When Hannah Met Jim

Fighting down a double take, Glen glanced worriedly over at Jill, who suddenly wasn't where she had been a moment ago. Rather, she was several feet lower, and quite horizontal.

Jill had fainted.

~ ~ ~

"Oh, God, oh God, yes, that's it, yes, yes, yes YESSSSSS!"

Deatra was draped over the kitchen table top, ass in the air, where Allen's hard member was surging merrily in and out of her anus. Flesh smacking wildly, he couldn't help thinking a number of things - who needed power walking when you had power fucking; empty nest syndrome just gave you more room to do it in; and senior citizen sex was even more fun because jam really did shake like the jelly of yesteryear.

Just as his climax was barreling down the runway, the phone rang. Allen ignored it. Shooting his wad gushingly into his wife's rectum, he mentally recited one of his favorite adages: "What else is voicemail for?"

After Dee repaired down the hallway to shower off, and Allen made a mental note to keep the balling rolling momentarily, he picked up the phone to see if the caller had left a message.

"Hello, Mr. Grosserhaun, my name is Glen Relleum. You don't know me, but I believe you do know my wife, Jill. I'm sorry to have to approach you like this, but there's something that we urgently need to discuss, and it can't be on the phone."

"Oh my God," Allen said aloud to himself, remembering his one and only fall off the fidelity wagon. It's finally caught up to me. And whatever this is, it can't be good, as his mind was already putting together some horrible possibilities.

Sticking his head in the bathroom door, Allen called over the running of the shower, "Dee, I think we need some milk. Do you mind if I run out and get some? Maybe give you a chance to curl up on the couch with a good book?"

"A BOOK?" Dee called back playfully. "That's what OLD people do." How well Allen knew it. "Why don't you come in and "wash my back'?"

"When I'm back with the milk," Allen repeated. "That's how we guys reload."

Deatra squirted him over the top of the shower curtain.

~ ~ ~

The Shari's restaurant parking lot wasn't exactly overflowing when Allen arrived, which wasn't unusual, he thought, since it was, after all, a nondescript Saturday afternoon. Whatever anxiety he had at finding Mr. Relleum, since, after all, he didn't even know what the man looked like, evaporated when he saw a fiftysomething man not a whole lot different in appearance from himself sitting in the "waiting to be seated" area. Unfortunately, that was by far the smallest anxiety on his plate at the moment.

Seeing him, the man rose and greeted him formally, "Mr. Grosserhaun? Glen Relleum. Pleased to meet you."

"Likewise, I’m sure," Allen replied, shaking the proffered hand while inwardly chiding himself - of course Jill would have told him who to look for. What, did I think she'd gone senile?

After they'd been seated and each ordered a slice of pie, Glen got straight to business. "Jill has, you know, told me of her history with you."

"No doubt," Allen replied, not particularly enamored with the comment but not reasonably able to take offense at it either.

Apparently reading Allen's expression, Glen added, "Please don't take this the wrong way, Mr. Grosserhaun-"

"Please, call me Allen. It'll save you a sprained tongue."

"Many thanks," Glen said. "My purpose here isn't to pass judgment on you - as Dr. McCoy might have said, I'm an economist, not a trial lawyer," which drew an amused snort from Allen.

"But I don't think you are aware of what happened since you and Jill were last together," Glen continued.

"She had my baby." It was a statement, not a question, but at Glen's unspoken query, Allen added, "No, I didn't know, but I can do social arithmetic as well as the next person. What I can't figure out is why I'm sitting across from you now versus sitting across from Jill or an attorney years ago."

"As she recounted the episode to me, she promised you that your…romantic interlude would be a singular occasion, with no strings attached."

"Yes, I remember that, Mr. Rel - Glen," Allen retorted a tad more curtly than he intended. "That night was a vulnerable one for both of us. I had just had a fight with my wife, and Jill's marriage - her FIRST marriage, I guess - had ended not too long before. She was still distraught about it, and it looked like she needed a friend. As it unfolded," he went on after an awkward pause, "she ended up needing a bit more."

The waiter chose that moment to arrive with their pie. Allen resumed before Glen could derail his train of thought.

"I guess I did, too. It was strange - I didn't have any intention of ending up in bed with Jill that night, and I don’t think she did, either. And no, I don't think that she was dazzled by the overpowering aura of my manly studmuffiness," he said, grinning ruefully, "It just…ended up that way."

