Finding Jessie: A Mystery Romance (19 page)

“Surely you didn’t think that because I never married that I was waiting for you to be free.”

“I kind of did.”

Jessie was scandalized by Nora’s bold play for Sam! It was all she could do not to scream, but she wanted to hear what they said next.

“Oh, my God, Nora.
No.
I never promised any such thing.”

Nora wept louder and Jessie cringed.

“Please stop crying about me when you should be crying about my dad.”

Her voice murmured something that Jessie couldn’t hear.

“No, Nora. I won’t. Because I love her, damn it. She is everything to me.  And even if I didn’t ever meet her, I still wouldn’t choose you. Not after…” and Sam’s voice faded out.

There was a feminine protest, but Sam came back in the bedroom and slipped under the sheets with Jessie again. She could feel his heart beating against her back.

After a moment, he whispered, “Oh my God! Jessie? You’re awake, aren’t you?”

She turned around to him, trying to keep any jealousy out of her face and voice. “Yes, Sam. I heard most of that.”

“Look, it happened a long time ago. I was…a kid. It wasn’t non-consensual, but it was so wrong.” A look of anguish passed over his face. “Are you angry? Do you hate me?”

“No, Sam. You’re human. You’re a good man. I am very happy that you are more like your good dad tonight than you are that high school student who had the hots for his stepmother.”

“Ugh, I knew it would come out if you came to Ohio with me.”

“It’s not the worst secret I’ve ever known. But it’s pretty bad.”

“I know it is.”

“You don’t think less of me? Of her?”

“Of you? Never, Sam. Of her. Oh yeah. I don’t know what possessed her to seduce you when she had your dad. That was trashy.”

“Yes, it was. Nevertheless, she led and I followed. It was a spur of the moment thing, a little skinny dip in a farm pond on a hot day that turned into something of which I am quite ashamed. To this day.” He hesitated. “She tickled me. That’s why I hate it so much. There’s the creepy fallout.”

“Oh, no. I am very sorry I tickled you.”

“You didn’t know. I can’t bear it though. Because of her.”

“We all have our triggers for the past. Did your dad ever know about you and Nora?”

“No. I wouldn’t have hurt him by letting him know and neither would she. We both loved him too much to let him know. We just—made a mistake, one hot day, decades ago. She clung to the memory of that one afternoon like I was some pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. She thought tickling was enticing. I was eighteen, and foolish. I could have said no and walked away. I’ve been trying to forget that horrible day ever since. I had to leave my father’s town to make my own betrayal fade into the distance and the years.”

“Thank you for telling me. That must have been very hard.”

“Truthfully, I would never have told you if you hadn’t heard that conversation between Nora and me.”

“I’m glad I know.”

“I will never live down the events of this road trip, will I?”

“Not likely, Sam. Still, that was what, forty years ago?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“So, how could I hold you to the same standard of the mature man that you are today? I mean, should people in middle age land be held responsible for that kind of mistake so far in the past that it seems like it’s a different person?”

“Are we talking about me or you, Jessie?”

“Both of us.”

Sam was silent for a few minutes. They watched the shadows of the bare tree outside the window, moving in the wind. They heard the branches scratching against the house.

“It wasn’t only that one time with Nora, was it, Sam?” Jessie asked softly.

Sam sighed, and it was a tortured sound. “Some things are better left in the past and should stay untold, Jessie. I respect your privacy when you ask me to do so. Now, please respect mine.”

Jessie burned with jealousy, as images of more than just Sam’s one coupling with Nora flitted through her imagination. Instinctively, she knew there were many lovemaking sessions between Sam and Nora, stolen moments when his father would never catch them. A man just did not walk into a woman’s bedroom without knocking, if he had only had her once, four decades ago. But Jessie said nothing in reply, so as not to incite anger, nor encourage him to tell her the tawdry details of his affair with his stepmother. Nor did she want to open discussion for her early life. That would be a disaster.

“Maybe it is better that I don’t know the details,” she acquiesced.

“Thank you for understanding about my need for privacy, Jessie. I mean that.”

She kissed him fervently and he returned her ardor.

“That feels like a jealous kiss,” he observed, not without a wry smile.

“That’s because it
is
a jealous kiss,” she admitted. “But you are mine now, and so that is the end of her.”

“I gotta tell you, Jessie, jealousy does not become  you.”

“Or anyone,” she agreed. “I guess I am feeling terribly insecure right now,” she admitted.

“Very well. Here’s some reinforcement for ‘us.’ From the moment I first saw you, there was no help for me but to be swept into your life, to be molded by you, and loved by you and, tortured by you, and damn it, possessed by you, with every fiber of my being. Don’t you know that nobody else has ever done for me what you have, Jessie? You’ve loved me for every good thing and now, also, every bad thing in my heart and my life. I can totally be myself, and truthful and there you are with me still, offering me your very sweet self. You have no equal, no competition, and no worries. We belong to each other in this destiny, or fate, or whatever you want to call it. But we are meant for each other, Jessie. Two imperfect people, dovetailing. Where I lack, you fill. And vice versa.”

