, even if I don't want it. If I say 'no,' I want him to ignore what I say and finish coming inside me. I want him to rape me forcibly if he has to. I want any man you send to me to finish having sex with me, no matter what it takes for him to do it.”

I pause. She can’t be saying what she just said. “You can't do that.” I hear the note of horror in my own voice and try to speak assertively but not so emotionally. “You can't ask a man to rape you and you can't ask me to help him do it.”

“Yes, I can. I am asking. Listen to me. It can’t be rape if I've given every man permission to have sexual intercourse to me. I'm asking you to make sure that he can do what I'm giving him permission to do. It helps that I'm going to be blindfolded so I can't decide that I don't like the way a man looks. But sometimes, I might need more. Sometimes you might have to tie me up.” She rushes the last few words and it takes me a second to untangle them.

This is the bomb. She can tell from the look on my face that it's missing the mark and begins talking quickly, rushing to get more words out before I stop her. “You might have to tie me to the bed with my legs tied apart and my arms tied down so that I can’t physically stop a man from having sex with me. You might have to gag me so that I cannot say 'no.' And then you might have to send man after man to have sex with me even if I'm sore and tired. I'm telling you right now that I want to be filled with so much sperm that it's flowing back out of me. I want to be filled like that all the time. No matter how much I don't want a man to have sex with me at any particular time, I do want to be pregnant all the time. It doesn't matter what I say when a man is coming into my room.”

I stare at her for a long time. I'm not shell shocked this time. I'm waiting for her to see how foolish her words sound.

She stares back, defying me to refuse her.

Finally, I say, “I can't do that. I can't let a man make love to you if you don't want it. And I certainly won't make you physically helpless so that he can more easily rape you.”

“We'll see what happens when the time comes.” All sweetness and innocence is gone. She stares at me with cold eyes. The Mindy who threatened to destroy me is back.

A minute later, her phone breaks the tense silence. She answers it and says, “Okay. Yes, I want to see you as soon as possible–”

I break into her conversation. “Just wait a minute. Put him on hold,” I say urgently.

“Just a minute,” she says into the phone, then, “What?” to me.

“We're going to have to move you to another hotel. We can't stay in the honeymoon suite here. Tell him that you'll call him back in an hour.”

“Okay.” She tells the boy on the other end that she's eager to have sex with him again but that she'd have to call him back at eleven to make arrangements.

When she hangs up, I tell her, “You should pack up so we can check out.”

“Pack up?” she laughs. “All I've got is the clothes that I wore here and my wonderful leather hood. Those two plastic bags that I put in your car yesterday is everything that I have in the world. It's mostly a handful of underwear, a pair of jeans, and a couple of blouses. And my toothbrush. My breath must stink. I've got to get my toothbrush. And my hairbrush.” She laughs again. “And tampons. I put a box of tampons in there. Can you believe it? If I get my way, I'm never going to use another tampon in my whole life. What was I thinking?”

I can only shake my head at her bloody single-mindedness. “Let's get checked out and find another hotel.”

“I'm with you, husband, dearest. Can you give me a couple of minutes to take a quick shower?”

“Take all the time you need. If your phone rings, I'll answer it for you.”

“Don't you dare!”

I never before saw anyone take such a quick shower. Her phone didn't have time to ring before she was back.

* * *

She seems happy with the room at the Day's Inn. It's not as palatial as the honeymoon suite at the Marriott, but it's spacious enough for her purposes. All she really needs is a single bed and a TV to pass the time between boys. She gets more than that here. I wait while she unpacks her plastic bags into the dresser drawers.

When I look at the king-sized bed, I can’t help but imagine boys fucking my little wife, one after another, right there. “You don't have to stay here all the time, you know. If you're determined to have relations with boys, you can come here just for that purpose and come home between times.” I don't know whether I astound myself more by using the quaint phrase, 'relations with boys', or by referring to my house as her 'home'.

“Thank-you, but I don't have a car. I can't get back and forth easily and I don't expect you to drive me.” She pauses, then says, with a surprised look, “Why are you here now? This is a school day. Aren't you supposed to be teaching?”

“I called in sick this morning. I hate to miss class. You have no idea what havoc a substitute leaves behind. But I thought that I had to be here to see that you're all right. It’s the first day of my honeymoon, you know.”

“Thank-you. That's sweet.” I’m taken aback to hear such patronizing words coming out of the mouth this child-woman. Not only am I old enough to be her father, I was a teacher in her school until she dropped out a week ago. She continues blithely, “But you don't have to miss class on my account. I'll be fine. Anyway, you can't be driving me because, if you did, you'd have to spend all your time on the road. I'm going to spend a lot of time in this bed in the next two weeks. By the way, if you can send any more boys out here, I'd appreciate it. Three boys isn't enough to fill my dance card completely, you know.”

“Don't be too sure about that. Those three are the horniest little toads I've ever taught. Once they get over the shock of having unlimited access to an available woman, they aren't going to leave you alone for hardly a minute. You're going to have to tell them that you need some time for yourself. Besides, I took a considerable risk approaching them. Be grateful for that much. Don't expect me to add more stallions to your stable any time soon.”

She shrugs. “Just keep it in mind if the opportunity arises.”

The opportunity will arise every time I enter a classroom, every time I pass a boy in a hallway, every time I walk across the school parking lot. I will have a hundred opportunities every single school day, but I don't say that. In my opinion, Mindy is already exposing herself to too much risk, too fast. She doesn’t understand that if she accumulates a few bad experiences before she learns how to have good ones, she ‘s going to learn to hate sex.

Or maybe she began to realize that last night. Maybe that's why she gave me the 'tie-me-down' speech.

On the other hand, if she hates sex, it might be a good thing for me. I'm definitely not going to be tying her to the bed to be ravished by anyone. If she looses her enthusiasm and begins telling every boy that she doesn't want to fuck him ever again, her whole foolish plan will crash and burn and she can go back to school like a sensible teenager. I almost laugh. In my considerable experience, 'sensible teenager' is an oxymoron. And Mindy is a prime example of that.

“I've been thinking about the hood. It's going to be a problem.”

“Right. I guess you won't be wearing it any more.”

“Oh, yes I will. I have to. It's real important to me that I never see who is fathering my babies. The problem is that you won't be here to lock it on. I'm going to have to lock it on myself. I can do that. I'll just keep the key in the drawer by the bed. The problem is that I won't be able to tell if the person coming in is the right one. I'd hate to get naked and blindfold myself and then have the maid come in to clean. Or worse, some strange guy. On the other hand, I can't just give the boys their own keys because they might barge in before I'm blindfolded. I'm going to have to work out a system.”

I shrugged. “Give them a password. Don't open the door unless they tell you the password first.”

“That would work. As long as they don't tell the password to their friends.” She paused, “Or maybe I shouldn't care about that. I'd be just as happy getting their friends' sperm. All I want is a boy with good genes. I don't prefer one boy over the other. Smart boys tend to have friends who are just as smart.”

I begin to freak. “No! No, it wouldn't work like that. Word would get around. Friends would tell friends who would tell who knows who. That's how these things work. Someone would brag to a friend who would tell his sister who would tell her boyfriend and you'd end up getting raped by every gangbanger in the city. You'll end up dripping with diseases and giving birth to retarded babies. I'm working as hard as I can to send you clean, smart, healthy boys. You have to keep yourself as clean as possible for as long as possible or you'll end up sterile within a year.”

“Okay. Okay. I get it.” She pauses. “You do realize that this process of me getting sex constantly is only going to last for a few weeks. The minute that I know that I'm pregnant, the sex phase will end until after the baby is born. Over the long term, I'm only going to be sexually active for a month or so every year, right? It's not a constant, year-round condition.”

“Yes. I understand that.” Actually, I hadn't thought about it that way, but she’s right. If she spends most of her life pregnant and has no reason to keep a man around during those periods, she’s going to spend most of her life being sexually inactive. For a married woman, she will have a lot of lovers but she’s going to have fewer than many life-long single women who are sexually active. She will probably have less than a half dozen lovers in a year on average. Some prostitutes have that many men every night. In fact, Mindy will make love to fewer men in her entire life than most prostitutes service in a couple of months. Even a slut hanging around bars every weekend could accumulate more lovers in a single year that Mindy is likely to have in her entire lifetime.

I can't believe that her plan is suddenly sounding almost reasonable. “So what are you going to do about the hood problem?”

She thinks about it for a minute then says, “Callbacks. I'll tell the boys to call me when they arrive at my door. Then I'll call them back on their cell phone and listen through the door to them talking to me on the phone. That way I'll know that it's them standing right outside and I'll open the door.”

“What if you can't hear them through the door.”

“When I have them on the phone, I'll tell them to knock a certain number of times. If they do it right away then it'll have to be them. It might not be entirely foolproof, but someone would have to work pretty hard to get around the system. They'd have to be relaying my message to their friend.” She pauses, then says, “I think that I should tell the boys that they can each share me with one friend if they want. Not all of them. One of them was pretty much a jerk and his friends would be jerks, too. But the other two can each recommend a friend. That way, you won't have to find anyone else for me and I'll get five boys instead of just three.” I raised an eyebrow and let her think about that for a minute. She did. “It probably wouldn't work,” she said. “I'd bet that none of these boys will want to share me.”

I think that she’s probably right about that. But if she’s wrong, she’ll be very wrong. There are many reasons why I don't want to see half the school lined up outside her door . “I'm not sure that’s such a good idea, either. You could lose control pretty fast.”

“You're probably right. You know more about boys than I do. I'll think about it.”

“Think really carefully before you offer yourself to all comers.” I’m not sure why she giggled a little at that so I ignored it and continued, “You want to keep your risks manageable.”

“Yeah.”

For her sake, I can only hope that she means that sincerely and isn't just blowing me off. I give in. “Okay. Look, if I can find two more boys easily and safely, I'll let you know and then send them over here. I'm not making any promises. I'll just keep my eyes open for possibilities. Okay?”

“Okay. Anyway, I've got some phone calls to make now. We can talk later.” She had received calls from all three boys before getting to the Day's Inn. It was time for her to call back and start making appointments. As I begin walking toward the door, she says, “I think two hours per boy is probably enough time for them to do me, don't you?”

“I would think so.”

“Before you go, can you show me how to set the alarm on the clock radio?” She laughed. “It'll be like reverse musical chairs. Instead of waiting for the music to stop, the boy will lose his place when the music starts.”

These boys were going to hate hearing the radio.

* * *

Mindy.

No surprise that the first boy to make a booty call this morning was the total asshole who took my virginity last night. Not that Mr. Speedy was any more sensitive than Mr. Asshole. The only one who seemed to care how I felt was Mr. Shy, the boy who had failed to give me any of his sperm, inside or out. It looks like being sweet and shy isn't the way to get your genes passed on to the next generation. Am I going to find out that the asshole genes are the ones that propagate best? Are all my babies going to turn out to be assholes? I'll never know because I'm never going to see how they turn out. On the other hand, I shouldn't care. It's my job to be fruitful and multiply. It's the job of my offspring to pass on their genes to the third generation. And, if the assholes do it best, then that's the way evolution works. Natural selection wins no matter what the outcome!

Of course, there's a little more to human propagation than first come, first serve. I told Mr. Asshole to come around at noon. I'll let him knock off a quickie and have him out of here in fifteen minutes. Mr. Speedy is scheduled for two and I'm sure that he'll be gone in five minutes. Mr. Shy will get me from four until he makes a proper deposit in me, even if I have to work on him all night long.

I may be open to all comers, but I can be more open to some comers than others. I do have some choice in the matter.

I hope Mr. Crane finds another couple of boys for me soon because, if I have only three boys servicing me, I'm going to spend most of my time alone, sitting around here with a book, waiting.

I want to get knocked up now.

Chapter 5: Baby Come, Baby Go

Mindy.

I love my baby so much. I know that he's going to be adopted but I hope that they don't take him soon. I don't know who adopted him because I told Mr. Crane that I didn't want to meet the new parents.

I moved in with Mr. Crane during my pregnancy. He has a nice house. He has three bedrooms – one for him, one for me, and one for the nursery – and a lot of nice furniture. When I moved in, I felt like I was Mrs. Crane for the first time.

