The Anniversary Stories (3 page)

***

J
ohn took a deep breath, rested his head
against Helen’s and smiled.  “I’m
never
going to repeat that fantasy,”
he vowed, his chest still rising and falling as though he had just completed a
hundred metre sprint. “God, I hope Mum drops the kids off and not Susan.  I
can’t look her in the eye for at least another ten years!”

Helen laughed, slipped her
arms around his waist and hugged him.  “You’re too straight-laced for your own
good!  Incest stories are all the rage at the moment.”

“To each his own I guess, but
Susan was such a bossy, older sister I never fantasized about her even when I
was a horny teenager.”  His eyes widened in alarm as a thought struck him. “And
please, please, don’t you dare be my mother next anniversary!”

“Honey, I would never go that
far!”  Her green eyes twinkled.

“Helen, I’m serious!”

“Okay.  You’re obviously not
ready for your mum yet, so that leaves my mom—”

“Helen, that’s just as bad!”

“My dad?”

John gasped in shock.

“Alright, maybe not my dad or
my brothers.  What about my sister?

“She’s sixteen!”

“Okay, we’ll leave her for a
couple more years.”  Helen sighed as if in exasperation.  “It’s becoming harder
and harder to think up surprises for you on our anniversaries.”

“Maybe next year you should
come as yourself.  I quite like the real you.”

“Maybe I will...or maybe I’ll
be Mrs Thompson.

“Helen, she’s at least
ninety!”

“Yes, and I’m sure that she
could teach you a thing or two.”

“You little minx!  Come here
and I’ll teach you several things!” he threatened, reaching for her.

Avoiding his hands, she
screamed, jumped off the settee and raced towards the bedroom.

With his much longer legs he
caught her in a couple of strides.  Lifting her bodily, he tossed her onto the
bed, the look of a man intend on punishing a naughty wife on his face.

*****

T
aking a careful sip from the oversized
mug cradled between his palms, John Elliott sighed in contentment as he gazed
out through the opened kitchen door.  Freshly brewed coffee and a chance to
drink to the last drop without any interruptions or distractions from his
noisy, playful, demanding twins.  Heaven on earth!

He was on his first real
vacation in nearly seven years and he’d already vowed that it wouldn’t be his
last.  The business was doing well; it was time he enjoyed the fruits of his
labour.  A few noses had been put out of joint when he had announced that he
was taking a three-month vacation and leaving Carl, the second youngest of his
bus drivers, as Office Manager.  One of the other drivers had sniggered
knowingly, but John had refused to acknowledge the inference that the openly
gay young man was more to him than just an employee.  It was a business he had
worked hard to turn around.  He couldn’t afford to be sentimental—if he left
any of the others in charge he would constantly worry that things weren’t
running smoothly.  Carl was resourceful enough to handle minor emergencies, but
had the acuity to call if a situation arose that needed John’s expertise.

The first two days of his
break had been tough.  Helen, John’s wife, should have been off too, but at the
last minute her employer had asked her to postpone the start of her leave
because the young man they had recruited to cover her absence had had to work a
longer notice period than anticipated for his previous employer.  And with his
seven-year-olds, Tim and Tina, on school holidays but spending a week with his
sister Susan, John had had the house to himself.  Used to dealing with a dozen
or more emergencies daily, he had found it hard to adjust to the slower pace of
life and had desperately looked for tasks to occupy the hours.  But, by the
third day he had gotten the hang of being idle.

Remembering that he hadn’t
yet read the newspaper delivered that morning, he turned and walked through the
house to the living room.  The neatness of the room gave him an unexpected
pang—the twins were mini tornadoes, leaving mayhem and destruction in their
wake—the room seemed sterile without them.  Shaking his head to clear the
feeling of loneliness, he took the newspaper out of the magazine rack where
Helen had placed it earlier and settled into his favourite chair, a wide
buff-coloured leather recliner.

“Is there any more coffee?”

Engrossed in the newspaper,
John started at the sound of his next door neighbour’s voice.

“Sure,” he replied, smiling
across at the West Indian woman as he folded
The Times
over at the
sports section and placed it and his half-empty coffee mug on a small side
table and got to his feet.

“No gardening today?” she
asked over her shoulder as she preceded him to the kitchen.

“Not today,” he responded.

Florence and her husband, Sydney, had moved next
door the previous summer, but until last week John had not exchanged more than
a dozen words with her.  He had once invited Sydney to the local pub for a
couple of pints, but finding that he and the man had little in common hadn’t
extended another invitation.

