Our Love Saga

Samantha returned my smile and said, "I could live with that compromise. Will you do something for me?"

I knew it. Here it comes. "I'll do my best," I answered.

"Will you start going commando for me on days when you don't have to work or go into the office?"

"You want me to stop wearing underwear?" I asked, the surprise in my voice evident.

"You usually wear jeans on the weekends and when you dress casual," Samantha replied in a reasoning tone. "They will give you all the support that you need."

"They also place a zipper precariously close to a very sensitive..."

"Not if you wear Levi's Five-Oh-One jeans. I'll buy you some, so take the fear of a zipper out of the equation, and tell me, will you start going commando for me?"

"If it would make you happy, I would be glad to."

Samantha placed little nibbling kisses as she moved lower down my body. When her lips had reached my pubic hair she paused and said, "Good, because it will make me happy having easier access to make you happy."

Chapter Four

I was thinking about Samantha and our plans for that evening as I backed the Terry trailer into its designated location alongside my former house. I had left the office early to beat the Friday afternoon traffic and to allow time to get the trailer moved and then get back to the apartment early enough not to disappoint Samantha.

I was just finishing the lowering of the hitch stand when I sensed her presence.

"Who is she?" Linda growled.

I turned to her and asked, "Who is who?"

"You know who I mean, the skank that you're shacking up with. You're obviously living someplace other than the trailer now, so who is she?"

"What makes you so certain that it's a 'she'?"

"Because no guy would make the changes in your appearance that a woman has obviously done unless you've finally come out of the closet and embraced your homo side."

Boy, Linda was on a roll today. I didn't care if she noticed my new hairstyle and color-coordinated clothing, but I wasn't going to allow her to continue insulting Samantha, a woman that she had never met or even spoken to.

When I arrived at the apartment last Wednesday evening, Samantha wanted me to allow her to cut and style my hair. When I agreed, I discovered that it was one of the most intimate things that a woman had ever done for me. I have had my hair cut by women several times over the years, but those had all be in salons and the stylists kept everything professional. With Samantha, she made it extremely personal. Her cutting my hair while topless added a nice dimension to the experience as well.

"Not that it's any of your business or concern, but yes, a former, and I mean that we no longer work together, coworker invited me to share an apartment with her until I get back on my feet financially."

"You mean until you're free to access all the money that you have been hiding and denying to your family. Cosmo doesn't believe that you're able to live on less than the five-hundred dollars that you claim is all you have left each month, and neither do I. Cosmo is going to hire an attorney for me so that I can challenge the settlement and prove that you are hiding assets."

"I'm glad to hear that," I told her. "You challenging the settlement will open the door for me to have the issue of custody revisited. I don't know what crap you've been feeding the kids about me, but you better make it clear to them and yourself that spending quality time with their father is not optional. When my scheduled days arrive, they had both better start being here on time for me to pick them up."

"There is no way that you would be granted custody of the kids and we both know it." Linda snarled. "You travel too much. It's not my fault if the kids resent the fact that their father is a lying, cheating bastard who has been depriving them of his attention their entire lives."

"Only because you have been filling their heads with your own delusions. I could have explained that I moved out because their mother was a round-heel biker slut. I have never said a bad word against you to them, but that could change if you don't start playing nice where my visitations are concerned. Remember, I have proof of your infidelity and financial shenanigans. You have nothing on me and never will."

"What proof do you have of anything? I had every right to spend the money in our joint accounts and to use our joint credit card however I saw fit. It was only fair since you were, and still are squirreling away money somewhere, and I'm going to find it."

I walked to the driver's side door of the truck and opened it. My briefcase was behind the seat, so I pulled it out, set it on the hood, and silently opened it. I handed the manila envelope to Linda and watched her open it.

"The only reason that those pictures and the record of your abortion are not part of the divorce petition that I filed is that this is a no-fault state. That means no matter how much of a whore the wife is, the husband still gets screwed by the system. I might not be able to use them to my advantage in the divorce, but I will use them to my advantage with my kids if I have to."

