Storiesonline.net ------- Bending the Rules by Openbook Copyright© 2009 by Openbook ------- Description: Ralph is anxious to leave his old life behind. He ventures up to Oregon to face a whole new set of challenges. Codes: MF cons non-con reluc coer Mdom rough mastrb voy slow ------- ------- Chapter 1 I'd just purchased a going business, or so I believed. One that was located in an area far from my family roots. I'd been born and raised in California, but the business was located up in Oregon, in one of the small cities close to Portland. Owning a beef jerky distributor ship wasn't something I'd ever aspired to. I'd just kind of fallen into it, almost by accident, after winning half ownership of it in a private, no limit Hold 'Em poker game being held at a mutual friend's house over in Manhattan Beach. Dave Towns, the fellow I'd won the half interest from, looked to be around twenty five years old, and he wasn't much of a poker player. His eights full of nines had been no match for my four nines. He used his half of the jerky business as collateral for the almost one thousand dollar bet he'd called to see my winning hand. He had the choice of just calling all in with the little he had in front of him for the bet, but he'd wanted to make the call for all of my bet money instead. Since I had an 'immortal lock' of a hand, I had allowed him do it. Under the terms of our deal, he'd had thirty days to come up with the little more than nine hundred he'd need to give me in order to buy back his ownership interest. I waited six weeks for him to show up before I finally decided he wouldn't ever be coming back to see me again. Even after him not showing up again to redeem his note, I probably would have just written the whole thing off to being a bad bet on my part, if Madeline, my girlfriend of two years, hadn't finally given up on me and suddenly packed up and moved out of our beach front apartment. I'd say her move was very unexpected, except for the fact that she'd been warning me for the better part of the past year that she was getting tired of me not taking my life or any of my other responsibilities more seriously. Without her there to pay her half of the rent, there was no way I could keep up with the twenty five hundred a month we'd been paying each month. I was a professional mid limit poker player, one with less than twenty thousand dollars in my playing bankroll. Most of what I managed to win each month went towards paying my share of our living expenses. A good limit Hold 'Em poker player could average a little more than one big bet an hour, playing in the poker rooms of Southern California. I usually played in the fifteen/thirty, twenty/forty, or twenty five/fifty dollar games. In a decent year, I'd bring home forty to fifty thousand. So far, I'd always had fairly decent years, but everything I earned went to supporting my lifestyle. Before I'd become a real professional player, I'd worked by selling central air conditioning at night, for three long years, in order to earn enough of a poker bank roll to go play full time for my living. I knew I was just one long losing streak away from having to quit playing for a living, or, at least, from having to go back to work to raise myself another poker bank roll again. Knowing this, my life had taken on something of a quietly desperate quality. This too had led to my break up with Madeline. I wasn't getting anywhere with my life, and I wasn't having any fun while just marking time with it either. Madeline's leaving was the final straw that made me decide to pack up and leave the area. My decision to head up to Oregon had more to do with me having some hope of being able to sell my half ownership in the beef jerky distributor ship while I was up there in that area. I figured I might be able to get a few hundred for it at least, either from the other half interest owner, or maybe even one of the customers, or other employee's of the company. I found the address that Dave Towns had on one of his business cards he'd given me the night I'd won his share in the company. It turned out to be a small office in an industrial park. The office part was in the front, and the back area was where all the real business got done. It had one of those roll up bay doors that you could drive a small box van into. Inside, I met the other owner, a young woman who turned out to be Nancy Towns, Dave's younger sister. It didn't take long for me to find out that I'd ended up owning a half interest in a nearly failed business. Dave had started the business himself, using money he'd borrowed from his parents. He'd gotten his sister involved in the business by offering her a half interest in it, instead of his having to pay her for her time. Nancy ran the office herself, and sold beef jerky to many of the local small markets, liquor stores, and gas stations. She told me that all these customers were one's that Dave had set up himself. All she was doing was delivering what they needed to replace the product they had previously sold since her last visit. She said she was barely making enough with the route she had to pay the jerky manufacturer and to keep the rent paid on the office. She said the office rent was only five hundred a month. I found out she still lived at home, with her parents, and that she had an old beat up Datsun pick up truck she made all her deliveries in. While we were discussing all this, several people from the industrial park came in and bought jars of the jerky or pepperoni sticks she kept in the back part of the building. She charged them fifteen bucks for a jar of the jerky, and nine for a jar of pepperoni sticks. That seemed pretty cheap to me and I asked her about it. "These are all guys who work here in the park. There are more than a hundred small businesses in here, mostly machine shops, or some kind of auto related businesses. Dave always sold to them at our normal wholesale prices, so I do too. We earn a few hundred extra every month by doing that. Without it, I'd have to shut things down here. Even with it, there isn't enough money for me to give you anything for what my brother sold you." "How much are you paying for the jerky?" "We get the jerky for nine dollars a jar, and the pepperoni for six. Those are really good prices, and the man who makes it for us is our uncle. There are forty pieces in each jerky jar, and thirty pieces in the pepperoni canisters." While we'd been talking, up to that point, she'd sold at least six jars of the jerky, and three or four more of the pepperoni sticks. She'd made more than forty bucks in the fifteen minutes I'd been there talking to her. She must have read my mind, because she looked at me and told me that there was always a rush on Monday morning's because the guys wanted to make sure they bought enough snacks to last them for the rest of the work week. Most of them would be broke until they got paid again on Friday or Saturday. For a few of them, the jerky or pepperoni would be all they had for their lunches until they were paid again. "If I can't get any money for my half interest in the business, can I buy some product from you at your cost? I'd like to go around to some of the other industrial parks and see if I could sell some there." "You'd need to pay me in cash for it. How much would you need?" "How about four cases of the jerky, and two of the pepperoni?" Both came in cases of six jars each I'd noticed. "We have Teriyaki, regular, and peppered for the jerky. Mostly, the Teriyaki sells the best, then the regular. You should take three cases of the Teriyaki, four jars of the regular, and two of the peppered. The pepperoni comes in regular and spicy. Maybe one case of each is the best for them. You'll need samples of each item too. Uncle Earle makes up these sample bags for each kind, bits and pieces of the jerky, and end snips off the pepperoni. He gives them to us for a dollar per bag. I sell them for two dollars sometimes, if someone doesn't have enough money for a whole jar. You should buy twenty five bags of the jerky, twenty Teriyaki, four regular and one peppered. Maybe another fifteen of the pepperoni samples, ten of the regular, and five of the spicy. If you do it right, you should sell enough of the sample bags to pay for all your give away sampling." I ended up handing over three hundred and twenty eight dollars to her. I'd always liked beef jerky anyway, and I figured I could eat at least half of it myself, before it went bad, in case I couldn't really sell any of it. Back in my own truck, I opened one of the sample bags to see what the Teriyaki flavored jerky tasted like. It was damn tasty, a lot better than what I was used to from the jars I bought pieces out of at the gas stations I used to buy from in L. A. I opened one of the sample packs of the regular Jerky, and it was pretty sweet too, and much softer than what I was used to buying. I wasn't too big on pepperoni, but I figured I better taste it too, just to satisfy myself it wasn't horrible tasting or anything. I didn't like pepperoni sticks that were too greasy, but this really surprised me. It tasted great and didn't have that real greasy aftertaste to it. I tried some of the spicy one too, and liked it as well. I started driving around, looking for industrial parks, and discovered there weren't as many of them as I was used to seeing in Los Angeles. I stopped in a few small mini strip malls though, and found out that places like beauty parlors and beer bars were good places to pass out my samples in. I ended up selling quite a few jars of the jerky and the pepperoni sticks to the beer bar owners, after first giving out free samples to all their customers. I ended up selling one jar of each flavor jerky and pepperoni I was carrying in two different beer bars, and another three jars of the jerky in a beauty shop. Just before lunch time I discovered a large industrial park over in Portland, and started handing out my free samples right and left to a group of hungry guys who were all standing around waiting for the "Roach Coach" to come by. People kept coming out of their shops, then hurrying over to where I was to see what everyone was crowding around me for. I went through a lot of samples over the next fifteen minutes, and ended up selling my last fourteen jars of jerky, and seven of my last eight jars of pepperoni. I even sold off twenty two packs of my samples at two bucks a pack. When I left that park, all I had was one jar of spicy pepperoni sticks, and about six bags of sample pieces. I counted up all the money I'd taken in that morning, discovering, as I did so, that I'd cleared a hundred and seventy five bucks, and still had some product left to sell. Not bad, I thought, not for three hours of effort on my part. I'd established a couple of things; that I could sell the product, and that I'd enjoyed myself while doing it. I always loved playing poker, but whenever you were doing it for your living, it was no longer just an enjoyable past time. While I was driving back to Tigard, I was giving some thought to staying in the area and adding to my net worth. I couldn't see myself settling down long term in this area, but I figured I could afford to spend some time to see where this jerky business might end up taking me. "How did it go, Ralph?" Nancy seemed more anxious than she'd been when I'd left her earlier in the day. "It went well enough, I guess. I was pretty much sold out by lunch time. All I have left are some sample bags and a jar of the spicy pepperoni sticks. People really seem to like the products, especially at the reduced prices we sell them for." "I need to talk to you about that, Ralph. I went over to see Uncle Earle after you left, to let him know what Dave had done, losing his half of the business to you like he did. My Uncle says I should shut the business down now, and come over to his plant to work directly for him. Until you showed up here this morning, we both thought Dave would be coming back here to work on the business. That was the main reason why I was sticking it out. Now, it doesn't look like he plans to come back here at all." "So, I guess that means I'm screwed as far as ever getting anything for my half of this business then?" "Uncle Earle told me he'd continue selling to you, if you wanted to keep buying from him after I told you what he's decided to do. He said he'll sell you the Jerky for sixty dollars a case, and the pepperoni for thirty nine a case. The samples you can keep buying at a dollar a pack. Those are all good prices still, better than any other wholesaler would get from him. He said you can sell in any territories you want to. He won't give anyone exclusive sales territory." "How soon would you be shutting things down here?" "I just gave notice to the end of this month. You can work out of here until then, if you want to. I'm going to be over at my Uncle's plant in Milwaukie, starting tomorrow morning." Nancy reached out with a business card in her hand. It read Earle Towns, Beef Jerky, Pepperoni Sticks, and Summer Sausages. There was an address, and two phone numbers on the card too. I noticed there wasn't a name on the card for his business, other than just his own name. "How do I get more product? Do I have to drive over there to get it?" "You need to speak with my uncle about that, Ralph. He told me to give you his card if you might be interested in doing more business with him. All the product I have left I need for my own deliveries for the rest of this week. Here's a key to the front, and another one for the padlock on the door here. You have to come in through the front door in the morning. I talked to Mr. Shipley, the man who leases out space here in the park. He told me you could stay on here for the same monthly rate if you wanted to. You need to go see him if you do. If you do stay here, you can take over the delivery route I've been doing. I've got a list with all the addresses, and who to see for payment." "You're just giving me the business then? That doesn't seem right to me, or fair to you either." "It wasn't really a business without Dave being here. I was just kind of watching over it for him until he decided what he wanted to do with it. I never believed my half was worth anything. It was just his way to get me to come down here and work for him for nothing. Dave is a user of people." I ended up finding myself an apartment less than a mile from the business. It was a one bedroom place, and not in the best of shape either. The rent was incredibly low though, and I'd never cared too much about appearances anyway. That had all been Madeline. She was the one who thought living upscale was the best way to go. I'd never wanted to be held hostage to such a huge monthly rent. It took me fifteen minutes to switch the rent over into my name for the industrial park the following morning. No new cleaning deposit, and no mention of first and last month's rent. Five hundred a month, including lights and water. That was less than forty cents a month per square foot of space. After I'd gotten the lease on the office squared away, I drove over to Milwaukie to meet Earle Towns. He was a tall, bluff faced man, with balding white hair kept long on the sides and in the back. He had no hair at all on the top of his head. He seemed friendlier than most people, insisting on giving me a tour of his smokehouse. I discovered that the huge bulk of his business was in making private label product for other smokehouses. Some were in the immediate area, but many were from out of state. He told me that the big edge he had over his competition was in his ability to purchase the meat he needed at a much better cost than his competition. He never explained how he managed this, only that he did. I learned a lot more about how beef jerky and pepperoni was made than I'd ever wanted to know before. Most of his plant was given over to making chubs of summer sausage which he claimed to sell all over the country. He had one pound, two pound and three pound sausages, and about six or eight different types of it that he manufactured and processed. He told me he sold more than twenty million dollars of those products every year. I put in my first order directly with him, ordering more than three thousand dollars worth of jerky and pepperoni sticks. He seemed somewhat surprised to find that I had that much cash on me. Most poker players are generally adverse to keeping their money anywhere that they can't get to it in a hurry. I'm no exception to that general rule either. I always knew how big my bank roll was because It was never further than fifty feet from me. After paying for my new product, I had sixteen thousand and some change left. When I was leaving, I ran into Nancy coming down from where the main offices were. Uncle Earle had his office downstairs, right next to all the smokers and ovens. "Ralph, how did it go with Uncle Earle?" "It went well. I bought some product, and he's going to have it delivered to me later today. By tomorrow, I'll be back out on the road, trying to make some new sales." When I'd first seen Nancy she'd been wearing a man's flannel shirt, one of those Pendelton's I think they're called, and denim jeans with cowgirl boots. She looked like she was about nineteen years old, with shoulder length black hair, and with two front teeth on top that were bent towards each other. She wasn't buck toothed, but they did stick out in front just a little bit. She had looked kind of cute and innocent when I first met her. Now, in a dress with high heels on and her hair put up, she looked older, and more sophisticated than she had looked before. Her teeth hadn't changed though, and, for whatever reason, I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss her with those prominent teeth of hers. "Mr. Shipley called Uncle Earle and told him you'd decided to stay with the office. Uncle Earle owns the park, in case you didn't already know that. He kept your rent low just like he set it for Dave. Can you give me a ride back to the park? I rode in with Uncle Earle, but he wants to go over to Lake Oswego to play golf this afternoon with some of his old drinking buddies. I can walk home from the office." I ended up driving her over to her house. It was less than half a mile from my new apartment. It seemed like a nice, older house, that her parents owned. The neighborhood might not have been that good, but the house itself looked well cared for. She leaned inside my passenger door window after getting out of my truck, thanking me for the ride. "I'll be over at the office in the morning to pick up some of the product I left there. If you want to, you can drive me around while I make my deliveries. It will give me a chance to show you where all the accounts are, and to introduce you to some of the store owners and clerks." "Sounds great. What time?" "I'll get there at eight, and we can leave as soon as we're loaded up and ready." I hadn't had any prurient thoughts about Nancy until she'd leaned into my window to speak with me. When she did that, the front of her dress kind of dropped down, putting both her breasts on open display for me. She had nice small breasts, and wasn't wearing any type of support for them. I could see her light pink nipples and areola's. From the way her nipples were extended out, and from all the crinkling going on in her areola's, I was certain that she was deliberately giving me this delicious peek at her delectable nubbin's. She held that pose for a long time. Her radiant smile when she said goodbye to me erased any possible doubts I might have had about how deliberate her provocative pose had been. I'm twenty eight years old, tall and slimly built, with glasses. I look like a prototypical nerd. I am somewhat nerdish I guess. I like math, am an inveterate reader, and have a true affinity for any games requiring some mental agility. In the past, before Madeline, I'd usually done quite well with girls and women. The two years she and I had been together had been the least amount of sex I'd gotten since my sophomore year in high school. Madeline wasn't a big fan of recreational sex. We'd managed to average no more than having sex twice a week, and that had only started happening at all after the first six months of courtship from me. Before that, I hadn't so much as managed to get a finger in her. I really believed I loved her though, and so I stuck it out and persevered. After we finally did it this one memorable night, I then discovered that Madeline had been trying to turn over a new leaf with me, having been promiscuous, her words, not mine, since her junior year of high school. To Maddy, five guys in eight years was considered promiscuous. The sex hadn't been that good for me, but, since I knew I really loved her, I made do. It was only when she kept complaining about everything that I began to doubt the possible permanence of our love. Towards the end, as I later realized, I hadn't done a single thing to change myself to make things easier for her to take. At least a small part of the reason I'd wanted to get away from Los Angeles had been my not wanting to have to deal with Madeline's next boyfriend. We had most of our friends in common. Many of those had been Maddy's friends more so than mine. My friends were all degenerate gambler's, according to Maddy, while her friends had been ever so much more refined and pleasant to be around. I'd never told her about her two best girl friend's, or about how they once offered to rock my world if I agreed to having a nice little threesome with them. The next morning I showed up at my new office at seven thirty. Nancy was already there, and had separated her delivery order into the middle of the floor in the back area. It took us only a few minutes to load everything up in the back of my pick up, and then we locked everything up and went out on some deliveries. We were driving to the first delivery, a small mom and pop market over in Oregon city, when Nancy started flirting openly with me. "Did you think I was too terrible when I did that leaning in your window thing?" "No. In fact, I was a little bit disappointed when I saw you dressed like you are today. I was hoping you'd have another dress on." "I never dress up when I go out on deliveries. Usually, when I wear that dress I had on yesterday, I have a bra on too. Sometimes I like to tease guys though. Tell me what you thought when I leaned over like I did?" "I'm not sure I thought anything. I was too busy looking to do much thinking. You have very nice breasts." "You had to be thinking something. Tell me what it was." "I don't remember thinking anything while you were leaning on the door like that. Earlier I was thinking something, while we were riding to your house, but I don't remember any thoughts while you were giving me that lovely peek at your titties." "What were you thinking before, then?" Nancy had turned in the seat so her leg was up near the center console and she was facing towards me. "I was wondering how it would feel to kiss you." I had decided to move things forward, letting her know I was definitely interested in her. "Because of my front teeth, you mean?" She gave me a bright smile, putting the aforementioned teeth on prominent display. She didn't seem overly self conscious about them. "Because of your whole smile. Your mouth looks very sexy when you smile." I was getting hard then, thinking about how my cock would look, going in and out of her pretty mouth. I saw her eyes checking my crotch area out. She wasn't trying to hide where her visual focus was. We made about forty deliveries that day. Most of them, the owners, or at least one of them, were in the store. Nancy knew everyone by name, and handled the product sales and subsequent payment with relaxed, low pressured, ease. I could see that she was well liked by all her customers. We were finished before three that afternoon. Nancy tried to share some of the profits with me, but I wouldn't accept any of it from her. "Well, we're done with the route deliveries for this week. Think you can handle next week's all alone?" "Probably, but it sure won't be as much fun, or half as stimulating when I do." "That's a very nice thing for you to say to me. Everybody else around here has known me since I was a baby. I don't get very many chances to show off some of the other sides of my personality." "There are more sides than you've already shown me?" Nancy laughed when I asked her that. A low, throaty, kind of laugh, not one that you'd expect to be hearing from such a young, innocent looking girl. "Believe me when I say that there's a lot more. Sometimes, that's about all I think about. Mostly it is a fantasy that I know I'd never really do. I don't want to shock anybody, especially my relatives. Unfortunately, I'm related to over half the people I know. You can't very well go around teasing your cousins. This is a very small community we have here too. If I ever really did something anywhere around here, it would get back to my family in a matter of hours. I already know that much for a fact." "Oh, really? It sounds to me like you may have tried to act out some of your fantasy's already?" "Maybe, but I'm not telling. Mostly though, I'd just love to have a chance to tease some guys. Around here though, you try to do just a little bit of teasing, and the boys will either rape you, or else they'll go around telling everybody that they got in your pants. Both those things have happened to me already." "I'd never rape you, and I sure wouldn't spread any stories about you. I also happen to love being teased by pretty girls." "No guy would ever be willing to admit that he'd rape a girl, but quite a few have." "I wouldn't. You can trust me not to do anything to take advantage of you like that. You can even tie my hands behind my back if it would make you feel any safer." "Really? What about after? When I let you get loose, you'd find a way to take your revenge on me." "I can show you how to tie knots that I could get out of by myself, after. It would just take me some time to do it. You could be gone by the time I undid those knots." "You're serious, aren't you? I was mostly just kidding around about wanting to tease you. I was having some fun with you, that's all it was." By this time I'd finished driving us back to the industrial park. I figured it was too late for me to go out to try to do some selling myself. I mentioned this to Nancy and she laughed at me. "Why are you laughing?" "You're getting call reluctance already. Most people get it, sooner or later, but they either get it right away, before they sell anything, or else sometime later, after they've been selling for awhile. You only lasted one morning. That might be a record for getting it the soonest. I think that's what happened to Dave too." "I'm not sure what this call reluctance is, but I'm pretty sure I don't have it. If it was earlier, say right after lunch, I'd go out and expect to make some sales. It's after three thirty now though, and by the time I got anywhere to try to sell, it would be after four." "You sound just like all the other salespeople Dave ever hired and trained. A million excuses about why it isn't a good time for them to get started selling." "This is beginning to sound like a challenge. Is that what it is? I'll bet I can go out and sell at least ten jars before six o'clock. If I do, what will you give me?" "If you don't, what will you give me?" "If I don't, I'll take you to any restaurant, within fifty miles, and let you order anything on the menu." "No. I can get that from lots of other guys." "What do you want then?" "Funny you should ask me that. You said you have your own apartment now, right?" I nodded that she was right. "If you don't sell at least ten jars before six, you give me the keys to your apartment for this weekend, so my girl friends and I can have ourselves a party there. You have to buy us some Tequila, vodka, gin, and some mixes, and some beer and wine too. You have to leave us alone all weekend too, so you'll need to find another place to sleep." "How many people will be there? I just signed my lease, and I'd hate to get kicked out before I even got a chance to live there." "There will only be five of us, including me. We won't be that loud either. We've partied together before and haven't gotten into any trouble." "Okay, now tell me what I win if I do sell at least ten jars by six o'clock tonight?" "We'll go over to your apartment and I'll take off all my clothes for you for one hour. You can look all you want to, but no touching me, okay?" "How will you know if I sold ten jars or not?" "Are you kidding me? I'm going to ride along with you to make sure. Ten jars, at the regular prices, and sample bags won't count, right?" "Deal, let's shake on it." I put out my hand and she took it. She had a big smile on her face. She really must have believed I wasn't going to sell those ten jars. I loaded up plenty of each type of product. Two cases of each style of jerky and a case each of the two pepperoni's. I grabbed sample bags for each product too. Once I had all the product I'd need, I drove straight back to that industrial park I'd gone to that first day I'd tried selling. It was only two days since I'd sold a lot of product there, but I was counting on word of mouth advertising to get me some new sales. It was a bit after four o'clock when we got there, and, as luck would have it, the "Roach Coach" was just leaving when we pulled up in my truck. Someone saw and recognized me right off the bat, calling me the Jerky Guy. "That Jerky Guy is back. Somebody go tell Fat Frank he's here." A couple minutes later, this really fat guy in a black tee shirt came waddling at full speed around one of the industrial buildings, heading straight for my truck. The man was in his forties, and he was huge. He had to be at least six feet six or more, and he was fat everywhere. Even his whole head looked fat. By the time he came to a stop, right in front of me, he was huffing and puffing like he'd just run a mile to get to me. In fact, it was less than fifty or sixty yards he'd come. "You have anymore of that Teriyaki flavor jerky left?" "I think I have a few jars left. How many did you want?" "Are they still only fifteen dollars each?" "That's right. That's my wholesale price though. How many do you want?" "You said a few. Do you have five left?" "Cases or individual jars?" "Uh, how many jars are in a case?" "Six to a case. I only have two cases of the Teriyaki flavored jerky left. If you need any more than that, you'll have to buy some of the regular, or the hot peppered jerky too." "No, just let me get five jars of the Teriyaki for now. How much is that, seventy five? Let me have two canisters of the pepperoni sticks too. Those are thirty pieces to a canister, just like in the stores, right?" "Regular or spicy for the pepperoni?" "I didn't know they came in spicy. Let me have one of each then." While he was talking to me and making his order, I saw he had a folded hundred dollar bill in his big hand. So far, he'd only spent $93.00 of it. "For that hundred, and only two more dollars, you can get your whole order, plus one more jar of the pepperoni, either flavor." I was pointing at the bill in his hand as I spoke. He thought about it for a few seconds, before finally shaking his head, signaling me that he didn't want to spend any more. I handed over his five jars of jerky, in the cardboard case, and two of pepperoni, along with seven dollars in change for his proffered hundred dollars. As he walked away, I was left wondering what I should do next to get the last three jars sold that I needed to have. Less than another minute had gone by before three other people came barrelling around the same corner of the building that my last customer had disappeared behind. This resulted in three quick sales of two jars each. I did have to give each of these people samples of the Teriyaki jerky and the regular pepperoni stick. The lady bought one jar of the Teriyaki, and a canister of the pepperoni. Each of the guys bought a jar of the Teriyaki and a canister of the spicy pepperoni. As they walked back to their building, I was turning towards the front of my truck, more than satisfied now with calling it a day after quickly selling off thirteen jars and canisters of product. I'd made fifty two fifty in half an hour, not counting the time it took to load up the truck, and drive all the way over there from my office. This was with my new cost for product. The old way, and I would have made an extra ten dollars and fifty cents. "That was pretty easy, don't you think?" I was looking at a suddenly very nervous Nancy Towns as I spoke those words. "Did you set me up, Ralph? I never saw any one person buy so much product like that man did. You don't suppose he bought all that for himself, do you?" "Did you get a good look at him? I'm halfway tempted to stay here until five o'clock, just to see if he finishes all he just bought, and then decides to come back here and order up some more. I've definitely got to get some business cards printed up to bring back out here for him. A customer like him, you don't want him having to wait too long for his next case of meat treats." I was interrupted by a knock on the window of my truck door. When I rolled it down, to see what the guy wanted, he already had his fifteen dollars in his hand. I got out and got him a jar of the Teriyaki jerky too. I stayed outside when I saw a group of three more people headed my way. This ended up with my selling two regular jerky's and three sample bags, one each of the peppered, Teriyaki, and regular jerky. I ended up staying in that same spot until after five thirty. Business slowed down some, but I did manage to sell another six jars of jerky and three more pepperoni canisters before I finally packed it in and left. "Ralph, would it be all right with you if I put off coming over to your apartment until sometime over the weekend? I'm not trying to weasel out of paying you what I owe, but now isn't the best time for me to be doing it. My period just started up yesterday. I'll be fine again by the weekend." "Nancy, if you changed your mind about doing what you said, you don't have to make any excuses for it. I'm pretty sure you never believed you'd have any chance at all of losing your bet when we made it. I won't hold you to it." "No! That's not it. I already told you what it was. I lost, fair and square, so I'll go ahead and do what I said I would. It would just be better if I wasn't having my period when I did it." I agreed that waiting for the weekend would be okay with me, and we rode back to the office in comparative silence. When we got there, Nancy got in her little truck and left right away. I had a strong feeling that she had no plans at all to pay off on her lost wager. It must run in her family is what I was thinking on my short drive back to my apartment. I spent most of Thursday, Friday and Saturday out selling product. I managed to open five new commercial accounts while I was out selling. Two were in mini markets, and the other three were in bars. I'd gone to a place that made business cards in four hours, picking up five hundred cards to hand out with my new cell phone number on it. Not counting my commercial sales, I was still averaging more than forty units sold each day. Thirty or more of these were of the jerky, so I was making better than one fifty a day average profit. Unlike with poker, there were none of those offsetting losing days for me to have to put up with. It was also healthier for me to be outside, walking around and talking with people. I met a girl on Friday, at one of those beauty colleges. Her name was Gretchen, and she was a bottle blonde, very thin, but with an amazing chest on her. She had lingered when all her school friends had finished their sampling and buying of my products. We got to talking about this and that, and I somehow ended up asking her out for that Saturday night. I picked her up at the apartment she shared with three of her classmates from the beauty college, and she started talking about this party down in Salem that she really wanted