The nurse, the housekeepers and Sharon

 

I fell asleep this afternoon and had a dream with Sharon in it. She was disabled and bedridden still, and I was living somewhat apart from her in our sprawling suburban home. I guess the house was big enough, and I had hired some help, so dealing with Sharon's daily care wasn't my main concern in life. 

Apparently, in this dream at least, my main job was that of hiding my infidelities from her. 

I was just outside the front door when, Gina, her hospice nurse approached me. She drew in close, as if she was going to whisper a secret in my ear. Instead, she pressed herself up against me, and I found myself the victim of a surreptitiously placed kiss. 

Torn between the instant pang of guilt and my rising desire, I reciprocated the kiss while weakly trying to extricate myself from her arms. We fell down on the grass together in a heap of tangled arms, legs and repressed sexual energy. Soon hands were on appendages, and fingers were in places that high school boys boast about.

"I've been wanting this for some time, you know," she said, giving voice to the unspoken tension. 

Like the song lyric, "It felt so wrong, it felt so right," there was no denying that I liked it, alright. Damn her devious ways, and damn my caddish oaf self for falling into the trap.

At that moment, the housekeeper, an English woman in her mid-fifties, sporting a Brady Bunch mom hairdo and the concomitant amount of '70s rouge, opened the door and spied me and Gina lying on the lawn. The housekeeper reached for a phone just inside the doorway and began speaking in hushed tones to someone.

"Can you come here?" she was saying. "Yes, come quickly. You'll never believe what I'm seeing." 

It was a rather awkward and unprofessional position for either Gina or myself to be caught in.  I was sunk. Busted, and I knew it.

I quickly extricated myself from the tangle of  lust on the lawn, stood up and approached the housekeeper. I was going to try to explain to her that it wasn't what she thought, although it probably was exactly what she thought. 

Instead, I took the phone from her and found that it was Sharon on the other end. I was about to explain to her what had happened and that it didn't mean anything, realizing how cheap and crappy that would make me look to her, to Gina and the housekeeper. The housekeeper interrupted me before I could speak:

"Just so you know, as of right now, Sharon doesn't know anything." 

Her words washed over me like a wave of relief. I didn't want to make Sharon's life any sadder with news of my actions. Apparently, though, Gina's kiss had awakened some kind of beast in my libido, and when I was handing the phone back to the housekeeper, I felt another spark of desire as my roughly stubbled face brushed her smooth cheek.

"I don't want your beard," she spoke reprovingly, "but I will take a beer for my trouble." 

"Right away, ma'am," I said, agreeing at once to the paltry blackmail.

I went inside to fetch the beer and found Sharon in the process of trying to transfer herself out of bed and onto a rickety manual wheelchair. This was not in her current repertoire, and she wasn't doing a very good job of it. She was dressed in an attractive evening gown, black with an aqua fade toward the bottom, where it ended in a kind of fishnet weave.

"That's a lovely dress you are wearing," I said. I wanted to give her a hug, but I was afraid that she'd catch Gina's scent on me. Women have an uncanny nose for news when it comes to the smell of other women.

"I'm about to poop myself," she announced handily. "That's why I'm trying to transfer by myself and get out of this dress. I wanted to save the housekeeper the work." Her innocent tone and selfless motivations made me choke up a little.

Another housekeeper, a large black woman wearing nurse's scrubs, arrived at that moment, ready to attend to the duties at hand. I felt guilty for not having any responsibilities regarding Sharon's care, so I offered the second housekeeper a beer as well. 

She graciously accepted the offer, and I went off to the refrigerator to fetch a couple of beers to pacify my conscience. They looked rather refreshing, and I thought of grabbing one for myself, but I stuck to the original plan. 

That was about where the dream ended. I woke up feeling like a philandering politician who has barely evaded discovery by the paparazzi. Though none of these type of events ever happened in real life, it was perhaps only due to lack of means and opportunity. I feel that there is an inner cad in me who might have jumped at the chance, had it presented itself.