Business Trip Chapters 7-8

Business Trip Chapters 7-8

Copyright © 2024 by W. Richard St. James

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental

CHAPTER 7

“SO WHAT’S THIS about being the other man?” As agreed, Ann had waited until they were in the car to ask that question.

“It was out in Berkeley.”

“When you were staying with your college girl friend? At her sister’s?”

“The next year.”

“Oh.” Ann was trying to figure out the chronology. “The summer you got married?”

“No. The summer before that. I had never taken Jane out on a date at that point. We were just buddies.”

“Oh. What were you doing out in Berkeley? The next summer? Wasn’t that the year you were living with the crazy student?”

“Yep. Her family had a cabin on Lake Tahoe and we had gone out to spend the summer there. But somehow we were stuck at her mother’s place in Palo Alto. It was miserable. She didn’t want to fuck with her mother around and there was nothing for me to do and I don’t know …” Brad gave a sigh. “We had a big blow up and she dumped me. Literally dumped me at the bus stop with my suitcases. Her idea was that I would take the bus into San Fran and then go to the airport and fly back home. But instead I called the sister. We were still friendly. She’d moved into an apartment but she took me in for a few days and then set me up to stay at the International House.”

“Did she make a move on you?”

“No. I liked her okay as a person but no attraction there. At least not for me. So anyway, the I House was coed, and I was sort of at loose ends wondering what I was going to do for the rest of the summer. There was this girl in the library who looked interesting, and I decided I was going to try to pick her up. Only time in my life I’ve ever done that. You ever pick up a guy like that?”

“Never had to. Never let myself get picked up, either.”

“Well you don’t have to prove anything. Different for a guy. So anyway, I asked her if she wanted to do dinner and a movie and she said yes and we wound up naked in her bed that first date. Well, it turned out she was only a freshman, well it was the summer after her freshman year and she went to college down near LA but she’d come up to Berkeley for the summer on a sort of sabbatical from her boyfriend. Which I understood. My girlfriend and I always had that understanding that we were going to date other people over the summer. But it wasn’t a one night stand.”

“You were fuck buddies.”

“Yeah I guess that’s what they call it now. She was a lot of fun.” Brad paused.

“And? I can tell there’s more to this.”

“Well, the next week the college girl friend came out to see her sister.”

“Oh.”

“So I went over to see them. They invited me for dinner. I didn’t think anything of it. We were just friends. Especially when I was living with someone else, it was safe to be friends again and we both still really liked each other. You know?”

“Not really. Do you think the two of us can go back to being just friends?”

“Maybe that’s why I’m telling you this story. Maybe it’s because there never has been someone to tell it to.”

“Jane doesn’t know about all this?”

“She might. I forget how much I told her at the time. Before we started to date. When it didn’t matter. Anyway, we fell very deeply in love.”

“So you broke if off with your fuck buddy?”

“No. She became the other woman.”

“You were fucking both of them. At the same time?”

“Well, not at literally the same time. No threesomes. But maybe within an hour or so.”

“Oh. I always thought you were so upright. I thought I was corrupting you.”

“Same the other way around. I always thought you were a good girl.”

“And now?”

“Even better than I thought.”

“Brad, you know I’m doing this flick tonight.”

“Oh yeah. I guess we’ll do dinner after?”

“Brad, sweetie, can I ask you a favor? Come up with me?”

“You want me to watch?”

“Just sort of be there? I’m sure they’ll have some beer and maybe some munchies.”

“Okay. Least I can do.”

“Thanks.”

* * * * *

KATIE WAS WAITING for them in the lobby. She whisked Ann away to a corner of the coffee area. “So what happened?”

“When?”

“After you got back to the hotel?”

“Nothing. We went to our rooms and got up and had breakfast and drove over here. But Brad was telling me stories about his wild youth.”

“Brad had a wild youth? He seems so buttoned down. At least that’s what I thought until we went to the lake.”

“One of his girlfriends dumped him once. Literally. At a bus stop in California.”

“Really.”

“And he was fucking two girls at the same time. Gee, I guess three within a couple weeks.” Ann was putting the time line together.

“So this is nothing new for him?”

“Guess not. Not for a long time, but maybe it’s like riding a bike.”

“Do you think we’re going to be like that? You know, respectable on the outside?”

“Maybe. I don’t think it’s a front with him, exactly. He’s just, I don’t know. A lot of things at once. Things you can’t be at the same time but he is.”

“Really. You know, Harry is talking about settling down. Maybe even getting engaged.”

“Do you love him?”

“Think so.”

“Even after last night?”

“Why would that make a difference? We went home and made love very nicely and it’s all okay now.”

“You still had something left?”

“Yep.” Katie giggled. “I told him he could fuck me anywhere he put his tongue. Apparently he had been watching me, at the river.”

“That’s not fair.”

“He wanted to do the same thing, just lie there and let me do whatever to him. But I said no, I was tired, other way around, I was going to lie there and he could do anything he wanted except he had to do it with his tongue first.”

