Chapter 12: Decisions

Mark sat on the visitor's chair in his hospital room, already dressed and anxious to leave. He sat quiet in the chair by his bed and decided it was par for the course that his mother hadn't called or come to see him in person. Mark snorted to himself, "Maybe I shouldn't have paid her bail after all, just let her stay in jail until her trial."

So far as Mark was concerned, his bitterness was not unreasonable, at least where his mother was concerned. It seemed he could almost taste the lifetime of anger that ran deep inside him. "To hell with her," he said to himself in a low voice and looked at the doorway as if to will Rachel to come through the door. He fidgeted and wondered what was taking so long?

Mark considered his situation and wondered if he had misjudged his mother? Then he shook his head and sat to wait for Rachel to come get him. The thought returned, what if perhaps Claire was driven by something other than greed as he first thought? "So many damned questions!" he exclaimed aloud. "No answers," he added seconds later.

Mark followed the logic of his questions and came up with a new line of reasoning. What if Claire, not the warmest person in the world, had been fed a series of lies? These thoughts bothered Mark because if this were the case, then he, Mark, had been wrong in much of his thinking. "Man, what a mess this is," he said aloud.

Mark sat and waited, deep in thought for nearly an hour before Rachel arrived to take him home. "Cole is out in the van waiting. He threatened to come get you and take you home with his power chair if I didn't bring him along."

She laughed and added, "Your doctor agreed to let you loose from the hospital with the understanding you are to do nothing more strenuous than get dressed in the morning and undressed at night."

"God," he told Rachel after he had been checked out of the hospital, "They treat me like I'm a damned cripple or something."

"Mark love," Rachel caught herself and blushed at the term of endearment she just used. "Ah..."

"What?" He turned his head so he could look at her. "Go ahead and spit it out, whatever you want to say"

"Damn it, Mark Hunter, I'm in love with you and I don't know if I can handle this."

"I already told you how I feel," Mark answered. He pursed his lips and frowned, impatient for her to complete her thought.

"Mark, you are, ah, physically impaired, at least for the foreseeable future. There's nothing we can do but make the best of things." She heard his swift intake of breath followed by an angry grunt.

"Why didn't the doctor tell me?" he demanded and became angrier than before.

"Sweetheart he did. The problem is you never listen to anyone or anything unless it agrees with what you want to hear. You just shrug and stop listening whenever someone says something you don't want to hear."

Rachel lowered her voice a little. "Mark, the doctor was serious when he said your heart has been damaged. Right now they're not certain the extent of the damage and at this time it's anyone's guess. He meant it when he said you must not engage in any exercise more strenuous than dressing and undressing yourself."

She gave him a self-conscious giggle. "He told me privately that there must be no sex for at least a week. He guessed at our relationship and I was too embarrassed to deny it."

"Damn, what next?" Mark looked ready to start another tirade.

"God damn it Mark, calm down! I mean it!" she yelled at him. Mark's eyes widened in surprise and he shut up. Never had Rachel raised her voice the way she just did.

"Mama, please don't yell at Mark." Cole had been silent since they left the hospital. "I don't like it when you yell at my friends." He frowned at his mother. "Right now I only got one friend and that's Mark. I want you to treat him nice."

"I'm sorry, Mark." Rachel blinked away the tears and added. "Let's continue this conversation after we get to your house."

Thankful for the reprieve, Mark nodded his agreement and sat in silence. He looked over at Cole and smiled. Cole winked back at him and gave a thumbs up sign...

Rachel had already ordered that Mark's computer and desk be brought downstairs to give him easier access. The high-end ergonomic executive's chair Rachel bought for him permitted Mark to sit in comfort for hours at a time. The occasional twinge that shot through his shoulder and into his chest reminded him he was an invalid and had not yet recovered.

Cole requested that Claire's abandoned computer be set up next to Mark's more elaborate setup. "After all, me and Mark like to work together," he told her. The proud look on the young teen's life reminded her again how much Cole had seemed to blossom since Mark became a part of his life.

That night, Rachel helped Mark undress. She giggled like a teenaged girl and told him, "I never knew how much more fun boys were over dolls. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't know or I'd have been too busy to go to night school at Community College." She kissed him and helped him into bed.

"You know that you're kind of goofy at times," he told her and puckered up for another kiss.

Rachel turned serious. She nuzzled his bare chest and asked in a half whisper, "What's going to become of us?"

Her eyes were moist with tears. "Mark, I try my best to ignore the difference in our ages and I can't. Ten years from now, you'll be twenty-eight and I'll be almost f-f-forty." Her tongue tripped over the "eff word" most women hated to say, "forty."

Mark's voice echoed his exasperation, "Rachel, I have no idea at all what will happen a year from now, let alone ten years in the future."

He tried to find a more comfortable position. "Rachel, I feel..." He started over, "You make me feel..." He tried again, "I think I'm in love with you. I don't know anything about being in love. All I ever felt toward any female before this was horniness toward the dim bulbs I had to associate with in school and my damned mother."

"Mark," she tried to interrupt.

He kept speaking over her. "Rachel, I want to please you and make you happy and all that stuff. You already know that I care for Cole and want to help him grow to be the best he can become, even though he's stuck in that damned chair. I love you." Those last three words came out in a rush.

"Damn you Mark Hunter!" she exclaimed and grabbed hold of him. Rachel hugged hard against his naked body. "Oh how I pray everything..." she couldn't say anything more.

"If we're careful, I bet we don't have to wait a week," He whispered. "You get on top." An hour later they went to sleep.

Rachel came awake the next morning and laughed aloud. "Today I go to work with a smile on my face!"

