Not This Time
28
Coming Clean
“I SEE YOU are still hurting over this,” Janna said. My psychotherapist. We’d been meeting for six months. Lily was due in three weeks. I had to get to the point. “You are making progress with your relationship counselor. Sometimes I think you are simply repeating yourself with me. Why?”
This was it. I was shaking. I knew I had to go through with it or I could never look my mates in the eye again. Or my daughter. Or our son. I would never again know that intense feeling of love when the three of us were together.
“What are the conditions under which a person can be institutionalized?” I whispered. That was what I was truly afraid of. I would tell her and they would lock me away. I would never see my daughter or my lovers again. I would forever be locked inside my own mind trying to figure out which life I’d lived. Janna chuckled.
“Do you think we are locked in the nineteenth century? I don’t know how these myths persist. There are two circumstances under which a person can be institutionalized, as you put it. The first is voluntary. Oh, there might be interventions and confrontations that lead to it, but most people who self-commit are suffering from drug addiction, alcoholism, or some other form of mental health issue that they realize has gotten beyond their control. They need help, recognize it, and ask for it. Those are usually for a finite term, as well, which could be renewed, say after a specific treatment program has been completed but more help is needed. Second, is court-ordered. In other words, I could not listen to you and simply say ‘this person is crazy’ and commit you to a mental health hospital. I would have to go to court and convince a judge that you were a clear danger to yourself or others, that you could not function in normal daily life, and that you needed long term professional care. I would have to call witnesses and then another health professional, not a therapist, but a psychiatrist with a medical doctorate would have to confirm my diagnosis and recommendation. The same is true if a close friend or family member decided you needed to be institutionalized. I can tell you right now that no matter what your head is telling you, I’ve been meeting with you for six months and have seen no sign that you are a danger to either yourself or others or that you can’t take care of yourself.”
“Thank you.” She just sat there waiting. And waiting. “I woke up the morning after my senior prom knowing that I’d been drugged and raped the night before and that I was pregnant. There was no question about it. I knew. I knew because I had already lived my life for the next twenty-five years and remembered all of it.”
“Dreams can be a powerful thing,” Janna said. “It is certainly possible that you retained memories of what happened and projected your life ahead of you.”
“It wasn’t a dream. I’d lived through twenty-five years, raised my daughter, and divorced my husband. I got in my little Prius and drove from Fargo, North Dakota to the Southern California Coast and, later that night, in another drug induced stupor, I had a heart attack and died. I didn’t see bits and pieces of my life when I woke up. I remembered all of it. I remembered my daughter’s birth, my forced marriage to her father, the day he confessed he’d been cheating on me, taking my real estate license exam… everything. I can close my eyes and feel my daughter’s arms around me when she hugged me goodbye the day I left. It’s driving me crazy.”
Janna just sat there, a puzzled look on her face.
“What’s a Prius?”
“Oh. You know. It’s a hybrid car from Toyota. They started making them back about… uh… next year,” I stumbled.
“So, you are saying that you know everything that is happening in your life? You’ve lived this all before?”
“No. When I woke up seventeen again, I swore I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Not this time. I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant. I got past my eighteenth birthday, graduated from high school, and ran away.”
“That’s good then, right? You saw a life that you could have had and chose to make better decisions.”
“It sounds so simple. But it’s all different,” I said. She nodded.
“Let’s assume that everything you have said is real,” she started. Assume? It was real! “For my sake. I can see that you already know it’s all real, so something else is troubling you. Whether it was another life or an extremely vivid dream doesn’t make a difference. Your brain recorded an entire lifetime and you are making decisions based on what you experienced. Do you know things in advance? Can you predict the future? More things like the Toyota Prius?”
“Some things. A lot of things happen or are just about to happen and I think, ‘I knew that!’ Like I know that the stock market is going to start a slide around the first of 2000 and banks will be overextended on bad mortgages. Some of them will be bailed out and some will be consolidated into other bigger banks. Most of that will happen after 2001 and in the wake of the Enron collapse. It’s not like I’m a walking encyclopedia, though. I don’t remember the exact date that the executives of that company were discovered to have stripped its entire value and stolen its employees’ retirement funds.”
“That’s a pretty heavy accusation.”
“You don’t believe it. Nobody would. Nobody would believe that we are going to have a president elected in 2000 based on contested ballots in Florida. And that a year later he’d commit us to a massive war in the Middle East that would still have troops tied up and in danger for more than fifteen years.” I simply couldn’t bring myself to say that the Twin Towers in New York would be attacked with airplanes. It was even hard for me to believe now.
“Okay. I’ll make notes of a few things that you’ve said you remember. I think that you should also write down as much as you remember—your predictions of the future. Enron. Who is going to become the next president. The names of some of the banks that will be involved in collapse and acquisition. Anything you can tie specific names to and, if possible, dates. By being proactive in this, you will erase some of your sense of déjà vu and will establish a firm standard by which to judge how accurately you remember. But I want you to keep this in mind: By making a different set of choices the day you woke up after the prom, you changed things. I have no idea how completely. Did you just change your own circumstances? Or did the change ripple through the world like the legendary butterfly effect? If the latter, things are easy. You just have to keep living and making good decisions in a world that is better for your experience, but is no longer dependent on it. If the former, you have to keep living and making good decisions in your life, knowing that you are no longer dependent on what happened before.”
“But what if I’m supposed to be miserable no matter what I do to change it? I love Bruce and Lily! I don’t want to end up dying in a hotel room by myself at 42!”
