Laura - Chapter 268

Laura raced to the telephone the moment she got inside the
door at home.  She was going to call Sara at work, but first
she checked her home voice mail.  Surely Sara had left her a
message there, especially after the message Laura had left
on Sara's answering machine the previous evening from
Dallas, after Ada had departed.

And Sara had left a message, the third one in the queue.
Unfortunately, it was not what Laura had hoped for.  Sara
was very somber.  She spoke slowly and very softly.  Her
voice was deep, very unlike her usual voice, and sounded
somehow disembodied, denatured, even wooden.

"Laura . . . I know you won't think it's right to leave you
a message like this," Sara said evenly.  "I've thought about
it, and I'm going to do it anyway.  I don't want to see you.
I don't want either one of us to go through that."  [There
was a pause here while Sara swallowed and composed herself
further.]  "Dee Dee told me about you two.  [Another pause.]
She drinks . . . smokes weed . . . snorts.  I don't know how
you thought she wouldn't spill it sooner or later.  Anyway,
she's jealous of me and likes to hurt me."  [Another
devastating pause, during which Laura could actually hear
her own whimpering, which until now she had been unaware
of.]  "I want you to know I really did love you.  I never
loved anybody so much.  But I don't love you any more.  I
don't want to see you.  Please don't try to see me.  It was
a mistake.  Let's leave it at that.  Don't call."

The cloying, automated whine of the voice mail lady came on
the phone.  "End of message.  To repeat message, press one.
To reply, press two.  To erase-"

Laura was so shattered that it was all she could do just to
get her quivering hand to hang up the phone.  After a few
moments she noticed that her nearly silent moaning and
whimpering had stopped.  The tightness in her chest and
stomach was agonizing.  Silent tears were sliding down her
cheeks, dripping off her chin onto her hands.  Her throat
was so tightly pinched that no sound could escape.  She was
sure she had never felt such intense emotional pain.

For an immensely long time, she sat like this, alone in her
living room, unable to cry, unable to do anything but hurt.
She knew she had brought this on herself.  Her own
recklessness had been the cause.  Dee Dee had tempted her,
but she should have been able to turn away.  No one had ever
meant as much to her as Sara, and she had thrown it away for
a few cheap moments of thrilling sex.

She wanted to talk to her but knew it was impossible.  Also
unwise,  given both Sara's admonitions and her own certainty
that she would simply blubber and grovel and plead and beg
and look altogether as despicable and contemptible as she
felt.  She remembered losing some boy, when she was a
teenager, to a high school rival and feeling a devastating
loss, as though she could not live without him.  This was
the way she felt about Sara.  Only now she was no longer a
teenager, no longer theatrically suffering the sharp though
callow yearnings of adolescence, but a responsible adult who
simply felt like she was going to die of this pain, this
horrible agony of loss.  I love her, she thought bleakly.  I
love her forever.

She cut herself short on this one, not letting her mind
linger on it.  Yes, you love her.  Now you can love her in
her absence.  Don't think about it, at least not right now.
You'll only feel worse.  As if that were possible.

She had arrived home at 3 p.m. and at eight-twenty she
looked at a clock and realized that she had no idea what had
happened in the past five and a half hours.  She was not
hungry.  She was numb.  She looked at her face in the
bathroom mirror and realized that she had been crying,
apparently pretty heavily, but had little memory of it.  Her
throat, however, was sore from the tight sobs.  Now she felt
drained, giddy.  Is it grief that makes you feel this way?
she asked herself.

Again she plotted and had to stop herself.  What would she
do if I just showed up there, on her doorstep?  Like when
she gets home from work?  There I am.  Would she be cruel?
Send me away?  Would she let me in?  Would she listen to my
apologies?

Oh god, I hate myself.  I want her to know how much I hate
myself.  Maybe I should call her and leave her another
message, tell her how much I hate myself.  How sorry I am.
Maybe I should send her a letter.  Maybe I should send her
flowers.  Ha, maybe that's it!  Remember how happy Dawn was
to get those flowers I brought?  Maybe I could send her
something else.  A telegram.  A simple telegram.  'I Love
You.  I Always Will.  I'm So Sorry.  Signed, Laura.'

Oh shit, no, she thought.

I can't do any of that.  Something like that only makes
things worse.  It only hardens her and makes me look
pathetic.  What am I going to do?  I have to do something!

But Laura knew it was hopeless.  She believed Sara when she
said she had truly loved Laura.  They had touched each
other's inner core, and not only sexually.  She knew that
under Sara's joking, happy-go-lucky exterior there was a
flinty, tough, and resilient woman, a rock, a woman one
could actually love and respect and adore, as well as
desire.  This was the woman Laura had offended, and she had
done it not with some stranger or past lover but with Sara's
own feckless but wildly sexy younger sister.

True, time could dissipate pain and anguish and feelings of
rejection, even sexual betrayal.  If Laura had cheated with
someone else, that person would perhaps disappear, die,
move, get hooked up in another relationship.  But every time
Sara looked at Dee Dee-whom she was constantly rescuing from
the consequences of her own worst impulses anyway-she would
see Laura writhing naked with her in bed, grimacing and
screaming with Dee Dee's face between her legs.  You
couldn't go on living with such a vision.

