Love Again

Author's note: Here comes a short romance of roughly 11k words. There are no further instalments. There's not much to be said beforehand. I hope you enjoy it and please don't forget to leave a vote.

There is a little sex in there but it's not much and only towards the end, so if you're looking for a quick fix, this is not the right story.

My thanks go to my editors. Stattion for his help to make the storyline consistent and fluent and Joffa for his spelling, grammar and punctuation expertise.

*****

February 2017

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the union of Tom Stewart and Trisha Mulligan..."

I looked to my left where my wonderful and beautiful really soon wife-to-be was sitting and smiled. She had seen my head move and turned to me, smiling back and I let my thoughts drift back to the day we met.

July 2010

I parked my Volvo Cabriolet in front of the house I owned, together with my beloved wife Ann, and closed the top. The house was rather large, too large in fact for two persons and a Doberman but the children we had wanted never came to be. Not for a lack of trying but for a lack of luck. I walked towards the front door, pulling out the house key from my jacket and pushed it in the lock. Thor would already be standing at the door, waiting for me to come in. I turned the key, pressed the handle and opened the door.

No Thor. No Ann. A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed her car, a Volvo Station wagon, standing in the driveway.

I slipped out of my jacket and shoes and walked through the entrance area towards our living room.

"Hello? Anybody around?"

"Oh, God, stop it. Stop it!"

I heard shouting from the patio overlooking our garden. I quickly moved towards the source of the commotion.

Ann was standing just off the patio on the grass, fully dressed, and was pulling on Thor's collar. Next to her was a young woman, I guessed she was somewhere in her early twenties, dressed in a light skirt and a bikini top. Her shoulder-long light brown hair was only a shade or two lighter than my wife's but she was an inch or two shorter. For a second I just stood there and admired the youthful body and the full breasts. What a hottie! I removed my socks, slipped into the flip-flops I always had on the patio and approached them. Ann often scolded my tendency to combine unfitting clothes. Right now, I was in my suit pants with a button-down shirt, I came from work in a private bank after all, and flip-flops.

Thor was clinging to a cute little Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever with his front paws while Ann tried to separate them.

"Thor! Down!" I thundered in my Alpha voice.

Immediately he stopped trying to mount that cute little dog and lay down, looking up at me, wagging his tail like mad. I looked at the scene and then advanced and extended my hand to the young woman.

"Hi, I'm Tom."

"Hi, Tom, Trisha. The dog is Kira."

We shook hands before I turned to my wife, putting a hand on her hip, giving her a peck on the lips, "Hi Love."

She melted against me, like she always did, "Hi, Stud. You're home early."

"Thor. Free!"

He jumped up, gave my extended hand a quick lick and dashed away, picking up a string ball on the way and tried to get Kira to play fetch with him.

"Once upon a time, he cared about me. Nowadays it's just girls, girls, girls," I joked before I turned to Trisha, my arm still around my wife.

"Finding it difficult keeping her out of the lake?"

"Don't say it," she sighed, "but to be expected when you get yourself a duck hunter."

We all laughed at that and kept chatting for the next couple of minutes, keeping an eye on the dogs. Kira had just turned one, Thor was half a year older, both crashing into dog puberty fast. Fifteen minutes later, Kira came rushing towards us, Thor just behind her, and skidded to a stop behind Trisha.

"Hey, girl. Go and play."

Before I had the chance to intervene, my wife did it, "No. Don't send her away. She's tired and looking for protection to recover. Stand between her and Thor and send him away."

"Thor, no, no, stop it, Thor, please, go away," Trisha babbled while Thor tried to get around her legs to play with Kira.

"Hold on," I interrupted before grabbing Thor by the collar, pulling strongly and 'throwing' him a good yard and a half away. Of course, I didn't actually throw him but built up enough force and momentum so that it took him a moment to come to a stop.

"Thor, no."

He got up, totally unimpressed at being manhandled but followed my command, even though his eyes stayed trained on Kira.

"He's a Doberman, not a plush toy," my wife joked. "He doesn't listen to pleading."