It was so nice being pregnant. I learned to cook and made nice suppers for Mr. Crane and his friends. I've met a lot of gay men now. I don't like all of them. Some of them are bitchier than girls. But most of them are nice. Most of them look and act just like regular men. Except when they kiss Mr. Crane. That was strange at first, but I got used to it pretty quick.

On the whole, I think I like gay men a little better than most of the straight men that I've met.

Of course, the only straight men that I met in the last year, I never saw. For two months, they just came to my room when I was blindfolded, had sex with me, and then left. I didn't want to talk to them, so I didn't encourage them to stay.

After I got pregnant, Mr. Crane sent them away. All five of them called me to tell me that they didn’t want to break up with me. They all told me that they loved me; even Mr. Asshole who, when I got to know him better, turned out to be just as big an asshole as he first appeared. I told them that I was moving on and it was time for them to do the same. Two of them cried on the phone. Two of them begged. Mr. Asshole just hung up.

I love my baby.

Mr. Crane said that I couldn't give him a name because that was up to the people who are going to adopt him, but secretly I call him Adam. That's because he's the first man that I made.

When I was pregnant, I read a lot. I mostly read molecular biology but I’m dabbling in a little psychology as well. The psychology books in bookstores are pretty silly but if you read real textbooks it’s a lot more interesting.

I haven’t had to have sex with any men for months. That’s a relief.

My baby was born four weeks ago today. I thought that I'd have to give the baby up in the hospital. I told Mr. Crane that I didn't want to see the baby after I'd given birth to it, but he said that it would be healthier for the baby if it was breastfed for a while after birth. The books that I read say that he's right and I want healthy babies. That's my whole purpose in life – to send healthy babies out into the world – so I agreed to bring my baby home for a while after it was born.

Mr. Crane is home babysitting right now while I buy some food for the week. I don't mind getting out for an hour and the baby naps during the afternoon, so it'll be all right.

My breasts are so full that they're tender so I'm anxious to get back home and feed the baby. I like breastfeeding more than I thought I would.

When I get home, the house is real quiet. The baby must be asleep. Maybe Mr. Crane is taking a nap, too. I put the groceries away and then go right to the nursery. When I look into the crib, I start to cry.

Instead of my baby, there's just my black leather hood lying on the mattress.

It’s time to get pregnant again.

My baby is gone and I can't stop myself from crying. This was my plan all along. But I never thought that it would be so hard.

I look at the hood in the crib and curse Mr. Crane aloud. He didn't have to be so cruel about it. He could have told me that my baby was going to be picked up today. He could have let me kiss my baby Adam goodbye. He didn't have to send me out for groceries.

When I pick up the hood, I see that there's an envelope taped to the other side. An apology for his cruelty?

No.

The note says that I have an appointment with my first man at my apartment at five o'clock. There is another coming at seven and a third at nine. There's cab fare in the envelope.

Mr. Crane isn't giving me any gentle re-introduction to sex. I'm a full-on slut as of right now.

It's three o’clock now, so I have two hours to get over there and switch from being a happy new mother to a childless roundheels. I came across that word, “roundheels”, a couple of months ago. I like it. It’s from the twenties and describes my state perfectly. Any man can tip me onto my back with no effort at all.

My vulva has recovered from the birth but it feels different. Looser. More utilitarian. I don't know what sex will be like this soon after giving birth, but I don't think that I'm going to enjoy it much.

My breasts are so full that they hurt when I touch them. Virgin boys love to maul women's breasts. I'm not going to enjoy that, either.

There's going to be no joy in my life for a long time.

I call a cab. While I'm waiting for it to arrive, I carry the hood down to the kitchen and put it in a plastic bag. I fill another bag with food. I'm crying so hard that I can barely see what I'm doing.

I keep crying all the way to my apartment. I don't want to cry, but I can't stop it. The tears just keep coming. The cab driver asks if anything is wrong and I tell him that I'm going to be all right. I'm just sad because I lost a baby recently. When we arrive, he tells me that there's no charge. I tell him that I appreciate his kindness, but he has to earn a living, too, and I give him the money on the meter plus a tip. He takes it without arguing.

The boy is twenty minutes early. Another lad eager for some beaver. Not necessarily my beaver, any beaver will do. Mine simply happens to be the one that's available, as often as he wants it until I’ve got another baby growing inside me. I have no delusions about what I am for these boys. I’m exactly what I want to be. A warm, wet place for them to put their dicks.

I get sperm out of our deal. All the sperm I need.

I heard a joke recently. “Question: What's the definition of a woman? Answer: A life support system for a cunt.” That's no joke. That's exactly what I am: a life support system for my cunt. My cunt sucks in sperm and pushes out babies and that's all that matters to the world.

I want my baby Adam back.

Instead, I lie on my back and guide yet another virgin boy into my cunt. This is the sixth boy that I've initiated into sex and I'm getting better at it. I'm not a blushing virgin any more. I'm now an experienced woman.

I’ll be seventeen in a couple more months.

All the time that I'm having sex with this boy, I keep crying inside my hood and my tears are soaking the leather, but I keep from crying out loud and I don't think the boy realizes what I’m feeling. Or cares.

I don't let the five o'clock boy touch my aching breasts, but it doesn't help much because they hurt like hell when he lies on them and jerks against me.

The motion causes me to let some milk but I don't think he notices that, either. It's his first time and he doesn't know what to expect. He thinks that everything that happens is normal.

The seven o'clock boy wants to kiss my nipples. I figure – what the hell? – and let him suck away. Does he know that I'm suckling him? That he's really drinking my milk? Does he care? He drinks quite a bit from my left teat and it relieves the pressure a little. I want him to do my right side, too, but he's ready to get on with the actual sex, so I let him.

The faster that I get pregnant, the sooner I can kick these guys to the curb.

Maybe I can get my nine o'clock appointment to suckle from my other teat.

I urge each boy to come back as soon as they want to have sex with me again. I tell them that I want to have sex with them a lot.

I really want to have another baby.

* * *

It's been four days since my baby was taken away from me and my breasts are still full and ache something awful. It's finally occurred to me that I'm going to have to stop suckling the boys or I'll never stop producing milk.

Sometimes I'm pretty dense about basic biology.

I don't know how many boys are coming around. I think it's at least five again, but it might be six. I can't tell if the third one on the second day was a new boy or if it was one of the first five coming back for a repeat. For all I know, it might be only one and he's coming back three times every day. I'm joking. I know that it's not the same guy every time because I can distinguish at least five different voices. And styles of making love.

My crotch feels almost as sore as my breasts. And it's going to get worse. I know from last time that the men get less shy about asking to come around as they get more familiar with me. Last time, toward the end, I was getting used a half dozen times every day. I was so happy when the stick finally turned plus, I can't tell you. Six times a day, every day is too much of a good thing. Way too much.

As sore as I am now, if the boys start requesting sex six times a day any time soon, I will have to get Mr. Crane to tie me down and gag me. And if Mr. Crane won't do it, I'm sure that one of the boys will. They’re always so eager to help themselves to me.

So far, though, it's all right. At the beginning, the boys aren't sure enough about themselves to try to get it on more than once every couple of days. That's the advantage of breaking in virgin boys.

Actually, I don't ask them if they’re virgins, I just assume that they are and give them as much instruction as they need to get inside me. Some guys need to get instructions for days before they settle into a routine, other boys ignore my instructions from the get go.

It doesn't matter. To me, they're all pretty much routine now.

The boy who comes to me at noon today starts out pretty much like always, kissing me for a minute, then undressing me. I still let the boys peel the tomato. They seem to like doing it, though I get tired of having to get dressed all over again between sessions. Sometimes I let them find me in my underwear, or even naked, just to save time and effort, but I can tell that they don't like that as much. Strange creatures, these man-boys.

Then I get a shock. The boy who has just undressed me is asking me to get down on my knees. I think that he wants to take me from behind – I've done that a few times before – but I'm wrong this time. He wants me to kneel upright, facing him. I can't see anything, but, suddenly, I feel something strange hitting me on the face around my mouth. I reach up to feel what it is and grab a penis. I understand. He wants to put his penis in my mouth. Yuk. I've never done that. None of the boys asked for that last time.

I don't know what to do. I mean, I've read about this but there's a big difference between reading about it and having the thing stuck in your face. I'm curious about what it would be like but a little repulsed at the same time. And, more important, I can't get pregnant if he puts his sperm in my mouth. I may not be as experienced as some women, but I'm real certain about the basic mechanics of reproductive biology.

I can't see him because I'm wearing my mother hood like usual, but I turn my face up toward him anyway and tell him that I'd rather have him make love to me the proper way.

He says okay and I feel him back away.

I tell him to wait. I'll get him started with my mouth if he likes. But he has to finish in my vagina.

I lick him a little. He tastes different than anything I've tasted before. I try taking him into my mouth a little ways. He feels smooth and warm and big against my tongue. Soft and solid at the same time. He pushes a little further into me and I start to gag. I back off and tell him that that’s enough. He doesn’t help me get to my feet but he does thank me.

Then he makes love to me on the bed the way I want him to. He's gentle but my crotch is aching worse every time he pushes into me. I can stand it, but it's not much fun.

I've got three more appointments to look forward to today.

I think about before when sometimes the boys wanted me to bend over so that they could take me from behind. That would be more comfortable because they would mostly be pushing against my butt and wouldn't get into me as deeply. I think that I'm going to ask the boys to do it that way for the next few days.

* * *

Mr. Crane.

Mindy raised the issue of rape again. She presented it as an objective scientific issue and her logic was unassailable. She noted that if only one out of every hundred babies is born of a rape then we are each the product of over twenty-five thousand rapes since the time of Christ; uncountable numbers if we go all the way back to our first hominid ancestors. Women have only one third of the upper body strength of men. She argues that women are designed by evolution to be rapeable.

Her conclusion is repulsive, but her logic is interesting. She argues that women didn’t have to be built weaker than men. They could have evolved to do as much physical labor as men. Housework is a physical job that is easier if a woman is stronger. Through most of human history, agriculture was critical to human survival and, before mechanization, farming would have been more productive if wives could have worked harder in the fields, especially during harvest. The only reason that evolution would select women to be much less strong than men is so that men are able to overpower them and rape them at will.

I can’t believe that she’s right, but I can’t think of a rebuttal off hand.

She tells me that she doesn’t want to be raped. No woman does. Rape is the less desirable way of getting pregnant because it leaves the mother with no support to raise the child. But she’s saying that it’s inevitable that she’ll be raped by some of the men that I send to her bed sooner or later.

I know what she’s saying. She’s saying that I should not stop sending her men if I find out that one of them has raped her.

She’s right. I try to find boys that will be good to her but there are a few men who prefer rape to normal sex and I have no way of sorting them out. Rapists do not tell other men that they prefer to force a woman.

It happens in the gay community, too. I’ve been sexually active since I was fifteen and, careful as I am, I’ve been raped twice by my pickups so far. Date rape isn’t limited to women.

She tells me that she doesn’t want to be raped, ever, but that I cannot shy away from forcing her to have sex with the men that I send to her. She assures me that she cannot be raped in the view of the law because she has already given her consent to have sex with any man that I send to her. Any act of intercourse, no matter what physical force is used to make her submit, is consensual.

She’s repeating what she told me a year ago, but I think that I understand better what she means now.

I think that she's saying that she doesn’t want to be raped, but she wants to use the threat of rape to convince her to accommodate the men who come to her even if she doesn’t want to do it. Unpleasant consensual sex is better than forced sex.

I'm going to have to think about this. I don’t think that I could enable her to be raped, even passively. But maybe I could bring myself to deliver a credible threat if it was necessary.

Part 2: Mindy at 25

Chapter 6: An Experimental Procedure

Mindy.

After giving ten babies away, it’s no surprise when I hear silence from the nursery, walk in, and find the black leather mother hood in place of my baby in the crib. This last one had been a boy. So far, I’ve had six girls and four boys.

