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DITW 15-19: Orbital Mechanics and Entry Windows
🕑 Added 2024-12-05 04:20:48 +0000 UTCThat she would do such a devilish thing! Kimmy would do the worst things she could imagine; had done the worst things, thinking meager Josh might fantasize it; did it because whether it was for Josh didn’t matter; Kimmy loved it. Loved to torture him in secret. This mild woman he’d married, this woman of once plain sex, and a kind, clean home, was wicked. Perverted. She wore a black crown of poisonous thorn, and wore it with grace. He would never know if Devlin or Amy had started last summer’s treachery, or even if it had been Kimmy who'd started it. He’d never know the truth because he’d stepped away from consciousness that night at Tiffany’s; had over-indulged and paid the price. Hell, maybe it had been Kimmy who’d put it in his ear he wanted to have Devlin fuck her.
Or maybe it had been him all along.
But he possessed Kimmy now. Of that he was sure. A baby and a house. And sex. Awful sex. Amazing sex. The return of whispered treasures, of diabolical sexual exploits that sent his delight into the stratosphere.
He pulled her face from the pillow, hand on the back of her neck slipping to her collar, and guiding her upright, his cock popping out from inside her, Kimmy's back pressing to his chest. He kissed her neck and stroked her shoulder. This was Colleen’s mother, and he wouldn’t mistreat his daughter’s mother. And deep down in his chest’s host rock, past the gangue and under the overburden, lay unexpected and undeserved love, a thin vein of still-sparkling ore. He said, “How can I still love you?”
Kimmy moaned and rubbed between her thighs, like she needed him. Or needed it. “Because you know I love you. You know it. And knowing that means everything.”
The idea rolled in his mind and found no dip nor abscess that would halt it. The idea had racy momentum, and all he knew was he needed an answer why he could love her; and her response was as good as any. Fear peeked past the veil when his preconscious whispered he hadn’t the courage to hate her. “You did those terrible things because you loved me.”
The hand Kimmy held between her thighs reached deeper underneath her and found his hardness. She angled his return and guided her hips back so he would enter her again.
He said, “I want to make love to you. I don’t want it like this.”
Kimmy stilled, his length only in her a shallow depth, and what he sensed as disappointment pierced his psyche. Wounded him. Frightened him. “Just one time, Kimmy. I want you as my wife. I want you like how we used to be.”
“I want that, too,” she said. After a moment, she eased forward, let his dick slip out of her, and knee-walked around to face him before reclining on the bed, head on a pillow. Her long legs parted, knees out to the sides, and she wiped her cheeks and then motioned for him to join her. To get on top of her.
A huge feeling of inadequacy seized his heart. A true and primal fear of not being enough. Not satisfying her. Of loving her and suffering under her cruelty, and yet once reunited, failing to please her in the way she liked—a perpetual failure that may have led to their catastrophe. Worry that his wife had gone to Devlin not just because of Devlin’s big dick and money and good looks, but because her husband wasn’t dirty enough. Wasn’t nasty enough. How couldn’t he think Kimmy loved all that depraved sex? How couldn’t he believe that she would miss it again in the future?
She didn’t love Devlin. She loved sweet Josh.
But she’d loved the wickedness more—and wickedness grew in unimaginable measure when applied in her husband's naive proximity. Being with Devlin alone would never do it for Kimmy. She would just be another wicked widget in the wicked widget factory. And now he could see the betrayal for what it was and how she’d worked so hard to have him back. The act of betrayal and the stark humiliation turned her on. Drove her wild. She’d even wanted to humiliate Devlin. And what would that have looked like? Would it have raised Josh Waters’ esteem in her own eyes? Or would she have reveled in humiliating them both at the same time? Maybe she loved disparity and would have experimented in exchanging one man over the other, waging them against one another in value, making sure each of them both equaled the same amount, but struggled in endless turmoil on their designated pans, wanting to make a difference in her measure.
How would he ever arouse a woman like that? How would he do the things that made her go crazy? Without a question, he wanted her to have that sexual satisfaction. To have that erotic joy.
What if she likes other men to come in her mouth and then have her kiss you? Would you do such a thing?
You already did such a thing.
