Bad Love

Chapter 10

Lucy's perceptiveness was not to be underestimated. Bradley had never realized this; Jasmine had realized it when Lucy was still small and Andrew realized it during his first day with them. She was an outsider, a perennial observer. She wasn't impressed by people's attempts at entertaining her and when they asked her about school and friends she was downright irritated. She remained at a distance from them, watching and learning. For entertainment she relied on herself. Like most people with an imagination she much preferred its company to that of people and in her solitude had developed an appreciation for stories. The games she played with her toys and her dolls were a combination of her love of stories and an outlet for her imagination. Each game was a story, featuring its own unique and diverse cast of characters and a constantly evolving narrative. In an attempt to rid her mother of some of her sadness Lucy had opened up her private world to her mother, but this only brought about a momentary reduction in her sadness. She knew that her father was the reason for her mother's unhappiness and never revealed anything of herself to him. By the age of eight, Lucy had grown to hate her father.

Since Andrew had come to stay with them Jasmine had undergone a change that Lucy was happy to see. Her mother had gone from walking around the house with her head down to a woman who now had a smile on her face and walked with a perceptible bounce in her step. Trusting Andrew was easy for Lucy because she already knew from watching him at family's get-togethers that he was also an outsider. She came to prefer it when Andrew drove her to school and spent her time at school looking forward to spending the entire afternoon watching anime with him. Like her mother she was happier with Andrew than she was with her father and she saw nothing wrong with how she felt.

* * *

A month into their affair, the fact that there were others involved began to press itself upon Andrew's conscience. As much as he wanted it to be, it wasn't just he and Jasmine. He was thinking about Melissa in increasing amounts, remembering her reaction when he'd told her he was moving here to be with Jasmine. He'd hurt her, more than he ever had before. Her relationship with Claire had started to really bother him, so much so that he called Melissa and cancelled their next monthly meeting.

Despite all of this, Andrew and Jasmine continued to sleep together with undiminished regularity, which resulted in an unexpected development. Jasmine was becoming real; the abstraction he'd fallen in love with was being replaced by the unhappily married mother she really was. The more she unburdened herself the more the image that he'd always held of her cracked and their affair transformed from the materialization of a years-long fantasy of his into a dense entanglement fraught with complications. Bradley had been horrible to Jasmine. In one deeply emotional outpouring Jasmine had broken down in tears telling him about the fights they'd had over her refusal to give him blowjobs, about how he'd once disgustingly attempted to push her into agreeing to give anal sex a try. That was the moment when Jasmine became real in every sense. She was emotionally overburdened and Andrew held onto her unsure of how he felt about the seriousness between them. Being in love with Jasmine he was happy that she trusted him enough to expose herself to him like this, but there was a part of him that perceived the naked woman's arms around him as a trap it was imperative he quickly escaped from. That part of him wasn't very strong though. He left Jasmine to shed her tears on his shoulder and when she was done promised her that he would never treat her with such foulness.

"I know you wouldn't, that's why I love you," Jasmine responded, saying the words to him for the first time.

Andrew wanted to protect Jasmine, he wanted her for himself so he could devote his life to her happiness and pleasure, but lurking in the background of this picture he had of them was divorce and a small child, and, as always, Melissa. The situation he found himself in with Jasmine was weighing heavily on Andrew's mind when the time came for him to attend the opening night of Melissa's play. He met Marcus and Sally at the entrance to the Hexagon Theatre and realized the moment he saw them how much he missed them and how much he had been doing things that he would not have been doing if they were still a daily part of his life like they used to be. Marcus looked exactly the same; Sally had shed her swaddling brown cardigan and was looking very different, sexy even, in a black pants suit. They were both happy to see him; Sally, he could see, was suppressing a great deal of curiosity.