Chapter 9

If you’re a guy, and you’ve just spurted your sperm into a woman without asking her if that’s okay, the thing you do is ignore the issue and talk about something else. It’s just easier than apologizing and begging for forgiveness or whatever.

I guess I should say if you’re me and you do that ... you do that. It’s probably not fair to paint all of us with the same brush. Not that I had a lot of experience doing that. Before I met Val, during the few liaisons I had that were on that level, I had been more circumspect about such things. If you want the girl to let you do that again, you try to make sure she’s not unhappy about how you do it the first time. What always amazed me was the number of girls who were not on birth control, and did not make that perfectly clear to me before we had sex. There were only two, by the way, but that still seems like a huge number to me. One was the first woman I fucked. Valerie was the last.

Anyway, I normally asked a woman if I could cum in her. I hadn’t done that with Valerie ... and now I hadn’t done it with her mother. I was batting a thousand on the negative side for caring about the reproductive health of the O’Malley women.

How’s that for a statistic?

And “normally” makes it sound like I was fucking women right and left before Val took me off the market. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I had had two girlfriends before her who I felt strongly enough about to enter into that kind of relationship with.

But I asked both of them before I did it.

Basically, the O’Malley women made me lose my head. Like daughter ... like mother.

I know it’s supposed to be the other way around, but that’s not how it happened.

So, there I was, in bed with my mother-in-law, in that awkward moment after the first time you make the beast with two backs. Her pussy was drooling my spend, the spend she hoped would make grandchildren for her one day. Emphasis on “Grand.”

“Thank you,” she sighed.

“My pleasure,” I said. I immediately felt both guilty and snarky. “What I mean is I’m glad you feel good about it,” I said.

“It will be some time before I fully understand how I feel about it, but I do know I want to thank you.” She rolled to get on one elbow. “Thank you for being you. Thank you for meeting my daughter and being patient with her after I screwed her up. Thank you for not being a dick about what just happened.”

“You’re welcome.”

Her eyes went to my stumps.

“And thank you for your service.”

“Any time,” I said.

We both understood I was referring to her last comment, and not about the sex.

“You’ve done enough,” she said.

We both understood she meant the Army ... and not sex.

Her ease, her lack of awkwardness was what got to me.

“I should have told you I was having an orgasm,” I said. “I should have pulled out. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

She gave me a gentle smile.

“I’m not an idiot,” she said. “Valerie has been trying to get me to do this for a while, now. I waited until it was unlikely any of your swimmers would find anything to attack.”

“Still, a man should warn.”

“You are correct,” she said. “That is just one more example of why I’m glad my daughter found you.”

“Except I didn’t warn.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” she said. “I didn’t make you wear a condom.”

“Which is interesting,” I said.

“To be honest, I still wasn’t sure I was going to do this,” she said. “Buying a condom is one of those things that makes you feel like you’re moving things along. I wasn’t sure I wanted to move things along.”

“Well, at a minimum, you can report to Val that her three-legged horse can still limp around the old corral.”

Eve leaned over to kiss my shoulder.

“Trust me, you did way more than limp.”

“Really?” I admit I preened a little.

“You need to get up and get dressed,” she said. “I need to take you back.”

I looked at my watch. A whopping sixty minutes had passed since we got back from Sonic. It was unbelievable.

“It’s still early,” I said.

“Not if you consider I’m already thinking about trying to get you hard again. I think once was enough for today. I already feel like a slut, so it would be nice if the temptation was gone.”

“You’re not a slut,” I said. reaching to grip her arm.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Say it.”

She balked.

“Say it!“ I barked. I also squeezed.

“Okay!“ she said. “I’m not a slut.”

“If you call yourself that again, I’ll spank you,” I said.

She smiled, and then said, “Get up. Get dressed. I mean it.”

So I did that. She got dressed, too, and took me back to the dorm.

We didn’t kiss good night. Somebody might have seen that.

But she reached for my hand and squeezed it.

If it seems like Eve and I were all comfy with our new relationship, it wasn’t like that at all. Neither of us could understand, or really quite believe, that Valerie approved of what we’d done. I know that the first time I talked to Val after that, I didn’t say a word about it. Instead, I went into excruciating detail about my physical therapy and all the things I was now able to do by myself.

And then there’s the fact that I didn’t see Eve again for another week. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. I felt guilty for cheating on my wife, even if she thought of it as therapy, rather than cheating. At the same time, the intimacy I’d shared with Eve was like a drug, a little like the morphine that had eased my pain. The life I was living was dull. I was trudging down train tracks, on artificial legs, and the tracks seemed to go on forever. I was worried that Eve was mad at me. I was worried that Val would find out. I was worried that I masturbated two times a day, and couldn’t decide whether to think about having sex with Valerie or her mother while I did it.

Poor communication abetted my stress. If I had just been man enough to tell Val what happened and then ask her how she felt about it, I would have found out that her mother wasn’t at all reticent about our ‘therapy’ session. She actually called Val and thanked her for letting me crawl into her bed. Well, not crawl, but you know what I mean.