He dropped over top of her, his face hovering over hers. "Why the fuck do I still love you?" Kimmy said nothing and he said, "Why don’t I hate you?"
"Do you want to hate me?" She touched his cheeks.
He shook his head. "I want to love you. I wish it was easier."
"It will be." Then she kissed him, holding his face, lying on her back. Just the way he'd asked her to. Like the way they were before everything went wrong.
Like the way that provoked Kimmy's disenchantment. The way he'd bored her before.
His hand trembled now, gripping his hardness and swiping the tip of his throbbing hardness along Kimmy's slippery seam. He thumbed it downward and sank inside her hot interior. He went halfway, withdrew and coated his tight cock skin with her slick lubrication. And she moaned. And while she moaned all he thought was she lied. She betrayed. She made the sounds she thought she should to appease his bruised ego. But so what? Hadn't she done enough? Kimmy had done so much to restore them, to bring him back to her bed. Did he want her to stay silent while he fucked her?
But now he moaned too, and the feel of her tight wet-velvet squeeze on his member was delight in the purest form. Light bloomed in his mind and he closed his eyes, rolled into her deeper, pulled back and did it again. Kimmy roiled against his intrusion. Wanting him. Perhaps wanting him deeper. Wanting him harder and dirtier, wanting him to do the kinds of things Devlin Stone did to her behind his back. The two of them fucking and sucking and laughing. Luxury hotel suites and fancy restaurants, and Prada shoes and Mercedes Benz convertibles.
Kimmy's pelvis rocked with his thrusts, giving him easy access and eager supplication to his turgid cock. He plowed her with ease. The pleasure was enormous. The fear was greater.
She'd given it all up for this? Given it all up for her okay husband with a mediocre job and soft body and average dick? When she'd had it all? There were things Devlin didn't have that she wanted. There were things about him that made Kimmy whole.
He grunted and groaned, watching his wife's upturned face, positive she feigned that look of ecstasy he witnessed. But she overflowed with wet. She made the sounds he liked. And he loved to be in bed with her. Their bed.
He fucked her faster, getting the bed squeaking, feeling his cock steeling harder; he'd lagged at those awful thoughts of inadequacy. But now he was iron again. Rock hard and wanting to come inside her. Wanting to go all night but knowing he wasn't that man. He could be what she wanted since she insisted so much she would do the same for him. He gripped her hair, not with anger or hatred, but out of sheer frustration. He growled at her, "Devlin came in your mouth and you kissed me?"
Kimmy shook her head no, wincing at the pull of her hair in his shaky grip.
He fucked her harder, and with urgent need. A man out of control with sexual excitement. "You sucked his big cock and let him blow his load in your mouth."
Kimmy gasped, eyes closed with intense lust, loving his words. freed by them.
"And then you kissed me."
Kimmy shivered with cruel excitement. “I wondered if you could, mm, taste him. Did you taste his, ah, come, Josh?”
Josh's balls climbed high. Disappeared up inside his body. Afraid and belittled and diminished. But swelling with impending release. Filled with seed enough to make them Colleen's beautiful sibling. Their connection slicked with a generous spew of his grease, thrusting into her, wishing he had a monster between his legs so he could punish Kimmy's sex the way it deserved. Stretch her sex to the limit, an enormous cock head reaming her guts before it exploded inside her like a hand grenade, flooding her with an orgasmic payload that rounded her belly once more.
Fuck, they’d come close to enormous destruction.
Colleen could have been Devlin’s.
It wasn’t impossible for it to have happened.
Colleen was all his, but it was close.
"You’re so fucking awful," he said, caressing her throat, racing thoughts of murder flittering over the surface of his mind. Yet so fucking in love. So renewed. The complex thing between them simplified in theoretical equations, chalk on a blackboard. Two sides of an equation. No matter how one changed, the other must follow. And after all the harm, all the betrayal, somehow she’d restored what they had. Had proved to him not only her love but her dedication.
The risk!
Kimmy had risked it all. Risked it all for the thrill. Fucked around without proper protection and almost bore another man’s child.
And the thought scared the shit out of him and drove him wild at the same time.
