by Kallysten
Letting out a deep sigh, Woods sat across from her, setting his still half-full plate aside on the table. “It’s not as though I choose what to show them.” He picked up the glass of juice, but simply held it on his knee without taking a sip. “You make it sound like it’s my fault.”
“How do you know it’s not?” Daisy said with a light shrug. “Maybe if you didn’t show them something else they’d stay together.”
For a long moment, Woods observed her. His gaze was heavy enough that Daisy felt like squirming, but she made herself remain very still and return his stare as coolly as she could.
“Maybe,” he finally said, and that simple word seemed to call her an idiot. “And maybe they’d be miserable all their lives.”
He took a sip of juice, then smacked his lips together as he turned toward the ocean again. “And it’s not always bad,” he added quietly, as though to himself. “Sometimes I get to show them that they’ve already made the right choice. Those are the good visions, the ones that balance out the not-so-pretty ones. But in the end, everybody finds someone.”
Daisy couldn’t let that pass. She sat up straighter, and her voice rose higher than she had meant it to, drawing Woods’ eyes back to her. “That’s not true. Tons of people end up alone, whether they want it or not.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, you’re not understanding me. Everybody I ever read.” Holding her gaze, he said, detaching each word, “Every. Single. Person.” He paused for an instant to let it sink in. “They all ended up with someone. They all had their happy ending.”
The thought was appealing, more so than Daisy would have expected, but she rejected it; Jack’s and Lydia’s pain was still too fresh in her mind.
“You can’t know that,” she said, darkly. “You’re what, thirty?”
He raised an eyebrow at her, as though curious of why she was asking his age. “Twenty-eight.”
“And you’ve been reading people’s futures for how long?”
“Eleven years.”
She nodded. It was pretty much as she had thought. “Have all the visions you’ve seen been realized yet?” she asked, her voice cracking in the still night air like trees splitting from the cold. “Maybe not all of them will. Maybe—”
“One day, Daisy,” he interrupted her gently, “you must come to my place. I’ll show you the box in which I keep the wedding and birth announcements. Sorry. The boxes.”
His words could have been harsh, but he softened them with a lopsided smile. Daisy couldn’t give in so easily, though.
“But you can’t know—”
He interrupted her again, this time by tilting his head to the French doors. “I think my next victim, as you say, is ready. Would you mind giving us some privacy?”
Daisy turned to find Joan standing beyond the window, looking a little nervous—but very excited.
“Sorry for interrupting,” she said with a sweet smile. “I can wait if—”
Daisy stood and walked to her with a smile of her own. “No, of course not. Go ahead.”
Joan stepped onto the balcony while Daisy reentered the house. She closed the window behind them, and as she had so far—as she probably would for all of her friends who decided to do this—she watched Woods try to make his ‘client’ comfortable with a few words before that always-awkward kiss.
As Joan sat down, her eyes already closing, Daisy repeated to herself that this time, everything would turn out fine. Joan and Brad belonged together, she was sure of it.
* * * *
The smell of cinnamon and chocolate filled the entire house. Joan checked her watch as she set the sliding sofa cushions firmly back in place. A few more minutes and her last batch of holiday cookies would be ready. It gave her enough time to finish straightening the living room.
She wasn’t even sure why she bothered. With all three of her boys at home for the holidays, she seemed to spend all her time picking things up the floor, whether it be cushions, magazines, or shoes. Brad was just as bad as their two sons when it came to keeping the house neat, but to be fair she had known that when she had married him, almost eighteen years earlier.
With Christmas only three days away, Brad had taken the boys for a bit of last-minute shopping that morning, leaving Joan free to bake her traditional cookies without sneaky fingers dipping into her batter or stealing burning-hot treats. She had no doubt that a generous portion of the cookies would disappear while she was shopping that afternoon.
Satisfied that the living room was decent, she moved on to the office den and dumped a pile of magazines on the low table by the entrance. As she did, she glanced at the computer and rolled her eyes when she noticed it was still on. Her requests that it be turned off when not in use were always met with promises that, of course, they would shut it off, but on this, all three men in her life were hopeless.
She moved the mouse on the desk to reactivate the screen. She was about to click the Start button to turn off the computer when she noticed the minimized window on the taskbar. She clicked on it—and grimaced at once when, on the window that popped up, a busty blonde thrust her chest forward, a flashing banner across the top inviting Joan to click for the blonde’s sexual exploits caught on camera in all their glorious details.
With a mutter of distaste, she clicked the X to close the pop-up. It disappeared, only to reappear almost at once. She did it again, with the same result. Now growing annoyed, she sat at the desk and summoned the task manager to force the browser program to shut. Those pop-up windows were so annoying!
A sudden thought stopped her before she could turn off the computer. Graphic pop-ups didn’t come out of nowhere. Where had this one come from?
She launched the browser again and searched the history. She found what she was looking for at once. Without even clicking on the links, the URL addresses and descriptions were explicit enough for her to recognize adult video sites.
