Fate and Destiny

This episode is Part 2 of 2. In Part 1, an elaborate foundation has been laid for the events in these chapters. Please read that part (published yesterday) before proceeding. Enjoy.

Chapter 8

Fever

"Passion in all its forms is a mental thirst, a fever,

a torturing unrest. As a fire consumes a magnificent building, ...

so are men consumed by the flames of passions,

and their deeds and works fall and perish."

James Allen

The next six months were a blur. The one consuming memory of that time is that Laura and I were frequently in bed somewhere making love. We were each burning up with the love we felt for each other.

The counseling to Gary and Laura at best was a neutral activity designed by me to not elicit any change in the relationship either way. I was having the couple read a book a month about relationships and giving them homework to discuss. Behind the scenes I'd coach Laura on how to prolong the discussion and how to avoid closure at either end of the relationship scale. Some special elections and referendum votes were coming in the county and Gary was wrapped up doing news coverage of the events; he seemed just as glad for the coasting we'd created in their marriage.

With various subterfuges, lies, and obfuscations, Laura and I actually got to spend five days together in Key West just after New Years. We alternated between wild and uninhibited sex and prowling the bars of the City looking for great music where we could dance and conduct the foreplay before our next fornication.

I couldn't remember a time when I'd been so horny – so singly focused on sex and on one person – Laura. We constantly touched, often in intimate places even though we were in public. Laura constantly whispered sexual things to me – things about how she'd enjoyed and was still resonating from our most recent sexual romp, or plans she had for how or where she intended to turn me every which way but loose.

Our first night in Key West we went to a bar with a good blues band. Laura pulled me into a stall in the ladies room and had me fuck her right there while she bent over the toilet and screamed encouraging words to me. Several other people – women I presume – came into the room, but no one disturbed us. Laura looked amazingly satisfied when we returned to our table.

As we sat listening to the music, Laura leaned forward and put her tongue in my ear. She then proceeded to describe to me her skills at fellatio. She assured me that I would be more than satisfied with her blowjob, and that she was on a mission to be sure it happened before we got back to our motel. She went into great detail, and I was hard the entire time we were at the bar.

On our walk back to the motel, she pulled me into an alleyway and had me sit on the hood of a car. There she proceeded to pull my manhood from my shorts and slaver over me for fifteen minutes, as crowds of people walked by at the head of the alley along the main street. Somehow, I was so lost in the sexuality of the trip, of Laura, of even myself, that I didn't care what we did or how or where.

The next evening we went to an outdoor concert with a series of rock bands. Laura pulled me behind a tarp suspended on wires that served as a windbreak and security barrier for those at the concert. With hundreds of people only a few feet away, she stripped off her shorts and thong and sat on the large black boxes that had contained some of the audio equipment on the stage. We coupled, oblivious of the crowd or the risk of being caught. When Laura came, she screamed out her orgasm to the stars overhead. Fortunately, the band playing on stage was loud and her screams of lust were washed away in the rest of the concert noise.

The rest of the Key West week went that way. I remember thinking that my manhood was on trial. Fortunately, I rose to the challenge of keeping a young horny woman satisfied. We parted company in Miami: I headed to Chicago for a day of business, and Laura flew home from what had been billed ostensibly as a visit with one of her old classmates in Fort Lauderdale. As I sat on the plane flying north, I couldn't recall being so sexually sated in my entire life. Later, Laura told me she'd had the same thought.

We were able to get together two or three times a week once we were back in Massachusetts. One of us would check into a motel miles away from Dillon and then we'd have our time together. We telephoned each other a couple of times a day, often at specified times so there wouldn't be others answering or listening in to half a conversation. There were a lot of 'I love you's' in those conversations.

We were entranced with each other. Laura hung on every word I said, and continually told me I was the most talented and brilliant man on the planet. I found her willingness to learn, her approach to problem solving, and her sense of humor captivating. I could go on with many other traits we discovered about each other. Somehow we never displayed our dark sides to the other, nor any anger or ill temper. The only time I saw frustration from Laura was when we couldn't schedule alone time together, or at her husband during a counseling session. Even then, it was measured and controlled.

Laura went on several committees in the church, so we had a chance to interact occasionally in those milieus. I chuckled one time when I realized that she was seeing more of Margaret in those settings than me. I usually left the committees to her or one of the assistant ministers.

Less romantic were the occasional Monday night counseling sessions with Laura and her husband, and most Sundays a chance to see each other after the service albeit in the presence of several hundred other parishioners.

The counseling wavered between once or twice a month, with Laura and Gary having homework in the intervening space. One book we spent a particularly long time on was Gary Chapman's 'The Five Love Languages.' We spent several sessions talking about how each of them liked to be loved in the book's paradigm: words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, receiving gifts, and physical touch.

I guessed that Laura wanted words of affirmation and physical touch. These fit our own relationship since I couldn't spend but a few hours of quality time with her in any week, we'd skipped gifting to each other – except of ourselves, and we weren't in a position to do little things for each other around each other's house. As we did some of the exercises in the book, Laura did indeed prove to fit my expectation.

