Authors: Carmella Jones
She’d been wearing this dress that day under the tree. She’d been wearing it the last time she’d seen him.
Her fingers trembling, she took it off, and stood in front of him. If she’d felt exposed before, now was so much worse. It felt impossible, and embarrassing, to see his eyes examining her body and every minute way it had changed in the last five years.
But it also made her wet. She could feel it turning her on even as she balked at his attitude.
Then he reached out his hand, and brushed his fingertips against her stomach, just by her pelvic bone. Just close enough to where she wanted him to touch to excite her beyond belief, but just far enough away to frustrate her. And the frustration intensified her desire.
He saw it. He saw her need for his hands on her body intensifying with every light touch. And he kept teasing her. He’d draw forward, and draw closer, and then draw away. It seemed to amuse him, looking playing with the fire she had for him, fanning the flames with every withdrawal.
Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
She didn’t specify – she couldn’t. There were no words coming to her mind, only an intense draw towards his body, and what he would use it to do to hers. When he stepped back, she almost exploded. To deny her now would be the highest cruelty.
But he reached up over his head, and pulled his shirt of over it with one deft motion.
Then his arms were wrapped around her. She hadn’t realized she’d been so cold standing there naked in the drafty room, but his skin war so warm – so impossibly warm.
She kissed his skin. His shoulder. His neck. She kissed it again and again. She kissed it for every tear she had shed when he’d left her, and she felt his lips on her skin as well.
Then Annabelle felt his lips on her lips, and felt his hand on hers. He had taken it, and had laid it on his chest, and was guiding it down… down… just enough to show her what he wanted.
She wasted no time. Her hand worked the belt buckle as quickly as they could. Then the button, and then the fly, and then she could feel the fabric of his boxers and what was beneath them.
He breathed in sharply in pleasure when she touched him, and spun her around, and began walking her backwards toward the bed. As he did, he had begun getting his pants down, so when they reached in, and he shoved her down and fell on top of her, they were equal in nakedness.
Now here, finally, was the Chris she remembered. The years of frustration, and the rejection he’d stewed in for the last five years and the last week… it had fallen away. He was the boy she’d known, who had taken her for the first time. She could see the branches of the tree behind him and could smell the spring in the air the way it had been that day.
His face softened, and she knew he felt it, too. He kissed her, gently, on her lips. Not the hard, desperate kisses they’d shared until now, but the kiss of familiarity and certainty that had once been the constant in her daily life.
Then he kissed her forehead, again gently, then went back to her lips, and kissed her again, this time a little harder, and a little harder, and harder still.
He lay over her and all she could think was how desperately she wanted him in her, but again he frustrated her. He had his hand on her face, then moved to her breast, clutching it and kneading it. And then he moved it down, down to where she’d wanted it since she walked in.
The first touch was like the first time she’d ever been touched – surprising in its pleasure. And it kept being so and he moved her, and read her pleasure. He kissed her neck, and brought his mouth to her breast as she shuddered beneath him.
And then the room and everything in it went away. She forgot herself, and forgot where she was, and forgot everything. And into that void flowed her memories of him, and she kissed him again and again, so desperate to express how grateful she was to him for giving her this pleasure.
And then, finally, now that she was ready for it, he pushed into her, and made her groan again and again, as quietly as she could and as loud as she dared.
When it was over, she laid her head on his chest and listened to the pattern of his heartbeat. Even now, even these years later, whenever anyone asked her what music she liked to listen to, her first thought was always his heart in these moments.
And then she felt it begin to speed, and she sat up, and looked at him questioningly. He saw her concern, but guided her head back onto his chest where it belonged.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m just remembering. That tree at the entrance to the ranch… you know it looks to me a lot like our tree.”
She nodded, knowing he’d feel it rather than see it. She’d noticed that, too. But they didn’t speak of their tree, or what had happened under it. They simply lay there until they were ready to begin again.
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Annabelle had come to him on a Tuesday. Tuesdays were his day off. For the next three months, Annabelle felt she lived the entirety of the life she wanted to live only on Tuesdays. The rest of the time she was only rushing through the days to get to the nights, so that she could sleep and wake, and be one day nearer to Tuesdays.
She’d wracked her brain to try and find another time or another place, but none existed. He was needed to work the other days, and his absence would be noted. In the evenings, her husband would notice if she were not there, and certainly she would be noticed going in and out of the men’s quarters.
So for the time being, she would have to live in Tuesdays. And every Tuesday she would meet him there, in his room, and they would be themselves together. For one day, her life looked the way she had imagined it would when she was young, and the years in between then and now had been ripped out and replaced with something that suited her better than the route her life actually took ever had.
It gave her a somewhat distorted view of time, only living on one day out of the seven. And that might have been why it took her so long to realize that her monthly rhythm wasn’t occurring the way it always, frustratingly, had. She’d tried with Jason so long to bear a child, and cursed everything that was every month that she found, once again, she was not pregnant. But here she sat, staring at a calendar on her phone, and willing the numbers to change.
Getting pregnant had been her focus for so long and with so little success that she hadn’t even considered the possibility that she might get pregnant from her Tuesday trysts. But here she was. She ran through her choices…
And found she had none. She could not give up this child, not when she had wanted one so desperately for so long. No, she would have this child.
