40 comments/ 49865 views/ 30 favorites Her Problem Ch. 01 By: mikoli5763 Her name alone would be enough for most people who met her to remember her, but her physicality insured that they would. Her name was Marizona Ortiz which made her the only Marizona I'd ever met. At 6'2" tall she was taller than all of the other Hispanic female students on the college campus we both attended. She had a second tier model or actress' face with her olive colored skin, evenly spaced and sparkling brown eyes, the most perfectly symmetrical nose I'd ever seen, high cheek bones, and full lips. Her jet black hair was long when she wore it down, past her shoulder blades long; but she'd very seldom wore it down when we'd been in college. She had an athlete's grace when she moved from the many years of playing volleyball which she was good enough at to have earned her scholarship even though her father could easily have sent her to college. She had long, well defined muscular arms and legs, that lean upper torso that seemed to flow from her neck to her slightly wider waist and the nicely rounded globes of ass. The only things not perfect on her were her breasts, which were orange sized and small oranges at that. I would discover that the size of her nipples and their sensitivity made up for her lack of mammary flesh. I would love to say it was love at first sight for both of us, but I can't because it wasn't. The first time we'd met was during freshman orientation and after being introduced, I quickly forgot her. I was still hoping to make a long distance relationship work with my girlfriend back home that was a senior at our old high school and not interested in other girls. Needless to say that relationship didn't last and was over by the end of the first half of freshman year and for the next two and a half years I concentrated on studying, improving my skills in the sport that had gotten me to college in the first place, and working whatever part-time job I could find to help cover the rest of my college education due to the fact that I only had a partial scholarship for those three years. It wasn't until my senior year when I received the full scholarship that I could experience the party side of college life and by then I was mature enough to know my limits and to walk away from any bad situations. My advisor had told me the class was an easy A so I was sitting in the back in the fifth seat of a nine seat row thirty minutes before the class started and watched as it filled up with mostly athletes from other sports which included a couple of my teammates. I hadn't been a social butterfly and the two teammates weren't very happy with the fact I'd gotten the full ride that they hadn't so I found that the only two empty seats in the room were beside me after the room filled up. She breezed in the second of the two doors into the classroom as the instructor was closing the first. The seat to my right was the closest to the door so she sat down in it, gave me a perfunctory smile, and ignored me the rest of the time. I was instantly smitten and sat through most of the class trying to figure out a way to get her to go out with me. When I heard all assignments had to be printed from a printer or typed and having noticed how fast her fingers had flown over the keyboard of her laptop as she took notes, a plan developed in my head. I lingered in my seat beside her when the class was over and touched her left arm lightly at the wrist to get her attention when I saw she was getting ready to leave. "Hi, I don't know if you remember me or not Marizona, but I'm Joe Scott and I was wondering if you're free to join me for lunch in the cafeteria. I have a problem and I think you could help me. I'll pay you for your time and I'd be in your debt for the rest of the semester." "Yes, I remember you, Joe, and please call me Mare instead of Marizona. Freshman orientation, right? You kind of blew me off back then so why should I help you now?" "I'm sorry about that. I still had a girlfriend back home and thought she was the one so I ignored other girls. I'm not seeing anyone right now, not that that's why I want to talk to you. I mean...I mean...not that I wouldn't want to talk to you about that." I said to her as I felt my face getting hot and knew I was blushing. "Oh, look. The big man is embarrassed." Mare said in what I took to be a sarcastic tone. "Forget it. I'll find someone else to type my assignments for me." I told her as my embarrassment turned to anger. I pushed the chair and desk in front of me up and to the side to make a path for me to get around her. I stopped when she took ahold of my right arm. "I'm sorry, Joe. I was teasing you. I didn't mean to make you mad. I'll buy you lunch to make it up to you." "All my meals are already paid for, aren't yours?" "Yes, they are that's why I can afford your lunch. Talk about a cheap date." Mare said again using the tone she'd used earlier and I thought I heard the tease in it that time. We ate lunch together and I explained to her why I needed her help. I hadn't learned to type and I was willing to pay her to type all of my assignments when I was finished with them. She found it hard to believe that a college student who'd grown up in the computer age didn't know how to type. I finally got her to understand that I was an outdoor person who hadn't even had a computer until I'd seen it was a requirement for college. We came to an agreement on how much I was going to pay her for each assignment and a schedule for when she needed the assignment and when I needed it back to check it for mistakes. I didn't get a chance to ask her out on a date because Stephanie, one of her sorority sisters saw us and came over to the table we were at. "Slumming, Mare?" Stephanie asked with a look of distaste. "No, Joe asked me to help him with a problem and I agreed; besides he seems to be a nice guy." Mare answered her friend who I had already taken an instant disliking to. "Are you done helping him with his problem? The first big party of the semester at the frat house is Saturday and I need you to help me and the other girls with the decorations." "Yes, we're done. I'll see you Wednesday in class, Joe." I watched as they walked away admiring Mare's ass as it bounced from side to side as she walked. I had to sit at the table until my erection had shrunk back down before I could leave. After my only class of the afternoon was over, I went to the athletic center for my off-season training routine then went to my off campus apartment to study. I worked on that week's assignment so it would be ready to give to Mare on Wednesday. I was surprised by the call I got in the early evening of that Wednesday. "Hello, this is Joe." "Joe, it's me Mare. I need to ask you something, but I need you to promise me you won't get mad. Can you do that?" "I don't know if I can or not. My getting mad depends on what you ask me, I guess. All I can do is to try and not get mad. Is that good enough?" "It will have to be because I need to know; did you write the stories in the back of the notebook that your assignment was in?" "Oh shit." I thought to myself. I hadn't even thought of what was in the back of the notebook when I'd written my assignment in it. It was the next notebook in use for my writing, which had begun when I was a sophomore in high school, and I'd automatically written my assignment in it. "Yes, I wrote them. Pretty lame, aren't they?" "A couple of them are definitely lame, but the rest are actually fairly good. A little editing and I think you could get them published in a magazine or something." Mare told me and I could hear the amazement in her voice. "Thank you for the ego boost, but those are personal and not for public eyes. Did you finish my assignment? When can I pick it up to check it out?" "Yes, I'm done and we could have lunch tomorrow and I'll give it to you then." "Sounds good. Twelve okay with you?" "Yeah, I'll meet you at the cafeteria at twelve. Bye." Mare hung up the phone as soon as she said bye which ticked me off a little. We met for lunch and she explained to me that the written word and the typed word didn't match in length. If I hadn't done three extra pages, my assignment would have fallen short on the length requirement. After we'd finished eating, Mare hit me with a big surprise. "Joe, you heard Stephanie talking about the frat party and I was wondering if you'd take me Saturday night? I don't know why, but after reading your stories, I want to get to know you better. Will you take me?" "I don't know, Mare. I'm not part of that crowd and don't think I'd fit in." "Don't worry about that, you'll be with me and I'll make sure you have a good time. Please Joe; it'll be the first of what I hope are many dates for us." "Yes, I'll take you." Mare grinned at me, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek. I stood as she did and she threw her arms around my neck and pulled my head down before plastering her lips to mine in a quick kiss. It happened so fast I didn't have time to react and by the time I'd recovered my senses; she was walking away from me and I would swear that her ass had a little extra sway in it as she did. "You've done it now." I thought to myself as I headed to my next class. I met Mare on the sidewalk outside of her sorority house that Saturday and we walked the few blocks from there to the Pi Delta Epsilon fraternity house. I began to feel a little apprehensive when I saw all the expensive cars parked in its parking lot. Mare took my hand and squeezed it while smiling at me. It was the first big happy smile she'd given me and what little resistance I may have had disappeared with that smile. Mare never left my side for the next two and a half hours. I didn't drink alcohol and Mare didn't drink much even though I had told her to have fun. Everything was going great until Stephanie showed up with John Sullivan as her dance partner during a slow dance. "Hey, Joe. You've been monopolizing Mare all night. How about you dance with me and let John dance with her for a couple of songs? I promise John will take good care of her." Stephanie said to me even though she hadn't said hello or go away or anything else to me since Mare and I had arrived. I started to say no, but Mare looked at me with a pleading look and I relented. I wasn't the greatest dancer and let Stephanie lead when she started to. I didn't realize she'd danced us into a corner away from Mare and John until I looked to see if I could see them. I didn't see them anywhere and started to head back into the middle of the dancing couples when three more of Mare's sorority sisters surrounded me and began talking to me. Stephanie, Heather, Ashley, and Lisa kept me occupied for the next fifteen minutes and I didn't see either John or Mare during that time. I managed to get away from the girls by going to the restroom. The restroom I found had two doors into it and after relieving myself, I exited the second door which opened up into a kitchen. The kitchen had a door to the outside that was wide open so I left the house circled around to the front and re-entered the house, looking for Mare as soon as I was in the foyer. I saw Mare dancing with John near the stairs and wondered what was going on. When John dropped both his hands to her ass, Mare kneed him in the upper thigh, pushed him away and slapped his face. I was hurrying toward them and grabbed his arm as he drew it back as if to strike Mare. "Didn't your mama teach you not to hit women? If she didn't, maybe I need to. If you want to hit somebody, hit me. I'll even give you the first punch." I told John, who was one of the few people on campus I could look eye to eye with because of our nearly identical 6'5" height. "No, you're wrong. I wasn't going to hit her. I was going to rub my face where she slapped me for no reason." John told me with a sideways glance toward the center of the room. I saw a couple of his fraternity brothers, who were members of the football team, heading toward us. I decided that it was time to leave. "Mare, I'm leaving; are you coming with me?" "Yes Joe, I'm definitely not staying here." Mare took my arm in hers and we walked away from the frat house toward her sorority house. "It's not that late, Joe, and I don't want to go back to a mostly empty house so do you want to do something else before you take me back to the house?" Mare asked me with a gleam in her eyes. I stopped on the sidewalk, turned toward her, and pulled her to me. I started kissing her, tentatively at first, but when she started kissing me back; it was with passion and some urgency. I hadn't been with a woman since I'd returned from summer break and had been fantasizing about Mare during my jerking off sessions in the shower on more than one morning that week. "Can you take me to your apartment, Joe? I can't take you to the sorority house and besides, I get kind of loud during sex and I don't want the sorority sisters still at the house to hear me." I didn't answer her verbally, but by taking her hand and starting to walk at a rather brisk pace back the way we'd come, past the frat house, and down the next side street to the basement apartment I'd been renting since the beginning of junior year. It was only three rooms plus a full sized bath, but it was all I needed and the rent was cheap. The professor and his wife who owned it was a former baseball player for the university like me and had bought the house out of foreclosure over twenty years ago, before fixing it up, finishing the basement so his elderly widowed mother could live with him and his wife. He began renting it to members of the baseball team after her death over ten years ago. He and his wife were gone most weekends so I didn't have to worry about how noisy Mare was or wasn't during sex. After we were inside my apartment, Mare became the aggressor, kissing me with a need I'd never experienced before, trying to take both of our clothes off at the same time, and exciting me to a height that I'd never been before. Mare maneuvered us to the couch and was going to push me down onto it, but I wanted to pleasure her for our first time together so I picked her up, turned us, and lay her down on the couch while continuing to kiss and caress her by then nude body. I found out how sensitive her inch long nipples were when I started suckling one and rubbing the other between my forefinger and thumb. Mare began screaming, squirming around on the couch, and pressing my head harder against her breast as I sucked hard on its nipple. "You're driving me crazy. Please Joe, fuck me, fuck me now." Mare yelled at me but I had other ideas and ignored her pleas. I hurriedly kissed my way down her stomach toward that treasure nestled between her legs. I began kissing all over her clean shaven mound and the outer lips of her pussy before running my tongue up her slit from bottom to top stopping before reaching her clit then doing it again. I hardened my tongue and plunged it as far into her slick hole as it would go and began exploring as much of the inside of her snatch as I could reach. I had to wrap my arms around her upper thighs to hold her in place beneath my mouth and tongue. When I heard her begin to whimper in frustration, I withdrew my tongue from within her and began lashing her clit from side to side with it. Mare began to really scream and squirm then and it took all my strength to hold her as she bucked her hips against my face and came all over it. Her final scream was loud enough that my landlords would have definitely heard it if they'd been home. After Mare had calmed some from her orgasm, I put my arms beneath her body, stood, picking her up as I did so, and carried her toward my bed. She surprised me by wrapping her arms around my neck and pushing her face to mine where she began to lick her pussy juices from my face before plastering her lips to mine and giving me a tongue wrestling kiss filled with more passion than any girl or woman, which hadn't been that many for comparison, had ever given me. I vowed to make her mine at that very second no matter what I had to do to accomplish it. I lay Mare down on my bed and got between her legs as she grabbed my engorged cock with her right hand. "I need this in me now. Please Joe; I need you inside me." Mare was moaning to me as she rubbed her wet slit with the head of my dick. When she had it lined up with her pink opening, I pushed forward a little and got my cock's mushroomed head inside her. I plunged to her depths with one push when she moved her hand and heard her moan in pleasure even louder than her previous ones. I began to fuck her with a slow, easy rhythm as she pushed up to meet me. I speeded up when she begged me to fuck her harder and faster and really began slamming myself into her when she begged me for more. At that pace and intensity I wasn't going to last much longer no matter how hard I tried to hold my orgasm back, but thankfully Mare began to scream like she had when I'd ate her to orgasm earlier and I knew she was cumming. I tried to pull out when I felt my scrotal sac tighten around my balls and knew I was about to cum, but Mare locked her legs around me and held me so that I couldn't while milking my cock with her pussy. I spurted my hot load deep inside her then collapsed down upon her after my final spurt. We lay like that while struggling to catch our breaths as we held each other in the afterglow of our climaxes. "I'm sorry I came inside of you. I tried to pull out but you wouldn't let me. I'll do the right thing if you get pregnant, Mare." I told her sheepishly when I could finally raise my head after she'd released it. Mare started laughing at me which triggered a bit of anger inside me. She stopped laughing and got serious when she saw that anger on my face and in my eyes. "Don't be mad, Joe. I was laughing at what you said, not at you. I'm on the pill and have been since I was sixteen. I wanted you to cum in me. I love to feel a man's hard cock pulse inside me when he cums and that hot load of cum. Lie down here with me and don't be sorry about anything that has happened tonight. You've given me two of the best orgasms I've ever had so lie down here beside me and don't say another word about being sorry." Mare and I lay there hugging and kissing each other tenderly until Mother Nature interrupted and I had to go relieve myself. I cleaned myself up a little when I was done with the hopes that there was more sex to come. Mare was standing beside the bathroom door in all of her naked glory and I got a better look at her beautiful body. I saw right away that if she ever posed nude they'd have to airbrush out a couple of scars that adorned her body. The biggest and ugliest was on her left knee and I knew from being in locker rooms for the last eleven years that she'd had some type of ligament damage in the past that required surgery. When I looked at her backside after she'd passed me to enter the bathroom, I saw another scar across her right shoulder and again knew from experience that she'd probably had surgery on her rotator cuff. I had seen two of my teammates who were pitchers and who had the same type scar on their shoulders and knew from talking to them that was the type surgery they'd had. I was lying on my bed with the sheet over me when Mare returned from my bathroom. She flung the sheet off me, knelt on the bed with her head at my crotch before taking my flaccid dick in her hand and dropping her head so that she could get her mouth around my dick. She began sucking on my cock gently and didn't stop until I was completely hard. I managed to get her to swing her lower body around until her knees were on either side of my head. I began to lick her pussy and felt her juices begin to flow while she gave me the best blowjob I'd ever gotten. Her Problem Ch. 01 Mare was deep throating my slightly longer and thicker than average cock; a first for me. I was licking and sucking at her as best as I could given the position I was in. It seemed like we pleasured each other with our mouths for longer than it actually was before Mare pulled away from me, swung around, and impaled herself on my cock and began to ride me hard and fast. I was twisting and rubbing her nipples with my hands while she drove herself up and down on my erection and began to scream that scream that I was beginning to recognize as her orgasmic one after only ten minutes of fucking me like that. She fell down onto my chest and lay there breathing hard. "Do you like doggie, Mare?" I asked her when she'd recover some from her orgasm. "Yes. As a matter of fact, it's one of my favorite positions." She answered me excitedly. We moved into position and I began to fuck her with the slow and easy rhythm I'd used during our first coupling. When she slammed herself hard back into me, I began to drill her hard and fast until we came almost simultaneously, another first for me. When we had caught our breaths, we lay down, cuddled up in each other's arms, and I turned out the bedside lamp. It was the greatest night of my short life and I drifted off to sleep with thoughts of us enjoying many more such nights. I was awakened the next morning by the most wonderful sensations I'd ever experienced that early in the day. I had thought it was a dream, but Mare was licking and nibbling at my semi-hard cock and I was in heaven. When I was fully erect, she enveloped my raging hard on with her sopping wet pussy and began to rock back and forth on it. I was massaging her breasts and tweaking her nipples while she rode me and managed to get one of her nipples in my mouth when she leaned forward and started slamming herself up and down hard and fast as she fucked me. She screamed that by now familiar scream as she came and I felt my own orgasm beginning when I heard her scream of pleasure. We cuddled together before we both had to use my bathroom. We showered separately then went to breakfast together before I walked her to the sorority house. We began to see more and more of each other after that blissful weekend and I started to think Mare felt the same about me as I did her. I had fallen for her in a bad way and had begun thinking of a future with the two of us married. I finally told Mare all that I was feeling and thinking and was surprised when she told me she had been feeling and thinking the same way. When she asked me if she could move in with me and my landlord had not objections, I hurriedly agreed and helped her move her meager collection of belongings to my apartment. I had to go buy a used armoire for her clothes which were decidedly greater than her other possessions. We both aced the class we'd become reacquainted in and the next two semesters seemed to fly by. We spent all of our free time together and explored each other's bodies in the most pleasurable of ways whenever we had the chance. Mare introduced anal sex to me, another first and we both seemed to enjoy it. I did wonder why she had no trouble accommodating me back there, but didn't ask. We never spoke about our past sexual experiences to each other which would prove to be a mistake on my part. The Saturday that brought that home to me will always be a day I'll never forget. It was the next to last weekend of the semester and the baseball team was playing in the conference tournament, the winner of which got an automatic bid to the College Baseball World Series. Our team had a mediocre season but had won two games to remain in the tournament. Our semi-final game had been postponed from the day before due to thunderstorms so we had to play an early morning game which we won much to everyone's surprise. The final game started at 2 PM and, if it had went the regular seven innings, would have given the team plenty of time to get back to campus in time for me to take Mare to the last big party at the frat house. Fate or bad luck made sure that my plan wouldn't come true that day. We lost after three extra innings and then had to wait another hour while the team bus was repaired when it wouldn't start after the game. We hadn't attended any of the other parties all year, but Stephanie insisted that Mare attend the last one and Mare didn't want to disappoint her best friend so I agreed we could go even though I didn't want to. I could hear the disappointment in Mare's voice when I called her using one of my teammates' cell phones and told her I'd be late getting back and asked her to wait until I got back before going to the party. She said she couldn't but promised not to drink too much and to stay away from John who had been trying with Stephanie to get her to come to one of the frat house parties. It was after 9:30 PM when I got back to my apartment and I didn't want to go to any type of party, but I'd promised Mare that I'd come to the frat house as soon as I could and I always kept my promises to her. I showered and changed and walked to the frat house. I had walked through the entire first floor and hadn't seen Mare, but I knew she was there because I'd asked one of her sorority sister's whose name I could never remember if she was still there after not seeing her. I had headed toward the stairs that led to the upper floors of the house when Stephanie and Heather got in front of me. "Stephanie, do you know where Mare is?" I asked her hoping that she'd answer honestly and without her "I'm better than you are" attitude she'd shown me the entire time I'd known her. "Yes, I know where she is. Go back to your apartment and she'll be there when she's done having some fun." Stephanie answered me with that same tone of distain that she'd used the first time we'd met. "I can't do that. I promised Mare I'd come here and we'd dance a few dances together before we went back to the apartment. Now tell me where she is." I responded to her as the anger inside me began to surface. Stephanie was cool as a cucumber and only shook her head no at me, but I saw Heather glance toward the second floor and knew Mare was up there somewhere. I had played a little basketball in high school so I head faked one way and went around the two surprised women on the opposite side of the fake and was on the stairs before they could react. I hurried up the stairs and would have started opening doors looking for Mare when I thought I heard her familiar pre-orgasmic squeal and saw two guys standing at the other end of the hall with their heads inside a room watching whatever was going on in that room. I had an idea what was going on and more specifically who was a part of what was going on in that room, but I had to make sure so I hurried down the hall to it. I was only a dozen steps away when I hear the orgasmic scream that I'd loved hearing for the past eight months and my heart sank into my stomach. I don't know what made me walk the rest of the way to the door, but that's where I found myself only seconds after hearing Mare's scream of ecstasy. One of the guys standing there pulled his head out and turned to me. "You'll have to wait your turn, dude. We're next." He said to me with a menacing tone. That was the wrong thing to say to me at that moment as all the frustration from the day's events and the pain from knowing my girlfriend was a cheater ran all over me before the anger overwhelmed those emotions and I let it out. Unfortunately for the two guys in the doorway, I let it out on them. I grabbed each of them by the hair of the head then slammed their heads together as hard as I could. That stunned them both and the two punches that I gave them both finished the job of putting their lights out and they hit the floor at my feet. I stepped over them into the doorway. I saw Mare on the king sized bed in the room still impaled on John's cock, but worse than that was the fact that John's best friend Charles Winslow was on the bed with his cock buried to the hilt in Mare's ass. The only emotions I felt then were pain and confusion. "Marizona?" I blurted out loud enough for all three of them to hear me. I turned and hurried back toward the stairs before they had time to react and didn't see or hear their reactions. I kicked the All Conference offensive lineman that belonged to the fraternity in his nuts and slammed his head against the wall when he got between me and the stairs, leaving him on the floor holding his crotch with both hands while curled up in the fetal position and moaning in pain. Lisa and Ashley had joined Stephanie and Heather at the foot of the stairs by the time I got back to the first floor. "Wait Joe, we can explain if you'll give us a chance." Stephanie said to me with a hint of satisfaction in her tone. "I've never raised my hand in anger to a woman before, but if you four bitches don't get out of my way, I swear I will tonight. Now get out of my way." I yelled at them. My anger must have convinced them that I wasn't joking because they moved from in front of me and I ran out of the frat house and all the way to my apartment. I started to flop down onto my bed, but remembered that Mare had a key to the apartment and I definitely didn't want to see her that night. I grabbed the travel bag I'd emptied only an hour earlier and shoved some clean clothes into it before grabbing my book bag already full with