The oven timer started ringing, the beeping shrill and obnoxious so that she couldn’t ignore it. Standing so abruptly that she almost knocked over the chair, she shut off the computer and left the room. Her jaw was locked in anger as she returned to the kitchen. She pulled the sheet of cookies out and transferred them to the cooling rack, her gestures harsh enough in her annoyance that she broke a couple of them.
It was exactly to prevent this sort of things that the family computer was in the den, the screen facing the living room. It was also why the door was never closed. It wasn’t that Joan and Brad didn’t trust their sons; they only wanted to make sure they used the internet responsibly. Looking up adult websites was not part of what they were allowed to do.
When they came back from the mall, hiding shopping bags behind them and grinning as they dashed through the kitchen, she couldn’t help but look at Joey suspiciously, wondering when exactly he had attempted to further his sexual education. She tried to be as fair as possible with discipline and not to accuse before she knew who was responsible for a particular bout of mischief, but in this case she was sure she had the culprit. At nine years old, Terry still thought that girls had cooties; she couldn’t begin to imagine her little boy looking at those videos. In truth, though, she didn’t want to imagine her oldest child looking at them, either.
She waited a few seconds after the boys had disappeared, long enough for Brad to plant a kiss on her cheek and eye the cookies a bit too closely, before she said, “Maybe we should rethink Joey’s laptop.”
Brad raised a surprised eyebrow at her and plucked a cookie from the cooling rack, quickly stepping out of reach of her spoon-armed hand. “Rethink it? Why? It’s already under the tree!”
“You’re going to spoil your appetite,” she complained even as she glanced toward the kitchen’s entrance, wondering where the boys were. She dropped her voice in case they were close enough to hear. “He’s been looking at porn online.”
The cookie Brad had just bit i
nto must have gone down the wrong way, because he started coughing and striking his chest with his fist, his face turning bright red.
“What?” he said, looking at her through wide, watery eyes.
“At least I hope it’s him. I can’t imagine Terry going to look for porn. I’m not ready to have that talk with him yet.”
She looked at him as she started setting the table for lunch. He had to be as stunned as she had felt because he still hadn’t said a word. He set the cookie on the counter and brushed his hand over his pants.
“Do you want to talk to him about this or should we do it together?” she asked when she finished, taken aback that he still hadn’t reacted. “Maybe he’d be less embarrassed if—”
“It was me,” Brad interrupted her, grimacing as he finished.
The words made no sense and Joan could only frown at him. “What?”
“It was me,” he repeated, scratching at his neck with two fingers. “I was looking at that site.”
Joan felt like she had just been drenched in icy water. She swallowed hard and tried to talk, but she couldn’t get out more than a word. “You…”
Taking a step toward her, Brad started raising his hand toward her arm, but she moved back and out of his reach.
“I just—” he started.
“Don’t.” She turned back to the oven. The warming drawer made a slight creaking noise when she opened it too sharply. “I don’t want to hear it. After the talk we gave them about the net, I can’t believe—”
She snapped her mouth shut. Sliding her oven mitts on, she pulled out the casserole from the drawer. She couldn’t talk about this now, not when she felt so wounded, not when it was so fresh. She didn’t want to say something she would regret later.
“Boys!” she called out, her back firmly to Brad as she carried the dish to the table. “Lunch is ready.”
They rushed into the kitchen fast enough that Brad didn’t try to explain himself again, for which Joan was grateful.
Lunch was a somber affair. The boys soon picked up on the fact that Joan was mad, and their initial chatter about the video game they had been playing together quickly died out. Joan could see them giving each other puzzled looks in between more concerned ones at Brad and her, but it was beyond her to act as though everything was all right when it wasn’t. She felt betrayed and hurt, and she could only wonder if she knew the man sitting across the table as much as she had thought she did.
After the boys had excused themselves, Brad started helping her clear the table, and she could tell he would soon try to explain again. She still wasn’t ready, however, and although she wasn’t proud about it, she took the easy way out: she fled.
“I need to go now,” she said without looking at him, already grabbing her coat and purse from the mudroom. “Daisy’s waiting for me. I don’t want to be late.”
Far from being late, she was two hours early in picking up Daisy for their annual “Crowded malls don’t scare us” outing. While Daisy finished getting ready, Joan sat in the living room with Daisy’s teenage daughter. Clara was on the phone with her father, and she clearly had him wrapped around her little finger. By the time Joan and Daisy left, she had apparently convinced him to take her and a friend to the cinema the next day. Terry and Joey had been asking to see the same movie, and Joan distracted herself trying to figure out when she would take them.
She continued to keep her mind busy on the way to the mall, chatting with Daisy about their last-minute Christmas preparations. It worked for a while, but as they were strolling through the crowd, Daisy stopped walking, laid a hand on her arm, and said her name in a concerned voice.
“Joan?” Tilting her head to one side, Daisy peered at her. “What’s wrong?”
