The next day, Saturday, Dad and I spent the late morning and early afternoon driving from place to place and looking at used cars. Dad showed me how to negotiate and how to check out a vehicle that you might buy. To my surprise he actually taught me a few things that I didn't already know. I was pleased with the vehicle we eventually settled upon. It was a 1976 Datsun B-210 with seventy thousand miles on it. The engine was in reasonably good shape although the paint job and the interior were in bad need of an overhaul. I paid five hundred cash for it and drove it home that day. That evening I took it to work with me. No matter what else happened, there would be no more walking to school in the rain or the snow.
A week went by and then another. Nothing changed between Nina and I. She continued to ignore me in class and to eat lunch by herself. I tried to talk to her a few times without any measure of success. I tried to tell her I missed her but she didn't listen. My hope for any future relationship began to dwindle. During this period I maintained my habit of jacking off once a day on average. I simply couldn't help it. Nina was always featured in these fantasies and most of them were not even about sex. Most of them just involved being in an intimate place with her, being together with her.
Anita continued to be a problem. She continually called my mother asking if I could come over to do little chores for her. I was fast running out of excuses for why I couldn't do what she asked and my mother, now quite plainly sensing that something was wrong, was running out of look-the-other-way-so-you-don't-have-to-address-an-unpleasant-truth. I knew that I was going to have to have another talk with Anita but I wasn't up for it yet. The memory of our first talk was still too fresh in my mind. I'd experienced emotions during that talk that I'd never felt before, not even during the divorce with my wife in my previous life.
On the following Friday night, while I was adding up my stock holdings after receiving my latest paycheck from the pizza joint, the phone rang. Dad answered it, listened for a minute, and then yelled my name. I walked into the kitchen and took it from him, figuring it was probably Mike.
"Hey Billy-Boy!" A familiar female voice haled. "How you been?"
Cindy! In all of the turmoil of the recent past Cindy had completely slipped my mind. Our album sessions had dwindled once she'd started college and had all but disappeared in the last two months. I hadn't seen or heard from her since then.
"Hi Cindy." I said carefully. If I'd learned nothing else over the past few weeks I'd learned that females that you thought you were having a casual relationship with were often not under the same impression. Was another bomb about to drop on me? Had I screwed up Cindy's life as I had Anita's? I honestly didn't know. In my previous life I'd lost track of Cindy after her and Tracy had stopped hanging out together. The last time I'd seen her had been at Tracy's funeral where she'd given me a sympathetic hug and had disappeared from my life forever.
"What's up?" She asked me.
We chatted for a few minutes. She apologized for not having contacted me lately and I assured her it was okay. She told me she had a new love interest and I was very glad to hear that. Even when she mentioned that he was a professor at her college who was 'kind of married', I maintained my delight.
"That's just great Cindy." I told her. "I hope things work out for you."
"Oh they will." She assured me. "They will. I'll see to it."
"I'm sure you will."
"Listen," She said. "The reason I called is that Maggie and I are moving into an apartment together. You remember Maggie, don't you?"
How could I forget her? She was Cindy's brunette friend that used to come over to 'study' with me on days that Cindy could not. Like with Cindy, I hadn't seen Maggie in quite a while. Was Maggie going to be the latest bomb?
"Yes." I said. "I'm familiar with Maggie."
Cindy giggled. "I'm sure you are." She said. "Maggie knows your album collection almost as good as I do. Anyway, we really need someone to help us move tomorrow. We have a truck but we need help getting our shit out of our parent's house and into ours. Could you be a sweetheart and give us a hand?"
"Is anybody else going to be there?" I asked.
"Just me and Maggie." She told me. "Everyone else is busy on short notice. And if you help us out, we might give you a real special reward."
"Special reward?" I said quietly.
"REAL special." She said. "So what do you say?"
I'd told myself that I was past my previous ways, that my days of fucking anything with a pussy were gone. I knew I should offer a sincere apology to Cindy and tell her I was busy. But I hadn't released my daily load for the day and I was feeling quite horny. The thought of Maggie and Cindy, of their tight, youthful bodies wormed its way into my mind and stuck there. I found my mouth opening and the words: "What time should I be there?" leaving my lips.
"My house." Cindy said. "Ten o'clock sharp."
"You got it." I told her.
"I'll be looking forward to it." She told me.
I hung up the phone feeling guilty about my actions. But I also did not have the willpower to call Cindy back and tell her I couldn't make it. I told myself that I would just help them move and that nothing else would happen. And I knew that I was lying to myself.
It was overcast the next day but not raining. I drove to Cindy's house, arriving promptly at ten, and met the two girls standing next to a medium sized U-Haul truck. They both gave me hugs for greeting and both gave my ass a discreet squeeze, making my dick, which I'd just releived only twelve hours before, pulsate in my pants. My morals wavered.
We spent about an hour moving boxes from Cindy's bedroom in her parent's house into the U-haul. We then caravanned to Maggie's house, where I'd never been before. It took an hour and a half to move Maggie's boxes from her room. Once the U-Haul was full we drove to a large apartment complex near the college.
Like Raisin's apartment complex, I knew this one from my previous life as a paramedic. We used to go to calls to it frequently, not because it was scummy, although there was a little bit of that, but because it was huge and because it was filled with college students. College students like to drink and take strange drugs and get into fights over things like parking space ownership and who drank the last beer. I'd been here for overdoses, for life-threatening alcohol ingestion, for countless assaults, for people on acid who'd convinced themselves that they'd forgotten how to breathe, and for the occasional stabbing or shooting. I remembered it mostly because each trip into its bowels was an exercise in celestial navigation. There were no maps in the front. The buildings had no numbers on them. Even the apartment numbers themselves were marked only with a four-inch set of black numbers on the brown background of the doors. I remembered driving around in the place for fifteen or twenty minutes looking for the right apartment every time I came, and receiving angry rebuffs from the drunken college students when I finally stumbled across the right one, as to why it had taken me so long to get there. I remembered thinking that there should be a law against places such as this.
Thankfully Cindy and Maggie had been to their apartment before. They found it after only ten minutes of driving around. The U-Haul was parked illegally in a red zone and the ramp was extended. The apartment was opened up and we began picking up boxes, each of which was marked either with a C or an M or an LR or a K, into the two-bedroom living quarters. Forty minutes later the U-Haul was empty.