I’m not overweight, but my belly feels sloppy. It’s been stretched out for so much of my adult life that it kind of sags. Not for lack of muscle. God only knows how much abdominal exercise I get pushing out baby after baby. But the skin is so laced with stretch marks that it fits only loosely over the muscle underneath.

I expect to gestate another twenty babies before menopause. I’ll look like hell by then. I’ll look like hell before I reach the half-way point to menopause.

I worry about that. At what point will men no longer find me sufficiently attractive to want to fuck me? No fuckee, no baby. That’s about as iron-clad as rules of biology get.

Of course, in the modern age, we bend the rules of nature pretty much at our whim. And artificial insemination is hardly rocket science. You can do it with a willing man and a turkey baster.

I don’t want to do that, though. I’ve pretty much made up my mind that, if I can’t get pregnant the natural way, then I’m not going to get pregnant at all.

I don’t like to admit it, even to myself, but the idea of not getting pregnant ever again is pretty damned appealing these days.

It’s not that being pregnant is so bad. But losing every baby a month after it’s born takes its toll. Even though I don’t want to raise them, and I know it’s coming, and I’ve survived the experience so often before, finding the baby gone is still an emotional sledgehammer every time.

Then there’s the other thing. I’ve got this rule that I’m going to let myself get fucked as often as possible until I get pregnant. Last time it took two months – I actually had a period – before I finally got knocked up. It’s the first period that I’d had since I turned sixteen. And that got me thinking. What if I become sterile? By my own rule, that would mean that I would have to let any men take me any time he asks every day for the rest of my life. Or at least until menopause. I’d have to get fucked a half dozen times a day, every day, for two and a half decades. I’d have to let myself get fucked fifty-five thousand times between now and when I turn fifty. That’s a hell of a lot of fucking.

Mr. Crane really would have to strap me to the bed.

That’s my biggest fear when I see the mother hood lying in the crib in place of the baby. The fucking is about to start and I have no guarantee that it’s going to end. If I knew for sure that it was only six or eight weeks, it’d be easy to grit my teeth, strap the hood over my eyes, and wait for the first man to come in me. But the possibility that it could be twenty-five years before the river of semen stops flowing into my cunt terrifies me.

I’m playing pregnancy roulette.

Okay. I admit it. I like the feeling that I’m stepping off a cliff when I pick up the mother hood. I get a thrill from not knowing if this is another easy drop into pregnancy like all the times before, or if, this time, I’m going to keep falling for decades, my screams fading with my youth.

I’ve always known that I have a masochistic streak.

Motherhood is the ultimate masochism.

I pack the hood and a few essentials into my car and drive over to the knock-up house. That’s what I call the place where I get pregnant. Mr. Crane makes a sixty-thousand dollar profit from every baby that I make. That’s six hundred thousand dollars so far. He insists that it’s my money and he keeps strict accounts. He doesn’t have to budget anything for medical expenses – he makes the adoptive parents cover that. He budgets fifteen thousand a year for food and incidentals, including clothing. The bulk of the remaining money has been invested in property. I own the house that I go to for impregnation. It’s a small house and empty most of the time, but it’s in a good neighborhood and Mr. Crane claims that it’s already appreciated more than fifty per cent. Not that I have much equity in it. It’s been mortgaged to provide the down payment for some commercial property. I understand his strategy. He doesn’t leverage the commercial properties too heavily so that we can weather economic downturns using the baby money. We never risk losing the property even if we lose most of the tenants for a while.

My only extravagance is my Prius. I’ve had it for four years and still love it as much as the day we bought it.

I park the Prius in the garage and lock the doors. The knock-up house is a small two-bedroom bungalow. The dining room is the waiting area and the living room is the knock-up room. We’ve installed a good door between them.

The waiting area has a TV and three easy chairs. Men enter through the patio door. If the door to the knock-up room is open – and it usually is – then they can come right in.

The knock-up room has a queen-sized bed with a good mattress, a desk with a sturdy wooden chair, and an easy chair. Sometimes boys like to bend me over a chair or desk. I encourage that because it’s easier for me if they’re grinding into my butt cheeks than into my crotch. When you’re servicing a half dozen men per day, and sometimes more, the less stimulation the better.

There’s also a small bathroom with a shower cubicle with doors to both the waiting and knock-up rooms. It cost almost twenty-thousand dollars to build it, but it’s necessary because it means that all the other rooms – the kitchen, two bedrooms, and main bathroom – are off limits to the men and are separated from the men’s area with security doors that lock with deadbolt combination locks.

Mr. Crane also insisted on installing a security system with panic buttons in every room – four of them in the knock-up room alone. I don’t know what good that would do. By the time the cavalry – him or the police – arrived, I would already be beaten, raped, or killed.

But, if it makes him feel better, then he’s welcome to have it.

I don’t know what’s in the knock-up room. At my insistence, there’s no windows or cameras between the my private areas and the knock-up areas. To this day, I’ve never seen the father or potential father of any of my babies.

I secure the mask with the little padlock and then feel my way through the door into the knock-up room. I’ve done this so often that it feels natural.

“Hello?” I say when the door closes behind me. There may be no one in the room yet, but I’m sure that I won’t have long to wait. Mr. Crane is good about scheduling my first appointment to coincide with my discovery of the mother hood and my trip across town. It helps that he knows my schedule and knows that I never delay once I find the hood.

I’m afraid that, if I delayed even five minutes, I might stretch the delay to forever. Mr Crane would like that but I’d never forgive myself for abandoning my life mission.

“Take your clothes off and lay down on the bed.” The voice is deep and confident sounding.

I’m taken aback. This doesn’t sound like a virgin high-school geek. I’ve come to expect that I’ll have to spend my first few days in the knock-up room initiating a half dozen men into the mechanics of the sexual act.

The procedure has changed.

I immediately strip off my clothes and lay on the bed. On my back with my arms by my sides and my knees slightly parted, ready to be used without further ceremony.

As I wait, I analyze my situation. I’m pretty sure that I can figure out what has happened. I’ve become too old and too sloppy to appeal to seventeen-year-olds. Mr. Crane has begun drawing my baby’s fathers from a new pool.

The question is: Which one? Colleges? Maybe. But this man sounds too certain of himself to be a college student. Other high school teachers? That’s more likely. Mr. Crane has easy access to teachers. I’d be surprised if he’d reveal our arrangement to his colleagues – it’d be too risky for him – but he might risk talking to other teachers that he doesn’t know personally. Is he picking up men in clubs and bars? That’s a possibility but it would surprise me more than approaching teachers. He’s always been too protective of me to expose me to men who are that likely to be infected with STDs.

Maybe he is whoring me out. Maybe he has contracted with an escort service or put an ad on the Internet.

Have I sunk so low that I’ve become a common whore?

The man feels between my labia to determine if I’m wet enough to be penetrated comfortably. I am. I felt my pussy start secreting as soon as I saw the mother hood in the crib. After ten years, it’s become a Pavlovian response. By now, I get a swamp between my legs whenever I put the hood over my face.

I part my legs wide to give him easy access.

As he pushes his cock into me, I dismiss my speculations about who he might be. I’ll never know. That’s always been the deal. I don’t ask; Mr. Crane doesn’t tell.

If the man is experienced and willing to tell me what he wants, then my only duty is submission.

It’ll be something of a relief not to have to train my lovers in the basics this time.

This man is only interested in the basics. He uses me efficiently, comes quickly, and then leaves without comment. I hear him turn the shower on before I realize that he’s left the room.

I push myself up, but another voice, this one more nasal than the first says, “Lay back down and spread your legs.”

I lie back down and spread my legs.

His cock feels fatter than the first man’s.

Within five minutes, I have a second deposit of sperm swimming up my vagina toward my uterus.

As I lie there, trying to hear if the second man has left the room, a third voice, deeper and more growly than the first, says, “Spread ‘em.”

I spread ‘em.

This cock feels long and skinny.

He fucks me as mechanically as the first two. As I receive his deposit, I speculate that the men are rotating though the shower without turning it off. They must be friends. Or something.

Approximately a dozen men – I didn’t bother to keep count – chain fuck me, one after another, for about an hour. I’m as sore as hell.

These guys don’t know the meaning of foreplay. Not one kissed me. Not one felt up my tits. Nothing. They just put their cocks into me, pumped away for a couple of minutes, and then got off.

The last man says nothing. I stay on the bed, waiting for the next one, but no more come. After a couple of minutes, I hear the shower turn off and I feel alone.

I don’t just feel that I’m alone because there isn’t a man in the room. I feel alone in the world. More alone that I’ve ever felt before. A profound feeling of loneliness descends over me like a thick black blanket. I know that the world is full of people, but it feels like there’s not a single person in the entire world who cares about me as a human being.

The pathetic thing is that it’s literally true. My parents are ten years out of my life. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. And don’t care. My children, the oldest would be eight by now, don’t know who I am. My lovers, several dozen of them, have no place in my life. I’ve deliberately kicked every one of them to the curb and told them to stay away from me.

Mr. Crane, my husband, seems to have abandoned me. An hour ago, I would have said that he was one person who truly cared. He always looked out for me.

Now he’s released a human wolf pack on me. If he cared about me at all, he would have arranged something more pleasant, or at least less unpleasant, as a re-introduction to sexual activity.

I want to cry, but tears don’t come. I don’t have enough energy to emote.

I sit up on the edge of the bed. Every muscle aches. It was only an hour, but it was a solid hour of constant pounding. “Is anybody else here?” I ask loudly. “Anybody else want me before I leave?”

If I believed in prayer, I’d be praying that no one answer. Instead, I wait for a minute, listening to silence. Then I waddle painfully to the door, punch in the combination by feel, and retreat to a warm bath in my private space.

When I’m in a knock-up phase, I stay in the knock-up house most of the time. It saves a lot of running back and forth. And it gives Mr. Crane and Russell a few weeks of real privacy.

When I limp back from grocery shopping at four o’clock, there’s a message on the voice mail. Mr. Crain says, “Same thing tomorrow and every day after that at the same time. Twelve o’clock sharp.”

There is no more explanation than that.

I don’t know what the hell is going on.

* * *

Mr. Crane.

I wonder how Mindy likes them apples. She’s always said that she wants to get pregnant as efficiently as possible. And she has made it clear that she wants sex to be as unemotional as possible. And that she wants to have a lot of it.

Well, I’ve lucked into an opportunity for her to experience a good quantity of the most mechanical, unemotional, efficient sexual intercourse possible. I’ve been living with Russell for three years. We’re practically married. We would be married if I wasn’t already married. And if gay marriage was legal in this state.

Russell, as it happens, has a contract to do some freelance data analysis for a research team in the medical school. I don’t know what their whole project is about, but part of it is an analysis of hormonal changes in the aftermath of sexual intercourse. It’s some kind of double blind study so they won’t tell anyone what the independent variables are but the bottom line is that they’ve got a dozen men who have volunteered to have their hormones tested after sexual activity.

Initially they intended to have the men masturbate because they want the sex to happen on a strict schedule. But, when Russell told me about the study a few months ago, I volunteered Mindy to be their sexual surrogate. She’s free of STDs – I arranged a blood test as part of her last obstetrics examination – and so are the men. Apparently the researchers are concerned that the presence of STDs might alter the biochemistry so they’ve gone to elaborate lengths to ensure that there’s no herpes or yeast infections or anything else floating around their subject pool. As well, I can guarantee that Mindy isn’t on birth control or using spermicides or any other hormonal or chemical substances.

It’s just the purest possible sex on a daily schedule for the next few weeks. The hardest part was convincing the researchers that Mindy didn’t mind getting a little bit pregnant. They want to stop the study as soon as she tests positive because they don’t want the pregnancy hormones interfering with their tests. They’re paranoid about cross-contamination of some kind of hormone from the woman back to the men. But they don’t seem to care about the cross contamination between men who use the same woman within minutes. They also don’t seem to care that she gave birth only four weeks ago and is still lactating. Go figure.

I did have to insist that they would not be taking blood from Mindy every day to analyze it for pregnancy factors. They’ll have to wait for her to pee on a stick. They grumbled that they’ll have to discard a full two weeks of data before the date that the test comes back positive, but that’s not my problem. They’re supplying the sticks and asking that she test herself every day, starting immediately.

