by Paul Preston
“I love you, Laura, whatever happens. I love you,” Stephen said.
“Me too, Ma Cherie. I’m there for you to the end,” Phillipe added.
“I know how you both feel. I love you too…”
She gave them each a kiss and left them sitting on the couch. They couldn’t seem to move. Stephen stared at the cigarettes and lighter she left and wanted to put one in his mouth and light it even though he didn’t smoke, just to be close to something Laura had just touched.
The next morning her nausea came in waves and Laura threw up several times. Roger heard her and came into the bathroom to help her. She told her husband she was pregnant and he immediately dropped to his knees on the bathroom floor, praising God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, raising his arms to thank the Heavens for the blessing. He was so emotionally moved Laura saw tears sliding down his cheeks. Roger hugged his wife with joy, then laughed and released her; worried he was holding the baby in her womb too tightly.
Plans were already being made for the baby’s room. As soon as they knew whether it was a boy or girl, they would start decorating it. Every conversation Roger and Laura had revolved around the baby. From that moment on, Roger refused to leave Laura’s side, even for a moment. He chattered on endlessly about the baby, constantly rubbing the “bun in the oven” and cooing to it. That’s all he could talk about with her, friends and parishioners. He didn’t care whether it was a boy or girl, as long as it was healthy. He kept asking over and over when their first appointment was with the doctor, whether they should have a natural birth, or a drug assisted birth and the pros and cons of each. He could talk of nothing else. They attended a prenatal training class together, awkwardly sat on the floor in different positions with the other couples, simulating what to do when the contractions started. The instructor advised the husbands to bring a shiny object to class to practice distracting their wives from the pain of their delivery by holding it up in front of them, while reminding them to breathe and push. Roger bought a silver baby rattle and was constantly shaking it in his wife’s face during the class in an exaggerated fashion that embarrassed Laura. It soon all grew tiresome for her. She had to cancel all future meetings with her gentleman lovers, as her husband seemed to be forever hovering over her shoulder. Laura missed Stephen and Phillipe. She thought about them often. Sometimes it would help her make her sleepy before bed, remembering all that they shared together. Then, right before falling asleep, she’d end her day with the same prayer.
“God, if you do exist, please make this baby the child of my husband.”
At the beginning of her first trimester, Laura emailed Phillipe, asking him to arrange a private meeting with his physician on a late Saturday afternoon for the paternity test. The physician took a sample of Stephen’s blood and he already had Phillipe’s DNA in his medical record. Both men wanted to come with her to get the results, especially Stephen, but she insisted on going alone.
After she knew the results Laura returned home, wrote in her journal and fell asleep at the vanity table. Roger arrived back from his church and called out Laura’s name as soon as he opened the door to their cozy home. He listened, but heard nothing, surmising she had already retired for the evening. He had called only twice, left messages, never reaching her at home and felt bad he didn’t try harder to contact her while he was tied up discussing which church Elder should be put on the Steering Committee. What once was so important, now seemed insignificant to the Reverend. Roger had done some thinking and praying about things ever since he found out about the pregnancy and came to the conclusion he had been neglecting his pretty wife and that was going to change. Unless God’s Voice rang out clear and true, he would put aside his writing and speaking engagements and conferences and spend more time at home with his family. Shepherding his flock at Our Savior would take up enough of his time away from them. His publisher will just have to understand. In fact, nothing in life gave him as much joy as seeing the pretty face and slender frame of his attractive wife, being in her presence and watching his child grow a little bigger and stronger every day in her womb.
Why did I wait so long to start a family?
Once he realigned his priorities to what was really important in life, he felt complete. God had truly blessed him and rewarded him for his years of faithful service to allow his seed to be planted in the womb of his lovely wife.
I know she’ll make a wonderful Mother
Roger smiled with love in his heart for his Laura. He climbed up the bedroom steps, groaning at the stiffness in his knees after presiding over church meetings all afternoon to the early evening. He opened the door and discovered the poor pretty young thing asleep at her vanity table, her delightful head resting on her folded thin arms. Careful not to wake her, he cradled her in his arms and carried her to bed. Laying her gently down she gave out a low throaty moan he had never heard before, like she had just put melting chocolate of the finest quality in her mouth. Roger was surprised by how light she was. The poor starved creature probably had not eaten much once again. Even though she was pregnant, she seemed as skinny as ever.
I’ll have to start feeding her more. She’s eating for two now.
He admired his wife’s physique and felt bad he had let his own body go. With all his work and responsibilities he never seemed to find time to work out at the health club he had joined. He made a resolution to get back on the treadmill and make himself look more attractive for his wife. Maybe he could go out running with his athletic wife again, even though it had made him terribly sore the next day. Roger undressed, put on a robe, used the bathroom and sat down on his side of the bed. As he fluffed up his favorite pillow he glanced at himself in the vanity mirror. Roger saw reflected in the mirror the diary she was always scribbling in at night. She was probably writing in it that very evening and had fallen asleep on top of it. Usually she kept it locked away in her drawer. Roger always wondered what it was she wrote about so much in her diary. He would sometimes ask and she would tell him it was just her private thoughts, nothing of any interest to anyone. He looked over her shoulder and she was dead to the world. He knew he really shouldn’t, it was her own private diary, but if she was sleeping, and would never know, why not have a little fun for a change, he thought. Ultimately, though he knew it would anger her if she ever found out, his curiosity about what was ticking away in that little brain of hers got the best of him. He had to get up anyway to turn the light off and the thermostat down, so why not take a quick peek?
