“Oh yeah,” she said, looking thankful she didn’t have to talk about babies anymore. I dropped the subject because I had already decided I did want Louis’s baby, after all.
I always had done.
◊◊◊
I went back to work the day after Boxing Day but Louis took a sick day, still not himself. He kept insisting he was fine but I was a little worried. He had two big lumps on his neck and I thought he was coming down with glandular fever or something, but he just passed it off as a mild head cold he just needed to sleep off.
So at Pat Val’s I buzzed around like usual, working the customers efficiently and with a smile. The day passed quickly alongside excited thoughts about New Year’s Eve, when I planned to tell Louis that yes, yes, I did want to start a family. We could figure out the rest later on.
If I was being honest with myself, the whole reason I hadn’t yet found myself a career—well, you know, one relating to my degree—was because actually, I hadn’t wanted to do a degree. I had always wanted to marry and have a family but I was frightened. I had chosen the so-called ‘career route’ of doing a degree in retail management because it seemed like the best thing to do at the time and yet, I’d carried all this guilt associated with getting my happy-ever-after. It was bizarre but I felt guilty almost every day of the week. I felt guilty I had ever met Louis because my mum and Jodie were still so very single. I also felt guilty I’d done a degree just because at nineteen years old, I had nothing better to do and thought I would never find anyone who might make me as happy as Louis did. I had a mountain of student debt still to pay off and I hadn’t done anything with my degree. I had worked crappy jobs since university because I didn’t want extra responsibility and I needed to focus on Louis. Was I wrong to do that? How many of us feel guilty for just being happy? With so many people around us unhappy, how many of us wonder if our own happiness has a time limit? That surely, we all succumb to strife, in the end?
Who knows what might have happened to our marriage if we hadn’t have had mind-blowing sex on Christmas Eve? If anything, it all just reminded me that it’s okay to let your guard down sometimes and just be with someone rather than question everything. Just being with Louis was the only thing I cared about. If Mum wanted to be a martyr and Jodie wanted to shag every guy at the gym, those were their choices! Not mine.
“You’ve got a customer who wants to be served especially by you,” my boss Sharon said with a raised brow, and she nodded at the back to where THAT strange man sat in the darkest booth we had.
My blood boiled. How? How? I thought I had seen the last of him.
“He’s an absolute dickhead,” I said to Sharon, “we’ve met before… I reckon he’s another of Jode’s cast-offs desperate for more, you know? Can’t you get someone else?”
Sharon laughed and fanned her face. “I’d give him a free lap dance if he let me! In public, too! Now shoo! He can’t hurt you in here… surely?” She pushed me in his direction and I walked slowly, watching his eyes flick to mine as he saw me stride his way. I noticed as I arrived, every other woman in the room looked on with curiosity as I got to talk to him.
“Hello, Jaimie,” he said in that feverishly gorgeous voice of his.
Oh no. What happened the other night was happening again…!
Heat rose in my cheeks and my throat even itched it was so hot, my shirt collar scratching the sensitive flesh. Memories of that kiss and brief flashes of the avaricious sexual appetite he displayed during that kiss were hard to forget.
I stood by the side of his booth and he looked me up and down. He didn’t look so pale but he still looked odd and drunk on lust.
“Won’t you sit?”
“No,” I said, scowling at him, trying to second guess, “are you here because somebody else dumped you?”
“Sit,” he growled, and to prevent a scene, I sat myself down. He continued, “Don’t you know… no woman has ever turned me down. No woman. The things I can do to a woman, Jaimie. Oh… you have no idea.”
“I’m glad I don’t know… I’m married, remember?” I flicked him a flash of the rings.
“Listen,” he said, using his hooked finger to bring me closer so I could hear when he whispered, “imagine how I kissed your mouth the other night. That was a preview. I could kiss you inside like that, too.”
Oh god no. I couldn’t help but squirm, my pulse there banging against the seat beneath me.