to go to. Salem was a good distance from Tigard, but being from Los Angeles, I was used to longish drives to get someplace. The trip itself was made to seem shorter, and much more enjoyable, because of the blow job that Gretchen insisted on rewarding me with for agreeing to take her to this party. Even with her having to be something of a contortionist while straddling herself over the center console, Gretchen showed me that she knew her way around a cock. I've had better blow jobs, but none while I was doing eighty five miles an hour at the time. It was a very interesting and enjoyable occasion. After she had swallowed my spend, she had insisted that I kiss her. Not a big problem as I'd run into that same demand from two other girls before. Not something I'd voluntarily choose to do, but not worth alienating her over either. The party we attended was right off campus of Willamette University in Salem. It was mostly a college aged crowd, with lots of marijuana in evidence as well as a whole coterie of "tweakers" busy getting high in one of the upstairs bedrooms. As soon as Gretchen found out where the "tweakers" were, she went and joined them. I didn't see her again for the next four hours. I got myself some beer and started wondering around the party. I don't do any drugs, mostly because I don't like not feeling in control of myself. I've tried it a few times, mostly pot, and some upper's once, but it isn't my thing. I got to talking to a group of young people who were just beer drinkers like I was. At the end of the night I came away with the definite sense that I was too old and set in my ways to fit in with the college crowd anymore. I went upstairs to find Gretchen and then we left. I was in no danger of falling asleep behind the wheel because of Gretchen's incessant yapping all the way back to Tigard. She offered me another blow job, but this time I demurred. I wouldn't have minded the blow job, it was the kiss afterwards I wanted no part of. I had no idea where Gretchen's mouth had been since the drive down to Salem. Having to taste my own sperm was just barely acceptable to me, but one has to draw the line somewhere. ------- Sunday morning I was awakened early by someone rapping loudly on my front door. I got out of bed and discovered Nancy standing there, a huge smile on her face. I told her to wait while I put some clothes on. I generally prefer to sleep sans clothing, and had come to my front door in that condition. It only took me a minute to throw on my slacks from the night before and my black World Series of Poker tee shirt. "I had planned on being here yesterday morning, but I had something I needed to do for Uncle Earle instead. I would have phoned you, but I don't have your number." I went over and took one of my new cards out of the box they'd come in, handing it to her. "I worked yesterday, all day. I plan on taking Sunday and Monday off, although I'll spend Monday morning's at the office, then go pick up my new product for the week in the afternoon. I was meaning to ask you, is there a limit to how long the jerky and pepperoni is good for?" "We say six weeks for the jerky, but after you open the jar, it's closer to two weeks before it starts to get dry and hard. The moisture is what gives it such a soft bite. The pepper sticks last about three weeks after they're opened. After that, they lose a lot of their good taste and turn greasy tasting. That's why they only have thirty pieces to a container, while the jerky has forty pieces to a jar." "I've still got a lot of product left, but I need some Teriyaki jerky since it seems to out sell all the others by a wide margin." "It's most people's favorite. Uncle Earle only makes the others because there are still a few people that prefer unsweetened jerky." "The regular is sweet too." "Maple sugar cured. All the jerky has their first cure in the maple sugar. The other flavoring comes with the second and third cure's. The third cure is what makes it so soft to bite into. Uncle Earle won't let anybody else in to see his third cure. Even the plant inspector's from the government just have to go by the ingredients he lists on the labels. Uncle Earle spent a lot of money defending that trade secret of his. He's turned down a lot of money to let other meat smoker's in on his secret method too. All I know for certain is that it involves using radishes as a natural preservative." "Enough business talk for now, Nancy. What was it again that we agreed you'd have to do if you lost the bet?" "You know." "I remember it vaguely. Wasn't it something about you were going to give me an hour to look at your naked body?" "Look, but you can't touch. That was what we agreed on." With that, Nancy started slipping off her tennis shoes and socks. I went over to the large, brown, overstuffed chair the apartment had come furnished with and sat down in it. It had large sides that seemed even larger when my weight caused the cushion I was sitting on to compress itself further downward. It wasn't comfortable to try to rest your elbows or arms on the padded sides of the chair. I watched closely as Nancy methodically removed all her clothing. She took off her shirt first, then slid out of her tight denim shorts. She had on a light blue matching bra and panty set. I could see her extended nipples poking against the sheer fabric of her bra cup. Her black pubic hair was clearly visible through her panty as well. When she had only her bra and panty left, she did a little pirouette move, like a model might do. She had a tight little butt on her, athletic looking, and well toned as well. When the bra came off she paused once more, allowing me to get a real good look at them. She reached up both her hands to cup her small breasts and gave them each a good rubbing. Stepping out of her panties was accomplished in a very matter of fact manner. Her pubic hair seemed to spring out after the panties came off. It was obvious that she did no trimming of her bush. I could see signs of moisture on the hairs surrounding her pussy opening. "You're only the third boy that has seen me like this. The other two both ended up raping me." "I already promised that I wouldn't do that, Nancy." "They both promised that too, but I still ended up being raped by them." "Why are you doing this then? You were the one who made this part of our bet, not me." "I know I did. Can't you guess why I did that?" "Not really. I think, if it was me that had been raped, I'd have to think twice before recreating the same situation that got me raped before." "That's what makes it so scary and so exciting for me this time. I know it might turn out as bad as those other two times did, but you can't know how exciting it is for me to be doing this with you now. This time I really believe you'll keep your word. I told you about how much I like to tease boys. The farther I go with it, the more exciting it gets. Right now, I'm having a real hard time not doing something about how excited I already am." "Me too, but I doubt it's the same for me as it is for you. You have a lovely body, and I'm really enjoying this chance to look at you in the nude." While we'd been talking, Nancy had been busy exploring herself with her hands and fingers. The atmosphere was already highly charged with her erotic energy. My cock was throbbing already with each beat of my heart. It was all I could do to keep myself still so as not to pose any hint of a threat to her. I watched as her finger snaked its way into her pussy and started making these squishing noises as she moved it around in that hairy dark grotto of hers. "Will you be able to just sit there while I play with my pussy?" "I'm not going anywhere, Nancy. The only touching that will be done here this morning is the touching you decide to do. I'll just sit here and watch, that's all." Nancy seemed to dissolve down to my carpeted floor when I told her that. She arranged herself so that her widespread legs gave me the best possible look at her pussy as she began to attack it with increased vigor, using both hands as she did so. Her right hand was busy working over her clit, while the left hand had two fingers moving in and out of her very excited looking pussy slit. Her hips were moving up and down and side to side, accompanying the increasing arousal her actions were causing in her. "Oh, jeez! Shit, this feels so gooooood! Do you like seeing me like this?" I had to clear my suddenly too dry throat before I could answer her question. "I love it. Your pussy looks like it might catch fire. It's so red inside. Some of your juice is beginning to splatter from the way your fingers are pounding in and out of it." "I'm almost there, so close." I watched her working on her pussy feverishly, but could detect her growing desperation as her arousal started slipping away from her. I didn't think she'd managed to achieve her orgasm, in spite of her earlier telling me she was getting very close to it. I watched as her motions became even more frenetic, and then, later, as her disappointment was written all over her facial expressions. After another short while, she stopped all her movements and just lay there, her breathing still very fast, with both her hands resting on her stomach area. I wasn't really prepared for her to start crying after that, but prepared or not, that's exactly what happened. I stayed in my chair, not knowing what I could do to give her some comfort. The very last thing I wanted to do was frighten her by moving from where I was sitting. "I can't even come like this now. I was sure I'd be able to." "It looked to me like you were almost there, Nancy. I hope my talking to you didn't stop you from being able to come?" "I can get close, but then it gets all numb down there and I lose the feeling. Before the rapes, I could come so easily. Sometimes, I could do it four or five times in a night, just by touching myself. Those stinking bastards have ruined it for me." "I think it's more of a case of you ruining it for yourself. It might help if you went to get some counseling about this problem. People get things in their head, and it can really have a big impact on their lives." "You think you're qualified to make these kinds of judgments?" "Poker players have to understand people. I've seen people who showed similar kinds of problems before. It was always something inside themselves that was the cause. I'm sure those rapes brought about the problem, but the cure for it has to come from inside you. You can't take back those assaults, but you can find ways to not let them impact on you like they do now." "Name something you saw that was a similar kind of problem." "There was this guy, a top player. If I told you his name, you'd recognize it if you knew anything at all about poker. The guy won the main event at the World Series of Poker. He lost back all his winnings, playing for high stakes in ring games. When he was broke again, he became totally impotent. Nothing he did made his dick get hard. Naturally, being broke and impotent, his girlfriend left him for another poker player, one who was riding a hot streak. "This guy I'm talking about got a chance to travel down to Costa Rica, mostly to get away from all the people here in the US he owed so much money to. Down there, between the games he played in the casino, and playing online poker, he slowly started to rebuild his bank roll. He stayed in Costa Rica for two years, sending money back with some friends to pay off other people he owed all the money to. "When he had paid it all off, he left and came back to Las Vegas. The first night back he sat down in the biggest ring game in the world and promptly won over a quarter of a million dollars. After he quit the game, he had his first boner in more than two and a half years. He later told a friend of mine that it was this first hard on that he had after coming back that gave him the confidence to resume his previous lifestyle." "How does any of that apply to my situation?" "He let what had happened to him change the way he functioned. The two things had nothing in common until he somehow linked them together. Rape is the same. It isn't about the sex, it's about dominance and control. You are letting them still control you. You're giving them a power over you that they shouldn't really have. Those raping's are over with. Nothing can change the fact that they happened, they're part of your history. You not being able to come though, that's something you do have control over, something you can change if you really want to." "You think I don't want to change it back to how it used to be?" "It looks that way to me. Did you come when they were raping you?" I could tell she hadn't been expecting me to ask her that question. I knew, even before she confirmed it, that she had. That was probably a major part of her problem now. Coming while being raped had shamed her. "I didn't want to, but my body went ahead and did it anyway." "That's why you made this bet with me too, isn't it? You were hoping I'd rape you, and you could start coming again." "That's not true! I never wanted you to rape me. Teasing is what I like, not being raped." "If you were being completely honest right now, you'd admit that coming is what you want. Teasing is what you think will give you the best chance of doing that." "You don't know anything! You're making stuff up to try to make me think you're some sort of an expert. Next you'll tell me that you can make me have orgasms again." I watched as she stood up and gathered in all her clothing. After she had it all, she went into my bathroom and put it all back on. I could see how unhappy and angry she was. I knew better than to try to engage her in any further conversation. When she came out of my bathroom, she headed straight to the apartment door, letting herself out without any further words, and slamming my door behind her, ------- Chapter 2 I'd be the first to admit that I missed being with Nancy over the next few months. I still thought of her as my very first Oregon friend. Missing her or not, I had set myself some very specific goals with regard to getting my business going. The best way for me to achieve my goals was to work longer hours. From eight thirty to eleven, I concentrated mainly on going around giving out samples of my products, passing out my business card with every sale I made. From eleven to two, I tried opening up new commercial accounts. After doing this for three weeks, I had an additional twenty three new commercial outlets that were now selling my products to the public. From two until five thirty, I concentrated on servicing the nine largest industrial parks in the area. Between the new business I got, and my repeat customers, I had started averaging more than fifty jars and canister sales to my non commercial customers every day. I had two delivery routes going now too. The first one was the route that Dave had started, the one that Nancy had turned over to me. I serviced this one each Wednesday morning. The second route, made up of all the new commercial customers that I had developed, I serviced each Wednesday afternoon. With just the profits from these two service routes, I was now grossing better than twelve hundred dollars per month. For the first time in awhile, I was taking some pride and satisfaction in what I was doing. Playing poker is a skill, and the best players usually take home the money. A lot of time though, the losers of this money are people with emotional illnesses, compulsive personality disorders. Having seen some of the darker side of problem gambling, it was difficult for me to believe I was engaged in a positive activity when I had played poker for a living. I found myself with almost no desire to return to playing, not even as a recreational pursuit. The money I was now earning made it easy for me to move myself away from the temptation of the so called 'easy money' aspect of playing poker. In my first full month of selling jerky, I'd netted more than five thousand dollars. My living expenses up in Oregon were negligible, so much so that I'd already increased my spare cash by quite a lot. What I used to think of as my poker bankroll was now my spare cash. I still kept it in the same place I had before, but now I thought of it in a slightly different way. If Dave Towns hadn't come back to Oregon when he did, I might have become complacent with my new endeavor. I wasn't all that ambitious anyway, and sixty thousand a year seemed more than adequate for what I wanted to do with my life. The first time I ran into him was at one of my inherited commercial accounts, a gas station, just off the Cascade Highway in Oregon City. I walked inside to find him writing out a delivery receipt for the product he'd just placed in the store. I recognized him right away. "What the hell are you doing, Dave? This is my customer now." "Hey, Ralphie, Earle told me you were up here, but I didn't really believe it. He also told me that you've been told about his policy of not granting exclusive sales territory to anyone. I'm probably not going to be hanging around here for that long anyway, so you'd be better off just putting up with my cherry picking some of my old customers 'til I leave." "That doesn't work for me, Dave. As far as I'm concerned, you lost your rights to selling these products when you didn't come back and pay me the money you lost in that game over at Ferdie's house that night. I own whatever rights you once might have had." "You have that business as near as I can tell. I'm not stopping you from selling anywhere you want to. I started selling here three years ago. You have the business, but I never said it included any of my accounts. My uncle will sell to me any time I go over to his plant with cash to buy some product. He even raised my prices, so now I have to pay the same as you do." ------- I didn't bother going over to see Earle Towns to argue my case with him. The fact that Dave had product to sell was all I needed to know. In the month I'd been in the area, I'd found out that there were quite a few meat smokers and jerky maker's within a fifty mile radius of Tigard. For the most part, their jerky wasn't as good as Earle's, and their pepper sticks didn't even come close to his. There was this one guy though, J.C., who had a smokehouse up in Clackamas. He made a very different kind of jerky. It was very moist and soft, and had a very sweet and mellow taste to it. It had only two drawbacks that I could see. There were only twenty pieces in a one pound canister, instead of the forty pieces in one of Earle's jars, and the meat would get moldy a week or so after the canister was opened. When I first saw J.C. he was experimenting with individually plastic wrapped pieces, using a gas as a preservative. On the positive side, not only was the meat very tasty, the price he'd quoted me to sell his products compared quite favorably with Earle's. I drove over to Clackamas that afternoon to see how J.C. was coming with solving his mold problems. "It's looking pretty good right now, Ralph. Look at these three pieces." J.C. handed me three of the individually wrapped long, skinny, meat pieces. "Try the Teriyaki flavored one first. I made it fifteen days ago. The other two are twelve and ten days old. Bite into each of them. I can't tell any difference at all between them as far as taste or bite goes. I can let you have these in packs of a hundred for thirty five cents apiece. Should sell easy in the stores for a buck a copy." They tasted fine, all three of them, but, whatever they were, they weren't really jerky. It was a different cut of meat for one thing. Earle's jerky was like steak and he called it beef jerky. J.C.'s was more like a pot roast, but he called it steak pieces. The steak pieces each weighed about twice what a piece of Earle's jerky did. "How can I make any money selling individual pieces J. C.?" "I'm getting a new box made for them, forty eight to a box. Be ready in a week or so, just need government approval. All the labels are already approved. $17.00 a box is all I'll need. You can put these in the same stores you put Earle's product in. Not really any kind of competition with his jerky. Different product all together." "There's a big market already for Jerky and pepperoni sticks. Might be awhile before people start switching over to these things." "Everyone who tries these likes them. People like something, they generally will buy it. All these need is someone to take them around to show to people. Let them try one and they'll start buying." "What about samples? Earle makes up sample bags for all his products." "Fair enough. How about this? Every box you buy off me, I'll throw in six extra sticks for sampling. Just for the first month say." I knew I could cut each piece up into at least eight samples, so I knew that would easily cover my sampling costs. I was also convinced that I could sell some of this new product if I could sample it to the people I'd been selling to already. I was paying about a quarter a piece for Earle's jerky, and a little less than that per piece for the pepperoni sticks. Based on weight alone, the steak pieces were a better deal for me, but only if they sold as well as the product Earle was selling me did. "If I went ahead and bought say two thousand pieces, loose like the ones you gave me to try, for six hundred dollars, would you still throw in the extra two hundred fifty sticks for sampling?" "Can't, not for six hundred. I'd be working for nothing if I did that deal with you. Could make out okay at seven hundred that way, for a short time. Best I can do." "I guess I'll just have to wait until you've gone out and established the market for it then. Most companies, they expect to lose money any time they introduce something new. Costs money to build a market for anything. I'll stop back to see you in a few months, if I start seeing these in some stores." "If I went ahead and saw things your way this time, just to help you get started and all, wouldn't mean I'd be agreeing to keep it up forever. Sooner or later I'd have to start seeing some return for the work I'm putting in." "You can call it market research and write the whole thing off on your taxes." "Could if I had any profits to write it off against. I've been spending a lot of money on product development and labels for this idea of mine. Too damn much, if you want to know the truth of it. I need to start seeing some future prospects out of this. I'd need to sell at least five hundred boxes a month just to break even on this product. That's twenty four thousand pieces. You think you could get me there?" "If it takes off I can. No reason I can't start looking around for other distributor's for you too, if the product finds a good reception in the marketplace. At seventeen a box, that's only $8,400.00 in sales for you to break even each month. Right now, I'm selling more than that for Earle, just by myself. Thing is though, I might just stop selling his products, unless things change in a big hurry." "You do know that me and Earle, we go way back? Like as not, he's going to find out that we're doing business together now." "I'm hoping he does, J. C. That's one of the main reasons I came over to see how you were coming with this new product of yours. Earle thinks it was funny setting his nephew up to compete with me. He'll probably think it's funny when we start competing with him in all the places I sell to now." "Not too likely, I'd judge. More likely he'd want to stomp you right out of business. The best you can hope for is he'll stop selling you his products." "If he does, I'll have to make a run over to Tillamook and see how badly they'd want to mess with Earle's head. From what I heard, there used to be a lot of competition between them. Earle's a pretty sharp businessman though. I can't really see him starting any new jerky war with Tillamook." "Tillamook is a long way to go for jerky. Plenty of people closer in would sell you theirs." "Earle's is the best. I haven't found anyone close who can compete with it, no offense, J.C." "None taken. Most people would agree with you on that point. I know a man over in Idaho could give Earle a close run over who made the best, but he won't sell at wholesale to anyone. Sells direct, always has." I ended up buying two thousand pieces for six hundred dollars, with another two hundred and fifty pieces for sampling. J. C. didn't have that much stock on hand ready to deliver, so I took what he had and arranged to pick up the rest in four days. J. C. should have been a fortune teller. Just as he'd predicted, Earle decided to come down on me with both feet. The first thing he did was evict me from my office because I didn't have a valid business license in my name. He also sent code enforcement around to ticket me for that as well. He called me on the phone to let me know I'd never get another jar of his product from him again. I offered to sell him back all the unsold product I had left, but he refused my offer. The people at Tillamook thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but told me that they already had representation in the area where I'd be selling. They didn't do any direct marketing to the public anymore, only commercial sales through their outlets. I went to get a business license in several cities that I sold in regularly. A wasted four hundred dollars I thought, but I avoided a five hundred dollar fine by showing my business licenses to the judge who heard my case on the ticket I'd gotten for selling without a valid business license. The citing officer hadn't bothered looking into any specific sale I might have made to anyone in his jurisdiction. It took me two more weeks to sell out of the remaining store of Earle's products I'd had in stock. While I sold those off, I was also introducing J.C's products in all my industrial parks. Initial sales were great. I had no problem selling that first two thousand, and people seemed to prefer the taste of my new product to the old ones. I knew it would depend on how repeat sales went. During the second week I only managed to sell sixteen hundred of the steak pieces. The new boxes were approved and ready by the third week, and I managed to sell about seventy boxes at all my commercial accounts. My industrial park sales in that third week tapered off to twelve hundred pieces. That next week, J. C. informed me that Earle had bought him out, lock, stock, and barrel. Effectively, I was now out of business. I was in my apartment, trying to decide what my next move should be, when my cell phone rang. "Hello." "Is this Ralph Rudd?" "Yes." "Mr. Rudd, my name is Jim Davis. A friend of yours, J. C. Crawford, gave my your number. He told me a little bit about what's been going on in your part of the country, and he thought it was possible that the two of us could do some business together. I'm in the smoked meat business, out here in Idaho, and I've got some products I hope you'll be interested in helping me market." "Beef jerky?" "Nine different kinds of jerky, Mr. Rudd. All of it award winning product that has won more state fair blue ribbon's than you could shake a stick at. Pepper sticks too. Four different kinds of them. I've got four different flavors of a cross cut steak product that old J. C. himself will admit puts his to shame. I'm the one who showed him how to beat that little mold problem he was having. J. C. told me you were a straight shooter, and he told me what Earle Towns has already done to try to get you out of his hair. Anybody that sombitch don't like, well, you could say I'm somewhat inclined to want to help." "I'm interested. When can we meet so I can find out more about your products?" "We don't need to have no meetings, Mr. Rudd. You just give me the go ahead to ship you out some of my product. I'll send out a three hundred pound container on the first air freight heading out to Portland from Boise. If you don't think my stuff is better than anything you ever sold before, and at a better price too, delivered to PDX, then you can keep what I'm sending you and you don't owe me nothing for it. That's how I do my business. I'll put in my price list with the first order. If you have a pen handy, let me give you my office number to call whenever you need some more product to sell." After we got off the phone, I was feeling a lot more settled than I had been before. There was something about the man that inspired my confidence. Although I had nothing to go on except what he'd told me, I really believed he was going to be the solution to my business problems. In my experience, when things go bad, they go bad in a hurry, and then stay bad for a good long while. Same thing with going good again. When it finally starts getting good again, it seems like it just keeps getting better and better. Two hours after I got off the phone with Jim Davis, who do you think comes by and starts knocking on my front door? Nancy Towns, of course. I hadn't seen her for at least two and a half months, and then she's right there, on my front door step. "Can I please come in, Ralph?" I opened the door wide, signaling her to come on inside. I had a big grin on my face, wanting her to know right off that I was happy to see her again. "This is a pleasant surprise. How've you been?" "All right, I guess. I had to quit over at Uncle Earle's plant. I got in a big fight with them about how they were treating you. It was Dave that started all your problems. He quit too, and he took my truck when he left. Said it was not mine, that it belonged to the business. I bought it with money I made from selling product at the office. I don't care that much, because it never ran very well anyway, but still, he was just being hateful to do that to me. I just came over to see if you still lived here or not. Uncle Earle told me that he ran you off." "He hasn't yet, but not because he hasn't been trying. Probably mostly my fault, but it made me mad when I caught your brother poaching on one of my customers. Sometimes I have a tendency to take things too far." "I do that too. I try not too, but I seem to do it anyway. Like that last time I was here. I really didn't have any call to get mad at you like I did. At least you weren't trying to be mean to me when you told me those things. I wanted to apologize for what I said to you before I left." "No apology needed. I can come across as a know it all sometimes. Maybe you were right, maybe I didn't know what I was talking about when I told you those things." "How did you know about me having orgasms both times?" "I didn't. I just thought there must be a reason why you were going back and doing the same thing you did those other two times. Plus, you said some things about how they'd ruined coming for you. This girl my sister knew back in high school was gang raped. She had several orgasms, even though they were hurting her, and she hated it. I remember my sister telling my mom that she'd never get excited from anything so cruel as being raped. My mother told her she hoped my sister never found out whether she would or not." "I was excited before they raped me. That was the whole point of me teasing boys, to get us both excited. I thought teasing them was what I was supposed to be doing. The first time it happened, I thought there was something wrong with the boy. When it happened to me again, I knew it wasn't just them, it was my fault too." "Dating is like playing a game. There are all these rules both people need to understand. They probably didn't understand the rules the way you meant them to be. For the teasing thing to work, everybody needs to know what is okay and what isn't. If not, things can go very wrong." "Don't I know it? So, how come you're still here, Ralph?" "For one thing, I signed a six month lease on this place. For another, I haven't decided yet about what I need to be doing about this mess I've made of the business. I really had things going well for awhile, then it all fell apart in a hurry." "If you're waiting for Uncle Earle to change his mind, well, you can just forget about that ever happening." "I kind of figured that out myself when he bought out J.C. Crawford's operation. I hope he wasn't banking on making any money from those steak pieces that J. C. had me trying to sell for him. People wanted to try it, but it doesn't seem to have the staying power, or the long term appeal that your uncle's products do. Repeat business wasn't so hot with J.C.'s product." "I think he just wanted to make sure you didn't have anything to sell. I know he sold off all of Mr. Crawford's ovens right after he bought them. All his boxes and labels had the old plant number on them, so Uncle Earle can't do anything with them at all. I don't think he paid much for any of it anyway. Mr. Crawford mostly wanted his old job back at the plant. I don't think he made much money being in business for himself." "He went to work for your uncle?" "Yes. He runs the first and second curing rooms. He does all the mixing for the cures. He worked for my uncle for about fifteen years before they had a big fight. Uncle Earle wanted him to come back to work anyway." "Did you ever hear of a man named Jim Davis?" "Uncle Jimmy? How do you know about him?" "He called me a few hours ago. Told me that J. C. gave him my number." Nancy started laughing, that deep, throaty, laugh that I remembered from before. "He's another uncle?" "Not really, but Dave and I always called him Uncle Jimmy. He used to be Uncle Earle's partner, years ago. They split up over some argument or something. My mom told us that Uncle Jimmy had moved to either Texas or Arizona." "He told me he has a smoked meat business in Idaho. He wants me to try selling his products around here. He's supposed to be sending me some by air freight right away. He claims it's better than your uncle's products, both quality and price wise." "I don't know about that. Uncle Earle makes a very nice group of smoked products. Company's all over the US order from him. He's one of the biggest independent operator's in the country. Maybe the biggest." "Well, we'll have to wait and find out if Mr. Davis was just bragging, or if he really has what he claims. I hope he does, because I'd really like to have something I could sell that would be able to compete with your uncle's products." "When Dave quit again, Uncle Earle said he was giving up on route sales. Too much aggravation for what he made out of it, he said." "He might be right. He told me he sells about twenty million dollars a year, just from his sausages." "I don't know about that. It sounds awful high to me. Those big contracts he has, he's lucky if he makes two or three percent net on. My aunt tells me all the time that its getting tougher and tougher to make any money, because of the competition. She does all the accounting at the plant, so she must know. I know she told me he made two dollars a jar on the jerky, and a dollar and a half on the pepperoni, and that was at Dave's old prices." "I just hope this Uncle Jimmy of yours has a halfway decent product for me to sell. Route sales might be too much of an aggravation for Earle, but it wasn't too much of one for me." "Did you want me to finish paying you the rest of that hour I owe you? I left before we were half way through it the last time." I looked at her after she asked me that. I knew I better choose my response to her carefully. Normally, my first inclination would be to tell her yes. After the way it had turned out before though, I wasn't too sure that I wanted to risk having things turn out badly again. I had an idea, but I was afraid she might take it the wrong way if I presented it to her. "We can call the last bet paid if you want. I'm not sure how long you were naked the last time. I know we spent a lot of time talking before you took all your clothes and got dressed again. We should make another bet for something else. I bet I can sell at least twenty five jars or canisters of the product Mr. Davis sends me in the first four hours after I get it. What will you bet?" "Suppose it gets here at night?" "Then we'll do it from nine to one the next day, unless it's on a weekend, then