A Bet To Lose, Chapter 25 free porn video

What Zoe noticed the most on Friday morning wasn't Leslie's improving numbers but her improving mood. Over the past few days, she'd grown livelier, peppier, not quite excitable but getting there, a lot like a cheerleader in certain ways, which Zoe found amusing since everyone in the Squad but her had on Team Leslie uniforms. She had every reason to be happy: she was finally getting out of the hospital, the treatment appeared to be starting to work, and her parents had sensibly decided not to get in the way of her being with her friends all day, so it was with hugs and goodbyes that they helped her into the back of Caroline's car. (Caroline had off that day, and her father had just straight-up told her "I'll ask for you when I need you" - which wasn't likely to be any time soon. Feast and famine, as he'd told her before.) "Guess what the last thing they did before I went to sleep last night was," Leslie asked after Zoe closed the door, giving the five of them physical privacy, together, at long last. That was one reason why Leslie sounded better, Zoe noted. Her voice was stronger. She wasn't fighting to get out every word. "Some kind of electro-stim?" Richard asked. Caroline chuckled. "Ricky, they're not going to do THAT," Zoe said. Leslie laughed. "They actually talked about it! You're right, Zoe, they never did. They gave me more stem cells!" The group was surprised. "All over. Even little places. They injected some in my eye muscles, not even joking." The needle that time had been very slender, and curved where it needed to go, but it had been a singularly unpleasant experience. At least she'd been allowed, instructed even, to keep her partially paralyzed eyes closed. They hadn't given her any sleep aids - it was still too dangerous - but she'd had no trouble falling asleep anyway, despite the handful of aches. She'd gotten all too used to pain. "Can we get breakfast somewhere? Not too much meat, I have been eating so much protein." She was very tired of hospital food in general and very eager to go somewhere, anywhere, with her friends. "There's a pancake place," "We can get pancakes," Richard and Zoe said at the exact same time, and the group started laughing. "Pancakes it is, then," Caroline said, and it was not a long drive at all. The group was served by the same waitress that had served the siblings' family, and Richard briefly wondered whether or not she'd make an issue of it, but his attitude to such things had been 'mess with me, and we'll see which one of us gets thrown out of here' for a while. She didn't even consider that, of course. Instead, even before she sat them at a booth (Leslie in her wheelchair at the side), she recognized exactly who they were. Her cousin, who she talked to daily, was a nurse at the hospital, and 'there's this disabled girl whose friends, even the boy, wear pink shirts to support her' is the kind of information that tends to leak very quickly, regulations and HIPAA be damned. Whatever this group wanted, they'd get. And did they ever want! Most groups of thin girls, she'd noticed, tended to look carefully at calories. This group didn't seem terribly concerned. Plenty of pancakes for all the girls, and bacon, eggs, and a fat stack of multiple types of pancakes for the boy, who was making zero effort to hide his gender even with his hair in pigtails. A fool would have asked if they could afford it all, but the waitress was certainly not that. "So, when do you want to do that princess thing?" Susie asked Leslie, sipping her water and waiting for her food, smiling and glancing at her boyfriend, who was smiling just as widely as he was. "Not yet," Leslie replied. She'd anticipated the question. "The daydreams I had were of us skipping, jump rope, hopscotch, all that stuff. I don't want to do just part of it." Susie replied with a smile and a nod. The waitress came back with five cups of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream, and Susie began stirring in hers almost at once, the others deciding to follow her lead. Caroline was greatly relishing their company that day but decided not to say so. The previous night, she'd had a dream - more like a memory - about when she was twelve, and one of her supposed friends had made up a story, completely out of whole cloth, about her liking a boy that she had been trying to get the hell off her back. It had taken two weeks and three teachers for the boy to finally, actually get the hint. She'd despised the other girl until they went to different high schools, and she didn't even think that girl had ever truly grasped why. The experience had led to Caroline just staying away from what she considered to be middle (and then high) school bullshit, and she'd had no one she'd really trusted until she met Leslie. She'd tolerate any amount of weirdness over being lied to again, especially when she'd enjoyed some of the weirdness herself. She had a car, a group of friends, and basically unlimited access to everything in the modern world. She was going to enjoy the hell out of her day, and she had an idea of just how to do it. "Hey, Leslie, there's no chance that rhabdo's going to happen to you again, is it?" she asked as the others were drinking, Leslie holding on to her cup with two hands. "It really shouldn't," Leslie replied. "They tested this morning, my numbers are fine." "That's great. Susie, can we use that boat again?" "When did you