Sari's Bargain

Sari gave a gentle cry and suddenly began to writhe against me, endeavouring to force me ever deeper into her.

I seemed to go on for ever pumping my seed into her as she climaxed, not with screams or shrieks, but soft cries.

During my other sexual experiences, when I had finished my emissions, I was ready to withdraw. My immediate sexual energy spent, I lost interest until the next erection arrived. With Sari it proved different.

It was the connection, the physical union, I wanted with her. I had found an oneness with her beyond anything previously felt by me. I stayed with her, kissing her face and hair, fondling her breasts, while she continued in her own language what sounded like a melodic love chant.

We stayed long together and as eventually I withdrew Sari spoke one word, yet in that one word was a world of love.

“David.”

I lay beside her pulling up the covers over us, and held her to me. All the puzzlement and perplexity that had enshrouded our past relationship had finally resolved itself in this act of love. Now she lay peacefully in my arms as if she had finally come home and was safe.

We coupled once more that night before falling asleep. For the moment the probable difficulties before us played no part in my thoughts, and I think the same applied to Sari. We were content for the moment to live within our own capsule of love.

Chapter 16. The Pain of Love and Desire

Reality came with the dawn. I was awakened by Sari getting out of bed.

“I must get back to my room, darling…Lisa, she’ll be here shortly; she mustn’t know about us.”

I wanted to pull her back into the bed, to feel her body against mine and to…but I saw the sense in Sari’s move. I lay back thinking over our night.

Throughout the day Sari and I tried to behave as we normally would have done. I set to with my studies and Sari went off to her refugees. The problem was, an emotional dam wall had come crashing down and its flood had inundated me.

I had experienced wild sexual couplings many times before, but with Sari it was something different. I knew from my perspective that I had found what I had probably unknowingly been searching for with all the other girls. I thought of it as the ever flowing fountain from which I could always drink. Sari was that fountain.

After what seemed a long day she came to my bed again that night and we loved. Perhaps there was a touch of desperation in our coupling because we knew father was due home the following day. I wanted to beg Sari not to sleep with him but knew it could not be avoided.

Sari in trying to console me rubbed salt into the wound.

“Darling, you know I can’t be with you again until he goes off on another trip. When he gets back from these trips he can usually manage to…to…”

“Have sex with you,” I said bitterly.

“David, if I do become pregnant, it has to be his child, you understand that, don’t you?”

I understood all right. If she got pregnant the father would most likely be me, but I would have to pretend along with Sari that it was his.

“My bargain, David, remember?”

“Yes.”

With Sari still beside me I woke about two o’clock in the morning; that hour when the dark thoughts come welling up to overwhelm us.

Was I simply a dupe? Was all the talk about love and trust simply a way of getting me to make Sari pregnant, perhaps even to save her from being divorced by my father for not keeping her side of the bargain? Were the stories about her “hell” even true? And what of my father; was he as sick as she had implied?

In short, had I been played as a sucker by a woman who knew how to look after her best interests?

I must have moved because Sari stirred, came awake and looked at me.

“Awake, David, are you all right?”

She snuggled into me and at the touch of her body against mine my doubts vanished, for the moment.

The day that followed was one of agony for me. My father arrived home and looking for signs of ill health I could detect nothing unusual about him. My dire thought of the night came back to torment me.

I had to attend lectures that day so saw nothing further of Sari or father until the evening. I joined them for dinner and noted that father seemed to be in a particularly jovial mood, having just won himself an enormous fee for the defence he had conducted. I noted that Sari was using some of the endearments she had earlier abandoned.

A piercing blow was struck in my guts when rising from the table he said to Sari, “Let’s make an early night of it, my dear.”

Sari had said he could usually manage it when he came back from one of his trips; “He’s going to manage it tonight” I thought, and the image of father penetrating Sari sent waves of anguish through me.

Distraught I called for a taxi and went to a university club I belonged to and tried to drink myself into oblivion. I have no recollection of arriving home that night, except before falling still fully dressed into bed I vomited down the toilet pan.

