Wings

"Money, yup. And I've been doing my own thinking too this couple of weeks. Just hear me out. I'm still trying to get my thoughts together but. So... Look, the garage is in a bloody good position at the moment."

"I know right. You've worked really hard over the years to make a wonderful business model. I'm not blowing smoke up your bum, but I kind of copied some of your principles when building Pheonix."

"You wash their cars for them after they visit the shrink?" I smirk.

"Fuckwit. Your Q.S.C. principals. Quality work, great Service and Cleanliness. Well maybe not the cleanliness, it's mostly online and you've seen my office." She laughs.

"Well look. You know. I've been feeling like I've been missing a lot of time with little Sammy. These two weeks just gone by, we went fishing, spent a lot of time talking, did things like a father and son should. I felt now and then like I didn't really know him like I should."

"You're a good dad. Don't be silly."

"Not that. Look. Long and short... I'm going to make Mick the manager. The business is putting seventeen percent to the bottom line even with me drawing a generous salary. If he hires the apprentice when he finishes next month, then he can afford to employ another apprentice. I can stop in now and then and I... Look."

I need a moment to arrange my thoughts a little better and she hugs my arm silently as I think.

"So... We put the house on the market. It should pull close to five. Good location and sturdy. Good family home. That and your money could buy us a block big enough to work. Not just a little place like you're suggesting. I could direct the garage and work the farm. It would..."

"Fuck yes!" She fist pumps. "You'd be home with me. Oh, and the kids of course. Ha. We can find a place with an office for Phoenix, maybe even a little... Just. Fuck I love you, honey."

It was dark when we finished speaking our dreams and pulling them into creation.

~~<>~~

It was four-thirty on a cold Autumn morning two months later, when Joshua James was born. He came home to a struggling small cropping farm. When it came to farming, I was a good mechanic. I grew fantastic crops, but I was learning that they had no value unless I could negotiate the market politics. It was disheartening but I was enjoying my family.

Initially, it was the garage paying the small mortgage we took and the Phoenix foundation paying for our groceries and bills. We got the place for just over a million. We put eight hundred and ninety into that so our mortgage was just shy of two hundred thousand and I should have easily been able to pay it back with crops over a five-year period instead of the twenty. It made a lot of sense on paper, especially when given the books we looked over that showed yearly profit of around a hundred thousand.

We'd owned the block for almost a year. Little Josh has his birthday in a couple of months. I was lamenting our struggle with the market to Elly. Lara was out in Charleville. She had a few clients out there and she needed to identify and assess local services and support. Whenever she travelled, Elly visited to 'help with Samuel and Josh'.

Seriously, she wasn't needed. I enjoyed fatherhood. Even the bum changing and bottles and making lunches for Sam who was going to kindy. But Lara insisted. She also insisted on not talking about her reasons and cited the need for Elly to have access to her office.

Her office is a converted stable. Her admin, Natalie runs it like a nazi war camp. Elly could have done anything she needed to from home over the six-thousand-dollar server that the building houses. But I'm well aware of my wife's reasons. Even if they're silly and based on her own fears.

Not once have Elly and I acted on her hall pass. We're affectionate still in our conversation and gestures, but we just haven't gone there.

"Fuck sake Elly. I just can't sell. And when I do, they know they can hold me to a pittance because my crops will spoil."

"Sounds like you need a market you have more control over."

"Exactly, but it's just a handful of families run the markets. It's not acknowledged but it's true. Like vegetable mafia."

"So, what can you control?"

"All I can control at the moment is the bloody grass. I drive around in circles slashing most days, trying to come up with a solution."

"Have you thought about selling hay?" Asked Natalie. "You've got plenty of water, right?"

"Again, there's an established market locally. Shit, sorry girls. I'll take my whinging bum up to the house and let you keep working. Josh should be waking up soon and I have to go and-"

"I'm picking up Sam this afternoon. You don't have to do everything. What's the point of me being here then?"

I just nodded and trudged away. I really was low. My dreams: 'our' dreams of an income from the farm were remaining stubborn to manifest. I was watching little Josh on the veranda in his play pen while I mowed the house yard when an idea occurred to me.

Later, I was following a rabbit hole of google research into the concept when Elly draped a freshly showered smelling arm around my shoulder.

