Chapter 7

Women can perform feats of magic. I learned this as Judith and Erica (while in different cities) planned a wedding, got the church reserved, and ordered a dress within two weeks. Things were made a lot easier because there was a woman’s group in the church that said they’d take care of the rehearsal dinner and reception, there in the church fellowship hall. I gathered this was a traditional kind of response from this group. I looked into renting a tux, but the sticking point was that I had nobody to stand up with me. I didn’t have a “best man” kind of friend, or others to be groomsmen. Erica said she’d been gone from home long enough that she couldn’t think of anybody to ask to be her maid of honor, so we simply dispensed with a wedding “party” and decided to go it solo. Frank would walk her down the aisle and give her away. I’d be waiting, and the ceremony would proceed. We didn’t need a ring-bearer or flower girl. It wasn’t quite as traditional as Judith wanted, but it was a church wedding and that was what mattered the most to her.

All I had to do was get my hands on the final divorce decree, which I did seven days after we got back from breaking the news to Erica’s parents.

As for invitations, we invited the congregation of their church and a few extended relatives. Erica had one uncle and two aunts. None of her grandparents were alive. In the end, about fifty people showed up to see one of the town girls snag a man. I think most of them came because there wasn’t anything else exciting going on in town. Erica’s dress didn’t show the very slight bump of her pregnant abdomen and the reception was a civilized social gathering of people who had known each other for years. They had a good meal, danced to some canned tunes, and then waved goodbye as the newlyweds got in their car to go on a honeymoon that was only vaguely described.

The honeymoon was at our house.

“We can go on a honeymoon later,” said Erica. “School starts tomorrow and you need to work.”

Melody had wanted to go to Hawaii for her honeymoon, but had had to settle for a ski lodge at Aspen. It had taken me almost a year to pay that off.

My second wife was a much more practical woman.

Thanksgiving was a much more relaxed and fun visit. It was the third time I’d been in their home and the first time I slept with their daughter in her old room. We went to a church service and I got nods of hello from people who recognized me, but whose faces I didn’t remember from the wedding. My reply to “How’s it going so far?” was simply “Fine, thanks,” and they wandered off to ask somebody else, perhaps, how it was going for them. I got one other comment from a man who said, “I see you didn’t waste any time,” glancing at Erica’s five-month developed baby bump. He grinned, though, and winked, so it wasn’t a snide comment.

I make this sound impersonal and drab, but I didn’t see it like that at all. I liked her parents and their friends were pretty okay, too. I still felt a little guilty that I had forced things on them by sliding my not-quite-yet-divorced penis into their virgin daughter and impregnating her. That milk was well and truly spilled, as she now showed a definite bulge where her flat stomach had been, but now that we were wed, they could celebrate it. By the time they held their first granddaughter in their arms, all was forgiven and I was a member of the tribe.

Again, I skipped over a few things in order to show a more or less smooth progression to the point where I was no longer considered to be a cradle-robbing son-of-a-bitch.

Melody’s parents had never been the kind who called a lot. We heard from them every two months or so, and they always called Melody’s cell number. They didn’t even have mine. That’s why I didn’t hear from them until almost a month after their daughter walked out and abandoned her child. She at least told them the truth, or at least part of the truth. She told them she was in therapy to deal with the mental health issue that had caused all this. I doubted that, but I had no way to verify it one way or the other. Anyway, her parents wanted to know if they could still come see Jordie. I said they were welcome anytime and that was pretty much the end of the conversation. It was very awkward, at least for me. They’ll have to come here, of course. There’s no way we have the money to gad off to California. Because they live so far away, and because Jordan is still young enough to prohibit really meaningful interaction, I don’t expect them to show up right away.

Erica not only loved children, she loved being pregnant with one. It didn’t weigh her down. It didn’t even slow her down. She gained weight in only one place, and that was between her breasts and hips. She bulged as if she’d somehow swallowed a volleyball. As our daughter grew within her, every little movement was clearly visible across the stretched skin of her mother’s belly.

If anything, Erica’s sex drive increased, but since all I usually had to do was lie there, with her on top, or maybe get on my knees behind her and grasp her hips, it didn’t tax me at all.

Jordie had his first birthday the following January, and by March, when Erica was about to burst, he had figured out that he could take a few steps instead of crawling everywhere. Judith came to stay with us three days before Erica’s due date and she took care of Jordie when I went to the hospital with my wife to help her give birth. Melody had said, “Give me drugs. Can you just knock me out?” and I wasn’t in the room when Jordie was born. That changed with the birth of Lucinda Jean Wellington, who took a mere seven hours to coax from her mother’s womb. The doctor said she was ready to get out into the world and Erica’s body cooperated. During those seven hours, I wiped Erica’s brow, helped her breathe, and let her squeeze my hand as contractions rippled across her distended belly. When it was time to push, I encouraged her, but she was a healthy young woman who wasn’t worn out by eighteen hours of labor. She was eager to push.