He continued in a silken, delicious whisper, “Not only kiss you, but devour you. Take you to heights you never even imagined. I have ten inches beneath here, ten.”
Ten! I didn’t know you could get them in ten! How would that fit?
“I love my husband,” I insisted.
“Ten,” he repeated, “slick and throbbing, aching for your touch. Here, right now.”
Oh my god! Was he seriously trying to make me fuck him, in a public place?
“My husband satisfies me quite well.”
“Hmm, really? So before Christmas Eve, when was the time before that he really satisfied you?” I realised I still didn’t know his name but he seemed to know a lot about my life. Was he some sadistic serial killer, keeping me under surveillance?
I stewed whilst sat there, feeling unbearably aroused and angry. How much more of this could I handle? My heart couldn’t take anymore! What with my marital issues and sudden spike in libido… to now this, with this man… talking to me in ways that would get him killed if Louis was in the room with us.
“Oh hey babe, Sharon said you were over ’ere—”
Speak of the devil.
I looked up and Louis looked between us, some recognition there in his eyes. He knew the weirdo…
“Hey mate, it was Fabien, right? We met the other night didn’t we?” My husband turned and addressed me to explain, “I was stinking drunk on Christmas Eve, Jaimie… and this feller kindly walked me home!”
“Did he?” I looked between the two men suspiciously. My husband looked genuinely innocent whilst Fabien nodded in agreement, a glimmer of ironic amusement in his grimace.
What the hell was it with this man, Fabien? I felt afraid and confused.
“What happened. You feeling better?” I reached for Louis’s hand and he squeezed mine back.
“Yeah I woke up feeling much better and popped in to see my beautiful princess because I was missing her so much.”
I leaped from my seat and into my husband’s arms, begging him to save me from this vulture, this Fabien, who was a sexual predator no doubt. I wasn’t attracted to him but there was something so alluring about him, a powerfully masculine sexuality radiating from his every pore.
“Whoa, whoa,” Louis said smiling, as I threw my arms around his neck.
“He’s being a nightmare customer,” I said into my husband’s ear and then the next thing I knew, we were kissing. Not an ordinary kiss. No.
Louis pulled me to him with his hands firmly set under my armpits, clamping me to him so hard that my feet were momentarily suspended from the floor. People around us whooped and hollered and as Sharon was passing, I sheepishly asked for five minutes.
“What about Snake Eyes?” she asked referring to Fabien, and when we all looked at his booth, he was gone. “Oh, well.”
What a shame…
“Corridor and toilets, now,” I demanded of Louis when Sharon was out of earshot.
He was quick about getting me there and we got inside the disabled toilet, locking it securely behind us. I was frenzied with some sick, perverted need and I dropped to my knees, pulling my husband’s length from his jeans and instantly licking his hardening flesh.
“Oh god Jaimie, oh god,” he said, grabbing fists of my hair. “We can do this at home, we don’t have to… oh fuck!”
I had licked and sucked him plenty of times before but this felt new, because I wasn’t self-conscious at all. I needed this as much as he did.
I licked his scent into my mouth and whispered, “I was going to tell you at New Year… but I can’t wai
t.” I fondled his balls and he begged with his eyes that I tell him. “I didn’t take my pill this morning. I’ve stopped. I want your baby. I’ve always wanted it. I was just so afraid.”
“Oh my god Jaimie, that makes me so happy,” he remarked, eyeing me with such love.
I sucked on him until he was so close, he tore me off his cock.
“Let’s start now,” he said in a growl.
He pushed me over the sink and for the first time, was rough with me. He’d never been like this before. He took my trousers and knickers down without even undoing my button or zip.
He parted my crack and howled, “Fuck you are so wet. Shit, so wet.”
He slammed into me and pounded, pounded, over and over. The ache was unreal and I called his name and cried in rhapsodies I had never heard myself pant before. I threw myself back against him and he declared, “Jaimie, I love you so much. I love you so much, baby.”
What greater joy? Than to hear the one you love say that at such an existential moment, when all your heart and all your body is thrown up to the one you’ve entrusted yourself to!
