Chapter 9

This was very different for us than the relationship we’d had in the past. It’s hard to describe. If you could interview young married couples about the difference they feel between having “married sex” and “having sex specifically to make a baby” I suspect you’d learn some interesting things. Generally, of course, we don’t do that kind of interview in this culture. Or anywhere else that I know of. Most people have heard anecdotal evidence, however, of how trying to get pregnant and not being able to can put great strain on a marriage. Sometimes it can even destroy it.

There wasn’t a negotiation, as such. Hannah, as the “go between” (in more than one sense) had most of the contact with me, at least initially. That may seem to beg the question, but it’s completely understandable. Most men, even under these extraordinary conditions, don’t do well with sending their wives off to have sex with another man, especially sex intentionally for the purposes of making her belly swell with that other man’s baby.

Then again, the internet is awash with stories, some of which claim to be true, in which exactly that happens, so maybe it’s more common than one would think. In this case, though, Austin and I didn’t talk about it - ever.

The logistics of things was part of the problem, and Hannah had already been thinking about this long before she talked to me about it. Through contacts in her company, she found out about a position open for a science teacher at the junior high school in Neosho, Missouri. That would put me a little less than two hours from their house, which was located on the east side of Tulsa.

I interviewed for the job and got it.

My new principal introduced me to a lovely, eighty-year-old woman named Bernice, who became my landlady when she rented me a one bedroom house that was even older than she was. I could walk to school, though and it was the very definition of quaint. It was also in surprisingly good condition.

Hannah came to visit me on her own schedule, always alone.

What happened then was also different than it had been in the past. For one thing it was obvious Hannah was thinking of both of “her men” during these times. She always called Austin to tell him she got there safely. If she stayed more than one night, she also called or Skyped with him every evening. Those calls were sometimes an hour long. They never talked about why she was there. They just talked. Hearing her say she loved him was routine. Hearing the adoration in his voice if he was on Skype was also routine. I took care to stay out of his field of view, to make it as easy on him as I could.

Then, after she Skyped with the other man she loved, she’d make love with me. The fact that Austin couldn’t father a child on her was why she was there, but it was also clear she was happy about the solution to their problem. Only an idiot could have believed it was just for the purposes of procreation, even if that was the main intent.

At other times we were just brother and sister, talking about things going on in the family, going out to eat together, and things like that. She liked to take little presents back to Austin and on more than one occasion she asked my opinion about what to get him.

But she was there to have sex ... and lots of it. She wanted as much sperm in her belly as it would hold and she held nothing back during our lovemaking.

She teased me a lot. She had a lot of slinky underwear, things she’d purchased after leaving home. She’d wear some of that and stroll around in my apartment, holding her camera. I’ll describe one such incident.

“Want to take pictures of me wearing this?” she asked.

“No. I want to take it all off of you,” I replied.

“But you can’t take pictures of me naked,” she pouted. “What if somebody saw them?”

“I wasn’t thinking about taking pictures,” I said.

Then she did take it all off and sat down in an overstuffed chair that was in the living room. She leaned back and draped both legs over the arms of the chair, exposing every bit of her to my eyes.

“You don’t think this would make a good picture?” She sounded hurt, but I could see a smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

One time I had a function to attend the Friday night she got there, but she had a key and let herself in. When I got home, she was wearing an apron that said, “Kiss the cook” on the front. That was all she was wearing and she spent what seemed like hours bending over to check the oven and show off her fabulous ass. It turned out the cinnamon rolls she’d made had been done for an hour and that she’d left them in the oven just so she could tease me.

Eventually, though, we got down to business. That meant got into bed. We didn’t make love in different positions. It was always with me on top so that, once we were finished, we could prop a pillow under her hips and tilt her vaginal canal so that all my spunk stayed right where she wanted it. There was the occasional time she rode me, but she never allowed me to cum in her that way. I had to be on top of her when I spurted.

That it was no chore for her was clear. I can’t count the times she moaned, “I love you, Bobby, and I’m so glad we still get to do this.” Her exhortations for me to cum in her, to “Make a baby in me, baby,” or other such sweet (anything but) nothings were surely designed, at least in part, to get me to finish and make the donation she was there to get. The fact that she just flat wore me out every time she was there, though, spoke volumes about her willingness to “endure” this process.