want to go?" "When we're done eating." Susie was a little bit surprised. "Is something stopping us? Does somebody have an appointment? Does everyone want to?" Nobody had an appointment and everyone wanted to, and Susie was even more surprised at Caroline's forthrightness. She had been used to the money all her life, and she'd gotten used to having the house all to herself. She hadn't quite gotten used to the freedom of being able to say 'I feel like going boating on the lake today' and then just going, even though her father had made it abundantly clear, even if he didn't say so outright, that he didn't consider her a child anymore at all. That thought made her reconsider a few things - if Caroline could just do stuff, why couldn't she? "I'll have to call if it's available," she said, pulling out her phone. "We better go get sunblock, or I'm gonna get so fried," Richard lamented. "Sunblock's in my bag in the car," Zoe replied. She smirked and gestured to her brother. "Look at him. All that brain, and his big sister's still the one who's prepared." Richard looked down and smiled a bit as Zoe called herself that, and the girls giggled lightly. Susie's aunt - the one on her father's side, not Fatima - picked up, and their conversation was surprisingly brief. Was that boat being rented out that day? Nope. Could she use it? As long as she had someone with her who had a driver's license, and she couldn't really get there without one anyway. Okay, it's all yours, keys are here waiting for you. The others had finished texting their parents about where they'd be, long before the waitress came back with the food. It was exactly as delicious as they were hoping for, and Richard didn't realize quite how hungry he really was until he started eating, glad that he'd ordered a lot. As he chowed down, the waitress led a large family group past them, and one of the older men took a long glance at Richard, his pigtails, his pink clothes. Richard looked up at him, subtly showing off his glittery Team Leslie T-shirt, his smirking expression entirely 'Come the fuck at me.' The man, subconsciously realizing that the boy was immune to humiliation, passed by with his family without a word, and no one else appeared to notice. "Zoe, I have to go to the bathroom," Leslie said halfway through the meal, and Zoe reflexively got up to push her girlfriend to the bathroom a second before realizing the full implications of what she'd just said. The group turned their heads at once in surprise, and Leslie really hoped they wouldn't spend time on congratulating her because she was desperately trying to hold it. Zoe was already moving, though, spotting the bathrooms at once and pushing her in. Thank God it was empty. "Why didn't you tell me you got this back?" Zoe asked. There was a handicapped stall, of course there was, with helpful handrails on the side - which were totally useless to a girl who couldn't lift herself up with her arms, either. "I didn't want to talk about it, and it's still so weak," Leslie replied. The topic had never come up in their regular chats. "It's still something," Zoe said, and started performing the extremely awkward dance of helping her from wheelchair to toilet, wishing that she had brought someone stronger to help her with this. Caroline could do it, or maybe next time she'd have Richard, completely en femme. The two of them managed to struggle Leslie to the seat, pulling down her diapers around her slim hips instead of untaping them, and she immediately released... not very much. She'd felt like she was holding back Niagara Falls. "I shouldn't have said anything," Leslie said. "If it happens again, I'll just use the diaper." "You're getting better, stop putting yourself down," Zoe said quietly and warmly, reaching between Leslie's legs with a few folds of toilet paper. Having her intimate parts wiped by her girlfriend made Leslie blush deeply, especially since Zoe was annoyed with her - rightly, again - for minimizing her own needs. "If you can make it, it's okay to say so. If you can't, just use them." Zoe stopped, making sure that no one else had stepped in while she was talking. "And I'd rather have you put me in them again than this fucking disease making you use them," she said quietly. Leslie almost asked if she was serious before realizing that of course she was serious, and she had no idea how to reply. "Whatever kinky stuff you do or don't wanna do, as long as you're safe and healthy, I don't even care what it is. I'm all yours, Leslie. Simple stuff like this doesn't even count," she continued, pulling her pants and unused diaper back up and helping her back onto her chair. "I love you, Leslie. I love you like Ricky loves Susie." "I love you too, Zoe. And I might do that thing you want." The two girls smiled at each other, and Zoe pushed her back to the group, which was having a somewhat animated discussion about animation, as Caroline was informing them that a lot of anime had eight frames a second, but the good ones redrew more stuff and didn't use tweening, and then somehow the discussion had moved to the infamous CalArts bean face, which Susie had found so off-putting that she'd never watched a cartoon with it, and then Richard had tried to make the face and everyone laughed. Some thick dessert shakes and a generous tip later, the group was underway, Richard looked out the window, the AC blasting cold air at the sunblock on his face as the scenery turned from