What should have been a quick five-minute shower devolved into a frenzy inside of the bathroom, with each of his three redheaded fiancées taking a turn getting a load from him, and it was at least twenty minutes before the trio was satiated. He was particularly surprised how much Moira was determined to play not only with him, but with Sarah and Aisling as well, and without Fiona present.
When Fiona and Moira had joined Team Rook, Andy had sort of suspected that the two of them might be more akin Lauren and Taylor in that they would be more insular as a pair and simply delve out with the rest of the Team from time to time, but Fiona had made it clear that she wanted to be on equal footing with Ash, Niko, Em, Sarah and Piper. Andy wondered if that had left Moira feeling a little bit out on her own, and she'd been working to solidify her new relationship with Andy a bit more each and every day.
Seeing Aisling and Moira kissing each other around the head of his dick while Sarah talked dirty into his ear and ran her fingers along his chest as she pressed her sizable tits into his back, it was rather overwhelming, not the least of which because Ash and Moira were very much getting into it with each other as much as they were with him.
He encouraged all the members of his family to be open and adventurous with each other, but Moira seemed like she wanted to prove she had a place with the family outside of her pairing with Fiona, to not rely on her old connection with Andy as a kind of crutch.
With all three of them satisfied, they toweled off and got dressed.
Andy's days had gotten a lot less easy to predict since he'd gotten all the money from Nathaniel Watkins. He left his job over at Netflix and was focusing on writing full time, but over the last month, much of his time had gone to doing follow up interviews with various media sources, including several international. His interview with the BBC had gone a little viral since a number of the girls had wandered in and out of it during his talking with the presenter. He'd also spent more time than he'd liked to in contract negotiations, doing script revisions and offering notes on pitches and proposals for adaptation of his works for television and movies. It was the
last
thing he figured anyone should be focusing on, but the people at the studios were insistent that the more people were entertained, the less time they would have to dwell on their misery.
Andy came downstairs for lunch, finding lunch waiting for him. The girls were mostly hanging out, seeing what the plan for the day was, and wanting to check in on him after his regeneration. "So I figured I'd take Ash and Fiona with me into the city, although we've got room for one more, considering either Niko or Lexi's going to be on guard detail," he said.
There was a brief but frenzied set of Rock/Paper/Scissors games but in the end, Sarah came out on top and decided to take Andy up on the option of going into the city. As much as Niko wanted to go with them, she needed to head to the base so couldn't head out with them, although Andy assured her there would be plenty of further opportunities in the future.
It was the first time Andy had been in the city since March, when he'd gone to see Soul Asylum at one of the very last concerts Slim's would hold before closing during the quarantine. Apparently the venue's closure had been planned in advance, but they hadn't told anybody because they'd planned to have a grand farewell party in the fall, but instead, everyone had gotten locked in their homes, and the club had closed not with a bang, but a whimper.
They loaded up into one of the big Tesla SUVs and started driving south. Andy hadn't realized it before they left, but he hadn't been off the grounds of New Eden since their arrival in September, and he was eager to get into San Francisco and see what the city was like, now that the Air Force had come and gone through most of the buildings, pulling all the bodies from the high end apartments and homes that hadn't been willing to respect the quarantine.
Driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, it felt like the end of one era and the beginning of another. It was the middle of the day, and yet there still weren't any other cars on the highway. Andy had driven across the bridge hundreds of times since he moved out from the Midwest, but never once in all that time had he been on the bridge with no other cars. Of course, the new Bay Bridge wasn't all that old - well, part of it, anyway. The eastern span past Treasure Island had opened in 2013.
As they moved downtown, heading down from the overpass, Andy was shocked at exactly how empty everything was, how quiet the city was. No matter which direction he looked, no matter which way he listened, San Francisco was like a tomb. It was eerie and unnatural. No cars parked along the streets, nobody walking along the sidewalks, no food trucks, not even a car horn.