When I woke up I felt sicker than I had ever felt in my life. The stink of whisky and vomit still clung to me and I shambled off to shower like a ninety year old man having a bad day.

I avoided breakfast partly because my stomach could not face it, and partly to avoid seeing either father or Sari. I fled for the sanctuary of the university and some laboratory work I had to do.

For the next two weeks I moved through a surreal landscape, playing cat and mouse with Sari particularly with her asking me if I was all right, and me plastering on a smile and assuring her I was perfectly okay.

Neither of us approached the other for sex. This could be put down to the presence of either Lisa or my father in the house, but in my misery I failed to see the logic of things and assumed Sari had no wish to copulate with me.

I thought of taking my sweet revenge and actually brought a girl into the house for the night. I made sure Sari saw her and understood what we were going to do. The young lady lasted about an hour and a half when, in a flaming temper she got out of the bed almost screaming, “What are you, some sort of weirdo; you can’t even get it up.” She left me feeling completely humiliated.

It had been true when I told Sari I wanted no other woman but her, and that truth was now rammed home to me. Having once, as it were, tasted Sari, all else was bitter to my palate.

I was in that abyss of misery that love knows when if thinks itself betrayed. Love then takes on the form of its opposite, hate. Yet that hatred is really self hatred; self hatred because one feels humiliated by the knowledge that one has exposed ones most sensitive self to the other, and it has been flung back in your face. At the end of the two weeks father was off again to another distant trail and huge fee. I had to face the reality that Sari and I would be alone in the house once Josie and Lisa had left for the night.

I tried to counter the situation by eating in the university cafeteria and at home shutting myself away in my study. It was a useless ploy.

Chapter 17. Reconciliation

On the second evening of father’s absence I was working, or trying to work in the study when there was a tap on the door. I told myself I could not hear it, but there was no escape. Sari after tapping again, walked in.

She came to me where I sat at the desk and knelt beside me and laid her head in my lap.

“Darling, I think I’m pregnant. I should have had my menstrual period last week. I’m always very regular, but it didn’t happen.”

“Father managed it after all I snarled,” wanting to hurt her as much as I could.

She raised her head and looked at me; “David!”

“Been having a good time with him, have you? Been telling him how much you love and trust him? How much you long to have his baby?”

That brief outburst of venom had exhausted me emotionally and I sat silent and rigid.

Sari spoke slowly and deliberately. There was no anger in her voice, only sadness.

“So that’s it, David. That’s why you’ve been avoiding me. Well, if you must know, your father did manage it the first night he came home, just. Since then nothing, and if it’s any consolation to you, I haven’t tried to get him to do anything.”

I looked at her face, searching for the expected signs of falsehood, of an attempt to smooth talk her way into my confidence again. I had to admit I saw nothing but deep sincerity.

The pent up emotions of the past two weeks surged up to overwhelm me, the tears came and I broke down into an outburst of weeping. Once started I could not stop; I felt Sari’s arms go round me and then her soft voice was comforting me.

“David, David my love, you’ve been tormenting yourself and it’s my fault; but darling you knew what I had to do, I didn’t hide it from you. You’ve doubted my love and there was no need, I spoke the truth to you.”

Her voice became brisker. “David, if I had just wanted to get pregnant, don’t you think I could have found some man with the right characteristics, the right colouring, to make me pregnant. Can’t you see if that was all I wanted it would have been easier, safer? But it was you I wanted...want…why couldn’t you believe that? I tried to tell you that for once in my life I wanted to be with a man I truly loved.”

She paused for a moment and then her voice became sad. “Not once have I lied to you, David except through my demeanour when I first came to this house, but every word I have spoken to you has been the truth.”

We have deceived your father, but that was to give him something he wanted very dearly. If you doubt my sincerity in this, then I promise you I shall never make any claims against your father’s wealth. I could say that when I have given him his child I shall leave here and never come back, but would you ask me to leave my child…our child, David?”

