She swiped my stickiness from her thigh with a finger and touched it to her lips, tasting me, and said “I don’t think we have to worry about my getting pregnant from that.” She giggled. “Maybe we should try again.”

“Getting pregnant?” I was horrified and instantly impotent.

“Gosh, no! Silly.” She smiled up at me, her eyes a little bloodshot from the waning effects of the weed we had smoked. “I want to, you know, really do it…tonight…with you. I only want to do it with you, ever.”

I gazed down at her, soaking in the crescent rays of her dark blue eyes, seeking not only reassurance that she would not get pregnant, but reassurance that she wanted to actually try again after the abortion I had just performed.

“I won’t get pregnant if we do it tonight. And I really do want to do it with you.

I think I love you Mathew.”

And with no time spent to repair due to the virility of my youth I did, however clumsily, divine myself to her opening and with just a few strokes I once again expelled my seed, however prematurely, on target.

We never saw the beam of the flashlight as it approached or heard the huffing of Catherine’s Aunt Teresa’s rasping breath. We only felt the shame of our exposure as the lamplight uncovered our nakedness and the lash of Teresa’s whipping hand as I did my best to cover Catherine’s bare body with my own, an effort that in reflection now seems somewhat selfish rather than selfless as I relished the touch of her loins even at the moment of our apocalypse, and to shield her from the blows of Teresa’s capable slaps. “Get off of her you perverted shit!” she screamed revealing to me for the first time her ability to peasant her words.

Our naked bodies were covered from head to sticky crevice in the powdery brown dirt of the sandlot as we scooped up our clothes and clambered to defend ourselves while we scrambled into our clothes and ran away from Teresa, together, hopping and hobbling, while trying to dress, and to exchange what few garments we could salvage from the me’lay, mine to me and hers to her, and Catherine’s

Aunt Teresa still in hot pursuit.

We scampered across the road, past the rushing headlights of cars as we crossed the Grovewood Avenue still partially naked and sprinted to our hide-out, the decaying garage of an elderly widow who rarely left her house, and we laid together all night in each others arms in the back seat of a dusty broken down Ford Fairlane, staving off the inevitable separation and unimaginable discipline that we both knew was forthcoming.

I later learned that my Father having come looking for me in the few places he knew I might be: at the basketball court across from the ball-field, or at Teresa and Albert’s house visiting Catherine, had left me to face a more fearsome creature than himself by suggesting to Teresa that the next best place to find me would be at the baseball diamond.

As I drove down Interstate sixty-four the Eagles wound down the final chords of the song “Lying Eyes” all I could think about is Catherine saying “I only want to do it with you, ever.” And the pain of her betrayal scorched my soul.

It was not Catherine’s betrayal alone that had left me in such a melancholy state. It was also the lie that followed: namely that Sarah was my flesh and blood. It was an implied deception, but a painfully brazen untruth none-the-less. And the worst of it was that she had allowed me to fall head-over-heels in love with Sarah and I was inextricably tied to her. I had suggested to Catherine on several occasions, after realizing that she was not going to get pregnant despite our undying efforts that we look into adoption. The option was there. But Catherine had refused saying that she wanted to experience the whole pregnancy from conception to delivery. Without that, she said, she did not think that she could love the child as a mother should. “The attachment would be superficial.” She said. How wrong she was. It would have take bullets to separate Sarah from me. And as I looked down at Sarah, mile markers whizzing past us like memories to an amnesiac, I knew unconditional love for the first time. I’d carried it since Sarah was born; but now that I knew that she was not of my blood, that I had been duped, and yet could not fathom a life without her still, I knew unconditional love beyond the comprehensive definition. I squeezed her hand and felt the warmth of her love as she curled her little digits around my finger.

Despite her betrayal, I still loved Catherine. Killing her would have been tantamount to suicide. Perhaps what pained me even more than the ultimate betrayal, making me a cuckold, was that I was still in love with her. I wanted to hate her; to wish her hellfire and damnation; but I still loved her with all of my heart and her duplicity was thus all the more confusing and excruciating.

Catherine and I met, as most lovers meet, by fate of proximity. That is to say because we came to live close to each other, even if for just the summers which Catherine came to spend in Cleveland habitually, the opportunity for us to fall in love existed. And as a result of a mixture of thermo-chemistry and the oddest of opportunities, we did ultimately fall in love with one-another.

I was fourteen years old and in the awkward stages of puberty: voice changes, sporadic splotches of acne blemishes (always a new pimple to fill the ranks of a fallen soldier)

unsolicited erections at the most inconvenient moments and just enough hair on my lip to indicate that I was a man, but not near enough scruff to actually be one. In short: the most memorable yet forgettable days of my life. I was maybe five-foot six with jet black shoulder length hair, as was fashionable for the seventies, always dressed in raggedy denim jeans and tattered tee-shirts. I lived in a hallmark neighborhood in the suburb of Cleveland Heights in one of the few rented two story two family houses on the street.

As a child I used to hang out with Tommy Sullivan (a juvenile delinquent to be sure) a burly ox of a boy about six inches taller than me and about twice my weight. He had sandy brown hair and brown eyes encompassed in darkened circles which hovered above his scowling jaw (as if by puppet strings) which I swear he clenched deliberately and constantly to intimidate anyone who crossed his path. Tommy and I spent most of our time playing baseball in an overgrown field, with a wood and chain-link backstop and old car-mats for bases, at the end of our street with some twenty or so other kids who shared our obsession with the sport. We would often rise at sunrise and sit on our respective stoops waiting until a decent hour, as my mother used to say, for the opportunity to bolt to the ball-field. We would get their by eight in the morning and would often play until dark, or until one of our siblings, or god forbid, one of our mothers dragged us away under the threat of our father’s leather belt.

If it wasn’t baseball at the diamond it was dodge-ball in the middle of the street, a game where the object was to hit anyone in the game with a bouncy plastic ball without them catching it, and you got three chances before you were out of the game. The game would begin with just a few of us, say Tommy and I and the Landry family (there were so many

Landry children that I wondered how their parents had time for anything but procreation). Before we knew it there would be thirty or forty kids playing dodge-ball in the street, jumping and running and evading, and the Beautiful song of kids squealing and screaming and laughing would fill the air, stifled only by the acorn and buckeye trees that lined the front yards of our street and the thick damp summer air that dewed the lawns. The game might begin a few hours before sunset and last until past the dawn of the street-lamps until the fireflies and mosquitoes and our parents chased us back into our houses to our dinners and baths and prime-time television with a choice of three fuzzy stations.