Matchmaker Bandit Novel Pt. 03

Her jaw still open, Andrea handed the picture back to Willie and just stood there and stared at him for several minutes. Both amazed and mystified, she admitted to herself that, for reasons even she could not explain, she was suddenly attracted to this so totally unique little man. And so, when next he asked her if she would like to go with him in two months to Savannah and see 'The Escape', with almost no apprehension, she said yes.

The rest of the week went by quickly and with each passing day, or night, as it were for they both worked nights, they began spending more time together talking whenever possible.

Each time she talked to him gave her a better understanding of the man and she began to realize that forty-four years of living isolated on an island had left him very ignorant of American culture and customs. That ignorance ranged from little things like how much to tip to more important things such as not arguing with a policeman when he stops you for jaywalking.

She had spent twenty minutes trying to convince the law officer not to take Willie in because he kept asking the man "But why? Isn't it safe? There wasn't a car anywhere near the intersection!" Finally, she just told the police men that she was taking Willie home so he could take his medicine and that he would be much better afterwards.

Luckily, for Willie, the policeman just smiled and told her to make sure Willie took it on time in the future. Andrea grabbed Willie by the arm and rushed him away as fast as she could, the entire time he was protesting to her, "But I don't take any medicine, I'm perfectly healthy!" With the patience of a saint, she spent several hours explaining to him what had happened.

The more time she spent with the man the more she learned about him. He was naïve in some ways and very astute in others. Most of his naiveté came from his lack of knowledge of customs but where he lacked there, he more than made up for with an almost uncanny ability to learn very quickly. His mind was like a sponge soaking up everything. One time she had asked him what he did when he was not working and he answered that when he was not going to museums and tours, he was reading. When she asked him what he read, he simply told her "Everything!"

About two weeks later, he surprised Andrea by asking her if she wanted to meet him at a bookstore he had heard about across town. When she got there, he was standing outside waiting for her. The establishment was closed. There was a sign on the door saying there had been a death in the family and it would reopen the following Monday.

Seeing how disappointed he was, she told him she knew of another bookstore not far from there and that he would take him there. When he got in the car and began looking at, turning and opening everything, she was set aback until it occurred to her what was happening.

She turned to him and asked, "Willie, have you ever been in a car before?"

"No, but I was on a bus once." He said with a big smile on his face.

She thought for a minute and then said, "How do you get everywhere?"

"I walk." Willie replied.

Just then, something occurred to Andrea and she asked, "We clean offices all over the city, how is it that you are never late for work?"

"I leave early so I can get there on time. If it's a new place, I just leave earlier and take my map with me." He said and showed her a tattered map of Atlanta he had purchased. Then he added, "I bought a car but I don't know how to drive it yet. The man at the, what do you call it? Dealership? Said they would hold it for me until I picked it up."

She decided to start giving him a ride to work from then on even though it cost her more in gas, she didn't mind. She found him interesting and it gave her more time to get to know him.

That Friday afternoon on her way to work, Andrea went by the D.M.V. and picked up a copy of the Georgia Driver's License Handbook. She gave it to Willie later that night telling him to take it home with him and study it and ask her later if he didn't understand.

The following Monday, he came to work filled with questions. When they got off work that that morning, they went to an all-night restaurant to talk about what he had read. She quickly realized that he had read the entire driver's manual over the weekend and seemed to know it word for word. He just didn't understand everything in it. Some of it he said, "Just doesn't make sense."

It had been years since she had taken her driver's test. She looked at the manual for a few minutes and then had to agree with him, too much of it was left up to judgment. On the one hand, it said would say you had to yield the right of way to someone and then it would say, you don't have an absolute right of way at an intersection. She could see why he was confused.

That weekend, she picked him up and took him to a large empty parking lot and started teaching him how to drive. Two weeks later he walked out of the D.M.V with a brand new learner's permit in his hand. He had passed the written test without missing a single question.

Two months and quite a few driving lessons later, Willie walked out of the D.M.V. once more but this time with his driver's license in hand.

What started out with casual conversation soon turned to lunches together until finally they were going out regularly on what she knew, but suspected that Willie did not know, were dates. They started doing almost everything together from paying bills to attending concerts.

Andrea and Willie celebrated Willie getting his license by attending a live performance of 'Henry The Eight' at a small theater.

They left the theater after the play was over and were walking back to Andrea's car when a rather dirty, unkempt man brandishing a knife stepped out in front of them demanding that they hand over their money to him.

Willie took out his wallet and removed his money. He was about to hand it to the robber when the man turned his knife towards Andrea. Without saying a word to the man, Willie struck the man in the face with his fist breaking his nose.

Tears immediately began flowing from the man's eyes blinding him as blood poured profusely from his nose.

Willie then grabbed with both hands the hand the robber was holding the knife in, raised it and stepped under the assailant's arm. When he stopped moving, Willie was standing behind the attacker and was holding the man's arm behind his back.

"It's not nice to threaten people with knives and try to take their money. You aren't very good at it. Don't you think you should find some other way to earn money before you get hurt?" Willie said to the man in a calm and almost understanding voice, there was an ice-cold look on his face when he said it. He was pulling upwards on the man's arm as he did.