“Then go home and love them. Stop letting your former life control you!”
“Do you love me?” I asked Bruce as we cuddled Lily between us and gently massaged her round tummy and swollen legs.
“Yes,” he said. “I love you—both of you, all four of you—so much it hurts. I’m sorry…”
I pushed my fingers against his lips and then my lips against his.
“Don’t say it,” I said. “You never have to apologize for it again. Ever. It’s past. This little kid between us is present and future. I love you. I love you both.”
There were lots of I love yous and kisses. I kissed both my lovers as deeply as I could. I could feel Lily’s fingers between my legs and knew she was finding more moisture there than she had in a long time.
“I was wondering… Do you both think… Is it too late to start a little sister for this little boy?” I stumbled. “I mean, if it is okay? I’d like to get started.”
“Yes!” Lily cried out. “Yes, yes, yes! Do it, Bruce. Please, please make a baby sister!”
“I think I’m all for it,” he said.
“You think so?” I said dipping my head and inhaling his cock into my mouth. “You think you’re all for it?”
“Oh, darling! I want to put what you are sucking between your legs and plant a seed that will grow. I want to plant our new life together. Our future.”
“Does that mean you’d like to fuck me? Right now? Right here beside our lover while she kisses us and guides your bare cock into my wet pussy?”
“If you keep stroking me like that, the first load is going to go all over her round tummy,” he said.
“Much as I’d like that, how about you put it someplace where it would do more good?” Lily said.
We scrambled around and Lily gave me enough room to spread my legs as Bruce got between them. It wasn’t the first time we’d made love since his announcement in January, but it was different. I didn’t feel like I was doing it just to try to heal the family or hold us together. I wasn’t there because I was jealous of seeing Bruce sawing in and out of Lily. I was here to make love to the man I’d committed my life and love to. That’s what was turning me on so much my juices were running down between my cheeks.
Commitment.
How much had I held back in our relationship? I had my life. Lily and Bruce—maybe even Emily—were convenient accessories to it. But had I ever really committed to them? It was definite in my mind now. If I got pregnant again—When I got pregnant again and had another child, I would know that I had truly left my former life behind.
Bruce moved to go down on me but I pulled him over me.
“Don’t bother. I don’t need anything extra, Bruce. I just need you. Make love to me, darling.”
I could feel Lily manipulating his cock between my legs as I kissed Bruce. She pushed it against my clit and I squirmed on it, taking in the sensation of his fluids mixing with mine to prepare me for his invasion. Yes! I was ready. And for the first time since we got together seven years ago, Bruce entered me with no protection between us. What was I protecting against all those years? Protecting myself from a life that might only have been a dream? I’d gone off the pill when Lily got pregnant, before we fell apart as a family. Now there was nothing stopping us. This. This was real. This was love. This was the life and the lovers I had chosen.
My orgasm took me by surprise and I think it took both Lily and Bruce by surprise as well. As I thrashed beneath him, I could feel him tense and release his sperm into my fertile depths. I could feel it splashing against the receptive soft membrane of my cervix. In my head, I could see his sperm being sucked through the barrier to find my waiting egg, to besiege it until one breached the final barrier and triumphantly divided to start the process that would become our child.
I came again.
“Eat me!” Lily exclaimed as I buried my face between her legs. “It’s time to get this show started!” For some reason, I’d woken up extremely playful this morning. It was the third week since Bruce and I had started using every available opportunity to make sure I was pregnant and by now, I was certain. My periods were like clockwork. Or lunacy. My periods always coincided with the new moon. It had come and gone.
This morning, I had started kissing and rubbing Lily as soon as sleep left my eyes and I bathed her clit with my tongue. Lily had been so uncomfortable over the past few days that we all knew the baby was imminent. I attacked her pussy with vigor and felt Bruce move behind me to give me the same attention. I felt his tongue first and then his cock as he nudged it between my lips and sank to my full depth. I wiggled my ass in the air as he plunged in and out, my tongue picking up the rhythm as I probed Lily’s wet pussy.
I felt it before it arrived. I knew I was moments from the explosion when Lily began to scream.
“Yes!” Bruce howled as he let loose a flood of sperm in my pussy—just in case. I opened my mouth to scream my own pleasure when fluid burst from Lily so powerfully I choked on it. She screamed. I coughed the water out of my lungs, my pussy still spasming around Bruce’s cock.
“It started!” Lily yelled. She immediately began panting and I realized her labor pains had begun with the breaking of her water. We got her through that first one and waited for the next. It was almost twenty minutes—enough time for Bruce to fix us all coffee and tea. We were going to have a baby.
Once the next pain had passed, we showered together. Sleepy Emily came out of her bedroom to find out why we were making so much noise. It wasn’t the first time we’d ever woken her up with our passionate screams, but it hadn’t happened in quite a while. She was six years old and was starting to gain a more mature outlook on what happened when Mommies and Daddy went to bed.
“Mommy is going to bring your little brother into the world soon,” I said.
“Duhduh-duhduh, duhduh-duhduh, Batman!” Emily sang as she hugged Lily’s tummy and was rewarded with a powerful kick. Lily laughed and shook a finger at me. I’d found episodes of Batman on Nick at Night and made it a point to watch with Emily just to tease Bruce.
And wouldn’t you know that when the red, squalling bundle made his appearance from the Batcave, they named him Robin.
When Robin was a month old, my doctor confirmed that I was pregnant. And I was determined that I would never again look back on my former life with either fear or anticipation.
Not this time.
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