6 comments/ 76675 views/ 23 favorites Separate Vacation By: sex4u4647 "NO." Jill said firmly. "I will not spend a week roaming those stupid mountains, sleeping in a stupid tent and cooking over a stupid campfire. That's not my idea of a vacation." They were disputing where to spend the next weeks vacation. Ralph was pushing the idea of a camping trip, ruffing it, camping out in the wilderness. Either that or a week at a ski resort in Vermont. Jill's idea of ruffing was a four star motel on the beach and dining in some fine restaurants. She wanted to lounge in the sun, swim in the gulf. Come home with a nice tan. And make love in a soft fluffy king size bed. "We did that 3 years ago and I came home with a sprained ankle, bug bites, thorn bush scratches and poison ivy." She told him. "NEVER AGAIN." "Ah, come on hun, you know I can't swim and hate the sandy beaches. Damn sand gets everywhere." "OK. You can go camping and I'll hit the beach." Jill replied. "You can have your fun and I'll have mine." "Won't be half as much fun alone." "Call a couple of your buds, get one or more of them to go with you. "Won't be as much fun without you. You know I hate sleeping alone." "SORRY!" She smiled. "You can get some other girl to take, just not me!" "Sure, then you can sue my cheating ass for divorce when I get back. RIGHT!" "Not if I had some fun too." Jill laughed at the look on his face. "Got ya with that? Didn't I?" The phone interrupted their conversation. "Hello. Oh hi, hold a sec." Turning to her hubby she asked. "Want to go for dinner with Sally and Mike? There's that new Italian place, supposed to be good. OK?" "Sure, sounds good, better than cooking here, we'll meet them there. Tell her yes." Ralph and Mike worked for the same company and had been friends for several years. Had been best man at each others wedding. Jill and Sally became almost like sisters. Sally was a well stacked 38DD, 5'8".blond shoulder length hair. Was usually the life of the party. loved to flirt with the guys but never went any further than that. Jill wore her dark hair in a short bob, Stood only 5'5", 34C boobs ,but on her small frame they appeared larger. Pretty face with a lovely smile. Both were sexy enough to stop traffic. Ralph and Mike were opposites. Ralph was a ruggedly good looking, 6 ft, crue cut dark hair. While Mike was 5' 9", slim, med brown hair, small mustache. Considered handsome by most women. Fifteen minuets later they greeted their friends, found a table and after ordering starting chatting about different things. Sally asked Jill. "Have you decided about where your going on your vacation? We're not sure about our's yet." "That's our dilemma."Ralph replied."Jill wants to go fancy, beach resort, fine dining. I prefer hiking in the wild or skiing down a mountain slope." "No contest there." Sally quipped. "I love to ski, haven't been in years. You wanna trade husbands for a week?" She asked Jill. "Sure. If it get's me out of the cold and on to a sandy beach in a bikini." Jill laughed. "I'd love to see you in a bikini." Mike told her. "In your dreams, you pervert." Sally admonished him as she lightly slapped his wrist. "Hey, that really does sound like a simple solution." Ralph said. "Jill and Mike can go have their fun on the beach and Sally and I can go skiing in the mountains." They all had a chuckle at that last exchange. Agreeing verbally that it was a silly idea. But there was a slight twinge in the gut of all four. Giving them all something to think about. Changing the subject to other mundane items, they soon said their goodnights and started to their respective homes. Laying in bed later Jill cuddled close to Ralph and reached for his semi hard cock. Pressing her titties to his side. She asked. "Hun? I was thinking. Would you really take Sally skiing for a week and allow me go to the beach with Mike?" "Sounds crazy, but that would solve a big problem." "Yea, sure but create a hell of a lot more. Could you be trusted to keep your hands off Sally's big tits for a whole week?" "How about you?" Ralph countered. "You 've always had a bit of a thing for Mike. You looking maybe for fun and games on the beach or at the hotel in a big bed? "Thinking about it honey. We talked a few times about expanding our sex life. We almost swapped with that couple last year. This might be the chance to do some experimenting. I've often wondered about what it would be like with another man. You often said that you thought Sally was sexy. Wouldn't you like to fuck with her?" "Would love to." Ralph confessed to his wife. " Mike hints that she is good fuckin. And I would love to stick my tongue or cock in her." "OK. You can fuck her if I can fuck with Mike? Deal?" "You serious? You would really want to switch with them?" "What better time than this? Going away separately on vacation with them?" Jill confided. "Bet we both would enjoy sex with a different partner. I want to try it." "Works for me! How do we find out if it happens?" "Whoever gets lucky first calls the other." With thoughts of sexy fun with their friends going through their minds. Jill and Ralph rolled together, he reached for her sensitive titties as she continued moving her hand around his hard cock. Ralph was only six inches long but two inches across. "You want Sally to suck your hard cock like this?" Jill asked, as she lowered her lips to cover his stiff prick. Jill loved to suck her husbands cock and hoped that Mike had a nice cock for her to enjoy. Jill soon pulled Ralph over on top of her naked body, guided his now stiff cock to her eager, sloppy wet pussy. "Fuck me, fuck me lover, pretend I'm Sally and use that nice hard cock in me. Fuck me hard!" Ralph eagerly thrust his stiff cock between her clean shaven lips as they parted for him. " Yea, Sally, take my cock. I've always wanted to screw you , now take my cock." Jill, hearing his words, and not wanting to be outdone leaned to his ear and whispered. "That's it Mike use your hard cock in my hot cunt. Wrapping her legs around her hubbies waist she thrust her eager cunt up to meet his plunging, stiff cock. Their love sessions usually took a lot longer but the fantasy of their fucking Sally and Mike took over and they pounded into each other. Both climaxed way too soon. As Ralph's cum exploded deep in to Jill she screamed her climax. Collapsing together they fell into a deep sleep, not to wake till morning. Jill went back to sleep in the morning after Ralph left for work. The ringing phone woke her around nine. It was Sally wanting to know if they had talked any more about what was said last night." Was Ralph really serious about me going to the ski resort and Mike going with you to the beach?" "Yes we talked a little, Not much. (She didn't dare tell about their fantasy fucking.) What do you think about the whole idea?" Jill asked her. " "I think it would be a fun thing to do but could lead to problems. Spending a whole week away at a fancy hotel with a man not your husband could lead to temptations. We are all close friends but I don't know what could happen." Jill said. 'I trust Ralph and I'm sure I could keep control of all Mikes hormones." "I would really love to go skiing and I promise to be good and not seduce Ralph. Is that OK with you?" Jill laughed at her remark. "If you do weaken and decide to fuck him I'll get even with you and screw Mike." "That's no problem." Sally told her."I always promised to not fuck around on him unless he gave me permission and you know Mike. He would never give me permission for something like that." Jill laughingly said. "If you do get his permission go for it. I give you mine right now. If you want to you can fuck Ralph." "Your not serious? Are you? You wouldn't get pissed if Ralph and I did fuck?" "No! Go for it! If you will I will. What better chance to get some strange cock. Think about how much fun we all could have." "I don't know!" Sally quietly said. "That's a lot to think about. Cheating like that." "It's not cheating if we all agree." Jill told her friend. "Think about it and call me!" The next couple days were spent packing and getting ready for their adventure. Sally packed heavy clothing, long johns, sweaters, several pair of gloves. Just as she was closing her suit case Mike threw her a bathing suit. "You might need this for the hot tub. Want a bikini too, or not? " "Sure, I'll take one along. Might give Ralph a cheap thrill." Sally laughed and blushed at the thought of how much of her lush body the bikini exposed. Would it turn Ralph on? She quietly snuck in some sexy lingerie. Mike packed light. Several pair of shorts half dozen shirts, sport coat and slacks, sox and shoes, sandals, 3 swim suits. That afternoon Sally called Jill. "Jill, I think that we both are going to get fucked this week. I hope a lot. The more I thought about it the more I decided it would be fun to trade our husbands for the week." For the next hour they planned the seduction of their men. That night as they crawled into bed Sally leaned over to Mike, kissed him lustfully and whispered to him. "Make love to me honey. I'll miss you this week. Give me enough loving to last till we get back home." For the next hour and half they made passionate love to each other. As they climaxed together Mike whispered to her. "Hope that can hold you for all week and you and Ralph can behave yourselves off the slopes." "Mike!" She exclaimed. "I like Ralph and Jill and would never do anything like that to ruin our friendship." She kissed him and reminded him. "Plus, I know that I need your permission before I can fuck another man, RIGHT." "That's right, and the only way you will get that is if I'm fucking another woman. That's not very likely is it?" "OH. I don't know. Seeing Jill in a bikini on the beach showing her body to you might get you horny." Sally teased. "Bet she looks sexy in a skimpy bikini. Sexy enough to give you a woodie that you would find hard to resist." "You sound as if you would like some things to happen on this trip?" Mike questioned his wife. "You having devious plans?" "No, not really. But it would be fun to flirt a bit. Have a little fun teasing." "You want to have some fun, teasing? Nothing more than that?" Mike asked Sally. "That's all. Just a little flirting and fun." "What happens if I do get a woodie from looking at Jill? Won't do me any good just looking. Tell you what. If and when I sink my cock into Jill's sweet pussy I'll call you on the phone and give you my permission to fuck Ralph." "Mike! You know that could never happen. Not with Jill, she would never fuck around on Ralph. NEVER!" (Smiling to herself Sally thought of the plans Jill and she had made.) Jill packed her bags with Ralph's help. Several thin sun dresses, sexy bras and thongs, and four skimpy bikinis. Each more revealing than the other. "If these don't turn him on nothing will." She told her husband. Ralph picked up Sally and just before they drove away Sally called to Mike. "Don't forget to call me as soon as you can. I'll be waiting to hear from you." "What was that call me, all about?" Ralph asked. "Nothing special, just a bet we made. We're on our way. Let's enjoy our vacation." Hours later they landed in Burlington, Vermont, rented a car and drove to the ski resort. It was mid season, crowded, rooms were scarce and Ralph could only get one room. "We have to share a room but it has two beds. Can I trust you?" he laughed. "As much as I can trust you! I promised Jill that we would be good, so we WILL be good." When Jill and Mike signed the register Jill suggested they save money and get just one room. "I know I can trust you and it makes sense to conserve finances." "OK by me. But you have to behave." Mike chuckled and thought. ("What's going on with this one room? Am I going to get lucky.") "Let's hurry and change. I want to hit the beach." Jill called to Mike as she grabbed her bikini and entered the bathroom, leaving the door partly open. Mike watched as she quickly undressed and sat on the toilet. As she peed she saw him watching. "No peeking, yet." She laughed and pushed the door closed. Mike, flabbergasted, stripped and stepped into his trunks. He had to bend his very stiff 7 inch cock to one side to fit. As Jill came out of the bathroom dressed in a very revealing white bikini she could see the large bulge of Mike's hard cock pushing out in his trunks. "I'll have that in me before the day is over." She thought. Mike adjusted his stiff cock in his trunks as he turned to Jill. "Wow! You look great, that suit could give the pope a hard on." "Never mind him, how about you? You got one yet?" She asked as she stood close to him. "Let's see if it got you stiff." Kneeling down Jill pulled his suit down to his ankles, Mike's hard cock slapped against her lips and she sucked him in her hungry mouth. Her tongue tasting the pre cum seeping from its tip. Totally amazed by her actions, Mike eagerly thrust forward, plunging his stiff prick deep into her throat. Jill gaged a bit, not used to a longer cock than her husbands. Finally setting up a rhythm she proceeded to give Mike the best blow job he ever had. He grasped Jill's head and fucked her mouth. His wife Sally could suck cock great but Jill was as good. Faster and faster till his balls tightened up and he blasted a full load of hot cum. Jill eagerly swallowed most of his spunk. The overflow dripped to her bikini covered tits. Rising she kissed his lips giving him a taste of his own fresh cum. "That's enough for now. Let's hit the beach." "Wait a moment! I'm not complaining about what just happened but WHY?" Mike asked. After Jill explained the swapping husbands idea that she and Sally had planned. Mike quickly agreed to go along. Checking into their room Sally and Ralph unpacked, then went to explore the resort. They made arraignments to rent skis for the rest of the week. Explored the gift shops. Had a light lunch at one of the dining areas. When they discovered the swimming pool and two good size hot tubs Sally said that she was glad that she had brought her swim suit. "I brought mine too." Ralph replied. "Let's get changed and relax in the hot tub for a bit? OK?" Sally and Ralph changed and wearing robes made their way to the hot tubs. Two good sized hot tubs, one open to the outside, the other surrounded by a six foot privacy fence. The one with the fence had a sign. "CLOTHING OPTIONAL" "That sounds interesting." Ralph quipped. "Wanna try that one?" "Not yet! Maybe later I would." Sally blushed. Going to the open tub they removed their robes. As Sally's lush body appeared, almost covered by her tiny bikini, Ralph's cock came to attention. Her 38DD tits held up by a narrow band of hot pink material, so thin that her proud nipples showed through. The small triangle bottom ludely outlined her protruding bald cunt lips. Posing for him she said." Mike thought you might like me in this suit. You like?" "Like it? I Love it. That's better than seeing you naked. Mike know you have that suit?" "Yes. I bought it to wear here, we both want to tease you and Jill a bit. Just a little of friendly fun between good friends." Ralph laughed. "It won't be just friendly fun for Jill. She has plans to fuck Mike this week. What do you think about that?" "I know, we planned this together. I hope she does. Then I can fuck with you. That's what that CALL ME was about. If he fucks her I have his permission to fuck you." They both laughed about the situation. Both hoping Mike makes out very soon with Jill. The white sandy beach was crowded with sun worshipers, men, women and kids of all ages were lounging in the sun or swimming in the refreshing water. Any size or shape could be seen. Most of the women wearing skimpy suits or bikinis, exposing a lot of sexy flesh. Tits overflowing their tops and just barely concealed pussys. The men likewise advertised their goodies to the ladies by wearing skin tight trunks, their half hard pricks bulging nicely. "Look at all the eye candy." Jill said to Mike. "You check out the girls and I'll check on the men." Spreading a blanket they hand in hand went to the water and dove into the small breakers. The water was very refreshing and they were both laughing as they rose. Standing Mike saw that Jill's top was completely transparent when wet, almost as if she was bare. Her protruding nipples showed proudly thru the thin material. Reaching for her he lightly caressed them. Jill again pulled down his trunks, freeing his once more hard cock. Moving her bikini bottoms to one side she wrapped her legs around his waist and with one hand guided his prick to her hungry cunt. They fucked in the cool water. Mike walking slowly around with his hard cock imbedded deep in her pussy for the first time. Jill rode him, partly supported by the water and his strong arms. Loving the feel of a nice stiff cock in her pussy. Not really fucking but just enjoying the feeling of their connection. One couple was in the hot tub. Sally and Ralph joined and made introductions. Sue and Jim, middle aged, both a bit heavy but still nice looking. Sue in a two piece suit, ample tits over flowing her top, about 5'6", short dark hair, nice smile. Jim, in a loose swim suit, grey hair, small mustache. Sue welcomed them with. "Hi, we were just hoping that some body would join us. Needed some one to chat with. You and your wife here to ski or party?" Sally replied. "Mainly to ski and some to party. We're married but not to each other." "OH? That sounds intriguing where're your spouses? "Their in Florida enjoying the sand and beach." Ralph volunteered. " They know you're here together?" "Sure do. We planned separate vacations. They can have their party there and we can enjoy our party here" "Would you object to company or do