THE AFFAIR (35 page)

“Is that when you got a divorce?”

“Shortly after. She wanted to go to counseling and I wanted to find someone to help me with regression, someone to help me find you. She thought I was nuts. Until I spoke your name I’d thought that I loved her. After that first revelation I knew I had to find you. Making love to her would have been wrong.”

He looked at me. “I would have only been using her body. It would have been you I was making love to, so I told her how sorry I was, but that I had no choice but to find you.”

“Was she bitter?”

“No, I think she was relieved in a way. I think for a time she thought she would be stuck with having a husband in the loony bin. She didn’t think my career would ever get off the ground, not when I was chasing, as she refers to you, a figment of my imagination. Tell me something. Did you ever have those dreams?”

“Yes,” I answered truthfully. “They began in early childhood. My parents were a bit afraid of me. They thought I was crazy. Around the time I met Larry, I thought maybe he was the man I’d been dreaming of.”

I could picture the moment, the extreme joy I felt on nursing my baby. The love for her that filled my heart. I saw Larry’s face, proud and oh so happy.

He had kissed me while I nursed Erica and whispered into my mouth, “
I promise, I’ll never let anything happen to you, I’ll love you forever
.

I felt a cold shiver ride up the small of my back. The same shiver I’d felt that night when I’d been happy with my husband and my baby.

I could still feel the sense of dread that crept in and laid claim to my happiness, a dread that told me not to hold on to the two of them so tightly, that they would be taken away.

I was determined that wouldn’t happen. Whatever I had to do to stop it I would. If it meant loving them less, I would do that also.

I felt the sting of tears. “Chance, finding both you and Blaine has been a blessing in so many ways for me. It’s cleared up my dreams. Blaine has helped me in ways I never believed possible. He helped me to see why except for a short period of time with Erica I never felt what mothers are supposed to feel. I’ve always felt so guilty, so damaged inside for not having maternal instincts. I will always be grateful to Blaine for releasing me from that emotional prison. Thanks to him I now know that I only wanted to protect my babies. I was afraid they would be taken away. I couldn’t remember Blaine or you, except in my dreams, but I remembered a deep sorrow. I wanted to prevent it from invading my life again.”

“I know what you’re doing, what you’re leading up to. All of this talk isn’t as much about your children as it is your husband. I know what you’re planning to do. You love him,” Chance said in a surprised tone.

“Yes, Chance, I do. But I told you that from the beginning. I’ve never lied to you about my feelings for Larry. You and I, we’ve had forever together, and we’re going to be together in the future, but this lifetime now doesn’t belong to us. My life this time was meant to be spent with Larry.”

“How can you leave me after all we’ve been through to find each other?”

“To safeguard our future. I have to give Larry the one thing I have held from him all of these years. I have to give him all of me, free from my past, free from my dreams of you and Blaine. He deserves that, and my kids deserve for me to try and be a better mother. Chance, you’d been looking for me for over twenty years. Why do you think you found me when you did?”

He sat up on the side of the bed, looking away. Then he looked back at me, as if having made his decision. “The night before I found you, you came to me. You told me you were going to die.”

“I don’t understand. How did that help you find me?”

“Because I made contact with you. I asked you to help me find you, to lead me to you. I asked you to hold on. The thought of your dying filled me with panic. That was the only day I’ve ever canceled patients.”

“I thought you said you’d never cancelled patients and never would, even for me.”

“I lied.” Chance smiled slowly. “What choice did I have? I had to find you so I emptied my mind and made a connection with you, asking you where you were. I drove until I came to the store. I heard your voice saying, ‘
Jeremy, I’m here
.’

“I don’t remember doing that.”

“You wouldn’t. You were in denial. It was your soul that was leading me to you. So I sat in the car waiting, wanting to have you come to the car and say, ‘H
ere I am
.’

I smiled at him. “Instead you got caught up with me in a downpour.”

He smiled back at me. “Yeah, I was annoyed in the beginning. You were distracting me from the reason I was there, but I couldn’t resist helping you. The moment I ran to help you I lost contact with Dimitra. I remember saying, ‘D
amn that woman standing there crying in the rain.’

“When I held you, I swear I heard Dimitra in my head saying, ‘
Thank you, Jeremy. Thank God that I found you.
’ And when I asked you where you’d been, you answered you’d been looking for me. That was my proof.”

“It didn’t dissuade you when I thought you were a mental patient?”

He laughed, remembering. “No, but I was surprised that with the frequency of the dreams, you had not sought out the meanings. Besides, you never really thought I was a mental patient. You just didn’t want to believe what you knew to be true. You never wanted me to tell you. You weren’t ready to know or to believe. I had to let you make that part of the journey alone.”

“Chance,” I moaned, reaching for him, feeling his arms lock around me. “Thank you for finding me.”

“Why thank me if you’re planning on leaving me?”

