by S. K. Lessly
I was becoming obnoxiously infuriated the more I talked about it. Instead of saying what I really wanted to say, which was, ‘I’m too sexy for someone to ignore’, I took another sip of the hot coffee.
“Lauren, have you talked to him about it before today?”
“No. I mean I was trying to be understanding. I figured maybe he was feeling pressure from his job, and that’s why he didn't want to be with me. But I guess him being so nonchalant about the whole thing has pushed me over the edge.”
Paul was silent for a long time. It was probably from the shock of it all. It had taken me for a loop too. I didn’t realize the implication of what I had just said until now. A noise coming from the doorway brought me out of my thoughts. I turned toward the noise and found Sebastian standing there.
Paul stood and gave Sebastian a head nod. He cleared his throat before he addressed us both.
“I need to get to bed for this drive tomorrow. See you in the morning.”
Paul left and Sebastian sat in his seat. The quiet between us stretched to an excruciating level. It was beginning to drive me insane. I couldn’t take it any longer. I started to get up, and tell him all the ways he could kiss my ass, but Sebastian finally spoke.
“Lauren, I’m sorry about all of this. I’ve been so stuck on work and everything that I’ve been blind to what was going on around me.” He looked over at me and slid his chair closer to mine.
“Lauren, there isn’t anything wrong with you. It’s me,” he admitted and sighed. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to tell you this but…” Sebastian reached for my hand and laced his fingers through mine. “I’ve been so worked up and wound up from work that um…” He sighed again and looked at his slippers. “Wow, this is harder than I thought it would be. Look, it hasn’t been working.”
“What hasn’t been working?” I asked with my face frowned in confusion.
“It.” He looked down at his crotch and then back at me.
I still looked confused until he did the eye motion a couple more times. Finally, my eyes grew wide. “You can’t get it up?!” I blurted.
Sebastian gasped, dropped my hand, and looked around the porch conspiratorially. “Jeez, Lauren, can you not say that so loudly?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “But are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I went to the doctor and he told me it was the stress from the job that was making me unable to get aroused. Look, I know this is a lot to take in, but I just need some time, okay? I know it’s been a long time and believe me it’s hard for me to ask you to wait longer, but I really need your support.”
I leaned in and rubbed his thigh. “Why don’t you let me help you? I’m sure I can—”
Sebastian frowned and forcefully moved my hand away. “No, you can’t!” he snapped.
I looked at him stunned. He had never been that way with me and it was kind of shocking. I felt like an idiot for even touching him. Maybe I was selfish.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian.” I touched his arm and then the side of his face. “I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath before bringing his eyes to mine. “Look, I know you were really looking forward to this week, but I promise I’ll make it up to you, okay?”
I gave him a warm smile and leaned closer to him. He met me halfway and I kissed him briefly on the lips. When I pulled back, I smiled.
“Okay, no problem. I’ll just have to think of something that you can do to cheer me up.” I wiggled my eyebrows before my smile widened.
Sebastian laughed. “I’m in for it, aren’t I?
I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not… We'll just have to see.”
Paul
I stared blankly as Sebastian took his seat. My head was still spinning from what Lauren had told me. I couldn’t believe it. I was still standing in the doorway when I heard Sebastian say that he had a hard time getting it up. I almost dropped the cup in my hand.
That lying son of a bitch! And from the way the conversation was going, Lauren was believing him too. I shook my head. I couldn’t believe this.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I jumped at the sound of Samson’s voice. I shushed him and walked close to him.
“You will not believe what I just found out,” I said in a low tone.
“Damn, I never thought you were a gossip, Wolf. That’s some bitch shit.” He shook his head disapprovingly. I ignored him and the stupid nickname they called me at work. I hated it as much as Samson hated Tank. Wolf was a play on of my last name and referenced the character from X-men, Wolverine. His real name was Logan.
“Will you shut up and listen,” I chastised him in a harsh whisper. I walked away from the back porch, signaling him to follow me. I headed toward a small sitting area located in the front of the house and sat down in one of the two chairs sitting in front of a large picture window. I impatiently waited for Samson to join me and take the seat opposite me. When he reached to turn on the lamp between us, I stopped him.
“Dude, I don’t want to be caught sitting in the dark with you,” Samson said jokingly.
“Shut the fuck up and listen,” I ordered, my voice short but hard. Samson sat down across from me and I didn’t waste any time. “Lauren just told me that she and Sebastian haven’t had sex in six months.”
“Bullshit.” Samson blurted out in a somewhat hushed tone.
“Yeah, no bullshit. I’m just telling you what she told me.”
“How can that be possible? I mean have you seen her?” Samson pointed in the direction of the back porch.
“Exactly. But that’s not the crazy part. Think about what I told you about a month ago.”
Samson shook his head. “Man, I don’t remember what you told me yesterday much less—”
“Damn, Tank. Remember I told you about hearing Lauren and Sebastian having sex marathons during the day for a couple of weeks now?”
Samson looked at me for a minute before his face lit up in recognition.