you want to party alone?" asked Jim. "What?" Sally replied. Sue asked. "He wants to know if you would like to fuck with us? Want to?" Saying that she lowered her top exposing her nice titties. "Why not?" Sally replied and pulled off her bikini, then moved over to Jim holding her tits to his mouth. Settling down on his lap she discovered that he had removed his suit and his stiff cock smoothly entered her bald pussy. Surprised but not disappointed she began to happily ride the first new cock to fill her in years. It felt so good. Ralph stood and started to pull down his swim trunks. Sue beat him to it and as his nice hard prick became exposed her mouth closed over the length of it. Sue had sucked a great many pricks over the years that her and Jim had been married and enjoyed them all. Sally turned to see Ralph fucking Sue's face as she bounced on Joe's stiff member as he sucked on her 38DD tits. (Wish Mike was here to see all this.) She thought. Ralph, totally horny was having trouble holding back his climax. "I'm going to cum, stop. Stop sucking or I'll cum in your mouth. Sue paying no attention to him, kept sucking even harder. With a low moan Ralph shot his load of cum juice to Sue's hungry mouth. She swallowed his gift. "My turn." Sue said as she sat in the edge of the tub spreading her legs wide. "Now you eat me." Sue's pussy lips protruded out from her gapping cunt. The dark pink inner cavity was moist and inviting. Ralph wasted no time before diving his face eagerly to her. His tongue lapping at the sweet moisture of her sex organ. Grasping Ralph's head Sue held him tight to her pussy. She always enjoyed oral sex better than fucking, but both were great fun. Sally had climaxed several times from the eager fucking that Joe had given her. She could feel the growth of his cock as he started to load her cunt. With an extra hard thrust he filled her pussy with his cum. Standing with his cock still impaled, he sat her on the edge of the hot tub. Pulling out his now limber cock he lowered his mouth to her sloppy, cum filled pussy an proceeded to lick her, cleaning up his recently deposited cum. Licking and sucking until all was consumed. Separate Vacation "Wow! That was the first time that's ever been done to me." Sally kissed him, tasting herself on his lips. "I loved it." "Let's continue this in our room." Jill whispered to Mike. "It would be much more comfortable, ok with you?" "Alright with me. Much more private." Adjusting their suits they left the water. Jill's see through suit got a lot of attention from both guys and girls as they crossed the sand, lots of whistles. As she reached the edge of the beach Jill pulled off her top and walked the rest of the way showing her bare tits to all. "I didn't know you were such an exhibitionist, when did you get this way?" Mike asked as they entered their room. "Just on this trip. I'm hot and horny, and I want to get screwed." Jill dropped her bikini bottoms and jumped on the king size bed spreading her legs wide. "Screw me!" Just as fast Mike stripped and dove after her. His face landed between her spread legs as he used his tongue to lick at her bald pussy. Wrapping her legs over his shoulder, pulling him closer she cried. "Eat me you bastard, eat my hot cunt." Mike had brought her to several orgasms when Jill cried. "Fuck me, I want your hard cock inside me. Fuck me!" Moving up he lined his throbbing cock to her eager entrance and jammed in. "That's it. Give me some cock. Fuck me!" Where he was so slow in the water Mike now pounded her sloppy fuck hole. Faster and faster he fucked as she bucked her ass up to greet his hard prick. Finally with a loud primal scream Jill climaxed just as Mike filled her pussy with his spunk. Twenty minuets later Jill stirred. Opening her eyes she realized she had been royally fucked by her best friends husband. (Was it worth it?) "Yes." "Mike, wake up. Time to call Sally and give her permission to fuck Ralph." "You think they waited for us to fuck first? He asked. "Call her and tell her to get busy. I want to hear about it. Wish I could watch, don't you "Got her voice mail. I'll leave a message for her to call back." ("Hello sweetheart. It's your ever lovin husband. Call us when you get a chance. Good news. Love you.") That will get her to call." When Sally and Ralph went back to their room both of their cell phones were blinking. "We've got calls. Mike says it's good news." Sally and Ralph both called their spouses and asked. "What's the word? Are we a go for it?" They put all phones on speaker so all could talk and hear. Jill could hardly wait to say. "YES. Mark and I did it. We had a great fuckin time fuckin. You two now have to catch up." Ralph asked "Where are you? We're in our room in our swim suits." Jill said. "Both of us naked and on the bed. Join us. Get naked too. Hurry up." Sally and Roger stripped off their swim wear and climbed on their bed . "I'm now sitting on Mikes hard cock. Sally do the same to Ralph. Now guide him into your pussy like I'm doing here. NOW let's fuck our men." Connected long distance by telephone the four friends eagerly fucked. Each with the others spouse. 'I can hardly wait till we get back home and can really do this all together for real." Said Sally. STAY TUNED FOR MORE Separate Vacations Author's Note: Although this story is set in my familiar North Florida universe in the recent past and has links to most of my other stories including When We Were Married, it is a complete stand alone piece. I hope the pace and mood of this one represents a break with WWWM, but WWWM 5A should be posting within two to three days. As always, I hope readers enjoy it. ############################ Most of the times the bad things that are coming your way aren't really surprises. Oh, you can tell yourself that you were caught off guard, but if you look back, you can almost always realize there were signs, indications of something bad heading your way. You just didn't want to realize it -- or deal with it. Tiffany and I -- I'm Bruce Davis -- had been married for 9 years when this story occurred, back in 2006. I'd like to say they were perfect years of marital contentment as we raised our two daughters, who were six and eight at the time that our marriage crashed and burned. But they weren't. Like most real marriages, we had our ups and downs. We had gotten married in a perfect storm of lust and young love just after graduating from the University of Florida. We'd met at a fraternity party. I was the frat boy and she the sorority hottie. She likes to tell everybody we dated for two weeks before anything happened. But really.... ########################## We had found an empty room upstairs. It was covered in coats and wraps and other crap, but it was empty. I pushed her in ahead of me and enjoyed the view of her tight ass in a skintight pair of shorts twitching ahead of me. When she turned to face me twin apples caught in a blue pullover attracted my eyes and hands. "Did I say you could do that?" when she came up for breath after another record breaking kiss. "Are you saying I can't?" "I didn't say that. But you're moving awfully fast. I just met you an hour ago. You're going to think I'm the sluttiest tramp in the world." "Oh, God, I hope so," I said as I caught both nipples in my hands and squeezed. She closed her eyes and moaned until I filled her mouth with my tongue again. We went over on the bed and I couldn't believe her small hand was already molded to my cock which was throbbing with every beat of my heart. She pulled back so she could look me in the eye. "I shouldn't do this, Bruce. God knows I want to. I don't know why. I haven't been able to take my eyes off you since I saw you. Do you believe in love at first sight?" I'm not a total idiot so of course I said, "Yes," but then my conscience got to me. "I don't know, Tiffany. It's an easy line for a guy to say, but all I can honestly tell you is that I haven't been able to take my eyes off you. Normally I'd be staring at Delores' tits, but I can't even tell you what she was wearing tonight." She looked down at the nipples popping out through the pullover. "She is so much bigger than me. I really don't have that much up top. Are you sure you wouldn't rather be-" I bent down and bit her right nipple through her fabric and told her honestly, "Right now there isn't anyplace else in the world I'd rather be." That went double fifteen minutes later when my exploding cock was nestled deep inside her pussy which seemed to be running at 135 degrees Fahrenheit. I'd had to work for five minutes to get it in there. She wasn't the tightest pussy in the world, but she had to be right up there in the top 15 or 20. She told me later she wasn't a virgin when we did it, but Jesus, her two lovers must have had cigarette-sized dicks. I thought she was having a fit when I told her I was getting ready to come into my condom, but it just turned out that when she was excited she had very, very intense orgasms. Like eyes-rolling, fingernails embedded in my flesh, teeth buried in my lower lips -- orgasms. I think I really fell in love with her when she went down, pulled my condom off, and started to lick my dick clean. She said she'd never done anything that dirty with her other boyfriends, but she wanted to do it with me. And she liked it. ######################### We dated for two years until I graduated with a degree in English literature and she with a degree in Business Administration. That should have given me a good heads up that this would not be a marriage made in heaven. I liked books and movies and writing and game playing. She was a by-the-numbers business type that loved working deals, figuring how to make money and planning what to do with the money when she got it. Her mother hated me, which I should have expected. But her mother was a head case. She had married a good looking, big dicked salesman type out of college and suffered through ten years of his screwing every pussy that he got within reach of until one day he walked in and told her he was leaving her and eight-year-old Tiffany because he had found the love of his life: a cocktail waitress working at a bar in Orlando. He left Tiffany's mother with a mortgage-laden house, a car that lasted two months before making its way to the junkyard, two strains of sexual diseases, a $5,000 Visa card debt, $20,000 in other assorted debts, and a broken heart. She had bounced around until she found -- eventually -- a position as a secretary which led to a paralegal position at Martin, Devon, Bailey and Bartley in Jacksonville. The lawyers there liked her --so much so that the word I heard was that before she'd been there two years she'd fucked every attorney, aide, investigator and even a few delivery guys. I guess after having been saddled with an asshole who really didn't appreciate her pussy for a decade, finding a whole building full of men who really, really did appreciate her tits and ass did wonders for her ego and temperament. She really wasn't a bad looking woman. But while she fucked and sucked with great abandon, she trusted no one who had their sex organs on the outside of their body. And she'd raised Tiffany to hold the same opinions. Sex was fine. Love was fine. But you keep your own bank account, you have your own money, you keep it so you can walk away at any time and survive on your own without the prick who'd been giving you his prick. I picked up on the lack of trust early on in our dating life, but I understood where her mother was coming from and tried to reassure her that I was a different kind of man. I would never leave Tiffany in the lurch. Didn't matter. Especially when after graduating I decided teaching was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to write. The Great American Novel no less. And I needed time and freedom to do that. So I found myself working at a Blockbuster store in Orange Park, Florida, a little bedroom community south of Jacksonville where both Tiffany and I had grown up. Tiffany, of course, went to work in a real estate development firm that built some of the highest dollar combination golf/country club/yachting properties on the Northeast Florida coast. Through the years she advanced from a junior associate to one of the highest paid people who wasn't an owner. She handled sales, public relations, government relations, investor relations -- relations in general. Old, old, old story. I was still working in a Blockbuster, albeit working my way up to store manager by choice and a regional troubleshooter when hell broke out at any of the Blockbusters within a 50 mile radius of Jacksonville. I had tried to write the Great American Novel nine times. I'd actually finished it once and was up to 123 rejects. I was beginning to be a little dejected. Tiffany was pulling down ten times my monthly salary, in salary alone not even mentioning stock options and other perks, driving a brand new 2006 Lexus, wearing clothes that you had to fly to Atlanta or New York to buy. Despite that, I paid the home mortgage, which alone wiped out 60 percent of my monthly income. I paid the electric, the telephone bill, satellite, etc. Tiffany kindly paid for the gas for every vehicle that she drove, not my 1994 Volkswagen Beetle which was big enough only for me and one passenger so every family trip was made in one of her vehicles -- either the Lexus or her personal Land Rover new Range Rover Sport SUV or a company one she had whenever she wanted it. Why did we live that way? Because there was no money that was 'ours.' Her income and her savings were hers. Always had been from the time we married. We had separate checking and savings accounts. One of the biggest fights we ever had, one that almost wrecked us in the first six months of our marriage, was her insistence that I NOT be on her bank accounts. We almost didn't' get married at all when her mother had one of her asshole boyfriend lawyers draw up a pre-nup that said I couldn't' touch any money she brought into the marriage or made while we were married, but that my income would be joint. Of course, a guppy would have starved on my income, but I drew the line on that. No pre-nups And after a few months the subject just went away. But she wouldn't yield on separate monies for the two of us. And that enraged me. "You don't trust me? You don't fucking trust me? You think I will steal your goddamned money, you miserable bitch." I had been a little upset when she explained to me that I would NEVER be on a joint account with her. Common bills like the house and utilities were my responsibility as husband. Clothing, food, trips, entertainment, the kids' education, all the extras were hers. But her money was hers. She would never try to get on my accounts. It still upset me. "Okay you miserable bitch. I tried. I tried. I honestly tried to live with your crazy ass ideas and your crazy ass mother. I bent over backwards until I broke my back. But this is the end. Go fuck yourself, or better yet go to Martin, Devon, Bailey and Bartley and I'm sure you'll find plenty of hard dicks to fuck you. Your mom will probably share, like the true slut she is." I barely managed to avoid having my brains smashed by a piece of wedding china from one of her mom's rich lawyer boyfriends as I stalked out. She followed me out cursing a blue streak and doing her best to send me to the ER using more china. I was sorely tempted to go back, but I'd never touched her in anger and even while she was royally pissing me off, the trouble was that I still loved her crazy ass. We held out a week. We met at a neutral bar, made some hurtful comments to each other about how childish the other was, and barely made it my car before I was inside her and she was bruising my lips and trying to pull my cock out by the roots with her cunt. We took makeup sex to ridiculous new levels. But I couldn't break her insistence that our money be kept separate. Her money was hers. Always would be. I could see us old and gray together. I'd barely have enough money to buy some gruel for my morning breakfast in the servants quarters outside the big house where Tiffany lived with her mother and our children. So I pinched pennies and the only new clothes I could afford were those that Tiffany bought for me when I had to attend one of her business functions and she didn't want to be embarrassed by my cheap, old clothing. You ask, why the hell did I stick around? I was working my ass off, watching my pennies while my wife had a net worth of well over a million dollars. Actually between two and three million. You didn't hold her in your arms, your dick inside her furnace of a pussy while she screamed at you to fill her up with your seed....actually she said hot cum. You didn't hold her on the nights after a visit with her mother, or on Father's Day, when she buried her head against your chest and her tears couldn't be stopped while she tried to heal the wound her fucking poor excuse of a father had left in her heart. She didn't smile at you in the dunes at St. Augustine Beach as she hit you in the face with a chunk of ice cream and ran shouting at your daughters to get away before the ice cream monster caught them all. She didn't cover your face with kisses when you brought her down in the dunes and your little daughters piled on you to rescue their mother from the ice cream monster. That is a little of what we had. It wasn't perfect. Far from it. And I think I knew deep down that someday it would all come crashing down on my head. We didn't have a marriage in the sense that my mother and father, before he died, would have recognized. We lived together and had a relationship and had kids, but it wasn't permanent. It never could be. And I