Published: 8 Aug 2019

I told you how cool my dads’ were didn’t I? When I was 13 and about to leave middle school, I told them I pretty much had figured out I was gay myself and they, after hugging me, asked if I had any questions I hadn’t answered for myself on the internet. I had a few and I got the answers I needed, and then I asked them if I could invite a friend to the farm to ride some of the trails we had, and maybe stay for dinner, on Saturday. All they asked was if I had someone in mind and I told them about this guy at school I was friendly with and that I thought he might like to spend some out of school time with me.

They told me that they hoped I had explained that we were a gay household and I told them that I guess I had better, as I had intended to come out to him, Paul, while we were here at the farm, here where I felt safe. I really had no idea if Paul was gay himself, but he didn’t seem to mind if the guys he hung around with at school were. I resolved to make sure he knew about my household, and me, the next day in school. So, during our first period science class I ran over in my mind just the right way to do this, as the last half of the period we were given free time as it would be the last class of our school year for this period, tomorrow would be the last day of school and we didn’t have science tomorrow. Most all our classes today and tomorrow would be like this, the only one that wouldn’t was PE where we would split up into teams and play a game of some sort.

So, Paul and I usually sat next to each other in our shared classes and while others talked around us we were comparing our test scores from earlier in the week, and we came out of the end of the year tests pretty darn even. I turned to him as I put my papers back in my backpack and just blurted out that I was gay and had gay dads and “uncles” that I lived with at our farm and I liked him and wondered if he’d like to go trail riding with me and stay for dinner. He sat there rubbing his chin and I noticed his sparkling eyes as he pretended to talk real serious and said that he would have to clear it with his moms first, but yeah, he’d like to spend a lot of time with me.

My friendship with Paul lasted until one of his mothers’ got a big promotion at work and they had to move to Virginia. We communicated via emails for quite a while, but by my junior year we were down to holiday wishes and then nothing after that. I was crushed, he was my first crush, my first kiss and my first experience exploring another naked body, after which we had frotted and had what seemed like the first ever orgasms in the whole world. It felt to us like we had invented it. Years later I tried to track him down, but to no avail. His family had moved on from Virginia and I couldn’t locate him. My dads’ knew what I was going through all this time and were so supportive, as were Jake and Heath.

The mood in the office the next day was one of excitement. We all had projects to work on and Amy was busy getting the info on our new clients entered in her computer to prepare to print out a master schedule for all the new and older projects we all were working on so a schedule could be prepared for all of us. Susan, Bill, and I all had private homes to design and meetings with our clients to solidify their preferences before final plans would be drawn up, while Mike was working with an insurance company for a new branch office they wanted to open in our town. We each broke for lunch on our own that day and when I went up to the house there was lunch ready for the five of us that lived there. After lunch was over and the clean-up was done, I went back to the office and to my project I had been working on.

So, Monday turned out to be a rather ordinary day, but Tuesday was just one of those days that dragged on and on and I must have worn out the dial on my watch looking at it. I couldn’t wait to get home and change into something comfortable for dinner with Alex. We had agreed on casual, and that I would pick him up at his house just up the road from me. Had we decided on where to go? Yes, we had decided on a restaurant in the next town, The Riverboat Lodge. It’s nickname was the “Surf and Turf Restaurant” as it was really a combination of a steakhouse and a seafood restaurant, very casual, but the views across the river to the mountain were very good and if you timed it right you could see the sunset across the expanse of water as you gazed out the windows, or if the evening was pleasant you could eat out on the deck at private tables scattered out there and watch the sun set behind the mountain.

We arrived just before sunset and it was such a nice evening we opted to dine outside which turned out really nice because the inside tables were all filled and it really looked crowded and a bit noisy in there, but out on the deck there was just the soft sounds of the evening and the occasional chuckle or laugh from another table. We chatted over glasses of white wine and while looking over the menu we decided to split whatever we ordered, we thought that way we’d get more steak and more lobster instead of ordering a surf and turf meal for each of us. So, I ordered the two-lobster tail meal and Alex ordered the sirloin steak dinner and we feasted. Alex cut the plate sized steak in half when it was served, and he placed a half on my plate as I placed a full tail on his. It was a very companionable meal and I admit he even chewed in a sexy manner.

