Separate Lives (Chapter 1)

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Separate Lives (Chapter 1)He catches her cheating, and won’t put up with it.My wife knows me so well. She can predict where I will to take her out to dinner, for instance, though I’ve tried hard to surprise her. She has an instinct for when I need a little tender loving care too. She knows everything about my life…from fumbling flirtations with girls in high school to the angst of being passed over for a promotion I thought I deserved. She knows I’m scared shitless of snakes, whether they’re dangerous or not. She knows I can’t bear to hear small c***dren cry without wanting to pick them up and wrap my arms around them…and she even knows I’m that way because my father could never unbend enough to hug me. Everything about me, I entrust to my dear wife.She knows I always go to lunch at 11:30 every day because I had to take a lunch break at that early hour when I was the most junior guy in the office. Back then I would always be back at 12:30, because other people would want to leave right about then. I got into the habit and never changed. But, as some philosopher should explain, shit happens.My wife doesn’t know I’m taking a late, extended lunch today. The whole office is going out to a farewell party for one of the senior administrators, specifically the director of the Research and Development Branch, where I work. Bill Thornton was retiring after thirty-six years and the whole operation was being shut down to wish him a happy retirement.********Lyle was one of the youngest engineers working in my division and I was happy to have him under my supervision. He was a hard worker, imaginative, and highly resourceful. When it came time for merit pay increases and bonuses, I was happy to put in his name.With his first big bonus, Lyle bought one of those mammoth Chevy Suburbans. He had one k** and another on the way, so he wanted a wagon big enough for lots of k**s. Apparently, his wife felt the same way. I privately considered his new SUV big enough for a whole clan, much less one family. But he was proud of it and wanted to show it off. With my seniority, I got to ride “shotgun” on the way down to the convention center.”So, Ron, what do you think of my new buggy?” Lyle asked. That’s me. I’m Ron—also known as Ronald Masters. Twenty-nine years old, in pretty good health and well thought of within my field of expertise—mechanical engineering—though lately my job has had little to do with that degree. I hadn’t been a manager for very long but it was taking up more and more of my time. I was even thinking of taking some night courses in personnel and resource management to keep up with the responsibilities the boss kept pushing my way.”It’s cool,” I replied, interjecting some enthusiasm into my voice. “Or is that supposed to be “hot” or “tight” these days? I can never remember what the latest slang is,” I told him. He laughed.”You like it?””Oh, heck yeah,” I said. I twisted around to peer into the interior of the spacious vehicle.”Shoot, Lyle,” I remarked, “I think the first apartment Sherrie and I lived in was smaller than this.” He laughed, pleased with my comment. I turned back around to face the front.As Lyle braked to a stop at a red light, I saw once again how high off the road I was sitting. Lyle’s “truck,” as he called it, gave the driver and passengers an excellent view all around and even over most of the cars on the road. I glanced down out the passenger side window when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I was surprised to see my wife sitting in her two-year-old Taurus beside us at the light. This wasn’t a part of town that Sherrie would normally go. It was a long way from her office and she rarely had to leave during the day.I was looking at the controls on the door’s panel, trying to figure out which one lowered the window but it was taking too long. I started to open the door and tap on my wife’s car window when I saw another movement. As I watched, a man’s hand was thrust up her skirt so far his wrist and some of his forearm disappeared.I froze. My gut knotted up so badly and so quickly, I was abruptly deep in pain. I felt the blood drain from my face. My fingers trembled where they rested on the door handle. I felt disoriented…I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move. All I could do was watch.I waited for Sherrie to shove the man’s hand away. Surely, this was nothing she would put up with from any man but me. I found it hard to breathe as I watched my wife spread her legs wider, accepting the intruding fingers into her pussy. The guy she was with, whoever he was, had to have two or three fingers inside her. There simply wasn’t anyway that length of male arm could disappear under her short skirt without his fingers being in a place I thought only I had access to.”Please…no,” I whispered, but no one heard.I’ve only passed out one time, after being struck on the head by a baseball when I was twelve years old. I was feeling the same sensations I’d felt that day right now. My vision began to contract into a