Chapter 7: Marisa

"She's beautiful." Marisa and I were just finishing a late dinner in a small restaurant in Little Havana. She'd just gotten back from Tampa.

"Who?" I knew who.

"Your sister-in-law."

"Caitlyn?"

"She seemed nice too." Marisa was clearly trolling for info on her sister-in-law to be.

"Yeah she's okay," I agreed.

"You guys seemed a little ... I don't know ... uncomfortable maybe ... no something else ... maybe--"

Just like that I decided it was time to fill her in. "It's complicated," I started. Marisa was already ahead of me.

"You two liked each other didn't you? When you were young."

"It's a long story."

"Is it?" I nodded.

"Tell me," she invited.

"Not here," I answered. "Let's go to the beach."

"The beach?"

"We'll go for a walk on the beach and I'll tell you a story," I answered as I stood up from the table.

"Am I going to like the story?" she asked. Probably not I thought.

Twenty minutes later we were holding hands and walking barefoot along the beach. I started to talk. About my brother and I. About our lives. About Caitlyn...

"You were still a virgin at eighteen?" There was both a touch of disbelief and surprise in her voice. I welcomed being sidetracked. For the next twenty minutes I told my love of the sexual trials and tribulations of a teenage Dave Montgomery.

"So you had a crush on Caitlyn?" Maria asked when I finally got to my senior year of high school.

"Yes."

"And what about her?"

I laughed. "Some years later she did concede that she thought I was a pretty hot senior."

"Did you two ever go out?"

I told her of that Halloween years earlier. Of how Adam and Caitlyn's romance was born. Of the day months later I'd lost my virginity to another girl. Of Adam's and my College years. Of the girls we'd dated. Of the girls I'd had sex with.

She asked questions as I talked. Interrupted. Told me she wasn't that impressed by my sexcapades. "I still don't understand why you waited so long, in Cuba men start..." she said at one point. She even promised to fill me in later on even more of her past sex life. I didn't care about her past.

"That wasn't that complicated," Maria said when I'd finished that part of my tale. "You had lots of girlfriends. That's normal. Especially when you started so late." There was a twinkle in her eyes.

For a moment I considered leaving it at that. But I couldn't. "That wasn't the complicated part."

"It wasn't?"

I watched as her eyes tried to read me in the darkness. Saw as the sudden awareness hit. "You never got over her did you? Even after they married."

"Mom says all my girlfriends were pale imitations of Caitlyn. Except for you."

"You loved her." I could see Maria's mind racing as it examined the possibilities. "You've slept with her?" But before I could answer she'd already moved on to the next thought. "Did you have sex with her this weekend?"

"It's more complicated than that."

"That's pretty complicated Dave."

So I told her about my brother's inability to impregnate his wife. About the decision the three of us made about using my sperm in the artificial insemination scheme. I told it slowly. She didn't interrupt until I'd finished.

""Poor Adam," she said. "So Sam is your daughter?" I nodded. I could see her processing this new info.

For a second I hesitated, asking myself if it wouldn't be better for all of us if I didn't mention the rape. Then I told her. I knew she had to know every grisly detail. If she was still going to marry me she'd have to know the whole story going in.

"You raped her?"

"Yes."

"After she'd been artificially inseminated? Your brother's wife?" I nodded.

"You prick!"

"I know," I agreed.

"Your own brother? You love him." I nodded. "Did she tell him?" I shook my head no. She said nothing. Instead she simply sat down on the sand while shaking her head. I sat down next to her.

"They want another one. That's what this weekend was about," I said softly as I put an arm around her shoulder. She shook it off.

"She wanted you to rape her again?" Marisa's voice conveyed her incredulity.

"I was supposed to have arranged it with a clinic down here. Adam thought--"

"But Caitlyn must have known." Marisa protested. "She must have known after the first time."

"I think she'd convinced herself that--"

"Bullshit! She knew. She came down here to have sex with you. She had no right, you're engaged," Marisa growled.

"She's not the bad guy hon," I said.

"Oh she's not as bad as the asshole who fucked her but she's still a slut. And she was all so smiley and nice when we had dinner together. Then, the second I'm shuffled out of town, she sleeps with you. Fuck her." I put my arm around her again. "Fuck you too," she added as she pushed my arm away. There were tears falling down her cheeks. For minutes we said nothing, the only sound around us the lapping of the waves along the shoreline.

"So now you've put another baby in her?"

"Probably."

"After you put one in me." What could I say? "I'm not having an abortion." But I knew her statement didn't mean I'd be still around when she had the baby.

"I love you."

"Yeah right. And now that slut is going to move in next door to us."

"We could move," I offered.

"That makes a lot of sense. Your parents and brother move down to Florida to be with you and you move?"

"We could move to Cuba."