We chatted some more before Trisha said goodbye, took Kira on the leash and walked towards the gate in our fence. I called Thor to heel so that Trisha could exit the garden and close the gate.

"Welcome back anytime. Thor always enjoys visiting girls," my wife called after her.

When she was gone, Ann turned to me and embraced me, resting her head on my shoulder, "You're early."

"Yeah, we had a power failure in the office and I decided to call it a day," I replied before enquiring, "How are you doing?"

"Ok. I guess."

We had unsuccessfully tried to become pregnant for a long time now and a few months ago we had started a new attempt at in vitro fertilization (IVF). That meant regular hormone injections for Ann and as a side effect of them, she sometimes was a bit moody. I was thirty-eight, she was thirty-six and she felt like time was running out for her. I was willing to accept that we wouldn't have any children, no matter how much we both wanted them, but for her, it was much more difficult and no matter how often I told her I'd love her until the end of time whether we had children or not, she didn't stop trying everything.

We had met when I was just out of college with a Master's degree in finance and IT technologies and her with a bachelor's degree in architecture and interior design. It was love at first sight; we moved in together after four months and married another six months later. From the beginning, we never used contraception but to this day she hadn't become pregnant. We did all the tests and the doctors were unable to explain the lack of children. My sperm count was good, their agility above average, her tubes were open, her ovaries fully functional, her cycle regular, everything was ideal. After five years of trying, we started our first attempt at IVF and have since tried every year.

I loved my wife beyond measure. Maybe she wasn't the prettiest, maybe she wasn't the hottest, maybe she wasn't the cutest but she was intelligent, compassionate and we shared a connection which let all other relationships in our environment look stale. According to her own assessment, she was too thin, ninety-nine pounds on five feet seven, her hair colour boring, her face was too angular, her nose too hooked, her ass too flat and her tits too small. Also, she had a skin disorder which left her with large white blemishes and made her look as if she had lost parts of her skin after a heavy Sunburn.

I cared about none of these. From my point of view, she was slim, fit, her breasts were a proper handful and her butt was so sexy I couldn't get enough of it and when I got the chance to devour her legs, I was in heaven. In the fourteen years we had been married I had never even come close to think about cheating on her. Of course, I looked at other women, preferably beautiful ones, but I loved her and only her and would never consciously do anything to hurt her. Our sex life was good. Not extraordinary but good. We didn't go at it like rabbits every day, not anymore at least, but we got intimate once or twice a week and more often than not, it was mutually satisfactory.

I pulled my wife into a strong embrace, holding her tight, rocking her left and right lightly, "I love you, Ann. No matter what happens. Never forget that."

After giving her another kiss, we went inside and started on our dinner.

+++

Over the next couple of months, while the doctors and I tried our best to get Ann pregnant, we slowly built a friendship with Trisha. Mostly it was Ann and Trisha building the friendship while I tagged along. They went window and clothes shopping together, they'd walk the dogs together and they talked a lot.

Over time, Ann found out why Trisha was here. She had married rather young, only twenty at the time, and moved to the city where her husband had grown up. She lived happily for three years until she found out that her husband had been cheating on her with several women over at least the last two years of their marriage. She packed up and moved back here, only a village away from where she had grown up herself.

A couple of times, we went out together and by together I mean Ann, Trisha and I. Dinner, cinema, even to a couple of nightclubs. Sometimes it was just the girls. A few times I went out with Trisha when my wife wasn't able to make it but I swear that not once did I think about cheating on Ann but instead I sometimes invited guys along who were around Trisha's age. I never made a secret of it and always told both before that I was setting them up when I thought they might fit together but it never worked out. Trisha went out with one of them a few times, a co-worker of mine, but they decided together that they weren't made for each other. During a lunch break, he told me confidentially that she was not willing to enter a relationship after having been burned so badly by her ex-husband.

Her divorce was painful. More than once, she came over and ended up crying on either my or Ann's shoulder. We did what we could to support her but there wasn't much we could do. When her divorce was finally over, she fell into a depression for a few weeks but with the help of Kira and Thor we managed to guide her out but her performance at her work had suffered and shortly after recovering she was axed when the company had to reduce staff due to economic difficulties.

