In the taxi back home, Al stared at his wife as if she might disappear if he took his eyes off her.

"Al," she said. "I'm not going anywhere, and you're kind of creeping me out."

"Sorry," he said. "I really was afraid I'd never see you again, you or Joe."

She looked at him a moment more before staring ahead. "If something happened to me and Joe, would you..."

Al felt a tightening in his chest. "Would I what?"

"Would you go on?"

Al didn't think that was what she was originally going to ask. "I couldn't," he said.

"Of course you could," she said. "You'd have to. You have people who depend on you. Your mother, your other friends and their kids."

"I'm only an uncle in name. They have their own families to look after them."

She turned back to him and put a hand on his face. "I know you love me, have loved me since we were kids, and I feel so lucky to have your love, and I love you just as much, but I couldn't die in peace if I knew you couldn't go on without me." She tapped his face so hard it was almost a slap. "I'd come back and haunt you until the end of your days."

"Ow. And I'd wake up to your ghost every morning and say goodnight to it every night, and count myself lucky."

She growled in frustration and said, "You're so fucking weird!"

"How about we stop talking about death, then, and just be glad you're still alive."

She nodded and wiped a tear from her eye. "It wasn't a foregone conclusion there for a while, I can tell you that."

He kissed the other tears on her cheeks and said, "What else are you comfortable telling me?"

She flinched and looked to the taxi driver, whose eyes flicked to them in the rearview mirror more often than they should have for safe driving. "Not here," she said sotto voce.

They rode in silence as the taxi crossed the Cambie Street Bridge and made its way into the downtown core. Al paid the driver when he dropped them off at their building, feeling lucky that his card still worked; when they'd married, they'd joined their accounts, an act of great optimism on both their parts, especially Al's, who'd known very well the financial troubles Rachel had when they'd reunited, and now that Rachel's purse was stolen, there was every possibility that whoever stole it maxed out their account. It occurred to him only now that he should have called his credit card company to track any expenses that were made in the time since Rachel had left Saturday night, and try to find her that way. Then again, that might have led him to the robbers, not to Rachel and Joe. Hopefully the police would use that method to find and arrest whoever was responsible for beating up Joe like that.

Samson met them at the door, yowling his head off. "Oh, shit, he must be starving," he said, remembering the last time he'd fed him was yesterday afternoon. It was now almost a day later.

Rachel, to his surprise, scooped him up and pressed her face into his fur. "Oh, sweet boy," she said, kissing him repeatedly. "I thought I'd never see you again."

Samson's purr seemed to shake the room. He never let anyone pick him up. He came to you if he wanted affection. It had to be his idea. Once again, though, Rachel upended everything Al thought he knew about his own cat, and he'd had no idea she felt this way about him; he'd thought she just tolerated him and gave him lap time when he wanted it, but he knew she also got pissed when he scratched something of hers, and hated being woken by his need for his morning feeding. This... love... she was displaying knocked him off balance, and it made him wonder if it was being close to death that made her look at everything in her life in a new light, or if he'd misjudged how much she felt for Samson all along.

He busied himself filling his water and food dishes, and scooping his litter, while he thought about it. Rachel carried Samson into the living room, and finally let him down on the couch. Then she just started stripping off the clothes the hospital gave her out of the lost and found, ripping them away as if they were crawling with bedbugs. "Ugh," she moaned. "Other people's clothes, I just can't..."

"We can toss them. Just leave them there and I'll take care of them if you want to shower."

"I need to shower. I've been in the elements for two nights. The police took some samples, but I feel so unclean..."

"Rachel... were you..." He couldn't even say it. It made him sick to think about it.

She read his mind, though, and shook her head. "It wasn't like that, but... I still need to get clean. I'm sticky, and I stink, and I'm too bruised and sore to wash myself, so I need you to wash me..."

She bit her lower lip, and Al didn't need any more incentive. He started stripping off his muddy, crusty clothes, and it was only then that Rachel noticed how dirty they were. "Where did you get so dirty?" she asked.

"This construction site in Aldergrove that Joe and Johnny were working on. We were digging up a pet grave."

She stopped when he said that, her face fell, and she nodded sadly. "Charlie."