"And you parted ways and never saw her again."

Abashed and increasingly exasperated, perhaps fueled by the long-buried guilt, Allen launched. "Look, GLEN, I make no pretense of being proud of what I did twenty years ago. And yes, I have wondered from time to time how Jill was doing, or even if there was any consequence from our 'little slip'. But I took her at her word. Besides which, how would it have been redemptive for me to turn one night of infidelity into an ongoing illicit affair? Even if we hadn't gone to bed again? Besides which, Jill never contacted me, and I had no 'desire' to flush MY marriage the way her first husband did hers."

Clearing his throat while Allen stopped to breathe, Glen said quietly, "Allen, remember, I said I didn't come here to judge you. Nor am I here to be your father confessor. Jill did indeed keep her promise to you, and in fact was joyful for having had your child. A son, by the way," he added, seeing a wistful expression pass over Allen's features.

"She and I met about two years later, after my first wife passed away."

Allen's momentary ire deflated. "I'm sorry."

"That's quite alright. Or rather, Jill helped make it alright. Three years after that we were married. JD - that's short for James Dennis - was the ring bearer at our wedding, while my daughter, Jeanne, was the flower girl. I adopted James and Jill adopted Jeanne, and we somehow formed a family. Just like the Bradys, only smaller."

Allen chuckled. "I sense the other shoe about to drop."

"Just like Damocles' sword? Well, not just yet." Glen replied "You see, I am the only father JD has ever known - or had ever known until about a month ago."

"Glen, you ARE his father. I wouldn't have any right to infringe upon that."

"Glad to hear it. JD felt the same way, so much so that Jill never really had a chance to tell him the whole story before he became extremely agitated and abruptly left."

Allen cringed at that - to his credit, Glen thought.

"The good news is, he showed up on our doorstep yesterday after a day-long drive from University and apologized to his mother."

"Yes…" Allen prompted, as Glen apparently had been waiting for another flash of intuition.

"The bad news is…" Glen paused, as if trying to gird himself, "he showed up with his new girlfriend."

Allen waited a few beats, nonplussed, until the probable reason for Glen's reluctance began to dawn on him like a storm cloud passing over the noonday sun. The feeling was not unlike the one he'd experienced the first time he'd been fired from a job. In the movies it was depicted as receding rapidly backwards through a dark tunnel while the object of your vision somehow remained the same size, as though receding with you. Allen wished he'd put on his deodorant.

"Hannah."

"Yes."

"Do they know?"

"No. After the way JD reacted to just the revelation that I wasn't his biological father, and how Jill passed out when she heard Hannah's surname, I didn't deem it wise to divulge that information. Not yet, anyway. That's why I wanted to meet with you first."

"You're a sharp man, Glen. A lot of politicians could take a lesson from such discretion." Allen ran a hand over his face and hair, his pie forgotten. Stunned as he was at this turn of events, he was unable to see how this could be contained. How could it be? It had obviously gone way beyond him and Jill in a hotel room two decades ago. Even if it could still be contained, it wouldn't be right.

Or, in other words, the piper had finally come to collect.

~ ~ ~

Deatra stared out the kitchen window, arms wrapped around herself. "So. My fears weren't groundless after all."

Her calm was almost preternatural, which was surprising to Allen only in the sense that he really hadn't had any handle on just how his wife would react to this news. Though he suspected that their unstoppable twenty-year honeymoon was now a thing of the past.

"I wondered, you know. Did you think I didn't? Oh, I didn't KNOW, but I did wonder. Did your mother ever tell you that I called there that Saturday night to apologize for the fight we had? And then she tells me that you're 'out with some of your high school friends.' I figured I was just imagining things. 'My Allen, have an affair? It can't be.' Then I thought that Jill would probably be there, and you had the romp for the ages with her in college, and you hadn't been getting what you wanted from me…but no, that's just not you. Wouldn't do that. Impossible."

"And now you tell me that you did, and lied about it, and kept this from me for all these years I've been giving myself to you like a three-dollar whore, and that you sired a son off her, and now this son has the hots for my little girl, and if they 'have a little slip,' I could end up with a half-grandchild with two heads. Have I left anything out?"