“Holy shit! So, that means…”
I started to nod. “Yeah…”
Samson shook his head again. “Wait, maybe you were hearing things. I mean what if he was just watching porn or something.”
“Yeah, that would be plausible except I just heard him tell her the reason why he hasn’t fucked her. He claimed can’t get it up.”
Samson laughed. “Ah, hell. You’re kidding me? And she bought that?”
I shrugged. “Why wouldn’t she? Also, I know what a porn movie sounds like, Samson. That wasn’t porn I heard. That was two people fucking in the middle of the day, multiple times for multiple days.”
Samson looked at me and started nodding slowly. “Yeah, man, I agree. Wow, what are you going to do?”
“Nothing. Seriously, what do I look like telling Lauren that I heard Sebastian having sex with someone else behind her back? Talk about some bitch shit.” I shook my head. “I just can’t believe what he’s doing. I mean granted I don’t know Lauren as well as he does, but if I was with her, if she were mine…” I let the rest of my sentence hang in the air and shook my head.
Samson didn’t say anything else to me. He blew out a breath, pawed my shoulder with his meaty hand, stood, and left me sitting in the dark thinking about a woman I was beginning to start to care about more and more.
10
Paul
The next morning everyone rose early to pack and put the house back together again. We had a cleaning service coming to do the major cleaning. We took care of the smaller items like emptying the pantry and refrigerator of the food we’d bought and things like that. Any leftover cooked food we had, we split it up among ourselves. The food that hadn't been opened, Tyler was going to drop it off at a local shelter on his way home.
Sebastian needed to leave extra early from the Poconos in the morning so he had asked Sabrina and me if we could give Lauren a ride home. I agreed, of course, without question and loaded her bags in my truck for the trip home. As I drove, Lauren sat quietly in the
back. I wondered how everything had ended with her and Sebastian last night. They seemed okay earlier, but as Lauren sat in the back alone with her thoughts, I wasn’t so sure.
I thought about the advice Samson had given me. Should I tell her about my suspicions? It was clear to me that Sebastian was cheating on Lauren. I damn well knew the difference between what a porno sounded like versus live action between two people. Besides, what were the odds that someone in a porno would shout Sebastian’s name?
I also thought about the possibility that the Maxwells had house guests for a time and it was their “guests” that were engaged in afternoon sex. However, there was that point about a woman screaming Sebastian’s name that nixed that idea.
For a long time, I had begrudgingly thought it was my neighbors getting it on, taking advantage of the time they had together. Sebastian did work a lot, but I thought maybe he had taken off a few afternoons to make love to his wife. It wasn’t a foreign concept. I used to sneak off of work to come home and screw Sabrina’s head off. It made sense because of Lauren and Sebastian’s work schedules, they could indulge in an afternoon quickie. But that idea died last night when Sebastian lied to his wife.
Erectile Dysfunction my ass!
I looked in the rearview mirror and found Lauren’s eyes were closed. I looked over at my wife and she had her eyes glued to her cell phone, in her own world.
I wasn’t a stranger to the suspicion of infidelity in a relationship. In fact, I had been on the other end of the spectrum. Sabrina had falsely accused me of cheating about a year ago. I didn’t blame her when she confronted me with all of the facts she had secretly acquired. Secret phone calls, lying about where I going, and mistrust were just some of the things I was guilty of doing. There were times when I would tell her that I was going one place when in actuality I went somewhere else. And one day Sabrina followed me, which gave her everything she needed to confront me.
She waited until I came home from my shift before she confronted me. At first, I was shocked. I hadn’t realized the implications of my actions until that moment. I had been shutting my wife out of my life. Stacy Larson, my therapist, had told me as much, and I would always deny it. But as I watched how upset my wife had been, the depths she took to find out why I was lying floored me. It was then that I decide to come clean and tell my wife everything.
I had explained that there had been a bad case not too long ago where three kids had died in a fire and I had been the one to discover them. I had never been affected by a case like this before in my life, but this one was my exception.
My firehouse had arrived on the scene of a house that had been engulfed in flames. There wasn’t anything we could do but contain the fire and prevent it from spreading to the neighboring houses. The woman who lived there was stricken with horror. I heard her tell an officer that she had pulled up and found smoke and flames billowing everywhere and she couldn’t get close to the house at all.
A police officer had asked her if she had any ideas how the fire had started. She shrugged and shook her head. I asked if she had a space heater in her house. Space heaters had been the cause of a few fires we had been dealing with for weeks now. Some people didn’t understand the dangers of space heaters when left unattended.
Because of that, I figured it was a shot to at least ask and sure enough the woman nodded that she had one. She hadn’t been sure but she could have sworn that she had turned off the heater before she decided to go out for a couple of drinks. As I listened to the rest of her statement, one of the onlookers watching the destruction called to her, a neighbor I guessed, and asked her where her kids were. The moment her eyes grew the size of her face, my face and heart dropped.
