Mary Elizabeth Nelson

In contrast, I had a remarkable lunch with Suzanne the next day. She kept apologizing until I told her to cut it out. I assured her that while what happened to me was tough, at that moment I was in a wonderful place. Especially being with her. I said that she should never cast her family off. "Always leave the door open."

At that time I did not know that Suzanne was gay so I did not understand the depths of her concerns, that she knew that were her parents to find out she would be treated in the same way that I had been. It was enough that she told me how unhappy she was for the way my parents—her father's parents who she never knew—treated me and how her father and mother had written me out of their lives. And out of hers. And her brother's.

After she got down from that, I found her to be a marvelous girl. She was sweetness itself, and my first impressions were reinforced when I began speaking to her regularly.

Coming to New York II

Suzanne called me on the Christmas after my visit and we have spoken regularly ever since. Mostly I was a sounding board for her complaints, which were the normal teenager complaints. But she was tense in the house and she did not find it easy to speak with her mother. Who she always called, "mother." We spoke more often after she moved to Stanford. I made it a point to emphasize that her mother and her father were her only parents. They were not perfect, but they were the only ones she had.

When she was a junior at Stanford, she told me she planned on going to law school, and asked whether she should head east. I knew little about law schools but I did know that some of the top ones were here. In March of her senior year, in 2016, she asked if it made sense for her to come to New York, to Columbia Law, which she got into. She made it clear that she was not following her father's and her grandfather's footsteps by going to Stanford. "I might come back here when I'm finished but for now I want to get away."

I made inquiries and tracked down a two-bedroom apartment on West 87th Street, just off Central Park West, and she and a friend from Mill Valley, Annie Baxter, took it. Suzanne told me her parents agreed to pay her rent, as they were paying half of her tuition. She said she and Annie were driving east. Annie was going to Columbia Business School. I told Suzanne she could leave the car at our house in Yonkers. She was not to tell her parents that. The less they knew of my involvement the better.

So the calls started coming in mid-August as she and Annie made their way across the USA. When she told me she was about an hour-and-a-half away, I took the train and subway to be sitting on the stoop of the apartment when her Camry arrived. I had not seen her in six years but she was so much older. I cried when I hugged her and helped her and Annie get settled. Suzanne and I drove the car to Yonkers before she turned around and headed back into the City.

I spoke to her often and saw her on a number of weekends when she and Annie took her car out for a drive. It was routine until early November when she called from a New York friend's place and by day's end I met that friend, Kerry Neally, and Kerry's mom, Eileen. Kerry was a classmate. Her mom was sweet but reserved. I liked them both.

Eileen was a widow who lived only a few miles from us and gradually Betty and I had lunches and dinners and went on outings with her. She was extremely shy and had placed herself into a shell when her husband died in 2010. With the two girls, Betty and I were able to get her out of it to the point where we were suddenly part of one family. She would eventually fall in love with and marry Tom Doyle, which I mention because his house in Chappaqua is important to my story. I'll get to that shortly.

Suzanne, for reasons she herself explains elsewhere, dropped out of law school after her first year. She got a job as a paralegal in the City, and moved in with Betty and I, each morning taking the 8:16 train from Bronxville. We loved having her there although after she and Kerry realized they loved each other they spent a fair amount of time at Kerry's house a few miles away until Eileen moved to Tom's place in Chappaqua and Suzanne moved in with Kerry. It was complicated at the time, but what matters is that at some point, as now, I was with Betty, Suzanne was with Kerry, and Eileen was with Tom. And—spoiler alert—each couple got married in 2018.

Marriage

Perhaps it was fear. When gay marriage became legal in New York in July 2011, neither Betty nor I spoke about it. We attended weddings of friends but things were going well enough. Betty's marriage had not worked. Why tempt fate?

Then suddenly Suzanne and Kerry were engaged. I skipped over what happened with those two since they wrote about it themselves. Suffice it say that they fell in love, albeit it took a while for them to realize and admit it, and Kerry proposed to Suzanne on the train and they were still trying to figure out when they would do it. Spoiler: September 22, 2018.

Anyway, in a May 2017 theatrical display Betty proposed to me in Kerry and Suzanne's house and I knew it was time. Old as I was I wanted her to be my wife and I wanted to be hers. But right before that, which I'll get to presently, literally the six days before that, the hated Kathleen Pugh Nelson reentered my life.

Somehow Kerry's mother, Eileen Neally, got me and Betty to agree that an effort should be made to see if Kathleen—Kate—could be reunited with her gay daughter. A sense of what she and my brother thought can be seen from what they said on Thanksgiving 2010: he said, "I will not allow her," that'd be me, "to do to Suzanne what she did to herself, ," he said, "I'm not giving her another chance," with his charming wife responding, "I don't know why you thought it would be a good idea to ask that bitch here." To them, as it was to my parents, it was a matter of deep religious and embedded faith. So I didn't give it much of a chance but thought it worth the effort.

Eileen made a phone call out-of-the blue to Kate in California that did not go well. But well enough so that a few days later—four days before my wedding—I was walking upstairs in a pub on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan with Eileen to meet Eileen's fiancé, Tom Doyle, as well as Kathleen Pugh Nelson herself.

It did not last long and it did not end well. But somehow Eileen got Suzanne to meet with her mother and somehow Suzanne got her mother to accept her and, with it, to accept me. No one, however, managed to get her father, my brother Billy, to accept her or me and that's the last I will say of him.

That explains why when Betty and I got married on June 23, 2018 at Tom's house in Chappaqua, New York, Kathleen Pugh Nelson was a guest. While I said earlier that my hatred of Kate came later, my love for her came later still and I now understand that Suzanne's sweetness comes from her Mother.

Betty and I were going to Bermuda for our honeymoon in the morning. When we got home—my wife and I—I saw her with new eyes. Far wrinkly than the first time we'd made love. My hair a not-entirely-natural black. Hers still the same light brown. We had changed from the gown we wore at the ceremony and were in dresses that ended mid-calf. When the door closed, I turned and looked down at her as I loved to do. Our tongues danced and we were upstairs in a flash.

I undressed my wife slowly and she did the same to her wife and we wore nothing but our ivory lingerie with garters and stockings. I knelt to remove her stockings and she did the same to me before unclasping my bra. I lost track of what happened next but it was not long before I was beneath her on our bed and suddenly she was gnawing on my left tit, larger than hers but not big. And she nibbled on it while I moaned and then she moved across my no-longer-flat stomach. I spread my legs to my bush, which I trimmed that morning for this very reason, and she spread my lips. I was so primed, that I came almost immediately after she began to suck on my clit.

She was determined. I tried to push her away. She refused. Avoiding my clit, she painted the folds around it and her fingers, one, two, three, entered me and turned to rub. I was no longer pushing her away, my hands above my head and my eyes staring at a spot on the ceiling. I feared my heart would give out. I would die happy. Married and happy.

I've had many orgasms and many at the mouth of this woman. The one I had that night, the second one of the night, was the most intense of my life. When it was finally over, I could not move. Every bit of my energy was sucked into my pussy until it exploded into a million bits cascading through the universe. I could not get up. I could not get up.

Betty moved next to me, her hand grazing up from my pussy, across my stomach and my tits until it caressed my cheek. I could not say it. I was spent. She did. "I love you." That was the fourth of the sessions between us—the others being back in 1985, my apartment in 2005, and our kitchen in the fall of 2009—that I can see whenever I close my eyes. The next thing I remember was our approach to the airport in Bermuda.