“Oh David, what a price we pay when we make such bargains as the one I made with your father. Is part of that price the loss of your love?”

“David, don’t you think I’ve suffered enough loss in my life? Do you really want to add one more loss?”

Shame overwhelmed me and I could say nothing, but Sari with that mysterious instinct women have for knowing what was needed said, “David I want you to come to bed with me. We don’t need to have sex, I just want to hold you and talk to you about our baby.”

I rose, drained of all emotion at that moment. She took me by the hand and led me to my bedroom. Later I realised her delicacy in not taking me to her bedroom where she slept with father.

That night she not only spoke to me of her joy at hopefully being pregnant – “we can’t be sure until I’ve had a proper examination” – but held me as if I were her child.

She had said we did not need to have sex, but with my head between her breasts desire took over. I took this opportunity to engage with her in one of the most intimate activities that can occur between a man and a woman.

I moved her to the side of the bed, knelt before her, and parting her legs bent forward to kiss her vagina. I ran my tongue over her outer lips, then pushed in to taste and smell her womanhood.

She began as she had before softy calling out, “David, oh David,” then as her orgasm approached the climax came upon her she once more began that low chant in her own language.

When she had calmed I moved her back to the centre of the bed and penetrated her. She was soft and relaxed as women often are after a fulfilling orgasm, but as I came into her she started the chant again.

Still lying inside her I asked her about this chant. She looked up at me shyly. “Darling, I can’t find the words to express what I’m feeling in your language.”

“But what are you saying,” I asked.

She gave a little laugh and said, “I need several words in your language to say the same thing, but they are words of love.”

“I sensed that,” I responded, “but try and tell me what they are.”

“Well, if you won’t laugh at me…”

“I promise I won’t laugh.”

“What my words say are, ‘You are my beloved one; I desire only you; you are my sacred place.’ But you see, I need only three words in my language to say that, and those three words are the deepest words of love and commitment we have.”

There was something almost biblical in those words, and I found myself overwhelmed by the power that lay behind them. I said, “That is the most exquisite thing anyone has ever said to me.”

I with drew my penis from her vagina and lay once more with my head between her breasts, hearing the beating of her heart. I felt her breathing grow more rhythmic and she slept.

Chapter 18. Looking into the Depths

I did not sleep immediately, by lay with her contemplating what she had said. I found it breathtaking in its commitment, but I also felt apprehensive. Could I live with that degree of commitment from another person? Did it not place a heavy responsibility on me, and could I ever match it?

I thought about my past relationships; how we had sneered at the idea of commitment and love, deriding them as “something for “dreary people,” not the free swinging “beautiful people.”

We live in an age in which people are throwaway items. When they no longer serve our ends, no longer fit in with or get in the way of our other desires and ambitions, we cast them aside.

Had Sari achieved nothing else in my life she would have forced me to look at what was inside. I did not always like what I saw but I acknowledged the truth of it. “People can get nailed to a cross for speaking the truth,” I reflected.

As I listened to her heart beat and felt her steady breathing I felt an overwhelming desire to care for Sari and that which she carried inside her. “Yes, I’m committed,” I thought. “More committed than any marriage ceremony could have made me.”

From then on there was no more doubt between us and I seemed to bask in an aura of love. When we could come together sexually it was always the sweetest coupling I had ever known, like Cleopatra she never sated my desires, but always fuelled the fires of my passion for her.

Medical tests confirmed her pregnancy and my father on being told was jubilant and cast grim looks of satisfaction on me. He would have his replacement son – he had no doubt it would be a son.

For a while he fussed over Sari, but the novelty seemed to wear off, and soon he was dashing about all over the country more than ever piling up his fees. There was something almost frenetic in all his rushing back and forth so it was I who enjoyed the beauty of Sari as her belly began to swell.

Perhaps you think I say that cynically; not so. Sari was one of those fortunate women who in pregnancy become ever more beautiful, and this added to her normal beauty made it almost heart stabbing to look at her.

