I Didn't Know...

Don and I had a deal. I got his hand-me downs and I really wanted that car. Right now, I was driving Don's old 2004 Mustang GT. I loved my car but I wanted his more. Our cars were the same color. I imagined how black rims and red calipers would look on my car.

I smiled at the doorman who came over and told me that my dad was in my apartment. I took the elevator up and opened the door as quietly as I could. Don was sitting on my sofa watching TV.

"We have to get you a bigger TV," he smirked.

"Uh, my 32 inch plasma is fine," I said.

""Honey, the average TV set is 42 inches now," he said.

"Average, means that there are some bigger and some smaller," I told him. "Mine is one of the ones that are smaller. I love my TV now just as much as I did when you bought it for me. Can we stop avoiding the issue and talk about you and mom?" He smiled and looked away but I could still see the pain in his eyes. His iPhone chirped and he looked at the screen and then silenced it.

"She's not going to stop calling you," I said. He put the phone on the sofa near him. Even as he put it down the phone started to vibrate. He looked away from it as if that would stop it from demanding his attention.

"So I guess the wedding's off huh?" I said.

"I guess she never knew it was on," he said. "I never had the chance to even ask her. But in retrospect, maybe it's good that this happened. As much as this hurts, it would have been worse if it had happened after we got married, or even after we got engaged."

"Don, there's no such thing," I said. "In the eyes of the law, you two are married. If she went to a lawyer, that's exactly the way he'd pursue it. Remember the Lee Marvin case, from back when I was a kid? They even had to come up with a new term for the money he paid his long time live in lover. Remember they called it "Palimony?"

He nodded his head. "That's the way it works for famous millionaire movie stars. I don't think it's as cut and dry for regular people. We've never gotten married. We've never even mentioned it. We don't have any kids together..." He looked over at me. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded, Terri," he said.

"I know what you mean," I said sadly.

"No, you don't," he snapped. He turned and looked directly at me. "Terri, I couldn't possibly love you anymore if you were my own biological child. And this won't change anything between you and I. Our relationship will stay exactly the same. Things will just be different between your mother and me and..."

"But why Don?" I whined. "My mother...she doesn't have a malicious bone in her body. She's not a rocket scientist, Don, but she loves you..."

"Then why did she...?" he'd changed between sentences. His eyes were narrower and his voice was harsher.

"She was tricked, Dad," It's partially her own fault but come on...She's getting older and she's starting to wonder if she's still attractive and she ran into a guy who was a real piece of shit. Do you even know what he did to her at work this morning?"

"Bent her over his desk and..." he began.

"No, silly, she said the sex was awful, he hung her panties over his..." I started.

"What did you call me?" he asked.

"Sorry, it just slipped out," I said looking down. I was too embarrassed to meet his eyes at first and then I felt a burst of courage moving up my spine.

"But you heard what I said," I spat looking straight into his eyes. "I'm sorry, Dad, but that's the way I've always felt about you. And you probably shouldn't be upset with mom because I lied to you too. I've been lying to you for a long time...I"

"You're not a virgin?" he asked shocked. "You lied to me?"

"Every girl lies to her father about that," I smiled. "But that's not it. We'll talk about that some time waaaaaaaaaayyyyyy later. For now, let's just handle one lie at a time. Growing up all of my friends thought you were my dad."

"I know," he said smiling.

"No, you don't," I said. "They thought that because I told them you were. I told them that I didn't call you dad because you were one of those guys on a youth kick. You let me call you Don because hearing the word Dad made you feel old. There were a couple of moms and dads who really WERE like that so it didn't seem to be very weird. And I guess in my eyes, you did the job, so you might as well have the title. But now everything is just fucked up..." Tears filled my eyes and just like when I was a little girl, I threw myself in his lap and hugged him.

"Terri, don't worry about it," he said. "I'm honored and to tell you the truth, I've always felt that way about you too. In my heart, you've always been my daughter. Maybe it took something like this to bring it out. So maybe some good came with the pain."