sprawl to dotted houses to woods. It wasn't like he hadn't been out that way before, but this time he was with his friends and not his mother, and despite the fact that she'd (wisely) retreated from getting too involved in her children's lives, he could just feel the emotional baggage, the long-pickled regret, hanging off of her. He didn't want to end up like that, and he certainly didn't want anyone else in that car to end up like that. He didn't even mind that he had no idea what they were talking about. He wasn't really familiar with the term 'stan', but his big sister was saying that she did that for some music group he'd never heard of, and she was apparently in agreement with Susie and, surprisingly, Caroline, and he was only really alerted when Caroline told him, "Hey, Ricky, we're going to break a rule." "What rule?" She couldn't have meant Susie's Rule One? He was totally confused. "The no-music rule," she told him, as Susie Bluetoothed her phone to Caroline's car and his ears were greeted with K-pop, and the girls sung along to lyrics in a language none of them actually knew. It was a little annoying, but at least the beat was catchy. A couple months ago, he wouldn't have liked it at all, but if the girls were enjoying themselves, he was happy as well, and he couldn't help but smile all the way to the boating dock. "Am I going to be okay like this?" Richard asked Susie, reaching up to one of his pigtails. "You'll be fine," she told him, gently lowering his hand. Yasmin had already pulled up the boat; to Richard's surprise, she greeted her niece with a hug, and the two of them exchanged rapid-fire Farsi. Yasmin gestured to Richard and said something that Susie found amusing, and then Susie replied and both of them shared a chuckle. It was Caroline who got most of the talking in English; if they went up the river, beware of the shallows, down the river, beware of the somewhat narrow passages. Caroline planned on going up the river; just in case something happened, they'd be able to float downstream. She and Yasmin talked briefly about tying Leslie to the boat again, but Zoe promised simply to hold on to her, and Caroline was not going to go fast enough that she could get bounced out or capsized. They were underway after they went to the bathroom and Richard put Leslie's wheelchair back in the trunk. Caroline gently turned the boat out of its dock, and Richard relaxed, a blissful smile on his face. Five teenagers out on a expensive boat, and the last adult to talk to them had simply handed them the keys to it. There were a lot of luxuries he could get used to in his life, and this was decisively one of them. "It's a shame there's no speakers on this, we could keep going with the albums," Susie said. "You really want everyone to hear that?" Richard asked. "You didn't have a problem in the car," Susie replied, frowning a bit. "No, I don't mean everyone in the boat, I mean everyone within range," he said, gesturing at the wide-open space around them and the couple of people canoeing on the other side of the lake. "If you could play it louder than that engine, you'd turn us into a traveling concert." His sister laughed. "That gives me an idea," Susie said mischievously, and popped out a pair of headphones from a compartment in the boat. "This is actually supposed to be used with the emergency radio, but it takes a standard jack, fits right in my phone," she continued. "And here's the lyrics," she said, gesturing to her phone, where she started playing the album. "Now, sing!" Caroline immediately cut the throttle, her ears wide open for this one. Richard, having long lost any embarrassment and humiliation over such things, tried his very hardest to sound like the singer he was listening to. He didn't flub the pronunciations any even if he didn't know what any of the words meant, but he was competing with a professional who was probably slightly autotuned. By the time the first song was over, the girls were just shaking their heads and giggling. He was thankful that none of them had been recording him - not because he'd tried to imitate K-pop while wearing a pink glittery shirt and pigtails, but because he'd been terrible at it. "Ricky, just give me that," Susie said with a very bemused grin, pulling the earphones off and taking her phone back. She began to sing, not sounding quite the same as the lead singer but actually singing in her own way, and Richard immediately paid total attention. Susie was beautiful, everything about her was beautiful, but it hadn't ever occurred to the boy that his girlfriend might have a beautiful singing voice as well. She got thunderous applause, as thunderous as the other four could, and Richard noticed that Leslie was actually clapping with some force. "These headphones are going to eat my battery," she complained, putting them back into the compartment. She'd never owned earbuds, never wanted them; being out and about was when she talked to her friends. "But we've got to get you some practice." "Want to start with 'I'm a little teapot'?" Zoe asked with an evil grin, and Leslie looked at her in exaggerated reproach. "Don't torment him here, you'll torment our ears too," Caroline said, revving the engine back up. "Mean, you guys are mean," Susie replied with a giggle, holding her pink boyfriend close and kissing him on the cheek, and the group rode with the couples' arms around each other while their driver continued at a moderate pace