Chapter 57: Changing Perspectives

Mark

By our standards Christmas and New Year’s Eve were positively tame. One reason for that was that Jenny was nearly ten now and thus would stay up all night, and secondly, in solidarity with Nadja, all the girls had been living a teetotaler’s life since we knew she was pregnant.

I had planned to stay away from my occasional beer too, but Nadja had vetoed that idea. I didn’t know if it was a Russian thing or just a personal quirk of hers, but when it came to men, she disliked teetotalers as much as she disliked drunks. In her view the true manliness lay in the power of moderation, not abstinence. Well, who was I to argue?

Alas, it seemed to be a supreme rule of the universe that something always had to go wrong at least every five years. I normally called John and Rhonda once a week to keep tabs of what was going on in Pasadena, but in early February I had found both of them nearly unable to speak – they were bawling. It took me some time to get out of them that their good friend, and in John’s case live-saver, Bill O’Connor had died when his jet crashed on approach to Moffett Field, near San Jose. Bill and his wife had been the only ones aboard and neither of them had survived, leaving their seventeen year old son Ian behind as an orphan.

Lydia and I had packed our bags in no time. Since Fred and Jack needed at least twelve hours to reach Europe in our plane, we chartered a small twin-engine plane from airTaxi in Braunschweig, who collected us at Drewitz airfield, just a few kilometers from Senftenberg. Thankfully it was Regina who drove us there, not Nadja.

Compared to our usual transport, the French-built Reims-Cessna propeller plane was positively pedestrian, but considering that we only had to cross Germany, and not the Atlantic, like Fred and Jack, we would still beat them to arrival at Groningen by at least three to four hours.

Femke already awaited us at the general aviation terminal. She hugged Lydia and started crying. Unlike other sponsors, Bill O’Connor had always taken a keen interest in where his company’s money was going and he had been a regular guest at the races. All the girls had loved this amiable, almost comically British guy from America.

My thoughts were with poor Ian, frankly. Okay, if I remembered correctly he was just a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, so there was probably no danger of him disappearing into an orphanage, but I knew the youngster was a keen pilot himself. I didn’t want to imagine what it would do to the poor guy to lose both parents to a plane crash.

I left Lydia and Femke to consoling each other and fished my mobile out of my pocket. I dialed John’s number.

“Mark?” he asked by way of greeting and I could tell he had at least calmed down somewhat over the last few hours.

“We’re coming to Pasadena, we’ll probably arrive tomorrow morning. I’ll bring Lydia and Femke too.”

“If you’re worried about the team,” he started but I interrupted him.

“Forget the team for a moment,” I said. “Lydia and I are probably the only ones who know what role Bill played in the lives of you and Rhonda. You had our backs back in ‘92, the least we can do is returning the favor, and besides, young Ian would probably have an easier time of it if he can talk to someone closer to his age.”

“We really appreciate it,” he said after while. “Do you want me to send a car to pick you up?”

“Not necessary,” I told him. “There’s a Merc dealership right next to the GA terminal. We pay them to store and maintain our ride whenever we’re away. Where do we find you? At your place?”

“No,” John answered. “We’ll be in the office. Work takes our minds off it a bit. We’d both go mad sitting at home.”

“Alright, John. In the office then. Give my best to Rhonda.”

Lydia

Jet-lag seemed to become our natural state lately. We landed in Pasadena, our internal clocks completely out of whack and we were horribly tired. So tired in fact that we didn’t collect the car and took a taxi instead. Neither of us trusted himself or herself not to fall asleep.

And if we were looking ragged, that was nothing compared to John and Rhonda. You could see the worried looks of their employees. Both of them looked like they hadn’t slept in days. For an over forty year old, Rhonda was a fine-looking woman, but right now she looked like something you’d encounter in a front yard on Halloween.

I took Mark aside and we quickly hatched a plan.

John

“Right, we’re taking over here,” Mark announced loudly, leaving me and Rhonda to gape at him slack-jawed.

“Who’s responsible for the company fleet here?” he asked one of our interns, who happened to walk by with a stack of papers. He awkwardly pointed at Travis’ office from under the stack, trying not to drop it. Somewhat dazed Rhonda and I followed our three guests to the office of our TD.