wondered sometimes if deep down Tiffany knew that. We had a good marriage, in a lot of ways, except that it wasn't a marriage. The world crashed down on my head in June of 2006. Kaitlyn and Kristen ran into the house where I was seated in my office working on my tenth Great American Novel. Tiffany had picked them up from her mother's house and was walking in behind them. "Daddy, daddy, I'm going to go surfing with Uncle Stephen." Eight-year-old Kaitlyn ran up to me and hugged me saying, "And I'm going to learn how to dance the hula. Grandma told me she'd take me to a school on the Big Island where they teach you. We'll be there for a month, so we'll have plenty of time to learn." "Oh," I said, wondering what I'd missed out on. "That sounds like fun. Where are we going?" "Oh, we're going to Hawaii," Kaitlyn said. "I wish you could go too." "What?" "Mommy said you had to work. I wish you could get off and come with us. Mommy is going to be lonely without you there." I looked up at Tiffany and just stared at her but she wouldn't drop her eyes. She wasn't going to be embarrassed. "So we -- that is you and the girls -- are going to Hawaii for a month and I'm staying home to work, dear. Do I understand? When did all this come up?" "Several members of the firm booked a hotel on Oahu and have planned a month worth of activities. We've had a great year and the owners are coming along and helping with the expenses. The girls are out of school and Mom was able to get away from the law firm." "And Uncle Stephen? Would that be Stephen Middleton?" She just stared back at me. "Yes. He decided to take his vacation with us. Us all." "Adjoining rooms? Is he staying in your hotel?" "The same hotel. Yes. We're all staying there. Not adjoining rooms. Try to behave like an adult. It's a group vacation." "Which I'm not a member of?" "The firm is paying a lot of the expenses, but they're not made of money. They're not paying for spouses. Anybody who wants a spouse has to come up with the money to cover them." I leaned back in my swivel chair and told the girls, "Go play. Mommy and I have to talk for a minute. Give me a kiss." They did and when they'd left I said, "Well how much will we have to come up with? And it would have been nice if you'd given me some heads up. I don't know how I'll be able to free up a month away from work." She kept staring at me with an unreadable expression. Looking back, I hope it was guilt. "I don't think you'll have to worry about that. I expect you'll be staying here." I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. "You don't think I'll be going?" She sat down on the edge of my desk and looked down at me. Her hair was cut short and she wore a scoop neck blouse and a blue dress that showed off her fantastic legs. "I had the costs expensed out. It would cost $8,000 for you to come with us. Can you afford that?" I said the words out loud to make sure I hadn't completely lost it. "You're saying I can't go unless I come up with $8,000 of MY money to pay for the trip?" "It's really only fair, Bruce. This is partially business and partially personal. You know the rules we've set up. You should be responsible for your share of the costs." "I thought that YOUR money was for entertainment, family outings and the like. This doesn't qualify?" She finally looked down at her feet, which she was tapping gently on the tiled floor of the office. "Bruce, this is more business than personal, except for the girls, and mother will be there for them." "And don't forget Uncle Stephen. He'll be along to take care of the girls. Is that all he'll be taking care of?" She glared at me. "You jealous asshole. You know there's nothing going on with Stephen. He's just a friend. A good friend. It's nice to be able to talk business sometimes with somebody who-" "Is your equal, Tiffany? Not a clueless loser like your husband? You enjoy his company. Have you found out if his cock is as big as the secretaries say?" Her eyes narrowed? "Where the hell..." "You don't think I ever hear any of the gossip about the guy? I have been to some company outings. I've heard the woman buzzing about him. I know he's gone through most of the secretaries and he's considered hot shit by the married and unmarried women of the company. You ever checked out his equipment?" She would have caught me across the face, but I knew her temper and I've taken karate for 15 years. I caught her hand in mid-air. "You sorry bastard. I've never cheated on you. Although, God knows, why I haven't I couldn't tell you. You want to know why you're not going with us, Bruce? The real reason?" "Enlighten me." "I knew you couldn't come up with $8,000. You know that's pocket change to me. I could pay your way and never even notice it. But why should I? You're my husband. I make $300,000 a year in a bad year. You make barely $40,000. "You're not stupid. You could have gotten a real job, with a real company. Where I wouldn't be ashamed every time somebody asks me what my husband does. A video store manager? For God's sake. I'm ashamed of you, Bruce, and I hate being ashamed of you. "I'm going to leave your ass behind because I want to rub your nose in the fact that you've let me down, and you're letting your daughters down. I want you to develop some balls, go get a decent job and, for God's sake, let this adolescent dream of writing the Great American novel go to hell. "The way it is now, I'm the man in this damned family. I'm the dominant one, and that's not natural." She gave me a look and I knew something bad was coming. "You asked me if Stephen has a dick as big as the girls say. Yeah, he does. I've seen him in a bathing suit and he is hung. God he is hung. "There was a time last summer...on that trip to the beach you didn't take. He caught me behind the dunes. He put my hand on that monster and made me jerk him once or twice. Of course, I slapped his face and tried to dropkick his balls back into his abdomen. He didn't try again. "But, God help me, I wanted to jerk him off. I wanted to suck him off. I wanted to spread my legs and let him spear me with it. Because I like him. And I respect him. "He's a man. He may be an aggressive asshole, but he's a man. If I didn't love you, at least a little bit still, I would have let him take me in the dunes." She stood up and smoothed down her skirt. "I'm not going to fuck him this trip. I don't plan to anyway. I want you to think about that. Because if things don't change, if you don't change, there's going to come a day when he puts my hand on that monster and I won't take it away." I stared at her and knew this day had been a long time coming. We didn't have a marriage. We had a partnership and I wasn't keeping up my end of the bargain. I had known and sensed her waning respect for me. Even our sex wasn't as hot as it had been. How could it? How could a woman be really turned on by a man she didn't respect as a man? I let her walk away and we didn't say another word to each other for the remainder of the day. I worked on my computer until late and she was already asleep when I entered our bedroom. She was up before me the next morning. I found her drinking coffee at a table set on our covered back porch. The house edged some woods and there were days you could see deer from the table. There were none today. I grabbed a cup and sat down beside her. Separate Vacations "Charlotte wants to do Florence and Venice and take a cruise in the Adriatic." "Sounds good. I'll take the butter please." "She doesn't want to go alone, but Andy has no interest in art at all." "No, he doesn't. That's for sure." "You'd probably be bored stiff too." "Yep, I would. Dinner's good—as always." "Thanks. They were just putting the kale out at the market. I couldn't resist. Anyway, Charlotte wants someone to go with her, and I think a sisters' vacation would be just what we need. Our lives have grown apart and I feel like I hardly know her anymore." I turned my eye to the back garden through the sliding glass doors out onto the deck. I didn't want her to see the smile on my face. "I think it's a splendid idea. We used to do separate vacations now and then—and I think it did us both a world of good. Tell Charlotte you'd love to go with her. Two, three weeks?" "Three, I think. The cruise itself is ten days, she says." "Go for it, hon." I continued looking at the azaleas at their peak in the soft hours moving into twilight. Indeed it had been far too long since the last separate vacations. I'd supposedly gone to D.C. on a Smithsonian crawl while she went to London with her sorority sisters from college. And I had gone. But just not right away. Tennis with Samir. A hard-fought battle on a sweltering day where we'd both wound up "skins," and I ultimately lost in the third set because I was looking at his brown, well-muscled torso and his dancer's flexibility more than where the ball was being returned. Then we were fucking in the backseat of my Mercedes sedan at the back edge of the club parking lot, me riding his cock hard, him licking the sweat off my chest and chewing on my nipples. The first weekend of the vacation I found myself in my bed—Judy's and my bed—with Samir, young, virile, and hung, teaching me sexual exhaustion. Then I did go to D.C., Samir in tow, and spent more time sheathing his churning cock at the Key Bridge Marriott than visiting the museums on the mall. I was sore and unable to close my legs when Judy flew back from London—but I was purring like a sleek Persian cat. Best vacation ever. But that was three years ago. Both of us retired now, Judy and I found that there was no reason we couldn't schedule our vacations together. Another chance now. But a pity that Samir went back to Beirut nearly two years ago. I'll have to think. I've never had to look for it before. But it's been a long time. I'm not the young man I once was, although I've done what I could to hold off time. I think the gray hair suits me even better than the chestnut brown—and I may have thickened a bit, but it's not fat. Judy clearly still finds me sexy. She couldn't be hiding her responses in bed, and I've heard her girlfriends talk of their envy of her. Some of them have even been brazen enough to suggest a side sampling to me—when Judy wasn't listening, of course. There's Daren out at Edgeworth. We had our fling before Samir strutted into my life, demanding my full attention. Luscious and exotic and so cocky—with every reason to be so. I'd go out and help Daren hay his fields. When we'd worked up a sweat and were having trouble keeping our eyes off each other stripped to the waist and pumping up our muscles with the lifting of the bales, we'd break open the beer in his barn and he'd lay me on my back on a freshly set bale of hay, wishbone my legs, and feed me with his cock. Daren was older than I was and I liked them younger. But what a monster of a cock. When Samir arrived, Daren and I sort of drifted apart, and we haven't spoken for more than a year now. Is he even at Edgeworth? He spends half his year on Long Island. And I think I read in the papers that he has a new wife. * * * * Judy and Charlotte left on a Monday morning. I drove them to Dulles and stayed around until I knew the plane had lifted off. Then I drove back home, a two-hour drive, and took a nap. Some way to start an unsupervised vacation, I thought, but I'd had to get up in early dark and I wasn't a morning person. I was bushed, feeling my age. I knew this wasn't a good start and that chances were dim I'd actually do anything. But I needed the sleep. I had Oratorio Society practice that evening, and those sessions were always grueling. It was free going for the next several days, though. There was plenty of time to decide what, if anything, I could do to make the time free of Judy memorable. "Hi, you're in good voice tonight, Carson. What do you think of the Haydn?" "Not really my preference, Jean," I answered. "Too many difficult runs that don't have much meaning for me. And thanks for the compliment. Harmonizing with your rich baritone makes me sound better than I'm really capable of alone, I think." I was sitting on the edge of the tenor section, he at the edge of the basses, and I wasn't lying when I said I liked my singing to blend with his voice. When we were singing next to each other and his part weaving in with mine, I found it sexually arousing—raising images of our bodies entwined and working in harmony. I had almost moved away from him when I'd first had that sensation, but it was too enticing. Now I found myself seeking him out to sit next to in these sessions. And, as often as not, when I returned home after an Oratorio practice, I went straight to my bathroom and masturbated the arousing experience away. We had both returned early from our fifteen-minute break between practice sessions and found ourselves sitting alone while other choristers swirled around us, still enjoying their break. He was French, a graduate student at the university. This was his first year with the oratorio society, and he was a real asset to our blend. Tall and dark-haired, but alabaster skin. The complexion of a scholar, but he was well muscled. I knew he played soccer—which he called football—for the university team, and was somewhat of a star in doing it. His hair was long and curly—in fact, all that I could see of his body was covered lightly in curly black hair, contrasting starkly with the whiteness of his skin. His fingers were long and sensuous, and, what had disconcerted me the most, were his long toes, with dark curly hair on them and the top of his feet. He always wore sandals, with no socks. And all of this was what made me want to sit next to him at oratorio society practice—his sexy appearance even more than his voice. His feet in his open sandals were so sexy. I fantasized sucking those toes. Samir had taught me that. I had sucked his toes when I massaged him before we fucked and then he'd suck mine as we were both building up to another fuck. "Will you be joining us at Lucky's after the practice," Jean asked me. Lucky's was where those who lived and breathed the choir gathered after practice. I didn't live and breathe the choir and had never joined them for socializing afterward. "No, I don't think I will." "Have to run home to the wife?" "No. She's off on a three-week art crawl through Italy—with her sister. I'm batching it." "And still no incentive to have a drink with us?" "No. Home to bed. An old man." "No, that's not true. Age has been very kind to you." "You don't have a wife to go home to?" "No. Not even a boyfriend at the moment. I take my chances at the bar after choir practice." His open expression of a boyfriend struck me dumb without knowing what to say next. I was saved by a familiar sound from the center of the room. The conductor was tapping his music stand with his baton, insisting on a resumption of the practice session. I had no time to do more than give Jean a curious look, wondering if there was less behind Jean's comments than it seemed—whether I was just keyed up and looking for a connection too hard. He was French, and they were always on the make in words. Not always in action, though. Jean wasn't looking back at me, though. He was opening his music and giving his attention to the conductor. I spent the rest of the practice looking at his long, hairy toes whenever I could, wondering if the length of his fingers and toes carried on to his other appendages, and also wondering if his chest and legs were as hairy as his arms. I liked a hairy man. Samir had been hirsute. His hair, even darker than Jean's, had been coarse and thick, though. I had enjoyed tonguing him and making swirls of hair on his chest, belly, and in his armpits after we've made vigorous love. Sami had obviously enjoyed that well enough as well to often give me another round of deep-plunging loving. Another tenor asked me a question about whether we were on the right notes during one of the vocal runs on the Haydn right at the end of the practice. When I turned around after consulting with him on that, Jean was gone. I was so keyed up now that I couldn't go home and go right to bed. Instead I drove from practice to Water Street, parked in a lot there, and walked the two blocks to Club 216. I hadn't been there often—and not since Judy had retired. When I'd gone before, I went in the afternoons while she was safely tucked away at her office. It's where I met Samir. It's where, tonight, I hoped I'd find some relief to start off my vacation. It didn't have to be someone long term or even for the length of the vacation. I was so keyed up tonight that I'd settle for a quick suck and fuck in one of the club's back rooms with someone I'd never see again. It would be nice if he were just young and had some body hair. It was a busy night—a lot of movement around the big, dimly lit, smoke-filled room, with the only strong light being from the spot lights on the dance floor, where couples were clutch dancing, man with man, woman with woman. The tables surrounding the floor were similarly segregated, and as far as I could determine, a lot of testing out and shopping was going on. There were some gray hairs, but not many. And once again I felt too old doing this. I headed straight for the bar and sat on a stool and ordered a beer. My eyes went to the door to the corridor off to the back of the club, where a beaded curtain separated the world of the shoppers from that of those who had settled on a deal. I knew what went on back there. It hadn't been that many years ago that I had gone with men to the cubicles back there and been transported to paradise—if only for twenty minutes. Just beyond the beaded curtain, I could make out the silhouettes of a long