up the river, eyes open for shallows. Perfection, Richard decided, this was as close to perfection as his life was ever going to get. He was on a boat with the people he loved, not an adult in sight - literally, they'd gone up the river and the people in the canoes were out of view - and there was basically no risk of something going wrong because Caroline was being absolutely, precisely meticulous in where she was going. His rich, pregnant girlfriend was by his side and he would have done anything she told him. Leslie was fine and happy, and Zoe was not only holding on to her but cuddling her. As often happened when things were going too right, his worry flared up and he looked around, but there was seriously nobody out there. The water was deep, despite the hot weather. Stomachs full, bladders empty. Ah, there was a problem: the wind was picking up and hitting them in the face. Of course it had to be something, but Richard would gladly take wind to the face all day, even if it whipped up loud enough that talking was nearly impossible. What was there even to say? Their communication was non-verbal: Leslie pointed out a grazing deer, which stared at the boat as it passed by, and they laughed as Caroline waved to it. The only way things could get better, Richard decided, was if Susie was on his lap. Oh, wait. It was just the five of them. Richard smiled at her, reached under her legs, halfway picked her up, and slid her onto his lap, and she snuggled back into his arms, her lifejacket rubbing against his. Zoe, laughing, did the same thing with Leslie, and as soon as the wind started to die down a bit, Caroline cut back on the engine and told her passengers that Susie could have asked for a smaller boat if they were just going to use two of the seats, causing general giggles. There were some narrow spots, and one place where Caroline went very, very slow because she worried about the water depth, and they got hit in the face with wind again, and then to everyone's surprise, she turned around. "Why are we going back?" Leslie asked first, making herself heard with effort. "You want to have time to eat something before your therapy tonight?" Caroline asked in reply. Leslie, confused, checked the time - oh, right, it took an hour to get back, and probably another hour at the restaurant, and Caroline would spend the same time going up the stream as she had going down it. Leslie, like Richard, was very glad that her friends were so well-prepared. They didn't see the deer again, deer were skittish like that, but they did see a large hawk flying overhead and they saw a tent deep in the woods that they hadn't noticed before. They were also going downriver, with the wind at their back, and Caroline saw a place where she knew it was safe, told her crew to hang on, and then gunned the throttle. The squeals of laughter were almost louder than the engine, and by the time Caroline cut back, the whole group was yelling with excitement and slightly damp with lakewater. "Leslie, you all right?" Zoe asked. The acceleration and jostling had made Zoe hold tightly onto her girlfriend, and she worried about Leslie's breathing. "I'm fine," she replied, laughing. Not only could she breathe, she was breathing more easily and freely than she had in years. Caroline easily and deftly navigated the boat back to the pier she started at, and Susie jumped out to tie it to the pier, leading Caroline to very correct suspicions about her skill with rope. They found the bathroom but couldn't find Yasmin right away to give her back the keys, so Susie called her up, and she broke off from her dealings with other customers. Did they have a nice time? Of course they did. Did they scrape the boat? No, they did not. The only thing that had been scraping was Richard's erection in his pink shorts from Susie sitting on his lap. Yasmin actually told her niece to come back every so often to prevent the boat from settling too much during the season, as the coronavirus was discouraging people from taking vacations. And then, having thought a lot about it on the boat ride, Susie took her aunt into a back room of the shop to discuss something very privately. Caroline decided to help Yasmin out by convincing the worried potential customers that steering a small boat was, in fact, not difficult at all and that they had a whole wide open lake to practice. Five minutes later, she emerged to deal with the customers again while Susie was looking things up on her phone, and after she rented the boat out - a thing made much easier by Caroline's reassurances - she went back in to talk to Susie for another ten minutes. "What was that about?" Caroline asked once they were done, and Susie wouldn't answer her until they were all in the car with the doors closed. She took a breath. "I totally forgot about school registration," she said. "I know Dad'll pay for it for Ricky, but he has to register early, so it's actually way better if I just tell everyone now. Yasmin promised me that she'd help me, too, and I know Fatima will. So I'm going to tell Fatima, and Dad, and everyone else tomorrow," she said, a look of determination on her face. "Sorry, I forgot, who's Fatima?" Zoe asked. "And what's this stuff about school registration?" "Susie, you're not making sense," Caroline said. "Tell everyone what?" "Okay," Susie said. "This is going to take a while, can we find a place to eat?" "Saw a steakhouse on the way here, it's where I planned