Day 8

My weekend spent with the Collins was eye opening to me on many levels. They lived like I’d never dreamed your could. In my mind I kept contrasting that huge new immaculate house with my small apartment and the drafty old farmhouse I’d been raised in. Everything was new or looked new and the house was luxurious in every way, from the wall to wall carpeting to the french doors outside. Any child raised in this home would surely want for nothing.

Annie and John treated me like I was their treasured and honored guest. They catered to my every desire, which was a bit hard for me to take because of how I’d been raised. In our household you were taught that what you wanted didn’t matter, only that you do what was necessary to keep the group going, everyone pitching in for a common goal. If you didn’t like what was being served that night you’d damn well better eat it.

I came away from that first weekend just a little bit in love with the Collins and several days later I told them that I would give them my baby. I can still hear their cries of joy and I remember feeling loved, swept into the circle of a loving family as they were insisting I spend every other weekend with them so that they could get to know me better and I would know them. The next time I came to their home the first thing that John did was pull out the contract and insist I sign immediately. I did because I was now more determined than ever to give my baby to this perfect family.

And they seemed too good to be true at first. They gave me money to help with my living expenses so I wouldn’t have to work so many hours and when I was there Annie would haul me out to shop, buying me a stylish maternity wardrobe, taking me to her hairdresser and springing for makeup at the dept store counter. I felt like a princess.

Weekends at the Collins also involved things like games, watching movies and cooking together. I got comfortable with them, so comfortable I found myself one night telling them the true circumstances of the baby’s conception. All they’d been told initially is that I’d gotten pregnant from my ex boyfriend. Now I told them what really happened, that I’d been on a blind date, a fix up and decided that I needed to know why everyone was so insane about sex and how I still hadn’t figured it out, I just knew it was better for me to live a celibate life. My pregnancy was proof of that.

In retrospect I wish I’d have never uttered those words because what happened as a direct result later left me crushed. I was so naive then as to think that most people were purely good and if you’re dealing with them in honesty they’ll not use and manipulate you.

It all started innocently, I was down at their home for the weekend sometime in my fourth month, just as I was starting to show when it started. Annie had gone to bed early with a migraine so John and I were left alone in the kitchen to do dishes and put away everything from our late dinner.

I have to confess I was halfway in love with John at this point. Everything I’d never felt before I was developing for him, falling for the adoptive father of the baby I carried. He must have seen the way I looked at him when Annie wasn’t around, my open hero worship of him must have been irresistible to him.

John stood at the sink rinsing dishes and putting them in the dishwashing while I rushed around putting leftovers in plastic containers. He looked up from his soap suds and said to me, “That story you told about the night you got pregnant.. are you serious about that?”

I stopped what I was doing and I know I had to have been flushing red to the tips of my fingers. I couldn’t find my voice so I just nodded yes. I could feel his eyes on me, crawling over my bloating body and I felt something new, desire for him, desire to let him look at me however he wanted.

Turning off the faucet John turned to me, coming dangerously close to say, “That’s a shame, a beautiful girl like you should know love, passion, experience how your body was created to work.” I backed away from John and then he said, “ I just don’t want what happened to Annie to happen to you.. She was raised in a strict religious household like you and she doesn‘t like sex. She‘s refused to have sex with me since her last miscarriage three years ago. I‘d hate to see someone as beautiful and sweet as you miss out on what it means to be a woman”

I’m trembling as his closeness and I gasp out, “I’m not beautiful.”

He closes the gap between us and touches me, rubbing his large masculine hands over my belly and up to my breasts as he says, “Sweetheart, you are so beautiful to me right now. It’s all I can do to keep my hands off you.”

“But.. but..,” I sputter helplessly, part of me wanting him to stop but a larger part dying for him to keep on, “Annie.. what about Annie?”

I could feel his hot breath against my neck and I shivered. He moaned into my skin, “Annie’s told me she doesn’t care if I have lovers but I have stayed as celibate as you... until now. I can’t help this, I’m falling in love with you.”

John picked me up as though I weighed nothing and carried me out the door to the pool house. He did things to me that I’d only read about and for the first time I fully understood why Jake and Cynthia Rose fought so hard for their sexuality. I finally got it! It made sense.

Entwined with John in the moonlight I whispered to him that I wished he could have been my first. He smiled, that devastatingly charming smile and said, “Oh, but I am.. you might have gotten pregnant from that other time but you didn’t get any pleasure from it.”

And so it started. Part of me felt very guilty, I loved Annie like a sister. But the bigger part of me loved John and not like a brother. I had fallen in love with the adoptive father of my baby. Sick and twisted, yeah, I knew that. But I also knew I couldn’t live without him. I lived for the moments he was on top of me and inside me and the things he said to me. I was as firmly addicted to him as to any drug.

John and I would make up several times on the weekends at their home, whenever Annie left us alone in the house or went to bed after taking her migraine meds we were on each other like famished sailors. The garage, the pool house, the kitchen, even their own bed.

After the first month we were together things got even more intense, John swore he couldn’t live without me and we started meeting up for sex several times a week. The passion between us burned with a white hot flame. Being that John was a lawyer working for big real estate developers and he was a state senator meant that he had a good excuse for late nights and over nights from home.

I felt bad for Annie but I was too much in love to really care what the consequences of my actions could be.

The only person in Biloxi that picked up on something was my sister Cynthia Rose. We’d gone out for our usual Sunday late morning brunch and walked along the beaches, talking, sharing what the past week had brought into our lives. Now that we no longer lived together we made time to get together at least once a week. That particular Sunday Cynthia kept starting at me and I couldn’t figure out why. I knew I was getting pretty big with the baby at 6 months along but it wasn’t like I looked like a freak of nature.

As we paced the beach, braving the brisk March winds, she’d said suddenly, “You’re in love..so who is he?” I denied it, denied there was anyone and she said she knew there had to be someone, because I had that glow about me, the glow that you get when you’re madly in love and getting regular fantastic sex.

“I’m pregnant, you twit..” I’d growled out in denial, “All pregnant women glow like that.”

She pulled her sweater closer and said, “Nope, it’s not that.. Momma never glowed.. it’s love and sex.. so who is he?”

Despite the brisk winds I pulled off my sweater, I was always hot all the time now and I sighed, “Who do I even have contact with enough to have an affair with? I’m either working at the school mental health clinic or I’m in school or I’m away visiting the Collins. I don’t have time for an affair and Momma never glowed because she was too busy thinking she was fulfilling God‘s will to be happy about being knocked up..”

“So you’re happy about this now?” Cynthia questioned.

“Yeah,” I replied, “I’m helping a family that cannot have kids to have a family. Can’t I just be happy because I’m helping someone else? Is it a crime?”

“It’s not a crime,” Cynthia Rose shot back, “but it’s him.. you’re doing the husband!”