Taylor Made Owens (41 page)

He nodded with wide open eyes.

She sauntered up to him and jutted her left leg through the slit in the towel. Her whole body was buzzing with excitement. Looking into his bright eyes, she pulled the towel aside just a little, so he could see between her legs. She covered up again and smiled, coveting his adoring gaze. “More?” she asked as her excitement grew. He nodded with a broad grin. Facing him, she pulled the towel down slowly, holding it tight against her until her breasts popped out and bounced back up. Her pink nipples were erect. He was, too, she could tell when she glanced down at his lap. The delighted tease bent over to put her hands on his legs and slowly brush her breasts against his cheeks. He kissed her right nipple. Excited by his touch, she took a deep breath.

She pulled the towel back up and scolded, “Naughty boy.” He smiled impishly. “More?” she asked again, her voice tremulous with ardor. Another nod.

She made a leisurely half turn, stood straight up, turned her head back to see his eyes, and lifted the towel gradually until her perfect bottom was uncovered. She stepped closer to him so that her derriere was only inches from his face. He leaned forward and kissed her there. Goose bumps jumped up on her legs and bottom. She covered up and turned back to him.

“More?” she said. He nodded as his breathing became more rapid.

By this time, she was so eager every hair on her body was standing on end. Keeping her eyes on his eyes, she turned around again, spread her legs apart, and bent over little by little as she slowly raised the towel. His excited eyes and breathing exhilarated her. She held the pose for a few seconds, then covered up again, turned around, smiled salaciously at him, opened the towel wide and displayed her figure, swaying her hips to a song playing on TV. Then she abruptly closed it, tied it off at the top, and said, “Now you.”

She pulled him up, and she sat with an expectant smile and an erotic pose, legs slightly parted with her right hand resting on the chair as to conceal her genitals. Bashful, he stood still. “Here, let me help,” she said, as she put one forefinger on each of his pelvic bones. Her fingers pointed down and burrowed under the waistband of his boxers, then they continued down, pulling his boxers out over his penis until the top was exposed. Her eyes grew wider and breathing grew deeper as she continued pulling down, all the while brushing his penis with the back of her hands until his boxers fell to the floor. She kissed the tip and relished his sudden gasp. Her teasing was now bordering on torment for both of them.

She stood, pulled off his T-shirt, and pushed him back into the chair. “Here’s how it’s done,” she said. She turned around again, dropped the towel to the floor, and moved to within a foot of his face. He put his warm hands around her legs. His touch electrified her. She put her hands on his and bent over. He licked up her left thigh and kissed between her legs.

Startled at how good that felt, she said, “Oh!” He licked up her right thigh and used his lips to draw her clitoris into his mouth and licked and sucked it. That was all she could take.

Breathing hard, she quickly turned, straddled him, plunged down on him, clutched his head savagely, buried her tongue in his mouth, and aggressively thrust up and down on him. As undulations started deep inside and spread throughout her body, he took her left breast in his hand and the other in his mouth, propelling her over the edge. Her excitement launched his orgasm.

“Look in my eyes!” she commanded breathlessly. With her eyes, she tried to communicate, “I love you, and I want you forever.”

As she climaxed, she spread her legs as wide as she could and pushed down with all her weight, wanting every inch of him inside. So overwhelmed with passion was she, she bit his neck hard enough to break the skin, and she breathed so hard, she got lightheaded. When her long orgasm ended, she collapsed on him, powerless to move a muscle or even speak.

After a few moments cuddling, she said with a little embarrassment, “God, I think the whole neighborhood must have heard that. I’ve never been close to that wild before.” She kissed him and said, “I love you, Mr. Owens.” She took his hand and tried, “Come to bed, and we can be together all night, and every night from now on.”

But with his absolute physical need for her now considerably diminished, he refused. That did it.

“Dammit!” she said as she donned her towel. “I’ve been doing everything I can to be nice to you, to give you everything a man could possibly want. I’ve shared everything with you—my place, my daughter, and now myself, yet you continue to treat me like a stranger. I demand better, Bobby.”

