Early morning. Magic time. Turning in my bed to find him watching me. Trading smiles.

Soft morning light.

Hard morning man.

The sun also rises. It rises in the East. Look, it rises in his eyes.

"I am so glad you're here with me," I whispered to him just as his fingers first touched me below.

"I'd say show me, but you already have," he whispered back, his voice husky with just-ended sleep that hadn't been long enough. Settling in against me with a satisfied sound deep in his throat. Almost like a purr, but a bit more aggressive than that. I took it as absolution. "You feel so good to me, Ann. Soft, like a woman. The way you take me inside you ... I could almost get lost inside this time with you."

"Mmm. I was just gonna say the same thing about you feeling so good to me, East. Getting lost inside you ... nice thought," I sighed to him. Our bodies fit together like they'd been made with just this morning in mind.

His fingers. Their touch had always worked wonders on me. They always seemed an extension of the way he cared. From that first time when he'd touched me and showed me the way he liked to explore a woman ... starting with the extremities and then moving in toward her core. Such a special man to me.

His body. How can mere words do it justice? I may prefer an older man's more impressive frame for how it fires my deepest cravings, but there is something about East's body that has never failed but to make me caress it.

His mind. The way he concentrated on me like he was storing up every single second with me. He seemed to have this uncanny knack for being with me when my soul was unsettled and for figuring out how to touch me on an intellectual level.

I had only realized that in this visit. I had always rather thought it was the fact that he'd seen and filled an emotional need for me the first time we met that had been the basis for my deepened affection for him. But in this visit, I had come to realize that it was the way he'd used his brain to figure me out that had made us click right from the beginning. And he was doing it again in this visit. He never even blinked when I told him why I'd wanted him here on these specific days. He just asked me who it was I figured I'd sinned against the most.

We had been sitting on the steps that led into Lake Pontchartrain's water the night before when he asked me this. Funny how this conversation had started. We had gone there to watch the sunset on the third night he was with me and I started telling him about how when I was a kid, I'd come here to spend time with my cousin Reggie and his family in the summers. It was just after the waning years of the great Pontchartrain Beach, which had been this wonderfully risqué amusement park right there near where we were sitting. It had been torn down years ago, when segregation's disruption of suburban white life had caused the customary patrons to abandon the place rather than lose yet another bastion to the progress of better rights for other races. Ah, civil rights in the South ... never a pretty picture, never an uncontested remembrance.

"Reggie used to tell me that if you just kept on walking down these steps, pretty soon you'd pop out on the other side of the globe in China," I told him. I pointed down the big cement steps that disappeared under the lapping water; they were essentially nothing more than the breakwater. But when I was a kid visiting my cousin, this was where we came in the heat of summer's stickiness to cool down. We'd swim right off the steps. Of course this was before pollution caused the authorities to ban swimming in the lake. "I tried and tried and tried. Every summer, I couldn't wait to get out here so I could try again. I believed him, see, and I kept thinking if I was just strong enough, I could keep my feet on the stairs and walk down under the water. I just couldn't wait to get to China some day."

He started laughing with me as I ticked off all the hopeless schemes I'd come up with to stay on the steps and walk to China. "Love, were you ever that gullible?" he asked me as he wiped his eyes and regarded me with such amusement.

"Yeah. Actually. Once upon a time, I was." My smile fled and I found myself suddenly ashamed. "I used to believe a lot of things men told me."

East took this deep breath and then pulled me in against him. I twisted in his arms and snuggled in tight against him. We sat like that and watched as the sky turned magenta streaked with red and cobalt. Before the cobalt chased away the other colors, he kissed my neck and whispered to me. "Tell me what's really bothering you, Ann. Maybe I can help. Even if it's just listening, maybe it's me you'd like to trust right now."

"I met someone."

He didn't say a word. Just this squeeze around my waist and his breath across my cheek.

"I've broken a rule."

Still no words from East. He nuzzled in, cheek on cheek. I felt the stubble of his face rub across my jaw.

"Really, it started back in my portal. In my real world."

