94 comments/ 311210 views/ 113 favorites Separate Lives Pt. 01 By: Longhorn__07 My wife knows me so well. She can predict where I will to take her out to dinner, for instance, though I've tried hard to surprise her. She has an instinct for when I need a little tender loving care too. She knows everything about my life...from fumbling flirtations with girls in high school to the angst of being passed over for a promotion I thought I deserved. She knows I'm scared shitless of snakes, whether they're dangerous or not. She knows I can't bear to hear small children cry without wanting to pick them up and wrap my arms around them...and she even knows I'm that way because my father could never unbend enough to hug me. Everything about me, I entrust to my dear wife. She knows I always go to lunch at 11:30 every day because I had to take a lunch break at that early hour when I was the most junior guy in the office. Back then I would always be back at 12:30, because other people would want to leave right about then. I got into the habit and never changed. But, as some philosopher should explain, shit happens. My wife doesn't know I'm taking a late, extended lunch today. The whole office is going out to a farewell party for one of the senior administrators, specifically the director of the Research and Development Branch, where I work. Bill Thornton was retiring after thirty-six years and the whole operation was being shut down to wish him a happy retirement. ******** Lyle was one of the youngest engineers working in my division and I was happy to have him under my supervision. He was a hard worker, imaginative, and highly resourceful. When it came time for merit pay increases and bonuses, I was happy to put in his name. With his first big bonus, Lyle bought one of those mammoth Chevy Suburbans. He had one kid and another on the way, so he wanted a wagon big enough for lots of kids. Apparently, his wife felt the same way. I privately considered his new SUV big enough for a whole clan, much less one family. But he was proud of it and wanted to show it off. With my seniority, I got to ride "shotgun" on the way down to the convention center. "So, Ron, what do you think of my new buggy?" Lyle asked. That's me. I'm Ron—also known as Ronald Masters. Twenty-nine years old, in pretty good health and well thought of within my field of expertise—mechanical engineering—though lately my job has had little to do with that degree. I hadn't been a manager for very long but it was taking up more and more of my time. I was even thinking of taking some night courses in personnel and resource management to keep up with the responsibilities the boss kept pushing my way. "It's cool," I replied, interjecting some enthusiasm into my voice. "Or is that supposed to be "hot" or "tight" these days? I can never remember what the latest slang is," I told him. He laughed. "You like it?" "Oh, heck yeah," I said. I twisted around to peer into the interior of the spacious vehicle. "Shoot, Lyle," I remarked, "I think the first apartment Sherrie and I lived in was smaller than this." He laughed, pleased with my comment. I turned back around to face the front. As Lyle braked to a stop at a red light, I saw once again how high off the road I was sitting. Lyle's "truck," as he called it, gave the driver and passengers an excellent view all around and even over most of the cars on the road. I glanced down out the passenger side window when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I was surprised to see my wife sitting in her two-year-old Taurus beside us at the light. This wasn't a part of town that Sherrie would normally go. It was a long way from her office and she rarely had to leave during the day. I was looking at the controls on the door's panel, trying to figure out which one lowered the window but it was taking too long. I started to open the door and tap on my wife's car window when I saw another movement. As I watched, a man's hand was thrust up her skirt so far his wrist and some of his forearm disappeared. I froze. My gut knotted up so badly and so quickly, I was abruptly deep in pain. I felt the blood drain from my face. My fingers trembled where they rested on the door handle. I felt disoriented...I couldn't think, I couldn't move. All I could do was watch. I waited for Sherrie to shove the man's hand away. Surely, this was nothing she would put up with from any man but me. I found it hard to breathe as I watched my wife spread her legs wider, accepting the intruding fingers into her pussy. The guy she was with, whoever he was, had to have two or three fingers inside her. There simply wasn't anyway that length of male arm could disappear under her short skirt without his fingers being in a place I thought only I had access to. "Please...no," I whispered, but no one heard. I've only passed out one time, after being struck on the head by a baseball when I was twelve years old. I was feeling the same sensations I'd felt that day right now. My vision began to contract into a narrow tunnel and a huge weight was crushing my chest. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I'm a strong man, but the shock siphoned all my strength away. I was nothing but an empty shell. If I'd been lying across a set of railroad tracks and had only to roll to the side to avoid being run over by a train, I couldn't have done it. My eyes filled with unshed tears as I watched my wife of four years lean back to better enjoy this unknown man's ministrations. She never objected, never tried to get the man to stop. It came to me that this was a thing she'd enjoyed before with this man, a thing she wanted and was used to receiving. Sherrie tilted her head back; her eyes closed as she lost herself in the pleasure his fingers were giving her. The look of lust and need for gratification shocked me. It was the same one she showed me when we had sex. The light turned green. I saw Sherrie slap at the man's forearm playfully. She tugged his hands from beneath her skirt so she could drive, I guess. I twisted around in my seat as Lyle accelerated away from the intersection. I watched my wife's Taurus as it made a right turn down a street that would take her back to where she worked. She'd never looked up to wonder who might be watching in the big Suburban, not that she would have seen me through the dark tinted windows. She "knew" I wouldn't be out and about at this hour...my lunch hour ended thirty minutes ago. She hadn't cared what an obscene, exhibitionistic show she and the man with her had put on for whoever it might have been. It didn't have to be me watching; it could have been anyone. Sherrie had been so caught up with the sex play that she hadn't thought to conceal the act. Yeah, my wife knew me well...but it seemed I only thought I knew her. ******** When she got home that evening, I got a quick peck on the cheek. A couple of years ago, my mind told me, I'd gotten long, loving kisses at the door when I came in from a hard day's work. Somewhere along the line, they'd decreased in number until they tailed off to nothing. I watched my wife as she started up the stairs. Suddenly, I noticed something missing. It hadn't struck me earlier in the day as I watched her perform in traffic. "Sherrie!" I blurted. "What the heck happened to your pantyhose? I know darn well you put on a new pair this morning. How come you're not wearing any now?" She hesitated before proceeding down the hallway to our bedroom. She didn't turn around to face me for a long moment. "Oh, I got a runner in the right leg," she said finally. "It kept on growing and growing and I finally just took them off," she said. She grinned back at me, looking at me more intently than I think she would have under other circumstances. She needed to know if I was buying her explanation. I nodded understandingly. She turned away, but not before I detected a small look of relief cross her face. "I see," I said in what I hoped sounded was a more playful tone. I hadn't planned to say anything, but a sudden surge of pain and rage had taken control of my tongue and made me ask about the pantyhose. The dual emotions still had control of me. An evil imp pushed me into seeing how far I could provoke my dear wife. "I thought some guy might have ripped them off because he was in a hurry to get into your panties," I said, studying her reaction. She was good. There was little to see beyond a slight stiffening in her posture. "What in the world brought that on?" she said inquisitively. I looked at her with as blank a face as I could manage. I refused to let the hurt and anger show in my eyes. I shrugged. "It's been known to happen," I said. "You remember Katy, that girl I had to fire last year after she got caught screwing one of the men on the loading dock? Well, I remember her coming back from breaks and lunches without her thigh high stockings and pantyhose many a time. That was before I knew what was going on, of course." I shrugged and looked away, trying to project an image of a man remembering a painful event. Sherrie nibbled at her lower lip for a bit before coming to me. Stepping close to me, she put her palms flat on my lower ribs and swept them up my chest in a slow caress before throwing her arms around my neck. She pulled my head down and pressed her lips against mine, slipping her tongue into my mouth for a few teasing seconds. "Honey," she said earnestly when she finally broke off the kiss, "You are the only man who will ever rip my panties off...I thought you knew that." There was a hooded expression on her face. Her eyes flicked from side to side as she searched my face for some telltale sign. She was gauging my reaction, hoping I would accept her explanation. I was willing to bet she was wondering how much I knew and what she'd have to do to deflect my suspicions. It broke my heart all over again. She'd been lying "by omission" all along and now she was lying to my face. It was a raw, calculating thing to do, born of deception and reared by cruelty. I'd hoped...well, I didn't know what I hoped for. I guess I thought that if I got a confession from her, we'd find some way to get past this, even if I had no idea how. If you love someone, though, it's hard to let go without one last attempt. But Sherrie was waiting for an answer. I'd been looking too long into her eyes for something I just this second gave up all hope of finding. "I know that, sweetheart," I said with as much sincerity as I could muster. "Katy's husband threw her out and got custody of both kids. She wrecked her marriage, the other guy's marriage, and her life...all for a little stupid, dirty sex out behind the warehouse." I let my contempt color the last few phrases. Sherrie flinched slightly, almost undetectably, but her expression never changed. "Well, she deserved it," Sherrie said...and now the deceit was complete. My dear wife thought the rules by which other people restrained themselves didn't apply to her. I caught her wrists in my hands and tugged her arms from around my neck. I looked at her levelly, not saying a word, and then kissed her lips gently. Taking hold of one of her shoulders in each hand, I turned her around and slapped her beautifully shaped little ass. It didn't "belong" to me anymore; it no longer mattered that she didn't like even playful spanks. "Now go get changed...I'll have dinner on the table in ten minutes," I told her. I turned away and walked into the kitchen without looking back. Chapter 2 At first, I had no idea what to do. I didn't have a clue what I should do. What was the approved reaction from a husband who discovered his wife was cheating on him? I'm afraid the company didn't get much work from me over the next week and a half. I would be working on something and then would suddenly find myself gazing into space, not knowing how long I'd been doing it. A number of the staff members asked me if there was anything wrong, but I always replied there was not. No one could help me through this. I'd have to solve the riddle by myself. I was able to reason my way through a few things. For one, that the guy felt comfortable fondling my wife in public said they had been having sex for some time. If they were just beginning with each other, he'd still be a lot more tentative. It meant Sherrie had been cheating on me for some time. I wondered when it had begun. I couldn't remember any signs that she was cheating on me. There'd been no attitude changes, or any modifications in our daily life that I could think of. In the final analysis, though, it didn't really matter how long it had been going on. The only important factor was that it was happening. Second, I wasn't going to put up with her infidelity. I was not going to go off to work each day, wondering who Sherrie was fucking that day. I wasn't much of a church going man anyway. There was no way I was going to turn the other cheek. It wasn't in me to do that. I couldn't see any point in trying to save the marriage. Sherrie had broken the trust we'd built up over the four years of our marriage. It seemed to me she'd broken it a number of times, judging by the evidence, and I didn't know how it could ever be made whole again. The only thing that logically remained to do was to confront her and get myself out of this mess with my mind as intact as I could. If there was something I'd done so terribly wrong that it prompted a reaction like this from Sherrie, maybe she'd tell me. I tried to pull my eyes back inside the windows through which I'd been staring blindly. I felt more alone than I ever had in my life. The hurt came in cold waves, alternating with fiery periods of anger. Neither emotion would let me be long enough to do any productive work. Having decided that my marriage to Sherrie was dead, I set myself the dreary task of finding some quick way out of my pain. The thing was, without proof of some kind, Sherrie would probably be able to take damn near everything we'd put together. Texas courts are not friendly to a man making unsubstantiated allegations about his wife. In the twenty-first century, wives got the benefit of the doubt in almost any situation. I shoved what loving feelings I had left for Sherrie behind a door in my mind and slammed it shut. I decided I wanted my share of what we had. We had some good equity in the house and the savings account was beginning to show a nice balance finally. We both were making pretty good money, and had been for a year or so. We'd managed to buy some quality furniture and appliances. The cars had both been financed, but we'd been making balloon payments and the loans were nearly paid off. If I wanted my fair portion of what we'd accumulated, I had to catch her red handed. I watched for an opportunity. ******** On Tuesday, one day short of three weeks after I'd seen Sherrie letting some asshole play with her pussy, she told me she was going to go out Friday night with a group of her girlfriends for a few drinks and lots of gossip. It was something she and a half-dozen women in her crowd did every six weeks or so. She said Connie, Barbara, Miranda, Colleen, Tammy were going along but not Melissa, Sherrie's best friend. They were going to find all the things they could to talk about Melissa behind her back. Sherrie giggled a little about that when she told me. There was absolutely nothing suspicious about her doing this. She'd done it before on widely separated occasions through the years. I knew in my heart, though, this one was different. I couldn't see anything in her behavior that indicated she was not actually going to do exactly what she told me. But I didn't trust her anymore. I had to verify what she was saying. ******** "Connie!" I said cheerfully into my cell phone. Connie was one of my wife's friends. She and her husband Art were occasional guests over at what had been "our" house for barbeques and sometimes dinner. "Hey, tiger," she responded happily. Connie liked to flirt and she took every opportunity. "What's up?" she asked. "Not much," I said. "I was just wondering if you and Tom have any plans for Friday night...tomorrow evening. I was thinking the four of us might get together for dinner and some cards." "Hmmmmmm," she said in her mock-seductive voice, "I'll have to check my busy calendar, big boy." There was a momentary pause but not one long enough for her to actually be checking anything. "No...nothing on tap for that night, sugar," she said. "I'll have to check with Tom but I think it sounds like a great idea...what shall we bring?" "Just your cute little self, your better half, and a pair of bright smiles," I quipped. I tried to sound upbeat, but inside I was dead. All the pleasure in my life had disappeared over the past few weeks. "Okay, hon," she said. "I'll give you a call when I know for sure, okay?" She paused briefly. "Ahhhhhhh, Ron...me and Tom are sure glad you and Sherrie are doing so well, sugar." I frowned into empty space as I listened. "We weren't sure after the Vegas trip that you guys would be able to get things together...you know?" she said in a more serious voice than I'd ever heard from her. "Vegas?" I said, a little mystified. I thought at first she was aware of Sherrie's straying, though I didn't have an inkling how she would have known. The trip she was referring to was one I hadn't gone on because at the last minute, my boss had called, needing me to go to Denver to straighten out a mess in the R&D division in our parent company. Sherrie; Melissa and her husband, Cal; Connie and Tom had gone without me and, by all accounts, everyone had come back with small winnings for once. Wait! Was Connie saying something had gone on in Vegas? Hell, she had to be...but I needed to know more. It made me sick, but I had to know. "I don't understand what you're trying to say, Connie," I said. Even I could hear the confusion in my voice. She was silent for a long time. "Oh...it's just scatter-brained ol' me," she said. "You know how I am...well, listen, I'll get with Tom and check if he's already got something planned for tomorrow or not, okay?" "Sure. Let me know, all right?" I replied. She said she would. I got off the phone as quickly as I decently could. I was afraid my voice would reveal the pain I was in. Half an hour later, Connie called back and apologized. Tom had obligated himself to play in a poker game at a neighbor's house. Connie was just as sorry as she could be...maybe next time, she said. I agreed, regretting that they couldn't come. Maybe Sherrie and I would just forget about the whole thing and try again at a better time. Neither of us was fooling the other. I knew two things now. Something involving my wife had occurred in Las Vegas and Sherrie was not going out with the girls tomorrow night. I had to let the former lay uninvestigated while I dealt with the latter. ******** I've heard it said that adulterous spouses get into a mindset where they conclude they must be more intelligent than those they are cheating on, simply because they're getting away with what they're doing. They begin to believe they are cleverer than anyone else in the world. Because they manage to deceive their marriage partner for a time, they begin to disrespect him or her and hold their spouses in contempt. Eventually, so the story goes, cheaters start making mistakes because of overconfidence; they don't think anyone else has the smarts to catch them. I didn't know about all that, this was my first experience dealing with such a thing, but I did know that Sherrie was making mistakes. If I hadn't seen her that day with that sorry SOB in her car at the stoplight, I'd have caught on to her activities eventually anyway. Being in public with that man was a bad mistake. Any one of our friends or neighbors could have been in a van or SUV beside her car—it didn't have to be me. Separate Lives Pt. 01 Not making sure Connie would cover for her was another blunder, a major one. Second, she knew I was friendly with Connie and Tom—even more so with Melissa and Cal. Whatever happened in Vegas was almost certainly known by both couples. Either of them might have called me sometime to give her up. These were loose ends she should have tied up somehow. Her third error was assuming I still trusted her and would stay home like a good little boy while she was out whoring around. Her fourth was thinking I would put up with a cheating slut of a wife. I smashed my fist down on the coffee table beside me, making the lamp dance around on its base for a long moment. Sherrie was in the shower; she didn't hear a thing. I massaged my hand and wrist, seething inside as I contemplated my wife's betrayal of our marriage, herself and me. I was worried that my anger was going to take over my whole life. It seemed to me that my jaws were always clinched tight these days and my pulse pounded whenever I thought of what Sherrie and that guy were doing. I was ruthlessly suppressing those feelings when I was around her. It only made the rage burn that much hotter. The sad thing was that I was actually a little relieved when it became clear tonight was to be their next little get-together for sex. I hated to admit that to myself, but I was. Once I got through whatever I had to face this evening, I'd take what I knew and put it in the hands of my attorney. I had him primed and ready to file charges whenever I gave him the go-ahead. ******** Sherrie left a little after seven o'clock, just as twilight was beginning to make soft shadows all around. She thought I was in the garage straightening up the disorder that accumulates if one doesn't give it constant attention, but I was really just killing time, waiting for her to leave. Now that the evening had come, I was anxious to get things over with and move on with my life. Sherrie hadn't been interested enough about what I was doing to come outside for a look, much less to spend any time with me. I guessed she was just happy I was out of her way so she could get ready for her date...or whatever she was calling it. That was fine with me. If she'd come out to be with me, she'd have seen the rent-a-lemon I'd arranged for that morning. I hadn't wanted to park the shabby looking wreck on the street; it might have been towed as an abandoned vehicle. It was a small lie, I suppose—hiding the rental's existence. That's what's wrong with lying and cheating. The lies begin to take on a life of their own and reproduce more of their kind spontaneously. There were three more lies told as she walked out the door. I wished her a good time and we both said we loved each other. A man and a woman who loved each other wouldn't be doing the things to each other that we were going to do tonight. I told myself I didn't care. When she was far enough down the block not to be able to see inside the garage, I opened the outside door and jumped in the rental car. Driving away, I pointed the remote over my shoulder to close the door and sped down our residential street to make sure I didn't lose contact with her. Paradoxically, I had to slow drastically when I saw her ahead, waiting at a stoplight for cross traffic to clear. I had to pull to the curb and stop for a bit or I'd have gotten too close. As it turned out, following her didn't prove to be that big a problem. Like most drivers, she paid almost no attention to the traffic behind her and, even if she had, she wouldn't have known to look for a beat-up, eight-year-old gray Chrysler sedan. She had no idea that her husband was in that vehicle tonight and tailing her, half a city block behind. The light was still good enough for me to be able to identify her vehicle but it was gradually getting darker. It gave me an excuse to turn on my headlights. If she were to look back, she wouldn't be able to see my face past the glare. I followed her through thinning traffic to the far southwest side of town and watched her pull into a moderately priced motel. I quickly found a space across the street and parallel parked my ratty old vehicle. Getting my camera ready and trying to settle my jangled nerves, I watched out the driver's side window while my wife sat in her car for five minutes or so. It seemed she was impatient. She made a series of quick calls on her cell phone. Mine didn't ring. It was not me she was calling. A few minutes later, a big dark blue SUV came down the street and turned into the motel. I could see the driver was a male but he was going too fast for me to get a good look at him. He parked beside my wife's Taurus and they both got out. Shortly, the guy had my wife in a tight embrace and was kissing her hungrily. After a bit, she patted his chest and pulled back a little. I'd bought a Nikon Dimage Z1 digital camera when I started planning this operation a couple of weeks ago. Even with my limited experience with digital cameras, it looked like this camera was going to be perfect for the job I had to do. I started snapping away, taking pictures of my cheating wife and the guy she was screwing. Though twilight was fading into night, there was still enough illumination under the motel's exterior lighting to light up both of them. The camera's 10X optical zoom...multiplied by its 4X digital zoom...gave me superb close-ups of his hand trying to squeeze her breasts. I could have counted the freckles on my lovely wife's face if I'd been in a counting mood. My only real problem was keeping the camera steady enough. I solved that by scrunching down low, rolling down the window, and bracing the camera on the two inches of glass that refused to disappear into the door. Neither of the cheaters across the way noticed me, though I was less than fifty yards away under a streetlight. They were awfully careless. I guess it was true that cheaters begin believing they don't have to take elementary precautions because they can't be caught. The guy produced one of those plastic cards with the magnetic strip on the back and opened the motel room door. He and my wife went inside and I settled back to wait them out. I wanted some pictures of them leaving the room to show how long they'd been inside. The camera had the ability to insert a date stamp on the face of the digital pictures and the downloaded .jpg file would show the precise date and time it was saved in the camera. I thought a computer expert would explain such things well enough so any court could understand it, even if the judge wouldn't accept my explanation. I was sure my attorney would be able to find and hire such an expert. My stomach was churning. The bitter taste of bile was in my mouth; I was barely able to control stomach contractions that kept threatening to force partially digested bits back up my esophagus. The longer I waited, the worse it got. Abruptly, I couldn't hold it back any longer. I wrenched the car door open and spewed an ugly pool of nastiness out onto the pavement. The flood kept regenerating itself long after I thought I'd brought up everything I'd eaten for the last several days. After a minute or two, though, there was nothing more in my stomach. It got painful then. The dry heaves continued for another eternity before gradually dying away. I wiped my mouth on my handkerchief, rinsed my mouth out, and drank a half-liter bottle of water. Shaking with anger, humiliation, and feeling a sense of loss so strong I could barely stand it, I stepped over the mess in the street and walked a few yards up and down the curb to see if it would help settle me down. I glanced at the room door over there, making sure they hadn't come out yet. I stopped in my tracks. There was only a dim glow coming through most of the drawn curtains but at one place, down low on the left side, there was a small area where the light came through more brightly. I was intrigued. I looked all around to make sure I was unobserved; then I crossed the street and walked through the motel parking lot. From a few feet away, I could see that my dear wife and the sorry bastard who was with her had been inexcusably sloppy for two people doing something they shouldn't. They'd left a space a couple of inches across where the curtain had not quite been pulled closed. I glanced around again, checking to see if anyone could see what I was about to do. I decided that I really didn't care what anyone else thought, even if someone did see me. This was an opportunity to photograph these two in flagrante delicto and I was going to take it. I knelt on one knee and eased the camera up to the window, aiming it through the opening in the drapes. The LCD screen on the back of the camera lit up when I pressed the power button and I had my proof. My wife was on all fours on the bed with a short, stocky man with blond hair getting into position behind her. He was, I guess, the kind of man women thought of as handsome. He looked to be a little younger than me, but it was hard to tell. My hands were trembling too badly for the camera to focus properly and I had to press the lens against the window. It took some experimentation to get a good series of pics. If I let too much of a gap develop between the window and lens, the harsh brightness of the lights out here reflected off the glass and tended to wash everything out. In a minute or two, though, I had everything I needed. Inside the room, I could see the guy beginning to slam his cock in and out of my wife's cunt. He wasn't gentle about it, but it appeared Sherri had developed a taste for a little rough sex because her face was screwed up in a mask of lust and illicit pleasure. The camera could take six pictures in a fast sequence and I'd put it on that setting before leaving home. I pressed the shutter release button again and again. I couldn't take too much of watching them. Still badly nauseated and feeling more pain inside than I'd known since my parents died, I settled back on my haunches and tried to get myself together. I drew in a ragged breath and closed my eyes tight to fight back the tears I refused to shed. I hurt...but a human being can only hurt so long before they shift themselves to another place. I pushed my emotions aside, damming them up and putting them back behind that door I'd thought I had closed on them earlier in the week. Suddenly, there was no more love when I thought of her...and I damned sure didn't like her at all. My new remoteness, my detached view, gave me the strength to get to my feet without swaying or feeling stick to my stomach. There was a sudden flurry of loud voices from inside the room. I could hear Sherrie but I couldn't tell what she was saying. Then there was a louder shriek a second or two later, but it sounded like a man. I didn't know any men who admitted to being "screamers" during sex but I guess they could be. Anyway, the suddenly noisy sex play got me on my feet and moving away. I was afraid it would attract someone to come see what was going on. I started to walk back to my rental across the street but I paused behind the son of a bitch's car while I thought for a long moment. I turned and walked down the sidewalk past all the motel doors. I looked carefully under the eaves, then stepped away from the building to examine the roof and every light pole in sight. I was looking for any outside security cameras the motel might have. I found a place down at the far corner of the structure where there were some unconnected wires and an empty mounting bracket, but I didn't see any cameras. I crossed the parking lot and stood next to the rental car, looking at the empty, abandoned restaurant. There were surely no spy cameras over there. There were some apartment buildings I could see on down this side street, but they were far away. On the main thoroughfare, I couldn't see any businesses that would logically be protected by surveillance cameras pointed in this direction. I made sure the cap was securely fastened over the lens and put my camera in the back seat for safekeeping. Walking purposefully, I went back to where my wife...and whoever he was...were parked. I pulled the pocketknife out of my jeans and opened it while I debated with myself the wisdom of doing what I was thinking of. Then I shrugged and bent low beside lover boy's rear tires. It took a stronger thrust than I'd thought it would, but I soon found the right amount of velocity and power to shove the blade deep into the tire. I was afraid my grip would slip and I'd cut myself badly, but that didn't happen. The hissing of the air escaping from the expensive set of tires seemed terribly loud, but no one came out to investigate. Encouraged, I took care of all four tires on his SUV, and then all my wife's tires too. I guess it was a childish gesture. It didn't solve anything and it very well could make it clear to the cheating duo that someone was on to them. I decided they wouldn't think that. They were too cocky. I wanted to do more, but I didn't. A hundred years ago, I could have smashed down the door and put a bullet in each of their brains and no jury would have ever convicted me. Two hundred years ago, I could have challenged him to a duel and killed him in front of his friends and family. Those were acceptable ways back then for a man to salvage his honor in situations like this. Ahhhhh, but we're so much more civilized now. A cuckold has so few options open to him these days. I did what I could. Feeling a little better, and not in the least guilty about the damage I'd done, I walked back to my rental and got in, slamming the door and not caring if anyone heard. I'd taken the first steps to rid myself of a faithless wife and regain some self-respect. There was little remaining yet to do. Monday would come soon and I'd have a long talk with my lawyer. Chapter 3 Sunday comes before Monday, though, and Saturday before that. Sherri came home well before midnight, pissed off because some SOB had slashed the tires on her car "outside the club." Three teens had been seeing running away, she said. Then she'd had to wait three hours for the AAA folks to get there. Apparently, I'd not been observed destroying the tires on the cars and someone else was suspected. I actually had no idea whether the 'three teens' story had any legitimacy, but the three-hour wait sounded about right. I shrugged. None of it mattered in the least. I was surprised she was home that early though. I'd thought she'd be out a lot later with her fuck toy. If she was outside waiting for the wrecker for any time at all, it meant her tryst with the new man in her life had been a short one—not that it made any difference. I said a few consoling words to calm her down. She got in bed and went to sleep shortly after coming in. She hadn't wanted any cuddling. I knew why. The odor of cheap motel soap on her body was strong enough to make me gag. ******** Sunday afternoon and evening, Sherri got very affectionate and wanted me close to her. It was impossible to tell from looking at her that she'd been out fucking some other man on Friday night. She showed no sign of feeling guilty about anything at all. If anything, she was more relaxed and pleasant than she'd been in months. That, I had read, was one of the classic signs a spouse is cheating. Whether they showed it or not, they usually felt some degree of guilt and would try to "make it up" to their dishonored spouse. I had talked to my attorney earlier today while Sherri was fixing lunch—he'd said to call him at home if I needed to. He was all set, he said. All he needed was my signature on the paperwork and he'd file them at the courthouse before noon tomorrow. The pictures were bargaining chips if Sherrie contested the divorce. Tomorrow afternoon, I was going to be a free man, in a sense. The divorce wouldn't actually be final for six months, but I'd be separated from the woman who'd brought me so much pain. That night, Sherri put on a black lace