The Prodigal
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.”
“How would you like to honeymoon in Kentucky?” I asked Kate.
“Family meeting,” I said as we finished dinner. “We have to talk about logistics. We’ll have a new project, a new marriage, and a new baby.”
“And a new house and new in-laws and new pregnancy,” Melody added. I looked at her. She was grinning. “I’m late.”
Well, that interrupted the family meeting, as someone had to run out and get an EPT so Melody could pee on the stick and see that she was, indeed pregnant. None of us wanted to say anything because it had only been three weeks since conception. We learned with Lissa that we shouldn’t tell people until at least three months, but keeping a secret in our house was impossible. We finally got back to the meeting.
We’d be working most of July and part of August on the materials for Kentucky. Then in early August we’d go there and plan to work for a month doing the two installations. Both the cathedral and the church had special services planned for welcoming people back after the summer and wanted the new artwork ready for their homecoming.
I asked Morgan to be my assistant. That promised to be fun. She still had a year to go in school, but part of the shift with PCAD becoming part of SCU was that it would now be on quarters and wouldn’t start until mid-September. Kate already talked to Josh Baker who had been her right-hand man on the installation at St. Jerome’s. He’d agreed.
I saw Wendy’s hand rising toward her throat and averted my eyes intentionally so she would know I couldn’t see her touch the stone.
“We’re going to need more than the two assistants,” I said. “There are times on the frescoes that we need another pair of hands to hold the cartoon in place, and I know Kate had non-technical work, too. I’m thinking that, if she’s willing, we should take Wendy with us.”
She squealed and launched herself into my arms.
“Thank you, master,” she whispered.
“It’s going to be hard work, Tiger. Penny found a house we could sit for the month, but we’ll need cooking, cleaning, transportation, and help on-site. It’s not glorious work, but I would love it if you would take it on. Can you do it?”
“For my master and my wife, I can do anything.”
“Your baby is going to need a dose of her father while you are gone,” Lissa said firmly.
“And your wives are going to need a dose of our three lovers,” Melody added.
“I foresee a long Labor Day weekend,” I said. “If you don’t think the baby is up for the travel, we can come home that weekend.”
“We’ll work it out, but right now little brother is thinking there must not be a daddy since he hasn’t been inside the pussy since the baby’s been in the womb,” Melody grinned.
“We should all welcome junior Ames to the family,” Wendy said.
“How do you propose we do that?” I asked as Wendy crawled toward Melody.
“Face-to-face,” Wendy growled, burying her face in Melody’s pussy. And we all followed suit. Melody had orgasms from everyone and we each had a few of our own as we took turns pleasuring the newest mommy-to-be. Mine came while buried in her pussy and staring into the depths of her lavender eyes.
As much as I kept trying to push it to the back of my mind or forget about it, I felt guilty. I’d been dishonest with Kate. I had all kinds of justification. It was for her own good. It was my responsibility. I hadn’t actually lied to her. But even putting pressure on the archbishop not to say anything, was no guarantee that she would never find out about the man’s threat or how I handled it. Now we were less than a week away from our wedding and I couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about it.
We were in the studio prepping materials for the Kentucky project just so we could get out of the house. I wasn’t accomplishing anything. I tossed my sketchpad on the desk and plopped down in my chair.
“Kitten, we need to talk.”
“That sounds ominous, Tony. Are you getting cold feet?”
“God, no!” I hadn’t considered what that line would sound like. “It’s about the chapel. I didn’t tell you about everything and I was wrong to hide part of it. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Kate settled onto my lap in the chair and said simply, “Tell me.” I did. I told her about ‘James’ threatening to pull all our art from the chapel. I told her about investigating the archbishop and the vicar and exposing him as a pedophile. Finally, I told her about confronting the archbishop at our opening and threatening him if he ever breathed a word. I told her everything and then I waited.
Kate was pissed.
“Why did you think you needed to hide all this? Why would you imagine I’d want you to protect me from the archbishop? Tony, you should have talked to me.”
“I was afraid, Kate.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I was afraid you’d be angry and noble and insist that we quit work or let him tear everything out. If you’d done that, I’d always feel guilty about ruining one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen you do. It was selfish of me. I’m sorry.”
“You should be.” I realized that as pissed off as Kate seemed, she hadn’t moved off my lap. Maybe there was hope.
We sat there in silence a few minutes, not trying to get closer or to move apart. I heard her sniff and saw tears in her eyes. Oh hell!
“Kate…” She held up a hand to silence me.
“You saved me again, Tony.” I tried to protest but she shook her head and I shut up. “I’ll never be able to live up to your image of me. I understand how you felt when I kept holding your paintings up as being so great and mine so poor.”
“I’m not doing that,” I protested.
“Yes. Just not with my paintings. You put me on a pedestal even after all the terrible things I’ve done. You ascribe these wonderful noble characteristics to me. I want to believe that I would have threatened to remove my mosaics in support of you. I would have made the right noises for a while. But somehow, I’d have tried to get you to paint over your picture so I could keep mine. I know how selfish I am. It makes me ashamed. I called you a whore for art, when all the time, I would have pushed you to do the same thing. How can you love me, Tony? How can you not see me for who I am?”
“I wish you could see you through my eyes, Kitten. I know you are sometimes selfish. I know there is nothing quite as important to you as your art. I know you make mistakes. I know all that because I’m the same way. And I’m sure you can see it. But when I look at you, I see how much you admire me and I want to be more admirable. I want to be worthy of the girl who spent eight hours watching me paint a mural when we were freshmen, who dared to pose for me in front of an entire party, who held my eyes when we painted each other, who courted and won the love of four people at the same time, and loved each of us in return. It’s not that I don’t see you for who you are, but that I see you accepting me and my faults and take that as my model. I can’t always make the right decisions, Kitten, but every decision I make will be made out of love and respect for you and Wendy and Melody and Lissa and however many children we populate the earth with. I’ll try to do better. I still get caught up in being ashamed of what I do and trying to hide it, even when there’s nothing to be ashamed about.”
“Like your newest paintings.”
“Yeah. Like that. Kate, loving you—each of you—brings out something in me that is better than I am. Grandpa Ken wouldn’t approve, but it makes me willing to fight for you. The archbishop can just be glad I didn’t close my eyes and let my hands do the talking.”
“You have to admit, that unlike Dusty or Neil, that would have had disastrous results,” Kate laughed. I breathed. Maybe we’d make it through this. “It would have been satisfying, though.” She relaxed into my arms rubbed her cheek against my shoulder. The smell of her hair filled my senses. We didn’t get more intimate, both of us soaking up what we’d discovered about each other.
“Tony, don’t keep secrets from me and I promise I won’t judge you or shame you. I’m too selfish to let you go. I love you too much.” This time we kissed. We kissed. We kissed. These lips were made for mine.
“I promise,” I breathed. “And I ask no more than the same.”
“I promise.”
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