I guess I really was into this guy, I mean I hadn’t planned on it, there was no immediate need to couple, there wasn’t any pressure being put on either of us, but I can’t even tell you how much I felt we belonged together at that time and it surprised me. We were halfway through dinner, and I felt Alex press his leg against mine. Not accidentally, no, this was deliberate. And my heart sang. He looked at me and raised one eyebrow at me, just as he had on Sunday when he held my hand and asked if that was alright to do. I flexed my leg against his and smiled at him, I hope in a kind of sexy way, I didn’t want him to think I was having a gas attack or something, and thankfully he smiled shyly at me.

Unfortunately, we had so much to eat for dinner that when the waitress came to clear our dinner plates and asked if we were ready for dessert Alex and I both groaned and she said she understood. When I drove back to his house, taking the long way to spend more time in his company, he paused as he was getting out of the car and asked if I wanted to come in for a cup of coffee. I told him that if I did it would probably keep me up all night, and he asked if that would be such a bad thing, he could think of several things to help calm me down.

We ended up walking past his workshops and the on-site office down along the path between his fields and it was then I remembered to ask if he would rent us some of his acreage that ran alongside some of our grazing fields in the Springtime and the Summer months. He said he thought that would be doable, as he hadn’t had anyone ask to rent those particular areas yet. I didn’t realize it until about then, but we had been “walking off our dinner” while holding hands. He asked if we could seal our agreement with a kiss, and standing out in the middle of all his fields, under the full moon above, we kissed.

That little tingle of shared electricity was felt and we both giggled at that, but we went right back to kissing and by now our arms were around each other and we were touching from our lips down to our ankles. The feelings were exquisite, and I didn’t want them to stop. But he gently guided me back toward his house and we entered his house as one through the big front door.

He offered coffee or wine for when we sat and talked, and I admit it was me that said I thought we had talked enough for tonight, and since we both had work in the morning, I thought we should get to bed as soon as possible. He looked hurt, but just for a moment, as he saw me head to the big staircase in his front hall and quickly followed with a huge smile on his handsome face. He caught up to me at the top of the stairs and quickly kissed me again, taking my hand and guiding me to the master bedroom.

I could just say we had a good time in bed and leave it at that, but that wouldn’t cover what we both experienced in that bedroom that night. He tried to kiss me again once we were inside the room, but I told him that in the bedroom we had to remove articles of clothing before kissing, unless one of us was on the way to work. He chuckled that deep throated chuckle that sent shivers through my body and began tearing off his dress shirt, but I put my hands on his and undertook the task of unbuttoning his shirt which was fitted to his muscular torso and I enjoyed immensely revealing every inch of his musculature to my hungry gaze. His left pec danced for me as I captured his meaty nipple in my mouth and tasted it, gently warming his right one between the fingertips of my left hand, getting that one ready for the same treatment. Now this was a taste of the desert I was waiting for.

He was fumbling with my shirt buttons as I suckled on his nipples and when I felt him undo the last button, I stood up to lock eyes with him as he slipped it off my shoulders and he tossed it onto a bedside chair. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me the whole time and as I stood there with my shirt off he let out a guttural moan and began to run his fingertips over my torso and soon his tongue had found one of my engorged nips and he was suckling on it, I think having an expectation of something to swallow eventually. My pecs are inordinately large, not to the point of grossness, but each is definitely more than a handful, and each is capped by a large nipple, the size of most men’s engorged nipples, but that is only the start for me. Once erect they project a good ¾ of an inch from the constricted areola, and I totally enjoyed having a great deal of nipple play, even when on my own, but having a stud like Alex nursing on me was a total turn on and I was doing all I could to get his pants off him all during this tit play.