nightgown she knew I liked and glided seductively across the carpet to where I sat on the bed. I didn't want her, not after I'd seeing what I had Friday night. I was trying to come up with an excuse not to have anything to do with her tonight. I was sick to my stomach again just at the thought of touching her. I sat on the bed and tried to look uninterested. She stayed with it, though, the very image of a loving wife who wanted some loving from her husband. She exposed a breast, round and pale in the dim light, capped with a dark circle and a proud, partially erect nipple. Coming closer, she rubbed her breasts against my face in a move she knew usually aroused me. Even though I didn't want to—even though I could barely bring myself to be civil to her, her strokes and caresses were beginning to have a visible effect on me. She smirked, knowing the power she had over me. It pissed me off. Abruptly, I changed my mind. Without any thought at all, much less a careful consideration of the consequences, I knew I was going to give my dear, deceitful young wife the sex she wanted, and more. It would be one last fuck before we separated forever. If I were rational at that moment, I would have known what I was going to try to do to her was rooted in my own humiliation. There was, perhaps, some arrogance mixed in also. But, at the moment, all I wanted to do was exact a small measure of vengeance for the disgrace that this woman had heaped on me. Carefully, I built up an image in my mind of a street prostitute. I envisioned a whore who deserved no consideration and who was nothing more than a receptacle for me to use and discard. I would masturbate, using her pussy, when I was ready, but my revenge was going to be a little more subtle than that. If it worked, she wouldn't even understand it as retribution for a long time. I let Sherrie's face blend into the faceless features of the whore I had just constructed. Having dehumanized Sherrie sufficiently enough for my purposes, I was ready. I stood up and pulled her close. I bent to find the lips I'd kissed so many times before. I started gently, our lips barely touching before I drew back. Once, twice, a third time, and more before I became more demanding. When I came back again, I found her lips open and waiting for me. I pushed my tongue inside, searchingly. I flicked my tongue at hers, teasing her and making it clear I wanted more. I let my hands roam, sweeping them down her arms to her fingertips in a slow caress. Abandoning her arms, I cupped a hip in each hand and stroked her smooth skin through the silky material. My thumbs stroked the soft hollow inside the hip and moved across what they could reach of her lower belly. She sighed into my mouth as my hands moved behind her to take each ass cheek and knead it gently, massaging them and pulling her tight against my body at the same time. I traced the line of her backbone from bottom to top and then brought my hands back down in a smooth stroke from between her shoulder blades to her ass. I checked. Her eyes were closed now. She was swaying gently, searching for my mouth every time our lips separated. Her hands fell to my forearms to lie there softly while my assault continued. Her nightie had a wide, scoop neck and I pushed one side off her shoulders. Leaning over, I touched my tongue to her right nipple, flicking at it gently before swirling all around its circumference. I made her nipple and aureole wet with my saliva, sweeping my tongue around and around the blood-engorged nipple. Then I sucked her nipple into my mouth and touched my teeth to it. I wasn't biting—just letting her feel the hardness of the enamel against her sensitive skin. Sherrie was not a very vocal lover. Her commentary was mostly limited to low murmurs that were unintelligible and the occasional "Oh, my precious" when we were making love. Tonight she was confining herself to soft moans and appreciative groans when I touched a particularly sensitive place. It was just enough for me to figure out where to go next. I'd given up trying to get her to talk to me during sex and tell me what she wanted, much less talk dirty. Separate Lives Pt. 01 My left hand was stroking low on her belly and then between her legs. I'd thought she'd be sensitive there, considering the hammering I'd seen her blond fuck toy give her Friday night. But if she was sore, she gave no sign of it. I slipped my hand beneath the short nightie and stroked the outside of her thighs before working my way back inside and up to her vulva. Easing my head back a little to focus on her face, I gently put a finger inside her outer lips, but she only shifted her weight to one side and moved her legs farther apart. Evidently, she was not in the least tender down there. Suddenly, I had contempt for her boyfriend. If I'd been pounding her like I'd seen him do it, she'd have had a puffy, bruised pussy for a week. I pushed the other side of the nightgown off her other shoulder and cupped her left breast in my right hand. I squeezed it tenderly, gently tweaking the nipple with my thumb. The nipple grew rock hard quickly and I added my index finger, twirling the hard nub between them. I held her breast in my hand; the hardened point poked into my palm. I kissed her right nipple, slathering my tongue all around her aureole and then the rest of her breast. I paid close attention to the soft underside, knowing she loved to be kissed there. Sherrie's breathing grew more ragged as I worked to bring her body to a hard boil. Bent over as I was, licking and tonguing her breasts, I was in an awkward posture. My back began to ache so I sat on the edge of the bed. Taking her breasts in my hands, I manipulated them a little more firmly while my tongue traced a line down her breastbone and further below to her belly. I got to her bellybutton and paid it close attention, thrusting my tongue repeatedly into it and swirling my tongue around it before moving lower. I had to release her breasts now; I was stooping over too far over to keep them in my hands. I felt Sherrie's hands leave my wrists and cup her own breasts, manipulating them far more energetically than I had. I pulled the nightie completely off my wife's body and dropped it to lie in a dark pool about her feet. Slipping off the bed to my knees in front of her, I put little butterfly kisses around her lower belly while my hands molded her butt cheeks, squeezing and massaging them firmly. I found the hollow of her hips with my lips and kissed from the point of her hip inside and down to where her thigh met her vulva; then I did the same on the other side. I stood. Using my hands on her hips for leverage, I turned Sherrie around and gently pressed her down on the bed. Pushing her flat on the bed with her knees just at the edge, I lay beside her and took some time to kiss her lips once more. I took each nipple into my mouth in turn, sucking at it and trailing kisses down each side of her breasts before tonguing my way down her abdomen. Sliding back down onto my knees on the floor, I spread her legs and bent to kiss her lower belly. Pulling back and straightening my back for a moment, my hands gently stroked the inside of her thighs in long, sweeping moves. Leaning over, I replaced my right hand with my lips and kissed her inner thighs from knee to groin and back again. My tongue brushed the lower opening of her slit when I went from one leg to the other, making her gasp and twitch each time. Gradually, I paid less and less attention to her thighs and more to her vulva. Sherrie had a beautiful pussy. She was proud of the fact that her inner lips didn't protrude beyond the outer ones. She trimmed her pubic hair but had never shaved it for me. I'd asked many times earlier in our marriage but she always said she'd feel naked with out that patch of hair. I'd never understood her reasoning; she'd have to actually BE naked for me to see her pubes under any circumstances...but there it was. It was her body. I had eventually quit asking. I let the memory slide away. I leaned in to touch my tongue to the lowest part of Sherrie's labia majora. Tracing the outside of her right labia, my tongue swept up to the top of her slit and back down the left. Sherrie sucked in a short breath and her thighs quivered in reaction to my touch. Reversing course, my tongue worked back up the left side and came down the right. Her fingers clamped down on my forearms like vices. My hands had been resting on the tops of her thighs, but now I began caressing and stroking the sensitive insides and underneath. Abandoning any further attempt at teasing, I urged her outer lips apart with my tongue and slipped it inside to rake the length of the more tender labia minora. Sherrie's legs jerked spasmodically. She pulled her knees up as she fought to push my mouth away from her sensitive inner flesh, but simultaneously she was pulling me closer. Her feet waved in the air, kicking out as nerve endings fired randomly. She wasn't aware of what her lower body was doing, nor was she in control of it. I licked my way up the left side of her blood engorged inner lips and down the right. I lapped up juices spilling from her vagina, spending a moment or so at the bottom of her slit just because I liked to do that. Then I licked from bottom to top on the left and back down the right side. I felt her struggle up onto her elbows to look down the length of her body at me. When Sherrie saw what I was doing, it made her all the wilder. Her body rocked from side to side as she tried to anticipate where my tongue would be next. She was wriggling all over the bed now, unable to keep still under the non-stop stimulation of the most sensitive parts of her body. It was hard to keep her fixed well enough in position so that I could continue my oral assault. After a few more strokes from my tongue up and down her hot, drenched pussy, I moved up and used my tongue to search for, and locate the little nubbin of a clit peeking out of its concealing hood at the top of her opening. When I touched it with the tip of my tongue, Sherrie's whole body convulsed. Her hands clamped down on mine so fiercely I had to tug them free. She began humming a faint, high-pitched little whine. When I touched her clitty again, she grunted as if I'd sucker punched her. If she had been writhing before, her body tried to twist itself into a pretzel now. It was difficult to keep my mouth plastered to her vulva. I lapped up her juices as fast as they poured from inside her cunt. Her clit tried to hide as I played with it, but I coaxed it out into the open with my fingers and tongue. With it more clearly exposed, I attacked it, playing with it with the tip of my tongue and twirling my tongue in circles all around the hood that shielded it. While I did that, I slipped my right forefinger beneath my chin and into the drenched flesh at the bottom of her slit to moisten it with her own juices. It took no time at all to coat my finger with the fluids pouring from her cunt. I slowly inserted that finger inside her vagina and leisurely withdrew it, only to slide it back in—deeper this time. I built up a steady rhythm, moving slowly but adding speed as her vagina opened more. I added another finger and pressed both inside her pussy. Sherrie's legs spread even wider and she began to moan and whimper at the sensations sweeping up from her groin. I stopped working my tongue around her clit long enough to move more to her side. From here, I could resume my assault on her clitoris with my head at an angle that left plenty of room at the bottom of her pussy for me to press two fingers inside her with my palm up. Working them in and out slowly, I found that sensitive little place on the front wall of her vagina they call the G-spot. I made sure my fingertips rubbed it gently with each stroke. I leaned back for a moment to get a breath of air and watched Sherrie as she worked up to a hard climax. Her abdominal muscles had taken on a life of their own, contracting and relaxing in random patterns all across her belly and groin. Her legs erratically spread wide and then scissored shut again. Her hands were in constant motion, unable to find a place to rest. Her face and upper chest were flushed. My dear, loving wife was fast approaching what I planed to be only her first sexual climax tonight. Just seeing her this way was affecting me too. Realizing she was at so high a pitch of sexual excitement made me more aroused too. I didn't look down, but I could feel I was hard as a steel rod and as lengthy as I'd ever been. Tensing my lower groin muscles, I could feel my penis bob up and down in response. I wiggled my hips for just a moment, letting the underside of my hardness rub lightly across the fabric of the bedspread. I reveled in the thought that I had a strong, hard cock and I could do anything with it that I wanted...in spite of the humiliations that had been heaped on me. Tonight was not about me though. Tonight was to give my wife a lesson she would never forget. Bending back down to her pussy, my lips fastened around her clitoris. I sucked carefully at its tip, alternating this with swirling my tongue around its tiny circumference over and over again. In seconds, my darling wife was in the throws of a monumental orgasm. Her groin pushed up into my face trying for an even tighter union between her clit and my lips. Rubbing her cunt around my mouth made it hard for me to continue sucking the petite organ but I stayed with it. Every so often, I let it go so my tongue could slather the sensitive flesh all around. Sherrie went berserk. The high pitched keening that had been coming from her lips changed to gasping moans interspersed with small unintelligible cries. "Unnnnnnngh – unnnnnnngh," she groaned. Her hips began to rotate in tiny circles. She stopped to hump my fingers at an ever-increasing rate. Taking her faster movements as a signal, I sped up the pace with which I was fucking my fingers in and out. It was all I could do to keep my lips in place around her clitoris. "Unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnnnnngh." Sherrie could breath only in quick, short gasps now. Her hands had gathered up sections of the comforter and she clinched the material in her fists, alternately yanking at it and pounding the mattress. My fingers began rubbing her G-spot almost non-stop while I sucked madly at her clitoris. She couldn't take much of that. "OH GOD!" she shrieked. She didn't have enough breath to get the whole word out but she kept trying. "RON!" "RONNIE!!!" she cried. Her feet scrambled to find a purchase on the slick bedcover but they slid off the edge. Her hips came up off the bed as she arched her back at an impossible angle. Her vagina tightened around my fingers, virtually trapping them inside. Muscle contractions rippled across her abdomen, racing each other from top to bottom. For a moment, her body hung in the air, supported only by her shoulders and her feet. She held her breath for a few seconds and then let it out with a sigh. Her eyes closed, she settled slowly back to the surface of the bed. Over stressed muscles began to relax. Her breathing was fast and shallow, interrupted at times by short, quick inhalations that she held in as residual waves of pleasure swept through her body. Moving as slowly and carefully as I could, I extracted my fingers from her vagina but, gently as the motion was, it set off another round of muscle contractions and irregular breathing. Bringing my fingers to my lips as she watched, I licked her juices from them, taking care to get every drop. I could see her watching me. I wanted her to. I wanted her to see what she'd be missing, beginning tomorrow. I stroked the outside of her thighs for a minute or too, occasionally leaning in to plant little kisses across her mons while she cooled down a little. She kept urging me to come up beside her by pulling on my wrists but I wouldn't budge. In a short while, I made my cool down kisses a little more fervent, increasing the intensity slowly, but very surely. Before she had truly caught her breath from her first orgasm, she was on her way to a second. When her hips quit rolling from side to side from that one, I worked on bringing her body back up to a fever pitch again. Sherrie protested, she tried to push my head away but I was on a mission. I kept going. Before she realized it, she was in the throes of a third climax and wiggling her lower body all across the bed. I didn't ease off after this one at all. I kept sucking at her clitoris and stroking two and sometimes three fingers in and out of her cunt. She was soon bucking her hips off the bed, screaming my name and rubbing her pussy against my face for all she was worth. Before I was through with licking her pussy, I counted five orgasms and there might have been another. She was in no condition to tell me. I knew one, and possibly two, of those five was a G-spot orgasm, because her fluids flooded my mouth and face. I drank it down, smirking, as I lapped it up. This woman was out of control because of what I was doing to her. Her body was not her own tonight. I was the one who commanded it in the dimness of our bedroom. She would remember this night in the coming months and years. But I would be gone. After she and I rested for a short time, I got to my knees and settled between her thighs. Supporting myself on one hand and my knees, I held my cock in my right hand and began rubbing the head along her slit. Sherrie was not ready for more stimulation. She moaned a plea for me to slow down. Normally I wouldn't have done this to her so quickly after she'd come so recently, but this was not a normal occasion. Shortly, her body was responding in spite of her need to rest. Her thighs parted widely to give me better access. Bumping the tip of my penis against her clitoris made her suck in her breath. Her body was soon trembling with renewed arousal and anticipation. She began trying to time my manipulations and hunch her cunt up to me. I adjusted my position minutely and pressed myself inside her outer labia and then through her inner lips. Smoothly, and slowly, I pushed inside her vagina, moving deeper with each stroke. She was sopping wet; she could probably have taken a baseball bat inside her but I worked myself into her pussy as if she'd been completely dry and her vagina still unready for me. In moments, her thighs were sawing back and forth on the outside of my legs in a steady rhythm and her fingernails were lightly scraping the flesh on my chest. She was pinching my nipples every so often. From time to time, some sensation would get to her and her hands would clinch tight on me before she could relax them. I increased the tempo at which I was feeding my cock into her cunt, making the thrusts stronger and deeper. Sherrie couldn't control her hip movements any more; I was nailing her to the bed on my downstrokes and she was slinging her ass up at me trying to keep me tucked deep inside her when I pulled out. She humping me hard now, thrusting her hips up at me and grinding her cunt against my groin. We were both in a frenzy. I could feel the hot semen bubbling slowly up deep inside me. The pleasure was so powerful it was almost painful. I tried to stop it; I tensed every muscle in my groin that I had control of, and some I did not. I fought to not come; I willed my body to hold off my release until I was ready for it. I groaned aloud with the strain. "Unnnnnnngh – unnnnnnngh," she moaned with me. "Unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnnnnngh." Sherrie was clutching at the bedcovers, my body, the bedpost...anything that would give her something to hold on to. Then her hands fluttered over my chest and shoulders, and slipped under my arms to cup my ass cheeks and pull me harder and more strongly into her hot cunt. I bumped her cervix several times and tried to ease up—I had no overwhelming desire to cause her physical pain, but Sherrie would have none of that. I drove hard and deep with each plunge, banging against the opening to her womb with each thrust. Sherrie's heels were soon locked around my waist. My strokes became shorter, but faster. It wasn't long before my attempts to stave off coming were becoming increasingly futile as Sherrie's vagina gripped my cock tightly. Suddenly, hot white fluid burst from the little slit in the tip of my cock and into my wife's hungry cunt. I'm sure she felt it. When the first spurt splashed against the walls of her vagina, she humped her lower body up into mine and then wrenched herself back down again. I shoved my cock back down into her, trying to get as deep inside her as I could get. Her vagina clamped down on my penis and I couldn't hold back a second spray of semen deep inside her. Her thighs tightened around me; I couldn't have backed out of her if I'd wanted to. "PLEEEEEEEEESE...RONNIE," she shouted. Her body seemed to be in convulsions. Her head was thrown back; she rolled it back and forth on the pillow. She bucked back up at me again and we strained against each other. Her vagina milked my cock, pulling every droplet of sperm laden fluid out of my balls. Sherrie's body spasmed, every muscle in her belly seemed to contract at the same time. She froze, not even breathing for a few long seconds. I could feel the muscular walls of her cunt rippling in haphazard patterns...and then the contractions eased. Sherrie's body relaxed and she lay there peacefully. I could see small quakes twitching her belly muscles for a while before they died away. Sherrie was expecting me to get off her and lay beside her for some cuddling but I didn't intend to allow that tonight. I never took my cock out of her. Instead, after a few minutes, I began pumping in and out of her again...slow and steady in the beginning but stronger and more energetically moments later. The tightness of her sheath had kept me hard while I recharged. Ten minutes later, I brought her to another screaming orgasm that seemed about to rip her insides apart. One more time—I made my wife accept a third orgasm from my cock and I was done. I hadn't come these last two times. I refused to. As I finally pulled my cock out of her, I reached out to sweep my hand swiftly down the front of her body from her breastbone to pubic mound. Her body convulsed through one final orgasm. When her body relaxed this time, I let her lay there unmolested. Exhausted myself, I stretched my body out on the bed beside my wife. Our only contact was my fingers around her wrist. After a while, Sherri rolled over and cuddled against me, putting her head on my shoulder. "Oh God, honey," she breathed into my chest. "If only you'd—" Her voice faded away before completing whatever she'd been about to say. I didn't care any more. I didn't ask her what she meant. "All you had to do was be here with me," I answered. I trusted it was enigmatic enough for her to remember tomorrow. She stirred a little, nodding her head as if in reply to what I'd said, and then she slipped quickly into a deep sleep. I got up and took a long, very hot shower. When I finished, I walked down the hall to the guest room and lay down on the bed. Sherrie had not moved when I walked past our bedroom...her bedroom door now. I doubt she knew I wasn't there. She was sleeping on the wet spot, something that she did not like. She would be irritated when she woke up the next morning. I didn't sleep much the rest of the night; I knew what the coming day would bring and I dreaded it even as I welcomed it, knowing it would bring me release from the demons that had haunted me for the last month. ******** Next morning, I was dressed and gone before Sherrie woke up. I didn't doubt she was upset by my unexplained absence, but I had no desire to be around her. It was too painful. Three hours after she left, I was back at the house with a U-Haul truck. I'd already delivered the camera to my attorney's office and one of his assistants had printed two copies of everything. The sympathy the young woman felt when she brought them back into the inner office was evident in her eyes. I appreciated it, I guess, but I was suspicious there might have been some pity there too. I didn't want pity. Separate Lives Pt. 01 At home again, and after a couple cups of coffee, I got busy packing up my clothing and the few personal possessions I had brought to the marriage. There were even fewer items we'd bought together I wanted to keep. While one of my original goals had been to salvage some of the furniture for my own use, I found I didn't want anything more than the DVD player, a 25-inch TV, and a few music CDs. Nothing else caught my eye. I made a backup of everything on the computer, opened the case, and disconnected the backup hard drive. I put it in my briefcase. I'd buy another computer somewhere to put it in. Before I left, I scattered a dozen prints of the pictures I'd taken last Friday night on the top of her dresser. I used the computer one final time to print my darling wife a short note in the biggest font I could use and still fit the whole text on the page. ENJOY THE MEMORIES OF LAST NIGHT, DEAR! THEY'RE THE LAST YOU'LL HAVE OF ME This was the second childish thing I'd done in the last four days and I didn't get any good feelings from this one in the cold light of morning, as it were. But I'd worked hard last night for the opportunity to say this to her and I wasn't going to back down now. Taping the message to the mirror, I turned around and left what had been our bedroom, down the hall and out the garage door. I didn't bother locking the place up. It was no longer my responsibility. Chapter 4 I'd thought once divorce papers had been served on Sherrie, our attorney's would talk and work out the division of our property and other assets. Then, I figured we'd sign the paperwork, go before the judge and it would all be over with. Silly me. It seemed discussions between attorneys was necessarily a long, drawn out process that became negotiations about the most inconsequential of things. For instance I know the lawyers spent one whole lunch hour—I paid for it, I'm sure—on the question of whether I should return the TV I'd taken with me or did it constitute my share of the electronic equipment in the house? Who gave a flyin'...? Well, anyway, it was taking forever. What it finally all boiled down to was that the house and all the furnishings were to be sold and the proceeds divided equally—after the lawyers got their share, of course. Sherrie and I would identify any furniture or other things in the home that we particularly wanted and, if the other didn't protest, that item was theirs—up to a total value of five thousand dollars. I didn't care. I'd already made my selection. I told my attorney just to get on with it. ******** A few weeks after the petition for divorce was filed, but before our first court date, I went over to Cal and Melissa's house to see if I could get some answers to the question of how this whole thing started. Melissa had been Sherrie's best friend in college and I'd had known Cal slightly. Over the past few years, we had all become very close. Melissa had become as good a friend of mine as she was Sherrie's. I realized, belatedly, that Cal and Melissa had not come to our house, nor had they invited us to theirs, since the Vegas trip. Thinking of how Connie had spoken of Vegas, I wanted to see if Cal and Melissa could shed any light on the problem. They were outside in the back yard when I arrived. When I rang the doorbell, Cal came around the side of the house and escorted me back, handing me a cold beer before having me sit in the shade of a big pecan tree that was growing in the far corner of their yard. We sat for a couple of awkward moments. "So..." I said finally. Melissa burst into tears and got up to run in the house. Cal and I stared at the door through which she'd disappeared and then at each other. "She's a little emotional sometimes," Cal muttered. "I know," I said, smiling a little in spite of all the pain everyone was feeling. Melissa was up front in everything she did and I loved her for it. In many ways, she was closer to me than my deceased sister ever had been. I took a long swallow of Coors' finest. "Ron..." Cal said at length, "Melissa and me are just as sorry as we can be that you and Sherrie are breaking up, but we didn't know what to do, you know?" I looked at him questioningly. I could see comprehension spreading across his face. "You don't know," he said. I shook my head. He got two more beers from the ice chest beside him and handed one to me. "We didn't know whether to tell you when we got back from Vegas or not," he remarked sadly. "We thought that surely Sherrie would tell you what happened—it couldn't be kept hidden—and, after a while it seemed she had and the two of you had everything all worked it out." "Worked what out?" I asked quietly. Cal took a deep breath and spent the next twenty minutes explaining how Sherrie had gotten sloppy drunk the first night in Vegas. Tired and mad because I'd had to cancel at the last minute, Sherrie had told the other two couples that if I wasn't going to be there when she needed me, she was going to find someone who would be. Sherrie spent the rest of the night gulping down hard liquor while dancing and flirting with every man who caught her eye. At some point, Sherrie and some blond guy managed to disappear even with both of the other couples trying hard to keep track of where Sherrie and the guy went in the casino. No one saw Sherrie until the next day. That afternoon, Saturday, Melissa and Connie had gone to Sherrie's room and hammered on the door until Sherrie finally answered. She looked like she'd been rode hard and put up wet, according to what Melissa had told Cal. The blond guy had been in the bathroom, but had come out. Sherrie had been defensive, but also drunk and defiant. The guy had acted completely unconcerned about the whole thing. He left eventually, but since Sherrie didn't join Melissa, Cal, Connie, and Tom that Saturday evening, they were pretty sure Sherrie and the unknown man had hooked up again. Actually, other than that one meeting Saturday afternoon, none of the four saw Sherrie until late Sunday afternoon when she showed up at the airport to board the flight home. They hadn't seen how she got to the terminal so they couldn't say her boyfriend had brought her. They hadn't cared. I didn't blame them. Melissa had come back outside wiping her eyes and was standing behind my chair with her hands on the tops of my shoulders. Every so often, she would pat me as one consoles an unhappy child. I'm not so sure that wasn't exactly what I was at that moment. When Cal finished, I sat looking into space. "I wish you'd told me," I said after a while. "I don't know what good it would've done, but some of the lying and the cheating might not have occurred." I sighed and bit my lip. "But the damage had already been done, I guess. It wouldn't have made any difference in the long run." "How did you find out about Vegas?" Melissa asked gently. I craned my neck back to look up at her. "Ya'll just told me," I replied. She was confused. "Well, how did you find out, then," she asked. I took her hand in mine and patted it gently. "I saw them in Sherrie's car on the street a few weeks ago and that blond guy had his hand up her skirt so far I knew he had to have his fingers inside her," I said tersely. Both their faces blanched; they winced in sympathy. "Oh, you poor man," Melissa said. "What a horrible way to find out." I shrugged. "I'm not sure there is a good way, 'Lissa," I said. "But it's over and done with now." I looked down at the grass about my feet so I wouldn't have to admit to the sting of tears that had suddenly rushed to my eyes. Sherrie had evidently come over to tell them of the divorce a few days ago. Melissa said Sherrie had been mad as hell that Melissa wouldn't support her. It had been just a horrible mistake, according to Sherrie. When Melissa had called her a hussy and some other things, Sherrie had left in a huff. That was my Sherrie, all right. Blame everyone but the two people who committed the adultery. Cal, Melissa, and I talked for another hour or so before I left. Their eighteen-month old baby needed attention and I wouldn't have been good company at dinner, though they tried hard to get me to stay. ******** Three and a half months into the "negotiations," the question of the pictures I'd taken of Sherrie and Blondie came up. Sherrie was afraid I was going to put them on the Internet. I thought their suggestion was a good one and I started to look for a website that would handle them. I offered to send copies to everyone at Sherrie's office and all her friends too. I didn't intend to do that, but it sure got the talks moving again. There would have been some legal complications if I'd tried to do as I threatened. For one thing, there was the invasion of privacy thing since I'd taken the pics through the motel window and without permission from the motel or the participants. I told my attorney I'd go ahead and chance a law suit if something didn't nice happen real soon. The next day, Sherrie's lawyer reopened the question of how to divide the house and offered me 60% of the sale price if I would turn over all copies of the pictures, but I refused. After a while, they offered 55% of the proceeds if I would agree to keep only one copy of the pictures and agree that I would never transmit them over the Internet in any way. And, oh by the way, Sherrie demanded a closed-door meeting between just the two of us. I made a counter offer of 60%, I'd keep only one set of prints, no digital copies, and a maximum of 30 minutes with her. We eventually settled on the 60% of the house, two sets of the pictures (one for me and one, surprisingly, for Sherrie), no digital copies, and a one-hour closed-door meeting. They withdrew all of their motions before the court and agreed to a no-fault divorce at the earliest possible moment. A court order was obtained recognizing Sherrie and I were no longer living together as man and wife pending a final divorce decree. Texas does not have "legal separations" and this was as close as the attorney's could get to one. It was fine with me. The sale of the residence and furnishings could move forward, the mandatory wait time for the divorce would not be interrupted, and things would be over in another two months. Meanwhile, I'd made a particularly strong effort to keep my divorce from affecting my job. In fact, I took refuge in my work. I was the first one to arrive in the morning and the last to leave that night. Maybe because he noticed my renewed dedication to the firm, the big boss made me the interim director for the R&D branch. He gave me all the problems to solve, but none of the pay increase for that position. I didn't care that much. I just made sure the disaster of my personal life never hurt my professional career. ******* I got there about ten minutes early. I'd hoped the traffic would be heavy and make me late, but it was not to be. The meeting between Sherrie and me was to take place in a temporarily vacant office in my attorney's suite. I was hustled into that office and ushered me into the big chair behind the desk. That would have a considerable psychological impact on Sherrie, they said. It would put her at a disadvantage. One of my lawyer's legal aides, the young woman who'd been so sympathetic when I'd initiated the divorce papers, fussed over me for a few minutes, straightening my tie and brushing at some imaginary lint. She leaned in very close to me as I sat there. I could smell her perfume and if I'd let my eyes fall from hers, I'd have had a superb view down her open-necked blouse. When everyone else had