TWO WEEKS IS FOREVER
For regular readers, this has been the longest gap in the story since I started, for reasons I've touched on in a couple of postings. This is not the Chapter 5B I intended to put on Lit. I'd expected it to be at least two, maybe three times longer, which means more chapters. But I realized I'd hit a natural stopping point so I stopped and here is 5B. Fortunately, the writing has begun to flow again so I'm hoping 5C won't be as delayed. As always, I hope readers continue to enjoy the story. For obvious reasons I've become even more of a correspondence hermit than I have been , no time to reply your comments or emails, but I'm going to try to get back to more people.
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My name is William Maitland. Six months ago I was a boringly happily married husband and father of two teenagers. I had one of - if not the hottest - women in Jacksonville in my bed, I basically ran the State Attorney's Office for my boss while he ran for Governor of Florida.
I knew who and what I was and I was happy with it. I had my nightmares. I knew that I didn't deserve the woman I was married to, that my kids had lost respect for me and that my hot wife Debbie for too long had seemed to look at me more as a roommate and good provider than a stud. I had gotten bald and fat and women no longer looked at me with an appraising eye, if they ever had.
But I told myself that nobody has it all. I had the woman I'd loved for 20 years in my bed and my life, the kids would grow up, I was doing a job that was actually more my life than an occupation, and I had a chance to make the world make sense sometimes.
And then it all went away.
In the space of a few weeks, I learned that my wife didn't love me anymore, she soon began fucking a tall, good looking young stud I couldn't begin to compete with on any physical level, my kids didn't know or respect me. I lost my wife, my kids in a way, my manhood and my balls when I couldn't even get an erection while jerking off.
I made a detour into the bottle and could have lost everything, but some good friends including people I didn't even know, helped me claw my way out of the bottle. I fought my way back to a better body and better health and the realization that it's possible to live even after the person you love most in the world has torn your heart out of your chest, chewed it up and spit it out.
It had taken awhile, but with the help of a better friend than I deserved, some kind ladies and one beautiful French woman, I had rediscovered my dick and my manhood. I hadn't stopped loving that bitch Debbie. I was beginning to think when they dumped my body into the ground I'd still love her. But I knew now I could live without her.
And so, only days away from hitting my 42nd birthday and becoming officially Middle Aged, winning a major court case and sending an evil woman to Death Row at Raiford, burnishing my growing legend as the Angel of Death, and not so incidentally having hot sex with only the third and fourth women I'd known carnally in the last 20 years, I thought my world had finally begun to make sense again.
Until SHE walked back into my life....
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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005 -- 9 p.m.
I stood in the dunes in the humid darkness, holding a soft, very sexy bundle of femininity against me, feeling her push the globes of her fantastic ass back against my dick and massage it gently. I nuzzled the back of her neck and drank in the odor of her hair and skin.
I pointed out into the darkness.
It was dark enough that the horizon was only a faintly darker smudge against the night sky.
"Go about forty five hundred miles in that direction, heading northeast, and you'd be in sight of the French shoreline."
She didn't say anything but I knew we were both thinking. Beyond that horizon were her husband and son, her family and her life.
Far away near the horizon there were several moving lights, pinpoints in the darkness so close to the horizon it was difficult to distinguish them from stars hanging low in the night sky.
"Shrimpers," I said as she followed my finger to gaze at the spot where the Atlantic merged with the sky.
"Maybe cruise ships, but more likely shrimpers coming back into St. Augustine or maybe heading up to Mayport."
She leaned back into me and tilted her head back to kiss me. I loved the taste of mint on her lips.
"You think they could be cruise ships?"
"Sometimes they sail this close to the coast, but usually this far north you don't see them unless they're heading just north of us back to Blount Island. And there are only a handful. Most of the ships cruise from ports south of us to the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico so you don't see them often. Although there are some cruise ships that sail from northern ports."
She turned in my arms and kissed me hard. I felt her nipples as hard little buttons pressing into my tee-shirt.
When she buried her head in the side of my neck, I said, "Do you miss it that much, Aline? Would you rather be out there in the darkness looking back at the shore lights?"
"Maybe," she breathed heavily, "if you were out there with me."
