Author's Note: This is a continuation of the story "Sisters' Indulgent Secret". While it can be read from this point, I highly recommend reading the prequel, also, for an even better understanding of Karen and Jessie and their relationship with George.
*
"Poop!" Cried two-year-old Grady as he raced around my living room sofa, Jessie running in hot pursuit. "Poop! Poop! Poop!"
"Baby, stop!" His mother shouted as she panted with exasperation.
I turned up the TV to compete with my wife's increased volume.
Frustrated, Jessie stopped in her tracks and blocked the television directly. But I did not tell her to move. I knew another lecture was coming. No matter, I thought. Why should tonight be any different? But I didn't say anything.
We didn't say things, anymore.
"George, I'm not gonna get angry," she lied.
I rolled my eyes but remained silent.
"Hello!" Jessie shouted as Grady started to yank plugs from a surge protector in the dining room. "Houston to George! Come in, George! Your child is trying to kill himself!"
I tipped my head back. "Grady, don't kill yourself, buddy. Word?"
"...Werr..." said Grady, who abruptly dropped the power strip and began a slow-but-happy saunter back to the couch.
It wasn't really the fact that Grady didn't listen to his Mommy that got on her nerves, nor that he so readily obeyed me. It was my attitude about it. And about everything in our marriage. Later, I would tell her that I didn't know what the hell she was talking about - that I wasn't angry with her.
I could lie, too.
"Got your footies on?" I asked Grady as he jumped onto the sofa next to me.
"Fooeys-onn." He said calmly as he dug in next to me, bobbing his stocking feet in gleeful acknowledgement.
Jessie put her hands on her narrow hips. "Uh-uh, Mister. Bed."
Grady paid no attention to her. Neither did I. It wasn't that it made me feel more like a man when I treated Jessie this way. It was that I literally had run out of ways to keep the peace. If she was hell-bent on making me as miserable as she was, there was little that I could do. Five years of marriage had taught me to roll my shoulders and bear my punishments when the mood struck her.
Jessie's eyes told the whole story. Whatever tenderness I might have salvaged from this evening was now gone.
I kissed my son's sweaty head. "Grady, go hit the sack, home-slice."
***
I laid on the same sofa four hours later, my house dark except for the blue-tinted light from the muted soft-core channel that had become my only friend and lover. Though my eyes were closed, I was not asleep and I knew that Jessie was standing over me, watching me pretend.
We did this, every night. I would pretend that I was asleep and Jessie would come down in her homely nightgown and just look at me. What she was thinking, I had no idea. And I was confident that I never would know, because she would never say anything.
"George," she said, her voice soft and gentle like I remember it from our courtship years ago, "what happened to us?"
I opened my eyes. She was beautiful - her straight brown hair cascading down to her shoulders and her clean face had a pure, creamy white complexion through which her emerald eyes looked down at me with cold and empty exhaustion. She was emotionally drained and there was nothing that I could do.
The silence was long and uncomfortable.
"We let it get away from us, didn't we?" she asked.
I nodded. There were so many things that I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say that I liked being with her even when we were fighting - that I couldn't imagine my life without her. But then what? These conversations always turned into more things that I should be doing and had nothing to do with her behavior.
But I did love her.
"Say something, George."
"What do you want me to say?" I asked.
"That you still love me," was her honest reply.
I swallowed hard, "I do."
"Say it." She folded her arms in front of her breasts.
I shook my head. "Jess, sweetheart, it wouldn't kill you to be the first to say it, once in a while."
Her face cringed in frustration. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
I shrugged. "I didn't lose it. That's what it means. We lost it, but it's not my fault."
"When did you start feeling like this?"
I let go a long sigh. "When you started thinking of someone else while I made love to you. Missing someone else."
Her heart seemed to skip several beats. She had never known that I had a videotape locked away in a shoebox in the garage with a secret that she had unknowingly shared with me for years.
She didn't know that I knew about her rapture with her sister, Karen, five years ago. I pretended that Christmas and Easter at her parents' house wasn't awkward with the strange glances between the two of them. The unspoken exchanges that said "I miss you." Then there were the drawn-out hugs and pecks on the cheek. I knew that when she put her lips to mine, she wished they were someone else's.
"George, I don't know where you come up with this shit."
Reluctantly, I stood up and approached her, her arms still defiantly crossed over her bosom. Her jaw locked and her lips frowned in her resistance to my intimacy.
"Kiss me, Jessica," I said.
She didn't move for a moment. She was fighting it. She was confused and lonely and I wanted to be there for her. But she had to meet me halfway. I couldn't be the only initiator.
She did nothing. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because I love you, Jessica. I want you to love me. I want you to make love to me. I want you to be my wife, again. I want to feel your love wrap around me like it did that first night that we got coffee and made out in the Jeep. I miss the girl that liked it in the ass in public bathrooms."
