Pixie, Katie and Me Ch. 01

Thus, at 5:50 p.m. I stood just outside the airport security area holding a single yellow rose I'd purchased at a florist shop I'd passed near our house. The deplaning passengers were mostly past by the time I saw Katie trudging along slowly, trying to keep her trolley suitcase on course. She also carried a greatly over-stuffed shoulder bag.

She didn't see me right away. Perhaps she was expecting Mel in the baggage claim area. The pause gave me time to study her for the first time in years.

Katie stood about five-foot-five and had beautiful auburn hair, now long and pulled back tightly -- almost severely - in a ponytail. She had greenish eyes, a cute button nose and small mouth, yet her face looked ashen. She wasn't wearing any makeup and the paleness of her face was also clearly stained by the new tension in her life. Her shoulders were slouched low, carrying far more of a load than just the shoulder bag. There was no doubt as you looked at her but that her life was in crisis.

I moved forward to meet her, putting myself squarely in her path before she looked up to examine the obstacle in her path to baggage claim. I held the rose out to her slowly and said the first words that came to me, "Katie, you are loved here."

"Oh, Doug," she wailed as she dropped the shoulder bag and hurled herself in my arms. Her wail wasn't a sound of joy, but more a plaintive cry to make the badness in her life vanish. She broke into uncontrollable sobs, holding onto the lapels of my jacket to try to muffle her more audible howls.

I wrapped her in my arms and held her tightly, allowing her to hide against my chest. Other passengers flowed around us, yet somehow we remained oblivious to them or what they might think.

Gradually, perhaps over ten minutes, Katie's uncontrollable crying slowed and finally stopped. My jacket and shirt were soaked with her tears. Finally, we just stood and I held her close. I kissed her forehead and told her it would be all right. She nodded in understanding -- in appreciation. She said nothing.

I picked up her shoulder bag and put my other arm around her as she pulled her suitcase. I led Katie out to short-term parking and we found my truck. I put her bags in the backseat, made sure she was secure, and then drove us north towards home.

In her current state, I couldn't see walking into either a bar or restaurant with Katie. One glance and you'd know she'd been crying -- a lot! Plus, there was always a fifty-fifty chance that I'd be pegged as the guy that brought tears to her eyes rather than seen as one of her rescuers. Thus, as we left the airport, I phoned in an order for pizza to our favorite deli and drove in the direction of home.

I tried to engage Katie in a light conversation on the way home, but she made no response, so I figured she just wanted to be a recluse. I told her we cared and were glad she thought of us as a 'safe haven' in her time of need. After that I shut up and drove. Katie just watched the scenery float by in some sort of vegetative state.

Mel was reading a story to Ashley when we came in the house from the garage. I carried Katie's bags a step or two behind her. When she saw Mel, Katie dissolved into tears again and ended up sitting next to her on the sofa sobbing wildly. Ashley looked concerned and then got up from the sofa and walked around Mel so she could gently pat Katie's back in a comforting gesture from the two-year old.

I got us two glasses of wine and a Diet Coke for Mel, listening occasionally as Katie attempted to talk. She'd get about three intelligible words out of her mouth before the sentence dissolved into jerky sobs. Gradually she quieted down, but she was unable to talk. I sat on the floor turning the pages of several books with Ashley.

Our pizza arrived and I settled with the delivery boy, leaving a generous tip. After wolfing down a slice, I took Ashley by the hand and led her to our master suite for a bath in the big tub. A half-hour later, after another story while sitting in my lap, she willingly went to sleep in her crib. I went and rejoined the others.

Mel and Katie hadn't moved except that Katie was curled up in Mel's lap with her eyes closed. Mel was stroking her cheek and hair in a loving gesture.

"You eat?" I asked quietly.

"No," Mel replied. "I'm starved. Can you bring us a couple of slices? Zap them in microwave to warm them up, please." I nodded and went to the kitchen to fix up a few slices. I brought two plates back to the spacious living room as well as refills for the drinks.

Mel inhaled her two slices and gulped the soda down, holding her glass out for a further refill. I complied and asked if I could get her anything else.

Katie didn't move and her pizza slices went untouched for an hour until I finally ate them.

"Is she awake?" I asked the Pixie.

