Mary Jenkins - A mother_s forbidden passion

Bette moistened her lips, then, before she could think, she was saying, "You won't have any refusals from me either, darling. When can we meet again? Just tell me and I'll be there, I'll be there in a minute, darling."

Their affair had gone on for two blissful weeks, and Bette had never known such happiness, such rapture. Bixby was true to his word; each time she made love with him it was better than the last, and she was not disappointed on a single occasion. A part of her knew that their adulterous affair couldn't go on forever, that she would one day soon have to make a choice between Hale Bixby and David and Tony, but she was so giddyingly caught up in the ecstasy and excitement of her secret love affair that she was unable to think rationally. She snapped at Tony, denied David his marital rights when he came home and snuck out every opportunity to meet Bixby. Nothing else mattered, not her home, not her family – nothing except Hale Bixby deep inside her, his monstrous penis ejaculating his hot seed deep into her belly again and again and again.

David found out about the affair at the beginning of the third week.

Bette had not been nearly as discreet as she had thought the night of the party – which had been given by a good friend of both hers and David's – and her nocturnal meetings with Bixby had for the most part taken place in his hotel in downtown Westridge. Word had gotten around, and David had heard it; shocked and disbelieving, he had confronted Bette with the knowledge in their bedroom as she was slipping on her coat preparatory to leaving "to go for a little walk."

At first she hadn't known what to do. Admit her guilt or deny it. Confusion reigned in her. But then even though she did not want to hurt David or Tony, ignoring the pain in his eyes, she had become defiant. Nothing else in this world seemed at that moment to mean as much to her as keeping Hale Bixby, as prolonging their blissful affair. Yes, she was having a lewdly illicit affair, she had shouted at David. Yes, yes, yes! And it was with a man who was twice the lover, twice the man, that he was! She loved him, yes loved him, loved him as she could never love David Clark.

David had slapped her, his face contorted with pain and rage, and called her a slut and a whore and a dozen other names. She had begun to cry, but the defiance remained strong within her, for she had finally admitted to herself as well as to her husband a fact that she had known was true each of the previous fourteen days; she was in love, madly, crazily, blindly in love with Hale Bixby.

Bette had run out of the house, gotten into her car and raced to Bixby's hotel. She told him everything, about David finding out, how much she loved him, how much she wanted to be with him and the rest of the world be damned. Bixby had taken her into his arms, holding her close, calming her, and then he had said, "Don't worry, Bette, we won't have to be apart. I love you too, honey, and I want you with me always. I'll take you away to Chicago."

Bette could hardly believe her ears. "Oh Hale! When? When darling?"

"At the end of this week," he said. "I've just about wrapped up my surveyor's report on the new highway, and I should have everything ready by Saturday. I was going to tell you to come away with me."

"Hale, is it true? Is it really true?"

"It's really true," he'd laughed. "Now you go home and pack your things and tell your husband you're leaving him. Then you come back here. You can stay with me until we leave."

Bette had obeyed, a deep glow of happiness within her that far overshadowed the wrongness of what she was doing to David and to Tony. David had been drunk when she entered the house and told him she was going away with Hale Bixby, and he had been maudlin, crying in an unmanly way, pleading with her to stay. She had been oblivious to his entreaties, thinking of Hale, only of Hale, a real man, and she had packed everything she wanted to take with her into three suitcases. When she was ready to go, David was so drunk that he had passed out on the couch.

And then Tony had come home from his Boy Scout meeting and seen her packed bags and his father lying there, and his young face had clouded with confusion. "Mom," he had said, "Mom, where are you going? You're not going away, are you? Oh Mom!"

Her heart had gone out to him. In spite of her feelings for Hale, she still loved her son, the product of her flesh, and she had taken him into her arms and held him tightly, trying to explain to him that she was in love with another man, that it was impossible for her to stay there feeling as she did. But he had been so young then, and he hadn't understood. Anger had flared in him, and he had cursed his mother and then run sobbing from the room. Bette had taken several steps toward his bedroom, crying a little herself, wanting to go to him, to explain further, but then she remembered Hale Bixby waiting for her, wonderful, loving, passionate Hale, and she had pivoted abruply, picked up her bags and left the home she had helped to create for the last time.

Hale took her to Chicago at the end of that week, just as he had promised, and her first three months in the huge metropolis had been a merry-go-round of expensive nightclubs and restaurants, parties, trips to New York and Bermuda, wild lovemaking, delirious happiness. She had thought of David and Tony often in the very beginning, but as her blissful existence with Hale continued, she thought less of her former life, blotting it out of her mind. When she received the notification from David's lawyer that he had filed for divorce, she experienced a mild pang of regret and guilt, then nothing. The past was behind her; there was only the future now, exhilarating and exciting, the adventure she had always craved and now was embracing completely.

When the divorce was final, she married Hale in a lavish ceremony, attended by dozens of his friends, and they bought a house in Oak Park there. Time seemed to fly by, and Bette had never been happier, more effulgent, in her life. Hale had inherited a considerable amount of money when he was younger, and that, coupled with his huge salary as a surveyor with the State Highway Commission, enabled them to live in monumental luxury – to take an extended trip to Europe, to rub elbows with movie stars and starlets, to become an integral part of the hectic social whirl of metropolitan Chicago. It was a dream come true for Bette, a Cinderella story.

And then suddenly, it had become instead a nightmare.

The beginning of the end, a little less than a year ago, had come in the form of a telegram and two letters from David's brother, Ken Clark, which she had received three weeks late upon returning from a Mexican cruise with Hale. Her hands trembled when she read them and tears spilled from her eyes. David was dead. He had been killed in an automobile accident on the outskirts of Westridge.

She had called Ken immediately, and though his voice had been cold, he had talked to her, listening to her explanation of why she hadn't come to the funeral. He told her that Tony had moved in with him – Ken was a widower who lived alone in the wealthy section of Westridge as a result of his successful commercial artist's talent – and that the old house was in the process of being sold. Bette had asked to speak to Tony, but her son had refused to talk to her, saying loudly so that she could hear over the long-distance phone wires that he never wanted to see his mother again. Ken had quietly urged Bette to come home anyway to see Tony, and she had said that she would. But she had never gone because of guilt and her son's stinging words – and because of what happened in her marriage to Hale Bixby.

She had sensed a cooling of Hale's ardor for her in recent months, but she had attributed this to, simply, the passage of time; after all, they had been together for four years, and the honeymoon couldn't be expected to last forever. She was soon to discover, however, that there was far more to it than that.