Selena Kitt - Grace

“What’s for dinner?” he inquired. “I’ve been shooting city council photographs all day, and the only thing they had was bourbon and Good n Plentys out of the vending machine.”

“Leftovers?” she suggested. “Solie didn’t come today. She called with a cough and I told her to stay home.”

Rob nuzzled her neck, his hand lightly cupping her breast through her blouse. “How about I take my beautiful future bride out for a nice, big juicy steak dinner?”

“You sound more interested in the steak than me.”

“Only momentarily.” He grinned. “One need satisfied at a time.”

“I’ll have to get ready.”

He groaned. “I’ll starve.”

“Five minutes. Just let me change and freshen up.” She pushed at him and he rolled off the couch, standing and holding out his hand.

“Oh all right.” Rob tossed his suit jacket over a chair and wandered off toward the kitchen. “I’ll raid the fridge while I wait.”

Leah went over to the closet under the loft. Many of her clothes were still at her mother’s, but Rob had cleared room for some of her things in his walk-in closet and she flipped through her dresses, finding a nice casual, cream-colored one with a pencil-thin skirt.

“Don’t spoil your appetite!” she called, stripping down to her underwear and slipping on a garter belt. Then she pulled the dress over her head.

“Not possible.” His mouth was full, his words intelligible, but barely. “Oh, you meant for food?”

She smiled, zipping her dress and choosing a light blue cardigan to cover her shoulders. Sitting on the edge of the desk, she slid one stocking on, slipping it up to her thigh and fastening it to the garter, front and back.

“Rob, can I ask you something?” she called.

“Mmmmph?”

Leah did the other stocking, fastening it to the front, the back giving her more trouble. “Did you change the lock on the darkroom door? The one under the loft?”

Rob went quiet. Leah frowned, still trying to get her stocking hooked to the garter, when he came around the corner, seeing her with her dress hiked up, stockings showing.

“Why?” he asked.

Leah finally got her stocking fastened, smoothing down her dress. “Because I tried the key and it didn’t work.”

He frowned. “Why were you trying to get in there?”

“I don’t know.” She slid up onto the desk, so she was sitting, holding a hand out to him. “I guess I was thinking about what the lawyer said. About having anything incriminating in our past?”

“I suppose you’re right.” He sighed, taking her offered hand, situating himself between her thighs, leaning into the desk to put his arms around her. “If anyone found out, it would be very incriminating.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck. “So can we get rid of it?”

“No.” He grimaced.

“Why?”

Rob nuzzled her neck. “I promise you, no one is going to find out about it.”

“But what if they did?” Leah asked, pulling back to look at him. “You know, your daughter has been sneaking out in the middle of the night to see that Webber boy.”

“What?”

“Rob, think for just a minute, what Erica’s been through,” Leah said. “She finds out she’s adopted-that you aren’t her father, and Susan wasn’t her mother-and not only that, she learns that one of the conditions of her adoption was that she be sterilized.”

“I didn’t know about that!” he insisted, his eyes flashing.

“I’m not blaming you,” she soothed, touching his cheek. “I’m not accusing anyone. I just want you to think about it from her point of view. She’s confused, she’s hurt. Not only that, but she let herself get involved with that damned baby-selling sex ring Father Patrick is running and she ended up being ritually gang-raped by, oh I don’t know, how many priests?”

Rob winced, turning his head away. “Jesus, Leah.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “I really don’t want to think about that.”

“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” Leah replied, repeating Erica’s words to her.

“Look, Father Patrick and I have an understanding-”

“You had an understanding before, but Erica ended up being initiated into the Mary Magdalenes anyway.”

“I know! I know!” Rob threw up his hands, stepping away. “I just didn’t anticipate her pursuing it on her own.”

“But that’s what I’m saying,” Leah pleaded, sliding off the desk and facing him, looking up to meet his eyes. “We have to anticipate what could happen. Donald said this could be a long and drawn out fight, right? Well Erica is out running around with boys, and she’s absolutely fearless because she knows she can’t get pregnant. It’s only a matter of time before tongues start wagging.”

Rob went to the closet, yanking off his tie and tossing it onto the closet floor. “I’ll talk to her.”

“It won’t help.” Leah went to him, touching his arm. “She’s rebelling, and who could blame her? She’s angry and she has a right to be, although I think that anger is being misplaced onto you…”

“Then you talk to her.”

“I tried.” Leah shrugged, turning up her hands. “She’s mad at me for loving you. But listen to me. What if she decides to defy you? Get back at you? She’s already pulling the ‘you’re not my real father, you can’t tell me what to do’ bit out of her bag of tricks. What’s next? She calls the police and tells them about your hidden darkroom?”

Rob paled, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. “What do you want me to do?”

“We have to get rid of it,” she insisted. “All of it. And you have to stop. Are you still… involved?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“You can’t do it anymore,” she cried. “It’s going to jeopardize everything!”

“If I stop, it will jeopardize everything.” Rob dug into his pocket, pulling out his key ring. He walked over to the tapestry, pulling it aside and unlocking the bolt. He motioned for her to follow, the door closing behind her from the weight of the tapestry alone. He flicked the switch, the fluorescents buzzing to life overhead.

Leah’s sense memory came to life at the smell of the darkroom chemicals. There were photographs of nude women hanging on the clothesline over the developing table. Full breasted women with roomy hips who spread their legs and let Robert Nolan photograph their most private parts, the looks on their faces orgasmic or teasing or seductive, but every one of them arousing.

“Come on.” He went around the developing table, finding the hidden latch in the wall and opening the door to the other room. Leah remembered the night she had first discovered it, how she had snuck in so quietly and had found Rob on the twin bed, a reel of film running on the projector, his erection in his hand as he watched the couple on the screen have sex.

Leah had watched too, touching herself-she couldn’t help it. Later, she would lose her virginity on that bed, lost in the bewildering, wondrous pleasure of her first time. Did we make Grace on that bed, she wondered? Or was it the time in the movie theater bathroom? Or one of the many times they’d made love in the backseat of his Cadillac.

“I met Susan in the summer of 1937.” Rob turned on the small lamp beside the bed and went over to the cabinet where Leah and Erica had found all those reels of film. “I was a young photographer, just out of college, and she was the most stunning beauty I had ever seen.”

Leah cringed at that, but she took it in stride. She’d known Susan Nolan, had come to think of her as a kind of surrogate mother over the years, because she spent so much time with the Nolans, and she had been a very beautiful woman.