"But we're supposed to be a family," I said.

"We are Honey," he said. "But maybe like a lot of your friends' families, we're going through a divorce. But ours is just going to be easier. You're the only kid. So we don't have to worry about who gets custody of you because you're already out of the house. Once I find a place to live, you can come and visit me or I can come and..."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "You already owned the house when we moved in with you."

"I'm not sure I could live there," he said. "There are just too many memories and ..."

"Dad, are you serious?" I asked. "You can't just give her your house."

"We all lived there," he said sadly. "It was OUR house." He stopped and smiled at me.

"Maybe I should give the house to you," he smiled. "It makes the most sense. In a few years, you'll get married and have kids hopefully. A growing family will need a house, not some tiny apartment. You could even keep your mom with you until your second child was born unless you had two of the same gender."

"Dad, she won't survive without you," I said. "Over the years, you've just spoiled her to the point that she just doesn't know how to take care of herself. Sure she can cook and shop and do some of the cleaning too, but without you, she's not going to be able to handle it. I'm not even sure she's going to be able to sleep tonight without you there." He just shrugged his shoulders. I guess that he was just being human but it seemed as though the thought of my mom not sleeping made him feel better. Maybe it was a normal reaction to think that the person who caused him pain was feeling his loss herself.

Perhaps it was some kind of validation that he mattered.

"Dad, I have an idea," I said. "Why don't you stay in my guest room until we either work this out or you find a place to stay, okay?"

Dad agreed and we sat in front of my TV and watched our usual shows. We tried not to talk about what was going on, but it was there in the room with us.

Later on, Dad went to sleep in my guest room and I called Mom to see how she was doing. She answered the phone on the first ring. "Terri, have you heard from him?" she asked. She was distraught.

"Yes Mom," I said. "He's really hurting, but other than that he's okay." I didn't want to lie to her but I wasn't going to tell her that he was here.

"Mom, we'll get through this but you have to realize that most of, if not all of this, is your fault," I said.

I could hear the pain in her voice as she answered me. "Terri, you're right," she sobbed. "I was so stupid. I didn't know I was married. When I get together with the girls, we all talk about how strong and independent we are as women. And the first con man that came along, just used a little bit of flattery to separate me from my panties. I feel stupid about that, but I feel worse because he separated me from Don too. I think I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to be able to go out and have every one seeing me with a young attractive man on my arm. I guess I thought they'd see me as beautiful and mysterious. But now I know that Ted was just a fucking toupee or a sports car."

"Mom, it's way too late in the evening for you to use those insane metaphors and expect me to figure them out," I yawned.

"You know, when a man gets older and starts to lose his hair, he gets a toupee and he thinks it makes him young a virile again. But in reality, everyone is just laughing at him. Or the guys who buy a Porsche and think that having it will make them young again. I guess I thought that I could have Ted for the excitement and then come home to Don for love and affection."

"Yep, that sounds about right," I said.

"The worst thing about all of it," she said. "Is that now that Don is gone, I realize exactly how much I loved him and exactly how much he loved me. There are a thousand stupid little things that make love. It's not just, Oh God I want to spend the rest of my life with him, like we're two teenagers. I've been through that shit. It burns out. And in a lot of cases, it leaves you feeling like you've been through a hurricane when it's over."

"Terri, when I first met your biological father...the attraction was so strong you could touch it. I felt this incredible pulling towards him that always ended in sex. But after a few weeks, it just burned out. A few weeks later, I was pregnant. Our parents forced us to get married and move in together. That was when we discovered that except for sex, we had nothing in common. We really didn't even know each other. But Terri, by the time that you were born, we'd been together long enough to actually know each other and discover that we didn't like each other."

"To me, your father was just an asshole. I started out this impressionable young girl. I couldn't imagine that the man whose child I'd borne would beat me. By the time we left there, I hated him. I couldn't see any reason why I'd ever fallen for him. I realized then that it had only been youth, stupidity and hormones."