Linda's mouth was hanging open as she flipped through the half-dozen images of her initiation into Cosmo's biker club. Being initiated meant that she had to have sex at least once with every member of the club. Since she didn't know which of the men had gotten her pregnant, she didn't know which one to ask to pay for the abortion and had to foot the bill herself out of her support payment.

Now, this wasn't a biker gang reminiscent of the Hell's Angels or anything. It was made up of Cosmo, who worked as a shift foreman manufacturing office furniture, a chiropractor, a dentist, two plumbers, and my former next-door neighbor, a used car salesman. They all had to work at decent paying jobs to support their Harley-Davidson hobby, and as a bonus, they got the privilege of having the occasional gangbang with a married woman. Tough guys.

The investigator that my lawyer used knew where this particular biker group held their initiations and had easily captured the happy event for posterity. He had provided me with portfolios on each member of the club in case I ever needed their testimony, which I wouldn't. I just might have a use for the information for other purposes in the future, especially if Cosmo continues to provoke Linda into making my life miserable and turning my kids against me.

I reached over and took the pictures back, slid them into the envelope, and replaced it into my briefcase. After placing the briefcase behind the driver's seat I turned to Linda and said, "Talk to the kids and make them understand or I will. I expect them to be ready tomorrow when I get here."

In the last almost two months, I had called to speak with Bryce and Paige every night, but they had no interest in talking to me much unless one of them was having a problem with their homework.

Since each of them had started school, I had always been the parent that they came to with schoolwork problems or projects that they needed help with. Bryce had an attention deficit disorder, was hyperactive, and struggled with his schoolwork. Linda had no patience with him, so it had always fallen on me to assist him. Paige, on the other hand, was an 'A' student assigned to advanced placement classes all through school, and she had no patience with Linda trying to help her with subjects that were beyond her understanding. It was hard for me to be relegated to being just their tutor when they wanted my help and not receiving any of the affection I had been blessed with as their father.

Driving back to the apartment, I considered Linda's threats to hire an attorney. I knew that they wouldn't find any hidden assets because none existed. I could prove that the separate private account that I had was established with the one-thousand dollar permanent travel advance that the company had given me to pay for business expenses until I had received reimbursement for them.

The fact that the account had considerably more than the original advance in it was irrelevant to the case. As my lawyer explained, the company could demand everything in the account back at any time. We could argue that the unused per-diem that I had been saving over the years was justifiably due me, but they could counter that argument by claiming that they had paid for an expense never incurred and thus the money was not mine. In any event, the money in that account could not be perceived as part of the marital assets and was safe.

When I got onto the Garden Grove freeway, I was stuck momentarily in the right lane behind someone towing a U-Haul trailer. As I was able to move over a lane to the left to pass it, I smiled at the memory of the past Monday when Samantha and I had used a trailer identical to it to move her stuff from the house to the apartment.

Samantha had the looks of a model and the style and grace of a princess, but she also had the strength of a lumberjack and a vocabulary when she was pissed that would cause drunken sailors to flee a bar with their hands over their ears. She hefted her end of the dressers and other larger items with ease and without complaint, except when she broke one of her fingernails.

With nothing more than a bedroom set consisting of a king-size bed, two nightstands, two dressers, and a cordless phone on the kitchen counter, we set up our new home together and spent our first night in the apartment. Samantha had taken enough dishes, utensils, and linens from the house to get us started, however, she wanted all those things that we would be using daily to be chosen by us together. We planned on some major shopping this weekend.

Speaking of that bed, it did get the christening that Samantha had asked for, and then some. I had friends when I was younger who had waterbeds and remember their stories about how long it would take to fill them with water. The handheld electric air pump that Samantha used had that mattress fully inflated in less than five minutes. It was a pain getting the cover zippered around the inflated mattress, but other than that, we had the bed assembled, and christened by the time our pizza for dinner was delivered.