we'll do it at that time on Monday." "What do I get if I win?" "I'll buy you another truck, one at least as good as your old one." She laughed when I said that. Her old truck had really been an old beater. "It would almost have to be better. What if you win?" "Then you come over here and spend the night in bed with me. Naked. Both of us naked I mean. No sex, just in bed together, naked." "Why would I ever agree to make that bet?" "You're the one who said teasing boys excites you. What better tease than being under the covers with someone without either of you having any clothes on?" "I can see where it would be exciting, but how do I know I could trust you not to force me to have sex with you?" "I know. You wouldn't be sure, and I wouldn't be either. The best part of teasing is not really knowing what will happen. Even if I promised I won't make you have sex with me, you can't be sure I wouldn't break that promise." "Would you?" "I don't know. I know I'd be very tempted. It's been a very long time for me since I've been naked in a bed with a naked woman. Sometimes, even when you think you know what will happen, it doesn't turn out like you thought it would." "Look, I'm going to go home now. I'll have to think about this before I could make any kind of decision. I really don't want to get raped again. Twice was enough. What you just told me, it sounds like you're already planning to make me do something. What would I tell my parents if I voluntarily got in bed with a naked man and then ended up getting raped all over again?" "You want a ride over to your house?" "I don't think so. You know something, Ralph? You can be a very strange man at times. If you think this was a good way for you to try to talk me into going to bed with you, I don't think you could have been any more mistaken." "How many people have you had sex with voluntarily?" "I never have. It's funny though, because fifteen minutes ago, I was thinking that you might be the first one. Now, I'd bet a lot that you won't be." "Don't bet more than you can afford to lose, Nancy. I'm a pretty good judge of the odds of things like this happening. I'm betting that I will be the first one you make love to voluntarily, and that you'll have an orgasm before we actually do it." That got a smile out of her. She didn't say anything more to me, but this time when she left, she didn't slam my door. ------- Chapter 3 I didn't get my shipment from Mr. Davis until that next Friday morning. I got a phone call from the air freight people out at the airport telling me that it was ready to be picked up. I drove over there, excited about seeing whether the jerky and other products were as good as he'd said. J. C. had told me that his Idaho friend made a jerky good enough to compete with Earle's, but I'd learned that there were a lot of different opinions when it came to beef jerky. So far, out of everything I'd ever tasted, Earle's jerky had been the best. J. C.'s steak pieces had been pretty good too, but it wasn't really beef jerky. I got the big cardboard container home all right and decided to unload everything at my pick up. He'd sent me twelve cases of beef jerky, four cases of pepperoni and two big boxes of his own brands and flavors of steak pieces. In total, there were seventy two jars of jerky, twenty four canister's of pepperoni, and five hundred assorted flavors of the steak pieces. I looked over the hand lettered price list he'd included with the shipment and started laughing. $9.00 for a jar of jerky, $6.00 for a canister of pepperoni, and $ .25 for each piece of the individually wrapped cross cut steak product. I opened one of the Teriyaki jerky jars and tried a piece. Just from that first taste, I knew I had a good replacement for Earle's jerky. The texture and the bite were nearly identical to Earle's, with what was possibly a little stronger teriyaki flavoring, and it definitely was not quite as sweet as Earle's jerky. I liked it. I opened up one of the pepperoni canisters and took out a piece of that. I tried squeezing one of the ends, seeing if I could get much grease to appear from doing that. I couldn't. When I bit into it, I couldn't detect any difference from one of Earle's pepperoni sticks. The biggest difference I found was in the cross cut steak pieces. Jim Davis's product looked and felt like a long strip of beef jerky. I could see it was a lot different than the product J. C. had made. It had more of a jerky smell to it too. When I finally bit into it, I couldn't believe how much better it tasted than J. C.'s steak pieces had. Sometime's, when you'd buy a piece of jerky, there is this small place along the edge where part of it is just hanging by itself, almost ready to fall off. I think it ends up taking a better cure than the rest of the piece does, or else absorbs more of the natural smoked flavor. Whatever might have caused it, that little part of the jerky piece always tastes better than the rest of it. When I used to buy jerky in mini mart's or liquor stores, I'd always try to search for a piece that had one or more of these dangling edges. The steak pieces that Jim Davis made, the whole thing tasted like those dangling pieces did. I ended up eating six pieces of it before I did anything else. Every piece tasted the same way. I started moving some of the product up to my apartment, but I kept more than half of it in my truck, because I wanted to go right out and start selling it. I didn't know Nancy's home phone number, so after I was ready to go out selling, I drove over to her parent's house, parked in their driveway and walked up to the front door. I knocked on the door before I noticed the button for a door bell. I ended up pressing that button a few times too. A woman who turned out to be Nancy's mother answered the door. "Hello, is Nancy at home?" "She is, can I tell her who's here to see her?" "Yes, ma'am. My name is Ralph Rudd." "Mr. Rudd. I see. You've created quite a stir in this house Mr. Rudd, I can assure you of that. Let me go get Nancy for you." The woman's face didn't tell me much about what kind of stir I might have created. Usually, people communicate quite a bit by their facial expressions and body language. Mrs. Towns would have made an excellent poker player. She hadn't given me much information to go by at all. I waited for more than five minutes for Nancy to make her appearance. When the door opened again, it was Nancy's mom there again. "She asks what you want?" "Tell her that my shipment just arrived, and I needed to find out if she wanted to make that bet with me or not." "She doesn't want to make any bets with you, Mr. Rudd. She told me this herself, not three minutes ago. Now, if you'll please excuse me?" "Tell her we don't have to make the bet. Ask her if she wants to try out the new product for me, maybe tell me what she thinks of it?" Just then I saw Nancy move back away from where she'd been hiding, behind the half opened door. "Why should I want to help you, Ralph?" Nancy didn't bother trying to hide her belligerent attitude towards me. Seeing this, her mother's face began reflecting that same belligerence. "I don't know why you should be mad at me, Nancy. All I did was propose a little wager to you. You never had to accept it. I just thought you might be interested in trying out some of these products, and let me know how you think they compare to what your uncle makes. I've got some right back there in my truck. I didn't think you were going to accept the bet anyway, but I didn't know if you wanted to see how the new product sells or not." "Did you already try it?" "I tried some of it when I unloaded the shipment. The Teriyaki flavored jerky is as good as your uncle's. The steak pieces are a whole lot better than what J. C. was making. All the prices are better than what your uncle or J.C. were giving me too." "I'll try the Teriyaki jerky if you want me to. I don't know much about the jerky that J.C. was making." "You should try a piece of this new stuff anyway. Hold on, and I'll get some for you. Do you want to try some too, Mrs. Towns?" "This is jerky from Jim Davis's plant? He's over in Idaho now, is that right?" "Yes, and yes. Let me go get some for you both to try." I went to my truck and got a handful of the individually wrapped steak pieces and the open jar of the Teriyaki jerky, hurrying back before Nancy changed her mind about trying any of it. They both liked the Teriyaki jerky, but, like me, the steak pieces blew them both away. Neither had experienced any smoked meat product they liked as well, and Nancy knew exactly what I meant about it tasting like those dangling edges on regular jerky pieces. "You're going to sell quite a lot of these, Ralph. How much are you going to sell each piece for?" Nancy was getting a bit excited about my new product I could see. "I'm going to buy a bunch of those clear plastic boxes they sell over at Walmart for two dollars each, and I'm going to put fifty pieces in each box. I'll sell the filled cartons for twenty five dollars to the commercial accounts. If they sell each piece for one dollar, they'll be pretty happy, I think. Out at my other sales places, I'll bundle them up in roll's of twenty five, and sell them for $12.50 each roll." "You can do that and still make enough profit?" This was Mrs. Towns asking that question. "I can. It would be my largest profit margin if I sold them that way. Better than the jerky I sell for fifteen a jar. There are four different flavors too. The regular comes in mild or spicy, and there is a jalopeno flavored one too. These could turn into real big sellers at the commercial accounts. I was going to talk to Nancy about helping me out with my commercial deliveries. I can pay her $50.00 a day, and let her use my truck to deliver for me on Wednesday's. In a month, I should have enough new commercial location's opened up for her to work two days a week. Eventually, I'd expect it to be full time for her." "I can't go to work for you, Ralph. Uncle Earle would have a stroke it I did that." "Okay, I understand. I didn't think that through, I guess. I can find someone else, but they wouldn't be able to relate to the store people like you do. People on the route used to always ask me how you were. They miss you. I missed you too." "I'll bet." "No, really. They did, and I do." "No, I meant I've decided to take your bet. Give me a few minutes and I'll be ready to go with you to make sure you don't cheat." "Nancy Rose Towns, you'll do no such thing. No daughter of mine is going to make such an outlandish wager. What would people think?" "I'm twenty two years old, mother, so I'm free to do whatever I choose to, besides, I don't care what people would think anymore. Wait for me Ralph, I won't take too long." She took off then, presumably to change into whatever clothing she thought she needed to. I was left alone with her darkly glaring mother. "My husband and I will not be happy if anything of a violent nature should happen to our daughter, Mr. Rudd. You can no longer say you haven't been warned." "Nothing like that is going to happen from me, Mrs. Towns. I like Nancy. The furthest thing from my mind is hurting her in any way. I would never attempt to force myself on her." "See that you don't." With that final warning or admonition, she slammed her door in my face. That was a first for me. If she was like this to me before I'd done anything at all to deserve such treatment, what would she be like if all of this ended up badly? Something for me to think about. Before I'd gotten started on contemplating the different possibilities, Nancy opened the door and stepped outside. She was wearing the same dress she'd had on that day she'd leaned into my open truck window. She wasn't wearing a bra this time either. I might have groaned, but I'm not one hundred percent sure about it. Whatever I did, it brought a big smile to Nancy's face. "Before you start selling, let me show you the truck I want you to buy me if you lose." "I never said that you get to pick out the truck. I said I'd buy you a truck at least as good as your Datsun was, if I lost. We both know I won't lose, right?" "You should trust me more, Ralph. This truck is only three hundred dollars. It runs too. I drove it around all day yesterday, when I was out looking for a new job. My Uncle George owns it. He offered to give it to me, but I told him I could probably afford to pay for it." "How many uncles do you have, anyway?" "Three on my dad's side, and four on mom's. Plus a bunch of people who are close friends with our parents. People that mom or dad told us we should call uncle. Like Uncle Jimmy. Uncle George is one of my real uncles, he's mom's oldest brother." "If you'll come to work with me, I'll buy you the truck right now, as a bonus, just for agreeing to do it." "I can't do that to Uncle Earle. I already told you that. He's family. We might fight among ourselves, but we do stick together when it comes to doing important things." "Will you at least call him and ask him if its okay? He's going to find out soon enough that I'm not going to just give up and move away. No reason you should lose out on a job, just because he and I can't get along." "I can't work for you, so quit asking me to." The truck was an older model GMC. The body looked a little hard used, but the truck ran fine. I gave Nancy the three hundred to pay her uncle for it. She gave him the money without asking me any questions, then she and I drove back over to her parent's house. After she had parked her truck she came over and got into mine again. I'm sure she expected that we'd go out to see who would win our bet. "I think I've got a sudden case of that call reluctance thing you were telling me about before. I don't really feel much like selling right now. You win the bet, I guess. Go ahead and hop out of the truck. I need to go somewhere and get a postal money order for your Uncle Jimmy to pay for all the product he sent me." "You knew you were going to do this when you came over to my house today, didn't you?" "Actually, I didn't. I came over to see you, expecting that you would refuse to take that stupid bet I offered you before. When you took it, you kind of forced my hand. I know that it wouldn't be good for you, right now, if I ended up winning it. Also, your mother kind of let me know that she and your father would be mad if anything like that was to happen between us." "I don't want to win the bet this way. I'll take the truck back to my uncle and get your money back. It isn't a bet if you don't even try." "You can do whatever you want to. As far as I'm concerned, that truck is yours now. I won't take the money back from you. Besides, you won it fairly anyway. I really don't feel like selling anything right now." "I'll just leave it parked on the street until they come by and tow it away as an abandoned vehicle then." "Sounds like a plan to me. I think I'll start heading back down the coast in a couple months, selling this new product until I get back down to LA again. I can sell this stuff anywhere that has an airport that has flights from Boise. People like good beef jerky all over the country. I might end up setting up territories, and then selling the franchise to the kind of people who have money, but don't know how to set up their own businesses for themselves." "I made the bet expecting to lose it. If you go through with what you're planning to do now, we're just going to have to find a new bet to make." "I've already thought up a new bet. I'm going to be leaving here in two months. Let's say the first of October is the deadline. I'll bet you a thousand dollars that you'll come over to my apartment before I leave, and insist on taking all your clothes off and getting into bed with me. You want to take that bet?" "I would, but I don't have a thousand dollars to pay you in case I lost." "That isn't what you'd have to pay if you lost. I know you don't have that much money. If you lose, you have to leave with me when I go, and travel with me down to Los Angeles. It might take a month or more, because I'll be stopping off to sell product all the way down there." "No way. I'm not leaving here for anything. I'm not like my brother. I like living up here." "In that case, it sounds like an easy way to pick up an extra thousand dollars. All you have to do is accept the bet and then stay away until I leave. I'll stop by your house and leave you the money on my way out of town." "I don't want your money." "Wouldn't matter if you wanted it or not. You couldn't win that bet, and you already realize it. If I hadn't come to see you today, You'd have come up with a reason to come see me and accept the bet I just lost. We're both teasing each other, and we have been from the start. Sooner or later, we're going to wind up naked in a bed together. You'll end up accepting and losing this bet too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to give you what you want. I may never give it to you. If you want me to be inside you, you're going to have to put it in yourself." She sat there for a minute, unwilling to say anything more to me. I knew she hadn't expected me to say what I'd just pointedly said. We both knew it was true that we'd almost certainly end up in bed together. Whether she'd take it upon herself to put my cock in her pussy, or not, only time would tell. She finally opened the door to my truck and got out. I had a bet with myself that she'd find a way to bend over and lean into my truck window, so she could flash me another look at her unfettered boobs, but she didn't. I could see she was deliberating about something though. For a brief minute or so, I really thought she was going to accept my bet. "Even if I do come over and get into your bed, like you say I will, I won't put it in me. If you want me, you'll have to take it. I might not fight you much, but I wouldn't ever do what you say I will either." "If you don't, you'll be as safe in my bed as you'd be in your own. We both know all the rules of the game now, and we've both indicated that we're ready and willing to play. If I end up raping you, you win. If you put it in you, or if we end up not doing it, I win. If I don't rape you, and you cum, whether I fuck you or not, I still win." "You can't win if I decide not to come over to your apartment, and I probably never will." "You'll come, and when you do, you'll cum. The more you think about it, the more exciting it will seem to be to you. In the end, like a moth drawn to a flame, you won't be able to resist the lure of it." As soon as she started to walk away, I started up my truck and backed out of her driveway. I sold my twenty fifth jar or canister, forty minutes after I started selling my new products. Fat Frank bought two hundred of the steak pieces for one hundred dollars. I was feeling so good about how the new product was selling that I decided to give him five "free samples" to share with his friends or family. He was so grateful for my gesture that I was afraid he'd try to give me a hug. He finally settled for giving me a simple, but heartfelt, thank you. By the time I ran completely out of the product I'd brought with me. I'd made back more than the three hundred I'd spent on Nancy's new truck. I went to the post office and bought two postal money orders to send to Jim Davis. The total amount I sent was $977.00. I'd added an extra sixty dollars to pay some of his freight costs, even though he'd written that he'd pay the freight charges on his price list. I put in a note to let him know about the freight money, and to ask him to send me three more of those big containers, each filled just like the first one he'd sent. I told him to call me to let me know the best method for me to pay what I'd owe for the next shipment of product. After I'd mailed off his payment, I remembered that I could phone in my order too. By then it was after four P. M., but he still answered the phone, after the third ring. "Jim Davis." "Hi, Jim. it's Ralph Rudd. I just wanted to call you to say I got that shipment of product you sent. I sold most of it today. I just put two postal money orders in the mail to you, before it occurred to me that you might have some better way I could pay you for the product." "I use Bank of America. I could give you my account number, and you could stop by any branch and make a deposit that will get to me in a day or two. That would probably be the simplest way." "Listen, I wanted to help out some with your freight costs, so I added an extra sixty to what I owed you. If you can send me triple my original order, I can make a deposit for the full amount of the order into your account from here. There's a B of A branch a few blocks down from my apartment." "I get special deals on air freight, and I had already included that cost in the price list I quoted to you. If you were to start moving around the country, that might change things some, but for now, just to PDX, you don't owe me anything for freight. It will take me a couple of days to get things ready for that big of a shipment. I'd need to smoke up a lot of meat to fill that much of an order. Just out of curiosity, what did you think of my steak pieces, and what did you end up selling them for?" "I loved them. So did everyone I gave out a sample to. This one customer of mine bought two hundred pieces, just for his own use. So far, this guy spends about a hundred a week buying product from me. I charge the stores fifty cents a piece, and it comes out to the same thing on my retail routes. I generally charge everybody the same. I've been buying some clear plastic boxes to put the steak pieces in, for my commercial accounts. I'll sell them a box of a hundred pieces for fifty dollars. I'll have to eat the cost of the first boxes, but I plan on reusing them if I can. I already told the three store owner's today that these are my display boxes, not theirs, but we'll have to see if they listen to me or not. I'll probably charge them, at my cost, to replace any that turn up missing." "Sounds about right charging them fifty cents each. They turn around and sell them for a dollar, right?" "Most do. I was in this one bar that put up a sign for $1.25, but most are at either a dollar, or ninety nine cents per piece." "I could run a box with ten thousand steak pieces out to you tomorrow morning, if you know for sure you can sell them. I ran up a big batch for a friend of mine, for him to sell at a state fair, but his wife up and took sick on him and he needs to stay home with her now. You'd be doing me a favor if you could sell them for me. I might could shave something off your cost if you could do it." "Go ahead and send them out. Hell, I can probably sell at least two thousand a day for the next few days if I have that many to sell. The steak pieces were the first thing I sold out of, but I only had five hundred pieces to sell anyway. I can put that $2,500.00 into your account tomorrow morning, if you give me your account number now." I got his account number, again turning down his offer to discount his price for this one time special order. I knew he was doing me the favor. With that many steak pieces I could plan on being busy until the rest of my next order arrived. My minimum sale was ten pieces for five dollars, and that seemed to fit everyone's budget. Most wanted more. "You hear anything back from Earle yet? I meant to ask you not to say anything that tips him off that it was J.C. that gave me your contact information. He'd get in some hot water with Earle if that ever became known." "I haven't heard from Earle, but I should tell you that I mentioned J.C.'s having given you my number to Nancy Towns, Earle's niece." "Can't be helped if you already told her about it. J.C.'s fault for not warning me that he'd gone back to work for Earle when he first called me and talked about you." "I can ask her not to say anything to Earle, but, I'm not sure how much good it will do. We're kind of friends, but the situation is pretty fluid right now." "What one Towns knows, all Towns know. Thick as thieves, that whole family." "She called you her Uncle Jimmy. Maybe she won't say anything if I don't bring it up again." "I remember her. She was a sweet natured little thing. Didn't care much for her brother, or her father, but her and her mother, they were both sweethearts. Her brother, Danny or David, one of those, he used to come down to the plant and steal us blind. I'd catch the little bastard red handed, and then Earle would make me let him go. Led to some hard feelings in his family, but I hated being robbed by a damn ten year old. Kid was supplying half his school friends with stolen jerky and pepperoni. Half of what he was stealing belonged to me." "I know Dave. Terrible poker player, and no sense of personal ethics. He's the main reason I came up her to Oregon. He's also the main reason I had that falling out with Earle." "Then he's the main reason you and I are doing business together, so it wasn't all bad. I'm not like Earle, if you treat me decent, I'll do the same to you. We can both make some money if we treat each other all right." Right after I got off the phone with Jim Davis, I drove over to Bank of America and deposited that $2,500.00 into his account. The bank stayed open late on Friday's. On Saturday, after I'd sold off the rest of that first shipment from Jim Davis, I drove by Nancy's house and the truck was missing. I went by her uncle's house, the one who sold her the truck, but it wasn't there either. I was pulling into my covered parking space at my apartments later when I saw the truck sitting in one of the visitor parking spaces. My first thought was that she'd driven it over and left it there. When I looked over at my apartment door though, I saw Nancy sitting on the top step of the stairs in front of where my apartment was. She was wearing that same dress she'd had on earlier. I took that as a positive sign, one that told me she wanted to play some more. The first thing Nancy asked me, when I was climbing up the stairs, was how much product I'd sold the day before. "All I had with me. Sixty jars of the jerky, eighteen canisters of pepperoni, and whatever I still had left of those five hundred steak pieces, after I let you out at your house." "So you ended up winning our bet then?" "You're hoping I'll tell you I did, so you'll have a good excuse for climbing into bed with me. Were you able to cum yet, yesterday or today?" "No, but I came real close, twice. Let's go inside, Ralph. I don't like standing out here like this." "Does your mother know where you are?" I turned my key in the lock and let the two of us into my apartment. "She knows I won't be coming home tonight. I told her I was going over to spend the night with a friend. She knew better than to ask me who that friend was." "Did you come over to just try your luck, using the old bet as an excuse, or are you here to make that new bet with me?" "I already told you I'm not making the new bet. It isn't an excuse either. You know I lost that bet. What time do you usually go to bed at night?" "Not before dark. It's not even six o'clock yet. Are you hungry? We could go out and get something, or order in some delivery." We finally decided to go out. Nancy wanted me to drive her truck, to tell her if I thought it needed a front end alignment. I explained that my mechanical knowledge wasn't much. After driving out to this Chinese restaurant and having a big meal though, I told her I thought she either had a separated tire on the driver's side front, or else the tire was out of round. It didn't feel like an alignment problem. I told her again that my opinion was probably wrong anyway, but there was something wrong on the front driver's side. (It turned out it was an out of round, separated tire, and that the truck needed an alignment as well) One of her many uncles just happened to own his own tire store over in Portland. We got back to my apartment before eight. Nancy seemed disappointed when I turned on the television set. The Mariner's game had just started. They were playing the Angels, and were already down four zip, in the bottom of the first inning. It was ten to three in the seventh before I finally allowed her to convince me that it was time to go to bed. I'd have to admit that was one of the strangest nights I'd ever spent in bed with a woman. No penetration of any kind was achieved. Not even a tongue in someone's mouth. There was a lot of "accidental" rubbing though, and my very hard cock pressed tightly to her back. Twice I woke up because she was frigging herself with her fingers. Once, she had thrown a leg over my leg and was trying to get off by rubbing her pussy on my kneecap. I almost came myself, while watching her doing that. We both wound up sleeping during parts of the night. Usually not at the same time though. She accused me of cheating when she woke up and caught me spanking the monkey. I explained to her that she'd done quite a bit more masturbating than I had. She countered by claiming hers didn't count, because she hadn't done it to orgasm like I had. When I was getting up to wash the cum off my hand, I held it out to her and asked her if she wanted to do anything with it before I rinsed it all down my sink. She said she didn't, but she looked like she might be lying to me when she told me that. I think we were both relieved when she got up, just before seven the next morning. She put her dress back on, then drove herself home. Right before she walked out of my bedroom she made a comment. "I came, but I didn't cum. It looks like you got that one wrong too." I'd been so horny that I really thought I couldn't take too much more of that. I'd woken up after she had, that last time, and she was staring at my cock, looking like she thought it was one of the four major food groups. After she was gone, I had a double jack off session and went back to sleep again. My cell phone ringing woke me up at one o'clock that afternoon. It was the freight people letting me know that my shipment was ready for pickup. Ten thousand individually wrapped steak pieces is a lot. It was forty cases of two hundred and fifty pieces, and it came in two of those huge cardboard containers, just like the one I'd received the day before. On Monday morning, my goal was to try to sell 2,000 steak pieces a day. Wednesday afternoon early, saw me selling off my last two cases of the steak pieces. I'd made almost $2,500.00 net in three days of selling. I knew I'd lucked onto a super hot product. Jim Davis called me to let me know my new order had shipped earlier that afternoon, and should be ready to be picked up before five. I asked him if he had any more of those steak pieces he needed to get rid of, but he laughed and told me he didn't. When I told him I'd sold off the last of the big order he'd sent me, in less than three days, he invited me to either drive or fly over to Idaho for a visit. I told him that my plan was to leave the Portland area on October first, and that I hoped he'd continue selling me his products wherever I ended up settling down at. "Ralph, you don't have to worry none about that. You remember that friend of mine, the one who's wife got sick so he had to cancel out on selling my steak pieces out at that state fair? That man paid the fairground's people better than four thousand dollars to set up a ten by ten foot booth. I think that fair of his was going to run about three weeks in all, and he was hoping to sell between ten and fifteen thousand steak pieces during the run. For what he had to spend in up front costs, even at a dollar per piece, he was going to clear less than two or three thousand dollars, even if he got that first ten thousand he'd already ordered sold. At fifteen thousand pieces, he'd have been cutting up a pretty fat hog. Just between the two of us though, I was expecting him to have trouble banging out much more than five or six thousand. This is based on the previous total's he's managed at some of the larger county fairs he usually rents space at." "That doesn't sound like very good selling if you're asking me." "Well, old hoss, the thing of it is, up until now, he was, by far, my very top producer. I have this big fund raising program we do with a lot of the schools, but with my buy back program for any unsold merchandise, and the heavy discounts I have to give, breaking even, with a little positive publicity, is about all I can ever hope to achieve." "If it would help you at all, you could raise my prices up a little. I could easily pay an extra nickel for each steak piece, and another buck a jar on the jerky. Only fifty cents more for a canister on the pepperoni sticks though, because I make less on those already." "You aren't understanding what I'm telling you here, Ralph. I'm damn happy with the business deal we have right now. I don't need to charge you any more money for my products. What I've always needed, and haven't had, until just recently, was someone who was capable of selling enough to smooth out all my production runs. I can operate at a much higher profit margin if I can load up with full racks in the smoker each time I fire one of the ovens. It costs the same to smoke twenty five pounds, as it does to do five hundred pounds. Same with the cure ingredients I use. Most of the time, I fire up with considerably less than a full oven. Every extra rack I put in means somewhat higher profit margins. Individually, it might not seem like that big of a deal, but, over the course of six months or a year, I figure it will at least double, and probably triple, the amount of my net profit." "How much would I need to sell to make that happen?" I was worried that he might be expecting too much from me. He just laughed when I asked that. "About a third of what you've been averaging so far. The thing I mostly need is a steady, dependable, demand, across my whole product line. Right now, while we're trying to get used to each other, things can get a little overwhelming, mostly because I'm not currently geared up to produce as much as you seem to be capable of selling. This will change once we settle into a dependable routine. When I have a better handle on the overall demand, I can schedule more efficient production. I sell about sixty to seventy pounds of jerky a day, from my store here, and this takes care of all my normal business overhead. My profit comes from all those extra things I get involved in, but mostly, these don't happen in a way that spaces things out evenly for me." "If it only takes a third of what I'm doing now, why don't you just fill up every oven when you smoke some product? Send me what you need to have sold, and I'll do my best to sell it. I can't see myself getting overwhelmed with anything you've sent me so far," "Can you sell three thousand of the steak pieces every week?" "Sure." "Fifteen cases of my jerky?" "No problem." "Six cases of the pepperoni?" "Again, I don't see a problem with it. So far, all that looks like about three days of my normal sales. What about when I run out of product to sell?" "All that product I just asked about, that's two full runs for my big smoker. I can smoke the steak pieces with the pepperoni, but not with the jerky. I can't put pepperoni in with the jerky either, but I can smoke up each flavor of the jerky together. The biggest problem for me is after the product comes out of the smokers, when the various racks of meat need to go into their properly timed drying rooms. This is what can cause me problems, if everything isn't coordinated properly." "Jim, to be honest with you, my thing is more about selling your products, than it is about me wanting to know how you do it. I trust you to work out whatever production scheduling you decide will help you the most. I can take a guess to estimate what I'll need to have to sell in a normal week, but it is just my ball park figure. I think five thousand steak pieces, thirty cases of jerky, and ten cases of pepperoni. I'd like to build my inventory up to that level, then have you send me whatever you need me to sell for the following week. If I get low on anything, I'll just have you run off one full smoker of it for me, either