and lean couple—young men—both in black leather. They were embracing, one having the other backed against the wall. "Hi. Haven't seen you here before." He was young. Blond, his head hair long and with downy hair on the forearm he had laying on the bar next to my beer bottle. If he had a pattern of hair on his chest too . . . "I've been here, but not for some time." "Been out of commission?" "A long-term relationship." I didn't think he needed to know it was with a woman. "Ah, so, into long-term relationships?" I was listening to him but looking at the couple beyond the beaded curtain. The man pushing the other against the wall was dominating. A shirt was unbuttoned and open and a face was buried in a bare chest. A leg of the man against the wall was already raised and hooked on a hip of the other. "Not necessarily," I answered. "Not tonight, at least." "Interested in something?" "Maybe. The night is young, though." "And so am I. Here," he continued, as he took my hand and brought it to his crotch. "Young and hung . . . and available." The couple beyond the beaded curtain were doing it now. As they were kissing. Legs were wrapped around hips and hooked at ankle. A butt was thumping against the wall, being pumped in a steady rhythm by the pelvis of the dominator. Fucking. It's what I wanted to be doing. I let my hand linger on his crotch, measuring him. He was hard. Hard for me. It was an exhilarating feeling. The blond leaned his lips to my ear. "Thirty dollars for a suck, either or both, fifty dollars for a fuck. I do the fucking. Seventy-five for the full service." I dropped my hand from his crotch, in shock. It wasn't that I didn't have the money. It was the shock of the assumption I'd pay for it. I'd never paid for it before in my life. It was deflating. I'd keyed myself up so high, and just like that, I had tumbled down. "Uh. Thanks, but no thanks," I said. I turned and took a swig of my beer. And when I turned back he was gone. I could see that the couple beyond the beaded curtain were also gone—probably farther back in the bowels of the club, into one of the cubicles, to finish off with more privacy. In my mind I tried to follow them in what they were doing back there—legs more spread now, cock digging deeper, a steady thumping rhythm established—but that exercise only depressed me. The atmosphere in the club was suddenly ugly and harsh. I felt like everyone was looking at me, staring at my gray head, wondering what the hell I was doing there. I wondered that myself too. I tossed down the money for the beer, not even finishing it. Lowering my head and not making eye contact with anyone around me, I walked briskly out of the club and to my car. When I reached home I stripped and went into the shower and, under a stream of water as hot as I could bear it, beat off to fantasies of what might have been. And then I climbed into bed and slept the sleep of an aging, forgotten man. * * * * It took me until Thursday to build up the courage to venture out again in search of the thrill that earlier separate vacations had brought me. The day was glorious, and I drove toward the mountains to one of the wineries that dotted the foothills of the Blue Ridge. The excuse was that I had a quarterly order of wine club bottles to pick up. The real reason was that Edgeworth was just seven miles past the winery, on the same road. I figured that if I got to the winery and chickened out on going farther, I could always tell myself that all along I'd only intended to come out as far as there to pick up my order of wine. After I had gotten the wine, though, I turned the nose of the Mercedes farther west rather than back east, toward the town. After pulling into Edgeworth's farm lane and driving several hundred yards, the barn came into view and then, over a rise, the antebellum house with its white columns a football field's distance beyond the barn. There were three cars parked between the two structures. Daren's old Bentley was there, a sign that he was home. He insisted that he drive that to Long Island to have with him even if it needed to take several service garage stops en route. Beside that were a sleek new Jaguar sedan and a BMW roadster. I parked the Mercedes beside those and walked up to the house. "Yes, Daren is here. But he and my nephew are out riding. Can I tell him who called." "Carson. Carson Daniels. I'm sorry to have disturbed you." "Ah, Mr. Daniels. Yes, I've read your books . . . and Daren has spoken of you. He will be sorry he's missed you." I looked hard at the woman. She was anywhere between her early and late fifties, depending on how much work she'd had done on her. A statuesque blond, no doubt a model at one time. Tall, angular, New York chic. And with an English accent that I couldn't tell was affected or not. Elegantly dressed for not expecting visitors out in this isolated slice of paradise. Pretty much like all of Daren's earlier wives. Not all of my books, I thought, as I was walking back to my car. I was sure she hadn't read all of my books. Not the early books—the ones that had brought me into the office of Daren DeMourier, the New York publisher, in my very fresh early twenties. The explicit books that told Daren, a good ten years my senior, he could close and lock his door and fuck me on the publisher's version of the casting couch. But he had been good to me then and for the years intervening, as we both aged—he preferred to call it mellowed. I'd aged better than he had, I thought, except for that thick, talented dick of his. He'd seen that I could write mainstream mysteries as well as I could write gay male smut. He'd done me a good turn there. And in watching him at work, I was able to make the transition to publisher myself in my later career, when I started running out of ideas for straight mysteries when what I really wanted to do was write about a New York homicide detective who loved taking cock rough and often. The top of the barn was in my line of vision as I walked to the cars, and as I walked up to the rise of a hill, no doubt put there by man to block the line of sight between the house and the barn when farming was no longer the central and only reason for living here, I saw the two horses. Sleek thoroughbreds, they were. Standing politely at a hitching post at the side of the barn, their saddles still on. I knew enough about horses to know that if they'd been taken for a ride, their saddles should have been stripped off of them when the ride was over. I was still looking at them when I arrived at the car park—and I just kept on walking toward the barn. I could hear them before I saw them, so there was no surprise, really. The young blond man was laying on a hay bale. The legs I could see on either side of Daren's buttocks were, strangely, still booted in shiny black leather. I saw the ruins of a set of tawny-colored jodhpurs thrown to the side on the ground along with evidence of a red thong. These must have been cut off his body with a knife for him to still be wearing his riding boots. One of the booted feet was lodged in a wooden railing next to the hay bale. Daren was holding the other one up and out with his fist. The youth was slim, the bared and heaving breast arching out of the flaps of his open riding blouse almost that of a boy. He couldn't have been much over legal age—but Daren would have been careful to establish that he was. That was what he'd done with me when he'd fucked me on his publishing house couch. I had been young looking too. That's how Daren liked them then. He made me show evidence that I was old enough. Then he'd fucked my lights out. He hadn't even asked me if I'd been with a man before—and I hadn't been as intensely and totally as he took me that first time. Obviously Daren still liked them young—and as fresh as possible. Daren's riding blouse was off, and the sinewy muscles of his back and arms were straining. He was still wearing his jodhpurs and boots, but I could tell that the fly had been undone and flared out so it wouldn't be an encumbrance. The way Daren was straining and the young blond was warbling and writhing under him—and the wild expression on the youth's face—told me that this likely was the young man's first experience with Daren's cock. In time, Daren stretched his young men's channels to fit. But at the beginning it felt like a telephone pole was being rammed up there. My butt twitched at the memory of that staff. As I watched—just for a few moments, but long enough—I saw Daren reach for the youth's throat and stretch the young man's body up and his other hand ball into a fist that he not so lightly beat on the blond's pectorals briefly before reaching down and fisting the young man's cock and slow pumping him. I knew this was a sign that Daren was fully in—but probably still growing in thickness, stretching the youth's channel to the limit. And then the young man's body went limp and his head lolled to the side and the wildness of his eyes turned to a mixed look of awe, resignation—and want. Daren's buttock muscles began to contract and loosen, contract and loosen in the rhythm of the fuck, and the youth began to groan and moan deeply. These were phases of Daren's mastering that I knew so well. I wondered briefly if Daren wore a condom now. In the days we'd first fucked, that hadn't been considered necessary. And Daren had a forceful ejaculation that both flooded the channel in ways that really let you know you had been seeded and that went on at great length. I missed those days. When Daren had fucked me, I knew I'd been fucked. When Daren's buttocks tightened and he grunted his completion, it certainly looked to me like the blond nephew knew he'd been fucked as well. Separate Vacations "When?" "Next Wednesday." Four days from now. "This is wrong, Tiffany, and you know it. Don't do this." She set her cup down and looked at me with sadness, but resolve. "It's going to happen. There won't be any embarrassment. All anybody at the company knows is that you couldn't get away from work. I told them you'd probably take a week or so while we were gone and have a bachelor vacation, a chance to get away from the wife and kids. Some of the guys thought it was a great idea. "Look, why don't you take some vacation time. You could go down to Key West, or up to the Smokies for a few days. You might like it. And...I think it might do us both some good to spend some time away from each other. Separate vacations aren't a terrible thing. A lot of couples take them nowadays." "Do you want a divorce?" Her eyes flared again. "Don't threaten me, you son of a bitch. Just because I want to make you think about our life, and I want to get away from you for a little while, you are not going to try to scare me with talk about a divorce." "I'm not threatening you. I'm just asking you a question." "Well then, to answer your question. No. I don't want a divorce. I want some changes. I want you to demonstrate that you love me. I love you." "And you're going to demonstrate that love by going away with a big dick wonder for a month and leaving me alone here to kill time and wonder if he's started fucking you yet." She just sat there and finished her coffee. I spent Sunday and part of the next few days with the girls, taking them to the Beach and to Water World and one day to Disneyworld in Orlando. I felt like I was saying goodbye to them, and maybe I was. I spent as little time as I could with Tiffany and she found reasons to be out of the house with the girls or by herself. We slept in the same bed but we could have been a million miles apart. She didn't offer, and I didn't ask, for any intimacy. Tuesday and Tuesday night were spent making final preparations and Wednesday morning she got the girls up at 5 a.m. to prepare for the ride to Jacksonville International Airport where they'd catch a connecting flight from there to Los Angeles and from there on to Oahu. Her mother had spent the night previously, without saying more than five words to me and she took the girls out after each had given me a kiss and hug and promised to call me every day. I was sitting out at the table facing the back yard. It was still dark. She came up behind me and I sensed she was about to bend over to kiss me. I held my hand up and she froze. I didn't look back at her. "You still have time, Tiffany. You don't have to do this." She stood there silently. "I have loved you since the first moment I saw you. I wanted to grow old with you. Please don't walk out that door." She still didn't say anything. After a long moment, she finally said, "We don't have any more time. I have to go." She turned and I heard her heels clicking on the floor. As she reached the door to the interior of the house, I said softly, "I won't be here when you get back." She stopped then, and I like to think she was conflicted. Then she stepped inside the house and was gone. I sat there for a long time. Until the sun rose and beyond. Through my tears I saw two deer appear like phantoms in the pale early sunlight when the day hadn't yet decided if it was ready to make an appearance. One was small, the other a mature version. Mother and child. I don't know why, but I cried like a baby. I felt like I had the morning my mother had called me to tell me that my father had gone to sleep the previous night and never woke up. And I remembered that I hadn't been by to see them in two weeks. I thought there would always be more time. And suddenly there wasn't. What do you do when you realize that the biggest decision of your life was the wrong one. The woman you'd bet your life on, you'd trusted to bear your children, was not the woman you should be with. I didn't know just who I should be with, but it wasn't the woman I had loved with every fiber of my being until a few hours before. I looked at my watch and realized about this time they were getting ready to board their plane. I wondered if Tiffany really knew what she was giving up when she stepped on board with our daughters. Or if she even cared. Eventually I got up and even managed to go to work because it was a regular work day. I hadn't told anyone what was happening. That night I surveyed the house. I had some belongings, but nothing that couldn't be packed into the back of a friend's pickup truck. That night about 9:30 p.m. my cell phone rang and both my daughters told me about how exciting the flight to Los Angeles had been and how scary the long flight over the Pacific had been before they finally reached Oahu. They were already in their hotel and checking out the room's mini-bar and where the icemakers were located on their floor. They told me they loved me and handed the phone to their mother. "Bruce-" I hung up on her and when the phone rang again in 30 seconds I turned it off. The house phone rang and I picked up the receiver and buried it under two pillows so I couldn't hear anything. Then I went out to a bar called O'Brien's on the Westside of Jacksonville and knocked back a few, played some pool and tried to remember what it had felt like to be single. Now I remembered. It had felt shitty. The next day I called a few friends who'd gone through divorces and got the names of a few attorneys. Even preliminary calls told me that I'd be flat broke before I got much of the way through their retainers. And I realized that it didn't matter who I got. Nobody was going to have the firepower to go up against the attorneys that Tiffany could hire or her mother could sweet talk into representing her. Then I started looking around for a cheap apartment. We were living in a $1 million home in an expensive gated community between Orange Park and Jacksonville, one which we could only afford because Tiffany had put a half million dollar cash deposit down on it. It basically belonged to her even while I sweated monthly to pay the mortgage. I was looking for something decent, a two-bedroom, on the Westside not too far away from our home where I could see the kids, assuming Tiffany didn't screw me out of that too. That night the cell phone rang again. I didn't want to take it, but I did want to talk to Kaitlyn and Kristen. I hit the talk button. Tiffany said, "You miserable son of a bitch. Why do you have to..." "I don't want to talk to you, Tiffany. I thought that was clear. Could I talk to my daughters?" "So that's the way you want it? You're going to turn this into a major fight, just like you have with every disagreement we've ever had in our marriage?" "Can I talk to the girls?" "No, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you." She must have been using a hotel phone because she managed to slam it down with a vengeance. I didn't talk to the girls that night, or the next two nights. Sunday night the phone rang and when I picked it up Kaitlyn was on asking why I hadn't been at the house to take their calls. I told her I'd had to work late at the store, and that was a reasonable excuse because I did get called out some. When I'd finished talking to her and her sisters, and learning how nice Uncle Stephen had been and the things he'd done with them and their mother, Tiffany came back on the phone. "Can you just for a minute pretend to be a grownup and talk to me, Bruce? What is the point of acting like a spoiled..." I tried to imagine what bad words she'd said after I hung up on her and hoped she was able to exert enough self control to keep them to herself in front of the girls. I didn't hear from anybody on the island until the next Friday night. The call came from Tiffany's cell, but when I punched it on her mother, Marge, said, "So you were able to tear yourself away from your girlfriends long enough to answer a call from your wife?" "Are the girls there, Marge?" "Yes, but you won't hear a word from them unless you try acting like an adult. What kind of spoiled little boy won't talk to his wife because she wouldn't take him on a vacation with her -- a vacation he couldn't afford because instead of working to support his family he insists on playing with videos and pretending to be a writer? "Because of you, you miserable failure, instead of enjoying the vacation of a lifetime with her family and co-workers and friends, she worries about what kind of crazy things you're thinking of doing while she's supposed to be having fun. You're ruining it for her, your daughters and everyone else. You should be ashamed of yourself." "Can I talk to my daughters?" "When you calm down and decide to start acting like a husband instead of a juvenile delinquent, we might let you talk to them. Right now I'm afraid you'll just upset them. Their mother has been so upset, they know something is going on and it's starting to upset them." "So you and Tiffany aren't going to let me talk to my daughters?" "No, not when you're like this." "Okay. Tell Tiffany she can go back to fucking big-dick Stephen and you can go back to fucking a few of your married fuck buddies from that law firm. "And by the way, I don't have any girlfriends. I'm not like that asshole skirt chaser of a husband that you couldn't keep satisfied in your bed. Have fun." This time Marge slammed the phone down on me. By the middle of the next week I'd found a two bedroom apartment in a not-too shabby Westside apartment complex and managed a deposit with first and last month's rent. By that weekend I'd gotten with a couple of friends and moved my personal belongs, a chair, and a few other items and I'd set up housekeeping in my new place. The Friday night I'd finished moving my stuff in and was sitting around drinking a few cold ones with the guys who'd helped me the cell rang and it showed Tiffany. I had started missing the girls big time and so I answered. "Hello, Tiffany." "Hi. Bruce..." "Are the girls there?" "Yes. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have kept you from them this week. I know it was wrong, but you're driving me crazy." "Can I talk to them?" "Yes. YES. You can talk to them. They're in the other room with mom. Before I put them on, could we talk for a minute?" "About what?" "About you. About us. You've blown an argument up into a nuclear war. I know I hurt your feelings...not taking you with us...but it's only a vacation. Couples go away without each other all the time." She lowered her voice and I knew she was whispering. "Baby, I miss you. I want you so bad at night...and I can't even do anything about it because I'm always with the girls or mom." "Or Uncle Stephen." There was a long silence. "I know I hurt you, but I was so damned angry at you. Stephen...did...try something in the dunes, but trust me, he walked funny for a week after that. He's not the man I want in my bed. You are. He's been flirting since we've been here, but he knows better than to put his hands on me again." "I begged you not to go. And you walked away from me." "Can't you understand, Bruce. We can be lovers and good and have our own independent lives. I need to have an identity away from you." "And your own money." "And my own money." "Can I talk to the girls?" "Yes, I'll get them. And we can straighten all this out when we get home. But baby, I want you well hydrated and rested when we get back because I am going to fuck you into the ground." I didn't say anything and in a moment Kaitlyn and Kristen were on the phone. I wondered later if Tiffany knew what my silence meant. We talked for nearly a half hour and I could only pray that Tiffany would find it in her heart to cover the bill because a half hour cross-ocean cell phone bill would probably require a bank loan on my part to get paid. When the girls and I had finished Tiffany came on before I could hang up. "Bruce. I love you. You know that, don't you." I sighed and I knew somehow that this time she caught it. "Yes, Tiffany, I know you love me." There was a long silence and I was about to hang up when she said softly, "You're not going to tell me you love me? I don't know we're ever talked on the phone in our entire married lives that you haven't told me you loved me." There was something that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. "Don't do this," she said softly, and I almost reminded her I'd used those same words to her and had she listened? But I didn't. There was no point in being needlessly cruel. She was going to be hurt enough in a few weeks. "Yes, baby, I love you. I always have and I always will." I hung up. I couldn't add, "but that's not enough anymore." Over the next two weeks I removed everything I wanted or needed from our home and moved it to my apartment. I checked the house every day to make sure everything was running right and no one had gotten in. Burglars did hit expensive homes, even with the security provided by gated communities. I didn't have to take my name off of any of her bank accounts of other banking instruments, but I made sure that I took all of my precious little money out of any account she had her name on. My junker car was in my name alone, as was my medical insurance and retirement accounts, although God knows she wouldn't have touched either of those. I had divorce papers drawn up by a decent attorney who only charged me an arm and a leg to come up with the basics. Mr. Davis was seeking a divorce from Mrs. Davis on grounds of incompatibility. No alimony or division or property was sought. I asked for joint custody of the girls, even though my attorney -- the best that little money could buy -- had been frank in telling me there was no way in hell the court was going to order that in these circumstances. The best I could hope for, the graying, beaten down little man who had taken my $2,000 retainer told me, was maybe two weekends a month during school, alternating holidays and birthdays and maybe a month in the summer. I already knew that would be the most painful part of what was about to happen, but Que. sera, sera. I talked to the girls almost every night now and fortunately Marge never got on the line. They told me about the wonderful sights they'd seen, the trips to a Macadamia factory, to the black lava beaches, to Waikiki. They told me how Uncle Stephen had gotten them surfing and how he had managed to talk Mama into going out on a long board and how they had crashed and come up sputtering but Uncle Stephen had somehow gotten her to the shore. They told me about how they and other children in the party played at a club for little ones in the hotel while Momma and Grandma and others including Uncle Stephen went out to dinner and dancing. And how Momma had come in laughing late one night with her lipstick smeared and told them that Uncle Stephen was just being a silly man. It should have hurt more than it did, but I already had steeled myself to the loss of this woman and this marriage, and somehow, it didn't. Tiffany got on the phone and almost every time closed with, "I love you and I miss you. Take your vitamins." I made myself tell her I loved her. It wasn't hard. I did love her. I didn't know how long I'd love her, but unfortunately, I still did. And then it was Friday again and they called to tell me they were getting on an airline to head back. They'd stop overnight in LA and then get back in Sunday about 3 p.m. Their Range Rover Sport had been kept in storage at the airport so they wouldn't need a ride. "Why don't you get a cab to the airport so we can ride back together. The girls are missing you terribly. But not as much as I am." I didn't say anything, except, "I'll meet you there. I'll get there about 2 p.m." I sat in the airport waiting area where their flight was due in. I drank a hot coffee and then another. I could have used a stiff alcoholic drink. I felt nervous, jumpy jittery. I couldn't make myself sit still for long. I walked to the windows where you could watch the planes come in, back to my seat, around the waiting area. Had I done the right thing? This was going to tear our lives apart. My relationship with my girls was never going to be the same. No matter what happened, this was the end of the 'Before' period of my life. Anything from now on would be dated "A.T." -- after Tiffany. But eventually the announcement was made that the flight had landed. I watched the parade of humanity, the old and young, the tired and those full of nervous energy, young girls running out to boyfriends and grannies and grandpas greeted by grandchildren. A good chunk of the crowd, about 30, were with Tiffany's company or Marge's law firm. I recognized Stephen, tall, dark and handsome, walking off beside Tiffany and the girls. He had a briefcase in one hand and in the other --he held Kristen's hand. The miserable son of a bitch. I had told myself I was not going to explode at anything I saw, but I only hoped I could avoid killing the SOB. He might take my place in the girls' lives after I was out, but I wasn't out yet. I cut through the crowd like a Great White through a school of tuna, as people moved away to let me through. Stephen caught sight of me first and after one glance at me stopped dead still and let go of Kristen's hand. He must have said something to Tiffany because she stopped to look at me and I saw her go a little white. I don't know what I looked like, but it must not have been pleasant. She moved to step between me and Stephen but two little female bodies hurled themselves on me first and between kisses and hugs and feverish cries to "look what I got Daddy," I must have started looking more human because Stephen lost that tense expression on his face. Tiffany was on me then and threw her arms around me. She would have kissed me full on the lips but I turned my head just enough so that her lips grazed my cheeks. I hugged her so she couldn't try for another kiss and a moment let her go -- actually pushed her away gently. She gave me a hurt look. I bent down and took my girls in my arms. I kissed them as if I was never going to touch them again, and inside me that's what it felt like. Finally, Tiffany put her hand on my shoulder. " Bruce, Bruce, let's go. You've got the rest of the weekend, the rest of their lives to love on them." I finally stood and released them. Tiffany came into my arms and I held her. I looked at Stephen and he had the grace to back away and pretend he had other things that suddenly needed doing. I noticed Marge standing beside Stephen. I might have glared at her. Regardless, she glared back. Tiffany tried to kiss me on the lips and again I moved so her lips graced my cheek. She just stared at me as if not believing what was happening. Marge came up to stand beside us. Tiffany exchanged a look with her and before Marge could say anything, Tiffany told me, "Why don't you go get our car, Bruce and meet us at the departure loading zone. We'll say goodbye to Stephen....and everybody and be ready when you get around there." I nodded and walked away. Despite what Tiffany had said, I noticed the looks that the members of her company and her mother's law firm gave me as I walked past them. It was partly pitying and partly curious as if they wondered how I was able to walk around with my head up after being deserted by my wife. I wondered if any of them believed her fairy tale about my having to work, or if she'd even gone to that much trouble to avoid embarrassing her loving husband. I got the SUV and pulled it around to the pickup area. As I parked, I turned off the ignition and slid out from behind the wheel. I got the girls inside and seatbelted, got Marge into the middle seat and then went around to where Tiffany was about to slide into the passenger side. Separate Vacations I handed her the car keys. "What?"" "You'll have to drive home, Tiffany. I drove my car over here." "How -- why? I told you that we'd ride home together." "I'll -- uh -- you just drive home and get settled in." I pushed the keys into her hands and walked her around to the driver's side. "I'll get my car." That's all I said and I know she thought I meant I was going to drive to what had been our home. I should have said something, I know. But I couldn't do it in front of the girls. And I couldn't stand the thought of going back to what had been and no longer was our home. I know it was a shitty thing to do, but I drove back to my apartment and turned off my cell. There was no home phone. So I would never know of my own direct knowledge, but I could envision it in my mind and I later learned I was pretty close. I could see her driving to the house, unlocking it and unpacking the SUV with Marge's help. It would take awhile to unpack the debris of a month's worth of clothing, souvenirs, brochures....etc. Then she and Marge would be getting the girls into the bathroom for baths and dressing them in pajamas, telling them that daddy would be home soon. By that time it would be around 7 p.m. and they would be feeding the girls. I expected that she and Marge would settle them down with a little television before making them go to bed early after a long, long day. And then, I expected around 8 p.m. or so Tiffany would have called me for the fourth or fifth time and gotten no answer. I figured she would wander into my office at some point and look around, hoping to get a glimpse of what I'd been up to for the month she'd been gone. It was then that she'd notice that all the papers and documents and my old desktop and my new laptop and other regular working materials were gone. Everything was neat as a pin. Everything except the pile of documents with my wedding ring lying on top. I figured that it would take a few moments for what she was seeing to sink in. Then she would pick up the ring, try to figure out what was going on and pick up the documents. She would stare at them and, I hoped, break down into tears. And after awhile Marge would wander in and then all hell would break loose. I know I was being a damned coward. I should have driven over there and when the girls were down, simply told Tiffany we were through. And I was being brutal. I thought I was just being a coward, but looking back, I know I wanted to hurt her as badly as I could. She had torn my heart out, destroyed our marriage and my world. And even if it was mean and low of me, I wanted some payback. I knew Marge would tell her daughter to let me go fuck myself and that she was better off without me. And I knew Tiffany, with that hair trigger temper of hers, would go crazy trying to find me to curse me as a cowardly sack of shit. But how? While Tiffany was gone I'd opened a new cell phone account using a friend's address so it couldn't be traced back to me. I had a new cell number. I didn't have a new home phone. I wouldn't answer the old cell and there's no way it could be used to track me down. She didn't know that many of my friends, but if she did manage to reach anybody, they'd been sworn to vows of secrecy and would tell Tiffany they had no idea I'd moved, or if I was staying with somebody. I hadn't changed my address with corporate, changed my address for anything, simply so somebody in her law office couldn't contact a friend to pull my address out of their billing records. I'd talked a friend into putting up a deposit on the electricity so that the electric was in his name. I knew that worse than the anger at my leaving her with divorce papers with -- according to her -- no warning, would be the unleashed rage that would have her stomping all over the house, trying to vent without terrifying our daughters. I watched television on the cheap little 32 inch black and white screen TV and DVD player for an hour and plugged in the laptop to work on the novel, but I deliberately didn't log onto my internet account. Around 1 a.m. I had started flagging. The nervous energy and anger finally ebbed and I couldn't keep my eyes open. I hit the bed and set the alarm for 7 a.m. Saturday morning I got up and threw some clothes into a carrying case and hopped into the junker and drove down to Daytona Beach. Two buddies of mine celebrating their new bachelorhood had invited me down for the weekend and I was going to take them up on it. Her law firm could hire the best PIs in the world and they'd never find me before the start of the next week. I knew it was going to hit the fan that Monday because I'd be back to work. But I had prepared myself. I was restocking the shelves with returned DVDs when Mike came to the back and pointed to a well dressed, silver haired guy standing at the customer service counter. He looked back at me as Mike was talking to me and I nodded. He walked back. "Mr. Davis?" "Yes. Would you be with the firm of Martin, Devon, Bailey and Bartley?" He nodded without smiling. He didn't seem to be carrying any legal papers. I was honestly surprised to see him instead of Tiffany. I figured she'd be storming into the store hurling hot lead with fire in her eyes and steam coming out of her ears. "Yes. Matt Henry. I was asked by the firm to come by and try to get a little bit of information from you. We're representing your wife." "What do you need to know?" "Well, why would you file for divorce out of the blue with absolutely no warning to your wife and then vanish off the face of the earth for nearly 72 hours leaving her no way to contact you to find out what precipitated this?" "There's no mystery. She knows what 'precipitated it.' She precipitated it. And she shouldn't be surprised. When she walked out on me, deserted me for a month, I told her I wouldn't be at home when she came back. "I gave her fair warning. She just didn't want to believe me. She's been so used to wearing the pants in our family for most of our marriage that I guess she just forgot that I'm still a man and I still deserve to be treated like one." He looked at me with a little surprise showing on his face. Obviously Tiffany hadn't gone into a great deal of detail with her mom's law firm about our life or what had happened when she went on the one month vacation without her dear husband. "She doesn't want a divorce." 