"Mmm. Now we're getting somewhere, aren't we?" he whispered to me.

"I have been unfaithful."

"To him or to us?" he asked me in the blank space that was hanging on the horizon.

I turned in his arms and our eyes met. "Would it matter?"

"It must or you would have answered my question rather than trying to divert me with yours." He gave me this wry grin and for some reason it made me laugh.

"You've got my game down, don't you, East? Have you always known I use that trick of answering a question with a question just to keep from giving a real answer?"

"Read about it in one of your diaries. Then I noticed how you do it a lot." He put his hands on my face and suddenly his smile was gone. He was so serious and so intense; it was like flipping a switch. "Answer the real question. Were you cheating on him or were you cheating on us?"

"On you. On the men here. On Jack, most of all, I guess. But in a way, also on him."

"There now," saying it soft but still burning me with his eyes, "that wasn't really so tough, was it, love?"

Trying to figure him out. How did he feel to know this? How would the third man I'd told about some of this react? Would he judge me? Would he think me weak? Would he be angry? Would I seem the embodiment of the lying female a man lets himself become attached to only for her to betray the commitments he thought she'd made with him? Would I be yet one more female who'd proven herself unworthy of the pedestal? Or perhaps he would see it as my grandmére used to say about affaires du coeur: we're none of us perfect.

Somehow, it seemed to me, of the ones I'd confided some of this in, perhaps it was East who would be a barometer of the majority of the men. If he could hear me, if he could accept this, then perhaps many of the others would give me a second chance. I looked hard into his eyes. They glinted with the dying sun's fire. In the end, I chose to tell him more than I'd told either of the other two because I realized I was now determined to figure out how to atone for these mistakes. And if East did not reject me when he heard the whole thing, then perhaps the others would also forgive me. Or at least be willing to admit I'd always been real clear that I was far from perfect.

But, as always, I will tell these things in my own way. I grabbed his hand and pulled him up with me. "Come on. I need to take you somewhere. And I'll tell you why I needed to see you right now."

This new-old me. Determined to start fixing my mistakes but not quite sure where to start. Maybe it was just that East was the easiest man for me to start with? Or was it just that the timing of his visit happily coincided with the new determination I had in the wake of Lachlan's visit? This understanding that I had never meant to be a betrayer like Cal, my ex-husband, was. This determination to see if I could affect my own fate. This deliberate decision to stop sitting back and just letting my life here be destroyed without a fight to save it.

In a way, I had experience with this. With reconstructing my life after fucking it up. Remember that quote I left you with in my last diary? The one from Oscar Wilde: "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." Keep it in mind as you delve into this with me. Or else, just stop now. Stop witnessing my life and go on thinking you know me. Because if you keep on with me on this journey, you may find out that I'm a lot more of a mystery than you ever realized.

Thirty minutes after we left the lake, we were walking into a hotel bar on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. We took a seat at the bar and I waited to see how much it had mattered to East to know me. Because if he really had tried to understand me through my diaries, then he'd probably start getting a clue as to where we were. And he might even start figuring out why we were there.

We sat at the round bar. My friend was actually tending bar and I looked around like I might see a ghost come walking through that door at any moment. I think that was when East added things up.

"This was where you met Terry," he said. "This is the bar. Why are we here?"

I waited a partial revolution of the Carousel Bar inside the Monteleone Hotel's lounge. And then I was suddenly struck by the need to tell someone and to see if I could survive the telling. "Yeah, this is right where it happened. He walked through that door ..." I nodded my head to my right ... "... and everything changed. I took this path that led to you. To here. To now."

"Why are we here?" he repeated his question.

"Because I wanted to make a point. I wanted you to feel this place while I try to tell you." I took a long sip of my wine and tried to understand within myself what I most wanted him to understand. "That night I met Terry. It was the true start of my time in this world. It was the moment I think of as when I left the path I was on in my real world, my old world, and began walking this other path. Remember when I asked to be sent back in my portal? I wasn't just sent back to my own world but I was sent back to the day before I was to have walked in this bar to meet Terry."

