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Chapter 12

It’s a long night. Taylor’s attack went on and lasted most of the night. He either passed out from the pain of it all or it finally let him go. He slowly began to untense and unwind about 3:40 AM, we’d gone to bed about 10 so that was almost six hours of holding him and being only able to offer him my small comforts as I held him and watched as he went through hell.

I learned a hard lesson tonight. I learned what it’s like to watch somebody you love more than breathing go through something like this and not being able to do anything about it.

Lord forgive me when he untensed and went limp I checked his breathing, I checked his pulse. He was asleep, finally asleep. I tried to get some sleep too but with the feelings swirling around inside me it was a definite no go. I kiss him and tuck him in with my pillow more and slip off to the kitchenette and make myself a pot of tea tossing in with the chamomile a bit of rosemary, I heard it’s supposed to be soothing. It doesn’t taste too bad so I take my meds and get my tea and slip back into out bedroom and into bed setting the teapot and cup on the nightstand and read from my beat up old bible sipping my tea, and going between watching Tay sleep and talking to my God. I thank him for blessing me, I thank him for our love and I ask him to help me, I ask him to lead me to the strength to be there for Taylor. I read for a few hours before I feel better, balanced I guess.

I put my bible into my nightstand, pick up my cell phone and send out a text to everyone that Tay had a real hard night and we’re going to try to recover for awhile. We should be up by at least two in the afternoon. I set my alarm on the phone to play “Kiss from a Rose.” to wake us for about one in the afternoon. That done I get into bed properly and move and slide into the sheets and shimmy over until I’m spooning with him. I reach over and lift up his arm and settle in so it’s wrapped around me. My fingers laced in his and feeling him breathing against me I’m lulled into sleep.

It’s true you can fall in love with someone more and more every second of every day. You can fall deeper in love with them because of the fights and misunderstandings and even being sick, and even being helpless as you watch them suffering. Taylor walks through his own personal hell because he loves me. I love him even as it tears at me because helping him, saving him is out of my hands. And I love him more, because it’s so hard. I know that some people say love should be easy.

Love is easy, it’s keeping that love despite life is what’s hard. It’s why to me there’s so much divorce and stuff nowadays, life gets hard and they get mad, sad, hurt, frustrated and take things out on each other. If you love them they’re what you reach out for, they are the person you just be vulnerable enough to say… Help me, I need you.

As I hear that opening music it’s cleat to me as anything. This is real, Taylor and I are real, our love is real because last night, hell the last two weeks plus has been hard but…as hard as last night was. I wake to the music and feel his arms tighten around me and he’s shaky, I can feel the tremor in his body but I know he loves me and I know I love him more than I did when I had closed my eyes.
“I love you Taylor.” I whisper to him before turning around. He buries his face into the side of my neck. Kissing me there, nuzzling me and he rubs his face against the stubbly hair on my head, breaking that up with random kisses on my head, and neck, shoulder and ear. He whispers. “Thank you.”
I roll over turning around to face him.

I feel my heart catching in my throat. He’s beautiful, I know I’ve said it before but it’s true. Especially this morning. He’s got that sleepy kitten thing he has first thing in the mornings mixed with the messy hair, the need to shave and the hints in his face and eyes of how hard he had been crying last night. He leans in and kisses me. I kiss him back and we spend at least five minutes just kissing each other.

He’s shaky as he’s touching me, that frayed shake of his nerves not quite acting right. It’s upsetting to him. “Tay, Tay baby it’s alright. It’s just a bit of the shakes.” I take his hands and put them on my breasts. “See honey, you’re my boob vibrator.” I try to say in my best attempt at wide eyed innocence. It doesn’t work but It get’s him laughing. I roll over on top of his and kiss him and let him fondle me to his hearts content, well mine too but after a maddening our of attention his touch becomes smooth and my panties are…an hour of tender attention to my breasts, they’re actually aching and sore now from the stimulation and swelling from the blood flow. He made me uhm…yeah…twice from all that foreplay.

Is it foreplay when it’s that gentle, dedicated, beautiful? Just his hands and his lips touching me in hundreds of different ways and textures and speeds. I loved it, it was so good for me on my end but it did do what I really wanted it to do and he stopped shaking as he touched me. The look on his face when he noticed that was what took me over the edge the second time as little tears had gathered in his eyes and he reached up and stroked my breast just ever so with the back of his hand as he touched my face and smiled…”Thank you, ….God, Jen thank you.”

So was that making love too?
Love heals right?
I believe it does.

It took only seconds after that and Tay rolls us over and makes love to me. It’s been awhile since we made love like this. Oh, I hadn’t enjoyed this nowhere near as much before but we know more now. I love wrapping my legs around him, it feels right. I want to have this be really right between us in the baddest way. I get into it though, It’s way more for him than for me but he’s feeling so much better right now and so confident and feeling strong. The fact he’s this burning hot and feeling so passionate for me, I’m into it. Really into the way he wants me.