With a boyish grin, he got up very quietly, grabbed his reading glasses off his bed table and looked at the page of the journal where she had stopped writing. A confused look entered his eyes as he reread a passage. He stood up straight, licked his finger and turned back a few pages in the diary, bent closer to the page and read more. He took his glasses off, wiped them with a tissue, rubbed his eyes, put his glasses back on and read more. He felt a pressing in his chest and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He felt light-headed, his knees buckled and he fell back into the vanity chair.
This can’t be. This can’t possibly be…
He kept turning back the pages in the diary and could not stop looking at the words, just as one is compelled to slow down and gawk at a terrible car accident on the highway. Squinting in the dim light, he continued to read his wife’s pornographic writings.
Roger gathered his strength, stood up, moved the chair over to the wall, with effort stood up on the chair and disabled the fire alarm. He got down, moved the chair back to the vanity and ripped out the pages from the last three months of Laura’s journal. Roger went into the bathroom, closed the door carefully and locked it. He grabbed a bath towel and pushed it tightly into the little space between the door and the floor. Using the lighter she kept in a bowl next to a candle on the bathroom sink, he lit the torn pages on fire, tossing them into the bathtub, the burning embers reflected in the lens of his wide brimmed glasses.
Chapter Eleven
Communion Sunday
“What is that smell? Is that ashes?”
Laura followed the smell into the bathroom and saw a fine layer of black dust on the surface of the tub. She walked back out, looked over the room and saw her closed diary on her vanity table. She looked over at Roger who had retained the odd look in his eyes. Laura walked over to put her diary away and suspected it had been tampered with. She looked at Roger, opened the journal and saw a large section of pages had been ripped out.
“Did you rip these pages out of my diary Roger? You did, didn’t you? You read it then? Answer me, Roger. Did you read my diary?”
Roger stood up calmly and slipped on his shoes. He spoke to Laura in a matter of fact, cold tone, without making eye contact with her.
“We are late. I had the courtesy to wait until you woke up to speak with you, but now we are late. Please go into the bathroom and get dressed. I’d like to drive separately to church today. I’ll drive the BMW and you can take the Lexus. I assume you’ll be meeting your “friend” at the 11:00 service?”
“What friend? I have no idea what you’re talking about. And how dare you rip pages out of my diary! That was my private possession, which I’ve had long before I met you. How dare you rip pages out of my diary and burn them! Have you lost your mind, Roger?”
“I could certainly ask the same question of you. We’ll see. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Please don’t be late for the service.”
Roger left the bedroom. Laura watched him go, her heart beating wildly, her diary clutched to her chest. Laura went downstairs and called Stephen. He was delighted to hear her voice after several long weeks apart. He asked how she was, but she told him they’d discuss it later in a rather curt tone of voice.
Is she angry with me?
Laura asked him in hushed stressed tones to meet her at church for the 11 o’clock service and hung up the phone. After the too brief conversation, Stephen was more despondent than ever. He suspected her girlish infatuation with him as an older man was now over. Stephen looked at his face in his rust-stained bathroom mirror and wanted to smash it into the glass. He felt extremely angry with himself for being so irresponsible with Laura. Not only was he having an affair with a married woman, the wife of a minister no less, in the guise of a dom/sub relationship, but he had lost count of how many times he had ejaculated inside her without protection.
“How could I have been so fucking stupid!” he shouted out loud at himself.
Tears pooled in his eyes, slipped out and ran down his cheeks.
She’s no longer in love with me.
In the first week of their separation, to relieve his sadness and pent-up desire, he masturbated several times, but in the end it only made him feel worse. Williamson noticed how sad he looked at work and offered him to be Belle’s Dom on stage in one performance a week, after hearing the rumors of the torch she carried for him. Stephen refused to take the position and personally apologized to Belle, which led to a terrible scene in her dressing room and she stopped talking to him as a result. Even though business was slow, Williamson offered Stephen a position as a real estate agent in his firm. He said he would pay for a class to help Stephen study for the test to take his broker’s license. Perhaps that would take his mind off the woman who had drifted away from their lives, but he politely refused. He just doggedly walked the perimeters of the club, kept an eye on the safety of the performers and thought about Laura.