my books from having been with me during our tournament. I hurried to my car and drove away from my own apartment down the one way street that went the opposite direction from the one that led from the frat house. I didn't know where I was going to spend the night, but it wouldn't be in my own bed. The tears didn't begin falling until I saw the poster on the billboard that had been put up congratulating the women's volleyball team for coming in second in the nation that past winter. A picture of Mare spiking the ball had been used for that particular poster. I had been so proud of her and she'd been just as happy that I'd been there to watch her play. I pulled over into a mostly deserted, but well lit parking lot and cried until I couldn't cry anymore. All my dreams, hopes, and plans for a happy future with Marizona as my wife vanished in that parking lot as my tears ran down my cheeks. I don't remember falling over in the bench seat of my car or how long I was out, but the sun shining through the side window onto my face awakened me and for a few seconds I thought that it had all been a part of a bad dream until the pain from the muscles in my back, hips, and lower legs became apparent in my brain and it all came rushing back into reality. I climbed stiffly out of the car and began stretching trying to get the pain to go away. When most of the pain had left my body, I sat back down in the car and tried to think about where I could go for the next couple of weeks and be able to avoid running into Mare. I decided to go and talk to my baseball coach and see if he could help me. I drove to Coach Holliman's house and was relieved to see him already outside working in the flower beds in front of his house. I parked in the street and walked up to where Coach was standing from being on his knees weeding and re-mulching around the flowers. "Coach, I hate to disturb you on a Sunday, but I didn't know who else I could talk to." I said to him. "Why couldn't you talk to Mare about it? Oh no, the problem has something to do with you and Mare; doesn't it? What did you do, Joe?" He asked me with true concern in his voice. He and his wife had gotten to know Mare since we'd been dating and liked her almost as much as they liked me. "It's not what I did, but what she did and I don't want to talk about it. Me and Mare are done, but I need somewhere to stay for the next two weeks until the semester is over. I can't go back to my apartment with her there." "What did she do? Surely it can't be that bad." Coach asked me with a bewildered look on his face. "I said I didn't want to talk about it. Can you help me find some place to stay or not?" I answered with the anger returning within me and becoming apparent in my tone. "Okay Joe, you don't have to get mad. If or when you're ready to talk about whatever happened between you and Mare, I'll be ready to listen. You can stay in the guest room for the next couple of weeks. You'll have to park that tank you drive on the street, though." Coach told me trying to be upbeat and cheerful even though I could see the anxiety in his eyes. He showed me to his guest room and the bathroom that I would be using for my hopefully short stay. After he'd left me alone, I flopped down on the bed and fell into a troubled sleep. The memory of seeing the woman I had loved and still loved with two other men's cocks in her body kept running through my dreams like a movie reel set in continuous loop mode. I awakened at mid-day and decided to go to the farthest cafeteria from my old apartment for lunch, praying that I wouldn't run into Mare or any of her friends. I managed to avoid Mare and her friends for the next two days, but on Wednesday, Mare grabbed me by the arm from around a corner of two corridors as I walked from my last class of the day. There were too many other people around for me to make a scene so I allowed her to pull me into the closest empty classroom. She pushed me into the room and shut the door behind us, placing herself between me and the door. I retreated to the opposite wall and stood with my back to her, looking out the window. "Joe, please look at me. Please Joe; I need you to look at me." Mare begged me as I stared out the window as my fellow school mates walked on the sidewalks outside the building unaware of the conflict that was raging inside of me. "No Mare, I can't. I begged you to wait on me to go to the party, but you didn't. Part of me wishes I'd stayed at the apartment like I started to, but the other part of me is glad I went. At least I found out what kind of woman you are before we were married. I hope you have a good life, Mare; but it won't be with me." I said trying to hold myself together long enough to get it out before the pain and confusion became too great. "But that's not the kind of woman I am, Joe. Please you've got to let me explain how it happened. I swear nothing like that will ever happen again. Please Joe, I love you and I need you now and forever. That wasn't me the other night; it was the me before I met you. I thought I could rely on my friends to keep me from becoming that slut again, but they helped make it happen instead of trying to prevent it. Please Joe, don't throw away what we have. "I love you and I know you love me. We can still have that life we talked about having before what happened Saturday night. You were right, I should have waited on you, but Stephanie wouldn't let me. She insisted I be there from the start and that everything would be okay until you got there. I didn't find out until Sunday that she and John were working together to get me back into John's bed one last time. I found out that they'd gotten me drunk on purpose when I woke up at the ER after collapsing in the street as you roared away in that Caddy you drive. I have a problem of getting wild when I'm drunk and that's what happened that night. "Please Joe, come back to the apartment with me and we can get past this. It was only sex for God's sake." Mare begged then yelled angrily at me. I spun around to face her as my own rage came back with a vengeance. "It was only sex, Mare. You sure were enjoying it an awful lot if it was only sex. Two men at the same time with two more waiting for their turn isn't just sex, Mare. I can't help it that I still love you, but I can stop the pain from what I saw Saturday night by not seeing you anymore. As long as you're at the apartment, I won't be. I don't want to hurt you so move away from the door so I can leave. "I don't care that you think because your friend set you up you're not responsible for what happened Saturday night. If that's what Stephanie does to a friend, I'd hate to see what she'd do to someone she hates. Oh wait, she does hate me so in a way she got exactly what she wanted from Saturday night. I guess she didn't anticipate it would hurt you as much as it hurt me. Now move or I'll move you myself and I won't be gentle." I yelled at her. She moved to the side of the door, but tried to grab me as I went by. I had anticipated it though and jerked my arm away and twisted sideways to get past her; keeping my eyes on her the whole time. I was sprinting down the hall as soon as I was clear of the door. Coach told me my apartment was mine again if I wanted it as Mare had went by and told him she'd moved all her stuff out and back to the sorority house after our afternoon confrontation. I slept on a bare mattress for the rest of the semester after throwing the sheets and pillow cases away after I couldn't remove Mare's scent from them even after two washings. I had the university mail my diploma to me so I wouldn't have to share graduation with Mare and her friends. I signed a modest contract with the Colorado Rockies and reported to their Single A farm team in Asheville, N.C.; where they began working on switching me to the outfield because they had no plans for their Hall of Fame bound first baseman, Todd Helton, going anywhere in the foreseeable future. With all of the work that my new position required me to put in, I mostly forgot about Marizona and when I did think about her, I was usually able to make myself believe I was over her and even if I wasn't; I'd never see her again anyway, but fate or luck would prove that thought to be wrong. To be continued Her Problem Ch. 02 After being sent to the Asheville Tourists Single "A" team by the Rockies, my Caddy with its two hundred thousand plus miles died on me. I thought about trying to find another large, used automobile to replace it because those seemed to be the only ones I was comfortable in due to my height; but one of the coaches with the Tourists convinced me that a full sized pick-up truck was just as comfortable and more practical for my needs. I used part of my modest signing bonus to pay cash for a new Ford F-150 extended cab truck from the local dealer. I went to an accessories store and had a bed cover installed which gave me a dry place to haul the unbelievable amount of equipment I'd accumulated since joining the Rockies organization. I had been approached by an elderly couple dressed in an amusing mixture of team logoed apparel after my first home game in Asheville. He had on a Tourist's cap, a windbreaker with my alma mater's logo on it, and a Rockies T-shirt on under the windbreaker. She had on a cap from my alma mater, a Rockies windbreaker, and a (I assumed) replica jersey from my alma mater. The coaches had emphasized how important team relations with fans were so I stopped and listened to the couple as they introduced themselves to me. "Hello, Joe. My name is Max Seaton and this is my wife Madge. We wanted to welcome you to the Tourists and ask you about something that could be beneficial to us and you. Do you have time to hear us out?" Max said to me. "I don't have any plans except to find something to eat, going back to the motel, and resting until tomorrow. I guess I can give you a few minutes." I answered him with an annoyed tone. I didn't really want to spend any time with them but didn't want to upset them and have them complain to the team manager. When Madge spoke up, some of my annoyance went away. "We know that the meal allowance is barely enough to feed a strapping young man like you so we'll buy you dinner. Will you follow us to the restaurant?" Madge interjected having detected my tone. "My momma told me long ago not to turn down a free meal so sure, I'll follow the two of you." I said to her. I had expected them to go to the parking lot and drive to one of the better restaurants located on the other side of town, but they walked away from the ball park and I had no choice but to follow them. Thankfully we were in the middle of an eight game home stand and my gear was in my locker and I didn't have to carry it the four blocks we walked to the little diner they finally went into. I had seen it before while driving back and forth from my motel to the ball park, but had ignored it because of its shabby appearance. Max and Madge were already seated in a large booth at the back of the diner and were having a conversation with a middle aged woman dressed in the typical waitress uniform for a diner; blue striped dress, white socks, and white rubber soled shoes. The waitress had left by the time I got to the table and Madge motioned me to sit across from her and Max in the booth. They waited as the waitress brought glasses of water to the table. She had started to turn away when I got her attention. "Excuse me, but do you have fresh brewed sweet tea? I have trouble with tap water in a new city until my body gets use to it so I need something else to drink. I don't see a menu either so can you bring me one?" I asked her as politely as I could. The look she gave me made me think I'd asked for a glass of bull piss instead of tea. "Sugar, we have the best sweet tea in the state of North Carolina and Max has already ordered for everybody so you don't need a menu." She told me and I heard the sarcasm in her tone. All three of them started laughing when my face turned red from her statement. "Relax Joe, I guarantee you'll like what Max ordered and I swear you're among friends here." Madge said to me after she'd stopped laughing. "We'll talk about what we hope will be a win-win for you and us after we eat." The food began arriving fairly quickly after that. Large bowls of green beans, corn, and mashed potatoes made from real potatoes and not a mix were brought to the table along with a platter of grilled chicken breasts. A plate full of fresh baked biscuits with a bowl of white gravy was placed in the center of the table. A whole pitcher of sweet tea was also brought out. Max waved away my comment that they were spending too much for my dinner. We ate in silence and the food was better than I had expected. It was almost as good as my mom's cooking and it didn't take long for me to get full. I pushed my plate away before leaning back away from the table when I was done eating. Madge and Max had big grins on their faces when I finally looked up at them. "I don't have to ask how you liked the food, Joe. Your actions and the look on your face right now have shown me that you enjoyed it. I think you're ready to hear our proposal now." Max was saying to me with a large smile on his face. I merely nodded yes as I settled back into the surprisingly well padded bench seat of the booth. "Madge and I met in college, the same college you recently graduated from to be exact. After we were married and after a few years working my way up the ladder in the company that hired me out of college, I was transferred here to Asheville. Madge and I both fell in love with the area and Asheville in particular so we settled down here and have been happy here. "We're getting on in years and can't do all the things that need doing to maintain our home so we've been letting young men like you stay in the apartment above our garage for free in exchange for doing the things we can't. We would be overjoyed if you became our next tenant. Earlier you said you were still staying in a motel, but you won't be able to afford that for very much longer and still have any money left in the bank. "What do you say, Joe? Would you like to help us out? I promise the work at our house won't interfere with your ball practices, training sessions, or any other activity you may want to pursue." "It sounds too good to be true. If I were interested in taking you up on your offer, what kind of restrictions would there be?" I asked. "No loud parties, no loud music after 9 P.M., and no roommates of either sex are the only restrictions." Madge answered me before Max could. "That doesn't mean you can't have friends over, Joe and that they can't stay a night or two if that's what you want. They just can't stay permanently." Max jumped in before I could say anything. "I'm not a big party person, don't like loud music myself, and hopefully I'll be moving up to the next level before too long so those aren't a problem. I think I'll take you up on your offer. I have to be at the ball park early in the morning though so I don't know when I'd be able to move into your garage. For that matter, I don't even know where you live." I told them in what I hoped was a warm and friendly voice. "If you tell the desk person at the motel that it's okay with you, Madge and I will move your stuff from the motel you're staying at and we'll show you where we live as we walk back toward the ball park. If you're ready, we can do that now." Max said to me excitedly. I nodded yes and the three of us left the booth. Max pulled a fifty dollar bill from his wallet and threw it on the table. "Keep the change, Molly and tell Josh Madge and I say hello. We'll see you again next week." Max yelled as he led Madge and me out of the diner. We walked back toward the ball park and Max stopped in front of a huge two storied house half way between the diner and the ball park. "Here's our house. You can see the garage there on the right. There's room for your truck on the right hand side, but you'll have to raise and lower the door manually until you install the new door opener I got last week. The last young man we had living over the garage burned up the old one, he was in and out so much. I hope you're not going to be like him. The last I heard about him, he was in drug rehab, and didn't have much of a future with the Rockies." Madge stated with a touch of pride and of disappointment. I didn't know what to say so I nodded my head no and turned away as my own disappointment overtook me. The man she was talking about had been a teammate of mine in college and a good friend. The experience of more money than he'd ever had before had gone to his head and the partying had not only wrecked his career but possibly his life. I trudged back to my truck and went to my motel to relax from the day's game and the evening's sad turn. Even though I'd used the whirlpool at the ball park, I still went down to the motel's hot tub for a few minutes. When I left the next morning I told the young man behind the motel's desk that Max and Madge were coming for my stuff and it was okay. He only smiled and said that was okay with him. I spent the rest of the day at the ball park shagging flies, working on hitting the correct cutoff man during game situations that my position coach yelled out at me, and my hitting. After that evening's game, Max and Madge were waiting on me in the parking lot. I helped them both into the cab of my truck and drove us to their house. I helped them down and Madge gave me the key to the garage apartment before she and Max went to their house. I opened the garage door and parked my truck inside before climbing the stairs to the apartment. It was more spacious than my old basement apartment and extremely clean. My stuff was in the middle of the floor and I spent the next few minutes putting things away before flopping onto the bed in exhaustion. Tomorrow was a day off from baseball and I was going to start earning my room by doing as much work as I could around Max and Madge's house. I stayed in Asheville the rest of the Single "A" season and didn't get to Double "A" Modesto until it ended. There was only a month left in their season, but the Rockies had already convinced me to go to their rookie fall team to continue my work on my new position. After fall league, I went to winter ball in Mexico and baseball was my life for the next three years. I met some fine looking women during the next three years and enjoyed some of them sexually along the way, but none of them made me feel the way Mare had. Baseball was all I thought about or cared about during those thirty six months and a long term relationship wasn't in the cards for me. I had almost put Mare completely out of my mind until the day one of my Hispanic teammates in my third season of winter ball sat down beside me an hour before that evening's game was to start. "Hey Joe, do you know this fine Latino babe? It says here she went to the same college you did." Miguel Gomez asked me after flopping down beside me. He opened up the magazine he was holding and held it in front of my face. I didn't need to read anything on the page and couldn't anyway because it was in Spanish because the picture of Mare spiking a volleyball on a sand court took up the whole page except for the narrow margin of prose on the right hand side of the page. That picture made all the work I'd done trying to purge her from my memories useless as those memories came rushing back into my head. "Yes Miguel, I know her. We graduated at the same time from our university." I told him as I struggled with the mixture of emotions the picture had invoked. "It says here that she's going to be in Cancun the same week we are. Man, I sure would like to meet her. Will you introduce us if I can find out where she's staying?" Miguel asked me with obvious lust in his voice. "No, I won't introduce the two of you. Take it from me; you don't want anything to do with that slut." I yelled as my anger again over-powered my other emotions and I sprang up from the bench, stormed onto the field, and sprinted away from him. I wouldn't know until later that most of my teammates had heard my outburst and had stood in shock as I ran as hard as I could across the field away from the dugout. Surprisingly I had my best performance of the season that night, going four for four and hitting the game winning homerun in the bottom of the ninth. I struggled with the old emotions that I thought I'd conquered before seeing Mare's picture in that magazine. I don't know why I did it, but when I saw it in the trash after that night's game; I picked it up and kept it. The next three weeks were some of the most difficult of my professional life. My Hispanic teammates and coaches couldn't seem to understand why that picture had affected me so much even though I tried to explain it to my position coach. The team arrived in Cancun and I tried to avoid leaving the motel when I wasn't busy with ball practice or games. I didn't want to accidentally run into Mare if I could help it. Unfortunately what I wanted was in direct opposition to what other people that knew of Mare's and my past and the way it ended between us, wanted. I was walking back to the motel from the ball park on the third night we were in Cancun when my future was changed forever. I hadn't been too worried when all of my teammates had turned me down when I asked them to accompany me back to the motel. I had been acting kind of strange since seeing Mare's picture so I chalked up their refusals to that. It was a well-lit street in a good neighborhood by Central American standards and I had on the team windbreaker so I wasn't expecting it when the Mercedes limo stopped beside me and before I could react, two big Hispanic males grabbed my arms, and marched me to the car before forcing me into the back seat. "Hello Joe." A very familiar voice said to me. "What's going on Mr. Ortiz?" I managed to ask Mare's father as the car sped away down the street. "Call me Roberto, Joe, like you did before. I give you my word that you'll not be hurt, but I need you to listen to me and this way guarantees that. You know how much I love my daughter and it's tearing me up inside how bad she's been hurting for the last three years. She loves you with all her heart and won't even try to get over you. I need to know what happened between the two of you, but she won't tell me, so you need to." "I don't think I can do that Mr. Ortiz. I'm sorry Marizona's still hurting but it was something she did that caused us to break up. If she won't tell you, you'll have to forget about why we broke up because I won't tell you either." "You'll tell me or I'll keep you until you do. Why do you think you were alone tonight? I had my friends tell your teammates to let you walk back by yourself. We are in Mexico and you wouldn't be the first gringo to go missing for a few days, weeks, months, or years. I gave my word you wouldn't be hurt, but I didn't say anything about keeping you prisoner until I find out what happened between you and my daughter. This best thing for you to do is tell me and get it over with. I promise you'll be back in your motel room tonight if you tell me." I looked at him and then at the three large men that were in the car with us. I might could have beaten one of them one on one in a fair fight but I stood no chance against all three of them or the four of them if Mr. Ortiz decided to join in. I weighed my options in my head and decided that telling him was the better of the two bad options I finally reduced my choices down to. I hesitated as I realized the other three men in the car would hear about that night at the frat house. "Mr. Ortiz, what Mare did isn't very pleasant. Wouldn't it be better for us to talk about it somewhere with a little more privacy?" I asked him after deciding to tell him. "Whatever you have to say to me can be said in front of these men. They know what will happen if they ever say a word to anyone about what they hear tonight. Not just to them, but their entire families and the families of whomever they talk to. Go ahead and tell me." I told Mr. Ortiz about that day and what had kept me from escorting Mare to the party. About not finding her on the first floor and tricking her sorority sisters into letting me know where she was. About hearing her squeals of sexual pleasure and her final scream of orgasm as I felt my face turning red from a mixture of anger and embarrassment. His facial expressions didn't change as I told of the two men who were watching and expecting their turn when whoever she was with was finished having sex with her. How I knocked them out cold before looking into the room and seeing her with not one man but two and they both had their cocks in one of her bodily orifices and her mouth wasn't one of them. How I fled after calling out her name in anguish. I didn't leave out one detail which included the confrontation between us in the classroom. He listened patiently as I told him of my resolve to never see her again and how I'd been able to keep that resolve until the magazine with her picture in it had been shoved in my face. He smiled knowingly at me after I'd told him that. "You're still in love with my daughter, aren't you, Joe? I heard about your reaction when you saw her picture and Miguel's request for you to introduce them. I think it's time for you and Mare to finally talk to each other about what happened three years ago. I can promise you she's not the same woman she was before she met you. Do you think that was the first time she'd been with two men at the same time? "Marizona was my only child so I didn't try and interfere when she started dating John Sullivan and became involved with her sorority. The fraternity John belonged to and the sorority Mare belonged to had reputations as party houses with lots of free alcohol, drugs, and sex. I tried to talk Mare out of joining that particular sorority, but she didn't listen and I left her alone to sow her wild oats and make her own mistakes like I would have if she'd been a son. "She was over that when she returned that fall and wasn't going to have anything to do with the fraternity that year. I was so happy when she met you and the way she changed when the two of you became a couple and serious about each other. "She didn't lie when she told you she was drunk. The hospital found she had twice the legal limit of alcohol in her blood when the campus police found her lying in the street outside of the house your apartment was in. I was told about the two different semen samples in her vagina and rectum. I found out who the men were from my sources on campus and I promise you John Sullivan and Charles Winslow were dealt with in a very serious and painful manner. I had mercy on Stephanie because she didn't deny her part in what happened to Marizona and Mare begged me to. "My daughter needs you back in her life, Joe. She's withdrawn into herself, never goes out to have any type of fun, hasn't had a date that I know of since the two of you broke up, and the only time she seems happy is on a volleyball court. The problem with that is she's playing so recklessly that she's injuring herself and it's taking longer and longer for her to recuperate during which time she's miserable and hard to be around because she's unhappy." "You're a smart man, Mr. Ortiz, and knowing everything you just told me you knew; you had to have figured out why I broke up with Marizona. Your little abduction of me was your way of forcing me to see your daughter, wasn't it?" "Yes Joe and I apologize for bending the truth a little when we first started our conversation, but you didn't give Mare or her friends a chance to explain how Mare ended up in the situation you saw her in that night. It wasn't her fault, she didn't have any intentions of doing those things you saw her doing, and you made it worse by abandoning her and not giving her a chance to explain everything. She loves you still and won't be happy until you at least give her a chance to prove that to you." Her Problem Ch. 02 "She didn't look like she was drunk and it looked and sounded like she was enjoying what those two men were doing to her and as far as listening to her "friends"; all of them thought they were better than me and had taken every opportunity to make me aware that they felt that way. Stephanie only spoke to me when it fit in with whatever scheme she had come up with to try and break me and Marizona up. Her final scheme worked to perfection though, didn't it? I never did like or trust her so why would I have listened to anything she had to say? In my mind, Marizona cheated on me and you know what they say "Once a cheater, always a cheater". Why would I want to get involved with her again only to have her break my heart again by cheating on me?" "I'm telling you, she didn't knowingly cheat on you, Joe. I would swear on my late mother's grave that Marizona would never knowingly betray you. She honestly does love you and knows that you're her one and only true love. I think you feel the same way. I promise you that I'll do anything you want if you'll only see her and talk to her face to face." I sat in the back of the limo thinking