This is a work of fiction. While some real places and institutions are mentioned or implied, they are used fictitiously here. As far as the author knows, no real person affiliated with any of those places or institutions has done anything akin to what is described in this story. Any similarities between any character in this story and any real person are coincidental and unintended.
I apologize but, like many of my stories, this one takes a little time to get going.
I encourage comments on this story, both favorable and unfavorable. Thank you for reading.
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It may help to start this story by introducing a character who isn't mentioned a great deal but who bears responsibility for much of what happened. I leave it to the reader to judge whether the consequences of his influence were positive or negative. The character is my father Henry "Hank" Stone.
Dad was a career military officer, having graduated from one of the academies. For reasons which may become obvious, I'm not identifying the service of which he was a member. By all accounts, he was a good officer. He had technical expertise, and he treated the men and women under his command well. Dad was loyal to his service and his country. However, he wasn't loyal to Mom, at least not in the sense of marital fidelity. Dad was addicted to women like a chain-smoker to nicotine. Unlike a smoker, Dad was too particular about brands.
The only thing I saw that Mom had in common with Dad's other women was that Mom was, and is, very good-looking. Mom was fairly quiet and never ditzy, even if she'd been drinking. I think it's also fair to call Mom intellectual. She ended up with a Ph.D. in economics.
The other person who appears throughout this story is my sister Kim. Kim is three years older than me. Kim apparently felt a lot of responsibility for me. Kim brought about unquestionably the best thing that has happened in my life. This story tells how that started.
For most of my childhood, we lived near Washington, D.C. Mom had a career position in the Commerce Department dealing with international trade. She was in her fifth administration, just a level below the people who got called to Congressional hearings. Dad spent some of those years at the Pentagon and the rest stationed near D.C.
It was the spring of Kim's freshman year in college and my sophomore year of high school when Dad announced that he'd been offered a promotion. The catch was that the position which went the promotion was in Southern California. Mom was not leaving her job in D.C., but she didn't want to cost Dad his promotion. They agreed she would stay in Washington and Dad would go to California. That was ok, except Dad insisted I go to California with him. Dad had been a wrestler at the academy. I had wrestled since fifth grade. I had a little talent. Dad said he wanted to see me wrestle my last two years of high school. That did not, in my mind, justify uprooting me from my friends, teammates, and all the places I knew. Besides, I'd only be with him for two years before I went to college wherever. But how do you tell your father you don't want to live with him?
Mom acquiesced in me moving to California with Dad, I guess because I didn't voice objection. Just before Dad and I started the cross-country drive from Virginia to California, Mom pulled me aside and said, "try to keep him out of trouble for two years at least."
I didn't like California. Removed from my friends, I put all my effort into school, wrestling, and the weight room. Apart from his work, Dad devoted his free time to his favorite hobby. He was not hesitant to bring women home for the night. I grew used to hearing moans and occasional screams coming from the master bedroom of our ranch home. I got used to meeting different women in bathrobes with disheveled hair as I got ready for school in the mornings. I wasn't there to rat Dad out, but what do you do when your mother calls from three time zones away and specifically asks how many women your dad is fucking? In one space of eight days, four different women spent the night at our house. That struck me as, to be charitable, extremely disrespectful of all four of them.
I did not win a California high school championship, but I came close. That fact and the fact that I had excellent grades earned me a partial wrestling scholarship at a school in suburban Chicago that was well-regarded academically and tried to do bigtime college sports. I'm probably odd, but I liked Chicago a lot more than California.
Between wrestling and school, I didn't have a lot of free time in college. The university had a lot of very attractive girls who were also very bright. I dated a few. However, I found myself afraid of getting too close to a woman. What, I thought, if I'm like Dad and treat the women I meet as just a place to put my dick? I didn't trust myself.
I hadn't talked with Kim much while I was in California. We began talking more, first by phone and later face-to-face online, after I started college. Kim became very easy to talk to. Maybe she always was, and I hadn't noticed. She would ask about my "love life." At first, I put her off with vague generalities. Finally, around the end of my sophomore year, her first year of grad school, I told her why I was afraid of getting too close to any woman. Kim assured me that I wasn't like our father. But, I thought, what else could she say, and how would she know? I continued to be afraid of close female relationships.
I did ok as a wrestler, finishing fifth in my weight class at the conference tournament as a senior. I just missed qualifying for nationals. I did better academically, majoring in political science with an adjunct major in international studies. I'd studied French in high school, so I stayed with for my language requirement; but I also started on learning Russian. Wrestling had taken enough time that I was a few credits short for my degree after four years. I'd earn my degree after one more quarter.
I had stayed at school every summer in college. I worked at a summer camp for high school wrestlers for the parks department of the suburban city where the university's undergraduate campus was located. Mom and Dad had divorced during my sophomore year. I was surprised it took them that long.
I was done with wrestling when I used up my eligibility. Consequently, I didn't have much to do, besides paint park benches, that last summer of college. Mom was still in D.C. at Commerce. Kim got her master's and moved to D.C. She worked for something called the "North American Council." While the Council tried to look like a thinktank, it was funded by some large Canadian businesses and banks to monitor and influence U.S. trade policy with Canada. During one of my online sessions with Kim that June, she asked me "Can you get leave from that highly skilled job you have for the Thursday and Friday the week after July 4?"
"I suppose I can," I replied. "Why?"
"Mom and her friend Clayton, and Brad and I are going to a place in the woods in Maryland, about two hours' drive from D.C.," Kim replied. "We've been there before. It's really nice. Anyway, I've become friends with this woman who's interning with us this summer. I asked her to go with us and I thought, if you come, that will make three couples."
"Trying to play matchmaker?" I asked a little warily.
Kim laughed. "Maybe," she said, "you could do a lot worse than Lise. She's bright, very pleasant, and, at least from a woman's perspective, very good-looking. It's a long weekend Peter, not a lifetime commitment. You'll fly back to Chicago that Sunday night and Lise will go back to school in Montreal in August."
"You know I don't have a whole lot of money," I said.
"No problem," Kim replied. "Mom's already paying for the lodge for everyone. Adding you doesn't increase that cost. I'll loan you the airfare. Pay me back whenever you get a real job."