Chapter 19. One more Crisis

One more crisis emerged in our lives. It was about a month before Sari was due to give birth. Father had gone up north for a trial and late one evening we received an urgent telephone call. Father had collapsed in the court room and suffered a stroke.

He was in hospital in the northern city and Sari and I drove there to see him. We were led into a private room and saw father, his face and body paralysed down one side and unable to speak except to make a few difficult to interpret sounds.

The doctor told us that with time and treatment he might regain some mobility and speech. We arranged for him to be brought south to the most expensive private hospital we could find. Whether the expense meant any better treatment is a moot point, but had father been capable of making the arrangements, expensive they would have been.

Treatment began and with agonising slowness father began to speak again in a slurred manner, but his mobility did not respond so well to the therapy.

In the meantime Sari had given birth to a boy so I found myself travelling from one private hospital to another.

My studies got into a hopeless mess, so after several interviews and much paper work I got them deferred for twelve months so that I could take care of things on the home front.

When Sari arrived home with our son, we took the first opportunity to take the boy along to be viewed by father. He managed what looked like a lopsided smile and said to Sari what sounded like, “Well done, my dear.”

We had not named our son, so we asked father what he would like him to be called. He took so long to answer we thought he had not understood so we repeated our question. He made several attempts to answer and finally came out with what sounded like “Jonathon”. To be sure I wrote the name on a piece of paper and held it up to him. He managed to give a sign of agreement. So Jonathon it was.

Sari breast fed our baby, and it was one of the pleasures of my day to watch the little one at her breast. Sari made a picture of tranquillity sitting there, Jonathon making little sucking noises as he greedily took her milk.

Sari was still breastfeeding Jonathon when father was finally allowed to come home. He had gained almost no mobility and had to spend his time in a wheel chair being pushed usually by a nurse we had hired and who lived in the house. The doctor had sounded the dire warning, “Another stroke like the last one could be fatal.”

Sari and I had been sleeping in my room, together with Jonathon who needed to be fed during the night. Lisa and Josie were now fully aware of the situation, and although they had not been told, they must have worked out whom Jonathon’s father was. After her earlier warning Lisa said nothing.

With the arrival of father thought had to be given to the sleeping arrangements. We had plenty of bedrooms, but the question was, should Sari return to sleeping in the same room as father? If she did, Jonathon would have to join them as well.

It was no longer a case of Sari sleeping in the same bed as father, but a matter of being in the same room with her own bed. As far as father knew, he was the begetter of Jonathon. We had no wish to let him think otherwise, but if Sari failed to share his room if not his bed, suspicion might arise.

It was the nurse who resolved the matter for us, declaring that it would not be a good idea to have Jonathon in the same room as father since the child still woke in the night, often crying to be fed and would probably disturb her patient. So Sari and baby slept in a separate room.

Once recovered fully from giving birth, Sari and I had resumed our sex life. The situation was now made a little difficult in that I had to go to her room when we wanted to make love. I missed her absence from my bed sorely.

One small thing I noted that had me a little puzzled. Whenever Sari was feeding Jonathon in my presence her breasts were exposed. If my father was present her breasts were covered by a cloth. I asked her about this.

“Ah, yes,” she said, “among my people it is customary for only the father of the child to see the mother’s breasts naked as she feeds the child.”

I hoped father did not know about that custom.

After my twelve months absence from the university I began my studies again. Given that I passed all the necessary exams I would qualify at the end of the year and commence twelve months internment in one of the major hospitals.

It was about half way through the year when one day as I was attending a seminar, I got called out of the room to a telephone call. It was Sari.

“David, your father’s just had another stroke; it looks very bad for him. He’s on his way to the City Hospital now in an ambulance.

The hospital was situated in the university grounds so I said, “I’ll go straight over there.”

The hospital was only about ten minutes walk, but even so, they had already brought father in. On giving my name and asking for him I was told to wait and after a few minutes a doctor approached me.

“Mr. Brook?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Brook, your father died as we brought him in. We did everything we could, but nothing worked; sorry.”