about everything Mr. Ortiz had told me. Had my anger and pain been so great that I'd over-reacted when I'd seen her with John and Charles? Was I being a hard ass prick because I had been hurt by what I saw? I couldn't deny that deep down in my heart; I still loved Mare and had been fooling myself thinking I was over her. I couldn't stop myself from voicing the one last desperate straw I had that might keep me from having to see her again. "My pursuit of a major league baseball career isn't very conducive to a long term relationship, Mr. Ortiz." I said to him. "Be honest with yourself, Joe. You know your chance of making the major leagues is slim at best. Are you really going to spend three, four, or five more years living mostly in motels and out of suitcases? I know for a fact the Rockies don't plan on re-signing you. Yes, you may get offers from other teams to sign a minor league contract, but do you want to start over at the beginning with another team. You'll be twenty six years old when your current contract runs out. Surely you don't want to be one of those career minor leaguers who can't give up the game for anything or anybody, do you Joe? My daughter loves you and would be anything and everything you need: best friend, faithful wife, and good mother of your children if you give her the chance. "What do you say, Joe? Are you ready to go see Mare and at least listen to what she has to say?" Mr. Ortiz asked me with a hopeful look on his face. I continued to sit between the two men that had hustled me into the back of the limo and thought about everything Mr. Ortiz had said. I realized that he was more than a successful businessman after he told me he knew the Rockies weren't going to offer me a contract extension. No one had come right out and told me that the team was going to let me go when my current contract was up, but I had heard all the negative comments about my abilities as an outfielder. Comments like: "He's too slow for the outfield.", "He doesn't have a good enough arm for the outfield.", And the one that really hurt was "He's a little long in the tooth to be playing in the outfield, all of our other prospects are younger and have a better shot than he does." It was possible another team would offer me a minor league contract and even move me back to my natural position of first base, but Mr. Ortiz was right, I was tired of living out of a suitcase and sleeping in motel rooms. I decided to do what he wanted and go see Mare. "Yes, I'm ready to go see your daughter, but you need to promise that if we don't get back together, you won't ever try and force us together again." I told him in a stern and I hoped confident tone. "I promise if you promise to really give Mare a chance to make things right between the two of you." Mr. Ortiz said to me sticking out his hand for a shake. I took his hand and shook it while nodding my head yes. We sat back away from each other and I relaxed for the first time since I'd been shoved into the car. I hadn't been paying attention to where the limo had been going and was taken by surprise when it pulled into a hotel across the street from the motel the team was staying in not five minutes after our shared handshake. The hotel was definitely in a higher class than the motel I was staying in. Its lobby would have taken up most of the cheap motel's first floor and had marble everywhere. I followed Mr. Ortiz across that lobby to the row of elevators as his two employees walked over to a group of armchairs and sat down to wait. Mr. Ortiz went to the last elevator and used a key to open its doors. There were two buttons for operating the elevator: an up and a down. My Ortiz pushed the up button as the elevator doors closed and our elevator ride was made in silence. I noticed as soon as I exited the elevator that there were only two doors for guest accommodations on the floor the elevator stopped on. Mr. Ortiz went to the one marked "PH-2", motioned for me to stand to the side out of sight of the door, then knocked loud enough to get whoever was on the other side of the door's attention. I couldn't see who answered the door, but the woman's voice who did answer it wasn't Mare's. "Mr. Ortiz, what an unexpected surprise. Mare didn't say anything about you coming to see us. I hope there's nothing wrong and that this is only a social visit." The unknown to me woman said to Mr. Ortiz. "Hello Claudia, I have a surprise for Mare and didn't tell her I was coming. How's that knee doing? Will it be ready in time for your next game?" "My knee is coming along and I'll definitely be ready for Mare's and my next match. I'll go get Mare and you can come in and wait if you'd like." "No, I'll wait out here until she gets here." I was getting impatient because the wait seemed to be taking forever, but I finally heard footsteps inside the room and my impatience instantly transformed into nervousness. The woman I'd fallen deeply in love with almost four years earlier and hadn't seen or had any contact with in three was only a short distance away and her reaction to seeing me was an unknown. "Poppi, what are you doing here and why didn't you tell me you were coming?" The woman of my dreams and nightmares said to her father. "I wanted to surprise you and hopefully give you something you've been praying for." Mr. Ortiz told Mare before reaching out and grabbing my right arm then pulling me from beside the door to in front of it while he yelled: "Surprise." "Joe? JOE!" Mare screamed as a look of puzzlement then joy spread across her face before she leapt toward me and I had no choice but to catch her in my arms. Even in an oversized T-shirt, sweatpants, her now short jet black hair a tangled mess, and no make-up on; she was still beautiful and my heart melted again like it had that first wonderful night we'd shared in that little basement apartment. The first kiss she planted on my lips brought all of those old feelings of contentment, peace, and love flooding back and flowing over me from head to toe. I knew that she was the one and only one for me like she'd known I was that for her. Neither of us responded when Mr. Ortiz told us he would be going so the two of us could do some catching up. I stood in the corridor holding Mare up as she continued to kiss me with a passion and sense of need I'd never felt with any other woman. Mare's kisses caused my cock to become engorged and harder than I could ever remember it being and all of the memories of that awful night were temporarily banished from my head to be replaced with memories of me pleasuring and receiving pleasure from the body that was hanging onto me for like its owner's life depended on it. When Mare began rubbing her own over heated sex against my member, I knew where and how our reunion was going to end. "At least let me into your room, Mare, before we go too far and end up molesting each other out here in the hall or do you want to give the guy monitoring the security cameras a free porn show?" I finally managed to say during her oral attack on my mouth. I managed to untwine her legs from around my waist and pushed them to the floor then bent down so I could get my right arm behind her knees and picked her up in my arms so that I could carry her more easily. The woman I knew as only Claudia stood with a wide open mouth and obvious signs of shock on her face as Mare directed me to her bedroom in the at least two bedroom suite. I kicked the door closed behind me after carrying Mare into the room and laid her down on the king sized bed I'd seen upon entering the room. Mare didn't let go of my neck when I laid her on the bed and pulled me down on top of her as she again began kissing me with that same passion and sense of need she'd started with standing in the hall. We managed to undress each other despite the frenzy of activities our mouths and hands were engaged in as we kissed and caressed each other. I found myself lying on my back with Mare lying on me as she continued to kiss me and was surprised and enraptured at the same time when she managed to impale herself upon my rock hard cock without breaking our kiss. Her pussy felt hotter, wetter, and tighter than I remembered, but Mare was able to take my above average length and girth entirely as she slid herself slowly down upon my cock. "So good. It feels so good. It's been so long. I missed you and this beautiful cock you have, Joe. Fuck me, Joe, and make me your woman again." Mare said to me after rising up from kissing me. I grabbed Mare in a hug and rolled us so that I was on top without breaking our physical connection and began slowly pumping my cock into her pussy while kissing her with the same passion and need she'd been kissing me with earlier. When I felt her begin to quiver and quake beneath me, I rose up on my forearms and began hammering her pussy as hard and fast as I could. Her pre-orgasmic squeal did cause me to remember the last time I'd heard it, but it was only a brief flash and was replaced by memories of me being the one who brought it forth during our many love making sessions. Her scream of release and the squeezing her vaginal muscles were giving my cock had me cumming seconds after her. I continued to stroke in and out of her until my cock had begun to soften. I wrapped Mare up in another hug and pulled her upper body onto my when I lay down beside her after our orgasms. I know people can't purr like cats, but the sounds of contentment and joy that Mare was making at that moment made me think that she was. Neither of us said a word as we lay there in each other's arms. I don't know how long we'd have lain there if our moment of reverie hadn't been interrupted by Mother Nature's call. When I reentered the bedroom after relieving myself, I saw Mare lying on the bed with the sheet pulled up to below her neck and with an anxious look on her face. "Joe, I want to say..." Mare started before I interrupted her. "You don't have to say anything, Mare. Your father told me about that night and your history with John and his fraternity. I don't care about what you did in the past and hope you feel the same way about mine. I haven't been celibate the last three years like you have, but we don't need to talk about any of that. I love you with all my heart and have been fooling myself into believing I didn't. If you promise to be true to me from this day forward, I'll never mention what happened that night again. Can you promise me that, Mare?" "Yes, Joe. A thousand times, yes. I love you so much and thought I'd lost you forever. I'll never do anything to make you leave me again, I promise." Mare exclaimed as she jumped up off the bed and into my arms again where she started planting kisses all over my face and neck. Needless to say, Mr. Ortiz's promise of me being back in my motel room that night didn't come true, but I definitely wasn't going to complain. The next day while I was at baseball practice, Mare used my room key to move my stuff from the motel to her penthouse suite. Her father owned the hotel's parent company and the two penthouse suites were permanently reserved for him and his family. I was apprehensive the next time I saw Roberto Ortiz, but he erased it immediately when he grabbed me into a bear hug while grinning from ear to ear. "Thank you, Joe, for bringing my daughter back from the edge of the dark hole she was headed toward. She's not been this happy since she told me and her mother she was moving in with you back at the university. Promise me you'll never abandon her again." "As long as she keeps her promise to be mine and only mine, I promise to always be there for her and to do everything in my power to take care of her, love her, and make as many of her dreams as possible come true." Mare came to see me play that night and made quite a stir with not only all the ball players but most of the fans as well. She was the most beautiful woman in the stands that night and everyone knew who her favorite player was within five minutes of her arrival. Miguel Gomez was at first elated when he saw her thinking he might have a shot at her then crestfallen as she hugged me and gave me a very passionate kiss at the bottom of the stands before the game started. "I thought maybe you'd changed your mind, gringo, and was going to introduce me to her." Miguel lamented beside me in the dugout while our leadoff hitter was batting. "No, she's here for me and only me. If you even look at her sideways, I'll stomp your ass into a mud puddle then stomp it dry. Do we understand each other compadre?" I said to him angrily and that and my facial expression told him I meant every word. He slid down the bench away from me and we ignored each other for the rest of the game. Mare was waiting outside of the players' exit when I emerged from the park and her body was plastered to mine as we walked back to the hotel. Our second night wasn't as exciting or frenzied as the previous night had been, but we were both very well pleased and satisfied when we did finally manage to fall asleep. Our relationship was back to the point it was at before and we began talking about all of those plans and dreams we'd talked about in college. I was going to fulfill my obligations to the Rockies and then go back to school for my Masters in Education so I could become a baseball coach in high school to begin with and hopefully in college later on down the road. Mare was going to finish her current pro beach volleyball season then retire and go back to school for her own Masters in Education so she could coach volleyball. Both of our professional athletic careers would end within weeks of each other, but too late for us to enroll for that fall's classes. We decided to get married during the time we'd have to wait before we could resume our higher education. Everything seemed to be falling into place for the two of us until our first major disagreement nearly drove us back apart and a certain person who was partially responsible for our first break-up was the reason for the argument between us. Mare was still friends with Stephanie be it long distance or not and wanted to include her in our wedding as a bride's maid. I didn't even want to invite her to the wedding and definitely wasn't going to have her image in half of our wedding album's photos. We came to a compromise that allowed Mare to invite Stephanie but not include her in our wedding party if Stephanie promised to not act like the bitch I thought she was and not ridicule me or try and embarrass me in any way. Mare swore she'd physically throw Stephanie's ass out into the street if she did either of those things. Mr. Ortiz might have given her a pass for her involvement the night of the frat party, but I wasn't and secretly vowed to get revenge on her even if it took the rest of my life time. The only other glitch that sprang up that almost derailed our nuptials to each other was her father's initial insistence that we sign a pre-nuptial agreement that limited me in receiving half of Mare's share of the family fortune in the event of a divorce. It was a lot old fashioned, but I believed when two people got married everything they owned separately became the property of both parties. If Mare trusted me enough to give me her heart, she should be able to trust me with her worldly possessions and vice versa. I knew that it wasn't Mare but her father that wanted me to sign the pre-nup, but if she wouldn't stand with me against her family about that issue, could I rely on her to stand with me against her family when other disagreements arose between them and me? I explained all of that and more to her before we talked to her father again. "Mr. Ortiz, I know you're worried that if, God forbid, something happened to cause Mare or me to fall out of love with each other and end up divorced; you want to protect her wealth in that event, but I can't sign a pre-nup. I know it's not the norm for today's society, but I believe that when two people get married they share everything they have equally including any and all possessions and worldly goods they had before the marriage. I also believe that a man's word and his handshake is his bond and should be better than any piece of paper. I promised both you and Mare I'd always love her and do my best to take care of her and if that's not good enough I guess we'll have to live in sin and all of our children will be looked upon as bastards." I told him at the table in their home during the short break between winter ball and spring training. "Please Poppi; don't spoil my happiness by trying to force Joe into signing those papers. He loves me and I trust him with all my heart. I will live with him like he said and we will have children together, God willing. Please, don't make me chose between him and my family. I will always chose Joe over anybody, friend or family. Please Poppi, forget about the pre-nup so we can get married and make you proud to be the grandfather of our children." Mare begged of her father. "Okay. Okay. Forget about the pre-nup." Mr. Ortiz said with a sigh before picking it up and tearing it up into little pieces. "Besides, it wasn't me who insisted that I get you to sign it anyway; it was my damn lawyers. If they're not happy about me not making you sign it, I'll fire their asses and hire new ones. I realized that those fuckers work for me and not the other way around so no pre-nup and my blessings on the both of you." Mare and I enjoyed the rest of our short stay with her family and when we left I felt like I was a part of it and that they were overjoyed to have me as a part of their family. I hadn't had a cell phone ever in my life, but gladly accepted the one Roberto gave me so I could stay in contact with not only Mare but the rest of the family as well. I went to spring training and as I expected was sent to the Colorado Springs "AAA" team after it ended. Mare continued traveling around the world on the pro-beach volleyball circuit which made it difficult for us to talk to each other as much as we would have liked. For the next eight months, we had to rely on our phone conversations and occasional phone sex sessions to keep the connection that we'd reestablished after being reunited. Until someone is in one, they'll never understand how hard it is to maintain a long distance relationship. I had only my faith and trust in Mare to keep me from returning to those dark nightmares I'd had of her with other men while we were apart until I was able to vanquish them with an "I don't care what she doing or how she is" attitude during my second season of winter ball. I did have my stint in "The Show" as ball players refer to the big leagues when the major league roster was expanded in September. My final big league stats were: 30 innings played, .500 batting average from 10 base hits in 20 official at bats with all of them singles except for one double and one meaningless (to the game I was in, not to me) home run, and two errors. I wasn't offered another contract by the Rockies and the desire to play in the majors wasn't strong enough to overpower my desire to be with Marizona so I refused the two minor league contract offers I did receive. I was done as a professional ball player at the age of twenty six. Her Problem Ch. 02 Mare and I got married in October of that year two weeks after her last volleyball game. Her professional athletic career was over at age twenty five while she was still in her prime. The pressure her sponsors and Claudia Stanhouse, her partner on the courts, to continue playing was unbelievable, but Mare wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her. Mare's family had taken care of all of the wedding arrangements and paid for it and our honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. We'd both had our share of tropical locales so we did the next most typical thing for newlyweds. Stephanie was angry that she hadn't been included in the wedding party, but due to the threats Mare had made about what would happen if she caused a scene; she behaved with only a few "If looks could kill" moments when she thought Mare wasn't noticing directed at me. Her husband was the one I wanted to kill, but I'd promised Mare and her family not to embarrass them during our wedding so I restrained myself. William Robert Bass, call me Billy Bob, was Stephanie's husband and although he came from one of the rich's, oldest, most influential families in Birmingham, Al.; he was a redneck bigot who would have fit in with all those KKK'ers that sprung up after the Civil War. The first time I wanted to kill him was at our wedding. "I can't believe he's marrying a wetback. He should have found a fine looking white woman for his wife and had his little hot tamale on the side like we do it down home." He wasn't counting on his conversation being carried through the ventilation ducts into the room I was changing in. Even though I was half dressed, I rushed out of the room and decked him as soon as I heard his comment. The fact that he was still sitting beside Stephanie as his eye swelled shut told me all I needed to know about their relationship. The next time I wanted to kill him was at another wedding. Even with the four year separation that we'd had; Mare wasn't the last of her sorority sisters to get married. That distinction went to Heather who had went to Europe, then Africa, followed by Asia before coming back to the United States and begun living in Knoxville, TN where she met a member of the Knoxville Police Department named Mark Brooks, fell in love with him, and they were married in Knoxville. Mare declined the offer to be a bride's maid because we lived too far away for it to be practical. Billy Bob saw Michael Davis, Mark's best man, and his beautiful black wife Latesha and opened his racist mouth again. "First she drags me to the wedding of that wetback friend of hers and now she's drug me to a wedding were the bride and groom are best friends with a n*$%&r lover and his darkie wife. I'm beginning to think I married the wrong woman." "No, but you sure know how to open that big mouth of yours when the wrong person is around." I told him angrily before I decked him again. He wasn't anywhere in sight after that even though Stephanie was one of Heather's bride's maids. Mare and I relocated to the town where we'd be working on our advanced degrees and into a furnished apartment not far from campus. I began working with the local beer distributor as a truck driver and stockman for their cases and kegs of beer. It was hard work, but it helped with our goals of being debt free when we received our Masters. Mare got lucky and signed a modeling contract with a local talent agency and was making more than I was. Did that bother me? Hell no! If me looking the other way at the monthly checks her father sent her didn't bother me; her making better money didn't. She did decline the offer when a bigger out of town agency tried to get her to sign with them. We had both decided that nothing was going to keep us apart and her signing with them would have. After we received our Master degrees, we began the nomadic life of newly graduated want to be coaches and it didn't take us long to figure out that Mare was going to be in higher demand than I was. A woman with her education and experiences from playing against other top volleyballers from around the world was rarer than a man with the same education and experiences like her new husband, namely me. Mare was offered her first head coaching job after only three years of being an assistant coach while I had been doing odd jobs and substitute teaching still waiting on my first assistant coaching position. The decision of her taking the job was a no-brainer so we relocated to the little town the job was in and continued in much the same pattern as we'd been in before. We had decided to wait on having kids until one of us was settled into a coaching job that looked like it may become permanent and we weren't there yet. Mare took her volleyball team from perennial doormats to two time state champions in the school's class rating in the four years she was the coach. I stayed busy with whatever job I could get and by working out in the football team's weight room. I accompanied Mare to every away game and was the team's biggest cheerleader. Our life together would have been perfect except for one thing; her continued friendship with Stephanie Bass. It was the only thing we ever argued about and when we did argue about it; we both ended up mad at each other. Little did either of us know how her uncompromising attitude when it came to Stephanie would cause the next bit of chaos in our otherwise happy lives. To be continued. Her Problem Ch. 03 My beautiful wife Marizona had successfully turned around the small high school girls' volleyball team in only four short years. After the second consecutive state championship, larger schools began inquiring about her for their volleyball team's new head coach, even schools hundreds of miles away. We listened to their offers of more money, better facilities, and larger pools of talent to choose from as a couple which turned a few of the committees for the schools that were interested in her off. They couldn't or wouldn't accept the fact that any decision about where she coached would be made by the both of us and not just her. The schools that those committees represented were dropped from consideration as to where Mare obtained her next job. Mare and I agreed we both had to be comfortable with the new school and the community it was located in before she accepted any offer. We traveled to the three schools we'd narrowed it down to so we could get a feel for each of them. Of the three schools and communities we visited, only one didn't disappoint us almost immediately and it was located in a suburb of Dallas, TX, six hundred miles away from where we were living at the time and seven hundred miles from the college town were we'd met and fallen in love with not only each other but the town as well. We loved our college's town so much that we'd spent many a weekend during those four years bunking with friends who were still part of the college community. Mare's attention was focused on her new coaching position and it didn't bother her in the least that we had no friends in our new community. I was the one left trying to adjust to a new location, new teaching job at a different school from Mare's, and the cultivation of new friends for not only myself but for us as a couple. Luckily I met another male teacher who was as much of an outdoor enthusiast as I was. Mark Stinson and his slightly overweight yet still beautiful wife Angelica became the closest thing to mine and Mare's best friends as Mare would allow. She couldn't or wouldn't allow herself to see that Stephanie, "My BFF", wasn't a good choice for a best friend. How many best friends help in setting one up to be used sexually like Stephanie did Mare that night at the frat party? How many best friends ask you if you've had any experiences like that since you've been married like I inadvertently overheard Stephanie ask Mare when I accidently picked up the phone during one of their long distance squeal-a-thons? Those questions and many more were brought up by me after the confrontation we had when I confessed to hearing their discussion of Mare's sex life while she was my wife. When Mare stormed off to our bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it behind her, I guess she thought our argument was over; but I spoiled her plans when I used the thinnest screwdriver from my tool set to unlock the door with an exterior knob and the hole in the center expressly for that purpose, barged right on into our bedroom only to find her curled up, and crying on our bed. Seeing her crying then had the same effect on me as it almost always had so I hurried to her and grabbed her up in my arms, cradling her body to mine as I tried to sooth her short of apologizing and telling her I was sorry. I didn't feel like I was in the wrong and I wasn't going to say I was only to make her feel better. After Mare had stopped crying, she began kissing me and caressing my upper body through my tee shirt which led to me getting hard. Mare scooted down in the bed, pulling the coaches shorts I'd been working outdoors in down as she went. By the time her head was even with my crotch, my shorts were down below my knees and Mare wasted no time in taking my hardness into her warm welcoming mouth. Mare had always been excellent when it came to sucking my cock and she was doing another great job at sucking me that afternoon as well. With my head laid back and eyes closed, enjoying the sensations her mouth was giving me as she sucked me, I didn't notice that she'd been working at removing her own pair of coaches shorts until she released my cock from her mouth, crawled back up the bed, impaled her hot, wet pussy upon my manhood, and began rocking back and forth as we kissed each other. I managed to get my mouth on her breasts when she raised up, bracing herself with her hands on my shoulders, while she increased both the speed and force of her pussy sliding up and down on my cock. When she dropped her hands down onto the bed beside my