by Jojo Brown
“Things were done differently, back in the old days. Women were a lot stronger than they are today. They weren’t mollycoddled the way they are now. They just went in and had the babies and we stayed out in the waiting room, the way it should be. A man does his part, when he plants his seed; it’s up to the woman from there on. And, if anything goes wrong, it’s her fault.”
“But Dad, Nanny said that there were some strange things about my birth. Surely you remember what happened.”
Finally focusing his eyes on me, as if he had just realized that I was still there, “I told you—I wasn’t there! How should I know what happened for sure? I waited in the waiting room—you were born—that’s all I know.”
Pulling the chain from its hiding place under my sweater, I held the pendant in my hand. For some unknown reason, I had kept it a secret, hidden against my breast, until now.
Opening my hand to show it to my father, I asked him, “Do you know where this came from?”
The transformation of his face was very nearly the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. All the color drained from him. His eyes widened, so that I feared they might fall from their sockets. His lips peeled back into a fearsome grimace, exposing shrunken gums and stained teeth.
With a sudden movement, he pushed me away, sent me sprawling, painfully to the floor. Jumping to his feet, he literally ran to the other side of the room.
“Where did you get that thing?” His strangled voice was nothing even close to the strong, baritone I had grown up with.
Tears were now streaming down his face. My father was scared. No, he was terrified! Closing my hand again around the small disk, I felt its warmth.
“But what is it, Dad? Where did it come from?”
“Ask her!” he screamed, “Ask your mother.”
“Oh sure. I’ll just do that,” I yelled right back at him, feeling the tears now soaking my own cheeks.
“I’ll go ask someone who has been dead since I was six years old. I know, I’ll have a séance and say ‘Excuse me … spirit of my dead mother … but I have a question for you …’”
“She’s not dead.” He said it so quietly that I wasn’t sure if I had actually heard him right.
“What did you say?”
Opening the front door, he turned back to me, “I said she’s not dead. She’s at Mountain View. Has been all along.”
Four
I’m not sure how long I sat there in the middle of the living room floor, stunned by what I had just heard. My father had not come back into the house, as far as I knew. I didn’t know where he went nor did I care.
By the time I pulled myself together, my legs were asleep from sitting on the hardwood floor and the sun was setting. As I stood, stamping my feet to get some feeling back into them, I knew what I had to do. I just hoped that I had the strength to do it.
I had to leave.
I had to find the answers for myself, and I had to find someone to help me.
It was so cold, I wasn’t sure that my old Ford Ranger would even start for me. I threw a hastily packed bag onto the passenger side floor of the truck’s cab and jammed the key into the ignition. Praying that my faithful old truck would still have what it took, I turned the key. After only two or three tries, the engine rolled over and caught.
Throwing it into gear, I slammed my foot down on the accelerator and tore down the ice-packed laneway. Sliding sideways out onto the gravel road, I had one thought in mind. I had to get to Chris. He was the only one that I could think of that could or would help me.
When old Doctor Stockwell retired, Chris took over his practice.
His wife had left him after only being here for a little over a year. She had never been able to handle living in a small town and the winter out here in the prairie, had been too much for her.
She’d moved back to Vancouver and filed for a divorce. The last news of her had been eight years earlier. She remarried and moved to California with her new husband.
For the ten years after her unceremonious departure, Doctor Christopher Andrew McLean had not only been the town’s physician, he was also the town’s most eligible bachelor. At least as far as the general population knew at that moment, he still was.
At forty years old, Chris was still a very good-looking man, in excellent physical condition. He and I had become very good friends, more than two years earlier, while my grandmother still lived at home on the farm. Chris would come out to tend to her, on a moments notice.
House calls were a regular part of his practice. His philosophy had always been that farmers are just too busy to be sick. On more than one occasion, he had been known to say, if I didn’t go out to check on them, we would be finding their bones out in the fields, dry as the prairie grasses in August.
For the most part, he more than likely was right. Of course, the townsfolk and the younger generation of farmers all saw him at the office. The twenty-first century has brought so many new innovations that even the farmers have more free time on their hands.
Not the ‘old-timers’, though. They stick to the old ways, communing with the earth, feeling the soil in their fingers and watching the weather by looking at the sky instead of some computer readout. Somehow, their produce always tasted better to me.
When Nanny was moved into the nursing home, Chris continued to find reasons to come out to the farm. He eventually asked me out for dinner, for the first time, about thirteen months before Nanny died. He was my first and only real love, I had been with a few select other men, but none of them compared to Chris. Not only was he older and more experienced in the fine art of lovemaking, he seemed to truly want to focus in on my needs, my wants.
I still remember the first time he buried his beautiful face between my thighs. His tongue sought out and found my until-then-shy clit. With deft flicks and swirls, he coaxed that tiny bundle from its hiding place and introduced my whole body to the glorious world of screaming orgasms. My thighs and his entire face glistened with the great waves of fluid he drew from my shuddering body.