Through it all, though, she made it clear to Austin that he was her man. She never teased him, or made any reference to why she was there when she talked to him. The only times I even heard her acknowledge me were the times when she said something like, “Bobby’s taking me out to eat and I’ll leave from there to come home. I’ll call you when I get on the road.”

One thing that might have helped Austin was that as soon as she missed a period she stopped coming to see me. Another was that I never went to their house until after she was firmly pregnant. Initially I didn’t stay the night, just visiting, having a meal with them or something like that. After her doctor confirmed she was pregnant, his wife didn’t stray back to her “other lover.”

She had a little girl they named Cynthia Jean and my mother went over the moon. Dad was happy, too, though I could tell he kind of wished for a grandson. They lived far enough away that they only got down there two or three times a year, but Mom said they didn’t have anything else to do anyway, since their children had abandoned them. She also started asking questions about why I didn’t have a girlfriend and when was I going to get with the program, like Hannah had.

By the time Hannah and Austin were ready to have number two I did have a girlfriend, another teacher who was a single mom. That sounds both simple and normal, but was neither. The father of her child had taken off as soon as he found out she was pregnant. It was a sad tale, especially since she was a bright, cheerful and very pretty woman. Her little boy seemed to scare off suitors, though. Her parents had taken care of him while she went to college but as soon as she was employed that resolved to a more normal life. It turned out she was from Joplin, though, which was just up the road, so I saw her parents frequently. Chris, her six-year-old, lit up whenever Grandma’s car pulled into the driveway.

I’m getting ahead of the story, though, so I’ll back up a bit.

I knew she had a child before I asked her out. She taught Spanish, just down the hall from my classroom and we saw each other in the teacher’s lounge and other places. She had an elfin face with almost startlingly blue eyes in a round face framed by coal black hair. She was also barely over five feet tall, so she was as different from Hannah as a girl could be. Her name was Phoebe.

It was because of Hannah, in fact, that I decided to ask Phoebe out. Hannah had been coming up to see me for about three months, trying for number two. The weekends weren’t cooperating with her cycle this time, and my sperm was entering her on the margins of her peak fertile times. She was tracking her body temperatures and all sorts of other things I didn’t know anything about and if her ovulation happened on a Tuesday there wasn’t much we could do about it. Still, I hadn’t been in a serious relationship with anybody and making love to Hannah reminded me of how much I’d been missing. I had weathered the sudden halt to having a lover when Cynthia began her gestation. Now that carnal bliss had returned to my house, I didn’t look forward to the time when it would inevitably stop again. I felt like having a girlfriend would help me transition to a more normal life.

I had actually been interested in Phoebe for a while, but had never done anything about it. So I decided to ask her out on a date.

When I did that, I thought I did so in a very normal way. We were in the teacher’s lounge at the time.

“Hi,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. You want to go out sometime?” I asked.

She cocked her head and studied me.

“Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know. To eat dinner?” I suggested.

“Why?” she asked again.

“Surely you get hungry now and then.”

“I don’t know. This is kind of sudden,” she said.

“You think so? I guess we have only known each other for two years.”

She studied me some more.

“I have a little boy,” she said.

“I know. His name is Chris,” I replied. “He draws pictures that you put up in your room.”

“You’ve been in my room?” Her eyebrows went up.

“I confess I looked through the window in the door a couple of times,” I said. “I assumed the crayon drawings on the wall weren’t made by your students.” I thought about some of the shenanigans the kids in that school had been involved in. “I could be wrong,” I added.

“You’re not wrong.” She went back to her original question, but added a qualifier. “Why now?”

I was getting mildly frustrated. We had been on a nodding acquaintance for two years and she’d always been pleasant. I began to think there was something wrong with me and she was debating whether to ignore that flaw or not.

“If you don’t want to go out it’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t think you were in a relationship with anybody.”

“I’m not.”

“Well I’m not, either. Imagine that! A guy who isn’t in a relationship asking a woman out who also isn’t in a relationship.” I admit there was a tinge of sarcasm in my voice.

“What about that blonde woman I see you with?”

That gave me pause. I didn’t think anybody had noticed Hannah and me together. We left the house when she was visiting, of course, but we didn’t spend hours window shopping or engaged in public recreational activities. Most of her time in Neosho was spent naked, under me, or lying with a pillow under her hips, trying to get one of my little swimmers to track down one of her eggs.

“Do you mean Hannah?” I said.

“Is Hannah blond and beautiful?”