"Your father saw it completely differently, of course. He hated me much sooner than I hated him. He saw me as an anchor around his neck. If it hadn't been for me and later on you, he could have gone away to college to play football. He could have hung out with all of his friends and did all of the things they did. He couldn't just throw some beer in the back of his friend's truck and go off camping for a couple of weeks, because he had us to think about. The longer we were together the worse it got."

"By the time that he threw us out, I was firmly convinced that I NEVER wanted another man in my life ever. Then Don came along. I wondered at first why the hell he'd want to saddle himself with a beaten down woman and a child. I figured that beggars couldn't be choosy, so I was willing to put up with him to put a roof over our heads as long as things didn't get too wild."

"I'm a grown up, Honey. I expected to have to put out a little. But even then, I figured it would probably be less humiliating than the things your father was making me do. But it never happened. And for the first few months, I made sure that you and Donald were never left alone together. I know it seems silly to you, but I had to watch out for you. He might have been some kind of pervert."

"I think I started to appreciate Donald when I noticed the way you followed him around, trying to help out with chores around the house. And he took time to show you and explain to you what he was doing. He amazed me even more by reading stories to you at night. He even got me a job." She smiled remembering that.

"Terri, do you know that was the first time that anyone other than my parents ever took me shopping," she smiled. "He bought me some clothes that I could wear to work. I tried on a lot of things that day. I often asked him for his opinion on them. I think that was the first time that I actually noticed the way he reacted to me. He really liked it when I tried on tighter skirts, but he actually told me what I could and couldn't wear in the office."

"It was a short time after that, when he started going out at night occasionally. You probably don't remember this but Don and I had a big argument," she said.

I didn't remember it at all.

"Oh yeah, Honey," She said. "Don was going out to bars and picking up women. I never would have found out about it except that one of the women he spent an evening with worked with me. She mentioned it the day after she noticed him when he picked me up after work."

"So we argued about it. The stupid thing is that the woman really wanted Don. She didn't know exactly what our relationship was. I didn't tell her that we weren't married and Don was within his rights to go out and pick up women. I just got angry."

"And Don, he hinted around but I had to beat him over the head to get him to admit that it had been our shopping trip that got him back in the mood for regular sex. So he came up with a solution," she said. Even over the phone, I could hear the joy in her voice.

"He thought that the two of you should start having sex, right?" I asked.

"No, he thought the two of us should make a schedule of which days we could date. It was a really stupid and complicated arrangement. Like, he got Monday, Wednesday and Friday as date nights. I got Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Whoever was the stay at home person would watch you. By that time I trusted him enough to watch you without me being there, so I guess it would have worked, but I had a better plan. I told him that we should just have sex with each other."

"I think he almost had a heart attack," she said. "But we agreed to it. We set down all kinds of rules for how we'd do it and when. It was odd for both of us. I just looked at convenience. I was still in my I hate men phase. But I didn't want Don sleeping with any other women. For some reason, Don just didn't register as a man to me."

"In the back of my mind, there was also the survival thing. I mean we had a very good set-up. I figured that if Don was dating, sooner or later he'd meet a woman that he wanted to be in a relationship with and you and I would have to move out."

"The whole sex thing was ridiculous. In the days that led up to the first time we did it, things got crazy between us. On one hand, I really wasn't excited about it. Don isn't the bad boy type like your father was. We didn't have that hormonal attraction thing going on. The sex was going to be just something I let him do to pay him back for the things he'd done for us, but also to make sure that he didn't find someone else."

"Don, on the other hand, was really nervous. He was almost too polite. And I later learned that there were two reasons for it. The first reason was because Don didn't want to do anything to make me change my mind about us having sex. And the second reason was because Don thought I was attractive. In all of the time that we'd been living together, he'd never told me. He hadn't gone around sneaking glimpses of me after showers or trying to look up my skirt. He hadn't tried to grab my ass or any of that shit. He was too nice for that. But it had been seeing me bending over in those skirts that had made him ready to forget his ex and move on."