I called a couple of friends, cashed in on a few favours I was owed and managed to get her a few interviews. Fortunately, it didn't take long for Trisha to find a new job. I found out before her when my phone rang.

January 2011

"Tom Stewart."

"Hi Tom, it's Sam."

Sam was one of the friends I had pulled the 'I-never-spoke-about-that-event'-card on in order to get Trisha an interview.

"Sam! How are you doing?"

"Great, thanks. Just wanted to tell you that we have decided to hire that friend of yours for our accounting department. You owe me one."

I could hear the smug smile in his voice at finally having a lever on me. My knowledge of his student days had been hanging above him like the sword of Damocles for years now. We were good friends and he knew I'd never actually harm him but he knew all too well that I could embarrass him in front of everyone within seconds if he pushed too far.

"And I do so with great pleasure but you can't tell me you just hired her because of me."

"Of course not. We had three equally qualified candidates and you just tipped the balance in her favour."

"Thanks. I won't forget that. She's a good friend of Ann and her dog Kira is Thor's BFF."

"There's nothing going on between you, is there?"

I was honestly a bit shocked that he even had to ask.

"Sam! No, there isn't. You know how much I love Ann, I'd never cheat on her."

"Sorry I asked. But she's a real stunner. Have you ever seen her made up or only when she walks the dog?"

"The three of us have gone out a few times together, so yes, I've seen her but I've also seen her shoot down men becoming too bothersome. You'll find out soon enough that she isn't a doll but rather an Amazon."

We shared a laugh and chatted a bit more before we hung up.

+

The IVF didn't work. Again. Of the ten ova they had been able to extract the last time, eight had fertilized and had been implanted in pairs over the next couple of months. None nested. Trisha and Kira still came visiting regularly but I rarely saw them, they were usually off again before I came home. I wasn't one who lived to work but still was in the office until at least five thirty and came home around six in the evening. From what Ann told me, Trisha usually came around five and stayed for twenty to thirty minutes.

March 2012

We decided to take a break from the treatments for a few months and restarted the IVF process in spring 2012. By December it had become clear that we had again failed. Ann was falling into a depression and nothing I tried was helping.

It took Ann over a year to overcome her depression. In summer 2013 Ann seemed to finally accept that our marriage would remain childless and slowly recovered. Our love life slowly started to pick up again and it was at the start of the Christmas holiday when I came home and was nearly tackled to the ground by my beaming wife.

December 2013

"I'm pregnant. Ten weeks along."

I was totally baffled and overwhelmed. Could it be? Had we finally succeeded?

"Oh, Ann, my Love, that's amazing. I'm speechless."

I pulled her close for a kiss. She had pushed to the living room and onto the couch within moments, opened my belt and pushed my pants down before I had the chance to say anything else. Fortunately, my body reacted faster than me and I was in her before I even had the time to remove my shoes. After she rode me to a quick climax, she lay on top of me, my dick still buried in her freshly inseminated pussy and sighed contently. She was over the moon and when she was happy, so was I. Not because I got a lot more sex than during her depression, at least not only, but because I loved her and making her happy was one of my main motivators in life.

April 2014

Her pregnancy moved along according to schedule and I admit I had never seen her happier. She was not only glowing, she was about to outshine the sun. Not once did she complain about her morning sickness, even though she was hit hard by it, not once did she complain that her clothes weren't fitting anymore or that she was getting fat. In hindsight, it might well have been the happiest period we ever had.

At least it was until one day in early April when I came home to find her unconscious on the floor in a puddle of blood. I called nine-one-one and they were on site a few minutes later and rushed her to the hospital. They took her to the ER immediately and I somehow had the presence of mind to call Ann's mother to come to the hospital and Trisha to ask her to pick up Thor and look after him.

Four hours later, I sat at the bedside of my dying wife, holding her hand. She had had a miscarriage and had suffered from internal bleeding as a result of it. My unborn daughter was already dead and my wife was beyond help, there was nothing they could do anymore. I sat there, looking at the face of the woman I loved so deeply, hoping she wouldn't wake up anymore only to find that she had lost the baby she so desperately craved.