I held her in the night and it felt for a moment that the whole world was spinning around us. Nothing had seemed quite real since that moment yesterday when she had appeared as if by magic in my office and was kissing me.
I had known she was gone and never coming back. Her life was on the French cruise ship Bonne Chance which was a maritime gypsy circumnavigating the world. It had stopped in Jac ksonville for a while, and then moved on to ports south. It was probably never be back and neither would she.
Which I had told myself over and over in the weeks before the Bonne Chance had finally sailed out for the last time, was a Good Thing. Because Aline des Jardins was a married woman, with a son, and her husband was a good man who had been a friend. Of course, he was also a cheating son of bitch who was screwing half the women in Paris while his wife worked at sea, but with the exception of that one little character flaw, he wasn't a bad guy.
"Do you think Philippe might object to me becoming a permanent cruise sex buddy?"
She breathed into the side of my neck again.
"He will never know. He can never know."
"I thought you were going to tell him that I had given you the Fleur-de-Lis pendant. Tell him that I was a passenger and you saved my life, sort of. And you would wear the Fleur --de-Lis proudly for the rest of your life. How can you wear it if he can't know who gave it to you?"
She separated herself from me and stepped a pace back. There was a cooling night wind whipping through the dunes and it caressed her heavy black bangs. The Fleur-de-Lis sat on her chest between her small, but delicious breasts bulging softly out from a light blouse. The moonlight glimmered off the diamond in its center.
"I thought I could tell him and he would never know the truth of what happened, even if he might guess. I thought that he wouldn't mind, because he's doing the same thing. But..."
"But what?"
"He's not a stupid man. The opposite actually. He reminds me of you. He is very, very sharp and perceptive."
"How can he-"
"You remember I told you that you were different?"
"Yes."
"I told you -- the others were -- just diversions. They never threatened....Philippe. And I think he knew that. I don't think he's ever had me watched. He could tell if...there was someone else...who mattered. But you...."
"What about me?"
I said the words carefully, the way you'd move around a coiled rattlesnake that you'd discovered sitting on your dresser drawers one morning. This was the thing that had lurked behind every word we'd said to each other since the moment I'd looked up into her eyes yesterday afternoon. It was the elephant in the corner of the room that you couldn't ignore, but couldn't acknowledge.
"You want me to say it? To put it into words?"
"One of us has to. Every day after I walked away from you, every single day that I woke up, I had to fight the urge to call you, to go back to the Bonne Chance. Every fiber of my body wanted you. But I couldn't, because I'd be breaking every rule that I've ever lived by, betraying everything I've ever believed in.
"But I'm weak willed. I couldn't go to you, but I couldn't push you away when you came to me. It doesn't make it right, what we're doing."
She held my face in her hands and kissed me. I felt that same weird sensation of fear that caused the little hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. It wasn't the night breeze. It was her kiss. It was fear. And now I knew what I was afraid of.
"I told you I felt something when I looked at you the first time, Bill. It was the same feeling, the same emotion, I had years ago when I first looked at Philippe across the room at that party. The night we wound up in his bed. The night he made me his. I am his. And so I can't be feeling those same emotions now for you."
She stared at me across a gulf of a few inches with those sea-green eyes that held the ocean in them.
"I can't be head over heels in love with you. I'm a married woman. I love my husband. I love my son. I have a life and a family. And I shouldn't be here tonight. So why am I here?"
"Because as I should have told Father Dunleavy, and he would have appreciated the joke, God has a cruel sense of humor. You love Philippe and you have a life you can't let yourself lose. I don't have a life anymore but I do have a woman that I shouldn't love anymore, but I do."
"You love her even though you don't want to? What about me, Bill? What do you feel about me? You realize you've never put your feelings into words. I don't really know what you think about me. Except that you like to have sex with me and ... you were grateful to me for helping you get over your cheating slut of a wife."
There was an odd expression on her face and I tried to analyze it: fear and female pride and worry and something else inexpressible.
"We only known each other for a week. We really don't know each other at all, Aline. We met in a dream and that's all we have. But...
"I think...I....might be in love with you. I have feelings for you I haven't had for anyone other than...Debbie... in 20 years. In the last week I've had sex with two women that I liked and it was great sex. But it didn't mean anything. You meant something."