left the room to greet the arriving party with my wife, she impulsively kissed my forehead and told me to "hang in there," and squeezed my hand encouragingly. Standing, she turned and walked through the doorway, but she looked back and smiled before she disappeared. When everyone was gone, I got up and moved to a seat at the short conference table that butted up against the front of the big desk. I didn't think I needed any props or artificial barriers. My wife had committed adultery, I caught her, and I was getting rid of her. I didn't see things as any more complicated than that. When Sherrie came in, she found me sitting there calmly placing 5 X 7 prints on the table of her and her blond fuck toy hammering away at each other on the hotel bed. I was going for neat rows of six pictures in each row but the photos tended to slide on the slick tabletop. It was a lot of effort to make each line of pics to line up. I worked while Sherrie settled herself. When I looked up, there was a flush across her face. She was an attractive woman—not beautiful in the classical sense, but more than just pretty. I knew that under the bulky sweater top and knee length, dark blue skirt, there was a very exciting body. I looked into the face I'd loved for the more than six years we'd been together—four of them as a married couple. She'd been so warm and affectionate through most of those six years. Looking at her now, I couldn't say when the woman I used to know had disappeared, or where she'd gone. "You got me really good didn't you?" she said bitterly, interrupting my train of thought. Her face was twisted into a mask of irritation, something I'd come to expect from her more often than not lately. "I'll bet you're soooo proud of yourself, aren't you?" I snorted. The puff of air moved three prints sideways and I urged them back into place with a fingernail. "Nah," I said quietly. "You got yourself," I told her. I glanced up to see her still glaring at me. She opened her mouth to say something I figured would be spiteful. I beat her to the punch. "And no...I am definitely not proud of having caught a slut whore fucking around on me. I thought the woman I was married to would never, ever screw some strange man. Exactly why would you think I'd be proud to find out differently, huh?" It took the wind out of her sails and she sat with a blank expression on her face for a time. I held up my left forearm and checked my watch in as ostentatiously as I could. "I was told you wanted to talk to me...so talk. We've got just about fifty-five minutes left." I leaned back in my chair. I was tired of playing with the pictures. Sherrie made an effort to keep her eyes from straying to the pictures and look only at me. She took a deep breath. "Ron, honey, I—" "Whoa...huh uh...back up there!" I said quickly. She pulled back, surprised at my vehemence. "You don't have any right to call me "honey," "sugar," or "sweetheart" or anything else," I told her. "You gave that up when you started playing with your little fuck toy in Vegas." She flinched and swallowed hard. She couldn't meet my eyes, but she couldn't look at the pics either. The wall behind me was suddenly being given her complete attention. "I didn't mean to...to step over any boundaries here," she said finally. "Okay," I said, "just so we understand each other." She nodded. "Ron..." she paused and looked at me, expecting me to object again, I guess. "Ron," she continued, "first...I want to say I'm so sorry about all this. I never meant to hurt you, you've got to believe that." "I don't have to believe any such thing," I retorted. "What the hell would make you think you could fuck around behind my back and not have it hurt me?" She looked at me for a long moment. "I never meant for you to find out," she said in a low voice. "And if you hadn't found out, you wouldn't have been hurt." I snorted again disbelievingly. "What? No harm, no foul? Sherrie, either you are pretty damn stupid...or you think I am. From what "our" friends are telling me, you were dry fucking this guy on the dance floor and in the casino. You went off somewhere; they couldn't find you and didn't manage to corner you until the next afternoon. Fuck toy was there in your room with you and you didn't even try to hide it. Just how the hell did you think you were going to keep me from finding out eventually?" She sat looking at me without saying anything for a bit. "Then why didn't you stop me?" she asked sharply. "What?" I said. "I wasn't there, Sherrie." She shook her head. "When we came back, why didn't you say something? Why didn't you stop me from seeing him again?" She was getting worked up but I couldn't understand what she was talking about. "Why didn't you fight for me? You're supposed to love me," she blurted. I shook my head in confusion. This was hard enough without her talking in riddles. "Sherrie," I said wearily. I didn't know what you were doing. How could I stop you...read your mind?" Then it struck me. "Oh—Sherrie, Melissa and Cal didn't tell me about Vegas until I'd already caught you with your fuck toy." She winced at my repeated description of the blond guy but I wasn't in any mood to be gentle. "You want to know how I caught you?" I asked challengingly. She nodded. There was a small tear at the corner of her left eye. "I saw you and fuck toy while I was sitting in a van at a stop light," I said shortly. "He had his hand so far up your skirt, I'm surprised his fingers weren't coming out of your mouth," I told her. Her posture changed. From one that had been aggressive, she slumped into one of despair and pain. I waited. I'd said my piece. "I am so sorry you saw that, Ron," she said finally. "I'm sorry I let him do it...I'm sorry all of this happened." "You sure didn't look like you were sorry that day," I told her. "In fact, you looked like you were having a ball," I said, "no pun intended." She cringed in her seat before straightening up. "I came here to be honest with you and I'm going to do it," she said. "I was enjoying it," she said. "God help me, I was...but no more than I would have if it were my fingers in there, or...uh...a dildo, Ron," she said. "But they weren't your fingers, Sherrie," I said softly, "it wasn't a dildo and they sure as hell weren't my fingers. They were his and his had no damn business being there." I slammed my hand down on the polished tabletop, my open palm making a loud, smacking thud echo off the law books in the shelves all around. "I had an exclusive rights contract with you, Sherrie," I said. "It's called a marriage. No one else in this whole world had any right to put his hands down there except me, dammit to hell!" I sat back, trembling with anger. I fought to keep my temper from exploding. The twenty-four pictures on the table had all skittered across the surface of the table. To occupy my hands and mind, I began picking them up and placing them in a neat stack in front of me. "I'm sorry, Ron," she said after a while. "You're right. I should not have done anything with that man. I know that. I don't have any excuses at all—" "For the first time today, I agree with you," I said, cutting off whatever she was going to say. "Yeah..." she said, "I know." She took a deep breath. "Ron, would it make any difference if I told you that the night you took all these pictures...that I told him I wasn't going to see him any more?" I glanced up from my pile of photos. She held my eyes with her own. I shrugged. "No, not a hell of a lot," I said evenly. She was startled. She'd thought she had something important to throw into the mix. "Sherrie, you cheated on me in Las Vegas, right in front of our friends. When you came home, you didn't come to me and tell me about it...and then you fucked him three, four, five...a dozen times more here in our town. You didn't stop when you came home. "What's that saying? 'What goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas?' Boy that sure didn't apply to you, did it? Not one damn bit! Hell, you were like that energizer bunny—you just kept going and going and going. Separate Lives Pt. 01 "You know what, Sherrie? I've been told cheating gets easier every time you do it. Apparently, it is. You sure didn't seem to have any trouble finding places and times to fuck your blond guy. I doubt you would have ever stopped if I hadn't nailed you with some really good pictures...and then filed for divorce." I looked up from my mound of pics. "You tell me you weren't going to see him any more but, to put it bluntly, I don't believe you," I told her emphatically. "I think you're lying in your teeth." "It's true!" she snapped. "Right after we went into the room, I told him this would be our last time...I'd already decided to stop seeing him...I was feeling guilty and ashamed and I wanted to end it." She reached out, snagged one of the pictures, and held it up in front of my eyes. "You see this?" she demanded. "He's trying to hurt me here, slamming in to me really hard. He was punishing me for telling him I wasn't going to be with him anymore. A little bit after you took this, I got away and kicked the SOB in his balls." I shook my head. I didn't want to see what she was trying to show me...and it really didn't matter. "It looks to me like you're getting a little rough sex there, and you were liking it," I said. I held up my hand to stop her from saying something. "But let's say you're telling the gospel truth." I leaned on my elbows partly across the table. "If it's true you wanted to stop fucking him, Sherrie, why the hell didn't you give him a call and tell him? Why was it necessary to give him a good-bye fuck?" She hung her head. "I know. It was wrong, but—" "Don't bother, Sherrie! I don't want to hear it! Even if I accepted what you say at face value, I don't believe—and I never will believe it—that you would ever have stopped so long as your slutty secret life was still a secret from me. "Oh, you might mean what you say. You might have even done it for a week...a month...six months, maybe. But you'd have gone back to him...or found someone else...the first damn time you got pissed off at me again, or you had car trouble, or when you had a fucking bad hair day! "Sooner or later, you'd have had that urge to get a little "strange" and pay me back for every real and imaginary problem we've ever had, wouldn't you? Isn't that what you were doing, Sherrie?" I had worked myself up again. I had to pull back. I slouched in my chair and tried to look more impassive than I felt. Sherrie was crying again. "You don't have to talk to me like that," she whispered. "I'm your wife." I looked away in disgust. "Not for very long," I said cruelly. "We're separated, the courts have recognized it, and all we have to do it wait another 52 days and it's all over with. And besides...I talk to sluts and whores a lot differently from the way I would to my faithful wife, assuming I ever have one again." The tears were rolling now. "Ron...I'm trying to say I'm sorry for what I've done. Can't you understand that? I'm sorry!" I shook my head. Abruptly, I was weary of the whole thing. "Okay, Sherrie, you're sorry. I'm sorry too. Hell, everybody involved in this damned mess is sorry. So what? Where does that get us?" We sat quietly for a while. "Sherrie," I said slowly. "You've ripped the heart right out of me." I tapped my chest. "Right here—there's a big hole, a whole lot of emptiness inside me where I used to keep the image of a woman I loved more than life itself...a woman I trusted with my most private secrets...someone I could count on to be good to me when the whole world was against me. "You were my friend, someone I could talk to...trade opinions about anything under the sun. You were my lover; the one woman in the world I would ever make love to for the rest of my life and the only woman I wanted to make love to me. You took that all away and I can't get it back," I told her. My voice cracked on the last few words and I had to stop. Sherrie was crying harder. "Ron—" I interrupted her. "Sherrie," I said slowly and carefully, "you've half-killed me, fucking that guy...betraying me, betraying yourself, and betraying our marriage." I took a deep breath. "I sure hope whatever you got out of it was worth wrecking our marriage and his...'cause I heard this morning his wife kicked his ass out and is filing for divorce too." That was true. An investigator working for my attorney had tracked down the garage that had sent a wrecker to pick up two sets of slashed tires from a motel, take them back to the shop for repair and return the tires to the motel and mount them on two vehicles. The wrecker driver had remembered a furious brunette woman and a subdued blond man as owners of the cars. Each of the billing reports had included the license plate number of the vehicle involved and, once he had that, it was child's play for the investigator to find out the man's name and all kinds of personal information. When my attorney told me the guy's identity, I found a phone number for his home and got in touch with his wife. She became enraged when I told her what I knew. I wasn't surprised she had filed for a divorce too. Curiously, it seemed there actually had been three teens who had run away from the motel when Sherrie walked out of her room. They may have been involved in some other mischief, but I knew they hadn't done the tires. I watched my wife cry inconsolably for a while. I wanted to take her in my arms...but she wasn't my woman anymore. She was a stranger. "Will you tell me why you did it?" I asked. It took her a long time to smother the tears and get control of herself. Melissa and Cal had told me some of what she'd said in Las Vegas. I wanted to see if she could add anything to that. "I don't know, Ron," she said a little bitterly. "It's like a whole other world in out there. It didn't feel real from the minute I got off the plane. Then I got drunk...the lights were so bright. It was like they hypnotized me. You weren't there and I was mad you wouldn't come with me. Then P—he...was talking to me so nice, telling me how sad it was that I was alone. After a while, I just gave in, Ron." The last phrase was wailed rather than spoken. I looked at her and for the first time I felt contempt. "Well, that's just..." I said, trying to find the words to tell her how I felt. I gave up. They wouldn't come. "God damn it, none of that is any fucking excuse!" I said, finally exploding. "First of all, I had to go to Denver and fix that damned glitch in the proposed power delivery system. If I hadn't gone, I'd have been fired and if I didn't have a job, we couldn't make the payments on that nice big house you just had to have a couple years back. I couldn't be with you in Vegas, dammit! It wasn't a matter of not wanting to. Don't you think I would have if I could? "What else was it? Oh yeah. You got drunk. Well excuse the hell out of me, sugar pie honey bunch, but who the hell told you to get drunk in the first place. Are you a child that someone has to take a glass of rum out of your hands when you shouldn't be drinking it? Fuck you! You had no business even thinking of getting drunk if you can't control who you let shove a cock up your damned cunt when you do! "Bright lights? Hypnotized? What the shit does that mean, Sherrie? Should everyone treat you like you had some kind of mental problem because you might be...uh...hypnotized by the pretty lights? Give me a break!" I took some deep breaths and leaned heavily on the left arm of my chair. Then something else she'd said made me mad all over again. I sat up straight and leaned across the table toward her. "And...you said he was talking to you real nice. Isn't that just precious? You're an attractive woman, Sherrie. Of course, men are going to come on to you! So what? Who the God-damned hell told you a married woman has a right to even think about letting some strange guy console you and flatter you and tell you how rotten it was that your husband wasn't there, huh? That's what he did, didn't he, Sherrie? He told you I was a sorry son of a bitch for not being there for you, didn't he?" She nodded, mopping up some of her tears with an already sodden tissue. "Yeah," I said contemptuously, "and you lapped it up, didn't you?" I shook my head in disgust. "Dammit, Sherrie...you talked about being drunk and drinking. You were married. A married woman...or a man...hell, it applies to all of us. The fact is you were supposed to act like you were a recovering alcoholic. I mean that. A married person is like someone who can never touch alcohol...ever! "But you did. You know what? The first time you danced with him too close...the first time you let him touch your arm in a possessive way, you were an alcoholic breaking your vow to never touch the stuff. Our marriage vows said we would forsake all others, Sherrie...forsake all others. What the hell did you not understand about that? "Do you think I'm so ugly and unattractive, so inept in bed that I couldn't have been doing what you did? Don't you understand I get chances to spend a night or two with strange women every, single time I go on a trip? "Dammit, I have to travel seven or eight times a year and every place I go, there's a secretary in the office, a professional woman from down the hall, a waitress in a restaurant or a woman in the hotel bar where I go for a nightcap. Maybe it's just a girl I pass in the corridor going to my room, but every time I go somewhere, there's a woman who I might be able to fuck, but you know what? I never have! I've been propositioned ten times...I mean by ten women...this last year alone I think, and I've never even given one of them a second's worth of consideration because I had my loving woman at home." "Guess you fooled me, huh?" I said bitterly. "If I'd only known." I shook my head disgustedly. There was no sound but crying in the room for a long while. Sherrie just sat there hunched over. Her shoulders were shaking from the sobs she didn't want me to see. I didn't know why Sherrie had wanted to talk to me but it was I getting in most of the talking. I started up again, breaking the long silence. "You should never have let that SOB touch you at all, Sherrie," I said, starting in again. I couldn't let this topic die—it was killing me. "The first time he did, and you let him get away with it, you took a swallow from the cup that you could never drink from if you wanted to stay married to me. The first time you let him kiss you...you did it again. The second he put his hand on your ass...your breasts...ah, hell. What's the point?" Abruptly, my rage left me. I slumped in my seat and tried to breathe slowly. "I don't know else there is to say, Sherrie," I said finally. "I just know you've ruined something that was really beautiful, you know that? Now, I don't have anything but pain...and it won't go away. I loved you with all my being. Hell, I still love you, I guess. I haven't learned how to turn it off yet and then back on like a faucet the way you have." "Ron..." Sherrie said tentatively. "If you can still love me, we could try again..." She stopped when she saw me shaking my head. "But...you made love to me so...so good that Sunday before you left me," she wailed, shaking her head in confusion. "Not hardly!" I said brusquely. "I wasn't making love to you that night, Sherrie...I was fucking you and making you come over and over so you'd remember it when I left. I'm sorry I did it now. It was a mean thing to do—something childish, arrogant, and worthless. I'm sorry I did it," I said. Sherrie looked shocked and then dismayed. She'd pinned her hopes on me having a desire to get back with her. We sat looking at each other for a time. "Oh, and no...I can't try again," I said, remembering the question. "I don't have anything left to try with, Sherrie," I said, at last. "I don't believe a word you say. I know for a fact that you've lied in your teeth every day since you started fucking that bastard. You were deceiving me every minute of every day and that's one cruel, heartless thing to do to someone who loves you. "I can't possibly trust you anymore, Sherrie...I can't imagine ever trusting you again out of my sight. I can't live that way, Sherrie." I sighed, leaning my head back on the back of the chair and looking up at the ceiling tiles. "I don't know what I did to deserve this, Sherrie," I said musingly. "Based on that last night of sex we had together, I seem to be able to satisfy you sexually. If I can't, you're one hell of an actress...I never saw so many fake orgasms all strung together that night if that's what you were doing." I was quiet for a bit, trying to get it all straight in my mind. "You know, Sherrie...I know I'm not perfect. I don't always see when you're unhappy about something. Sometimes I don't pick up on your signals quick enough. I know there are times you want to talk to me and I'm wrapped up in something else and I don't understand. There are times I don't know have a clue what it is you want me to do...and I've never learned how to talk to you when you're mad. "But—right off the top of my head—I've never shut myself off from you. I try to be considerate, even if I don't succeed all the time. Hell, I only watch one football game a week on TV just to make room for a little extra time with you on weekends. I take you out when we can afford it, I bring you flowers or a little something every so often. I guess I don't do everything I could, but I try. I guess there are a lot of times I'm not the man I'd like to be...but what the Goddamned hell did I ever do to you to make you do something like this?" "Nothing...nothing at all, Ron," Sherrie said in a rush. "It was just me, all right? I did something incredibly mean, and stupid, and spiteful...and I'm sorry for having hurt you. I'm so ashamed and I feel so...so...unclean...that I did those things with him. Ron...I feel guilty all the time now. I wish...I wish so bad that I could go back and stop myself...but I can't, Ron. I can't push some "undo" button and make it all go away. I wish I could." She was quiet. I guess she was all cried out for the time being. "I can't keep from wondering, Sherri," I said in a voice barely above a whisper. "When did you make the decision that you could fuck him and it would be all right? And how did you make a decision like that, huh? What made it "okay" in your mind to use sex with someone else to solve a problem you had with me, huh?" "I never made a decision to do any of that, Ron," she said in the same voice. "If I had been making decisions, I wouldn't have made this bad a mistake...it just happened...I didn't want it...I didn't go looking for it," she said. That did it. I'd had enough. I straightened up in my chair and started gathering the pictures together and patting them into a neat stack. I was fed up with all the bullshit. "No...it didn't just happen," I said briskly. "Come on, Sherrie. You weren't just walking through the casino that night and suddenly find a strange cock sticking out of your pussy. No sireee, Bob, that's not what happened. You let this happen. Hell, Sherrie, let's be frank here...you made it happen after you got back home. And, by the way, you damn sure did want it, and you most emphatically did go looking for it—at least here in the town we live in, even if I believe you when you say you didn't in Vegas. "Shit, take a little responsibility for this, Sherrie. This wasn't a lightning bolt coming out of a clear sky. You did it, you liked it, and you kept on doing it...period!" She just looked at me. She was in shock, I guess. "And it wasn't a mistake, either," I added. "A mistake is when you reach for a can of tomato soup on a supermarket shelf and you come away with mushroom instead. Hell, this is more like the mother of all catastrophes. "And...I guess that's just the way it's just going to have to be, Sherrie," I told her. "I can't live with a woman I can't trust. They don't have chastity belts any more...and I wouldn't lock you in one if they did. If I have to worry every time I leave your side that you're going to be fucking some guy when I'm out of sight...well, I'd rather just get out of the situation. I'll leave you to every Tom, Dick, or Harry you want to fuck...or do all three of them at one time, for all I care." I put the pictures in my inside jacket pocket and stood up. "I don't have anything else to say, Sherrie, and the time we agreed to talk on is almost over. Do you have anything you need to say to me?" She stood and looked me in the eye across the table. "Just one thing, Ron...and then you can go if that's what you want. I just thought I could explain to you what happened and...see if we might could find a way through this..." I snatched one of the pictures from my coat pocket. I held it by one corner and showed it to her. "Sherri, I don't need an explanation. This is it. This is what happened! This one photograph tells me everything I need to know. If it didn't, what Cal and Melissa told me would have done the job sooner or later. I don't understand where you're coming from. "Don't you get it? When you went up to your room in Las Vegas with that man and closed the hotel door behind you, you shut me out of your life. You killed the marriage with just that one act. All the rest of it is just shit piled on top of more shit. There is nothing you can explain away. The facts are the facts...and nothing on God's green earth is going to change them. "I don't know what else I can say. Well, how about if I say there is no explanation that will change a damned thing. Does that make it any clearer?" She seemed to summon some last bit of courage. In the process, she completely ignored what I'd just said, I guess. She surely didn't comment on it. "Ron...I love you and I will always love you...I want you to remember that," she said. "I've been selfish, petty...I've screwed things up bad, but I won't ever stop loving you...can you understand that Ron?" I nodded. I shrugged. I didn't doubt she thought she did, standing with me in this room and at this moment. But it was an awfully one-dimensional, self-serving love if it was flexible enough to let her to do what she'd done. I pulled my jacket into a better fit across my shoulders and turned away from the woman who had been my wife. "Ron, I'm—" "Sorry...yeah, I know," I muttered, not looking at her. I didn't say anything else, and neither did she. Sherrie didn't try to touch me as I walked out the door. I was glad. Because I knew whatever she felt for me...deep inside, locked away in a vault I'd never open again, I still loved her as much as the day I'd married her. Love couldn't overcome this. She'd dishonored our marriage and me. There was nothing left to salvage and it was best left behind. I shut the door behind me, closing it firmly but without making an echo boom down the corridor. End Part I Separate Lives Pt. 02 Chapter 5 The reason the bigwigs had not made me permanent Director of Research and Development became clear two days after my forced talk with Sherrie. I was offered my choice of that job or a position as Deputy Assistant Director of Western Operations with our parent corporation. That office was headquartered in Denver, but I'd be away as much as three months out of every year, traveling to every place between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean where we had a factory or office. I took their offer without thinking about it for more than a second. It would get me out of town and that was suddenly very important to me. The way it was going to work was that I would stay on board here until my replacement came in from St. Louis and was familiar enough with the operation to take over. In the meantime, the company was going to bring in people from the various western locations to brief me on what they did and how they fit into the total corporate structure. There would be slide presentations, live video conferences, one-on-one discussions—anything I needed to get a handle on what my duties and responsibilities were going to be. The pay raise was going to put me over the hump into a six-digit salary, but it didn't make me as happy as I'd thought it would. There was no one to share the news with...only a few close friends. I called Melissa and Cal a few minutes after I got out of the boss's office. Melissa was the only one home, but she was thrilled at my promotion and let me know it in no uncertain terms. Then she got sad because I was moving away. We talked about dinner out Friday night and I agreed. We had a good time, but it just wasn't the same. ******** Two weeks later, give or take, the first of the people who were going to brief me came in to town. Ms. Webster was actually a buyer for some of our ancillary businesses and I wasn't going to be her supervisor when I got to Denver. She worked out of Sacramento and her "chain of command" went through another channel. But she had all the information necessary to give me a good look into what they did for the parent corporation and she even had a boilerplate PowerPoint presentation on her laptop. She was on her way back from a trip to the Carolinas and could drop by Texas on the way. It was Friday afternoon but she was here and I was duty-bound to meet with her. Ms. Webster was thirty-ish, but it was hard to estimate her precise age. She wore a severely cut, dark gray businesswoman's pantsuit and there was a strict, no-nonsense, expression on her face when I first met her. She shook hands briskly with me and walked down the hall beside me with strides as long as mine. She was shorter than I was, but you'd never know it by the way she walked. We went to one of the conference rooms equipped for audiovisual presentations. When we got there, she surveyed the room and, rejecting the adjoining room with all the projectors and high tech equipment, she put her laptop on a table and started setting up her briefing slides on its smaller screen. Sitting at a corner of a table with the laptop between us and angled so we could both see it, Ms. Webster walked me through all the operations of her division and her company in general. I think I surprised her with some questions that I had about organizational matters...who did what and why did they do it that way? On a couple of matters, she didn't have ready answers and took notes so she call me back when she got with the appropriate personnel in Sacramento. It was a very productive meeting and I understood most of her division's impact on the overall corporate structure when we finished. We walked out of the audiovisual room into a nearly empty floor full of individual cubicles. Ms. Webster and I looked at our watches simultaneously; both of us were amazed the afternoon was so far advanced. "Ah, I'm sorry, Ms. Webster," I said contritely. "I had no idea we were spending so much time in there." I smiled at her. "I think," I said thoughtfully, "I'll blame it on such a well-prepared and knowledgeable briefer." For the first time, she flashed a bright smile at me. Heretofore, it had been a professionally courteous, remote thing that barely twitched her lips and it had been aimed somewhere over my left shoulder. I liked the new one a lot better. "Karen!" she said emphatically. I looked around. There were only a couple of people lining up in front of the elevators and they were all guys. "No...me...I'm Karen," she said less stridently, grinning openly at me now. I blushed. I could actually feel the warmth spreading up from beneath my shirt collar and enveloping my ears. "Oh!" I replied. "I'm sorry 'bout that...I guess I'm not paying real good attention." "And I'm going to blame the late hour on a surprisingly well informed, really smart boss-man," she added before I could say anything more. The grin and nice compliment, coupled with the hand she put on my forearm made me feel a lot better. "You're very nice to say that...I appreciate it very much." I wasn't quite stuttering but I was a long way from being articulate. "Not at all," she said, patting my arm and dropping hers to her side again. The place where her hand had rested was suddenly cold. I wanted it back where it had been. "I meant it," she added. There was that wonderful smile again. "Well...anyway...thanks," I said. "Uh...can I get you back to your hotel or to the airport maybe? I don't know what your plans are or anything—I should have asked a lot earlier." "Well, I haven't checked into a hotel yet," she said lightly. "I came right from the airport to here and haven't gotten there...to the hotel...yet," she added. I felt bad about that. I hadn't realized. "Well, then I can at least get to wherever you're going to stay," I offered. "You have reservations, right?" She nodded and told me where. "Then let me lock my office and I'll drive you over there. Would that be all right?" She nodded again, showing me some more of that brilliant smile. It made me feel warm even in the cold air conditioning favored in south Texas office buildings. It turned out that Ms. Webster...Karen...hadn't even taken the time to claim her baggage so we made a detour by the airport. Eventually, we found where her two suitcases had been taken when she hadn't picked them up immediately and rescued them from a storage facility. The lady that helped us seemed a trifle miffed, as if there was an unwritten law requiring travelers to retrieve their luggage immediately upon arrival at their destination. Karen and I poured nice words and warm compliments all over the lady's irritation and had the woman entirely mollified by the time we left. When we got out of sight, Karen and I looked at each other and laughed out loud at how well we'd managed to get the airline employee back on "our" side and happy with us. It felt good to laugh so companionably with a woman again. Reclaiming my car from the parking lot, I drove Karen to one of the nicer hotels in the downtown area and walked her to the front desk. It turned out the reservation had been confirmed and her room was ready for her. It wasn't actually necessary that I accompany her there...Karen had everything well under control. But I had made myself useful carrying in her luggage so I didn't look like a complete fool—I hoped so anyway. When all the paperwork was done and she was ready to go up to her floor, I stood there debating whether to just leave...or not. I felt like a sophomore in high school again. "Uh...Karen, if I'm out of line, please say so, but—" "I accept," she said, startling me with her directness. "Just dinner, or...?" I looked at her blankly for a moment. The last time I'd asked a girl for at date had been many years previous and I didn't remember it as having been this easy. "Well, how about dinner...and then I know a place we can go for a quiet drink and if you're feeling really adventurous, a little dancing, maybe. How's that?" She stepped close drew my head down to plant a kiss on my cheek. "Pick me up at eight?" she asked, stepping back. "I'll be here," I agreed. She smiled warmly and turned around to lead the bellboy off toward the bank of elevators. The place where she'd kissed me seemed hot enough to be a beacon, flashing on and off in the late Texas afternoon. I walked past my car and had to come back half a block to find it. ******** I couldn't get reservations at the restaurant where I'd envisioned taking Karen, so we settled for what used to be called "Fischer's Dining and Dancing." Through the years the name had gotten progressively shortened until it became just "Fischer's." It was a dinner club, with a very good kitchen that served evening meals until 10:00 PM. Then they opened up a sliding, collapsible wall that concealed more tables and a big dance floor. They called that section the ballroom. Anyway, at that point, the whole place became one of the better