Lovers

Does he know about the baby?” Jared asked, worry contorting the features of his handsome face; the same handsome face that had knocked the wind out of Melissa’s lungs just a year earlier. There was no wind to be knocked out of her now. Rather, sense trickled into the cracks of her mind in a thick stream, betraying the daftness that had led Jared to ask such a question.

Several responses flooded her mind, but none was polite and she needed to stay in his favour so she shook her head slowly. Moments later, under his eager gaze, she replied “Three years after the fact?! I would be a fool to open my mouth about it.”

Jared sat back in his leather sofa, shirt unbuttoned low enough to liberate a few struggling chest hairs. He stared at the ceiling endlessly, quite possibly hoping for God’s finger to spell a solution for him up there. He was not ready for the trouble this kind of news would cause him. It would most certainly impose an instant family on him and the thought made him rub the same chest hairs, subconsciously massaging away the pain of what he wished now was an impending heart attack.

“This is not how I saw my life going.” He was honest; vulnerable even, but certainly fleeing the situation.

“Neither of us saw our lives going like this but we are here now and I want this baby. This might be my only one, Jay…” Melissa could hear the desperation in her voice and immediately resented herself for it. It was the same desperation with which she had pleaded with her husband to just be patient with her, she would eventually get pregnant. But he would hear none of it. She had taken too long. Three years too long and the anguish, as he had called it, had killed his love, need and desire for children. So he had taken matters into his own hands: a vasectomy. But he had loved her and of that there had been no doubt. Still, she had managed the ultimate betrayal with a man whose intelligence, it seemed, had only been imaginary.

“Well, I do not want it. You can keep it if you want but leave me out of it.”

“What?!”

“You heard me Mel. I cannot do this. Not now. Not with another man’s wife.”

“Let me get this right; you were fine having an affair with another man’s wife but refuse to be a father to your own child?”

Jared stood up, hands over the sides of his head, squeezing in agony, “Stop saying that!!! The child is not mine as well okay? Remember that night we had a threesome? With Robert? It must be his.”

“How dare you say that! I had the affair with YOU!”

“Yes. I know. But when Robert and I wanted a baby it was him who was the fertile one. Not me.”

“What?” Shocked. Breathless.

“Yes, Melissa. Robert and I are lovers.”