The bed proved that Jimmy was a bigger idiot than I had originally thought. The mattress was the most comfortable sleeping experience I had ever had. The surface was smooth and firm and unlike a water-filled one, this one didn't shift every time your partner moved. The only negative that I saw in the mattress was that the vinyl it was made of tended to squeak sometimes when Samantha and I made love on it.

Samantha worked late on Tuesday to try and catch up from taking Monday off for the move. She ran into my arms as soon as she had closed the front door. She just melted into me and sighed contently as I held her for several minutes. I picked her up in my arms and carried her into the bedroom and set her on the bed.

She must have been expecting me to begin undressing her because she remained sitting upright. I had to gently prod her shoulder to get her to lay back on the bed.

"Relax," I said as I slipped both of her shoes off and knelt at her feet. "Your feet aren't too ticklish, are they?"

I didn't wait for an answer as I took a foot into each of my hands and started massaging them. The material of her pantyhose allowed my fingers to slide smoothly over her tired feet as I kneaded each foot from heel to toe, making certain that nothing on either foot was missed. Samantha lay on the bed mewing like a kitten, occasionally expressing her love for me, as well as promises of great pleasure for me later.

After almost fifteen minutes, she said, "You're going to put me to sleep and that doesn't fit my agenda for tonight."

I stopped rubbing her feet and stood. She raised her arms and I took her hands to help her sit up on the bed. "You don't want to sleep tonight?" I teasingly asked.

"Maybe in a few hours," she said while standing. She started unbuttoning her blouse so I took a seat on the bed to watch the show. She smiled at my attention and asked, "Have you given any thought to what we might have for dinner?"

"I was thinking of running over to the Togo's on Glassell for sandwiches. I was just waiting to see what you might want."

"Togo's sounds good. You can get me my usual barbeque sandwich."

"That's what I figured. Do you want me to go now or can I wait until the show is over?"

Samantha leaned down and kissed me before saying, "Go now. Between your foot rub and your lascivious attention on me undressing, another hunger is growing in me. I need you away from me for a few minutes so that I can calm down enough to eat and take care of other things before your real show starts."

I stood and kissed her smiling lips before quickly heading out to retrieve our dinner. When I returned fifteen minutes later with the sandwiches, I was hit with a strong odor as soon as I opened the door to the apartment. I left it open to try and air the place out some and asked, "Has someone been cooking meth in here while I was gone?"

Samantha was standing at the kitchen counter doing something with her fingernails. She laughed and said, "Sorry, I have gotten used to the odor and neglected to have enough ventilation so that the smell of the acrylic wouldn't bother anyone else. I'm almost done repairing the nail that I broke yesterday. Can you open the kitchen window too and turn on the exhaust fan over the stove? The smell should go away pretty quick."

I did as she asked and she was right, the smell did disappear pretty fast. By the time that we began to eat our sandwiches, it was almost entirely gone. We stood across from each other at the kitchen counter and updated each other on our day.

The furniture was delivered the next day, so we spent the next two evenings positioning everything to Samantha's liking. When Samantha came home from work on Friday, she was loaded down with grocery bags.

"There are several boxes in my car that I could use a hand with," she told me after a kiss.

"I'll get them," I assured her. It took me three trips to get all of the cookware that she had purchased into the apartment.

Samantha had changed her clothes by the time that I had returned with the last boxes. I began putting the groceries away while she started removing cookware from the boxes. Once she had unpacked the items that she felt she needed, she set the rest aside.

"Can you wash these while I get dinner started?" she asked. "Are pork chops and fried potatoes okay for tonight?"

"Of course, but you don't have to cook. I don't mind take-out."

She turned, pulled me into her arms, and said, "No way. You've avoided my cooking long enough."

After washing the skillets and utensils that Samantha had selected, I remained in the kitchen out of the way but available to assist if needed. While Samantha prepared our dinner, we updated each other on our days. When I told her about my conversation with Linda, Samantha was silent for a few minutes as she considered what I had told her.

