The next three days were a sexual paradise for the forty-two-year-old woman and the twelve-year-old boy. On one pretext or another, Laura managed to bring Joey home alone each day. From the moment they entered Laura's house until they climbed back into her Mustang for the drive back to the facility they were naked and doing things to each other.
They went to the bathroom together, took showers together, and fucked and sucked until they were both raw and chafed. Never in her life had Laura Norton felt so completely fulfilled and happy! Even her husband commented on it at dinner the fourth night.
"Your job certainly seems to agree with you, Laura," Jack said. "I haven't seen you so happy in years."
"I haven't been this happy in years, Jack," she replied, withholding the guilty secret of why she was so happy.
"You seem to have a glow," Jack added. "It's good to see you like this again. Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you. I have to go out of town for a few days on business."
"Oh?"
"It's the Federated account," he added a little vaguely.
For some reason, Laura knew that he was lying! It was nothing she could put her finger on, but she knew he was lying.
"How long will you be gone?" she asked softly.
"It's hard to say," he replied vaguely. "Not more than a couple of days. I thought that we'd leave Sunday evening."
"We? Jack, I can't possibly go now. I have so much to do," Laura protested. "Maybe if I had more notice…"
"I'm sorry, honey," Jack smiled. "I didn't mean you and me. I'm taking Candy Delany along. We're going to have to negotiate new contracts with Federated, and I'll need her to take notes in the meeting and type the contracts."
"You're taking Candy Delany on a trip out of town?" Laura asked with tight lips.
"Betty Morrow is on vacation, Laura," Jack said. "I'm sure Mike won't mind letting Candy go."
"You can't be serious!" Laura snapped, even though she knew he was. "You're going to take a seventeen-year-old girl on a business trip!"
"For God's sake, Laura!" Jack snapped. "It is a business trip! It's not as if we were lovers!"
Laura's nails bit into her palms and it was all she could do to control herself. Not lovers! Bullshit!!
"And just how do you think that Candy's parents are going to react to all of this?" Laura demanded.
"Hopefully, a lot better and more realistically than you are!" Jack shot back.
"Get off of that, Jack!" Laura snapped in warning. "You're not going to use that old trick of making me look like the guilty one! I'm not slipping out of town with a teenage sex bomb – you are!"
"Sex bomb? Oh come on, Laura!" Jack said with a forced laugh. "Candy is the daughter of our best friends…"
"I'm surprised you remembered that," Laura retorted with sarcasm dripping from her voice.
"… and my secretary," Jack continued. "Honestly, Laura, I can't see why you're making such an issue of this."
"You can't?"
"No, I can't!" Jack said with mounting anger. Laura could tell from his tone of voice that he was now beginning to see himself as the wronged. How could he? He'd been balling the young girl every afternoon, but now he could suddenly see himself as a paragon of virtue!
"I think you've lost your mind, Jack," Laura said firmly. "What's happened to your common sense, your usual good judgment?"
"What do you mean by that!" he snapped.
"Don't try to tell me that you don't know what people are going to say about you traveling around with a seventeen-year-old girl!"
The expression in his eyes, flashing only briefly, told Laura that she had touched a sensitive nerve, made a telling point.
"People who think things like that have lousy, dirty minds!" he shot back weakly.
Laura had a flash of intuition. Jack wanted to back down! He knew that what she was saying was right, and he really didn't want to go through with this ridiculous scheme. Yet she also knew that for some unknown reason he couldn't back down, that he had to go through with it. Why?
"Jack," she said quietly, "you're making a big mistake and you know it."
"That's your Goddamned opinion!" he retorted in a flash of anger.
"Yes, Jack, it is," Laura retorted. "And nothing you can say will change it. You can hire a secretary up there, and one of those Kelly girls. You don't have to take Candy and you know it."
"Candy knows our business," Jack offered weakly. "It would take a strange girl a day or more just to understand what we're doing."
"Bullshit!" Laura snapped. She wanted to scream at him that a couple of lays in a strange city with his seventeen-year-old mistress wasn't worth having eyebrows raised everywhere, but she forced herself to curb her tongue.
"I've never seen you so damned unreasonable about anything, Laura! You're being a real bitch about this."
"Not at all, Jack. I'm being very reasonable and trying my best to make you listen to reason. You're the one who's being a stupid, obstinate bastard about the whole thing! You've got it in your stubborn mind that you're going to take that young girl with you even if it destroys you. You don't care what it does to us, to your business, or anything."
"I just can't understand why you're being so over dramatic and making such an issue out of a couple of days business trip!"
"Because you're acting like a schoolboy following his penis around without using his brain!" Laura cried.
"That does it! That fucks it, Laura," Jack screamed. "I don't have to sit here listening to you when you're raving like a jealous maniac!"
Jack walked quickly out the front door and slammed it behind him Laura heard the engine of the Skylark in the driveway.
This wasn't the first time in their marriage Jack had stormed out the door, but it was the first time in a very long time.
Laura was livid! She was furious, both with him and with herself, and she paced the living room like a tigress until her anger began to subside.
After her daily adventures in paradise with twelve-year-old Joey, what right did she have to be mad at Jack for his affair with seventeen-year-old Candy Delany? She wasn't mad at him about the affair. It was taking Candy on a trip, and doing it publicly, that infuriated her. That was a challenge to their marriage, an open challenge!
Laura was willing to tolerate the affair. After all, wasn't she having one of her own? But she wasn't flaunting it for the world to see, for God's sake! And she wasn't challenging their marriage with it! She was trying to be discreet and maintain at least some semblance of their marriage.
She stopped pacing long enough to find a cigarette and light it. Why did she have the feeling that Jack really didn't want to go through with the trip? Her intuition told her this and her intuition was seldom wrong! Why?
Laura, shook her head and sighed, then walked out and began cleaning up the kitchen. Something else her intuition told her was that Jack would not back down on this. He would take Candy on the trip. They would fuck themselves weary and then come home. There was nothing Laura could do about it.
She turned out the lights in the kitchen and stood in the living room for a while thinking. The ball was in her hands now. Jack had tossed it to her with this trip. Did she want to let this be the last straw that broke up their marriage?
For all of his thoughts, and as mad as she was at him right now, Laura knew that she still loved Jack. They had lived together twenty-one years now, and she couldn't imagine a life that didn't include Jack.
The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Jack was trying to force the issue, that maybe he wanted to marry Candy and this was his way of forcing her to ask him for a divorce.
No, she decided, Jack might be going through his second childhood, but be was smart enough to know that society would never accept him marrying a seventeen-year-old girl, a girl young enough to be his daughter. She could just picture Mike Delany's reaction to that. And even as angry as he had been, Jack wasn't all that sure of himself.
"Well, I'm sure as hell not going to make it easy for him!" Laura said aloud as she went into the bedroom and picked up Jack's pajamas and pillow and threw them out in the hall as she closed and locked the bedroom door.