"You knew?"

"Yeah. But why were you digging him up?"

He cleared his throat and said sheepishly, "We thought maybe you or Joe were in there."

"Jesus!" she gasped. "Really?! I think something has happened here. We seem to have had two completely separate sets of experiences, what happened to us, and what happened to you while you were looking for us."

He nodded. "You're absolutely right, more right than you know."

She was completely naked now, and her furrowed brow was so cute that he just wanted to smother her with kisses all over her body, but one look at her body stopped him. "My God, Rachel, how did this happen to you?"

He reached out a hand and gingerly touched one of the many bruises on her body, this one on her hip. She hissed in pain and said, "Would you believe a fall out of a moving vehicle?"

He gasped. "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

She shook her head. "Let's shower. I want to forget about what happened for a while, and I want to feel your hands washing me, and I want to make soft, gentle love to you, and if I do that I think I can forget for a few minutes."

He swallowed back tears of sympathy for her and nodded. "I can do that. I guess your period's over?"

She blinked in surprise and said, "It is, as a matter of fact, but just; my pants were ruined out there because my tampons were in my purse and my purse was stolen. Why do you ask?"

"The police used your used tampons for DNA to find you."

"Jesus, you have been busy. And, ew, by the way, just, ew."

"Did I just turn you off?"

She shook her head, led him into the shower and got the water going. "How much pressure do you think you can handle?" he asked.

"Light, please, but enough that you can wash my hair and get the shampoo out."

He pampered her. He massaged her scalp with shampoo and she purred as loudly as Samson. He applied conditioner. He took his time with every part of her body. He held her against him and fondled her breasts from behind with the puff and his hands. He made her so clean that her skin became pink from his scrubbing. She turned and held him to her and kissed him hard, and kept his mouth there so she could breathe his breath for as long as she could. He knelt down and gave her sweet pussy lots of attention, and she moaned contentedly and pressed his face between her legs, and he could have basked in that moist warmth forever, so happy was he that she was back in his arms. She came once quickly and a second time a little later, and then she lifted him to his feet and guided him inside her, and he was slow, sliding with her, grinding with her, and she moved her hips to his rhythm and seemed almost surprised to come a third time when he finally exploded inside her.

"Don't be alarmed, Al," she whispered in his ear, "but I haven't been able to take my birth control pills while I've been out, so we're kind of taking a risk here, but it's early enough in my cycle that I should be okay."

He looked her in her lovely green eyes and said, "I love you so much, and if it happened I couldn't be happier."

"Seriously?"

He shrugged. "The fostering application has been such a hassle, I sometimes wonder if we should just go ahead and try being parents instead."

"Uh, well, okay, but I think I'm going back on the pill as soon as we're out of this shower. Just, you know, because."

He chuckled. "Okay. I love you."

"I love you too, you big weirdo."

They stepped out of the shower and Al dried her gently with a fluffy towel and gingerly combed her hair for her while she took her pill with a glass of water she kept at the sink. She looked so sleepily content that Al wondered how tired she was and whether she'd gotten any sleep out there. He led her to the bed, fully intending to tuck her in and get her some Ibufrofen if she needed it, when she stopped and stared down at it, and he saw what she saw.

"What happened to the sheets?" she asked.

Fuck. He hadn't put new ones on before he left yesterday, he'd been in such a hurry to get back out to Burnaby and see... Lauren. Odd, how he'd almost forgotten about her as soon as he'd seen his love standing there in the emergency room. That was just as much a betrayal of Lauren as his unremembered dalliance with Lauren was a betrayal of Rachel.

"The police took those too," he said. "They also took the bottles and the glasses from Saturday night."

Rachel's eyes widened, and she stepped back out in the living room with only a towel wrapped around her. After a few seconds, she reentered the bedroom. "What... why did they take all of that, all of this?" she asked, gesturing to the bed, which Al had already started remaking. "I can understand why they might have wanted my DNA, as you said, and I'm happy they basically cleaned our apartment for us, but what were they hoping to get from all this?"

Al finished cinching the fitted sheet, sighed, and straightened. "Okay, I'm going to tell you something, and I don't want you to be alarmed."