“Oh god, Louis. You’re so hard inside me, it feels so good. I want you inside me, growing. I want to let myself be happy. I want to let myself. Oh baby, I want you… all of you.”
When Louis kissed me then, his teeth nipping my top lip before licking and smothering my mouth with his, sparks shot to my clit and I began coming just from his deep kiss.
He didn’t let up though. He wanted more. He pounded on through my spasms and told me, “You’re taking the rest of the day off sick and I am going to make slow, slow love to you when we get home. So slow. I want to spend more time licking your bald cunt and your breasts… such perfect breasts. So beautiful. I love you, I can’t tell you enough… I love you so much.”
I reached below and flicked myself, masturbating in front of him for the very first time. He gawped at our reflection in the mirror and grinned, “Oh baby, I love this new side of us.”
“Fuck, so do I!” I screamed, and screamed, and screamed…
Ten minutes later, dishevelled and my uniform beyond reparation, Louis dashed out the back while I had to awkwardly face Sharon.
She grimaced. “I am glad to know you and he have sorted everything out. Plus, I’d like your secrets… maybe over a pint though, not here. Everyone heard. I think they will come here now expecting such a show every day. However, we can’t have this kind of thing, you know that!”
“It won’t happen again…” I wrung my hands like a bad schoolgirl.
She frowned. “It won’t. Here’s your pay plus a month’s severance. I’m sorry, but you know how it goes Jaimie. All these perverts will come crawling in here otherwise… word gets about.”
I took the envelope offered to me and shrugged. She was kind enough to give me a month’s pay, after all. I hugged her and apologised, then left. I knew when I told Louis he would be mad, but what did he expect? What did I expect? Plus, anyway, we had hot sex to enjoy back home and his job earned enough to tide us over for a while. Plus for some reason I just felt like everything was going to be all right for a change. Maybe I could learn a foreign language at night school and become an interpreter? Maybe I could waitress elsewhere or become a street artist? I could do anything I wanted to, if I put my mind to it, and right then all I wanted was to be the best wife to Louis I could be. Starting with sex. Then a baby. Then a little earner after that which would make me fulfilled yet not take me away from my husband and child.
Oh suddenly, everything looked ripe and rosy and nothing else mattered. Everything was going to be fine.
FABIEN
I HAD SAT on the roof of the coffee house listening to them, a floor below, having wild sex in the toilet. For some reason, this all seemed so familiar. I regularly bit drunken men on the way home from the pub and consequently, they regularly got so horny their wives were happy for weeks afterwards. Leticia had certainly made my life a misery with her magical curse and all.
Despite being in the throes of passion, I heard sincerity in Jaimie and Louis’s declarations to one another and one other thing too—real love. I saw it when I watched them indoors just moments before, when she threw herself into his arms. Though I couldn’t read her mind for some reason, I could read his and his love for her was so strong, I felt it like it was my own love. Except it wasn’t. Jaimie clearly wasn’t a woman I could ever love. She was too maternal, too helpful and caring and sweet. I’d only ever loved one, challenging woman, my Juniper. Pity we only got given one night together.
I recalled… I met my love in a dark alehouse just outside Valdoria. Though things with Leticia had started off well, the awesome sex had started to bore me, because that was all it was. So I started sneaking out a lot, just to get some fresh air, away from her relentless need of me. I braved it in the outside world.
Juniper was a barmaid, she wore poor clothes and yet her beauty did not perish for it. I began frequenting the place she worked after seeing her only once. I was there often enough that I was endangering myself in mixing with the humans so much, but I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just her beauty that pulled me in, but her fearlessness too. She was intelligent and recognised what kind of creature I was on only my sixth visit, speculating on why I ordered beer but never drank it.
I remembered, one of the first things Juniper ever told me was, “I was a twin but the other died in birth. They said that I survived was a miracle. We were six pounds each, you see. I still feel like she’s with me, do you know what I mean?”
