When Tony met Monica

(A companion story to Gemma)

It was to be a special day for Tony for two important reasons, Michaela would be arriving back home after completing her finals and he would be meeting Monica in person for the first time. They had already exchanged emails and photographs and had several warm and affectionate phone conversations. But he still felt the usual twinge of anxiety whenever he thought about their first meeting, even though he was keen to meet her in the flesh after what he had seen of her in her photographs. He also felt anxious about telling Michaela, Gareth and Alex about how he had been spending his time while they had been away at their respective colleges, and about his hopes for the family's future that arose from his activities.

His consciousness of how much his children had been through since their mother had died five years previously and his determination to ensure that there would no further upsets for them was central to all he did. Not only had they lost their mother, they had nearly lost their father three years later when he almost died of heart disease and been clinically dead for nearly a minute during the emergency operation that saved his life. He had been spared then but now he lived with a permanent shadow hanging over his future. Twice he had had to rebuild himself emotionally. Then for a while afterwards he had made caring and being there for his children his only concern in life. Partly in gratitude for the love and they had given him, far beyond their years, when he was too emotionally wrecked to be a father and a mother to them, partly to salve his desperate loneliness without Helen.

But eventually his own desire to have love and companionship again had overcome him. He had finally summoned the courage to date again, which led by chance to him meeting Gemma, a young artist not much older than Michaela. Their relationship had lasted a few weeks before ending sadly but amicably when she decided she couldn't commit herself to him because of their age difference. To make it up to him she had set him up with a close friend of her mother's, also widowed five years ago, and that was how he had come to be meeting Monica that evening.

He used his flexitime to come home earlier for Michaela's homecoming to find she had arrived half an hour before. She and several friends with homes in the same general area had clubbed together for a hire van to get them and their gear back from their various colleges. Strange sounds emanated from the DVD player as she wandered around the lounge in a rumpled maroon sweatshirt, tattered jeans and thick grey socks whilst replenishing herself alternately from a large mug of tea in one hand and a bacon sandwich the size of a telephone directory in the other. He had never understood how she never changed from looking like she could make a good living as a Kylie Minogue look-alike.

"Want one, Dad?" she managed to mumble through a mouthful as she waved the remnant in his general direction. They both preferred low-key homecomings.

"Sounds good and smells wonderful Sweetheart," he smiled, kissing her cheek and apprehending several fugitive crumbs as he did so, "But I need to save my appetite for tonight."

"Are you going out?"

Her enquiry was entirely accepting and without a trace of suspicion or resentment, but he felt a twist of anxiety in his stomach as he realised that he would have to start filling his children in on the direction his life was beginning to go in.

He loved his three children equally and without favouritism whilst at the same time enjoying a different relationship with each. His close bond with Gareth was based on their shared maleness, their love of sport, a similar brand of slightly off-the-wall humour and the fact that his son at each stage of his life reminded him so much of himself at the same age. With Alex, Gareth's younger twin sister, he shared a love of science and for communicating its actual and potential good, a pleasure in enquiry and discovery for its own sake and a deep desire for fairness and justice in all things. But the relationship he had with Michaela had come to be of special importance to him because she was the one most like their mother in appearance and character. She had inherited Helen's artistic talent and temperament and her wholehearted, generous and spontaneous response to all she encountered and experienced. It was because of this that he wanted her to be the one he shared his thoughts with first.

"Yes, but I've got time for a natter before I start getting ready."

He hoped this would be a good lead-in to their conversation, but he was totally derailed by her next question.

"Are you going to see Gemma?"

How on Earth did she know? He panicked inwardly for a second before realising that the innocent way in which she had asked the question indicated that she had no idea of it's significance. Hoping to get some kind of clarification he dissembled.

"Sorry, love?"

"Is Gemma some new jazz singer you're going to see? I just happened to see her name on one of your new CDs you hadn't put away yet."