narrow tunnel and a huge weight was crushing my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I’m a strong man, but the shock siphoned all my strength away. I was nothing but an empty shell. If I’d been lying across a set of railroad tracks and had only to roll to the side to avoid being run over by a train, I couldn’t have done it.My eyes filled with unshed tears as I watched my wife of four years lean back to better enjoy this unknown man’s ministrations. She never objected, never tried to get the man to stop. It came to me that this was a thing she’d enjoyed before with this man, a thing she wanted and was used to receiving. Sherrie tilted her head back; her eyes closed as she lost herself in the pleasure his fingers were giving her. The look of lust and need for gratification shocked me. It was the same one she showed me when we had sex.The light turned green. I saw Sherrie slap at the man’s forearm playfully. She tugged his hands from beneath her skirt so she could drive, I guess. I twisted around in my seat as Lyle accelerated away from the intersection. I watched my wife’s Taurus as it made a right turn down a street that would take her back to where she worked.She’d never looked up to wonder who might be watching in the big Suburban, not that she would have seen me through the dark tinted windows. She “knew” I wouldn’t be out and about at this hour…my lunch hour ended thirty minutes ago.She hadn’t cared what an obscene, exhibitionistic show she and the man with her had put on for whoever it might have been. It didn’t have to be me watching; it could have been anyone. Sherrie had been so caught up with the sex play that she hadn’t thought to conceal the act. Yeah, my wife knew me well…but it seemed I only thought I knew her.********When she got home that evening, I got a quick peck on the cheek. A couple of years ago, my mind told me, I’d gotten long, loving kisses at the door when I came in from a hard day’s work. Somewhere along the line, they’d decreased in number until they tailed off to nothing. I watched my wife as she started up the stairs. Suddenly, I noticed something missing. It hadn’t struck me earlier in the day as I watched her perform in traffic.”Sherrie!” I blurted. “What the heck happened to your pantyhose? I know darn well you put on a new pair this morning. How come you’re not wearing any now?”She hesitated before proceeding down the hallway to our bedroom. She didn’t turn around to face me for a long moment.”Oh, I got a runner in the right leg,” she said finally. “It kept on growing and growing and I finally just took them off,” she said. She grinned back at me, looking at me more intently than I think she would have under other circumstances. She needed to know if I was buying her explanation. I nodded understandingly. She turned away, but not before I detected a small look of relief cross her face.”I see,” I said in what I hoped sounded was a more playful tone. I hadn’t planned to say anything, but a sudden surge of pain and rage had taken control of my tongue and made me ask about the pantyhose. The dual emotions still had control of me. An evil imp pushed me into seeing how far I could provoke my dear wife.”I thought some guy might have ripped them off because he was in a hurry to get into your panties,” I said, studying her reaction. She was good. There was little to see beyond a slight stiffening in her posture.”What in the world brought that on?” she said inquisitively. I looked at her with as blank a face as I could manage. I refused to let the hurt and anger show in my eyes. I shrugged.”It’s been known to happen,” I said. “You remember Katy, that girl I had to fire last year after she got caught screwing one of the men on the loading dock? Well, I remember her coming back from breaks and lunches without her thigh high stockings and pantyhose many a time. That was before I knew what was going on, of course.” I shrugged and looked away, trying to project an image of a man remembering a painful event.Sherrie nibbled at her lower lip for a bit before coming to me. Stepping close to me, she put her palms flat on my lower ribs and swept them up my chest in a slow caress before throwing her arms around my neck. She pulled my head down and pressed her lips against mine, slipping her tongue into my mouth for a few teasing seconds.”Honey,” she said earnestly when she finally broke off the kiss, “You are the only man who will ever rip my panties off…I thought you knew that.” There was a hooded expression on her face. Her eyes flicked from side to side as she searched my face for some telltale sign. She was gauging my reaction, hoping I would accept her explanation.I was willing to bet she was wondering how much I knew and what she’d have to do to deflect my suspicions. It broke my heart all over again. She’d been lying “by omission” all along and now she was lying to my face. It was a raw, calculating thing to do, born of deception and reared by cruelty. I’d hoped…well, I didn’t know what I hoped for.I guess I thought that if I got a confession from her, we’d find some way to get past this, even