Orphans (the Raccoon)

Myself, my wife Sarah and the man she was pregnant by, Adam, had all assembled in the livingroom to discuss what Sarah termed "the situation." Our college-age daughter Jordan had just joined us. Her mother and I had never—well, not since she turned 18-hid the nature of our "open marriage" from Jordan, and now we were not about to hide from her the unexpected consequences of it. Although...

...there was an aspect to our threesome, and now foursome relationship, Sarah knew nothing about. One afternoon a few months ago when Jordan was again home from college I'd arrived home early from work (Sarah was out of town on business) and discovered Adam's truck in our driveway. As soon as I opened the front door I heard the lovecries funneling down the short hallway from my daughter's bedroom. I debated whether to burst in and confront the two of them. Well, Adam mostly. Was it not enough that he'd been openly banging my wife for months now? Nearly a year?

Now he was having sex, secret sex on the side, with my tender-aged daughter as well?

After Adam left, tail both literally and figuratively between his legs, I confronted my daughter about it. Exactly like her mother when cornered, when caught, Jordan went on the offensive, an index finger wagging. She was a veritable Ulysses S. Grant when it came to illicit sex.

"Don't you dare tell mom about this! She'll kill both me AND you!"

"Why me?" I asked.

"Because you let it happen."

"I didn't let it happen," I protested, on a back foot. "I came home and—"

"It happened on your watch, dad! You're the captain of the ship."

"I've always felt like your mother was the..."

Jordan's hands were now on her hips, defiantly. Like mother like daughter... "Not when mom's not around she isn't. The command falls to you. You're at the helm, dad," pointing at me.

(I wondered where all these nautical/military-related analogies were coming from. Was Jordan contemplating following her mother into the navy? Her mother and the lower-ranked Adam both? Or was she simply the product of an endlessly militaristic society?)

"Promise me you won't tell mom."

I lowered my head. Looked down at my daughter's bare feet, her stair-stepped toes, her nails painted a milky aqua. How would this go over in the military? "I promise." I looked up:

"Is this the first time?"

"First time what?"

"You with...?"

One of my daughter's big toes described a kind of lazy circle on the tile floor. "Not exactly. We've done it before. When mom wasn't around..."

"Are you making him wear protection?" For some reason I asked this in near whisper. It was Jordan's turn to look up.

"Adam never wears rubbers, you know that."

I winced.

"Besides, I've been on the pill for, like, forever. You know that."

Another wince.

Now, at tonight's emergency "pow-wow," I watched my daughter circle around, ominously perhaps, tellingly, to livingroom's two-cushion loveseat and sit next to Adam. I sat at a right angle to them on a chair across from Sarah, who sat alone on the middle cushion of the matching sofa, a glass-topped coffee table separating us, oversized colorful, if faded, vintage military books atop it. I was leaning forward. Everyone was leaning forward except for Jordan, who'd brought along a bottle of flavored water. She went first.

"So what're you going to do, mom?"

Sarah looked over at her daughter, to her right. "You know how I feel about these things. I'm going to have the child."

"You're going to have Adam's child," disbelief competing with contempt in Jordan's voice. Her mother nodded.

"And what about dad? What about his feelings?"

Sarah looked across at me. I spoke, after clearing my voice: "Your mother and I have discussed this previously and...I fully deport her suspicion."

If there had been an audience in the room, like at one of those salacious afternoon talk shows, there would have been an audible gasp from the crowd at this moment. But there was no audience, no prompted crowd, just the interrelated four of us. Jordan squirmed on her vinyl cushion. She knew what I meant.

"Then why the big meeting if everything's already been decided?"

Sarah: "Because I want to make sure everyone is on the same page on this. It's important."

"So who's going to be my new sibling's daddy?"

Everyone else, the three of them, looked at me. I closed my mouth, reopened it. "I'm going to be the daddy."

"The pretend-daddy?"

Sarah: "What makes you think it's not his, Jordan?"

"Duh-uh! If it wasn't Adam's would he BE here, mom?"

"It's conceivable."

"No it's not. That's ridiculous. So dad's gonna be play-pretend daddy while...?" Jordan looked over at her seat-mate: "What's your role in all this, Adam?"

"I..."

"I mean aside from your sperm donation."

"Jordan..."

"Mom...," parroting her mother's disapproving tone.

"I can't be the baby. I mean the father!" Adam corrected. "I have two kids of my own. And a wife."

"Well la-dee-da..."

"Jordan, I don't understand why you're being so sarcastic and aggressive in all this. You sound like...like a jilted lover or something."

"I'm not a jilted lover, mom!" glancing at me. Had I talked? Spilled the beans? "I'm just..."