His lifelong love of jazz had been a lifesaver during the years of his recovery and rehabilitation. For a second he was tempted to take this unexpected opportunity to obscure the truth but he resisted it. Whatever course and shape their life would take, it had to be based on truth and openness from the start.

"No, love," he replied, looking straight at her. "She isn't a jazz singer. She was my girlfriend for a while until several weeks ago. I'd decided to start dating again and she was my first date. This isn't a music CD; it's a DVD of pictures of her, which I'd meant to put away. I'm sorry for not telling you. I was afraid you'd be upset and you'd think I was trying to replace your Mum."

"Oh Dad!" she exclaimed as she rushed over and hugged me. "I'm not upset about you wanting a girlfriend and I know you'd never mean for anyone to try and take Mum's place. Only that you were afraid to tell me."

"Didn't we used to have these kinds of conversations in reverse?" he smiled weakly, amazed and thankful for her maturity, as they hugged each other.

"We're all growing Dad." Her simple statement needed nothing more. "Was she nice? Can I see some of her pictures? They're not mucky are they?" Her questions tumbled out in a kaleidoscope of thoughts, concerns and expressions just as if it were Helen speaking.

"You can see for yourself and they're certainly not mucky. Do you remember June who always used to photograph you in your stage school costumes? She took them when we visited her studio a few weeks ago. Gemma had always wanted to be a ballerina so we dressed her up as one."

A random picture came up on the plasma TV.

"Dad, she's lovely!" she exclaimed.

Gemma was in full length. She was dressed in her white classical tutu with the short skirt, her long bare legs flowing down to her feet looking lovely in her white satin ballet shoes with the ribbons cherishing her slender ankles. One leg was straight with her foot flat on the floor, while her other leg was bent so she could point her foot and rest the pointed tip of her ballet shoe on the floor. She was leaning back against the barre with her elbows resting on it. Her auburn hair flowed in long, straight tresses framing her face and draping her shoulders. Her head was tilted back as if she was about to laugh and her smile beamed happiness and her eyes were wide with delight and shining with pleasure. The honey sparkle of her freckles spread across her face and body glowed against her pale skin thanks to June's mastery of studio lighting. He felt a lump in his throat at the sight and of the memory.

"I'm sorry things didn't work out for you Dad." She squeezed my hand. "Are you going out with someone new tonight?"

He explained to her how Gemma had persuaded Monica to make contact with him. Then he asked her a question that had been gnawing away at him inside.

"I know it's really early days but, just supposing that it works out for Monica and I, how would you feel if we wanted to get married?"

She put her arm around his waist as they sat together on the sofa and looked at him tenderly.

"I hate it that you're lonely Dad. No one should be lonely and everyone needs a special love of their own. I'm so grateful that you've given us the time we needed to get over Mum dying. But for months now we've been saying wouldn't it be great if you found someone and it's a shame you weren't doing anything. And all this time you were doing something. Isn't that great! I'm so proud of you"

His stomach churned and he could hardly stop himself from crying because of the poignancy wrapped within the love and the innocent acceptance her words communicated to him.

"You mean that Gareth and Alex feel the same?"

"Of course they do."

"Why didn't any of you ever talk to me about it and tell me you feel that way?"

"We didn't want to make you feel we were pressurising you into doing something you weren't ready for or didn't want to do?"

"Come here You Great Pudding!" He hugged her even closer this time. He always called her that at especially emotional moments, like saying goodbye on her first day at University, which now seemed like a lifetime ago.

His emotions were now totally in turmoil. If he had only known how willingly his children would have accepted her, he would have had a much better chance of persuading Gemma to stay with him. She might still have balked at their age difference but she would not have needed to fear becoming a hate figure to them or being responsible for driving them apart from him. But then he wouldn't now have the prospect of meeting Monica, the woman who had captivated him from the moment he had first seen her photograph and who had been working her way deeper into his affectionate longing with each email and phone call they had exchanged since her first email just a week ago.