His were nubs and I kept playing with them as he suckled and I enjoyed the hardness of his pecs, but once I had the top button on his jeans undone, I wanted to see what I was feeling in his pants. I could feel a real good-sized cock, uncut I determined, and leaking. His balls were in a smooth sac I found out, free of hair and they filled my palm as I gently rolled them in my hand, loving the feel of his foreskin moving on the area above my wrist as I did. There was the real desert I wanted.

But I was going to have to wait a bit as he shimmied out of his pants, as did I, and we stood there taking each other in, naked as our hard dicks kissed as we leaned in to kiss each other again. The time was standing still for us as we both toppled onto his king-sized bed and began grinding against one another as our lips remained connected and our hands roamed the naked flesh of each other.

I let my hands and fingers roam the hills and valley of his exquisite ass and then one of my fingertips found his rosebud and it tickled him there, just the tip of my finger, rubbing and caressing and pretending to push in, but only the tip, not even up to the first knuckle at this time. The smartass groped around my backside and it wasn’t long before I felt the same sensations at my pucker and we were soon shooting our wads onto each other’s stomach, our mouths gasping, but unwilling to give the other back his tongue, our chests heaving against each other as we lay facing each other on our sides, our dicks still oozing as they ground against each other. I was laying on my right side, he on his left, and there was goo (definitely not GOOS!!) from our belly buttons up to our chins and our chests had lubrication for now as we each took a break from sucking tongue and we captured as much goo as we could reach on our chins and necks before rejoining our mouths and sharing what we had captured with each other, now that was a desert dish best served fresh and warm, YUM!! I fell asleep holding Alex close and when I woke later, he was cuddled into me, asleep also, but with the cutest satisfied smile on his face, so cute I had to kiss him and without even opening his eyes he returned my kiss.

That woke us both up enough to realize we had to clean ourselves up a bit before going back to sleep, which we did in his bathroom. I cleaned him, and he cleaned me, with washcloths by the bathroom sink. You know that the warm water was supposed to clean and sooth us, but what it did was to waken us to full arousal once again and we were soon back in bed, kissing and nibbling and teasing each other until he actually begged me to fuck him. I mock seriously promised I would but only if he promised not to cum himself so he could return the favor once I was done in his ass. He didn’t say anything, he just smiled up at me and nodded, not exactly promising, but who was I to pass on a gift ass, especially one as fine as his was?

It had been some time since I had prepared someone for my big dick, but I took the time with both my tongue and mouth and three fingers to do so properly before sliding my big dick in, an inch or so at a time to let him adjust, and once seated all the way in I loomed over him. His legs on my hips and his feet urging me to pump as I leaned over and captured his right nipple in my mouth and proceeded to suck as I fucked, soon swapping back and forth on his nips and then closing down on his mouth as my climax was reached, sucking on his tongue as my juices entered deep within him, a spurt with each consecutive thrust, my lowest abs capturing his throbbing hardon in their valley and teasing his repeatedly exposed cock head. He gasped and gasped and finally pushed on my torso until I was no longer laying atop him, but still between his legs and still embedded inside him. I looked down at him and watched as he wrestled with giving in to his own climax, or flipping me over and fucking my ass. I kissed his nose and withdrew out of him and then rolled onto my back and raised my legs for him.

He had the lube in his hand as he dove onto my exposed hole and had his first taste, second taste and a thousand more as he made himself familiar with my hole. I then began to feel the slicked fingers of his right hand as they explored my insides, gently stroking and prodding my hole until I felt the wetness of his cockhead making its entry, after he had asked if I was ready. I had just nodded up at him, my eyes locked onto his as he made his way slowly into me. We were the same generous size and with the exception of his foreskin, we were nearly identical in the private parts department. He was a lot bigger than any of the other three dicks I had ever had in there, but he made me want him in there and I knew that with him it wouldn’t be a once in a blue moon occurrence either, in his own way he was letting me know that “tit for tat” was going to be the norm in our relationship. Both of us were versatile and we both loved it.