'I do." "Mr. Davis, please. I don't know a lot about your marriage, obviously, but there's no record and your wife gave us no indication there had been previous marital difficulties. You've been married for more than eight years, have two young children. "To file for a divorce under those circumstances is...unusual. Is there -- someone else?" He threw his hands up as if to forestall any protest I might have and said, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked that. Your attorney would tell you not to answer any such question, but honestly, in this day and time seeking a divorce to be with somebody else is not something that would prejudice your case unduly. It's just that -- " He looked at me with a speculative glance. "I've handled divorces for nearly 20 years. Men and women don't out of the blue seek a divorce after a long and apparently happy marriage. I've been with the firm for 15 years and I've known Tiffany -- your wife -- since she was a teenager. I think I know her fairly well. "And your actions -- they've shaken her. Nobody is that good an actress. She said she had absolutely no idea you were even...unhappy...much less distressed to the point of walking out on her and your two daughters." "Then she's the biggest idiot that ever walked the earth, and I know she isn't that big an idiot. Look, Mr. Henry, the divorce papers are fairly clear cut. I don't want anything from Tiffany. All I want is to be away from her, and retain contact with my daughters, as much contact as possible. "And, it's none of your business, but I don't have a relationship with another woman, with anybody outside my marriage. Although, you might ask Tiffany if she could say the same." He looked a little surprised at that, then asked, "You've obviously arranged it so your wife couldn't reach you. She still can't, unless it's at this store. She doesn't have your address or a phone number and apparently you haven't seen or responded to any of her e-mails. Is there a reason for that?" "Yeah. I don't want to talk to her. I don't want to receive emails from her. I don't want her showing up on my doorstep to fight with me or try to fuck me into changing my mind. I'm not going to." "You're that determined to go ahead with this? She didn't ask me, but I feel honor bound to ask, is there any possibility you would consider going to see any kind of counselor, any counseling, to see if there's any way to keep your marriage intact?" "No. I won't go to a counselor. I wouldn't go if ordered by the court, and I don't think a judge would order it, but I'd go to jail first. Make sure she knows that." He looked genuinely puzzled. "Why in the world would you be so adamant about this? Counseling has been known to help in the most bitter of divorces." "Not in this one." I stopped and realized he had no idea what he had stepped into. It wasn't his fault. "I'm not being hard nosed to hurt her, Mr. Henry. I know you believe in what you're saying. But I've been married to her for eight years and I know my wife. She will never change and I can't change to what she wants me to be. "I'm doing what is best for both of us, even if she won't admit it. She needs to be free to find -- somebody -- more appropriate for her. Somebody she can be happy with. And I need -- my freedom." He just shook his head. "I'll relay the information, but you know she'll come after you, don't you?" "Yeah, I know it. That's going to be the hard part of this, but it won't do her any good. Try and tell her that, even if she won't listen to you." ######################### Tiffany sat at a long table. Her mother sat beside her and next to her sat Stephen Middleton. Across the table from her sat Matt Henry, senior partner Wilson Wilkes and the senior and founding partner Mort Bailey. A pretty, long haired blonde, Amber Dawson, was standing by in case anyone wanted coffee or anything to drink. "....and that's pretty much the gist of what your husband had to say. It's pretty simple. He wants out of the marriage, he wants visitation and contact with his daughters, and he wants to have absolutely no contact with you. And he doesn't want any of your money or assets." "The asshole," Marge Benner said, glaring at Henry as if he were in cahoots with Bruce Davis. "Did you get him to admit that he's been screwing around on Tiffany. You know that's what this is all about." "Mother!" "Damn it, Tiffany, have you ever listened to anything I've said? He's a lazy, no good bastard just exactly like your father. He has no energy, no ambition, and no man walks away from a woman like you and his children unless he's got a girlfriend, or two or three, on the side. Mark my words, we'll find out that's what this is all about." Bailey rubbed his chin. He was 74, but still strong and active and one of the best minds in the firm. "It's puzzling, Marge. As Matt says, the papers are very straightforward. Of course, he had that little pissant Morgan filing, and he can barely tie his shoes much less file a decent legal brief, but even so... "Tiffany, he never signed a pre-nup, and he's got to know you're worth millions. There's your house alone that's worth a good million in this market. That's maybe $4 million in assets and even with a friendly judge, and any halfway decent attorney, I don't see how he'd walk away with less than $1 million. He's not asking for a penny. That makes no sense." "He probably doesn't have any idea what she's worth," Marge snapped, softening her tone a little as she looked at Bailey. A few years ago, despite his age, he had wielded a very large cock very expertly and they had had a lot of fun times together. He had been good to her. "The man's an idiot. He didn't sign the pre-nup out of sheer stubbornness. I don't think he could plan far enough ahead to think about walking away with any of Tiffany's money." Tiffany leaned forward and put her head in her hands. "I don't think he'd come after my money mom. That's not what this is all about. He's hurt. I hurt his pride. And he's trying to hurt me." Stephen spoke up for the first time, reaching out to cover one of her small hands with his large one. "I could tell he was upset at the airport, Tiff, but do you really think he would plan all this out, go ahead with a divorce, and chance losing his kids, just because you hurt his feelings, hurt his pride?" She pushed his hand away but didn't make a production of it. "I never would have thought so, but I guess....he was hurt more...." She lowered her head to her hands. "He told me he wouldn't be here when I got back," she whispered. "It was the last thing he said to me as I walked out the door. And I walked out anyway." Her mother put her arms around her. "He doesn't deserve you, baby. He never has. The only good thing he ever did was give you two beautiful daughters. But he's served his purpose now. You need to move upward. You're a beautiful woman. You're successful and wealthy and you're going to go higher. You need someone of your own caliber, not a loser." "He's not a loser." Marge hugged her daughter, ignoring the men around them. "You think I don't know how you feel, baby. You think I didn't love that selfish bastard that walked out on us? I worshipped the ground he walked on. I degraded myself to keep him. I loved him for years afterward. But I got over him. "Just like you'll get over Bruce. Trust me, baby. You will get over him." "I'm going to talk to him." "Don't. Don't be a fool. Let him go." She shook her mother's hands off her. "I'm going to talk to him. He's never been able to resist me up close and personal. I can change his mind. And we can forget all this and put it behind us." "I don't think that's a good idea," Marge said. "Let it go Marge," Bailey said in a tone that told her to stop talking. "You were in love with that bastard husband of yours when you came here and it took you years to get over him. She's only had a few days. Let her try. If it doesn't work, at least she'll know she tried." ########################### She was waiting for me when I closed shop at 10 p.m. Tuesday night. She was in a SUV I didn't recognize so I wasn't able to sneak out away from her. As I walked out to my junker the door of the SUV swung open and she stepped out. She was dressed in jeans that showed her belly button, a younger style than she usually wore, but it looked good on her. She wore a v-necked blouse that let the small swells of her breasts show. "You were really going to walk out on the girls and me and never even talk to me again?" "That was the idea, but I wasn't walking out on the girls. I'll keep my relationship with them, if you don't try to screw things up." "How can you do this, Bruce? I thought you loved me. Were you lying all these years, or did you just stop loving me somewhere along the way?" "Why don't you just let things go, Tiffany. The wheels are in motion. It's too late to go back. We're through." "Why? Why can't we go back? Nothing is set in stone. It's just some papers now. Your feelings are hurt. And your pride is hurt. And I'm sorry. But you don't throw away your family and your wife because of one fight." "It's not just one fight Tiffany. It's not because you deserted me for a month. It's not just because I'll never know and be able to trust that you didn't fuck Stephen while you were there." "I didn't fuck him, Bruce. Why would you say that?" "Did you wear that skimpy bikini when you were out surfing with him, Tiff? Did he give you mouth to mouth when you came in? Did he rub that big dick all over you while you were out in the water away from the girls? "And when you came in with your lipstick all smudged and told the girls that Uncle Stephen was silly, was he just kissing you or did he put that big monster inside your pussy or your mouth? Don't bother answering because I'll never know the truth about what happened. "And it doesn't matter. If you had sex with him, or didn't, we're still through. The sex isn't the problem." "What is the problem, Stephen? Is it still just about money?" She pressed herself against me and I felt the hard nubs of her nipples rubbing my chest in the humid summer air. She reached up to put her arms around my neck, figuring that once again the lure of those breasts and that steamy pussy would reduce me to jello. I pulled her arms free from around me and set them at her side. "It is about the money, Tiffany, and it's not. We don't have a marriage. We have a partnership. What is yours is yours and what's mine is mine. There is no 'our.' The only thing we truly share are our two girls, and if you could establish legal ownership of them and cut me off, I think you'd do that too." She backed away and stared at me with hurt in her eyes. "You want me to be your property, that's it, isn't it. That's always been our problem. You want to own me. Why can't you see that I have to be my own woman. We can love each other and be together, but I have to have my own life as well." "I want to own you and everything you have. And I want you to own me and everything I have and ever will have. Marriage is a joining of two people. In the old saying it said making two one flesh. As far as I'm concerned, everything I've had had, everything I ever will have is yours. We don't need a legal document. "You see, I trust you. I trust you with my life, with my heart, with my children. Even if you screwed me over, broke my heart, I wouldn't regret loving you and trusting you and opening myself up to you. But you can't trust me. You can't leave me in a position to hurt you, because deep down you know I will. "You remember when we first got serious. You wanted to live together. To see if we'd be compatible. Your mother was all for it. And I said no. "If you love somebody, you love somebody. You make a commitment. You don't keep running shoes under your bed ready for that moment when you're ready to make a break for it. I was the one that insisted we marry. "If it was up to you, we'd still be living together. No real bonds except our children. And you'd always have those shoes ready to go off and make a new life for yourself if I turned on you, disappointed you, hurt you." I reached out and held her face in my hands and I knew this was when the pain really began. This was for real and I was going to lose her, give her away actually. I was going to give her her freedom, because that was what she really needed. "We've never really been married, Tiffany. We have a legal document, but no marriage. We have never been joined together. We've just been two people living in the same house, having sex and raising two children. That's not a marriage. "It's what you want, but I've never wanted it. And I just decided when you walked out on me, that I couldn't go on living that way. "So go back to that house we used to live in. Sign the papers. Don't fight it. Let me see the girls and you go and fuck Stephen or anybody else you want to. Make lots of money and have a good life, and let me try to find a life for myself." I turned around and walked away from her. She didn't call me or try to stop me. I think I heard crying. But she let me go. She let me pick up the girls every other weekend with no static. She didn't try to talk to me, just sent the kids out to meet me. I talked to the girls and tried to explain to them that sometimes mommies and daddies just couldn't live together even though they still loved each other. And that nothing would ever change my loving them. Separate Vacations I think Kaitlyn understood, because she was old enough to know friends whose parents had divorced. But Kristen never did. She cried when she left her mother, and she cried when she left me. And I felt like the shittiest human being on the planet. I gave Tiffany my cell phone number and a few times late at night the phone would ring. I could hear someone breathing, and I think crying, but they never said anything, just hung up after a few moments. I knew who it was. And I knew she was hurting. But I was too. I could have stopped at any minute. I could have turned back. And I would have had her and the girls and our house and our old life. But I would never have what I truly wanted. And now I did wonder if she had been faithful. And I wondered if she had been, could she continue to be. Everything she had said to me the day she announced our separate vacations was still true. She missed me and she was lonely and she was afraid of change. But none of those affected the fact that we were fundamentally mismatched. We were two people who should never have gotten married. Time passed and three months later with an expedited schedule, I got a notice and showed up on a Wednesday in Circuit Judge Katherine Holden's courtroom. I was there with my pitiful attorney, Jeffrey Morgan, who I don't think even had the nerve to look the opposing attorney in the eye. His hands shook and I wondered again if it was as obvious to everyone else as it was to me that he was a flaming alcoholic. Tiffany sat in a demure powder blue blouse and matching skirt looking like something out of Betty Crocker, alongside Matt Henry. She didn't look over at me as the judge asked us a few questions. "Mrs. Davis, it's evident this divorce action was brought by your husband and equally as evident that you opposed it. But you haven't thrown up any roadblocks, asked for any counseling, nor has your husband asked for any share of your financial assets or child support which in almost every other case where there's such a financial disparity between the two parties is almost inevitable. "The only thing he has asked is an equitable share of time with your two daughters and you've not only acceded to that, but given him more time than he requested. "I have to say, you have both surprised me. I understand that you've already indicated, Mr. Davis, that you won't consider counseling, but could I ask you to reconsider?" Morgan just looked at me. "No ma'am. I would not consider it." She looked at Tiffany. "It would be well within my rights to order both of you to undergo at least three months of counseling, Mrs. Davis. In this case I can't help but feel that you two have not apparently had any discussions of the underlying problems that led you to this courtroom. Would a delay of three months pose an intolerable hardship to either of you?" "No ma'am," she answered, looking at me. "I don't want you to order counseling. Bruce has already indicated he'd rather go to jail than sit down with me and try to save our marriage. I don't have a lot of pride left, but I have some, and I will not force him to sit down with me when all he wants to do is leave me behind." The judge gave me a hard look. "Is that correct? You said you would go to jail before you'd sit down and talk with your wife and a counselor?" "Yes ma'am." "And if I said I would put you behind bars until and unless you agreed to go to counseling. I could hold you for six months without even another hearing. Would you be prepared to go to jail for that length of time just to gain your freedom from your wife and family?" "I'd go to jail. If you held me for a year or two. Eventually you'll be replaced or die. And I'm not seeking my freedom from my daughters. I love them. I just want to be free of my wife." "Are you in love with another woman, Mr. Davis? Do you have plans to engage in another relationship after this divorce is granted?" "No, although