"What?" she breathed.

"Lauren and I believe we were drugged that night."

"What?!" she squawked in disbelief, chuckling at the absurdity of his statement. "What are you talking about?"

"We can't remember anything. We can't remember you leaving. We can't remember the early hours of the morning. We woke up in the apartment with you two gone, terribly confused."

Rachel looked again at the bed, then back at him. "You... both... woke up here?"

Al swallowed hard and said, "Yes."

"And you couldn't remember anything."

"No. I woke to you calling me, and then I saw the texts you left, and then I played your message, and I threw up because I was so worried and confused, I didn't know where you were... and Lauren was worse, because Joe hadn't called or sent any text messages, so she had even less to go on." He gestured to the bed. "The police took the sheets in case some derivative of whatever we were drugged with ended up being excreted in our sweat or..."

"Bodily fluids?" she finished with raised eyebrows.

Al knew she knew. He could never lie to her. Best just to come clean. "Okay, so... we woke up naked in each other's arms."

Her eyelids fluttered, and he thought she might faint. He took hold of her and she sank into his arms, and he helped her on to the bed and placed a pillow behind her head, the whole time saying, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, we couldn't understand what happened, we were so confused."

She put the back of her hand against her closed eyes and groaned. "How?" she asked. "How could you not have known what happened? I saw you. Joe and I both saw you making out right in front of us."

That was true. Even Sunny had seen it. "See, we think that was still the drugs. We don't remember that either."

"You really think something like that happened to you? Why just the two of you?"

He blinked in surprise. "I don't know. See, this is why I hope the police find something. Maybe they can pinpoint what glasses got spiked, maybe get some more evidence of who spiked them."

She lowered her hand and looked at him hard.

"If you saw Lauren and me... being amorous..." he stammered. "Why didn't you give me the cold shoulder as soon as you saw me? Weren't you angry with me? With Lauren?"

She sighed and put a hand to his cheek. "At the time I was just so relieved to see you. Plus I'd just come back from Hell, so I didn't have time to remember what happened before we left that night. I can work out my feelings about this later, especially if you say you were drugged. But I can't stay mad at you and Lauren, especially after all you did to try to find us. Joe may have his own ideas about what the two of you did, although he might be more forgiving if you really were drugged."

"I guess I should be lucky Joe's laid up right now, it'll give me time to run far away."

"Huh." She looked away for a second and then back at him. "Joe won't be able to judge you two. Sometimes shit just happens. This is what I wanted to talk to you about in my message. When we were out there, we had to do things we wouldn't normally have done."

Al blinked in surprise. "Like what?"

"We had to keep warm. We had to use our body heat."

"Oh. Of course. You... held each other."

She nodded.

"You... comforted each other?"

She bit her lower lip and nodded. "We had nobody. Just each other. We kissed, okay? Just kissed. And poor Joe's face was a mess so we had to be very gentle. We didn't get naked or anything." She added this last pointedly.

"Because it was too cold?"

"No, because Joe and I didn't want to go that far. We were just two friends giving each other comfort." She saw his face and asked, "Are you angry?"

He sighed in resignation. "No."

"And, okay, maybe we did it because we were getting our own back after watching the two of you going at it like starving dogs. Joe was really, really hurt by that."

"I guess I should be relieved he didn't deck me. Were you hurt? I'm so sorry, I never meant..."

"Yeah, I was hurt, but..." She looked away.

"What?" he asked.

She looked back at him. "You're going to think I'm a freak."

"What?" he asked again.

She smirked and said, "I was also a little turned on."

He gasped, then felt aroused, and he had to kiss her, so he did, and she unwrapped her towel, and he whipped his off, and for the second time he was unexpectedly granted the blessing of making love to his wife.

While he slowly rocked and thrust, she gasped and said, "How did she feel in your arms? I bet she felt strong and lithe, like a snake. How was her mouth? I bet she tasted sweet."

She would know, he thought, but he decided not to give that game away. Yet. "I don't remember," he said. "How were Joe's arms?"

"So strong," she breathed. "So cozy. I felt like I was being hugged by a bear. His shoulders, my God, I held them so tightly, and they were more than my hands could hold."