"Oh, George, shut up."
I shrugged. "We haven't had sex in 6 months, Jess. People wind up separated with periods like that."
She became furious, her volume decreasing as her intensity rose. "You know that I lost a lot of my sex drive after Grady was born."
"Bullshit." I fumed. "Total bullshit, Jess. Don't blame it on the baby, that's a total cop-out and besides, that was two years, ago! You love someone else, why can't you just admit it?"
She yelled back. "Because it isn't true!"
Upstairs, Grady began to whimper through our paper-thin walls.
"Jesus Christ!" she whispered angrily. "You made me wake up Grady."
I shook my head. "You always blame it on me, don't you?"
Her eyes narrowed. "Fuck you, George."
"Or something." I retorted.
"Fuck you!" She shouted with angry tears welling in her emerald eyes. She turned toward the stairs to go back to our bedroom that was her exile.
"Or at least suck me off or something, you used to like that." I angrily shot back.
"I hate you!" She said.
"You said that you liked to taste me, that you like to feel me fill you up."
"Shut your goddamn mouth, George, I'm warning you!"
I dropped my angry man routine and let it go. All of my frustration with her seemed to fall to the floor.
"I'm tired of fighting with you, anymore, Jessie. If you won't love me back, then just say what it is that you do want."
The tears flowed quickly and overrun her cheeks. Why couldn't she just say that she didn't want this, anymore?
"Just say it, Jess." I said, calmly. "Just say what you feel, baby. I won't be mad, anymore, no matter what it is."
She wiped the tears from her face and did her best impersonation of a brave woman as she rose up to her full height.
"I want a divorce," she said.
I sighed. I turned away. I sank onto the same impression that I had made on this couch every night for six months.
"Fine," I said.
***
Three days, later we had still made no phone calls for lawyers. We had not spoken more than three words to one another. And none of them were the three words that we wanted from one another.
And for three nights, I woke up on the couch at two o'clock in the morning and found the cordless phone missing and its line occupied.
Just like my wife, I thought at half-past-two. Even when she calls Karen to bitch about me, she has to skimp on her damn precious cellular minutes.
For fifteen years before Jessie and I fell in love, I had loved her sister from my comfortable place as the family friend. He parents loved me and wanted me as a son-in-law. Her extended family had welcomed me into their homes and lives and I had basked in the beauty of being a part of their family. A new family, besides my own.
It wasn't until Karen had said that I was like a brother to her that I could no longer fantasize about having her naked body on mine. I couldn't love her the same, anymore. Then she and Jessie had set up a video camera in the family bathroom in their parent's house in Seattle to settle a bet that I used to masturbate in there - which I did - but I always chuckled to think of how the plan had backfired on them and caught their Sapphic experiment on tape though neither of them knew it, still.
Wait a minute, I thought as this thought occurred to me. I had never considered that these late-night phone calls to bitch about me could have been made during the day while I was at work and Grady was at Pre-school. Why late-night calls? Why always at the same time?
***
It had been a long time since I'd used this phone that was in the infamous "Goodwill pile" in the garage. A plain telephone that used to sit in my office before I started managing everything on my BlackBerry. I had quickly unscrewed the microphone end and by-passed the wires to make it a silent phone. Then I had set up the phone from a jack in the den and closed the door.
As a last-minute modification, I unscrewed the phone cover and removed the speakerphone mic. Just in case.
My heart already racing, I unjacked the phone itself and lifted the receiver. I cradled the handset in my neck and jacked in the telephone, silently connecting myself to my wife's "house-line".
I listened to a long moment of nothing. Then faint breathing and nothing else. Whose breathing was it?
"...oh, god..." came one soft whisper amid heavy breathing.
I knew it! I thought. It was Karen. I knew there was something still there.
"...it feels so sweet, so soft..." I heard. Was Karen really calling my wife to get off with her? For a moment I imagined Karen pleasuring herself like she claimed that she did not know how to do.
Then came a voice that was not whispering, at all: "what are you doing now, sweetie?"
It was Karen's voice! Of course! Her husband was deployed and so she didn't have to whisper in her house.
That meant that the voice that was making sweet self-loving was Jess.
"....mmmmm... I'm taking my panties off..."
"Where are you putting them?"
"....on the nightstand..."
"What do they look like?"
"...just...normal granny-panties, I guess..."
"What color are they?"
"...cream and red stripes..."
"Do you remember what I taste like?"
My heart raced as I sank back in my den-chair. There was no amount of porn in the world that could arouse my forgotten passion like this did.
"...yes....I remember...mmm..."
"Can you taste me, right now?"
"....I...wish...."
"I want you to taste me. I want you to describe it to me. Make me take my panties off, too."