I hope I will find someone else after this marriage ends. And I hope Tiffany can do the same." She looked at me and then at Tiffany and just shook her head. "I have no legal authority to question you about your emotional involvements since adultery or infidelity or anything like it is not alleged on either side. "It's just that...I've been on this bench for seven years. I've seen a lot of divorces. Sometimes people divorce because they fall out of love or just get tired of each other. That's so obvious I don't even have to look for the signs anymore. "That's not the case here. I can look at you two and see there is still an emotional attachment between you. And when there is that kind of passion, there's almost always an outside precipitating cause. It's either adultery, infidelity, suspicion of infidelity, some type of emotional harm or injury that one or the other party cannot get past. "Both of you have in your court documents not alleged any type of such conflict, and in fact, you've behaved more rationally and responsibly, and in your case Mr. Davis unselfishly, than the couples who just don't care one way or the other about each other anymore." She looked down at the documents in front of her. "I will honestly tell you both that I have a bad feeling about granting this divorce. I will ask you one more time. Would you consider counseling, or if you're adamant about that Mr. Davis, would you simply consider a postponement. Give yourselves another three months to think about what you're doing. These divorce papers will still be here in three months if you want them." "No, your honor. Three months won't make a difference. Three years won't make a difference. " She looked at Tiffany. Tiffany looked over at me and there were tears in her eyes but she wouldn't let herself go. "No your honor. If my husband wants to get rid of me that badly, I'm not going to stand in his way. Give him his divorce." "The divorce is granted. Mr. Davis, you are a free man and Mrs. Davis, you are a free woman. I wish you both well." Tiffany didn't even look at me as she walked out of the courtroom with Henry. I sat back down for a minute and then realized a new attorney and new clients were waiting to sit down. The divorce merry-go-round never stops. I walked out a free man, but freedom is over rated. I'm fairly tall and in fairly good shape and I've had girls in the store and female customers come on to me, but I never took advantages of any of the offers. I didn't when I became a bachelor...for two months. One December night in the middle of the month, I was working in a Blockbuster filling in for a sick manager when a dark haired woman came in with her elderly silver haired grandmother. They were chatting away in Italian. My mother was born in Naples and had grown up in Italy before meeting my father who was in the Air Force at the time. So I had grown up with a fairly good understanding of spoken Italian and a rough ability to speak it. They were asking a question about a movie and I answered without thinking, in English. They both stared at me and the grandmother tilted her head and looked at me as if trying to recognize me and said in Italian to her granddaughter, "A paisan, and not too bad on the eyes. You should flirt a little." I blushed a little and said, again in English, "My mother was born in Naples and I understand more than I speak. Thank you for the compliment, and your granddaughter is entirely too beautiful to be chasing men. They should be chasing her." The grandmother looked at me and smiled and a slow smile grew on the granddaughter's face. She was beautiful. Long black hair, red lips, and a set of breasts that threatened to overwhelm her sweater. It was sweater weather because it gets cold in December in Jacksonville. It was raining which made it even colder. Jacksonville is a Florida city, but it's more apt to consider it South Georgia weather wise and we've had bone-chilling freezes as early as December. Anyway, she was huge and when I'd gone back with my mother to visit relatives in Naples before I'd met Tiffany, I got the impression that most Italian babies would never starve. Almost every Italian woman seemed to have big tits. And Delanna Smith, her father was a good old Georgia boy, was definitely all Italian female. She was the apple of her grandmother's eye and her daddy was big and protective, but two weeks later after celebrating New Year's Eve together she was bucking underneath me and trying to push my cock all the way through her pussy while I milked her two handed and tried to suck her tits off. The only thing I'd ever missed with Tiffany was that she didn't have large breasts. I'd learned to live with it and I loved our sex life, but manhandling those huge fleshy mounds while I pumped her as hard as I could made sex with Delanna unforgettable. She'd made me come hard inside her twice when she grabbed my dick and with her mouth and hands made me hard again and rolled me over and enveloped my dick in those mountains of titties. She started massaging my dick roughly and sucking on the tip as it popped out between her breasts. "I know you want this," she said because sucks, " because guys always want to tittyfuck me. How'd you manage to hold out so long." "I didn't want you to think that all I wanted you for was your boobs." "It's okay," she said sucking and slurping. "All I want you for is your big hard dick." So for four months we did our best to fuck each other to death. And while I didn't love her, not the way I had Tiffany, she kept me happy in bed, she was funny and loving and good company. When we finally broke up it was my girls, oddly enough, who precipitated the split. She had loved the girls when she'd met them....loved them too much in a way. One night after I'd had them for the weekend and took them home she used her mouth, pussy, ass and tits to drain me four times. I lay back in my bed in my cheap apartment and thought that life wasn't too bad. "We need to talk," she said and a shiver went through me. Whether you're dealing with a girlfriend or a wife, those are four words you never want to hear. "Where are we going?" she asked and those are another four words a single guy never wants to hear. "Back to your house in a little while and maybe we'll take a movie in tomorrow?" I said smiling. She shook her head. "I'm serious. What are we? Fuck buddies? Boyfriend/girlfriend? Lovers? Do you ever want to make this permanent?" I tried to come up with an appropriate answer and she read me. I asked, "Why are we talking about this, Delanna? Can't we just be friends and have fun and fuck each others' brains out?" She put her face down on my chest and said, "I hurt every time I see your girls. I know how much you love them. I really like them. But I want my own babies. I'm not getting any younger. I would be a great mother. Have you ever thought of us...." I couldn't lie to her. She was a sweet woman, a good woman, and she wanted more than I could give her. Just like I had wanted more than Tiffany could give me. And that was the end of that. When I dropped her off at her apartment, we kissed and I knew there was no point in calling her again. I got a card from her a year later announcing her wedding in a big Mandarin Catholic church. I didn't go. Because I wondered why I was stupid enough to let her go. She was a good person and a great fuck and would have been a wonderful mother. But I didn't love her. The April night in 2007 after I dropped her off I was at home at 11 p.m. after finishing a shift at my home Blockbuster. It was a Sunday night. The phone rang. I picked it up. "Mmmmmmm...ohhhhhh....that's sooooooo gooooddddd...." What the hell? I knew who it was, but what was she doing? "Oh, Goooodddddddddddddd....it won't go in...it's bigger than it ever has been...." "Tiffany, I'm hanging up if you're going to be pulling this shit." "Don't you hang up you bastard, don't you dare.....oh ...Stephen, fuck me baby..." "That's it. Fuck you, you bitch." "No, Stephen's fucking me, you cowardly bastard. If you got even a fraction of a ball left, don't hang up that goddamned phone. If you can throw me away, the least you can do is listen to another man give me what I need." She wasn't pretending. I could hear the squish of organs rubbing against each other, the noise a cock made sliding in and out of a wet pussy. She might be faking it, but somehow I thought he was inside her as I listened. "We've been fucking for six months, Bruce, since the day our divorce was final...and my pussy should be loosened up, but some nights...GODDDDDDDAAAAMMMMMMIIIIITTTTTTT...Stephen it's going to come out my throat...but don't' stop....." He pounded and hammered her over and over. I should have hung up...I wanted to...but it was like watching two cars colliding in slow motion. I couldn't force myself to hang it up. And in my mind's eye I could see that body and pussy I had loved being penetrated and ravaged by Stephen's huge cock. I could see her drooling, from the pussy and mouth as he drove her over the edge again and again. I could hear the non-stop gasping that meant she was orgasming over and over. She wasn't that good an actress. I don't think anybody could be. She let out a long, shuddering exhalation and he breathed loudly and then it sounded like he was lying down beside her. It took her a minute and I was about to hang up when she got her breath back. Her voice was whispery but got stronger as she went on. "You know, don't you Bruce. You wanted to think I was faking it...but you know, don't you. You remember when I was with you. We fucked so many times. You'd know if I was faking, and I wasn't, and you know it. Stephen is lying beside me with that huge cock...it's soft now, but it's still almost seven inches long. "It's so damned big....a lot of times even when he's done and I can't squeeze another cum out of him, I like to lay here and just run my fingers all over all over it and then get down and lick it up and down and up and down. It's my toy....no matter how depressed or bad I feel, I can lay down here and play with it and I get to feeling better. "And I have you to thank, Bruce. I wanted to call tonight and thank you. The girls told me a couple of nights ago about that big boobed bitch of yours. I know you must be in Heaven. I was never big enough for you, you son of a bitch. "Well, you want to know something...I never knew it, but you were never big enough for me. I never knew what having a really big cock stuck up your ass or your pussy or down your throat really felt like. "He's better than you...he's better than you ever will be...he's better than you could ever be.....you never opened me up the way he does, you never filled me up the way he does, you never filled my mouth and throat with so much hot white cum that I nearly drowned...what a way to go.... "And if I was ever crazy enough to let you in my bed again, I might pretend so I wouldn't hurt your feelings, but you would never do it for me again. I'm ruined for you. "I actually feel sorry for you, Bruce. You got a wild hair and your feelings hurt and you threw away a woman that loved you. And now you'll never get me back, unless you'd settle for a pity fuck." After a long time, she said, "You still there, Bruce?" "Not any more, Tiff. Don't call again." I snapped my cell flip top closed. When it rang again I set it on the floor and smashed it with a clock radio until I'd killed them both. Then I went to my liquor cabinet, pulled out a nearly full quart of Jim Daniels and proceeded to get seriously wasted. I had to have a cell phone so I replaced it despite not having that much free cash. And two nights later I smashed the new one all to hell and gone when she tried to give me a stereophonic cuckolding by phone. I didn't want to replace it, but there has to be a way for the company to contact you and I bought a third phone. And smashed it three nights later. I knew I was being stupid, but it was either smash the phone or drive to her -- what used to be our -- home or his apartment and smash him and lose the chance to see my daughters again unless it was on visiting days at the state prison. Two weeks later he was walking into his apartment about 8 p.m. in the dark when I came up behind him just as he unlocked the door. A kick to his back sent him through the doorway, slamming the door open so hard it bopped him in the face before he got all the way in. He came down on a flimsy wooden coffee table and reduced it to splinters. It took the breath out of him and he just lay there for a minute. I sat on the couch opposite him and just watched. He rose to his knees and shook his head. When the door slammed back it bloodied his nose and busted his lip. He was bleeding. He looked up at me and noted I had closed the door behind us so we were unlikely to be disturbed until we'd finished our discussion. "I don't care what fucking karate shit you try, you asshole, I'm bigger than you and I'm going to smash your fucking face in....you coward...had to jump me from behind...not only have I got a bigger dick than you, and I make Tiff scream louder than she ever did for you, but you're afraid of me...." I held my hands out in a peacemaking gesture. "I'm sitting right now nice and quiet. I'm not jumping you. Why don't you get up and try to kick my ass? Please." He had the heart for it. He got up and charged me. And after I put him down he got up again. He was holding his side and he couldn't breathe right, but he went after me again. I could have killed him, but I just broke his nose. He stayed down longer that time, but after awhile, he just shook his head and rubbed the blood out of his eyes. "She loves my dick, you know. She's not just saying that to rev you up. She can just play with it for hours..until my skin gets sore and then I let her suck me. And there's nothing -- I mean nothing -- that I want to do that she won't do. "You're the stupidest fucking moron I've ever known. You threw away that piece of ass because you got your feelings hurt." I didn't' say anything, just remained seated on the couch across from him. His big screen television which had been hanging from the wall was a collage of metal and glass on the floor after I'd sent him into it. Two chairs were pieces of kindling. A pretty nice piece of mounted modern art was scattered in pieces across his den. "You can still leave and I won't hurt you." He actually smiled. I had to stop myself from liking him. "Your move." "Well, let me get myself up," he said moaning and managed to make it to his feet. He came at me and I didn't see the leg of one of the chairs until it was whistling by just over my head. I took it away from him and hit him in the side and then in the stomach and then in the back over his kidneys. He collapsed like a balloon that's had a spike driven through it. This time he wasn't going to be getting back up. I sat back down and after awhile he was able to roll over onto his back. He looked up at me and I saw for the first time that he'd had enough. "I guess.....I should...taken that karate shit.....seriously.....but...I always....thought....it was...camera tricks." He laughed and spit blood. "Shows how much...I know....right?" "For a pussy, you didn't do too badly." He lay back and tried to draw air into his lungs for a few minutes. "I guess...you're going to beat me...to death now, right?" "No. How can I beat you to death? I was never here. I'm in a video game marathon at a friend's house in St. Augustine right now. Have been there for the last 18 hours and I'll probably be there for the next 24. Got seven people who will swear I never left the house." "So I got the crap....kicked.....out of me...by a figment...of my imagination?" Separate Vacations I smiled at him. I couldn't help it. If he hadn't been fucking my wife and he didn't have that huge dick that had enchanted her, I would have really liked the son of a bitch. "I'd say a burglar or two, maybe home invaders, broke in and you fought them off. You can reach a phone and call 9-11 and have somebody here in a few minutes." He smiled back. "I could probably call them in time... for them to catch you before you...got back to your alibi....and....what would you do then?" "Spend a few years in prison. But I'd get out. And the next time I'd have an iron clad alibi and I'd rip your dick off with my bare hands and cripple you so you'd never walk again. I'd do it even if I had to go back to prison. You can buy a gun, but you can't watch your back forever." He took a deep breath and coughed up blood again, then breathed shallowly until he could talk again. "I guess I have to...chalk this up to...experience.....I'm going to miss her...you know...but she's not worth....dying for...." I got off the couch and knelt down beside him. He drew back for a second but I didn't reach for him. "You can still see her." "What?" "I divorced her...you're right....I lost the right to say who she can fuck....and if she wants you...that's okay. But...." I looked down at him and made a quick chopping motion in the direction of his dick. He flinched. "But, you will never, ever, go along with her calling me while you two are having sex again. As long as you live. I don't care how you do it, but convince her that would get you killed. If she really likes you, she ought to be willing to stop tormenting me." He shook his head. "I thought it was true. You still love her.... don't you? Why in the hell....did you throw her away....?" "It was the best thing for both of us. Don't try to figure it out, and please...if I can ask you any favors and I won't hurt you if I find out you went against me, don't ever tell her I still love her. It would just make things worse." I got up and walked out