“Oh, Sam!” Jessie whispered softly in his ear. “I am yours in the exact same way. That you have failed or fallen short of your own expectations, or of mine – all is forgiven in this heart of the woman who loves you without conditions or strings. I am here for you, Sam.
Always
.”

“Then my past is washed away by your love, Jessie? All those ugly things that I am, or that I was, just—forgiven? Those horrible secrets of mine that only you and I know about—gone?”

“I believe you’ve said this to me: We are who we are, Sam. What we were made us who we are today. So, who is to say those paths were so wrong, if they eventually led us to each other?”

He held her tightly in his arms and kissed her hair and her eyebrows and her eyelashes.

“I am the luckiest man on Earth,” he told her.

“Yes, you are,” Jessie agreed, and he laughed with her. They cleaved together on the bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, and in their own thoughts, for many long minutes. Sam kissed her gently and she sighed with soft pleasure. Finally, Sam spoke.

“I have email to take care of and books to ship to customers. I think that instead of staying another day, we should use her computer early in the morning to check for online sales, then start for home tomorrow afternoon,” Sam said, at last, and to her relief. “I don’t want to stay with Nora another whole day, but I don’t want to be rude and leave at the crack of dawn, either. I do not leave crying women in my wake.”

“I think that is an excellent idea, to leave on a kind note,” Jessie agreed. She relaxed against his familiar warmth. “I’m ready to go home, too. With you, Sam.”

“Jessie, I really have fallen from grace in your eyes. Do you still love me as much?” Sam asked.

“More than ever, Sam,” she replied and sealed her words to Sam with a long and lingering kiss that erased all doubt from his heart. “Nothing foolish that you did when you were eighteen years old is relevant today. And I place most of the blame on her. She had a lot of nerve, taking your virginity, and messing you up so bad in the head that you didn’t trust any woman enough to marry her for the rest of your life.”

“Whew, I believe you are correct about that. I never thought about that, but yes. This kind of thing can scar a man, as far as trusting women.”

“I’m so sorry about your Dad,” Jessie said. “I wish I could have known him when he was strong and well.”

“Me, too,” Sam replied. After a moment, he added, “Just in case there really is a heaven, good night, Dad. I love you.”

“Sweet,” she said.

“How do you know there is a God, Jessie?”

“Because I prayed for God to bring me a man who would love me for myself, faults and all, and here you are, physical proof.”

He held her in the curve of his arms. “Oh, Jessie,” he said softly.

She replied, “All the way down in my gut, I am sure there is a God and that He listens to lonely women when they weep in the night. Even pitiful Nora. I know this because I was pitiful before I met you.”

There was a little crying sound, muffled into a pillow, from down the hall. Jessie felt very sorry for Nora’s loss. Nora had now lost the both of them. Sam and his son, Sam. With the connection permanently broken, there was no reason for Sam, Junior, to ever see Nora again, not after they left the farm anyway.

After they were gone from Ohio, amicably, with hugs and kisses and great baskets of food for the road trip home, and boxes of Sam’s dad’s personal effects, Jessie wanted to ensure that Sam did not ever see Nora again, for as long as she lived.

A few weeks after the funeral, Sam was still in agony, and falling into a depression. He was grieving, he was restless and migraine headaches sent him to bed with cold packs over his eyes. Jessie asked what was wrong and he admitted how he wanted to be forgiven for his part in what he had done with his father’s wife, that summer after he turned eighteen, but before he went off to college. It was tearing him up more than it ever had, maybe because he had seen her again and she had thought she could just pick up where they left off, thirty years ago.

“Sam, you might have had a young man’s body, but you were very young emotionally, too. She took something away from you, your virginity, not to mention she scarred you emotionally. She came onto you and although you went along with the seduction, the onus is really on her. She was an adult and in a position of authority over you as your stepmom. She had a responsibility to act like a parent and she did not.”

“I know, but I could have said no. I just didn’t stop her. And then it happened again, and again, all summer, until I went to college.”

“I thought so. Just think, Sam. If you would have been one year younger, she could have gone to prison for what she did.”

“As a lawyer, I know that. Just…how do I forgive myself? It was more than her. It was me, too. I can’t stop thinking of her and…my God, I adored my father. He was such a good man.”

“You’ve beat yourself up for a lifetime and you don’t like touching people, except me, thank goodness. Was this a way to punish yourself?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Until I came along, it sounds like you withheld so many good parts of yourself in previous relationships that ended not working out, maybe for something related about the way you felt about yourself after your intimacy with your father’s wife.”

He nodded and groaned, his hand on his head. “It’s all true, Jessie. I know it is. But what do I do with the pain?”

“Come here.” Jessie joined hands with him and prayed with him.

He wept in great heaving sobs at her simple words, almost the same ones he had spoken in childhood in a little chapel on the prairie in Ohio when he’d felt his beliefs as a living thing and had gotten himself baptized.