nightclubs in town until 2:00 AM. Diners could finish their meal, and then stay at that table through the club hours if they wanted. They would have to thread their way through all the other tables to the dance floor if the urge struck them, though, and some viewed that as a problem. Other people came just to occupy the small tables adjacent to the hardwood dance floor. It was a good place for thirty-something age people to go. My wife and I had gone there many times...when we were married. When I got to her hotel, I called up and Karen came down to the lobby. I know my jaw dropped when the elevator door opened and I'm equally sure it gaped open for long moments while she strode across the lobby to where I stood. She was in a sea foam green evening dress with spaghetti straps over her otherwise bare shoulders. The bodice was gathered into a couple of rows of pleats just below her breasts, making the waist very high on her body. The skirt fell simply from the bodice to a couple inches above her knees in front and a few inches below the knee in back. It seemed to me to be composed of several layers of sheer silk over a more opaque under layer. Her dark blond hair fell gently to almost shoulder level. When she'd stepped up to me, her understated, open toed heels put her eye to eye with me. Hers were lovely eyes too. "You're beautiful," was the only thing I could say. It was heartfelt, but not terribly eloquent. I thought I was coming across as a bashful schoolboy, but maybe it was all right. She blushed faintly, but didn't seem to mind the compliment. She took my arm and tucked it to her side familiarly. "Shall we go?" she asked. "Heck," I said, still bashful, "I could stand her all night just admiring you." I tried on a smile, hoping it didn't look like the ones painted on puppets. She smiled again and kissed me—a little butterfly kiss just in front of my ear. "But I'm hungry," she said. "You have to feed me." I nodded, smiling back at her like a simpleton. "Then shall we go, Madame?" I swept my left hand out in an expansive gesture toward the sliding glass doors leading out front. She nodded; we walked outside arm in arm. I never remembered passing through the doors. ******** "This is a lovely place," Karen said quietly, leaning close to me to talk. She was looking all around, smiling at people who caught her eye, and absorbing the character of the establishment. People were looking at her too. I wasn't that much of a regular here, but there were some who knew me. They wondered who the attractive young woman was. Many of the unattached men were just looking at Karen with lust in their eyes. I could sympathize with them. She was extraordinary looking...and she was with me. "It is," I agreed with her. I debated whether to say what was on my mind. I took the plunge. "You're probably getting a lot of looks because I used to bring my wife here sometimes," I told her, trying to keep my tone matter-of-fact. She looked at me for a moment, then leaned closer and ran a fingernail along the pale circle on my ring finger where a wedding ring had once been. "So...what's this all about," she asked. "That is what's left of what I thought was a heck of a good marriage," I said slowly. "Just two more weeks, a couple of days and I'll have the final decree," I told her. "We've been separated for a while, just marking time until the mandatory waiting period runs out." "What happened?" Karen said in a level voice. She was looking me directly in the eyes with no hint of reproach, but no particular sympathy either. I gave her the short version. "Oh, we had been getting a little distant over the past year or so...and I'm not exactly sure why. She has her career and I seem to be developing one I hadn't counted on. Maybe we were just drifting apart all along and didn't realize it," I mused. "Well, anyway, she went to Vegas with two other couples—friends of ours—and I couldn't go at the last minute because of a problem at the Denver plant. She says she was mad at me, she got drunk, got dazzled by the bright lights and all the commotion, and went with a man up to his room, and...that's all she wrote," I said. "A one-night stand?" Karen asked. I shook my head. "No, she spent the whole weekend with him. From what some friends told me later, she didn't know the guy was from here. But when she got back, he started calling her and eventually they hooked up for some noontime quickies and a few evenings. I don't know how many times, but it went on for about a month and a half before I saw her on the street with the SOB." "I see," was Karen's only reply. I took it as mildly reproving. She later told me she'd not meant anything of the sort, but I didn't know that at the time. "Uh...I just couldn't forgive something like that...I'm sorry, but I'm a little rigid on the cheating thing and Vegas was bad enough. I've tried to figure out if I could have worked past the first...thing...out there but I don't know if I could have. But I sure couldn't deal with them keeping on doing it back here at home," I told her. She nodded her agreement, sighing expressively. She scooted closer to me, putting her hand on my wrist and lowering her voice so no one else could hear. We talked for a long time, at first about my failed marriage, but we got off that subject quickly. There were too many good things to talk about. I found out that she was thirty-one, a year and a half older than I was, and we joked about her being the "older woman." She had been divorced herself, more than ten years ago, so she had an insight into my problems. She had worked as a waitress for a couple of years afterward while she went to night school for a business degree. She'd then started to work in a large office where a beautiful woman was almost expected to advance "on her back" but she'd refused that route up the chain. Nowadays, she headed up a division of twenty-six buyers who roamed the nation locating the corporation's necessary resources. We talked about our lives, discovering we both had a love for Tom Clancy novels, music from the 60s and 70s, and paintings that actually seemed based in reality instead of a hodgepodge of mismatched blurriness. I warned her I wasn't a very good dancer, but I felt great on the dance floor with her in my arms. I managed to not step on her toes even once. I told her on the way back to our table that I couldn't understand why she ever wore pants to hide her beautiful legs. They were lovely. She was a tall girl anyway and her dress accentuated that. Her tanned legs were bare of any stockings—she just didn't need any. Her legs seemed impossibly long and beautifully shaped from slim ankles all the way up to what I could see of her slender thighs. She told me that business was business—and this wasn't business. I smiled at her and agreed there was no way this had anything to do with the job. She looked closely at me. I guess she saw my sincerity because she came up to me and kissed me lightly on the lips. I was surprised, but enormously pleased. She said she had to go to the little girl's room. She picked up her clutch purse, smiled at me, and walked away. I watched her leave, mesmerized. How do women manage to sway from side to side that way while moving forward at the same time? ******** I didn't know that Melissa and Cal were at Fischer's that night also. Melissa told me years later that she'd gotten up from her table and gone to the ladies restroom to confront Karen when she saw Karen leave our table. When she got there, Karen was already back out at the vanity and was touching up her makeup. Melissa had chatted with Karen a little and watched as Karen took off her panties while surrounded by a half-dozen other women. Karen told a startled Melissa and the others that her guy was going to get lucky that night and she wanted him to know it. Melissa blurted out that I was married. Karen questioned her a little to make sure I was actually separated and that my divorce was going to be final soon. Once assured this was so, Karen stuffed her panties into her small purse and snapped it shut. The clutch bag was a tiny one and there hadn't been much room. The catch didn't want to close. After a bit more conversation, Melissa told me, she'd warmed to Karen and they chatted for a moment before Melissa impulsively reached under her own evening gown and yanked off her panties. She told Karen her guy was going to get lucky too. ******** I didn't know why Karen was laughing quietly to herself when she got back to me and she didn't explain. It wasn't important. Just seeing her smiling, happy face was more than enough. That she seemed to be paying me close attention was making my pulse race faster than it had for a long while. My wife and I hadn't had a good time out in so long, I'd pretty much forgotten what it was like. That was the last time I thought of Sherrie that night. As we were making our way to the door at closing time, I saw Melissa and Cal also leaving and I bulled my way through the crowd to get close to them. I introduced Karen but Melissa told me they'd already met in the restroom. We stood around talking for a bit but parted company quickly to go our separate ways. I didn't know at the time why Cal was so flushed and anxious to leave. I thought his constant shifting of weight from one foot to the other was a pee-pee dance of some kind. In retrospect, I guess it was a modified one. Melissa's panties, I know now, were in his sports jacket pocket. Outside in my car, Karen disdained the seatbelt and sat close to me. When I turned my head, her lips were there to greet me and we kissed for a long time. It was soft and gentle at first, short and tentative. She became more demanding after a bit, though, and I met her half way. I found her tongue ready to flick out and twine itself around mine as we kissed deeper and longer. My left hand found its way to her soft thighs and I slipped it slowly under her skirt. Her smooth skin felt hot under my palm. The sheer, flimsy material of her skirt slid over the back of my hand sensuously. Her legs were closed at first. When my hand reached her hip, even I could tell she had no panties on. Then she spread her legs for my hands. There was only silky smooth flesh under my fingers...until I found the moist, heated outer lips of her sex. We broke the long kiss; we were out of breath anyway. I looked questioningly into her eyes for a long moment. "If you don't want this to happen," she whispered, "you better say so now, Ron." It was the first time she'd said my name just that way. "Is there a boyfriend at home...or someone you're close to...?" I asked quietly. She shook her head gently. "No one," she said softly. "Then let's not stop," I said simply. She put a hand on the back of my neck and pulled me tight for another long kiss. Our tongues dueled as my fingers probed gently, stroking all around her vulva. I was pleasantly surprised to find her pubes were shaved clean. It only made my arousal that much harder and stronger. Separate Lives Pt. 02 Karen's fingers got busy unzipping my trousers and releasing the hardon that had become too large for comfort inside my boxers. We kissed and explored each other until the horns and shouted suggestions to "get a room somewhere" became too intrusive. We broke apart, grinning like children caught being mischievous. "We have a room," she breathed into my ear. "We have an apartment," I said, "but the room is closer." "Drive fast?" she said with a little giggle. "Ohhhhh, yeah," I replied. The motor was started, the transmission in gear, and we were rolling in less time than it takes to tell. On the way, Karen pulled my cock out of my shorts and slowly massaged me. Halfway to the hotel, she slipped lower on the bench seat and took me in her mouth. I sensed she didn't want to make me come, though I'm not sure she understood how long I'd been without a woman. She almost miscalculated the effectiveness of her tongue on me. She wanted to give me a little pleasure and saw no reason to wait until we were behind closed doors. I liked the openness of that. It was honest and clean when compared to the dirty, sneaky sex between my wife and her lover that I'd had to deal with for so long. It was good—so good that I don't remember much of the last half of that trip. ******** Once in the hotel room, Karen locked the deadbolt and turned to face me. Smiling mischievously, she reached behind her head and undid a couple of buttons. Pulling the thin spaghetti straps off her shoulders, she let her dress fall in a shimmering slide down her body. The breath hissed between my teeth when I saw her nude for the first time. The woman was a walking sex bomb, and she knew it. She looked at the bulge in my pants and licked her lips. "This is going to be fun," she said. I had to agree. I think she saw my agreement in my eyes. Confidently, she walked up to me, still in her heels, and wound her arms around my neck. Our lips met and her tongue snaked into my mouth and weaved a dance with mine. I beat hers back and thrust my own through her lips to repay the favor. In seconds, we were breathing hard through our noses, unwilling to break apart just to breathe. I took her right breast in my left hand. She was bigger than my wife. Sherrie wore a bra with a comfortable "B" cup. On her best days, I told her it was a B+ and made her believe it with extra attention to her breasts before we made love. Karen's titty was a somewhat bigger than Sherrie's—more than a mouthful, more than a handful even...and I have big hands. I kneaded her breast for a time, thumbing her nipple gently because I hadn't had time to moisten my fingers yet. It was hard to think with Karen's body mashed against mine but I finally hit on the idea of slipping a finger inside her and using her own juices to wet her nipple. No sooner thought of than done. My hand roamed down from her breasts to her hip and inward to her mound. She accommodated me by pulling back slightly to let my hand glide over her satiny skin down between us, over her faintly rounded belly and down into the "V" between her legs. In seconds, my middle finger was slipping inside her outer lips, and then deeper to tap into the hot wetness within. My index finger joined the other and they began sliding inside her as one. "Oh geeeeez," Karen breathed softly. Karen writhed under my hands, working her hips up and down against the invading fingers. She broke off the kiss and threw her head back as she humped my hand, breathing hard and fast. I never got my hand back up to moisten her nipple. "Seems to me like we should keep the foreplay to a minimum?" I breathed into her ear. My fingers were moving faster, sliding in and out of her more quickly. It took her a while to respond. "If you don't," she panted, "I'm starting without you!" I chuckled. Karen was a lusty woman, unafraid of saying what she wanted. I'd been used to a more withdrawn woman for years. When I was married, I'd wanted Sherrie to open up as Karen was, but Sherrie had never quite gotten there. I wanted to show Karen I was equal to the task of satisfying a woman so free and expressive about her needs so I determined to hold off on my climax as long as I could. I would have anyway, but I wanted this to be extra special for both of us. I shifted a little to her side and pressed her up against the bathroom door so I could put my palm flat against her belly and on the midline of her body. Sliding my hand down, my index and middle fingers naturally entered her slit and slid over her clitoris before diving deeper into her vagina. Once my fingers glided over her clit, I curled them inward so they pressed against the front wall of her cunt. Finding that little bean-shaped, raised area already prominently developed in my new lover, I worked her G-spot for all I was worth. The dual stimulation on the nubbin of a clitoris and on the sensitive tissue a couple inches deep inside her was too much. Before long, Karen was sobbing for breath, telling me over and over not to stop—as if I had any thought of doing that—and shuddering with each new sensation that welled up from her sopping pussy. I don't know how long it was but in surprisingly short time, Karen stiffened for a long moment before relaxing again. I slowed my hand, making the caresses long and slow while she recovered from a small orgasm. We never stopped though. Her hands were darting all over; touching my chest, my arms, down to my waist, plucking at my shirt as she tried to find a place for her fingers to anchor themselves. She began humping her groin into my hand again, slowly at first, then with greater urgency. We found a new rhythm, my fingers stroking in and out over her clitoris and G-spot while her hips bucked up to meet downward plunging fingers. She was panting hard now, sucking in her breath and puffing it out again just as fast. I could feel her upper body trembling; her high heels beat a quick tattoo on the tiled floor as she shifted her feet to accommodate my fingers just a tiny bit better. "Baby, baby, baby," she chanted. I could feel her vagina begin to snatch at my fingers, trying to keep them inside her for non-stop stimulation but I wouldn't cooperate. I worked my fingers deeper, my palm sliding over her mons and rubbing hard against the small, blood red clit. My fingertips slide over the textured G-spot and beyond, racking over it both going and coming. "No...anhhhhh," Karen gasped. Her body become rigid again, even more unmoving than before. It was as if she were pinned against the wall by my fingers as they worked in and out of her cunt. Her head was thrown back, her flushed face twisted in concentration as she slowly worked her hips in a tight circle. She stopped, freezing in place...and I felt her juices pour down my fingers and down her thighs. She sighed, unable to move for a long moment. Leisurely, gently, I caressed her upper thighs before working my way up to less sensitive places...the heaving of her chest eased enough that she was able take in great gulps of air and let them out slowly. "Hold me up," she pleaded. Her knees weren't as steady as they had been. I pressed my body against her, propping her up and holding her firmly against the wall. "I think I'm making a mess in the floor," she said ruefully and giggled "I know you are," I told her, "and you taste delicious." I stroked between her thighs once more and brought my fingers back up to lick the thin, pungent syrup of her G-spot fluids. She giggled again, and caught my wrist, pulling my hand to her mouth. She took my fingers, one by one, into her mouth and slowly licked and sucked them dry. "You're right...I do," she said finally. "You are soooo lucky to have me." I had to agree. We kissed for a long time, sharing the taste of her orgasm once more. "I want you inside me," she whispered finally. She finally had her breathing under control again. I took a step backward. "Undress me?" I asked. She didn't bother answering before kneeling in front of me and yanking my shoes off. She tossed them into the closet behind me and followed them with my socks. Seconds later she had my belt undone and my pants around my ankles. I felt foolish, but there was no one there to see except Karen and she was concentrating on something else. She was pleased—she looked up at me and grinned—when she saw how hard I was. Still looking me in the eye as much as she could, Karen began licking the underside of my shaft from my scrotum to the little slit in the end of my cock. She took the head inside her lips and then deep into her hot mouth. I shuddered with the dual pleasure of seeing what she was doing and feeling the sensations coming from my penis. Karen felt my body tremble and glanced up again with a sparkle in her eyes. Her tongue swirled all around my cock, wetting it thoroughly before she let me out again. Working slowly, she eased my foreskin back over the glans a little bit at a time, using her tongue to spread more lubrication as she went. She seemed to know just how much my flesh could stretch before it began to hurt and she never went faster than I could take it. Even so, it wasn't long before my foreskin was tucked securely behind the mushroom shaped glans and Karen, took me into her mouth again. This time, the heated wetness of her mouth and throat; the motion of her tongue swirling all over the head...it all made my knees begin to buckle. She began a slow bobbing motion, letting the purple head of my cock slide in, then letting it nearly fall completely from her lips. Her tongue slid enthusiastically around the underside, stabbing into that tiny "V" shaped area at the base of the glans again and again. I couldn't take too much of that. She had me groaning aloud in just a few minutes. I took her wrists in my hands and pulled her back up. We melted against each other, my cock sliding along her soft belly while she cradled me, rocking her hips back and forth to massage it between us. We kissed, our tongues diving deep and insisting upon twining, and twisting around the other. We broke the kiss, breathing deep from each other's breath. "I want you...now," she ordered. I kissed her lips once more just to taunt her. "How do you want it?" I asked teasingly. "Tell me how you want it," I insisted. My hand was busy on her mons veneris again; my fingers were stroking in and out of her in a demanding rhythm. Her chest was heaving against me; her hard-pointed nipples scraped against my chest with every breath. "Hard," she whispered, trying to adjust her body so that my cock would slide into her of its own accord. I kept my body high, not letting her have it. "Just hard?" I asked. "You want me to take you hard...just hard?" "Hard and fast," she said, "and now," she added. There was a tiny pleading note in her voice as our little game played out. "Hard and fast?" I asked. I could feel her nodding though she didn't speak. She needed her breath too badly to supply an overstressed body with oxygen. "Then that's what I want too," I said. Dipping low, I pressed the head of my penis inside her outer labia. Working it up and down her slit, I coated it with the juices from her vagina and remnants of her ejaculation fluids. When I was ready, I guided myself lower to the spreading opening of her sex. Pushing a little further inside, I could feel when I was seated securely in the front of her vagina. I bent my knees a bit more, shifted my feet and thrust deep inside Karen's cunt with a single, long plunge. Karen's head tilted back spasmodically. She cried out so loud I was afraid someone passing by the door would hear and think it a scream of torment. I knew it wasn't. Her vagina already had been open its whole length and was more than ready for me. The tip of my cock nudged her cervix and I felt her wince slightly. I knew how deep I could go now and I adjusted my feet a little. It probably wasn't necessary. In seconds, I was plowing just as deeply again and there was no contact. Her womb had done its magical little trick of withdrawing and I could now pound my hardness deep into her body. Karen was pinned there against the wall by my penis and her own desires. Our bodies strained at each other as we worked hard to force pleasure from each other's body. I powered into her, pistoning in and out with abandon. She'd wanted it hard and fast? She got it. Harder and harder we fucked, pushing and mashing ourselves against the other in an ever-increasing pace. I changed what I was doing abruptly and slammed balls deep into her while I whipped my groin around in an arc to make my cock corkscrew down inside her. I did the same thing in the opposite direction when I withdrew. She gasped and nearly lost her balance as she set herself to take my new tactic. She was bucking back into me now. When I stabbed in, she met me with an equal push out. Our groins were mashed tightly together now. Neither of us could move. There was little thrusting or riposte. Our straining, overheated bodies were soaked with sweat, our muscles tiring quickly. I could feel the tightening in my scrotum as semen pumped upward – I imagined I could feel the muscles in my groin flex and contract as salty fluids from my prostate were added to the mixture. I felt the mass working through muscular tubes in my lower abdomen and from there into my penis. Thick, liquid heat was pumped the length of my cock as I summoned the strength to push deep into Karen one final time. The milky white come spurted from the slit at the end of my cock and splashed inside her onto the walls of her vagina. Once, twice...I felt a third eruption launch itself inside my lover. The fourth time was almost painful but I lurched forward anyway, planting still more cream inside her cunt. The sensation of the hot come jetting into her vagina must have set Karen off too. Her own orgasm had built until she was beside herself with the need for completion. Her legs splayed wide as she balanced on her high heels, she whipped her groin up at me as I continued to thrust inside her cunt. She rode my cock hard, adjusting her stance to make my cock rub harder against her special, sensitive places. When the last of my come spurted into her, she screamed out her need, pushing back and rotating her hips one last time. She jolted to a stop, her body freezing into place with the intensity of her ecstasy. I felt her tummy contracting in time with the ripples spreading along the length of her cunt. Her vagina tried to milk a few more drops from my balls, but I had no more to give her for now. Her leg muscles spasmed, jerking uncontrollably and she avoided falling only because my cock was holding her in place. I held her up, propping her body and mine against the wall as well as I could while I gulped in huge lungfuls of air. I watched Karen come back down from her orgasm. I felt the intense sensations emanating from her vagina slowing, lessening, and finally giving up their lock on her body. She was breathing as heavily as I was, almost gasping in her need for oxygen to fill overworked lungs. Gradually we recovered, but it was a while. When we could breath without panting, her arms tightened around my neck and she pulled me into another long kiss. "Hey," she said softly. "Mmmmmmm?" I answered. "You do know there's a bed in this room, right?" she asked teasingly. I chuckled and bent my knees to allow my barely tumescent penis to slide out of her. She whimpered in protest but I caught her hand and began pulling her farther inside the hotel room. "Wait!" she protested. I turned to see her slipping out of her heels and tossing them aside. She raced past me and got to the bed first, skidding across the satiny bedspread and landing on her back with her head on the pillows and her legs spread wide. I wasn't far behind though, and I was hard as a rock again before she could find me and guide my cock inside her. Her enthusiastic, open sexuality had an effect on me far greater than anything that could ever be stuffed into little pills and sold on the open market. There were actually two double sized beds in her hotel room. We played on one of them for hours, took a long lazy bath together, and then played some more. Sleepy and almost exhausted, we stretched out between the sheets on the other bed so neither of us would have to sleep on the wet spot—the wet puddle actually—on the other bed. ******** After that first night, Karen checked out of the hotel and spent the rest of the weekend with me in my apartment. I'd thought I'd show her off by taking her out Saturday night again, but we wound up spending all of Saturday and Sunday indoors. I couldn't get enough of her body and it seemed to me she felt the same about me. We wound up not wearing a stitch of clothing the whole time and had sex in every room. The bathroom, with its inexhaustible supply of hot water in the shower, got a lot of attention, as did the bedroom, but Karen spent a good amount of time bent over various pieces of furniture in the living room too. She loved to ride me "cowgirl" style for an hour at a time, teasing me by freezing an instant before I would otherwise come inside her. She'd let me recover for a minute or two and then begin rocking her cunt over my cock again. When I finally came, I gave her more ejaculate than I can ever recall gushing out before. She enjoyed a few hours on the dining room table too—with her legs splayed wide while I licked her pussy through as many orgasms as I could give her. When I slipped my cock inside her, she would whimper softly and wrap her arms around my neck, holding on until we worked ourselves up to more climaxes. By Sunday evening, we were exhausted and even a little bit sore in places. When Monday morning came, I drove her to the airport and put her on a Sacramento bound aircraft. We'd agreed not to call each other until Saturday came around but when it finally came, we both got busy signals because we were calling each other at the same time. From then on, we met whenever we could. The sex was great and so were the times we made it different...the times we made love. For a time, we were making American Airlines rich with our travel back and forth, but my move to Denver finally came about and the trip was shorter. We saw each other every couple of weeks for a year and a half and took two weeklong vacations together, one in Vail and the other in the Bahamas. I finished the flying lessons I'd let lapse years earlier and got my certificate. I promptly bought a small, single-engine Cessna whose upkeep and operating costs were even more than airline tickets, but I could fly on MY schedule. The memory of the time I took Karen up and we initiated each other into the mile high club high over the mountains kept me smiling for weeks. Chapter 6 Melissa's Diary: I was happy for Ron. After seeing him so miserable for so long, it was good that he'd found someone he could be happy with and who seemed to have his best interests at heart. They made a beautiful couple on the three occasions Cal and I saw them about town and especially on the dance floor at Fischer's. Ron, I could tell, had taken some dancing lessons, though I didn't know when he'd found the time. Their effect was more than evident. He and Karen would glide around the ballroom floor almost effortlessly, their arms wrapped around each other and their attention focused completely on each other. It was clear they were in love and I had mixed feelings about that. I'd been Sherrie's best friend since high school and Ron was a comparatively recent addition to my list of close friends. But he was so happy...and I couldn't blame him one bit. Karen was so beautiful and Ron was a much better looking man than he knew. I knew more than a few women in the club who would have left their dates, and some their husbands, in a heartbeat if Ron had crooked his finger and beckoned them to come to him. But he'd never do that. I knew my Ronnie. It's enough to say that the two of them just seemed to fit perfectly together. Separate Lives Pt. 02 Now that he's moved to Denver, Ron emails me once a week or so, always full of cheerfulness and inquiries about the new baby and everything. I never told Ron I was sure Cal had gotten me pregnant the night both Karen and I took off our panties in Fischer's ladies room, but I think he knows. I did tell him about the panty thing in Fischer's...and that was probably enough. Ron's a smart guy and reads between the lines pretty well. When Calvin Junior was born six months after Ron left, I'm not sure he realized the "R" that was Cal's middle initial was for "Ronald." That was just like him. That Cal senior and I had given our baby his middle name in recognition of Ron's friendship would never occur to our good friend. Anyway, after her divorce, things were really rough for Sherrie and that went on for a long while. She had to quit her job because the word got around the office about her and Ron's divorce and what caused it. Every unattached male, and many who weren't, thought what he had between his legs was just the thing to make her happy again. Even though she cut everyone off cold, and embarrassed a number of them in the process, they wouldn't quit trying. Her new job was at lower pay and she found it hard for a time to pay all the bills. She finally found the big two-bedroom apartment she wanted, but it cost more than she really had to spare, and she had to buy a lot of new clothes too. When the sale of the house she and Ron had lived in finally closed, things got better but she was soon buying food, clothes, and what all for those two other people who came into her life and...well, I don't really want to get into that. I didn't understand what she was doing for the longest time, and I still don't agree with her reasoning. I mean, those two "roommates," as she called them, weren't going to intimidate my—. Shoot! I said I wasn't going to get into that mess, didn't I? Enough said. It took 'til almost a year after their divorce for me to get comfortable with Sherrie again. She called me every week during that time and never got off the phone without apologizing to me and Cal for that Vegas nightmare. She was sorry...but sorry don't cut it sometimes, you know? Well...that's what I thought, but after a while it was clear the girl was absolutely overwhelmed, totally ashamed of what she'd done with that man in Vegas and more ashamed of seeing him after she came home. Separate from that, she was also devastated that she had hurt her husband so badly. She couldn't talk to me for even a minute without breaking down and crying when she tried to say how bad she felt about betraying his trust and love. She'd felt guilty at the time, she said, but she got messed up in a feeling of dirty excitement. She said it had given her a fluttery feeling in her belly like when she used to sneak out of her mom and dad's house to meet with her first serious boyfriend. She said doing that guy from Vegas made her feel young and alive again, vibrant and a good kind of nasty. I didn't understand any of it, and the part about feeling young again didn't sit well at all. I turned thirty year before last, and Sherrie was just twenty-nine now. I wasn't sure I bought a single word she said about a need to feel young "again," the little twit. Hey, guess what? I didn't know this until Sherrie and I resumed visiting each other on Saturday mornings again for coffee and a little gossip. That was a long time coming, let me tell you! I was some kind of unhappy with that girl for the longest time. Anyhow...she told me one morning that she'd actually been at Fischer's one night back then, all by herself...and she'd seen Ron there with Karen. She said it had been just before he moved to Denver. She'd gone just to have a decent dinner she didn't have to cook but she wound up watching them dance while she tried to eat a cold steak. Sherrie said what she had done to Ron really came home to her right then and there. She said she'd hadn't understood—not way down deep where she lived—exactly what Ron had gone through...what he'd felt. That changed when she saw him with "that woman," as she put it. Seeing that Ron cared for Karen really hurt. It was like someone had driven a stake right through her belly, she said. She actually felt a physical pain, according to her. I told her Ron had every right—I was a little snippy about it, I think. I said he had a perfect right to be seeing Karen and Sherrie said she knew that, and she'd known it at the time. They'd already been divorced a month and more at the time, but it still hurt her worse than anything she'd ever known. She was only telling me so I'd know she finally realized how shitty she had treated the man she loved and who had loved her. I told her it was about time and Sherrie didn't even get mad at me. Actually, she was real bitter—mad