Five Christmases

"I am not some piece of shit that you can fuck around on. I'm not your bitch, Lauren. At least...I'm not anymore. Good bye."

Finally, she got it, and immediately burst into tears. She reached for me as I went for the door and grabbed my arm. I spun around violently, and she flinched hard, dropping my arm and throwing her own hands up in front of her face, defending against an assault that wasn't going to come.

I don't remember any coherent sentences coming from her, just a string of words.

"It's not...I...no! David, I'm stupid. Please!"

I didn't have any reason to respond to her, but looking around at all the Christmas decorations in the house, a weird kind of gallows humor overtook me.

"Merry Christmas, Lauren. You've given me a gift I'll never forget."

***December 23, 2011: My House, Party of Two***

For about two years, there were three things on my desk and three things only.

There was a bottle of Evan Williams, periodically replaced. I had quit my job and was living off savings and a few meager royalties for pieces in new fiction anthologies. I couldn't afford the good stuff.

There was an old Dell laptop, whose battery no longer worked. It was too old to run really up-to-date programs, but perfectly capable of word processing, which was all I needed. It allowed me to write.

There was my grandfather's old revolver. At first, I hardly believed it worked, until I took it out to the woods outside my father's new house down south and shot it into the ground. It sat on my desk, a bullet in the chamber, waiting for the day I might need it.

Everyday, I woke up and went for a run. I came home, took a shower, and ate a meal in my sparse bachelor's apartment. Then I went to my desk and made a decision. What kind of day was I going to have? At first, I chose the bottle more often than not. When that got old, I started choosing the computer. Unlike the romantic images of the alcoholic writer, you can't really get much work done in a haze of bourbon. When I wrote, I was almost always stone sober.

I never chose the gun. That's because of my girls.

I saw Polly and Jenny every weekend. By then, they had turned seven and had become walking, talking, actual people. Don't get me wrong, I loved them as babies and toddlers, but being with them now was so much better. Even though they were a lot alike, being twins, they had their own unique quirks and personalities. I never thought I would be a good father—mine wasn't, Lauren's either. But I loved those girls, and they became my reason for living.

So I wrote. I was dead broke when my agent called me and told me Knopfler Publishing wanted my book. It's not what you might think: I had tried to write "serious fiction." I wanted to be Wallace or Pynchon. Instead, I ended up a second-rate, male Stephanie Meyers. Yeah, that's right: I write schlocky romance books about magic for fifteen-year-old girls. It's called "Young Adult Literature," though it turns out that writing a book for teens actually means that a lot of adults, especially women, will also read and love it.

My series was about a world where certain people could remember things from their past lives. The heroine, who, let's be honest, is pretty much just me in a dress, is a teen girl who begins to remember things from the past that she couldn't have otherwise known. The protagonist in this kind of book is always a teen girl, and she always has some kind of power. My girl found out about her past lives and uses the knowledge to find her true love and save the world. It was utterly clichéd, but I can't lie: I loved the recognition and just knowing that people liked something I had done. A lot of writers don't even get read at all. This was something at least, and it made me a decent living too.

I still saw Lauren of course, when I picked up the girls, but other than that, I tried my best to steer clear of her after the divorce. We had a pattern. When she had a boyfriend, all she could talk about in front of me was how wonderful her life was. Then when they broke up, all she could talk about with me was how horrible her life was without me and how we should get the family back together. Then a new guy came along, and all that vanished.

Things weren't just stuck in the same rut, though. In fact, as my life improved, hers declined. It started when she lost that management consulting job back in'08, a truly shitty time to lose a job. It turns out that prick Frank Kelly fired her to placate his wife when she found out about the affair. The next year, Lauren sold the house, which she could never afford without me anyway. Then came the parade of short-term relationships and instability for my daughters, punctuated by desperate, transparent attempts to get back together with me that fell flat.

After a while, I guess she gave up. We talked less and less, and by 2011, she just seemed...defeated. She stopped pretending everything was OK around me. I'm sure it ate her up inside to see my writing, which she had no doubt viewed as some kind of silly, useless hobby, turn into something big. I had hated the corporate world, and I managed to escape it and do something I loved. She had lost the life she loved.