*
It felt incredible to have him inside her again. To feel his hardness thrusting in and out, to hear his breath and feel his body. No man had been inside her since Devlin. It took almost a year for this reunion but it was worth the wait and worth the effort.
She asked him again if he tasted Devlin's semen on her kiss and Josh rewarded her with liquid delight and quivering limbs. He shivered with his orgasm's hasty approach. He sought to rage and rail, but succumbed to his own delight. Easy surrender. For Josh was fictile, and the world around him chose his shape.
And like that, he stiffened, and she closed her legs around him, held him close and held him tight. He bucked and grunted with wonderful release and the woe of completion. He hid away his face in the pillow, their connection warm and sweaty now, but still very nice. She rubbed his back as his seed leaked from their union and his hardness faded. It would return.
She told him: “I’m not me without you. I’m nothing. I wouldn’t know who I am.” And there was more truth in that than she could describe to Josh. A slippery phantasm pastiche would sometimes flicker behind her eyes like a zoetrope, showing trips to Taiwan and high school and happier times at Dalton High and in Kingston, of going to university, of marrying Josh and wanting a family. That’s who she was and she never wanted to forget that. Without Josh, she would be a woman she hated. Who most everyone she knew would hate. Her father, her friends. Even her mother wouldn’t like that person. And Colleen Chang had loved everyone.
Josh stirred, kissing her neck and jaw, showing his face once more. She smiled, patted his bearded face. He was handsome and boyish, and though he said Colleen had his mother's eyes, she saw only his when she regarded their daughter.
Josh withdrew, and a stream of semen spilled from her, getting her legs closing while Josh rolled away and lay next to her. He gripped her hip and pulled her closer. Then his hand slipped down her thigh and up the back, sending her into shivers, hardening her nipples and making her gasp. He smiled, knowing her spots. —And it made her think of how she'd shared that with Devlin. Intimacy. Not always raw sex, but sometimes a dark closeness she regretted.
There was sadness though in his eyes, and she could imagine a few things that would bother him. The thing she had said and his own regret for enjoying it. When she'd said it, he couldn't hold his orgasm back for long. And the shortcoming. Worried how much bigger Devlin's penis was, and how quickly he'd ejaculated.
He sat up and left the bedroom, walking naked to the bathroom. He looked good leaner. When he returned he delivered a towel and she fixed it between her legs, remaining on her side and watching Josh's eyes. He settled beside her, laying the way she was, the two of them close and confidential.
He said, "What would you have done to him, if you could?"
She snuffled a small laugh. "Who, Devlin?" She snuffled again, looked away and then looked back. Josh still stared, undeterred. She said, "I would have broken him. I told you. I was so close to owning him."
Josh smiled too, a sparkle in his eyes. "Tell me."
She breathed deep, adjusted the towel between her thighs. "I . . . I made him as obsessed with my panties as you. Maybe even more." She cupped Josh's cheek and thumbed the corner of his mouth.
He frowned but his smile stayed. "Why?"
"To break him, Josh. He thought it was so funny to do it to you. So I did it to him."
Josh closed his eyes and chuckled. "What did you do?"
She hesitated, unsure of what to say. Then: "I made him wear them."
Josh laughed. "They wouldn't fit him."
"They did," she said. "And I filmed him in them."
Josh's smile and frown faded and he licked his lower lip. The frown returned.
Cold fear formed below her heart and she opened her mouth to speak but didn't know what to say.
Josh sat up, cheeks hollowed and eyes staring.
"I'm sorry, baby," she said, sitting up, following him, touching his back. "I don't want to talk about those bad things. I shouldn't have said anything."
Josh turned his face to hers. "Did you really?" His expression was softer, but she remained expressionless.
Josh looked down and then back up again. "Do you have the video?"
