by Moriah Jovan
She’d never slept naked.
She’d never had an orgasm.
She’d never been given jewelry other than her simple gold wedding band.
“Oh, McLean,” she whispered, angry. So angry now for so many reasons she couldn’t begin to sort them out.
With which man, she didn’t know.
McLean, for barely keeping a roof over her head and leaving her nearly penniless, with no provision for his death because it was one of those Things Polite People Don’t Talk About . . .
Or Knox.
For showing her in one week what she’d missed in twenty years of marriage.
She wasn’t sure, but perhaps she was more angry about that than about the way Knox went about getting her in bed.
Gritting her teeth, refusing to think about what to do with the things Knox had given her, she swept out of bed and walked naked across the room, across the hall to the restroom. She stopped short when she saw herself . . . nude . . . and forced herself to really look at her body without shame.
Breasts still pert— Was that normal for a woman her age? She didn’t know; she had no basis for comparison. Flat stomach. Wide hips, though. She worked to keep her body looking acceptable, but it was unreasonable to compare herself to what she saw in magazines. Besides, her motive was to keep osteoporosis and heart disease away; a reasonably fit body was a side effect.
The face that stared back at her didn’t seem any different than it had for years, so she didn’t figure she was a good judge of how old she really looked. Her only vanity, her hair, was a light auburn naturally, and her only splurge was that she kept it that way. Her dark auburn pubic hair hadn’t yet faded to gray.
Her knees nearly buckled with the weight of the desire that overcame her, staring the V between her legs, remembering what Knox had done to her this week.
He liked putting his mouth there, between her legs, licking her there, putting his tongue up inside her, making her hips buck up off the bed and screech with the power of the sensations rolling through her.
She’d never known people did that.
As she watched herself in the mirror, she put her hand flat against her stomach and slowly stroked downward.
Touch yourself, Leah.
Knox, no, I . . .
Do it.
She’d done it.
Cautiously. Frightened.
Of what, she didn’t know, but . . .
He’d opened her legs for her, taken her hand, put it there, taken her middle finger and put it on that little pea-sized protrusion she had never felt until his tongue found it.
That’s right. That’s your clit. Stroke it.
She knew what it was. She hadn’t become a registered dietitian without anatomy classes, but she had never known how it looked or felt. She’d never explored by sight or by touch, and McLean had certainly never done so.
McLean had never seen her naked, sex being another one of those Things Polite People Do But Don’t Enjoy.
No, no. I’m not going to help you. I want to watch you learn how to do this yourself.
Knox had propped her up with a stack of pillows, bent her knees, spread her wide, placed her hands, then sat at the foot of the bed facing her, his knees pressing hers open. But he’d guided her hands anyway, watched her, directed her some more, talked to her low and soothingly.
Encouraging her.
Teaching her.
Don’t be shy, Leah. I’m not going to make fun of you. Relax. Think about how my tongue feels there.
A thirty-one-year-old man teaching a forty-six-year-old woman how to masturbate.
Unbelievable.
She’d found her clitoris, stroked it the way he’d instructed, found herself catching her breath.
Other hand, now. Put your fingers up inside you, the way I do.
She’d done as instructed, half afraid of . . . something . . . she didn’t understand.
Then she came.
Arched her back.
Closed her eyes and groaned as her body clenched around her own fingers and she felt Knox’s big, warm hands around her inner thighs, keeping her open. She’d felt his long, hard legs under hers, supporting them.
That’s right, Leah. Let yourself go. Feel it . . .
Leah moaned, gasped as she came right then, sitting on the bathroom floor and watching herself in the mirror, remembering Knox teaching her how to please herself.
Of all the things Knox had given her . . .
She sagged back against the wall, tired, confused, sated (for the moment), and smelling of sex. She sniffed her fingers and wondered that the acrid scent didn’t really disgust her; it wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t unpleasant, either, and she couldn’t reconcile it.
McLean had been an elder at the Lynwood, Texas Church of the Firstborn. He’d been twelve years older than Leah and had certain opinions about what a husband and wife should and should not do together—
—and Leah only just now realized it.
She couldn’t help her anger that he had left her to find this with a man fifteen years her junior and who had gone about his seduction in a truly evil manner.
Sex with McLean was a duty, and one not that often done, either. She’d never known it could be enjoyed; no one had ever told her.
Perhaps it was best she’d never known, because surely she would have grown to resent him the way she was growing to resent him now.
Leah arose slowly, slightly sore in muscles that she hadn’t known could get sore.
She showered and dressed.
Packed up what little she had kept at Knox’s; Rachel would have probably stolen everything from the motel room they’d shared, but no matter. She wouldn’t miss a few clothes and toiletries.
She glanced at the rose and the note, the jewels and the key that still lay on the fine linens where she’d left them, then decided to take them.
It was the only thing she’d have left of Knox, though why she wanted to remember him, she didn’t know.
* * * * *
When she pulled into her driveway the next evening, it was to see the secretary of Lynwood, Texas Church of the Firstborn lurking about her dirty picture window and peering in one of the three small diamonds in the front door.