I’m going to wait for a couple of weeks before I tell her to start testing herself. But I will make sure that she does it every day. I owe the researchers that much.

I met with the men, the subjects, and explained the mechanics of having sex with Mindy. The hood. The no talking beyond the simplest possible instructions. The layout of the rooms. Everything. I’m pretty sure that they understood how they were to treat Mindy. They’re smart guys. I suspect that they’re medical students. And they suspect that Mindy’s rules are part of the experimental protocol.

The researchers also stocked the waiting area with a pile of the dirtiest, most explicit porn that I’ve ever seen. They want to ensure that they get a hundred per cent sexual response from their subjects when they go in to see Mindy.

I’ve never been able to find so many men for Mindy so easily before. No risk at all and most of the work has already been done for me.

I hope these researchers want to conduct a follow-up study next year and for many years after that.

* * *

Mindy.

Thank goodness the stick finally turned color. I don’t think I could have taken another day of these guys slamming into me. I don’t know if you would call what I’ve been put through a six-week-long gang rape, but it sure felt like it.

One thing I can say, though: it worked. All that sperm caught my egg on the first bounce; no period this time.

I call Mr. Crane and tell him that I’m pregnant so I’m coming home.

He sounds sincere when he congratulates me on my latest conception, but I suspect that he’s being ironic.

This is the first time that I’ve not had a single man call me and beg me to keep being his girlfriend. It’s a weird end to the weirdest conception that I’ve experienced yet.

When I get home, Mr. Crane offers to take me out to dinner. Just him and me; Russell’s working late tonight. Apparently Russell has a lot of data that needs analysis. For some reason, this is his busy period.

Mr. Crane doesn’t get down to business until the main course is served. “You may have noticed that I didn’t send high school students to you this time.”

No shit. “I noticed,” I say.

“People have realized for some time that I have been giving my wife’s sexual favors to my ex-students. That’s the kind of thing that people talk about. A lot. They haven’t been able to fire me yet because they don’t have cause. After that first time, I’ve been careful to wait until students graduate before getting in touch with them.” He smiled sardonically. “It’s no secret that my former male students are more likely to come back to visit me after they graduate than all the other teachers’ students combined. I’ve been to more meetings with my union representative, my principal, and school board authorities than you can imagine.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I am. He never said a word and I had no idea that he was getting grief over our marriage arrangement. I should have realized how much trouble I must have been causing him, though. It’s pretty obvious. But, if I had it to do over again, I’d do exactly the same thing. It’s my biological imperative. Evolution rules!

“It’s okay. My days as a teacher are numbered. The pressure has ratcheted way up during the past few months. I’m pretty sure that they’re going to find some way to fire me at the end of the year. The union is weary of fighting the battle for my job and so am I. I’ve been teaching for twenty-five years and I’m bored. I’m going to negotiate a partial pension in exchange for leaving quietly.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I know that I’ve limited your options.”

“You’ve certainly given me a unique experience,” he replies. “I’m fifty years old. Too young to do nothing, but too old to start over. I’m going to terminate our contract with the property management firm and take over the management of your property myself. If you agree, I’ll take a commission on the rental income and that’ll more than compensate me for the loss of my teaching income.”

“Of course. Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, it was your money and your property. You earned it by keeping me pregnant.”

“As far as the law is concerned,” he countered, “the property is a marital asset that is owned jointly by you and me. But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s property that you’ve earned in a rather hellish way. I will never claim any part of it, apart from a commission for the work I do managing it.”

“Whatever.”

“I also intend to ramp up the activity. We’ve been playing a zero risk game so far, only taking mortgages that we can cover with your baby income and then paying them down fast. Right now, you own several buildings outright. I’m not going to take big risks, but I’m going to re-mortgage some of the buildings to get capital to buy several more. I’ve talked to a lawyer about setting up two corporations to spread the risk. One corporation will take a high-risk high-growth strategy with half of the buildings; the other will pursue a low-risk strategy with the others. Right now, the economy is in the dumps so we can acquire a lot of property on the cheap. Filling them with tenants will be hard but, if we can hang on to the property, we can multiply our equity dramatically when the economy turns around. What do you think?”

“I’m making another baby right now and that I’m going to make another after that and another after that. That’s all I care about. I don’t care about business. You can do whatever you want. If you need my signature on anything, just let me know. In fact, you ought to draw up financial power of attorney papers and let me sign all my legal authority over to you. Then you won’t have to bother me with this stuff again.”

“Okay,” he says. “By the way, you might be interested to know that I’ve got a waiting list for adoptive parents. Your babies are selling at a premium. That’s the silver lining to the rumors about your pregnancy strategy. Everyone knows that they’re getting clean babies with good genes.”

“As long as they’re going to good homes. I don’t want my babies going to any losers.”

He smiles. “They’re going to good homes. I vet the parents rigorously.”

I don’t tell him that I’ve started a new initiative. My life is boring, even more so right now. When I only spend an hour a day getting royally fucked and then spend nine months sitting around gestating, I have too much free time. I spend it reading. Mostly science and math. I’ve become especially interested in evolutionary psychology. I’m fascinated by the way the human mind has evolved. By now, I’ve read almost everything important that’s been written. I have a library full of books and cabinets full of articles in the knock-up house.

I’ve decided to write a text book on the subject. I’m aiming for a senior undergraduate or beginning graduate level treatment. No original research, just recasting other researchers’ findings into a more elegant, coherent model. In particular, I think we need to bring some more sophisticated math to bear. There’s a limit to what you can accomplish with game theory and statistics.

I’m going to spend the next two months writing a prospectus and finding an agent.

* * *

I wasted months trying to find an agent. I have a good proposal. I’ve had a half dozen agents agree on that. But they always have the same response. They won’t represent me because I’m a high school dropout. As though that makes me stupid. But I can see their point. They can’t put an attractive bio on the back cover telling everyone that the author is an accomplished academic and that will hurt sales.

Even so, that should be a minor point against me, not a complete deal breaker. I know that I’ve read as much about evolutionary psychology as any professor because I’ve read all that’s been published. It’s impossible for anyone to read more. And I’ve understood what I’ve read, so what’s the problem?

I firmly believe that every problem has a solution and the solution to this one is easy.

I’ll get a co-author. Someone with prestigious credentials and an international reputation. Someone like Professor A. J. Petreric. He’s ideal. He’s written some pretty good papers on evolutionary psychology and has been the keynote speaker at a half-dozen conferences. And, best of all, when we have to meet in person, it’s only a three hour drive to the university where he works.

I find his number on the university web site and call him. It takes a lot of effort to explain to him what I need. I don’t see his problem. There’s no down side for him here. He doesn’t have to write anything. He can read what I write. Or not. If he decides that he doesn’t want to be a co-author with me, then he doesn’t have to put his name on the book. If he likes it, he gets second authorship. Whatever happens, I get an agent and publisher, at least for now.

He has a lot of questions. Most of them are good ones and I’m sure that I’m giving him good answers, but for some reason, he doesn’t seem to trust me.

Finally, he agrees to have a look at my proposal.

I was on the phone with him for an hour and I’m mentally exhausted. It’s a drain to have to pay that close attention to something for that long.

When I go to feed my baby, I find the mother-fucking hood in the crib. It’s not a surprise, but it’s unpleasant because it sends me back to the knock-up house.

I hope that this knock-up period will be better than the last.

My heart sinks when I hear a deep voice say, “Get your clothes off and lie down on the bed.”

I strip.

This is going to be an exact repeat of my last knock-up season. Another six-week-long gang rape.

The session lasts for an hour and a half. I keep count. Sixteen men use me. My teats are aching from being filled with so much breast milk and my crotch is almost numb from the pounding. It’s only four weeks after I gave birth to my eleventh baby. My vagina needs more time to recover before it gets abused like this.

After the last man leaves, I lie in bed for another hour, tears leaking from my eyes. I don’t bother getting the key from the other room to remove the hood. I just lie there blind and suffer.

The only way that I’m going to be able to take this for another forty days or longer is if I’m restrained.

Chapter 7: A Surfeit of Cocks

Mr. Crane.

I find a message on the home phone. Mindy’s voice says, “I’ll make myself available from twelve until two every day, but you’re going to have to come to the knock-up room at exactly two o’clock every day and check on me. It’s important that you be there on time and that you don’t miss a day.”

I’m puzzled. I can do this. Since I resigned and became a full-time manager of Mindy’s properties, I set my own schedule. But it’s been years since I’ve gone to the knock-up house. That’s her place. I think the last time I was there was when I was helping her move the beds in. Why do I have to go there now?

Nonetheless, I have to honor her request. She does nothing without a reason.

This has got to be related to the number of men that I’m sending to her. I was pleased when the medical researchers asked if I could supply a sexual surrogate for the next phase of their research. They were a little ticked that they had to wait for Mindy’s baby to be adopted but that’s tough. They’re getting a deal here and I don’t care if their schedule has to be set back by a couple of months. But I was taken aback when they said that it had to be sixteen men this time. They mumbled something about counterbalancing using a Latin square design. I’ve taken statistics and experimental design so I have a vague idea what that is, but hell, sixteen men is an awful lot for Mindy to have to fuck every day.

I argued that they should only send eight men every second day, but they claimed that would wreck the results. Then I suggested eight men use Mindy and eight masturbate but they said that would create another independent variable and require thirty-two men in all. The only reason that I agreed in the end was that I knew that Mindy could always say, “No.” And if she stops half-way through and wrecks their experiment, that’s no problem for us. I’ll just go to my alternate plan.

I even told her that, indirectly. A couple of weeks ago, I told her that she could always refuse the men that I send to her. If she did that, then she could still get pregnant. I’d just send someone else to do it.

She brushed me off, saying that she would stick to the plan as long as she didn’t get injured or killed.

I couldn’t tell if she was feeling guilty about the trouble that she had put me through or if she was just being stubborn.

She’s an awfully stubborn woman.

As she requested, I go to the knock-up house at exactly two o’clock. When I walk into the knock-up room, I’m appalled.

Mindy is lying on her back on the bed with her hood locked over her eyes. Her legs are held wide apart by chains that link cuffs about her ankles to each side of the bed frame. Her arms are bent toward the headboard, held over her head by handcuffs that are chained to an eyebolt in the top of the bed frame.

“What the hell?” I exclaim.

“The key to the handcuffs is in the drawer in the bedside table. Unlock me, please.”

I unlock her hands.

She groans when she puts them down to her waist. “I’m stiff and sore all over,” she says.

Her ankle chains are attached to the cuffs by clips, not locks. She could have released them herself if her hands hadn’t been cuffed over her head. I realize that she’s probably too stiff to reach down and unclip her ankles so I do that for her.

She groans again when she slides her legs closed.

I unbuckle the cuffs from her ankles.

“If you don’t mind, could you put the handcuffs and key back in the drawer. I’ll just leave the chains and ankle cuffs on the bed for tomorrow.”

“You did this to yourself?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure if I can take sixteen men voluntarily every day. If it’s like last time, then it’ll get worse as the weeks wear on. But, as long as I can force myself into my restraints at the beginning of every day, then I’ll have no choice but to accommodate all of them.”

I’m dumbfounded.

She continues, “It took longer than yesterday to get through all sixteen because I had to explain to each one that the chains were just part of the procedure. That nobody is forcing me to do anything. I even had to offer to sign a statement that I’m doing this voluntarily. I’ll give one to each man tomorrow.”

“If you have to go to these lengths, then I’m going to stop this right now. I’m not going to be the instrument of your self-rape.”

“You already are, dear husband. You already are and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Don’t worry. Like I told you before, it’s not rape if I’m consenting. If it gets to be too much to bear, I can tell the men to go away. They’re brusque, but I’m betting that they’ll stop if I ask them to.”

She’s right. They’re all medical students and have been indoctrinated with the ethics of volunteering. The minute that she indicates that she’s no longer consenting, they’ll stop. Maybe one or two will want to proceed regardless, but the others will stop them anyway.

As well, I’ve already put some basic security in place without her knowing about it. I can improve that to better protect her.

“You can leave if you want,” she says. “I’m going to rest here for a while.”