I’m so sore as I take a bath and get cleaned up. Taylor shower and kissed me and rumbled downstairs like a herd of animals. I hear my family after a bit and I’m still soaking and soothing when I hear Holly knock and Nin.
“Yo, you here Jenna?”
“I’m in the tub!”
“Can we come in?”
“If you want.”
They both traipse in well Holly does, Njinda or Nin wouldn’t ever be that brazen even if she was by herself. Holly passes me a strawberry milkshake in two of our take out cups. I take it and bliss out for a minute. I love strawberries as much as I love chocolate. Oddly I’m not a fan of the two mixed together, especially with flavors. If I’m having chocolate and strawberries I want both to be real. I don’t like chocolate with orange either.
“So I heard it was a hard night last night?” Holly asks me.
“Yeah, Tay opened up to me about the accident and his folks and the way he hates the hospital so much.”
“That’s good Jen he needs to let some things go.”
“Yeah, we both do but after that he broke down and as he did he got hit with another attack.”
Both the girls wince and look concerned. I get out of the tub and we talk as I’m getting dressed and lotioning up myself and uhm parts and my girls and get dressed. Just Haines for girls in rose trimmed grey and a comfy pair of my old jeans faded and a heavy sleeveless gym tank. I wear my sneakers and just ankle socks. Y’know it took me forever to get used to those? Too many years as a jock-boy and wearing sports socks. I still like them but I really love just wool socks in the winter especially around the house.

As I’m getting dressed we talk. Holly wants details about the uhm fun this afternoon I had with Taylor. I’m a little hesitant at first and the more we talk the more that I let loose and get into talking about the sex. I mean we made passionate love and then we had hard sweaty dirty sex. It gets a bit raunchy as we talk and Holly is far worse than I am by like five hundred percent. Poor Njinda is quiet, she’s not used to this stuff even being a topic of conversation. She’s somalian and women have certain roles in her old country especially if you live in the Muslim dominated extremist regions. She’s scared of the topic at first actually until we get her to open up as she does we go downstairs and I get to hear of the most horrible fucking thing I’ve ever heard of…Female circumcision. There’s tears in her eyes as we sit beside her and she tells us.

“Back in my village in Somalia we had lived good. My father was a proud man with good livestock and daughters. The village headman wanted young girls for himself and he say he was told that his could get himself rid of the Aids by giving it to young virgin girls. He had come to my father and demanded us. They argued and fought and my father killed him. The militia led by the Imam had come and they shoot my father.

It was the next month and we had lost everything as our uncles took what was fathers and left us with nothing because they were petty and jealous men. My mother cursed them and soon came the Imam with his men. He say we were prideful, that we needed to be purified. His men and others his followers took us and they began to rip off our clothes and my mother she fought. They beat her with the rifles which is why she is hurt to be crippled today. They started to cut us, they cut it out of my sista who was older than me. They would have raped us for certain if they were not with the Imam. They started on me but this was when the peacekeepers came, Canadian and American soldiers come and stopped them. The Imam went mad and cursed at them and pulled a dagger and stabbed the medical person deep in the arm and the American soldier girl she shoot him in the head.

We got to fly to base in helicopter the taken to a refugee camp. They did all they could to fix my sista but the damage was too deep to the nerves. She got a pistol and shot herself a month later.

I am trying to become more North American, I am sorry that I do not talk as much of these things as you can. Home it’s is forbidden to act so. I am still trying very hard to adjust here.”

We’re all crying at this point and take turns hugging her and telling her it’s alright and that it’s safer here. It took awhile before the three of us are calmed down and my Grams came into the laundry room to check on us. “Is everything okay?”
I nod. “Yeah, now it is I guess. We were just kind of dishing about earlier today with Tay and me and we ended up with Njinda telling us about some of the terrible stuff that went on over there.”
“Like what?” she went over and wrapped Nin up in a big hug, while pulling a tissue out and wiping Nin’s eyes.
“How her family was attacked and how they tried to castrate the girls over there for defending themselves and not buckling over because some so called headman and Imam told them to do something.”
“Somalia right?”
“Yeah…I’ve never heard of something that bad, not first hand.”
“Your father did.”
“Really? How?”
“Johnny did a stint out of university in the armed forces and he was over there and he was in Golan Heights too as a UN peacekeeper. After that he went and worked for a few years in Amnesty International.”
“Uhm, wow.”
Holly nods. “Johnny is a really good guy.”
Njinda nods enough her braids get a shake from it. “He is a very good man, he went to fight and save people like me and my family from monsters, real monsters…”
We all hug her again.
Yeah we all cry some more too, even Grams. I look at her and she looks at me and there’s this shared bit of pride in her son/my father.

There’s part of me kind of ashamed at what I was going to try to do. I was having what I thought was a really hard life. I thought I was tortured. I’ll admit that Stephen and Natalie are sick, twisted and possibly evil people but I never even remotely lived through what Njinda had. I know that there’s a lot more to her past she went through. I know that there is shit that evil happening to people right now. I know I’m really, really lucky. Somewhere else, if I had grown up somewhere else and people found out about me I’d be killed or worse. I close my eyes for a minute and that God for everything I have, for being safe. For being loved. This really powerful though comes to me then and I can’t help but smile as I think it.

