” “Okay!” “Laura is coming round after I come back from my vacation. I’ll ask her tomorrow, but she’s not had a guy for a while either, ...so she’ll be up for it.” “Okay.” “This is a one-time offer though, Tommy. So don’t go thinking there is anything in this apart from sex.” Tommy gulped. “Yeah, I understand. But we’ll be friends after?” “Yes! Of course. And when you hear your mates bragging about their exploits, you can smile and nod and keep this to yourself?” “You don’t even need to. And when we were just kids, we introduced each other to... to sex. It was clumsy and everything, because we were both too young and we were inexperienced. But it was... sweet and good, too." OK."I had lots of things I wanted to say, but I was reminding myself, every ten seconds, to keep my mouth shut."So then we grew up, and, and we grew apart, and we both had other experiences and lovers and so forth. And that's about the time my folks moved to Chapel Hill, so I didn't see Hal as much... But. Then the chairman stuck his hand into the blue barrel, swished it around and pulled it out with a single ticket. He slowly read off the numbers and like the ladies, the men were scrambling to check their dozens of tickets. The chairman repeated the winning numbers several times until one man thrust his hand in the air and hollered. He ran to the stage and jumped up, handing his ticket to the chairman to verify the numbers. Then he took the winner behind the blue box and showed him what he had. We know what we want but aren't sure how to go about it." Shirl and I both nodded gravely.Bennie continued, "In our travels, we have met many people. Until we were at Protection, we had never met anyone who seemed to be in our league in skills and who was more than a friend. Now, we have.While we have been at Protection, we have stayed at the home of Robby, Pam, and Melissa. As Janice and I have found each other to be soul mates, we have both found them to also be our soul mates. We have talked.