I wondered if that certain “give and take” had been missing from his relationships in the past too as he slowly dismounted and kissed me from my belly button up to my mouth where he breathed out, almost breathlessly, “Bradley, I love you” before falling asleep where he lay.

I eventually fell back asleep also, but not before thinking about what he had said, and taking it for what I thought it meant, an utterance in bed after some of the most glorious sex that I had ever had.

When morning came, we were now spooned into each other, Alex with his backside against my front, and my arm around him, he was using my other arm for his pillow, although there were softer pillows at the head of the bed. I guess what woke me was Alex flexing in his awakening mode of sleep about to become fully awake. I flexed myself and saw his head go up and down as my bicep moved under his head, then I flexed my feet which made me realize we had our legs entangled and then my abs and groin which surprised me as Alex groaned and shoved his ass back into my crotch and then I realized that not only did my morning hardon feel real good this morning, but it was sheathed by the warm clenching walls of the inside of Alex, and that he had started to clench and unclench his ass, essentially milking my cock, going for a morning eruption from my hardon.

Well I was a fair and generous fellow and my hand went from his great abs and found his morning erection and I pumped him as he moved himself back and forth on my cock. The arm under his head I found, if I shifted it slightly, could reach his closest nipple and I then went to town, tweaking his nub and grinding into him while pumping him. We both had a wet wake up and there was no morning breath to contend with as we engulfed each other’s mouth just as his alarm clock went off, announcing another work day. He pulled me into his bathroom and into his generously sized shower where we cleaned each other up before drying off.

Just before we dressed he came to me and we held each other naked and he asked me if I remembered what he had said before he fell asleep last night and I kissed him and told him I did and I was about to say more when he kissed me again and said out loud that he now knew he was right last night, that he loved me and that he thought he could even be IN love with me. I was startled by this and asked if he was sure that this wasn’t some kind of line he was using to get me to come back again, and he said he had felt the same way since he had met me the other night and those feelings had only intensified during dinner, and our desert party after, here in this room.

He told me he had let himself go and actually connect with someone for the first time in many years, and he hoped he hadn’t jumped the gun and voiced his thoughts too early, but he said with me he was hoping for a very long term relationship, if I felt I was ready, otherwise he was prepared to wait for me to realize I was in love with him too. I held him to me and told him that if I wasn’t there already, I would be soon and I too was hoping for a long-term relationship, as that was how I was, one guy forever, unless that guy betrayed my trust.

As we dressed, me in last night’s clothes, we discussed when we might have time to spend together and we decided on tonight, for dinner again, we would cook it together here at his house. I have to admit that I was a bit spaced out at work that day, but I was able to sit in my office at my drafting table and create designs for my new customer’s house, but ended up tearing up the first two exterior renderings, I didn’t think Marsha and Josia would want to raise their family in a house that looked like a giant prick, nor the second one that looked like an upturned butt on the plot of land they had purchased. After lunch up at the house, and a great deal of good-natured ribbing from my dads’, things settled down and my modern exterior house design was finally taking shape. I had told Heath that Alex seemed open to us leasing his fields nearest us for the next year’s grazing and he thanked me, and he went after lunch to draw up his proposal for the rental agreement for both parties to sign.

As it was, I was able to bring the letter of intent to Alex that night for his signature, that would ensure the acreage wouldn’t go to someone else next Spring. Our dinner was actually fun to prepare as we shared the kitchen and worked together to prepare our meal. We both tended to clean up as we worked, so the final cleaning of the kitchen went quickly after we had eaten and I was wondering what Alex had in mind for the rest of the evening before bedtime, when he suggested we take a walk.