"Your tea is in the oven. The kids are in bed. Is this important?"

"Haha. Get your head out of the computer, Jaxon. I hear you. You don't have to nag woman."

"Well, I've got to do something wifely, seeing how you won't let me in your bed still." She kisses my head.

"Sorry, I've been a little... on to something. Thinking." I tap my head.

"Smelling..." She screws up her nose at me and taps it. "You need to wash the day off."

Point taken, I kiss her cheek and she held her nose like a cheeky cow. Then I shower and I think on my idea. I'm still thinking hard on it when I return to the kitchen to get my dinner from the oven and sit to eat.

"Well, the smells improved and so has the view." A smiling Elly tells me.

"Oh shit. I..." I shake my head and remember you should put clothes on when there are visitors. Lara and I are quite casual with the dress code and occasional nudity is not something the kids are unaccustomed to.

"Don't." She presses on my shoulder as I try to rise to go find pants. "How's tea?"

"Great thanks. Sorry I didn't come in earlier. I've been thinking on turning the place around. I've got to back into it. I've got to establish my market then deliver. Not deliver and find a market. It's..."

"Quite exciting by the sound of it."

"Yeah, really. Um. Are you right with the kids tomorrow? I need to follow some inquiries through."

"It's one of the things I'm supposed to be here for." She winks. She is relentless.

"About that."

"Hmm."

"You know I love you right?"

"Yes Jax." She puts the plates she's shuffling needlessly down.

"I'm just... I just... I am taking a stupid amount of time to get my head around how I feel about sleeping with you now that I'm the married one. I made promises you know?"

"I know, sweety. It's okay. Well, it's all a little over there somewhere. Always has been. Even before our beautiful Lara came along. Steve and I still... Pfff... Fucks me. It's a big mess of things. Things we just don't talk about and accept as our own normal and okay. Things that helped us work when nothing else helped." She looks hard at the pan she's scrubbing and laughs, "That was really helpful, huh?"

"Elly?" I ask. Naked. Sitting a few feet from where she washes dishes. "I don't know how this all works. My pretty wife is... Miles away. Miles. She is doing things. Her foundation. I'm just trying to... Keep things... Myself... All together. Our family. I love her so... So..."

"Jaxon, sweety. Shhhh." She plonks on my legs in her gown. I've forgotten that I'm naked and remembered it in the moment as well. I'm so exposed right now emotionally that my body is forgotten.

"She's so driven, Elly. I... Sometimes it feels like we're forgotten. Then I remind myself why she's doing it and who she's helping, but she's still not here. I just... Keep going for the boys."

"And you have an empty spot in your world where she should be. It's how it feels with Steve. I turn to talk to him and he's not there. I roll over at night to hold him and the bed is empty. I'm a big girl and I understand it but... There's still an empty spot."

"Shit. Sorry." I tell her. Her weight on me has me hardening beneath her legs.

"Ha. I was worried you didn't find me attractive anymore. Thought maybe now that I'm older... Silly. I'm forty-two. The kids have left home. If it wasn't for your little family, I'd have no-one when Steve's away. I feel so old sometimes."

She lifts her face from my shoulder where she's been cuddling onto me and kisses me gently on the lips. "How long have we been friends now, Jax?"

"I don't remember when we weren't. Fifteen years? Steve brought the wagon in for... That was god..." I don't remember and I can't think. She's opened her gown and she's naked underneath it. Her hot wet folds slide along my erection as we speak and I remember my Lara and the last time we made love as Elly tilts her hips and invites me inside her.

It was the evening before she left and we were sitting on the veranda looking up at the stars and she simply pulled me out into the moonlight and mounted me much like Elly has. She rode me all the while with her head thrown back marvelling at the milky way.

My own eyes are closed in recollection and revelation at the sensations of Elly sliding hotly on me. Slowly and luxuriously, she just snuggles into my chest and moves me inside her gently.

"Do you remember when we first got together, Jaxon sweety?" She mumbles into my neck.

"Hmm."

"I wanted to feel guilty."

"Hmm."

"I couldn't. I thought I should."

"Hmm." In my defence, it's hard to speak when you're this deep in pleasure and the moment.

"Do you feel guilty, Jax?"

"No."

"Take me to bed."

