"That's all very interesting Billy, but…"
"When I got stabbed." I told him. "I remember that the paramedic who was treating me was not wearing any gloves. I'd been cut open and I was bleeding and he was touching me with his bare hands. The nurses and the doctors in the hospital did the same thing. It wasn't just me, it was almost all of the patients that I saw there. Nobody was wearing gloves on their hands as a matter of routine. It just isn't done right now. Are you following me?"
"You're saying that is going to change?"
"In a big way I predict, and soon. As more heterosexuals get the disease and the epidemic grows, ambulance companies, fire departments, hospitals, nursing homes, every medical office is going to start ordering huge supplies of latex gloves. There might even be a shortage of them for a while. The price of them will go up according to the law of supply and demand and their sales figures will probably increase by at least four hundred percent, maybe more. This is the perfect time to invest in the latex business."
He was impressed with my reasoning of the subject but I could tell he still wasn't convinced.
"It's still pretty risky Bill." He told me. "Are you sure you want to invest ALL of your money in this?"
"All of it." I nodded. "Can you do that today?"
He gave me one last glance and then said, "Sure. I'll do it during lunch hour."
The summer rolled on. I continued to have plenty of sex on a fairly regular basis but my heavy work schedule put something of a ding in the variety I was getting. I was down to three females that I enjoyed, rarely getting anything new. Anita would still have me over to do some work for her a few times a week, after which, or sometimes before which, we would go to her bedroom and enjoy a long sex session. She always had me over in the evenings when her kids had gone to bed. Cindy still came over to check out albums with me during the day when my parents were not home. If fact, with Tracy gone a lot of the time on various missions to prepare for college, Cindy's visits became more frequent. It seemed she felt a little guilty about screwing me while my sister was there. With Tracy gone we enjoyed the best sex we'd ever had, with no worries about being too loud or too obscene.
The third girl was Maggie Bartlett, a friend of Cindy's. She would come over on the days when Cindy did not. I tried to talk them into a threesome a couple of times but they just giggled and told me they weren't into that. A pity.
Nina and I remained in contact with each other even though we no longer had to study for anything. We would meet a few times a week at my house or hers, just enjoying each other's company. A few times we drove into nearby Idaho to spend the day at one of the resort lakes. One such day I found myself looking at her in her bathing suit while we soaked up rays on the hot sand. She was starting to fill out nicely. Her breasts, which the previous summer had been almost non-existent, were now pushing at the cups of her one-piece. Again I remembered her classy good looks as the bitchy emergency room doctor. Now that I'd removed the bitchiness I figured she would make some guy very happy someday.
"What are you looking at?" She'd asked, blushing a little as she found my eyes upon her.
I smiled. "Just seeing how your tan is coming along." I told her.
"Well?" She asked. "How is it?"
"It's lookin' good." I answered. I picked up a bottle of sun lotion. "Can you put a little of this on my back? I don't want to burn." That was the advantage of having a girl for a best friend. You could have them put oil on your back. You certainly wouldn't ask a guy friend to do something like that.
"Sure." She said softly, taking it from me. I noticed a slight tremble in her hands as she squirted some into her palm.
Dismissing this, I laid on my stomach on the towel. Her hand began smearing the slippery lotion across my back. Her hands on my skin felt good I realized. They were soft yet eager, gliding over my shoulders and through the small of my back. Her touch was almost sensuous and I felt myself, to my surprise, getting a hard-on beneath my suit.
What a mind-blower, I thought. Nina is giving me a boner. What a strange world.
On September 2 Tracy left the house for California and UC Berkeley where she would begin her first semester as a college student. She planned to get her graduate degree in Business Administration and then move from there to law school. Her hopes were to one day be a rich corporate lawyer. At least she was honest about it.
I gave her a big hug before she climbed into Dad's car for the trip to the airport.
"Take care of yourself." I told her, "And be careful."
"You too." She answered.
She climbed into the car and a minute later it backed out into the street. As I watched it go I felt a tear running down my face. Tracy was still alive.
My senior year began. Because Cindy had graduated and enrolled in college that meant that I was without a ride to school. Though Mike had improved in many areas over the last few months his driving was not one of them. I attempted to mellow him out a bit by letting him know that the fire department would not hire him if he had too many points on his driving record. I suppose this did some good, he never got any points put on, but I still was not going to get into that Volkswagen with him. Strangely enough, though this subject had prompted our long estrangement, he seemed to understand. The subject was never brought up. But this still left me without a lift to school and I'd been driven so long that I'd lost my taste for walking. Nina came to the rescue here. Her Mom, who was a housewife and who thought I walked on water, had always been in the habit of driving Nina to school all through high school. It didn't take much convincing on Nina's part to persuade her Mom to run by my house in the morning and again in the afternoon. Her Mom, who was considerably older for a parent, Nina had been a late child, drove like an eighty-year-old grandmother in her Lincoln. But that was just fine with me. I felt there was little chance of getting killed with Mrs. Blackmore at the wheel.
The reason I'd known so much about our school's ROP program was that I'd taken it as a senior my first trip through. I hadn't taken fire technology but health careers where I'd been assigned to the emergency room at one of the local hospitals as an ER tech. It was this part of my life that had seduced me into my eventual job as a paramedic. I took the health careers once again, as did Nina. I tried to remember if she'd been in it with me before and I couldn't. She had been such a forgettable person back then. Nina planned to sign up for emergency room assignment since she figured, as I had all those years ago, that would be the most exciting. Though I was tempted to do the same, I missed the thrill of the unknown that came with working in emergency situations; I chose central supply instead. Those that chose central supply were sometimes hired by mid-semester if they showed some responsibility. I planned to show lots of it. Central supply techs were paid six dollars an hour.
Mike was accepted into the fire tech ROP program. Like with our health careers program, it was required that you spend the first two months in a classroom learning the finer points of your career assignment. He grumbled about having to spend three hours a day in a class instead of in a fire station like he'd thought but he stuck with it. I knew his grumbling was good-natured and offered only because it was expected of him. He was actually finding the classroom lectures on the basics of firefighting interesting, perhaps the first thing besides marijuana and pussy stories that had ever interested him. I began to feel that Mike was going to be okay.
I perhaps suffered the worst through the classroom portion of ROP. They were teaching us how to take blood pressures, temperatures, pulses, and how to respond to various hospital emergency situations like fires or floods. This was all stuff I knew not just intimately but genetically it seemed. There was however some interesting perks to the classroom. It was made up of mostly girls. I had a fresh hunting ground to pick from and an additional challenge thrown in since most of the girls did not know who I was because ROP classes were made up of students from all the regional high schools.