of the jerky, or of the steak pieces and pepperoni. An extra three thousand steak pieces, and another six cases of pepperoni wouldn't worry me a bit. Same thing for fifteen extra cases of jerky. It sounds to me like your only problem will be having to schedule in a full smoker of extra meat every now and then." "I'm a little worried that you might be overestimating how much the market will bear." "If I do, you won't be out anything because of my mistake. When I place an order, I'll make a cash deposit for it into your BofA account. So far most of my mistakes have been not having enough product to meet sales demand." "Just so we're clear, Ralph, I will not take back stale product if anything happens to you, or if it doesn't get sold for some reason. Defective product is a different story, but I'm not willing to take a big loss for something that wasn't a problem that I helped create." "That makes perfect sense to me too. You told me that your products all have a shelf life of at least six weeks, if they haven't been opened. What I'd be holding in my inventory is a lot less than I can sell to my commercial accounts in two or three weeks, even if I couldn't go out doing any selling myself. I could hire a bonded employee from a temp agency to make all the deliveries and pick up any payments due. I'm not looking to hurt anyone. I like the prospect of all the money I know I'm going to make selling your goods." "I'm not that worried, but I do need to use some caution. I hope you can understand this?" "Let's make and sell so much product that we both have sufficient cushion not to need to worry about these sorts of things." After I got off the phone with Jim, I had to give a lot of thought to everything we'd talked about. He'd started out very upbeat about things, but over the last few minutes we'd talked, he had become a lot more negative, on the whole, than positive. At first, he was telling me that I'd solved his biggest problem, but then he'd started making it sound like he was worried I'd do something to get him jammed up. Since I didn't really know the man, except for some phone conversations, it was hard for me to anticipate how large or small a problem was for him. I didn't know if he was well capitalized, or on the verge of filing bankruptcy. When I had offered to take those 10,000 steak pieces off his hands, he'd seemed very relieved about it, and that was, at the most, only a $2,500,00 difference on his books. I knew I'd developed a pretty casual attitude about sums of money while I had played poker for a living, but, for a businessman, that amount should hardly make much of a difference. Later, after I'd gone out to the airport to pick up my new product shipment. I thought some more about Nancy's visit the night before. We were well begun with playing out our little teasing game with each other. I made myself a mental note to not toss of any more of my flippant remarks, like the one about if she came she'd cum. I was starting to believe that Nancy wanted me to step up and start leading her to wherever it was she wanted to be led. It was getting exciting for me, especially now, after having put up with Madeline's shortcoming's for the past two years. Nancy wanted to be molded by someone, told what she should do. I could see already that she had a much more passionate nature than Maddy had ever shown me. I was hungry to explore that incredibly passionate nature I had sensed in her since that day I'd given her a ride home from Earle's plant. ------- Chapter 4 It only took me one day to completely sell out of all fifteen hundred steak pieces I'd been sent with my last order. Tuesday was the date for my next promised shipment, and Jim had said he was planning on sending me a special order of between five and six thousand steak pieces sometime in the next three weeks. He was also going to try to fit three hundred into each box the next time he tried shipping an order of just steak pieces. There was a weight limit for those big containers, and steak pieces alone weren't as heavy as the jars and canisters were. Jerky sales were still strong, but many people told me they were going to wait for the steak pieces to be back in stock. All three of the commercial accounts I'd put boxes of the steak pieces in had sold out of their initial supply. It looked like the steak pieces were beginning to erode interest in the beef jerky purchases. This wasn't a problem in my mind, but when I mentioned this to Jim Davis he expressed immediate concern. "I need you to sell the complete line, Ralph. It's fine if you have a large volume on the steak pieces, but selling the complete line is what I need in order to be able to keep your overall costs down. I don't even offer the steak pieces in my shop. Ninety percent of all my shop sales are jerky, and the other ten percent is pepperoni." "I told you I could sell thirty cases a week of jerky, Jim, and I still can. I'm selling at least ten cases a week of the pepperoni too. These are both higher numbers than you told me you needed. What I meant to communicate to you was that the steak piece sales are preventing the jerky sales from increasing. The steak piece sales are increasing faster than I can keep up with, while still trying to keep at the same ratio you set out for me earlier." "That's different, and it isn't a problem. I can raise the ratios, as long as you buy and sell at least fifteen cases of jerky a week, and six cases of pepperoni. I sell my jerky by weight here in the store, and I generally pick out the pieces that are a little off in size, but still look attractive in my display cases. The jar stock are really the culls from my smokers. The steak pieces, all they've been so far is space filler for my smoker runs of pepperoni. An eight rack run of steak pieces is one full small smoker and two dryer rooms for two days each. I don't need to use my big smoker for the cross cut steak pieces, not if I don't have any pepperoni in the run to worry about." "I can sell about five thousand more steak pieces next week, in addition to the fifteen hundred you told me you'd send me on next Tuesday. How many are on eight racks?" "I can fit about one sixty to a side, so say three hundred per rack, because I hang only two sides. Twenty four hundred pieces per firing, but I could do two firings for you and put out forty eight hundred in three days by moving to a different series of dryer stations. If I start firing tonight, I can have an extra forty eight hundred ready to ship by Tuesday. You want me to cut back on anything?" "Instead of thirty six cases of jerky, could you make it twenty four, and as much of that in Teriyaki as you can?" "How about fifteen Teriyaki, six regular and three of the peppered?" "Would that cause you any problems with maximizing out your runs?" "The only problem I might run into would be not enough pepperoni to send you. I have about three cases in the dryer now, but I need at least one case for the shop. Can you make do with only two cases?" "I have about four cases left now. Having the extra steak pieces to sell is much more important to me than whether or not I might run out of pepperoni. Can you schedule a run, after Tuesday, for more steak pieces and about twelve cases of pepperoni?" "I can fire up a pepperoni smoke run on Sunday, and move it into the big dryer after I take out your current orders. That would give you twelve cases of pepperoni and as many steak pieces as I can fit in on the other six racks I have room for. About an extra eighteen hundred pieces. Should be ready to ship on Wednesday afternoon." "So, that's sixty three hundred steak pieces, twenty four jerky cases, and two pepperoni cases on Tuesday, and another eighteen hundred of the steak pieces, and twelve cases of pepperoni on Wednesday?" "Sounds about right. You sure you can handle all of it?" "I'm still wondering if it will be enough. I'm getting a lot of interest on my commercial route for boxes of steak pieces. I'm thinking that I can put boxes of one hundred into all eighty of my commercial accounts. That's eight thousand right there." "How about if I do another run on the cross cuts for you, just as soon as I clear out the Wednesday order for you? I'll be using the big smoker for a full jerky run, then I can do more cross cuts and pepperoni over the weekend." By the time we got off the phone, I had essentially what I wanted, an extra five thousand steak pieces each week, a bit less jerky, and about the same amount of pepperoni. More than that, Jim Davis was assuring me that this was a schedule that fit well within his normal weekly capabilities. I didn't want to put any strain on his business, but I did want to make full use of the capacity he had available. ------- Nancy hadn't called or come over since the night she'd slept over at my house. Several times I'd thought about going over to see how she was doing, but something told me it would be a mistake for me to do so. I had offered her that new wager, which she had, so far, refused to take. I'd made the last move as far as going over to tell her she needn't take the last wager, so now it was up to her to move us forward from where we had left things. By the time that two weeks had passed by since seeing her, I became convinced that she had become disenchanted with the way our game was being played out. I didn't feel there was anything positive to be accomplished by my backing away from the prior position I'd taken with her. As it later turned out, I had been right to not approach her, but not for the reasons I'd been assuming. Nancy had failed in her attempts to locate new work. The employment picture in Portland had turned downward, just like most of the rest of the country, and new jobs were hard to find. By waiting to contact her, I'd allowed Nancy to become discouraged with her future employment prospects. I'd rented a storage unit close to the airport to keep all my extra product. It had twenty four hour closed circuit security, and a very good record as far as tenant contents not disappearing from their storage lockers. I was just coming out the front gate of the storage place when I saw Nancy driving by in her truck. I pulled out behind her, since traffic was extremely light, and was able to pull up alongside her at the next traffic light. This only took a matter of a minute or so to accomplish. I beeped my horn and pushed down on the window button to lower the passenger side window. She looked to see why someone had beeped, and then recognized me. When she lowered her window I hailed her. "Hey Nancy, what are you doing way out here?" "I filled out an application over at the airport. They said they aren't hiring now though." "I still have that job opening servicing my commercial customers. I can pay you two hundred dollars for three days a week. Next month it will be four days. You can keep working after I move down south again. I'll have Jim continue shipping you the product you'll need. I can make it a full time job after I leave, because you'll need to do product pick up's at the airport too. I've got a storage locker about half a mile back." "I asked Uncle Earle if I could, but he said no. Maybe he'd let me if you weren't here though. How much would I make full time?" "Four hundred? I don't know what would be fair. Let me think about it. By now I was figuring you'd have taken that last bet I offered you, and you'd be moving down to Los Angeles with me when I left." She laughed. "I'm not moving from this area. I love it here. All my friends and family live near here. I've never lived anywhere else." The light had already changed twice by then, and some old lady was behind Nancy's truck, leaning energetically on her horn. Nancy put her truck back in gear and drove forward. I followed after her, to the next red light. The old lady stayed right behind her. "Nancy, you want to stop off somewhere and get something to eat? My treat, of course." "I can't. I'm supposed to be over in Gresham for an interview, in forty minutes. I wanted to get there early, because I'm not sure of the address I have for it. I'm afraid about running out of gas later too." The old lady didn't wait to start blowing her horn this time. The light had turned green about two seconds before she started leaning on that loud horn of hers. Nancy pulled away from the intersection as soon as the horn started. I pulled forward too, inserting myself right behind Nancy, before slowing way down. The old woman and I moved towards the next light at about fifteen miles an hour, with her pushing on her horn the whole way. I kept this up for another mile and a half, long after Nancy had disappeared from my view. After a mile and a half of this, the old lady had suffered with my foolishness for long enough, pulling out into the left lane, quickly passing me by. She caught the next two lights, but got stopped at the third, with me changing lanes right behind her, then letting her know I had my own horn too, and that it was as loud as hers was. I didn't wait for the light to change to start in with blowing mine. After I got tired of doing that to her, I changed lanes again and headed off towards Gresham. I couldn't find Nancy's truck, but I did manage to find a fairly substantial industrial park while I was driving around looking for her. I did some sampling and selling for about an hour, passing out my business cards while telling the people who bought from me that they needed to call me whenever they wanted me to come back to sell them more of my product. I was in an insurance office giving out samples to three or four women working there when the owner or at least the big boss came back in the office from somewhere. He pointed at this sign on the counter that said "no soliciting". "Don't you see that sign, young fellow?" "Yes sir, I see it." "If you see it, then why are you still here?" "I'm not smoking." "It doesn't say no smoking. It says no soliciting. That means no selling. Can't you read?" "No sir. I'm sorry, but I never had a chance to go to school. We were too busy working the farm to spare any time for things like that." "You really can't read?" "No sir. I better go, cause I can see you're all too busy to bother with me." "Wait, what was it you were selling?" "Just these here steak pieces my dad's uncle makes in his smokehouse over in Idaho." "Looks like jerky to me, boy." "No sir. One taste and you'd see it wasn't any kind of jerky. This here is Uncle Jimmy's own special recipe. Nothing else like it in the universe. That's what he says, anyhow." "You giving out samples? For free?' "Yes sir. Would you like to try one?" "Don't mind if I do, long as its free." I gave him a whole wrapped steak piece to sample, and he opened it right away, shoving half of it in his mouth for the first bite, then followed that up by, pretty quickly, wolfing down the rest. "What do you think of it, sir?" "Not bad. In fact, it really is good. How much are they?" "I sell them for a nickel each, or twenty five of them for a dollar." "You're kidding me? How can you sell them so cheaply?" "My uncle raises all the beef for them, and he don't feed them nothing but free grass anyhow. Only thing it costs him is for those little bags he puts them in after they come out of that smoker of his." "Let me have a hundred of them then. You have that many on you?" "Sure, I've got about ten thousand of these back in my truck. I'll go get them for you." I turned as though to leave. "Wait. These are real good. Better make it three hundred of them, okay?" "Yes sir. Three hundred. I'll go get them and come right back." I went out the door of his office and took maybe ten steps towards my truck before turning right around and going back inside. "Sir, I'm real sorry, but I can't sell you any of these here steak pieces. I just remembered about that no selling rule of yours. My uncle told me to never do no business in places where it wasn't welcomed." I left before giving him a chance to make any response. I guess that old lady beeping her horn for so long had made me somewhat testy. I hoped he thought he'd missed out on the bargain of the century. ------- I found Nancy parked along the side of the road on SE Division street, just west of SE 182nd avenue. She had run out of gas, and was sitting in her truck, looking pretty unhappy about things. I pulled in right behind her and got out of my truck. "Out of gas?" "Yes, and I never did find that place I was supposed to be interviewing at. I'm so mad." "I've got a gas can in my truck. This takes regular, right?" "I can't pay you for it until sometime later when I get some money, Ralph." I went to get my four gallon spare gas can and poured it all into her gas tank. It took her a minute to pump the gas up to her carburetor, but then she got it started and running smoothly again. I went over to her and offered her twenty dollars, but she refused to take the money. "Nancy, you really should take this, just in case something like this happens to you again. It isn't like I need it, or that I'll have to do without anything until you find another job and can repay me." "There aren't any damn jobs. Half the people I know right now are out looking for work. I don't want to take charity from you. It's bad enough my taking your gas. I wouldn't do it if I wasn't stuck all the way out here." "There is such a thing as taking things too far, Nancy, and you're past that point already. Take the damn money and you can return it to me after you make it safely home today, if it turns out you didn't need it for anything. I don't like having to worry if you're stuck somewhere and out of gas. I'm lucky I was able to find you this time." "What do you mean?" "You think I came way out here to sell jerky? I remembered what you told me about being worried about having enough gas. I came out here looking for you." Nancy reached out and took the money from my hand. "Okay, I'll let you lend me the money, but I feel real bad that I need to do it." "Well, I feel good about it, so it evens out, doesn't it?" "I'll pay you back as soon as I get some money." "Please, stop worrying about it. I wish you'd take that job helping me. It would make my life a lot easier, and you'd have enough money to not worry about things like this. I don't think Earle is looking out for your best interests by telling you not to come work with me. I'll tell you what, come help me with all the commercial accounts, and I'll split the profits with you, right down the middle. Your share would be over a thousand a month, even if I don't open another account." "You'd just give me half your business?" "No, I said you could have half my commercial account business. Why not? You'll do all the delivering and collecting for it, and I'd still make half the money. You won't get anything when I open a new account, not until after I turn it over to you. Besides, didn't you give me your half of that business when you quit and went to work for your uncle? Its only fair that I offer you the same deal now." "When I gave the delivery route to you, the whole thing only made about five hundred a month. From what you said I'd make, it must be a whole lot bigger now." "It is, and it will be even bigger by the time I leave here in October. The business has been growing quicker than I can keep up with it. With you taking over the deliveries for me, I'll have more time to open new accounts now too. This is a good deal for both of us, Nancy." "I'll need to see what my parents think before I say yes. Everyone will think something fishy is going on for you to be giving me so much. Uncle Earle could take it out on my father now too, if I was to do this. He might let him go because of this." "Your dad works at the smokehouse too?" "No. He works at the dry cleaners that Uncle Earle owns. They were supposed to be partners in the beginning, but my dad could never save up any money to pay for his share of it. He needs his job though, because he has a mortgage, and bills to pay." "What does Earle do at the dry cleaners?" "Nothing. He put up all the money to buy it though. My father had a good job at another cleaners that he quit to come run the place they have now." "Sounds to me like Earle might have taken advantage of your father." "My mother says that too, but Dad said Uncle Earle's been fair with him." "Fair would be to pay himself a decent return on the money he put up to buy the cleaner business, then pay your father a good salary for working there. Whatever money was left after that, they should split between them. That is what I'd do in a case like that." "They sure don't do that. I guess my father is just a regular employee to Uncle Earle. I see the sense in what you say, but it doesn't matter what we think, because daddy and Uncle Earle already made their own deal." I followed Nancy over to her house before going off to do some more selling. I was concentrating on selling the jerky and the pepperoni. I didn't want to get in the habit of only pushing the steak pieces because they were the easiest to sell. I had a profitable two hours that afternoon, but it wasn't as much as I would have made if I was showcasing the steak pieces like I'd been doing. I still sold four cases of jerky and two cases of the pepper stick, and that was what I'd been trying to do. I'd also gotten in a little flirting with these two girls I'd met in a dental office. They were using a play on words as a double entendre about me wanting them to eat my meat. It was all done in good fun, but I had the impression that the older, darker haired woman had been hoping that it might lead to something more than it had. They each ended up buying a jerky and a pepperoni from me. When I was ready to leave, I told them that I'd be back soon to let them try the best tasting meat of all. "Don't be a tease, Ralph, let us taste it now." The dark haired one was looking right at my pant zipper when she said that. "Are you sure? I have to warn you that its seven or eight inches long, and it isn't even hard yet." "Oh, what a braggart. Probably a big exaggerator also." "Only one way to prove I'm telling you the truth. Either of you happen to have a ruler we can use?" The little, lighter haired, girl rushed over to the desk and pulled out a ruler from the middle drawer, holding it up with a nervous giggle. "Here's a ruler," she said. "Okay, where should we do this at? I don't want a patient coming in when I'm out here proving I told the truth to you." "Take him over to patient room two, Nat. I'll stay here to make sure you aren't bothered by anyone." The lighter haired girl who had been the quieter of the two up until then was handing the ruler to her darker haired co-worker. "We have to both do it, Patricia. If we both are in it together, then we can be sure neither of us will let anything slip when we're at home." "I wouldn't ever say anything. You do it. It was you that said he was bragging." "Don't you want to see for yourself if he was lying or not?" "Girls, never mind. I don't want you two fighting. I can show you right here. Give me the ruler." I reached out my hand and Nat dropped the ruler onto my open palm. I reached into my display tray and pulled one of the steak pieces out of a bag at the bottom, where I had about fifteen pieces hidden. I placed the ruler next to the lower end of the piece and displayed it so that both the girls could see that it was just over eight inches long. Then, I bent it in the middle to show them that it wasn't hard yet. I handed it to Nat and told her to go ahead and taste my best tasting meat. "That's such a disappointment. I thought you meant something else." She tore the plastic wrapping off and gave a fairly sexy oral performance, first teasing the first inch or so of the steak piece with her tongue, then, later, taking about four inches worth of it inside her mouth before biting down hard on it in with her teeth. I almost had to wince when she bit into it like that. "Darn, that really is good. What is it?" "We call them steak pieces. It is some of the best tasting jerky anybody ever made. I'm not selling them right now, but, next time I come back here I'll have enough to start selling them. The best thing is they only cost five dollars for ten of those big pieces. Isn't that a great deal?" "It is. I wish you had some with you to sell. I'd love to take some home to put in my kid's lunch boxes. They start school next Monday. These would make a great snack for them." "Look, I'm not really supposed to do this, but you've both been so much fun today. I can let you each buy ten, but you have to promise me that you won't tell anyone that I jumped the gun and let you buy them, Okay?" I handed a piece to Patricia to try when I told them that. Patricia was satisfied with buying her five bucks worth, but not our girl, Nat. She ended up talking me into letting her buy thirty, for her kids she told me, not for her. I left that office ready to call it quits for the day. All in all, it had been a fun day. Nancy called me at around seven thirty that evening. I'd just gotten home, after first stopping off at a hamburger joint for a burger, fries, and a large strawberry shake. "Ralph, can I come over to talk to you? I've got some questions about that deal you told me you'd make with me." "What time would you be coming? I haven't straightened things up around here in awhile. The place is pretty messy right now." "I don't care about that. I can be there in five minutes, and it won't take more than ten or fifteen minutes to ask you all my questions." "Sure then. I'll be listening for your knock." Five minutes later, and she was again standing in my living room. The first thing she did, even before telling me hello, was to hand me back the twenty I'd lent her. She was wearing that same low cut dress, the one she seemed to wear almost every time we got together. I was beginning to wonder if it wasn't the only dress she owned. Earlier, when she said she was out interviewing for jobs, she'd worn Levi's, boots, and a nice white blouse. "I talked to my parents, and they both told me I can't pass up such an opportunity. Daddy told me not to worry about Uncle Earle, or anything he might decide to do. I wasn't too clear on what you said before about me working part time at first, until you left, and then going full time. Also, that part about when I'd start getting half the profits from the deliveries. Can you tell me about those parts all over again?" "Why don't we just make it simpler? Whenever you start, that will be when you start getting half the profits from the commercial deliveries. Right now, if you split the routes up in a better way than I have them arranged, you could probably work everything so that you worked half days, Monday through Friday. We should go over all the accounts and try to divide them into five reasonable geographical areas. By the time I leave here, next month, I'll try to have about thirty to thirty five accounts for you to service each day. You should be able to get that done in four or five hours, and still have plenty of time to make your runs out to the airport to pick up any new shipments, or over to the storage locker to get any product you'll be needing for future deliveries." "I don't have one of those top covers for my truck bed either. What happens if someone steals the product from out of the truck bed?" "I keep an eye on my truck, and I usually park somewhere that I can watch it as I'm moving around. I keep the steak pieces in the cab of my truck. A case of jerky costs fifty four bucks, but a case of the steak pieces is seventy five, because there are three hundred pieces in a case now. Pepperoni is thirty six a case. You'll need quite a bit of product to service thirty five accounts. I usually can carry enough to do about ten accounts at a time, but I've set things up so that I start with the storage locker and work out from there. You'll need to see what works best for you." "I don't have insurance for my truck yet. Is that a problem?" "You should get it. I have a business liability policy that covers most things, but you should have car insurance anyway. Didn't they make you show proof of insurance when you registered the truck in your name?" "I haven't done that yet. I was waiting to get a job so I had the money to pay for it." "I can let you have an advance on what you'll make. You need to get things like that taken care of Nancy. I'll give you a thousand dollars tonight, and I'll take it out of your share as we go along. After I leave, you can just put the rest of it in the bank account I'll open up before I leave." "A thousand dollars? I was hoping for maybe a hundred. I still owe you for my truck, and for the gas today." "That truck was a signing bonus for coming to work with me. I told you that when we bought it. The gas wasn't anything at all. It was getting old anyway. I was going to dump it out and refill the can whenever I got around to remembering to do it." "That brings up another question. Why are you doing all this for me? My mother keeps asking me that, but I don't know the answer to the question myself yet." "First, because I like you. You were my first friend in Oregon. My best friend too. Second, I know I'm going to be leaving here soon, and it just makes good sense for me to leave somebody I trust in charge of looking after my best interests. Third, mostly, I'm a nice guy, and I try to help people if I can. You helped me when I first got here, and now I'm trying to return the favor." "You aren't expecting me to let you have sex with me?" This time it was me that laughed. "I never said I didn't expect to have sex with you. I do expect to. It doesn't have anything to do with what we've been talking about though. Those are separate issues. I was always planning on sleeping with you, with or without this partnership thing. If we don't sleep together, that won't affect our business partnership. Sooner or later, you know we're going to end up back in bed together. I'm not sure how long it will take, or how many nights with us naked in bed together, but I'm nearly certain that you'll finally end up putting my cock in your pussy." "Just nearly?" "I didn't want to seem like a know it all. When a girl tries to hump her pussy against your leg, when she thinks you're asleep, that is usually a pretty good indication that she wants you to fuck her." "I knew you were awake. Besides, it was itching me, and I wanted it to stop itching." "Let's get back to the partnership. Do you have any more questions for me?" "Do you still want to make that other bet with me? I'm betting that I can spend as many nights in bed with you as I want to, and still never do what you said I would." "That wasn't the bet, and you know it. The bet was that I would pay you one thousand dollars if I rape you, or if you don't come over to get in my bed naked. You've come over and gotten into my bed naked already, so you already lost one way you could have won. Now, since you've gotten into my bed already, you can also lose if you put my cock in your pussy, or if we end up not having sex while we're in bed together. The only way you can win is if I rape you, and I won't. You know the rules, and so do I." "When I came here before though, we hadn't made this bet we're talking about now. It should only count when I do anything after the bet gets made." "Fine. Do you want to make the bet now?" "Yes." "Good. We have a bet. Do you have any other questions?" Nancy stood up and pulled her dress over her head. She had no clothes on underneath. Turning without speaking a word to me, she dropped her dress and walked back to my bedroom. It took me a minute to decide to get up and lock the front door, then to turn out all the lights. A minute later, as naked as Nancy, I climbed into my bed with her. "I'm not going to put you in me." "I'm not going to rape you, so it looks like it will be another long night without either of us getting much sleep." "Does oral sex count against me?" "That depends on whether or not it counts against me. I don't remember any of the rules dealing with that issue. Did you want to perform fellatio on me?" "No. I was thinking that you might do it to me. You don't have to, but it might give you a better chance of winning if you did." Did we ever make a ruling about if it counts against us or not?" "You said there wasn't any rule against it." "I've never done that without using my fingers too. I'm not sure I could do it right without using my fingers." "Is finger fucking rape?" "Not if you're doing it right." "I think it might be a gray area. If you did the oral sex on me, I'd give you permission to use your fingers too." "I'll think about it. Right now though, I'm tired. Good night." "Bastard." ------- Chapter 5 I ended up getting more sleep this time than I had the last time Nancy had spent the night in my bed with me. This time she made it a point to rub herself suggestively all over me, and to use her hand to fondle my cock. I didn't exactly keep my hands to myself either, but I did stop short of putting my finger into her. At one point we'd spent about fifteen minutes kissing, with her perched on top of me. That had been the closest either of us had come to winning or losing the bet. Finally, with both of us as sexually frustrated as we could possibly be, we gave up and kept ourselves separated enough to be able to go to sleep. Sometime in the night we both had shifted back towards the center of my bed. When I woke up at six thirty the next morning, Nancy's face was snuggled against my chest, and my left arm was around her, my hand resting lightly on her ass. I had just finished my shower when Nancy came into the bathroom and started peeing. I opened the shower door to see her squatting on the toilet seat. She looked a little uncomfortable to be found there like that. "Sorry. I couldn't wait any longer." "Not a problem. I go to the toilet sometimes too. I think most people do. Are you going to be in any trouble at home for spending the night here like you did?" "No. I'm an adult, and I already told my mother I wouldn't be back until sometime this morning." "You admit that you came over here planning to sleep with me?" "Think about it, Ralph. How many woman come to your house in their bare feet, only wearing a dress? Of course I came over planning to spend the night. I brought a bag with a change of clothes and some makeup, but I left it down in my truck, because I didn't want to make it even more obvious that this was what I was planning." "Are you ready to start working today? If you are, it would really help me out. We can go out on the delivery run first thing this morning, and I could get you signed in to have access to the storage locker from now on. You can go take care of getting insurance on your truck this afternoon, then go get it registered at the motor vehicle place right after." "I still haven't decided to take that money you said you'd give me as an advance. We need to talk about that more. Suppose this partnership thing doesn't work out for us, what then? I wouldn't be able to pay you back if I quit, or if you fired me." "Nancy, you're just looking for problems that aren't going to come up. You already know you can make deliveries to these commercial accounts, because you've done it for more than a year already. We might have personal fights, but we'll keep our business lives and our personal lives separate. You have your work and I'll have mine. We wouldn't even have to see each other if we were fighting. The important thing, the only thing that really matters, is that we each continue to do what we're supposed to be doing for the business. I'm not worried about the thousand dollars, and you shouldn't be either. You already told me that all your money problems would be caught up with less than that. I want you to take care of anything that might be a distraction, so you can do a good job with your delivery routes." "I tried to take care of one distraction last night, but I got no cooperation from you." "I cooperated. I noticed you had your hand on the proof of my cooperation, for a long time, but you didn't do what you needed to do." "I'm not going to put it in me, because that's your job to do if we ever get that far. I