The robber nodded, after which Willie let him go and stepped back slowly. Andrea could see Willie was holding the knife in his hand.

As he held his bleeding nose with both hands, the failed robber began walking slowly away from them, looking back over his shoulder occasionally as he did.

When he was a safe distance away, Andrea looked at Willie and could see he was shaking like a leaf in the wind.

"What's wrong Willie?" She asked.

His voice almost broke as he said, "I've never had to hurt anyone before."

Andrea had read about men who were like stone-cold killers in combat but as soon as the adrenalin wore off the fear hit them like a ton of bricks.

"It's okay Willie," she said to him soothingly, "He'll be fine." Then added, "Where did you learn to fight like that?"

She had figured it out but wanted to get him talking so he would calm down.

After a few seconds, he said to her, "Father taught me. We had a lot of spare time on the island and we used to practice together. It helped pass the time. I've never actually used it against anyone before today. When I saw him point that knife at you, I just reacted. What if I had killed him?" She could hear a note of panic in his voice.

"But you didn't so don't worry about it. You didn't do anything wrong. He might even have learned something." She replied.

He turned his eyes away for her and she could see a look of shame on his face, "But I would have. If he had hurt you, I swear I would have Andrea."

"Forget about it Willie, you didn't. Besides, hasn't it occurred to your that you father might have taught you those moves so you could defend yourself? There are other ways to exercise you know? Now let's go get something to eat, I'm starved." And with that, she put her arm around his and they walked back to the car.

The next day, as they both took turns driving to the docks at Savannah, she found herself excited at the prospect of seeing the man's home for the past forty plus years of his life.

Chapter Five – "The Awakening"

From the very beginning, Andrea Marion had been trapped in a loveless, passionless, nearly sexless marriage that was completely devoid of anything that could remotely be considered romance.

Alexander Thomas Osborne, her husband, spent most of his time away from home on this business trip or that.

No one will ever no the amount of human suffering he had caused as he would casually decide whose jobs did not have 'an economic right to exist' as he put it. That was his excuse for putting people out of work by the thousands so that he could line the pockets of himself and his investors. So cold was Alexander Osborne that he even treated his private life as if it was just another business venture to be analyzed, planned and executed, then overseen dispassionately on a daily basis.

Andrea wished she had known before she married him that he was a cold-hearted professional man that made his money buying and selling businesses like other people buy stocks.

Andrea did not love the man and in point of fact, she had never loved him. Had she not become pregnant, she would never have married him.

They had been at a party together and she had drunk just enough to not be thinking clearly when it had happened. For several years later she had thought it had all been a mistake and that he had also been drinking too much that night. But, time would teach her otherwise and she learned that Alexander Thomas Osborne never lost control. While her head was clouded in an alcohol-induced fog, his had been as clear as Fortessa Crystal.

He wanted a trophy wife and he got one. For Andrea was, beyond a doubt, a stunningly beautiful woman. Her dark golden blonde hair flowed past her shoulders to halfway down the small of her back and her beauty was breathtaking.

It was a different time back then and she did what was expected of her. After all, she was a good Catholic girl; so, when her family, friends and the church told her to marry the man it never entered into her mind to challenge their advice. It was a decision she would regret for many years to come.

At that time in her life, she was still heavily influenced by her families' traditional Catholic values making abortion never an option for her and she didn't have the courage to ask them about adoption.

It didn't take her long to find out how empty the marriage was. Alexander was never home and she found herself left alone most of the time in a big house with no one for company.

After months of isolation, she wanted so desperately to have someone to love but when the child was still born and she was told that she would not be able to have children anymore, she was heartbroken.

Even after the loss of her baby, she could not bring herself to divorce him. "Andrea," her mother said to her when she asked her about it, "we just don't do that sort of thing! We're better than that!" And that was that. Andrea never brought up the subject again because she knew that both the Church and her family frowned upon it.

In the twenty years of marriage, her husband was intimate only once each year, on their wedding anniversary. Even that he treated as dispassionately as a board meeting.

Trapped as she was, she refused to consider extra-marital affair so she remained in that soulless, lifeless, spiritually and sexually unfulfilling marriage right up to the moment Alexander Osborne died from, to her surprise, and later she would admit relief, a highly aggressive form of lung cancer.

Two days after his death, Andrea was still struggling with herself as she tried to deal with the mixed feelings she was having over the passing of her husband.

When she received a visit from a woman she had never seen before, Andrea thought the woman was there to express her condolences.

In shock she sat as the woman explained to her that for twenty-two years she had been her late husband's mistress and they had raised seven children together. Andrea sat there in utter disbelieve until the woman produced several photographs of herself, Alexander and their children. The woman sat there dispassionately, with not even the slightest sign of remorse on her face as she told Andrea of her infidelity.

In calm reflection that comes with the passage of time, it would occur to Andrea some years later that the woman was indeed a perfect match for her late husband.

Andrea called her mother to talk about it only to find out that not only did the woman already know about the affair, but so did both his and her entire families!