His hand slid along my arm until it ended up resting upon my fingers that were drumming along the bar's slick top. "That must have been a really tough thing for you. You'd lost Jack. You felt used by Terry. Guess you were on the run. And then to find yourself back at the beginning."

"Exactly. Back at the beginning -- that's exactly how I felt. Once I got over the shock, I tried to figure out what I wanted. I thought about coming back to this bar that night ... just to see if Terry showed up and that maybe I could start over. Avoid the mistakes. Not fall for him this time. Just wait for Jack to come in our world and ..."

"But you didn't, did you? You chose another path. You would. Stubborn to the end."

We chuckled at each other. Then I sobered to tell him, "I went to a business function instead. A friend dragged me. I am never better than when I am embarking on a new cause and she found one for me."

"That why you jumped into work so hard when you got back?"

"Yes. And no." I took this deep breath and then blew it slowly out. "See, the thing is, that night? The same night I had met Terry in this world? Well, there, in my world? Y'see, I met someone that night, too."

"What do you mean?" He asked it slow but I think he already had a clue.

"I mean, I met this man named Pat at that function I went to. And I listened to him talk about this community effort he was working in ... to stop the state from letting a chemical processing plant be built in this place where the residents didn't want it. I don't know what it was, but there was something about him that made me want to know more. So, on an impulse, I signed on as their PR person. And I ... well, he just ... we simply clicked and I felt like I'd met that someone special. I'd never really ... It just had never happened that way for me ... not in that world."

"You'd never been ready to meet someone like him in your world before you came back, were you?"

It made me almost cry. I somehow thought I'd kept that bit about me to myself. "No. I hadn't been. I had stopped trusting men. I hadn't even realized until I met Pat that I had changed from the person I had been before I went into this world. I am a different person in so many ways."

It had seemed like fate. Just imagine it. The same night I would have met a man in this other world who would have made me fall hard for him ... but if I had stayed in my own world, that same night I would have met another man to whom I would have been instantly attracted. Trust me when I tell you this -- I honestly thought that maybe I'd solved the entire meaning of my being brought into this new world.

I truly did. Back in my old world, doing in new, I went home that night with such a tingly feeling that I'd just met the man I'd always been destined to meet. But if I'd met him before the experiences I'd had in this other world, I'd have never given him the chance to get close to me. So I figured that maybe that's why I'd been called there, to that other world, to the one I was in with East, to the one I'd returned to because of Jack. People had always said we were called for a reason. This was the reason, it seemed to me.

I was torn apart until I could rationalize it. I mean, I was still so in love with Jack that being separated from him, knowing that he might never forgive me, it hurt so bad that I didn't know how to recover. But if all that had happened for this reason ... to prepare me to fall in love with a real man in my real world? Well, then, didn't I owe it to the fates or whoever had set this up to actually do the right thing and try with this new man, Pat, and make it a real love?

Ah. But everything's about choices, isn't it? And if I chose to accept this theory, if I chose to believe ... then wasn't I also choosing to believe that I'd never again have the chance to go back to this world? I had to consider that the reality might have been that Jack was never really meant for me except as the man to make me trust again. And I thought long and hard about the other gifts the other men had brought to me.

It all made sense to me.

And if that was what had been handed to me by some unseen power who'd taken pity on me and didn't hold my past transgressions against me, then I was going to take this chance at real love since I was back in my real world and living out what seemed to me to be the path I had been destined to take in life.

I leapt in with both feet. For a while, I ignored the way I never stopped looking for Jack. It's true. Even while I was falling in love with the wonder of Pat, I was watching for Jack. I didn't realize it at the time. It was only later that I admitted what it was I really wanted.

Let me tell you about Pat. God. Such a great man. Perfect for me in so many ways. We had similar backgrounds, similar beliefs. It was like finding the twin for my heart. We wanted the same things from life and from love. Our mothers were even from the same town. It was so easy loving him; I think I was falling for him from the moment he shook my hand and smiled into my eyes. Nothing exotic ... just a boy next door who looked like the answer to my prayers. He was nothing more than a big, strong, good-hearted Cajun boy. Yet we also had this ying-yang thing that worked for us ... where I was complicated, he was refreshingly simple in his approach to life and love. Where I had a troubled past, his was healthy. Hard to explain, perhaps, but it was a match unlike any I'd ever had. He was such a good man. He had only one real drawback.

