A mother's love

Chapter 35

When Brian saw Michaela the next day his mind was once again on other things. Not that it mattered; Michaela had gotten a call for some session work and took Brian straight to the recording studio with her after she'd picked him up from school. She explained to him that she was going to be doing some guitar tracking for the band Kabal whose album was being produced by Rick Beato, a hard rock legend, at the London Bridge Studio.

"This is the studio where Alice in Chains recorded Dirt, this is hallowed ground," Michaela said to Brian when they entered the building.

Brian was surprised to learn that Michaela wasn't going to be recording with the entire band. Waiting for them at the studio were the producer Rick and the band's lead singer Matt Marko, who was co-producing the album. Brian sat with them in the mixing booth while Michaela recorded in the recording booth. The recording session would be a short one, all of the music had already been written and Michaela didn't need anything explained to her. The only time Brian had seen Michaela playing an electric guitar was when they'd first met at Wal-Mart; whenever they wrote songs together it was always with the accompaniment of her acoustic. Looking at her, playing with such focus and assuredness, no one would have guessed at the torment that was raging inside of her. What Brian saw when he watched Michaela performing was her entering a zone in which there was only her and her music. Brian had always thought of her music as being an outlet for her but it wasn't, it was who she was and had nothing to do with the things that she had been through. Her only outlet was Brian, without him she would have no way of facing what had happened to her and taking steps to move past it. As much as she looked completely in her element playing guitar in the sound booth, to Brian she looked equally alone and lost, and he was the only one who saw it. They finished at the studio at 5p.m. and instead of going to Michaela's house for dinner straight away she drove them to the lookout spot where they'd had their first kiss to watch the sunset.

"What did you think about my guitar solos?"

"I was amazed; I didn't know you were that good."

"That was my first session job in months; I was really lucky to get that call from Rick."

"He told me that he enjoys working with you, that you're always nothing but professional. It's not because of luck that this was your first session job in months, is it? It's because you completely withdrew from everything and everybody, and it's only recently that you've been able to start returning normal."

"It's because I have you that I'm able to start doing the things that I used to do again, because you've been so good to me. I don't know what would have become of me if I hadn't met you; your love is everything to me."

Brian was trembling when Michaela kissed him. The weight of the depth of her feelings for him was, at first, more than he could bear. Coming so soon after his and Brenda's recommitment to each other he struggled to make sense of what the way forward was for the three of them. There was nothing he could do but continue to love Michaela and doing what he needed to do to help her.

"I want to try again, this time I know I'm ready," She pulled her face away from his and said to him.

Michaela didn't want to wait until they had an opportunity to be alone at her house or at his house. They lowered the back seats in her car and tried making love for the second time. Michaela was anxious but not nearly as much as she had been the first time they'd tried. She laid on her back and entrusted herself to Brian entirely, without the presence of any of the feelings of powerlessness that had brought things to a premature end the first time. The anxiety that she felt was more like that of a virgin, a mixture of fear and excitement over a rite of passage it was impossible for her to prepare herself for. There were enough ways in which making love with Brian was a first for her for her to think of it as a new experience unrelated to the rape she had suffered. She loved Brian and she trusted him; she knew that he would never hurt her and that he wouldn't hesitate to do what it took to make her happy if it was within his power to do so. When he was on top of her it didn't feel like he was overpowering her and when he was inside of her it didn't feel like he was violating her. She was right there with him the whole time; at no point did it feel like anything was being done to her. She and Brian broke through the final barrier standing between them and emerged on the other side of it together with only the smallest fragments of their individual selves remaining. Returning to a state of wholeness, which not that long ago she hadn't been able to think about, now seemed possible. Being with Brian, everything seemed possible.

Taren waited until Brian and Michaela arrived at 7p.m. to serve dinner. Michaela explained to her that her recording session had lasted longer than it was supposed to and Taren accepted her explanation without question. Dinner was no different than any of the previous dinners the three of them had eaten together, Brian and Michaela gave Taren no reason to suspect that anything had changed between them. After dinner they went up to her room, closed the door and went straight down onto her bed. Michaela wanted Brian like she'd never wanted him before, the closeness to him that she felt in the wake of their first time making love was enough to make her feel like she was all the way to being reconstituted as the whole entity that she had been before she was raped.

When the time came for Brian to leave Michaela hugged him with seemingly no intention of letting him go. She buried her head in his shoulder and made him support the weight of her body by pressing down on him. Brian couldn't get the feeling of Michaela clinging to him and leaning on him out of his mind. Things with Michaela were once again at a point at which Brian was struggling to live with the complications of the love triangle of which he was the central figure. The time had come to tell Brenda about what he and Michaela had been doing behind her back.

"I can't say I'm not hurt, but I'm also not surprised; like I said, you two make more sense than we do."

"I'm sorry, one afternoon she just kissed me and since then it's like I've been a passenger; she keeps telling me about how much better she's been feeling since she's met me and it's made it impossible for me to end things with her."

"I don't want you to end things with her."

"What? Why not?"

"Because that girl has gone through something inconceivably horrific and you're the one that she's reached out to for help; you will not abandon her."

"What about us?"

"This changes nothing between us; you're the one who said that we've been through too much together for you to ever love anyone more than you love me."

"Michaela loves me, she tells me so every time we're together; isn't this only going to end with me hurting her feelings?"

"After she was raped she probably felt like nobody would ever want her, like she had been marked with a stain that nobody would ever be able to look past. You're showing her that she can be valued and loved, right now that's all that matters."

Brian agreed with Brenda's assessment of the situation but he continued to feel uncomfortable with the deception they were perpetrating on others, and with Michaela the seriousness of their deception had escalated to a new level, playing games with her fragile feelings was not the same as lying to a principal to get him admitted to school. Brian had no solutions for the quandary in which he found himself, his only available option was to follow Brenda's instruction and maintain the status quo.