"I'd like to put you on a fucking raft and send you off to join Uncle Fidel," my love spat back. I had no more words for her. And she knew it. I put my arm around her shoulder. This time she didn't throw it off. I just held her lightly as we both contemplated the universe.

"You made me so happy." Her voice was a raspy, teary sound when she finally spoke. "I never really thought I'd feel this way about someone." I simply let her talk. Tears were falling down my cheeks too. "And then you go and fuck it up."

It was a good five minutes later before she said her next words. "Give me your phone."

"My phone? You want to make a call now?"

"Hurry," she ordered even as she fumbled in my pants pocked for my cell. Finally pulling it out she asked, "What's Caitlyn's number."

"Caitlyn? You're not going to call--" Her angry look stopped the rest of my sentence. "Under Dave, number one on the speed dial," I said. Marisa pushed the button and then, as it rang in a bedroom in New England, leaned her body over so that her face was inches from mine. She pressed her body against me as she waited for the call to be answered.

"Dave?" I heard Caitlyn tentatively ask.

"No, it's his fiancée ... his pissed off fiancée," Marisa said angrily.

"Marisa?"

"You and I are going to have to talk," my wife to be, I still hoped, ordered.

"He told you?"

"It may be the last thing he ever tells me," Marisa told Caitlyn as she stared angrily into my eyes. Which wasn't good.

Marisa didn't come home with me that night. Nor did I hear from her in the following couple of days. She went to visit Caitlyn that weekend. Adam meanwhile flew down to Miami. He'd been ordered out.

He was elated. "It's great the girls are getting to know each other," were his first words on greeting me at the airport. I wasn't sure I'd ever see Marisa again.

And she kept me hanging. It wasn't until the following Wednesday, three days after getting back from the north, that she phoned me. "You and I have some things to sort out," were her ominous words. An hour later I was sitting facing her in the cramped living room of the small apartment she rented in Little Havana. I wasn't offered a drink.

"If I hadn't liked her and if she wasn't pregnant I might have strangled her," were my loves first words. I was trying to think of an appropriate response when her eyes caught mine. They were like lasers. Angry lasers. I decided to shut up.

"She's as bad as you." I heard Marisa's words and wondered if that was good or bad.

"She's always wanted both of you," she accused.

"I don't think so. She chose--"

"Shut up Dave. The slut chose your brother but she never really let you go did she? She always kept you around ... always teasing and flirting."

I knew that wasn't true. "It was I who had the crush on her--"

"Because of her. The things she did, the little things. She never really wanted you to find a real girlfriend. Not someone you'd love."

I didn't really accept the view of Caitlyn that Marisa was drawing but I was also smart enough to realize that I hadn't been dumped outright. That maybe, just maybe I still had a chance. I had no idea how to play it. "She set me up with dates, with some of her girlfriends," I offered tentatively. Playing for time.

"Girls she knew you'd never prefer over her."

"But she was Adam's wife. She knew I'd never do anything."

"But she didn't want you to do anything with anyone else."

"But--"

"But nothing," she interrupted. "She may not have done anything and may not have even consciously known what she was doing, but she was doing it. She wanted both of you."

"I raped her." I'd sensed that our conversation was leading Marisa towards some sort of rapprochement but I hadn't been able to stop myself from saying the words.

"Yes and you were a real prick," Marisa agreed. "But it was her fault almost as much as yours."

"I don't see how--" I started.

"Was it your fault your brother's sperm was no good? Was it your fault that they begged you to impregnate her?" I wanted to argue with her but she didn't let me.

"Do you know what she told me?" I shook my head no. "What her very first thoughts were when Adam came home and told her that he'd told you about their problem. And what you'd said to him about using your sperm?"

"What she's say?" I asked even while wondering how Marisa had got all this info from Caitlyn.

"She said that very night, even while Adam was making love to her, that she'd thought of you and your prick pumping sperm into her."

"She did?" That same night I'd jacked off to thoughts of her.

"And she admitted that it wasn't the first time she'd thought of you that way. That from the time she'd first gone out with Adam there were always nights when she dreamt of you and what it would be like."

"She never did anything, never said anything."

"Hah! As if. And do you know what else she said?" I was hooked. I wanted to hear every word.

"Do you know what her greatest sexual fantasy is?"

Caitlyn told all this to Marisa? Over one short weekend I asked myself as I watched my intended. "What?" I asked.

"Both of you ... you and Adam I mean. Making love to her. At the same time. Two big cocks inside her."

"No way," I denied. "She'd never tell anyone that even if it was true. And it's not." I was pretty sure Caitlyn wouldn't have ever told a stranger her sexual fantasies.

"Oh we talked about it. We talked about everything. We drank and talked and then drank and talked some more."

"Still, she'd never have told you that."

'I wasn't going to leave that house until I'd heard every goddamn word that bitch had to say. And she knew it. And you know what Dave? She's been just looking for someone to tell her real feelings to for years."