“How so?” he responded as he put on his boxers.

“Start loving me!”

“No, Jenny, no! This is what I’ve been worried about. I warned you before I moved in. I’ve warned you a dozen times since I moved in. I do not and will not love you. I am here for Kara alone.”

“And what do expect to come of that? What happens when I go on tour?”

“You leave her with me?”

“Wrong. You don’t get her without me.” He looked at her with a combination of shock and anger. He put on his shirt, went to his room, and began packing his suitcase. She observed, leaning against the door frame, arms folded.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, hoping he was just grandstanding.

“What’s it look like? I’m moving out. This experiment has failed.”

“So you’re abandoning me again—just like that?”

“Yup.”

“And you couldn’t care less about our daughter?”

“I love how she’s yours when it suits you to assert ownership over her and ours when it suits you to assert ownership over me. You put the case starkly and convincingly. I’m wasting my time here. Kara and I have no future together without a price I will never pay, so I have to get out now before I get so close to Kara it would kill me to lose her. I fear I’m too late already.”

Seeing him continue to pack, she said, “Don’t leave! Please stay with us. Kara loves you, and I know you love her. I do want you to look after her when I’m on tour; I want her to be loved, not just cared for. You’re the only person in the world I could ever leave her with. Please say you’ll stay,” she pleaded with tears streaming down her cheeks.

He unpacked and said, “I’ll stay for her. No more pressure to love or marry you. Understood?”

She nodded and went to her room, depressed. Lying in bed grieving, she finally began to accept that husband and wife they would never be again. The best she could hope for was a continuance of their current situation.

By the time Jennifer left a month later to begin rehearsals for her upcoming tour, she had come to terms with their common-law relationship. She would come home to him and live with him when she wasn’t on the road, and they would be the best of friends. Kara would be brought up by her loving father when Jennifer was absent, and both parents when she was home. It wouldn’t be so bad, she concluded.

•

It took no time for the doctors at UCSF to recognize that Kristen was a gifted young woman who had already blossomed into an outstanding physician. The director of pediatric oncology at UCSF considered her the best new resident he’d seen in years and started just months into her first fellowship year trying to convince her to stay on full-time at the university once her fellowship was completed.

Near the end of that first year, he asked her to play a central role, under the guidance of a preceptor, in a phase I clinical study to test a promising new treatment on a small number of neuroblastoma patients, using nanotechnology to deliver chemotherapy drugs to the tumor cells. Too many times in her first year she’d had to convey a diagnosis of neuroblastoma to parents without much hope to offer, for this dreadful childhood cancer remained a death sentence for upwards of half the unfortunate children with it. Too many times she’d had to inform the parents of the death of their child from this disease because, once disseminated, it is resistant to conventional modes of treating cancer.

She jumped at the offer. This research project comprised the central focus of Kristen’s second and third years at UCSF.

•

Whereas Kristen loved her work, Robert didn’t relish the thought of the career for which he was training. Computer programming was a breeze for him, but it bored him, and the realization that he was now a computer geek depressed him. He was no longer a dashing major league baseball player, he was a nerd, which meant he had to beat himself up. His new profession held no gratification in comparison to his former calling, no distinction in comparison to Jennifer’s, and no meaning in comparison to Kristen’s.

His role as a father did give meaning to his life, though. To think he had wanted Jennifer to have an abortion, and later wanted nothing to do with the precious creature. Now he loved Kara and couldn’t imagine life without her.

He often took her to campus because he liked to be with her and to show her off. And she embodied a decided bonus: she was the greatest chick magnet ever conceived. Had he known, he’d have made Kara when he was sixteen and taken her on advertising junkets. “Want one just like this? Free delivery right to your womb. You provide the box.” Little Kara was beautiful like her mom, and all the coeds fussed over her, then examined the father, perhaps trying to determine if he had another one of those in him. As usual, though, the pretty ones—he had extremely high standards—would give nothing of themselves without the vow of a long-term relationship, a condition he was unwilling to meet.