got naked and went to bed with you. I even told you what I wanted, but you wouldn't even do that for me. I've heard that a lot of girls get orgasms from having that done to them." "I've heard that too, but there isn't anything in the rules that says I have to make you cum before you put my cock in your pussy. I thought about doing that for you. I'll even admit I was tempted to do it. I just didn't want to make it so easy for you to lose. You should thank me for being so considerate. A lot of guys would just do anything, especially if they knew doing it would let them win their bet. I don't want to win like that, because you'd resent it if I made you leave here with me with that kind of a technicality." "I wouldn't consider being able to have orgasms again a technicality. I forgot what you said about me losing if I came though. I was only thinking I had to avoid putting you in me." "You know what? That should be the only way for you to lose, now that I think about it. We'll change the bet again. You only lose if you put my cock in your pussy, and the only way I can win is if you do that. Forget about the other ways. Okay?" "Do we go back to bed again now, so you can try to make me cum with your mouth?" "No way! You need to go out and get those other clothes of yours before you shower. We both have a lot to do today, and I want to be at the storage place before eight." Nancy didn't speak another word to me, other than for business reasons, for the rest of the time we were out making deliveries together that day. We drove around in my truck all morning, making deliveries to some commercial accounts. About half the accounts were ones that Nancy had serviced before I took over her route. At all the rest, I introduced her as my new partner, and let people know she would be servicing their accounts from then on. We ended up making three trips out to the storage place, to load up with more delivery product. We went to, and serviced, thirty six accounts in a little more than four and a half hours. We collected $7,345.00 for our deliveries, of which $2,115.00 was gross profit. We'd had to have been really moving fast to get so much done in such a short period of time. "I guess I'm not going to be able to give you that advance like I said I would. I must have been way off on figuring how much these commercial route delivery stops were making me since I first started selling the steak pieces to them. It looks like you just made more than a thousand dollars, just from what we did today. I'll need to take out something towards my gas and the storage rent, but you'll still end up with more than a thousand dollars from today, according to what I've added up here." Nancy was looking confused, so I let her take the copies from all that day's deliveries with her, to check for herself. I handed her the thousand dollars as I passed my sales books over to her. "How could it be so much money, just for this morning's deliveries?" "It must be the steak pieces. Most of the owners wanted two hundred pieces from us, and their other sales, for the jerky and the pepperoni, have been strong too. My gross average sale is way up today also. There is a lot more money, because I usually only get around to fifteen or twenty stores at the most, in any one day. Today, with you helping, we serviced and sold new product at thirty six different places. By yourself, you couldn't get to so many. Still, making two thousand dollars like we did, I'd have to say that is pretty impressive. Makes me want to go out and just concentrate on opening up more commercial accounts. The bad news is that we're almost completely out of steak pieces for tomorrow's deliveries. That is going to be a big problem. I should have thought about that when I was letting the store owner's talk me into increasing their steak piece orders." "What are we going to do? We need to have the steak pieces when we do our other deliveries. They'll be mad if they are out of them and we can't sell them any more." "I've got some coming in tomorrow night, I think. Either then, or over the weekend. Let me think, because, maybe, I already got them earlier, and went and sold almost all of them today. I better call Jim to find out. One thing I do agree with you on is that we shouldn't make any more deliveries unless we have the steak pieces for them. We made at least two days worth of deliveries today. I'll go back to my apartment so you can get your truck and go take care of the insurance and registration thing. I can call Jim from my apartment while you're doing that, and try to find some way to work around this problem we have." "This money, you're telling me that it is all mine to spend? I won't owe you anything if I take it?" "Look at the sales books, Nancy. Figure out how much we grossed, and how much of that is net profits. Divide that number in half, then see what you get. I'm pretty sure I did it right, but it won't hurt for you to double check my arithmetic. I'm as surprised at the numbers as you seem to be. We need to get started again early tomorrow. If we don't have enough product, you and I can buy a street map and try to make better sense out of the delivery scheduling. I've been doing it in kind of a hit or miss way, but we could probably streamline it to make it work more efficiently, if we were to try to organize things better." ------- Jim Davis had one piece of very good news for me. He had another twenty cases of steak pieces he'd gotten ready, anticipating that just such a problem might arise. He could send it out that afternoon, and I could pick it up at the airport the next morning. I told him that I'd made Nancy my partner in the commercial accounts, and then I told him that I thought it made a lot more sense for me to concentrate all my immediate efforts on opening up more of these outlets for Nancy and me to sell his products in. "Jim, if we had around two hundred outlets selling two hundred steak pieces a week each, that could be a whole hell of a lot of steak pieces. Can you gear up to produce that many? That's forty thousand pieces a week, just for the cross cut steak alone." "I could if I wanted to tie up all three smokers, and hire on two or three people to give me a hand with it. The problem with that is that I don't want to have to push myself that hard. Even with what you've got me doing now, I'm asking myself if the extra money is worth all the stress I'm already starting to feel. I'm sixty three years old, Ralph. This is the time in my life when I ought to be slowing down, beginning to take things easy. I can't see myself working this hard for too much longer." "You don't think I should try to grow the business even more then?" "Not without you first come out here so we can have a little sit down talk about what we both might want out of this new venture we've gotten started. We need to meet, if only so I can put a face to your voice. I already have a pretty good idea that you're one hell of a salesman, but I don't know too much else about you. We need to get together and do some talking." "I'd like that too. You sure don't sound that old on the phone. It never even occurred to me that you might not want to sell as much product as you could. Let me get Nancy up to speed on everything, and I'll fly out sometime next week so we can both get to know each other better. Do they have rental cars at the airport in Boise?" "One or two, I expect. Hell, boy, Boise is a big city. We have over two hundred thousand people living here. A hell of a lot more in our trading area as well. You'll find that we have everything most other big cities have. We're the Capital of the whole damn state." "I'd be impressed, if I hadn't grown up in Los Angeles. We have about fifteen million people in our trading area." "Seen it on the television. Couldn't pay me enough to get me to go down there to live. Even Portland was a little too big and messy for my tastes, and it was a hell of a lot better than most other places I've ever been to." "Thanks for saving my bacon with that extra steak piece order. I guess I'll see you sometime next week then." ------- I sat in my apartment for the rest of the day, just thinking about some of the surprising things that Jim had said to me. The thought that all this smoked meat distribution business might be taken away from me was a very troublesome thought. Nothing Mr. Davis had said in the past had given me any indication that he was wanting to cut back on things. Several things he'd said had made me believe he thought he was finally getting his business on track to be more profitable. I was still deep in thought when Nancy came by to see me. She came into my apartment wearing that same dress again. She claimed she had wanted to find out if I was going to have steak pieces or not the next day. I knew she could have just called me on the phone if that was all she wanted. I played along with her though, telling her we had to make a quick run out to the airport, in the morning, to pick it up, but this meant there would be plenty now to service the next day's deliveries. "I may as well stay the night here then, if we're going to be getting such an early start. Don't you think so? I have my clothes for tomorrow down in the truck. I've gotten all that stuff done with the registration and with the insurance now. I paid all the people I owed money to as well. From now on, I'm free and clear. No more borrowing for me." "When I spoke with Jim Davis today, he told me how old he was, and that he's thinking about slowing down at work, maybe even retiring. I'm supposed to go over to Boise to meet with him next week, so we'll need to make sure you have everything you'll need to make all the deliveries while I'm gone. You'll need to learn how to go pick up the shipments too." "How old is he? I thought he was about the same age as my father and Uncle Earle, about sixty four." "He's sixty three." "That is not old. My mother is fifty eight, and you met her. Uncle Earle and my father are both a year older than he is, and neither of them are very old." "Earle is your father's twin brother?" "Yes. I thought you already knew that they were twins. Earle and Merle, the Towns twins. They were both real famous football players, back when they were in high school. Uncle Earle went on to play football in college, on a scholarship. Daddy stayed here and started working at a dry cleaners." "I'm not from around here, so I didn't know." "Sometimes, I forget that you just got here. It seems like I've known you for a long time. Were you trying to tell me to not make any big plans for having this job servicing these delivery routes? Not to spend all that money you paid me?" "I won't know about that until after I go see Jim. The money you already spent is yours anyway. You might want to try to save some of the rest of the money you make for awhile. It never hurts to have a big cash reserve, just in case something happens. A good rule of thumb is to have about three hundred times what you make in an hour of work. That was what we used to say when I played poker. For you, it would be what you expect to make for seven weeks of work." "How much would that be? If every day is like today was, that would be a lot." "You should probably try to save up at least ten thousand dollars. If you were out of work, that should keep you in spending money until you could find something else to do." "Is that how much you have, ten thousand?" "No. I have quite a bit more than that. I had a lot more than that when I first came up here, and I've saved more than what I brought up here with me since I first got here. I'm not much for spending money if I don't need to." "I know. I've seen how you live. You're probably the only one who lives in this whole apartment complex who pays his rent with his own money. The Social Services people pay most of the rent that ever gets paid here. The mattress on your bed has more lumps than you could count. I'm surprised you can even sleep on it at all." "Now you're just exaggerating. My mattress is pretty comfortable. The only thing wrong with this apartment is the paint. Well, the paint, and the fact that the oven doesn't seem to work at all. I don't use ovens anyway, so it hasn't been a problem for me so far." "If I'm going to be making good money, I'll want to move away from my parents, but I'd rather stay there with them than live here." "I don't blame you. They have a nice looking house. I'd rather live there too, but, like with you living here, no one has invited me to go live there." "Are you telling me you don't want me spending the night here?" "I was telling you that I haven't invited you to come live with me. If I was living with a girl, I'd have a much nicer place to live. My last place, it cost $2,500.00 a month for the rent. Utilities were on top of that, usually more than three hundred or so extra, including the cable and internet charges. I didn't like having to come up with my half of all that money, not just for a place to sleep. This place costs me four sixty a month, plus about another fifty a month for utilities. I could get a much nicer place if I needed to though. I'm leaving in less than a month anyway, so why should I bother?" When I was saying all this, I had my back turned to Nancy, only because I was picking up some of the mess I'd been leaving on the carpeted floor. When I turned back to see how she was taking what I was saying, she was no longer in the room. Her dress was on the carpet, in the same spot where I'd last seen her standing. I finished picking a last few things up, including her discarded dress, and locked my door, turning off the lights as I made my way back to my bedroom. "You can sleep on my side if you want to. There aren't as many lumps on that side." "I didn't come in here just to sleep, Ralph. Remember, you were going to do that other thing we talked about?" "You mean eat you until you come? I don't remember that we set any appointment for a specific time for me to do that for you. We just said it wouldn't mean you would lose our bet if you were to cum while I was doing that for you." "I'm pretty sure we agreed that you'd do that, Ralph. That was the main reason why I had that big fight with my mother tonight, because I wanted to come here to have you do that for me. You told me you wanted to." "I said I had been tempted. That isn't the same thing as saying I wanted to. I've been tempted to do a lot of things I never would really do. Maybe if you get on top of me, then slide my cock up into you, that might tempt me enough to want to do that oral thing for you." "How about if we both do the oral thing together? I really want to see if you doing it to me would give me an orgasm. You said it might." "I'll make a deal with you. You come lay on top of me, then rub your pussy up and down on my dick. You don't have to put it in, just rub it back and forth. Do that for ten minutes, without stopping, and I'll eat your pussy after, if you haven't already had an orgasm." "Just rub it against you? I can do that." Nancy moved over on top of me, and we started kissing. Somewhere, maybe a few minutes after that, I felt her hand moving my cock until it was laying straight up and down, on my stomach. She was already leaking her juices by the time she started moving up and back on me. I kept feeling more and more moisture as she pushed her pussy harder against my iron hard cock. We were both breathing hard after a few minutes of her doing that. I felt her hip motion changing after awhile, as she kept trying different tilting angles with her hips. I already had both my hands busy cupping her ass cheeks. From time to time I'd help her move her pussy a little bit quicker against my very aroused prick. It was starting to feel extremely marvelous to me. I knew I wasn't going to be able to last through much more of that exquisite stimulation. "How long has it been, Nancy?" "I don't know. Weren't you supposed to be the one keeping track?" Her voice sounded as strained as mine had to my ears. "You better stop, because I'm about to get off from doing this. Are you taking anything to keep from getting pregnant?" "No. I wasn't planning on needing to take anything. Don't you have something?" "No. My last girlfriend was on the pill. You better stop moving and get off me. We'll say its been ten minutes now." Nancy just kept on sliding up and back, and I had all I could do trying not to blast my load on her. I knew I was leaking gobs of pre cum from all her sliding and from her kissing too. Finally, unable to take any more, I flipped her over onto her back. I wasn't thinking about what my next move would be, I just didn't want to cum with her on top of me like she'd been. I saw her looking up at me, a fearful expression on her face, along with the lustful look she had because of what we'd already done. That fleeting look of fear was all it took to give me a chance to get myself back under some semblance of control. Instead of fucking her, I moved lower, attacking her engorged and inflamed pussy with my hungry mouth and tongue. She had a strong, almost pungent taste, unlike any previous pussy I'd ever eaten. It was different, but still right up there with the best I'd ever had. Nancy had both her hands behind my head, almost from the first second I started eating her. I didn't have any chance to wonder about if she'd be able to cum from my doing that to her, since she started humping up at my face, clenching me tightly with her thigh muscles, not to mention pulling my hair out, while howling out at the top of her lungs words of appreciation and lust, as wave after wave of orgasmic relief washed over her. I was no stranger to women having orgasms, but not like that one that Nancy was having. That one orgasm was probably stronger than all of Madeline's, combined, had been, over the whole time we'd lived together. "I knew I could cum with you, I just knew it. I didn't even have to lose the bet to do it either." Five minutes later, after she'd had a chance to recover somewhat, Nancy scooted her body around and put my probably blue by now, prick head, in her mouth. She didn't suck it or lick it though, merely let it rest inside her mouth as she used her hand to rub one out for me. I wasn't complaining. Any relief was better than what I thought I was going to end up getting from her. When I started cumming, she tightened her hand on me, and spit my first spurt out on my stomach. From the face she was making, I had to believe that cum wasn't going to be a staple of her future diet. She kept moving her hand until I had finished cumming. When she let go of my hand, she rushed right off, into my bathroom. I heard water running in my sink, with repeated spitting and gagging sounds coming from in there. When she came out of the bathroom, she was still scowling at me. "Don't tell me you've never tasted a man's cum before?" "Yuck, never! It tasted like rotten eggs, and it smells bad too." "A lot of men think spitting their cum out is about the rudest thing a woman can do." "I'm sure woman don't think that. I don't know how they could keep from gagging or throwing up if they swallow it like they do in those porno movies. I don't think I'll ever put one of those in my mouth again." "Reciprocation." "Why did you use that word?" "Girls who won't suck cock, don't usually get eaten out either. One begat's the other." "You won't do it for me, if I don't return the favor? Is that what you're saying?" "Bingo. Got it the first time." "I don't care if you don't then. You tasted nasty." "Good night, Nancy. I'd say it was fun, but these last few minutes have ruined the rest of it for me. Thanks for that." "You taste it sometime, Ralph. I don't think you'd disagree." I did take a tiny dollop off my stomach and put it on my tongue. She was right, it did taste pretty rank, but that wasn't the point. It was a symbolic gesture or something. A girl swallowed. Even if she didn't swallow, there was no reason to act like Nancy had. A short trip to the bathroom to spit it out would have been acceptable to me also. That's what Maddy had always done. There was this predetermined acceptable protocol for things like that. "Tasted fine to me, Nancy." "Too bad you aren't about twice as long as you are then. If you were, you could suck it yourself, since you seem not to mind the taste." "I wouldn't have to be twice as long. I'm very flexible. Three or four more inches is all I'd need to be able to do that." "Three or four more inches sounds about right to me too. Isn't that what I said?" I was supremely confident in my manhood. I knew I was of at least average size, if you didn't include black people, or most middle Europeans, I was probably well above the median size for all the remaining men in the world. I hadn't had any complaints from my other intimate acquaintances. "Six inches, Nancy. That is how much I'd have to grow to double my present size, another six inches." "Who did the measuring for you? Mr. Magoo?" "Who?" "Never mind, that's something Uncle Earle likes to say. I'm not sure what it means either. I was just teasing you, because you tried to make me feel bad about not liking how you tasted." "Let's go to sleep then. I'm tired, and we have a lot to do tomorrow." "If you want to do the other thing to me, you can. I wouldn't mind if you did it." "I can't. Remember our bet? You need to put it in for me." "It felt really nice, the time we were doing that rubbing thing, with me on top. I wanted you to slide it in me. I was ready to make love with you. I'm ready again, right now, but not if it means I'd have to leave here with you next month. You wouldn't be raping me, and that is a part of the bet too. We could do it, and the bet would still be going after." "I'll pass. The only way for me to win the bet is if you end up needing to put it in you. I can't win if you have any other way you can get what you want." "You aren't the only man I can do that with, Ralph. I wouldn't have to put it in with any other guy." "That's very true. Of course, that has always been an option you could have taken. Nothing has changed that, in any way, prevents you from doing that." "I wanted to have an orgasm with you inside me. That is important to me, because it would mean I'm all right again, over those two times I was raped. If I knew I could, with you, that would mean a lot to me. I might even start considering going south with you when you leave." "Things are mixed up in my head right now. I always liked getting oral sex. No one else has ever complained about the way I tasted." "You aren't going to win that bet by being upset with me for being honest with you. You'll just end up making me angry like before." "You've had your orgasm already. That's enough for tonight. Let's go to sleep now, okay?" When I woke up again, around three in the morning, Nancy was gone. I got up and looked for her, but she had left. Later that morning, after I'd gone out to the airport, I waited at the storage locker, and she met me there at eight. Both of us were real careful about what we said. We worked all morning on servicing the remaining commercial accounts together. It went all right, but neither of us seemed to have much positive energy to put into the work. That afternoon we worked on how the routes should be divided up. We marked each account on the map, then made daily lists of the order Nancy would be going out servicing them. When we were finished, both of us had a better understanding of how the delivery schedule should grow. Nancy expressed confidence that she could do all that was required of her. I had her signed on to the company checking account. She could now deposit and withdraw funds at any time. Tuesday evening I flew over to Boise, to meet with Jim Davis. Nancy hadn't been back to my apartment over the weekend, or on Monday. I didn't see or hear from her on Monday. On Tuesday morning I'd gone out and picked up the shipment of product at the airport. I'd needed to make two trips to get everything Jim had sent. I wasn't sure how long I'd be gone, but it looked to me like there would be plenty of product to last her at least til the end of the week. Jim turned out to be a short man, probably no more that five feet five. He had grey hair, a ruddy complexion, and wore old fashioned, black horn rimmed glasses. I introduced myself to him when we met at his beef jerky shop at just after nine o'clock that Tuesday evening. "I see you found the place all right. No trouble renting a car either, I see." "No, you were right. I even had my choice of rental companies. So, this is where you perform your magic? I thought it would be a bigger place, more like Earle's." "I've got everything I need, right here, and in the back. I've got a friend who comes in to slice the meat for me, but I do everything else myself, Let's go in the back and I'll show you everything. You know, for some reason I thought you'd be older. What are you, about twenty one?" "I'll be thirty on my next birthday. Everyone says I have a young looking face. It helped when I played poker. Some players didn't take me seriously." "I've been thinking things over since that other phone call when you were talking about maybe needing up to 40,000 cross cut pieces every week. That would be a lot of work to put out that many all the time. I'm not sure I could even do it with how things are set up back here now, not if I was going to keep making the jerky and pepperoni too. Like I said though, I've been giving it some thought, and I have a proposal to make to you." I wasn't really liking what he was saying to me. It wasn't any surprise, but I had been hopeful we could agree on something that would make that much product possible. It was a good thing I hadn't started telling him about the plans I'd been making to set up commercial sales routes down in California. If 40,000 a week was bothering him, he sure didn't want to know any of the rest of it. "I'd be open to hearing any ideas you have, Jim." "Good, because I have a couple I've been floating around in my head that would only need a real go getter to make them work. You remember my friend, J.C. Crawford? I heard recently that Earle Towns just up and fired his ass all over again. Reason he gave was that J. C. had talked to me about Earle's business dealings. My friend, J. C., he is a pretty good fellow, but he has shit for brains when it comes to anything having to do with running a business. He's honest though, and a damn good worker as long as someone lays out for him whatever they need done. Anyway, to cut right down to the bone, J.C. needs himself something to do right about now, and I've got some leads on where I can put my hands on everything we'd need to put up a big smokehouse operation together over in King City. J.C. bought back all his labels, bags, jars, canisters, and stickers from Earle, since he had no use for any of that anyhow. You probably already know that J. C. has been hounding me for years to let him use my recipes for him to smoke product to compete with Earle. I hadn't wanted to do it until just recently." "J. C.'s steak pieces weren't anything like yours are." "I know that and so does he. He needed to do everything on the cheap, because he couldn't afford any other way to do it. I warned him you can't make anything decent that way, but he wouldn't listen to good advice. Anyway, getting back to what I've been thinking, we have a pretty good opportunity right now to get into a nice situation. I have a little money for this, but not enough to swing the whole deal. J. C., he doesn't have fifty dollars he can call his own. If you have some money to help me swing this deal, it could be a good thing for all three of us. Do you already know about J. C.'s two boys, Eric and R.W.?" "Sorry, no." I shook my head that I didn't. "Well, don't matter if you don't, because I already do. Both them boys are young, like you, and fine workers too. They do tend to take right after their daddy though, when it comes to having any kind of business sense at all. I wouldn't trust neither one of them to be able to make change for a dollar bill. What I do know though, is that if I was to set 'em down, and ask them to do it, they'd both give me their all out effort to try to come up with the right answer. What they do know how to do is work, and to follow carefully laid out instructions or directions. The three of them are some good tools for a businessman to be having over on his side." "I believe you." I was getting a little impatient for him to get to the point of his rambling. "I'm getting there, Ralph, so you needn't be worrying, or in too much of a hurry. If we do this, you'll be the one to benefit most of all from it. I'm thinking that J. C., and his two boys could put out just as many steak pieces as you were talking about. But, only if they had my meat supplier, my recipes, and someone to show them every single step they needed to be taking along the way. I'd need another forty thousand to be able to swing the rest of this deal. I could get it myself from my bank, if I really needed to do it, but, that isn't what I'm wanting to do. I don't want to be head honcho of this new operation, if we end up doing it. I'd be willing to get it started up and running, but after that, I'd want you to take over keeping things going for us. This is so all of us can benefit, not just the two of us. I'd want them youngsters to have a real stake in this new business, say five percent each to start out with. Another ten percent to J.C., then we'd be splitting the rest, even up. J. C. and the boys would need paychecks too, so they could afford to live." I had almost fifty thousand dollars in my "spare cash" account. It was, by far, the most I'd ever had saved up in my life. I'd managed to save over thirty thousand dollars in the five plus months I'd been in Oregon. I was going to have to pay some taxes on the money I'd already made, but I could just manage to swing the forty, if I let myself be talked into going along with Jim's plans. "The best advantage we'd have though, is my nearly unlimited line of credit with my meat supplier. Getting the meat wouldn't be any problem, not as long as we could turn it all into money before the sixty days were up. Same thing with spices and ingredients for my various cures. I buy in bulk quantities, and that keeps my cure expenses at a reasonable level." "Why do you need me for this, other than the forty thousand?" "Because you're young, because you have the mind sharp enough to do this, and because both J. C. and me think you have the energy and ambition to make sure it succeeds. I can get it started, and make sure the product is every bit as good as what I've been giving you so far, but I don't have the temperament or the energy to run a big operation like you've convinced me you'll need. In a year or so, the boys will probably be ready to take over for me and J.C. in the smokehouse, by themselves. That new place has about five times as much room as I have here, and the equipment is newer, and much more efficient than what I have here. The two big smokers both will fit forty eight seven foot racks each. There are another three smokers that will fit twenty four six foot racks. The drying rooms are all temperature and humidity controlled by computer sensors and electro thermostats. Using them for just the steak pieces, we could put out two hundred thousand pieces a week easily." "That many each week, all the same as what I'm getting now?" "Exactly the same. I guarantee it. Those boys, I know they wouldn't mind hiring some help and working two shifts if we wanted them to. We could buy up some portable drying rooms, like I have here, and put them out back by the cutting floor. As long as they have power, and the room passed government cleanliness inspections, it doesn't matter where they are. Those units are all self contained anyway. Now, the only two important questions are, are you willing to throw in with us, and can you sell as much as we are able to produce? If you answer yes to both, I'll make some phone calls and tie everything up by tomorrow at noon." "I have a question for you first, what price will I be getting these steak pieces for?" "J. C. was right. He told me you'd want to keep the lion's share for yourself. We talked it over yesterday, trying to see what was fair for all of us. You need to bear in mind that J. C. and his boys aren't in any position to be making any demands, not like we would be. J.C. wanted you to pay thirty five cents, the same as you used to pay him. I told him our deal, and he said they couldn't make nothing at those prices. He's wrong, but that is what he's convinced himself is the truth of it. We both decided to give you some choices. You can pay the smokehouse thirty cents a piece, and we'll keep things as they are. J. C. will get fifteen hundred a month, and the boys a thousand each. We'll pay all other expenses for any clean up help, and the two of us won't get any salary from there at all. Anything that's left, we split it up, according to the ownership I told you about." "You said choices. That was only one choice." "The second choice is you paying all the costs for the smokehouse, including meat and everything else. Their salaries are the same as before, but I get five percent of your gross profits from the crosscut sales, and J.C. and his boys split another five percent between them. I don't much care for that choice, but I told J.C. I'd tell you about it." "Anything else?" "One more, and this one is the one I favor. You buy for what you pay now, everyone gets their same salaries. If it turns out that what you pay isn't enough to show a profit, you have to make up any shortfall. Before you decide, let me fill you in on what I know already. I make about a nickel right now, off every piece I sell you. This new plant is a lot more efficient than mine is. The meat and all other costs are the same. The lease rent on the smokehouse building and grounds is two thousand a month. We can get a fifteen year lease with the first five years at the current rate I just quoted to you. Utilities will be about fifteen hundred more. At forty thousand pieces a week, that comes out to around 170,000 pieces a month. At a nickel a piece that comes to $8,500.00 a month. To my thinking, this makes us around break even. If you have to kick in anything out of your sales, it shouldn't be much. Since we both expect you to push on past that forty thousand a week starting figure, any growth beyond that makes it that much less likely that you'll need to pay anything from your selling profits." "Now tell me why I want to spend forty thousand dollars to buy into something that looks like it will only break even, at best, after the landlord and J. C. and his sons all get theirs?" "Because you stand to lose your supplier otherwise. Having this new smokehouse means you'll have the product to keep what you've been able to build up, and probably grow and expand. I'm putting in thirty thousand dollars, plus my recipes, and my meat supplier. I'm doing this because I have faith that you'll go ahead and make something really good out of this idea. J. C. and the boys, mostly they just want a steady pay check to live off of, and some stake in the place where they'll be working. What is your possible future worth to you? Remember, you're still young. You can make money at this for many years to come." "If I decided to do it, I'd go with that third choice. What I'd mostly be worried about is J.C. and his sons getting greedy, and using their positions to squeeze us for more money. I have no knowledge or interest in how to make those steak pieces. They could force me to give them a bigger share, down the road, after I've built the sales way up there." "I'd make them sign a contract that only you and I own that recipe, and that they can't make anything that competes in any way with our current product. If they get greedy, we'll have to go out and get someone to replace them. I've known all of them for a lot of years, and I have faith in them that they'll do whatever they agree to. Remember, it was J.C. that called me and asked if I could help you out after Earle cut off your supply of product." "How