That alone would have been enough to keep me coming back to him, but he also became my savior, my anchor, in the turbulent waters of my life. I could turn to him whenever I needed him, no matter what. I don’t think I had ever needed anyone as much as I needed him that strangely cold March night.
Jumping from the cab of my truck before it had come to a complete stop, I ran to the door of Chris’ home. Leaving the truck where it had landed, with its front end shoved into a snow-bank, as I’d slid into the driveway, I only thought of my extreme need to get to Chris.
All the lights were out in the front of the building, which housed the medical practice for Chris and his partner of two and a half years, Joe Connelly.
There in the back, I saw a light shining through the paned window of the door. I hoped that meant Chris was home. If he was out on a call, I didn’t know what I would do. Pressing my ear to the cold glass surface of the window, trying to hear some sign of life inside, I pounded.
I pounded on that metal door so hard, for so long, that my unprotected knuckles were split and bleeding when Chris finally pulled the door open.
He’d been in the shower.
He stood there in nothing but a fluffy white towel, wrapped around his waist when I fell through the door, into his arms. Holding my cold, trembling body against his warm moist one, he pushed the door closed with a dripping foot.
As the bitter cold air that had rushed through the door with me, hit his warm wet skin, a cloud of steam surrounded us.
“She’s not dead. She’s not dead. He told me she’s not dead,” was all I could keep sobbing into his shoulder. My absolute distress was so intense that I didn’t even notice that the towel had slid from his hips and he stood in the entry hall of his home, holding me, completely naked. Once he stepped back, to guide me into the living room, my gaze fell to his well-loved cock. Even in this time of fear and confusion, I could feel my inner core heating at the sight of him.
Five
/> "Ella, what’s going on?” Chris asked again, once he had me settled on the sofa in his cozy living room, with a steaming mug of coffee in my quickly bandaged hands. “Who is it precisely, that is not dead?”
“My mother.”
As Chris pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater, I tried my best to explain to him about the story that my grandmother had told me, as well as, my father’s reaction to it all. Sitting beside me on the sofa, he asked to see the necklace.
I pulled it from under my sweater, slipped the chain over my head and passed it to him, reluctant to let the strangely comforting warmth go.
He held it on the palm of his hand and immediately began to shiver. Severe trembling took over his entire body and his teeth were chattering so violently, I thought he was having a seizure. Staring intently at the unusual markings on the pendant, his breathing came in short gasps.
Looking closer at his hand, I snatched the chain and pendant away from him. There were ice crystals on his skin, where the pendant had sat. Chris looked up into my eyes. “It’s so cold, so extremely cold—it was like it was burning me, but I couldn’t move.”
With the chain safely back around my neck, I took his hand in both of my own and blew the warmth of my breath onto his chilled skin.
“Ella, what is that thing? How can you stand to have it touching your skin? It’s so cold.”
“Not to me, Chris. It feels warm against my skin. It makes me feel safe and oddly strong.”
Moving to snuggle into his side, resting my head on his shoulder, I allowed myself to enjoy the feeling of safety, found only in his arms. I also let my heart guide my fingers as they traced up the length of his denim-clad thigh and closed around the warm bulge at his crotch. His soft moan against my hair, told me that he was fighting against the urge to just forget about what had happened, and rip my clothes off. I’m not so sure that I would have stopped him.
Instead, he wrapped his hand around my searching fingers and pulled them away. “Why do you have that thing Ella?
“I’m afraid of it somehow, but I am also unexplainably drawn to it. What can it be, Chris? Where do you think it came from? I need to find my mother. I have to know the truth. Please, help me.”
“Of course I will help you. At least I will try to.” His promise was accompanied with a tender kiss on the top of my head.
Lifting my face to him, looking into his wonderful eyes, I found the strength and assurance that I so richly needed. “What are we going to do, Chris?”
“First of all, we are going to do this.” With the slightest shift in position, his mouth captured mine.
I swear to you that I felt that kiss all the way down to my toes. Chris and I had shared a kiss, many times before, but it had never felt so fulfilling. It was almost as though he had entered my soul and brought a light to all of the lingering dark corners within me. I quite literally melted into him.
Every nerve ending, in my entire body came to blazing life, as his tongue ran rampant with mine. He tasted warm and masculine, with just a hint of mint that lingered from his recent use of toothpaste. I felt my nipples harden and press almost painfully against the confines of my bra. My pussy swelled and throbbed softly, when his arms pulled me tighter against him.
As he lifted his mouth from mine, a feeling of shuddering sadness at the loss of that contact overcame me, accompanying the heavy, gasping breaths that came from both of us. Behind it though, there was a feeling of completeness. That was exactly where I was meant to be at that exact moment in time. I don’t know how I knew that—I just knew it, right down to the core of my being.
“Now, I am going to make some phone calls and see what I can find out,” he told me softly, as though he regretted having to move away from me, as much as I regretted having him go.
After getting the number for Mountain View Institute from information, Chris winked at me and punched the numbers on the keypad of the phone.