He was not Jack. Or Terry. Or Bud. Or ... well, you get my drift. I kept asking myself if I was crazy ... how could I compare him to men who were now out of my reach? Men who more than likely never wanted to have me back in their lives anyway.

But here's the thing that finally made me unfaithful to the men here in this world. It was when I realized that in Pat I had a man who loved me not because of some magical influence in that other world ... but a man who loved me simply because we were meant to be in love. No outside influences. Just us.

And that's when I did it.

And here's why it was cheating. Because even in the moment I was loving Pat, I knew somewhere so deep inside me that Jack and I were not through. I knew he'd come for me someday. The rational part of me kept telling the emotional part of me to let it go, to admit it had ceased to matter. But it did matter. Because I was still a part of this world as long as I held out hope of returning and I believe that the promises I'd made there to abide by the rules still governed me as long as I wanted to return. But, okay, this is really the most important thing about that. It was never really about the rules. It was more about this soul deep certainty that, for me, it was not okay to be unfaithful to someone I love just because I was lonely and hurt.

But it was also cheating because I was saying I was committed to Pat at the same time I knew he'd never have gone forward with me if he'd known my heart was still committed to Jack. Well, Jack and the other men. But Jack most of all.

It was always more about the fact that I was violating my own personal ethics.

I cheated on them all, you see? Pat never knew my heart still was beating partly because it wanted to stay alive for Jack. And I knew the men expected the women to stay within our family in such relationships. Who knows ... but maybe part of what I let happen with Pat was a way to strike out against Jack for rejecting me? And even maybe a smidgen at Terry for using me?

So is there any doubt in your mind, really, that this has tormented me?

It is too complicated, isn't it?

But there was more to it than just that. It's never simple with me, is it?

"So there I was, and I had to make a choice. Keep holding out hope for Jack or realize that maybe Jack had only been given to me long enough to make me ready for Pat. And I was also angry that I was in this position because I'd made the sacrifice for Jack but it didn't matter," I told East. Looking at him hard. "Weeks of waiting and he wasn't coming to me. So I did it. I fell bad in love with Pat even though a huge part of me knew that at some point, Jack was going to come back for me. I went into that affair feeling in my heart that I was cheating on Jack. Cheating on all of you, really. But ... I did it anyway because ... because didn't I deserve to be happy? Didn't I?"

"I won't pass judgement on you, Ann. You seem to be doing a good enough job of that without my help," he said after a few minutes, his voice soft and his eyes not steady on me. "So don't bite my head off but I just gotta say ... you sure didn't waste time before you fell into some other bloke's bed. Hard to believe it wasn't more about showing Jack and Terry that you didn't need them."

My eyes turned from watching his face. How was he able to do this? To so easily cut through and touch my guilt? Well, one aspect that made me feel so guilty.

"Not to mention that as soon as Jack showed up, I left without a second thought. What kind of cold bitch does that to a man like Pat?" I asked into the air.

Unfaithful to the end. Doing to Pat what had been done to me. Lying to him even after I'd made him a commitment. Continuing the lie even after returning to this world. Now think how it felt to have had a recent reminder of how what I was doing would hurt others like Cal had once hurt me.

 "He never knew I was involved with other men. He just loved me. He did. And how did I repay his love? I cheated on him, too. Because the moment Jack came back ... I mean the instant he touched me, all I wanted was to be back here with him and with the rest of you. I let Jack make love with me knowing that I was now being unfaithful to everyone. And no one knew. Well ... no one but Reggie."

Reggie. My sweet cousin. When Jack sent me to tell him that I was leaving that world and returning to this world, it was to Reggie I gave the burden of telling Pat that I'd chosen another man, another love that Pat knew nothing about. Can you imagine how that would have hurt Pat? But he had to know, didn't he? Didn't he deserve to know the truth? You have no idea how I've tried in all these months to justify it by hoping that when I left that world, some other 'me' took over and she went on with her relationship with Pat.