long do I have to decide about this?" "You can take all the time you need to, but things like this almost never stay available for long. Either the ovens and equipment are going to be sold, or else the building will be leased. Hell, maybe I'll change my mind, or J. C. will find jobs for himself and his boys. If any one thing gets taken away, this deal won't hang together anymore. I might go ahead and buy up most of that equipment anyway, if this deal looks like it isn't going to come together. The racks alone are worth more than they're asking for the whole shebang. If you aren't coming into this, then I'm not going to try to put it together with anyone else. You're the only one that can make this thing work out for all of us." "I'm going over to my hotel room. I'll be leaving on the first plane out of here that's headed for Portland in the morning. The way things are right now, something would really have to change for me to agree to go into this with you. How much longer do you think you'll be willing to keep me supplied with your product line?" "We'll just have to see. I won't be making any sudden changes for awhile though. J. C. is going to be disappointed when I let him know you probably won't be coming in on this. I told him that it was us that was taking all the risks, but he wanted to try to get the best deal for himself he could make. I'm not that disappointed myself, because it would have represented some risk to me. I don't think I can ever put out much more than about ten thousand cross cut pieces in one week from here. Even that will be a stretch." We shook hands when I left. It was a pretty complex series of puzzle pieces he'd outlined for me when he spelled out his wanting us to open a new smokehouse in Oregon. Nothing he'd told me justified my assuming that much risk. It wasn't even clear to me what he was hoping to gain from his participation in this. I already had access to his meat supplier through him. It felt to me like Jim was wanting to expand, and was hoping I'd help him pay for that expansion expenditure. The next morning, as I was heading back to the airport, I called Jim. "Jim, I was thinking about what you said last night, and I've decided that it doesn't make any sense for me to participate in this new plant you were talking about opening. You're right that I'd love having access to a lot more steak pieces though, so I have a fourth choice to give you. If you go to your bank and borrow that forty thousand you wanted from me, I'll pay you an extra nickel a unit, for every steak piece I buy from you, starting from right now. I'll keep paying this extra until you've earned enough extra from it to pay back the whole forty thousand. After that, we go back to a quarter a piece. What do you think?" "I'll wind up owning my forty percent, and your forty too?" "That's right. I'll also commit to opening up enough new markets to get you producing up to whatever capacity you tell me you want. I want the product, just like you said, but this is how I'm willing to contribute to getting it." "If I take you up on your offer, Ralph, you aren't getting any protection for your future, not like any of those other ways would have provided to you. We could decide to market this product in a way that would leave you out in the cold." "You always had that option, Jim, just like Earle did. Even if we did it the other way, I wouldn't really be any better off. I don't mind contributing to something that will make me lots of money, but I'd rather do it on a pay as you go basis. The more product I sell for you, the quicker you get that loan paid off. I don't want to get this thing more complicated than it already is. My way is a lot better for you, in the long run, and there isn't any way J.C. or his boys can use their shares to change who has voting control. You'll always have that." "No question in my mind that this would be the better way to go for me. On the face of it, now that I'm looking at things from your viewpoint, it makes a lot of sense for both of us to do it this way. I never would have thought of having the audacity to ask you to pay that loan back for me, but, since you're volunteering, I think I'll just accept. The only thing this changes is now I'm going to have to sell my business here and move back to Oregon permanently. Somebody is going to have to keep a close eye on those three, and if you aren't babysitting them, then I guess that only leaves me to do it." "Do we have a deal then?" "We damn sure do. It only makes sense that one of us must have lost something here, but I really don't see how either of us did. I wish I'd had someone like you around when I was first starting out. It might have saved me a lot of grief." ------- I went over to the storage place and made an eyeball estimate of how much product we had left. I grabbed a few cases of everything and went driving away, hoping to open a few new commercial accounts over the next few hours. I stayed on the same street for over five miles, stopping at every convenience store, mini mart, and beer bar along the way. It didn't take me long to open the first two new locations, but, for some unknown reason, the third one proved rather elusive. I was beginning to think I'd lost my touch before I finally put in a full product line at a gas station with a small convenience store inside. No more than fifteen minutes later, I hit a real bonanza when I placed another full line of products in a newly opened truck stop. I knew this was going to be a great location right after five or six truckers started grabbing and buying steak pieces by the handful, at a price of one dollar each. The place was open twenty four hours a day, and was almost constantly filled with long haul eighteen wheel truck drivers. I didn't run into Nancy again until the Friday after I got back from Boise. We both showed up at the storage locker at the same time. I was dropping off a shipment I'd just picked up at the airport, and she was picking up more product for her second group of commercial accounts. "I've added seven more accounts since Wednesday. I've got all the addresses and contact information for you in my glove box. Four are on one street, and three are on the street just north of the first one. You'll probably want to add them to the same route." "Are you still thinking about leaving on the first of the month?" "I'm not sure yet. Something has come up with Jim Davis, and I might have to stick around to make sure he doesn't need me up here. He might be setting up a smokehouse in King City, but I won't know for awhile if the deal goes through or not. By the way, we're paying thirty cents for each steak piece as of Wednesday morning." "If you stay here after the first, do I still win our bet?" "I think you should. If you want me to, I'll pay you now." "I can wait. You shouldn't have made that bet. I knew you were going to lose it." "I've lost a lot bigger bets before. Losing this one was probably a good thing. Who knows what might have happened if we'd ever gotten together like that? This way, we're still friends, and we both have what we wanted." "I have what I wanted, but how do you figure you got what you wanted?" "You had me really worried there for awhile. I almost had myself convinced that you were the one. Because of the bet, I found out some things that let me know I was wrong about that." "Because I didn't like the way your cum tasted?" "That was only one thing. There were other things I learned along with that. I'm sure you found other things about me besides for that, things you didn't like either." Nancy didn't say anything more to me, going back to loading up her truck with new product. I wasn't at all surprised when she knocked on my door later that night, or that she was again wearing that same dress she seemed to always come over wearing. "Tell me about those other things you found out you didn't like about me." "You're stubborn, and you only want things if you can have them your way." "Both things you just said are wrong. Let's go to bed and you can tell me why you thought I might be the one." "You just want to get up on my chest, and rub your pussy on my cock." "I'm not putting that in my mouth anymore, Ralph. I went to the planned parenthood place and got one of those birth control patch things. I can't get pregnant now, if you ever do decide to fuck me." While she was telling me this, she had climbed up on top of me, and was using her fingers, moving my cock up on my stomach, just like she had done the last time. I tried to take my mind off what she was doing, but it was no use. It felt so good, what she was doing to me. "I'm not going to fuck you unless you reach down and stick it in yourself. I'm not eating you out any more either, because I don't do that unless the girl is willing to return the favor. You're really wet already. Did you play with yourself driving over here?" "Tell me why you thought I might be the one." Nancy was already gliding up and down, her hips moving against my body in a sensual dance as old as time. "I don't remember why. You better quit what you're doing, unless you want me making a sticky mess all over your pussy." "Guess how many times I came today? All because of what you said to me at the storage place. Nobody else has ever told me that I might be the one for them. My truck smells like pussy juice. My fingers smell like it too. Five times, just since this afternoon, isn't that great? Tell me that I'm the one and I'll put it in me as soon as you say it." "That would be cheating if I did that. Too late anyway, I'm already cumming." It was a narrow escape I'd just made. Lucky for me that I hadn't played with myself earlier when I'd been thinking about her. "That's six now for me. We came together this time. I think that's some kind of sign or something, don't you?" "I guess you must be cured of whatever it was that kept you from being able to cum before. Six is a lot of times to cum in only five or six hours. I think my record is only three times in that long. I was only thirteen when I set it." "Am I the one, or not?" "I'm not sure. I don't see how you can be if you won't suck my cock anymore." "Tell me I'm the one, and I will suck you, if you promise not to cum in my mouth." "Guys promise, but they don't really mean it. You came on my tongue, and I never complained about it." "Why is it so hard for you to tell me nice things when we're together in bed like this? Say anything nice to me and I'll do what you want me to." "Okay, you're very cute, and just seeing you gets me all excited." "See, was that so hard? Tell me what you want me to do, and I will." "Go out in the living room and lock my door. Turn out the lights when you come back to bed." "That's what you want me to do?" "Hurry up and get back here so I can snuggle with you before I fall asleep." She felt nice when she got back in bed after doing what I'd asked her to do. She pressed her ass against my crotch, and it was a perfect fit for me. Madeline and I had never seemed to fit together when we cuddled after sex. I reached over her and cupped one of her small breasts in my rather large hand, then leaned down a little and planted several kisses on her exposed ear. "Am I the one?" "We won't know that until after our bet is decided." I woke up at three in the morning with my cock buried in her pussy. I didn't know how it got there, but it sure felt good. She seemed to like it too, because she was moving back and forth on it with a purposeful intent. I tried not to let her know I was awake, but she sensed something, and suddenly stopped moving back against me. I fell asleep again, and when I woke up again, just after six, Nancy was asleep on the other side of the bed. ------- Chapter 6 When we woke up the next morning, nothing at all was mentioned about the little sexual interlude I'd awakened to at three that morning. We quickly finished our morning ablutions, dressed, and headed off to the storage locker to begin our separate workday. I felt really good all day, working on opening up new outlets starting from just before nine that morning, and not quitting work until a little past seven that evening. I'd made two trips back to the storage place to get new product during the day. The first had been a normal stop after I'd gotten low on product to place in my new accounts, but the second had been after I'd received a frantic phone call from the day manager of that new truck stop, complaining because he was out of steak pieces and running really low on all the other jars and canisters I'd put in there the previous Wednesday afternoon. I had sold them over nine hundred dollars worth of product when I opened the account three days before, including six hundred streak pieces, two full cases. The new order came to almost twenty three hundred dollars, including eight new cases of 300 count steak pieces, and twelve cases of mixed beef jerky jars. The manager told me he thought they were all right for the pepperoni sticks which I'd kind of loaded them down with when I'd opened the account, because I'd sold them a case of each of the four flavors I carried. Even with the new price I was now paying for steak pieces, that re-order made over a nine hundred dollar profit for Nancy and me. I'd turned the account over to her on Friday, so she was entitled to half the profit I'd made on this sale. When I finally called it a day, I'd opened seven new commercial accounts. For me, that was a new one day record for opening new outlet accounts. ------- I pulled up in front of my apartment at seven thirty, hoping to see Nancy's truck parked in the guest parking lot, but it wasn't there. I turned around and drove over to her parent's house and was rewarded for my effort. Her truck was parked in the driveway right behind a white van with Towns Cleaners painted on the side. I parked in the street and went up to the door and rang the buzzer. When the door opened, my first thought was that I'd had the misfortune to come calling while Nancy's uncle, Earle Towns, was visiting. I was wrong though, because it was Nancy's father, Merle Towns, that had come to the door. "You must be that Ralph fellow I've been hearing so much about. Come on in, we're just getting ready to sit down to supper, so you're in time to join us. Hey "Ninney", your boss is here. "Ninney?" "Family nickname. When she was first born, that was how her brother, Dave, pronounced her name. As she got older, her own actions proved to us that the name might be appropriate." Just then, Nancy came scurrying out of the kitchen. I was still trying to get adjusted to the uncanny resemblance Merle had to his brother, and trying not to think about what I'd face if I ever accidentally referred to Nancy as "Ninney". "Ralph, why are you here?" "I needed to warn you about that big new truck stop that opened up just north of the airport. I opened the account on Wednesday, and today they called me to get more product. They were out of everything but the pepperoni, and the manager said he really needed a refill right away. I took him over almost twenty four hundred dollars worth of jerky and steak pieces. This is on top of the nine hundred I placed there initially. The counter guy told me they've been selling the jerky by the jar, for thirty bucks each. When I put out three boxes of the steak pieces, two guys came over and bought twenty five each. Some of these drivers are as big as Fat Frank, and they seemed to like smoked meat almost as much as he does too." I handed her my sales book for the day, so she could copy out the seven new addresses and contact information for the new accounts I'd opened. Her father showed me where I could wash up for supper, and then went into the kitchen to inform his wife that they were having company that evening. Nancy followed me right into the bathroom, watching me as I washed my hands and face. "Uncle Earle called me this afternoon. He asked me a lot of questions about you, Uncle Jimmy, and what your plans were. I told him I didn't know anything about any plans you might have. He wasn't happy before, when I told him we might start working together, and now I guess Daddy told him that we were business partners. He's even less happy now. He gave me this long sermon about family, and how something like this could unravel everything he's worked so hard to build up. He said he won't be able to assume responsibility if this ends up badly for me." "Did you ask him how much responsibility he'd assumed when you were out of work for so long?" "Are you kidding? I don't say things like that to him. You don't understand our family situation, Ralph. Uncle Earle has all sorts of ties to everything we either have or do. Like this house. When my parents bought it, Uncle Earle had to go to the bank and sign papers guaranteeing that we'd make the payments. He owns the dry cleaners, and he's the one that helped my mom get her job with the state liquor board. It isn't just our little part of the family here either. He has these kind of holds over all my uncles and aunts, even my mom's brothers. If he gets mad enough, he can bring a lot of pressure to bear on all of us." "He would look pretty bad if he started bullying you because you had a job now and were finally making decent money. It would look to others like he couldn't stand to see you doing well without his help." "He asked me to have you come see him. He said he has something we might be interested in." "He said "we"?" "Yes, I asked him about that too." "After what happened before, I can't see myself wanting to do any more business with him." Dinner was great, some kind of beef roast with mashed potatoes and gravy and corn. Dessert was a cherry pie, which Nancy told me she had made, while she had stopped off at home for lunch earlier. Dinner conversation was minimal while we were all eating the main course, but it picked up quite a bit over the pie and ice cream. "My wife keeps wanting me to ask you about why you keep having "Ninney" over to your place so often at night?" "Daddy!" "Don't be yelling at me, girl. We're your parents, and we have a right to ask these kinds of questions." Nancy got up and left the dining room. She seemed in a hurry to get away from the interrogation that was just starting. "Well?" I couldn't detect any teasing or even a sense of humor in his question. "Well, what?" "I asked you why you keep having my daughter spend her night's over at your place?" "It would be pretty hard to do what we like to do over the telephone. Shouldn't you be asking Nancy these kinds of questions?" "Am I to infer, from that flippant remark you just made, that you think my questions are some kind of joke that you can just play off?" "No sir. Tell me what you want to know, and I'll try to satisfy your curiosity." "I want to know why you keep having her spend the night at your apartment?" "Your daughter and I are in the process of negotiating the parameter's of our future relationship. It is to be an adult relationship, and, because of that, it requires a certain degree of privacy amid intimate surroundings. My apartment is a dump, but it does have a door that locks, and places where we can go to further our acquaintanceship in relative comfort." "Are you abusing her in any way?" "We talk, we argue, we disagree about so many things, and often, when we engage ourselves in that way, one or both of us get so frustrated that we need to have time away from each other, time to be separate. We also have our reconciliations, and time where we no longer wish to be separated from the other. As I said earlier, it is a process. At this moment, it appears to be going well for us." "Are you sleeping with my daughter?" "Every chance I get." "That was all you needed to say. How did you like that pie of Ninney's?" "I no longer eat her pie, since she refuses to reciprocate." I had the satisfaction of listening to him choking on the piece of pie he'd jammed into his mouth right after asking his final question of the night. I found it very interesting that Mrs. Towns started laughing after I'd answered him. Overall, I thought the evening went pretty well. Merle did a little glaring at me for a few minutes, but he didn't say anything more to me about his daughter. I got up to excuse myself, thinking that my departure might reduce the tension I was presently feeling. I thanked my host and hostess for an enjoyable meal, and for the after supper entertainment. "You have gumption, I'll grant you that much, Ralph. I'm starting to see how you might be a burr under my brother's saddle. Are you planning to go over to Milwaukie and see about what he wants?" "I'll have to think about that. I can't see myself giving him another chance to try to put me out of business. It bothers me that he's able to intimidate Nancy like he does. I'd hate to see her suffer, because he feels such a strong need to try to push his weight around. I might go over there to let him know that I'm not going to just sit around while he tries to make her life miserable. That's my job." "She's been a sight better recently. Even seems like she might be starting to stand up for herself, like she used to do, before all her troubles. I'd like seeing her happier, but that doesn't mean I approve of how you two have been carrying on. I'll stay back for a while, watching how this process of yours looks to be playing itself out, but I'm not giving any long term permission or approval to what I've been seeing going on here." We shook hands, rather solemnly I thought, and I walked, under my own power, through their front door. I had only made it halfway down the driveway to my truck before Nancy came running out the door with an overnight bag over her shoulder. I could see she had on that same dress once again. I opened the passenger side door and held it for her as she climbed up into the cab. "Don't you have any other dresses?" "I have several, but this is my only "whoo hoo" dress. When I'm wearing it, I feel like I'm the person who's in charge of my life." "It was so strange meeting your father, then finding out that he's a dead ringer for that evil uncle of yours." "You think Uncle Earle is evil?" "Maybe evil is too strong a description for him. He's definitely mean, and he's overbearing too. I strongly disagree with most of the choices he seems to have made when it comes to living his life. It appears to me that he's at a place in his life where he can afford to be kinder, more benevolent. He appears to have plenty of money, and a lot of people who, one way or another, are somewhat dependent on his whims and shoot from the hip decisions. I think he will eventually allow his bullying nature to sully his legacy within his own family, and that is never a good thing, in my opinion." "He has helped a lot of us in the family. He's done quite a bit more than anyone else to help keep everyone afloat. We all know he can be ruthless at times, but we also know he'll help us if we ever really needed it." "Your father really ran me through the grinder after dinner. I'm glad he waited until after I'd eaten all your mother's food. I felt like I was at a Spanish Inquisition there for awhile. Doesn't he know you're an adult? I could see it if you were sixteen years old, but you aren't." "He loves me. They both do, and, because of all the stuff that happened to me, they worry more than they probably should." "I'm sure they both hate me." "No they don't. That's silly. If they hated you, they wouldn't have had you over for supper like they did." "They didn't have me over for anything, I rang the doorbell when you were all getting ready to sit down and eat. They invited me, because it would have been too awkward not to have." We had arrived at my apartment complex. After getting out of my truck we walked to my apartment. I reached out and took her free hand as we walked. That seemed to please her a lot. "We need to make a ruling about last night." "We do?" "Yes, for that little accident we had right before you woke up. You were probably wondering how that happened?" "Not really. I knew we were spooned together when I fell asleep. Sometimes, when you do that, things just seem to happen. That wasn't the first time something like that has happened to me." "I didn't put it in with my hands, but I did use them to move it around some before I fell asleep. I left it right at my entrance, just outside, a tiny bit. That's how it was when I fell asleep. When I woke up though, something had happened, and it was all the way up inside me. You need to make a ruling. Did I lose?" "Did you put it in your pussy while you were awake?" "No. Almost though, but I only rubbed on the outside for awhile, and that was just for a minute or two. Five minutes at the most. When I fell asleep it wasn't in me. It was in me when I woke up though, and I didn't try to take it out until after I knew you'd woken up too." "When I woke up, you were fucking me pretty good. It seems suspicious to me that you only stopped when you realized I was awake." "I know. That's why you need to be the one to make the ruling. I was asleep when it went in, but I was awake later and kept on using it. I didn't cum on it though. I might have if you'd stayed asleep, but you didn't." "It never slipped out while you were fucking it, or did anything else to make you put it back in?" "No, I was super careful about not letting it do that. In the beginning, I moved around only a little bit. It was only near the end that I got a little bit carried away. It didn't fall out though, I took it out. At the, end I mean." "Based on what you've told me, I'd have to rule that no one has won or lost the bet yet. The bet is still on." "I'm glad. I would have hated to lose while I was asleep." We wasted very little time getting undressed and back in the bed. Once there, Nancy demonstrated exactly what she'd done before she fell asleep. She spent a good ten minutes swabbing the head of my cock up and back in her slit, including giving me a running commentary of how that earlier stimulation had affected her. She certainly had never shown any tendency to have a need for any artificial lubrication. The girl's pussy was in full salivation mode. "Show me how you left it before you fell asleep." I wanted to avoid ejaculating prematurely again, and felt this was my best chance of avoiding it. She placed it right on the channel where her opening was. Half an inch of the head of my cock was splitting the lips of her vulva. This was torture for me. So close, but I knew I had to be strong. "Right like that. It even feels the same as it did last night. My pussy is going crazy right now. I want to push back on it and make it go all the way up inside me again." "I'm afraid to move even the least bit. We are definitely right on the very edge here, Nancy. One push from either of us and we're both fucked. If you catch my meaning?" "I know it. My heart is beating really fast. Give me your hand so you can feel it." "I know that trick, nice try. Look on the wall behind me! Is that a black widow spider?" "No fair making me laugh. It makes me jiggle around too much. How can you stand not pushing it in me?" "I don't have to. You'll push back on it yourself, in the next minute." "No I won't." "Will too." "Won't" "You're the one. I love you, Nancy." Fifteen minutes later, and we both were ready to talk about it. I was afraid of how she'd take my declaration. I hoped she didn't think I'd just said it to win a stupid bet. "Why did you tell me that?" "Because I thought it was time you knew it." "You meant it then?" "Yes." "That was even better than I thought it would be, and I had some real high expectations too." "It was good for me too." "Are you waiting for me to say it back to you?" "No, not really. I realize that people move at different speeds. It was time for me to tell you now." "I would be waiting for it, if I was the one who had just said that to someone." We fell asleep together, facing each other, with our lips less than an inch apart. Whatever happened after this, I was always going to be happy I'd said it. I realized it was very likely the very first time I'd ever said it when I really did mean it, without there being any reservations. Before, I'd said it because I felt an obligation, or else knew it was expected of me. This time I'd said it because I'd been unable to hold back from doing so, for even another second more. Waking up with my arms around Nancy was just as satisfying to me as going to sleep like that had been. I felt content and at peace with my place in the world. I realized that I was the happiest I'd ever been as an adult. I didn't need anything else to happen in order to complete my life. "Good morning, Ralph. I can't believe that neither of us moved at all during the night. Tell me again." "You're the one, and I love you." "I want you to love me. I need it. You've made it possible for me to be able to get my life moving forward again. When we're together, I'm not afraid anymore. You make me happy, and make me feel really protected. I love you too, of course." "Of course. How could you not?" We took a personal day for ourselves. Not that we would normally work on Sunday, just that we stayed in my apartment and kept the rest of the world at bay. We were truly alone, with each other, for the entire day. We talked about almost everything. Nothing that memorable was said, other than what was memorable to us, personally. We managed to solve nothing of any real importance to anyone else. In spite of that, we both felt we'd accomplished quite a lot. We hadn't argued or fought the entire time we were together, this time. ------- "Ralph, we've hit a little snag. Somehow, Earle Towns got wind of what we were up to. He's been calling around, trying to see if he can reopen the bidding for all that smokehouse equipment we said we'd buy. He's offering more rent money to our landlord, trying to break that lease we just got done agreeing on. He even went and offered J.C. his old job back again. Sounds like he doesn't want to let no competition get started. That's one sorry ass sombitch." "He called Nancy and asked her to set up a meeting with me. He claims he has something I might be interested in." "Maybe he finally figured out how to keep them Nuggets of his from growing hair." "What nuggets?" "About seven or eight years ago Earle came up with an idea for these cubes of beef that he cured for five days in maple sugar, then slow smoked them in a real oak chip smoker. They had so much sugar in them that it was near impossible to keep them from getting mold within three or four days after coming out of the dryer. He spent a boatload of money on it, but never did figure out how to keep them from spoiling. Hell of a taste to 'em too. In a way, I got the idea for my crosscut pieces from what he was doing. I don't try a long sugar cure with mine though, and I use gas to preserve each piece. Could be he found a cheap enough way to wrap and gas them. If he did, he sure might be onto something. All that sugar cuts way down on the weight shrinkage on the meat. His product would cost half as much by weight as regular jerky, because the meat shrinks less than half as much, and the sugar adds weight too. Trick is to control the moisture, and to find some way to tie up less time in the production process. That might be why he wants a whole new smokehouse operation now." "You think he wants to talk to me about selling it for him?" "That's what I'd do if I was him. You have a lot of the local customers, and you sure seem able to handle quick expansions. You need to sell a lot of something if you want to make any money off it." "I can't see myself doing any more business with him. He already screwed me over once. I don't want to give him any new chance to do it again." "I just wanted to see if you could come up with any good ideas about how we can keep Earle from knocking loose all our plans for that new smokehouse?" "You have agreements with people for both the equipment and the lease. Are they verbal, or in writing?" "I have faxes from both parties, agreeing to go ahead with the terms we negotiated. My lawyer and my bank people have separate memos from both of them. I know I can sue if they try to back out, my lawyer already made that clear enough, but that isn't my style." "Sue Earle then. Slap an unlawful restraint of trade suit against him. I'll testify, if it comes to court, and I bet J.C. would too. I'm betting he'd pull in his horns if his lawyer told him how much it would cost him to defend against it, and how much he stood to lose if your suit prevails. Earle is a bully, and most bully's are cowards down deep." "Earle ain't any kind of coward. He's a mean bastard, and he loves a good fight. Don't sell him short, because you'd be making a big mistake in doing that." "Talk to your lawyer and run it by him before you discard it completely. It is a valid assumption that part of Earle's motives are that he's hoping to prevent you from coming to the area and giving him competition. He may love a good fight, but he's a man who cares enough about money that he's screwed his own twin brother out of his share of a business. A man who's so worried about money that he's capable of something like that, he can be pushed if he gets entangled in any kind of legal wrangle." "I'll call my lawyer and run it by him. Anything else?" "You could try calling him on the phone and ask him to please stop messing with you." "That would be the day. I'll get on the horn with my legal beagle and try to sic him on old Earle. That bastard might turn tail if he honestly believed he'd lose a bundle if he kept on with it. Let me know if you hear any information I might could use." ------- Chapter 7 I've always had a natural curiosity, and I'd be the first to admit that isn't necessarily a good thing to have. It took me until Wednesday afternoon to convince myself that I really should contact Earle Towns myself to find out what he wanted with me. Nancy and I were nearly living together, ever since I told her that night that I loved her. Our only remaining obstacle to achieving complete togetherness was my continued insistence on moving away from the area. So far, we had kept this from becoming an insurmountable problem, but only because I had been willing to push back my departure date until some indeterminate time, probably shortly after the new plant was up and running. I placed the call to Earle as soon as I decided I'd done enough sales calling for the day. I'd gotten five new accounts, and had made three stops at different industrial parks, to make deliveries on some phoned in orders, as well as to sell my products to anyone who saw and recognized my truck, or had come over to me wanting to buy something. Business was very good. When the receptionist answered, I identified myself and told her that Earle had asked for me to get in contact with him. "Ralph, good of you to call me, son. I've been hearing some exciting things about you from the family. It sounds to me like we might soon be related, if all I'm hearing is true." "Well, Nancy is definitely the woman for me, and I hope she feels the same way. Nancy said you told her you had something I might be interested in?" "That's a fact, I do. Something I'd need to show you. Is there a chance you might be able to come by here any time soon?" "Over to your plant?" "Yes, that's right. What I have needs some explanation, and you have to see what it is and how I produce it." "It wouldn't be that Nugget product, would it?" "Who the hell told you about that? Damn! Well, since somebody already let that cat out of the bag, I'll have to admit that you guessed pretty damn close, but not quite exactly. You remember them steak pieces that our pal J.C. Crawford used to make up for you?" "I sure do. They tasted pretty good when you first opened them, but they didn't keep very well. I sold a bunch at first, but the repeat demand wasn't all that it should have been. It needed something, but people I talked to couldn't tell me what it lacked." "They were right, and I found out just what it needed, and that was a whole different cure. The meat he was using really does take a cure, but J. C. and me, we were both barking up the wrong