I could now see why at least Laura thought their marriage wasn't working. Gary was economical in his discussions with her, seldom telling her he loved her or validating her role and performance in their relationship.

After several weeks of discussion and a number of exercises from the book, Gary turned out to value acts of service and gifts. Laura wasn't attuned to either of those love languages. She felt that the service acts for him were anti-feminist, and placed her in a subservient role. Laura was anything but the docile, passive, and compliant wife. To her, having to buy gifts, however small, for a man also smacked of servitude.

After about six weeks of kicking these topics around, and slowing reaching the epiphanies about their behavior with one another, I tried to help them negotiate a behavior contact with each other, one where they would humor the others love languages for a few months and see how it went. Both parties would have to move off of their entrenched positions to make this work.

As Laura and I lay in bed one day enjoying the afterglow of our lovemaking, I coached her on things to do to help Gary. It was anachronistic and we both chuckled over the situation and venue for my counseling to her. Nonetheless, she took the advice and pledged to buy a few things appropriate to the editor of a local newspaper, and to start to do little things around the house or Gary's office to send love signals to him.

Gary tried to do things that would appeal to Laura too. In a one-on-one session with him we drew up a list of situations where he could use various words of affirmation. He would have to change and be more observant of her behavior, and reward her with gratitude, appreciation, and love for what she'd done. Overall, I thought I'd done a decent job of counseling him.

What we hadn't discussed so much, in part because of its obvious nature and the fact the topic was so well covered in the book, was the issue of physical touch. To take things in the 'right' direction as Gary saw it, he started to come on to Laura more frequently. Besides holding her hand or the more public displays of affection, he turned up the heat on their conjugal bed.

Laura was caught off guard more than once after we'd made love during the day, to find that she also had a happy and horny husband when she got home. Gary was random, a point that started to make planning our liaisons more difficult. One solution was for her to be sure and bathe fully before we parted, but sometimes that wasn't enough. Certainly her need for physical touch was lower after we'd been together, so by the time she got home she was sometimes just not in the mood. Laura's behavior in the face of her comments several sessions earlier about the importance of physical touch puzzled Gary and was a topic that came up in one of our counseling sessions, specifically the signals he should look for that she wanted to be touched.

Each counseling session we had and each liaison that Laura and I had seemed to be taking us further and further down an unpredictable path. At one point I thought I knew how our affair would end: we'd come through the infatuation phase into something more steady and mundane, interest would wane for any number of reasons, and we'd eventually part. I expected we'd each grieve over the affair in our own way after it ended, the excitement of the illicit relationship would be missed, but we'd remain knowing friends – always ready to reach out to help the other with a loving word or deed. There were other paths but I didn't hold them in my thinking.

The love I felt for Laura spilled over into my other relationships. I found myself becoming more caring and expressive towards Margaret and my now grown children. Our conversations were more intimate and revealing about how we felt about issues surrounding the family or what was in the press.

I took Margaret to lunch more often, brought her flowers on a special occasion, bought an expensive pendant for her birthday, and in general became more attentive and loving. It was effortless on my part, just part of what I was feeling for the entire world as I walked around on clouds of love.

Mae, Margaret's ninety-year-old mother, became increasingly befuddled with dementia; she required increasing medical and nursing care. She'd lived with us for a good portion of the past three decades, and had been a fixture and given in our household. Some of my private periods of estrangement from my wife were rationalized around Mae's dominating presence. Now we needed to do something about Mae.

Margaret and I opened a dialogue about how to care for her in her waning years, a dialogue that revealed a great deal about how we felt about our own mortality and care as we aged. Joy and Heather, our older girls, became a party to the conversation too. Between discussions each of us did some homework on alternatives and their costs.

Part of the discussion about Mae also devolved into a discussion about the family structure, in particularly how Margaret would feel without her mother and companion being close at hand in the household. While she was ready for her eventual passing, putting her in a nearby nursing home seemed an unattractive option unless I was going to be at home more to fill the friendship gap. Not seeing any options, I pledged to be more available in the coming months. Mae went into a nearby nursing home two weeks later.

The prevarications Laura and I had to tell to create time together became more and more complex. Although we both found it a dubious task, we would carefully craft our stories to cover our time together. At times the task was daunting, yet we forged ahead with our liaisons at motels or inns away from Dillon.

Laura and I drove up to Maine one day in the late spring. I went ostensibly to oversee getting the boat into the water. Laura was supposedly out all day taking a class on volunteerism. In fact, the boat was already in the water, and Laura's class had taken place the week before with the byproduct of a recording of the entire class that she'd already listened to in her spare time. Thus, we spent the day on the sloop, making love and cooing into each other's ears about how we dearly loved our time together.

Even though it was over an hour away from Dillon, the boat became a love nest for the two of us over the summer. Margaret had never been all that enthralled with sailing, but humored my mid-week afternoon jaunts to the sloop for an outing. A hundred dollar tip assured the secrecy of the harbormaster that would ferry Laura and I out to the sloop. Apparently, yachts were favored locales for afternoon dalliances.