And all those times after that, when I talked about everything else except Aoibheann O’Malley, my wife already knew. Later she would tell me I was cute, and that me feeling guilty reassured her that I really did still love her.

I’ll never understand women.

Anyway, Vlad and the doctors decided that my stumps were now ready for running legs.

I should take a minute to explain that an amputation, particularly one in which the remaining ends of the two lower leg bones are sculpted and fused, is treated much like a broken leg. The bone has to grow together, something your DNA keeps thinking, “This is wrong!” about, and the shape of the bone changes. The skin also has to adapt to the new shape of the end of the leg, and that changes. That’s why you have starter legs, and then intermittent legs, before you end up with the permanent ones. They don’t give you the permanent ones until they’re sure nothing is going to change anymore. Actually, they never stop changing but that’s more than you need to know. Let’s just say there comes a time they think the changes will become minimal. Part of that is stressing the stumps in different ways, to encourage them to get the changing done with.

One of those ways, at least in the military, is to fit the patient with running legs. You’ve seen them if you saw Oscar Pistorius run at the 2012 Olympics in London. They’re sometimes called blades, and when you use them, you’re called a blade runner.

Not every patient gets blades. It all depends on the assessment all the medical folks make about the patient’s physical condition, and attitude, and all that. I’m sure there’s a checklist for it somewhere. Apparently they thought I was a good candidate. A med tech installed them and then I underwent two hours of Vlad’s patented enhanced interrogation, first standing between the parallel bars and bouncing gently, and then moving forward and back. Then they put me in a harness and hung me from the ceiling on bungee cords that wouldn’t let me hit the floor if I lost my balance. Artificial legs are like stilts, as I mentioned before. Now imagine putting bouncy springs on the bottom of your stilts. The bungee cords were fastened to a track on the ceiling, so I could move 25 feet or so, and turn around and move back.

They had to make adjustments to the padding, because it hurt like a motherfucker. It was one of my milestones, though, so I thought of every bouncing step as bringing me closer to Val. I had to take the next day off because my stumps were swollen. That meant wheel-chairing it. I was lying on my bed, reading, when there was a tapping at the door and Eve breezed in. She was working, or at least at work, and dressed in one of the more colorful sets of her scrubs. This set had pictures of Sponge Bob and his friends on them.

“How you doing?” she asked. “I heard you’re on the bench for a day or two.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, artlessly.

“I’m checking on a patient,” she said. “You want me to leave?”

“No,” I sighed. “Thanks for coming. I’m bored to tears.”

She closed the door and came over to me and looked at my stumps, exposed by the running shorts I was wearing. She lifted one and ran her hands over it gently. Then she reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a little jar of something.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Noxzema,” she said. “It will soothe the skin.”

“I forgot about Noxzema,” I said. A lot of soldiers used Noxzema in the Middle East. It did wonders for both easing the pain of sunburn and healing the skin. That’s not what it was designed for, but it works really well for that affliction.

I felt the cool tingle as soon as she spread some of it over my left stump.

“Thanks,” I sighed.

She did both stumps, and then wiped her hands off on my thighs. I tensed as her hands got close to the hem of the shorts. I watched as a tent formed in the stretchy material above that.

Without a word, Eve reached for the waistband of my shorts and pulled, exposing my cock and balls.

“I used to hate it when that happened because a man was thinking about me that way,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Would you stop being so fucking sorry about everything?” Her voice was suddenly heated.

I managed not to say I was sorry again, but all I could do was lie there.

She took advantage of my speechlessness to lean over and suck my penis. She did it so matter-of-factly that it seemed surreally normal. That, and the fact that she was incredibly good at doing this, had me ready to pop within a couple of minutes. I did, and she stayed on, swallowing like it was all part of my regular treatment. I was panting as if it were yesterday and I had just ‘run’ 25 feet while strapped to the ceiling.

She stood up, licked her lips, and said, “You owe me one, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I breathed. It was just instinct to agree.

“See you later. I’ll leave the Noxzema here. It’s not in your chart, by the way. The doctors all call it voodoo medicine.”

“Have one of them put it on a sunburn,” I said.

“Right. I might as well try to get them to do a Tarot card reading.” She grinned and left.

Valerie came to visit eight days later. There was a holiday of some sort - I didn’t pay attention to those anymore - and she had a three day weekend. She got a room in the Fisher House and then came to collect me. A sergeant actually brought me a paper copy that said I was on pass for three days.

We went straight to her room and she stripped, while I stood there on my “street legs.” She didn’t exactly do a striptease, but it affected me like one. She craned her neck and looked at her butt.

“I’ve gained four pounds,” she pouted. “Does my butt look fat?”

“Your butt looks beautiful,” I said. “The rest of you looks beautiful, too.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls who get naked in front of you.”

“There are no other girls who get naked for me,” I said.

She walked over to me and draped her arms around my neck. I got a kiss, a nice, warm one. When she stopped, she pulled back only an inch.

“I can think of one other girl,” she said. “Thank you, by the way.”

I got tense. She could only be talking about her mother ... but she’d thanked me. My reply was designed to get more information, but it was a pretty stupid reply.