“Because, Chance, I had to know. I suppose my spirit couldn’t rest without knowing you and Blaine were alright. I couldn’t love the people in my life fully without feeling I was betraying you somehow, that I would lose them as I’d lost the two of you.”

“But you’ve found us. Now we should all be thankful. Besides, Michelle, you weren’t happy. You wanted to die.”

I held him tighter. “You’re right, I wanted to die.”

“Then how could you ever consider going back into that? I don’t care that you think we’ve broken some kind of cosmic law. I can’t allow you to torture yourself, and for what? Honor, commitment, a promise you made?”

“Chance, it’s none of those things, yet it’s all of them. I love Larry. I always have. I was just afraid. This lifetime I’m meant to spend with him.”

“In hell? Because that’s what you were in. If not, your spirit would not have been in such agony.”

“My life was hell because of me, Chance. Because of my actions, not because of Larry. I never demanded anything different of him. I allowed him to think I was happy when I wasn’t.”

I looked at Chance. “It wasn’t Larry’s fault that I was missing you, that I was suffering over losing Blaine, that when I nursed Erica, somewhere within my spirit I thought of the other child I loved and I mourned.”

“You know I can’t do that. Our hearts and our spirits are one. For the rest of my life and the next, with every breath I take I’ll love you more.”

“Then how can you leave me? How can you even think about it? I won’t let you. I don’t care about the next lifetime. I care about the here and now.

“Don’t you see how wrong that is? Not caring about the future will insure that we’ll never have one together. We’ll only build a tremendous karmic debt if we remain together in this life.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?” Chance screamed at me. “To insure a future for us, you want to sacrifice our present?”

“No, Chance, I want to finish this life the way it was meant to be. I’m not going to return to Larry as a sacrificial offering. I love him.”

“What about him? Are you going to tell him that you plan on being with him for the time you have left, that you never expect to spend eternity with him?”

“And when the time comes, will you ask me again to let you go? After you’ve haunted my dreams on a constant basis for twenty years, you want me to just let you go?”

“You have no real choice in the matter, Chance. It’s my decision to make.”

He paced around the room, his manhood hanging heavy between his legs, swaying with his body movements. I observed him, filling my senses with the sight of him because I knew I could no longer allow him to own my dreams.

“Chance, I wish I could tell you that I’m sorry you found me and mean it, but I can’t. I can’t tell you what it means to know that you and Blaine are here.”

“How can I not? Forget Larry. Get a divorce. Marry me.” He fell on his knees. “Michelle, I love you. I always have and I always will. Will you marry me?”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer. He began kissing my throat and nibbling my lips, touching me at the very core of my being with his infinite love.

“So what?” Chance roared, his voice filled with anger and with pain. “I say we take it. Fate has handed it to us. Who are we to argue with it? You love me more than you could ever possibly love Larry.”

I had no scale on which to measure love. I only knew that my love for Larry in this life was just as great and just as real as my love for Chance.

I wanted to be with Larry. That revelation surprised me because it was so unexpected. I wanted to be with Larry not out of need or commitment or even because of a promise.

I wanted to be with him because I remembered the look on his face as I breastfed Erica. And I remembered the love in my heart in that instant that I had for my husband and daughter and I wanted to return to them.

I held Chance tightly in my arms, accepting his love, accepting his body. “Make love to me, Chance,” I whispered, “so that I’ll never forget you.”

Hours later, when Chance could no longer woo me with his body, he continued arguing, stating the many reasons I couldn’t return home.

“Chance,” I finally told him, exasperated, “it’s not like I’m going back tomorrow. I can’t return and live the same life I did before. I’ve changed. I have to give Larry the opportunity to change also.”

I thought about it. Maybe Chance was right. Maybe I’d never be able to convince Larry that Chance wasn’t the reason I left him, but that it was for my own soul.

It was a bit disconcerting to say the least that everything I was saying to Chance was spoken with some greater knowledge. There was a lot more going on with me that I knew I was going to need to explore. There was a wealth of knowledge buried somewhere inside of me and I needed to bring it out.

As gently as I could I stroked the face of the husband of my dreams trying my best to assure him of my love. “This still is not our time, Chance. I will wait for you like always and like always we will find each other.”

“Even if I agree to that, how can you be so sure? How can you not grab what we have today and hold on to it?”

I ran my hand across the man it seemed I had loved forever and who I was destined to love in the future. “I love you, Chance, with all my heart. And as unbelievable as it may sound to you, I love Larry also. The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you. You can call it guilt because I’m not certain that it isn’t a part of my decision.

“But loving you now, here in the present, remembering that I’ve loved you in the past and knowing that I’ll love you in the future gives me strength. I don’t have to be afraid of loving my husband, my children, of showing them that I do. I need to give that to them and to myself.”

“Then it is guilt.”

“Call it what you will, but I saw our love. We never hurt anyone, Chance. I’m not going to start now. I’ve done enough damage to my family. I can only hope I have time to repair some of it.”

I looked sharply at Chance. “Do you want them to carry my indifference around with them and drag it into their next life?”