My daddy fought monsters…real ones.

It takes a bit before we get calmed down enough to get back to doing the laundry. There’s a lot of it, yeah, Taylor had stopped doing laundry days ago. The girls have theirs and Grams comes back in after slipping out to help and after the whole emotional bonding thing she came with chocolate cake and coffee because. “Here girls, if this isn’t a case for the healing powers of chocolate the I don’t know what is.”

It’s a thing I’m always going to treasure, it’s a thing that we can really bond over. The banter, hearing a hard, hard story like that and nurturing each other as we do our wash together. The three of us radically different from each other but here and as friends, sisters even and with Grams there as the older and wiser matron in our little circle of women. I feel real, and it’s more than that. It’s like getting a birthright. It’s being a part of something that’s so indelibly female. Stuff like this makes us women. Living, sharing, laughing, crying and healing ourselves and one and other.

It’s not all the EMO serious stuff either.

Apparently my gramps did their laundry and they take turns. I get introduced by these really entertaining monologues from both Holly and Grams about men and women and the lot in life of the modern woman. Grams taught high-school math and English so she is really smart, well read and has a whole life of funny stories.

We end up going to join the fellas down stairs as things are going in the laundry. They’re talking about real estate and are looking at places here of nearby for Gram and Gramps. Tay’s cooking and him and Tim and Davey are chiming in about the places and Davey has his laptop out and looking up some of the places and addresses on Google earth or maps or whatever. The kids are being taught crib or cribbage by gramps at the same time.

Tay makes spaghetti. Lots and lots of it with this really good sauce that is really not what I expected. Mine I grew up with was kinda like chili without the chili powder or the beans, Natalie was told by Stephan to put all sorts of stuff in it. Taylor’s is good, really good with San Morit…something canned tomatoes buzzed up in the blender, finely diced garlic and onions and a couple of bay leaves and chopped fresh basil and thyme and a little red wine and allowed to cook down. He says there’s a secret ingredient in it too. I don’t care but it’s good. He serves it with a bowl of grilled up chunks of Italian sausages and there’s bowls set out with stuff to put on it like cheese mostly for the kids and shaved off things of real parmesan reggi…something, a mixture of chopped up black olives and sun-dried tomatoes and a bowl of some kind of crispy Italian bacon called pancetta?

I get to have something called Polenta too which is made from corn meal but isn’t grits…it’s savory and amazing because it’s like corn cake but if it was grilled and all buttery and cheesy all the way through.

I eat way too much, I get the feeling Tay’s trying to get me to put on some weight. Dad has brought dessert. Gelato…Chocolate gelato might very well be silky smooth chocolate ice cream sex.

Taylor made hazelnut liqueur flavored whipped cream to go on top of it….

We ate then talked and even looked at some more of the houses out here for my grandparents. I’m out here, dad’s in northern California not al that far away so all the family they have left is out here. They want to be close to both of us. Grams wants us to be close enough that we can have Thanksgiving together this year. Christmas too.

I got all happy teary emotional just at the thought of having these holidays…Last year It was so lonely…I had nothing but…If it wasn’t for Nona bringing me a few Christmas cookies and hot chocolate I’d probably have killed myself. I cry a bit more sad by what I’m thinking and yet really happy I didn’t, God what I would have missed.

I’m crying more I’ve noticed and feeling more sexual too. I think the new prescriptions and the shots are starting to kick in. Yay! And yet I’m dreading the side effects I’m going to go through until my system levels off.

Ughh…it seems that doing laundry is a lot harder with a tummy stuffed full of pasta and gelato. I haul some stuff up to my clotheslines. Yep James is gone, I’d be beat up and battered and still would have been running the stairs up in the stands. I’m wiped just getting my basket of laundry to the roof. My shoulder is killing me and I still kind of like this feeling. Even this, more affirmation of non-guyishness.

Three hours later and everyone’s heading home, there’s laundry up on the roof that can dry there all night as far as I’m concerned. I’m folding towels and putting things away While Taylor bakes off a batch of bread for tomorrow. We’re having a family Sunday dinner or supper as the case may be. It’s something that Grams used to do back home and it’ll be my first one…ever. It was something we didn’t do in our house. I want to get some board games here too and a few odds and ends we didn’t realize we’re going to need. Taylor gave Grams a key to the diner so she can come and go as she pleases. She wants to do most of the cooking. She invited all of us girls to come and help. I’m kind of thrilled by it. It’s another milestone for me.

Taylor and I settle in for the night and just curl up together spooning all over again quite early too. He cuddles but I’m just still too sore from earlier. I love the fact that he wants me. I love the fact he’d never push me or pressure me. I fall asleep with one of his hands cupping one of my breasts.

Okay, I can live with that.