With new perspective, Leah studied her home, a small dingy tan brick ranch with mortar weeping “decoratively” from between each course of masonry. It needed a good sandblasting to clean it. Her yard was a mess, but she’d been gone two weeks. Not that that had made much difference; it wasn’t a mess of good grass that had grown and gone to seed. It was a mess of weeds, and sparse at that, interspersed with patches of dirt. She had the worst house in an aging, rundown neighborhood.
She swallowed with shame: hers or McLean’s, she didn’t know.
It was all she could do to pay the mortgage, much less keep up her home or improve upon it. And now, after having finally called in to her answering machine this morning and listened to her messages, she wasn’t even sure she had her job waiting for her in the morning.
“Leah!” called Noreen as Leah emerged from her rattletrap car. Her brow wrinkled when she noticed how decrepit it was. How had it made the round trip from Houston to Kansas City? “Where you been, honey?”
Leah looked up at Noreen as if meeting at her for the first time, and perhaps she was. Noreen had always been a very good friend to her and McLean, always around for special occasions, celebrations, and generally made herself available to them.
At Leah’s age, Noreen was single, having never married, and Leah had always wondered why. She was an extremely attractive woman. She’d been the church secretary for as long as she could remember, and it seemed she’d taken McLean’s death harder than Leah had.
Leah opened her mouth, and said with a calm that astounded her, “How long were you in love with McLean?”
Noreen’s eyes bulged and her mouth worked up and down, soundless. Leah would never have seen it and, further, never would have had the courage to ask the question, had not Knox shown her wha
t she was missing.
“Were you sleeping with him?”
“No!” she breathed, horrified. “McLean wasn’t like that, Leah, you know that.”
Not even with his wife.
Leah wondered why she hated McLean at this moment far more than she hated Knox, who had demanded her virtue yet given her more in return than it was worth.
“Did McLean know?”
Noreen gulped. Well, that could mean anything, Leah supposed, but she felt that same strange serenity she’d felt all the way from Kansas City to Houston. “I don’t— I don’t know.”
The diamonds in Leah’s bracelet flashed and she looked down at it.
So did Noreen, and an unfamiliar confidence flowed through Leah.
“That’s pretty,” Noreen said, but Leah couldn’t tell if she wanted to weasel out of the awkward conversation or if she wanted to know how Leah could have come by something that fine. It hadn’t come from Claire’s, for sure, but Noreen was too polite to be that gauche. “You have— Uh, you have matching earrings.”
Leah laughed, though it was more sad than funny.
“These diamonds are probably worth more than my house,” Leah murmured to herself, not caring that Noreen didn’t realize she was eavesdropping.
Yet another way Knox had taken care of her that McLean hadn’t.
“Go home, Noreen,” Leah finally said.
“You never said . . . about Rachel, I mean.”
Leah took a deep breath. “Rachel is . . . ” And Knox just kept on giving, doing what McLean never had. “Not my problem anymore.”
“Wha—?”
She looked at Noreen then, fully, and thought she shouldn’t resent the woman because she had no real reason to. So she’d been in love with Leah’s husband; he hadn’t had any more interest in her than he did Leah. In effect, they were in the same boat, but that didn’t mean Leah wanted her around. “Please, just go home. I need to get a few things sorted out.”
Noreen looked about to cry. “I’m sorry, Leah.”
People had been saying that a lot to her lately, all except the one person who should’ve.
But, again, perhaps that was for the best.
“Can I help you with anything, at least?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
Or she would be as soon as she got a new life, because she certainly could not live like this anymore.
Noreen left, and Leah walked across her knee-high-weed-ridden lawn to the front door, shaking out her keys. She chose the correct key by feel and shoved it into the lock.
Which didn’t turn.
What?!
She began to panic because . . . well, because. The last two weeks had been surreal enough, anything horrible was possible.
Lifting the keyring to make sure she had the right key, she saw that she didn’t. She had tried to slide Knox’s key into her lock.
She choked.
I want you.
One week, and she’d miss his body beside hers in bed tonight.
You’re beautiful.
McLean had refused to tell her that, even when she’d asked. That’s a vanity, Leah; we mustn’t be prideful.
She sighed and went into her house, opened it up, collected her mail from the floor, unpacked the few belongings Rachel had left in the motel room, and went to bed.
* * * * *
“I’m sorry, Leah, but two weeks . . . A week was hard enough, but I understood. Another week on such short notice? No, I don’t think I can let that slide.”
Leah stared at her boss stonily, her jaw clenching.
One of those big tanned hands giveth, and the other taketh away: Her only way to make a living, and not likely to get a comparable job since she’d burned this bridge and her options were slim and her profession was a small community.
She looked at the bracelet around her wrist and wondered . . .
“All right,” she said without another moment’s hesitation, refusing to bow and scrape and beg the way her boss wanted her to. “I’m owed comp time. I have three weeks of sick time left and four of vacation. Since you don’t think you can let that slide, I’ll take every bit of that in cash, please.”