“Alright, Sir,” Lydia addressed him without so much as a greeting. “You’ve not taken care of your bosses too well. We need two company cars with drivers. We’ve just arrived from Germany, and John and Rhonda look like they haven’t slept a minute since Christmas. None of us if fit to drive.”

Completely flabbergasted, Travis looked at me, and lost for an explanation myself, I just nodded weakly. My tired brain was too fried to make any heads or tails of it, but secretly I hoped that Mark and Lydia had any brilliant plans to help us find sleep. The last two nights had been a failure in that regard.

By the look of it, Travis was all too keen to get us out of the building as the two cars showed up at the main entrance in no time. Instead to our place though, we went straight to Lydia’s house.

“What’s happening, Mark?” I asked tiredly.

“You’ve tried to find sleep and couldn’t. We’ve been there, done that, when Grandpa Ernst died. But since we have more than one partner we soon found out that we were essentially just feeding each other’s grief, instead of finding any solace. That’s why you and Lydia will sleep in the main bedroom, Rhonda and I will go to my old room and Femke takes the guest room.”

“You know this nearly blew up in our faces in ‘92,” I protested weakly.

“Look at us, John,” Mark said. “Does anyone of us look like we could be in a frisky mood anytime soon? And if you don’t trust yourself, keep the pants on. What you both need is a good day’s sleep, not a desperate shag.”

“I still know the way to those elderly folks you shop at,” Femke said. “I’ll put something in the fridge before I take a nap.”

Rhonda

Mark’s idea had worked like the golden elixir. I had started to cry, but Mark had just spooned me from behind, holding me in his strong arms and I soon drifted off into a deep dreamless sleep. And his prediction had been spot on. Being in bed with him, stark naked, would probably have ended in fireworks on any other day, especially after I had seen those pictures of him, but anything other than just enjoying the calming effects of his embrace was as far from my mind as could be.

And boy had we slept. We had gone to bed at around eleven in the morning, and when I finally woke up it was four in the morning the next day!

I turned around and saw Mark looking at me. I gave him a kiss. “Thanks Mark, you have no idea how much you helped me.”

“Considering you saved our relationship more than once, it was the least we could do.”

“I take it, you’ve been awake for a while yet?”

“Not really,” he said. “I woke up at ten in the night, but I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep since then.”

Suddenly the door opened. Lydia looked at us, bewildered.

“Mark, Femke isn’t here!”

“Have you looked in the fridge?” he asked.

“The food is there, but she isn’t.”

“Today’s the thirteenth isn’t it,” he wondered aloud. “Mrs. Ross has her birthday the day after tomorrow, so have a guess who’s visiting his parents. I bet she’s been sleeping in Jonjo’s bed, next to him.”

“I forgot,” Lydia realized with a chuckle. “But she could at least have left a message.”

“Under more normal circumstances you wouldn’t wear anything, so I bet she left one in the very place where you and Regina normally put your clothes for the case that Jenny comes home earlier than expected – the left edge of the sofa.”

“Is clothing still optional around here?” I asked. “John doesn’t mind wearing the same clothes for three days, but I do.”

“We also have some of Meri’s clothes still left here,” Mark said. “If you don’t mind dressing up like a twenty year old in 1993.”

“That’ll do me for going home,” I said. “But if you don’t mind. I’m almost desperate for some sense of normalcy. I can hardly remember when I was fully clothed for nearly a week the last time.”

“Do what helps you most, only I cannot vouch for how long my sense of celibacy will last,” Mark said with a smile. “You can still stop traffic, dear.”

Suddenly Lydia blushed an alarming shade of crimson. Mark picked up on it immediately.

“Things didn’t turn out quite that celibate in your room, did they?” he asked, but with neither malice nor reproach in his voice. He tapped the bed next to him and Lydia sat down.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I can’t even describe it, it was pure desperation I guess,” Lydia admitted, tears of shame welling up in her eyes. “I’ve never done it with a man who cried through the whole experience. I’m so sorry Mark.”

He kissed her. “If it helped him, then so be it. We’re not the insecure idiots of 1992 anymore.”