“What about the hood?”

“I’ll take it off later. It’s restful lie here in the dark and I need the rest.” After a minute, she says, “You know, when I came in here to install the eyebolts and set up the chains, it was the first time in years that I’d seen this room. I always put the hood on before I come in here and I don’t take it off until after I leave. It was strange to see the room again. I’d forgotten what colors we’d used. I think the curtains have faded.”

I want to ask her about the men that I have been sending to her, the experimental subjects, but I don’t. She prefers the don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach that we have maintained for so many years.

* * *

Mindy.

Mr. Crane believes me when I say that I’ll be able to tell the men to stop if they wear me down. He has no idea what I’ve planned.

The next day is just like the first, except that I have a pile of signed statements that say that I’m consenting to sexual intercourse even though I may be restrained.

The following day, I start the next phase of my procedure. When the first man pushes himself into me, I say, “No,” in a soft, calm voice.

“What?” he says, pausing.

“Keep going,” I say. “Don’t listen to me if I say ‘no’ because I don’t mean it. I’m just jerking you around a little.”

And that’s the start of their training. Every day for the next few days, I protest more and more emphatically, then, if a man pauses, I urge him to ignore me and continue to fuck me. I don’t just urge him on, I berate him for not understanding and trusting me when I said that I’m consenting no matter what I say.

By the sixth day, I’m practically crying and screaming and they’ve learned to ignore my protests.

Forcing myself to urge the sixteenth man in a row to keep raping me when agony is radiating from my crotch to every extremity of my body in waves because I’ve already suffered fifteen assaults in ninety minutes is the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. But I do it. My will is as strong as iron.

It’s interesting that a surprising number of these men get turned on by my protests and come more quickly than when I lie there passively. That helps.

By the end of a week, I’m sure that I can no longer make any of them stop, no matter what I say or  how much I scream. My work is done. Now, as long as I can force myself into my chains before each session starts, I’m going to have to endure my agony until Mr. Crane releases me two hours later. It doesn’t matter how much I have to suffer during those two hours. I will have no choice.

As the days turn into weeks and my suffering intensifies, I dread what is coming each day. The dread begins anew as soon as the last man has left the knock-up room because I know that the pain that I’m suffering at that moment is going to be a little bit worse tomorrow. Twenty-two hours is not nearly long enough to recover even a bit from the cruel pounding that bruises my crotch without respite.

I cry continuously during sex but the hood hides my tears. I don’t think that my rapists know that I’m crying beneath them. I cannot help but protest but my protests are ignored. I have trained my rapists well.

I pee on a stick every morning, but do not hope for a positive result. Letting myself hope only sets me up for a crushing blow when the stick stays negative. Pregnancy will happen when it happens.

At the beginning of the third week, I find blood on my panties and begin to weep in despair. A period will condemn me to at least another six weeks of daily gang rape. Then I realize that it’s not real menstruation. The feeling is wrong. The smell is too clean. Metallic, not musky. It’s just a ruptured blood vessel in my vagina. That’s all. It can’t be a big one because there’s not that much blood on my panties. Just some spotting.

I’m not going to bleed to death.

I will carry on.

A full six weeks pass before the plus sign appears on the stick. When I see it, I test myself again because I can’t believe that my ordeal is truly over.

I can’t believe how eager I am to phone Mr. Crane and tell him not to send the men any more.

It’s been hell.

* * *

The baby, number twelve, is born, and I’ve written more than half of my evolutionary psychology textbook. I didn’t send any chapters to Dr. Petreric until I’d finished the section on analogical reasoning and language parsing. Everything before that was preliminary, mostly introducing concepts and defining terms. I didn’t want him to see what I was writing until I had something interesting for him to read.

I sent him more than sixty thousand words without getting any feedback and I don’t know if he still wants to be my co-author or not. Rather than asking him outright and risk losing him too early, I keep sending him the latest chapters as I write them.

The first time he responds is when I send him the chapter on my evolutionary model for the psychology of rape.

I get an email asking if I could meet with him face-to-face. He does not say whether he likes what I’ve written or not. Maybe he is going to tell me that he wants nothing more to do with me. Though I don’t see why he’d have to do that in a face-to-face meeting. That’s what email’s for.

Though I feel some trepidation meeting with him, I am ready to do it except for a logistical problem. I have a three-week old baby on my hands. I can’t take a day trip yet. But the day the baby gets sent out for adoption, I’ll start getting gang raped again immediately. While I could, in principle, drive to Dr. Petreric after a rape session, meet with him in the evening, stay in a hotel overnight, and drive back the next morning in time for another vigorous raping, I would hardly be in top form. It would be better not to meet at all than to give him the impression that I’m half brain dead the first time he sees me in person.

I tell Mr. Crane that I’ll need to take a couple of personal days before the next knock-up session begins.

He agrees.

I tell him that I’ll have to know when the baby will be taken so that I can schedule my meeting with Dr. Petreric.

He tells me.

For the first time in my life, I know beforehand which day I’ll lose my baby. Instead of dreading every day as the day of loss, I know which day to dread.

Knowing doesn’t make losing a baby any easier. When I try to prepare myself mentally, I only rehearse my coming grief over and over and make it worse.

I never before realized that Mr. Crane was being merciful by always taking my baby without warning.

The only bright spot is when Dr. Petreric replies that he’ll set aside an entire afternoon to meet with me.

When I walk into his office, I’m surprised to see how young he is. I thought that he’d be a middle-aged man, probably in his fifties. He can’t be more than thirty-five, or maybe a young-looking thirty-eight.

When I introduce myself, he looks shocked, as it turns out, for the same reason. “You’re so young. When you walked in here, I thought that you were a student and I was about to send you away.”

I’m not sure what to say. I guess I am young, but, after giving birth to twelve babies in eleven years, it’s been forever since I felt young. “I haven’t had any reaction from you about what I wrote,” I say. I’m stating a fact, but it sounds like an accusation in my own ears.

“I’m sorry about that, but I didn’t write because I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t but we have to talk about it anyway.”

“Do you think it’s any good?”

“I think it’s brilliant. Your writing is clever and grips my attention. Your logic is impeccable. Your theories are more detailed than any that I have seen. Your conclusions are unique. If anyone is brave enough to publish your book, the public is going to crucify you. Every chapter you send me is more radical than the last. Pinker and Hofstadter are going to pick over your bones. I hear lynch mobs gathering in my dreams.”

“You think I’m wrong?”

“Of course you’re wrong. You can’t possibly be right. Women can’t have evolved to be rapeable. Masochism has to be a mistake, not a demonstration of physical fitness. And, then, on the other hand, you argue that there is much less genetic basis for language than everyone else thinks. Cosmides and Tooby are too widely recognized for you to dismiss them as cavalierly as you do. Language can’t simply be an epiphenomenon. It’s too basic to human cognition. It’s too universal.”

My heart falls. “You think that everything I say is wrong.”

“Of course you’re wrong. From beginning to end. You’ve got to be. The problem is that I can’t say why. Like I said, your theories carry the weight of mathematical precision and your logic is impeccable. I can’t find a single weakness to exploit or oversight to criticize. You’ve got to be wrong, but you sound so damned right, it’s scary.”

“Do you still want to be a co-author with me?”

“Hell, yes. Even if you’re wrong, you’re setting a new standard for intellectual rigor, not just in evolutionary psychology, but for all studies of evolution. You’re probably going to have as much impact as Wilson. Maybe as much as Darwin. Unless the mob draws and quarters both of us on the nearest church altar. Which is a real possibility.”

Every man who helps me talks about being killed by a mob. I don’t get it. “Well, I guess I’ll just keep writing, then.”

“Please do. But I asked you to come here to talk about what I’ve been doing.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. When I read your theories about language I realized that you were making some specific predictions. New predictions. So I’ve had a couple of my best undergraduates conducting an experiment. They’re not finished, but we have some preliminary results. Damned if they’re not confirming your theory. Grammar really is as flexible as you claim. When we put a person in a virtual reality with different physics for as little as eight hours, they start developing a new grammar to describe it. It looks like physics drives grammar more than innate rules.”

“That’s good. Our book will be more interesting if we can include some new empirical results.”

“It’s something that I can contribute. As co-author, I want to have something of mine in there.”

Dr. Petreric and I spend the next two hours discussing ways to test predictions arising from my theory of the evolution of analogical reasoning. I haven’t had so much fun ever. He’s ready to get his students running a dozen experiments in the next six months. Empirical confirmation will make my arguments unassailable.

But Dr. Petreric keeps talking about lynch mobs. He’s a bit of a coward that way.

But, then, he’s not like me. He has a comfortable life. I’m going back home to be gang-raped every day for another six weeks at least. Spending a few minutes being lynched doesn’t sound like such a bad alternative. The only problem with being murdered it is that it would end my reproductive capacity permanently.

Our discussion turns to my later chapters on sex, rape, and sado-masochism. “There’s no way to test those theories,” he says. “Maybe we can touch on the periphery with some kind of survey, but we can’t run actual experiments on the heart of your theory. I can’t think of anything that I could get past my university ethics committee. If I even submitted a proposal, they’d be so horrified that they’d never let me run another experiment of any kind again.”

“We have a case study. I’ve been running my own private experiment since I was sixteen.” I spend the next half hour telling him about my marriage to Mr. Crane and my twelve babies. Dr. Petreric doesn’t interrupt me. He doesn’t say a single word. He doesn’t even nod his head. For half an hour, he does nothing but stare at me in shock and horror.

When I finish, there is a full minute of silence. Then he says in a strangled voice, “Twelve babies. You’ve had twelve babies. And you’re only what? Twenty-eight, maybe.”

“Twenty-five,” I say. “Having all those babies has aged my face a couple of years. If I were naked, you’d think I was closer to forty. My body’s been pretty heavily used. My breasts sag. My abdomen is slack. My vulva has been permanently distorted. But I’m still fundamentally healthy. I’m sure that I’m good for another dozen babies before menopause.”

“You’re going to keep having babies?”

“As often as I can. This book is just a hobby to distract me. My real life’s work is having babies. I don’t just theorize about evolution. I live it every day.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You read my manuscript, at least as much as I’ve written so far. That explains me.”

“Theory is one thing. Getting yourself impregnated constantly by large number of anonymous men is a whole different can of corn. I don’t see how you can do that to yourself.”

“Just think of me as a true believer.”

I could see a the obvious thought finally forming in his mind. He couldn’t keep the sly expression off his face.

“If you want to be pregnant and don’t care who the father is, then anyone can volunteer to impregnate you.”

I smile. He was not put off by my description of my prematurely aged body. That makes evolutionary sense. I’m still fertile. Provably fertile. That forces another interesting prediction: that there are different types of sexual aging. Chronological aging indicates reduced fertility; aging through repeated gestation indicates high fertility. I’m not a cougar, I’m the ultimate MILF. “The fathers of my babies can only be people who are anonymous to me. I don’t want to know who the father is so it can’t be someone that I’m working with.”

He frowns in disappointment.

I give him hope. “Of course, if someone makes arrangements through Mr. Crane without my knowledge, then they will be an anonymous father even if I do know them personally in a different context. The only concern would be that they’d have to be very careful not to do anything that would identify themselves when they were fucking me.”

He doesn’t reply.

I wonder if Dr. Petreric really wants to be one of the men who’s going to be gang-raping me.

I don’t want to know.

* * *

Mr. Crane.

I tell the medical researchers that Mindy can’t handle sixteen men per day. Either they find a way to reduce their protocol to no more than six men per day or they lose access to Mindy. I’m not going to see her chaining herself to her bed again. I don’t care how vehemently she insists that she wants to do it, I’m never again going to send men to rape a bound and helpless woman.

She’s going far beyond conforming to some scientific dogma about evolution. She has entered the realm of pure perversion and it’s too sick for me. I’m just a normal gay man.

I have to accept the possibility, nay, the likelihood, that she embarked on this mad scheme of extreme motherhood from an original masochistic desire. What could be more masochistic than being a mother who loses every baby? But I do not have to enable it. At least, not any more than I already have.