It was really nice out, with the temperature around 60 which was really good for the early October evening. We walked about his property, taking in the night sky and at one-point Alex spotted and pointed out to me a shooting star. We had our arms around each other as we walked and to celebrate the star moving across the night sky, we kissed. My arms snaked around him and I pulled him even closer and we snogged right there in the path between his fields. We eventually resumed our walk and Alex filled me in on the job he was currently working on, a full renovation of a 60s ranch style house that had been a foreclosure sale to a young couple who had chosen the home for its location, halfway between each of their jobs, the husband working in Springfield and the wife working in an office at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

He told me that the house was a nightmare. The couple that had been foreclosed on had left everything in it and just took off for parts unknown. Alex told me that there was stuff in every room, just as if they had just walked off and left. Furniture, rugs, wall pictures, lamps, drapes and curtains, he told me that even the towels in the bathroom were hung on the towel bars and looked undisturbed. He said it was really spooky. I asked where this house was, and he told me the address and I had to stop walking as he told me this, and then I blurted out that Paul used to live there.

I told Alex about my little infatuation with my schoolmate Paul and that I knew the property well. He thought for a few moments and then asked if I’d like to see the property again, he had to do his own assessment about costing out the removal of the contents and then the cleanup before his crews could begin to work on the property. I said sure, and he asked if tomorrow would be OK, because the sooner the better so he could begin work on that project. I told him I could meet him there in the morning, if we got up early enough, and he smiled and told me we had better start getting to bed now then.

After another night of exploring each other, manually and orally, we got up really early and after a bite of breakfast and cleaning up, we each drove to the property Alex had the key for. The house looked the same, the yard a bit more overgrown than I remembered it, but still the same. Alex opened the door and we went in and I could immediately see what he had meant, all the furniture was in place, all the various decorations and Bric-à-brac even still in place. The whole house was the same, bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen, it was just as I had remembered it from those high school years of visiting here, exactly. I asked Alex how long the place had been on the foreclosure listings and he looked in his paperwork and told me about three months.

I noticed that the basement door had been left ajar, and I asked Alex to go down there with me, but to make sure his flashlight was turned on, as there was no electricity turned on in the house. We descended the stairs and there were definite signs someone had used this space more recently than my high school years, more than 8 years ago. There were crumpled paper bags, cardboard boxes, and plastic garbage bags strewn about the family room area. The couch there had been used as a bed and sheets and a pillow were still in place and the recliner facing the TV set also had a blanket and bed pillow on it. The former family room had housed at least one, if not two people for some time it appeared. I remembered there had been a bedroom down here, off the family room. They had called it a guest room, but it was the room Paul and I had used during sleepovers. I walked over to it and opened the door so Alex could shine his big flashlight around and the room still had twin beds, all made up, and they also looked used, made up, but looking as if someone had just gotten up from each of them. Again, there was debris scattered about like the family room at the bottom of the stairs.

The bathroom out in the hall looked used also, with used towels and washcloths in there, and for some reason in the adjacent laundry room was a heap of clothing, clothing that had been worn and not washed yet. As Alex trained the flashlight beam on the pile of clothing on the floor it was immediately recognizable as women’s clothing mixed with clothes for a young man; jeans and polos and T shirts, and underwear a male would wear. We worked our way to the utility room at the end of this hall and there was the usual furnace, a hot water tank, a storage area that now held some sort of shelving with both women’s and young men’s clothing on the shelves. Along the outside wall was an old chest freezer, the type sold by stores like Sears so a family could stock up.

I was, I admit, curious and went to open the freezer and Alex was by my side with the flashlight and trained it on the big opening of the chest as I lifted the top and we both gasped at what we saw in there. The interior was devoid of the partitions usually found in chest freezers, instead there were two rotting bodies in there, and my first instinct was to slam the top back down and retreat to a corner and throw up. Alex was gagging and trying to dial his cell phone at the same time. I had recognized the two bodies in the freezer. One was one of Paul’s mothers, Sheila, the quiet one, a very pleasant lady, but she always took a back seat to Hilda, the other, more dominant of the two women. The other body was Paul’s. He looked a bit older than when I had last seen him, and his hair had grown out some, but yes, it was my first boyfriend, Paul.