And that cadence that once was our pattern of pleasure, one that contrasts I'm reminded in the moment, with that of Lara and I, returns like it was only yesterday when we last loved like this; friends who's bodies spoke to each other when their lovers couldn't. Her generous breasts filled my eager hands instead of Lara's pointy smaller ones, and my mouth explored her in the ways it remembered she enjoyed.

I shouldn't have been thinking of Lara. I should have been thoroughly present. Surely Elly deserved that. But my mind drew endless contrasts and similarities as if needling me with the iniquity of the moment.

While Lara likes soft butterflied whisps of licks on her tidy looking lips and clit, Elly endures with much delight, harsher nipping and sucking and thrusting with my tongue. Lara's shaved mound and her trim physique poke bony at me while I dig my jaw into her, kissing at her clit but Elly's bushy wet mess of dark curls sings sweetly to me of arousal as I smear at the flappy core of her.

Her fingers in my hair drag me and direct me, where Lara would simply urge me and direct me with her vocalisations. Elly grunts to an early orgasm and holds me hard against her bucking self while I struggle for breath.

It's wrong I feel, to compare the women. They are each their own temple of woman. I love their bodies and adore my worship at them but in my heart, I realise something. I understand. This with Elly is pleasure and friendship. With Lara it is more. This moment of connection and intimacy that I share with Elly is beautiful in its own right but somehow lacks.

It lacks the deep connection of hearts that Lara and I share.

And that realisation forgives me.

I forgive myself this physical pleasure and consume it eagerly now that I understand how Lara could allow it. How Steve could allow it, even. It is such a poor consolation for what Elly and I both miss but we can warm each other when they can't, so we shall.

It is still welcome and wonderful when I rise on her to feast now at her breasts with their large dark nipples and slide myself inside her. She smells different, she tastes different and it's good because she is her and Lara is Lara and I'm right here, right now and so it should be different as I pump into her how she likes.

She feels different. Not as exquisitely tight as Lara. Yielding and welcoming; wet and sloppy and wonderful where Lara is intense and hot and slick and wonderful in a different way.

And then bodies do what they do and we crash through our chased releases. Me flooding into her and Elly milking at me. Our eyes are locked together in total knowledge of our act and acceptance of our need for each other then we roll apart and smile.

"Too long, Jaxon sweety. Too long. Let's not fuck about in the future hey?" She asks with her fingertips brushing my jaw.

"I forgot." I huff. "So different but..."

"Shh... It's us Jax. How you and I work. It took me a long time to stop comparing notes and to accept it was just the way we work. I need to wee."

I laugh at the remembered pattern.

From then on, a new pattern emerged. At least once a month, Lara had to spend a night or two at least, away and Elly shared my bed as well as my family for those few days. No one spoke about it. The kids didn't even ask why Aunty Elly was sleeping in our bed.

Lara grew her business until she had her home office, one in Roma and one in Brisbane so that she was able to service the whole of south west Queensland's veterans. Josh was two in no time. She missed that birthday while she was auditing her Roma office and helping the manager, Warren, interview applicants for a psychologist position.

Elly sent her loads of pictures from the birthday party. Her favourite was of Josh opening our present to him and of the surprise and excitement on his little face. It was a workbench just like Daddy's with tools and plastic nuts and bolts to undo and redo. I think he's gonna be the spanner twirler of the two boys. He's always tinkering in the shed with me.

Ironically, it was Peter O'Rielly, Sammy's father, who helped turned my farm around. That day I was mowing the lawn and had my epiphany, I thought perhaps he could help me with industry knowledge in relation to the supply and demand of turf. God knows I could grow grass. I spent half my life slashing and mowing.

He answered my email inquiry asking for an hour or so of his time the following morning and I met him for lunch at the City Golf Club. It was not so awkward as I had worried it would be.

"Jaxon mate." He called warmly from the bar, rising to shake my hand and slap my shoulder. "How've you been?"

I filled him in on my life and family.

"Oh bejesus an get fooked, Kathleen will have a hernia when I tell her you married Lara. She hated the wee lass and you'd know yourself."

"Turf you say?" He asked me more seriously over our steaks. "The problem with turf is quantity and sizes. I might go six months without needing any and then I'll have a development and not be able to get the quantities I need in the time frame I want. When I do get it, it's cut in wee dainty pieces. If only an I could get it in metre wide rolls by the semi-trailer load."