Helen and Florence on the
other hand, had instantly become good friends.  The woman had even cut her
long, flowing curly locks into a pixie style similar to Helen’s.  She and Sydney
were both half-Black, half-Indian as were many Trinidadian and even in a thick
plait down her back, Florence’s hair had been a thing of beauty.  Loose around
her shoulders and flowing down her back, it had been every man’s fantasy. 
Helen had told him that Sydney had not been amused when his wife had cut her
hair.  Secretly John hadn’t blamed the man; he would have been apoplectic
himself!

Earlier in the week when he
had been in the garden vigorously attacking the weeds around one of Helen’s
rosebushes, his t-shirt drenched with perspiration, Florence had popped her
head over the dividing wall and started chatting.

Now sinking carefully onto
one of the sturdy chairs set around the kitchen table, she gave a soft sigh. 
“I shouldn’t really be drinking coffee but you make it so well.”

“One cup of coffee won’t harm
you.” John reached into the cupboard for a small cup and saucer.

“The house is too quiet
without the kids,” Florence remarked, taking the cup of sweetened milky coffee
from him when he had made it exactly to her taste.

“They have probably exhausted
poor Susan.”  John chuckled.  “I was expecting her to bring them back after a
day or two, but they seem to be having fun.”

His older sister hadn’t had a
playful bone in her body when they were growing up together, but she was the
complete opposite with his children.  They absolutely loved her and could
barely contain their excitement when he’d told them that she had invited them
over for an entire week.

“So it’s just the two of us.”

John’s heart had been beating
erratically since he had turned and caught sight of her in the sleeveless, pale
yellow dress.  It beat even faster at her words.

It was his and Helen’s
wedding anniversary.  Helen had often teased him that Florence had a little
crush on him and had jokingly, he’d thought, said that she would ask the other
woman if she wanted to sleep with him.  He had dismissed the idea that Florence fancied him, but he had felt it each time the woman popped over to discuss plants
whenever he was working in the garden.  She loved flowers, roses especially,
but Sydney who had grown up on a farm didn’t see the point of planting or
growing anything that wouldn’t bear fruits or be eaten in some form.

Sydney worked long hours and spent most of his
leisure time travelling around the country with his domino club.

Florence was a bored housewife.

A heavily-pregnant, bored
housewife.

John just happened to be a
man who adored pregnant women—bored or otherwise.

He had enjoyed Helen’s
pregnancy.  She was usually on the slender side—a trait shared by both her
parents, her three brothers and her much-younger sister—but she had bloomed
during pregnancy.  Her breasts, in particular, had surprised him completely by
going up several cup sizes and becoming even more delicious to fondle and suck
on.

The twins had thankfully not
been large babies, but carrying two babies instead of one had been tough on his
petite wife.  He had insisted that she stopped working six months into her
pregnancy and though she had protested vehemently she had acquiesced when she
realized just how worried he had been about her driving to and from work each
day in her condition.  Bizarrely—well, bizarrely because it seemed contrary to
what most women experienced during pregnancy according to the pregnancy books
they had read—Helen had been in an almost constant state of arousal.  He had
often come home in the evening to find her eagerly waiting for him.  He’d often
had to eat
her
and then his dinner.

They had hoped for more
children after the twins, but it hadn’t happened yet.  They were largely
content, blessed with a child of each sex, but they had planned on having four
or five children when they had first married.  They had discussed IVF when the
twins were three years old and Helen hadn’t fallen pregnant again, but mutually
agreed that it wasn’t for them.  It seemed selfish to want more children when
there were couples who had none, but they both prayed for at least one more
child.

“Another two and a half
months to go.”  Florence gave a long sigh and placed her hand on her distended
stomach.

“Aren’t you enjoying the
pregnancy?” John asked, surprised.  She seemed content enough, constantly
stroking her stomach softly, looking dreamy as she hummed to it under her
breath.

“Yes I am, but I don’t think Sydney is very much.”

“Are you sure?”

John and the man might not
have much in common, but surely their tastes could not be so dissimilar. 
Surely the man could not think that his wife was anything but beautiful.

“He rarely makes love to me
now that I’ve gained extra weight,” she explained.

“He’s just worried about
you.  All men get worried about making love to their wives when they’re
pregnant—it’s only natural,” John reassured her.  “The little extra weight
suits you.

“But everything on me seems
twice the size it was before,” she complained.  “Even my feet feel bigger!”

“Your feet look fine to me.”

Actually, they looked better
than fine.  They looked dainty and soft and incredibly feminine even with
toenails cut short and free of polish.

