Fifty-eight

THE BIG BED GOT A WORKOUT after the chapel dedication and art show Sunday night. The five of us hosted four guests when Allison, Beth, Bree, and Whitney joined us. It was like Christmas and I was pleased to find that we could all play comfortably in the huge bed. Kate and I were the focus of everyone’s attention, but each time I neared a peak, it was Melody whose pussy was firmly grasping my cock. It was just insurance, Lissa had said, in case the previous two days didn’t take. We didn’t start falling off to sleep until four in the morning.

I awoke to Lissa’s butt muscles clenching my hard cock. No one else was in bed with us.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” I asked.

“We were beginning to think you don’t love us.”

“We?”

“Me and baby.”

“Mmm. I love you more than anything,” I said. I let my hand drift from its grip on Lissa’s full breast to her tummy where I felt the baby kick inside as soon as my hand reached her. “Would you like me to do something for you?” I asked as my hand rounded the hump.

“Yes. I want you to fuck me, silly.”

“But with the baby at this stage, is it okay?”

“Yes, it’s okay. It’s okay and is a requirement to keep the mother of your child feeling like you love her even though she’s fat and ugly.”

“The mother of my child is not fat and ugly.”

“I feel fat and ugly and sex would make me feel like you still want me. You do still want me, don’t you, Tony?”

“Only all day every day.”

“I read a book...”

“Another book?” Our birth instructor was like a pusher with a new book to feed Lissa’s addiction every week.

“Yes, and I wish I’d had some of these books when I was pregnant with Drew and Damon.”

“What did the book say?”

“It said sex was good right up to the time I go into labor or my water breaks. In fact, sex has been known to start labor.”

“So, if we fuck like bunnies, junior miss might get tired of being jostled around and decide to come out?”

“Oh. Yes.” I’d finally managed to work my hand between Lissa’s legs to gently rub her clit. Apparently, the pressure on her pelvis was pushing things other than her belly button out. Her clit was longer than I’d ever found it. And super sensitive according to the way she responded.

“I love you, my precious Lissa.”

“Tony, be gentle but push into me. I need to feel you inside.”

“If you’re sure it won’t hurt.”

“You probably can’t go as deep, but it won’t hurt; I promise.”

It was never difficult for my cock to find Lissa’s pussy from behind. Having eight or nine pounds of baby pushing down, though certainly made things a little tighter. That seemed to change Lissa’s responses, too, and she ramped up quickly to her first orgasm. I hadn’t caught up yet so I just kept gently pushing in and out of her tight channel. I kept my fingers busy at her clit, even though once I entered her it was harder to get my hand around her belly. Nonetheless, she made it to a second, bigger climax before I was near. I kept whispering over and over how much I loved her and how happy I was that our baby was coming soon. The words probably did as much to drive her toward her next peak as my cock or fingers did and soon, we were both climaxing as I felt tiny contractions ripple through her pussy.

My first thought was, Oh boy! Here she comes. But after our orgasms subsided, so did the contraction and baby seemed as firmly lodged inside Lissa as ever.

We’d barely taken a breath after that last orgasm when the bedroom door opened and Wendy came in.

“Coffee?” she asked.

Mom announced that she and Gypsy would stay with Jack and Lexi for the next month as they awaited the birth of their grandchild and the wedding of their children. That still sounds all screwed up, but we all understood what she meant. They’d decided that staying in our new home would seem too much like hovering over us.

Now that was a real laugh. For four weeks they only left to sleep.

Dad went back to Nebraska for the end of the school year in Fremont and promised to catch the next flight if we told him Lissa was in labor. He’d been taking flying lessons, but he was still hours of flight time away from his license. If there was no baby, he would be back the week before our wedding. Oke and Ken went back to Oregon to tend the crops and said they’d ‘be back for the wedding.’ None of us were sure if that would be on Monday that week or at one o’clock before the one-thirty wedding on Saturday. Having all the moms present, though, was both fun and stressful. Kate and I considered going back to Georgia to check more prints for a week, but we were afraid we’d miss the birth. Lissa’s due date was July first as close as the doctor could guess.

That date came and went. We were so busy, no one noticed.

“So, if you are willing, there is a commission for each of you in Kentucky this summer,” Clarice said as she finished explaining the offer from Bishop Donnelly. Kate and I were both reeling from the numbers. How the heck could we earn that much money from one job? I realized that I’d been giving away a lot of work that I could have been paid handsomely for. Sure, I’d been given a $50,000 grant to support me while I was doing the entablature of the chapel, but this offer was for three times that amount and a quarter the work. And each piece was based on a piece I’d already done, though the sizes were larger.

Kate’s contract was for a quarter million.

“It’s so much for work I’ve already done.”

“Kate, you got paid well for the Stations of the Cross artwork and supervising the installation. The Jesuits paid separately for the materials, like they did for Tony. All your labor was for classroom credit. Not so this time. This contract is the total amount for the installation. That means you buy materials, hire workers, pay for the firing of the tiles. The same is true for you, Tony. It looks like a lot of money, but no school is paying for the materials. You buy your own plaster, paint, pay your assistants and all your expenses.”

“Is it enough?” I asked.

“As long as you don’t decide you should live in a castle and eat filet mignon every night.”

“Do they have castles in Kentucky?”

“Wait! I don’t have a ceramic studio. How am I going to get the tiles fired? If we had enough tiles, we could do the layout on the mesh in the studio, but getting tiles is going to be impossible,” Kate said.

“Waste not, want not,” Clarice said.

“What?”

“You have exactly one freebie. I anticipated that someone else would want your mosaic, so I negotiated with the college to fire enough tiles for a second full set and bought them out of your fee. Kate, do you pay any attention at all to what you are paid?”

“Uh ... not really. Since January, all the money has been paid to the partnership, right?”

“That was your instruction, but you should really keep track of your own income. Tony? Do you?”

“Well, sort of. Penny has been explaining my finances to me each month. I didn’t know how to read the royalty statements.”

“If you are careful, you can do this project and make a nice profit. Of course, Tony will have a new set of prints he can sell and if you follow my advice this time, we’ll have some originals to sell as well.”

“You mean paint the images full-size before I do the cartoons?”

“The paintings don’t need to be full-size, just like you didn’t do a full-size rendering of The Wall. But these frescoes play into your strengths. They would be ideal as gouache on paper using some of your watercolor techniques.”

“I haven’t done much watercolor since you pushed me toward oils.”

“Here you have an opportunity to return to your love. We’ll use the originals to make the prints since the actual pieces will be too big.”

“I guess I’m okay with all this,” Kate said. “If we do all the mosaic work except the installation here, I won’t have to cover expenses for my crew. I’d only need to take one person with me for the installation.”

“Yeah. It was a luxury to have both Morgan and Adolfo as assistants in the chapel, but I’m going to have to work sections on the new pieces so just one person would be enough to help me. The pieces will be too big to finish all in one day.”

“And if you work daily at this without interruptions you can still finish within a month.”