A little squeak came from Katie's lips, "Yes." She gave a huge sigh, her shoulders rising on the intake of air and then falling as she expelled the air with a shuddery sound.

I sat next to Mel on the sofa and reached over and stroked Katie's hair. She sighed again, but not as deeply or as emotionally. I kept stroking in a loving and caring gesture. When I felt bad I always liked to be touched in some way. Mel always seemed to instinctively know just when and how to touch me to make the badness go away.

I looked lovingly at Mel and then at Katie as the light faded outside and night settled in. One light we had on a timer in living room came on, yet the three of us were mostly in the shadows of the room.

We sat for a long time. I dozed on and off, and I guess Mel and Katie did too. Finally, I announced I was heading to bed.

"Help me bring Katie into our room. We'll surround her with love tonight," Mel said.

I acknowledged her instructions and then lifted Katie up into my arms in one smooth move. She put her arms around my neck and her head on my shoulders. I heard her whisper "Thank you" as I led the three of us into our master suite.

When I set her down, Katie came to life enough to go to the bathroom. I left to close up the rest of the house and check on Ashley. When I returned, Mel and Katie were in our bed. Katie was clearly going to be in the 'middle' for the night.

I hesitated a moment. Mel and I usually slept in the nude except on the coldest nights of the year when we don our flannels. I wondered what the women were wearing. Uncertain about protocol, I decided that sleeping in my briefs would be acceptable, thus I stripped to my dark blue bikini underwear and slipped into the king-size bed next to Katie.

As I raised the covers, I realized that Katie and Mel were nude. Mel gestured to me wildly and I got the two messages she was sending. I slipped off my briefs and tossed them on the floor, turned out the bedside light, and then cuddled up to Katie, encasing her in my arms. She nestled into me as though we did this every night. Somehow our nudity didn't matter.

No one said a word. And soon as I embraced her, I felt Katie's body sag as sleep finally overtook her. I then allowed myself to pass into dreamland, but not before acknowledging some of the erotic feelings I was having over the situation. Only then did I feel a slight surge of life in my penis.

I awoke the next morning when I became aware off Mel getting out of bed and waddling off towards the bathroom. When she came back in the bedroom, she sat next to me on the bed, leaning in and kissing me to be sure I was awake.

"Good morning," I said in a muffled voice.

"Thank you for being so loving to my friend," Mel said as she stroked by unshaven cheek with the back of her hand. She gestured towards Katie's sleeping form.

"She's easy to like," I whispered, turning to look at the still sleeping figure next to me. The sheet was just above her waist as she slept on her stomach. The naked back was alluring and suggestive, even though I knew its owner was suffering dearly over the demise of her long-term relationship.

"I'll go fix breakfast for us. Can you rouse Ashley and get her changed?"

"Sure," I replied as I hoisted myself up to a sitting position next to Mel and planted my feet on the floor.

A muffled voice next to me asked, "What time is it?"

I said, "Oh, 'bout seven o'clock."

A long groan erupted from Katie's prone form then a sleepy voice said, "I don't do seven a.m." She rolled onto her side, cranked one eye open, and faced us. Her perky breasts were obviously evident to both Mel and me. I just accepted the moment as it was and tried not to read anything into it relative to any other subject in the world. This is just the way life is right now.

Katie started again in her sleepy voice, "Thank you. Thank you both for all your caring last night. I feel so much better this morning but don't let that be a reason to stop." She smiled wanly at the two of us.

Mel said, "You came to the right place." She put her hands on her swollen belly and moved them around. She unabashedly turned her naked body toward Katie and said in a slightly excited voice, "Katie, give me your hand. You can feel the baby move."

Katie immediately extended her right hand past me and put it on the beach ball part of Mel's swollen abdomen. Ten seconds later she alertly sat up and grinned, "I can feel it. It moved for me." She moved her hand around slightly following the squirming bump.

I put my hand down on Mel's belly too, something we'd done more frequently when she was pregnant with Ashley. I too felt the gross movement of an elbow, knee or foot somewhere in the inner reaches of her womb. I smiled at Katie and then at Mel. Mel looked very proud, as though she was controlling the movements.

Finally, I said, "You girls play. I'm going to shower then I'll do Ashley." I stood in my naked splendor and sauntered away towards the bathroom, my morning tumescence pointing the way. Just before I shut the door, I heard someone comment "Nice buns" in a taunting voice.