Comments
Bill F Protagoras
"I've never been to heaven, but at least I've read about love!" Richard Thompson. Read About Love. Asked my daddy when I was thirteen "Oh Daddy, can you tell me what a lover really means?" His eyes went glassy, not a word was said He poured another beer and his face turned red Asked my mother, she acted the same She never looked up, she seemed so ashamed Asked my teacher, he reached for the cane He said, "Don't mention that subject again" [Pre-Chorus] (Read about love) I read it in a magazine (Read about love) Cosmo and Seventeen (Read about love) In the back of a Hustler, Hustler, Hustler [Chorus] So I know what makes girls sigh And I know why girls cry So don't tell me I don't understand What makes a woman and what makes a man I've never been to heaven But at least I've read about love [Verse 2] My big brother told me when I was fourteen "It's time I showed you what a lover really means Girls like kissing and romance too But a boy's got to know what a man's got to do" He gave me a book, the cover was plain Written by a doctor with a German name It had glossy pictures, serious stuff I read it seven times then I knew it well enough [Pre-Chorus] (Read about love) And now I've got you (Read about love) Where I want you (Read about love) I got you on the test bed, test bed, test bed [Chorus] So why don't you moan and sigh? And why do you sit there and cry? I do everything I'm supposed to do If something's wrong, then it must be you I know the ways of a woman I've read about love Well, well, well When I touch you there it's supposed to feel nice That's what it said in Reader's Advice I've never been to heaven But at least I've read about love Eat your heart out John Milton...
KT Morrison
I do read a lot of the great Irish poets, and did so from a very young age.
KT Morrison
Wonderful. I'm also unsure if any finale I contrive is a true finale and not just the closing of a chapter.
Bill F Protagoras
"Let me not be mad!" Excuse my Learing!
Bill F Protagoras
These red hearts!
Bill F Protagoras
How Kimmy's unreasoning cunny must have rejoiced to hear Josh asking after the video... Was something turning out as her capricious consciousness had rashly foreseen that long long life sundering year ago? When she let go of Josh on an impulse difficult, if not impossible to recall...
Bill F Protagoras
On closer examination of this chapter's title there is a good (or bad) deal of ambiguity on hand... Also as my ole mucker the Joker wryly mentioned... The hour is getting late!
JL23
Resolution is "a" goal of a story. You need some kind of resolution, but it doesn't necessarily have to tie all the knots together. And it doesn't necessarily have to be "the" goal of a story. The journey along the way is important too. Guess I used quotations there more for the idea that a lot of us seem to be thinking, that this isn't necessarily going to be one of those tie all the knots, no doubt they live happily ever after endings. Feels more ambiguous, and maybe even a bit ominous, long term. Interesting thoughts above about how both Josh and Kimmy may be using their kinks as the string that keeps them together. I kind of agree with some of that. Definitely from Josh's POV.
Bill F Protagoras
Very interesting and perspicacious take, Randy, and run with it. My only discrepancy is the centrality you give the erotic game. What seems more important to me is that the love that they took for granted pre-trauma and pre-Devlin is now so problematic that they have started to try to recover a relationship out of nostalgia and a nuclear family alone. The rigorous stomping Kimmy inadvertently gave Josh (traumatized in his own fashion) through her big magic wang coping strategy was not only nearly totally destructive, but transformative. Now the eroticism of the deviant game they used as a temporary patch is being used by each of the insecure Waters as a bargaining chip. The ephemeral nature of their kinks and it's innate conflictive nature doesn't make it seem a reliable fix. Despite my passion for irony, and my confidence in KT's artistic prowess, it may be darkest before the dawn in psychosomatic land... but in my experience it's darkest in the middle passage of a moonless, starless night miles away from anywhere (or as they put it round here) en el quinto coño!
Randy
A thought just occurred to me. First, KT seems to have gone deep into the characters of Kimmy and Josh. And, bringing the angst to a sufficient level to end the story is not easy as a result. Both Josh and Kimmy have to come to a place of self and mutual understanding to both see the game for what it is…a mutual turn on…and how each mutually benefits without the game tearing them apart individually and as a couple. Second, ending the conflict will not be the end of the story. It’s not like they can put this Genie back in a bottle and set it on the shelf. The game will need to continue except around another person. Third, I wonder how KT will reveal the affair between Hyun and Kimmy? What a perfect ending, Josh discovering his next point of torment, arousal will be his best friend’s ex-wife, now in lover for Kimmy, and care taker of their daughter and home.
Bill F Protagoras
Sorry, Pete, but after the work we've read, and especially after the most recent instalments... nothing and no one could convince me of an HEA. These babes are not out of the woods for a good while yet. And now I see another reason why 'the ending' of Cherry Blossoms was located where it was! Also, is there anything that KT has written that you've read that would lead us to expect a fairy tale adjacent ending... ?