While he made that call, I went back out to the truck to get my bag. Changed into warmer, more comfortable clothes, I joined him back in the living room, with a fresh cup of coffee for each of us. I was shocked to find him sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall.
“I don’t think I like that look on your face. What did they have to say?” I handed him his steaming mug.
“They won’t tell me anything without the original registration code.”
“And what, pray tell, is a registration code, exactly?”
“It’s the patient number, under which your mother was registered at the institute. It would have been on the copy of her registration that stays in her files.”
“Okay. So crank up that handy-dandy computer of yours and find my mother’s number.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that easy.”
“Why not?” I couldn’t understand why he was being so obstinate. Why else would he have a computer if not to hold the myriad of files that a doctor needs to have on hand?
“I only put the information about the patients that I actively see, into the computer. Your mother hasn’t been an active patient with this practice for more than thirty years.”
“Well then, where are my mother’s files?”
Taking a deep breath and blowing it out in a long, low whistle, Chris closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the sofa. “They have to be in the dungeon.”
“The what?”
Believe me, when I say that it did not take me long to agree with Chris about his dungeon theory.
Taking our coffees with us and arming ourselves with flashlights, we ventured into the basement beneath the front section of the building. Old Doc Stockwell had not been the most organized or tidy person in the world.
Chris hadn’t found, or made, the time to do anything about the mess down there. He probably never imagined having to find a lost file amongst the mess.
Dust encrusted boxes were stacked, haphazardly from floor to ceiling, the bottommost ones elaborately decorated with black and red mold. Old cobwebs draped between the rafters, grey with their film of ancient, undisturbed dust. All of the surfaces, softened with the buildup of their intricate lace.
As the beams from our flashlights passed over the surfaces, we could hear soft scurrying. With a look, it was clear that neither of us wanted to meet whatever it was that made those sounds.
Starting with the boxes closest to hand, we began our seemingly impossible task. Having assumed that, even though they were in a jumbled mess here in the dark, dank dungeon, they would be in some sort of order … I was dumbfounded.
Not only were the thousands of files not in any sort of order, they were also mixed together. Whoever had put them all in the boxes, hadn’t even taken the time to make sure that one person’s files were separate from another’s.
Even though it seemed an insurmountable task, we kept at it.
When Chris finally looked at his watch, we were both amazed to find it was nearly midnight and we hadn’t gone through even half of the boxes.
Chris sat back on his heels, after closing the last box he’d searched. He stretched with his arms raised, rolling his shoulders, and yawned loudly. “Let’s call it a night, sweetheart. We can have a go at it again in the morning.”
Luckily, it was Saturday the next day and Chris didn’t have office hours. Unless some sort emergency came up, of course. We wearily made our way back up the stairs, accompanied by a film of dust and cobwebs.
Six
When I’d thrown my clothes into the bag, in my haste to get away, I’d forgotten all about nightclothes, so I borrowed a t-shirt from Chris. After a quick shower to get rid of what felt like a two-inch layer of dungeon dust, I slipped into it and a little pair of white panties.
As I walked into the bedroom, Chris burst out laughing.
“What, may I ask, is so funny, Dr. McLean?”
He was laughing too hard to speak, so he just pointed at my feet. Looking down, I found the source of his mirth—the sloppy pair of old work socks that I was wearing to keep my feet warm.
“Well, I don’t like to have cold toes,” I announced, embarrassment heated my cheeks.
“Well then, get over here and I will keep every inch of you warm.”
The cotton sheets were damn near frosty against my skin. I gasped and snuggled in as close to Chris’ side as possible, hoping to at least share some of his warmth, if not steal it all. With the light filtering in from under the bathroom door and Chris’ arms securely around me, I felt as safe as I had in a very long time.
“Thank you for helping me, Chris.” I whispered softly, against his bare chest.
“I would do anything for you, Ella, surely you know that by now.” His strong hands soothed down my back and arm.
“We’re not doing anything wrong, are we? I mean, is it all right for me to be going through those files and everything?”
“Well, we may be walking a fine line, but as they are all old, non-active files, I think we should be okay. Now stop your worrying and let me try to help you forget.”
Gently rolling me over onto my back, Chris started placing small kisses along my cheekbones, the tip of my nose and finally his lips found mine. It was there again instantly, that wonderful feeling of completion. If only I could hold him against me forever, I could face whatever trial life might throw my way.
As his fingers made their way under the thin material of my makeshift nightie, I ran my hands down his toned body. Pressing firmly against his skin to slide below the waistband of his flannel pajama pants, I massaged the round flesh of his firm buttocks, forcing him even closer against me.
With a slow tenderness that stated clearly our belief that we had an eternity to love each other, we each guided the other to ultimate release. His hands closed on my breasts, kneading the soft flesh, lovingly. He pulled on my nipples with thumb and finger as I lay writhing and moaning beneath him. His lips and tongue upon my breasts and nipples caused ripples of heavenly tension to course through my body. I dug my short, rounded nails into his shoulders and cried out when his teeth gently grazed over the extremely sensitive flesh.
