Hands on the Wheel Ch. 02

The next day he showed up at her desk again. He was puzzled by the look Woodley gave him as they passed the door of the office suite she shared with Jeremy, but figured it was just Woodley being Woodley and who understood her? Hell, no one even knew where she lived.

Again they walked to Starbucks and talked about everything and nothing. On the way back to their cars, he worked up the nerve to take her hand. He was afraid she would pull away or think he was being weird, but instead she laced her fingers through his and graced him with a stunning smile. He grinned like an idiot all the way back, and almost fainted when they reached her car and, standing on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek then rubbed it gently with the back of her hand.

"I think I like you a lot, hero, and I think you just might like me too." Before he had a chance to respond, she repeated her exit routine and peeled down the ramp.

She called him that night and said she had meetings the next two days, but would he be interested in getting together Saturday night? He quickly said sure—Jesus! You sound like some eager hick from Iowa!. She said she'd pick him up at 7:00, she knew where he lived, dress casual, what sort of food did he like? He noticed that she seemed to be taking charge of their relationship—if that's what it was—and that didn't upset him the least little bit.

They went to a quiet little Italian restaurant in Cupertino. She asked him to drive the Porsche both ways, and when they parted in front of his apartment she didn't kiss his cheek, she tenderly kissed his lips and hugged him longer than the ubiquitous ceremonial squeeze that seems to have replaced the handshake. He called her just before he went to bed and said he had a wonderful time and hoped she did, too. "And I you," she responded. He fell asleep with a smile on his face.

He called her again the next morning and took her to Sunday brunch in the City. They spend the afternoon walking through the Steinhart Aquarium and Golden Gate Park, then ate crab and greasy fries from a food truck. He took the lead in their relationship (or thought he did) and they became an exclusive couple (or he thought they did). Their kissing became more intense, leading to some passionate sessions on her couch that ended in mutual masturbation.

Late one Friday night five months after the awards banquet, they were dancing slowly at the Top of the Mark. The small dance floor was crowded but quiet. Ivan gently kissed Jean's ear. "Jean..."

"Hmmmm?" She was almost purring.

"Will you marry me?" She stopped, stepped back, and looked him straight in the eye.

"Seriously?" He pulled her back against him, slowly resumed dancing, and again kissed her ear.

"Absolutely." Again, she stopped and stepped back.

"Then why aren't you on your knee and where the hell is my ring?" Again he resumed dancing.

"Because I can't dance on my knees and—" He kissed her and teased her lips apart. When he pushed his tongue into her mouth, she felt something hard on the tip. Her eyes opened very wide, and she slowly reached up and took the foreign object from her mouth. It was a simple 1-carat solitaire diamond ring.

"How did you...I don't believe...what if I'd..." He took the ring from her and slipped it on her left hand.

"Was that a yes?" She put a hand on either side of his face and pulled him into a sloppy kiss.

"Absofuckinglutely, mister. And we're leaving right now." She led him back to their table, down to the lobby, and retrieved her Porsche from valet parking.

She didn't let him drive this time. Pushing the 911 as if she were shooting for the track record at Nürburgring, she got them back to her apartment in less than half the time it had taken him to get them to San Francisco. She started shedding clothes as soon as they stepped in the door; he followed along, gathering up the discards. By the time they reached the bedroom all she had on were her CFMPs and a thong.

"No more blue balls or vibrators! If we're gonna be man and wife, we'd better find out if your tab A fits my slot B. Now why the hell have you got so many clothes on?"

Ivan realized that she was taking the lead back, and again he didn't care. He wasn't stripping quick enough for her, so she slapped his hands and did it herself.

"I know you're pretty good at the preliminaries, so we're gonna jump right to the main event the first time." She pushed him down on the bed, straddled him, grabbed his cock to position it, and sat all the way down in one plunge. She was so lubricated that even though it was a pretty tight fit, he slid right in without any resistance. They both groaned at the instant shock of pleasure. She started moving about more axes than he knew women had, and in less then two minutes they both stiffened and spasmed in ecstatic bliss.

"There. You've fucked me good and proper. Now we can make love the rest of the night." And so they did.