Williamson missed Laura intensely as well. After she saw the grid of scars on the back of his legs during one of their last sessions together, Williamson wished he had the chance to tell Laura the horror of what happened to him when he was 13. He wanted, for the first time, to unburden it on someone he could trust, but now he would never get that chance with her. The erotic images with Laura were burned into his mind, causing the inguinal ache to return with a sharp and stabbing pain. He intuitively realized that the positive pregnancy test ended the sensual time they spent together. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being a father, but what he was sure of was that Laura’s baby would not want for anything for his entire life, whether the child was his or not. Unlike Stephen, Williamson didn’t feel particularly guilty about the affair. He was merely playing his role in the sensual awakening of the young woman. He felt his time with Laura was special to him, and a reprieve from the memory which slowly came back to haunt him with an even stronger and more biting force, the memory of his enchantress in the dark, Bella Lisa Mauricio…
Stephen slipped into the chapel a minute before the 11:00 service was about to start and sat on the aisle of the back row. The last six weeks apart from Laura had been very difficult for him. He missed her so much his heart muscles literally ached. He was tempted every Sunday to sneak in the back to catch just a glimpse of her hair or the side of her pretty face when she walked by, but knew it would only make him suffer to see her with her husband. Over the heads of the congregation, Stephen spotted the back of Laura’s golden blond hair, sitting in her usual place on the aisle of the front pew, immediately feeling warmth surge throughout his body.
Due to their performance fee and the tips Laura so kindly had given to him, as well as the paychecks he earned over the last few months at the club, he was able to pay off his credit card bills as well as the back rent he owed, and still have a little extra money left over to start life over in a new town.
I’m running off again.
He had promised Laura he would never leave her, but felt he now had no other choice. If it was her husband who had made her pregnant, Stephen thought it would be better if he left town. If it was Williamson who had made her pregnant, the situation would be complicated enough for Laura without him sticking around. And if the baby was his, it would be better for the minister never to know the truth. In any scenario, his relationship with Laura had to come to an end. He made a promise to Laura to always keep their affair a secret and not disrupt her marriage.
At least I’ll keep that one promise to her.
He contacted his landlord to break the lease, left some cash and his keys in an envelope, disposed of his few sticks of furniture, packed all his worldly belongings in one suitcase and drove to the church. The engine light was on, as usual. It had intermittently come on while Laura was in the car with him and Stephen was sure she had seen it. It showed just how sensitive and good-hearted she was to never mention it, as well as the huge dents and the broken brake light on his ugly old car he had driven her around town in, that he could never save up enough money to fix. Compared to Laura’s shiny new Lexus, his dinged up old car was an embarrassment.
I don’t deserve her…
During the service, Stephen hoped Laura would glance behind her. She appeared as still as a picture, her pretty hair resting on her shoulder over her off-white cardigan sweater. Stephen watched Laura stand, sit, pray, open a hymnal, sing, open a bible, recite the Lord’s Prayer, all quite mechanically. At one moment in the service, the Reverend asked the congregation to bow down on the padded knee rest, shut their eyes and pray for those in the church by name who were suffering, hospitalized and the like. When everyone knelt down and the Reverend shut his eyes and raised his arms in supplication, Stephen’s heart stopped. Laura stood up and turned around. She stared over the pews toward the back on the chapel. Somehow she must have sensed his presence. Stephen stood up and stared at Laura from across the length of the chapel over a hundred fee
t away. They stood watching each other, the only two out of the hundreds of worshippers whose eyes were open during the prayer. Laura seemed to sense when her husband was finishing the prayer. She broke his eye contact, turned and kneeled. Stephen sat back down as the Reverend lowered his arms and everyone sat back up in their seats. The Reverend began his homily. He was an excellent public speaker and delivered his sermon in a steady and confident tone, though he did appear a little tired, towering above in the pulpit, just below the impressive large white cross behind him.
The sermon was over and the Eucharist service began. The Reverend stood behind the altar, dramatically tearing the loaf of bread in half.
“And the Lord said, This is My Body, which was Crucified on the Cross for the Sins of the World. Take and Eat.”
Then he poured red liquid from a pewter pitcher into a silver chalice.
“And the Lord said, This is My Blood, Spilled to Cleanse the Sins of the World, Take and Drink.”
Worshippers filed up the front of the chapel to take Communion, while Stephen watched from the back. Laura was at the front of the line and was one of the first to receive the Holy Sacrament. The Reverend put a piece of bread in the open mouth of his wife and handed her a small cup of juice, without making eye contact with her.
After the doxology, the service ended. The congregation filed out row by row, led by the Reverend and his wife. As Laura passed by the final pew she stared straight ahead, though out of the corner of his eye he thought he may have noticed the Reverend glance in his direction. Laura walked rather stiffly, almost mechanically out of the chapel, standing next to her husband to greet the worshippers on the way out of the church. Stephen waited patiently in the line, his heart beating rapidly, sweat beading on his brow. As he got closer to the front of the line he got a better look at Laura. She stood next to the Reverend like a good soldier of Christ, her hands ball into fists, a strange distant look in her eyes. When Stephen made it to the front, the Reverend looked at him out of the side of his eyes, one eyebrow raised slightly, with an odd tone in his voice.