“And did he?”

“He wasn’t going to let himself be upstaged by some college kid. First he French kissed me. Then, well you get the idea.”

“He stuck his tongue up your butt?”

“Yep. And his prick. Then he French kissed me again.”

“Oh no!” Ann was sputtering out her coffee. “This is too rich. And you let him, like …”

“What was I supposed to do? They were my rules.”

“Guess you didn’t think that one through.”

“Guess not. You know what? It wasn’t so bad.”

“I’ve done it. Not with a real prick though. And done it to other girls. So exactly what did you do to Jim?”

“Well, after you two had raped me all afternoon, I figured it was time to be on the other end. So I played a game that one of my old boyfriends liked. Except I used to actually tie his hands down. I had him lie on his back with his tongue and prick sticking up and then I would use those like dildos. Except when I used to do it only up my pussy. That was before you two loonies had corrupted me.”

“It’s Brad. He’s got, like this anal fixation. The guy is a total pervert.”

“So what about you? Was Hal any good?”

“Neither of us were really into it, you know? Everyone else paired off and there we were. We just sat and talked and he was saying how beautiful I was and I decided might as well show him a little pussy. So I did. And then I thought, well why not let him have a little taste. So I did. He actually knew what he was doing. Then he wanted to fuck me but I told him only my boyfriend could fuck my pussy.”

“Why?”

“Oh I don’t know. That was Brad’s rule at one point before the two of them just declared open season this week. I think his wife has something going on too.”

“Oh. Think they’re going to split?”

“No. I think they’ll have a nice makeup session like you and Harry did and get on with their lives. Anyway then I rolled over to see if he could figure out the loophole.”

“Oh no. You’ve been around Brad too much.”

“Tell me about it. Here I thought I was corrupting him. Well, he did, but I told him he had to use his tongue first.”

“And he did?”

“I don’t think it was a novelty for him.”

“Maybe not. You know what Harry told me? That Carla told him she’d been doing this stuff since she was nine. That she had run away from home at thirteen and lived as a hooker. Then wound up in jail.”

“Wow.”

“So are you going back to the lake today?”

“Yep. Coming with us?”

“I don’t know. When I told Harry I was going yesterday he said I needed to work it out of my system. Then I told Brad that and he said maybe we needed a couple more treatments.”

“He said that?”

“So I’ve been thinking how it would be fun to do the hands by your side thing with him. Think he’d like that? I mean, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“I just want to swim this afternoon. I’m doing this stupid movie tonight.”

“Oh. Forgot about that. You’re going through with it?”

“Guess so. I was all hep on it Tuesday. Now I’m not so sure. Ever do that?”

“Once. A long time ago.”

“When you did it with Sam?”

“Same time period. I was sort of a slut in those days. It was this big college orgy thing. I think I only show up in it for about ten seconds.”

“Oh. What was it like?”

“It was a lot of fun. But I was like twenty. Not even.”

“I can’t imagine how beautiful you must have been.”

“Yeah, everyone wanted a piece of me. And I gave it to them. Well, that was a long time ago. What are you doing for this flick?”

“I think it’s just me and a couple of guys. Not sure though. Guess I’ll find out when the time comes. What are we doing today?”

“More on those data classes. We’ve got a few existing data sources to work with. Mostly old stuff, IMS. Want to know how to integrate them.”

“Okay. Brad gave me some notes, but we may need to get him in to help.”

They went up to the same conference room as the day before with the same people in it. “Good morning.” This time it was easier for Ann to get them to shut up. Had Harry been gossiping about their night at the volleyball place? Apparently not. “Today we’re going to talk about how to use your existing data. I’ve got to tell you, Atlanta has written everything so far on the assumption there’s a nice clean relational database with all the data. And all the customers are telling them it’s not really that way. The next thing our group is doing is the internal version. So we need to figure this out too. So here goes.”

Ann put up a foil. “Now the way we’ve been thinking of it is that you have a data base table and a data class. The fields in the table correspond to the attributes of the class. But why does it have to be that way? Brad already has implemented the idea of related and computed fields. For example, an order line might include the customer name from the order. Or the price computed from the unit price and the quantity. But what if you wanted to get data from several different places? To instantiate the class, you need some sort of identity information. For example, the order number and line number or part number depending on how you have the keys set up. But suppose your order isn’t sitting in the new database at all? Suppose it’s sitting over in IMS somewhere?”

“Yeah, just suppose.” That from Ned drew a wry chuckle from the others.

“Well one solution is to do a mass migration over to the new database. And there are reasons to do that.”

“And a lot of reasons not to, honey.”

“That’s why we’re having this talk. So step one would be to set your data class up to look at the IMS database to get the data. But how? How do we get our stuff to do that? Well what we would need would be some sort of handler class that knows how to serve up data from IMS. So what would that look like? Any clues?”

“Some connection to IMS. And some methods to do the retrievals.”

“Good guess. But there’s another piece to it. If you look way way down in our system, you find classes that are just wrappers for C code.