and there was no one around in the night and I made it back to St. Augustine in an hour and a half to my friend's marathon gaming session and it was like I had never been gone. Nothing else happened. I heard from the girls a week later about Uncle Stephen's house being invaded and his fighting two men off. And mom cried and spent the day at the hospital with him. Eventually she went back to work and Uncle Stephen went back to work and the cops had absolutely no luck finding the two black guys who had tried to rob him. It was a Saturday night and my latest cell phone rang at 11 p.m. "Hello Bruce." "To what do I owe the pleasure?" "Stephen told me everything." "He probably suffered a little brain damage from that beating he took. No telling what he thinks happened." "I feel guilty. You hurt him really bad, and it's all my fault. I won't....call you again like that." "Thanks." "I knew you still loved me. The sad thing is, now, it doesn't matter anymore. I could never be satisfied with you now, even if you came to your senses. And even though I don't call you, you know I'm going to be fucking him. As often as I can. Because I can't get enough of him." I didn't say anything. "Do you ever wonder, Bruce...sometimes late at night and you're all alone, what it would be like if we were still together? I know you'll find other women. But they won't be me." This time she didn't slam the phone down, just hung it up gently. But it still sounded like the end of the world. I dated and I fucked and I partied over the next six months. I took the girls to school events and to soccer practice at the YMCA field in Orange Park in the Spring. There were times in the months after my little heart to heart with Stephen that I sat in one bleacher cheering the girls and Stephen and Tiffany sat 50 feet away on another bleacher. We'd catch each other's eyes and nod once in a while. I'd see Tiffany talking to Stephen as they snuggled and stared at me, but they weren't obnoxious about it. They were just another couple watching their kids. Then during the summer when I went to pick them up or when we went to summer camp events and Theatrical Camp because Kaitlyn was a budding thespian, I noted that Stephen wasn't around any more. Not once in a while, but he had vanished. The next time the girls came over and I subtly pumped them I learned that Stephen had started disappearing four months ago and for the last two months they hadn't seen him at all. Mom had told them that she and Uncle Stephen decided to stop seeing each other. They weren't fighting, just wanted to take a break. Kaitlyn told me that Mom hadn't cried, but she'd walked around looking sad for a week and then she seemed to be her old self. And the first new guy the girls had never seen before had come to pick Mom up on a Friday night while Grandma babysat. I wondered if he had dumped her or she'd finally got her fill of his big dick. And now she had gone to playing the field. Just like me. So we lived our lives on parallel tracks, trying not to pay attention to what the other was doing, connected only by two little girls, one of whom had her period and started developing little breast buds. And then I was really glad that Kaitlyn had a mother, because no way did I feel up to guiding her through the treacherous waters of adolescence -- being a teenage or even pre-teen girl. The other major change in my life occurred about six months after Tiff and I divorced. I was at one of the Blockbusters in Arlington when a big dark-haired man came in with a half dozen DVDs to return He was cursing under his breath as he dumped the DVDs off and then pulled out his cell phone and punched a number in. He talked for a minute and then slammed it shut and said, "Fucking waste of air...sorry son of bitch...you miserable bastard...."" I usually shot the breeze with customers I knew and tried to tell them what was out that was new and worth renting. I knew this guy and he was usually a happy-go-lucky bastard who, when he came in, was usually with a woman, always a "10" on his arm, and usually a different "10" each time. He was obviously not in a renting mood tonight. "I'd give you the new release list, Mr. Fleming, but something tells me you're not in a DVD-watching mood. Is there anything I can do to help?" He looked at me and shook his head as if to physically dispel the dark thoughts and said, "Oh, hey Bruce. Nah, nothing you can do. It's just a goddamned shame that when you pay people good money to come up with words for you, the sons of bitches get drunk and overdosed and I wind up trying to come up with the copy myself. And I'm not a word man." I thought he was in public relations, for some little firm in Jacksonville. We'd talked briefly over the last couple of years when I'd run into him about the vicissitudes of the PR game. Then he stopped muttering and looked at me and, I think, saw me for the first time. "Bruce....am I remembering correctly? You write novels and short stories?" "Yeah, plugging away....haven't sold the novels yet but I've placed some short stories." "You ever done any non-fiction? Any PR or promotional writing?" "No." "Could you?" "I don't know. I doubt it. I don't really know anything about that type of writing. I haven't even tried it since college. There must be tons of guys around that have experience doing that kind of thing." "Yeah, there are, but I don't know any I can trust that will finish a job for me tonight." "Tonight? You mean, like in the next 4 hours or so?" "You'd have till 8 a.m. tomorrow, which means about 11 hours." "You ought to try to find somebody else. If I can't get it done, I'd feel bad about getting you in a bind." "I'm already in a bind, Bruce. You know we're a boutique agency. We're small, but we work for really high dollar clients and we've built up a good reputation over the last 20 years. Hank --Henry -- Clark and I are the owner/partners. We built it since we left UF. Hank has always been the word and idea man. I handle clients and sell our stuff. "We've gotten a little too big for ourselves lately and we had to bring in three writers. Which was enough, but we've got this account and we need copy for a very expensive retirement community that needs to go into the printer tomorrow morning to make the deadline for their national ad campaign. "Two of our writers are jammed on big accounts that provide a good chunk of our income. Hank is a walking zombie because...of his family situation...and my last hope was just busted by the cops for possession of cocaine after plowing his car into the front of a nightclub in Orlando. He blew a .19, which means his blood is basically almost pure alcohol. "I am shit out of luck, Bruce, unless you could help me. Even if you can't do it, it would at least give us a shot." "I -- uh -- I'll take it but I'll tell you right now I might not be able to do it. You'd be better off looking for a pro." "I'm going to, but in the meantime could you try to crank out some copy? I've got some samples, their talking points, stuff that will show you what they're looking for and what we need." I told him I would and I looked it over between customers and took it home with me. I didn't get to bed until 4 a.m. and was up at 6 a.m. in time to get into Jacksonville and be in his office by 7:30 a.m. I had kept it as simple as I could, basing my copy on what I thought the owners were trying to sell. What they were trying to sell was security and reassurance that even though you were aging and might need some help with daily living, you were still better than 95 percent of the working stiffs and Their Place was the Right Place for a special person like you. It was pure horseshit of course, but it appealed to the twin needs to assuage the fear of dying on the part of aging customers and stroke their ego at the same time. I wasn't sure if my stuff was any good at all, but I thought I'd hit close to the mark. I sat across from Vic Fleming and watched as he read through the copy, then read it again and read it a third time. He finally looked up at me, hit the intercom after which a blonde with 42DD tits and an ass to die for swayed into his office and took the papers from him. "Candy, get that to the courier and get it over to The Right Place before 8 a.m." She took it without a word, gave him a glance that should have melted steel, and glanced at me on the way out. I could feel every nerve ending in my body tingling. "Who do you have to kill to get a job around her?" I asked, only half joking. "She's a very sweet lady, high IQ, great secretary, happily married and the mother of two small boys. But she's also wonderful eye candy and we've gotten a lot of business from guys that were dreaming about getting between her legs. Fortunately," he said and lowered his voice so only I could hear him, "she likes what I have between my legs. She loves her husband, but she's not fanatical about it." Then he turned his attention back to me. "It's not the best or most polished stuff I've ever seen, but it's useable and good enough that they'll come back to us. For a first time effort, on the fly, under unbelievable deadline pressure, it's pretty damned good. What do I owe you?" "I've got no idea what to charge. Whatever you think is fair." He opened his wallet and passed me five $100 bills and then fished a form out of his desk and slid it over to me. "Sign this. You're signing away any rights to your text so we can use it whenever and however we please and you can't come back and sue us if it winds up making somebody a million dollars. That's because you're a freelancer. If you were working in the shop your work would be covered and we wouldn't need to do this." I looked at the $500 and couldn't believe my eyes. $500 for only two or three hours of real concentrated work. It was a nice piece of change. I reached out and shook his hand and got up to leave. Before I could make it out the door, he asked me, "Would you like to try this again. I think with some effort and maybe a little training by one of our regular writers, you'd be a valuable addition to this firm. The money is good for freelancers. I'd like someone who can write fast, and turn out acceptable copy." I shrugged. "Sure. I can always use the money." "Ever thinking about doing this full-time, if it works out?" I thought about it for a moment. "Naw, I don't think so. I like Blockbuster and the people I work with. This way I've got time for my fiction writing, I'm keeping my Blockbuster option open, and I would almost always be available when you needed a quick turnaround." He just nodded at me. Before I could leave, he said, "I could introduce you to Candy. Maybe you could go out to lunch sometime. Let her fill you in on how the office works. It would be good to know." "No thanks." "I could tell you were impressed and she's been around here long enough that I know when she's interested. It might be fun. And it's a definite perk to working around here." I shook my head. "No. No offense or anything personal, but I'm not interested. I divorced my wife six months ago and I think she might have been running around on me before we made it final. I just don't -- I don't want to do that to some other poor bastard." He looked at me and smiled a sad smile. "You and my friend Hank. God, I'm glad I've never loved anybody like that. Sometimes I think I've missed out on something important, and other times I say my prayers of thanks that I missed out on it." I walked out and for the next year and a half wrote ad copy for Vic and Hank. And made enough to beef up my bank account and take the girls to a few nice places. I was nowhere near Tiffany's league, but I was making more money part time than I was with my full-time Blockbuster job. And I was up to 400-plus rejections on the Great American Novel and wondered if my dreams would die before I did. ############################# Vic Fleming sat up a little straighter in his chair behind the big marble desk he had had carried to three different offices over the years as the firm had grown or changed locations for strategic reasons. It was probably something very childish, but a memory of a desk like this seen in some movie or documentary when he was a child had stuck in his head. And when he and Hank had begun making the money they had never dreamed of making, he had the desk produced to his specifications. He always felt more powerful, more in control of the world around him behind this desk. He sat up straighter in what he recognized was an instinctive attempt to preen for this young woman entering his office. The woman entering his office was well dressed, although not too dressy, and appeared very professional. Despite looking all business, she was still hot. Young, probably too young for him, but what the hell, robbing the cradle occasionally was fun. Slim, brunette, not ostentatiously built, but there was just something... He reached down as unobtrusively as he could to move his rapidly thickening cock to a more comfortable position. Having a big dick was usually not something that posed a problem, but getting an erection in front of an attractive woman in a business setting was not good business. As it was, he was forced to be somewhat impolite simply because he couldn't stand up to shake her hand without embarrassing himself. She just looked at him for a moment with a hint of a smile as he gestured to one of the chairs in front of the desk, then sank gracefully into it, crossing her legs and revealing some very nice leg encased in sensuous nylon. "Miss...Hampton, I believe it was....I appreciate your taking the time to come down to our office, but I would have been happy to meet you." She shook her head. "No need. I had business downtown. And I wanted to talk to you in person and meet some of your staff. And it's Mrs. Hampton. I'm keeping my ex's name for awhile since some of our larger customers are familiar with me under my married name." "Meet some of our staff? I'm afraid I don't understand." She reached into a slim briefcase she had set down beside her chair and pulled some papers out and leaned over to hand them to him. As she leaned forward some very nice swells of small but attractive breasts peeked out from her cleavage. He wondered if it was accidental. He looked over the papers she had handed them. They were primarily print ads, along with a few transcripts of radio ads and a few television ads with still shots attached. "We've used other advertising firms in the past, but the owners of our firm and staff including myself felt they'd gotten a little...stale....over the past year. We started looking around at some other agencies' work and some friends pointed to your agency as a possibility to handle some of our new advertising campaigns. "After we decided to study your agency, we got a list of your clients and started looking at the print and media ads you've done for them. We were pleasantly surprised. "These ads are ....I don't know quite how to say it and we haven't quite pinned down exactly what the quality that impresses us is, but the easiest way to explain it is that they are fresh, Their concepts and writing doesn't seem like the same old-same old. "I've dealt with a lot of advertising agencies over the past 10 years and I think I've developed a pretty discriminating eye. I like the work and the feel for the written word and the buyer's market pitch that whoever prepared these had. "I'd be happy to meet with anyone on your staff, but I really would like to meet the individual or individuals who did these." Fleming looked over them and most were relatively easy to place. A couple were harder to place, but a few moments recollection brought them back to him. He wasn't surprised. "I know who did these, Ms. Hampton. We run a small shop here as I'm sure you've been told. Our total staff including Mr. Clark, my partner and co-owner, and myself, amounts to only 15 people including secretaries. We have four writers and idea people. One is Hank Clark, we have two writers on staff, and a fourth writer who is basically a freelancer but on call whenever we need him." He laid the papers down in front of him against the cool marble desktop. "These were all done by the fourth writer. He's a freelancer. Actually, I brought him into the business about a year and a half ago. We were in a crunch and I ran into him where he was working at his fulltime job. I knew he'd written some things and asked him if he were willing to give copywriting a shot. "He did and the rest is history. I started using him for freelance assignments and he always delivered, always did a good job, and he was fast as hell. Fast and dependable, and good. It doesn't get much better than that." She looked down at the papers. "He did these as a part-timer? I'm impressed. Actually amazed. You wouldn't believe how much crappy copy I've had to wade through over the years, from people who were supposed to be dependable professionals. "I'm quite surprised that you let him hang out there as a freelancer. Somebody else is going to notice this guy and snatch him up." "I've had the same worry. Unfortunately, he likes his full-time job and he's also a writer of fiction on the side. One of those guys who keeps trying to write the 'Great American Novel.' But a few months ago my partner and I finally bit the bullet and decided we didn't want him to get away. "Hank and I have always been 100 percent owners. We split the company 45-45 and offered him a 10 percent ownership stake to be exclusively ours. If he writes for us exclusively for five years, he's vested in half that, and if he stays with us a full ten years, he gets 10 percent of the company. He can stay or sell his percentage and walk away. It's win-win for everybody."