shoulders, I put my hands on the small of her back and began pushing down as I pushed upward into her as she slammed down. The manner in which my beautiful wife was fucking me, added to the blowjob that had preceded our coupling, had me unloading my sperm filled balls into her depths. The pulsing of my cock as my semen shot into her coupled with the hotness of my cum drove Mare over the top and she began to scream as she came on my dick. She laid down upon my chest after our climaxes had begun to wane and we cuddled there; telling each other we were sorry for the argument we'd had and finally agreeing we could disagree with each other when it came to Stephanie and Mare's stubborn devotion to her. My own stubbornness wouldn't allow me to like, trust, or forgive Stephanie for the way she'd treated me in college, her own part in that fateful night that had resulted in Mare and me being apart for the better part of three years, and her continued interference in our marriage, but more specifically, our sex life. Mare had finally broken down and told me that Stephanie and Billy Bob cheated on each other on a regular basis and each chose to look the other way whenever one of their affairs became common knowledge to their high society friends in Birmingham. I reminded Mare that we weren't Stephanie and Billy Bob and I reaffirmed that I'd never cheat on her, wouldn't tolerate her cheating on me, and that there would be consequences for her if she ever did cheat on me. She swore that I had nothing to worry about in that department. "Why would I want to make love to another man when I'm married to the best lover any woman would ever want?" She asked me. When I started to bring up her previous involvement with multiple men at the same time, she assured me that that was history and she didn't crave it or need it ever again. It was hard for her to admit, but she finally was able to tell me that she was always drunk whenever she'd indulged in that type of activity and that was the only time those urges emerged. She hadn't been drunk like that since that night and promised me she would never get that drunk again. I believed that she would keep it at the time she made that promise not knowing that it would be history in the not too distant future. Being the newest member of the faculty at my new school made it impossible for me to get out of having to teach the entire summer session that the school was required to provide for the students who were either behind in their school work or for the ones who wanted to finish high school as quickly as possible for whatever reason and elected to attend the summer session. Most of the students in the second category were either very gifted or extremely driven to excel and finishing high school early gave them a head start on their classmates when it came to college. When Mare was invited to attend the Women's National Volleyball Association as a guest speaker at their Atlanta, GA. convention and fundraising event during the second week of July, it was an opportunity for her to promote the sport that she loved almost as much as she loved me and I encouraged her to accept even though I couldn't accompany her despite the fact that I so desperately wanted to. The school system's superintendent refused to attempt to find a substitute for that week and with it being my first real teaching job; I had no choice but to let Mare go alone if I didn't want to put my entire teaching career in jeopardy. Mare assured me that she'd be fine by herself and I had nothing to worry about so with trepidation in my heart; I dropped her off at the airport on Sunday morning for her flight to Atlanta. Her return flight wouldn't get back into Dallas until around 4 PM the next Saturday. We agreed to talk to each other with our cell phones early of a morning and early in the evening each of the days that we were apart as we kissed and hugged each other in a tear filled goodbye outside the airport terminal. I wanted to run after her to stop her from going as I saw a majority of the men's and a few of the women's heads turn to follow her still lean and beautiful body as it walked past them in that graceful and unintentionally sexy way she had; the lust for her clear on most of their faces. I was stuck again in having to have faith in her and trust that she'd keep her promise to be totally mine as I got back into my truck for the long lonely trip back to our home. We'd only been separated from each other less than an hour and I was already missing her terribly. I didn't look forward to the upcoming week and the loneliness I was already anticipating with Mare's absence. I tried to relax and enjoy the Texas Rangers' baseball game that was on that afternoon, but was unsuccessful and ended up cleaning up and organizing our garage and the things that were stored within it as a way to keep me from thinking about Mare not being there. I was both relieved and a tad bit angry when Mare's call finally came; informing me she'd arrived in Atlanta safely and would call me back later when she was settled into her hotel room. The reason for the relief should be obvious, but the unjustified yet undeniable bit of anger was the result of the happiness I heard in her voice and the sound of many women in the same state of happiness I could hear in the background. I resented the fact that I wasn't there sharing in my wife's happiness and after we'd said our goodbyes; I silently berated myself for that resentment. Except for the separation from each other, things went as well as could be expected for most of the week. We talked to each other twice each day for as long as we could, especially on our nightly calls. We could have talked all night, every night if we hadn't needed to function the next day, me with the daily routine of teaching and her with the multitude of activities she was expected to be a part of before her big moment at the fundraising banquet on Thursday night. We engaged in a bout of phone sex on Tuesday night to relieve the sexual frustration we were both experiencing and made plans to do it again either on Thursday or Friday night depending on how Mare was feeling after her full day of activities on Thursday that preceded her speech that night. Unknown to either of us at the time, but the making of those plans was an act of futility and never came to fruition. "Hello, love of my life." Mare said to me over the phone that Thursday morning. "Hello to you, my beautiful lady. I miss you and can't wait to see you on Saturday. Anything exciting happening today that I don't already know about?" I replied with as much love and adoration as I could muster. "Yes there is Joe." Mare literally squealed at me excitedly. "Stephanie's arriving later today so she can hear me speak tonight and we're going to share the room I'm in until we both leave on Saturday. It's been so long since we've been together that I'm about to jump out of my skin from the excitement. Isn't that wonderful, Joe?" "To be honest, Mare, no I don't think it's so wonderful. You know that we don't like each other and I don't trust her not to try and encourage you to be like her and forget about your promise to be mine and only mine for as long as we live. Promise me you won't let her get you drunk. You know what will happen if that happens and you know you won't be able to resist if the situation presents itself. I love you with all my heart, but if something happens while the two of you are together and you cheat on me, you better pray I never find out about it because there will be consequences for both of you if it happens and I find out." "Joe, I don't know why you can even think that Stephanie would try and do something like that. She's changed since we were the "Terrible Two" of Alpha Delta Gamma and I trust her not to do anything like what you're thinking. She knows how much we love each other and what her actions at the frat party almost did to us and I'm sure she'd not do anything that would cause damage to you and I or our marriage. I promise to watch my drinking and not lose control, but you have to promise me that you'll try and change the way you think about Stephanie. She's almost like a sister to me despite the part she played in that dreadful night so please, don't be so down on her. Will you promise to try and change your attitude toward her for me?" "Okay Mare, I promise to try. I won't put her down to you anymore and I'll try to like her for your sake, but I don't think I'll ever be able to fully trust her. I know that's probably not what you wanted to hear, but I promised to be honest with you in all things and that's how I feel right now about Stephanie. My feelings may change as the years pass and she proves she can be trusted, but for now and from her past actions toward me, that's the way I feel. I love you and could sit here and talk to you all day, but I gotta go to work so goodbye for now and I'll talk to you tonight." "I love you too. Be careful today. I'll be waiting for your call later tonight. Bye." Mare said to me and promptly ended our call before I could say anything else. My entire day was spent with thoughts of Mare and Stephanie out drinking and partying with the end result of them ending up back in Mare's hotel room with as few as a couple of strange men up to an endless line of men with Mare and Stephanie sucking and fucking those men from Thursday night until Saturday morning. I knew my thoughts were irrational and that I should stop having them, but I was unable to and was a nervous wreck when I returned home that afternoon after school. I knew that Mare would be unavailable to talk to until 8 PM or a little after Atlanta time so I busied myself around the house as best I could during the agonizingly long wait. When I called her cell at 8:15, it went straight to voice mail and did the same when I called again at 9:15. I was beginning to get worried about where she was at and why her phone was still off when she called me back thirty minutes later. From the loud music I could hear when I put the phone to my ear; I knew she was no longer at the hotel or convention center where the WNVA's week of events had been held. "Where are you, Mare?" I had to yell over the phone to be heard. "I'm with Stephanie at a club in Underground Atlanta." She had to yell back at me. "You didn't say anything about going out clubbing with Stephanie. Have you been drinking already?" I asked as my fear of her being led astray by Stephanie reemerged. "I've only had one and this is the only club we're going to. I promised not to get drunk and I won't. Stephanie promised to stop me from drinking more than two drinks tonight. I still have to attend tomorrow's closing events and continue to glad hand as many influential people as I can so that girls and women's volleyball programs don't fall to the way side because of not enough money. I'll be alright and we won't stay very much longer here. To be honest the music is too loud for me and I'm a little tired from today's activities. I love you, but if it's okay with you I'd like to end our call so I can get Stephanie off the dance floor and headed back to the hotel. I'll call you in the morning, okay?" "If you're leaving soon anyway, call me as soon as you get back to the hotel so I know you're safe for the night." "Okay "Mr. Worrywart", I'll call you in a bit, but it will have to be short because I do have to get up early for the last breakfast meeting of the week. I love you and I'll call you back very shortly, I promise." Mare called back forty five minutes later letting me know she was back in her hotel room before shooting me down about a bit of phone sex because Stephanie was there and Mare didn't want her to hear us or her final scream of pleasure when she would have come from our dirty talk. When I hinted at maybe it happening the next night, she told me she'd try to make it happen before saying goodbye and ending our call immediately like she'd always done. She called me the next morning right before she had to head down to the conference room for the last breakfast meeting. We promised to talk later that night, but that phone call was the last one we had during the last day of her stay in Atlanta. While I was in the school, I wasn't allowed to have my cell phone on me because the students weren't allowed to have theirs and the system's superintendent felt that the teachers needed to abide by that rule as good examples to the students. I knew the majority of my colleagues broke that rule, but I'd been taught by first my parents and then the Boy Scout leaders while I was a member of a local troop that obeying the rules was one of the ways a person showed his character, so I left my phone in my truck while I was at school. I had to listen to the voice message that Mare had left telling me she'd finished earlier than planned and that she and Stephanie were going shopping for the rest of the afternoon. I replied and asked her to call me as soon as she got my message, but she never returned the call. I went over to Mark and Angie's house for dinner because I was tired of my own cooking. I made plans to go fishing early the next morning with Mark before going back home. It wasn't until I got home that I realized I hadn't heard from Mare yet. I called her cell but it went straight to voice mail so I finished cleaning up the house so that Mare and I would be free to enjoy her homecoming the next afternoon. I was slightly worried when I called again right before I went to bed and again got her voice mail, but there was nothing I could do, so I went to bed and slept fitfully until I finally drifted off into a deep sleep sometime after midnight. I was tempted to roll back over when the alarm awoke me at 4 AM, but Mark and I hadn't been fishing together in a while and I knew if we didn't get to the lake before the heat got too high; our chances of catching anything would be slim to none. I forced myself out of bed, looked at my cell phone only to discover the battery had went dead sometime in the night. When I had plugged in the charger and powered it up, I immediately got a ping and the front window showed I had a missed call and was dumbstruck when I saw it had come in after 2 AM. I flipped open the phone, checked to see who the missed call was from, and accessed my voicemail expecting to hear my much missed loving wife's voice. The surprise was on me when it was Stephanie's voice I heard. "Hello "Mr. Average", bet you didn't expect to hear me on my best girl's phone, did you? I was surprised to hear that you weren't as big of a caveman as I thought you were after Mare told me you'd learned some basic computer skills and even had an e-mail account. I sent a little video to you via your e-mail so I hope you enjoy it...NOT. "You'll understand what I'm talking about after you see the video, you should be proud of Mare because she resisted as long as she could; but after the right amount of liquid courage, she really got into everything that happened tonight. I would wish you a nice day, but I'm fairly confident that you'll be having anything but a nice day after you see the video. "Bye, you loser! I tried to tell Mare you weren't good enough for her, but she wouldn't listen. Maybe after what happened last night, she'll come to her senses and start living the good life that she deserves." I heard as Stephanie started cackling hysterically before ending the call. Her Problem Ch. 03 I was filled with dread as I walked into the den and powered up the desktop computer located there. After hearing her mention the words "liquid courage", I had an inkling of what I'd see when I played the video. My emotions were bouncing back and forth between anger, fear, and hope with anger and fear the strongest of the three. I clicked the play button when the video was loaded and after inserting a CD into the computer so I could burn a copy of the video not wanting to take the chance that it would get lost or erased somehow if I only left it stored on the computer. I managed to watch as Mare got drunker and drunker at some club which allowed her to become more uninhibited whenever she accepted an offer to dance from the multitude of men who asked her. I was angry at that time in the video as I heard Stephanie encouraging Mare to keep drinking the endless supply of free drinks that they were receiving at their table. I could tell that whatever device Stephanie was using to make the video was sat down on top of the table for a short period of time an hour into it and was wondering why when it was picked back up, focused back on Mare, and Stephanie narrated to the recorder the reason. "See those three hunks Mare's dancing with, "Mr. I Hate Your Guts". I had a little talk with them and assured them that they could all be getting lucky with my "BFF" if they didn't mind doing it together and letting me record it. From the way they're already touching her, you know what their answer was. "My girl's going to have so much fun tonight, she'll forget about you, "Mr. Strait Lace Party Pooper". After your reaction the last time she had that kind of fun, I'm sure you'll overreact and run off again. Don't worry though; I have a number of men, the right kind of men, picked out as candidates for Mare's next husband. Goodbye Joe and if I never see or talk to you again, have a shitty life." I watched the video up unto the point that the three men and Mare were in the back of a stretch limo that Stephanie had panned before they'd climbed into the back of when they exited the club and the men began mauling Mare's body while she groped their penises through their pants. I staggered out of the den and barely made it to downstairs bathroom where I puked up the mostly stomach acid filled remnants of the previous night's excellent home cooked meal. The fact that someone was incessantly ringing the doorbell finally registered in my pain filled brain. I glanced at the clock hanging in the living room on my way past and saw that it was 5:30, a half hour past the time I was supposed to pick up Mark. Mark was on the other side of the door when I opened it and he couldn't suppress the look of shock that flashed across his face when he saw me. "My God Joe, you look like shit. Please don't tell me Angie's cooking made you sick." Mark exclaimed to me. "Not cooking. Den, computer, video." I managed to blurt out before having to run back to the bathroom and mostly dry heaved into the commode. Mark stood outside the bathroom until I'd stopped heaving and then started toward the den. "NO MARK, STOP! I DON"T WANT YOU SEEING THAT!" I yelled, much too loudly. Mark hesitated before turning around and coming back to where I was slumped against the bathroom door. He helped me to my recliner in the living room before going to the kitchen and bringing me a glass of water. "Mare, my Mare, why didn't you believe me when I told you Stephanie wasn't the kind of friend you thought she was? What have you done to us? What am I going to do? Oh Mark; tell me what am I going to do?" I mumbled to him in a barely understandable tone. "I can't tell you what you're going to do unless you tell me more about what's going on or I see whatever has you so upset." Mark explained to me in a slightly agitated voice. "Are you going to tell me or do I go look at the video you mentioned a few minutes ago?" "I can't tell you, Mark, it hurts too much and I'm definitely not going to let you see the video." I said to him as some of my composure began to return. "Then I don't see how I can help you. I'm guessing our fishing trip is history. Do you want me to fix you something to eat or how about some coffee?" Mark managed to say after the short interval of nervous silence that had followed my refusal to tell him what I knew in my heart had happened the previous night. "The thought of food has my stomach churning again and I don't drink coffee. Why don't you go back home and I'll call you if I need your help after I figure out what I'm going to do? I do know that I need you or Angie to pick up Mare at the airport later this afternoon. Will one of you do that for me, Mark?" "Joe, you didn't have to ask. You should know by now that both Angie and I would do anything that wasn't illegal for both you and Mare. I think it would be better if Angie was the one to pick Mare up. What time is she getting back from Atlanta?" "The plane is supposed to land at 3:48 PM, but at that time of day and it being a weekend, it will more than likely be late. Thanks for coming to check on me. I promise to call if or when I need your help." I told Mark dejectedly. I sat in my recliner with all kinds of lewd and obscene images of Mare naked with those three men running through my head after Mark left. I didn't realize that I was crying until some of my tears landed on my bare chest and in a fit of anger toward myself, I slapped myself as hard as I could on the left side of my face. The pain from the slap broke the melancholy mood my mind had drifted into and anger with a tad of determination took its place. I headed toward the den, but stopped when I could hear that the video was still playing. I only got close enough to hear an indistinguishable noise coming from the computer's speakers. I turned and ran upstairs to put on some clothes but was stopped short when I saw the rumbled bed clothing on the huge custom-made king sized canopy bed that Mare just had to have after she'd seen a full sized version of it in a furniture store not long after we'd been married. When I tried to refuse it when her father gave it to us on our first anniversary, he politely yet firmly reminded me of our little ride in the back of his Mercedes and told me another ride similar to it wouldn't be as pleasant for me as that one had been before he asked me if I understood what he was saying. I quickly affirmed that I did understand and that I'd not do anything in the future for him to use that threat again. I don't know how long I stood and stared at the bed as a slew of memories of Mare and I enjoying each other carnally upon it mixed with memories of us only lying in each other's arms as our love for each other filled us both. There were also memories of those horrible months of separation we'd put each other through after the night I'd caught her in a similar situation as the one I was sure she'd been in the night before. I was snapped back to the present by the ringing of my cell phone still on the charger and from the ringtone, knew that the call was from Mare. I was far enough away that I wouldn't have reached it before it went to voicemail so I stayed where I was. I ignored the house phone's ringing, was far enough away from the answering machine that I couldn't hear what Mare was saying when it picked up, and started unplugging all the phones throughout the house when my cell phone started ringing again. I turned off my cell phone after it had quit ringing as a kernel of a plan began to sprout in my head. I left our house and drove to a small local diner that had the best breakfast menu and food I'd ever eaten. The tiny kernel blossomed into a full blown plan of action during my drive and smaller than normal for me meal at the diner. I knew from our past separation that I couldn't live without Mare in my life, but I couldn't let what I thought had happened yet was too afraid to confirm by watching the video Stephanie had sent me, go without there being some consequences for both Mare and Stephanie. I didn't have a plan for Stephanie; but the plan I formulated, which would be hard on both me and Mare was the only one I could live with. I wasn't going to throw the woman I loved out despite the fact that she'd probably been unfaithful to me again. To be continued. Her Problem Ch. 04 I had developed a plan in my head for punishing Marizona for letting her old college sorority sister, Stephanie; get her drunk and having sex with multiple men while away on her trip to Atlanta. I hadn't been able to watch the whole video that Stephanie had gleefully sent to me that would verify that Mare had actually indulged in a drunken night of sex with three men, but I knew from Mare's and my past that it more than likely had happened. I left the diner I'd eaten breakfast in and drove to one of the nationwide home improvement and building supply stores that was close to mine and Mare's home. (For the NASCAR fans, it's the one that sponsor's Jimmy Johnson.) I picked up a keyed interior door hardware set before heading over to Mark and Angie's house. I would need both of them to help me if I wanted to have the first phase of my plan complete before Mare returned home. "Joe, I didn't expect to see you today. Are you okay, now? You were pretty upset when I saw you earlier." Mark said to me after answering my knock on his door. "I'm better than I was, but I wouldn't say I'm okay. Can I come in? I wanted to ask you and Angie if you'd help me today." I replied uneasily as the idea of what I was planning asserted itself within my head. "I'm sorry, Joe. Yeah, come on in. I already told you Angie and I would do anything we could to help you or Mare any time you needed us. Have a seat in the living room and I'll go find Angie." I trudged across the plush burgundy colored carpet in my best friend's living room and plopped down on the loveseat of their living room set. I would have to turn slightly to my left when he returned with his wife and they sat on the couch which I was sure they would do when they joined me. "Joe, where's your cell phone?" Angie yelled at me as soon as she and Mark had returned to the living room. "Mare has called four times in the last hour wanting to know if you've talked to either of us. She sounded really upset the first time she called and she progressively sounded even more distraught in the following calls. The last time she called, all I could understand was that you were right, but she didn't listen and she'd driven you away again. What was she talking about and why are you deliberately ignoring her?" "I'll explain what's going on and what she was talking about if you promise not to answer any more calls from her until you've heard what I have to say. You need to promise me you won't tell her about what I've been doing, where I'm at, or the fact that you will be picking her up at the airport instead of me. What I'm about to do may seem cruel to the both of you, but I can't let what I think happened last night go unpunished and I need Mare to finally understand that I was right about her "almost a sister to me" BFF Stephanie. Will you both promise me that and, more importantly, can you keep your promises?" I said to them with a determined tenor to my voice. After they had both promised that they could, I told them about the worst night of my life before the one that had only ended a few hours earlier even though I'd promised myself I'd never tell it to another after my little car ride with my father, Roberto Ortiz. Their reaction to my tale of woe went from shock to surprise and back to shock when I explained to them what I was going to do and asking for their help. Angie's phone had rang twice during the first few moments of my story and but she didn't answer and then silenced the ringtone after the second call which let me know that it had been Mare who called both times. After I was finished telling them what they needed to know, they followed me home and Angie watched enough of the video to confirm my suspicions about the previous night's activities while Mark helped me move the junk that was piled up in the small room on the first floor that would soon be my bedroom. He helped me break down the queen sized bed in the upstairs guest room and move it and a chest of drawers downstairs to my room. I installed the new hardware set in the door while Angie and Mark move as many of my clothes that would fit into the smaller, than I'd been using, closet of my new room. When we had moved as much of my things as we could into the room I'd exiled myself to, Angie gave me a hug and a sisterly kiss on the cheek before she ran out of the house unable to stop her tears any longer. I saw the glisten of tears in my best friend's eyes when I went to shake his hand in thanks for what he'd done for me. Mark grabbed me into a bear hug and I could hear the pain and sadness in his voice as he swore to me that he'd always be there for me no matter when or where I needed him. I stood behind the shut front door as tears of my own flowed down my cheeks after they'd gone. I went upstairs to begin carrying my everyday toiletries from the master bath down to the first floor bathroom I'd be using for the foreseeable future. I couldn't have imagined anything could have made the day any worse than it already was, but reality and imagination collided in a big way when I opened the medicine cabinet in the master bath to get the replacement blades for my razor. I hadn't had any reason to open the cabinet all week so when I opened it that morning and saw that familiar circle of pills that every boyfriend or husband who's significant other used as their birth control method would recognize; reality grabbed my brain in a stranglehold and I again found myself on my knees in front of the porcelain bowl expelling my stomach contents into it. I