A mother's love

Chapter 33

Brenda thought about what her reaction should be to Brian and Michaela closing the door to the spare room after they'd repaired to it for the night and she arrived at her decision surprisingly quickly. She decided to leave them, though her reasons for deciding as much weren't entirely clear to her. Brenda's original assessment of Michaela was that she was a threat that she needed to be wary of. Her impression of her had changed dramatically since then. There was barely a thought that Brenda had that didn't concern Brian; thoughts about his wellbeing occupied her mind from when she woke up in the morning until she fell asleep at night. Providing for his material needs was not a problem for her, but Brian had many other needs in areas in which he had fallen behind because of the all consuming job of taking care of his mother, areas in which Brenda was useless to him. They couldn't go out in public together as a couple and at her age she was clueless about what he needed to know and what he needed to be doing to find acceptance among those his own age; in that respect Michaela was a godsend. Naturally Brenda was aware of what all the risks were. Anything could happen between them with all of the time that they were spending together and Brenda hadn't seen anything that suggested that Michaela didn't like Brian in that way anymore or that Brian was any less mesmerized by her. They could have been doing anything between the hours when Brian got out of school and Brenda returned home from work. In the beginning the thought of what they were doing during all of the hours that they were unsupervised had worried her to no end but over time her worries had relaxed. During the night that Michaela had stayed with them Brenda had paid attention to them when they were together and they looked better together than she and Brian ever would. The news that Brian had shared with her about Michaela having been the victim of a horrific rape resulted in Brenda relinquishing the majority of her remaining concerns and wondering if the time hadn't come for she and Brian to stop being lovers, freeing him to be with Michaela. Brenda thought, given the experience that Michaela had gone through, that having Brian as her boyfriend would be good for her, that his kindness and sweetness would go a long way to helping her overcome the cruelty she had suffered.

She didn't take any action to free Brian to be with Michaela. She couldn't bring herself to let go of Brian, not after going out with Taren to her singles bars and seeing what would be in store for her if Brian was no longer in her life. She understood completely the anxiety over her age that Michaela described her mother as being consumed by, it wasn't that long ago that she was sitting at her kitchen table with her convenience store dinner before her and was reduced to tears by the crushing loneliness that she was feeling, loneliness that Brian had saved her from. She was at an age at which she just couldn't afford to take the risk of letting go of what she had without any certainty that she would be able to find companionship of similar quality. She decided that she had no problem with ignorance. She wouldn't make any inquiries as to what Brian and Michaela were doing that she didn't know about and so long as she didn't come across anything that indicated that she was going to lose Brian to Michaela she wasn't going to intercede to protect her claim to him, because that would mean alienating Michaela. Brenda wanted to grow as close to Michaela as she could, enough for Michaela to trust her enough to tell her in her own words about being raped and how she was coping with it. Under the pretext of needing help moving some furniture around Brenda invited Michaela to their house a few days after the sleepover while Brian was at school. They moved around the chairs in the lounge and Brenda asked Michaela if she could thank her by taking her out for something. Michaela told her that she didn't have any lessons and suggested they go to the café where Brian had watched her performing live for the first time. Brenda ordered a coffee for herself and Michaela ordered an ice-cream sundae. It being their first time together they were both feeling more than a little uncomfortable.

Michaela had surmised on the night that she'd slept over at their house that Brian had told his mother but she wasn't mad at him for it. Michaela was extraordinarily happy when she was with Brenda and Brian. She felt welcomed and accepted by them and envied their closeness, their inhabiting of the same space. Michaela had always existed within her own intensely private space of which she was highly protective and outside of which she didn't care to venture. Her involvement with Hollow Point had been all about the music for her, making friends with her bandmates hadn't been a concern of hers at all. Her parents were no different. Their divorce had no impact on her and neither did being told that her mother had been granted full custody of her after her father had done nothing to contest her application. The only time when Michaela left her space to enter another's and invited them to enter hers was when she had a boyfriend. When she was in a relationship with a boy Michaela found herself inexplicably gripped by an impulse to give as much of herself emotionally as possible and to ask the boy she was with to give as much of himself to her; just like her mother always did she came on far too strong far too early and was dumped without the boy she was with even trying to take advantage of her emotional vulnerability to have sex with her. After she was raped Michaela became acutely aware of her extreme isolation and at a time when she was in desperate need of love and support it was painful. Something that she sensed about Brian early on told her that he could be trusted not to be frightened by strong emotional attachment. She was cautious with him at first and only kissed him when she was confident that she could trust him to remain committed to her past the point at which her boyfriend would ordinarily have left her. He proved to be as trustworthy as she'd believed he was; the more time she spent with him the more convinced she was that he wanted to have a deep connection with her. She fell in love with him and confided in him about being raped. Telling him the story alone was emotionally draining for her, seeking to use the physical intimacy that she was sharing with Brian to overcome the trauma she had been left with was the hardest thing she had ever done. Every day she felt like an egg that was being slowly cracked open; sometimes she felt like a pane of glass that had been forcefully thrown to the ground and shattered into a million pieces. Brian would have agreed to stop any time she told him that she didn't want to continue but that was precisely why she wouldn't, she wanted to be as close to Brian as possible and was prepared to do whatever it took to bring herself to the point at which she was able to make love to him. She couldn't talk about such things with Brenda without breaking the promise she'd made to him and could think of nothing else with which to make conversation with her.

"I want to thank you for being so nice to Brian and spending so much time with him, he wasn't able to have much of a social life before."

"You don't have to thank me; I like spending time with him, he's sweet."

"He is, though it's mostly shyness from everything that he's been through."

"He showed me the burn on his arm; I can't believe his own father could be that cruel."

"Neither could I; Brian told me that it had been an accident but as soon as I found out the truth I took him and we ran. It takes a lot for him to trust, to be open about himself; it's huge that he's able to do that with you."

"If you're worried about me hurting him, don't be; I would never do that, I care about him too much."

"You know, your mother and I have been talking about the idea of you two becoming a couple, and from listening to you it sounds like that's something that you've been thinking about."

"Brian told me that he's worried that if he starts dating it's going to make you feel like he's leaving you behind."

"I've never given him any reason to feel that way; I've told him countless times that he's free to do all of the things he wants to do."

"He probably thinks that you're just saying that, that you're hiding your true feelings because you don't want him worrying about you."

"I don't need him to worry about me, so if you two want to be together I don't want you to think at all about me being left behind."

"Okay, I'll remember that."

Brenda could think of no explanation for what she had said to Michaela other than that deep down she knew that the time had come to let go of Brian. She didn't have the problems with Michaela that she used to have; she actually didn't have any problems with her at all. The most important thing was that she cared about Brian and had no intention of hurting him; everything else: her aimlessness, the difference in their ages, could all be overlooked. It was only with Michaela that he could enjoy the freedom that she had taken him away from his mother to give him, and Brenda was pleased with the creative influence that her music was having on him as a form of expression. Brenda thought about all of this in the moments that she had to spare for thought throughout the rest of the day and the case for releasing Brian to be with Michaela only grew stronger, nevertheless when she arrived home from work she took him straight to the bedroom with her and she was more engaged in their lovemaking than she had been in all of the times that they had made love since moving into the house. They made love three times that night and only went to sleep at 1.a.m.