It couldn't have helped that I was also meeting a steady stream of women. I promised myself I would never fall in love again, but that didn't stop me from sleeping with more beautiful women than I had ever thought possible. I don't want to exaggerate—I was never Hugh Hefner, just a nerd who writes books. What I learned, though, was that those books spoke to women better than I could ever do on my own. Sometimes, it seemed like women fell for me almost before meeting me.

It was never hard to find pussy, and that was all I really wanted. I made a point of never having any one woman stick around for too long—my favorite were the graduate students at the nearby university, since they were usually there for only a short period of time and weren't looking for a long term thing. I didn't have an advanced degree or anything, but they even had me conduct a few creative writing workshops, which was also a great way to meet hot women.

I was spending the night with one of my favorites at the time, a petite blonde, who was sweet and a little submissive in bed named Melanie. I had gone back to my type, and Melanie let me pretty much have my way with her, within reason.

It was the 23rd, Christmas Eve Eve, and we were cuddled up on the couch drinking wine. I knew I was going to have to avoid her tomorrow and the next day, since both of those were actual holidays. I even considered not fucking her tonight in order to get rid of her more easily. I couldn't have her around for the next two days, since the holidays were too intimate and too family-oriented. I didn't want her thinking we were getting serious, and I had resolved to break it off with her after the first of the year. It seemed shitty, after all, to dump someone right before Christmas.

I remember her putting her wine glass down and leaning in to kiss me. With her, it was always easy to move from kissing to getting her to give me head. All it took was to place my hand on the top of her head, and she immediately got the picture. That night was no different. I loved to watch a blonde bounce her head up and down on my crotch, and Melanie had learned, through my skillful and patient teaching, exactly how to suck my cock right.

"Do you want to...you know?" she asked tentatively.

I had no idea what she was talking about. There were a lot of things I wanted to do to her, so I decided to just tell her what I wanted. She never gave me much trouble.

"Yes, I do want to fuck you later. First, just suck my cock," I told her firmly.

She blushed with shame. I loved playing the worldly, rough-edged writer to such an innocent girl. I got off, admittedly, on being emotionally withholding and demanding with someone like her. I guess I can be a prick some times too.

She went back to work, taking as much of my cock as she could into her warm, wet mouth. Even now, she wasn't the best cocksucker I'd been with for certain, but she was one of the easiest and most compliant. I was considering pulling out to cum all over her pretty face when we were both startled by a knock on the door.

I could tell she wanted to stop, but I was almost there. I held her in place, and right when the second series of knocks came, so did I, spurting a thick load into her mouth. I could feel her swallow around my cock, always a great feeling, before she pulled me hastily out of her mouth. Normally I like a good cleaning, but I couldn't hold it against her under the circumstances.

Melanie got up from her knees and straightened her hair out. She looked at me confused, mouthing out "What do you want me to do?"

I thought it was kind of cute at the time. She acted like a frightened teenager. She looked so adorable, slightly disheveled, her lips a little extra red from giving me head. Part of me wanted to keep her around longer. She was a lot of fun.

"Go get yourself something to drink," I said out loud. "And you don't have to whisper."

She scampered away into the kitchen, and I went to the door.

Shit, this is the last thing I need, I thought. It was Lauren.

Then I heard my daughters, bounding up from the car, their little matching pink bags bouncing around at their sides, screaming and giggling for their Daddy. Now I wasn't upset, just a little confused.

"David, we need to talk," she said seriously.

I had been distracted by Polly and Jenny, but now that I looked at Lauren, I could tell she had been crying. This might sound strange, but I've always had a weird thing for a woman who has just been crying. Who knows what kind of psychological damage that reveals in me?

"I'm surprised to see you, Lauren. I don't get them until after the holidays," I said, a little annoyed.

Lauren looked kind of terrible and kind of great at the same time. She was still in great shape, and despite gravity and two kids, the tits were still fantastic. Her eyes though, carried the weight of all disappointment in her life since I left her. She couldn't hide a kind of hollow, weary sadness.