The next morning she called her parents in Connecticut and he called his in Iowa. Yes, they were sure, no they hadn't set a date yet, probably in West Hartford, of course in the church, no Jean's not pregnant.

The next few months flew by. Jeremy had sounded pleased when they announced it, but Brian's response was oddly subdued. Ivan had the feeling that Brian thought he was making a mistake, but neither brought it up and the awkwardness between the two friends soon passed. Brian agreed to be his best man, Ivan's two brothers would be groomsmen, and Jean recruited her attendants from high school and college friends in Connecticut.

_________

Ivan and Jean flew into Hartford three days before the wedding. After growing up in fundamental-Protestant, small-town Iowa, then establishing his professional life in snarky-agnostic, sloburban Silicon Valley, Ivan wasn't prepared for the culture shock posed by an Irish-Indian household in the class-conscious, hyper-religiosity of urban Connecticut. Oh, they welcomed him enthusiastically into their family, but they all seemed to have a serious case of ADHD: they talked too fast (and incessantly), walked too fast, worked too hard, and always seemed to have to be doing something. He was exhausted by the time he fell into his bed in the guest room.

Alone, of course. With the apparent exception of Jean, the whole family was proudly, devoutly Roman Catholic; there would be no carnal carryings-on in the FitzHenry household.

And the wedding prep! Thanks to a dispensation from the Archbishop, the wedding would be a Mass despite Ivan's not being Catholic. Jean's mother, Samreen, was totally immersed in last-minute details. Her father, Eamonn, was an ordained Permanent Deacon; he would read the Gospel, preach the homily, and serve at the altar with the priest. Topping it all, the priest would be Jean's brother, Steven.

Ivan felt like a leaf carried on a rain-swollen stream as the hour approached. He offered to help, but everyone seemed to take their responsibilities as a holy order; he could but simply watch and wait, try to stay out of the way, and collapse each night into his empty bed, exhausted.

After three days of frenzy and fret, the ceremony itself was almost anti-climactic. Jean was beautiful, of course, as she floated down the aisle at St. Brigid on her father's arm to Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary (the only time she overrode her mother's choices was to replace Pachelbel's Canon in D—which Jean airily dismissed as Taco Bell's Cannon). They knelt before the priest until it was time to stand for the vows, returned to their prie-deux for communion, then stood for the final blessings.

The reception at the Marriott Courtyard in Farmington was more boisterous than Ivan expected. The Irish (and wannabe Irish) from Eamonn's family far outnumbered the more reserved south Asian relatives of Samreen, and the young friends of Jean and her brothers—she was the only female and oldest save one of the six FitzHenry siblings—were determined to make the occasion memorable.

Eamonn shut down the open bar at nine, but the band continued to play for an hour and a half, at which point hotel security "suggested" that the band pack up their gear and the raucous party break up. By that time Ivan and Jean had already slipped up to their bridal suite and were eagerly consummating their marriage. They honeymooned for five days in Manhattan, staying at the Harvard Club courtesy of Eamonn and Uncle Sean, both Harvard Law grads. They saw the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Metropolitan Museum, The Cloisters, two plays, and a great deal of each other.

A week after the nuptials, they were back living in what had been Jean's apartment and toiling in the Golkonda vineyards.

_________

Marriage wasn't quite what Ivan expected. They both seemed to have little time for anything except work and sleep, were seldom able to eat meals together or even spend much time together. The closeness, the friendship that would enhance the passionate love that brought them together, wasn't developing as he hoped it would.

Brian had his development crew pushing hard to finish a security upgrade for Kimberly. They had caught and hot-patched a potentially serious vulnerability in the transfer protocol between their cloud server and a Kimberly local host, but Brian wanted to refresh the beta sites before the formal release targeted for the beginning of the next quarter.

Because Jean was the only Golkonda employee with PR responsibilities, she was spending almost half her time at the Silicon Valley PR agency they had under contract; she also had to juggle growing demands for interviews, briefings, and other miscellaneous meetings that often took her out at night. They still had sex two or three times a week, but at times it seemed almost passionless. Ivan's disappointment was being replaced by worry.

