“May I ask what it was that you bought me yesterday?” John asked as he and Linda walked back into their room.
“I took a picture of myself to Walmart and had it enlarged and bought a frame for it so you would have something to remember me by when you went back,” she replied as she sat down in one of the chairs around the living room table.
John was surprised to hear that. “Really?” he asked. “That was very sweet of you. And your husband broke it?”
“It’s destroyed,” she replied with a heavy sigh.
“What a prick!” John exclaimed.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “He’s always been a prick.”
“Well if you will allow me,” John said, “you weren’t the only one to go out last night and buy something for someone else.”
Linda watched John open his largest suitcase and remove the gift box he had bought, which he then handed to her.
“Oh sweetie,” she said as she took hold of it. “You didn’t need to do this.”
“But I did,” he replied. “It’s not much. I found it in a store and thought you might like something like this. I happen to love Cucumber Melon, but I don’t know if you do. Anyway, I hope you like it.”
Linda looked tenderly at him and smiled. “You have just turned out to be the sweetest man,” she said. “You make me almost sorry that we’re related.”
“Oh?” he said, suddenly feeling the knot in his stomach again. “What do you mean?”
Linda’s smile widened. “Never mind,” she replied.
“Oh no, no, no,” he said as he walked over and stood next to her. “I want to know what you mean.”
From the way John was looking at her, Linda knew for sure now that he did have an interest in her. Had this been any other man, she had no doubt that she would have nipped his interest in the bud right away. But he wasn’t any other man. He could have been a second chance with the one who had left her alone and scared with a new life growing inside her. And he was very clearly a romantic who knew how to convey his passions for someone through the way he would look at them, the same way he was now looking at her.
She felt almost terrified at the thought. On the one hand this was her offspring. She would have to be deranged to even consider being weak in the presence of this stranger who had once spent nine months inside her. But she was weak. She was so weak that she could see the right word or the right touch causing her to give in to the desires beginning to well up inside her. The thought of incest versus the imaginings of her heart were at war with each other inside her, and the thought of who the victor might be frightened her.
“John, please don’t look at me like that,” she said very nervously. “You don’t know the effect it’s having on me, and this cannot happen.”
John’s heart went into emotional overload at the sound of her words. At first it may have just been a desire for her body, but now he suddenly felt something different. Could he really love this woman, knowing who she was? Whatever hesitation he might have experienced quickly disappeared as her words sank in. She was interested. She was tempted. And she was weak.