Bill F Protagoras
*"Prosody refers to the melodic aspects of speech, including variations in pitch, intensity, and duration, which convey meaning through paralinguistic cues and help organize language. AI generated definition based on: Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006." Maybe AI isn't just a load of bollox... Sorry, David Hume just nudged me and hissed... Or somebody is lying.
Bill F Protagoras
"This mild woman he’d married, this woman of once plain sex, and a kind, clean home, was wicked." What a great sentence! The more lurid Pre-Raphaelite image in continuation climactically leaving it in the shade... but how impressive is the sneaky semantic elision of "and a kind, clean home"? This is prosody.* How many people write as well as this nowadays?
Bill F Protagoras
The final line of one of my favourite novels is "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan ..." I'll give you a clue, Rachel was not a weary lady of easy virtue and feckless maternal instincts plying her trade at the docks. This American novel was examined in one of the few critical essays I truly admire... written by Charles Olson. Claiming that this novel was not the kind of epic it appeared to be, but rather the epic of the birth of industry in America. Not in the lands it was in the process of underhandedly and hypocritically appropriating from the skraelings, but by ships' companies in the Pacific Ocean hunting down and efficiently butchering, processing and capitalizing huge powerful sea mammals. Foreshadowing future exploitations through the labour of outcasts and the unpropertied seeking a minor share of the wealth they harvested for the profiteers who equipped the whalers. Doing the dirty dangerous work to line the pockets of the privileged. Pursuit of the whale for others' happiness. Here I go again, riding a hobby horse of mine while others get to make a hobby of enjoying the riding of all kinds of whores... PS- 'The Dick' not only showcasing explicit descriptions of sailors rubbing their hands together ecstatically in maritime companionship in copious buckets of richly textured precious sperm, but also plunging into the whiteness of not only Moby, makes it a uniquely placed, and timed, anachronistic candidate for queer great American Novel... without even a cursory examination of the nature of Ahab's prosthetic! Even Devlin would blanch with humble Josh-like timidity at the proportions of the true eponymous hero of this particular offering of Melville's multifaceted literary imagination... and tiny Kimmy might quiver with renewed excitement in the burley arms of some daring heroic First Mate upon sighting IT. Or should IT be HIM? Bearing in mind it is 'based on a true story'!
Bill F Protagoras
You are, as you can see, Pete, not alone... maybe not a twist, but something that begs the question about our presumptions, perceptions, and simplistic hopes of satisfaction or resolution. After all, the linear progression of a novel when reading is as deceptive as the concept of self. It might require much more blind optimism than the bones of the story can bear. I might bring up the concept of prescribing a grain of salt, but this work may already have tampered with the blood pressure of its 'dear' readers enough. When in unchartered waters we will all profit by there being a firm alert hand bending the rudder... even if it's to run the vessel aground in a pinch. PS- '11th' hour has a bit of a rosy glow, or a feeling of reprieve about it.
Bill H.
Would love to see a big twist too, Pete!
Pete
I'm not sure. Maybe a return of Devlin? Maybe a twist with Hyun? Or with what Kimmy wants? The story, over the last several chapters has seemed to be moving inexorably toward a Happily Ever After (HEA). It just feels like it could be the calm before the storm (or before the twist).
Zach
What did you have in mind?
Pete
Perhaps I'm the only one, but I can't help but wonder if we might see an 11th-hour twist. KT has done so before (e.g. Learning Lessons).
Randy
First, I think Hyun could be a separate story line of it’s own. It would work out that KT simply lets is dangle. It would also work out that it neatly fits into my Second comment. That is that relationships don’t always move in a simple, straight line. Marriage is about accepting both the good and the not so good in a partner and mutually helping one another grow up. In the case of Josh and Kimmy, the whole story has been about the how sordidness around Devlin both exposes the immaturity in both Josh and Kimmy and forces them to count on their love, their deeper inner connection to one another, to help them achieve some of the intra and interpersonal insight to grow up individually and as a couple. Hyun is merely one additional character in the process. How will KT weave that in? That’s what keeps me reading!