But here's what I've finally come to realize; she would have been the old 'me.' And, as such, she would never have let herself love him. So even then, Pat lost out. I knew I'd hurt him. And it had been Cal's unexpected return to my life that had made me realize that everything happens for a reason.

God. It felt like things were being arranged just to make me understand the significance of the horrible thing I'd done to someone who loved me. And in that moment of clarity I had when Lachlan was visiting, I just knew that it wasn't going to be something I could run away from. I knew it was going to be something that would destroy the life I'd chosen to lead in this world if I didn't figure out some way to not let that mistake continue here. Such a risk, though.

Put it together with me, then, and see if it doesn't add up the same way to you. Cal lied and cheated; so had I. I had hurt Pat just like Cal had hurt me, even if I hadn't done it to be mean to him. I thought I could leave all that behind me when I came back here with Jack ... that it didn't matter in this other world, because the Pat in this world wouldn't know me. But then in the space of a few weeks, what happens in this world? Pat meets me and Cal sees me.

There's only one conclusion -- my other world was intruding on this one. Nothing happens without a reason in this world. And this was being set up to punish me ... to force me to deal with the consequences of my bad actions. But ... well, hell ... I should tell you one other little thing about all this. Because I had been curious after I'd run into Pat in this world. I had wondered about something Terry had said. That the people in this world were the same as those in the other world and, if that were true, was Pat destined to be important to me here?

It's taken me a while. I think I've mentioned to you before that I am often slow on the uptake about important opportunities and possibilities and changes? Must be why it took me until this moment, sitting there with East in that bar after telling him so much no one else even knew yet ... and he said ...

"So, you wanted to fix it, didn't you? But you can't, can you? Because it's not like you can go back and have a do-over in life, eh?"

"God." I just looked at him. "Wouldn't that be something?"

He shook his head at me. "Nope. You've got to fix it here."

"I will. I promise. I need to put it right."

"You have to come clean."

Shaking my head at him. "Maybe not. Not if ... I don't want to hurt anyone else."

His hands on my face made me pay attention and he spoke slowly. "It was never really about Cal cheating on you. It was about him lying to you. Don't be like him. They'll understand. Well, they'll understand about what you did in the portal."

I never tell it all. Ever.

But in this case? There are a few men that I need to tell some other things before I tell you.

So, mistakes, eh? The father of our experience? Or the sires of our fate?

"Thanks for talking things through with me last night, East," I whispered against his neck. Just a kiss of a thought. Just a lick of a desire.

"Great. Now, less talk, more action?" he said and in his voice were all these smoky delights of a man who understands he can fulfill many a woman's earthy fantasy.

But in his body's movements, there was a subtle change, like a gruffness and something hard to define. It came to me slowly ... but then I was distracted by what I wanted to be feeling happening between us. I only realized it when he was pushing into me and it was more a nuance than anything else.

No kissing.

Not even my skin merited his kiss. Surely not my lips.

His mouth was at my ear. Too busy perhaps with words in this morning? Too bad the words meant little between us. Just spoken manifestation of what he was doing to me below.

A good hard rooting, he might have called it. I tried not to read anything into it. When had I ever objected to a down-and-dirty fuck with one of the men? So what if I had been expecting that after the intimate nature of what I had shared with him the night before that in this morning, we would be sealing a more intimate bond between us.

I closed my mind to my own ramblings and was intent on simply concentrating on the physical.  I could feel it spreading out ... those flickers of the impending release. The way your body begins to celebrate all the while you're trying not to simply forget that your partner is not there just for your service.

But it can be hard with a man like East. A hard man who in this morning seemed to be wanting this to be about how hard he could make me come.

"Ah ... fuck ... jeezuz ...you feel so fucking ... nnnnn ... ah yeah ... come on ... tha's right ... come on, woman." Muttering to me by then. Mindless.

And I could have been any woman. The anonymous lover.