would have to confirm it with Angie, but I very seriously doubted that the men Mare had been with the night before had bothered with protection and Mare wasn't in her right mind so the possibility of her thinking of it was very remote, extreme corner of the Earth remote. On top of everything else that had happened; the probability of Mare being pregnant was something else I had to worry about. If she was, it might be the one thing that would lead to our divorce. Everyone would think of me as being a bastard about it, but I wasn't going to be a father to someone else's child. Mare being raised Catholic meant she'd probably never agree to an abortion so if she refused to give the unconfirmed, but beyond a shadow of a doubt child I believed she'd conceived during her drunken night of debauchery, up for adoption; our marriage would be over. I placed her birth control pills in the center of what would be her bed until we either reconciled or separated from her actions and her devotion to Stephanie. I left the upstairs portion of our home not knowing when or if I'd ever enter it again. I wrote three notes to leave for Mare in the short time I had left before my departure from the house. I taped the first note to the front door, left the other in a sealed envelope beside my cell phone and the den's computer, and the third on a small table I'd positioned to the side of the stairs to the upper floor. I ignored the ringing of my cell phone after I'd turned it back on and left the house that I no longer considered a happy home to await Mare at the restaurant/bar that was built beside and partially over the small lake near the house. My first note to Mare read: Marizona, I haven't fled like I did the last time this happened, but I need you to hear and see what I heard and saw almost the first thing this morning. My cell is in the den. Please listen to the voice mail that I received from your cell last night after 2 A.M. After you have listened to it, watch as much of the video that is on the computer as you can stomach. I only made it to where you were in the back of the limo. Angie only made it to the point of you being airtight by your "friends". It was two hours into the video before Angie had to quit watching it so I think you need to watch it at least that long. When you've reached your limit, open the envelope on the desk. DO NOT OPEN IT UNTIL YOU'VE WITNESSED FOR YOURSELF WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT! Joe My second note to her read: Marizona, I hope you're hurting as much as I was this morning. I told you that Stephanie wasn't to be trusted, but you wouldn't listen. I told you there would be consequences if you cheated on me and even though you were drunk; you cheated on me last night. Go upstairs and see what your actions have wrought. DO NOT OPEN THE NOTE ON THE TABLE BESIDE THE STAIRS UNTIL YOU'VE LOOKED UPSTAIRS! Joe My third note read: Marizona, I am at the Lakeside Restaurant. If you want to remain my wife, come to the restaurant and we'll talk. You are in the wrong so you will be making all the effort required to save our marriage. If that's not acceptable, call the restaurant and tell John that we're done and I'll spend the next couple of nights with Mark and Angie. I'll move out of the house as soon as I can on Monday. I still love you and know that most of what you did was from being drunk, but you promised never to get that drunk again and you broke that promise. Whether we stay together depends entirely on you. If you show up at the restaurant before 7:30, I'll know you didn't watch the video to the point Angie did and we'll be done as a couple. Joe I had picked at the appetizer platter the waitress had brought to me until it got cold and I had her take it away. I had been staring unseeingly at the waters of the lake lapping at the pilings that supported the portion of the restaurant that overhung the lake and on the third refill of my tea when I sensed her presence beside the booth I'd been seated in. My heart almost broke anew when I saw the pain mixed with anxiety on my beautiful wife's face and the evidence of the tears she'd shed for only she knew how long during the long day that we'd both just experienced. I shook my head no when she tried to sit beside me at the table. I nodded to the other side of the booth and watched her tears start flowing again as she struggled to control them. "You need to compose yourself and I need to use the restroom so I'll be right back, I promise." I said to Mare as I arose from the booth and hurried away, hoping she'd not seen the beginning of my own tears. I used the facilities, washed my face with cold water, and then returned to the table I'd occupied for the last three hours. I was barely seated before Mare reached across the table in an attempt to grab my hand. I waited until her fingers touched the sides of my hand before pulling it back quickly and dropping it down beside me. I fought the internal struggle that was occurring between the urge to reach out to her and the need to hurt her more than she was already hurting. I wasn't proud that the need to hurt her won out over comforting her at that particular moment. "Ha, ha, have you left me, Joe?" Mare was finally able to stammer out after she'd sat back away from me. "Yes and no, Marizona. Have I moved my things downstairs into the room beside the kitchen? Yes, I have. Am I going to move out if the house completely? No, unless that's what you want. I meant it when I said I still love you and we both know what it felt like when we were apart before, but I can't forgive you for what you've done at this time. You've broken more than one promise to me in the last few days, done things that you knew would hurt me if I found out about them, and you need to feel some of what I'm feeling right now. "Whatever happens between us depends entirely upon you, Marizona." I told her in as neutral a tone as I could while my inner demon chastised me for not lashing out at her verbally if not physically. Mare turned her head to look out the window at the lake and I saw a single tear appear at the corner of her right eye before she reached over and pulled a couple of napkins from the dispenser on the table and wiped her face with them. When she turned her head back toward me, I saw the look of determination that she usually only had while on a volleyball court, first as a player and now as a successful, slightly famous high school coach. "I know that it won't help ease the pain you're feeling right now, Joe, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what happened last night, sorry that you saw me like that again, and sorry that I didn't believe you when you told me that Stephanie wasn't the friend that I thought she was. You were right about her and I was too stubborn to see or hear it. I truly felt like she was the sister I'd never had and thought she felt the same way. "I swear to you right now that I won't have anything to do with her ever again, Joe." Mare told me in her "I'm the coach so listen to me" tone of voice I'd heard for the last eight years whenever I'd watched her teams' practices or been to their games. "Hold it right there, Marizona. Did I ask you to not have anything to do with Stephanie? No, I didn't. You have to stay in contact with her and, if need be, at least pretend that everything is okay between the two of you until I can get my payback on her for what she's done. I would bet everything we own that she was going to try something like that Thursday night, but your phone call to me upset her plans. "One of the things you will have to do if you want to stay my wife is help me set Stephanie up for my punishment on her for what she did last night and for her part in setting you up to be used at the frat house our senior year. Your father may have let it slide, but I haven't and I've always promised myself I'd get her back someday before she or I were dead. I haven't figured out what her punishment will be and until I do, you need to make her believe everything is fine between the two of you. "That is one of the things you'll have to do as part of your repentance for cheating on me. If you can't or won't do that, tell me now so I can move on in my life without you. I doubt I'll be able to find another woman who I'll love as much as I love you, Mare, but I'm sure I can find one that will make me happy enough to survive without you." "I'll do it, Joe. I'll do whatever it takes to show you that I'm yours and only yours for the rest of my life. Please Joe, let's go home and I'll do all the sexy things I know you love for me to do for you." Mare begged of me with a hopeful look and the hint of desire in her eyes. I was tempted, painfully tempted, to take her up on her offer because it had been almost a week since we'd made love to each other and four days since we'd had our little session of phone sex and that look of desire in her eyes had the same effect on me then as it always had, but that would put an end to my plan to punish her and to make her see that the consequences of bad decisions are sometimes greater than the reward or pleasure received from those decisions. "No, Mare. We can't have sex tonight. It's too soon after what you did last night. I don't know personally, but I have my doubts as to whether the men you were with last night used condoms or not so you'll have to be tested for STD's before we have unprotected sex again. I think I remember from all the literature the university sent out about HIV and its incubation period that a person couldn't be one hundred percent sure he or she didn't have it until six months after the time he or she thought they may have been exposed. "Mare, do you see now what you've done to us. Because you didn't listen to me or trust my judgment when it came to Stephanie, we won't be able to enjoy each other fully like we have in the past until you do get a clean bill of health. "No long weekends of lying in bed pleasuring each other with our mouths, fingers, and other bodily parts. No exchanging sloppy wet kisses anytime or anywhere we felt like it. Your drunken night of pleasure has ruined everything we had together and I'm not sure if it will ever be the same for us again. "I'm sure you saw what was lying in the middle of your bed when you went upstairs and found most of my things were gone from our closet." I started to say before Mare gasped out loud and interrupted me. "No Joe, please don't say that. That's our bed, not mine. Please tell me it's our bed." Mare whimpered before new tears started to flow from her eyes. "Until this morning it was our bed, but until you've been shown to be clean and have shown me that you're truly sorry for what has happened and proven to me that you place me above everyone like you told your father you had done, it won't be our bed, only yours. "Getting back to what I was saying before, you saw your birth control pills on your bed and we both know you're in the middle of your menstrual cycle so has it even occurred to you that you're probably pregnant with another man's child? "I can tell by the look on your face that you hadn't, Mare. I won't be a father to a child that's not mine so if you're pregnant; we've got another problem that we'll have to deal with all because you trusted your "friend" more than you trusted me. "If you are pregnant, you'll either have to have an abortion or give it up for adoption if you want to continue to be my wife. "DAMN IT, MARE! ARE YOU BEGINNING TO SEE HOW BIG OF A MESS YOUR ACTIONS HAVE GOTTEN US INTO?" I couldn't stop myself from yelling at her after jumping up from my side of the booth and standing beside hers feeling the heat of my anger on my face. I turned and walked away from the table to the door that led out onto the covered deck of the restaurant. I stood at the rail around the deck and let the cool breeze from the lake help cool the heat in my face. I took in a couple of deep breaths of air while I struggled with my emotions. I chastised myself for getting so angry that I'd nearly crossed the line and struck the woman I'd loved and continued to love despite her betrayal of me and the breaking of not only our wedding vows but her promises to me about not drinking too much and losing control like she had. I honestly didn't know if our once happy marriage would return to us or not and that thought along with the one of being alone again scared me more than anything had every scared me before. After the anger had passed, confusion and doubt replaced it. It was so easy to want to hurt Mare as much as she had me when she was hundreds of miles away; but I was having second thoughts about what I'd set in motion from the initial anger and pain of what I'd seen and guessed had happened the night before. I could see that Mare was hurting already from her actions and the way I'd handled it was causing her even more pain, maybe more than I had felt that day. I didn't want her to return to that dark depressed state she'd been in after the first time I'd abandoned her nor did I want her to be in so much pain that her love for me withered and died because I was more concerned with punishing her than I was in helping us get past her actions while we were separated the past week. I honestly didn't know if I could carry my plan of punishment of Mare to its completion as I leaned against the rail watching the small fish that lived under the patio dart out from underneath it whenever something that might have been food landed in the water in front of them. I didn't hear her approach and only realized she was there when she leaned her upper body against my back and put her arms around my waist. "Joe, I'm sorry I've hurt you. I can't change what I've already done, but I promise I'll do whatever it takes to make this up to you. I'll help you with your need to get revenge on Stephanie and then I'm done with her forever. If I am pregnant, I'll do whatever you need for me to do about it. Please Joe, let's go home. It's been a long day and I'm tired. Will you please come home with me?" Mare said in a monotone and with a hint of sadness. I turned to face the love of my life and kissed her gently on the forehead. "It has been a long day, Mare, so yes we can go home. You lead the way and I promise I'll be right behind you." I told her before turning her away from me. Her Problem Ch. 04 I watched as she walked away from me and could tell from her walk how much she'd changed in such a short length of time. The slouch she was in as she left me was one hundred and eighty degrees away from the upright, confident, sexy walk she'd had as she walked through the airport terminal earlier in the week. She shuffled along instead of striding gracefully away like she had in the past. My plan to remove myself from her as much as possible until my pain was gone almost went to pieces when I saw the broken woman she'd become instead of the vibrant woman I'd fell in love with. I followed her home and parked beside her in our garage before going to her car door and opening it for her. I allowed her to lean against me as we walked into our living room. I sat on the right hand side of our oversized couch with my arms resting on the arm and back of the couch while she clung to me with her head on my chest and I felt the wetness of new tears on my chest as she cried harder than I'd ever seen her cry. In a moment of weakness, I wrapped my left arm around her shoulders and hugged her to me as I fought not to cry myself. The emotional stress we both had been in that day finally caught up with us and we both fell asleep there on the couch. I awoke sometime in the night and had to answer the call of nature so I eased Mare's head down onto the couch cushion, grabbed an afghan off the back of the couch to throw over her, and went to the downstairs bathroom. I went to my room and stripped off all my clothes before lying down and falling back to sleep. I was awakened by the sound of someone pounding on the front door. I jerked on a pair of sweats and ran to see who was making so much noise at 6 AM on a Sunday morning. Mare must have slept the entire night on the couch because she managed to get to the door before I did. When I saw mys standing on the porch after Mare had opened the door, the situation that Mare had put our marriage in worsened by a factor of two at least. I hadn't had one thought about the my in-laws the day before and knew that their showing up at our house so soon didn't bode well for me if Mare wasn't totally on my side as she'd promised she would be. The thought of me disappearing without a trace flashed across my mind and for the second day in a row I felt the most fear that I'd ever felt in my life. "What the hell is going on, Joe?" Mr. Ortiz bellowed at me before he'd taken two steps into my house. "Don't you talk to my husband that way, Poppi." Mare yelled back at her father. "I'm the one to blame for everything that happened yesterday. I let Stephanie get me drunk and I reverted back to that filthy slut I was in college. Stephanie hates Joe so much that she videoed me doing it and sent it to Joe. That's why I couldn't reach him yesterday and called momma in a panic." "He still shouldn't have made it impossible for anyone to get in touch with him. I left more messages on his voicemail than I can remember and not getting even the answering machine here at the house made it worse. We didn't know if something bad had happened to him or not. Surely whatever you did wasn't bad enough for him to do what he did yesterday." Mr. Ortiz exclaimed with the same angry tone to his voice. "Yes, it was that bad and to make it worse he found the birth control pills that I forgot to take with me to Atlanta. "Do you want to see the video, Poppi, and decide for yourself if what I did Friday night into Saturday morning wasn't bad enough for Joe to react the way he did? Or maybe you'd like a copy of the CD that Joe had the presence of mind to make of me having sex with three men at the same time? I thank God that Joe didn't have the stomach to watch the worst of what I did with those men or we wouldn't be standing here yelling at each other right now. "I know Joe would have kicked me to the curb if he had seen the video in its entirety like I did. I forced myself to watch it and couldn't believe that Stephanie would say all the bad things she said about Joe at the end of the video. Joe was right about her all along and I refused to listen to him. "Stephanie was so good to me when we first met, not like the other girls. You remember how miserable I was before I met her, Poppi. Being called all those ugly things the other girls were calling me, being ashamed of how different I was from them, and feeling helpless because I couldn't change the body I was developing back then. I truly thought Stephanie would be my best friend forever. I didn't realize how much she's changed over the years until I heard what she was saying at the end of the video. "I'm probably pregnant with another man's child on top of everything else so I ask you Poppi; how should Joe have reacted when he found out about all of this while he was here alone without anyone to help him cope?" Mare ranted at her father before she ran out of steam. "He could have called me, he could have talked to me, he knows I love him like he was my own son, and I would have listened. I can't say I would have been able to give him any advice about what to do about the situation, but I would have at least tried." Mr. Ortiz said as the angry tone was replaced by one of sadness. Mr. Ortiz turned to me with a pained look on his face before speaking to me in that "time to get down to business" tone he'd used on me twice before. "What do you want to get out of the divorce settlement, Joe? I honestly thought you and Mare would be together for the rest of your natural lives or I never would have buckled on having you sign the pre-nup my attorneys had prepared before the two of you got married. I tell you right now that I'll spend the money on legal fees so that you don't get half of Mare's inheritance if that's what you're thinking of getting." "I don't want a divorce, Mr. Ortiz. The only reason I'd want one is if Mare insists on having, keeping, and raising another man's child if she is pregnant. I won't be a father to someone else's child; it would be too painful. The child would be a constant reminder of what Mare did and I wouldn't ever be able to forget or forgive with another man's child around. "The best solution would be for Mare to have an abortion." I told her father while struggling to control my emotions. "There will be no abortion." Selena Ortiz, Mare's mom, said emphatically. "Mare will not kill my grandchild even if you aren't the father." "But that's the most practical way to handle an unwanted pregnancy, Mrs. Ortiz. I don't want to live without Mare, but I can't stay with her if she keeps any child she may be carrying right now." I replied to Mrs. Ortiz with my voice rising in volume from the anger I was beginning to feel. "She wouldn't have to keep it to have it. When she has it, we'll take it and raise it as our own. No abortion, no divorce, and everything works out to the good for all of us." Mrs. Ortiz answered me while remaining cool and calm. "I don't see how that will work. The new school year is only a month away and a couple of months after that Mare will be showing. How to we explain that she's pregnant for nine months and then suddenly she's not and the baby is gone also? "I won't lie to anyone about Mare being pregnant nor can I act happy that she is when I know it's not my child. An abortion is the best way to deal with the situation." I was literally yelling at her at that point. "Mare will have to go away to have the baby so that no one here knows she's pregnant. If the school won't give her the time off, she'll be able to get another job coaching quite easily somewhere else." Mrs. Ortiz lectured at me and I realized for the first time where Mare's in charge voice came from. "Where can she go that she won't be recognized? How can she keep her pregnancy a secret when a photographer manages to take a picture of her with her belly big and full with child? She was in the news all last week because of the convention. She was on ESPN's "SportsCenter" for God's sake. Like it or not, Mare's a minor celebrity so tell me how she's going to be able to hide a pregnancy now?" "She stays with us in our compound in Mexico until she's ready to have the baby. I guarantee that the child will have a US birth certificate and that Mare's name will not appear on it. No one will be able to get any pictures of her while she's pregnant and no one outside of my people and us will know she was ever pregnant as long as we don't tell them." Mr. Ortiz said as he took over the argument as to what to do about Mare's pregnancy from his wife. "But where does that leave me? I finally have a teaching job that could lead into a career and, more importantly, an assistant coaching job with the baseball team. I can't take time off to be with Mare in Mexico and keep my hopes of being a baseball coach alive and I don't want to be separated from her for however long it may take for her to recover if there are complications from her pregnancy or the birth of the child. "I still say an abortion is the best way to go." I implored of mys. "Does anybody care that I'm standing right here listening to you argue about what do to about a problem that we don't even know we have yet or not? Have you forgotten that it's my body that you're talking about like I'm not even here? No matter what the three of you decide, I will be making the final decision on what happens if I am pregnant. "I love you all, but I will be doing what I feel is the right thing to do if it comes to that so stop arguing about it." Mare yelled at mys and me before fleeing up the stairs to what used to be our bedroom but was hers now. Mrs. Ortiz followed her up the stairs after she saw that I wasn't going to and I heard the door to Mare's room close with a small click that was barely audible even in the suddenly silent air in the entry way to our home. My father and I stood there staring at each other for a few minutes before I managed to break the tension between us. "Roberto, make you at home. Since neither of us drinks it, I think the only coffee we have in the house is instant, but you're welcome to it. I have to take care of some business in the restroom, but I'm sure our wives will be back down shortly." I said to him before turning away and going back into my room for some fresh clothes. I did my morning constitutional, took a quick shower, and walked back into the kitchen where I could smell that someone was cooking. I saw Mare and Selena working together to get a good breakfast together for the four of us while Roberto sat watching them and grimacing every time he took a sip of the hot cup of instant coffee someone had made for him. We sat at the dining room table and ate with me and Mare on one side and her parents on the other. When Mare returned from removing our dirty dishes from the table and sat down with her parents instead of rejoining me that they had decided on they wanted to happen in case Mare was pregnant and that together they could persuade me to agree with their decision. "Joe, I love you, but I need you to listen to what I've decided to do in case I'm pregnant without you getting angry. Please Joe, I promise everything will work out for us if you can do that for me." Mare asked me with tears beginning to glisten in the corners of her eyes. "I'll try, Mare. That's all I can promise and I need you to know that I already feel like I'm being ganged up on here and it makes me nervous and a tad angry. You promised me you'd take my side in any disagreement we might have with your parents, but you're sitting over there with them instead of over here beside me." I managed to say without too much of the anger I was feeling being expressed in my tone. Thus began the discussion between the four of us that would set the course for what would happen to both Mare and I in the foreseeable future and beyond. To be continued... Her Problem Ch. 05 I was sitting on one side of our dining room table while my beautiful wife Marizona and mys sat on the other trying not to lose control of the anger I felt beginning to build inside of me. The fact that Mare was not sitting beside me was part of the reason for my anger and the feeling that my solution to Mare's possible pregnancy wasn't going to be what she and her parents wanted was part of it also. "No Joe, don't feel that way. There aren't any sides for anybody to be on in this situation. We don't even now that I'm pregnant yet. Let's try and work this out together as a family. Please Joe; can you do that for me?" Mare asked me with the whiny tone that she had learned to use whenever she wanted the exact opposite from what I wanted and which usually caused me to give in and let her have her way. "If there are no sides, why are you sitting over there with Roberto and Selena while I'm over here by myself? If you want to work this out as a "family", why are we having this discussion with them still here? Our family consists of you and me, Mare, not you, me, and your parents." I said as the anger I was struggling with caused my voice to get louder than I meant for it to. I took a couple of deep breaths to give myself time to get myself back under control as I watched Roberto's face and neck begin to redden as his anger began to build while Selena and Mare both cringed from the my outburst. I saw Selena grab her husband's hand and squeeze it in what I assumed was an attempt to get him to control himself before he said the wrong thing. "Yes and no, Joe." Mare said to me after the four of us had gained some control over our emotions. "Yes, you and I are a family, but we both are part of a bigger family, my family; which you were welcomed into with open arms and that I had thought you accepted as well. They are a part of this because, if I'm pregnant, it's their grandchild I'm carrying. Like it or not, they have as much at stake if I'm pregnant as we have, Joe. "You knew I was an only child, you knew how much they've wanted us to have a baby so they are still here because they have a right to be here." "Joe, please believe me when I tell you we had no idea of what was going on when we came here today. Mare called her mother in a panic when she couldn't get a hold of you yesterday worried that something bad had happened to you. When your friends Mark and Angie wouldn't tell her whether they'd seen or heard from you yesterday, she assumed the worst and her mother and I came to be with her if something had happened to you. "We didn't know about what Stephanie had done to the both of you until Mare throw her little temper tantrum at me for yelling at you this morning. I'm sorry that this has happened, but I agree with Selena that there can't be an abortion if Mare is pregnant. It is murder as far as we are concerned and I'll do everything I can to see that our little girl doesn't become a murderer." Roberto told me with an edge to his voice that let me know that he was barely containing his anger which only rekindled my own anger. "I'm