The tv detective, the reverend, the psychiatrist, the truck unloader from across the hall--all have haunted her psyche and plagued her heart. Who will win in the end or will her sanity betray them all?
Sweet Fields was where they met and it took her years and cataclysms to remember. She knew that he had always wanted to tell her something, something that he was bursting to say, but that he was her David returned to her--well that she had no idea was looming large in his consciousness. Now she must worry if it is too late to try to find him and let him know that she is finally ready, finally strong enough, if the doorway is still open, if the spiritual connection has not grown too taut and broken.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
THE DISSOLUTION BEGINS
for me
“Where do I begin? To tell the story of a love that never ends ......”
The moment I saw him I thought, oh, so that’s what 6’4” looks like, knowing that he probably lied on his IMDB bio. It didn’t matter; the essence was the same, the telekinesis was the same, the voice in my head still seductively sweet. Nothing demonic about it--simply my sweet, beautiful David come back to me.
I had buried the memory so many years ago, I was what, eight? Running in the fields, endless fields, with my yellow pants and his pudgy eight year old self, both of us free for the first time and we loved each other right then, as eight year olds do.
We were at the Jim Jones compound, one of his weekend events, and we, the children, had been let out for a momentary respite.
David and I ran and played and felt release from all of our problems and promised our love forever, in the way that children rarely freed from tough homes do.
I remember only his dark, straight hair, slightly olive skin, and our looking up to the heavens as we prayed we would find each other again.
We have.
We endured that weekend of attempts to brainwash. What happened in his life I have no idea.
I came home from that weekend and my mother was shocked at the state of my hair and my clothes. She had not taught me self-sufficiency at 8 like my good friend down the street. My mother vowed I would never go anywhere with them again and took her baby to her breast and washed me clean.
Not much was ever said about that weekend again, not even when my friend’s mother was one of the victims of the mass suicide reported a year or so later.
Every now and again, on rare occasions, when I was my most frightened, memories of my David would appear again. Only when I was my most frightened. I did not know I was also coming to him.
I am 48 now, perhaps indeed the perfect timing, and the companion with whom I am living presents himself as an extremely terrified child. He is. Massive continuous relentless abuse, from adults, his school companions, a choral master, a teacher. Fear and torture everywhere.
It has made him, this bullying and abuse, a recovering sex addict who now punishes himself with a sexual repression based upon Biblical principles. It has also made him a serial monogamist: someone who finds a bright and capable woman and treats her with so much kindness and caring that she falls in love with him.
But he withholds physical intimacy, and any and all serious penetration because there will be no fornication before marriage.
I am 48 and in my sexual prime. He has no idea what he is asking.
I fell, I fell hard, I loved even his length of leg. But the repression, the putting of anything any church or pastor needed before any need I may have for his time and attention finally just wore me down. His deathly fear and obedience to every controlling woman in his life turned my passion to ashes and now, after four years of living with him, I am cramping and worried that I am pregnant. I do know, however, that feeling pregnant is a danger sign for me from a spiritual guardian. I have felt his presence for a long while, and now I know it is my David’s competition, his older brother in fact, come back to me.
Brothers fight, you know, especially over the women in their lives. These two brothers have traveled and fought over me before and will again. Little brother won this time.
That sweet afternoon in the fields, free to just be children.
How rare that was for both of us.
He has been working behind the scenes in ways I cannot yet reveal.
I will simply say, the novel begins here, and tell it in flashback.
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