“What about the rest of me?”
she asked, holding her arms outstretched and looking at them.

“Those matchsticks!”  John
laughed.  If he tried hard enough he could probably snap one of her slender
arms in two.

“And what about these?”  She
pulled the top of her dress downwards suddenly, exposing her chest.  “They are
huge!  I used to have small, firm bubbies.  I didn’t really need to wear a bra
until well into my twenties.  Now I need all the support I can get.”

John coughed self-consciously
and then took a sip of the now lukewarm coffee he had fetched from the living
room as she made no attempt to cover herself.

“At least lingerie designers
make pretty maternity bras these days,” she ran her hand over her left breast. 
“I particularly like the intricate lacework on this one, don’t you?”

“It’s pretty,” he agreed,
without looking at it too closely.

“And look how well it
supports me.”  The next instant she had taken her breast out of the cup to
demonstrate.  “See.  Without the bra my breast would droop slightly.”

“But only very slightly,” he
acknowledged, his eyes locked on to her uncovered breast.  God, she was the
epitome of lush womanhood!

“Feel how heavy it is,” she
offered, bouncing it gently in her palm.  “And it will get heavier when it’s
filled with milk.”

“No, thanks.”  John hastily
clasped his hands behind his back, away from temptation.

“Oh, don’t be such a prude!”
she admonished, taking his hand and placing it beneath the heavy orb.  “Surely
you must have touched Helen’s.”

Touched?
 An understatement if he’d
ever heard one.  He had been at Helen’s breasts constantly during her
pregnancy.  And had been only marginally better after she had given birth.  He
had been surprised and horrified to find himself a little jealous of his twins
as Helen had breastfed them.  He had needed to be close to her, sometimes
sitting behind her and cradling both her and the feeding baby in his arms,
unless he was occupied with holding the other twin.  But even that had not been
enough—for the first few days he had felt strangely disconnected from her and
them.

Thankfully Helen had always
been able to read him like a book—sometimes it was scary the way she knew his
thoughts before he had articulated them.  She had known exactly what he’d
needed to feel less isolated.  One night, after they had put the twins to bed, he
had been lying with his head on her lap—something he had done increasingly
since the twins were born but had never done in the past; usually he cradled
her
head on his lap—she had opened her dressing gown and the flap of her nursing
bra and guided her nipple to his lips.  As though it was the most natural thing
in the world, he had latched on, his toes curling as her milk obeyed the pull
of his lips and surged from her body into his.

The next day he had awoken
feeling a hundred times better.  He had looked at the babies with a new-found
love and marvelled that he and Helen could have created such tiny miracles
together.  And later that day when he’d held her as she breastfed Tina, he had
felt absurdly happy and content.  Tim had been the better feeder of the two and
when he’d finished with a breast there was nothing left for his dad, but Tina
always the one more willing to share, had left just enough to keep John happy. 
They had all been weaned when the twins were four months old so that Helen
would be ready to go back to work two months later.

“John?” Florence’s
questioning voice brought him back to the present.

He had been fondling her
breast rather ardently.

“Sorry, I got a little
carried away,” he apologized and released her as he straightened.

“Oh, don’t stop!” she
begged.  “I was just telling you that the other one was getting a bit jealous.”

“Is it as heavy as this one?”
he asked, smiling at the absurdity of the question.

“Heavier I think,” she
responding playing along with him.  She unsnapped the clasp of the
front-closing bra and her glorious breasts tumbled free.  “You can compare them
and see.”

Cupping them in his hands he
closed his eyes for a moment in ecstasy.  But only for a moment.  He reopened
them and watched his hands as they moved over the honey-toned flesh.  The
contrast of her darker skin against his was surprisingly erotic.  Strangely, he
had never fantasized about making love to a Black or Asian woman.  Growing up
in a small village his sexual yearnings had been focussed on the brunettes,
redheads and the other blondes around him when not focused on Helen, the girl
next door.

“Did you know that I read a
lot of Mills and Boons when I was younger?  I used to dream of growing up and
marrying an Englishman,” Florence confessed.  “Someone with dark hair and blue
eyes like you.  I told Helen.  She knows that I have the hots for you.”

“Do you?” he asked and
grinned like a schoolboy when she nodded her head.

“Sydney will be home in less
than...three hours,” Florence squinted at his watch, trying to read it upside
down.  “My mother always told me to play hard to get—make a man work before I
give him my cat, but I don’t have time for that—not this time.”

She made to climb up onto the
kitchen table and John rushed forward hastily to lift her up onto it.