sorry you see it that way because it's not the way I see it. To me, it's just another form of birth control, an extreme form of birth control, yes; but still a legal method of birth control." I managed to say without raising my voice. "Shut up, both of you just shut up." Mare yelled at her father and me as she sprang up from where she was sitting and knocking the chair over. The sound of it hitting the hardwood floor of the dining room made the three of us still sitting jump a little in surprise and shock. I couldn't remember every seeing Mare look as angry as she looked at that moment. "If I'm pregnant, which I hope and pray that I'm not, I'll be the one deciding on what happens. It's my body, my baby if there is one, and my decision. I will make the choice if there is one that needs to be made. Part of that decision will come from whether Joe and I are still together or not. "Joe, I want to remain your wife and I promise that I will do everything I can to prove that to you. I won't make you raise another man's child if I am pregnant, but I can't agree to an abortion right now either. Please Joe, don't worry about whether I'm pregnant or not and concentrate on what I need to do to make this up to you. I love you and I know you still love me. "Tell me what I need to do for you to move back upstairs into our bedroom and our bed." Mare managed to say after picking up her overturned chair and sitting back down in it. "No, I won't discuss that with you while your parents are here. I'm sorry I didn't think that they'd be dragged into this mess, but I wasn't exactly thinking very well yesterday for some reason." I said with as light hearted a tone as I could. "They may have a part in your pregnancy if there is one, but they don't have any part in our marriage, Mare. "If you want to talk to me about staying together, you'll have to wait until they leave. If you all will excuse me, I think I'll go outside by myself for a while. "Roberto, Selena, I'm sorry you came all the way up here and got caught up in all of this, but Mare and I need to work out our problems together without any influence from the two of you. I know you were concerned about my well fair and I appreciate it, but I don't appreciate how you both have tried to dictate what will or will not happen when it comes to mine and Mare's situation. "If Mare and I can't get past this, I promise to be fair when it comes to the terms of the divorce as long as you are, Roberto. Stay and visit with Mare as long as you want, but I need to be alone right now." I stood up from the table and shook my head no at her when I saw Mare start to stand. I walked around the table on the opposite end from where Mare was sitting and proceeded to my room where I slipped my feet into a pair of sneakers that I'd removed the laces from that I wore when I went outside but wasn't planning on going anywhere else. I went out to the big tree in our backyard, the outdoor table and pair of matching lounge chairs under it, and sat in the one that was still in the shade of the tree. I sat and thought about everything that had happened in the last few hours. In our nine year marriage, this was the first time Mare's parents had tried to manipulate us in any way. I didn't like the way I was feeling at that moment and was even more confused about the future of mine and Mare's marriage than I was before. I didn't want mys and particularly my father in-law having influence on mine and Mare's marriage. Divorce seemed to be the only way to keep that from happening if Mare continued listening to them. The thought of divorce caused me to remember those years of separation we'd went through before and doubt became the foremost emotion inside of me. The loneliness I'd felt without Mare in my life came rushing back and a feeling of dread overwhelmed me. I didn't see how I'd be able to survive without her and I began thinking maybe I could live with Roberto and Selena's occasional interference. The waffling back and forth in my head must have exhausted me because the next thing I knew, Mare was squatting beside me softly kissing as much of my face as she could reach. I sat up suddenly and gently, but firmly, pushed her away from me. "Don't." I barked at her. "I've not forgiven you yet so don't." "But you've always liked it when I awakened you like that in the past. I was only trying to show you that I haven't changed and that I love you more than ever, Joe." Mare struggled to say while fighting not to cry. "It's too soon for any lovey-dovey, Mare. On top of your cheating on me, the possibility of you being pregnant, and my need to for you to hurt as much as I am; your parents are trying to interfere in our marriage and I don't like it. "You promised me you'd never get drunk again so that your urge for multiple sex partners wouldn't come back, promised to be mine and only mine when we got married, and promised to have my back against any and everybody, your family included; but you've broken every one of those promises as far as I'm concerned. "When we discussed the possibly of you being pregnant before, you promised you'd do whatever I wanted you to do about it, but since your parents have put in their two cents on the matter; I'm almost certain that you're going to break that promise too. "I can't live with your parents interfering in our marriage or you're not taking my side whenever there is a disagreement between me and them. "I'm seriously thinking that divorce is the only option we have for resolving this mess, Mare. I love you, but I'm not sure that I can live with you any longer. You've broken too many promises and it doesn't look like you're going to be able to stop breaking them so maybe it would be best if we go our separate ways." "Please Joe, don't say that. This is the first time that you've known of in our marriage that my parents have tried to influence me whenever you and they didn't agree on how we should go when there was a decision to be made in our marriage. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want it to upset you, but they wanted me to take that modeling contract when we were in grad school. I knew you didn't want me to and I didn't want to be separated from you any more than you wanted to be separated from me so I didn't take it. "Can you honestly tell me of one time that we've made a decision in our marriage that my parents influenced either one of us into making?" Mare pleaded, argued, and asked of me. "No, I can't; but there's always a first for everything." I answered her, flippantly. "I thought you could control your drinking if I wasn't around to help you, but the first time I'm not with you, you get drunk; let three men have their way with you so your choosing your parents' side over mine will be another first in the long line of firsts of things you've done this weekend that I never thought you'd do. "If you're pregnant and decide to have the baby, our marriage is over. I won't quit my job or coaching so we can be together in your father's complex in Mexico during your pregnancy and I won't be separated from you for however long you'd be hiding down there so no one finds out about the pregnancy. I've never tried to force you into doing something I wanted and you didn't and I never will, but I can leave you, divorce you, and do everything in my power to never see you again in person if you're pregnant and won't terminate it. "If your father comes for me again with some of his goons like he did in Cancun, I'll fight until they either kill me or leave me in such bad shape that I'll never be any good to you or any other woman." I was able to say to her without getting too loud and animated. "Please Joe; stop worrying about what to do about something we're not even sure about. We need to be worrying about what I need to do to make you forgive me so we can save our marriage. I don't want to sleep alone another night so tell me what I need to do to get you to move back upstairs." Mare begged of me. "I'm sorry, Mare, but you'll be sleeping alone for I don't know how long. You only think you know how much you've hurt me with your actions, but you can't possibly know because it happened to me and not you." I told her as I felt the pain again and began to tear up. I turned away from her so she wouldn't see my tears and used the bottom of my t-shirt to wipe my face dry. I turned back to her when I felt her place her hand on my shoulder and heard her try and contain her own sobs of pain. I shook my head no when she held her arms open for a hug even though that was what I wanted as well at that moment. Mare sat down on the ground beside me before speaking to me again. "I'm going to the clinic tomorrow to get checked for STD's and, if it's possible this soon, a pregnancy test. I trust Marcia enough to explain to her why I need them done so that no one finds out about them being for me. I don't think I'm good enough at lying to stay in contact with Stephanie, but don't worry, Poppi is going to take care of our revenge on her. We'll never be bothered by Stephanie ever again Joe." "What is your father planning to do to her, Mare?" I asked. "I was thinking about setting her up to be used by two or three men, preferably black or Hispanic men; making a video of it and sending it to Billy Bob. As racist as he is, I'm sure that their marriage would be over. If she happened to get pregnant from her encounter, it would be icing on the cake. I wasn't thinking about hurting her physically or making her disappear forever which I'm afraid your father is thinking about doing to her." I explained to Mare as her eyes got bigger with shock from the revenge I'd been thinking about inflicting on Stephanie and the vicious tone of my voice. "I don't know what he has planned, but I did get him to promise me she wouldn't be hurt too badly and that he'd eventually return her to Birmingham when he was through punishing her. Forget about her and tell me what else I need to do to get you to forgive me. I've loved you since before we ever went out on that first date and I still love you, Joe. "I knew you weren't like the other boys and men that I dated before I met you from reading your stories. I still have those old notebooks with your writing in them along with the ones you've written in since then. I know you thought they'd gotten lost or thrown away during our many moves, but I've kept them near me all this time and still read them whenever I start feeling overwhelmed with things. "What happened to that sensitive, caring young man that wrote such wonderful things in those notebooks, Joe? That man wouldn't be demanding me to get an abortion or give up a child I'd borne even if it was another man's." Mare said to me as her in charge voice began to return. "He got replaced by an older, tougher man that realized that being sensitive was looked upon as being weak by his teammates and coaches. That man might be able to have raised another man's child even though that child would be a constant reminder that his wife cheated on him. I'm not that man anymore, Mare. I promise you I won't lose any sleep worrying about Stephanie, but you may if you find out your father has hurt her or killed her thinking it would make me come around to his and your mother's way of thinking. "I need to get away from the house for a while so I'm going to go down to the restaurant and watch the Rangers on the TV in the bar. You need to give me my space if you want me to begin forgiving you for what you've done so don't follow me down there or call me every hour wanting to know when I'm coming home. I'll be home when I'm ready. "One more thing, Mare. Don't be trying to break into my room and moving my stuff back upstairs. If you do that, I promise the next move my stuff makes will be into the back of my truck. I'm sure Mark and Angie will let me use the guest room until I find an apartment to move into. "The divorce won't be that bad unless you or your father make it that way. The house is a rental, nothing to gain there, both our vehicles are paid for so I keep the truck and you keep your car, even though technically, they were bought with your father's money, so we'll be even there; you make way more than I do with your salaries from the school and your monthly dividend from your share in your father's companies and I could probably get the court to order you to pay me alimony, but I won't do that. "The way I look at it, a divorce would be a "win-win" for both of us if that is the way this whole mess ends up going. Truthfully and at this exact moment, Mare; I not sure if I'll ever be able to forgive you for what you've done. I can only promise to try and as long as you leave me alone to get over the pain, anger, and confusion that I'm feeling, I won't leave you like I did the last time this happened." "What am I supposed to do while you're gone, Joe?" Mare asked me while struggling not to cry. "Clean the house, do the dirty laundry, go spend some of your money you've been saving; hell Mare I don't know what you're supposed to do while I'm gone. You're the one who has upset our normal routine so you figure out what to do until we can start doing those things together again." I told her before storming into the house. I threw on some clothes, drove to the Lakeside Restaurant, went into the bar, nursed two club sodas through nine innings of baseball, then wondered around the edge of the lake or sat in the shade of trees growing beside the lake until it was almost dark before returning to the house. Mare must have cleaned the whole time I was gone because the inside of the house was neater and smelled fresher than it had in a long time. She must have been upstairs because I didn't see her while walking through the downstairs to the kitchen and to my room. I was down to my boxer-briefs when I heard the tentative knock on my door. I saw the sadness on Mare's face when I unlocked the door and opened it and she was standing in front of it. She had on her sexiest lingerie which caused my cock to react the same way it had always reacted when I'd seen her in it. She tried to smile her most seductive smile at me when she saw my reaction. "I see a part of you is glad to see me like this, Joe. I'll help you get rid of that if you'll let me. Please Joe, either let me in or, better yet, come back upstairs to our bed and you can make me your woman again." She purred at me. "Did you go out and get some condoms, Mare? By your reaction I can see you didn't. Don't worry about my hard cock; it'll go back down by itself, eventually. Have you forgotten what I said yesterday? Evidently you did or wasn't I clear enough for you? "We will not be having unprotected sex until all of your tests for STD's come back clean. If you can get Marcia to prove to me that six months isn't how long that will take, then it will be shorter than that but until she does; six months from now, if we are still together, we can start having bareback sex again and not before. "You caused this mess so you'll have to get the condoms if you want to have sex with me before then. Good night, Mare. Unlike you, I have to be at school tomorrow and I need to get some sleep." I told her as I saw the dejection and pain on her face before shutting the door and locking it. The next two days were uneventful as I went through as normal of a routine as I could while working on avoiding Mare when I was at the house. I let her give me a hug on Wednesday of that week and that must have been all the encouragement she needed. When I returned home that afternoon Mare was waiting on me in an even sluttier lingerie set than the one she'd had on the Sunday before. It must have been new because I'd definitely not seen it before. A sheer red teddy through which I could see her unencumbered small breasts and the already erected nearly inch long nipples that were underneath it made up the top portion of the set. Mare's right thumb was rubbing her hardened clit through the matching pair of panties that were crotch less and gave her easy access to her sex which was glistening with her juices. She pulled her left hand from behind her back to reveal the box of twelve Trojan condoms she'd been hiding as I'd entered the house. "Do you like my surprise, Joe? I got these and my attire while I was out today. You've barely touched me since I've been back from Atlanta and I miss that. Please Joe; I need you to fuck me. However you want, whatever you want; I'm yours tonight to use. Please make me your woman again." Mare begged of me as she continued to alternate from rubbing her clit and fingering her pussy. It had been a week and a half since our last fuck session and except for the bout of phone sex we'd engaged in barely a week ago I hadn't had any sexual release so that the sight of her in the excited state she was in was too much to resist. My cock had hardened on its own; betraying me for a second time in only a short span of time so I gave into to it by unbuckling my belt, undoing my pants, and dropping them to the floor with my right hand while taking a condom packet out of the open box it was in with my left. I used the toe of my left shoe to slip the heel of my right down so I could step out of it then used the toes of my right to do the same to the left. Her Problem Ch. 05 I turned Mare toward the living room and guided her to the couch. I bent her over the arm of the couch, open the packet, rolled the condom onto my shaft, and plunged it into her depths in one hard thrust. She grunted from the force of my thrust into her, but didn't make another sound. "You wanted it so take it. Take it all you worthless, cheating gang-bang slut. I'm going to use all three of your holes just like Angie told me your "friends" did last Friday night into Saturday morning. Is that what you want, bitch?" I growled at Mare while I slammed her hard and fast with my dick. "YES! YES! YES! USE ME, PUNISH ME! MAKE ME YOURS AGAIN, JOE!" Mare yelled at me between grunts and moans as I hammered her unmercifully. I wished I could have fucked her like that longer than I did, but my frustration, anger, and need made it impossible to control my orgasm and I was filling the end of the condom with my cum after only five minutes of using her pussy for my masturbatory tool. The preparation she'd evidently done before I'd arrived home allowed Mare to orgasm while my cock head was still pulsing deep within her as I emptied my scrotal contents into the condom. When my cock began to soften, I grabbed its base above the end of the condom, stepped back away from Mare, and managed to remove my shirt with one hand before throwing it to her. "Use this to catch our cum before it drips on the floor. Don't go anywhere. I'll be back shortly." I ordered the woman that I both hated and loved at that moment. I hurried into the downstairs bathroom to dispose of the condom. I thought about cleaning my dick and matted pubic hair, but decided to let Mare do it with her mouth. I detoured into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of olive oil from the cabinet above the stove before returning to the living room. Mare was sitting in the floor beside the couch and I could see by the wetness of her cheeks that she'd shed a few tears in my absence. Whether they were tears of joy or sadness I didn't know and at that moment; didn't care. "Clean it and get it hard, I'm not through with you, yet." I barked at her when I was in front of her. "Act like a slut when I'm not there to stop you; get treated like a slut by me until it's out of my system. You're nothing to me but my slut for the foreseeable future, bitch. If you can't take it or don't want to, you're welcome to leave at any time. If you do leave, we're done and I'll do whatever it takes, use whatever I need to, to get my divorce from you. "Do you understand what I'm telling you, slut?" I said to her angrily before releasing my grip on her hair so she could disengage from my cock and speak. "I understand, Joe. I'll endure any punishment you give me, do whatever you need for me to do, short of killing someone. I'll never leave you no matter what you do to me. I love you and can't live without you. I know it doesn't mean much, but I am sorry. I'll never question your judgment again, Joe. If I'm pregnant and an abortion is the only way for me to make it right between us, I'll have it. If momma and Poppi disown me because I get the abortion, then it's their loss and not mine. "They'll be the ones missing out on their grandkids growing up when we have kids of our own. I'm yours, Joe, body and soul. All I want is for you to love me again and I'll do everything within my powers to make that happen." Mare said to me as she looked up at me from where she was kneeling with a look of hope on her face. My resolve to punish her almost melted away after her speech and the look on her face, but I happened to look away from her and fate, karma, or some other unexplained force in the universe led my eyes toward the den and I could see the back of the computer monitor through the open door. The memories of Saturday morning and everything that I'd heard and seen then came unbidden to the forefront of my mind. Those memories rekindled my anger to the point that I grabbed Mare roughly by the hair and forced her face back into my crotch. "Nice speech for a worthless slut, you bitch. Now get that dick hard. It has the craving for ass and you're going to satisfy that craving as soon as it is hard. "Oh yeah, suck that cock. Get it good and hard. You're close to the best cocksucker I've ever had. That girl in Asheville that almost got me down the aisle after I ran away from you is the only girl I've had that was better. Good thing I found out she was a bigger slut than you before the wedding. "It's hard enough, slut. Assume the position you were in earlier so it can get into that nice firm ass you have." I chastised her after I was hard. When Mare was again bent over the arm of the couch, I used first one then two fingers to lube up her ass with the olive oil. I encased my cock in a new condom and forced it past her anal sphincter and into the channel behind it. I wasn't totally barbaric in my taking of her ass. I went easy until she was relaxed and shoving back to meet my forward push into her before I began hammering her ass in the same manner I'd hammered her pussy earlier. My earlier orgasm allowed me to last slightly longer than twice the time I'd lasted in her pussy, but the tightness of her ass and the way she managed to squeeze me with it had me coming again long before I wanted to. Mare didn't cum while my cock was in her ass, but did shortly after I'd collapsed into the floor behind her from her own fingers on her clit. I pushed her away when she started to sink down beside me after her own orgasm. She flopped face down onto the couch where I could barely hear her sobs as she pressed her face into one of the throw pillows that we had on the couch. "Go, get cleaned up and I'll take you out to dinner. Wear that strapless black dress that hugs your body so well. No bra and that black pair of crotch less panties you got for our honeymoon that I know you still have. Those black spaghetti strapped shoes with the two inch heels will work nicely with your dress. No hose or anklets, I want your legs bare. "Hurry up and get ready. If you're not ready by the time I am, I'll not wait like I have in the past. Things are going to be different around here at least for a while, Mare. Your actions have forfeited your status as an equal partner in our marriage until I'm ready to return it to you. "From now until further notice, whatever I say goes. I'm leaving in twenty minutes with or without you so you better hurry. Now go." I told her forcefully. The days of Joe Scott going along to get along were over and that evening was the beginning of my new marriage to Marizona. To be continued... Her Problem Ch. 06 I had come home to find Marizona, my beautiful wife, horny and dressed in a new set of lingerie that was guaranteed to get me aroused as well. After using both her pussy and ass to relief me of some of my sexual frustrations, I'd given her only twenty minutes to get ready for a night out. After taking a quick shower, I dressed for the evening in a light blue shirt, navy blue pants and matching jacket because the restaurant I had in mind required one, and finished off with a black belt, matching shoes, and socks. I took slightly longer than the twenty minutes and was happily surprised to find Mare waiting on me for the first time ever in our marriage. "Wow! You look great, Joe. Stephanie wouldn't be able to call you "Mr. Average" if she saw you like that." Mare gushed at me with the first sign of happiness she'd shown since the whole situation we found ourselves in had begun. Her words and expressions were supposed to be complimentary and help keep me in the semi-good mode I'd been in after the sex we'd had, but the mention of the bitch's name that set this whole whirlwind into motion brought the pain and anger back with a vengeance. I closed the distance between us in three long strides. I grabbed Mare's arm above the elbow in a firm grip and pulled her to me so that we were nose to nose. "YOU HAD TO RUIN WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN A BEAUTIFUL EVENING BY MENTIONING THAT BITCH'S NAME, YOU STUPID SLUT. YOU WILL NOT MENTION HER NAME WHERE I MAY HEAR IT EVER AGAIN. SHE IS "THE BITCH" IF YOU EVER NEED TO TALK TO ME ABOUT HER FOR ANY REASON FROM NOW ON. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?" I yelled into Mare's frightened face. I pushed her back away from me without relinquishing my grip on her arm. She had to struggle momentarily while she fought the tears that wanted to flow before she could answer me. "Yes Joe, you've made yourself very clear. It will be hard for me not to use her name, but I'll try to call her the bitch if I have to. I'm sorry that I've spoiled the mode of the evening. Do you want to forget about going out, Joe?" Mare was finally able to say to me. "No, we'll still go, but you get to pay for the evening now. Go get a few hundred bucks out of your "mad money" and fix your face while you're gone. You've got five minutes, now go." I answered her after gaining control of my own emotions. Five minutes later we walked out the front door and I led her to my truck. I opened the driver side door and Mare looked at me questioningly. "I need you to get used to being close to me whenever we're out in public together from now on, Mare. The days of he's just Marizona Scott's husband are over. So get into the truck, slid over to the middle, and buckle up using the middle seatbelt." "But..." "Listen to me and listen to me good because this is the only time I'm going to say it. From now on you will do as I say without question, without complaint, and without hesitation. NOW GET IN THE TRUCK." I started out mild manneredly saying to her, but angrily and loudly at the finish. Mare's face paled from my outburst but she scrambled up into the truck giving me a brief flash of her pink lips framed by the lace of the crotch less panties she had on. Even after already having been inside that hidden treasure once that day, the little guy decided to make a halfhearted effort to rise from the sight. Disappointingly halfway hard was as far as he got, but I hoped that with a little more time and the right encouragement, he'd be able to rise completely later that night. We were on the highway to the restaurant when Mare started to speak to me again. "Joe, what did you mean...?" "Not now, we'll talk when we get to the restaurant." I told her before dropping my right hand down onto her bare thigh and giving it a squeeze. It was still early when we got to the restaurant and it being the middle of the week, there weren't many people and they were all seated within a small area in the center of the restaurant near the kitchen entrances. When the maitre d' came to lead us to a table, I showed him the fifty dollar bill in my left hand. "I'd liked a booth in the corner far from the kitchen and restrooms so we can have some privacy." I said to him. "Of course, Sir, right this way." He answered in that snooty way all maitre d's seem to have. I didn't give him the money until we were seated at a booth well away from the other diners. I motioned for Mare to sit on the bench seat of the booth that faced the room and made her slide in so that I could sit beside her. I returned my right hand to her bare thigh were it had been during the entire drive to the restaurant. "Hi, my name is Jennifer, and I'll be waiting on you this evening. Can I start you off with something to drink? The special cocktail of the day is..." "Two sweet teas, one with lemon and one without, please." I interrupted her. "Joe..?" Mare began to say, but stopped when I squeezed her leg firmly. Jennifer returned with our drinks and started to leave, but I again changed the normal routine. "We're ready to order. She will have the 8 ounce sirloin, medium, loaded baked potato, house salad with honey mustard dressing and I'll have the grilled salmon, steamed vegetables, house salad with blue cheese dressing." "Now we can talk until the food gets here. I need you to listen and not interrupt me. I promise you'll have your turn to speak and ask any questions you may have. I'll answer them honestly even though the answers maybe painful to hear." I said to Mare as I turned to look at her. "You seemed surprised earlier when I mentioned your father and a couple of his goons in Cancun. I don't know what he told you about how he got me to come and see you down there, but I'm going to tell you what really happened. I swear that it is the truth." I thus explained to her about being grabbed up off the street, the talk her father and I had, and her father's threat to hold me indefinitely if necessary to force me into seeing her. I knew her face so well that I recognized each of the multitudes of emotions she went through during my story. Her expression of anger lasted longer than any of the others and I had begun to fear that it was the one she was going to retain for the remainder of the evening. Thankfully for me, it was finally replaced with one of sadness and acceptance. My story had been interrupted once by Jennifer bringing our salads which we both had ignored. We ate in silence when the rest of our meals were delivered after sharing half of each of the meals with each other like we'd been doing for years. Any casual observer would have thought we were a loving couple without a problem between us, but I'm sure Mare was feeling the tension that remained between us from her indiscretion like I was. My mind couldn't stop from dwelling on the situation we found ourselves in, what the outcome from it was going to be, and was it even possible for us to achieve a happy ending. I still loved her and the rational side of me knew she'd done what she'd done while drunk after trusting the bitch yet again. I'd never known about her insecurities growing up and could see why she'd cling to her friendship with the bitch after what had happened at the frat house. The bitch's hatred of me must have been stronger than her love for Mare for her to do what she did. I didn't know why she hated me so much and probably never would, but I began to see that hating her back and wanting revenge weren't going to help me save my marriage if it was even possible to do that. All of those thoughts and more raced through my head during the twenty minutes it took for us to finish our dinner. After declining dessert and being told to take all the time we wanted by Jennifer, I turned to Mare again. "Mare, you know I still love you and I'm hoping we can rebuild our relationship so that it is stronger than it was before; but there has to be some changes. I'm tired of being afraid of your father and what he might do to me if I didn't make you happy. I'm tired of being on the fringes whenever we've been to all those social events thrown in your honor or for your activism for girls' sports and volleyball in particular. "Evidently you hadn't heard the "He's just Marizona Scott's husband." comments, but I had and they didn't make me feel very good. "I don't want you to think that I'm one of those men that get jealous because their wives are more successful in their careers than they are, but I can't continue being an afterthought. For us to continue to be married, things have to change so that we become the Scotts and not Marizona Scott and her husband. I will not sit at the end of a table with four or more people between us like I have in the past. "Until you've rebuilt my trust in you, we'll be joined at the hips whenever we go out for whatever reason. If you can't live with that, let me know now and I'll move out tomorrow." "I can..." Mare started to say. "I wasn't finished." I growled at her. "I have something more to say." Mare paled at my anger and then tried to look contrite while motioning for me to continue. "I've been struggling with something I thought of from your little adventure last week. Are you a closet slut who uses getting drunk as an excuse to indulge in what you secretly grave or are you an alcoholic who can't control her sexual urges when she's drunk? "I think you need to see someone and try to find out which it is. If you're a closet slut, our marriage is over. I love you, but I wouldn't tolerate a repeat of last weekend. Now I'll listen to what you have to say." "Joe, I love you and I will do whatever I have to so we can stay together. I didn't know about what Poppi did to you in Cancun. I was so happy to see you that day that I didn't care how he'd gotten you to come and talk to me. When you caught me instead of stepping back and letting me fall flat on my face, I knew you still cared at least a little for me. "Our first kiss that night only intensified my love for you. It was like all those years apart hadn't even happened. Joe, you're the only man I'll ever be able to love and I promise you'll never be made to feel like an outsider ever again. "If you think I need to see someone about why I turn into a cock crazed slut when I drink, I will. I'll ask Marcia to refer me to a good therapist tomorrow. "Will you move back into our bedroom, Joe?" Mare asked pleadingly. "Not until you've been proven to be completely disease free, Marizona." "Marcia says that will only be six to eight weeks not months. You can call her tomorrow and ask her if you don't believe me. I won't pretend that I'm happy about us sleeping apart, but I'll deal with it for however long it takes, Joe." Mare was interrupted at that moment by an attractive, older woman. "How are you folks this evening? My name is Tilda and I'm the manager this evening. I hope Jennifer took good care of you. I'm sorry to have to ask you, but would you mind moving to the center section? It would be so much easier on Jennifer if you did." "Everything was fine and we were ready to leave anyway. Give the lady the check and a hundred dollars, Mare. Would you please have Jennifer take care of our bill and tell her to keep the change?" I said to Tilda. We left the restaurant and I drove us to a sports bar to kill some more time until the nightclub I had in mind opened. We each nursed a club soda while trying to act comfortable with each other again. It was the most awkward two hours for me that I'd experienced in all the time I'd known Mare and thankfully the time for us to leave and go to the nightclub finally came. Mare and I spent the next few hours dancing, an activity we'd not enjoyed for longer than we should have. I made a pledge to myself that if we did stay together; we'd start going out and enjoying each other's company more in the future. The evening would have been perfect except for one minor incident. I had to go to the men's room and without thinking, left Mare sitting at our table alone. While returning, I saw a man talking to Mare and from her actions; he must have been pressuring her into doing whatever it was he was trying to talk her into doing. I hurried toward them and managed to grab him from behind as he was drawing back his arm to reciprocate the slap that Mare had given him. I recognized him as soon as I had spun him around to face me. "I don't know what you had in mind, but even from where I was, I could see my wife telling you no and to go away. Unless you want to lose all those millions of dollars you just signed for I suggest you forget about this evening and be on your way, Rodrigo." I managed to tell him in a monotone. Rodrigo Guerrero, runner up for the American league Rookie of the Year two years prior and recent signee of a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract, was standing there glaring at me. "Let me go, gringo, or things will get very ugly for you. See my friends are heading this way right now. After they are through with you, me and the beautiful lady are going to get to know each other better, if you know what I mean." "If your friends even lay a finger on either one of us both their days of breathing and yours will be short. The beautiful lady is not only my wife, but the daughter of Roberto Ortiz. I see from your reaction you've heard of him. Apologize to my wife then I think you and your posse need to leave." "I'm sorry if I have upset you, madam, or if I've ruined your evening. Let me send over a bottle of Champagne to show there are no hard feelings." Rodrigo said to Mare. "My husband and I don't drink alcohol so that won't be necessary. Thank you for the offer, but if you'd just go I'd be most appreciative." Mare answered him. Rodrigo hurried toward his friends and managed to stop them before they got close to Mare and me. One of his friends, another Hispanic male who was at least as tall as I was but with an additional fifty to sixty pounds of weight than I carried, was arguing with Rodrigo and kept pointing in our direction. I watched as all of his agitation ceased and he nodded to Rodrigo before turning his back to us and walking away with the rest of Rodrigo's friends following behind him. Rodrigo stood by himself for a short moment as if he were debating with himself on what he was going to do before shaking his head no and hurrying to catch up with his posse. By the time they had reached the front door, he was at the front of the crowd with arms around the waists of two of the beautiful women that were a part of his group. "We need to go, Mare. I have two more days before the summer term is over and have to get up in the morning. I'm sorry that Rodrigo spoiled the evening. I promise we will do this again in the near future maybe with Mark and Angela along so that nothing like what happened tonight will happen again." I said to her while extending my hand out to help her down from the taller than normal chair she was seated in. She didn't hesitate before climbing up into my truck and scooting to the middle when we left the nightclub. On the drive home, I continued to caress her bare legs like I had been doing since we'd go to the club. I could feel the juices that had begun to flow from her snatch on her upper thighs when my hand eventually made its way there. I touched her mound at the exact moment I was pulling into our garage. As soon as I had the truck in park, the ignition off, and my seat belt unbuckled; I twisted in the seat to face Mare. I used my right hand to jerk her dress down below her tits while shoving two fingers of my left hand into her extremely wet and hot cunt. I finger fucked her using hard fast jabs of my arm while I attacked her tits and especially her nipples with my mouth. After nine years of making her cum, I knew from her sounds and actions the moment right before she was about to reach her orgasmic peak and at that moment; I bit down harder on the nipple of her left breast than I had before. Mare's scream of ecstasy was almost earsplitting in the confines of the truck cab and it took all my strength to hold her close to me as she thrashed about on the seat. When she began to relax after her orgasm, I opened the truck door, stepped down onto the chrome running board, unzipped my fly while ripping open the wrapper of the condom that had been in my pocket with my teeth, rolled it onto my hard dick after I'd pulled it out into the open, pulled Mare to the edge of the seat, and proceeded to fuck her as hard if not harder than I had earlier that afternoon. I pounded into her for the next fifteen minutes, giving her two more orgasms, before my own release overtook me and I filled the end of the condom with my third ejaculation of the day. I had to grab ahold of the doorframe on either side of me to keep from falling backward when my knees got weak as my orgasm reached its conclusion. I held myself there with my hard cock still inside Mare until it began to deflate before grabbing the end of the condom so it wouldn't stay inside Mare's pussy when my cock flopped out. I disposed of the condom in an oily rag I kept under the seat of my truck and reached into the truck to help Mare down. She kept trying to kiss me on the mouth, but I twisted my head so that she continued to miss. "STOP!" I yelled at her. "I'm not ready to forgive you yet and we're not making up until I am." "Will you sleep in our bed with me tonight, please? I don't sleep well without you beside me." Mare began to whine at me as soon as we were inside the house. "No, I won't. I told you when I'd return to your bed and I'm not going to change my mind about it so quit asking me to every other day. I'm tired and have to get up for school tomorrow so I'm going to my room to bed." I answered her before kissing her forehead and retreating to my room. I slept fairly well after having gotten use to sleeping alone for most of the last two weeks and found Mare asleep on the couch when I went to the bathroom. I let her sleep, but my taking a shower must have awakened her because she had a half of a grapefruit, a couple of pieces of toast, and a glass of milk waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom. Thursday seemed to crawl while I was at the school and I wasn't in a better mood even after the sex and enjoyable evening Mare and I had shared the day before. I didn't go out of my way to avoid Mare like I had been, but she must have sensed my mood and avoided me instead. If I'd have known what the events of the next day would bring that night, I would have tried harder to dispel the dark mood I was in and pay more attention to the woman I still loved. Her Problem Ch. 07 We have heard the public service announcements about drunk or impaired drivers and that there is at least one of them on the road every second of every day somewhere in the United States; but we or at least I didn't think there would be one anywhere near me at 2 in the afternoon or that I'd be the one involved in a crash by one of them. I wouldn't find out about what happened until much later than that afternoon though. The red light I'd been stopped at turned green and I started through the intersection. The last things I remembered were seeing a flash of movement out of the corner of my left eye, the sound of metal striking metal, and an intense burst of pain on the left side of my head before the world around me disappeared to be replaced by a black veil over my consciousness. The next thing I knew, I was drifting toward a brightness that was barely in focus and an indistinguishable murmur coming somewhere to my left. As the brightness became clearer, the murmur became more comprehensible to the point that I could tell that someone was talking or to be more specific, due to the rhythm the person was using he/she seemed to be reading something. As I came fully awake, I recognized the fabric of the canopy of Mare's huge bed and Mare's voice. I realized she was reading one of the stories I'd written in high school and thought: "Why was she reading that stupid shit for?" I resolved in my mind to find out: a) where the hell am I? And b) why was she reading that garbage? What I wanted to do and what actually happened were two totally different things. I didn't realize how important having a half way moist mouth was for speaking until I tried to speak at that moment. "Where...?" Was all I managed to get out before the dryness of my mouth and throat stopped me from speaking another intelligent word. The rest of it came out as moans and gasps with a good grunt thrown in. "Joe? Oh my God, Joe! You're awake." Mare squealed from somewhere beside me. I turned my head to the left to see where she was at and the stupidest thought went through my head. "Where's the window? I could see the window when I turned my head to the left before while in this bed. Where did the damn window go?" By that time Mare was standing and leaning over me at the side of the bed. "How do you feel? Do you hurt anywhere? Can I get you anything?" Mare was rapid firing questions at me faster than I could process them. "Water?" I managed to mumble. Mare hurried through a door in the left hand corner below the end of the bed and I heard water running in that room and deduced it was a bathroom. She came back with a full glass of water and one of those flexible straws they use in hospitals. I turned my head to the left and began to gulp the water down while sucking on the end of the straw as hard as I could. Mare jerked the glass and straw away before admonishing me. "Tiny sips and take it slow. You haven't had any thing in your stomach for a long time so tiny and slow, okay?" I nodded my head yes and took small sips of the water waiting until the sip before was well on its way to my stomach before taking another. I was looking at Mare while I sipped the water and from the way she was bending over to reach me on the bed; I could look down her blouse and see her unfettered breasts and thought to myself. "Damn, her tits look bigger than I remember. Why is her belly visible below her breasts? I don't remember it being visible before." That question and a million more where swirling around in my head, but the energy I'd spent coming awake and sipping down all the water in the glass was all I had and I drifted back down toward the darkness once again. When I came awake again, I found myself lying on my right side with my left arm across Mare below her armpit with my hand lying in the region between her breasts and her belly with Mare's left arm lying beside mine. I moved my hand up and cupped Mare's left breast to find it felt fuller and heavier than it had in the past. Or it was all in my imagination? The bulge of her belly when I trailed my hand down to it wasn't my imagination and all those horrible memories came rushing back. "The lying slut is still carrying another man's bastard. I must have been out at least six or seven months from the size of her belly. I bet she was praying I wouldn't wake up until after she had it. No, I bet she was praying I wouldn't wake up until it was two or three years old and I'd let her keep it out of gratitude for her taking care of me while I was out. "I thought the stupid slut knew me better than that. As soon as I'm able, I'm divorcing her ass. Hell, with my half of her monthly income from her father's companies, I can move down to Mexico and not have to work another day in my life." I thought to myself before pushing myself over onto my back using Mare's shoulder for leverage. The pain that shot through me from my left leg caused me to groan and it and the push were enough to wake Mare. "Joe? Are you awake? Are you in pain? Tell me where it hurts." Mare blurted out with concern mixed with anxiety. "Get away from me, you lying, cheating slut." "I'll have the abortion and my parents be damned." "Isn't that what you promised me? How long will it be before you have your bastard child, slut? Get away from me, now." I croaked at her as my anger overrode the pain from my left leg which came back with a vengeance when I began to calm down as my energy deserted me and I groaned again. Mare had stood beside the bed in all her naked glory, cringing at first in fear then in anger, which was replaced with a determined look on her face. "I will not get away from you and I'm not a lying, cheating slut. I had that baby months ago. This is our baby I'm carrying now. It's been twenty two months since that drunk ran into you and nothing is the same as it was back then. Poppi is dead. Momma lives in the other wing of this house. I quit coaching and took over the family business. It took several months, but with the help of local law enforcement and the DEA, I managed to break all ties with Poppi's partners in the illegal part of his business. "We live in El Paso now, but more important than all of that is that you're awake, I love you, and we can finally begin putting our marriage back together." "If I've been unconscious for twenty two months, how can that be our baby?" I managed to mumble through my grimace of pain. Mare realized that I was in pain and laid back down diagonally on the bed to be closer to me. "Where are you hurting, Joe?" She asked me and I could see the concern she had for me in her eyes. "My left leg." I blurted out. I saw the look of surprise on her face that appeared there fleetingly before it was replaced by a look I'd never seen her express before. "No, it's not your left leg, Joe." She said before she stood and jerked the sheet that had been covering our bodies all the way down to the foot of the bed. "Let me help you sit up and you'll see." She got behind me and lifted my upper body up as I pushed up with my arms. I began to cry when I saw what she was talking about. My left leg was gone from mid-thigh down. An ugly, scar covered stump was all that was left of my leg. I released my arms and fell back only to land on Mare's body as she wrapped her arms around me and rocked me like a baby as she whispered "you're okay's" and "it will be all right's" to me as I cried harder than I could ever remember crying which included the crying I'd done both times her sexual improprieties had become known to me. I must have cried myself to sleep because that was the last thing I remembered. The sensation of movement in the bed was what I awoke to along with a familiar feeling of both wetness and heat in my crotch. I finally realized that my cock was hard and someone was using it to fuck a hot, wet pussy. I opened my eyes and saw Mare straddling my waist, leaned back with her arms on the bed for support, and slamming her cunt up and down on my cock. I managed to lift my right arm to where we were joined and pinched her clit causing her to cum and the squeezing of my dick by her vaginal muscles drove me over the edge and I joined her in cumming. She fell forward onto my chest after our peaks had waned and I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her to me with what little strength I had. I listened to her murmur had much she loved me, how sorry she was for everything, and that we'd be together for the rest of our lives. She shushed me when I started asking some of the questions that had returned to the forefront of my mind after my euphoria from our coupling had dissipated. "I promise I'll answer all of your questions when I get back home, but right now I have to go get ready to go to work. Mary will be in to do your morning therapy before she cleans you up. I'll be back before lunch and I'll be taking the rest of the afternoon off. I want you to know that I never once stopped loving you and never believed for a minute that you'd not come out of your coma. Together, we'll get you back on your feet and as strong if not stronger than you were when we first met." Mare declared to me before bending over to kiss me hard on the mouth. I wasn't quick enough to move my head so she'd miss my mouth, but when I didn't try to pucker my lips to return her kiss, I saw the look of joy Mare had fade to be replaced by one of sadness. "I hope you'll find it in your heart to forgive me some day, Joe. I know what I did in Atlanta is still fresh in your mind, but that was months ago and so many things have happened since then. I will take care of you until you're able to take care of yourself then if you don't want to be here with me, I'll not try and force you to stay. I'll pray that you'll want to stay and be a father to our baby, but I won't force you into being a daddy if you want to leave. It may be hard to believe, but this is your baby, Joe." Mare said to me before turning her back to me and walking out of the room, still naked. I didn't have long to contemplate on what Mare had said before a beautiful 6' blonde woman who was at least ten years younger than me literally bounced into the room. When she got closer, I could see her blue eyes, pert nose, plump lips, and my cock began to harden again even though it hadn't been even fifteen minutes since Mare had reduced it to its normally flaccid state. I would swear the yet as unknown to me woman got a gleam in her eyes when she saw it and I realized I was naked and uncovered before trying unsuccessfully to grab the sheet and cover up. "Stop trying to hide that beautiful cock. It's not like I've not seen it like that before. Lie back and relax, I won't hurt you, too much." The woman said to me before starting to cackle with mirth. "Who, who are you?" I managed to stammer out. "I'm Mary, your daytime nurse, physical therapist, and anything else you need. I'm glad you're awake; you don't know how long we've been praying for you to come out of your coma. Now no more talk, it's time for your morning stretches and then we can talk some more. Since you're awake, I think I'll push your muscles a little farther than I've been in the past and you can tell me when I go too far. Let's get started." Mary started with my right foot, bending and pulling on each toe moving onto the next when I flinched or grunted in discomfort. She methodically moved up my body from there, and for the next two hours stretched and pulled on every part of me. When she was done, we were both drenched with sweat and due to the constant contact her body had with mine; the erection that had begun when I'd first seen her had come and gone numerous times in those two hours never going completely soft. I gasped in surprise when she bent over my waist, dropped her mouth onto the crown of my cock, and began sucking and licking it while jacking the rest of my cock not in her mouth until I spurted my seed into that wondrous mouth she had. From the angle that her body was in, I watched as she swallowed when each spurt landed in her mouth and she proceeded to lick up what little of my semen that had escaped from her mouth. When I was spent, she wiped her face with the bottom of the thin tee shirt she had on, twisted around, and kissed me on the cheek. The events of the morning had not only drained me physically, but emotionally as well, and even though I wanted answers to what seemed like thousands of questions swirling around in my brain, I couldn't stop myself from falling asleep. I awoke an indeterminate time later to the sound of Mary reading and I again recognized it as one of the stories I'd written years earlier. "Why are you reading my stuff, especially that piece of garbage? Why the hell did you do what you did this morning? What the fuck is going on around here?" I yelled which I immediately regretted because of the sharp pain that suddenly bloomed in my throat. "Water. Please, water." I managed to moan out in pain. Mary had jumped up when I started to yell and rushed to the nightstand beside the bed to pour a glass of water from the pitcher that was located there. She didn't have to tell me to take small sips and to go slow like Mare had. When the glass was empty, she looked at me with true concern in her eyes. "Are you okay? Where does it hurt? I can give you a pain pill if you want one. The ones the doctor prescribed are still good; Marizona trades the unused ones in for new ones every month so they'd be fresh in case you woke up in pain when you finally did wake you. Can you talk? Can you tell me where it hurts?" Mary asked of me with anxiety mixed with love and I realized that I was more than a patient to her. "Throat and left leg." I moaned. "You probably strained your vocal cords yelling like that after not having used them for so long and that's why it hurts. We both know your left leg isn't there to hurt, Joe. Don't look at me like that. I'm not going to hem and haw about anything when it comes to you, your care, and your condition. That's just not me. Your leg is gone and any pain you think you are having from down there is not real. Your mind hasn't accepted that your leg is gone and is imaging the pain. I don't think you need a pain pill, do you?" "No." Was all I could say. Whatever emotions that were showing on my face caused Mary to lose her stern professional posture and look and I watched as it was replaced by a relaxed stance and loving look. She turned and walked back to the chair she'd been sitting in and picked up the book that was laying there. The reality of what she had in her hands finally sunk in and the shock of what she'd done earlier was replaced with the even bigger shock that the book in her hand brought into my head. "I have a story published in a book of stories?" I said/asked in amazement. "No, you have a bunch of stories published into a book. The whole book is nothing but your stories, Joe." Mary answered in admiration before showing me the back cover. There was a picture of me smiling and holding one of the notebooks I'd written stories in. The memory of when I'd posed for that picture came floating into my mind and then slowly faded as disbelief replaced it. "How? Why? Mare?" I blurted out. Mare walked in the door at that precise moment. She looked at me with the familiar look of love she'd always shown me except for that last week before my wreck when she had mostly fear and/or sadness as her facial expressions. She turned to Mary and her look instantly changed to one of anger. "You're fired." She said to Mary, angrily. "What? Why? Please tell me what I did wrong and I promise I'll never to it again." Mary begged and pleaded as tears came into her eyes and as she clutched the book she'd shown me to her chest. "For the inappropriate sexual touching of my husband this morning. Now get your things together and leave." Mare said to her as her face darkened even more in anger. "How...how did you know...know about that?" Mary stuttered out. Mare pointed to something in the ceiling in the corner of the