But Jason would know it was not his. It couldn’t be. He was not a dumb man, and the basic math was uncomplicated.
Annabelle knew her husband’s face well, and she knew the look he got on it when he was hurt, and disappointed, and angry. She could see it clearly in her head now. She’d seen it a lot lately as she’d been turning down his advances, and he was unable to understand why. The thought of the pain it would cause him struck her like a physical blow. She lay back onto the bed and looked up at the ceiling.
How had she come here? How had she done this? Things should have been different. She should have made difference choices. But what different choices could she have made? She thought about her choice to be with Chris. That was a choice she couldn’t regret, however inconvenient or problematic. It was the right choice, even surrounded by all the wrong circumstances.
And it had been the right choice, at the time to marry Jason. He’d been good to her, and she had been, for a time, happy with him.
She let herself think of their early life together, thinking back to when they first met, then thinking back to before…
And finally she found the choice she shouldn’t have made. She was sitting under the tree. It was
their
tree. And he asked her to go with him to California and she didn’t answer him.
She sat up straight in her bed. It was a Monday. Why was it a Monday? Why couldn’t it have been just one day later? She could have spoken to him. She could have discussed it with him.
But that wasn’t an option now.
She went to her purse and found her wallet, and began to dig through it. She and Chris had never used their phones to communicate with one another. Desperate as they were for every chance to speak, it was simply too risky. But they needed to exchange numbers, they both agreed, non-electronically, so that if an emergency ever arose, they would be able to get a hold of one another.
Annabelle had imagined that it would have to do with her husband of one of the other hands finding out about them or almost finding out about them. She hadn’t imagined this. She hadn’t let herself imagine this.
She found the piece of paper with the number in it, and entered it into her phone slowly and carefully, double checking every digit. Then, certain that the number was correct, she came to the message.
“How about California?” she typed, then clicked send before she had a chance to regret it.
The rest of the day was agony. He didn’t respond. But he was out working with the other men, and of course he wouldn’t be able to. How foolish she had been, she thought, to text him when he couldn’t answer!
But then the doubt crept in. How difficult would it be to find a spare moment? To see the number and type “sounds good”? This wouldn’t need to be hidden. There was nothing salacious, and Annabelle felt sure none of the other men would recognize her number from a glance at Chris’ phone.
When dinner began creeping up, it seemed intentional. And when he went through the serving line without even the slightest of looks at her, and she knew that it was.
She wavered. She thought of the hurt on Jason’s face. Even if she was not there to see it, surely she would know it was still there. But how much less would it be if he didn’t know the intensity of her feelings? If he didn’t know that Chris had given her the child that Jason had wanted all along? If he didn’t know that the whole of her marriage, she had owed a piece of her heart to a man he’d never met?
No, no, she could try and look at it that way all she wanted. In no world was she merciful to Jason, and she must not think it. She would be ruining him, she knew. But the alternative? To raise Chris’ child with Jason, even if he agreed to it, would be cruelest of fates for all involved.
Her mind was made up. But Chris’ wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be. He continued not to reply.
Every Monday she desperately waited for Tuesday, but this time the wait was especially agonizing.
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After breakfast, Annabelle found herself suddenly less anxious to find her way up into the room where all her bliss had been hidden for months. She cleaned everything she could in the kitchen, and neatened the chairs. She wasn’t sure why it felt like a death sentence for her to climb the stairs and tell him. She only knew that it did, and it didn’t help that she had begun feeling the sickness of pregnancy right about when she learned that she was pregnant.
Finally, she forced herself to go, and opened the door to Chris laying on his bed, much the way he had been when she had first come to him here, ready to give herself to him. This time there were no commands. His face was ashen, and when she closed the door, he sat up in the bed, like a learned response.
She came and sat next to him, wordlessly.
“Is it because you’re pregnant?” he asked her.
She asked him how he knew, and he didn’t answer. He only said:
“I don’t want you if you only want to go with me for the sake of the baby.”
If Annabelle did not know Chris well, he would have seemed callous. He didn’t betray any emotion at the thought of abandoning the mother of his child because he didn’t think she loved him enough. But Annabelle
did
know Chris, and she knew the sound of his voice when it was covering emotion.
She wanted to reassure him. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t true. She wanted to tell him that of course she loved him. That was easy, because of course it was true. But what he wanted, and what he needed to hear was that if it weren’t for the child growing inside of her, she would still want to run away with him.
She wanted to say the words. And she wanted to mean them. But they weren’t true. She knew it was wrong to cause Jason the pain she would cause him whether she did it in secret or she did it quickly. But she wasn’t strong that way. And as long as he wasn’t forced to confront it, and the situation didn’t change, Annabelle could hold on to the hope that maybe Jason would fall out of love with her, or perhaps she would fall out of love with Chris, or perhaps something would happen that would make causing that pain unnecessary.
If Chris didn’t know Annabelle well, she’d have been able to get away with it. But Chris did know Annabelle well, so she knew she couldn’t.
Instead, she stood, and walked to the door.
“If you change your mind,” she said, not looking back, “I’ll be under the tree that looks like ours at 1 am, with everything I’m taking with me.”
Then she left the room, and stood in front of it until she had pulled herself together enough to walk back to the main house.
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