A part of me wondered whether Jaimie was a reincarnation of the twin that died and my Juniper was lost somewhere else… tangled in transit, until she revisited this mortal world once more.
For now I knew, I couldn’t split up a happily married couple and I felt entirely certain, Jaimie wouldn’t fall for me even if she wasn’t married. I wasn’t her type; neither was she mine.
When dark came, I flew back home from the coffee shop and slept for some hours before deciding enough was enough. Either I could go back to Valdoria and try to kill Leticia and thus break this curse, or I could be killed trying to at least ask her to reconsider lifting it. Either way, life as I knew it was death, and dying wasn’t a worse fate than mine.
You see what it was with Juniper… well… after a while I stopped visiting the alehouse and visited her in the woods instead, sneaking into her bedroom at night for long sessions of kissing that almost tempted me to bite her. Yet I couldn’t. She was so beautiful in human form, I didn’t want to ruin that. In a bedroom at her father’s log cabin, we did almost make love so many times. Until the night we did just that—the night she pinned me down and forced me, well not so much forced as demanded that I, make her a woman. She told me over and over that she loved me and the feeling of her warmth in my cold arms was not like anything I had felt before. Juniper was demanding and yet sweet, too, and strong and vulnerable. All those things I’d missed in a mate. She was light and dark, all mixed in one. Yet the dark I loved best.
I had to cover her screaming mouth that night so her daddy didn’t hear us and rush into the room, then try to kill us—forcing me to kill him first. She’d nestled in my arms afterwards and slept the night away while I stared at her, trying to decide what it was I loved. I didn’t know if she was my chosen one but I knew I had only ever felt this way for her.
We were doomed anyway because as soon as I made myself loyal to Juniper, Leticia realised immediately that I was no longer loyal to her. After Juniper was killed mercilessly, it was then I realised really how much I had loved her. How much loss hurt.
After 321 years, I still loved her truthfully. It had never gone away and I thought about that one night, and those few precious moments, endlessly.
Endlessly.
Maybe I was giving up too soon…
Perhaps… I had overlooked something.
JAIMIE
A FEW DAYS later, Louis was back to work as normal and I had signed on to do a night course in cake decorati
ng. I had loved watching cakes come in for delivery in my old job to see what new designs would emerge and I had learnt a lot about what people wanted while working at Pat Val’s. So I was going to be a professional cake decorator. Not a baker, no. I could order the tiers in. I would just decorate the sponge or fruit tiers with my creativity. I didn’t know where all this had come from, but I saw the course and thought, why the hell not?
Since we’d met Fabien, a lot had obviously changed. My anger toward him had simmered and I felt a little bad. I should have sent Fabien flowers and a thank-you, really. Although, I wasn’t sure it was appropriate… and he had disappeared after making inappropriate advances toward me. It was all odd but I knew my marriage was stronger than ever before… and I suspected he was in part responsible.
EVEN though it wasn’t an after-work drink for me as such, I still met up with Jodie at our pub, the Friday night before New Year’s Eve. Louis had a surprise for me regarding the new year, he’d said, but warned me it was a secret and would be until the very last minute! I was so excited wondering about this, I could hardly contain myself!
Jodie was as withdrawn as ever and was nonchalant when she told me she was attending a few NYE parties with her colleagues. I nodded cheerfully, hearing how they planned to be seen but not stay long at any one address. She made me chuckle.
Then I asked her out of curiosity, “I mentioned to Mum about me and Louis having a baby and she said something about her pregnancy. I don’t know if she ever mentioned it to you before…?”
Jodie looked confused. “Hey, what? She never tells anybody a thing, so you know more than I do.”
“Hmm,” I mused, sipping on my chocolate stout, “she said the first scan didn’t show her twin pregnancy and it was a shock when she had her next one and they told her we were both on the way.”
“Really? Weird! I never knew that and never heard of it before now either.” Jodie chewed on the lemon from her gin and tonic and composed herself, though she was wondering about something.
Fabien Page 6