room and then at a lamp sitting on a chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. "Security cameras, not a smoke detector and a simple lamp. With all the death threats from the criminals that used to work for Poppi who managed not to get arrested and the ones from some of the families of criminals that ended up in prison with my help, I had a security system installed and it records as well as having someone monitoring it 24/7." "Then you know that that's not the first time I've done it or the other things I've done with that beautiful cock Joe has. Why are you firing me now?" Mary asked as she got angry as well. "Because Joe wasn't fully aware of the things you were doing until this morning and I loved seeing him try to smile when you were using his cock to give yourself pleasure, but everything has changed now that he's awake. I'm the only woman who gets to use him for her sexual gratification now that he is awake. So you're fired. Get your things together and leave like I told you before." I could see the pain and sadness in Mary's face as she began to cry before dropping her head and walking slowly toward the door that led into the hall. I remembered the looks of admiration and love she'd shown me. I couldn't help myself from speaking out. "Stop where you are Mary." I said forcefully before looking at Mare who had a look of bewilderment on her face. "You're not fired and you don't have to leave." "What? What the hell do you mean she's not fired? This is my house and I'll fire whomever I damn well please." Mare yelled at me. "I won't get into a yelling match with you, Marizona. For one thing, I don't have the strength, and for another, it hurts my throat when I yell so shut the hell up and listen." I said evenly to her and watched as the anger showing on her face and in her eyes disappeared to be replaced with the look of fear which in my mind she'd shown me yesterday and not twenty two months ago. "Unless you want to find me a handicap apartment, pay for round the clock care until I'm able to take care of myself, become my ex-wife raising a baby on your own after the divorce, paying me alimony for the rest of my natural life, and never seeing me while I'm alive ever again; you'll do exactly what I want, when I want it, and how I want it. "You may have been in charge for the last few months around here, but that's going to change. I'm still the man of the house, still the aggrieved husband whose wife cheated on, and who hasn't forgotten that his wife swore she'd do whatever she had to so that her husband would stay with her and eventually forgive her. "I don't care that twenty two months have expired since those horrible events took place. To me it seems like it was just last week, the same as it was before my wreck. "Do you remember swearing those things to me, Mare? Do you not want to honor them now? I'm pretty sure that there's another woman in this room right now who would swear those things to me and do everything in her powers to make them come true. I could probably learn to love her, too. Not as much as I still love you, but enough to be happy for the rest of my life." Both Mary and Mare stood there with shocked looks on their faces. My little speech had left me both thirsty and worn out. I motioned toward the water pitcher beside my bed and Mary beat Mare to it as they both rushed to get it. I waved Mary away and watched as the look of pain returned. I had to flash the stop signal at her to get her to stay in the room while I drank the water Mare held for me. I managed to tell Mary what I'd thought of before I ran out of steam. "I'll see you tomorrow, Mary, same Bat time, same Bat channel. There can't be any repeats of what happened this morning or I'll fire you, understand? If I'm naked when you get here, you'll help me into gym shorts at least. I don't know what the routine was in the past when both you and Mare were here, but from now on whenever Mare is here and unless it's related to my rehab; you're free from waiting on me. Her Problem Ch. 07 "I'm tired now and think I'll take a nap so goodbye and cheer up everything is going to work out, I promise." I told her and had to smile when she replaced the sad look on her face with the happy one she'd had when she came into my room earlier that morning. She even bounced out of my room the same way she'd entered it. "I'm sorry, Joe." Mare began before I cut her off. "I said I was tired and ready for a nap. Unless you're going to lie down here with me, please go and let me sleep. We'll talk later, I'm not going anywhere." I said to her before I turned away from her and immediately drifted off to sleep. I was awakened by a bright light shining into my left eye. I tried to swat it away with my left arm, but it was jerked away before I could. I had to blink my eyes two or three times before the white dot in front of them disappeared and I could see clearly. I saw Mare at the foot of the bed and another woman with a stethoscope looped around her neck standing beside me. She was almost as tall as Mare, but unlike Mare, she was broader in body type than Mare, the image of Dick Butkus in his playing days came unbidden to my mind when I looked closely at her. "Who the hell are you and what were you doing to my eye?" I growled out at her. "I'm your doctor, Joe, and I was checking to see if you were back in your coma or only sleeping." She replied with a smug smile on her face. "And does my doctor have a name?" I asked angrily though it was mainly from being frustrated at not knowing what was going on. "Dr. Rebecca Hinderland at your service, Joe." She answered me as the smile she'd first shown me changed into one of happiness and, unless I was imagining it, love similar to the one I'd seen on Mary. "How do you feel? Hurting anywhere? Can I get you anything?" "I'm thirsty and hungry. Except for feeling confused about what the hell is going on, I feel okay. I'm not hurting anywhere, yet. Since you're here, why am I feeling pain in my left leg when it's not there?" "It called phantom pain and it's common in amputees, especially in the first few months after the amputation. You haven't been conscious so the loss of your leg seems to be a recent event instead of the months ago occurrence that it actually was. It will fade in time, but can occur occasionally for the remainder of your life. With physical and emotional therapy, you'll learn to cope with it, I promise. I think I'll go and let you and Mare be alone together." "No wait. I have one more question for you. Mare says she's carrying my baby so I'd like to know how that is possible." "Simple Joe, you ejaculated into her while she was in a fertile time of the month and she got pregnant." "I know how women get pregnant, dammit. How was I able to get an erection while unconscious? How was I able to ejaculate?" "It's not uncommon for men in comas to have erections, Joe. The thing about you was that you were able to get an erection anytime someone stimulated you down there. Ejaculation is mostly an involuntary reaction to stimuli and even though men can learn to postpone it if they work at it; eventually no matter how much they try and stop it, ejaculation will occur. Now it really is time for me to go. I'll see you in a day or two." Rebecca turned toward Mare and they hugged and again it may have been my imagination, but it seemed more intimate than a simple friendly hug. I immediately rationalized to myself it was my imagination and dismissed it. I had answers to a few of my questions, but there were a thousand more that I wanted answers to. I waited until Rebecca was out of the room and Mare was sitting on the bed beside me holding my hand before I began talking to Mare. "Mare, what the hell is going on? I wake up after what seemed like a good night's sleep to find out I've been unconscious for twenty two months. My left leg is gone but still hurts. You're pregnant and I immediately assume you're pregnant with a child from your dalliance in Atlanta, but no, it's mine and you've already had that baby. Where is it? Is it here and will I eventually see it and be reminded of what you did every time I see it? How did your father die? What happened to the bitch? Why did you have to take over the family business? And why does every woman who's been caring for me have looks of love on their faces whenever they're near me?" "Joe, it will be easier if I start at the beginning. A doctor who had more than a "three martini lunch" ran a red light and crashed into your truck at a high rate of speed. You hit your head on the side window of the truck and suffered a major head trauma. Your left leg was mangled so severely that they had to amputate it to save your life. I won't go into everything they did to save you, but it was huge. "After a month in the hospital and due to the expense, I had to have you moved to a nursing home. That's where you were for the next eight months. I had my baby and Poppi took it before I even got a chance to see it and he had a couple unable to have children fake being pregnant so they could be listed as the baby's parents on the birth certificate. I don't know if it was a boy or girl and don't know where it is at. "Not even a week after I had my baby, Poppi was murdered by one of his own men who wanted to take over his empire which included his legal enterprises. Momma and I inherited those and we had to hire protection so we wouldn't be killed also. "During all the chaos following Poppi's death and the battles Momma and I had trying to keep what Poppi had built; I wasn't able to come and see you at the nursing home until late at night. I don't know how long it had been going on and if luck or fate hadn't brought me past the nurse's station while it was empty, don't know how long it would have continued, but I caught one of the night nurses riding your cock for her own pleasure. "Joe, I can't describe the look of pleasure you had on your face while she was fucking herself with your cock; but it filled me with so much love and joy that I couldn't get mad at what she was doing. I didn't stop her until you both had finished cumming, but I forced her to tell me everything she would about what I'd seen. "She wouldn't tell me then and she won't tell me now when it started, but she did tell me that she'd accidentally caused you to have an erection the first time and began experimenting to see if it was a fluke or something that she could cause to occur whenever she wanted. That's how she discovered you could get hard when she played with your cock. She swore you smiled every time she did it and since you seemed to be enjoying it, she graduated to fucking herself with your cock. "She and the other night nurse took turns using you for their human dildo while the other one watched for any doctors or visitors at the nurse's station. Another patient had a heart attack and she was dealing with that until the EMTs' got to the home is why the other nurse wasn't at the nurse's station. "I had to report it to the home's administrator and the two nurses were fired. I talked to the home's doctor about moving you to El Paso because Momma needed me and after she told me that with around the clock care, there wasn't any reason you couldn't be with me in our new home instead of in another nursing home. "The government let me keep the wealth Poppi had amassed in exchange for me helping dismantle his illegal enterprises so I could afford to hire the best people to help me take care of you. Mary was the nurse I caught and I know she loves you and I can live with that. Rebecca was the doctor at the nursing home and I know she loves you, too. You've not met Jasmine or Marisol, your other nurses, but they are in love with you too. "I know I shouldn't have, but it looked like you got so much pleasure from what they were doing and I wanted to make it up to you for what I'd done, that I didn't stop them. All of them plus Rebecca's partner who is also a woman, and me of course, have been using your cock for their pleasure. It didn't hurt you because you weren't consciously aware of it and after I saw the looks on your face when they did it, I stopped letting it hurt me. "I love you, Joe, and didn't know when you were coming back to me so I at first buried the pain from what they'd been doing and finally accepted it because if you were getting some pleasure from it, you deserved it. I want it to stop now that you're awake though. Is that okay?" To say that my mind was reeling from what she'd been telling me would be an understatement. Six different women using me for their own pleasure. Six different pussies on my cock and I didn't know the differences and/or similarities they possessed. The only one I knew was my loving wife's and the last thing I remembered about it, I had to use condoms when I fucked it. Her story answered some questions but raised a few hundred more. Those and the ones not answered from before would have to wait because my thirst and hunger hadn't gone away. "Water. Food. Now. Talk later." I barked at Mare. She looked as if I'd struck her instead of raising my voice to her, but jumped up off the bed and poured me a glass of water while talking into the air. "Ramon, bring whatever Rebecca recommended Maria to make for Joe's first meal." The next thing I saw was one of the gorillas Roberto had used to hustle me into the back of his limo in Cancun. I must have shown some sign of fear or discomfort because Mare was suddenly there holding me and murmuring to me to relax. "Ramon works for me now. He's head of my security and he's a good guy. He was working undercover for the DEA in Poppi's organization. His bosses weren't happy when he quit and came to work for me after we'd shutdown the illegal activities." "I'm sorry about what happened in Cancun, Joe. I had to do as I was told or blow my cover. I swear to you I'd have stop it before any serious harm came to you. Will that be all Ms. Marizona?" Ramon said to me and Mare. "Yes, Ramon. I can take it from here. I wish you'd start calling me Mare like everyone else does. How many times to I have to tell you that?" From the quick blush he got on his face that was replaced by a look of longing just as quickly, I knew Ramon wanted to call Mare more intimate things than that. Even though I was in no condition to do anything about it, I got angry and was about to yell at him to leave and not come back; but Mare must have saw my anger and clamped her hand over my mouth until I couldn't hear his footsteps in the hall any longer. "I know why you're mad Joe, but you don't have anything to worry about. I know Ramon wants me, but I'm yours and no man will ever have me again if you'll stay my man. I don't care if you do get tired of hearing me say it. I love you and only you. I promised I wouldn't force myself on you and I won't; but I'm yours to have and do anyway, anytime, anywhere you want me. Here let me feed you. I'm sorry it's only broth, but Rebecca thinks you need to go slow since you've not eaten in a while." Mare fed me the broth and I didn't care that it was only broth. It tasted so good and felt so good going down and inside my stomach. I finished the whole bowl and asked for more. Mare told me I had to wait a couple of hours before I could have anymore so we could see how I'd react to having food inside me again. Mare showed me the lump in my chest where the Power Port was installed for my IV feedings and explained how she and my nurses had learned to read my body's signs when I needed to urinate. How, since I wasn't on solid food, my bowel movements were infrequent and they knew the signs for them as well. Roberto had kidnapped Stephanie and introduced her to large black cocks after Mare had slipped and told him what I would have done as revenge on her. Once she was addicted to them, he returned her to Birmingham. She couldn't do without a big, black cock and found a black lover in Birmingham. Billy Bob had caught them together and killed them both and the police think that the man's family was responsible for Billy Bob's murder. Mary had introduced Mare to a publisher after she'd heard Mare reading one of my stories to me. Mare thought that reading the things I'd written would stir the memories of me writing them and help me come out of my coma. Together they had picked out stories that were similar, edited them, and presented them to the publisher who liked them enough to publish them. The fact that the author, namely me, was in a coma helped them sway her from rejecting them out of hand. The first book was enough of a success that they'd done the same thing and published a second. My royalties were a drop in the bucket compared to what Mare's businesses brought in, but they had helped in paying for my care. The next six months were dedicated to getting me back in good physical and mental health. Mare had her baby, a boy, and I didn't argue when she wanted to name it Roberto. I allowed Mare to sleep with me and we began repairing our marriage and a sex life that I was fully aware of. The fact that all five of the other women who had cared for me during my coma turned up pregnant and swore I was the father of their children was only one of the many surprises that I had to face as we worked together on not only making me whole, but fixing our marriage. Mare was an alcoholic who couldn't control her sexual urges when drunk and went to AA meetings twice a week and sometimes more often when she was under stress. She admitted to me that she had gotten drunk once while I was in my coma right after Roberto was murdered. She was so drunk she doesn't remember how many men had her that night, but when she sobered up enough to realize what she'd done and being disgusted by the dried semen all over her body and the semen leaking out of both her pussy and ass; she got professional help which led to her discovering she was an alcoholic. She had a D & C to insure she wouldn't have another illegitimate child. It took some time and intense therapy for me to let go of the anger that was still fresh in my mind from Mare's actions in Atlanta, but I did love her and I knew I'd been miserable once without her in my life and I didn't want to go through that again, so I forgave her and tried hard to forget what she'd done. Life went on and, when they were born, the children my caregivers gave birth to were proven to be mine, but none of the women asked for a thing from me or Mare. They all lived within a three mile radius of the compound Mare and I lived in and I was involved in the upbringing of their children, even after Mary, Marisol, and Jasmine married. I know Jasmine's husband wasn't happy with me coming around visiting my daughter, Jolene, or that he was helping raise a mulatto child, but he'd agreed to allow it for the chance to marry Jasmine and he proved to be a man of his word. With Mare's and my publisher's help, another taller than average beautiful older woman named Myrtle, I managed to write complete books from several of my short stories and, even though I never made the top ten best seller list, sold enough of each book to justify the writing of the next. All the money from my books went into college funds for my children. I learned to walk then run on a prosthetic leg and began volunteering as a baseball coach at the Little League and Babe Ruth league levels. Even though we tried, Roberto was the only child Mare and I had. My children knew that I was their father and that I loved them all. Roberto was naturally my favorite, but that's was only because I was around him more and was able to do more of the things fathers do with their children than I was with the others. Mare and I were a happy couple totally in love with each other and the life we had together for the next twenty years. She was fifty eight and I was fifty nine when tragedy reared its ugly head again in our lives. Mare was diagnosed with ovarian cancer with one hundred percent chance of it being fatal. Chemotherapy and/or radiation would maybe add a few months to the six months to a year the doctors gave her for a life expectancy so she refused them. Three months after the diagnosis I was sitting beside her on the same bed she'd provided me with during the months I'd been comatose in our home. Rebecca thought it would be her last night on Earth so I'd brought her home to die. She was weak and shouldn't have been talking, but she was adamant that she had something to tell me so I stopped trying to get her to hush and be still. "Joe, I need to tell you something and I don't know how you're going to take it, but please believe me when I tell you I never stopped loving you and it didn't affect you in anyway. I've kept a big secret from you all these years even after I promised that I wouldn't keep any secrets from you after you came back to me. "I guess the easiest way to do this is to just say it. Joe, I'm a closet bi-sexual and the reason I couldn't stop being friends with Stephanie was because she was my first lover, female or male. We were lovers all through high school and college, but I swear I stopped having sex with her when we became serious. "I didn't correct you when you said I'd been celibate during the years we were apart. Claudia Stanhouse wasn't just my partner on the court, she was my lover also. That was one of the reasons she was so upset when I retired. We did have sex during the months we were finishing our obligations for the volleyball season, but you weren't there and I needed her to help relieve the stress of us being apart and I've not been with her since we've been together both physically and emotionally again. "When you were in the nursing home before I knew you could get erections, I was involved with Marcia Thompson, the doctor at the women's health clinic I went to before and during my first pregnancy. It ended when I moved to El Paso. "I'm sorry, Joe, but even after I'd moved you into the house and my bed and was able to satisfy my physical needs with your wonderful cock; I became involved with Rebecca and her partner. We had sex, but it was more for the fulfillment of my emotional needs than the sex. You couldn't give me the love and support I needed so I got it from them. "Please don't tell me that you would have given those things to me if you weren't in a coma. I knew that then and know it now and I'm not trying to cause you any pain by telling you all of this. I had to tell you before I died so I could keep my promise to you of no secrets. "You are the only man I have ever loved, Joe, and that's the God's honest truth. When you were supplying all of my emotional and physical needs, I swear I was faithful to you except for the two times you knew of before I told you about the other time I wasn't. I didn't need any one else, man or woman, when you were there for me. I even managed to refuse Stephanie when she tried to initiate sex with me the night before I fucked up and caused you so much pain. I slept in the floor of the bathroom with the door locked to get away from her, I swear. "I won't lie and say I wasn't tempted for some girl-on-girl sex while we were married because I was, but I was able to resist the temptation. I shouldn't have let Stephanie get me drunk, but I did and I can't change that or what happened because of it; so I'm swearing to you now that those three times were the only times I was unfaithful. "I don't know if you can forgive me again, Joe, but I hope you can. I went to confessional in the hospital chapel last Sunday and confessed everything to the priest and God and the priest assured me I'd get into heaven for doing that and being truly sorry for what I've done over the course of my life. If you want to see me again in heaven Joe, you have to forgive me for what I've just told you. "The lesbian sex only occurred when you were either not there for me physically or emotionally and I never snuck around to continue having it when you were with me in body, mind, and soul. I stopped doing it when we were together and never regretted for one minute not doing it while we were together. I'm sorry if I've hurt you but I had to tell you. Her Problem Ch. 07 "I'm tired now and I'm going to sleep. I hope you'll find it in your heart to forgive me tonight and lie here with me. If it is my last night, I want it to be wrapped up in the arms of the one person I've loved whole heartedly and unconditionally for the last thirty seven years. "Please lie down here with me Joe and hold me at least until I fall to sleep. If you can't stand to be near me after that, I won't be mad if you leave the bed and sleep somewhere else." I was an emotional wreck after Mare's little talk. On the one hand; I was shocked, angry, and hurt by whet she'd told me. On the other; I was overcome with love, compassion, and sorrow because she was dying and I could stop it from happening. For maybe the first time in my life when I had a choice between anger or another emotion dictating my course of action, I didn't chose anger. I lay down with the woman I'd loved for the last thirty seven years and wrapped her up in my arms where we both eventually fell asleep. I awoke sometime in the middle of the night and knew she was gone as soon as I was fully awake. I untangled myself from her lifeless body and called 911, beginning the ritual of death every one of us will go through eventually. We had made her arrangements months ago so phone calls were the only things I needed to do. Mare was cremated and the memorial service was held two days later at her church. Roberto, his wife and their children sat on the front pew with me. All of my other children and their families were in the pews immediately behind me, including the women who had born them. They were as much a part of Mare's family as me and Roberto were. She had accepted them long ago and I think they knew she loved them in her own way. We scattered her ashes in the scrub land outside of the compound we'd lived in since her father's death. I cried in front of my children for the first time that day and none of them acted like they were embarrassed at seeing my tears. I wish I could say that it was the last time I cried for or because of Marizona, but I can't because it wasn't. I cried alone in the bed we'd shared for so many years at least every other day for the next month. Sometimes they were tears of pain from her death and the other times they were tears of pain for what she'd told me the last night she was alive. With the help of therapy and the love of my children, the pains of losing her and of what she'd told me faded away until I could continue with my life. Mary, who had been divorced for a couple of years by that time from her second husband, came to see me and confessed that the reason her marriages hadn't worked was because she was still in love with me and wanted to see if I might be able to love her as well. We began dating and I did develop feelings for her, which may have included a tiny bit of love, but they never were as strong as the ones I'd felt for Mare. She did move in with me and we're taking it one day at a time. ***************************************** Epilogue: Twenty years have passed since Marizona's death. I will join her in the near future from congestive heart failure. All of my children will share in my inheritance equally and will be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives unless they blow it on lavish life styles or drugs. Mary is writing this as I dictate it to her because I don't have the strength to do it myself. We never married but I did love her enough that we both were happy together. I wanted to include her in my inheritance, but she refused. She is an accomplished author who did make the best seller top ten, twice, and she gives all the credit to Mare and me. I as an inspiration to start writing in the first place and Mare for giving her the courage to present it to someone even though, like me, she didn't think her writing was good enough. I forgave Mare for everything that she'd done that had hurt me many years ago and know we'll be together again when I die. My ashes will be scattered over the same patch of scrub land as Mare's was twenty years ago by Roberto and any of my other children who want to join him. I tried to run away from true love once and learned that life is hard without that love in it. My only regret is the three years we were apart. I often wondered if she'd been there with me, encouraging me, pushing me; if I might have made the big leagues and stuck and how that would have changed both our lives. I'm tired now and think I'll go to sleep. Goodbye for now, dear reader. P.S. Hello I'm Mary. Joe, the love of my life, passed away in his sleep last night. I know he didn't love me as much as he did Marizona even after what she did to him, but what he gave me was enough for me. I had to wait twenty one years, go through two marriages, hurting two wonderful men whose only problem was they weren't Joe, and live under the presence of a dead woman to be with the man I fell in love with before he even knew I existed; but it was worth it. I've got to go now and make all those calls necessary for Joe's last wishes to come true. Someday I'll join him in heaven, but until then life goes on as Joe would say. The End.