if you're all good with it," Caroline said, and the group was all good with it, particularly Leslie, who hadn't eaten anything since breakfast and was feeling a deep-seated need for more protein. "Just tell us from the beginning," she said as she started backing out the car. "Okay. First off, Yasmin is my aunt on my dad's side, the one you just met, and Fatima is my aunt on my mom's side, the one who lives near me," Susie said. "School registration is, the deadline for new people at my school is probably in a couple of weeks, and just trust me, my school is just way better and there's none of the weird stuff." She got a silent nodding of heads; being public school students with high intelligence, they knew what she meant more than she did. "Maybe even sooner because of corona, so she says we have to do it as soon as possible, but Dad wouldn't pay for something like that until he knew we were really together, and we are really together, because... I'm pregnant." Leslie was surprised; Caroline was not. "Always kinda wondered if that's what you were going for," Caroline said. Zoe's lack of visible reaction caused Leslie to stare at her in shock. Okay, she'd clearly told Richard, but... "Zoe, did you know?!" She felt betrayed at not having been told something important, especially something like that. "It wasn't her secret, Leslie," Susie said. "It was mine, and I'm glad she kept it." Leslie tamped down on her emotions; that made sense. She would trust Zoe to keep some secrets from them, too. "And I'm going to make a big formal announcement tomorrow." Leslie was still obviously miffed about not being told. "Leslie, I didn't want to make you have to keep something like that from your parents, and I'm sorry, I really should have just told everybody immediately. It'll be fine, that's what Yasmin says." Susie couldn't keep the nervousness out of her own voice, which cascaded to the rest of the group. She'd gone ahead and crossed the Rubicon yet again, having done so in many ways multiple times over the past months. She admitted to herself that she'd shielded herself in aristocracy, in confidence, in being the almighty mistress whose word was law. Raw fear, even of nothing in particular, was cracking her shield, no matter how much she reassured herself that her father would not even be truly angry with her and Richard would do anything in the world for her. "Got a name picked out?" Caroline asked, and Susie abruptly laughed, her fear suddenly breaking. If Caroline, the sensible and worldly one of the group, wasn't worried about this, then why should she be? Why should she approach this with fear, rather than joy? She was starting to understand Richard's recently gained attitude to life. He'd made sure that no one and nothing was going to hurt him and then broken through his fears. Why couldn't she? "It is way too early for that!" she replied, a giant smile on her face, but that didn't stop the three other girls from suggesting baby names, some usual and some totally ridiculous, more than a few based on various anime, all the way to the steakhouse. The steakhouse in question was at the corner of the highway and the interstate, and the guy at the entrance as well as the waitress were both eager to serve them for a simple reason: they smelled like the lake, which meant they were out on a boat, which meant they had money. The pigtailed boy - was that some kind of dare? Oh, no, it was some kind of benefit thing for the disabled girl, it had to be. Right, 'Team Leslie', that had to be Leslie. A kid like that obviously wouldn't wear pigtails and pink clothes for any other reason. They sat down together - a table, not a booth this time - and Caroline spoke with authority on the subject of steak. Leslie had never dared to eat any steak but well done, Susie's dad had always insisted on medium- well, and while Caroline somewhat understood Leslie's need for caution, he thought that Susie's dad was being needlessly paranoid and, like her own father, considered any steak cooked more than medium-rare to be somewhat sacrilegious. Zoe and Richard had never had restaurant steak, and Caroline gave the other four a lesson on the doneness of steak and why it was okay for steak, but not burgers, to be red inside. By the time the waitress asked if they were ready to order, Leslie spoke up first and said that she wanted medium rare, and the rest of them joined in. They were still talking about random baby-related stuff - the topic had drifted to what kind of names the kid's grandparents (and was it ever weird thinking of them as that!) might want - when the steak, served with mashed potatoes and gravy, arrived. It was absolutely delicious, although everyone but Caroline wasn't really used to the texture of truly red meat, and Leslie, to her embarrassment, had to ask to have hers cut up into small pieces because she was having a tough time chewing some of it. It was all right, Zoe assured her. This was all temporary. Her disease, the crippling ailment that had crushed her dreams for most of her life, was now officially temporary. They did get a few glances from a pair of elderly men, out of jealousy more than anything else, and one look in Richard's direction said it all, a whole sentence from just a half-second glance: 'How is a kid who looks like you hanging around girls who look like that?' Richard barely even bothered to smirk at him. If that guy only knew! The bill came to a hundred and fifty