if I had no idea how. If you love someone, though, it’s hard to let go without one last attempt. But Sherrie was waiting for an answer. I’d been looking too long into her eyes for something I just this second gave up all hope of finding.”I know that, sweetheart,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster. “Katy’s husband threw her out and got custody of both k**s. She wrecked her marriage, the other guy’s marriage, and her life…all for a little stupid, dirty sex out behind the warehouse.” I let my contempt color the last few phrases. Sherrie flinched slightly, almost undetectably, but her expression never changed.”Well, she deserved it,” Sherrie said…and now the deceit was complete.My dear wife thought the rules by which other people restrained themselves didn’t apply to her. I caught her wrists in my hands and tugged her arms from around my neck. I looked at her levelly, not saying a word, and then kissed her lips gently. Taking hold of one of her shoulders in each hand, I turned her around and slapped her beautifully shaped little ass. It didn’t “belong” to me anymore; it no longer mattered that she didn’t like even playful spanks.”Now go get changed…I’ll have dinner on the table in ten minutes,” I told her. I turned away and walked into the kitchen without looking back.Chapter 2At first, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t have a clue what I should do. What was the approved reaction from a husband who discovered his wife was cheating on him?I’m afraid the company didn’t get much work from me over the next week and a half. I would be working on something and then would suddenly find myself gazing into space, not knowing how long I’d been doing it. A number of the staff members asked me if there was anything wrong, but I always replied there was not. No one could help me through this. I’d have to solve the riddle by myself.I was able to reason my way through a few things. For one, that the guy felt comfortable fondling my wife in public said they had been having sex for some time. If they were just beginning with each other, he’d still be a lot more tentative. It meant Sherrie had been cheating on me for some time. I wondered when it had begun. I couldn’t remember any signs that she was cheating on me. There’d been no attitude changes, or any modifications in our daily life that I could think of. In the final analysis, though, it didn’t really matter how long it had been going on. The only important factor was that it was happening.Second, I wasn’t going to put up with her infidelity. I was not going to go off to work each day, wondering who Sherrie was fucking that day. I wasn’t much of a church going man anyway. There was no way I was going to turn the other cheek. It wasn’t in me to do that.I couldn’t see any point in trying to save the marriage. Sherrie had broken the trust we’d built up over the four years of our marriage. It seemed to me she’d broken it a number of times, judging by the evidence, and I didn’t know how it could ever be made whole again. The only thing that logically remained to do was to confront her and get myself out of this mess with my mind as intact as I could. If there was something I’d done so terribly wrong that it prompted a reaction like this from Sherrie, maybe she’d tell me.I tried to pull my eyes back inside the windows through which I’d been staring blindly. I felt more alone than I ever had in my life. The hurt came in cold waves, alternating with fiery periods of anger. Neither emotion would let me be long enough to do any productive work.Having decided that my marriage to Sherrie was dead, I set myself the dreary task of finding some quick way out of my pain. The thing was, without proof of some kind, Sherrie would probably be able to take damn near everything we’d put together. Texas courts are not friendly to a man making unsubstantiated allegations about his wife. In the twenty-first century, wives got the benefit of the doubt in almost any situation.I shoved what loving feelings I had left for Sherrie behind a door in my mind and slammed it shut. I decided I wanted my share of what we had. We had some good equity in the house and the savings account was beginning to show a nice balance finally. We both were making pretty good money, and had been for a year or so. We’d managed to buy some quality furniture and appliances. The cars had both been financed, but we’d been making balloon payments and the loans were nearly paid off. If I wanted my fair portion of what we’d accumulated, I had to catch her red handed. I watched for an opportunity.********On Tuesday, one day short of three weeks after I’d seen Sherrie letting some asshole play with her pussy, she told me she was going to go out Friday night with a group of her girlfriends for a few drinks and lots of gossip. It was something she and a half-dozen women in her crowd did every six weeks or so. She said Connie, Barbara, Miranda, Colleen, Tammy were going along but not Melissa, Sherrie’s best friend. They were going to find all the things they could to talk about Melissa behind her back. Sherrie giggled a little about that when she told me.There was absolutely nothing suspicious about her doing this. She’d done it before on widely separated occasions through the years. I knew in my heart, though, this one was different. I couldn’t see anything in her behavior that indicated she was not actually going to do exactly what she told me. But I didn’t trust her anymore. I had to verify what she was saying.