at herself. She wanted to punish herself but didn't know how. She had too many responsibilities. Well, Sherrie and I got through that phase and we've gotten closer. I suggested she get a little counseling or talk to a minister or something. When she got back on her feet financially, she did go see a guy who did marriage counseling and she got better. She never got comfortable with what she'd done, but she came to accept the things she'd done without them dominating her whole life. If she'd let it, I'm not too sure she wouldn't have wound up in a mental hospital or something. She felt that bad about it. She comes over all the time now and we talk about anything under the sun, just like we used to. My boys think their "Aunt Sherrie" hung the moon and stars and they run to greet her whenever she comes around. She hugs them tight and gives them tickles and kisses until they laugh and laugh and laugh. Cal took longer to warm back up to Sherrie. For the longest time, he would quietly be somewhere else whenever she came over. Between what I was telling him from my talks with Sherrie, and the things that he saw firsthand, he slowly thawed. Sherrie used to bring her two roommates over to visit every so often and Cal took to them right off. After a while, the house seemed a little empty when the three of them weren't there. I'm going to fix that though. Cal and I are going out to dinner at Fischer's tonight and I'm not even going to wear a pair of panties out there to begin with. We're going to work on having a houseful of people ALL the time, even if I have to change diapers on a bunch of them. I want a girl this time. ******** The first three years in Denver were busy, exciting, and jam packed. I was working hard and spending long hours in the office. It was the same old story. When the big bosses find out you can handle responsibility, they give you more pressure and additional responsibilities just to see if they can find your breaking point. They hadn't found mine...yet. But they were surely getting close. Karen and I didn't seem to cool off at all and I was thinking of giving her a ring and asking her to marry me. She never brought the subject up, though, and I sometimes wondered why. Then the shit hit the fan in Afghanistan. Our firm had secured a number of sub-contracts from one of the major Defense Department contractors to rebuild the infrastructure in that poor country. In one of them, we were acting as a service corporation, gathering the resources and sub-letting our own contracts to smaller firms to perform a myriad of tasks, very much like Halliburton does in Iraq. We just do it on a much smaller scale. Anyway, we were overseeing a contract to build a major highway north from Kabul through Feyzabad and up to the border with Tadzikistan. The road was going to be used primarily for military purposes for a long time, but the newly free elected government of Afghanistan hoped someday it would promote trade in the northern intermountain region between the two countries. It was dangerous because the shredded remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who'd gotten their asses kicked by a U.S. supported group of Afghani warlords weren't THAT far away in the steep mountains on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They came back across the border from time to time, slipping through an increasingly tight ring of Pakistani, Afghani, and U.S. soldiers, to wreck whatever they could and then run hard back to their sanctuaries. It didn't happen often. It was, more often than not, a one-way mission and the number of willing suicides had been steadily decreasing for years. One such group, though, managed to sneak into the country and had blown up a key bridge over an impassible gorge and shut down the road between our crew at the head of the new road and the supply depots in the rear. At the same time, they'd gone through a number of the small towns and villages for fifty miles around the bridge, destroying such things as schools built to educate both girls and boys, community centers, a few fledgling radio stations and one television relay site. The contractor personnel on the ground had called back for help and our firm had had to let a contract to another small business so our main contract could get finished on time. It was important for our future as a corporation. Seventy-two hours later, young Mr. Ron Masters was in the air heading for Kabul to supervise the combined effort of two dissimilar groups of workers now working on the same project. Both companies had agreed to that. In fact, they'd been relieved they wouldn't have to work out a pecking order and try to find for themselves an equitable division of the labor. Before I left, though, I had to have a talk with Karen. I'd be gone a long time and some things between us needed to be resolved. I needed to know if there was an "us" and, if so, what were we going to do about it? ******** "Honey, have you ever thought about getting married?" I asked. I was watching her prepare a tossed salad in her apartment the day before I had to leave. The knife she was using kicked against the side of the sink and made a harsh, clattering sound as it rattled around in the bottom. She turned around to stare at me with her eyes wide. She was clutching her hands against her stomach and I was afraid she'd cut herself. I got up and stepped quickly across the kitchen. Taking her by the wrist, I turned her hand over and examined it carefully but I didn't find even a slight nick. "Sorry," I said, "I thought you might have cut something." "I nearly did!" she remarked. Some color was coming back into her face and I sat back on the stool at the breakfast bar. "Well, have you?" I asked. She leaned back against the counter and looked at me wonderingly. "Have you?" she answered, except that it wasn't really an answer. I nodded anyway. "Yeah, I have," I said. "But I don't know how you feel about it. Sometimes I think you prefer what we have now...the independence and stuff, you know?" "What else?" she demanded. "Well, there are those times that I wonder if the way we live now doesn't suit you best. We see each other for a few days each month and we have an incredible time, but you live here in Sacramento and I live in Denver. I wonder if it's not one of those 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' kind of things. Getting married would be a heck of a step and I wonder if you would want me around...underfoot all the time, as it were." I'd rehearsed almost all these words. I truly had been thinking about our situation for a long while. I think I surprised Karen. We'd become comfortable with each other and hadn't found any reason for disagreement in a while now. "No," she said. "It's not that at all, hon." She hesitated, then came to me and wound her arms around my neck. She kissed me long and hard. "Ronnie," she said slowly, when we came up for air, "the reason I haven't brought this up is a little different from what you think." She took a deep breath, not backing away an inch. Her arms were still wrapped around my neck, though a little looser. "I love you, Ron, that's no secret, and I know you love me, too," she said softly. "The only thing wrong is that you hold back something of yourself from me and I don't think you even know you're doing it. If it weren't for that, darling, I'd quit my job in a heartbeat and come to live with you for the rest of my life." I was astonished. What was it I was holding back from her? We talked for hours. I never did get a handle on what she thought I was holding back. It had something to do with a belief that I hadn't yet closed the book on Sherrie—that I still loved Sherrie and hadn't worked her out of my system. I thought that, if anything, I might still be harboring a lot of pent up anger and hostility towards Sherrie. To me that sounded more like what I was feeling than anything else. I got a little impatient with Karen. I didn't believe there were any good feelings left for my ex-wife and I told Karen so. She was adamant, though, and wouldn't budge on the idea. We ended the discussion after dinner, refusing to let it devolve into a full-blown argument. Neither of us wanted to do that with only twenty-four hours before I left for Afghanistan. Life was too short. Later that night, we made love in her bed and bathroom, and then back again—twice. We finally lay exhausted in each other's arms. "Ronnie," she said just before we both fell asleep, "let's both of us think hard about our future while you're gone, okay? Then, when you come back, we'll go away somewhere...by ourselves for a long time...and we'll work it out, okay, darling?" "Okay, it's a date," I said softly. She didn't say anything more. After a while, she turned away from me and backed up until we were spooning. My arms were wrapped close around her. We slept hard, woke up early and made love again...and then I had to go. ******** When I got back to Denver, I had about six hours before the flight to JFK Airport in New York. From there, I'd take a series of flights heading east to Europe and then to the Asian continent, gradually working my way to Kabul. There weren't that many airlines flying into that war torn country and the corporation had a policy of requiring its employees to use American flag air carriers whenever possible. It made the routing a little more difficult and more circuitous than it otherwise would have been. After doing a load of clothes and packing everything I could imagine needing in Afghanistan, I still had two hours left with not much to do before going to the airport. Mulling over the near argument with Karen, I hunted through the back of my closet until I found the box containing all the papers, court motions, and other material left over from my divorce. In the bottom, hidden by a mass of paperwork, was the packet of photographs I had snapped of my wife and that other man. Beside them was the small ring box that held Sherrie's engagement and wedding rings. She'd sent her rings back to me through her attorney the day after our divorce had become final. I'd thought they were her property. After all, I'd given them to her, but I guess returning them to me was her way of getting some finality to the marriage. I looked at the photographs one by one, finding them to be distasteful but I couldn't summon up any deep resentment or anger any more. It was like the pictures were of two strangers instead of one stranger and one loved one. As such, they were just examples of low-grade pornography. It occurred to me I didn't want these left behind just in case I died over in Afghanistan and someone had to go through my personal things. Impulsively, I pushed everything else back into the box and closed it, leaving out the pics. Then I put the photos through my shredder. In a few moments, they were unintelligible bits of glossy, colorful paper and I thought no more about them. ******** Afghanistan in late winter is abominable. It's always bitterly cold...or snowy...or windy. Actually, it was usually all three at once. It was seldom that all three of the weather patterns ease up and give us a nice day. On top of that, this north, northeastern sector of the country was incredibly barren and bleak to my eyes. I had no clue why anyone would want to live here, but Afghanistan is one of the longest inhabited countries on the face of the planet. I could only shake my head. The days were long, the work hard and dangerous even without the threat of Al Qaeda or Taliban terrorist attacks. Working with heavy equipment is dangerous in its own right, but we built a pretty good safety program and rigorously enforced the rules. For defense against the bad guys, we had a platoon of Marines under the command of a young Lieutenant to defend us but they couldn't be everywhere. I didn't like the naked feeling of being unable to protect myself and my crew. After I'd been there a month, I coaxed the senior sergeant in the platoon into giving me an M-4, the carbine version of the M-16. Its real owner had gone back home on emergency leave and hadn't come back. It was still on the Marine company books; it was just that I was taking care of it for them. I felt a lot better with it around. I was a passable shot with it; I always had had a knack with weapons. With my Remington Model 700 at home, I could knock down a deer at 200 yards and more every time I fired it. Well, anyway, the M-4 felt comfortable in my hands. By the third month of my stay, we had the bridge virtually rebuilt. New foundations were poured where they needed to be and replacements filled in the places where the blast had blown girders away. At the same time, we'd worked out a resupply plan for the crew still building the road north, using helicopters to ferry in supplies and materials needed urgently. For other equipment, supplies, and vehicles, we bulldozed a dirt road around the gorge and through empty terrain. It worked, after a fashion. We could get to the head of the road, but it took a lot of time and the crew up there had to make supply requests a long way in advance. Actually, things were improving every day. The contract looked secure—the road would be finished on or before schedule, and the Department of the Army had even awarded us another small contract that looked very lucrative. We were working hard, but there wasn't much else to do in the empty wasteland so we routinely worked fourteen hours a day, or more, just to have something to do. ******** Melissa's Diary: When we heard Ron was going to Afghanistan, I almost died. Ron was as close to me as a brother and I was worried sick about him. When I told Sherrie, her face turned white as a sheet. She nearly collapsed. It surprised me a little; she and Ron have been divorced right at three years now and had lived apart for even longer, what with the separation after he left her and all. It's been so long since I had a minute free to add anything to this diary. If I repeat some things, I guess I'll just have to delete them when I look at this thing when I'm old and gray, huh? Well, let's see...where was I? Okay...a while back, I had to try and get Sherrie to lighten up on herself again. For the longest time, she went back to beating herself up pretty bad about having caused so much grief and it was hurting her health. She went through a second round of counseling and it finally began kicking in. She got over the worst of her depression as she and the counselor explored what she did and what she could do to make things better. She's done pretty well ever since. When I told her about Ron's trip overseas, though, it threw her for a loop. It wasn't until we started getting regular emails from him that she settled down again. The emails were widely spaced because they didn't have real good communications over there but they came through often enough to keep us from being worried too much. He said it was hard work and stuff like that, but also pretty boring. There wasn't much to do except work. On the other hand, he said that he'd worked off the "love handles" he'd been getting worried about and he was probably in the best physical condition of his life. A photo he attached to one of his emails showed us he was right. Sherrie made me blow it up to an 8 X 10 and print it for her. She also kept a couple of 5 X 7 prints. Separate Lives Pt. 02 It was about that time that I noticed Sherrie wasn't dating—not at all. When I asked around, I felt like a fool. She hadn't dated since she and Ron broke up...and I never noticed. Isn't that terrible? My best friend and I didn't know. Well, anyway, Cal and I started taking her out every so often with us to dinner and stuff like that, and sometimes to Fischer's for some dancing. Sherrie would dance fast dances with some of the guys, but she was awfully picky even then. Most of the men got turned down flat and some went away red-faced from whatever she said if they persisted. My Cal says Sherrie has a "real good" command of the English language when she wants to use it. He said it like he admired her for it. I guess that tells me what kind of language she commanded, huh? Well, I figured out Sherrie would only dance slow dances with Cal and a few older married men she'd found she could trust. On top of that, she wouldn't have anything but a little white wine when she went with us and only a couple of glasses lasted the whole night. It didn't take a genius to see that she was "saving herself" for something and one day, I got her to talking about it. It took isolating her in my backyard back under the pecan tree and making her real comfortable with a lot of good food and a couple of hours talking about nothing in particular. Finally, she let down her hair a little and said she had this feeling that Ron was going to come back to town someday. When he did, she said, he was going to see she wasn't fooling around with anyone and maybe he would forgive her for what she did "back then." If it took the rest of her life, she said, she'd wait for him to see how she'd changed and then she'd deal with whatever came next. She didn't really have more than a slim hope they'd get back together, she said. In fact, she assumed they would not. It was like this whole thing was some kind of penance and she was just serving time until Ron released her from it by coming home and agreed she had changed. Sherrie didn't know when he would come back, she just figured he would. I told her I could think of a couple of sure-fire ways to get him to come home. She wouldn't have any of that though. She was adamant she wasn't going to use any coercion though. I told her that sounded like she was setting herself up for a long, dreary life but she just shook her head and smiled knowingly at me. He was going to come back to town someday; she just knew it. I gave up talking to her about it. I even tried to introduce her to some nice guys from Cal's work but she never would go out with them. I'm not real pleased with this whole mess but she seems to be okay with it. She is just not going to date anyone at all. I had to accept it and let the discussion drop. I didn't have to like it though. Sherrie filled out again after getting her mind around most everything in the second series of counseling sessions. She'd lost a lot of weight with the worry and self-recriminations and stuff, but now she's gained most of it back and she looks really great. I hate her. Even after having three kids of my own, my boobs aren't anywhere near as big as hers. It's not fair. The woman seems to be more focused and happier than at any time since her divorce. She's a volunteer with the local PTA and works hard on the neighborhood watch program too...of all things, huh? Her life seems to be fun again; I guess her two roommates help keep her from getting too down in the dumps. Heck, they smile all the time and I guess that would have to give her a boost just about all the time, huh? Oh...and Sherrie's doing good at work too. She had taken a job at a new accounting firm not too long after the divorce and has been promoted three times in the little bit less than three years she's worked for them. She has sixteen auditors and financial analysts working for her now and it looks like she's in line for a better job when the old fart screwing it up finally retires. She loves her work. She's been coming over for barbeques for a long time now...whenever Cal and I have one...and she's just fantastic with the kids. She's like part of our extended family. Our oldest boy is five now. His birthday was last week. My three year old, Cal junior, is just like a son to her and my fourteen-month-old girl follows Sherrie around everywhere she goes. It's cute to watch my baby walk a few steps toward Sherrie, stand still when she feels her balance going, and then plop down on her bottom. Then she gets on all fours and crawls sooooo fast. She giggles like a maniac when she finally catches up to Sherrie. All three of my kids just love her to death. Ron should be emailing us again any day now. It's been about a week and he tries to send Cal and me something every week or ten days. I show them all to Sherrie; she hounds me for the latest one if I haven't forwarded it on to her right away. I wonder what Ron would say if he knew? ******** I found out that Afghanistan in early spring isn't the garden spot of the world either. Instead of blowing snow, we got blowing dust and I wasn't sure which was worse. Both have serious disadvantages. I think I'm tending toward a preference for snow though. At least it melts and goes away; dust and sand just get into small crevices and clog up the works. Twenty-five percent of our heavy equipment—bulldozers, dump trucks, rock crushers, etc.—were down on any given day because dirt had fouled air intakes, gotten into lubricating oil, or any number of other things. It's particularly galling because most of our machinery was made for environments where dust and sand are part of the working environment. I was beginning to suspect a little sabotage. Two weeks after my first suspicion, Marine Lance Corporal Arvin Cantwell and I caught one of the nameless unskilled laborers screwing on an air filter housing that should never have been unscrewed to begin with. We didn't like hiring these guys because it was impossible to vet them and we had no idea if the local warlord had actually sent them as trusted workers, or whether the guy just wandered into camp. The one we caught might have been Osama bin Laden's cousin, for all we knew. The handful of dirt and rocks we found in the air intake confirmed he had ties to one terrorist group or another so we turned him over to a trio of Afghani National Guard soldiers. They took him away and we never saw him again. The incident put us on guard and our equipment up time improved dramatically, but other things continued to crop up. We had about forty days to go on our schedule so we clamped a tight security on all our vehicles. First, we parked them separately from the main "tent city" set up for locals and contractors alike. Then Lieutenant Fredericks put on a night guard around them and my crew also provided personnel for that task. My people weren't armed, but they could sure raise a commotion if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Their purpose was to get an alarm spread wide enough, and quickly enough, for some of those tough Marines in our security platoon could handle whatever came up. There was a pervasive concern among all the imported contractor personnel that if something was going to happen, it was going to happen soon because once the road was bulldozed all the way to the border, disrupting it would be a strictly local event and easily repaired. We were uneasy and uncomfortable. ******** I'm going to have to have a talk with Melissa, I guess. Turns out she's been passing my emails on to my ex-wife, Sherrie. When I'd last talked face to face with Karen, Sherrie's name had come up as an obstacle in mine and Karen's relationship. Karen thought I wasn't "over" Sherrie yet and that she would always be some kind of ghostly presence between Karen and me. I thought that was ridiculous, but fortunately I bit my tongue before letting that word get out into the discussion. I don't know much about women, but I was smarter than that. Anyway, that Melissa was giving Sherrie information about me. Melissa compounded the error by telling me that Sherrie was concerned about me. It was all so darned irritating. In some way, although I had no control over it, it was a validation of Karen's concerns. It seemed to say that Sherrie was still a part of my life even though we'd been divorced over three years now. I really didn't appreciate Melissa telling me Sherrie wasn't dating anyone and would not date because of her guilt from the way she'd treated me so long ago. Big deal! Unbidden, some of the good memories came back to me last night, though—like...that first afternoon I went into the little café on the main drag just off campus. I was plowing my way toward a mechanical engineering degree, attending class in the daytime and working at night to make ends meet. Sherrie was a waitress in the café and gave me the biggest smile when I sat down at a table at her station. I think I fell in love before she handed me a menu. There were other dreams, but that was the most striking. ******** It was in the mindset of being highly security conscious that I found myself watching a chubby young Afghani male in the mid-day chow line a week later. He caught my attention primarily because he appeared suddenly from between two of our big dirt haulers. I hadn't seen anyone in that vicinity as I'd walked by, so his emergence startled me. The more I watched him, the less I liked what I saw. He'd come out of nowhere—as if he'd been hiding out there beyond the heavy equipment—and he was looking all around like a country boy just come to the big city. I set my cup down on the hood of one of the Marine Hummers and repositioned the M-4 on the strap that hung on my right shoulder. I put the muzzle pointing down and grabbed the pistol grip. That meant I had to twist the carry strap a little, but now I had the weapon ready for action. Seconds count and I'd just saved myself a couple if something was about to go down. Lance Corporal Myers was with me at the front fender of the Humvee. His steel tray and coffee cup sat beside mine. There were only a few of us who would sit down while eating. We wanted to be able to see all around and react quicker to potential threats. So we stood, and the Hummer's fender was a nice ledge at a convenient height for our purposes. Billy (the Kid, of course) Myers was one of the squad leaders and we'd become pretty good friends over the past couple of months. He and I were the best shots in the group's sporadic, and highly unofficial, target shooting contests. I examined and then loaded a thirty-round magazine in the M-4 every morning, just like the Marines did. I'd pulled the charging handle to lock the bolt back this morning as part of the loading operation, but now I thumbed the bolt catch release to send the bolt forward and chamber a round. As I watched the unknown young man, I clicked the safety off. My right forefinger was along the receiver, instead of on the trigger. I didn't want to fire accidentally; only a fool puts a finger on the trigger of a deadly weapon if he isn't ready to pull it. "Sir...Mr. Masters...what's wrong?" Billy Myers had glanced down when he heard the bolt mechanism snap forward in my M-4 and saw I was loaded for bear. "I'm not sure," I murmured, watching the young guy across the way. The kid had a strange expression on his face, intent, mesmerized...and scared. Suddenly my suspicions were kicked into high gear. This Afghani was positively rotund, a very plump young male in a place where there just wasn't that much food to go around. The only fat males I ever saw in this region were older men with a comfortable amount of authority. Their very plumpness was a sign of their wealth and power. This young man didn't meet any of the criteria. "Shit," I breathed softly. The young man was digging under his loose clothing, finally pulling a cord up the open v-necked over garment he had on. There was nothing I could think of in the Afghani wardrobe that matched what he had in his hand. He was walking quickly toward a big group of Marines and my construction contractors who gathered around the massive soup kettles waiting for seconds. I opened my fingers and let my cup of coffee drop. "NOOOOOOOOO!" I yelled. The man spun around and looked at me. A gust of wind pasted his clothing to his body and I could see the outline of several big blocks of...something...wrapped around his upper body and waist like a vest. He turned and tried to run toward the group of men. Yanking the M-4 up and putting the sights on the back of his head, I pulled the trigger. There were a lot of guys downrange and normally I wouldn't have fired, but nothing about this was normal. I saw the spray of blood, bone, and brain matter out the exit wound in his forehead. He pitched forward, dead before he knew it. I guessed, in a fleeting thought, that it was true a headshot killed a man instantaneously for all practical purposes. Whether it had or not, the detonator cord was not pulled and the gang of construction workers over there were not blown into tiny bits. "BOOTS AND SADDLES! BOOTS AND SADDLES!" Corporal Myers was screaming the untraditional alert signal for the detached platoon of Marines into his radio. The young privates had heard the phrase in an old John Wayne movie that had made its way out to us and they'd adopted it as quick warning cry. The Lieutenant didn't like it, but he wisely put up with it. There were more shots. They came from behind me. Billy and I whirled around to see a ragged line of armed men running toward the encampment. More were scrambling from a ravine no one had paid any attention to before. The Lance Corporal and I both went to one knee and began firing. The M-4 fires single shots or 3-round bursts. I kept the selector on the semi-automatic setting and squeezed off round after round. There were more Marines getting into action now. I could hear the Lieutenant directing a squad into position to pour an enfilading fire on the line of terrorist fighters. Seconds later, the squad opened fire and the number of attacking terrorists began to decrease rapidly. I punched the catch release to drop the empty magazine and slapped another one into place, tapping it to make sure it was seated properly. Hearing a discordant noise, I looked to my left. An old Afghani wearing a black turban, his face twisted with hate, was running toward me as fast as he could go, screaming imprecations at the top of his lungs. More importantly, he was firing a semi-automatic pistol at Billy and me. Billy wasn't going to be able to do anything about the new attacker. He was still engaging the group of terrorists coming in from the ravine. It was up to me. I swiveled clumsily around—I'd been shooting to my front and he was coming at me from my left—and started shooting back. This time I moved the selector to automatic with my thumb and began firing three round bursts. The second group stitched three .223 caliber holes from his crotch to throat and he lost all interest in killing Billy and me. Still running forward, he simply leaned forward until he ran his face into the ground. It took a short time for him to bleed out through the gaping throat wound and the big exit wounds on his back, but he was effectively dead when he hit the ground. Most of that had to be relayed to me later, because as I was firing that burst, the last shot he fired hit me in the left shoulder. The heavy round caught me just as I was awkwardly getting to my feet and moving toward the shelter of the Hummvee. I stepped into a depression and twisted my ankle before I could get there though. Already falling, the impact of the .45 caliber slug accelerated my fall and my head slammed into the Humvee's heavy fender. I'm told I went out like a light. ******** Melissa's Diary: Ronnie's been hurt! They say he's been shot but I can't get anyone to tell me how bad or anything. I'm going to start screaming and scratching some people's eyes out if they don't tell me. I didn't know it but Ron put me and Cal, as well as that Karen person I bet, down as "next of kin" to be notified if he died or got hurt or something like that. With no family, beyond a couple of second cousins—his only sister died in a car wreck a few years back—I guess Ron thought it was a natural thing to do. When he gets home, I'm going to hug and kiss him for thinking of us that way...and then I'm going to give him a piece of my mind about going places where they shoot at you and stuff. Sherrie took it well, darn her. I couldn't believe how cool she was about it. Heck, she was a basket case when she found out he was going to that country. Now she was calmly reassuring me and saying he was going to be all right. It was more of that drivel about how he was going to come home someday and nothing was going to prevent it. It was only a matter of time, she told me the other day. I hope she's right. He hasn't seen my two young children either; they were born after he left to go to Denver and I want them to know him. Oh God, I hope he's okay. ******** I woke up in an Army run hospital in a compound on the outskirts of Kabul. My head hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt in my life. When I tried to move, a fiery pain lanced through my shoulder. My vision contracted to a narrow tunnel of blackness before slowly receding. Holding my body still, I lifted my head an excruciating inch or so off the pillow and tried to look around. My right arm had a big needle sticking in the primary artery; a plastic tube lead from there to a bottle of what was clearly blood hanging on a pole next to my bed. There were some other liter-sized bottles up there too, but I didn't know what they were. On my left side, by craning my neck painfully around, I could see my shoulder was hidden by a mass of bandages. Experimenting with a tiny movement of my fingers, I confirmed whatever lay under the dressing was the source of the agony that had almost made me pass out. A middle-aged woman in hospital surgical greens came in a door I hadn't noticed. She took one look at me and backed out of the room to call a summons down what I took to be a long hallway. In a moment, a man and another woman joined the first woman and they all arranged themselves beside the bed that I was just now figuring out I was in. "How're you feeling?" the guy asked in a gruff voice. I could see the big silver eagles on the light green shirt under his white coat. I guessed he was a doctor. "Shoulder...hurts...bad," I croaked. I'd had to swallow hard a couple of times just to manage that. I massaged my throat and pantomimed drinking something. The doctor nodded and motioned to the first woman I'd seen to pour me a glass full of water from a steel pitcher. She put a straw in it and held it to my mouth so I could drink thirstily. "Thank you," I told her. My voice was still hoarse and faint, but it had improved a hundred percent from my first attempt. "Where am I?" I asked, glancing at each of the trio of medical personnel. "Kabul," the doctor said bluntly. He started pointing one of those little flashlights in each eye, flicking it away, and then back. Finally, he grunted and put the darn thing away. "What's your name?" he said suddenly, surprising me. "Ronald Terrance Masters," I shot back. "What's yours?" He was beginning to irritate me. "Doctor Evans," he said shortly, but he had a faint grin on his face as he said it. "You remember what happened to you?" he asked in a more amiable voice. I nodded slowly, careful to not move my shoulder. "We were ambushed by some Taliban guerillas," I said slowly. "There was one suicide bomber and then a bunch of them attacking from out of a draw behind us...and some old guy with a pistol." I waited but there was nothing else. "I can't remember anything past that," I complained. The Colonel/Doctor nodded. Curiously, he seemed very satisfied about something. Separate Lives Pt. 02 "From what they tell me," he said conversationally, "you smacked into something hard and got knocked out. But it looks like that's going to be okay. The skull doesn't appear to have been fractured and it doesn't look like you suffered more than a light concussion. You don't seem to have any loss of memory, and your pupils are equal and reactive so I think the head injury is the least of your worries." I accepted what he said. I sure didn't feel any different than I had before the firefight...well, except for that headache, that is. It was fading