Chapter 20

Mindy might have been so enamored with Bobby that she’d ignore the danger of having unprotected sex with him, but it only took her two days to nag him into contacting the official owner of the property that had been destroyed. She wouldn’t have characterized it as “nagging” and, to be honest, he probably wouldn’t have either, but that’s what it was. To be fair to Mindy, though, there wouldn’t be many issues in the future she felt strongly enough about to do that again.

She was actually the one who dialed the phone, and then handed it to Bobby. She folded her arms under her breasts, which distracted Bobby as he pressed the phone to his ear.

“What do you want?” came a rough, male voice in his ear.

“Hello, Uncle Patrick?” he said.

“That you, Bob?” The voice was much less demanding in tone. “How the hell you doin’ boy?”

Jennifer wandered into the room. She was wearing a tank top and panties, and was both yawning and stretching as she woke up.

“Pretty well, actually,” said Bobby, newly amazed at how much his life had changed, and how much for the better it all was. Then, as Jennifer bent over to pick up the shoes she’d left on the floor the night before, and the material of her panties stretched across her bubble butt, he thought about the A-frame.

“Except your house burned down,” he sighed.

“What?!” The voice was both rough again and loud, and it snapped Bobby out of his surreal mood.

“I had some problems with the local kids,” he said. “They had a party on my place and I chased them off. One of them was mad enough about it that he started a fire while I was in the hospital and the place burned down. I’m really sorry, Uncle Patrick. I should have been there and stopped him.”

“Hospital? You were in the hospital? Your mother never said anything about that. What happened?”

“I never told her I was in the hospital,” said Bobby, suddenly realizing there were a lot of things he should have told people about recently, that he hadn’t. “A tree fell on me,” he said.

“A tree fell on you,” said Patrick.

“Yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. It was after I drowned that they burned down the house.”

“You drowned too?” Patrick’s voice had risen. “I been overdue to visit you out there anyway. I ‘spect it’s time I did that. I can’t wait to hear this story.”

“You don’t need to come!” said Bobby urgently. “Besides, there’s no place for you to stay. I filed the insurance claim, and my lawyer sued them for five million, but he won’t pay and I can’t afford the house I wanted to rebuild, but I’m going to get another A-frame and I’ll put it all back just like it was, Uncle Patrick, I swear I will.”

“Where you callin’ from?” asked the old man.

Bobby relaxed. Here, at least, was a question he could answer.

“A woman named Mindy Franks took me in. Her daughter cut the tree off of me when it fell on me. Her daughter’s the one who saved me when I drowned too.”

“So you got a roof over your head for a few days?” asked Patrick.

“Yes, sir. And I’ll order the kit for the A-frame and get it built right away. I’m really sorry about all this. I didn’t mean for any of it to happen.”

“I can well imagine that,” said Patrick. “But hold off ordering that house. I been sittin’ around too much lately, and I do have a hankerin’ to see those woods, and that magnificent mountain again. So I think I’ll come on out there and have a look-see at things.”

“Oh,” said Bobby, sounding defeated. “Okay.”

“Of course it’s okay,” said Patrick. “I’m a grown man and can do what I want!”

“I’m really sorry,” moaned Bobby.

“We can talk about that when I get there. This Mindy woman. She the one north of the A-frame?”

“Yes,” said Bobby. “Well ... north of where it used to be, anyway.”

“I ‘member her,” said Patrick. “Moved in there not long before you did. Pretty little filly as I recall.”

“Yes,” said Bobby, simply agreeing because his mind was too busy with other things to really think about that.

“See you tomorrow, then,” said Patrick. “I could drive, but I have to pee damn near all the time these days, so I think I’ll just fly. Gimme a number to call so you know when my flight lands and can pick me up.”

“Yes sir,” sighed Bobby.

He dispensed the needed information and hung up.

“He’s coming here,” he said, his voice miserable.

“I gathered,” said Mindy.

“Who was that?” asked Jennifer.

“My uncle,” said Bobby. “Your mother made me tell him about the fire, and now he wants to come see it.”

“Well of course,” said Jennifer, siding immediately with her mother.