********”Connie!” I said cheerfully into my cell phone. Connie was one of my wife’s friends. She and her husband Art were occasional guests over at what had been “our” house for barbeques and sometimes dinner.”Hey, tiger,” she responded happily. Connie liked to flirt and she took every opportunity. “What’s up?” she asked.”Not much,” I said. “I was just wondering if you and Tom have any plans for Friday night…tomorrow evening. I was thinking the four of us might get together for dinner and some cards.””Hmmmmmm,” she said in her mock-seductive voice, “I’ll have to check my busy calendar, big boy.” There was a momentary pause but not one long enough for her to actually be checking anything.”No…nothing on tap for that night, sugar,” she said. “I’ll have to check with Tom but I think it sounds like a great idea…what shall we bring?””Just your cute little self, your better half, and a pair of bright smiles,” I quipped. I tried to sound upbeat, but inside I was dead. All the pleasure in my life had disappeared over the past few weeks.”Okay, hon,” she said. “I’ll give you a call when I know for sure, okay?” She paused briefly.”Ahhhhhhh, Ron…me and Tom are sure glad you and Sherrie are doing so well, sugar.” I frowned into empty space as I listened. “We weren’t sure after the Vegas trip that you guys would be able to get things together…you know?” she said in a more serious voice than I’d ever heard from her.”Vegas?” I said, a little mystified.I thought at first she was aware of Sherrie’s straying, though I didn’t have an inkling how she would have known. The trip she was referring to was one I hadn’t gone on because at the last minute, my boss had called, needing me to go to Denver to straighten out a mess in the R&D division in our parent company. Sherrie; Melissa and her husband, Cal; Connie and Tom had gone without me and, by all accounts, everyone had come back with small winnings for once.Wait! Was Connie saying something had gone on in Vegas? Hell, she had to be…but I needed to know more. It made me sick, but I had to know.”I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, Connie,” I said. Even I could hear the confusion in my voice. She was silent for a long time.”Oh…it’s just s**tter-brained ol’ me,” she said. “You know how I am…well, listen, I’ll get with Tom and check if he’s already got something planned for tomorrow or not, okay?””Sure. Let me know, all right?” I replied. She said she would. I got off the phone as quickly as I decently could. I was afraid my voice would reveal the pain I was in.Half an hour later, Connie called back and apologized. Tom had obligated himself to play in a poker game at a neighbor’s house. Connie was just as sorry as she could be…maybe next time, she said. I agreed, regretting that they couldn’t come. Maybe Sherrie and I would just forget about the whole thing and try again at a better time. Neither of us was fooling the other.I knew two things now. Something involving my wife had occurred in Las Vegas and Sherrie was not going out with the girls tomorrow night. I had to let the former lay uninvestigated while I dealt with the latter.********I’ve heard it said that adulterous spouses get into a mindset where they conclude they must be more intelligent than those they are cheating on, simply because they’re getting away with what they’re doing. They begin to believe they are cleverer than anyone else in the world. Because they manage to deceive their marriage partner for a time, they begin to disrespect him or her and hold their spouses in contempt. Eventually, so the story goes, cheaters start making mistakes because of overconfidence; they don’t think anyone else has the smarts to catch them.I didn’t know about all that, this was my first experience dealing with such a thing, but I did know that Sherrie was making mistakes. If I hadn’t seen her that day with that sorry SOB in her car at the stoplight, I’d have caught on to her activities eventually anyway. Being in public with that man was a bad mistake. Any one of our friends or neighbors could have been in a van or SUV beside her car—it didn’t have to be me.Not making sure Connie would cover for her was another blunder, a major one. Second, she knew I was friendly with Connie and Tom—even more so with Melissa and Cal. Whatever happened in Vegas was almost certainly known by both couples. Either of them might have called me sometime to give her up. These were loose ends she should have tied up somehow. Her third error was assuming I still trusted her and would stay home like a good little boy while she was out whoring around. Her fourth was thinking I would put up with a cheating slut of a wife.I smashed my fist down on the