"Can we come in?" she asked.

"Of course..." I answered.

At that moment, Melanie came back into the living room from the kitchen, holding a glass of water. She locked eyes with Lauren.

"...but I'm not alone. Can this wait?"

Lauren seemed ashamed. I could tell she was surprised; more than anything, she didn't want anyone to see her look like this, eyes red and rimmed with dry tears. She looked like she wanted to crawl in a hole and disappear.

Three years ago, I would have been happy to draw this out, torture her a little. Now, though, I didn't care. I wanted to know why she had come and what the girls thought was happening, and I wasn't going to figure this out with Melanie here. If anything, Lauren's arrival gave me a perfect excuse to kick Melanie out and avoid her for Christmas. I introduced her to Lauren and explained to her that I needed to sort some things out about custody, but that I would call her when I was free again. I knew in that moment that our next date would be the break-up.

Of course, Lauren and I couldn't jump straight into a deep conversation. The girls were just happy to see their Daddy, and I was happy to see them. They had just turned seven, and more and more they began to look like tiny copies of Lauren. I couldn't see myself in them much at all, only her, and more than once I had considered the possibility that they weren't really mine. The only proof I had for the fact that I was their biological father was Lauren's word, which wasn't worth a damn thing, and a picture of my mother's mother as a girl, who looked a lot like them too.

Once they had tired themselves out, we put them to bed in their room upstairs. I showed Lauren to the bar in the kitchen, and she sat down. I offered her a drink, and she accepted.

"David, Paul and I broke up," she said.

"The car saleman?" I asked.

"Don't play dumb, I know you know everything I do from those girls. That's how I know all about your parade of sluts," she said, with evident bitterness.

That made me angry. Who the fuck was she to criticize me?

"Look, this is a mistake. I don't want to fucking talk to you, anyway. You can pick them up in a few days when you get your shit together," I said, barely disguising my disgust for her.

I expected Lauren, even in her current state, to buck up against me and fire back. That was the woman I had always known. Only, this time she just kind of fell apart. I'd never really seen her cry like that.

"David, I need you to take the girls," she said, between sobbing.

"Fine," I said, a little less angry. "When are you picking them up?"

"No, I mean, I think they should live with you. I don't know how long," she said, her sadness and disappointment unmistakable.

I was floored. This wasn't like her.

"Why?" I asked, not meaning to sound like I was against the idea, though I probably did.

"Because I'm a fucking waitress. Because I live in a rat trap apartment. Because they want to be here, in your beautiful house, with their beautiful father, and not their bitch mother who cries all the time. Is that reason enough?"

Lauren's whole body was shaking. She downed the glass of wine I handed her practically in one sip. It worried me; I hoped she didn't drink like this in front of the girls. She could tell what I was thinking immediately, though.

"I'm not a drunk," she said defensively. "You just have no idea how hard this decision was."

She had a point. I poured her another glass of wine. This time, she sipped it slowly, as if to say that she was alright, or at least not on the verge of a total meltdown.

We talked logistics. I could tell she was happily surprised that I was going along with the whole idea. That, in turn, surprised me: did she not know how much I loved the girls? Did she think I held her actions against them? We talked for a few minutes, and when she had calmed down enough, she rose from her chair to leave.

"I guess I couldn't have hoped for you to be any better than this," she said. "Please tell them I love them, and that I will see them soon."

That was something we had passed over: what was she doing now? When would she come back to visit? Those seemed like important things to know.

"Where are you going now?" I asked.

She looked ashamed.

"Home to pack. I'm broke, so I'm moving back to Michigan. With mom."

That was like hearing a person say they were volunteering to go back to prison. I was stunned. Lauren had been on the executive track. She relished that stuff. Now she tells me she's a failed waitress going to live with her mother.

She turned, defeated, and trudged towards the door. I thought of the girls. No matter what kind of shit Lauren had put me through, she was their mom, and they were losing her. That would be their Christmas memory: the day their mom went away.

"Wait!" I called out to her.