"Standardised machinery." I tell him. "I've done a little research and most builders only require small amounts for little yards."

"When I built in Highfields, I had thirty, three-acre blocks to turf and you can imagine the cost and labour."

"Three-acre blocks are probably not the norm though, Peter."

"To be sure." He nodded. "I've another wee development in planning presently. Forty-two half acre plots with good sized family homes on them. Grand market at the moment for homes for young families and council want them all fenced and landscaped before keys are handed over. It's gonna be a nightmare. If you get serious about farming turf you call me, boy. I know a few builders in the game too."

We finished our meals and shared a couple of Jameson's at the bar.

"When I got your email, I was quite sad at how we treated you."

"You always held me to a standard, Peter. I think my success with the garage was partly due to that."

"Yes and well, Kathleen. She can be a harsh woman. I heard her at the funeral. I am sorry for that. Here lad." He pulled a manilla folder from his briefcase. "It's not much. But I was able to get these from Samantha's room. Bloody woman keeps it like a shrine."

Opening the folder, I see it contains photographs and other keepsakes. I close it quickly in a bid to shore up my threatened tears.

"Thanks, Peter. From Lara and me. She'll be as much..." I need to stop talking before I blubber.

"Stay in touch. As time goes by, I'll be able to sneak a few more bits and pieces past her majesty."

"Will do. I should..."

He shakes my hand and surprises me with a quick hug.

"Tiocfaide ar la." He nods. "That's what she would have told you. But now..."

"Now she has her angel's wings."

"True that and it is."

I am afraid that I became almost as driven in my turf farming idea as Lara was with her business. After many agronomists, surveyors, civil engineers and a two hundred-thousand-dollar overdraft, "Water's Turf" was flat out. I had a forty-eight-inch cutter and a more traditional eighteen-inch harvester as well. The forty-eight cost as much as a luxury car and the layer that complimented it as much as a sports car.

That layer did not sit idle. Along with Peter's larger blocks it was kept very busy with sporting fields and golf clubs. In short time it became quite evident that I was unable to run the farm by myself and I employed Mick's brother Alan, and his wife Sue. In our first year we turned over almost two million dollars but never really made much profit as it was all reinvested into machinery and sheds.

One of Lara's ideas was a major turning point in securing a good section of the homeowner / owner-builder market. At her suggestion, I had the old Commer truck painted and Toby fixed the motor. It was pale pink and Lara named it 'Angel', after Samantha's callsign. People loved the little vintage truck turning up with their small deliveries of turf. It became an icon that graced our website and gave people, me included, a lot of joy.

~~<>~~

"You can't stop the girl from going

You can't stop the world from knowing

The truth will set you free."

As happens when life is really busy, relationships get more than just a little neglected.

I was sitting in a motel room in Brisbane after having a really long day top dressing and laying an oval in Aspley. Sue, Alan's wife sat across from me at the motel restaurant and looked, as usual quite perky in a young twenty-something sort of way.

"I always feel like I'm on a date with a hot rich older dude." She smiles at me.

"Huh?"

"When we travel."

"Oh." Oh shit.

"Big day today." I tell her. "Thanks for your work on the layer."

"Got it done, boss."

We eat our meals and sit a while at the lounge bar like we usually do. She drives the layer for me on these trips and Alan keeps things humming back at home. She's picking chips off my plate. I'm full and tired and the smell of soap on my skin kind of lullabies me a little.

"Walk me back to my room?" She asks, smiling.

"Sure. It's kind of on my way." I laugh.

At her door she shuffles a little then relinquishes the hand that she's been holding since we left the restaurant.

"You want to... Ah... Come in, Jax." She looks up at me with blue eyes that remind me of my wife so far away. She's in Roma this week. Looking at the airport and trying to work out with local air services how to get remote veterans to Brisbane most efficiently.

"Umm."

She trails a finger down my chest and tugs at my belt.

"Shit."

"I'm kinda... Well. Come on. No one will know. And..."

"Shit."

"Damn it." She shakes her head and looks down at her feet. "Look, just don't tell Alan boss. But... BIG crush. Just saying and... Good night Jax. You're a good man."