coffee table beside me, making the lamp dance around on its base for a long moment. Sherrie was in the shower; she didn’t hear a thing. I massaged my hand and wrist, seething inside as I contemplated my wife’s betrayal of our marriage, herself and me.I was worried that my anger was going to take over my whole life. It seemed to me that my jaws were always clinched tight these days and my pulse pounded whenever I thought of what Sherrie and that guy were doing. I was ruthlessly suppressing those feelings when I was around her. It only made the rage burn that much hotter.The sad thing was that I was actually a little relieved when it became clear tonight was to be their next little get-together for sex. I hated to admit that to myself, but I was. Once I got through whatever I had to face this evening, I’d take what I knew and put it in the hands of my attorney. I had him primed and ready to file charges whenever I gave him the go-ahead.********Sherrie left a little after seven o’clock, just as twilight was beginning to make soft shadows all around. She thought I was in the garage straightening up the disorder that accumulates if one doesn’t give it constant attention, but I was really just killing time, waiting for her to leave. Now that the evening had come, I was anxious to get things over with and move on with my life.Sherrie hadn’t been interested enough about what I was doing to come outside for a look, much less to spend any time with me. I guessed she was just happy I was out of her way so she could get ready for her date…or whatever she was calling it. That was fine with me. If she’d come out to be with me, she’d have seen the rent-a-lemon I’d arranged for that morning. I hadn’t wanted to park the shabby looking wreck on the street; it might have been towed as an abandoned vehicle.It was a small lie, I suppose—hiding the rental’s existence. That’s what’s wrong with lying and cheating. The lies begin to take on a life of their own and reproduce more of their kind spontaneously.There were three more lies told as she walked out the door. I wished her a good time and we both said we loved each other. A man and a woman who loved each other wouldn’t be doing the things to each other that we were going to do tonight. I told myself I didn’t care.When she was far enough down the block not to be able to see inside the garage, I opened the outside door and jumped in the rental car. Driving away, I pointed the remote over my shoulder to close the door and sped down our residential street to make sure I didn’t lose contact with her. Paradoxically, I had to slow drastically when I saw her ahead, waiting at a stoplight for cross traffic to clear. I had to pull to the curb and stop for a bit or I’d have gotten too close.As it turned out, following her didn’t prove to be that big a problem. Like most drivers, she paid almost no attention to the traffic behind her and, even if she had, she wouldn’t have known to look for a beat-up, eight-year-old gray Chrysler sedan.She had no idea that her husband was in that vehicle tonight and tailing her, half a city block behind. The light was still good enough for me to be able to identify her vehicle but it was gradually getting darker. It gave me an excuse to turn on my headlights. If she were to look back, she wouldn’t be able to see my face past the glare.I followed her through thinning traffic to the far southwest side of town and watched her pull into a moderately priced motel. I quickly found a space across the street and parallel parked my ratty old vehicle. Getting my camera ready and trying to settle my jangled nerves, I watched out the driver’s side window while my wife sat in her car for five minutes or so. It seemed she was impatient. She made a series of quick calls on her cell phone. Mine didn’t ring. It was not me she was calling.A few minutes later, a big dark blue SUV came down the street and turned into the motel. I could see the driver was a male but he was going too fast for me to get a good look at him. He parked beside my wife’s Taurus and they both got out. Shortly, the guy had my wife in a tight embrace and was kissing her hungrily. After a bit, she patted his tuzla escort chest and pulled back a little.I’d bought a Nikon Dimage Z1 digital camera when I started planning this operation a couple of weeks ago. Even with my limited experience with digital cameras, it looked like this camera was going to be perfect for the job I had to do. I started snapping away, taking pictures of my cheating wife and the guy she was screwing. Though twilight was fading into night, there was still enough illumination under the motel’s exterior lighting to light up both of them. The camera’s 10X optical zoom…multiplied by its 4X digital zoom…gave me superb close-ups of his hand trying to squeeze her breasts. I could have counted the freckles on my lovely wife’s face if I’d been in a counting mood.My only real problem was keeping the camera steady enough. I solved that by scrunching down low, rolling down the window, and bracing the camera on the two inches of glass that refused to disappear into