Alex ushered us up to the ground floor and we sat on the front stoop as he contacted the bank that had foreclosed on the property. When he reached the correct flunky in the mortgage department he asked why the property had not been cleaned out like most reclaimed foreclosures were and he found out that the new buyers, Alex’s clients, had learned of the foreclosure and had put an offer in right away, without the bank having to pay someone to clean it out first. Alex told the dolt to expect a call from the police because he had just found two bodies in the freezer chest of the home and the police were on their way. I asked Alex who was the defaulter on the mortgage. And Alex asked and was told it was Hilda, the mother who had supposedly gotten the better job which meant they had to move to Virginia.

By now two police cars, the coroner, and his investigative team, and the chief of police had arrived, and we now had them to deal with. We went through what we had done and what we had discovered in the basement, and they were really courteous toward us, most of them knowing us or our families over the years, and one of the policemen was actually one of my, well, Paul and my classmates in school. He remembered Paul as well, and he agreed with me that that was Paul’s body in the freezer.

We learned a few days later most of the story, when we were asked to come to the police station to sign our statements taken at the house that day. The coroner had filed his report and the investigators had also and combining those with the police investigation findings we learned that Hilda had made up the new job offer, she had grown jealous of Sheila’s friendship with another woman, and she was afraid that Paul was moving ahead with his life after our friendship blossomed into more than just friendship. She felt she was losing control of her little family, and had drugged them, kept them in the basement rooms, and kept her family “intact” for a couple more years until one of her hostages and then the other had died because of the drugs in their systems. She had continued to mentally deteriorate, and she also began using some drugs and eventually lost her job, couldn’t pay the bills, and had gone off one day, never to come back. It was later determined that she had taken her own life by driving off a mountain road a few years after leaving town and going to back to Maine where she was originally from.

During this whole mess Alex was right by my side, figuratively and literally. It was a rotten two weeks for me, and he treated me so good. My dads’ and he encouraged me to lose myself in my work the day after we found the bodies, and doing that, and my understanding staff, helped a lot. The police had told me that at first Hilda had attempted to answer my emails to Paul, and after a while she just stopped, either to get me off her back, or because she might have started using drugs herself and just didn’t care to keep up the pretense any longer.

Poor Alex still had to deal with his clients who seemed unfazed by the police activity at their new house, but Alex spent as little time as possible there as his staff turned the simple ranch into the mid century modern home the owners wanted and he was himself with a different crew working on another of their projects. He came to eat dinner (and stay the night with me) a couple of times a week and my dads’ and Jake and Heath got to know him better and vice versa. The other nights we sometimes cooked at his house, and sometimes went out to eat, or to a show or a movie.

We had settled into a very comfortable routine, both in our home lives and in our working hours. Our office even had three projects that first year where Alex’s construction company was the builder of our designs, so we often crossed paths during our work day.

After the winter holidays we were lounging around watching a TV program when Alex asked me about being fostered, and then adopted by my dads’. I told him that my faint memories of my earliest years at the boys’ dorm were just that, dim and not very clear, until the year I was taunted and goaded into climbing that tree and shattering my leg. I hadn’t seen the others that taunted me as being necessarily mean, but while in the hospital, and then having to have my lower leg amputated, well, all the talk with the doctors and nurses made me see what had been done to me, oh, not necessarily on purpose, but nevertheless done with some expectations I would get hurt some way. I explained how Dick and Brad had hardly even mentioned my leg, by the time I had met them it was definitely a part of me that wasn’t to be slept in, at least not for the night, but a little nap or a rest was OK to leave it on for. They were the ones to get me a swim leg for my adoption. It was a water-resistant extension to my own half leg that ended in a modified webbed foot appendage.