Bill F Protagoras
KT regales us with further masterful demonstration of ad hoc realism and the mental acrobatics it sometimes entails, and the unintentional and irresponsible distress it leaves in its wake. I'm still hanging on by the skin of my teeth... see Job 19:20 "My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth."
Chris K
Someone has homework to do!
Zach
What was on that video?
Bill F Protagoras
Maybe calculation, or might it be the sharpened perception of miscalculation fuelled by trepidation.
Bill F Protagoras
"She wore a black crown of poisonous thorn," with the addendum "and wore it with grace." Together extremely allusive. Including far from consoling intimations of mortality, or dodgy second comings...
Bill F Protagoras
Healthy, JL? Psychology, like Judeo Christianity and most other religions, focuses on the innate wrongness of human beings and their perfectibility... a moot point if ever there was one.
Bill F Protagoras
As you put resolution in quotation marks, JL, I suspect that you don't see resolution as the end (goal) of a novel, or as a prerequisite. I tend towards Collingwood's view that what gives art its sense of completion is the artist's, in this case the author's ability to stop revising it, to cease revelation. If I remember rightly Collingwood began with the idea of a sculptor chipping a statue out of a block of stone... we can see from the Venus de Milo how disastrous an artist's lack of restraint can be. The novel still remains just that... still novel... a mirror or puddle in the mud reflecting the world with its sine qua non life... as Flaubert, or was it Stendhal suggested. As always your observations are interesting and pertinent.
Glaucon
Hey, KT! Hope all's well.
Bill F Protagoras
"Josh looked down and then back up again. "Do you have the video?" What I call switchback bathos, it being a smidgeon less dangerous than my old friend 'whiplash'.
Bill F Protagoras
"To break him, Josh. He thought it was so funny to do it to you. So I did it to him." Kimmy's law... reducing Devlin's pretentions of kudos to their innate absurdity... and incidentally exposing her own shamelessness.
Bill F Protagoras
"She'd given it all up for this? Given it all up for her okay husband with a mediocre job and soft body and average dick?" I wonder where Kimmy got her taste for teasing and tantalizing?
Bill F Protagoras
"He smiled, knowing her spots. —And it made her think of how she'd shared that with Devlin. Intimacy. Not always raw sex, but sometimes a dark closeness she regretted." Given the intrusive dimensions of his erotic 'attentions' how much of his doings were intimacy and how much happily fleshed coincidence... bumping and grinding in snug confines passing itself off as skill or serendipity. Or just rough approximation. Then again... guilt has its own particular squirming thrills and embarrassing stifled whimpers.
Bill F Protagoras
"He was handsome and boyish, and though he said Colleen had his mother's eyes, she saw only his when she regarded their daughter." You're the one doing the redeeming, KT. How skilfully the Waters' points of view elide...
Bill F Protagoras
"Without Josh, she would be a woman she hated. Who most everyone she knew would hate. Her father, her friends. Even her mother wouldn’t like that person. And Colleen Chang had loved everyone." Confession without the expectation of absolution? The niceties of the distinction between respectability, and self respect dabbled with.
Bill F Protagoras
"He bucked and grunted with wonderful release and the woe of completion." Nicely put and nitid to boot!
Bill F Protagoras
"For Josh was fictile, and the world around him chose his shape." Clever, cunningly wrought ambivalence. The measure of all things that are, and 'are not.' 'Fictile'... in Nordic mythology woman and man were made of wood (driftwood?) not clay, Ask and Embla. Each their own tree, no spare ribbing!
JL23
She always says how long she hasn’t been with a “man.” Very specific, and I feel like that’s not just a casual turn of phrase without any meaning. But maybe it is. I think Josh’s reaction to the videotape will probably be the same as his reaction to other revelations in this book. Horrified yet turned on, with the desire winning out. He’s come this far toward acceptance, I don’t think this would cause him to flee. And at this point, probably not even a Hyun revelation (if there is one) would cause that. I don’t know if he, or we, will get that. Again, I kind of hope at the very least we will get some clarification. For me, that’s kind of the last thing I’ll need before I’m personally ready to move on to other stories. I think we’re almost at a good “resolution” point of this one.
