John Miller - The Last Family

Laura loved both her children, equally if such is possible, but Erin could take care of herself, and usually did, so her son received the portion of his mother’s affection that Erin turned back unused. Erin remembered her father as a flesh-and-blood reality. To Reb he was an album of pictures, two letters a year-tucked into the Christmas and birthday gifts that arrived in the mail. He dreamed about the man in the pictures, and sometimes in his mind they had a real relationship. He clipped photographs of Montana-looking mountains out of magazines and pasted them in a sketch book he kept under his bed. Casting a fly out into the rapids in the cold blue shadow of mountain walls was his fondest fantasy of all. Laura knew all about it and felt powerless to help either of them find the other. She had tried. She had tried and failed. When she thought of Paul hiding from his children, she bristled-a flame burned beside those feelings. It was the closest she could come to hating the man she had once loved more than anything on earth.

Laura’s bedroom, with its fourteen-foot ceilings, was located directly over the ballroom and was half as long. She entered the room and crossed to the bed where Reid Dietrich slept curled in on himself, still in his clothing. The four-poster was shrouded in sheer netting, which made Reid look like someone stuck in a dream. She had thought long and hard some months earlier before she invited him into her bed with her children in residence. There had been no ill effects from it. She and Reid stayed private with their intimacy. He was never there before the children went to sleep and was always out of her bed and into his own, in the guest room, before they awoke, for appearances’ sake. No one was fooled, but it made Laura feel better and the kids never mentioned it. They seemed to know that loneliness was worse than whatever else was involved.

The children had grown accustomed to Reid, and the influence of a man in their lives again had been positive. They never suggested including him but, on the other hand, never seemed to mind his inclusion either.

When Reid Dietrich was in town, he split his time between Laura’s house, his own in the French Quarter, and his sailboat on the lakefront. He kept clothes in the closet of Laura’s guest room and had a toothbrush in the bathroom.

Laura studied his face for a few moments and then kissed him on the cheek. He smiled and looked up at her through the fog of faraway dreams.

“You ran out on me,” she said, a mocking chastisement. “You, sir, is a very bad boy.”

“I got tired. What are you gonna do, spank me?” he said.

“Don’t you wish?”

“What time is it?”

“After three.”

“I came up just after midnight.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t like me anymore.”

“Don’t be silly. Who else would I let ignore me for hours at a time and then come to bed smelling like Pine Sol?”

“Turpentine.” She creased her brow. “Poor baby, do I ignore you?” She undid his buttons and slid her hand down his smooth chest and over the solid stomach. Then she unzipped his pants, and her hand traveled farther down, into his pubic hair. She ran a fingertip the length of his member, which had stirred to life.

“Now look what you’ve done,” he said. “You have to put him back to bed.”

“Hold that thought,” she said. “I’ll be right back after a quick shower to get the Pine Sol off.”

She moved a few feet, unzipped her baggy jeans and dropped them to the floor, removed her sweatshirt, and stopped in the door of the bathroom to allow him a side view. Laura was thirty-eight years old, had a perfect helmet of straight light-red hair in which veins of silver had lately appeared here and there, and a wholesome, beautifully balanced face. There were the faintest whispers of crow’s-feet at the corners of her cornflower-blue eyes. Despite having two children, she had a well-toned body that caused men to smile to themselves as the fire of wickedness played behind their eyes. Then she peeled her panties off, twirled them in her hand, shot them out into the bedroom, and disappeared into the bathroom, laughing. She turned on the shower and climbed in, the granite floor cold under her feet, and let the needles of hot water wash over her. She was standing with her back to the nozzle and her hands against the wall, her head bowed, when the door to the shower opened and Reid entered. He moved up to her and put his arms around her, interrupting the spray.

“That striptease has my little friend wide-awake,” he said, looking down.

“Up indeed,” she said, laughing. “That’s a little friend?”

She didn’t mind the intrusion or the sudden pressure against her leg. She turned into him, pressing her body against his, and ran her hands down his back, stopping at the muscle-tight buttocks. He ran his tongue down her neck, over her breasts, pausing to tweak the rose nipples with his teeth, and then tracing a line through her belly button and down with his kisses. Using his tongue, he traced letters in the soft hair over the pubic cleft.

“Oh, Reid. That’s good. Oh, and I really like that,” she said playfully. He put his tongue through the patch of pubic hair to the place where the valley began. “Oh, but that’s the best of all.”

She threw her head back as he brought her to the slippery edge of an orgasm. She put her hands on either side of his head and pulled him up. Then she brought her right leg up until it was caught at the top of his pelvis, opening herself to him, and helped him inside with her hand. She brought the other leg up and locked her ankles behind him and, using him as a fulcrum, rocked them into an orgasm.

Later when they were lying in bed locked together like a pair of spoons, she studied the back of his head in the glow from the open bathroom door. She had always insisted on sleeping with a night light in the bathroom and that door cracked. She claimed it was so she could get to the children faster if they cried out, but the truth was she had always had a fear of the darkness. She ran her hand over the line of his shoulder, to the center of his chest, and hugged him tight. She felt safe and secure when they were together.

Laura was very fond of Reid-maybe she even loved him-but she hadn’t felt the same release of control she had experienced with Paul. She reasoned that she was older now, more experienced-not the schoolgirl she’d been when she found Paul. But she never revealed herself, her deepest thoughts, to Reid. She’d done that once.

Found Paul-no, discovered Paul. She thought about that phrase. Yes, she had found him and savored every minute they’d been together in the early days. They had lived a perfect love in those early days of their relationship, and then they had fallen into complacency, routine. But she had remained in love with him, and there had always been electricity when he touched her. She could admit that he had been less giving, but given the whole of their relationship, he had been so much more. Why was that? Reid was more handsome-more her type. He loved the same things she loved and had a remarkable body that fit with hers as though they had been designed as a set. Paul, on the other hand, had been self-absorbed; he had made decisions that affected them both without discussing them with her. He had been a magnificent consuming soul as a lover, but outside the bedroom he had been pensive and distant and didn’t need to be touched as she did. He had been dedicated to his work, often staying in the field weeks at a time, calling only sporadically. But they had been in love, and there was no doubting that. Even after the children were born and inhabited their lives, he had been like a lover at the beginning of a torrid affair. But that was then and this was…

Reid Dietrich was thirty-nine but looked ten years younger. Laura had met him at an opening of her work a year before at the Arthur Maxwell Gallery on Magazine Street. He had been staring at a particular painting when she arrived, and fifteen minutes later he was still staring at it. She had studied him as he studied her work. Reid was almost six feet tall, thin but muscular, and wore his light hair combed back over his ears. His features were delicate but masculine, sensual. His eyes were like children’s marbles with light-gray circular swirls beneath the surface. She had never before seen eyes the shade of his. She had been mesmerized by them, lost in the absolute depth of them from the moment she saw them. It was artistic interest at the beginning.