dollars. Caroline briefly held up her wallet, a silent invitation to help, and Susie merely raised an eyebrow at her and plopped nine twenties, including tip, like it was nothing. The elderly men were still jealously glancing in their direction by the time the group went out to the car. "So," Caroline asked, "we all happy, all set, all raring to go?" They were, and Leslie was actually texting something of that nature to her parents, who wanted to make sure that she'd be at her therapy on time. "Four cheerleaders, one player. Let's git 'er done." The others groaned at her saying that, but Richard could not help but laugh. "We have time, I need to stop at the pharmacy," Susie said, and she was in and out of there in two minutes. There was no question about what she had purchased. The therapy in the evening was much like the morning's therapy, although Mindy told Leslie that she'd be hooked up to a rail in the ceiling on Monday morning in order to determine how much of her own body weight she could hold up. Leslie assured her therapist that she was getting stronger, something that Mindy halfway ascribed to placebo effect, but she certainly didn't sound that well last week, even before she went into rhabdo. The girl's VO2 readings were much better, at least. Susie quietly told Leslie's parents that she had an important announcement to make tomorrow, and while they gave no sign, she got the impression that both of them had more or less instantly guessed what it was. "Does Richard already know?" Willa asked, and Susie nodded. That sealed it: they knew, just from her saying that. It was fine. "You can always call us if you need anything," Willa said. Robert had figured it out as well. He'd just dealt with a pregnant teen a couple of days ago, a girl who'd told her boyfriend that she was pregnant, and then he'd up and walked out without a word. Her parents had been horrified; they didn't have the time, money, or space to take care of a grand-daughter, and they'd screamed at her and beaten her bloody, which is how he'd gotten involved to begin with. He'd given the girl a referral to an abortion clinic and found another family member for her to stay with while the courts did their work. Here, though... here, everything was the opposite, which he found difficult to wrap his head around. Susie had unlimited money, room, and resources, and Robert was sure that if he even so much as brought up the idea of terminating the pregnancy, he would get a very harsh answer indeed. He just wondered what Susie's father would say, but he suspected that she already knew that, too. He sighed to himself wistfully. If all teenagers, if all families, were like them, he wouldn't have his job. Susie really just wanted to sleep, so they all went to their own homes after the therapy, Caroline dropping her friends off with a smile and a wave and good wishes, and Heather couldn't puzzle out the look on her children's faces. "What happened today?" she asked. They were still in their Team Leslie outfits and still smelled very faintly of the lake. "Susie's making a big announcement tomorrow, Mom, you'll want to be there," Richard said as neutrally as he could while his sister made a beeline for the bathroom, leaving Heather to fruitlessly wonder what it was before deciding to just wait. Damn, Richard thought, he should have gone to Susie's place, now he'd have to wait until his sister was done before he could clean the lake-smell off of himself. Oh well, he could play a game in the meanwhile, those noobs on SC2 weren't going to pwn themselves. He could have spent the time worrying, if only he had something to worry about. He found it incredibly easy to sleep that night, and he slipped into a dream almost at once. He was getting married, at the altar, in a room that had looked much like Susie's throne room from his previous dreams. He was wearing a bright pink and frilly tuxedo, with Susie in a long- trained wedding dress. All of their friends and family were there. The chapel was airy and well-lit, the cake smelled great, and 'Here Comes the Bride' was played by a live band. And a blend of Revenge and the thing in the darkness had taken the role of the priest, giving them vows in a language Richard did not speak. He was wearing boy clothes at Susie's house the next day at 9 AM, a rare occurrence indeed, but this was clearly a formal occasion and his mother was pleased that he'd willingly dressed in the highest-class set she'd bought for him. Zoe was well-dressed too, as was Leslie, and her parents, and even Caroline - although Caroline was alone - and two women Heather didn't recognize. Susie wasn't dressed as formally as she could have been, that was some genuinely high-class apparel, but she looked like she was prepared for a business meeting of some kind. There was one other guest, someone who was on a cargo ship leaving another country to go to somewhere yet farther away, and his face was visible on Susie's laptop. "I can hear and see you," Majid said after a delay. "Susie, tell us what this is about." "Richard and I are having a child," she said formally and forcefully. "I tested positive on a pregnancy test this morning." She'd had no doubt how the result would come back. Her period wasn't coming any time soon. The reaction she got, at least from her friends, was applause, as hard as they could - Caroline had started it and the others quickly joined in - and with no prompting, Robert and Willa joined