I can accept helping her find a variety of lovers. And I can accept facilitating the adoption of babies that she doesn’t want to raise herself. But I cannot accept being a conspirator in her daily mass rape. It’s too much.

I can afford to tell the medical researchers to get lost because I know how to do it myself, now. I can do what they do: post a notice in the medical school asking for volunteer first-year medical students, test them for diseases, then send them to Mindy every day. It’s better if I’m in control because I can choose four or five men, not sixteen, and I can instruct them to be gentle and loving despite her hood and their need for silence.

She won’t have a reason to chain her legs apart and cuff her hands above her head.

And if she doesn’t like that, tough. She’s not going to be raped again, no matter what she says.

I have another problem. I already have a volunteer. Her new scientific collaborator, Dr. Petreric, contacted me and asked me to include him as one of her lovers during her future knock-up sessions.

She’s told him all about her chosen life style. He says that she presented it to him as a life-long longitudinal single-subject scientific experiment that is essential for testing some of her more radical hypotheses. Apparently he thinks that he sounds more persuasive if he pulls out the dictionary and snows me with a load of scientific jargon.

I hope that he can tell that I’m not intimidated by his mumbo-jumbo.

As well, he assures me that she understands that he wants to be one of her lovers and suggested that he talk to me. As long as he stays silent and I do not tell her that he’s been included then she will remain ignorant of the paternity of her babies.

I can’t ask her about him because that would violate her anonymity requirement.

He volunteers that he is disease free and will submit to whatever medical tests are required.

He says that it’s his duty, as Mindy’s scientific collaborator, to assist in her “experiment.”

I know a horny man when I see one, no matter how many diplomas he has framed on his walls.

He swears that he’s willing to drive two hours each way to get his wick dipped. That’s pretty horny.

But my dislike of his approach doesn’t mean that it would be wrong to give Mindy to him. His genes are good, he knows the score, and, as long as he isn’t lying about his health, he’s as good a candidate as any.

And, if she told him about me, that must mean that she approves.

Something about this strikes me as a bad idea, but I can’t put my finger on it. He’s close to her but I’m not sure why that would be a problem as long as he’s just one man in the mix.

The bottom line is that I don’t have a good reason to exclude him.

It depends on what the medical researchers say. If they agree to six, or even eight, a day instead of sixteen, then I’ll go with them and there’ll be no room for Petreric. On the other hand, if they say it’s sixteen or nothing then it’ll be nothing and I’ll be scrambling to find some men for Mindy within a few days.

In that case, I’ll be happy to include him.

Part 3: Mindy at 39

Chapter 8: The Rocky Road to True Love

Mindy.

I’m going to fail to achieve my goal. I intended to average more than one baby per year from sixteen until menopause and I’ve only managed to have twenty babies in twenty-three years. The last half-dozen impregnations came slowly. I had at least one period before each pregnancy, sometimes a couple, and, last time, I had four periods in a row before the stick came back positive.

That was five full months of getting fucked full time.

That was tedious.

Maybe I’m not fucking enough men. Mr. Crane is only sending four men to me a day. I’m glad that it’s not sixteen. Sixteen almost killed me when I was in my mid-twenties. If I had to do that today, I’m sure that I’d haemorrhage and bleed to death. My vagina isn’t what it used to be. I had significant problems with bleeding during my last four deliveries.

My body as a whole is in rough shape. I’m healthy enough – I eat well and exercise moderately – but my boobs droop halfway down my chest and bags of loose skin hang down below my naval. I have terrible haemorrhoids and my legs have so many varicose veins that they look like roadmaps.

Well, maybe the varicose veins aren’t quite that bad. They look like roadmaps to me, but Mr. Crane says that they’re not that noticeable.

It’s okay that I’m using up my body. That’s what life is about. You use yourself up a little more every day, hoping to accomplish what you want to accomplish before you die. And I’m mostly accomplishing what I wanted. Not quite one baby a year, but close. Twenty babies isn’t trivial.

But I’m not ready to pack it in yet. I’m still at least ten years away from menopause. Thirty babies is theoretically possible, but twenty-five seems more likely.

Sometimes I wonder if Mr. Crane has a hard time finding men who want to fuck me. I haven’t had a high-school boy since I was in my early twenties. I still wear the hood so I don’t know exactly how old my lovers are. They’re probably younger than me – as near as I know I haven’t had sex with a man who’s my age or older since I was a teenager – but I’m pretty sure that they’re mostly close to thirty. And they’re not all in great shape. More of them are overweight than not. Some of them pant so hard when they’re pumping away that I fear they’re going to collapse for lack of oxygen.

It’s taking longer for me to get pregnant, but maybe I’m not getting less fertile. Maybe I’m having more trouble getting pregnant now because the men are not as virile.

I wish.

Let’s be realistic. A thirty-nine year old woman who’s delivered twenty babies isn’t going to be as fertile as a sixteen-year-old virgin. It’s just biology.

But I’ll just keep plowing on – or, more accurately, keep getting plowed by one and all – and I’ll keep getting pregnant.

I work hard to make men want me. I keep myself as toned as an overused thirty-nine year old can. I do yoga and aerobics and can run five miles in under forty minutes.

I wear sexy clothes when I enter the knock-up room. That’s a tricky thing. I can’t wear the same clothes as a teenager – I’d look ridiculous in those outfits – so I wear slit skirts that are just a little shorter than my peers’ and soft, tight, fluffy sweaters, or I wear formal evening gowns, or I go for a kinky leather jumpsuit –form fitting, but not revealing much skin. Underneath, I’m always wearing stockings – have to hide those varicose legs – with a garter belt to frame my crotch and a lace bra to lift those saggy boobs. More often than not, I wear a corset or bustier to hide those abdominal sags. I have a whole wardrobe of underwear in different styles and colors. I never have intercourse nude. I always wear as much underwear as possible when I’m having sex.

I’m getting a bit of gray on the mound, so I’m going to start shaving my crotch bald. Maybe that’ll make my pussy look like a kitten again.

I work hard to be a good lover. I’ll do or say almost anything for foreplay and I’ll take a man in any position that he wants to try. I’ll let a man tie me up, spank me, tickle me, dress me in rubber or leather, call myself a worthless slut, whatever turns him on. The only thing that I won’t do is anal. No ass play of any kind. The man has to end in my cunt and I don’t fancy getting a load of e. coli. shoved up there along with his cum.

And, of course, I won’t do anything dangerous. No choking. No cutting. No tattoos or branding. Nothing foolish.

During my first pregnancy, I started doing Kegel exercises to strengthen my vulva; and I kept doing them daily even when I wasn’t pregnant. By now, I have such strong muscles in my crotch that I can grip a man as firmly with my cunt as with my hand. I’m proud to say that I can bend over, let a man enter me doggy style, and neither one of us has to move. I can milk him to orgasm simply by massaging his cock with my cunt.

I still fill my daily quota of sperm. I just wish that I got pregnant as quickly now as I used to.

It may not be as easy for me as before, but I’m not about to give up. Not until I know that I’ve reached menopause and there’s no hope left for even one more pregnancy.

I’m no quitter.

* * *

Mr. Crane.

On the occasion of my sixtieth birthday, Russell gave me a terrible gift. He brought AIDS into my life. I’ve been faithful to him for almost twenty years. It turns out that he wasn’t as keen on monogamy as I was.

I noticed purple patches on his hands and asked him about it. At first he lied and told me that they were just age spots. Bullshit. I know Kaposi’s sarcomas when I see them. I have a university degree in biology. I pushed and he broke down and told me everything. During the twenty years that he was living with me, he continued to cruise for quick hook-ups with strangers a couple of times a month. He claims that he always used a condom, but they aren’t a hundred percent and the odds were bound to catch up with him eventually. He was diagnosed with HIV infection four years ago and has been taking anti-viral drugs on the sly ever since.

I thought that he was aging faster than me and that his reluctance to be intimate the last couple of years was related to his poor health. I was right, but not in the way that I thought.

I’m going to have to get tested for HIV every few months for the next couple of years.

It’s ironic. I’ve been so careful about keeping Mindy disease free and it turns out that I couldn’t do the same for myself.

The worst part about Russell is that I suspect that the asshole is still going out cruising and you can be sure that he’s not telling his hook-ups that he’s HIV positive.

I threw him out.

He’s furious. He acts like I’m the one in the wrong and he’s the innocent victim. He claims that we’re essentially married even though gay marriage isn’t recognized in this state and even though I’m legally married to Mindy.

Does he think that I’m a bigamist?

It’s all about the money. It’s always about the money. I’ve been re-investing the income from Mindy’s property back into more properties. Currently, her equity is more than thirty million dollars. And it’s growing by a couple of hundred thousand a month. His lawyer is trying to claim that it’s jointly held marital property so I own half – fifteen million dollars – and that, as my common-law husband, Russell has a right to half of my assets – seven and a half million dollars.

As far as I’m concerned, all thirty million is Mindy’s. She sure as hell earned it the hard way. I’m happy to give myself a good commission as her property manager but that’s all that I’ll ever take.

I’ve told Mindy that she’s a rich woman but she doesn’t want to hear anything about money. She just wants to have more babies.

She even thinks of her scientific writing as a casual hobby. Some hobby. Petreric tells me that most scientists consider her to be the world’s foremost expert in mathematical evolutionary psychology. There’s been talk about a Nobel Prize but he says that’s just scuttlebutt. It’ll never happen. Her theories are far too controversial for the Nobel Committee. She claims that women evolved to be rapeable and that masochism is a successful genetic strategy. The Nobel Committee will never even shortlist her no matter how well she can prove her theories.

Our lawyer says that Russell’s claim to Mindy’s money is ridiculous. He’s just trying to blackmail me with the threat of scandal.

Good luck with that, Russell.

Once upon a time, when I was still teaching high school and hiding in the closet, I supplied my teenaged wife with dozens of my students and ex-students as sexual partners. And I suffered no end of rumor mongering behind my back. Which eventually, inevitably led to my dismissal. If you think that you can threaten me with anything worse than what I’ve already endured, you’re sadly deluded.

I don’t care a whit about my reputation any more. And my wife definitely couldn’t give a damn. She never did and never will.

She certainly doesn’t want me to stop sending large numbers of horny men to her whenever she’s not pregnant. It amuses me that she still calls me Mr. Crane as though she is somehow deferring to me. Nothing will ever stop her from demanding that I give her exactly what she wants.

If she’s a slut, then I’m the servant of a slut.

At least, she’s a rich, brilliant, world-famous slut.

That makes me feel a little bit better about being her procurer.

Russell can go fuck himself.

* * *

Mindy.

My parents want to see me. They sent me a letter. I guess they figured that I’d hang up on them if they tried to phone me.

They guessed right.

Their letter said that they were sorry. That I shouldn’t hold a grudge because Father was a little hard on me when I was fourteen. It was so long ago, they should be forgiven. They were just doing their best to raise me right and I turned out fine in the end so maybe their strict discipline contributed to that. They didn’t mention what they were doing to me when I was twelve and thirteen and fifteen. Just fourteen. Like it was just something that happened once or twice during that one year. An aberration, not a long-term pattern of deliberate physical abuse. An understandable mistake.

I won’t bore you with the details beyond saying that I know intimately the feel of my father’s belt whipping me and got to spend a lot of hours in a dark closet crying about it. He drew the line at incest, though. Good old Father. I’m pretty sure that he got aroused by beating me but he made sure that my virginity stayed intact. I can’t prove it, but I know damn well that he was screwing Mom like mad all the time I was locked away in that basement closet. I’m not stupid and I had four years to learn the pattern. I could see the look of lusty anticipation on their faces when Father drew his belt and the look of obscene bliss when they let me out of the closet hours later. He was beating me for no reason but to get himself turned on, then locking me away in the far corner of the house so that he could go rutting on Mom while my screams were still fresh in his mind.

There. I gave you more details than I intended but that’s enough. I won’t try to explain the fucked up fundamentalist religious shit that he concocted to justify their sick sadism. Or how he called himself a Lay Minister of Christ so that he could recruit others to his perverted practices.

Now my mother thinks that she deserves to be canonized for letting Father fuck her half senseless three or four times a week after he beat me half senseless.