**********

Tony straightened his tie as he stood at Monica's front door before ringing the doorbell. He was wearing his favourite Italian dark grey two piece suit with a dark blue shirt, maroon tie and very stylish loafers. He loved Italian style and being smartly turned out always gave him confidence whenever he needed a boost. He already felt he knew her well from their previous communication but there was always that frisson of uncertainty in the final moments before the first sight of someone new.

She answered the door and his whole being was turned up a notch at the sight of her. She wore a beautifully styled and perfectly fitting jade green velvet dress in 1920's style with a low waist and a crisply pleated skirt. The material seemed to flow down her gorgeous hourglass figure from her classically sculpted shoulders and celebrate the curvaceous beauty of her breasts, hips and bottom. The low rounded neck showed an enticing prelude of her generous cleavage while the skirt came down to an attractive length above her knees and drew his admiring gaze to her long and shapely legs and her long narrow feet in low-heeled court shoes in matching colour. The colour of her outfit perfectly complemented her sandy blonde hair that framed her face in gentle waves before coming to rest on her shoulders and her bewitching hazel eyes that he had already come to love so much and which shone with delight as she beheld him.

She had dreamed of a moment like this for years and now it was finally happening for her she could hardly stop from hugging herself as she took in the sight of the well dressed, handsomely burly man smiling at her as he proffered a huge bouquet of flowers.

"You look wonderful Tony. Thank you for taking so much trouble for me. I do love it when a man dresses well. And these flowers are so beautiful."

"And thank you for all the beauty you've brought into my life already, which has just been multiplied a thousand times over," he smiled as he handed her the huge arrangement of lilies with their decorative foliage.

Cradling the flowers she took his hand and their hearts leaped in unison as they kissed for the first time. She drew him inside and he was greeted by the comfortably stylish interior that was somehow suffused with an atmosphere of peace and calm and also by a mouth-watering aroma drifting from the kitchen.

"Would you like some help in the kitchen?" he asked her.

Monica had always thought that how a couple shared the simple and mundane tasks of life was a good indicator of how close they were. She was completely satisfied on that score. After about a minute they were laying and arranging things and adjusting temperatures and setting out and serving, while keeping up a constant conversation on all manner of mutual interests, as if they had been doing it together for a lifetime.

"Can I ask you Darling?" he said gently taking her hand during a lull in the conversation, "Is Gemma happy?"

"She's very happy My Love. It's wonderful that you care about her so much. Thanks to you she's become the woman she was always meant to be and that makes me so happy. She's even started going to ballet classes with me after all the years I've tried persuading her to come. She says she's determined to dance on her toes before she's thirty."

"I've given her all I was meant to give. Now I give everything to you My Darling."

They shared a long, loving embrace as he kissed her between her eyes. Then their conversation settled back into more comfortable concerns.

"You've cooked this seafood to perfection," he said with knowledgeable appreciation, having eaten in many fine seafood restaurants around the world, after trying a mouthful of calamare.

"Peter's Spanish grandmother gave me lots of tips. She was a formidable old bird when I first visited her soon after we married. We became friends through cooking. She showed me how to make the perfect paella and I got her making the ultimate shepherd's pie. She was wonderful after that."

As they were both widowed they could talk freely about their loss.

"How long did you have to wait before you knew he hadn't survived," he asked gently.

"I was far more fortunate than many people in that his body was found and identified after three days. He had my last letter in his pocket. Whenever he was away on a long trip I would only email him about things he needed to know immediately. For the really important things I would write to him. We buried him still holding it."

She remained smiling but a sad and faraway look came into her eyes as, his heart overflowing with love and fellow feeling, he reached across the dining table and took her hands in his. Her eyes softened with responding love and she recollected herself.

"But I only had to wait for three days. You had to endure for four months."

"But at least I could share her last moments and tell her I loved her and hear her say ‘I love you' as she died. After she died I found a scrapbook I never knew she had. She had pressed a single flower from every bunch of flowers I had ever given her and put them in the book and the memories that came back as I looked at them tore me apart then. But now it's one of the most precious things I have of hers. I'm so sorry you lost Peter with no time to be prepared and no chance to say goodbye."