Jordie’s reaction to his new, baby sister was interesting. When we got home, Judith came out and received Lucy, to carry her in while Erica just walked. This was very intentional, because Jordie’s “Mama?” during her disappearance made it clear he wanted to see his “mama”. So Erica went in and sat on the couch. Jordie had been playing and as soon as he saw us, he started crawling like crazy. He pulled himself up on the edge of the couch and reached for Erica.

“Hi, little man,” she cooed, lifting him up onto her lap. “Did you miss me?”

He pawed at the front of her shirt. She had decided to just keep letting him nurse so that her breasts would be in working condition when the baby was born. He was a considerate eater and didn’t bite the nipples that fed him.

“Men!” she said, dismissively. “All you think about are breasts. Well, my little friend, you’re going to have to get used to going without mine. There’s a new mouth to feed in this house.” She pulled him to “eat” his neck and shoulder. He squealed and laughed and, for the moment, forgot about her milk-filled nipples.

Later, though, while Erica sat on the same couch, with Lucy cradled against her naked chest, sucking just as eagerly as Jordie ever had, he crawled over and stood, silently staring over the arm of the couch. He just stared, his brown eyes locked on the interloper who had stolen his nipples.

“She’s your baby sister,” said Erica, softly. “You’re going to help me take care of her and protect her from the bad things in the world.”

“Mama?” complained Jordie. He pointed at Lucy’s sucking lips.

“You can maybe have a little taste, now and then,” she said.

“How about me?” I said, making a teasing complaint.

“I beg your pardon?” yipped Judith, who was standing behind us, and who I’d forgotten about.

“Busted!” laughed Erica. “You are so busted, Bob.”

I looked at Judith, sheepishly. She had her hands on her hips, aggressively.

“It tastes good,” I whined. “I can’t help that it tastes good.”

“Well you can control whose mouth it goes into, and whose body it nourishes,” she snapped. “A grown man ... doing that! Preposterous!”

“I’ll get the rest of the stuff out of the car,” I said, fleeing.

Later that night, though, when Erica crawled in next to me in bed, she snuggled up to me.

“You can have a little taste once in a while, too,” she whispered. “We just won’t tell Mom.”

She offered me a breast and I sucked just long enough to get a taste.

We couldn’t make love yet. It was too soon after her vagina had been cruelly spread apart by something the size of a good-sized cantaloupe. So we just cuddled and fell asleep.

My mother-in-law stayed for two weeks. I think part of that was so she could see just what kind of mysterious things I did for a living. She brought me coffee and snacks in my office and watched me a few times, but didn’t ask a lot of questions. Most of the time she spent with her daughter and new granddaughter, or playing with Jordie, who had dubbed her with the name “Maw Maw”, which he pronounced in a distinctly different way than he said “Mama”. More than once I saw her pushing his hands away from her mature breasts, which were much larger than Erica’s. Erica’s breasts must have come from her paternal line.

My relationship with Judith got more comfortable and her attitude became much warmer towards me. I couldn’t tell you why, except she saw how Erica and I were gaga for each other. This marriage was so different from my first one that it’s difficult to compare them. Imagine having known only horse-drawn wagons for your early life, the kind that have no springs to soften the ride, and then being put in a stretch limo, or a Mercedes or something. I was submersed in love every day, and so were our two kids. That included Jordie’s relationship with his step-grandmother who he adopted with open arms. By the time she got in her car to leave, they had bonded in that special way grandparents bond with their grandchildren.

I missed Judith after she left, but that was primarily because I had to pick up the slack, doing the things she’d been doing. Taking care of one child is a job. Taking care of two, one of whom needs your undivided attention every hour or so and the other of whom can’t understand why his needs are sometimes being deferred - well, that’s real work.

Erica, though, saw that as her job, like mine was tracking down bugs and stomping them. She worked two jobs, actually. School was her other one. She’d quit working at the library after Melody left and she started spending the night at my house. She had to spend more time actually at college, going to classes. She was unhappy because she didn’t want to bring Covid home with her. She and I were both fully vaxed, but of course the children were too young for that. We hoped Lucy got some protection through Erica’s breast milk, which is why she relented and didn’t wean Jordie. Getting to her nipples was now just dessert for him, but his obvious delight in getting to suckle some mouthfuls of warm, sweet milk made it clear this was special time he had with the woman he assumed was his mother. I thought it was interesting that, though her breasts never got bigger than a B cup size, they produced all the milk that was needed to satisfy Lucy and Jordie. I didn’t poach very often. I’d have those breasts for the next fifty years, or so I hoped. I could wait a year or two until they were all mine again.