Her boss’s mouth went slack.
No, she hadn’t expected that. Leah had never stood up to her in her entire history here, which was how she’d ended up with so much comp time and sick time and vacation. She couldn’t say no. She wasn’t allowed to say no.
“You’re lucky I don’t sue you for not compensating me properly, and I will if you don’t cough it up.”
Leah now understood cynicism. Her boss had never realized Leah knew that what she’d done was illegal. Comp time in lieu of overtime. Well, now or later and if it were later . . .
As long as you want.
“I’m leaving Houston as soon as I sell my house,” Leah said calmly. “I’ll come back Wednesday for my check. I know exactly how much it should be. If it’s not that, I’ll call my lawyer.”
Whether he could practice law in Texas or not would be irrelevant to him; furthermore, she knew he’d come if she called.
“I promise you don’t want to mess with my lawyer.”
“Uh, Leah, you know, maybe we could reconsider . . . ”
“No. Wednesday by noon.”
It was possible the woman would lose her job over that, and Leah hoped she did.
Leah did what she could do herself on her house to make it presentable in the day and a half she had before she had real money to get real stuff done. She had a week-long garage sale and what she didn’t sell by the time her house went on the market the next week, she carted off to Goodwill.
The house sold in two days, praise the Lord, which she took as His will. She would find a new church when she got where she was going.
As soon as she had the cash, she traded in her car for one she knew would make the eight-hundred-mile trip back. Straight out of the lot, she headed north on I-35 once again, but this time to begin her new life, not to clean up her old one.
Her old life was as dead as her husband.
* * * * *
A chubby little strawberry blonde with frizzy hair, glasses, and braces opened Knox’s door Friday evening, and Leah felt her world collapse.
“Hi,” said the girl, who looked to be somewhere in her early twenties, a little older than Rachel. “What can I do for you?”
“Yo, Giselle!” Knox’s voice from somewhere in the depths of the house, then his voice got nearer as he continued speaking. She saw past the girl, who had turned to watch him come out of the hallway that led to his bedroom, pulling a tee shirt down over his broad chest still spotted with water droplets. His hair was wet. “Would you make me some favorite potatoes? Please? A couple, three pans, throw ’em in the freez— Leah,” he breathed, his eyes wide.
Leah didn’t know what to say. Her original assumption probably wasn’t correct, considering the girl’s youth and what he’d asked her to do, but . . . “Um . . . ”
The girl looked between Knox and Leah, then said, “Uh, yeah. I’m heading home. Thanks, Knox.”
“Yeah,” he said absently, waving her off, not breaking his stare with Leah.
The girl, Giselle, held the door for Leah, who stepped in warily. She brushed by and out the door, letting it slam closed behind her.
“Who’s that?” Leah asked calmly, surprising herself with the strength of her demand.
“My cousin,” he replied softly, as if it didn’t occur to him that she had no right to ask, and wanted to allay her fears. “I do her taxes.”
“Oh.”
The diamonds flashed in the meager sunshine coming through the screen door, and caught his attention. Then it returned to her face.
“I don’t know how long I want to stay,” she said, faking courage.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You wanted me,” she said deliberately. There was only one conclusion he could draw from t
hat, and he wasn’t slow.
He watched her carefully for a moment, then said, “You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He nodded, then said, “Uh, I was on my way to the airport to pick up a friend. Would you care to join me?”
So, this was it.
She hadn’t really thought about what returning to him would mean beyond being his lover, but—
“I don’t want to lock you in my bedroom, Leah,” he murmured. “I asked you to stay because I hoped you would want to see my life so you could make a decision as to whether you wanted to be part of it or not.”
Leah chucked up her chin. “Maybe all I want is sex.”
His mouth tightened. “Well,” he said brusquely, “I guess I can’t blame you for thinking that’s all I’d offer you.”
“I didn’t think much past that, to tell you the truth.”
A wide smile slowly grew on his face and she caught her breath at the change that true humor made in him. “Glad to know I’m that good in bed, then.” He gestured toward the door. “Shall we?”
He opened the passenger door of his SUV for her, handed her in, and closed it, then strode around to the driver’s side. She watched him, feeling as out of sorts as she ever had because this was a brand new side of him she saw: A normal man, albeit more gentlemanly than most.
“Who are we picking up?” Leah asked, as much to get McLean and all the levels of meaning of their relationship out of her head as to start a conversation.
“Annie Franklin,” Knox grunted as he climbed in and began the process of starting the car, backing out of the driveway, and going somewhere. “She’s— Well, it’s kind of hard to explain my relationship with her. I think of a lot of people in my life in terms of family, but they’re not related to me in any way.”
“So, Annie is . . . ”
He took a deep breath. “My little sister, I guess, if I had to label her. She just graduated from Princeton.”
“And you have many people like her in your life?”
“Yes. I have a daughter. She’s not really. She’s not even legally my ward or foster daughter or anything, but that’s how I think of her. You probably won’t meet her for a while. She left for college last week and she’ll be going year-round so she can graduate early.”