in as well. Yasmin began clapping as well, and then Fatima. Heather felt the mood and the obligation, clapping her hands after a second or two, but she was thunderstruck. He'd actually gotten her pregnant! And everyone was clapping over it! Conflicting emotions welled up inside her. She'd told her son to keep her, no matter what he had to do. He'd certainly done that! "Susie, I must speak with you and Richard privately," Majid said as the applause was dying down. "I need to be included in this," Heather stated very firmly. "That's your daughter, but this is still my son." "I understand." She followed her son and his girlfriend up to her room, and what got her the most was how Susie seemed to have been expecting that very reaction. Was this some sort of a show, where they knew each other's lines? That couldn't be right, but she knew what he was going to do, that was for certain. She knew nothing about their culture. Perhaps this was just what they did, where they were from? They sat together, the three of them on Susie's bed with the laptop on a nearby table. Majid looked stern but not angry, serious but not threatening. Richard was still glad that he was on the other side of a Zoom call and that he wasn't physically in the same room with them. "Richard, in a way, it is good that you are so young," the man began. "It means that you have more time to prepare for your life with your obligations to her in mind. But I want you to understand something. You get exactly one last chance to treat my daughter like a temporary relationship." That sentence came out like searing ice. "I am giving you two options. Option one. Fatima drives Susie to the nearest Planned Parenthood and none of this ever happened." Heather sharply gasped. "Susie moves away from that house and the the two of you never contact each other in any way from this point forward." Richard was starkly, sharply reminded of the non-choices presented in so much of his least favorite internet fiction, where the choices were between something very bad and something else that wound up being even worse. He really, really hoped that Susie's plan would work the way she thought it would. If the second choice was as bad as the first, he was going to start considering other, uglier options - he couldn't even imagine what would happen if he were to sic the thing in the darkness on his girlfriend's father - and he abruptly looked at Susie, who was looking at the screen, carefully keeping her face neutral. "Option two. I place the house title under Susie's name immediately. You move in and raise the child with her. I send you to the private school she goes to," - right, that was what Susie had been referring to yesterday - "and you focus on getting an education towards a profitable career. You will marry as soon as the law allows it, and as far as I am concerned, the two of you are married right now." There was a deep threat in Majid's voice, that if Richard betrayed her after that, Majid really would kill him, but it barely even registered. Instead, Richard reminded himself, very forcefully, that the man was expecting a mature response, so he did not burst out in laughter or blurt out 'Are you fucking kidding me?!' Didn't this guy have any idea what he'd just said?! 'Option one, I rip your balls off and ram them down your throat, oh and option two, you get to eat delicious food every day for the rest of your life.' "Option two," Richard said without any hesitation as soon as Majid was done speaking. He turned to his mother with a very serious expression. If she said anything against this, he was going to make all the legions of hell look like the Paw Patrol. She had no intentions whatsoever of doing that. "Option two," Susie agreed, smiling and relieved - not that Richard had made the choice, that was a given, but that her dad really had been predictable enough to give them the choices he'd posted about so long ago. "Are you sure about your decision? It is not as easy as you think," Majid said. "WHAT decision?!" Richard finally blurted out. "Getting an education towards a profitable career, isn't that what I have to be doing anyway?! I love her! Taking care of a little kid isn't easy but we'll be able to do it!" His mother spoke up. "You aren't going to keep me from my grandchild," she said firmly, with strong emphasis on the last two words. The man's face relaxed as if he, himself, were making a decision. "I do not intend to. Your son is still too young to entirely understand, but he will learn. Susie... is this really what you want? Is it really him?" "It's him," Susie replied without hesitation. Majid looked at who he considered to be his son-in-law. He knew how to read expressions very well, and the boy's attitude had not changed; for that boy, there was no choice at all, and his daughter had repeatedly told him of the boy's intelligence, skill, strength, and utter devotion. Majid had been worried sick for the past few years, after the passing of her mother, that his daughter would grow up to become an unloved and unlovable creature, her mind and body poisoned by the worst excesses of Western feminism and a succession of unfaithful men, only to wind up in a life of spoiled, self-centered misery as he had seen so many other women do. He would eventually tell them about the security cameras on the outside of the house (never the inside - he would NEVER see his adolescent daughter undressed!), that he and Fatima actually