She stopped without turning around. I could see her shoulders trembling.

"Sit down. Please."

She slowly turned towards me. Having to stick around after admitting something like that must have been hard on her.

"David, I didn't tell you that to jerk you around. I know you don't want me back, and I can see why after tonight. She's...pretty. Just leave me alone. You win, OK?"

I can't explain why I reacted to her self-pity with anger. It just happened that way.

"Oh, I win? What did I win, Lauren? A broken family? A broken heart? Years of misery? Now you tell me I'm the big winner here."

I suddenly felt like shit and prayed that the girls hadn't woken up. I expected Lauren to storm out, but she walked over to me and put her arms around me. Her body was warm, and in the midst of emotional turmoil, I have to admit that I felt a strange thrill to feel her breasts pressed against me again after all these years.

"I'm sorry," she said into my shoulder. "I just...I can't be a fucking loser forever. Polly and Jenny need me to get my shit together. I wouldn't do this if it wasn't for them."

I held her tightly. My head was spinning. I took a deep breath, until suddenly my mind cleared. I knew what to do.

"I'm sorry for yelling at you," I told her, pulling us apart just enough to look into her deep brown eyes, rimmed with tears but still so beautiful. "The girls need their mother. You're not a loser. You just need...help."

She looked up at me, her lips pursed ever so slightly. I could still feel her chest heave. My hands had crept down her waist to her hips, without me even realizing it. I felt a sudden urge to kiss her. This was taking a turn I didn't expect.

"I...I can get you a job. Over at Hawthorne. In the Financial Aid Office. Pays well, not too hard, and you've got all the experience in the world. You can stay in town and see the girls whenever you want."

She didn't look as happy as I thought she would.

"I can't get a letter from SKS. They despise me over there. I'll never get the job," she said with disappointment.

We broke off our embrace, and I watched Lauren's body shiver, as if she was returning to normal from a state of intense emotion and—was it arousal?

"Doesn't matter. I know a...guy there," I reassured her.

I didn't tell her that the person I knew in the administration over at Hawthorne wasn't a guy at all, but instead a tight little brunette, who was a big fan of both my books and my cock. Lauren didn't need to hear that right now.

That's when I saw the smile come back, for the first time in years. It only lasted a moment before vanishing, but it reminded me of how she looked when we first met. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

"David, I...It's just been...hard. I feel so alone," she said.

"Lauren, you've got the girls, and, shit, you've got me. Whether I like it or not," I told her.

Almost without thinking, I leaned down to kiss her cheek. She turned her head and our lips met. It was only a second before we pulled away, but after that, something was in the air.

"When I said I felt alone, that wasn't all. David, I miss you. I miss the things you can do to me."

I didn't know how to feel: flattered or worried.

"It would...I mean, if you could find a way to..." she stammered.

I didn't mean to sound impatient, but I told her to spit it out—what was the point of fucking around?

"David, I want you to fuck me. I'm not asking for the ring back. I'm not going to move in. I just need something in my life that makes me feel good. I know you don't want me anymore—"

I didn't let her continue. Something had come over me, and everything happened like it had when we first met, a blur of clothes and bodies, a hasty, long-delayed coupling. This time, maturity and Melanie's talented mouth meant that I lasted a lot longer, of course. We were fucking in the middle of my living room, wildly irresponsibly as any parent can attest, going at each other like we were kids again.

My hands roamed across her body, retracing the paths I'd followed so many times before. Everything was familiar but strange, like returning home after a long journey. There had been no thought or planning, just a desperate, hopeless desire within me to fuck her senseless, matched in intensity by the woman who had once been mine.

Somewhere in the middle of things, though, when I ought to have been focused on the moment, on the lust and passion going on between us, I pulled away in my mind. I know she could tell; she tried her best to bring me back, to make me be present with her there in the moment, but I just couldn't.

I thought about my desk. I thought about my grandfather's gun. I thought about Frank Kelly. I even thought about Charleen.

"Please, David, I'm sorry," Lauren said, almost out of breath from our furious fucking. "Come back to me. Be here with me tonight."