Chapter 10

It wasn’t too awfully long after that when Jennifer had a bad day. Maybe things just piled up and came crashing down on her emotions all at once, but I noticed she was down, and did what I could to change that. I pulled her into the family room, sat on the couch, and pulled her into my lap, holding her to me and kissing the top of her head.

“I miss him. I miss him so much, Charlie. He was so good to me. So good for me.”

“I can imagine, hon. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this, that you’re feeling like this, but I have to be honest. It’s going to happen once in a while until enough time passes to make it a bit easier. It’ll probably never go away, but it gets a bit easier with each year that passes.”

“What morbid thoughts are you two sharing, as if I didn’t know?” Doris asked as she walked in on our conversation.

Jennifer reached up to pull Doris down to for a hug as she approached us.

“My little sweetie here is having a down day, and missing her father isn’t helping,” I said, rubbing Jennifer’s arms and kissing her forehead.

“Don’t I know it. Jennifer, it’ll be better soon. A little, anyway. A bit at a time.” Doris leaned over into Jennifer until both of them were up against me, and I was able to wrap my arms around them together.

“It helps to have Charlie here with me, Doris. I don’t know what I would do without him. His loving arms, and Sandy’s caring voice, I think are keeping me sane.”

Doris looked up at me. “This does feel good, doesn’t it. It’s been a while now since I’ve felt the arms of a good man around me. Maybe I should do this more often.”

“Doris, I would welcome any possibility of making your life easier, but I don’t want you to get the idea I want to replace Matt in your eyes.”

“I’d never think that, Charlie. You aren’t that way, and you and Matt were good friends. I know that. You couldn’t replace Matt, anyway, Charlie. I may fall in love with you some day, like all these other women have, but you won’t replace Matt. I’ll always have him in my heart. You could kiss me and try if you want, though.” She giggled a little, causing Jenny to giggle as well, most probably getting what she wanted. A smile out of the little girl that had recently lost her blood family in one way or another.

I put my hand behind Doris’s head, pulled her close to me and kissed her. It was with a closed mouth, but certainly with feeling, that we kissed romantically for the first time. I had kissed her cheek when she arrived or departed, more than once, actually, but I’d never kissed her on the lips that I remember. This simple kiss was a signal to both of us that Doris would not spend any of the rest of her life away from our family. She would have me, she would have Sharon and Sandy, and she would have Jennifer with her from then on.

It was several weeks of normalcy, if you can call having several women crawling in and out of your bed, your heart, and your arms normal, before anything intimate happened between Doris and me. It happened with Sharon, first.

They had been basically bunking together quite often, but other than cuddling, hugging, and a kiss here and there, things were pretty much PG-13 between them until recently. Sharon let Sandy and me know that those ‘things’ had escalated, and that Sharon provided Doris with some much-needed oral relief one evening when her despondency reached critical mass and Sharon felt she needed to intervene. Calling Doris into the room with her to explain, she did so, while we watched poor Doris turn several shades of pink, each one darker than the other until we were finally notified that she squirted a bit, at which time pink turned to red, and she buried her face in her hands.

Sandy immediately went to her rescue, holding her and promising there was nothing to be embarrassed about. “The luckiest of women experience orgasms strong enough to cause that. My mother and I have both left Charlie looking like a glazed donut now and again.”

That helped bring Doris around to open up and smile. She was still a bit pink, but looked as if she was getting her color back.

That night, Jennifer, Valerie, and Sandy spent the night with Doris, leaving Sharon, Sally, Allison, Elsa, and Patty with me in our big bed.