The kids were still in the house, was my first thought, but the woman quickly assured us that they weren’t. She explained to us they were over a friend’s house and everyone relaxed except for me. It was something about the way the woman stared into the flames, how her top lip had a sheen of sweat coating it even though the temperature had been in the teens that night. Also, she started to fidget. She started asking if she could leave, practically irritating the cops on the scene so they would let her go. She had claimed that her kids were probably worried about her, and her youngest needed to get his medicine.
It was three in the morning, so I doubted her kids would even be up that early. But the cop didn’t hold her. They took her information down and let her go. By the time the fire had been extinguished and the house searched, I discovered a gruesome sight that made my whole body quake with rage. Three charred bodies were lying by a small boarded up basement window huddled together. The coroner estimated the ages were between five and nine.
I had been rocked by that scene. Everyone there had been affected. But for me it was different because I had been the one who’d found the babies. I had also been the only one who didn’t feel right about the woman’s story. I felt horrible for not pressing my chief more to investigate her story. Maybe I could have saved them.
After that fateful night, I started having nightmares. I could barely sleep or eat. It had started to affect my job in such a way that my chief grounded me and sent me to mandatory counseling. It took weeks, but I was finally able to close my eyes and not see the bodies of those children. Don’t get me wrong, I was still haunted by what I had seen, but at least I had stopped blaming myself for everything.
I had explained all of this to Sabrina. As expected, she asked why I hadn’t told her what had happened sooner. I had no reason to give her that would make sense. I just explained that it was due to simple pride. Again, I had never been affected this badly by the things I saw on the job. The number of people, even kids that died as a result of a fire wasn’t extremely high, but it happened. However, for me, this case was different. I blamed myself for not being able to save them. And I had thought that, if I told Sabrina, she might do the same.
When I was done coming clean to Sabrina, she just looked at me. The accusations were still in her eyes, but she verbally accepted my story. I even took her with me to see Stacy, thinking that bringing her to some of my sessions would solve her doubt.
It did, but only for a little while. Sabrina began to find other reasons to argue and fight. My marriage, after that, started to get rocky, but I didn’t think for a million years that I would be where I was today, fighting for a marriage that was probably already over.
This shit was fucked up on so many levels and I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I call it quits and move on or should I continue to fight? I figured the answer to that question would depend on Sabrina. If she would put forth the effort then I would too, if she refused, then… I’ll leave that last thought open, but you could fill in the blanks, right?
“There you are. I was looking for you.”
I groaned to myself at the sound of my best friend’s voice and wished I could disappear right now.
I breathed out a sigh when I heard his footsteps coming closer, but I refused to open my eyes. I had finally found a quiet place away from the hustle of the firehouse and surprisingly it wasn’t the sleeping quarters. Luckily, I had found the common room deserted, which was a rarity, but now, he was about to ruin it. Maybe if I kept my eyes closed, he’d think I was asleep and keep moving.
We used this common room to watch television and lounge. There was another common room that had seating too, but that room also had a few old-fashioned arcade games, a pool table, and an air hockey game. There was no way I was going in there to clear my head and rest. That room was always occupied. So was this room, but for some reason, it was empty when I walked in a few minutes ago.
The lounge area had three very comfortable couches scattered throughout the space, a few coffee tables, and end tables surrounding each couch, and a large flat screen TV.
I had settled on one of the couches and shut my eyes. It was close to seven o’clock in the evening. I was trying to get my mind right before I headed home. I was cutting out early tonight. Sabrina and I were heading to Florida on a late fl
ight for a long weekend to visit her parents and I wasn’t looking forward to the trip at all.
She and I needed this, though. We needed time to really get a way and talk about us, without any distractions. I expected this trip would determine our future. We’d either come home together with plans for our future, or I’d return home by myself.
I felt Samson’s bulking frame hovering over me and I held my breath, praying he’d keep walking. My prayers went unanswered as I heard him plop down on the couch next to me, an end table the only thing separating us. I heard the click of the reclining lever, announcing he was getting really comfortable, and a long sigh escape his lips.
There went my quiet.
“I thought you had left to head home already?”
I sighed begrudgingly and opened my eyes. I kept my eyes on the ceiling and blinked a few times before I turned my head to the right and met his disgruntled gaze. I thought about telling him I was sleeping and wanted peace and quiet, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me be. It would seem he wanted to talk.
Resolved to the fact I wasn’t getting any more peace, I shifted my eyes back to the ceiling, covered them with my forearm, and replied, “Nah, not yet. In about thirty.”
“You excited to get some alone time with your woman?”
I smiled thinly. “I don’t know about being excited, but we need this trip.”
I could feel Samson’s eyes on me, but I refused to look at him.
“What’s going on between you two? I thought you were working things out?”
Fuck…
I lifted my arm from my face and looked at him. He was staring back at me with his arms folded over his chest.
“Yeah, if we could stop arguing maybe we could work things out.” Samson’s eyebrows rose and I sighed and explained, “Ever since we’ve came back from the Poconos she and I have been at each other’s throats.”
