"Honey, no, I don't want to talk about it."
That's the answer I've gotten for the last three months! I'd become obsessed with Daniella, my wife, telling me about her first lover. The only answer she'd give me has been, "I don't want to talk about it."
I've asked her if it was painful? Was it bad? Good? Exciting? Dull? And I get, 'I don't want to talk about it.'
And she'd cut me off, then change the subject to something else. Hell, we've been married twenty-eight years. It was a long time ago and I don't understand why she wouldn't even begin a discussion. All I know is that Dani wasn't a virgin the first time we made love. I was. I hadn't ever been with a woman before her. I'd been on dates, even had a girlfriend for a bit in college. We kissed, but that was the extent of my sexual baseball, a single, first base only.
I even tried to let it drop and then dreamed about what might have been. The next morning, I told her about my dream. She giggled a little and said it wasn't like that at all. That was the extent of her hints.
ooOoo
Dani was a cheerleader and the star point guard on our 3rd place state finalist basketball team. She was the smallest on the cheer team and was the one doing the gymnastic leaps off the other girls' hands.
And she was the homecoming queen during football her senior year. I was gone that year, my first year of college. I've seen the picture of Dani and her boyfriend, a black guy football jock; the only black guy I've ever seen in our school. He was new at our school that year. I never knew him and she'd never even told me his name. But I wasn't surprised that he'd be her boyfriend. I've learned over the last twenty-eight years that there's not a prejudiced bone in Dani's body. Besides, in the picture, he was a darn good-looking kid.
Why did it suddenly become an obsession with me? It stemmed from an evening that we were going through some old albums and I saw that picture of my beautiful wife in her gown that night of homecoming, her boyfriend kissing her on the cheek the night she was announced as the homecoming queen.
I saw the look in her eyes when we turned the album's page and that 8x10 picture was on the next, kind of a 'longing' look. Or maybe not. I wondered if I was just imagining things and just blurted out, "Was he your first?"
She smiled at me and said, "I don't want to talk about it."
"You won't tell me anything about him?" I asked her.
She giggled a little, "He was a senior, a little older than me, first year in Kennewick, receiver and defensive back." That enough?
No! I wanted to scream. Not that it would have done me any good. The question I wanted her to answer, 'was he the one?'
That was when it began. Dani was so beautiful and sexy in that picture being kissed by probably the best- looking guy in school, chocolate-brown complexion. Besides, I'd heard the rumors, you know about black guys.
After that, my obsession with knowing just grew, that picture in my brain. But she wouldn't tell me anything; was she was dating the guy or was that just a 'homecoming' kiss?
ooOoo
Now, back to the beginning of the story, about three months after I'd first seen that picture. It was a normal Friday in October. We still lived in our home town. Dani had gone out that evening to visit a couple girlfriends she's had since school and I stayed home alone. We had three kids; two in college and one married, working at the local RV manufacturing plant.
We were proud of them all, our oldest was the youngest person the plant had ever promoted to a manager. The other two, too; our daughter was going to college to be a teacher, to follow in her mom's footsteps (pretty sure Dani's been the subject of many high school boys' wet dreams), and our other son was a math whiz, majoring in mathematics.
None of that had anything to do with the strange happenings of that evening, though, except that it explains why I was home alone. After Dani left, I was pondering that little mystery of my wife and even had gotten the album out again with the picture of Dani and her 'boyfriend' to look at again. She had the little queen's crown on her head and the kid was holding her hand and politely kissing her on the cheek.
Dani was wearing a pale blue dress with a beautiful corsage over her left breast. The dress was long, flowing with a slit up one side, bare shoulders with a deep 'V' showing her cleavage. Her auburn hair was curled under, just above her shoulders. She looked like a sweet, sexy, high school girl, her face beaming with the honor of being voted homecoming queen.
I sat, just staring at the picture, almost to the point of the picture putting me in a trance, wondering about later that night, the homecoming dance... and after.
I hadn't had dinner and decided to go buy myself a Pizza Hut dinner. I stepped outside, taking about four steps and stopping to gaze at my surroundings. I was thoroughly confused, my 2015 Accord was gone and my parents' old black '63 Ford Fairlane was in the street where the Accord was supposed to be. That was the car I'd driven my first year of college, before they'd sold it the following summer and I bought a little pickup.
How the hell was it sitting in our street? In front of our house! I checked the keys in my pocket and there they were... the keys for the Ford. Now, I was really confused. I knew damn good and well that I'd just picked up the keys for the Accord from the key rack beside the door.
I turned around to go back in and see if they were still there... and my eyes widened... there was no house! I was staring at the empty lot that Dani and I had bought six years ago. What the hell? I looked down at my feet and I was standing on bare dirt, not our concrete sidewalk. When I turned back around again, the old Fairlane wasn't on a street, just the dirt road that was there before the subdivision was put in.