Bill F Protagoras
"Stretch her sex to the limit, an enormous cock head reaming her guts before it exploded inside her like a hand grenade, flooding her with an orgasmic payload that rounded her belly once more." Progeny as the product of existential angst... fast-forwarding evolution.
Bill F Protagoras
"How couldn’t he believe that she would miss it again in the future?" The one... the sole ineluctable twenty-second catch.
Bill F Protagoras
"She would just be another wicked widget in the wicked widget factory." Now there's the inspiration for future bedtime stories for Colleen the toddler. Also amusingly self-effacing... recalling what must have been a humanizing facet of pre-reunion Kimberly.
Kat
I would be surprised now if she tells him anything about Hyun. It seems like she doesn’t consider it “real” cheating, as she keeps referring to having not been with a man in a year. I know it’s not in the style of the book, but I’d love to hear Hyun’s side of story, and did she hear them downstairs. Maybe a chapter with Hyun’s thoughts and story telling? I was also thinking, and I know this is very unlikely, that maybe Kimmy wasn’t with Hyun in a relationship-type way this past year. Maybe she was stringing her along, and Hyun was hoping Josh wouldn’t come back, and she’d get to raise Colleen as her own child. She’d also get to stay living in the house with Kimmy, but now she knows she’s going to have to leave. That could explain the tears in the kitchen. I know it’s unlikely. What’s Josh going to do when he hears Kimmy on tape saying that Josh will raise Devlin’s child within their marriage, and stay home and care for the house? At this point, I think they’re back together, so I don’t think it will jeopardize anything. This story could continue forever, and there will always be unanswered questions. I’d be okay with more chapters. I wish this wasn’t the last book. Lol
Bill F Protagoras
“Just one time, Kimmy. I want you as my wife. I want you like how we used to be.” Yet we never step in the same river twice... and "We can't go home again!"
Bill F Protagoras
"And deep down in his chest’s host rock, past the gangue and under the overburden, lay unexpected and undeserved love, a thin vein of still-sparkling ore." That's some petrifyingly astute post Homeric epic metaphor!
JL23
Another long asked question to be answered next it seems. I thought Kimmy talking about why she needed Josh to herself was enlightening. She fears how far she’d fall into the darkness without him, and that she’d become a person no one would like, including herself. In a way, they both cling onto the other because they’re frightened of who they become without the other. But…I don’t really think that’s healthy? Again, I believe there’s genuine love, but there’s also kind of a…I don’t know how to describe it…maybe a calculation? Or a bargain they’re each making by staying together? I can’t shake a nagging feeling now that both would be better off with someone else, and deep in their bones, they know that. But it’s too hard and painful to actually confront that truth, so they’re just going to bury it as deep as they can, for as long as they can. With the videos about to be resolved, the only thing I really feel is left now is Hyun. That would be the only big thing Josh really doesn’t know. Beyond exactly how all this started at Tiffany’s party, and we don’t even know that really.
Bill F Protagoras
Like the desperate besotted solipsist he is, Josh instinctively blames himself! While Kimmy, on her plinth, plays the sphinx... The right to silence protecting us all from self incrimination... Supposedly!
Bill F Protagoras
"Hell is other people." Sartre and his existential angst! However, as scouse xenophobe Dave Lister of 'Red Dwarf' dismissively explained it away... "All his mates were French!"
Donkatsu
Better than calling it "Escape Velocity", I suppose.
Tracey52
Amazing but, “He would never know if Devlin or Amy had started last summer’s treachery, or even if it had been Kimmy who'd started it. He’d never know the truth because he’d stepped away from consciousness that night at Tiffany’s; had over-indulged and paid the price.” This is a little unsatisfactory. I want to know (as I throw a tantrum.)
Bill F Protagoras
At the risk of repeating myself... Wow! But back to front...
Bill F Protagoras
And the title? Paradise Regained? Right?
Bill F Protagoras
That's some muse you invoke! It's easy to say you had it all planned, but the execution is really something else!
Bill F Protagoras
I'm so glad you made me wait!
Bill F Protagoras
Wow!
Jim
I unsubscribed last week. I’ve just reversed that decision. Please don’t end this incredible story.
Kat
Welcome back, KT! Great chapter.