tree by trying to use maple flavored brown sugar to cure our product. We should have used honey right from the start. When it finally came to me, I almost wanted to kick myself. It was right there in front of me, the whole time, and I just couldn't see it. It was the expense of the honey that always threw me off it, but I wasn't thinking about it the right way, like I am now." "Honey is still very expensive. I'm not sure I understand." "Ratio's, Ralph. I don't blame you for not thinking of it right off the bat. I've been doing this for near on to forty years, and I didn't catch on to it until about a month ago myself. Three hundred pounds of the cross cut meat will only use up about four pounds of clover honey in the cure. Plus, it is a whole lot quicker to take a cure than the other stuff was. Thirty six hours, instead of five whole days. I'm not saying we don't use sugar in the new cure, because we definitely do, but it is the honey that makes up the main part of the cure now, and the meat shrinkage is reduced almost as much as it was doing things the old way. With the plastic wrap, along with the infused gas, for eliminating all the moisture and preservative problems, the new product has an unopened shelf life equivalent to any other jerky product." "What is the cost for the same sized piece that J.C. put out?" "What are you getting quoted on that steak piece from Davis? Thirty cents is what I'm hearing. I can match that if you show me enough sales volume. It would cut me kind of close to have to do that, but after you try what I'm producing, you won't mind it, even if I have to bump you up a little bit, later on. One other thing for you to consider, and this is real important, is that I won't have any problem with pushing up my production to meet all your needs. You just tell me what you need, and I'll get it right out to you. Four days, start to finish. We can sit here jawboning all we want to, Ralph, but we both know nothing will get done without you coming over and seeing and trying this new product for yourself. How soon can you make it over here?" "Well, first of all, you heard wrong about my cost on the steak pieces. Try a quarter per piece, delivered too. Second, I wouldn't mind looking at your new product, but you can mail out some samples to me more easily than I could drive all the way over there to see it. I already have a very reliable source for the product I'm currently selling. Third, I made a mistake once, but I'm not likely to repeat it. People who smoke meat don't like it if you put them in direct competition with another producer. You didn't like it when I started selling J.C.'s product, and I didn't like it when you sent that fool of a nephew of yours out poaching on my sales territory. We both know that Jim Davis wouldn't like it if I started selling this new product of yours. You taught me a tough lesson, Earle, and I'm proud to tell you that I've learned it." "If you already had your mind set on not doing business with me, why did you bother calling me?" "A matter of courtesy, Earle. Nancy still thinks highly of you, and she's told me of all the good you've done to help out your relatives. Since I love her, I didn't want to be rude to anyone she cares about." "You don't seem to mind picking my pocket, but you're worried about being rude?" "How is my selling Jim's products picking your pocket? You told me yourself that I'd never sell another one of yours. I had a living to make, and customers who wanted a good tasting, fair priced, product. They never cared about who was making it, just that it met their needs. If you hadn't decided it was okay to dick me around, you and I would still be doing business. So, don't accuse me of taking anything away from you, because you threw it away yourself. Do you have anything else you still want to tell me, Earle?" "I've been going easy on you, because of Nancy, boy, but that ends right now. You're asking for trouble, and I'm just the man to give it to you." "My father told me that trouble was a two way street, Earle. Are you sure you want to start something with me right now? Word on the street is that you've been having some credit line problems with your banks. Something about a big bankruptcy back east tying up a bunch of money you're owed? I've been laying off all your grocery chain accounts up til now, but I'm pretty sure I could contact their buyers and give them a low ball bid to replace your entire jerky and pepperoni line, if I ever got mad enough to want to do something like that. So far, I've been content to take a live and let live attitude with you. Even if you managed to keep all those grocery accounts, I'd be willing to bet you'd have to at least match my bids. Is that what you want?" "I don't know where you've been hearing those lies, Rudd, but if I ever hear that you've been spreading them around to people, I'll haul your ass into court, and tie you up in litigation for twenty years. Don't you dare get started up with me by messing with any of those accounts of mine either. If you do, you'll find out there is a lot more than just me involved there." "See what happens, Earle? One of us gets just a little bit rude, and then the next thing that happens is that everything starts to go down hill from there. I've been considering the idea of investing in other businesses too. I just heard about a local chain of dry cleaners that came on the market sometime last week. Nancy's father is in that business, did you know that? I wonder if he could help me find out if buying them would be a good investment to make or not?" "Those are my businesses, and I can do whatever I want to with them. I've had them listed before, but it is mostly for accounting purposes, so we can mark them to current market value. I'm not really planning on selling them. If someone was to make me a full price offer though, I guess I'd have to sell then." "The man at the bank that told me about them, he was of the opinion that the bank would soon be the new owners. I guess he didn't know you only had them listed for accounting purposes. Nancy told me a few months ago that your wife told her it was hard making money when your profit margins on all those private label sausages were so tight. I think I heard two or three percent gross margins, because of all the competition. I guess a liquidation in bankruptcy, on a debt of more than eight hundred thousand dollars, something like that would eat up a big chunk of those profits?" "More damn lies. My business is sound, god damn it. You won't get very far making those irresponsible allegations. It won't make me want to take it any easier on all of you either. If that's what you were hoping to accomplish, you and Davis can forget it, because it won't work." "You know I told Jim we shouldn't discuss any of this with you. I even told him to go ahead and let you buy up that smokehouse equipment and take on the lease over in King City, but he wouldn't listen to me. I told him we'll probably be able to get a real good deal on your plant from the bankruptcy people, but he said you'd probably find some way to refinance everything, and end up coming out of it with everything intact." "For once the little gremlin is right about something, because I will." "You might, but only if your enemies don't get together and plot to undermine your real profit base. You have real decent margins on the jerky and pepperoni sticks that you distribute through the grocers. I think your wife told Nancy that you produce your jerky for around seven bucks a jar? I have to wonder how much of a cash flow disruption your company could stand right now though? If someone, say your good friends over at Tillamook, ever thought you were in a vulnerable position, cash flow wise, you don't suppose they'd deliberately cause you problems with that grocery chain business of yours, do you? Your grocery people might not take a bid from me that seriously, but those other people, that would be an entirely different matter, wouldn't it?" "Tell me what you want, Rudd." "Live and let live, just like I told you earlier. All you need to do is quit trying to make things difficult for Jim over in King City. If you'll do that, then I won't have to call my friend, Steve Chambers, over in Tillamook, and ask him if he's heard the same rumors I did. You don't have to control everything, you know. Give someone else a chance to make a little money too." I knew, if I mentioned a name high enough up in the other big smokehouse organization, someone in a position to make or alter company policy, that Earle would be a lot less likely to call the bluff I'd been trying to run past him. I did have several conversations with one of the executives who worked at a bank that Earle did most of his business with. He'd mentioned quite a few tidbits of information he probably shouldn't have, but I was feeding him free steak pieces the whole time I was encouraging him to give me the dirt on Earle's current business problems. There was a grocery chain back east that had filed for bankruptcy owing Earle's company over eight hundred thousand dollars, but Earle was probably going to get back at least eighty cents on every dollar he was owed from them. The seven dry cleaners that Earle owned were a different story though. I had no doubt at all that he was trying to sell them off to raise some cash. According to my banker friend though, he owed as much on them as they were probably worth. The bank would be very pleased if Earle found himself a buyer. I didn't think Nancy's father would be pleased though. He'd poured a lot of years into making something, after starting out in that first little dry cleaners location that Earle had bought and put him in charge of, twenty six years before. "If that was what you wanted, all you had to do was ask me. Consider it done. Live and let live, right?" "Absolutely, and I feel badly now. Ed told me that you would agree to back off if I just called you and asked you to. I should have listened to him I guess. He's going to laugh at me when I tell him he was right all along." "I won't ever underestimate you again, Rudd. That was what this was all about, wasn't it? You wanted to show me you could stand up to me if you needed to. I got your message, and I'm willing to play nice if you will too." "Great. When we set a date, we'll invite you to our wedding. I hope you will send me out those samples of that new product. Maybe we can work out a deal for some barter. You put Ed's steak pieces in your grocery stores, and we could then sell your new product in all our commercial outlets. We just passed a hundred outlets today, and I'm expecting to double that in the next three months. After that, I'm planning to go south, and open up Los Angeles. Can you imagine what the sales volume will be from down there?" "Talk to Ed. Tell him I'd be willing to meet with him and at least discuss the possibility. I never did much care for direct selling. I prefer to ship product out by the railway car load, not by the case." "I prefer to sell it whichever way makes me the most money. Tell me, how much free cash were you hoping to take out of selling those cleaner locations? Over and above what you owe on them." "I told you the reason I listed them for. I don't want to sell them. Merle would have a total fit if I did." "Merle would go along with the deal. He'd come out of it with some long overdue ownership. He knows more about that business than you or I do now or ever will." "I owe a lot, maybe a million on that one note all told. There are some other properties tied into it though, things I really do want to hold on to. I could get that note split in half, if I asked them to do it. I could take the other properties and one of the notes for half a million, and you and Merle could keep those cleaner locations, leases, or buildings and land included, and that other note. If the bank goes for it, would that work for you?" "I don't really have any idea if it would or not. Is it all right with you if I ask your brother about it? I'm not even sure if he wants to keep working. He doesn't have that good of an opinion of me yet either." "He likes you fine. Merle is one of those glass half empty people. If he didn't like you, he wouldn't have let you within a mile of his daughter. I heard what you told him when he asked you about how you liked Nancy's pie. I thought that was about the funniest thing. Merle said he spit up when you said it to him. Wish I'd been there to see that." We had started the conversation with false cordiality, but when I got off the phone with him, I was feeling better about things. I really did hope he sent me some samples, because, from what he'd described to me, I could almost taste the new product. I was always a sucker for honey too. My next problem would be going to Nancy's father and trying to figure out if Earle was trying to stick it to me with his offering price for those seven dry cleaners, or if he was actually making me a sound business proposal. I didn't know how many of those cleaners were leased buildings, and how many were free standing stores, or where the land and building were that were owned by Towns Cleaners. ------- "Who told you my cleaners were for sale?" Merle wasn't too happy with my first few questions. In fact, he wasn't too happy to even be seeing me again, especially at his place of business. I'd driven over to where he had his office after first calling Nancy and finding out she didn't know much more about her Uncle's dry cleaning business than I did. She hadn't known there were seven of them even. She said she thought they only had three locations, because that was all she'd ever seen. "I was talking to Earle earlier today, about an hour ago, in fact. He told me that he was considering doing some restructuring. He was saying he might spin off the dry cleaners from some other properties he has, but only if you could find yourself a financial partner to help you with the deal. I have a little extra money and I was thinking about investing it in something besides the smoked meat business. Don't want all your eggs in one basket." "How much did he say he wanted for all of it?" "I think half a million dollars for all seven, buildings and leases included." "Really? Why would he sell out for so little? The company is worth at least half again as much if we just sold off all the capital equipment, vehicles, and buildings. Something isn't right here. I'm going to phone him. You wait right here." "You can do that if you want to, Merle, but I've got a feeling that Earle hasn't kept too close a track of what you've been doing with the business. I doubt he has a good idea of what this is all worth. From what Nancy tells me, all he does is collect the money you've been sending him. Maybe he based the value on how much profit he was getting from it?" I was glad to see that Merle hadn't left to go make his phone call. After all these years of working for his brother, Merle had to harbor some feelings of resentment from what Nancy had told me had happened during all that time. It hadn't been the equal partnership he'd thought he was getting into. "Do you have half a million dollars to invest in the business?" "No. I have some money, but not that much. I doubt if you'll need anything like that amount. The bank has a note that your brother is going to have them split in half. How much debt, other than that, do you have?" "Less than a hundred thousand, mostly for the delivery vans, and some pressers I purchased late last year. These are all financed through the manufacturer's financing companies. I've been making the payments on that bank note out of operating profits. I thought he owed a million on the company assets alone?" "He said he had other things pledged on the note that he wanted to keep. Do you think he knows how the note was being paid before?" "He might not, but his wife sure does. She was the one who told me to pay it. This was a year and a half ago that she told me that. I've been sending the bank $8,250.00 a month, but that just covers the interest on that note. I'd have to look and see when the due date is, but I seem to remember it being close to now." He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a Manila file. It took a few minutes but he finally found what he was looking for. "Here it is. Yes, I was right November third of this year. A little more than a month from now. Look here, Ralph, I really need to call Earle to speak to him about this. How am I supposed to come up with that kind of money? There is just no way I can do it. You don't suppose he expects me to pay the whole half million out of the company, do you?" "Why don't you call the bank, Merle? Talk to whoever is in charge of handling that note, and find out what your options are. In fact, let me call Earle first, and try to find out exactly what he's expecting. I'll tell him I was talking to you about his proposal and we needed more information about some things." Merle sat in his chair just staring at me. He was getting more nervous as our discussion continued. "Earle, Ralph here. I'm sitting here with your brother and we're discussing how this proposal of yours might be worked out. We're interested, but we aren't sure about what you're expecting from us." "How did Merle act after you brought up me selling off the stores?" "I think he's okay with it. I'm sure he'd make out really well, once the transfer is completed. Whoever owns the stores, it is Merle who'll be left to run them, right?" "Is he getting all fidgety on you? Is that why you really called me. I was afraid of that. I already talked to the bank, and the new notes will be ready for us to sign next Monday. They want your people to pay the new note down to four hundred thousand, then you have to pay them interest only for five more years before the note comes due again. The rate is ten percent, but that was the best I could get them to go for. Mine is the same on my half. Money is tight right now, so it costs more to borrow." "Are you paying your half of the note down too?" "No, because my security has appreciated. Each note is based on the merits of the underlying collateral. My banker said there was too much old equipment as security with the cleaners business. He can't justify keeping the new loan at the whole half a million." "We're going to have Merle do all the signing for the company on Monday. Will they need anything other than the new note signed, and the hundred thousand dollars, before they transfer ownership to us? Is there some kind of escrow?" "No. I've already signed off at the bank, that was needed in order for me to relinquish my ownership to whoever takes over the new note. Once that gets done, subject to the bank's new note, and whatever other debts the company has, it all belongs to the new owners. Merle isn't mad at me is he? This is a good thing for him. Tell him that, okay?" I finished off my phone call and closed my phone before turning back to Nancy's father. "Earle told me to tell you that this was a good thing for you. I believe he's even more correct than he knows. How much money do you have in your operating accounts?" "We don't keep a lot on hand at any one time. We have about eleven thousand in our payroll account, another forty two thousand for current and future tax liabilities, and that is about it, except for the money in our sinking fund for equipment replacement costs. We're going to need that money eventually, and it has already been earmarked for specific use." "How much is in the fund, Merle?" "I believe there is ninety seven thousand, but we never touch that money unless we need to replace capital equipment. Large expenditure equipment, not everyday things that might break." "On Monday morning, we're going to the bank, and you're going to hand them a certified bank check for one hundred thousand dollars. You will take the ninety seven thousand from your sinking fund, and the other three thousand from whichever other account you feel you can best afford to borrow it from." "I won't be a party to something like that. I have an obligation to this company, and I will not stand by and see it weakened in any way. If Earle decides to sell, the new owners can decide to do whatever they want to, but I won't stay on here to be a part of it. You can't run a business that way." "Merle, I think you're overlooking one very important fact. After Monday, you're the new owner. Beginning on Tuesday, I want you to detail someone to do a complete equipment inventory on all seven of your stores. Do you even have any capital equipment that is so old your people would be worried it might break down and be unfixable?" "How am I the new owner? Didn't you tell me Earle was selling the business?" "I did tell you that, and, according to him, just now on the phone, he has. He's selling it to whoever signs that new note, assumes any other liabilities the company currently has, and pays down the note to $400,000.00. On Monday, you'll do all three. A week from Monday, you'll take an updated capital equipment inventory list to the bank and use it to convince the bank that your loan collateral is much stronger than they were led to believe. Based on this information, you'll ask them to extend a credit line to you to cover any future capital equipment needs you might have. Sinking funds are very old fashioned. They went out in the sixties, or the early seventies at the latest. I read about them in college. A general purpose business line of credit is a much better product for managing the allocation of corporate resources." "The dry cleaning business isn't like most other types of retail commerce. You can't treat it the same as all these high tech businesses you read about today." "Merle, you're just old fashioned and conservative, too set in your ways. Now is the time for you to join the rest of us in the twenty first century. You've built up a real nice business over the years, but it would be better if you took advantage of what is now available. Do you own a laptop?" "I don't, and I've gotten along perfectly well without one." "What would you say if I told you I could hire a high school kid for you who could set up software on a laptop computer that would tie you into the cash registers of all seven of your stores, and you could read out their daily business totals in a matter of seconds, from your home? We could set all of this up for less than three thousand dollars, including getting all your stores wired up for high speed internet access. This business may be low tech, but that doesn't mean that you have to operate the management functions that way as well. Use the tools that are out there. You will get so much more done in a day that you might have time to go do some fishing, or something else you might enjoy doing, just for the hell of it." I could see that Merle was going to be a longer term project when it came to dragging him into the modern business era. That was all right with me, because he was fun to play with. At least I'd managed to convince him that it was all right for him to go ahead and buy the company on the very generous terms his not very knowledgeable twin brother was now offering him. I didn't feel at all sorry for Earle either. He'd taken advantage of and used Merle, for more than a quarter century, riding his brother's hard work and long hours of absolute faithful dedication to achieve an annual return many times greater than his one time, totally financed, investment of thirty one thousand dollars. I also found out that Earle was paying Merle the princely sum of seventeen hundred dollars a month to run the entire seven store operation. It bordered on being criminal exploitation, and that was the way I was looking at it. On the following Monday, Merle did everything I'd told him to do, and everything went very smoothly. A week later, with me by his side, we negotiated a two hundred thousand dollar general line of credit for the company. It was a week after this that Earle's wife happened to mention to her husband where the true source of all that money each month to pay the interest on that million dollar note had come from. He had apparently thought it was all being generated from within the smoked meat plant. Earle tried to find some grounds for claiming that Merle had taken advantage of him, but the truth was he'd been the one who thought up and proposed all the terms of the sale. He was angry at me, probably for good reason too, but he didn't let that provoke him into going back on the deal he and I had worked out as far as the live and let live policy we'd agreed to adopt. ------- While all this was taking place, Nancy and I were fashioning our own peaceful accords. It turned out that Nancy decided she was willing for the two of us to orally swap bodily fluids together. She loved the orgasms she got from having her little pussy "Hoover'ed" by my talented tongue. I liked doing that for her, but stood firmly by my principles when it came to it needing to be a mutually shared experience. Nancy's mother had talked to her daughter, explaining the concept of a woman needing to make sacrifices, including doing things at times that they didn't really care to do. Nancy's mother was now my staunchest ally, after the considerable amount of effort I'd expended on her family's financial behalf. While Merle might have had strong ethical reservations about the fairness of what he'd done in buying the whole company from his brother, his wife had no reservations at all. In fact, she could not have been more delighted to have it unfold just as it did. I really believe she would have volunteered to take Nancy's place, sucking my cock, if Nancy had remained stubbornly unwilling to perform that particular chore for me. In Karen Towns eyes, I was really the fair haired boy. Jim Davis managed to get everything ready to start up production over at the new smokehouse in King City. I knew I'd be nervous about everything until after I'd tasted a few of the steak pieces they were getting ready to make. So far, even before they'd gotten open and produced the first unit, I'd paid in an extra thirty one hundred dollars with all those extra nickels I'd been paying for my steak pieces. I couldn't wait to get my hands on the increased amount of product I'd be receiving. Nancy and I now had one hundred and thirty three commercial accounts, and that wasn't even counting the displays of product being sold at her father's seven dry cleaning stores. Surprisingly, initial sales there had been much better than we had thought they'd be. A lot of people, as it turned out, liked to buy a snack to chew on while they waited for their cleaning to be checked in, or brought back out to them. Jim said he had a buyer for his smokehouse in Idaho, but told me he wasn't getting as much as he'd hoped for, because of his not including his best recipes along with the building, display cases, smoking equipment, and cash registers. He and I worked out a deal where he could come to me for funds if he started running short before the new plant started making money for him. I was comfortable with it, and he seemed to feel we'd made adequate provisions for the most likely contingencies. Jim and I had met with Earle at a diner over in Tigard. Neutral ground, as it were. It surprised me to see how friendly the two men were. From the way they both had spoken about each other, I had thought they were enemies, or at least bitter rivals. I waited patiently, and for the most part, silently, as they caught up with old times, after not having seen or spoken to each other for something like fifteen years. Earle's new product was very soft and sweet, and I'll admit it was far superior to what he'd bought the rights to from J. C. some months before. It was the same cut of meat, but now the outside texture was more heavily glazed, and the taste itself was more uniform and consistent all through each piece. I still preferred Jim's steak pieces, but what Earle had was something I thought would appeal to females more than males. My experience had shown me that men were far and away the largest consumers of jerky and pepperoni. Woman were more likely to buy chips or candy to snack on. Earle's new product tasted like candy, had the bite of a thick chip, and left a satisfying aftertaste, like a real good Italian salami. "Ralph thought we might be able to cross market this product and the steak pieces. I'll put yours in some of my grocery stores, under my own label, of course, and in return, you can sell mine in all of your gas stations and convenience stores. I'd need at least a nickel extra for mine, because of the production time, and to pay for the extra cost of my cure. You shouldn't have a bit of trouble making that back easily enough when you go out to sell it, Ralph." "Nice try Earle. Some things always stay the same, don't they. I'm not saying I'm opposed to you and Ralph making some kind of arrangement with each other. You both are in the distribution business, unlike me. I don't handle any private label business though. If I make it, it goes out with my label. Simple as that." "I'm with Jim on that one, Earle. If we used your label, there wouldn't be anything to stop you from making your own product with a look alike label, and selling that to people thinking they were still getting Jim's product. As far as that extra nickel goes, I don't mind having to pay you thirty cents a unit, but if I did, I'd pass that extra cost on to all my outlets. Are you that sure your product would compete well with Jim's if his was a dime less than yours?" "Who said a dime? We were talking about a nickel difference, not a dime." "I pay Jim a quarter for his and sell it for fifty cents to my commercial customers, or to the people on my direct sales routes. If I pay you thirty cents, then I'll be selling it for sixty cents, because that is how it works. The retail outlets do things the same as I do. If they pay sixty, they'll want to double their cost when they sell it to their customers. so, now it becomes twenty cents more to the ultimate consumer. I like your product, but I think you might be pricing it out of the marketplace. I could be wrong though." "If I sell it to you for a quarter, I'll end up competing against myself with all your locations. Right now, I can offer this to my grocer's as an exclusive." "Exclusive just like my steak pieces are exclusive to all his customers now? How is this any different? Earle, if I was Ralph, I'd tell you to take a flying leap. We haven't even got into it yet about what buy back protection rights Ralph has if your new product suddenly starts growing hair again." "Why do I get the feeling that you two are trying to gang up on me?" "We aren't Earle. We're trying to come up with a plan that makes sense for all of us. Would you allow me to private label this new product of yours? Probably not, right? Yet you want Jim to do that exact same thing for you. I told you I'd pay you thirty cents for your product, but I think you saw the kind of handicap you'd be giving yourself if that were to happen. I have a deal with Jim that he pays for quality control mistakes, and I pay for any stale product I get left with. We aren't asking you for anything Jim wouldn't be giving you on any of his products. That isn't ganging up, that's all of us agreeing to play by the same rules." "How much of my new product would you take out and sell for me, if we agreed on everything else?" "At a quarter a piece or at thirty cents?" "Say a quarter." "I'd like to start out small, say ten thousand pieces?" "Ten thousand is awfully small, Ralph. This isn't summer sausage we're talking about. I was thinking more like fifty thousand to start out with." "Okay, fine. I'll take fifty thousand, but you'll have to wait for me to do it. It won't be until I have four hundred outlets opened, because that is how many I'd need to get me to take that much for my weekly volume." "The product has a six week shelf life, Ralph." "This gets right back to what I said earlier, Earle. Jim's products have a guaranteed six week shelf life too, but I only buy one week's worth of projected sales volume in advance from him. I have about one hundred and forty outlets as of right now, and I know I can place a hundred pieces of your product in each of them. I'll take my chances on buying another six thousand if you really need me to, because I'm confident I can sell those on my direct sales routes. Twenty thousand is the absolute most I am able to take from you, right away." "I think I heard somewhere that you put at least two hundred steak pieces in each of your locations. Sometimes more than that." "That is true. How many different flavors of that new product are there? Jim has four flavors for the steak pieces, and nine flavors of his jerky. Next month he'll be rolling out a new flavor, pineapple honey, so that will make five." "I can live with twenty thousand if I have to, and I don't really care that much about the labels. When can we start cross selling these two products?" Earle and I looked over at Jim. "Won't be for at least two weeks from my end. You two can go ahead if Ralph wants to. Once we get up and running, I won't have any problem taking care of that size order." Jim seemed the calmest of the three of us. I knew he was very interested in what we worked out. He was just pretending not to care. "It would be simpler for us to just wait until Jim is ready." I said. "Not simple for me. I need to start moving some product, Ralph. The clock is ticking on what I've already got bagged up. I didn't anticipate needing to wait so long for home office approval at my biggest west coast chain of grocery stores. They won't take anything new, not until the powers that be gives them the go ahead to do so." "I'll take that first twenty thousand, if it will help you, but how are we supposed to keep who owes who straight?" "I'll put you on thirty days, and have my bank floor the first few invoices. I'll pay them the juice on it. Later, we can just trade invoices, using first in first out. If my product sells fast, can I expect a quick call from you for a re-order?" "That works. As to your other question, Nancy and I will put your product out there, just as soon as we can after first getting it. As soon as I get any kind of a feel for how the product is being received, I'll call you, and we can figure out when the next delivery should be." After Earle left, Jim and I sat around for a little while longer, talking. "You know, Ralph, he needs you more than you need him. He wants to start showing a quick increase in sales. All my stuff will go on his regular grocery wholesale sales sheets, and the stuff he's having you buy will look like even more new business. He was my partner for nine years, and this is his way of cooking his books. He does it so he can get more of somebody else's money to borrow." "I'm guessing you are absolutely right, but how can I lose? You tasted that new product, and it was very good, and it was very different from what we're now selling." "You need to watch him close. I'm sure going to. The main reason I'm going along with this is so I have some kind of a fall back position, just in case you decide to blow up on me. Earle controls a lot of shelf space in all those grocery stores he sells to. He could easily buy enough to keep us going, if something was to ever happen to you." "More likely he'd come up with a ridiculous low ball offer and buy you out." "I hadn't thought of that. Now you just went and ruined my day too. Thanks a whole bunch." ------- Chapter 8 All of us were standing around, watching the bagging machine infusing gas into the little plastic steak piece packets. Our first production run had been for forty thousand pieces. I'd argued for making a much smaller run, just to make sure everything was set up properly, and that no mistakes were made. Jim and J.C. overruled me. Both men thought my nervousness was funny. It had been decided that I'd get the first twenty thousand pieces, and the remainder would be loaded onto the new delivery van and trucked over to Milwaukie, for Earle to place with one of his local grocery chains. I was really looking forward