knew quite a bit about their little games, that he knew from the very first that Susie liked to see him in girls' clothing. It was their enjoyment, and if that sort of thing brought them closer together, then that was one of God's little jokes. (Majid never questioned Richard's sexuality. He had gotten her pregnant, after all.) "Then I hope you find happiness together," he replied, and Richard heard the sadness in his voice. An old wedding tradition was for the father to give the daughter away, and Richard finally understood why it was like that. "I love you, Susie." "I love you too, Dad. And, Dad, can you get Zoe and Leslie into our school, too?" "Leslie, she has Duchenne's?" "That's her." "Of course." Neither Richard nor his mother understood why the man agreed so easily, but he stood to make a fantastic amount of money if the girl's therapy, and the company backing it, succeeded. Paying for her high-class schooling was the honorable thing to do. "The two of you, be safe and happy together, and always be aware of one another," Majid said with a smile, getting back promises that they would before he cut the connection, and Richard sat in stunned silence, torn between jumping for joy and babbling nonsense. It might not be formalized, legalized, or on paper, but her father really had just effectively married them. Susie's plan had worked, entirely and completely! "You knew very well that this could happen, Richard," Heather said firmly, misinterpreting Richard's silence. "You're a very smart boy, you're not going to fool me into believing that you didn't know unprotected sex could lead to pregnancy. Now you have to take responsibility. Both of you do." He could have replied with the fact that if he wasn't willing to take responsibility, he could have picked option one, but the very idea was unspeakable. "I'll help when I can, but this is still your child. Do you understand me?" "I understand you," Richard replied. "I understand," Susie added. "And, Richard..." Heather turned to look him straight in the eye. Her face and voice were more threatening than he could recall ever seeing her. "Don't you EVER let what happened to me happen to her." "There's no way that'll happen, Mom." "All right. Well, we better get prepared. He said the two of you are moving in together and so that's how it's going to be. It's how it's been for some time, hasn't it? And now the two of you can play whatever games you want together for as long as you want." Susie chuckled very lightly, and Richard got the idea that he was in for a very wild and very pleasant ride. "Just not in front of the child." Richard almost laughed. As if the two of them hadn't thought about that! "Mom! We're not going to do weird sex stuff in front of our kid!" he settled on to tell his mother. "Neither am I," Heather said, to their surprise. "After the last man I had in the house, I decided that I wouldn't risk it anymore as long as I had to take care of you. I wasn't going to hook up with someone who didn't have your interests in mind, but I don't need to worry about that now, do I? You don't need me anymore, Richard, you nor your sister, and I've come to accept that. Susie, do you mind if Zoe moves in with you?" Richard was very surprised at the question but then realized he shouldn't have been. His mother had her own reasons to want to let go. "If she wants," Susie replied. "Oh, let's not fool ourselves, I'm certain she wants," Heather said. "Richard, once you're all settled in here, and please don't take this the wrong way, but I'll be able to be a single woman again, with not so many responsibilities. I guess that makes me a cougar." She laughed a little bit at calling herself that. "And any man I bring home, well, he won't be your business, you're your own responsibility now and you have a responsibility of your own. Please don't make anyone regret that, especially not yourselves, you're still just so young. Please don't hurt yourself, either of you." "We won't, Mom," Richard replied solemnly. "Can you leave us alone for a bit? I have something I need to tell Susie." "All right, but don't be long," Heather replied. "Everyone's waiting for you." She got off the bed and left the two of them there. "I can't believe that worked," Richard told his girlfriend, his princess, his mistress, his wife. "We just got everything! That's... I can't believe that worked!" He was at a complete loss for words and needed to let his emotions loose. She chuckled, gently patting his cheek. "Of course it worked. Don't I always decide what's best for you, little boy?" she asked quietly. Richard smiled gently. She was right, of course. He could always trust her to make decisions for him - her plan had given him exactly what he wanted - and things were going much better than he could ever hoped for. Everything he'd feared might happen to him due to his predilections, all the indignities and terrors he'd once worried about, had been burned away - by some adult or another, by the realities of the world, by his friends, by his loving girlfriend, by his own hand. He was in a heaven beyond heaven. "Yes... wait. If we're married, I shouldn't call you Your Highness anymore, should I?" he responded just as quietly. "Obviously not," Susie said in a haughty tone with her nose in the air. "Now that the castle is wholly mine, I have become a queen. Therefore, you will henceforth call me Your Majesty instead." "Yes, Your Majesty!" Richard eagerly replied.