She asked, "How have you been paying Linda the support money each month?"

I explained, "I opened a new account at the same bank where our joint account still is. I transfer the support payments from my account to the joint account when the time comes. Linda has access to the joint account but not my account. Why?"

"I trust that you always enter notes for the transfer describing what the purpose of each is?"

"Of course. If I didn't, I would have to write her a check so that there was a record of each support payment. All the other payments I make for them are recorded when they occur."

"Good. You're STIP eligible, aren't you? Can you have that payment sent someplace other than your normal direct deposit account?"

I knew where she was going with these questions, but she had one more, "You trust me, don't you?"

I smiled across at her and said, "Give me one of your deposit slips so that I have the routing and account numbers and I'll prove it to you."

Employees at my company above a certain pay grade became eligible for the Short-Term Incentive Program, which essentially paid a profit-sharing bonus that, while part of our compensation, it was variable. In fact, it wasn't even guaranteed, and some years nothing was paid out. Last year had been one of our better years so we were expecting STIP bonuses to be some of the best when they were distributed in a few weeks.

I had never told Linda about the bonuses, but simply let them go into our savings account for family vacations and the like. If she and Cosmo did follow through with her threat to get a new lawyer involved, it would be harder for him to track my bonus if it went to Samantha's bank instead of mine.

Samantha finished slicing potatoes and asked, "Do you still think it's a good idea for me to be introduced to your kids this weekend?"

"At this point, I don't see where it could do any more harm than Linda and Cosmo have already done to the kid's perception of me. We'll pick them up around eleven Saturday morning, take them to lunch someplace and then let them accompany us while we shop for a television. I'll let each of them pick out a movie on videotape at Circuit City while we are there."

"Maybe I should just stay here and do some laundry on Saturday and let you spend some time alone with them. We can shop for the TV and other stuff we need on Sunday."

I went around the counter and took Samantha into my arms. I told her, "That wouldn't be fair on so many levels. First of all, I know that we haven't talked much about our future together but I also know that we both want it. I hope that any future for us includes a loving relationship with my kids. I'm not as confident of that now as I was a few months ago, but I haven't given up hope. The sooner that they realize that you are in my life for good, the better, especially when you back me up with their crappy behavior and they recognize that I'm not the only one that they are disappointing..."

Samantha interrupted me and said, "That's one reason why I think it would be better if I met them at some other time. I know that I won't be able to tolerate them demonstrating even the slightest disrespect towards you without calling them on it. Do you think that their first impression of their future stepmother should be as negative as it will be when I challenge their behavior towards you?"

I hugged her tighter, both to reassure her, but also in elation over her vision of our future. I said, "Challenge away. They need to see that a real wife supports her husband and doesn't shit on him every chance she gets. Paige in particular needs to meet you. She needs to recognize that all beautiful women aren't vindictive, self-absorbed bigots. You are the perfect woman to set an example for her. Anyway, the main reason that your suggestion isn't fair is that you want to do the laundry. I told you on Monday while we were moving in that I had always done the laundry for my family and that I wanted to do the laundry for you and me. You can't deprive me of the opportunity to wash, dry, and fold your unmentionables. That wouldn't be fair."

Laughing, Samantha said, "Okay, but I get to do all the ironing, especially your shirts. Deal?"

"Deal."

~~~

When we flew to Dallas for our Easter weekend, we had driven Samantha's car to the airport so that she would have it available upon her return on Monday. When I returned to Orange County from Tampa, I was surprised to see her waiting for me as I walked off the jet bridge from the plane.

Over the years, I had flown more than five million miles. I had visited countries all over the world to meet with some of the most prominent people in the high-technology sector and returned home. Never had I been met by anyone upon my arrival. Now here, on my first trip since we had become a couple, Samantha stood in all her loving beauty waiting to welcome me home.