"Well calm down, dear. We're here to talk this out openly and objectively so we can—the four of us—make rational decisions about the matter. For the future."

"Put on a show...," I thought I heard my daughter mutter, before swigging some pink water. It was my rival's turn to clear his throat:

"From my standpoint I'm just wondering...what happens between us now that you're...?"

"Mom. Adam wants to know if he can continue fucking you three times a week."

Adam blinked. "I don't fuck your mom three a week. Make love to her I mean."

"Jordan..."

"And not wear a condom..."

"Jordan, calm down." My wife looked at her lover: "As far as I'm concerned, Adam, everything can continue on the same way it has been until...it can't. At that point I'm going to have more on my mind than just...fucking you every time the mood—"

"MAW-um!" Jordan protested. "Such language! Do you have to say fuck?"

"You just said fuck."

"Fine. Be crude about it. Jeece!"

Adam squirmed. "All I know is when...when Mary was pregnant, both times, toward the end she used to have me...do her up the ass."

Jordan jumped up. "I don't believe this!"

"Sit down, Jordan."

"I'm out of here!"

"Sit down. Shut up." Jordan did—albeit sunk low and smoldering on the loveseat, arms folded. Her mother looked at Adam—as if at something pathetic. A well-shoed street beggar for instance. "Adam, we'll see where it goes, OK? We'll play it by ear. We'll discuss this in private," Sarah nodded, "when the time comes? Got it?"

A relieved Adam nodded and sank back into the loveseat. Where my fuming daughter awaited him, her face reddening. She spoke to him, directly, in a low reproving voice, as if in a crowded room, or theater. A sufficiently long married couple. "That's all you can think about at a time like this? Your dick?"

"I...No, Jordan! Cut me some slack. That's the nature of our relationship. I'm just trying to figure out how—"

"Yeah," voice rising. "Let me get this straight. You impregnate another man's wife—my dad—and your only concern in this is when you can do it with my mom again?"

Adam looked at my wife, pleadingly almost. "I'll wear a condom from now on if it—"

"Oh NOW you make the offer, Adam. A little late don't you think?"

"Children...?" Sarah said, her tone an implying a soft, school-teacherly handclap. "Let's deal with facts, OK? What's done is done. What's going to happen is going to happen. What I want to know from each of you is...Adam? Something you want to add?"

My wife's lover had leaned forward again, hands clasped, lips parted. "No...I was just thinking about this on the way over." Adam swallowed, thickly, before continuing: "Mary...my wife..."

Jordan: "Yeah, we know her name, Adam. Fuck!"

"We have these cats out on our deck, see. They're feral cats but...they're also kind of tame. You can pick 'em up and stuff, some of them..."

"Your point being...?"

"Mary insists that we feed them. But there's also this raccoon, see. He—I think it's a female, she's kinda small. But she also comes around to, um, to eat the food we put out for the cats. And the raccoon now is kinda tame too. You can almost reach down and...pet him."

"I thought it was a her."

"But the cats get very upset, as you can imagine, when the raccoon comes around and tries to eat their food. So I've devised this strategy, see: I put a big bowl of food out for all the cats then, over at the edge of the deck, far away, I put a separate smaller bowl out for the raccoon. That way the raccoon doesn't bother our cats. They have their food, he has his."

The man who'd impregnated my wife now looked over at her, almost pleadingly once again, hands still clasped beyond his knobby knees. The good thing was that Adam and I were both white; we were both tall and slender; both had brown eyes and dark-brown hair (though mine was greying on the sides). This whole ruse would be easy enough to pull off. As everyone in the room knew I was an orphan. But I can't tell you how many times, when I was growing up and out with my adopted dad, people would say, in so many words: "Oh you two are father and son? Of course. I can see the resemblance."

"Are you done?" Jordan asked Adam.

"No, the point I'm trying to make is...I'm sort of like the raccoon. You guys," nodding at me now for some reason, "have your little lives, which is great, really, but I...I'm also sort of part of it. You eat from the big bowl but I...I also get my own little taste, y'know? In a sense. It's..."

Adam left it there. After unclasping his slender (like mine) hands and holding out his palms, his lifelines, he folded them again.

Meanwhile Sarah and Jordan and I were exchanging glances. It was Jordan, however, predictably, who verbalized our uncomprehending thoughts:

"Dude, raccoons? What the FUCK are you talking about?"

Hours later, after Adam was long gone but not before he accompanied my wife upstairs for a quick (by their standards) parting fuck, Jordan having fled the scene while shouting, "Dad, I don't understand how you can put up with this!"...

...Sarah, most of her, was submerged in the warm tub water I'd run for her, as if to wash her most recent sins away, while I sat on the porcelain edge looking down (water magnifies things) at my wife's belly imagining I could already detect an inchoate "baby bump."