She didn't. When the heart rate monitor registered the last pulse of her heartbeat and moved on to the monotone tone, I broke. I sat next to her bed for an indeterminable amount of time, crying at my loss. At some point, I was given a sedative and was taken to a bed somewhere in an adjacent room where I woke a few hours later. My wife had already been moved to the morgue and I was sent home.

Ann's mother, her father had died of a heart attack when she was nine, picked me up and took me home. She knew of all our attempts to become parents and she understood the deep connection I had shared with her daughter. Trisha was also there when we came home. She had cleaned away the blood and stayed the night in our guestroom in order to make sure that I wasn't alone when I came home. My mother-in-law handed me over to her and went to make some coffee while Trisha embraced me and just held me while I started crying again.

I have no idea what I would have done without the help of the two women. I was just a numb bag of meat with a pulse. I registered nothing that was happening around me, except for Thor who managed to breach the wall I had built around me. They took care of the funeral preparations, they fed me, they looked after Thor and they kept the house clean. It took almost two months before I came out of that almost catatonic state and was able to start caring for myself and Thor again.

June 2014

I was able to make an arrangement with my employer that I would be allowed to take Thor to work, even though he only agreed after I verbally gave notice the moment he declined my first request.

Work became my escape. I got up early, took a long walk with Thor, actively training him in order to avoid my thoughts returning to Ann, went to the office, worked hard until lunch, took another hour-long walk, returned to my desk and worked until it was time to take Thor on another walk. I then went home, worked some more, took some sleeping pills to suppress dreaming and went to bed.

It came to the point where my superior started to cut down on my work hours because I made too much overtime. I solved this by tricking the time registry system into believing that I had left the building by not using my security key card when I came back from the walk at lunch. That worked for a while until I was found out. I then simply took my laptop home and worked from there. Without registering the hours.

I rejected all attempts by co-workers and friends to socialise. I never joined them for lunch, I never went out for a beer after work, I never dated, I only spoke to those I had to and only about business. I ate irregularly, finding excuses whenever I was invited somewhere.

"Sorry, got to walk Thor, I'll just grab a sandwich." I never did.

"Sorry, I have some leftovers at home that I have to eat today if I don't want to throw them away." To have leftovers I would actually have had to cook first.

"I'm still taking anti-depressants and shouldn't drink alcohol." Another lie. I had stopped taking the medication when my mother-in-law had left for home and didn't supervise me anymore. I didn't stop because they didn't help, I stopped because I didn't care. And when it got too bad, I drowned my emotions in Vodka.

"I can't take Thor to a bar, can I?" That excuse was at least true.

I had never been overweight but during the six months after I restarted working, I lost sixty-five pounds. I was roughly one hundred and seventy-five pounds on a five feet eleven frame when Ann died. The day Trisha decided she had watched my self-destructive behaviour long enough I was down to one hundred and ten. I wasn't much more than a walking skeleton.

December 2014

"Enough!"

I jolted out of sleep, abruptly woken by the angry voice. It took me a moment to orient myself, the sleeping pills had that effect on me. I was in my bedroom. In my bed. Without Ann. Trisha was standing at the foot of my bed.

Without Ann.

I fell back on my pillow and pulled the blanket over my head in order to flee reality for a few more minutes. I heard rustling when Trisha opened the curtains and the windows, airing the room that must have smelled as if somebody had died in here.

"I will leave the room for one minute. If you are not up and decent by then, it's your problem."

I heard the door close, glad to be left alone again. I hadn't really registered what she had said and didn't really care.

I had just managed to stop all thinking again when the door flew open again and Trisha stormed back into my bedroom and ripped the blanket from my nude and emaciated body.

I heard her gasp.

"Oh, fuck."

"Leave me alone."

"No."

She grabbed my hands and started to pull me first into a sitting position on the edge of the bed and then to a standing position. She took the light blue bathrobe that was hanging on a hook on the door to the bathroom, slid my arms into the sleeves and pulled it over my shoulders.