a little. The intensity was already noticeably lessening. "And I don't think your shoulder wound is going to be a big deal either," he said confidently. It was easy for him to say that. It wasn't his shoulder. I bet his wasn't hurting even the tiniest little bit. "Ungh!" I grunted when I tried to move. The younger of the two, what I took to be nurses, wiped away the sweat that had suddenly popped out on my forehead. "We can give you something for the pain," the doctor said. He made a couple of entries on some papers on a clipboard at the end of my bed. He turned and left, taking the older woman with him. He was talking a mile a minute to her, using words I didn't understand and quickly lost interest in. The young nurse, a First Lieutenant, stayed behind to bathe my face with cool water. When I asked, she let me use the bed controls to slowly raise my chest and head higher. I've hated to lay flat on my back since I was a boy and felt a lot better reclining instead. When the matronly older woman came back, she put a needle into some gadget on the tube they had stuck in my right forearm and a few minutes later, the level of pain dropped away fast. It also put me back to sleep. ******** Two weeks later, I was "ambulatory" in the jargon the Army Medical folks use and more than a little restless. The shoulder was healing well and they already had me doing some really light, slow movements to make sure the knitting muscles would be flexible when they mended. I found a computer terminal they would let me use. I was able to access my Yahoo account and got off some emails to Karen and Melissa letting them know I was okay. My inbox was full of anxious inquiries from both of the women in my life—Karen and Melissa—and, surprisingly, from a lot of folks back at corporate headquarters. I emailed my boss and my secretary back in Denver and asked them to spread the word that I was fine and getting better fast. I said to tell everyone that I only could use my right arm for now and typing with one hand was really slow. I'd answer all the emails as I could, but it would be a while. The guys from the Marine Platoon came by yesterday. They'd been rotated back to a base camp for some R&R before going back out on another assignment. I had no idea what was going on when the young nurse rolled me and my wheelchair—I didn't need it, didn't want it, but it was "regulations" she said—into the hospital dayroom. A few minutes later the double outside doors crashed open and the whole Marine platoon, all 46 of them, marched inside. They halted, forming a double rank around three sides of the room, did a facing movement into the center toward me and stood at attention. The Lieutenant commanding them marched up to a point three paces in front of me and saluted. I learned a bit later the two officers flanking him were his company and battalion commanders. The nurse "helped" me stand up. I felt foolish in my faded blue hospital pajamas and ratty old robe, but no one paid any attention. The Lieutenant brought everyone to attention and then shouted a command to give me a hand salute, though I guessed it wasn't strictly kosher. Military personnel don't salute civilians but they did it anyway. After putting his men at parade rest, the Lieutenant read a thoroughly unofficial "award citation" off a piece of paper that looked kind of like parchment. Then they presented me with a large, circular hunk of metal from the base of an artillery shell and burnished to a soft brown color. It was, the citation said, to stand in lieu of a "Bronze Star" for bravery in the incident occurring at kilometer 137...etc., etc. The thing said my "quick reaction" (as opposed my memories of a panicked one) saved the lives of many Marines and civilian contractor personnel. My face was scarlet by now and I was so choked up I couldn't talk. Finally, I got out a shaky-voiced thanks to the officers and men. I asked if I could shake the hand of everyone in the platoon and I positioned myself at the door. As they filed out, I shook every single hand and then followed them outside to mingle with them for the last time. The next morning I was on a military Med Evac flight that went in to Landstuhl, Germany where I spent several days. Then I was put on a plane home. I knew the corporation was reimbursing the government for all the medical attention, but I think all those folks went a little above and beyond. Everywhere I went, Marines kept coming up to me and engaging me in conversation, always referring to my "Bronze Star." I didn't know how complete strangers knew my face and name, much less any details of what I'd gone through "in country," as they kept saying. It was a revelation to me that military personnel have one of the fastest unofficial communication networks in the free world. I loved the camaraderie of those dangerous men in the Marine Corps and wondered a time or two whether I'd missed my calling, but it was too late in my life to seriously consider a change now. It was time to go back to what I do best. My "vacation" in Afghanistan, exhilarating as it had been, was over. My office in the Denver corporate complex was waiting for me when I got back to town. Except for a little mustiness, it was exactly the same as when I left it six months earlier. ******** The relationship between Karen and I didn't make it through the long separation. It's not that she was seeing anyone. In fact, she was a very lonely woman in many respects. She'd waited for me to get back and well on my way to healing before laying the sad news on me. We argued for a while but I saw she wasn't going to budge on her idea of the ghostly presence of Sherrie still being between us. I sensed something had happened to push her over the edge. I could not get her to tell me what, though. I swallowed my anger before I said some things that would have made our split a viciously bitter one. I didn't agree with her but I had to accept that she most emphatically felt that way. I didn't like it but, in a way, I knew she was right about breaking up. But she was right for the wrong reasons. The thing was, we'd been together for a long time and, while I'd thought of asking her to marry me, I'd never quite done it. We parted as friends, I guess—as much as two former lovers can be, anyway. What brought everything home to me was how quickly I got back on an even keel. Two weeks after Karen and I split up, I was dating a woman who worked on the third floor of our building and enjoying it immensely. There was never going to be anything serious between us, but it was fun. Two months after I got home, I overheard two guys talking. One was the executive assistant to the Chief Financial Officer and the other a guy who ran a section in the Human Resources office. I, it seemed, wasn't going to be here very much longer. The CEO had mentioned my name had been proposed for another position and he was just about ready to announce the move. The two men I inadvertently eavesdropped on shouldn't have been talking about it, but even in the executive washroom, people don't always check under the stall doors before they start gossiping. A week later, I got the official word. I was going back to where I'd started from, but this time as Executive Vice President. I was intrigued by the proposal. It was somewhere between a promotion and a lateral move, but it had a lot of potential. The position I was holding down now was pretty much a dead end unless I was willing to wait seven or eight years for the two guys and one woman who were above me in the hierarchy to retire and get out of the way. I pondered my decision for a couple of days, but there were too many pluses to the position they were offering me. I took the job. Four years and a week or two after my divorce, I was going home. Separate Lives Pt. 03 Chapter 7 "Hey! Anyone home?" I was at Melissa and Cal's front door, banging on the screen door hard enough to rattle the windows. I was grinning for all I was worth. I hadn't seen my friends in a long, long time and I was anxious to see them. I heard the rustle of movement behind the closed door before it was pulled open. "RON!" I couldn't tell at first whether Melissa was happy to see me or not. She stood there, trembling like a leaf for a couple of seconds before pushing open the screen and leaping into my arms. Her arms wrapped themselves around my neck and she started crying into my chest. I just patted her back and told her over and over that it was all right and other nonsensical things. The only thing to do with Melissa was to wait her out when she got on an emotional jag. Suddenly she was finished. "Why didn't you tell us you were coming?" she asked. She hit me in the chest with her fist. I pretended to be knocked backward by it and got a reproving grin for my trouble. So much for my acting abilities. She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the cool interior of the house. "CAL!" she yelled, "COME HERE…IT'S RON." I was sure Cal could have heard her three counties over and, sure enough, he came galloping into the living room a few seconds later. We shook and pounded each other's shoulders until he suddenly realized what he was doing. I assured him my wound had completely healed. About then, a whole herd of young children erupted into the living room, running hard to see what all the yelling had been about. There were five of them—two boys and three girls. The oldest boy had to be Cal's oldest—he looked just like his father. He was six now. He'd been two when I left. His brother was three and a half, I was told. I shook hands with them as if they were men when Melissa introduced me to them. They thought that was just great. The smallest girl was Melissa's youngest—her daughter Jeanette. Melissa tried to get the little tyke's thumb out of her mouth but it wasn't coming out for love nor money. The two other girls were identical twins, blond, and completely adorable. Melissa beckoned them forward and I dropped back down on my knees to be on their level. "Girls, this is Ron. He's Jeanette, Ben, and Cal Junior's Uncle Ron. Ron, this is Cassandra and Courtney. We're babysitting them while their Mom is at work." Her voice shook a little and I didn't know why. I let it pass. Melissa is a bundle of emotions ready to spark even at the most placid of times. I shook hands with each of the little girls solemnly. "My goodness, you two are just as cute as you can be," I said. I reached out and put my hand on the head of the one on the left. "Cassandra…right?" She nodded, using a child's exaggerated motion. "Do you like to be called Cassandra? Or Cassie?" "Cassie," she said in a little voice. I smiled at her. "Then Cassie it shall be," I assured her. I turned to the one to my right. "And that must mean you're Courtney, huh?" She nodded emphatically. I sat back on my heels. "Courtney and Cassie…Cassie and Courtney. Those are two pretty names for two pretty little girls," I told them. They smiled tentatively. "Are you our Uncle Ron, too?" Cassie asked plaintively. I glanced up at Melissa and Cal. There was a sudden tension in their postures I didn't understand. "You think their mother will object to them calling me that while they're around me?" I demanded. They looked at each other. "No, I guess that's all right," Melissa said carefully. "We'll have to clear it with their mother but it should be all right for now." She was a little nervous. I made a note to ask why later. I turned back to the little blond twins. "Then "Uncle Ron" it is for now, okay?" They grinned. Smiling back, I studied them for a moment. Something about them was familiar but I didn't know what it was. "And I know I'm Uncle Ron to this little girl," I said. Sixteen-month old Jeanette had been edging closer while I had been talking to the two older girls and she was close now. I reached out, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her to me. In seconds, right after she shed her startled look, she was giggling like a maniac because I was tickling her tummy and wouldn't let her go. Suddenly, I got my arm around Cassie and pulled her in for a little tickling too. Courtney attacked to get her share. I just had to tickle her belly and ribs too. Shortly after that, the two boys jumped in the middle of everything, demanding some attention also. The living room was suddenly the scene of a free for all. Everyone was trying to tickle everyone else but I got the best of that. I'm not ticklish and no amount of little fingers poking into my ribs was going to make me laugh. After a while, the twins took off screaming in "fear" and Jeanette toddled off after them. The two boys tired of the game about the same time and sat on the floor, leaning against the couch while they caught their breath. I saw the girls peeking back from the doorway but I didn't react. "Whew!" I said breathlessly. "That was fun." I know a smile was threatening to split my face wide open. Both parents looked at me in stunned disbelief. They'd expected me to ask the obligatory adult-child questions, give them a kiss on the cheek, and then wave them away. I laughed at my two best friends in the world. When I stood up, Melissa was moved to wind her arms around my waist and hug me tight again. "You had us so worried," she said quietly, serious for the first time in a while. "I was afraid you weren't going to come home to us," she said. I could tell the waterworks were about to start running again. "Melissa," I said firmly, "I'm home…I'm all right…and I'll never be going over there again, okay?" It helped some, but my shirt breast pocket was still getting drenched. "It was so hard when we heard you were shot, you Doofus," she said. "You're the closest thing I've got to a brother and I was scared." I held her at arm's length for a moment. Suddenly, I was a little choked up. "Well, I don't have a sister or a brother either," I told her. I turned to Cal. "Cal?" He lifted his chin in response. "Is it okay if I adopt your wife as my sister?" I asked. My voice was halfway between serious and kidding. "Heck, you might as well," Cal said resignedly. "But if she starts in crying again, you're on your own. You understand that, right?" Melissa stuck out her tongue at him. "So what do you think, 'Lissa?" I said. "Shall we make it official? Brother and sister for ever and ever?" She nodded hesitantly. She had a feeling I was up to something but she didn't know what. I stood facing her and took both her hands in mine. "I, Ronald Terrance Masters, take thee Melissa…to love and respect…to tease and irritate—" I took off running for the kitchen door and out to the back yard but she got in a swipe at me before I was going real good. None of the five kids understood what we three adults were talking about. Ben—Melissa and Cal's oldest—came the closest. He looked at me and his mother, then at his little sister and the two twins and back at me. Plainly, he was wondering why any self-respecting guy would ever want a sister he didn't absolutely have to accept. I got a good home cooked meal that evening, something I hadn't even realized I'd been missing. Melissa beamed when I went on and on with the compliments…and meant them. When I kissed her cheek goodnight, I called Melissa "Sis," making my voice very serious, and she called me "Brother." I knew darn well when she closed the door she was going to burst out into tears again but, in spite of Cal's declaration that it was my responsibility, he had to deal with it, not me. ******** A week later at a delicatessen near the downtown business district, I was going over the housing inspector's report on the house I was buying across town. The roof needed some work to bring it up to specs and the sellers had offered to lower their asking price by the amount of the highest estimate if I'd go ahead and close now, accepting the roof as is. That was fine with me. I liked the place at first sight and I couldn't wait to move in. It would be the first two-story house I'd ever lived in. I signed my name on the equity paperwork and put my ballpoint away. Shuffling the documents back into a rudimentary order, I dropped them in my briefcase. "Hello, stranger," a woman said. All of a sudden, my stomach knotted up. I looked up to see a tall, very pretty brunette standing quietly beside my table. I stood up slowly. "Hello, Sherrie," I said. We looked at each other for a long moment. I shook off the shock. "Where are my manners?" I remarked. "Please, would you join me?" I reached out to pull the chair near me out from the table. She nodded and sat down in a sinuous movement. I didn't remember she had that much grace before we were divorced, but memories are always suspect. We remember the last thing we see of a person and my last view of Sherrie hadn't been a flattering one for her. "Thank you," she said. We looked each other over very closely for a space. She smiled. "I wasn't completely sure you wouldn't yell at me and chase me off," she said slowly, "like the last time we talked." I felt a faint blush begin rising up my neck. "I…uh…I should apologize for the way I spoke to you that day," I said quietly, trying to suppress the rush of blood that was threatening to make my ears glow. "No matter what…had happened, I had no call to use obscenity and four-letter words like that." "That's okay," she said, her eyes searching my face for a clue as to what I was thinking. I shook my head. "No…I'm embarrassed when I remember the way I acted that day, Sherrie. Mom and Dad didn't raise me to talk like that. Mom would've boxed my ears good for that kind of language." "Well, it's long past and… you did have some awful strong provocation…Ron," she said softly. It was her turn to blush at the memories. "Like you said," I remarked, "it's in the past. That was…what…almost four and a half years ago—no…a little more, isn't it?" She nodded. "We're coming up on being five years older than we were when…we separated," I said carefully. "Five years wiser, you think?" she asked tentatively. "I like to think so," I answered, trying to be as honest as I knew how. "Sometimes I don't always measure up…but I try." "So do I," she said gently. We spoke quietly for another thirty minutes until she had to leave and go back to work. While we talked, I watched her every movement. Each one was familiar but, at the same time, not the same as I recalled. Sherrie was thirty-one years old now. She'd been barely twenty when we first met. I sat there comparing the new Sherrie with the earlier version and I kept finding new things that I liked better about the way she was now. For one thing, she was calm and self-assured; her eyes met mine squarely without being unnecessarily aggressive. Her posture was erect; she exuded confidence. The mature Sherrie was not a classically beautiful woman—not a runway model too thin and aristocratic. But she was very, very attractive and always had been. Her lively green eyes were set wide apart on either side of a well-shaped nose that had small, pale freckles scattered across it. Her lips were full, but without that strange, swollen look some women affect these days. Her high cheekbones gave her a faintly Slavic appearance, a gift from one of her maternal great-grandfathers, and she had a vibrancy that animated her features. When she turned her grin on someone, there were few who could refuse to give one in return. Her body seemed fuller than it had been. Her breasts had been a source of annoyance to her before. She'd always complained they were only "B's" and I'd countered with a pronouncement they were "B-pluses." Now they were larger. I was willing to bet my girl-watchers of America membership card that she now wore a "C" cup bra. I couldn't think of a polite way to ask though. There are some questions one does not ask one's ex-wife. "Well," she said, looking at her wristwatch, "I have to go or the boss is going to have a kitten." I surprised myself with how disappointed I was at her leaving. I stood up with her. She hesitated and wet her lips before saying anything more. "Ron…can we go somewhere some time and talk? I mean, without having to get up and leave because we have to be somewhere?" I looked at her for a long moment. There'd been a faintly pleading note in her voice. "Would you like to go out to dinner sometime?" I said impulsively. "We could talk then." She smiled. There was a flash of pleasure in her eyes. "Tomorrow is Friday," she suggested delicately. "Uh…some place open and…neutral?" I asked. "Golden Corral?" she suggested. The buffet-style restaurant seemed a good choice to me too. She wrote her cell phone number down on a napkin and tucked it in my shirt pocket for me. She said she was never more than a couple of feet away from her cell phone. When she'd bent over to use the table as a desk, her v-necked blouse fell away a little. Her bra was definitely a C cup. She'd meet me at the restaurant just built out on the loop. She didn't think she could make it before 8:00 PM. I told her I'd be there. As Sherrie walked away, I saw she still had the same trim ankles and beautifully sculpted calves and thighs she'd had when I first met her. I remembered she'd always had a graceful way of carrying herself Pausing before she went out the door, she turned back and smiled warmly at me. ******** I did some deep soul searching that evening, and most of the next day too. I was still on an administrative leave of absence and hadn't gone in to my new office except to let them know I was around. A week from Monday would be my first day at work. I'd found the house very soon in my search and had already taken care of all the myriad of little details one must do when one moves long distance. The result was that I had a lot of time on my hands to think, and consider. Seeing Sherrie after so long had been a shock. I had expected to encounter her around town sooner or later, but she'd come up on me so unexpectedly. I'd had no time to prepare, to steel myself for the impact she still had on me. I hadn't even thought she might have an impact on me. We'd been divorced a little more than four years and separated four years and six months—give or take. It had been a long time since I'd seen her. I hadn't bothered to go to the final court hearing and my attorney told me she hadn't either. We hadn't seen each other for a very long time. I was caught off guard by the fact she could still make my pulse race. I could recall exactly what it was that she'd done to me. That was never in doubt. I could summon vivid images and bring them into sharp focus. For a long time, I'd kept the printouts of the pictures I'd taken that night but I'd shredded them when I left for Afghanistan. I remembered the sense of relief and satisfaction I'd felt when they'd become just scraps in the bottom of a plastic canister beneath the shredder. But when I reached for the anger I'd felt back when I first found out about Sherrie's infidelity, when I tried to touch the deep pain and sense of loss, I could find only the remembrance of them, not the rage and hurt themselves. I was astonished at myself. I wondered why I no longer felt the pain but I couldn't hit upon an explanation that satisfied me. I knew the old maxim that time heals all wounds, but I wasn't satisfied with that reasoning. There had to be something else, but what, I didn't know. ******** I'd been at the restaurant for twenty minutes when Sherrie arrived. I'd tried to delay. I'd wanted to keep her waiting, not the other way around. I wanted to have that little bit of an edge to set the tone for our talk. But I couldn't seem to wait at home either. She saw me in my SUV when she first drove in and parked nearby. When she hurried to me and apologized for making me wait, I had to admit she was precisely on time and no apology was necessary. My intention of having an advantage in our conversations…indeed, even the desire to have it…fled so quickly I didn't notice their passing. We talked for a long time after the waitress brought us our steaks—medium rare for me and well done for her. We discussed my promotion; she smiled prettily and patted my hand on the table as she congratulated me. She wanted every detail of my trip to Afghanistan, including the firefight that ended it. She concentrated intently on my words, seldom taking her eyes from my face and I had trouble focusing on the story telling from time to time. I did not remember her doing that while we were married. I was pleased, warmed by her attention. There was once—when I touched my left shoulder to indicated the one that had been wounded—that she left her seat across the 4X4 table from me and sat on my left. She demanded to see the scar and I couldn't refuse her. I unbuttoned three buttons of my shirt, in front of everyone, and pulled the collar far enough over to show the dime-sized dimple that was all that remained. She touched it softly with her fingertips and turned her face to me. I could barely keep from kissing her. I don't know what she would have done. She resumed her seat before I embarrassed myself. ******** Melissa's Diary: Well, I'll be darned. I don't know how she managed it, but Sherrie managed to hook up with my "brother" just a few days after he got to town. She swears it was just a coincidence that she found him in a cafeteria or something where he was eating lunch, and I don't know how she'd have known where he was…so I guess I'll believe her for now. I'll never know how she got him to go out with her the next night. Darn, that girl works fast! She said they went to Golden Corral, which is brightly lit and open and all of that…so neither of them felt pressured or anything. She said they talked for a long time and Ron let her tell him everything she'd practiced saying for the last two years that I know of. She said she apologized for doing what she'd done and told him how ashamed of herself she was for having let that jerk do anything with her in the first place…much less for continuing to see him after she got home. She said she told Ron that there was no excuse and she wouldn't try to tell him there was. Ron, bless my big brother's heart, evidently didn't try to hurry her or cut her off or make her feel like any more of a heel than she already did. Sometimes that big lunk manages to do the right thing in spite of himself. When she got through making a separate apology for hurting him and for being deceitful and sneaky and everything else she could think of, she said Ron smiled and told her it was awfully hard to be mad at someone who admitted everything right upfront. He told her that somewhere between here, and Denver, and that horrible Afghanistan place, and then back here, the anger and bitterness had died. He hoped her bitterness had too. Well, Sherrie said she told him she hadn't felt bitter about anything except the things she'd done and Ron told her he thought it was time for her to let that go too. He said it was like all that had happened to two other people. He said they were things that had happened in a marriage that didn't exist any longer and Sherrie thought he was kind of saying that they had a fresh start now. I have to wonder when she plans on telling him about her two roommates. It seems to me that if they're having a fresh start, he has a right to know about things like that, doesn't he? Anyway, she said she cried for an hour she was so happy when she got home. She felt like a huge load had been lifted off her shoulders. I tried to tell her that she had to go slow because he might suddenly remember some of that terrible pain he'd felt back then and everything could change in a heartbeat. I don't think she listened though. The next thing she said was how she loved him more than she had when they were first married. She said when she realized that, she cried for another hour. And that was… Separate Lives Pt. 03 Oh, hell, now I'm crying too…and Cal has told me before that I can't do that over the keyboard or it'll short out or something. I have to stop now. ******** I thought I got through that first meeting with Sherrie pretty well, all things considered. When she'd starting talking about what she'd done and how she'd hurt me, I steeled myself for a resurgence of the feelings I'd had at the time…but they didn't come. I wound up telling her all that was four and a half years in the past and that we weren't the same people as we were back then and that she should let the disturbing memories slide away. Without consciously thinking about it—I guess my subconscious mind was working overtime—I told her that all those things happened in a marriage that we weren't involved in any more. I also said the divorce had shut a door on most of the hurt. What was most surprising to me was that I realized halfway through my little speech I actually felt that way. The joy on her face was clear…and contagious. ******** Sherrie and I met to talk things over several times over the next month, usually in a restaurant like we had the first time, but sometimes we took a long lunch and went to a park or something like that. Each time, we discussed something of the incident that had sparked our divorce and we got…well, comfortable is not the word for it…but we became accustomed to talking about it without rancor or recrimination. I was beginning to be concerned that our ability to talk about it rationally was telling Sherrie something I didn't feel. We spent a couple hours at Denny's one evening talking about the fact that while I might have come to terms with what she'd done, I could never forget those things. While I was sure I was ready to forgive her, I told her there was no way she should consider that as absolution for the things she'd done. She still had to bear the responsibility for them. To my surprise, Sherrie was more than willing to accept what I said. She told she could not lay the blame for any of it on anyone but herself and that she'd have to live with it for the rest of her life. She opened her pursed to show me she always carried with her one of the pictures I'd taken the night I caught her having sex with that guy. It was a battered old thing, but it hadn't faded much. Well…there wasn't anything I could say to that. She'd gotten to where I was heading in the conversation before I had and I didn't have to convince her of anything. In some ways, actually, she'd gone beyond the point I'd been trying to make. It was disconcerting. The curious thing was that neither of us seemed to feel bad about the discussion. It was as if we had had to talk that through and when it was done, we could check it off the list of required topics and move forward. Once past that obstacle, we spent the rest of the evening talking about everything except our troubled past. I got her to talking about her job and how she felt supervising such a large group of analysts and she lit up like a neon sign. She truly enjoyed talking about her job and the people she worked with. When we finally left Denny's, I felt like I knew most of her coworkers and their families. I had to tip our waitress twenty dollars because we'd sat at her table all night long. I think we'd consumed at least that amount in coffee, so it wasn't a bad deal at all. ******** "So you're going to be four next month…and so is your sister? Wow!" I said. I was talking to Cassie who stood next to my right knee while her sister Courtney sat on my lap. Courtney wasn't talking. She was snuggling tight against my chest with her eyes closed. She was all tuckered out. Both were clad in matching pink shorts, white tops with little cartoon characters on them, and little white sandals. "We're twins, silly," Cassie said with a giggle. "We always have birt'days at the same time." I pretended to be astounded and got her to talking about what she wanted for her birthday and stuff like that. Courtney roused enough to participate in that discussion and moved to sit more on my left thigh, unconsciously making room for her twin, I'm sure. Soon I had both blond little cherubs on my lap and talking a blue streak. I was amazed at how adult they sounded. Since I wasn't using "baby talk" when I spoke to them, they weren't using it with me. Curious… Melissa and Cal seemed to always be babysitting the two little girls, so they were usually there when I came over to visit my "sister" and her family. Though I hadn't yet met their mother and father, I was planning to ask if I could buy the girls a present. Maybe Melissa would forward a request to them for me. Anyway, the girls and I seemed to hit it off remarkably well. They quickly got comfortable calling me "Uncle Ron," just as Melissa's children did. They competed with Melissa's kids for my attention as a team, as twins do, but also between the two of them. It was all very satisfying and heartwarming. I knew women spoke of a "biological clock" ticking. I wondered if I wasn't succumbing to a male version of that clock. Setting the two of them down and pointing out the other three kids had found something interesting in the far corner of the yard, I ambled over to where Cal was grilling some steaks for the adults and hot dogs for the kids. I had a wonderful time whenever I went to Cal and Melissa's for a barbeque, and that was the main agenda for today. "Cute kids, huh?" he asked, nodding at the blond twins. They were already with the other children, investigating a snail or something up by the back fence. "Oh, they are little darlings," I said enthusiastically. "Where are their mom and dad that I haven't ever met them? Heck, it's not like I'm not over here enough. I should have seen them by now." "Well, their mother is divorced," Cal said cautiously. I guess he thought the concept of divorce was still a painful subject with me. "And she's awfully busy," he added. "Hmmmmm," I mused. "Uh, you think she'd mind if I bought the girls something for their birthday next month?" I asked. "I mean, I wouldn't want to intrude or anything but I'd love to get them a little something." Cal looked at me strangely. "Well…maybe you can ask her yourself someday," he suggested. About that time, his right hand jerked forward as Melissa came up behind him and pinched his arm just above the elbow. "Hey!" he exclaimed. "What if I'd been flipping something over on the grill or something?" Melissa just snorted. "I looked first," she assured him. "Now you quit messing with my big brother, you hear?" Cal mumbled something and turned back to his steaks. "Don't you mind him," Melissa told me, putting her arm around my waist. "I'll talk to the girls' mother and make sure it's okay to give them something, okay?" I nodded. I looked down the side of the house when I heard a car passing by. Melissa saw me. "Oh…I forgot to tell you," she said. "Sherrie called and told me she had a really bad headache and she didn't want to inflict herself on all of us this afternoon. She's not coming, but she said she'd be home if you wanted to call." I was disappointed. Melissa had been Sherrie's friend long before I met Sherrie and I'd thought she might come to the barbeque. I was getting comfortable being around her. "I may just do that later on," I told Melissa. I was beginning to see a pattern in Sherrie's behavior. What she told Melissa implied she'd be home all evening and that she was ready to demonstrate that to me by way of the suggestion that I could call and "check up" on her. I don't know why she felt compelled to show me that. It wasn't as if I had a right to question where she was or what she was doing or anything like that. Still, I felt better. I wished she hadn't had a headache. ******** Melissa's Diary: I couldn't be happier for the two of them. Ron and Sherrie have been meeting for a little more than a month and a half. By each of their stories, they were both enjoying every moment of it. Those two nitwits aren't admitting to themselves that