Al now knew the appeal of porn that featured cuckolding. They were fucking to the fantasy of the other's betrayal, remembered or not, and it was so thrilling that he didn't know how much longer he could hold on. "And his cock?" he asked as he slid as deep inside her as he could. "Was it as big as it was in the Skype shows?"

"I told you, he never took it out," she breathed, "but..."

"But?"

"I felt him through his pants like a teenager, and it was like grabbing a salami, and when he exploded, his pants got all wet and sticky..."

This was more than she admitted to before, and the pain of it was the sweetest he'd ever known, and he basked in it. "And did he feel you through your pants? Did he touch you?"

"Yes!" she moaned, an admission and a climax. "He rubbed me good!"

"Lauren and I fucked and I can't even remember it," he breathed before he could stop himself.

He thought she would smack him. He thought she would push him off.

"Oh! Fuck!" she cried instead, in ecstasy. "Keep talking!"

Wow. This was going almost too far. Or maybe it had gone too far.

"All I know is we woke up naked in each other's arms, and the sheets were wet, and when she woke up she said, 'morning, lover,' and grabbed my cock, and I almost ejaculated in her hand."

"Holy shit! I'm coming again!"

He did too, and when they were finished, they looked at each other, gasping with the effort they'd just made.

"Okay, that was weird," Rachel said.

"It was," he agreed.

"I'm glad we got it all out, though."

"You're not mad?"

"How can I be mad? If you don't remember fucking Lauren, then I only feel sorry for you."

He chuckled. Again, she would know what it was like. "You're being remarkably charitable."

"Only because I want the same charity from you. Joe and I..." She trailed off.

"You were two friends who needed each other in a dark time and gave each other what you needed. I can't fault you for that. Let's just agree that it happened and move on. Our marriage and their marriage don't have to suffer for something that happened in extremis."

They kissed their agreement, and he rolled off and stared at the ceiling.

"I still don't understand how it could have happened, though," Rachel said. "How did the two of you end up in bed together? When we left you with Ralph, you were both fully clothed and sitting quietly on the couch, and behaving."

"I don't know, but why didn't you take us with you?"

She shrugged. "I don't know, we thought the two of you might have been a little drunk, and we didn't want to have to manage you while we were out. We were also still pissed at you."

Suddenly Al replayed what Rachel said before and realized she'd said something he didn't know already. "Wait. Ralph?"

"Ralph Rose, you know, one of the partners at Justiciar. He's kind of my boss, although Lauren's my direct supervisor."

Al turned to her and said, "Ralph was there when you left?"

"Yeah. He said he'd keep an eye on you and make sure you didn't get up to any more hijinks. Lauren's a partner of his, and he didn't want her to embarrass herself any further than she already had in front of her coworkers."

Al felt sorry for Lauren and dreaded what she would come back to at work, but he was still confused. "He wasn't there when we woke up. No one was. In fact, when we left to start looking for you, we discovered the apartment door was unlocked. He must have left at some point."

"Maybe. Maybe the two of you were asleep at that time?"

Al thought about it, thought about the discarded clothes on the way to the bedroom. If they'd fallen asleep, they hadn't fallen asleep on the bed at first. "Maybe."

"Still, it might be good to talk to Ralph and see what he remembers. Maybe then we can get some more answers. Now, though, I'm tired, and I think I'd like a nap to catch up on the sleep I lost."

"Of course. Let me get the top sheet on. Would you like something for pain?"

She shook her head. "I'm still coming off what they gave me at the hospital, so I don't think it's a good idea. Maybe later."

"Okay. I love you so much, Rachel. Whatever I might have done, I hope you know I would never willingly jeopardize what we have."

"I know. And neither would I. You believe me, don't you?"

He thought about Lauren's confession of their affair, and the pictures he'd seen on Rachel's phone, and, remarkably, he still did.

Well, that was weird. Al and Lauren aren't the only ones who misbehaved, it seems. Thanks for reading this far! If you liked what you just read, hit the "Vote" button and leave a comment. Let's go back to Lauren at the hospital with Joe by clicking "Continue reading."