Mark laughed at her antics. He patted her naked thigh and said, "You made me sleep on the wet spot all night. Now you better help me up off the bed or you're about to get wet all over. I got to go bad.

Rachel bounced off the bed, turned and held her hand out to take Mark's hand. She tugged and he sat up. They entered the bathroom together. "You pee and I'll start the shower."

"I need you to help me," he told her. "The doctor told me I'm not supposed to lift heavy loads."

"Oh Mark, you are the most grandiose one individual. That little thing..." She laughed at his put upon expression.

She came across the bathroom and took hold of his penis. It started to get hard again. She laughed and told him, "Hurry, get started or I'll have to beat this beast into submission." Mark obeyed and she held it until he was finished.

He dabbed the excess off the end with a swatch of toilet paper and followed Rachel into the shower stall. "You hurt its feelings. You better kiss it to apologize."

"You think one kiss would be sufficient?" she asked.

"Oh no, not at all. You have a lot to apologize for. You'll need to do a lot of kissing to make up for that insult to its size."

She laughed, "Well, you hold that thought for tonight. We need to finish our showers so I can get to the office. There is just too much going on right now."

"Yeah," he answered. "I hate being stuck here while you're running things."

"Mark, I like being in charge. If I were a man, I'd have a perpetual erection." She laughed at his surprised expression. "Until now, I never realized that power is an aphrodisiac for people like me. You make me horny. Work makes me horny. It's good to be the horny queen." She gave his half erect penis a quick squeeze and steadied him as she helped him out of the shower.

A half hour later, Cole called to his mother, as she hurried out the door, "See ya tonight, Mom." Mark waved and sat back in his chair.

"Oh boy, I need to get started earlier," Rachel told herself as she hurried to her van.

After two weeks of quick briefings from Rachel as she had dragged her weary body home late at night, Mark exploded, "God damn it Rachel, I feel so left out of things. Hunter belongs to me. It's mine and yet I'm sitting on the sidelines while you tell me a little of what's going on."

Mark resented it that he was forced to remain quiet while Rachel conducted Hunter business from their suite of offices on the fifth floor of the bank building. She nodded and said nothing. Inside, Rachel was busy planning the next day's moves.

Already she had negotiated with the bank's board of directors, battled with their lawyers with Del at her side. She tried to keep Mark aware of what she had done and the progress she had made. Rachel had in effect became Mark's alter ego during his, Mark's, convalescence. She was in her glory. For the first time in her life Rachel was able to do meaningful acts and become more than a look good token with nice legs.

Rachel kissed him on the lips. Then she shook her head, went into their bedroom and undressed. She took a quick shower, crawled into bed naked and went to sleep.

Later, Mark decided to try to get some sleep. He used the cane Rachel had bought for him to aid him as he moved from his computer to bed. He smiled at the sight of Rachel, as she lay flat on her back, naked, legs spread apart. Her arms were wide open as if welcoming a lover. Little snores erupted from her open mouth.

He felt a lump in his throat as he whispered, "I do love you." Mark undressed and eased down beside her on his side. He slept.

A month had passed since Mark's release from the hospital. Cole looked over at his really best friend forever, Mark, and grinned. For the young boy, life had never been so good. Mark was his hero, big brother and father all rolled into one. And Mark made certain he was well aware that Mark returned those feelings.

Mark swore to himself that no matter what happened between Rachel and him, Cole would get the best of everything that he, Mark, could give him. Mark swore to himself that Cole would have one friend that would always be there for him. In a moment of self-pity he remembered the relationship he had suffered through with Claire.

One morning Lorna had fed them both breakfast and they were back at their computers. "Hey Mark, what you want me to do with your mother's old files? I found a file that has all her passwords and user names in it. Man, she really has a real dirty mind." Cole laughed at the file that contained her saved emails.

"Transfer them over to my hard drive," he told Cole. "Do you know how to do that?"

"Of course I do." Cole's face got an indignant look. "I'm the Gosh Awful, I can do anything."

"You're the who?" Mark stared hard at Cole and laughed.

"Gosh Awful is my handle online, my hacker cracker nom de guerre. Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet. Well I invented Al Gore." Cole laughed at Mark's expression.

"I assume that means you feel you're computer literate?" Mark made it more a question rather than a statement. "I thought you'd be too young to know who Al Gore was. I barely remember him from school government class in the third grade.

"I read about him because a bunch of idiots tried to make it sound like he said one thing when he said another. When he said he invented the Internet, he meant he was the first man to make effective use of the Net as a political tool. He was a crook, not a fool."

Mark leaned back in his chair and swiveled it sideways to get a better look at his young friend. "You think you're pretty good with a computer? How good?"

"Well all we had was that old hunk of junk with a fifty-six K modem hooked up to a land line. I was good enough to get into Mom's bank and mess with a few minds before she made me stop."

He grinned, "I even hacked Bill Clinton's personal web site and left him a bunch of pictures of naked girls to look at." Cole got a worried look on his face, "Please don't tell Mom. She always gets upset when I do stuff like that."

Mark thought for a moment. He realized this might be a perfect opportunity to get Cole examined by a more competent doctor, despite Rachel's pessimism. "Cole, if your mom says it's okay, would you go talk to a new doctor and let him examine you?"

Cole looked at Mark. He became worried something more was wrong. "Why?" he asked in a fearful voice. In the past all the doctors Cole saw meant mind numbing waits and discomfort while they poked and prodded him and never said anything encouraging.

Mark sought an answer that wasn't a lie, but one Cole would accept. "Cole, I need help. That is, I need your help if you're strong enough. There might be a couple of computer jobs you can help to help me with. Before I could even consider to let you help me, you need to be checked out so we can make sure you can handle it."