I explained that I had never been in a real home before Dick and Brad came into my life, I had never in my memory been kissed goodnight, or lovingly tucked in bed. I didn’t know how families operated, but watching them, and my much older “brothers”, Heath and Jake, I learned, and I thrived on it all. Alex kissed me then, a soft and tender meshing of our lips and softly, almost shyly, asked if I thought I’d ever want to return the favor for another boy or two. Without hesitation, I told him that yes, I always had that thought about that in my mind, and I thanked the Gods that Scott had never expressed a desire to foster or adopt. Alex rested his head on my ribcage, looking at me with something akin to desire, but I knew it wasn’t the sexual kind, and asked if I thought we’d make good dads, once we got married.

I asked him if that was what HE wanted to do, because the parenting thing was a two-way street, it wasn’t something I wanted to take on by my own, at least not yet with my business just getting started on its second year. But I told him that parenting with him would make a lot of sense, as we both really loved each other, and we had both tried the pregnancy route and it hadn’t worked for us yet, but even after a year of tying, it was still a ritual I wasn’t ready to give up just yet, I’d give it another fifty years but that wouldn’t be fair to our children to make them wait that long for us. Our love making that night was long and hard.

The next noon Alex showed up at my office for lunch with my family, which I knew nothing about. During lunch he asked me to marry him, in front of my dads’ and Heath and Jake, getting down on one knee beside my chair. I responded that I would, but only if he agreed to make me, and him, a father, and when he placed a ring on my left ring finger, I had one to place on his own left ring finger as we kissed to cheers from the rest of the occupants of the table. It was now official. I felt so much more for this man than I ever had for Scott, and this time I could see the love in his eyes when he looked at me, when he touched me, when we lay next to each other, it just felt so right.

When we left the house we talked about when we should marry and Alex said that the sooner the better, as he wanted us to get working on one of us getting pregnant, or at least getting the parenting classes out of the way so we could find a boy who needed us in his life, of course I knew he loved me, just as much as I loved him, and I think he felt like me, that a child in our lives would only cement our relationship and make it even stronger, it would not only provide a child with a family and a better life, but it would announce to the world we were definitely a family.

We both returned to work, sharing a parting kiss at his pickup and then I could feel his eyes on me as I went into my office, my butt waiving him a goodbye. Once inside I asked Amy to bring me her master schedule and her big calendar with her so we could possibly find a weekend where I wasn’t too congested with potential client meetings, or going over plans drawn already for a client. Walking a client through a project already under construction usually happened on a Saturday or, when daylight permitted, on a weeknight if possible. Amy and I sat at the small conference table in my office and we figured out that the weekend before February 12^th, Lincoln’s birthday, would be an appointment free weekend for all of us at the office, so I asked her to temporarily mark if off for the whole office staff, including her, as I knew she sometimes came in on the weekend to look over something that had been nagging at her and she was usually able to figure it out without any distractions surrounding her.

I had taken down notes and texted Alex those proposed dates and he texted back that those dates, from the 9^th through the 15^th were all good for him, and there would be time for us to take the online parenting courses before then. So, we had a date and once we had it selected, I informed Amy that weekend there would be no office activity from Thursday through Sunday, Alex and I were getting married. We called the others from their individual work spaces and I informed the rest of the staff that Amy and I had marked off that particular weekend next month for Alex and I to get married and once Alex and I had the particulars nailed down we would like them all to attend. We didn’t get much done the rest of the working day, but we were all ahead in our work, so it really didn’t make any difference. They all made some good suggestions to me and I made notes so I could share them with Alex later.

Once we had closed up for the day, I went up to the house to change into more casual clothes and then sat with my dads’ and “uncles” to give them the dates of the weekend we had decided on. The men were so happy for us and the dads insisted on paying for the wedding, no matter how big or small we made it, they wanted to put their seal of approval on it. I should tell you that they never offered this when I married Scott, they paid for a dinner the night before we exchanged vows, but nothing more. I took this to mean that Alex had won their approval, or they certainly wouldn’t be offering to pay for everything.

Finding real love, even after a betrayal, is like a new lease on life. Let Art know you are reading this story: ArtWest at CastleRoland dot Net.

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