But I came like me. Who am I kidding? I was coming like a speed demon. Driven by lust and some undefined anger that erupted out of me with curses of my own and my body demanding his satisfy me.

And he came with this final jerky movement into me that almost felt like he was giving and then taking back. As he rested above me, I enjoyed the connection with his body. I kissed his neck and whispered to him. "You're so good to me."

He met my eyes as he shifted to roll off me and come lay by my side. Quick cover-up of his uncertainty inside that brief eye contact.

"Can I have a kiss now?" Rolling to my side to face him and giving him one of my best fake smiles.

Now he looked at me. Really looked. He hesitated, not like he didn't want to kiss me but more as if unsure if it's what I really wanted. So I kissed him. Arms around his neck and diving into the kiss with him. Forcing him and feeling what it really felt like ... reality.

In this visit, we'd moved into that space where we'd become free with each other. We'd been willing to fool around, to play together as an expression of how open we'd become with each other. It was why it had seemed easy to tell him about Pat and about the way I'd done wrong by all the current lovers in my life.

I had had this impression that somehow our bond was strengthened in confiding in him my transgressions. But in the middle of that kiss, the one thing that I understood was the reality of his change with me.

Paybacks can be hell.

In that morning, I had needed to know he still felt free with me. To know I still felt free with him. To feel a hope that things would work out if I was just smart about it all.

And by the time we finished that kiss, I was realizing that he had issues with what I'd told him but he wasn't ready to confront them. I sensed that for East, he was struggling with feeling that I was not the woman he thought I was. I had this 'duh' moment of seeing his face when he'd looked at Grace and knew she had betrayed his adoration of her.

And I wanted to just ask ... what is it about après-sex that makes you ask things?

"So you forgive me, then?" I asked it light but I looked with heavy meaning into his eyes.

"It's not me you need that from, Ann. I didn't even know you then." He moved in on me and buried his face in my hair; I wished he didn't feel he had to hide his own feelings from me.

"But you know me now."

He flopped over onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. When he swallowed hard, his face seemed to change and I felt like he was protecting himself from emotional harm I might do him. I felt like I read this so clearly -- that he'd begun to feel involved with me and now I'd proved myself untrustworthy. And now he was unsure ... unsure of whether or not he had the right to have an opinion of what I'd done ... unsure if he should take the chance and tell me how he felt about it... unsure if he was willing to risk frank words between us. And when he finally answered me, I figured he was just not able to say what he might have wanted to say.

"I'm okay. I think maybe I even understand. Appreciate the honesty." Then glancing over to me. "Others won't feel that way, y'know. How will you deal with that?"

What that did to me. Why had I not realized this would be hard for him? I chose to follow his lead. To talk about anyone but him.

"I think if I can take it one step at a time, then I'll be fine. If some of them can't forgive me, then that's the consequences. You know what's funny? It's not even Jack or Terry I worry about most in that regard. It's Bud. He's pretty rigid about this issue of going outside the family. I'm a little afraid of telling him," I told him softly.

"I would be, too."

It made me laugh. "Some help you are!"

"How will you tell them?" He wasn't going to let me smooth this over.

"By fixing it first. As much as I can. If I atone for the mistakes, and they see, then I think they will be willing to be understanding. But I'm not going to run from this. Not anymore."

Yeah, and I refuse to run from what I'd learned in East's reaction. Had I really thought I'd get a free ride on this from the men? Of course I knew that the consequence of my actions and my decision to be more open about what I've done will be a strain on the bonds I share with the men to whom I am closest. I can feel it about to happen and still, I will go through with revealing what's in this diary.

So, this is me then, eh? Taking a stand and willing to fight my fate. Why is it that doesn't instill the greatest sense of security in me?

On the other hand, at some point in my life, I have to choose my own future, or at least I have to choose how I'll face my future. So first I fix a mistake and then ...

It always sounds so easy in the abstract. Breaking someone's heart, though ... that takes more strength when you think you're doing it for the right reasons. Damn. I don't believe I said that.

Even now, telling it all may be the hardest part.