It was Jennifer’s night to have Bobby sleep with her. To an outsider, what they did would have seemed odd, and maybe even crazy. That’s because their relationship had evolved into something that the average stranger wouldn’t think was fulfilling. But the reasons why this outsider would think that are precisely why what they did worked so well for them. Both of them were relatively innocent, in terms of sexual experience. So both of them could fully enjoy sleeping together without actually having intercourse. What would seem like only foreplay to the rest of us, was actually fulfillment to them.

Of the two, perhaps Bobby could be expected to want more, but it must be remembered that he routinely got more, from Mindy. And his relative innocence allowed him to compartmentalize the different kinds of relationships, even if more conventional people might not be capable of the same.

This is not to say he wasn’t interested in sinking his rampant bone deep into Jennifer’s pussy, or that she didn’t dream of feeling that. Both did. But what they had was enough ... for now.

And what they had were sweet, panting orgasms, brought on by each other’s lips, and fingers. Jennifer had even had orgasms rubbing her sex against his knee while their tongues dueled in long, sensual kisses.

But on this particular night, Bobby was distracted. His uncle was coming. He would see the pile of ash that was almost all that remained of the home he’d once enjoyed. He would view Bobby’s failure to protect and defend that home. He would see ... like everyone else had seen ... that Bobby was damaged, incapable, worthless.

Jennifer sensed his distance, as she snuggled up to him. She didn’t understand it, but it didn’t threaten her either.

She just kissed his chest, and closed her eyes. There had been other times when they hadn’t made love until after they had slept.

She couldn’t know about the nightmares that tormented his sleep that night, nightmares that he knew only too well, nightmares he’d had over and over while his skin healed in the hospital.

But she recognized, when she awoke in the dark, the strangled sounds his tortured larynx produced, and the stiffness of his body.

He was having an episode in his sleep.

His groans woke Mindy too, and she padded, naked to Jennifer’s room. Her daughter sensed her come into the room in the dark.

“He’s having an episode,” gasped Jennifer. “I can’t wake him up.”

It was just instinct for Mindy to crawl into bed on the other side of him, to stretch her own body out and press herself against him, making a sort of sandwich of love, trying to sooth him.

And maybe that worked, because he did calm and thrash less, though his low moans still wrenched the hearts of both women. Or maybe it was two pairs of hot lips gliding over his skin that sucked the fear and tension out of his body, and allowed him to relax, until, finally, he simply lay, sleeping, still sweaty from his unconscious ordeal.

And while you or I might have found it odd, or strange to be in bed with two naked women at the same time, Bobby had no frame of reference in which to view things that way when he woke in the morning.

All he did was acknowledge how lucky he was that these women had stumbled into his life. That, and that he felt better that morning than he had when he went to bed. He would simply face his uncle, and admit his failure. He would either be allowed to rebuild, or have to find some other accommodation, should his uncle kick him “out.”

Either way, he knew he’d try to find a way to keep Mindy and Jennifer Franks in his life.

He was distracted from thinking about that by Mindy waking, and running her hand up and down his naked body. Her hand ran into the arm of her daughter, who had thrown it over him while she soothed him, and then fell asleep that way. Soon he was surrounded by two caring women, whose hands and lips spoke for them.

He was already hard. He wanted to stay there. But he knew his bladder would soon scream at him instead of merely complaining. He thought about getting up to deal with that problem, and then come back to bed. But his uncle was coming, and he needed to see if there was any way he could make the disaster look a little better somehow.

“I’d love to stay here,” he said softly. “I love you both.” His profession of love just came out. He hadn’t planned it. And what seemed strange to him about it was that the words felt perfectly normal in his mouth. It was only the second time he had voiced those words, at least as a result of overflowing emotions, rather than as an abstract concept during a normal conversation. But they felt right to him.

He had no frame of reference to detect how abnormal that might have sounded to someone else.

Those words felt like a spike of unbelievable, harmless pleasure in Jennifer’s heart.

And Mindy simply didn’t care what the rest of the world might think.

Like her daughter, she just loved him back.

They muttered when he left them to go to the bathroom. Their mutters turned to complaints when it became clear he was getting dressed and abandoning them.

“Got things to do,” he defended. “Uncle Patrick is coming today.”

“You’ve done everything you can,” said Mindy. “What are you going to do? Rake the ashes one more time?”