At first, Joan tried to deny that anything was going on. This was hardly the sort of thing she felt comfortable discussing with anyone, even a close friend such a Daisy. Because they knew each other so well, however, Daisy refused to believe her and continued to badger her until, a little embarrassed, Joan finally admitted that she had caught her husband looking at internet porn.
Angling their steps toward the food court, Daisy looped her arm through Joan’s and asked, “Anything more than that?”
“What do you mean, anything more?” Joan looked at Daisy as though she had lost her mind. “Isn’t it enough that he’s watching this stuff?”
“Well…” Daisy shrugged.
They had reached the coffee shop, and they both ordered a latte before finding a place to sit. Her cup cradled in her hands, Daisy leaned over the table to get closer to Joan and asked quietly, “Did he visit chat rooms, too, or dating sites? Or did he just look at porn?”
Joan bristled at the question, drawing her chair back a little and looking at the chattering crowd around them. Daisy clearly didn’t understand how upset she was.
“Not as far as I know,” she said coolly. “Does it make a difference?”
“Well, I think so,” Daisy said quietly. She reached for Joan’s hand on the table and gave it a light squeeze, drawing Joan’s eyes back to her. “Haven’t you ever read a romance novel and imagined you were in the arms of the roguish hero?”
Joan scoffed and took a sip of her coffee. It was too hot, and she burned the tip of her tongue.
“It’s not the same,” she said, sulking.
“I don’t know,” Daisy said, sounding thoughtful. “They say men are more visual than we are.”
Blowing on her coffee, Joan gave her friend a surprised look.
“Don’t tell me you’d be fine with your hubby looking at porn.”
Daisy was blushing as she raised her coffee cup to her mouth and drank deep. When she lowered her cup, she didn’t quite meet Joan’s eyes.
“Well, actually…I know where his stash is.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And it is not completely impossible that we watched some together once. Or maybe twice.”
Joan covered her mouth and stifled a burst of embarrassed giggling. “Daisy!”
Her eyes gleaming in amusement, Daisy stuck her tongue out at her. Joan laughed aloud, soon joined by her friend. Their antics drew curious glances toward them and, with some difficulty, they slowly calmed down. By tacit understanding, they finished their coffees without discussing the topic any further, and even when they returned to their shopping, they kept their conversation to safer subjects.
Joan was glad for the reprieve, but she was also glad for the perspective Daisy had cast on the incident. Maybe she had been a little harsh on Brad. As much as she sometimes joked he acted like he was Joey’s friend rather than his father, he was an adult, and maybe her reaction had been excessive.
If all he had done was look at videos, she might have been unfair. But if it had been more than that…
That evening, after a quiet dinner, Daisy’s words were still echoing through Joan’s mind when she riffled through the browsing history again. She didn’t find any dating or chatting sites, only the video ones. That was good, she supposed. She hadn’t even realized that things could have been worse until Daisy mentioned it.
She also didn’t think that she should have reacted any other way. She had a dim view of pornography, had never watched any nor had she ever wanted to. She had never imagined that someone as sensible as Daisy, someone who, all things considered, was very similar to her, could think any differently. Then again, she had never thought that her husband would look at porn behind her back, either.
She didn’t think of herself as a prude, but could it be that she was too uptight on this? Was it even remotely possible that she might enjoy looking at those videos if she gave them a try?
The boys were upstairs, and Brad was in the basement, but Joan closed the door before clicking on the first link. She couldn’t help glancing behind her as she did so, feeling slightly embarrassed at the mere thought of what she was doing. But she was only trying to underst
and, she told herself as the page loaded. She wasn’t looking at this for titillation, just to understand. She couldn’t help hiding behind her hand as the video started playing, and peeked at it from behind her fingers. The sound was turned very low at first, but she couldn’t bear listening for very long to the overly-dramatic dialogue—or what passed for dialogue—or the exaggerated moans. When the video ended, she was in part relieved that the ordeal was over, but also confused. Did Brad really enjoy watching this? It was so obviously fake, and so were the main actress’ assets.
Wondering if it was all this bad, she tried another video. The scenario that played out seemed awfully similar to the first one. At first, she thought it was a coincidence. But when the third video showed the same kind of scene, she started to suspect it was more than that. She continued going through the list, fast-forwarding through four more videos before she admitted to herself that, no, it wasn’t a coincidence. The sex acts were varied, but the videos all played through the same basic scenario.
The setting was an office. A woman sat in it, dressed in a professional suit and high heels. Sometimes she was blonde, sometimes brown-haired; sometimes she had short hair, sometimes long, in a tight bun at the beginning of the video, loose on her shoulders later on. It always was clear from her demeanor that she was some sort of supervisor, while the man who ended up joining her in her office, wearing his tie and meek attitude with the same artlessness, seemed to be her employee.
Having seen more than enough, she cleared both the history and cache before turning the computer off. She had just stood from her seat when Brad came in. He closed the door behind him, and gave the computer a quick glance before turning a pleading look to Joan.
“Let me explain.”
She raised her hand, palm out toward him to stop him. He took it and squeezed her fingers.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “Just…just tell me this. Did you fantasize about your boss?”