“I don’t think it helped,” Lydia said in a weak voice. “He’s sitting in the living room waiting for you to kill him, convinced he has wrecked our relationship.”

“I know what this was,” I said. “He relived one of the most important days of his life. When Bill saved him from slashing his wrists, we had pretty desperate sex that night, and he cried the whole time.”

“I’ll talk to the silly sod, before we have to lock away the sharp objects,” Mark said and left the room. He didn’t even bother to get dressed.

“That boy will never cease to amaze me,” I said. “That was the most mature reaction I’ve ever seen.”

Mark

“You better forget about that,” I said dryly when I saw John playing around with a kitchen knife. “Rhonda is way too young to become a widow, and she explained what happened.”

“I’m so sorry, Mark,” he said with a quivering voice, without even looking at me.

“Can the bullshit, John, it happened and if you stop pitying yourself it might even help you.”

“That’s not quite the reaction I expected,” he said and turned around, momentarily stunned when he realized I was naked.

“Because you still remember the greenhorn from six years ago. These days I live with three women. I’d be a selfish bastard if I wanted three women for myself but none of them can ever have another guy. And I guess we can agree that you had no plans to take Lydia away from me. It was a desperate shag, and Rhonda told us what this was about.”

For the first time ever I saw John blush.

“When grandpa Ernst died, both Lydia and I were shattered,” I continued. “Regina and Meri will back me up on this. We hardly had any sex for nearly five months, but we had a handful of rather desperate trysts in that time, so don’t think it is only you. When Lydia and I cooked up this plan, we knew this was a possibility, although we thought it would likely be Rhonda who needed more support than a hug. But Lydia had my expressed permission, so you need not worry about anything.”

“You’ve grown up quite a bit, kiddo,” he told me earnestly.

“And you and Rhonda helped that process along quite a bit. Without the two of you, I would be single now, not living with three of the most gorgeous women in the world.”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to forgive me this easily,” he admitted.

“There is nothing to forgive, I already told you, except for one thing. Be a little less desperate tonight?”

John looked at me slack-jawed.

“The arrangement apparently worked, it certainly did for Rhonda,” I explained. “So we’ll keep it for the next two or three days. A fine woman like Rhonda wouldn’t have put up with you if you didn’t know how to show a woman a good time, and the last thing Lydia needs is a memory of a desperate shag, so do it properly tonight, alright?”

“You are un-fucking-believable,” he said and shook his head. “Unfortunately I can now really no longer handle her management. That was a red line we crossed last night.”

“So what,” Rhonda said, coming down the stairs as naked as I. “Lydia lives most of the time in Germany now anyway. Just hand it over to Horst in the Berlin office. He’s every bit as good as you.”

I watched them kiss. John was visibly cautious at first, but Rhonda was quite good at making him understand that she had no problem with what had happened.

“Good, so can we put the self-recriminations behind us then?” I said. “I think we have some work to do. John, Rhonda, I think you better work from here. Your composure will be brittle at best, and your employees were spooked enough as it is. You can have my office over there. The remote connection to the company is all set up, since I used to work from here too. Lydia and I are going to meet young Ian.”

Lydia

There had been a somewhat awkward silence as we flew towards Santa Clara Valley. It was only a short hop of 350 miles, so it wasn’t exactly an intercontinental flight. Jack and Fred were away on a transfer flight so two of their younger pilots were upfront in the cockpit.

“Are you really okay with it?” I asked him when I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

He nodded. “Lydia, when I told you I was okay with whatever would happen, I meant it. I’m not stupid and I’m not a bigoted arsehole either. I can’t claim three gorgeous women for myself, yet demand they can never have another guy. Now, I will never invite any other guy into our lives permanently, but I can’t really realistically demand you’ll never be with any other man but me. If nothing else, for practical reasons.”

“Practical reasons?”

“Look, all four of you – even Meri – have developed a penchant for being double teamed, and the day is already in the calendar when for one of you a strap-on won’t cut it anymore, and since I only have one dick...”

“John was definitely right. You grew up some,” I said with a giggle. “Six years ago you went on a bender at the thought of another guy doing me.”