Disclaimer: Do not read further if you are under the age of eighteen or are otherwise prohibited by law to view sexually explicit material.
All characters engaging in any sexual activity in this story are at least 18 years of age.
Do not reprint this work on any other website, or any medium, without express consent from the author (me!).
This is the fifth chapter in the story arc. I hope you enjoy this submission! As always, comments are appreciated and encouraged.
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Standing Under an Umbrella, and Chasing a Waterfall
Chapter 5, Part 1: "Sometimes a Mirage is Real"
Michelle found herself in a bit of a situation on Monday, and it could not have happened at a worse time. She was a week away from final exams at school and she was in a bit of emotional turmoil.
First, was a series of rather odd intimate encounters between her and Eve. One could hardly call them an affair, but she did believe it had been cheating. She trusted Eve to keep silent on the matter, but she was beginning to wonder if that was the best approach to their dilemma. Normally she would have taken something like this to her grave, but she knew that she would continue to be uneasy around Cassie as long as they kept silent on the matter. Michelle knew she needed to talk to Eve again about the matter.
The second issue was a bit more complex. She had not entirely been honest when she had admitted to Cass and Eve that she might be bi. Michelle had down played what had transpired over the last few months. For about the last two months she had been in a bit of a secretive relationship. The trouble was it was not with a guy. Michelle had been seeing Helena Holiday since the first week of October. Officially they had met in her Criminology 341 class, though they had known of each other well before.
Even more worrisome, Helena was the younger sister of Mary Jane Watson. She was a close personal friend of both Cass and Eve. The three of them had gone to school together. Her older sister Shauna had been party to their many adventures as well.
Mary Jane Watson was a twenty-five year old woman who worked as a financial adviser at the local branch of Raymond James. Cass and Eve were not only good friends with MJ, but they had even roomed with Mary Jane until their relationship got serious. They often referred to her as the "straight friend." Michelle always thought this was a bit unfair given that most of their friends were straight. Their explanation for it had been that Mary Jane was rather promiscuous. She often had more than one boy on the string, and had a number of affairs. They stopped short of calling her a sex addict though.
From what she had gathering through various chatter with her roommates, Mary Jane and Helena had a rough childhood. Their father had been killed in a mugging gone wrong when MJ was only 13. He had been working in middle management at an insurance company back in Boston. Upon his death, their mother had been awarded full custody of the two children. It had been difficult, more so for Mary Jane than Helena. The two had been close. His death might have had less of an impact of Helena due to the nature of their relationship. He had been MJ's father, but to Helena he only been her stepfather.
His death had impacted Helena significantly as well, but not to the degree that it had afflicted Mary Jane. Over the next few years the girls struggled with their lose. Helena withdrew; becoming emotionally cold and distant for a time. Mary Jane's reaction was much more overt. It began with outward hostility, though this soon resolved into rapid mood swings. She had ups, she had downs, but she rarely had anything in-between.
Everyone in the beginning had believed that she was just "depressed." It was a phase that she was going through, and she would grow out of it as she learned to deal with her loss. This "common knowledge" had turned out to be incorrect.
An official diagnosis of major depressive disorder was made when she was 15. This was updated to bi-polar type II a year later when it became clear her moods fluxed more than they had originally believed. She never met the criteria for a type I diagnosis because she only had hypomania and not mania. Further, her depressive episodes were more frequent and had a more pronounced impact on her. This is how they discovered that there was more to her illness than had originally been believed. Her response to Paxil, an SSRI antidepressant had aggravated her into a manic state.
If all of this had not been enough on her, she had an ongoing conflict with her mother. Mary Jane and her mother had always been at odds. This was made worse by their mother being everything that the father wasn't.
She was an alcoholic; she had a drug problem and was a college dropout. Their father had not had any substance abuse problems. He didn't even smoke or rarely drank. He was educated too with an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. In a word, he was boring and stable. Mary Jane liked boring.
For all of her faults though, Mary Jane could have looked past them all if she had not been so cold and distant. At times it seemed that her children were almost a bother to her. Neither Mary Jane, nor Helena had ever been especially close to their mother. Helena, however, tried a lot harder then MJ did to forge some kind of relationship.
Upon graduating from high school, she had gone to live in Minnesota to go to college. Helena had followed after her once she had turned 16 to live with her big sister, who had only been 19 at the time. They stayed together through her undergraduate years, but went their separate ways once MJ got her undergraduate degree.
Mary Jane really needed to concentrate on her studies now that she was entering a graduate program. She had seen Helena through her high school years, and now with her getting accepted into St. Cloud State University, she expected that it was about time that her younger sister got a little bit of independence. The truth was; they needed a break from each other as well. They had at the time been living together for two years.
A few years passed, and Mary Jane found work out in the state of Washington after completing her MBA from the University of Minnesota. Not to long after, she had learned that Helena, who was now living off campus was having a bit of a rough time. At the time she believed she had a case of delayed home sickness. She was threatening to move back home. This of course had been the last place where MJ wanted her to end up. So she had reluctantly agreed to allow her to come out to Washington on the condition that she continued her studies. She had agreed. For the last two years, yet again, they had been living together as roommates.
In one of her first conversations with Eve, the topic of her friend had been brought up. Eve had described her friend as simply gorgeous in a glossy magazine, cover girl kind of way. Michelle had dismissed this as a bit of envy or an exaggeration or both.