A week before their first anniversary, he texted Jean that he wanted to talk with her before they went to bed that night. He knew that would puzzle her, maybe even worry her a bit. Why would he text her something like that? What could he want to talk about? She texted back that was no problem, she didn't have any meetings or interviews, she'd bring home Cobb salads and garlic bread.

For the first time in months, Jean was home when he got there. She had set out candles and wine to accompany their salads. How long it had been since they both sat down for an unhurried, pleasant meal? He hadn't noticed that Jean was trying to mask her unease, nor how his effusive praise for the occasion seemed to increase her anxiety. They traded strained comments about the weather (boringly delightful) and how their days had gone (SSDD, they both agreed). Finally Jean couldn't stand it any longer.

"What's wrong, Ivan? You're worrying me." He didn't have her experience speaking on her feet, so he waited a long beat before replying. Someone observing them would describe her look changing from concern to near-dread.

"I'm not sure. It just doesn't seem like marriage is bringing us closer together. Sometimes, in fact, it seems like we're growing apart, and I don't know what to do about it. Have you noticed anything like that?"

She tried to cover up her sigh of relief as a cough, then reached across and patted his hand. "We're both under some job stress, and we've been way too busy. We haven't had time to really talk with each other, let alone work on being a family." She paused dramatically—a pregnant pause? She smothered a wicked chuckle before it could escape—then stood up to lay the groundwork for playing her trump card. "I'll be right back."

She quickly went up the stairs to their bathroom and returned carrying a round plastic case. Without sitting, she opened the case, revealing half a dozen pills and 22 empty slots. "Maybe it's time we started working harder at being a family. Should I keep taking these or throw them away?"

Ivan couldn't hide his joy. He'd been afraid to suggest that maybe it was time to start trying to have a baby, because Jean had shown little enthusiasm the few times they had discussed it. "Discussed" wasn't really an accurate description of the exchanges; virtually every time he had brought up the subject of children, Jean's response was a question. "Are we financially secure enough?" or "Shouldn't we wait until Golkonda goes public?" or "Do we want to raise our children in an apartment with no yard or playroom?"

He didn't trust his voice or emotions, so his answer was simply a smile and two words that came out as a whisper: "Toss 'em."

Jean walked over to the sink, forced the pills one by one from their near-impregnable plastic prisons, and dropped them into the drain. She turned the faucet on full blast, then briefly ran the disposer. In a few seconds the pills were mush headed for San Francisco Bay via the Palo Alto water treatment plant, and Ivan's concerns were starting to fade into memories.

The bliss lasted almost three months. Their intention to impregnate Jean spurred them to more frequent and, for a while, more passionate couplings, but Jean didn't get pregnant. When she saw how upset Ivan it made Ivan, she scheduled appointments for them at a fertility clinic. Both were pronounced "fertile as a turtle" (the doc really had to work on her standup chops). Her advice was closer to condescension than concern: "Keep trying, kids."

They did, but to no avail. As Ivan's frustration grew, their sex life began to fade and Jean's absences increased. About the only time they spent together was late at night, when they both were tired and cranky, or on weekends, when they both spent a lot of time napping, trying to catch up on sleep lost during the week.

The beginning of the end happened late one morning when, for a change, Ivan came home for lunch and picked up a package left beside the kitchen door. It was addressed to Jean from Guajarat Biosciences Ltd. in Bengaluru; a gummed label that read "Opened and repacked by U.S. Customs and Border Protection" had been hastily slapped on, obscuring part of the address label. He started to fix a ham sandwich, then opened his laptop and googled the company. His curiosity surged when he found it was a pharmaceutical company.

Feeling curious but a bit guilty, he gave up the sandwich project and reopened the package where the feds had hastily taped it. The contents startled him: a plastic bottle labeled "Levonorgestrel 1.5 milligrams 100 tablets." WTF? A quick check with google gave him the answer: the active ingredient in morning-after pills. He thought he felt his heart stop, or at least skip a couple of beats. Why they hell would Jean need abortion pills?

He couldn't answer that, but he was sure he didn't want her taking them. Another consultation with Dr. Google revealed a suitable look-alike; it took him less than half an hour to get a bottle of 100 from Walgreen's. After another half-hour, he had sliced off the bottom of the bottle with an X-Acto knife, replaced the abortion pills with the imposters, then resealed the bottle with super glue and re-taped the package. Even he had a hard time telling where the cuts were.