"I still remember sneaking to his room that first time, while you were asleep," she laughed. "I figured I'd sneak in, let him have me and then sneak back out. I figured it would take twenty minutes or so. I was there for over two hours. It was the best sex I'd ever had." She laughed at my sharp intake of air.

"Terri, Honey, we all like different things," she said. "Don isn't a super stud. He doesn't have a foot long dick and he didn't pound me like drum. We didn't do fifty different positions and he didn't stay hard for an hour at a time. What he did was made me feel loved. He was so gentle and considerate. He tried his best to make sure that I enjoyed it too."

"Have you ever heard that expression, "Drive it like you stole it?" That's the way your father was with me. Donald treated me more like a treasured collector's car. I think you remember that our house is a three bedroom house. Originally, all three of us had our own rooms. As you got a little older, we decided that we needed an office to keep the computer in and where you could do your homework. Honey, that was a lie...I mean we really did need a home office, but the real truth of the matter was that I'd gotten so comfortable sleeping with Don that I wanted to do it every night."

"It wasn't just the sex, Terri, it was everything. Like I told you, I occasionally had night mares when we first moved in. Don would hold my hand and rub my back until I went back to sleep. But that was nothing compared to sleeping the whole night in the arms of a man who really cares about you. I had never experienced that with your father. Your father, that asshole, used to just fuck me and roll over and go to sleep. He didn't cuddle me or even touch me afterwards. With Don, I just felt protected and...loved. God Terri, I'm such a fool."

"Mom, we're going to fix this," I said. "Go to sleep and we'll talk tomorrow." As we hung up the phone, I wondered if there was a way to fix this. As I passed my guest room on my way to bed, I could hear Don tossing and turning. I felt sorry for him.

I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. Thing go in and out of my conscious and subconscious mind while I'm asleep. My brain must be on some kind of delay because there are times when I'm aware of things while I sleep, but I don't really process their meaning until later. During the next couple of hours, I recall Don getting up to go to the bathroom or get a drink. But I also recall my front door opening and closing. I got up myself after I realized it. I thought that Don had simply gotten up in the middle of the night and left. I wondered whether or not he could sleep. I decided to get up and check on him.

I peeked into the room and what I saw shocked the shit out of me. Don hadn't left at all. I ran back to my room and grabbed my phone. I took a bunch of still pictures and a short video, then closed the door and went back to bed.

When I woke up the next morning to get ready for work, my mother was sitting at my kitchen table. "Do you want me to make you some coffee?" she asked.

"Nope," I said smiling. "Why the hell are you so down?" I asked.

"I miss Don so much," she said. "I couldn't get to sleep last night. I was just out on my feet but I couldn't get to sleep. I came over here. I figured, I'd visit you for a while instead of trying to sleep in that big empty bed. I slept in your spare room. That mattress is incredible. I slept like a rock. But when I woke up, my problems were still there."

"Mom, do you even know what happened?" I asked her.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Mom, I think I know why you slept so well," I said. I pulled out my phone and showed her the pictures. Mom and Don were so used to sleeping together that both of them must not have been thinking about their problems. When Mom came in and lay down. Don was probably up getting a drink or something. He'd just gotten back into the bed and wrapped his arms around her out of habit.

In the pictures, Don was pressed against my mom's ass. He had one of his hands cupping one of her breasts. Her hand was on top of his as if she wanted his hand there. His other hand was on her pussy and her other hand was reaching behind her on top of his leg. Although they were both fully dressed, it was one of the most erotic things I'd ever seen. Even while asleep, they molded themselves to each other.

My mom's mouth dropped open as she saw the pictures. "When did you take those pictures?" she asked.

"Late last night or early this morning," I said. "You guys slept together last night, mom. It wasn't the mattress that put you to sleep."

"But he's gone," she blurted out. Then she got the weirdest look on her face. "I do remember him getting up to go to work. It just felt like every other morning...except that he didn't come back and kiss me goodbye." I just shook my head.

"Mom, if the two of you are only room-mates or house-mates or whatever you want to call it, why does he kiss you goodbye in the mornings?" I asked.