One of the things he'd always gotten used to was that going into San Francisco during the daytime was radically different than going into it at night, but now, it was almost like being in the city at 4 a.m. except that it was two in the afternoon. He fully expected that if they wanted to head back across the Bay Bridge during rush hour, they wouldn't even need to slow down.
That was
unheard of
.
Before, it had all sort of taken on a level of unreality, the numbers too big and hard to comprehend, the losses so unimaginable that it sort of cloaked itself in a sheen of imperceptibility. But driving through the once thriving downtown of San Francisco only to feel like the entire city was devoid of people, it all hit home just how monumental the loss to life had been.
They headed up Fremont Street before crossing Market to head over to Montgomery Street, passing by the Transamerica Pyramid Building before turning onto Columbus Avenue. Despite the fact that they were heading up to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, they crossed the infamous corner of Columbus and Broadway, which was sort of ground zero for the majority of the strip clubs in San Francisco. The Condor Club was right on the corner, and it had been featured in an Eddie Murphy movie. Hell, it was the first topless club in America, opening as such in the 1960s. He hoped that it reopened at some point, but it was hard to say, especially since the clientele had to have dropped to almost zero. Maybe it could rebrand more as a bar and keep the topless part simply as a legacy part. The other nearby strip clubs - Centerfolds, Big Al's, the Hustler Club, Vanity and all the rest - they weren't quite the historical mainstay that the Condor Club was, and he wondered how this particular street corner was going to look in just a few years' time.
Andy hadn't brought his partners to see The Condor Club today. No, today they were stopping at City Lights and then one other place before heading back home. As he headed into City Lights, a broad smile spread across his face as he spotted a familiar person behind the counter. "Hey Brittany," Andy said with a laugh. "Wasn't sure you'd still be here on the other side of all of the mess."
Brittany was something of a staple at City Lights - she'd been working there for almost twenty years now apparently, and her look hadn't much changed in all that time. She looked exactly how people
expected
San Francisco to look - her brown hair was in thick dreadlocks, her nose had three separate piercings, her ears had spreaders that had opened the lobes enough to slide a Coke bottle through, and what wasn't covered by the giant baggy clothes she wore stood a decent chance to be covered in tattoos. He was never quite sure how old she was - she could've been a hard-lived thirty or a well-kept sixty, and neither would've surprised him. Still, she was an utter sweetheart and she ran over to give Andy a big hug. "I saw you on the television last month, so I knew you'd made it, but I have to admit, you seemed like you're doing a lot better than you were last year," she said.
"I saw Lawrence didn't make it," he sighed.
Brittany laughed, rolling her eyes at him. "Andy, darling, Lawrence was
one hundred
. He'd lived a grand old life. I think he was ready to go long before the plague came to decimate society, although I'd wager he'd have had something wicked to say about it. That said, our rent has fallen to basically nothing for the time being, just as a way to keep San Francisco, you know, San Francisco. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Lawrence himself... we can't just let all that history disappear into the ether."
"I know, that's why I wanted to come by, see if maybe you wanted to do a charity signing for the latest Druid Gunslinger novel," he said. "I know I'm not a Beat poet or even maybe as radical a lefty as you like to normally house but-"
"We'd be delighted, Andrew," she said to him, patting him on the back. "It wouldn't hurt to remind people that we're still here, still kicking. Didn't you lose a lot of your fanbase with all the deaths, though?"
"I've done pretty well in cultivating a fifty-fifty gender split in my audience, so we'll see how the turnout would be. You and everyone else here were so nice to me when I got started, I feel like I have to give something back. You remember that first signing? I think we had three or four people show up total to get an autograph, and I'll bet half of them didn't even really know who I was. They were just buying a copy to be polite."
"Nancy always told us that we never knew whose work would catch on, or where people find their inspiration from. She was a big advocate for us including Tolkien and the like in their own section, saying we shouldn't devalue fantasy or science-fiction just because it wasn't always appealing to the mainstream," Brittany told him. "I'll see about setting aside the first Saturday in January for the event, so we'll have a little time to publicize it and we'll see what kind of turnout we get, but any publicity is good publicity."