He put the abortion pills in a baggie, replaced the package beside the kitchen door, and returned to work with the baggie in his messenger bag. After Brian noticed him sitting in front of his laptop staring at nothing for the third time in an hour, he called Ivan into his office. "Okay, spill. And don't give me any of that 'nothing' shit. I know you too well to believe it." Then he sat back and waited.

Ivan didn't respond for several minutes, but the silence got too heavy. "I...something happened...I don't...it doesn't make sense..."

"No shit, sherlock. You haven't said a thing that makes any sense. Let's try again. What happened?" Ivan didn't wait so long this time.

"Uh...I found a package when I went home for lunch. It was for Jean, from a drug company in India. It was 100 morning-after pills. I don't have a clue why she needs them, we're trying to have a baby. And how can she afford that many? They're around $30 apiece." Brian sighed heavily and shook his head.

"Jesus, Brian, Vicki and I tried to warn you before you got married. You might be trying to have a baby, but she's not. She's fucking around on you and found a way to do it bareback without worrying about getting pregnant. She's no more likely to have a baby than you are."

When Ivan told him that he'd replaced the abortion pills, Brian leaned back in his desk chair and smiled. "Well I'll be go to hell. For once you've done something smart." He thought for a minute. "Why don't you have dinner with Vicki and me tonight. You can tell Jean that I made you stay late to finish some bullshit project, but chances are she won't be home, anyway. What did you do with the morning after pills?" Ivan took the baggie out of his messenger bag and showed it to Brian. "Give those to me. Vicki volunteers at a shelter for teenage girls, and they use these from time to time to deal with girls who've been raped."

Ivan handed him the baggie, but said he'd rather not have dinner with them. Brian scooted his chair up, stood and leaned forward with his hands on his desk, and put on his Manager's Voice. "Listen, dipshit, I care about you too much to let you keep wandering through the Fire Swamp without a sword. Never mind the R.O.U.S, you're with somebody who's going to push you into the quicksand sooner or later. When we leave work, follow me home. You and Vicki and I need to parley."

Brian was punching buttons on his phone before Ivan was out of his office. They didn't leave work until 6:30. Ivan called Jean just before they left to tell her he would be late, but had to leave a message. When they got to Brian's place, the two guys went out in the living room with beers while Vicki put the food on the table. After Ivan stopped gushing about the beef stew and cole slaw—Jean had cooked dinner maybe three times since they were married—the three of them exchanged small talk.

In an unusual breach of manners, Brian checked his cell phone several times. The last time, he texted for a while, then tucked it in his shirt pocket. When they finished eating, Vicki got two more beers and shooed them back into the living room; she cleared the table, refilled her wine glass, and joined them.

Brian started off by saying he had told Vicki what Ivan found, then got up and left the room. Vicki took a sip of wine, then looked apologetically at Ivan. "He wants me to start off, because he thinks you're more apt to believe me." She took a bigger slug of wine. "This isn't easy for me, Ivan, you're a great guy. I hate to hurt you because you're already hurting, but if we don't say something you're going to get hurt a lot more." Ivan's threat level went to Defcon 2.

"When Brian and I told you a couple of years ago that Jean might not be ready for marriage yet, we weren't exactly honest with you. We knew she wasn't ready for marriage, because she was having sex with any and every man she found attractive. It was pretty common knowledge around the company, at least among the women and the guys she, um, fancied. She didn't limit herself to Golkonda guys, either; it's tough to know how many stories to believe, but I'm pretty sure she's slept with a few dozen guys in the past 4 or 5 years."

Ivan gasped. "But—"

"Yes, that means since you've been married. Not for the first year or so, but she started again a month or so before that first anniversary party we had for you two. You don't deserve to be treated like that, Ivan, but I've known Jean long enough to be pretty sure that she'll keep doing it because she doesn't see anything wrong with it and thinks she's too smart to be caught."

Ivan was numb. Even though he had considered that possibility when he was trying to figure out the abortion pills, it was still a body blow to hear it from Vicki. She had no reason to lie, and had known Jean longer than Ivan had. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing would come out.