When we did take the sloop out sailing, seeking some recovery time between our sexual bouts in the master bunk below decks, Laura would often be nude as she moved around the boat in the warm summer air. She was provocative, and as usual continued her erotic chatter about what we had done, were doing, or would do. To this day, I will carry a vision of her swinging naked from the mast of the boat like a stripper might use the pole in some sleazy bar, and trying to lure me into making love out in the open atop the foredeck hatch. After very little negotiation, we made love in the cockpit of the boat.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of our affair, I bought Laura an expensive diamond pendant on a silver chain. The gift cost over $3,000, yet it was an expression of caring and love from my heart. The gift required a story as to how she had acquired the necklace. She made an expensive purchase of cosmetics at one of the malls, and cajoled the sales clerk into giving her a 'general merchandise' receipt that she later told Gary was the cost of the beautiful necklace. From that day forward she was never without the necklace.

Throughout my preoccupation with Laura, I maintained the frantic lifestyle I'd created for myself in the other parts of my life. The counseling work continued unabated with a constant flow of new patients or couples seeking peace, connectedness, and love in their lives. My ministerial work led me to some of the best sermons I'd ever written. As the Internet came along, most of them went online and produced even more revenue for the Dillon Church. My Sunday television show continued, and Marsha, my old lover and friend became the only person in the universe to know that I carried two loves in my heart: Margaret and Laura. She smiled, gave me her be cautious look, and a hug.

The corporate world continued to beckon to me and occupied most of my weekly time. Inevitably it required travel to some far-flung corner of the world, and the travel required a juggling of life with Margaret, Laura, the Church, and my patients. After one international trip that lasted a week, I felt it took me a month to get everything and everyone back on an even keel.

Dean and I continued to have lunch every week or so. When we did meet our discussions were briefly about our formal families and then hours on business development and expansion. Dean led the sell-off of one major part of the company – a move that generated a huge amount of corporate cash, drove the stock even higher, and brought significant attention to the company as one that was going places. Our pictures got in the Boston papers as a result of the sale. That photo turned out to be the spark in a tinder dry forest.

Chapter 8

Conflagration

"Those that with haste will make a mighty fire,

Begin it with weak straws."

Shakespeare

"Gary is starting to grill me about where I've been each day; it's like he's trying to put together a minute-by-minute accounting of my time. He even wants to go with me on some of my errands. I guess he can do that now that he's hired an associate editor." Laura complained to me over one of our clandestine telephone calls. She was walking around her neighborhood getting some exercise and using her cell phone as we talked.

I spoke to the same theme, "Perhaps we should cool it this week. I've been out of the house too much too. Let's plan something next week. Does that work for you?"

"Yes, but I'll miss you dearly. You're the drug in my life that I'm hooked on – maybe late Monday. Gary will be wrapped up putting the weekly edition to bed. Can we use your office? It'll have to be quick." I could hear Laura panting as she spoke the plans for our next liaison. She went on, "If something comes up I'll call your cell phone. I'll come by about six-thirty."

Gary and Laura were at the Sunday service, however, we didn't speak to each other. I talked about faith – citing Hebrews 11:1 to the congregation as the starting point: 'the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.' I waxed eloquent about things to hope for, and then on how our prayers for things not seen can be answered.

As I talked I periodically checked in with Laura and Gary. Laura looked ecstatic and, as usual, seemed to hang on my every word; I could tell she loved me. I was trying to entertain 'her': to make her happy and joyful, to bring some thought provoking ideas to her, to help her see new and spiritual ways to a secure and loving future. Gary, on the other hand, looked glum and almost angry – anger that I took personally. His brow was furrowed throughout my talk, almost as though he was questioning not only the concept of faith, but also my credentials and beliefs about the subject.

My gaze shifted to Margaret and Joy, sitting together in the first row. Both looked pensive as they thought about my homily, but their eyes were glassy as though they'd disconnected temporarily from what I was saying and what was going on around them. I realized I was imparting my own interpretation of emotions to the various people I knew well in the congregation. What I attributed to them I was making personal, yet I had no way of really reading their thoughts or emotions.

Monday, Laura slipped into my office at 6:30, about a half hour after my last patient left. I locked up behind her, and we made love. It was rushed, and we both had other agendas we were worried about. There was relief and pleasure in our meeting, but by 7:00 she was gone. I had an empty feeling. I headed home for a late dinner with Margaret.

Tuesday is the day I'll always remember. This was a counseling day starting early and going right up until five o'clock when I'd have to run to the airport and fly to Atlanta for an early start the next morning for Triax.

My after-lunch patient left, giving me a half hour before the next patient for clinical notes and some telephone calls. Things were so quiet in my office I could hear the over tones of a telephone conversation my receptionist was having in the anteroom.

June Winters, the pretty middle-aged woman that kept my part-time counseling practice squared away and on track, appeared at the door a few minutes later. She had a worried look on her face. "I've got to run out for two minutes; I'll be right back." I nodded and waved to her to go.

A few minutes later I heard June return to the office. After a period of silence, she reappeared at my office door holding a copy of the local newspaper – Gary Wayne's newspaper. She was silent until I looked up at her questioning stare.

"What's up?" I asked.

After a long silence June said flatly, "Have you been having an affair with Laura Wayne?"