“I don’t know,” he said, truthfully. “But I feel like I have to do something. Everything he entrusted to me is gone.”

“You still have the truck,” argued Jennifer.

He ignored her. “You two stay there. I have to go.”

“I’m not staying in bed naked, with my mother!” snorted Jennifer.

He gazed at them both. The look in his eyes was detectable to both women, even as far away from them as he was. Neither knew it, but each of them felt an almost identical infusion of lustful happiness to be looked at that way. It only intensified when he spoke.

“I wish I could see the two of you together like that all day long.”

Life is complicated. Some taboos can be overlooked relatively easily. Others are stronger.

“I might feel differently if you were staying here,” said Jennifer. “But you’re not. You’re leaving.”

“So come with me,” said Bobby, grinning.

“Okay!” said Jennifer, rolling out of bed and standing up with the vigor of youth.

It was all that perkiness and vigor that drove Mindy to try to do the same thing.

By the time he walked out the door, he still had two women with him.

Patrick Michael Sullivan was a bit of an anomaly. He was sixty-three years old, and looked the part, with longish gray hair and bushy eyebrows that some children thought of as caterpillars, resting on his face. That face was creased with deep wrinkles, and tanned dark by the time he spent in the sun. His thoroughly Irish family had raised him in a thoroughly Irish fashion until the government drafted him into the service of his country and sent him to far away Vietnam. There, he discovered something about himself that both fascinated him, and made him ill.

What he discovered in the jungles of Vietnam was that Patrick Michael Sullivan loved to kill.

It evolved quite suddenly, when a Viet Cong sniper shot the man standing next to him, a man named Charley Green. Patrick and Charley had been in the same processing group when they arrived in country, and had gone to the same company. They were, quite literally, the only friend each other had in that strange and frightening setting.

Patrick had hunted his entire life. He was taught to shoot when he wasn’t strong enough to hold up a rifle, and had to rest it on a log. And, like most hunters, he had been required to track the game his shot didn’t kill outright. He showed an affinity for that, and eventually learned how to track that game so he could shoot it.

And when that faceless sniper killed his only friend in Vietnam, Patrick went AWOL on the spot so he could track and kill that sniper. When he walked up to the body of the first human being he had taken life from, he expected to feel guilt. Instead, he felt something else. It would be many years later when a psychiatrist would help him understand the responses of being an alpha male at a time when he’d never even heard the phrase. Until then, he just thought of it as “Kill or be killed.” And each time he came out on top, he felt the thrill of surviving one more time.

He became one of the top rated hunter/killers of the war. And after the war, his country continued to use his talents in the CIA, though no one in his family was aware of that fact. Even after he left “The Company” and lived quietly on his government retirement, everybody in the family actually thought what he had done to earn that pension involved inspecting turbines of some kind. He never talked about them because he said they were boring.

But that’s a very long story, and its full telling is for another book. The point is that Patrick’s life had been very different than the life most men live for sixty-three years. He had known love, but never been married. He still owned the car he’d bought with cash when he got back from Vietnam, and it only had seventy-five thousand miles on it, because he had been “away inspecting” so much over the years. He lived in his parents’ house, which his sister had inherited by virtue of him being overseas when their parents died. He couldn’t return for the reading of the will, so he simply sent legal papers awarding all his interests to her. She was married, of course, and living elsewhere, so she kept the place so Patrick would have somewhere to come home to. The only piece of property he owned was in South Dakota.

Scarecrow Valley was where Patrick had gone to “rest up” after some of his missions. Being an assassin was taxing in exactly the same ways it is taxing for a policeman to be under cover. One must live in a way that convinces those he is around that he is something very different than what is the truth. Actors in stage plays, or on movie sets, must pretend to be someone else for a short time, but when they go home, they leave that behind. When you are tracking someone who is important, and dangerous, and surrounded by a security team, perhaps in a country or culture in which you would normally stand out like a candle in a dark room, surviving that requires that you become someone else, sometimes for months.

The goal is to still be the Alpha Male when the mission is over. Unfortunately, in that particular game, the Alpha Male doesn’t get the best food, or the best women or the best lodgings. The successful assassin only gets to stay alive a while longer. And lick his wounds, if there are any.

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