Fuck! This was just the beginning. Next would come the visible swell and before you know it the all-too-obvious bulge beneath roomy maternity clothes. Accompanied at each stage by the lying on our parts, Sarah and our loud-mouthed daughter and me; all the play-acting as she called it, all the smiling deceptions which would go on for months and then years afterward.

It was like my adopted dad, the uncomfortable way he smiled when ignorant strangers would say to him, to us, "Oh! He's your spitting image! Congratulations!"

My "dad" had also been a navy man, in the thick of the war. The Greatest Generation. Hence his nervous breakdowns, what they would now call PTSD.

Adam's potent sperm stained the bedroom sheets. And now minute amounts of it, of them, were leaking, I presumed, out into the otherwise clear water, like silt in a river, which my wife's right hand gave a stir. If she was aware of the hard-on in the panties I'd stripped down to, before running the tub water, she'd didn't let on. She was used to it. Them. Normally I would be pulling the soiled sheets off the bed at this moment. But Sarah, more than was normal for her, seemed to have something on her mind.

"Where did Jordan run off to?"

"I don't know. She was upset."

"What about?"

"Oh, you know, us. The whole thing. I heard her talking to somebody on her cellphone..."

"Who?"

"Probably one of her girlfriends. From school..."

"What was she saying?"

"That on the one hand she really admired her parents' progressive views on marriage, on relationships..."

"But."

"But on the other she thought we were hopelessly decadent. All of us."

"She needs to get over herself. She's old enough now."

"She—"

"She may be my daughter," Sarah said, "but she's also another woman. A potential rival."

"What do you mean?"

"That I can tell something's going on."

"Rival?"

"Her and Adam," Sarah sighed.

I played along. Just as I would for years to come about the child that was not mine. "What are you talking about?"

"The way she acts around him. Something's going on between those two." Sarah looked up at me, my face. "You didn't notice? On the couch?"

"I wouldn't know what to look for."

Sarah surprised me by smiling. She lifted a dripping right hand out of the water and grasped my pantied cock with it. Wet. Warm. The microfiber a silky, inbetween massage. "That's because you're not a woman," she said, hand descending, submerging. "Just a pretend one sometimes, honey."

"No, I..." The front V of my panty was all wet—with a vague hand print. I never noticed anything much about my "dad's" behavior. Every so often they just took him away and he was gone for six weeks. Or so. I still had in what had become my "panty drawer," the top one in my dresser, hidden, the little stitched leather comb sheath he'd made in, I guess, craft class, at the institution he was carted off to every so often. In Richmond.

Grant takes Richmond.

Did I mention...Did I mention I was something of a Civil War buff? I—

"Keep an eye on the situation," my wife advised.

"What situation?"

"Are you paying attention or not?"

"No, I—"

"If not go change the sheets and leave me alone. Pay attention to what's going on between those two, especially when I'm away on business. I'm one thing, but the last thing we need is that asshole getting our daughter pregnant. She's off the pill, you know."

"I...No!" I felt myself, my face, going white, pale. The way my dad's had that night he wandered down the hall, the night before his latest sad sojourn to Richmond, mumbling something about a conspiracy. A conspiracy. Traitors everywhere...

"I didn't know that," I blurted.

"I think that's why she's making noises about moving back home."

"What? Jordan?"

My wife looked up. "Do you have another daughter?"

Not yet, I thought.

"Yeah, she claims it's out of consideration for me—for us. The baby and all. She'll finish her semester out then, she says, transfer to a school here and move back in. Help me take care of our child once..."

Our? I thought. (I'm an orphan. I'd sucked Adam's cock once, twice, when he was horny and Sarah was out of town. A few times actually. Me—Sarah—our daughter...everything was coming full circle. One big improbable, unhinged family.

"But I think," Sarah continued, "her real motive is to be near fuck-face. Adam. She wants to steal him from me."

"I doubt that, darling. Seriously, I can't conceive of—"

"A few months from now? When I'm...? Let alone seven or eight months into my pregnancy?"

"Darling, I think you're—"

"A girl half my age. Nearly half his. Pretty. Great body. And me fat and ugly?"

"You won't be ugly, dear."

My wife smiled again. "I don't trust either one of them is what I'm trying to say. You on the other hand...," dripping-wet hand again reaching up, grasping. "I'm so grateful for your loyalty. And support during this."

"I love you, darling," I whispered, breath at a premium.

"I know you do." Sarah was stroking me in my wet panty. I was about to cum. Prematurely, of course. I WAS cumming. It happened that fast.

"Oh!"

"Let it out, darling."

"Oh," I whimpered.

"You're going to make such a wonderful daddy," my wife reassured me.