It seemed that Andrea was the only one who had not known. When she asked her mother why, the elderly Mrs. Marion simply replied, "Things like that just aren't talked about in polite society dear. You should know that!"

'Obviously, someone had talked about it!' She thought to herself. 'They all knew about it but me!'

At the funeral the next day, to everyone's surprise, Andrea not only failed to shed a tear for her dead husband, but she threw dirt on his casket while saying to the horror of the attendees "ROT IN HELL YOU BASTARD!"

When the Will was read, Andrea found her not so loving husband had bequeathed most his estate to his mistress and seven illegitimate children and left Andrea with only a small insurance policy. When the funeral expenses were paid, she had just enough money to find herself an apartment. She could have fought it, but she wanted to be done with Alexander Thomas Osborne and his family.

From that day on, she never spoke to her family again and began dissociating herself from anyone else that had kept the knowledge from her. She resolved herself never to live her life again trying to please her family, friends and the church.

Knowing now what she did, if Andrea had it all to do over, she would make entirely different choices.

It had all been an awakening for her and Andrea decided to find out about all the things she had been missing out while she was married to Alexander Osborne.

She started trying new things. She tried smoking but didn't like it and the idea of lung cancer didn't really appeal to her after watching Alexander's death. Next she tried drinking, but that just seemed a waste of time, fine in moderation but not a good habit to take up. She just didn't like marijuana at all and decided not to experiment with any other drugs after that. She felt like she was sexually ignorant and wanted to try new things.

She started buying adult movies until she discovered she could download them from the Internet for free. She wasn't worried about being sued for copyright violation for doing so as Georgia is one of the few states left that still has a pretty strict pornography law on the books.

They distributors wouldn't stand a chance if they tried to sue her for downloading material they couldn't legally sell in Georgia, would they?

While the videos were virtually without plot and as romantic as a bad date with the town pervert, they did expose Andrea to a realm of sexual freedom that she had never considered before.

In all her years of marriage, she had only had sex in one position, missionary and she had never engaged in oral sex with her husband. He must have been saving that for his mistress!

Then, there was the sex toys that some of the movies had in them! While a few were quite intimidating, like the 6 inch wide 18-inch long dildo, others like the rabbit looked absolutely wonderful to her.

In her quest for sexual identity, Andrea even tried lesbianism once. But, she decided that while she found she really liked oral sex, she wasn't attracted to women and didn't want to give or receive it from one.

Andrea was seeing the world with a different perspective now and she wandered if the way she was viewing the world, both sexually and non-sexually was similar to how Willie must be seeing it?

While she lay there trying to fall into the darkness of sleep, it occurred to her that Willie must be a very lonely man after spending so much time isolated from the world. She realized that in his isolation, he had not even had the company of causal friends.

While her heart wept for the man and the life he had lived, still she took solace in the fact that he genuinely seemed happy and did not show even the slightest bit of self-pity. It was then she realized that she had fallen for him and it occurred to her that he was probably as inexperienced sexually as he was about everything else.

'What would it be like,' she thought to herself, 'to be with such a man?' Just before she drifted into the dark void of sleep, Andrea realized her nipples had become hard at the very thought and that night, she dreamed of a most erotic encounter between herself and Willie.

Chapter Six – "The Escape"

They were in Savannah and as they approached the docks, the sound of waves crushing into the sides of the pier almost drowned out the cries of seagulls in the distance.

As she exited her car to walk down the short distance from the parking lot to "The Escape", with every breath she took the salty smell of ocean breeze reminded her suddenly of the massive body of water that lay just yards away from where they were standing. Riding in the car, with its windows up and air-conditioning running, she had gotten a whiff of it every once in a while. But now, as they had approached the waterfront the full aroma of the sea breeze filled her lungs with the pungent odor of the Atlantic Ocean.

She strolled leisurely, Willie at her side, down the dock towards 'The Escape' and with each step she took closer the small cargo vessel seemed to grow ever larger in size until finally it seemed so massive as to dwarf them like some huge behemoth resting before ants.

Out of the water and in dry dock, 'The Escape' looked larger than she had expected it to be. The ship had a length of 195 feet and a width, or breath in nautical terms, of 30 feet. The cargo hold had been 120 feet long, 18 feet deep, and 20 feet wide when the ship was built.

She also noticed that he was having solar panels installed all around the top three feet of the hull of the ship. At first she wondered where he could have possibly gotten the idea until she remembered that he seemed to read everything he got his hands on. She recalled, as she stood there in front of the ship, seeing him come to work one time with a rather large bundle containing several issues of Popular Mechanics Magazine.

There were metal stairs, placed there by the workman so that they might gain access to the vessel, that rose from the ground to the top deck of the ship. When Andrea began to climb them behind Willie, the stairs rocked gently from side to side causing an unsteady feeling to come over her. It didn't end until she reached the top and climbed onto the sound unmoving deck of the ship.

Willie's father had divided the cargo hold into two sections: one 80 feet long and the other 40 feet long. Then, he had closed in the 80-foot long section and further sub-divided the closed in portion into two decks which became living quarters, each about 8 feet in height. It was like having a 3200 square foot house in a ship.