Ashley enjoyed the company as she sat in her high chair surrounded by three adoring adults. She carefully watched Katie, the newcomer, and seemed to enjoy the moments when she paid attention to her.

"I'm so sorry I caved in on your guys last night," Katie began, after the mundane matters about breakfast had been settled. "I guess all my tension about my crumbling marriage had been building and held together with a fragile thread right up until Dan told me to get out." She turned to me; "I sort of held it together until the airport - you poor man. You came to pick up your house guest and ended up with a distraught female on your hands."

"A knight in shining armor always at your service, Madame," I stated as I made a sweeping bow to her.

Mel reinforced my remarks, "I meant what I said; you're always welcome here. You're my closest friend -- since forever. Of course you'd come here to mend. You stay as long as you like -- you can even move in here with us."

"I thought I'd stay a few days and see what Dan had done with my things at the condo. He'd threatened to toss them all out -- whatever was left. He only gave me twenty-four hours notice. Not much of note to end a marriage on. Besides, I can always move back with mom and dad until I get reestablished."

"Dan told you he had a new honey?" I asked carefully. I didn't want to reopen the wound that had hurt her so yesterday.

"Yea. I guessed, but it was different having it confirmed and thrown in your face that he wanted to move her in and me out. I would have thought almost three years of marriage counted for something more than that."

"Me too," Mel said in a sarcastic tone, clearly unhappy at Dan's behavior.

After a long silence I went and sat by Katie and put my arm around her in a friendly hug. "What can we do to lighten your load, to bring you back to your usual state of happiness?"

She put her head on my shoulder and allowed me to kiss her forehead again. Mel watched with a smile on her face.

"What do you normally do on a Sunday?" Katie asked.

"Well, we'd thought about driving up to a lake and doing a picnic today," Mel announced as though we always did something fun like that every weekend. "The weather is nice and we wanted to get away from the house and all our projects for some quality time with each other."

I knew quite well that we had had nothing planned. More typically, our Sundays drifted by with a series of small home and work projects. Thus, the idea of a picnic came as a surprise that I managed to hide beyond actual enthusiasm for the idea.

"Oh, that sounds so nice. Can I help you prepare something? How can I help?" Katie inquired.

"Just keep Doug away from the kitchen while I prepare things," Mel said with laughter in her voice. I had a reputation for snacking on anything being prepared in the kitchen. For some remarkable reason, I could eat about anything and not gain weight.

"Come," I said to Katie, "I'll show you around the 'estate'." I took Katie's hand and led her towards the back door and our deck. Mel started to pull cold cuts and sandwich makings from the refrigerator. Ashley seemed content to play in the middle of the kitchen floor.

"We own almost as far as the eye can see back here," I said gesturing expansively at the backyard. "All the way to the back hedge row," I stated as though it was miles away, when in fact it was only about sixty feet from the back of the house. I got a laugh from Katie.

"This is so quiet and private. You can't see any of the other homes," Katie observed as she moved to sit on the rail of the deck, a cup of coffee in her hand. "Oh, is that a Jacuzzi?" she asked gesturing towards the covered spa in a corner of the deck.

"Yea," I said modestly. "We can fire it up when we get home and enjoy it this evening if you'd like. Mel and I use it about one or two nights a week, particular if I've had a physical day on the job. Mel really enjoys it now that she's carrying so much baby. It's pretty good at making all your worries disappear."

Katie said, "Then I definitely want to try that as soon as we can. I've got a lot of bad memories to make disappear."

Katie tried to muster some enthusiasm for the day, but I could tell she was working at being cheerful. Sometimes her responses were just flat and matter of fact. I continued to engage her and our conversation wandered to my job and the wide variety of tasks I encountered. Increasingly my time was spent interviewing promising candidates to head the various properties, particularly one shopping mall where the attrition rate had been rather high.

I got Katie talking about her job doing web development for an ad agency in Boston. She talked about a couple of large banks and financial houses I knew as some of her company's clients.

"I'm going to have to explain to my company why I'm absent tomorrow. Fortunately things didn't look too busy this week. I don't even think I had any meetings booked, just lots of computer time."