Sara would not forgive it.  Laura knew she never would.
Some things, maybe, but sleeping with Dee Dee, never.  Would
I forgive it?  No.  A thousand times: NO.

Months of alternating between sodden remorse and piercing
grief lay head for her, Laura knew.  Worse, she had to
return to work the following morning as if nothing had
happened, as if she had not been crushed and left bleeding
by this horrible event.  She was in a daze, not having eaten
since Dallas, having got little sleep, her insides feeling
knotted and raw and clenched in the effort to conceal her
pain, even from herself, though it gnawed at her like an
evil, poison worm.

She was staring glassily at her desk top, daydreaming,
abstracted, still vaguely wondering what she could do to set
things right again, when Randi came into her office in the
mid-afternoon.  Laura looked up.  Randi might not have this
effect on everyone, but to Laura-even in this depressed,
abstracted state-the girl was just as vivacious and
ravishing as she had been the first time she had seen her.
Randi could be a mischievous and coy little twit, but with
her sexy long braids swishing around her shoulders and her
beautiful face and tall, supple body, which Laura had so
thoroughly devoured on many occasions, she was eye-candy and
catnip rolled into one.

Laura smiled wanly at her.  There were at least some
consolations in life.  Sex with Randi was as hot as it could
get.  Maybe they could work something out that would take
Laura's mind off Sara.

"Hi there, you gorgeous creature," she said softly, hearing
her voice emerge very husky and sexy.  "Long time no see."

Randi smirked and flirted silently, like a small child with
a secret.  Her lengthy relationship with Laura had given her
deep knowledge of the things about her that aroused Laura's
desire.  In fact, like a few other women Laura knew, Randi
had that talent instinctively and could ignite fires in the
most unsuspecting people, male or female, by a few well
chosen bodily movements.  She also had an enchanting face
that, even now when Laura was down in the dumps, gloomy,
sluggish with lovesick pain, could pierce Laura's heart.

"It's going to be even longer next time," Randi flirted.
"This is my last day.  I came to say goodbye."

This news hit Laura like a ton of bricks.  From feeling a
pleasant, expectant glow (though still tinged by the
ineffable, gnawing sadness she felt from losing Sara) and an
agreeable tingle in her pussy at the prospect of rubbing
flesh with the delectable Randi she was plunged into a
further despair and painful shock.  She knew better than to
expect things to last forever, but she had always
comfortably kept Randi in the back of her mind, especially
since they had developed some space in their relationship
and weren't constantly feeding on each other's body and
emotions, as a friendly and deliciously sexy possibility.
She had felt Randi thought about her now in the same way.

"Laura?"  Randi came over to her desk, leaning down, so much
so that her long, thin braids swished against Laura's
forearm, and Laura could smell her sweet, warm breath.  She
was enjoying every second of Laura's dismay.  "Are you
okay?"

"I . . . I'm okay," Laura muttered, shaking the confusion
out of her brain.  "Last day?  Are you kidding?"

Randi looked down at her.  To look into her eyes, Laura's
gaze had to travel up her body, across her jutting breasts,
which was the way she had planned it.  Laura loved those
breasts.  Randi knew it.  Her eyes were flickering a
message: Don't you wish you could have them again?  Don't
you wish you could just rip this blouse off?

Smirking with self-satisfaction and sexual allure, Randi
stepped back a little.  "I'm moving back to North Carolina.
You knew I was from there, didn't you?  I'm going back.  I
got a job in Charlotte.  At a bank.  They're giving me a
better job than this one."  She tossed her head arrogantly,
fetchingly, her braids swinging around her lovely neck.
"Won't have to work for that stuck-up cunt Shontay Gibson
any more, either."  She winked salaciously at Laura.  "Maybe
when I'm gone you can suck her little Neegro pussy for her
and get her to lighten up a little bit, eh?"  But then she
sneered with contempt.  "On second thought, it probably
looks and smells like a rotten old prune.  Not a sweet
little black snatch like the one Laura is dying to slurp,
right?"  She looked down at her own crotch suggestively,
baiting Laura.

Laura blushed.  At the same time, she realized that two big
tears were rolling down her cheeks.  She had cried so much
in the past eighteen hours or so that she had thought there
was no water left in her.

"Oh, Laura, that's so sweet," Randi purred, leaning down
again.  "Are you crying because you'll miss me?"

"Oh god, yes.  I will," Laura blurted out, meaning each
word.

The combination of losing Sara, and now Randi, was
converging inside her chest into a huge, horrible wail of
pain.  It was all she could do not to let it escape.  Her
shoulders were even shuddering with incipient sobs, but she
stiffened her muscles with a ferocious act of will and got
them under control.

"Gee," Randi said, "I didn't think you'd take it so hard.
You been screwing that dwarf so often lately that I thought
you forgot completely about me."

'That dwarf' was Randi's cutting description of Deshona, for
whom she had long felt a fierce rivalry.

Laura sniffled.  "Why North Carolina?" she asked, reaching
for a kleenex.

"I just told you.  I'm from there.  I was raised there.  I
have a girl friend who works in a big bank.  Charlotte is
becoming sort of a banking capital, you know.  She offered
me this job."

"What about Nate?"

"What about him?" Randi said, waving her hand as if he were
an afterthought.  She leane                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   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