She doesn’t understand why I think she should burn in Hell for letting him do it. It was damn clear that she didn’t just let him do it, she rewarded him for it. She made certain that it was an ecstatic experience for both of them. If Father should burn in the lowest pit of Hell for eternity, Satan should dig an even deeper hole in the coals underneath him and plant my mother in it.

Too bad I don’t believe in Hell.

But I don’t believe in forgiving evil, either.

I’d tell them to go fuck themselves, but I’m sure that they’d be happy to do exactly that, even at the age of sixty. So I just throw their letter in the garbage and strap on my mother hood for another session in the knock-up room.

Someone may as well enjoy what Father couldn’t.

It’s the silent man again. Without a word, he holds me gently and runs his fingers over my back.

Every session for the past few pregnancies has included the silent man. He never says a word but he’s tender and considerate. The other men aren’t bad, but the silent man stands out for being exceptionally loving when he makes love to me.

The presence of the silent man is a violation of my arrangement with Mr. Crane. He was supposed to send me different men for every pregnancy. No repeats. It took me a while to realize that the silent man was the same man coming back again. I don’t know exactly when he first began repeating because a lot of my lovers don’t say much. They’re supposed to be as silent as possible. But the silent man is absolutely strict about never saying a word to me. Even in the throes of passion, he just grunts. Maybe he’s aphasic or even physiologically mute, but I don’t think so.

He might have been fucking me for two or even three knock-up periods before I realized that he was returning after each pregnancy.

Since I first realized that the silent man is a repeat, I’ve paid close attention to the other men, but I’m pretty sure that none of them come back after I give birth. I began taking notes about the quality of their voices and the pattern of their behaviour when they’re having sex. Either they’re all exceptionally talented actors or they’re different men.

At first, I thought that Mr. Crane might be sending me repeats because he’s having trouble finding new men, but that can’t be true. If he can find three new men every time I have to get pregnant, surely he could have found four.

No. There has to be something special about the silent man that Mr. Crane is willing to send him back to me again and again.

I should be angry with Mr. Crane for cheating me out of the genetic diversity that I wanted but I’ve mellowed a little in my old age. He’s done so much for me, giving up his teaching career and risking public condemnation, even prison if things turn ugly, that I have to give him a little leeway.

I don’t know what possesses me this time – maybe because I was thinking about my father, maybe I’m afraid that I’m turning ugly as birth after birth is ravishing my body, maybe I want to try real love, or maybe I just want to be shocking – but I break my own rule about never knowing the father of my babies.

After all, it’s not like I don’t know what’s going on.

“Dr. Petreric,” I say on a whim, “do you want to see my face while you make love to me?”

He freezes.

“I can unlock the hood if you like. It’s up to you.”

For the first time, the silent man speaks in the knock-up room. “I guess I couldn’t expect to keep my identity a secret forever, could I?”

His voice is as familiar to me as Mr. Crane’s. “It hasn’t been a secret for years,” I reply.

I feel him stroking the black leather hood. “Would you like to remove it?” he asks.

That is a question. “I don’t know. I’ve never had intercourse with a man without wearing this hood. I’m thirty-nine years old and have had sex with over a hundred men and I’ve never seen a single one of their faces.”

“You’ve seen my face.”

“Not when I’m making love to you.” And that is when I make my decision: when I realize that I think of myself as making love to Dr. Petreric, not just having sexual intercourse with him.

He’s not just another man trying to inseminate me.

And he’s not just a colleague.

He’s a lover in the real sense of the word.

“Wait here.” I open the combination lock on the door by feel, slip through just far enough to grab the little padlock key from the hook on the wall, and return, locking the door behind me. I’m not ready for him to see the part of the knock-up house where I live between pregnancies. I may never be ready for that.

After I unlock the padlock beneath my chin, I tell him to take my hood off. After wearing it in this room for all these years, I don’t think that I’d have the strength of will to lift it away from my eyes by myself.

I blink against the blinding light. Is it always so bright in here? I should have installed a twenty-five watt bulb in the lamp to give the room a more romantic air. I look around. There’s not a picture on the walls or an unnecessary stick of furniture or an ornament in sight. The room feels as anonymous and generic as a laboratory.

I’ve seen it a few times before, but I’ve never really looked at it. Somehow I always imagine it looking like the bridal suite in the Marriott where I lost my virginity.

When I gather the courage to look at Dr. Petreric, I see a strange expression on his face. An expression that I’ve never seen when I’ve been in his office explaining the importance of tree graphs in evolutionary configuration spaces.

Instead of his usual look of puzzled concentration, he looks happy.

“My hair must be a fright,” I say. “I always have hood head when I take it off. No one ever sees it.” I don’t know why I feel so nervous. I’ve never been nervous around him before. Nor around any man that I’ve fucked in here.

“Your hair looks wonderful,” he replies.

I can hear the insincerity in his voice but appreciate his attempt to put me at ease. “Make love to me,” I say. “Right now. Please.” I don’t want to wait. So many men have had sex with me in so many ways that I never expected to experience anything new.

But this is a new experience. I look down. This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever seen a man’s penis.

Dr. Petreric is erect and hard as wood but his cock looks smaller than I expect. From feeling them, I imagined cocks as being the size of baseball bats, but red and purple with bulging veins. I cannot help but laugh in delight and bend over to kiss its head.

“Your cock looks as wonderful as it tastes,” I tell him. “Now fuck me with it.”

I lay back and spread my legs for his pleasure. And mine.

I watch him while he fucks me. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth. His hair is long enough to fall around his face and it waves as he rocks back and forth. It’s a sensual motion and I luxuriate in the rhythm of it.

I’m reasonably orgasmic. Obviously, when a half dozen men are making love to me every day, I don’t come every time. Not even most of the time. But I’m not shy about giving myself a good orgasm at least every couple of days. Except for the time when I was doing sixteen men a day. During those times, I couldn’t come ever.

Today, though, I couldn’t stop myself from coming if I wanted to.

And I don’t want to.

I have good control – excellent control, actually – and I time my peak to coincide with his. We scream a duet and then fall silent together.

I wrap my arms around him and hug him to my chest until I feel him go completely limp inside me.

He thanks me.

I don’t know what to say in reply so I say nothing. Maybe I should have said, “You’re welcome,” but even I know that would sound strange.

Maybe I should tell him that I love him, but I don’t know if that would be true. I’m not sure that I know what love is. It’s not something that I learned from my parents, or Mr. Crane, or the hundred men that have inseminated me.

Maybe it’s something that I’ll learn from Dr. Petreric.

Maybe I already have.

When I let him roll off me, I continue to play with him – running my fingers through his chest hair, feeling his face, pressing my lips to his arm. But most of all, I look at him as my lover.

He’s in his late forties. His hair is gray at the temples. He has a bit of a pot belly but he’s mostly in good shape. I’ve seen all this before, but this is the first time that it meant anything.

Now he’s my lover. The only real lover that I’ve ever had.

“I can’t stop having sex with other men,” I say. “I’m still going to fuck every man that Mr. Crane sends here. I’m going to keep doing that for the next ten years.”

“I understand.”

“I’m getting less fertile. It’s taking longer to get pregnant.”

“That’s normal.”

“So I’m going to have to fuck men for longer than before. Probably for months at a time.”

“Will I be one of them?”

“You’ll be the first among equals,” I reply. “Anytime you want me, you can call me and I’ll make as much time for you as you want. Even if you don’t call, if you just show up, I’ll welcome you into me.”

He smiles. “I’ll call.”

I know that he will. He won’t want to have to see other men leaving my bed to make room for him. I may not know much about men, but I know that much.

“I’m married,” he says.

“I’ve seen the ring.” We’ve never talked about his personal life, which is funny considering how much I’ve told him about mine.”

“You’ve seen three rings,” he replies. “I’m on my third marriage. I was married to the first one before I met you. She divorced me when I told her that your husband had agreed to include me in your rotation. I told my other two wives about my special arrangement with your husband before we got engaged because I didn’t want to have to sneak around. My second wife tolerated it for two years after we married and then told me that she couldn’t stand it any longer. She gave me an ultimatum. I chose you. So far my third wife is hanging in there, but she makes it clear that she’s not happy about it.” He shrugs. “She’s not happy about a lot of things. You’re just one more item on a long list. In fact, I don’t think you’re in the top ten.”

After he leaves, I phone Mr. Crane and tell him that Dr. Petreric will always be welcome in my bed, not just for this insemination, but for as long as he wants me. Then I tell him that he should find a fourth anonymous man to fill his place. I still want as much anonymity as I can get.

And now, Dr. Petreric has a special status in my bed.

Chapter 9: The Shit Hits the Fan

Mr. Crane.

Two reporters phone me asking for interviews about my unique marriage to Mindy Crane.

I ask each of them what took so long to find out about us but that is a rhetorical question. The answer is obvious. Nobody had any reason to talk about us before and most had good reason to stay silent. The boys in the early part of the marriage didn’t want to be stuck with a paternity suit. The medical students that were recruited for experiments assumed that Mindy was just a paid sexual surrogate and didn’t want to be associated with any kind of prostitution, no matter how sterile and scientific. And the adoptive parents didn’t want anyone to question how they acquired their children.

The only person with a motive to talk is Russell. And his motive is pure spite. My lawyer spoke to his lawyer and informed Russell that he wasn’t getting a cent of Mindy’s money, no matter what he did. In fact, my lawyer hinted, not too subtly, that he could be charged with aggravated assault for failing to inform me and his other sexual partners that he is HIV positive.

The only way left for Russell to strike back is to send an anonymous message to as many members of the news media as he can find.

Two of them took his bait.

I tell them that I’m not about to grant any interviews but I know that won’t stop them. This story is too juicy to be dropped. Not only is there sex aplenty, but Mindy is a kind of bad-girl rock star in the scientific world. And she’s wealthy to boot.

I tell Mindy that our story is in the wind so she’s well advised to prepare herself. I recommend that we hire a publicist to tell us how to put the right spin on it.

In a case like this, it’s better to join the race than to let yourself be media roadkill.

Mindy is as blasé as if I had told her that my peonies are in bloom. She’s the only person that I know who genuinely doesn’t give a damn about what people are saying about her. She doesn’t even care if she’s shunned by the scientific community. As long as she can find men to keep her pregnant, she’s content.

I visit our lawyer and tell him the whole story. He listens and then tells me that, as a commercial lawyer, he’s not conversant with criminal law. He sets up a consultation with the highest-priced criminal lawyer in the state. After I tell my story in tedious detail one more time, the criminal lawyer assures me that I haven’t broken any laws. No money has changed hands so there’s no question of prostitution. Everyone has consented to everything, so rape is off the table. Everyone was an adult for the purposes of sexual congress in this state so there’s no problem with contributing to the delinquency of minors. The only iffy part is the first five high school students that I sent to Mindy because I was in a position of authority over them. But they’re not coming forward; the crimes, if any, would be minor; and the statute of limitations has long run out.

Besides what jury is going to care if a seventeen-year-old boy got lucky with a sixteen-year-old girl twenty-five years ago? The prosecutor who brought the case would be laughed out of court.

He tells me that I should sleep soundly as far as criminal prosecution is concerned. Once I lost my teaching job, fifteen years ago, I became pretty well invulnerable. The only possibility is that someone might file some kind of long-shot civil suit, but that’ll be no big problem. We’ll pay a bunch of legal fees to my regular lawyer and he’ll bury them in paper until they go bankrupt.

After worrying about being arrested every day for the last twenty-five years, his assurances give me a better night’s sleep than two thousand dollars worth of sedatives.

Which was his fee for an hour-long consultation.

* * *

The story breaks. It’s every bit as lurid as I imagined but I take a page from Mindy’s book. I ask myself: Why should I give a damn? I convince Mindy to join me in making a statement that our publicist prepared. It says that we are both adults and wish to keep our private lives private. The press doesn’t report our statement, but they don’t get any fuel to add to their fire, either, so it’s a wash. They were hoping that we would get defensive and start raving all kinds of nonsense that they could print.

The most important advice that the publicist gives is to not say anything except what is in the statement. Silence will protect us more than anything we can say.