they're dating, and my hubby says he agrees with them, but that's what they're doing all the same. I get to hear both sides and I'm here to tell you that they both are ready to put the messiness behind them, but neither knows for sure if the other one is. I'm about to burst with the inside information I have and I wish I could tell each of them how the other feels but Cal would cut me off if I meddled. I talked to Connie the other day and she said she and Tom were surprised they seemed to be getting back together. I don't know why! My goodness, these two have such a history together. Sherrie was my roommate then and I know she was practicing writing her name as "Mrs. Sherrie Masters" six days after they met. Heck, earlier than that—she hadn't been able to eat or sleep until he'd called and asked her for that first date. That was two days after he saw her in a little café down on the drag. I can't see this going on for too much longer though. It's like there's some strange, wonderful power pushing them together and some magical evening real soon, they're going to discover each other. Sherrie has got to deal with the question of her roommates though. Things are going to sizzle around here when Ron finds out. I'm afraid— Ouch! Cal just swatted my shoulder and told me I'd better not meddle. Anyway, he wants to go upstairs because the kids are all over at the neighbors. See ya later. ******** A couple weeks later, I came back early from a quick trip up to Denver. I'd met with the head of the returning crew from Afghanistan and gotten a debriefing on the status of the contract and for a "Lesson's Learned" conference with the corporate moguls. It was the final chore I had left to close out my stewardship up there as Deputy Assistant Director of Western Operations. It was a relief. It was tiresome trying to stay conversant on two separate sets of problems. The contract was completed a week ahead of schedule. The Army Corps of Engineers had already inspected the road and pronounced it fully acceptable. We'd learned a lot of things during the process of construction and the next time we got some crumbs from Halliburton's mighty table, we'd be better able to handle it. In particular, we were going to write new internal guidelines for security and organization of supply replenishment operations should we ever be involved in anything like that again. When we got through late Friday afternoon, the CEO suggested I use one of the corporate Leer Jets and fly home in style instead of waiting until the next day. Take the weekend off, he told me. I grinned, shook his hand enthusiastically, and took him up on his offer. I wound up getting back to town about eighteen hours before I had expected I would. It was dark, but the hour wasn't late at all. I assessed my fatigue, checking my stress level and such, and decided flying aboard a private jet was incredibly superior to the hassle of flying commercially. I actually arrived fresh and relaxed instead of tense and worn out. I tried to call Melissa and Cal to let them know I was home but the babysitter answered and, not knowing me, wouldn't give me one of their cell phone numbers. I made a note to get both numbers when I saw them. So I decided to go ahead and join Melissa and Cal out at Fischer's for the evening where I knew they'd been planning to go. I wasn't going to make it for dinner, but I could sit with them and watch the dancing. I kind of missed Fischer's. A lot of good things had happened to me there, including many occasions with Sherrie before we were divorced. I'd had several nice interludes with Karen out there too. I put on a fresh shirt and tie…then decided to change my suit too. It only took a few minutes. I called Sherrie to see if she would go with me, but she wasn't home. I felt the disappointment keenly. When I got to the place, it was packed. The parking lot was overflowing and there was a huge crowd inside. Edging inside the main door, I paid the cover charge and wandered inside. I had no idea where Cal and Melissa might be sitting and with all the people here tonight, searching for them might be a long process. I slid into a very temporary hole through the crowd in front of one of the bars and got a tall coke with a splash of bourbon just in case I got thirsty on the hunt. A few minutes later, I found them at a table near the dance floor. Melissa loved to dance and probably had dragged Cal there from the dining room to be close to the action. I stopped short and moved close to a plastic potted palm near one of the walls. When I stopped, I was partially camouflaged by the ersatz plant…at least for anyone looking my way from Cal and Melissa's table. I'd seen Sherrie dancing—it was what stopped me cold—and I watched her come off the dance floor with an older gentleman. She resumed a seat next to Melissa. The old man bent in a little bow and walked away to join what must have been his wife in a booth fairly close to where I stood. Sherrie was in a black cocktail dress that came down to a couple inches above her knees. It had to be layered. The chiffon on top looked like it was floating over a satiny under layer. I couldn't imagine that it weighed anything at all. I thought I could see halter straps from the satin under layer leading up and around, probably to tie behind her neck. The bodice was fairly high, so there was no hint of cleavage. The over layer was nearly sheer; the wide straps holding it up across each shoulder shadowed, but did not conceal her creamy skin. Her black high heels molded her ankles and calves into planes and curves that were as beautiful as they'd ever been. I watched my ex-wife for a while, feeling more than a little foolish. Still, I watched for half an hour or thereabouts. Sherrie was obviously without a date, and she was being swarmed by a mass of unattached men who wanted to enjoy her company. She would dance to fast tunes with some of the guys who came up to the table to ask, but not all of them. She would not, apparently, dance any slow songs with them. Some of the men were irritated by her refusal but she was always adamant. The only exceptions were some older gentlemen who she it seemed that she trusted—oh, and Cal danced one with her. I recognized one of her slow dance partners as a retired doctor who had been a friend of her father's for many years. Sherrie had an empty wine glass in her hand, twirling it around with her fingers for something to do. She refused a refill when the bar waitress came by. Everything I saw confirmed things Melissa had been hinting at for a long time. Actually, she'd been bombarding me with bits of information, along with the occasional lecture, all to the effect that Sherrie hadn't dated since I'd left, that she didn't drink, didn't get into compromising situations, etc., etc. I saw Melissa hadn't just been trying to be gracious to her old girlfriend. It was all perfectly true. I felt a warm glow flicker into life and grow inside me. Abruptly, what I was seeing made a connection with something else in my mind. I'd let the bitterness and the hurt slip away from me over the years—I knew that. But I'd not even suspected I was wondering if I could ever trust this woman again. I had not thought I might have a desire to trust her. Sherrie, though, for whatever reason, had been going about her daily life as if someone were watching her every move. She was trying to show me she could be trusted, or at least give me a basis for beginning to do so. It was then that I understood I wanted very badly to trust her. I also knew I wanted to let her know how I felt. I refused to let myself think beyond that. I put my empty glass on a tray with a dozen others, took a deep breath, and walked around the potted plant and toward Sherrie. When I was almost to the table, Melissa caught sight of me from where she was on the dance floor. She and Cal had been dancing but she stopped dead in her tracks, almost getting run over by a big guy and an even bigger gal hurtling past. Melissa put both hands over her mouth and held them there while she watched me. Cal looked around to see what was happening and I saw a smile cross his homely features. I knew Melissa had already teared up. Poor Cal was in the process of hauling out a huge handkerchief and handing it to her. I was walking up an aisle leading to the dance floor past Sherrie's table. The angle was so slight between that table and me that Sherrie thought Melissa was looking at her. I could see Sherrie's head cocked to the side as she tried to figure out why Melissa was staring at her. I stopped at Sherrie's side. She didn't know I was there yet. "I was wondering if you might like to dance," I said, just loud enough to be heard over the mass of people all around. She started to shake her head no—it was a slow song. Then her head jerked around and up to look at me. Startled, her fingers kicked the wineglass away and it went spinning. I caught it before it could fall to the floor and sat it down in the middle of the table. She looked up at me for a long time, frozen in place while she absorbed the fact that I was there and had asked her for a dance. Then her eyes glistened and she nodded yes. I took her hand while she rose and then led her to the dance floor. In another instant, she was in my arms. It was a wonderful feeling. Sherrie was an attractive woman, though not a raving beauty, when she had no makeup on at all. With the judicious application of some, she was, in my estimation, gorgeous. Her brunette hair fell softly to her shoulders, bouncing gently with our movements. Her dark eyes never left mine as we danced slowly about the floor. Without weighing the consequences, I bent and gently kissed her lips. This was the first time I'd had my arms around Sherrie since before our divorce…and the first time I'd kissed her too. But it seemed so natural a thing to do. I saw things had been leading to this moment for a long while. "I've never known a woman who takes my breath quite the way you always do," I told her softly. She smiled at me through tears that were starting to trickle from the corners of her eyes. "Don't cry," I said. "There's no reason to cry." At that moment, we collided gently with Cal and Melissa. Sherrie abandoned me and wrapped her arms around Melissa and the two of them started with the waterworks, big time. "We have to go to the ladies room," Melissa choked out. The two women fled across the floor, leaving Cal looking at me with a long-suffering expression. We shrugged almost simultaneously. "Well…I'm sure not going to dance with you," he said. "Let's go back to the table before someone steals it and maybe we can get something to drink." I wisely followed his lead and we did eventually get something to take care of the dryness in our throats. ******** I took Sherrie back to Melissa and Cal's house when we all left. She'd come with them, and her car was parked there. She was spending the night because it was just too late to be driving around town. The only other people out this late were probably going to be drunk, or up to no good. We sat in my SUV for a while before she went in. We talked, but it wasn't about anything serious. We held hands like two teenagers on their first date, but I wasn't disturbed by that comparison at all. After a while, we quit talking and kissed each other for the second, third, and…well, we caught up on a lot of them. When Cal and Melissa drove up—they'd detoured by a convenience store for milk—I walked Sherrie to their front door and kissed her goodnight. I didn't want to stop there, but I sensed Sherrie wanted to ease off and think about what we'd done tonight. I guessed I did too. Chapter 8 When I got right down to it, though, I found I had little to consider. Instead, I welcomed the new…well, renewed…closeness and, though we never discussed it, it seemed she did also. Over the next few weeks, I took Sherrie to dinner or a movie a number of times. I'd have done it more often, but we both had demanding jobs and needed our rest. That limited the number of times we felt like we could go out during the workweek. Even so, we did that a couple of times too. Separate Lives Pt. 03 On our second Wednesday out, I told Sherrie that I loved her for the first time in more than four and a half years…four years and eight months, to be more precise. She whispered that she loved me too. She hadn't hesitated even a split second and we spent the next half hour kissing and petting. If there had been more time to explore the newly opened vistas before us, we wouldn't have stopped at that, but life sometimes intrudes. The hour was late and we had to go to work the next morning. Gradually, as the days passed, we grew comfortable with saying "love" to each other and then began using the little affectionate phrases and touches we'd had between us before. Not for the first time, I began to appreciate the wisdom Karen had shown in breaking up with me. I hadn't even suspected it a few months ago, but she'd seen what I hadn't. Somehow, she'd known that I had not, and perhaps could not, let go of the emotional attachment to Sherrie that I had kept covered up for so long. I could have suppressed those feelings forever. I knew that, and I think Karen had also. But the repression took something away from my relationship with Karen and she'd sensed it. I realized now there had been some hesitation on my part when I tried to open up to her. She was smart enough to see it would always be that way. I respected her for refusing to accept it. I told her so in a phone call I made the next evening to her. She chuckled and thanked me for the compliment but it hadn't been something she'd thought out. It was more instinct than anything else, she told me. I thanked her anyway. Hesitantly, she asked how it was going between Sherrie and me. I was ready for the question and told her how deeply I felt about Sherrie. I told Karen that her instincts must be incredibly sharp and she laughed. As tentative as I had been talking about Sherrie and me, Karen told me about a new man in her life. I knew him vaguely. He'd been an observer from the International Red Cross in the Kabul hospital and had come in to see me a time or two. He was a Swede, but seemed intrigued by America and everything about it. It seemed he and Karen had talked about my condition several times and he'd become interested in the sad-voiced woman on the other end of the line. After a slight hesitation, Karen told me for the first time that when I was under anesthesia in the operating room, I'd called out for Sherrie. The Red Cross observer had heard and was under the impression Karen was Sherrie for a long time. I had not known. I was quiet for a long time. I didn't know how to apologize for an affront like that and I told her so. She said there was none needed. She'd already suspected the depth of my feelings for Sherrie and it only confirmed those suspicions. Anyway, she said when the Red Cross guy came to the United States on a U.N. sponsored trip, he'd looked her up in the phone book and called her. They'd dated a few times already and she told me she liked him a lot. She hoped I would too. I searched my mind for some streak of jealousy, irrational though it would have been, but I couldn't find any. I told her I wished her every happiness in the world and meant every word of it. She thanked me, hoped I would have the same, and asked me if we could remain friends. I simply said "forever." We got off the phone then—both of us, I think, feeling immeasurably better. ******** I picked Sherrie up for several of what we had decided were official dates at her apartment, but I never saw the inside of it. She would tell me her two roommates had trashed the living room or some other excuse. I told her I'd like to meet her roommates and she said I would soon. She was concealing something, but I didn't get the idea it was malicious. It seemed to be something she just didn't want to deal with right now. I could respect that. Besides, I figured if one or both of the roommates were men, I'd have heard by now and she'd be a lot more nervous about admitting their existence. She wasn't nervous. Therefore, they weren't people who were a "threat" to me. Still…I wondered. On Friday night three weeks after the first dance since our divorce, I picked her up and we went to one of the finer restaurants in town. The place featured an old 19th century San Francisco saloon/restaurant theme. They had a long swing attached to the ceiling and every so often a pretty girl dressed like one of the old saloon girls back then would climb up a ladder and swing over the audience for a while. It necessarily involved a lot of leg being exposed and the girl was obviously selected with that in mind. I looked. I am but a man, after all, but I had the sense to tell Sherrie that her legs put that girl's to shame. It was true too. Sherrie blushed prettily and got a tinge of pink every time the girl got up on her swing thereafter. It made her all the more beautiful in my eyes. We went to see a late showing at a theater afterward, but I'm not sure either of us paid any attention to the movie. I had her hand in mine the whole time; her head lay on my shoulder and I planted little kisses on the top of her head—her lips whenever I could. Certainly, I couldn't recall a single thing about the show when it was over and we came outside into the warm Texas night. We hadn't anything else planned and I was feeling a curious reluctant excitement—reluctant because part of me really wasn't sure if I wanted this relationship to take the next step, but excited because another part of me did. She stopped and backed up against the passenger side door of my SUV and pulled me tight for a long, lingering kiss. We stayed that way, enjoying the feel of our bodies pressing against each other. My hands roamed over her shoulders and back. I wanted to do more, but we were in public and…I didn't know whether she wanted me to. I was sure she could feel my penis as it hardened against her. She didn't pull back, but I didn't feel much encouragement either. No, that was wrong. I did feel something but she was holding back. When we broke our kiss, we were both breathless for a long while. We separated, I unlocked her door and handed her inside. I started the engine and turned on the headlamps but I didn't put the transmission in gear. When I turned to Sherrie, she responded eagerly. She was in my arms, kissing me deep and long. There was no sign of reluctance now. "Where do we go from here," I asked her softly when we came up for air. She pressed her lips to mine in a quick kiss before she answered. "Ron," she whispered, "you're in the driver's seat. You take us where you want us to go." I understood. "Are you sure, baby?" I asked. I had to be sure. She just kissed me again and patted my hand. "I'm sure," she assured me. Her voice was soft, but firm. I put the SUV in gear and we merged into the nighttime traffic. There was no doubt in my mind where I wanted to go now. ******** When we got to my house, we kissed inside the front door for a long time. It was more urgent this time, fueled by a fire mounting inside us. Sherrie pulled back and asked if there was something she could drink. I took her hand and guided her to the kitchen. I had some wine coolers for her in the fridge, the brand and flavor she'd liked before. She flashed a beautiful smile at me as she accepted it and drank deeply. I took her around my new house, showing her all the features and comfortable little things that had attracted me to the place. She loved the fireplace. "That's so beautiful," she told me. "It's exactly like the one I've always wanted in a home." I studied the rock-lined fireplace, the hardwood mantle over it, and the wide hearth in front. It did, indeed, fit a description she'd given me in our second year of marriage when we'd thought of buying a home. We couldn't afford it then, but the first time I could afford a nice house, I bought one with her fireplace? I had time to think that Karen had indeed been a wise woman. I was nervous about taking Sherrie upstairs to my bedroom, and I saw some small apprehension on her face too. We both knew what we did next would have far-reaching effects and it was a bit daunting. She didn't resist when I led her up the broad staircase and into my bedroom though. She'd said I was in the driver's seat and that's the way she was responding. When she saw the open door to the big bathroom—another of the selling points for the house—she broke away and went inside, closing the door for a moment with a murmured excuse. I was surprised a moment later to hear the water in the shower running. The door opened a crack and she called me to come in with her. This was another shock. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Sherrie had wanted to shower with me in our last year of our marriage. I had the presence of mind to toss my pants and sports coat over the back of a chair instead of tossing them in the floor, but I still made good time in getting through the bathroom door. Sherrie was facing away from me when I got in and pulled the curtain closed behind me. She looked over her shoulder with a sensuous smile and tilted her head back for a long kiss. "I have a surprise for you," she said with a sparkle in her eye. "But I want you to make me nice and clean all over, first, okay?" It sounded good to me. I soaped my hands up real good and began with her shoulders, rubbing the slippery suds all around. "Honey," Sherrie said tentatively, "I really, really want you to do me ALL over, please?" She looked back at me but I couldn't read her expression. She wouldn't turn around so I could see her face very well but there was something not quite right—something I wasn't getting. Then she handed me the shampoo bottle over her shoulder. "Please?" she said. There was a plaintive note in her voice and I didn't know the reason for it. But if Sherrie wanted me to soap her up and wash her from top to bottom, I still didn't mind it. Heck, it was good foreplay if nothing else. "Sure…but are you sure this shampoo's okay?" I asked. "It's just a generic brand I got off the supermarket shelves." She nodded. "It's just fine," she said softly. I gently pressed her forward a little to get her under the stream of water and until her hair was soaked. She looked back at me with her eyes squinched tightly shut. I chuckled. I recalled that I'd always told Sherrie I thought she looked like a pixie when her wet hair was plastered to her scalp. Without opening her eyes, she leaned back for another kiss. She was smiling. The kiss was awkward, but slow and loving. Evidently, she remembered too. Pouring a gobbet of shampoo on my left hand, I spread it across both palms by rubbing my hands together and then began to work it into her thick hair. While I shampooed her, I wondered what this was all about. Both of us had been clean and sweet smelling when we'd met this evening and neither of us had engaged in any particularly athletic activities since. Theoretically, we didn't need a shower. At the same time, I dearly loved to make love to my woman with nice, hot water pelting down on us. "You used to want me to shower with you more…back then," Sherrie said quietly. "I wish I'd listened to you and hadn't been so stupid about it," she added regretfully. "We can make up for lost time," I suggested. I was rinsing her hair under the showerhead so the reply was a while in coming. "Okay," she said happily. I worked some conditioner into her hair, giving her a scalp massage at the same time, and then rinsed it out completely. Sherrie was complaint under my hands, moving forward or back as I urged her, leaning back against me the rest of the time. With her hair finished, I soaped up my hands again and began with her neck, rubbing my fingers all around and spreading the suds over every thing I could reach. I even did her ears, expecting her to say or do something to show that this was over the top, but she didn't make the slightest protest. I saw she literally wanted me to wash her entire body and didn't want me to skip any part of her. I was getting curious about why we were doing this, but I felt very strongly that she felt explaining would ruin the effect. I swept my hands over soft, creamy flesh made slippery with water and soap, loving the feel of touching her intimately again after so long. From there, I worked my way down her back and sides. As I washed her, I enjoyed the view too. She was slim, but not skinny. Her curves were well rounded, soft, and gentle. Her waist was trim and smooth. It flared out a little more than I remembered to hips that had no excess flesh. Her butt cheeks were beautifully rounded, soft without being flabby. Below, her thighs were twin columns of wonderfully smooth flesh that blended into beautifully proportioned calves and then shapely ankles. On my knees behind her, I used my hands to urge her legs apart and I saw something, or rather, I didn't see something. "Wow," I said softly. I stopped soaping her up. My heartfelt comment and the cessation of my hands moving about her body brought her back from wherever Sherrie had gone to. "Hey! That is your surprise, Mister," she said in mock indignation. "But you have lots of work to do before you get there, so get busy, bub." She was pleased though. She didn't have any problem telling I was excited about what I'd seen. I got busy, as directed. I really wanted to explore the hairless pussy I could see through her open thighs. Before I went there, though, I soaped my fingers well and stood up. "Bend over a little, honey," I told her tenderly. She did it without saying a word. In a night of startling discoveries, here was another. Sherrie wouldn't even consider anal sex when we were married, and we'd never even gotten to the stage where she would talk about her reasons why. It was a topic that had never been on the table for discussion. Now, she had to know what I was going to do and she was letting me without the slightest protest. Soaping my forefinger well, I worked it all around her anus, keeping the pressure light. After a minute or two, Sherrie shifted her legs and put out her hands to lean against the shower wall. She arched her back to push her ass back at me, and rising a little on her toes to give me a better angle. Gently, making sure the slippery soap was lubricating her well enough, I pressed my finger inside. Holding her left hip in my hand, I worked my right forefinger deeper until the first knuckle disappeared. Abruptly, Sherrie found a way to relax the first ring of muscles there and my finger slipped in all the way. We both caught our breaths in distinct gasps easily heard over the sound of water cascading over our bodies. I was afraid I'd hurt her, but when she made no complaint, I began to work my finger in and out, spreading her wider at the same time. "That's number two," she said suddenly, sighing. I flinched a little. I'd been concentrating hard on what I was doing while waiting for her to cut off this exploration she'd never allowed me to do when we were married. "What, hon?" I asked. "That's the second thing I wish we'd at least tried before," she explained. "If I just hadn't been so uptight…and stupid…and mean…and—" I cut her off before she went any further down that path. "Well…" I said, drawing out the word. I tried to make my voice light and teasing. "Like I said before, we can make up for some lost time…if you're willing." Sherrie had been pushing back on my hand, working her hips around in a small circle. She stopped now and settled herself. "Count on it," she said succinctly. "We're going to do a lot of things we should have been doing a long time ago," she said. Again, she sounded excited and happy at the prospect of trying new things. I cleaned my hand off carefully. Manipulating the bar of soap between my hands to get them soapy again, I started doing her front by rubbing the soap into the skin of her forehead and working over her features. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to mine. I was struck by the trusting, almost childlike, quality of her submission to what I was doing. The warm water had almost removed all of her makeup; the soap completed the process. In a minute, her face was clean and shining under the coat of soap. I saw the light freckles across the bridge of her nose, the long lashes that didn't really need mascara, the beautifully rounded planes of her cheeks and chin. I let my fingers trail across her lips, wondering if she'd really intended me to do that, but she made no sound and didn't try to pull away. I rinsed her face off and was tempted to kiss her, but she wasn't ready for that. We hadn't kissed since I began soaping her up. I was astounded when Sherrie opened her mouth and extended her tongue. There'd been a disquieting question in the back of my mind ever since I'd stepped into the shower. I'd been wondering just what was going on, and now I focused hard on finding an answer. While I thought, I quickly applied a token amount of soap to her tongue and quickly tilted her head back so the water from the showerhead would spray into her mouth. She let her mouth fill and then spit out several mouthfuls of water before she was through. I worked my way down her neck and shoulders, her arms and then her sides again. All the time, I was thinking, trying to figure out why Sherrie was having me do this. It hit me from out of the blue. I'd probably read an article on it, or seen a documentary on TV or something—I didn't remember which. A ritual cleansing was a part of many cultures and most religions. It was a symbolized way to make the body clean, pure again spiritually and physically. In a stroke of inspiration, I was as sure as I could be that she was having me "wash" that other man off her. I didn't know why she wanted this—after all, we'd had sex after the last time she'd been with him—but she did and that was good enough for me. I worked my way down her chest to her breasts, marveling at their beauty. At thirty-one, Sherrie's breasts had yet to give in at all to gravity; they stood high and proud, round and firm, yet soft and yielding when I cupped them in my hands. Her nipples were erect, rock hard bits of reddened, sensitive flesh that begged for my attention. I think she expected it, her body language told me she did, but I refrained. I worked steadily, washing her abdomen and lower belly quickly, but thoroughly. Sherrie had her eyes open now, watching my hands as they swept across her body. Though she'd wanted a symbolic cleansing, she was also becoming very aroused by my touches. A faint flush spreading across her chest and her flared nostrils told me of her excitement. I slowed to look closely at her vulva. Her pubes were completely bare of any hint of pubic hair. I touched her gently, stroking from her labia outward to her thighs. Her skin was absolutely smooth. I looked up to find her watching me anxiously. "Do you like it?" she asked. "Ohhhhhh yeah," I said expressively. I more than liked the smoothness and the view. Sherrie had always had a beautiful, young looking pussy and so it was still. I couldn't wait to slide my tongue between her outer lips to taste her once more. "But how did you—?" "Electrolysis," she said simply. "Wow!" I gasped. "How come? How long did it take, honey? Did it hurt?" She smiled at me affectionately. "Uh, let's see," she said happily, "uh…I did it for you because you had always wanted me to shave it smooth…it took almost six months, doing it a little at a time…and yes it did hurt sometimes." I had to relate her answers back to my questions, but that was quickly done. Still on my knees in front of her, with water pouring down on me, I looked from her to my "surprise." I was truly astonished. "How did you know?" I asked. I was confused. "I didn't know myself until a couple of months ago that I would be coming back to town. And you couldn't have known we'd get together like this. How did you know?" Separate Lives Pt. 03 "Oh, I did this last year," she said quietly. "And I thought someday we'd be like this again," she added. I cocked my head to one side wonderingly. "Or maybe I wanted us to be here, like this so much it just had to happen," she said. There were tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. "I'm glad," I said simply. I didn't know what else to say, but it seemed that was enough. I went back to work, soaping and rinsing her thighs, calves, and feet. I came back to her pussy and soaped her mound liberally. Pressing my right middle finger inside her, I tried to dispassionately wash those parts of her inner lips and what I could reach of her vagina. It was difficult though. I didn't want to wash; I wanted to explore. Judging by the small hunching movements Sherrie made, the little jerks when I pressed a bit deeper or found a new region to stroke…well, I could see she wanted me to explore also. But she had already indicated she needed the cleansing, so I did my best to concentrate on what I was doing. It wasn't easy, but I was finally done. I stood, facing my ex-wife, my soon-to-be lover once more. She started to move close to me, half lifting her arms to wind them around my neck. I stopped her with my hand on her sternum. I was hoping my earlier inspiration was still valid. "Now you have to do me," I told her softly. The look of hurt was washed away in an instant. There was a gleam deep down in her eyes that told me I'd gotten it right again. I was batting a thousand tonight. She proceeded to soap my entire body from stem to stern, just as I had done her. She paid particular attention to my cock and scrotum, softly squeezing and massaging as she worked to clean me. I had to squeeze my eyes shut and not look at her while I ran some multiplication tables in my head. When I opened an eye, her lips were no more than a couple of inches from that little slit in the end of my penis and I had to start multiplying all over again. She moved on and I was sorry she did. "Is this okay?" she asked hesitantly. She was tenderly inserting a finger inside my anus, working it in slowly while she watched my face closely. "Uh huh," I replied. When she had her finger fully inside me, she worked it around until I'm sure she could tell from my expression that she'd found my prostate. She gently massaged it for a time while her left hand jacked my cock. When she stopped, I sighed audibly. She grinned cheerfully up at me while she cleaned her finger off. "That's another thing—" I stopped her with an upraised palm. "Darling," I said, "we're going to get around to everything and we don't have to have any regrets about when we coulda, shouda, woulda…and all that. Okay, sweetheart?" She nodded. "Besides," I added. "I've lost count…but I'm going to remember all of them later," I said with a lecherous grin. She began washing me faster. When she was finally finished, we came together for a series of long kisses and much intimate fondling. I couldn't get enough of her slightly larger breasts and I kissed them, tongued the nipples and hefted them in my hands for a while. On my knees, I licked at that smooth pussy and parted her lips to search inside. She tasted as wonderful as I remembered. More importantly, the drying effects of her soapy washing had already been overcome by abundant amounts of juices from her vagina walls. I had her dancing around on my fingers a moment later. We decided to get out of the shower—I think just before we wrinkled up like two prunes. Kissing and hugging, we used huge, fluffy towels to pat each other dry and then dried each other's hair. I drew her into my arms for one long, steamy kiss before we walked, naked as the day we were born back into the bedroom. On the way, I turned down the rheostat