Jennifer visited Robert and Kara but once between February and June, during a week’s pause in the concert tour in early May. Kara was strange with her, which was a downer, but she was soon off again, and out of sight, out of mind. It was a similar situation for Robert and his son. Robert had spent three days with him over Christmas and didn’t see him again until early July. As the visits were getting fewer and shorter, father and son began to grow apart. This bothered Robert, especially as he observed Jennifer and Kara growing apart, but he didn’t know what to do about it. And it would only get worse, as Phil’s sabbatical year had arrived, and he was to take Kim and Brian to Australia for fourteen months.

But life went on and, before they knew it, Kristen and Robert were in their final year of training. Robert had successfully passed his orals and qualifying exam, and embarked upon his dissertation. He’d had a hard time choosing what to do. Most of the work at the PhD level was dry, theoretical stuff that was of little interest to him.

Fortunately, he stumbled upon another field that sorely needed programming talents like his: astrophysics. He’d taken an elective in it, and discovered a fascination with applied work dealing with spacecraft and the challenge of getting them to their destination in one piece. Programming was so complex for missions to other planets that debugging had become next to impossible. Robert had a talent for cutting through complexity and getting to the crux of the matter in a hurry.

His professor of astrophysics brought a real life problem from the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory into class: write a program in as few lines as possible to deploy the parachutes for a Mars landing craft. “This would make an excellent dissertation for anyone interested,” noted the professor. Robert went to see him after class and expressed interest. The professor agreed to Robert doing the work, and to becoming his thesis advisor. He assigned a half-dozen books and innumerable papers on the area for Robert to learn and write a review on to serve as his background chapters for the dissertation. By the start of his third year on campus, he was ready to write the program.

Meanwhile, Kristen’s research project had returned disappointing results in terms of improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy to treat the disease. As always, though, good scientists learn from their failures. Kristen published two well-received papers concerning the trial itself and hypothesized reasons for its failure to fight the cancer. She derived new ideas on the basis of the outcomes, and theorized specific DNA mutations that may result in the development of neuroblastoma. Her theories would later lead to improved treatments for neuroblastoma patients.

This research and her superlative talent for managing the care of children with cancer impelled top hospitals and universities across North America to vie for her as her fellowship wound down.

•

Jennifer had spent a grand total of seventeen weeks with Kara and Robert since she left almost two years earlier. She had the month of December off and spent it with Kara and Robert. By that time, her daughter had forgotten her. It took until the end of the month for mother and daughter to feel comfortable with one another, just in time for Jennifer to leave again for four months. She continued to love Robert, but time away from him had cooled her desire, which was just as well. Out of the blue one afternoon in late December, he asked her, “Have you heard anything about Kristen? Where she is, whether she’s married or in love? Anything?”

“Nope. Let’s go out to eat.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I have a great restaurant in mind. We’ll have to cross the Bay Bridge, but it’s so good, it’ll be worth the hassle.”

“Maybe you could ask your father to ask her father.”

“Come on. Grab Kara. I’m starved.”

“Do you think Krissy might still love me?”

“Oh, how the hell should I know? Don’t look at me like that. She called me the day after you disappeared. She told me she wanted to help me and you work things out. She got frantic when I told her the awful things you said to me about both of us. I haven’t talked to her since.”

“God, I’m an idiot. I have to find her. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tracking her down, but it’s such a touchy situation. You two are a lot alike when it comes to me. How would she react if I contacted her?”

“I really can’t say.” Jennifer fidgeted and got up to pace. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“I can see this is upsetting you and I’m sorry, but this situation can’t go on forever. You go off for months on end and have the time of your life, and come home for a few weeks here and there, but I’m here all the time, and as much as I love Kara, I’m lonely. I need companionship. I need love. I need Kristen. What should I do to get her back?” Jennifer volunteered nothing, so Robert pushed more. “Jenny, I still love her.” He took her hand and added, “I promise we’ll always be close friends. You’ll always be welcome in my home. Please help me.”