"You've grasped the immediate predicament, yes," Allen replied, too chastened to be indignant. "As to the rest, I plead guilty, but with two questions I need you to answer candidly: Was the lover you've been to me the past twenty years the product of love, or fear? And would you really have preferred to know that I had been unfaithful?"

Deatra still didn't look up at him. "Yes, fear was the motivation at first. I didn't want to believe that you had betrayed me, but I didn't want to take the chance that you might betray me in the future. So I did what you had always wanted. I sucked your cock. I let you lick my pussy - I even SHAVED the damn thing for you. I even took it up the ass. Only after a while I found that I liked it. I found out what I had been missing. Was that love? I don't know. Maybe it was lust. But at least I saved it all for you."

Accepting his wife's rebuke, Allen prompted gently, "And my second question?"

Dee turned her back on him. "What does it matter? I know now. So it would have been better to know then. At least then I - WE - would have been forewarned, and our baby wouldn't be in an unwitting "hillbilly romance."

"And it's up to me to tell her."

"Damn right, it is. By rights you should be the one to tell both of them. You AND Jill. The Perfect Stealth Couple."

"Dee-"

"That's 'Deatra,' thank you. And no, I won't have the locks changed while you're gone. I'm not going to make any kind of decision right now until I can sort through this for myself. Nor am I going to make any promises."

"But what I was trying to protect our marriage from slammed into it before I even knew it was there. The damage is done. And the good times won't be rolling anymore."

Deatra left Allen standing in the kitchen, alone, feeling that it was pretty much as bad as he had feared it would be. It was, he reflected, somehow appropriate that he was the one with tears running down his cheeks. Particularly since he now had to go and break his daughter's heart as he had his wife's.

~ ~ ~

Hannah knocked on JD's dorm room door. Hearing no answer, she tried the knob and found it unlocked. Jim was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

"Hi."

Looking over at her after a few moments, Jim listlessly answered, "Hi…Sis."

Ignoring his gloomy demeanor, Hannah forged ahead. "Where's Bennish?"

"The campus hospital, I guess. I didn't think I had punched him that hard, but I guess I didn't know my own strength."

"You ATTACKED your roommate?!"

"No, not really. I've just had so many shitstorms dropped on me lately, I wanted to see what it felt like to be on the other end of the emotional shock treatment."

"JD, how are you feeling?"

"How am I feeling? How am I feeling? How are YOU feeling? Since you're in the same boat I am, maybe you can tell me how I should feel about this. Frankly, I have no fucking idea."

Hannah took a deep breath, then let it out. "Okay, fair enough. This time I'll talk and you can listen."

Jim just went back to staring at the ceiling.

:"My dad told me…everything. With the bark on, and with no excuses. How he and your mom become…involved-"

"Fucked, in other words."

"-and how she told him it was one last fling, and how she discovered she was carrying you and resolved to raise you on her own, and then met your dad. But he also told me how guilty he had felt, and then how my mother changed, and how it changed him, and how it transformed their marriage, and how I came from that. And how both of us, you and I, were the products of genuine, heartfelt, deep-seeded love."

"Your…our…father can really shovel with both hands, can't he?"

"That's not fair, Jim. He made a mistake and he's had to admit it. He told my mother before he did me, and I really don't know what it's going to do to their marriage."

JD snorted. "Sure, he admitted it after he got caught. All the rest is damage control."

"Goddamn it, Jim, I already said he made a mistake - more than one. But are YOUR parents drifting toward separation or worse? Besides, HE DIDN'T KNOW about you. And that's because YOUR mother never told him!"

Jim looked over at her. "Well, now, that's better. Misery DOES love company, after all. And it's good to see that you can be something other than raunchily glib."

Sitting up, he held up both hands to forestall her eruption. "You're right, Han, you're right. 'Mr. Grosserhaun' and my mother did collaborate on this conspiracy of silence. And I guess I'm as estranged from my mother as your mom is from your dad. Ironic that it gives your mom and I something in common. Maybe I can ask her out and we can compare notes."

Hannah took a swing at him, but he caught her hand and held it tightly in his own.

"Passion as well. REAL, HONEST passion, and not all that perky come-on garbage. Excellent."

Crushing her to him, JD kissed Hannah deeply. Her eyes widening, she struggled to break free of his grip.

"What the FUCK is your problem?!"

"Oh, you wanna know, do you? Okay, here it is: I'm in love with my half-sister, that's what. Anything else you'd like to know?"