"Can you work from here?" I asked.

She thought for a moment and said, "Yes. Yes, I could. I even brought my laptop although it's not much of a production machine for me. I normally use a four-core Mac that's maxed out in every way you can imagine with multiple displays, memory, hard drives, graphics tablets, and all."

"Give it a shot," I suggested. "But don't forget your real reason to be here is to get back to health, not to stress yourself out further with some work assignments. If all you do is bury yourself in your work, you'll find you just postpone the mental homework of dealing with the 'Dan Situation.'" Katie nodded in agreement with my concept.

I felt sorry for the emotions I knew she'd have to encounter and deal with over the next few weeks. I guess you never really get over being ditched so catastrophically. I moved to Katie's side and used my finger to brush back a lock of her hair from her pretty face. She looked up at me and smiled.

Impulsively, I leaned down and kissed her on the lips. She turned and met my kiss. This wasn't any torrid kiss that suddenly launched us into some sexual embrace. This was just a simple kiss that told her, "I love you" and "I'll take care of you" while you're here. She smiled at me when we parted and I stood.

I stroked her cheek gently and said, "Let's go check on the picnic."

"You really love Mel a lot, don't you?" Katie stated.

"Yes I do," I said. "We've had our rough moments too, but nothing as bad as what just happened to you. We got some marriage counseling and turned things around. You know Mel is such a non-conformist; we even managed to amaze the counselor at some of the things we've done."

"Can you share?" she asked inquisitively. "Not to gossip. I'd just like to particularly hear what you guys learned about each other and what the counselor told you or got you to think about. I tried to get Dan to go to counseling a couple of times but he wouldn't hear of it."

"Come on, we'll talk in the car or at the State Park." I led Katie back into the house. Mel was just finishing putting things in a large cooler on the kitchen table. I went to snoop as to what was in the cooler and Mel gently rapped my knuckled with a wooden spoon. We all laughed.

A half hour later we were in Mel's Jeep, heading northeast to Mount Gilead State Park. Mel sat in back with Ashley to keep her amused; Katie sat in front with me as I drove. We'd never been there before so this was a treat for Mel and me too. On the drive, we just chatted about our house, friends and jobs.

After we arrived, we made elaborate preparations at one of the campsites along side the lower lake. In a few minutes we'd set up a large canopy for shade, laid out a picnic table, and even provided a play area for Ashley.

I stretched out against one of the oak trees next to our picnic table and played with Ashley. Mel and Katie sat at the table.

"Mel," I said, "Katie wants to know what we learned from the marriage counselor. How we turned things around."

The Pixie blew me a kiss then turned to Katie; "First you have to understand what was happening in our marriage -- or rather what wasn't happening. We were in the doldrums. Both of us had put a lot of emphasis on our jobs and the house, and then Ashley. The attention we paid each other suffered. Our marriage just lost its warmth; there was no emotion, no heat. It was empty, dead."

Katie nodded knowingly at Mel's description.

Mel went on, "We started to nag each other about little things -- the house, errands, the baby, time spent at work, broken commitments -- real and imagined, and on and on. We got in a negative spiral; things only got worse. About the only thing we could agree on was that we didn't understand each other and needed outside help to pull us back from the brink."

I broke in, "One of the guys at work had been through counseling. He hadn't said much about it, but I could tell it had worked and he was so much happier after the weeks he and his wife went through it. I got the counselor's name and we called."

Mel picked up the thread, "From the moment we walked into the marriage counselor's office, things started to improve. Instead of asking us what the problems were, she asked us how we loved each other and whether we liked being loved that way? I loved her approach; it seemed so different from what I'd expected."

I went on, "After a few weeks of talking and reading, we realized we weren't loving each other the way that really meant love to each other. People usually like to be loved in one of five ways: words of affirmation about the relationship, quality time with one another, gifts showing love, acts of service that demonstrate love in some way, and physical touch. I described each of the 'love languages' in more detail and what Mel and I found out about each other."

Katie asked, "So what'd you do, change how you approached each other?"

"Exactly," Mel said, looking to me for confirmation. I nodded. "I started to go out of my way to touch Doug, anyway at all, even just a brush of my hand across his back when he was doing desk work. Of course we also started to spice up our bedroom play too."