The most difficult part is keeping Mindy under control. When she realizes that the press is going to be listening to her, she wants to start talking about how natural selection favors sluts, perverts, and rape victims over god-fearing prudes. Fuel? She wants to throw high-test gasoline on the media fires just to see how high she can make the flames soar.

I imagine lynch mobs forming outside my door. Criminal justice has no place in the fury that she wants to stir up. When she tells me that it’ll be good for people to hear the truth and that she has data to confirm her theories, I feel the noose tightening around my neck.

My only defence is to tell her that she’ll never get knocked up again if we’re victims of mob violence.

That shuts her up. She wants to have more babies.

In the days after the story blows through the media, I realize that this cloud has a huge silver lining.

My phone starts ringing off the hook. Men want to have sex with Mindy and they’re willing to take IQ tests, DNA tests, STD tests, psychological tests, provide references, whatever. And they’ll pay for all the testing themselves. You’d be amazed how many men are eager to prove that they’re fit to be a father if it gives them a chance to have unlimited free sex for a month or three.

Sure, a lot of these men are weirdos. But I’ve sent more than the usual share of weirdos to Mindy over the years. I know how to weed out the dangerous ones, the insane ones, and the frauds.

She doesn’t know that I’ve been maintaining physical security for her for more than a decade, ever since her personal wealth exceeded five million dollars. And it’s been getting more elaborate as she’s become wealthier. By now, there’s a metal detector built into the door frame and every man who’s sent to her is warned that he’s to have no metal on his person – not even car keys – when he enters the knock-up room. No alarms sound, the door simply won’t open if the metal detector is triggered. And there’s hidden cameras and microphones in the waiting room and the knock-up room that are monitored by two armed bodyguards in the house next door – which she owns – at all times during her knock-up period. If they see anyone try to strangle Mindy, they can be in the room before she runs out of air.

The whole thing is a lot more subtle than it sounds. Mindy sees no security. The men are simply told to undress in the vestibule between the waiting room and the knock-up room for the sake of efficiency. And the guards are from the company that provides security for all of her buildings. They don’t know that Mindy is the wealthy woman who employs them. They think that they’re keeping tabs on a special escort service that is used to reward business associates. They don’t want to blow the job because it’s a small part of a large contract that’s worth a lot of money.

My biggest worry has been that one of them will use the cameras to make a sex video for YouTube, but that hasn’t happened yet. It’s that whole losing-their-jobs thing that keeps them in line. They know that they’ll all lose their jobs, not just the guilty ones. The ones that are innocent are going to be very unhappy with whoever made the video. Dangerously unhappy. Someone might make a few thousand selling the video, but a job that pays fifty thousand a year is worth a million dollars over a twenty-year period. I don’t hire people who aren’t smart enough to do that math.

So far, everything has worked perfectly and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

And now I seem to have an inexhaustible supply of new men for Mindy.

Life is good.

Part 4: Mindy at 50

Chapter 10: Simple Logic

Mindy.

I had my period yesterday so I haven’t reached menopause yet. And menstruation means that I’m not pregnant either, but that’s not a surprise. I don’t expect to have any more babies at this late stage. I’m not getting fucked often enough.

Mr. Crane died from pneumonia four years ago. The AIDS that Russell gave to him finally destroyed his immune system despite the best treatment that money could buy.

If I believed in hell, I’d be able to believe that Russell is roasting in agony next to my parents right now.

That would be nice.

When I became a widow at forty-six, I decided to stop trying to get pregnant any more. I’m not using birth control, but no one is recruiting men to service me, either. The only man who has fucked me in the last four years is my second husband, Dr. Petreric, and that only happens four or five times a week. I used to get that much in a day. Hell, when I was doing sixteen men a day, I used to get that much in half an hour.

But I’m getting more orgasms in a week now than I ever did before. Life just keeps getting better and better.

My final count is twenty-three babies in thirty years. I would have had twenty-six if not for the three miscarriages that I had in my early forties. Not a world record, but definitely a respectable rate of reproduction.

During my early forties, I had to get fucked for a long time, sometimes as long as nine months before I got pregnant. And after the miscarriages, I had to start the knock-up periods all over again. It was getting unbearably tedious, so it was a relief when I finally decided to call it quits.

I never told anybody, but when I was young, I used fantasize that I’d never call it quits. That, when menopause struck, I’d just keep accepting all comers and keep getting fucked a dozen times every day until I died. My rule was that I keep getting fucked until I get pregnant and I imagined that the rule would still apply after I stopped being fertile and pregnancy was impossible.

I was such a masochistic woman when I was young. I matured out of it.

Maturing out of masochism is predicted by my configuration space theory of evolutionary psychology. Masochism is a trait that serves young women and men because it provides visible proof to their partners that they’re healthy enough to survive adverse conditions such as beatings, stress positions, and so forth. As people age beyond their fertile years, there is no need to prove their fitness any longer so their masochism will fade. Unless it mutates into a form of altruism.

My experience confirms my theory’s prediction.

When I called it quits, I cut the mother hood up into small pieces and threw it away. I wasn’t sentimental about it, but I didn’t want to think that someone might put it in a museum after I die.

Besides, it had become rather pongy despite my repeated efforts to clean it.

My life expectancy at this point is another thirty years – coincidentally the same amount of time that I spent married to Mr. Crane – and I can’t spend that much time doing nothing. I’m managing my corporations, of course. Big business is more fun than I thought it would be; and it’s a more interesting intellectual challenge than I expected. I think I’m doing it right because my accountants tell me that I’m worth more than a hundred million now. I’m sure that I can increase my net worth to a billion before I’m sixty-five, even if there’s a downturn in the economy. I’ve expanded far beyond real estate and have some ideas about new investments. My CFOs have their doubts, but I’ve worked the numbers so, in another five years, we’ll see who’s on the right track.

Every year, I get a few dozen invitations to lecture on the evolutionary configuration space that I developed with Dr. Petreric but I tell him go to the conferences that he likes and deliver the keynote addresses. I’m not interested in going and, when he lectures, he mostly gets the theory right. A number of schools, including MIT and most of the Ivy League, have asked me to teach a course on evolutionary psychology but I turned them all down. What are they thinking? I’m not a professor. I’m a high school dropout. I’ve been given a handful of honorary doctorates, but those aren’t real degrees. As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one Dr. Petreric in this house.

On legal documents I call myself Mindy Petreric in the same way that I was Mindy Crane when I was married to Mr. Crane – I won’t honor my father by keeping his name – but most people have never heard my last name. To the world I’m just Mindy and that’s the way I like it.

On the occasion of my fiftieth birthday, my husband tells me that he wants to throw a special party to honor me. It’s a surprise party that I can know about in advance. I don’t know what the surprise is, but I have my misgivings. I don’t like being surprised any more but I agree to attend because he looks so eager and I can’t deny him anything. That must be what true love is all about.

* * *

I’m wearing a long, black formal dress when Dr. Petreric escorts me into the ballroom. Underneath, I’m wearing my standard stockings, garter, and lace bra but only Dr. Petreric would guess that. I am determined to keep myself as sexy for him as I can. My husband deserves that more than any other man that Mr. Crane ever sent to me.

So far, I don’t see the surprise. There are almost a hundred people here, all staring at me, silent but for a few quiet whispers. There are children of all ages interspersed with the adults. 

I search for at least one face that I know, but everyone in the room is a stranger. It’s odd for Dr. Petreric to invite guests to my birthday party that I don’t recognize.

“Mindy,” Dr. Petreric announces, “I would like to introduce you to your family. These are your twenty-three biological children, their adoptive parents, and their children – your grandchildren.”

The room bursts into applause.

I can feel my face sagging in shock. My deal with Mr. Crane was that I would never meet my children after they were taken from my crib. But I made no such deal with Dr. Petreric. It was an oversight on my part. I look around again and discover that I don’t mind seeing them. I’m curious about how they turned out. It’s the scientist in me. Of course, my youngest child, a son, is not yet four, so there’s not much to learn about him, but the oldest must be thirty-four and well-established in life by now. He would be the father of some of my grandchildren. My oldest grandchild could be in his teens if my first children had reproduced as quickly as me.

For the next hour, my children and their families are introduced to me, one at a time, in order of their birth.

They’re a mixed bag, I must say. A few of my children are oriental and a couple black, but most of them are Caucasian. They’re not all handsome or pretty, but they look better than average to my biased eye.

I look carefully at the three younger ones. At least two look a little like Dr. Petreric. That’s probably my imagination. He had more chances to impregnate me than any other man, but less than the other men combined. He was only one of five men doing me and that was only for six pregnancies, of which three were miscarriages.

More important than their appearance is what they have done with themselves. Most of them are accomplished enough – there are four Ph.D.s among the eight oldest children – but two of them didn’t attend college at all. That’s all right – neither did I – but they don’t seem to have much of a career, either.

I understand regression toward the mean and don’t expect that all of them will be world shakers, but is it too much to ask that at least some of them would rise head and shoulders above the crowd?

My greatest disappointment is finding that I have only eleven grandchildren so far. Fourteen of my children are old enough to be fertile and they’ve only produced eleven offspring between them? Don’t they understand the biological imperative to pass on their genes?

Twenty-three children should be able to produce more than five hundred grandchildren. And theoretically, more than ten thousand great grandchildren. If they would all get busy, I could have two hundred thousand great-great grandchildren.

When the introductions are complete, I’m toasted with champagne and then asked to say a few words. No problem. I have words to say, all right.

“My children, my grandchildren, fathers and mothers, I thank you all for coming here today. Now that we have met, I hope to see you again so that we can get to know each other better in the coming years.”

I’m interrupted by a round of enthusiastic applause. They’re thrilled to know that they’re related to the famous Mindy. My first textbook on evolutionary psychology has been revised four times, is in it’s ninth printing, and is still the standard text for senior undergraduates and graduate seminars. I expect that at least some of the people in this room have read it. And now they know that they’re related to the author.

And, someday, they might inherit part of her wealth.

That’s cause for applause.

When they fall silent again, I continue. “Most of you probably know how I chose to live my life. It’s been described in the media often enough. I understand that someone wants to make a television miniseries about us. Unauthorized, I assure you. In a nutshell, when I was sixteen, I accepted the biological imperative of creating you, my children.”

More applause.

“But, at that time, I thought that my duty to my genes ended when I launched you into the world. Once out of my care, it would be up to you to make your own decisions in life. Meeting you, I realize that I made a mistake. I should have been more active in your lives, urging you to greater accomplishment.”

There is no applause now, merely the stunned silence of a crowd trying to understand where I’m going.

I make myself clear. “By accomplishment, I mean reproductive accomplishment. You should have figured out what I did – that what matters most is passing your genes to the next generation. I suspect that most of you are using birth control. And I doubt that any of you are fucking your mates nearly as often as you should.”

There is a collective gasp from the audience.

“I don’t expect you all to do what I did. You don’t have to have intercourse with a dozen different anonymous sperm donors every year. But you do have to have children. That’s the purpose of life. To reproduce.”

A few of the older people in the room are clutching children to them, trying to cover their ears. That annoys me. No child is too young to learn the basic lesson of evolutionary science.

I press on. “To encourage you to do your duty to the species, I’m going to offer an incentive. From this day on, I will pay you one million dollars every time one of you gives birth to one of my grandchildren. Whether you are the father or mother doesn’t matter. As long as genetic testing proves that the child is my grandchild, I will pay my son or daughter one million dollars. So, forget the cake and champagne, children. If you are old enough to be fertile, go home, go to a hotel, or go to the backseat of your car and get fucking.” I raise my glass. “To future generations!”

As I down the contents of my glass, I notice that no one joins me in my toast. But fuck ‘em all. Once they have a chance to think about my offer, most of them are going to start breeding like bunnies. Want a new sports car and a bigger house with a swimming pool? You can have it in less than a year just by getting knocked up. Once that thought percolates into their brains, it’ll be impossible for them to resist.

Right now, people in industrialized countries avoid having children because it reduces their disposable income. If I reverse the economic logic of having babies, then I’ll create a desire to breed just as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning.

My logic is simple.

It will work.

My children will breed.

My life will have been well spent.