Hannah's eyes remained wide, and for once she was at a loss for words.

"Okay, I'll drop the self-pitying asshole routine. That's the truth - I love you. I don't know if it was the interest you showed in me the last six months or the compassion you showed to me when I first found out about my parentage or the 'romantic interlude' at that rest stop or the pride I felt when I introduced you to my folks. Probably it was all of it. But I realized that I love you. And finding out that we share a parent hasn't changed it. If we had known that all along it wouldn't have happened, but we didn't and it did and…I don't want anything about us to change."

"Jim…I don't know what to say. I love you too, but…how can we? It's against the law, our parents would never approve, we couldn't risk having kids-"

"The law doesn't need to know, Han. We have different last names - who would know? As for kids, we could adopt them. And as for our parents, it's their fault that all this happened - you could even say that they brought us together."

"Hold on a minute, JD - aren't we getting ahead of ourselves? We just became a couple a few days ago, and now we're talking marriage?"

Jim kissed Hannah again, his tongue parting her lips and taking her breath away.

Pulling back, Hannah repeated, "Jim, answer me, are you asking me to marry you?"

But that just gave him access to her blouse, which he hurriedly unbuttoned, finding a shapely bosom and erect nipples awaiting his attention.

"Jim, please," she pleaded in a half-moan.

Running his tongue inside her ear, he whispered, "Let's elope."

"Oh, GOD, yes!" Hannah surrendered, dropping to her knees as he pulled out his stiff penis.

And then he made her his wife.

~ ~ ~

A lunar evening. Well, okay, that was just a convenient fiction designed to lend a human context to an unearthly environment, since the Moon's "day" was a month long. At Allen's age, he had long since stopped caring about such distinctions, or anything else, for that matter.

Emigrating to the lunar colony had, of course, extended his life. That's what the doctors had recommended to him after the second "cardiac episode," as they euphemized heart attacks these days. And even that had been over twenty years ago.

The price for the boon of one-sixth gravity was that he could never return to the world he had known. But then, there hadn't been anything left for him there anyway. So paradoxical, he thought, to pay for the worst mistake of his life by being condemned to live with the memory of all its consequences.

He'd stopped trying to determine whom he had hurt more with that "one last fling," just as he'd stopped flagellating himself over it. Not because he had forgiven himself, but because he had finally reached the point of being numb. Whereas someone else might have gone mad with the grief or committed suicide, Allen simply became so used to the pain that it became part of his natural emotional mindset.

Yet he couldn't forget. He wouldn't allow himself to.

Deatra didn't leave him and after a time did forgive his indiscretion. But their marriage never really recovered because, when it came right down to it, they had never truly loved each other in the first place. She had been swept away by Allen's courting, and he had been more in love with the idea of BEING in love, and had been on the recoil from his steamy first time with Jill. They had been committed to each other, and that had kept them together, but there'd been no more than that.

She had gone into a long decline, the youthful zest for life they had shared in their middle years extinguished as though it had never been. Deatra died of ovarian cancer ten years later, her passing, Allen would forever be convinced, the catalyst for his move off-planet.

His two older children, Elaine and Leonard, kept in touch and even visited him with their families as often as the lunar shuttle service could accommodate, which wasn't often. As for Hannah, he didn't know - she had disappeared not long after he had told her who her beau really was, and when he had found her through the efforts of a private investigator, his son/son-in-law told him in no uncertain terms that he had no place in their lives and to leave them alone.

Allen had wanted to argue, but he hadn't bothered. He felt responsible. He WAS responsible. He'd killed his wife and lost a daughter and a son he'd never known and never would, all because he couldn't, in his mother's immortal advice when he had first gone off to college, "keep that thing in your pants."

So, Allen lived. Or, rather, he existed. He got up in the "morning," wheeled himself down to the facility cafeteria, ate that bland, pasty, colorless sludge they called a breakfast, wheeled himself to exercise class, wheeled himself back to the cafeteria for more sludge, wheeled himself to arts & crafts to tie his arthritic fingers in knots, wheeled himself back to the cafeteria for still more sludge, then went to the observation lounge to sit and stare up at the star-flecked black sky, where the only change was the phase of the Earth. Then he'd go to bed, sleep fitfully, and wake up, indifferent to having reached another "day," and start the whole routine all over again.