control until the two lamps were putting out a dim glow. When we got there, I pressed Sherrie down on her back at the side of the bed and spread her legs wide apart. I got down between her knees and began to kiss her inner thighs from knee to groin. I loved to do this. I've heard of men who didn't like to make love to her woman orally, but I wasn't one of them. I loved to see my woman wriggling uncontrollable across the bed, begging me to stop—and in the next breath pleading for more. Tonight, though, Sherrie wanted very little of this. "Honey," she urged, "come up here. I need you in me," she begged. I kept on licking at her inner labia, flicking my tongue across the little flap of flesh that hid her clitoris but she began backing away, moving until she was in the middle of the king sized bed. She grabbed my wrists and pulled me up and onto her, bringing my head down so she could press her lips tightly to mine. I moved to the side so I could slip my right middle finger inside her. She was sopping wet; I could feel the heat surging up from her vagina. She whimpered, then moaned deep in her throat as we kissed. She pulled back, struggling to breath. "Take me," she whispered. "Honey, I need you…please take me." My fingers continued to probe deep inside her. She was too near a climax for me to stop. I wanted to see her cum while my fingers massaged her G-spot. It had been too long. I needed to give her this pleasure. "Nooooooo," she moaned. "Ronnie…please…I want you inside me first…please, honey." Resting on my elbow for a moment, I struggled to get my own breath back. In my mind, I listened to the echo of what she had been saying. She wanted me to "take her" and it sounded as if I needed to do something different than the way I liked to make love. Abruptly, I knew this was as important to her as the ritual-filled shower we'd just taken. Sherrie wanted me to take her, to possess her. She needed me to make her my woman again. It struck a chord with me—maybe, there was a need for that in me too. Supporting myself on my left hand and my knees, I took my cock in my right hand and worked it around her slit for a minute to coat it with her own juices. Slipping it a little inside her vagina, I transferred my weight to my elbows and knees. When I was in a stable position, I drove my penis inside her in one long, steady thrust. I didn't stop until I felt the tip of my cock touch her cervix with a gentle bump. Sherrie groaned the whole time I was plunging deep inside her. When I bottomed out, she crooned soft words of love in my ear, begging me to love her. I answered, telling her I loved her more than life itself. Sherrie didn't reply directly to what I said to her; I doubt that she could have, but I know she heard them on some level. We found a rhythm quickly, though we'd been apart for so long. She began to rock her hips from side to side, then humping up to meet my downstrokes. In a short time, the hours we'd spent together this evening all came to a culmination. Sherrie began begging me to go faster and I redoubled my efforts until I felt a slow, but relentless flood building inside my groin. The lava flowed upward, mixing with other fluids until I could feel it opening, spreading the fleshy tubes in my penis. I tried to stop it. When I couldn't, I tried to slow it down, but it had been too long coming. When I spewed my first splash of semen inside her, I felt Sherrie jerk. Her hips worked frantically at me for a couple of seconds and then she clamped her fingers on the backside of my arms and threw her legs around my waist, tightening her grip in both places until I couldn't move. I strained to push my penis just a tiny bit deeper inside her. A second eruption of cum spurted inside her. Sherrie bucked one final time and froze. Her head was thrown back. Her face was twisted in the agonizing pleasure of orgasm. I gave her one another spurt of sperm laden juice and a small one followed; then I was spent. Resting on shaky elbows and knees, I dragged in huge lungfuls of air. Sherrie was doing the same thing. The thighs that had held me tight against her relaxed and allowed me to move slightly, to adjust my position and rest. Gradually our breathing slowed to something approaching normal. I wondered if there was anything more that needed to be formalized within the framework of the ritualistic coupling we'd just completed. I didn't know about that, but there was something I wanted to tell her. "Sherrie," I said softly, "you're my woman and I'll never let you go again, ever." She started crying almost immediately, but they were happy tears. While they flowed, she planted little butterfly kisses on my face, my chest, anything she could reach. "I promise, darling, I'll never hurt you again. I'll die first, honey," she sobbed, "I will." After a time, we made love again—I'd never pulled out of her; she wouldn't let me. This time we wanted it to last. We talked to each other, whispering little endearments to each other between kisses. When we climaxed this time, it was a softer, but strangely equally satisfying orgasm for each of us. ******** "Are we going too fast?" I asked her. I was stretched out beside her, facing her on the same pillow while we touched and caressed each other with slow, tender strokes. She giggled. "I don't think so. It's been four years, eight months, two weeks, and…a few days since we did anything like this," she said. "Wow," I replied, "you've got the timing down that exact?" I paused for a moment. "Hey, does that mean I'm going to have to remember another anniversary or something?" I was being facetious and she knew it. But she changed the humor into something else. "No, baby," this is the only anniversary you'll need to remember from now on," she said softly. "Just today…tonight." I rolled up on my elbow to find her lips and kiss her. "I'll write it in my memory with indelible ink," I promised. We kissed again. Then she giggled. I drew back. "Don't you remember," she asked in an amused, but warm tone, "you made love to me just three weeks after we met?" I sighed. I did remember that. I'd known at that moment that I was the luckiest man alive. "Uh huh," I answered, "and a month and a half after that, you moved in with me…after making me throw most of my furniture away," I teased. "Well, most of it was junk," she said tartly. "But your bed was okay," she said thoughtfully. "We got a lot of good use from that, didn't we?" I chuckled, adding it to hers as we laughed together at the memories. "Yeah, we did that," I agreed. We were quiet for a time. "Ron?" she said quietly. "Hmmmm?" Sherrie pulled back until our foreheads no longer quite touched. "Honey…I've said it before but I want to tell you again that I'm so sorry I did those awful things back then and I'm even more sorry that I hurt you so terribly by doing them. I want to make it up to you for all the bad times and I will if you give me the chance...please?" I took my time answering her. She'd said, and done, so many things this evening that required interpretation on several levels and I wasn't sure this wasn't one of them. When I didn't answer, she started in again. "Honey, please…I love you so much I can't breathe sometimes," she said passionately. "Please…please forgive me for what I did. I don't think I can go on if you leave me…please, darling." She pulled my head to her breast and kissed the top of my head. Her arms were desperately tight around my neck. "Shhhhhhh," I whispered. I made my voice soft and gentle and stroked her shoulders and back. She was in a bad place but I thought I knew how I could bring her out. "Sherrie, darling," I said tenderly, "I've been needing to tell you something for a couple weeks and I ought to kick my own ass for not getting it out before tonight." I took a deep breath. Sherrie watched my face, half fearfully, it seemed. This needed to end now. "Honey, I forgave you for what you did a while back. I'll never forget it, but it's no longer something that is front and center in my mind; it's off to the side, tucked way behind a lot of other things." I rolled onto my back, my left shoulder was well on its way to a full recovery, but it was still possible to overstrain it. Sherrie followed me, her left leg thrown over my hips and her chin coming to rest on my chest as she stared into my eyes. "I know," I said, "saying that sounds awfully arrogant…like I'm bestowing some fantastic, wonderful gift on you…but I don't know any other words except "I forgive you." It quit hurting somewhere along the way. I'm not sure exactly when, but I know it was gone before I went to Afghanistan. Actually, it had to be gone long before that, because Karen had it figured before then that you were still on my mind." I stopped for a moment, afraid the mention of the woman I'd had a long-standing relationship with would upset Sherrie. There was no reaction I could detect, so I continued. "I love you Sherrie," I told her. "Whether it's arrogant or not, I forgave you long before I saw you in that delicatessen a couple months ago. After I did see you, I tried to take it slow, but I haven't really been in control of myself since. Can you accept that, honey?" She nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. "I will make it up to you," she said. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you." She kissed my chest, putting her lips down deliberately and kissing each bit of my flesh as if it were the most important thing she'd ever done. I touched her face, urging her to face me again. "Honey…you can't make it up to me," I said. "Don't you see? All that happened in a marriage that was over long ago. We aren't the same people who got divorced back then. If you try to keep on making it up to me, you'll wind up hating me for letting it dominate you so much. And I don't want you to hate me, darling." I thought furiously, trying to find a way to show her how I felt. Sherrie had been working on various bits of symbolism all night long and she needed one more. I felt the faint tugging of a memory…something to do with the delicatessen I'd just spoken of. Then I had it—not the delicatessen…it was at Denny's that she'd spoken of this. "Honey…where's your purse?" The energy I put into the question, as much as the content, caught her attention. She blinked, wondering what I could thinking of. "It's…it's downstairs…on the couch, I think," she said hesitantly. "Good," I said. I was sure I had it now. I scooted my body from beneath hers and stood beside the bed. "Come on," I told her, taking her hand and pulling her up. We got to the doorway before she balked. "Ron! We're stark naked. What if people see…?" I laughed. I thought all the drapes were closed tight downstairs but I really didn't care. "Screw 'em," I said shortly. "Let them watch…they'll just have to get used to it," I said, giving her my best leer. She giggled and released her hold on the doorframe. "Okay, honey," she said. We stole downstairs hand in hand. I touched a control that turned on a floor lamp. I lit the living room, but only dimly. "Sherrie…honey," I said slowly. "You have that picture in your purse…the one you told me you always carried when we were at Denny's?" Her face fell. She'd been excited, hopeful. It must have seemed like I was reverting to a time when I'd used the picture to beat her up pretty badly. I shook my head and smiled affectionately at her. "Trust me, honey," I said gently. "Just get the picture, okay?" While she dug into her purse, I made my way to the fireplace, tossed three fire-starter "logs" inside it, and lit them with a long match from the container on the mantle. The imitation wood logs caught immediately and flared brightly. I stood and walked back to my Sherrie. She had the photo in her right hand but she'd forgotten all about it. She loved fireplaces and the fire, so low it barely penetrated the dimness of the room, had her full attention. "Honey," I said, stepping up to her and gathering her in my arms. "I forgave you long ago, but now…you have to forgive yourself too, okay?" She looked at me questioningly. "Go ahead," I said, releasing her. "You need to put this behind you as much as I needed to. We can't move forward until you're willing to let all this slide away into some place where it won't hurt us…you and me…where it won't drag us backwards…you see?" I pulled back a step. "You have to make a choice, honey…throw that picture into the fire and let the pain and hurt die with it. If you don't, it's going to destroy everything we try to do for the rest of our lives." She stood there, her nakedness forgotten for the moment. She looked at me intently, her eyes flicking rapidly from one point on my face to another as if she was trying to find some deception there. "Are you sure, Ron?" she said in a quiet, firm voice. "You want us to start over as if it never happened…that I never did something so incredibly stupid and cruel that hurt you so badly you couldn't live with it? Are you sure you want that? Because I'll do what I said. I'll live the rest of my life trying to make it up to you. It won't bother me. I'll do it gladly." She might have added more but she saw me shaking my head. "No…we can't pretend it never happened," I said slowly. "Neither of us can ever forget it, but it can be just a…a reminder of what we can never allow to happen again…okay? What you can do is let go of the hard edge of guilt I know you're still feeling. Let it go before it turns into a hatred that would turn you against me, honey." I pulled her tight against me again and kissed her hard. Her eyes were closed so I kissed them too. "Sherrie," I said in a low voice, "I did forgive you a long time ago. It's time for you to forgive yourself, okay, honey?" She opened her eyes and looked up at me for a long moment, still trying to decide. "I want you to forgive yourself, honey," I said finally, "for us?" She tilted her face up and kissed my lips hard and fast. Then Sherrie twisted around in my arms and marched to the fireplace. She tossed the picture atop the log that was blazing hottest. She watched it for a minute, then turned and came back to me. My arms were already spread wide to enfold her and bring her back to me. She began crying and cried for a long time that night, but the tears were a purging of the poisons that had been building for so long. When she woke the next morning, I had my woman back—one who would walk beside me rather than a pace behind. Good people can only hate the things they've done and hate themselves for so long until the venom consumes them. Letting go of the bitter self-reproach was the final bit of the cleansing Sherrie began with the shower. It hadn't been perfect—I'm sure a rational man could find missteps and incongruities in our private little ceremony. I could only wonder that we had managed to work our way through it as well as we had. ******** In the morning, we took another shower together. We washed each other's bodies, but not with the ceremonial intensity of last night. This was a lazier, more sensuous experience. After a while, Sherrie tossed the well-used bar of soap aside, giving up the pretense of bathing. Her arms went around my neck and she kissed me urgently. Backing up against the wall opposite the showerhead, she pulled me tight against her and reached between us to guide my cock inside her. We fucked slowly for a long while, until we couldn't stave off our climaxes any longer. Sherrie had a screaming orgasm, bucking her hips off the wall to meet my thrusts and mashing our groins together. When it ended, she slid off my cock with an exhausted smile. I thought to turn around to wash myself, but she held me tight. After a while, she got her wind back but she wasn't about to let me go. She loosened her grip just enough to pull back and look me in the eyes. She smiled secretively. "I…uh…have another surprise for you," she said hesitantly, "if you want." I laughed Separate Lives Pt. 03 "My God, woman," I said happily, "after last night's big surprise and all the things we're going to explore…are you sure there's anything left to surprise me with?" She stuck out her tongue, then got serious. "Well, I've got one for here, for when it's just us together like last night. But there's another one that is…a little more complicated." She stopped for a moment, and then shook off whatever had briefly clouded her facial expression. "I'll tell you later, but it's a surprise I hope you'll like…but it's not like this one," she said. There was an impish look on her face; her eyes were sparkling. She took my cock in her hand and began stroking it gently, looking at it closely, as if seeing it for the first time. Glancing up at me, she reached under my penis to cup my scrotum in her left hand. She massaged it gently, manipulating it in her warm hand. "I'm not going to be very good at this," she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. "One of the girls at work has been telling me how to do it but I only have a…mmmmmm, a plastic thing and some bananas, sometimes to practice with…so don't be mad if I don't do it real good, okay?" I didn't know how to answer that, and she wasn't waiting for a reply anyway. Without another word, she dropped to her knees and took me into her mouth. Sherrie had not been stingy about giving me oral sex when we were married, but she'd always done it in the dark or in such dimness I never saw anything. Additionally, she'd done it laying her head on my stomach and looking away from me. I'd treasured the few exceptions, but they were, well…exceptions. This was a whole other thing. Sherrie had the mushroom-shaped head of my cock well inside her mouth and her tongue was slathering all around it, teasing the sensitive underside and rasping around and over the glans. Taking a deep breath, she took more of me into her mouth before tightening her lips around my shaft. I could feel her tongue sliding back and forth on the underside of my cock; she began to swivel her head from side to side for a different sensation. After coming hard, I'd been only half-hard. It took only seconds of this kind of attention to make me hard as a steel bar. I watched my cock slide in and out of her mouth as she began bobbing her head up and down. Most amazingly, every time she came up, she looked up to see if she could catch my eyes. She'd never done that before. She took me deeper, gagging slightly at first but working steadily at swallowing more every time she eased back to get used to my bulk. A few moments later, the end of my cock was well down her throat; she was breathing air filtered through my pubic hair. Bobbing her head, she would let me slide nearly all the way out, then slide her mouth smoothly down the whole length of my cock. I couldn't take too much of that. That, on top of the visual stimulation of watching my woman do this for me, had me ready to cum in just minutes. "Sherrie," I choked out. "Honey, I'm going to cum…" She just looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes and refused to come off my cock. It was impossible for her lips to do anything expressive, stretched as they were around my shaft, but I would have sworn she smiled at me. My haunches were clinched tight; the muscles in my abdomen were stretched tight as steel cables and my legs were trembling as they coped with the strain of keeping my body balanced and upright. I could feel my scrotum draw up. My balls swelled, then contracted, sending a river of sperm along canals that themselves began to constrict in waves, pushing my cum on. Then it was time. Liquid fire was flooding through my cock, about to spew out the end. The first gush of cum hit the back of her throat when she was on an upstroke. She looked surprised, but brought her head right back down on me. That caused another eruption of sperm and fluid. Her nosed bumped against my lower belly; all I could see of her was the top of her head. My hips jerked this time spasmodically; I'd been trying not to, but I was no longer in total control of my lower body. A third rush of cum, this one more of a flow than an eruption, poured out of the slit in the end of my cock to be deposited on her tongue. I watched as she played with it, teasing and tasting it. I couldn't help it. A fourth spray of cum spewed out to coat her lips. She licked at it, gathering it together with what she already had there—she showed me what she had with an open mouth—and then she swallowed the whole sticky mass. A few droplets dribbled from the slit in my glans and Sherrie promptly licked them away. I sagged, my knees unable to keep me upright. A grinning Sherrie stood and wrapped her arms around me. I kissed the top of her head, touching her cheek to bring her lips up to mine. With her lips still slimy with my come, she kissed me hard and demandingly. Our tongues flicked at each other, twining around each other in a deep, completely satisfying kiss. "I'd forgotten you don't mind tasting yourself on me," she said softly. "Most of the girls at work say their men won't do that." I laughed; I was recovering slowly. "Well, it's always seemed to me that if I expect you to take my semen in your mouth, then I shouldn't be that shy about it myself," I told her. "Besides, you don't seem to mind it when I kiss you after I've been lapping at that cute little pussy of yours…turnabout is fair play, right?" She nodded, her eyes bright with an impish glee. "I think we taste good together," she said contentedly. "Don't you?" I had to agree. After a while, we had to leave off the kissing for a badly needed oxygen break. "You know," I said tentatively, "you don't have to do that for me…I love it…but you don't have to do it." She leaned in for another quick kiss. "I know that," she said softly, "but I wanted to do it for my man." What could I do? I hauled her in tight for another round of kisses. "Was it…okay?" she asked, at length. "My first…blowjob?" I snorted. "It was a whole heck of a lot more than "okay," honey," I said enthusiastically. "Marianne said you would like it," Sherrie said in a pleased tone. "And I know I'll get better…it was fun," she said in a faintly surprised voice. "I forgot some things…but it'll be fun to do more things for you later on, right?" "Oh, heck yeah," I said happily. "Marianne was right," I added. I frowned a little; she canted her head to one side, concerned that something was wrong. "Was it Marianne who talked to you about…uh…trying some anal…exploring?" I asked. She nodded, blushing. "And she talked about other things too?" She blushed deeper but her eyes never wavered. She didn't nod this time, but she didn't have to. I sighed dramatically. "I'm going to have to find some way to thank Marianne for all her…help," I said thoughtfully. "Do you think it would be all right if I sent Marianne a truckload of roses?" After a brief moment of shock, Sherrie slapped my chest in mock exasperation. "A dozen, long stemmed, with a nice card will be quite enough," she said playfully. We got out fresh towels and dried each other off. It was getting late and we had to be at Melissa and Cal's house for a barbeque starting sometime around 1:00. As we walked back into the bedroom, something she'd said earlier came back to me. "Hmmmmm…uh…honey?" I asked her, not exactly sure how to approach her on this. "Did you say you had only practiced blowjobs with some bananas and a…plastic thing?" She was facing away but I saw the blush rush up the side of her neck. "Yeah…" she said slowly. "You have a dildo?" She nodded. "How about a vibrator?" Her blush deepened; her ears were almost glowing. I grinned at her. "Well…uh…you know that list of things we were getting together last night about things we'd not done that we should have?" She nodded…she gave me a little smile of anticipation. "Well, let's add "toys" to the list," I said. "I want to watch you, and help you play with them," I added. She was still red-faced, but she was getting used to talking about things she never would have before. "Can I watch you…you know…do yourself…sometime?" she asked softly. I was a little startled. She was coming out of her shyness, if that's what it had been, very nicely…but she hadn't made it all the way just yet. She couldn't talk about some things yet. I grinned. "My darling woman, it would be my pleasure," I told her as I dramatically bowed low to her. She giggled, then got serious. She was trying to fix her hair. "My hair is such a mess," she said grumpily. I laughed. "Last night was your idea, lover," I reminded her. She looked at me sharply but I kept a grin on my face and she couldn't get mad at me. She was too honest for that. Finally, she chuckled too. "I know…but that doesn't help me with this!" She was trying to comb out a tangled mass of her brunette locks. "Honey," I said slowly. I wasn't sure if my suggestions were going to be appreciated here. "Why don't you put it up in a ponytail or something like that?" She quit trying to coax it into some kind of shape and considered what I'd asked. "I'm not sixteen any more," she said reflectively. I just shrugged my shoulders. "It's up to you, darling," I said, looking around for my car keys. "I think it would look good on you, though," I tossed out as an offhand comment. She looked at me for a long moment. Then she began to brush her hair out, holding it at the back of her head where a clip would gather a ponytail together. It's a fine compliment to a man when his woman wears her hair in a way he likes. I walked over and took the brush away from her and began brushing her long hair myself. I wasn't an expert at it, but I was willing. After a while, I found the right amount of pressure and just how to hold her hair in place at the top in one hand while brushing down hard with the other to painlessly remove tangles and knots. Ten minutes into it, Sherrie was completely relaxed and her eyes closed peacefully. In another ten minutes, we were both letting this drift into an even more intensive foreplay, but we had places to go. Some men, I hear, wouldn't have known what we were doing was a part of foreplay. I felt sorry for them. Regretfully, we were committed to Melissa and Cal's for the afternoon. I did remember one more thing from the night before. "Honey, you said you had a surprise for me that wasn't anything to do with us…uh, well…making love or having sex…I think that's what you meant, right? "Uh huh," she said slowly. She took a deep breath. "Come sit on the bed with me," she said. Her face had a small worried expression all over it. My forehead suddenly collected a full set of wrinkles. The ringing of a phone broke our concentration. "Do we have to answer that?" Sherrie asked plaintively. I shook my head no. It rang again. "Shit," she spat out. My eyes widened. Sherrie almost never used swear words. The phone went off a third time. Sherrie took a deep breath and let it out. "I guess you might as well answer it," she said resignedly. "Ahhhh…honey," I replied delicately, "it's your cell phone." She rolled her eyes up in embarrassment. I watched her retrieve it from her dress pocket. "Hello? Oh, hi, Melissa," she said, looking up at me and smiling. "Uh…yeah, I am…uh huh…we're both very happy, thank you very much…" It seemed to me the conversation was going to be a lengthy one so I disconnected my brain and went about getting my watch and transferring my wallet, keys, and other stuff from the pants I'd worn last night into the pair of blue jeans I was wearing today. At the last minute, I had a thought. Checking to see if Sherrie was watching, I went to my top bureau drawer and searched to find the tiny box I knew was there. Finding it, I checked the content to make sure they were all right and shoved the container into my front pocket. I was ready to go. "Okay," Sherrie said into the phone, "we'll be there in a little bit…bye." "Checking up on you?" I asked teasingly. She nodded. "I really should have called last night to let them know I wasn't…uh…going to make it home last night but a certain somebody had me tied up in knots all night long," she said cheerfully. I sniffed, holding my head high as if insulted. She didn't buy it. She stuck out her tongue and blew me a raspberry. "Ready to go?" I asked. She was, and we went. We stopped at her apartment so she could get a change of clothes. She was just going to go get some jeans she could change into over at Melissa's house, she said. She wouldn't be a minute. Don't bother coming in and don't turn the engine off. The air conditioning would take too long to get going again and it was too hot. So, I sat there. She was, in fact, gone for three and a half minutes. I was beginning to get irked at this business of her two "roommates" being an obstacle so huge I couldn't step inside her apartment. I just wasn't sure how to approach the problem. I wasn't going to let it go too very much longer though. When Sherrie came out, she tossed a small overnight bag in the back seat and hung a pair of jeans and blouse on the hook above the door. I saw her also stuffing a sheaf of papers into her purse but she didn't say anything about them. A few minutes into the drive, I started to ask her again about the surprise but a small Honda ran past us and darted into my lane just ahead. I had to break hard and still just barely missed killing four high school students. Their white faces as I pulled around them told me they'd been scared into safe driving for at least a little while. Anyway, the sudden shock to Sherrie and my emotions drove the topic of her surprises completely out of my mind. ******** The closer we got to Melissa's, though, the more restless Sherrie got. She was checking out every control on her door and the dash with fingers that weren't obeying her brain very well. After finding the seat adjustment buttons, she changed her seat's position ten times in the nine-mile trip. By the time we pulled up outside, she was a nervous wreck. I turned to her and looked at her white face. She swallowed hard. "Ron, honey," she said uncertainly. "You know that surprise I've been telling you I need to talk to you about?" I nodded. "Well, there are actually two surprises for you in the house." She took a deep breath. "Good!" I said quickly, smiling at her and hoping a smile was appropriate. "Let's go see my surprises." I got out of the SUV and Sherrie got out on her side. We met on the sidewalk beside the passenger side door. "Ron!" she said sharply. She caught my arm and turned me to face her. "Ron…honey, I want you to understand these are your surprises, okay? You have to believe me. They're yours! Will you remember that, darling?" Sherrie was desperately trying to tell me something that she wasn't telling me but, unlike last night, I couldn't decipher what it was. She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me tight against her as if she was afraid I was going to run away. "Honey…" I said softly. "I believe you, okay? I don't know what's got you so upset but I just won't believe you would do anything to hurt me, all right?" She kissed me, her lips firm and demanding on mine. Then she leaned back to look at my face closely. Her body relaxed. She composed herself, leaning her forehead against my chest for a moment, and then gave me a warm smile. "I'm acting like a schoolgirl," she said a little more calmly. "I get myself so worked up, sometimes. I think you're going to like these surprises anyway, knowing you." She backed away and brushed at the corners of her eyes with a tissue she produced from nowhere. We walked up the sidewalk to the front door holding hands. Melissa met us at the door. She'd obviously seen us outside through the big picture window. "So," she said after greeting us both with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Today's the big day, huh?" Sherrie nodded and glanced up at me to reassure herself about something. I was getting impatient but I held it in. Too many people seemed to know what this was all about and it was getting irksome that I did not. Melissa looked me dead in the eyes and then gave me a smile as warm and affectionate as any I've ever seen on anyone's face. Melissa turned and gave one of those kinds of yells only a mother could. You know the ones I mean—the ones that can be heard all over the neighborhood, especially by the youngsters she's calling? Yep, them's the ones. "CASSIEEEEEEE…COURTNEY….COME IN THE HOUSE," she called. I was impressed. I'd not heard that volume of voice since Afghanistan when the platoon sergeant of our security detail had had an occasion to make himself heard to a group of Marines a couple hundred yards away. I thought Melissa might have been able to duplicate his shout, or exceed it. I could see the twin blond girls racing toward the house from the backyard. In just a very few seconds, they were through the kitchen door and into the living room. I flashed a grin at Sherrie. I thought these two little girls were something special and I wanted to share that thought with her. She was looking back at me, her face anxious. "UNCLE RONNIE," Courtney shrieked. Cassie's voice was just a beat behind. "MOMMY!" she squealed happily. Both girls raced by me without stopping with Cassie leading. I was a little disappointed. Ordinarily they wanted a hug when I came over and I loved to accommodate them. "MOMMY," Courtney cried when she heard her sister and looked behind me. I was confused. Turning, I caught a glimpse of Melissa staring at me intently and it distracted me for an instant. Then my poor, non-functioning brain caught up with what was going on around me. I whirled around to find Cassie in Sherrie's arms and Courtney hugging Sherrie's left leg…hugging her mother's leg. I know my mouth gaped open. I must have looked like a newly caught big-mouthed bass. I jerked my eyes up to meet Sherrie's. "Surprise…Daddy" she whispered. ******** I stared. Attacking terrorist guerillas in Afghanistan, screaming and firing AK-47s at me, hadn't managed this deep a shock. Then I began to come out of it. Well, I got my mouth closed anyway. It had been so unattractive hanging down like that, you know. "Mommy, why did you call Uncle Ron, 'daddy'?" Cassie asked wonderingly. I looked down at her to find her gazing back at me. "Is Uncle Ron your Daddy?" she asked my ex-wife. Sherrie was looking at me quietly. Her anxiety had fled when her baby daughters had come to her. "No, honey," she said softly. "He's your Daddy." Cassie was playing with the strand of pearls around Sherrie's neck. She stopped and looked at me, then back at her mother in consternation. Sherrie nodded. "Really!" she told her daughter. Cassie turned back to me, twisting around in her mother's arms. "Are you really my Daddy?" she asked in her little girl's voice. The beauty of it brought a tear to my eyes, and I was not a man who cried. I cleared my throat. "I think I must be, sweetheart," I said gently. Cassie looked at me with astonishment on her face. Then she slapped at my forearm with her little hand. I hadn't even realized I was reaching out to her. She wouldn't have been able to otherwise. "Where were you?" she demanded. The single tear in my eye began to multiply quickly but I blinked them away. "It's not your daddy's fault, Cassie. He was a long way off building roads and things," Sherrie said smoothly. "And you don't hit your father, young lady," she scolded. Cassie hung her head and then looked at me. "I'm sorry," she said soulfully. "That's okay, sweetie," I told her. I knew her question had been legitimate; it would have to be answered but not until she was old enough to understand. There was a tug on the left pocket of my blue jeans. Courtney was holding her arms up to me, wanting to be picked up. That did it. My eyes were swimming in tears now. Courtney saw them as I settled her in the crook of my arm.