With her schedule I had to spend more time with the kids. When she was gone to class I was their primary caregiver, and couldn’t get any work done. When she was home, she had homework to do and, even if she could take a class online, she had to be able to be at the computer screen, which meant someone else had to take care of Jordie and Lucy. The comparison between them was stark. Lucy needed attention often, but was relatively easy to satisfy. Jordie, as he explored more and more of the world around him, wanted to do more things, or things that were complicated, and the supervision he needed took much more time than his little sister’s needs.

Melody would have melted down and lost it. I knew that, now. Asking Melody to care for multiple children would be like asking someone with no arms to learn to play the piano. Erica, on the other hand, had four arms and hands, to keep the analogy going.

That said, there was one similarity between my first wife and my second.

Erica’s sex drive increased even more after having a baby. It didn’t matter how long a day she’d had, or how tired she was, she unfailingly either pulled me on top of her or crawled on top of me to get one or two orgasms before going to sleep at night. She went so far as to invent things I had done wrong and scold me for them. I packed the dishwasher wrong. I put the cereal boxes in the cupboard in the wrong order. I put Lucy’s socks on the wrong feet. My efforts at defending myself were just as loony, with the exception of Lucy’s socks, which didn’t have a left and right piece to each pair. I told her I packed the dishwasher by color, with the darkest dishes at the back, and the cereal was alphabetized. We “yelled” at each other about these things.

Why?

Because Erica had heard of “hot makeup sex” and wanted to have it, but we never got in any real arguments about anything.

That was Erica. She lured me out of the cave I’d been living in my entire married life and exposed me to bright, delicious sunlight and a whole new world.

And she was doing fine, too, in this relationship. It wasn’t because of what I did for her, really. She loved her studies into early childhood development and education. She soaked that stuff up like a sponge.

And she loved being a mother. She was built for it, both in attitude and physically, since she was light and wiry and could keep up with the kids. It would be like that for not only their formative years, but fully into their teens. It would be Erica who taught them how to catch (and throw) a ball. She would be the teacher for riding bikes, and roller skating. She would be the one to show them how to climb a tree and sit in the top branches, grinning as the wind made those branches move and sway a foot or two, back and forth. Meantime, my reputation got me bigger (and more difficult) jobs and a longer list of clients. My income grew in proportion. We weren’t rich, but we didn’t lack anything necessary, either.

Most of that was in the future, though. For now, she was putting her early childhood studies to the test, in the “lab” that was our home.

In March, Melody’s parents arrived for a visit. Jordan was four and not all that cooperative, basically ignoring their attempts to engage him. We didn’t talk about Melody, though I suspect they saw her, too. It was awkward, but I guess that’s not surprising, under the circumstances. They stayed three days and he eventually warmed up to them, but I didn’t get the impression they’d visit very often. I guess we’ll see about that in the future.

Four days after they left it was Lucinda’s third birthday and we had a party for her. Her big brother drew her a picture as his present to her. We gave her a few other presents and let her destroy her cake. It was a good day.

That night, when Erica got in bed with me, naked as usual (she wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool nudist at home, but all our kids saw their mother walking around naked well into puberty) she cuddled up to me and reached for my penis.

“I love your penis,” she breathed.

“Give it a second and it will show you how much it loves you back,” I said.

“It already did show me how much it loves me,” she said. “Twice, now.”

“What?” I was confused.

“Your penis has showed me how much it loves me twice,” she said again.

“Did you get into the cooking sherry again?” I said.

“You know, for such a smart guy, you can be pretty dumb sometimes,” she said.

“Ahhhh,” I said. “I get it, now. You want to have an argument so we can have makeup sex.”

She sat up in bed and then got to her knees, standing on them next to me. The light coming through the windows from the street light in front of our house illuminated her with a soft light. She looked gorgeous. Her nipples were dark points on her chest. She’d chosen to stay shaved after she had Lucy, but her pussy lips were pronounced enough that even in this dim light I could see a dark line where the cleft of her vulva was.

“I do not want to have makeup sex!” she said, her voice strident. She almost sounded ... angry.

“What do you want?” I asked. “I am your slave. I’ll do anything. I live to make you happy and your smile is enough to keep me going for days without food or sleep,” I said.

It was a little over the top, but I felt like I was clawing my way uphill on a strange slope.

“You are so goofy,” she sighed. “Cute, but goofy. Slow-witted, but lovingly goofy. I can’t stay mad at you.”