A Different Kind of Forever - By Dee Ernst Page 0,53

Michael were a complete surprise to her. Her physical desire for him was intense. She would find herself, in the middle of the day, doing something as ordinary as washing dishes or watering plants, when a sudden wave would come over her, beginning as a throb deep in her belly and moving up, a physical jolt, leaving her breathless and wanting.

But she knew, and not just from the many nights that she slept peacefully beside him without passion, that it was not just his touch that held her to him. He had a boundless energy and enthusiasm about everything that she found a complete delight. They could talk about any subject. They laughed a great deal together. When she was with him, the world was in sharper focus. When they were apart, she found countless things to remember to tell him, to ask him about. Her solitude was no longer a comfort to her. It was just time spent waiting to see him again.

She thought that she was in love with him. She would turn to Jasper and say the words aloud, trying on the sound of them.

“I think I love Michael.” Her voice was always in a whisper when she said it. The cat would blink wisely in response. She would take a deep breath and go on with her day. But the thought was always there, crowding out the quiet and carefully planned life that she imagined she would be living.

“I think I love him,” she would say to herself, driving out to his house. She sometimes reasoned that Michael was so irresistible to her because she had married relatively young. She had missed the sexual adventures of other women her age. She had slept with only a few other men before meeting Kevin, her high school sweetheart and a couple of brief college flings. She had loved Kevin deeply when they married. She was twenty-one, just out of college, and he, being five years older, had not wanted to wait. She continued to love him for many years into their marriage, and had remained faithful to him, despite the attention other men may have paid to her.

She wondered if she was just another sexually frustrated middle-aged woman responding to the attention of a younger man, but she dismissed the idea, because she realized that the spark that had been there from the very beginning, the thing that had drawn her to him from the very first day, was still going strong. He made her happy. From the moment she met him, it was not just passion he stirred in her. It was more. It was joy. And she had no idea what to do next.

If she was away more than a day, Michael would drive over to her house, unannounced. She was always there, waiting for him. Sometimes, he would come around the back of her house, and see her in the yard, tending her roses. He would wait outside the gate, not wanting the brass bell to give him away, and watch her as she weeded or raked. Her movements were quick and graceful, her concentration complete. She did not realize he was there, watching her, until he would call to her, or push open the gate. Sometimes he would walk into the house, and she would be in the kitchen, music blaring, dancing alone in front of the stove, and again he would watch her until he could resist no longer, and he would join her, and they would dance together in her tiny kitchen.

He hated them being apart. Gordon Prescott was bearing down on him, a huge, suffocating cloud that blotted out everything else. Michael spoke to him sometimes four or five times a day. FedEx delivered revised tapes several times a week. Prescott wanted him in Toronto. He wanted to know at every moment what Michael was doing, and Michael, used to the freedom of writing alone, under no restraints, was in agony. Diane was the one cool, soothing presence in his life. The nights she was not with him he spent awake, on his studio, with David Go, or Seth. Without her there, the movie pressed down upon him relentlessly. Her presence forced him to live a normal life.

They went into Manhattan together. Diane went to see Shakespeare in the Park. Michael followed gamely. He was not passionate about theater the way she was, and he did not like New York, but her excitement was contagious. They had dinner with Rachel. Rachel’s