"That was the hardest thing of all to have to bear. But I was given strength to bear it."

"We both came through."

"And now we've been given each other."

**********

He came round to her side of the table and as she rose with eager instinct in response to his approach he took her head in his hands and began to kiss the milky chocolate coloured skin of her birthmark that covered much of the right side of her face, while he caressed the other side of her face and stroked her hair. Straight away he discovered how receptive and responsive she was to him. Even his slightest touch of her brought from her a gasp or a sigh or, which excited him most of all, a little sound in her throat that sounded like the mew of a kitten. Meanwhile she thrilled to the feel of his dark curly hair as she combed her fingers through it and the thickset power in the muscles and sinews of his broad neck.

As he kissed her he reached behind her and slowly undid the zip of her dress. He saw her back reflected in a mirror and he delighted in the sight of the vee shape of her exposed skin, her tensing muscles bridged by the black stretchy girth of her bra, which he quickly parted. He ran his hands over her bare back as she pulled his shirt out from inside his waistband so she could feel the ridge of his spine.

They sat down on the sofa and enfolded each other in their passionate embrace as they slipped off their shoes and she delighted in rubbing her bare feet on the hair of his legs between his socks and his trouser bottoms.

"How do you keep yourself so fantastic?" he asked in between the deep breaths of his desire for her as he smoothed his hands over the gorgeous curves of her waist and hips.

"I'm blessed with a good constitution that I show I'm for grateful for by taking care of it. I have a sensible diet instead of dieting, I drink for pleasure instead of proving a point, and I enjoy my body instead of beating it into submission. I work out, I do ballet and yoga, I play tennis and badminton, I love walking and cycling. Being left enough money by my husband to not have to work helps too. You look as if you can still come on off the subs' bench and run in a couple of tries yourself."

After a minute of stroking each other up and down their spines and making each other shiver with pleasure she pulled back slightly from his kiss.

"The one part of lovemaking I've never got on with is all that fumbling with buttons, zips and fasteners. I prefer to slip into something….easier to manage. What can I wear that will give you special pleasure Darling?"

"Will you show me how you look when you're dressed for ballet?" The eager expression in his voice matched that in his eyes as he gazed hungrily at her.

"I'll call you up when I'm ready," she whispered, with a smile that would have seduced him if he'd been a statue. "Men do need their little fetishes," she smiled to herself and remembered how Peter had always loved and been so turned on by the sight of her fingernails, perfectly manicured and painted bright red, as she stroked him firm.

She didn't scamper up the stairs two at a time in her eagerness like Helen. Nor did she skip upstairs in girlish excitement like Gemma. She seemed almost to glide upstairs, her hand sliding up the rail as she drew it up after her and as she looked back seductively over her shoulder at him.

She eased herself out of her dress and, panting in her excitement, took off her bra and pants and then pulled and rolled on a pair of her ballet tights, poured herself and nestled her breasts into her most figure-hugging and sexiest leotard and slipped her long, slim feet into her soft-soled satin ballet slippers.

He raced up to her bedroom in response to her call and found her lying curled up and almost purring like a supremely aroused she-cat. She looked heart-leapingly sexy in her black sleeveless high-thigh leotard, white footless ballet tights and soft soled ballet slippers in pale pink satin kept on with a strip of thin elastic over the top of each foot.

"I'd like to feel something really nice through my leotard Darling", her devastatingly sexy smile hitting him straight between the eyes and her head resting on one bent arm as with her other hand she teased a strand of her sandy blonde hair. It took him several seconds to strip to his briefs and join her on the bed and it still seemed too long to both of them.

Every lovely line and curve of her body and legs was emphasised and celebrated by the thin layer of lycra and nylon that covered them so attractively and felt so tantalising as he held her to him. While his black briefs proclaimed the latent power running through his rugby player physique with its swathes of dark hair across his chest, back and limbs that she delighted in running her hands over as she kissed him.