to that happening. I'd noticed, early on, that customers on my direct sales route who had purchased my products at retail from one of my commercial outlets, were anxious to get in on what they now realized was a half priced bargain. As a consequence of this, my direct sales volume kept increasing, and that seemed not to have had any negative effects on the sales volume at my commercial accounts. I found this to be a pleasant happenstance. I had to eat seven pieces of the new steak piece product to satisfy myself that there were no differences in the taste. I was very much relieved to find out that there wasn't any difference, in the flavor, the bite, or the texture. I was counting on the steak pieces to be my premiere product when I moved down to Los Angeles and started really opening up new commercial accounts. I was happy, and I also noticed that Jim and J.C. had been waiting with slightly nervous expressions on their faces while I satisfied myself that the product had lost nothing in the location transfer. When they saw me smiling in satisfaction, they too broke out in wide grins. "I told you there was nothing to worry about, Ralph. As long as the meat and the cure are the same, it doesn't matter much about the smoker or the drying rooms. You want to wait around here while we get the jerky jarred up for you too?" "I need to get back up to the storage locker as soon as possible. I've got a lot of angry accounts screaming for this product. I'll probably sell all of this in the next three days. Can you deliver the jerky to me tomorrow? I'm renting the locker right next to my old one, because we're not going to have room for everything when we get caught up on standing inventory." "Earle has been calling me everyday, wanting to know when his product will get there. He told me you've been going great guns with his new cross cut?" "So far so good. He's only delivered to me forty five thousand pieces so far, but the product has been well received thus far. Half my stores are buying two hundred at a time of it now, and my direct sales and all my resale's have been great too. I still think your steak pieces will still out sell his, by about two to one. Nancy and I are thinking about hiring two new girls to help us out with route servicing. I've been helping her out when she needs it, but that means I haven't had time to go out to find new outlet's. I think Nancy wants to keep me from ever getting to two hundred accounts. She doesn't want us to move down to Los Angeles." ------- I hadn't gone into a lot of detail with Jim about the difficulty Nancy and I were having over my unshakeable commitment to moving down to Los Angeles in order to really grow the business. As far as I was concerned, that was the Mecca of beef jerky consumption. There was a lot of competition down there as well, but I now had two products that no one down there had anything that could compete with them. Pricing in Los Angeles was different too. Retailers paid eighteen dollars for a forty count jar of jerky, and twelve dollars for a thirty count canister of pepperoni. I knew I'd be able to get a lot of business by just staying with my current pricing structure. Jim and I had looked into freight costs from PDX to LAX, and, while higher, it wasn't an insurmountable obstacle for us. I told Jim that I'd pay him for the difference in freight charges. For the steak pieces it only came to less than one third of a cent per piece. Shipping jerky and pepperoni was somewhat higher, because of the extra weight, but still easily manageable for me at the price I was buying the product from Jim for. We hired these two girls that Nancy had known since childhood. Callie had been in a management training position for a fast food company, until she decided to quit, after breaking her engagement with her district supervisor. She was twenty three years old, about average height, and was a slim brunette with a nice sized chest. Her father was a dentist, and she had the most perfect teeth I'd ever seen on a regular person. I didn't really see that much of her, because I had Nancy do all the hiring and training. Nancy told me that Callie was a natural for this kind of work because she had a friendly personality, and was good with people. She could also add and subtract, and, as I quickly found out, she had good penmanship too. Her sales books were always neat and easy to read and understand. The other girl was also one of her cousins, on her mother's side of the family. Victoria, was twenty five years old, and was the daughter of Nancy's Uncle George, the uncle who owned the tire store over in Portland. She had a somewhat plain looking face, short cut light brown hair, and, at five foot ten, was tall, as well as exceptionally thin. She had been an athlete in school, and from what Nancy had hinted at to me, found other girls more exciting than she did boys. I ended up spending more time with Victoria for two reasons. Victoria seemed to make Nancy nervous, and Victoria surprised all of us by having a definite aptitude for sales work. She told us she really didn't really want to be a "delivery drone", and wanted the chance to go out and create some sales herself. I handled Victoria's training while Nancy went out searching for a third new employee. During the first two or three days of training, it became obvious to me that Victoria didn't really need any sales pointers from me. She quickly learned the product pricing, and had no problem handling any sales situations I put her in. She already had everything she needed except for a vehicle of her own to go out and sell all by herself. She rode around in her little Vespa motor scooter, but that wasn't a vehicle she could use for high volume smoked meat sales. I was impressed enough by her potential to go out and buy her a well used truck for two thousand dollars. I made a deal with her for paying me back by telling her that I would take one dollar off of what she owed me for every jar of jerky, or fifty pieces of steak pieces or honeyed jerky that she sold. Honeyed jerky was the name we were calling Earle's new product. I said I'd take fifty cents off for each canister of pepperoni she sold. In addition, I paid her three dollars commission for selling fifty pieces of the individually wrapped products, two dollars for every jerky jar, and one fifty per pepperoni canister. The first day she was out selling by herself, despite my explicit instructions to her not to do it, she opened up three new commercial accounts. I wanted to fire her for doing that, but Nancy convinced me not to. In addition to opening three new outlets, Victoria had made over a hundred dollars in commissions, while also paying off the first thirty eight dollars of her two thousand dollar truck loan balance. It really bothered me that she'd deliberately set out to do something that I'd expressly warned her I didn't want her doing. "She did it because she thought you didn't believe she could open up new accounts. She wanted to prove to you that you were wrong. Vickie likes to test other people's limits anyway. Don't ever give her a dare, because she doesn't refuse dares at all. She bit the leg off a big live bull frog once, just because Art Oldham dared her to do it. She was nine years old." "I don't like her thinking she can just do whatever she feels like doing. She's supposed to do only what we tell her she can, no more, and no less." "You told me yourself that you hated the idea of not leaving anyone here to sell product to your direct sales customers when we go down south, and now we do have someone. Besides, with the three she opened today, and the five new ones you got, we passed the one seventy mark for commercial accounts. You were the one who told me it is a lot easier to get a route service driver than it was to get someone who could go out and create their own sales. Leave her alone for a few more weeks, and we'll see how she does out on the direct sales routes. You don't have to like everything about her. She is honest, and she works hard too." Lydia, a woman in her late twenties was the next hire we made. Lydia was the older sister of Callie's best friend, and she really needed a job. She was a single mom, with two young children, and had been laid off when the floral shop she was managing went out of business suddenly, due to a divorce of the owners. Like she had with Callie, Nancy trained her, and took care of all her employment paperwork. It took me another two weeks before we reached our goal of having two hundred commercial accounts. I was now ready to head south to Los Angeles. By the time we managed to open our two hundredth commercial account, Nancy and I were grossing fifty thousand dollars a week, just from that commercial account part of the business. We were paying our two route delivery people four hundred a week each, for what usually amounted to five or six hours of work each day, Monday through Friday. We'd also gone out and purchased two brand new delivery vans, on the strongly worded advice of our new accountant, another one of Nancy's relatives, one of her many real aunts. Victoria hadn't wanted her own new van, preferring to stay with the pick up truck I'd loaned her the money to purchase. For some reason, she started gravitating more towards me than to anyone else in our small but growing company. It became commonplace that she would give me a call, after finishing up her sales work for the day, and I would meet her at the storage yard to check her unsold product back in. We'd spend about fifteen minutes after that, balancing out her sales results and having her pay us the money we had coming from her day's effort. She would often suggest that we stop off somewhere to have a quick beer after we were done with the check in. I found myself enjoying her company. In many ways, Victoria was similar to many of the male buddies that I'd had in the past. It was during one of these after work hours beers that she first confided in me that she had a "mad crush" on Nancy. I could see her extreme level of embarrassment plainly. It was readily apparent during the whole time she was confiding to me her strong sexual attraction to the woman I now considered my fiance. "Are you sure I should be the one you want to be telling this to? It kind of puts me in a delicate position. I can certainly understand why you would be attracted to her, because she affects me the same way, but, I'm probably the last person who'd have any sympathy with you having this kind of an interest in her." "I had to tell someone about it, it was driving me bonkers. You're the only one I thought of who wouldn't get all freak'ed out by my telling them this, or that wouldn't overreact that much to it." "I don't know what advice I can possibly give you. Naturally, I'm hoping that you won't make any attempt to act on this infatuation of yours." "I'd hardly say it was an infatuation, and besides, I've known Nancy for a lot longer than you have. If you weren't in the picture, I think I might have a real shot with her." "Well, in the first place, I am in the picture, and in the second place, maybe you haven't noticed this yourself yet, but Nancy sometimes gets a little nervous when she's around you. I'm not sure she's entirely comfortable with the whatever vibe it is you give off when you're anywhere around her." Victoria just laughed, asking me if I was ready for a second beer. We ordered up another round. At this point, I'd have to say I found the conversation fascinating, but not really threatening to me in any way. I knew that Nancy was very well aware of Victoria's sexual orientation. She had been the one to first tell me about it. "I don't usually like to go around people's backs when it comes to these kinds of things. I like you, and I figured I'd lay my cards on the table, just so you couldn't claim later on that you were blind sided. I thought I'd give you fair warning of my interest in her, in case it ends up that you do go to Los Angeles soon, and Nancy decides she needs to stay up here in this area. My motto for those situations has always been: "out of sight, out of mind". If you weren't going to be around for awhile, I might try to help her cope with any feelings of loneliness she might be suffering." Now it was my turn to laugh. It wasn't something I needed to take seriously, Victoria's interest in Nancy. She obviously was unaware of our intentions to both travel to Los Angeles together. "You might be better advised to pick someone with your same orientation. To the best of my knowledge, Nancy is strictly hetero." "You might be right. Most women start out believing that they are, but I won't really know if she is or not, unless and until she tells me she is herself." We finished our beer and went our separate ways. At this point, I still didn't think there was anything to this little crush that Victoria claimed to have. I drove back to my apartment, more concerned with all I still had left to do before Nancy and I would be able to head south. The biggest problem would be finding someone we could trust to handle the collection of the cash and check sales receipts, from Victoria, and from our two commercial route drivers. I had suggested Nancy's mom as a possible person to do this, but Nancy told me her mom was too busy with her job for the Oregon liquor board. Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of anyone else who might be willing to do this for us, and who we could also trust to represent our best interests, and not their own. Nancy and I went out to eat after I had gotten home and washed up. Mongolian Bar-B-Que was something we both liked, so that was where we went to eat. We were both sitting down, after making our first pass through the serving line and over to the wok. I was just finishing up with relating to Nancy about the day that I'd had. "After I checked in Victoria, we went out to get a beer. You'll never guess what she told me." I really thought Nancy had no idea that Victoria was crushing on her. "Does she still have the hots for me?" That set me back on my heels a little. Nancy acted like this was old news to her. "That wasn't how she phrased it, but that was really the gist of it. I told her she was barking up the wrong tree, but she told me she was determined to try to help ease your loneliness, if we ever got separated for any reason, or if I was somewhere else, temporarily, and out of the picture." "I've been worried about if she was going to still be acting that way. Right after the second time I got raped, she started coming onto me in a very serious way. She wouldn't believe me when I told her I wasn't into that whole girl/girl thing like she was. It took me two months before she finally agreed to stop trying to be my new boyfriend. Did she tell you about those times we slept together too? She was twenty years old then, and I was either seventeen, or else just turning eighteen. I mostly wanted to just go to sleep, but she didn't want to take no for an answer. That was back in the days when I liked to tease everybody. It didn't mean anything to me. We were just playing, and then she kind of took it the wrong way. At first, I tried to let her down easy, but after I tried doing that, it sort of got a little bit out of hand. My parents and hers had to finally get involved." "You're kidding me, right?" "What? I never told you I hadn't kissed a few girls when I was younger. How do you think most girls learn how to flirt? With each other, that's how. I promise you it wasn't ever anything serious on my part." "Victoria kind of has the idea that I'm going to be traveling down to Los Angeles by myself. Should I be worrying about her being right about that too?" "No. I'm definitely going down there with you, because that was what I lost when I lost our bet. I never said I'd be staying for that long. I don't think I'm going to like being down there with all those people. You never said how long we have to stay down there. How many accounts do you plan on opening up before we can come back here?" "As many as I can. Maybe five or ten thousand. I'm planning on us living down there, permanently. I thought you already knew that?" Nancy was frowning at me. She almost looked like she would start crying. "You're expecting me to stay down there with you? Forever?" "We can come up here to visit often, at least once a month if you want. It is only a two hour flight from here to there, I think. Jim says we can use his frequent flyer freight coupons for our trips up and back. If you want to, we'll even buy a house in this area, and then spend part of our time here, and part of it back down there. We'll hire delivery people down there too, just like we're doing up here. We'd need to come up here often anyway, just to make sure everything stays okay with this part of the business. After we get things running well down there, we can divide our time between here and there." "Okay. When you say it like that, it doesn't sound so bad. When can we buy our house up here?" "You can start looking any time. We won't buy right away though, unless we see something just too good to pass up. Getting back to your fling with Victoria though, you were a little vague with giving me any details. Would you care to expand some, or to clarify things for me?" "What do you want to know? We kissed, and we did a little touching, nothing serious. Why are you worried about this? It isn't like it just happened last month, or even last year." She was being too defensive. Something wasn't out in the open yet. My poker sense was telling me that something didn't quite ring true here. I didn't want her getting too upset about any of it, but still. In all the time we'd been together, now was the first I was hearing about her and anything involving other girls. I still didn't feel like Victoria was any competition to me. Right now I was more focused on Nancy, and on the both of us not feeling any need to keep things like this from each other. "You said when you were about seventeen, so it is closer to six years since you two fooled around together, right?" "That was the first time. Nothing else happened for a long time. Then, about two years ago, we got together again, for just a few days. I was bored, and had nothing better to do. It didn't mean anything. I'm not gay or even bi. It was just something to do to pass the time. We went out to the Gorge, and partied with a bunch of her friends for a long weekend." "Would you say that I do or don't have to worry about Victoria being any sort of serious competition for your affections?" "Do you even need to ask me that question?" "That's kind of what I'm trying to find out. This is a bit of a shock to me. I thought I was the first one to eat your pussy." "Vickie told you she ate my pussy?" She asked that as a straight question, giving it no inflection that might provide me with a clue to anything. "What I said was I thought I was the first one to do that. Now I'm asking you, was I the first one or not?" "I'm not really sure if you were or not. She didn't do that to me when I was seventeen, but that last time, I don't remember if she did or she didn't. I was pretty drunk for most of that trip. We did things together, I know that much, but most of it is really pretty hazy. What did she tell you, and why are you making such a big deal about it? No guy ever did it before you, and that I am sure about. I'm also sure that whatever did happen, it was before I even met you. Was I the first one who ever sucked your cock?" I knew we weren't going to get this resolved the way we were going. Her last few questions and statements had been good ones. It was before I'd met her, and I really had no idea why I wanted to make more of it than I needed to. I was curious though, and even a little intrigued. Victoria was a better sales person than I'd given her credit for being. With her looks, her bagging someone of Nancy's caliber was actually quite an accomplishment. I could almost say I admired her for it. I finally decided to just let the matter drop. We were leaving for Los Angeles soon, and that alone would show Victoria that she'd hoped in vain. ------- Nancy wasted no time at all with starting to look for a house for the two of us to buy. What surprised me was that she said she wanted to live at least an hour's drive away from Portland. She said she wanted a house out in the countryside. A place that wasn't already overrun with people. I was a big city boy. To me, Portland was about as close to country living as I wanted to come. The first place she dragged me off to look at was in a little town south of Salem. I'll admit the house was very big, and nice, with an indoor swimming pool, on seven plus acres of land, and with a nice gentle stream running through the western third of the property. The price seemed like a very good bargain too. It would take us more than an hour each way to drive to and from the storage place though. I couldn't see myself spending two hours a day commuting though. No way. The next one we went to look at was somewhat closer in, about half an hour's drive from the storage lockers. This house was almost a hundred years old, and needed quite a bit of work just to make it modernized enough to be livable for me. It went like this until it was almost time for us to leave for Los Angeles. Nancy would find a place she liked, and then I'd find things I didn't like about it. She finally got frustrated enough to tell me that I should go find a house. She told me she'd only agree to look at it after I had one that I was already willing for us to buy and go live in. I've always been a competitive person, hence my becoming a professional poker player. I took Nancy's challenge of finding us a house to heart. It was something I liked to do too, surprising people by managing to do something they hadn't expected I could. The house I found was in a nicer section of Forest Park. It was part of an estate sale that the executrix seemed over anxious to move, and had priced well below the prevailing market for comparable houses in the area. It had a nice view of the Cascade Mountains, as well as a really nice night time view of downtown Portland itself. There were ten foot high ceilings and every imaginable amenity you could want, or even think of wanting. It had a large outside deck up on the third level, with a five car garage where we could store all our vans and product in easily. The house itself covered over four thousand square feet of living space inside. Two really big master bedrooms on the third level, and two smaller bedrooms with a large recreation room on the second level. There was a gourmet kitchen, full laundry room, large living room, formal dining room, and a very small three room servant's apartment down on the ground level. There were also two large en suite bathrooms, two other full baths, and another two half baths. Because the woman in charge wanted to close out her father's estate in a hurry, she was ready to sell the house for an even half million dollars. To me, this house made sense on several different levels. Firstly, it was a fantastic potential investment, having once been appraised for more than one million dollars. Secondly, it was close in to downtown Portland, and an easy drive out to most of the areas we worked in. Thirdly, I loved the house. I had done a quick walk through with the listing agent, and just knew this was a house I'd be happy to spend the rest of my life living in. Nancy came with me to look at the house two hours after I'd gone through it for the first time. She wasn't as impressed, since the property didn't come with any acreage, it wasn't really out in the country. It also didn't have a pool, a nearby lake, or even a stream nearby. "This isn't what I wanted at all, Ralph. Why did you bring me over here to look at it?" "This is the house I want, Nancy. If you say we can buy it, I'll marry you before the escrow closes." "If I agree to us getting it, would you put off going down to Los Angeles for at least a year?" "I couldn't do that to Jim, or even Earle. People are counting on us to go down there and open up a lot of new business down there." "Ralph, we're making almost a million dollars a year right now. I talked to Uncle Earle, and he told me that he's making as much by selling Jim's steak pieces as he does with the whole rest of his smoked sausage business. Jim told me he has so much business already that he's afraid he'll need to put on a night crew soon. How much is enough for you?" "You really don't want to go down there with me, do you?" "I said I would, and I will. If you're asking me if I'd rather not go, then yes, I would rather not go. I'd much rather stay right here. But, only if you're here with me. If you go, I'll go." "You really don't like this house?" "It isn't what I wanted. The house itself is beautiful, but when I walked through it just now, it didn't seem like the kind of home that would be good for us raising a family. Take this deck up here. Can you see all the work we'd need to have done to make it safe up here for our children?" "That house in Shedd, the one you loved, kids could drown in that stream out back, or else in that big covered indoor pool behind the house." "They could run all around that big back yard too, and keep a dog as a pet. That was the kind of house I wish I'd grown up in." "That one was only three hundred thousand. We could buy them both. Live here during the week, and go down there for the weekend." "That is just crazy. What would our house payments be?" "They'd be a lot, maybe too much, but that's why we need to go to Los Angeles, and open up lots of new accounts down there. If we did that, in a few years, we wouldn't need to worry about how much things were going to cost us. Right now, we have a real opportunity to go down there and make ourselves a lot of money. Who knows how long that opportunity will still be there?" "How about two years? Can you do what you need to, in that amount of time?" "Could I, or could we?" "We. I could stand it there for that long, if it meant we could come back after, and never have to worry about needing to leave here again." I really wanted that buy this Forest Park house. More than that, I wanted to marry Nancy, and to get started on our having a real family. I was almost thirty years old, and I wanted to still be young enough to play with my kids when I had some. I knew Nancy wasn't going to change her mind about what she wanted. I'd been counting on her letting me buy the house after I'd told her we could be married before the escrow closed. I'd told her we could buy both houses, but she still hadn't agreed to do even that. I knew this house wasn't going to be on the market for long, not at the price it was being offered for. I had enough saved up to be able to put one hundred thousand dollars down on it. The payment would be less than $2,500.00 a month for a thirty year fixed mortgage. The Shedd house mortgage would be about $1,500.00 a month with fifty thousand dollars down. I could cover both down payments, and probably borrow the rest of the money we'd need for furniture and appliances from Nancy's money that she had saved. I really was comfortable with my life up here in Oregon. Nancy was right, we were already making more money than I'd ever thought about earning before now. I only had the one thing left I could offer her as an inducement for agreeing to let us buy this house. "If we buy both houses right away, we'll have to delay opening up Los Angeles for at least three years, possibly even longer. We can't take any chances on things going wrong down there, because we'd have spent all of our savings on buying these houses and getting them furnished. We won't have any of the cushion left that we have now." "We'd still get married right away?" "Of course. Buying two houses together, we'd need to formalize our relationship before we did something like that. You talked about our children needing a yard to play in when they were growing up. I'd like us to be married before we start having any kids." "It wouldn't work, us having kids up here and then going down to Los Angeles with them. Young children need to experience the security of having a stable home life. We can't be dragging them all around the country with us. That would be too selfish on our part." "I guess we really can't afford to be buying any houses up here now then. I hope you feel the same way when we're down in Los Angeles, and you end up getting pregnant down there." "I have the shot every three months. I'll just keep going to the doctor to get it, until we get back up here. I'm still only twenty three, so we can afford to wait a few years to have our kids." "I'm going to be thirty years old soon. I don't want to be in my fifties when my kids are still in high school. I don't want to wait to have kids." "My grandparents, on both sides, were born right here. All my children will be born here too. I decided that when I was a young girl, Ralph. Nothing will ever change my mind about that." Nancy has a stubborn streak, but so do I. After she left, I placed a full price offer on the Forest Park house, and called the other broker, the one who'd shown us the house in Shedd, and told her to make the owner's a full price offer on that house as well. When I got off the phone with her, I went out selling some product. A few hours later that afternoon, and I was taking down two deposit checks, so that escrow could open up on both properties. I'd already been pre approved for a mortgage loan of half a million dollars by Bank of America. I'd use most of that on the Forest Park loan. I went to see the loan officer who'd approved my other mortgage loan request and asked him what my chances were of getting a mortgage from the bank on my second house too? He asked me a lot of questions about how my business was structured, and verified with me that I'd be putting twenty percent down on each house from my personal savings. After he wrote down all the details of each house I was buying, he checked with someone else, presumably his superior, then he came back to his desk and told me that the bank would be happy to handle both loans for me. Somehow, my now owing over six hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of mortgages wasn't that troubling to me. The thought of how I was going to explain to Nancy about why I'd gone ahead and done this though, that was somewhat troubling. "Nancy, I went ahead and bought that Forest Park house. It was just too good a deal for me to pass up." She didn't say anything. She just looked over at me, her baleful expression letting me know how disappointed she was that I would go against her wishes this way. I'd been a bit apprehensive before, but now I was really getting worried. "I hope you'll be happy living there. I told you it wasn't the house I wanted to live in. Did you see all those trees around that house? It would be very easy for children to wander away from that little yard in the back and get themselves lost in the forest. What about the bears? Did you ever think that some hungry bears could come out of the woods and eat the people living on that hillside? That has happened before, you know?" "I also bought the house down in Shedd. We can hide out there during the worst part of the hungry bear season." I really doubted that there were really any wild bears left, not so close to the city like our new house was. "You bought my house too?" I was happy to see that Nancy's mood was getting more positive. "Nancy, I just couldn't not buy that other house. I got it for less than half price. Deals like that one don't come around very often. We need to get married very quickly, and get started on pounding out some rug rats." "I'm willing to do both, but I won't be going down to Los Angeles if we have children before we leave." "I told you I won't have enough money to go down there like we'd planned to, not for at least two or three years. If we do have children, I guess I can split my time between here and there. Nothing says I need to spend all my time down there. I was thinking about that while I was trying to decide if I should buy both houses or not. I could fly down on a Tuesday early flight, then come back up here on the following Thursday night. I'd have three days to go out opening accounts, and four days back here to take care of everything we'd need done here. If I average fifteen new accounts each trip, we'd have enough new business down there to make it more than worthwhile for us. That would be about seven hundred and fifty new accounts a year. I figure it will take us ten years, if we end up doing it that way. I'm also thinking about finding another salesman up here, before I start going down there to Los Angeles. That way I could take Victoria down there with me, so I could keep a close watch on her." "Ralph, you don't need to do that. Vickie isn't a problem I can't handle on my own." "I'm sure that's true, but remember you told me once about never giving her a dare? I've been thinking back to that time we were talking, back when she first told me that she had a big crush on you. I certainly didn't mean it as a dare, but I did tell her she was more or less doomed to failure because you were completely heterosexual. She told me she wouldn't really know if you were or not until after you told her you were yourself. She might think I dared her." "I'll just tell her I love you now, and I don't like flirting with people anymore. She'll accept that, I'm sure." "She might, but what if she takes it as another dare from you? What then? I told you what she said about out of sight, out of mind. Suppose she just decides for herself that you're lonely, and could use some comforting, whenever I'm down in Los Angeles?" Nancy just laughed at what I was telling her. I was mostly kidding her anyway, but I really did want to take Victoria down to Los Angeles with me. She wanted the challenge of opening up commercial accounts, and I wanted someone down there to help me, and to possibly remain behind when I was back in Portland. As far as I knew, Victoria had no objections to doing some traveling, and I knew she was at least as competent as I was when it came to talking to people. "You aren't serious, Ralph? Those times with Vickie were absolutely nothing you need to ever worry about. I'm not like I used to be. I don't just "go with the flow" anymore. Besides, I have you now. She knows me well enough to know not to try to come between us." "I know, babe. I still want to take her with me though. I'm going to turn her loose on opening up new accounts in L.A. She wants to try it, and I could use the help when I'm down there. She can either fly back whenever I do, or else stay down there and keep working. I'll leave that decision entirely up to her." Given the choices I'd been left with, I thought I'd made the best one. Sure, it would have been quicker, and probably a whole lot more profitable, for me to move down to Los Angeles more or less permanently. The way I'd be doing it now probably meant I'd end up missing out on getting a lot of business I could have gotten if I'd been working down there full time. Our competitor's would rush out their own products to try to capture some of the new market we were going to begin developing down there. I was learning there was more to life than simply whatever the bottom line on a column of figures was showing us. Happiness was important too, and I knew I couldn't find my happiness unless I made sure that Nancy was right there by my side, sharing hers with me as well. I was no longer as anxious about my future prospects either, because I knew I was marrying into a huge family. If worse came to worse, and people suddenly stopped wanting what I was out there selling, I could always get a job working for one of my new in laws or another. Dry cleaning may not sound that exciting, but it was an honest job, at least. If I ended up with all the rest of it, what I did for a living, or how much money I made, was a lot less important than I'd been used to thinking. ------- The End ------- Posted: 2009-09-30 Last Modified: 2009-10-09 / 04:53:19 pm ------- http://storiesonline.net/ -------