the door. Neither of the cheaters across the way noticed me, though I was less than fifty yards away under a streetlight. They were awfully careless. I guess it was true that cheaters begin believing they don’t have to take elementary precautions because they can’t be caught.The guy produced one of those plastic cards with the magnetic strip on the back and opened the motel room door. He and my wife went inside and I settled back to wait them out. I wanted some pictures of them leaving the room to show how long they’d been inside.The camera had the ability to insert a date stamp on the face of the digital pictures and the downloaded .jpg file would show the precise date and time it was saved in the camera. I thought a computer expert would explain such things well enough so any court could understand it, even if the judge wouldn’t accept my explanation. I was sure my attorney would be able to find and hire such an expert.My stomach was churning. The bitter taste of bile was in my mouth; I was barely able to control stomach contractions that kept threatening to force partially digested bits back up my esophagus. The longer I waited, the worse it got. Abruptly, I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I wrenched the car door open and spewed an ugly pool of nastiness out onto the pavement. The flood kept regenerating itself long after I thought I’d brought up everything I’d eaten for the last several days. After a minute or two, though, there was nothing more in my stomach.It got painful then. The dry heaves continued for another eternity before gradually dying away. I wiped my mouth on my handkerchief, rinsed my mouth out, and drank a half-liter bottle of water. Shaking with anger, humiliation, and feeling a sense of loss so strong I could barely stand it, I stepped over the mess in the street and walked a few yards up and down the curb to see if it would help settle me down.I glanced at the room door over there, making sure they hadn’t come out yet. I stopped in my tracks. There was only a dim glow coming through most of the drawn curtains but at one place, down low on the left side, there was a small area where the light came through more brightly. I was intrigued. I looked all around to make sure I was unobserved; then I crossed the street and walked through the motel parking lot.From a few feet away, I could see that my dear wife and the sorry bastard who was with her had been inexcusably sloppy for two people doing something they shouldn’t. They’d left a space a couple of inches across where the curtain had not quite been pulled closed. I glanced around again, checking to see if anyone could see what I was about to do. I decided that I really didn’t care what anyone else thought, even if someone did see me. This was an opportunity to photograph these two in flagrante delicto and I was going to take it.I knelt on one knee and eased the camera up to the window, aiming it through the opening in the d****s. The LCD screen on the back of the camera lit up when I pressed the power button and I had my proof. My wife was on all fours on the bed with a short, stocky man with blond hair getting into position behind her. He was, I guess, the kind of man women thought of as handsome. He looked to be a little younger than me, but it was hard to tell.My hands were trembling too badly for the camera to focus properly and I had to press the lens against the window. It took some experimentation to get a good series of pics. If I let too much of a gap develop between the window and lens, the harsh brightness of the lights out here reflected off the glass and tended to wash everything out.In a minute or two, though, I had everything I needed. Inside the room, I could see the guy beginning to slam his cock in and out of my wife’s cunt. He wasn’t gentle about it, but it appeared Sherri had developed a taste for a little rough sex because her face was screwed up in a mask of lust and illicit pleasure. The camera could take six pictures in a fast sequence and I’d put it on that setting before leaving home. I pressed the shutter release button again and again.I couldn’t take too much of watching them. Still badly nauseated and feeling more pain inside than I’d known since my parents died, I settled back on my haunches and tried to get myself together. I drew in a ragged breath and closed my eyes tight to fight back the tears I refused to shed. I hurt…but a human being can only hurt so long before they shift themselves to another place. I pushed my emotions aside, damming them up and putting them back behind that door I’d thought I had closed on them earlier in the week.Suddenly, there was no more love when I thought of her…and I damned sure didn’t like her at all. My new remoteness, my detached view, gave me the strength to get to my feet without swaying or feeling stick to my stomach.There was a sudden flurry of loud voices from inside the room. I could hear Sherrie but I couldn’t tell what she was saying. Then there was a louder shriek a second or two later, but it sounded like a man. I didn’t know any men who admitted to being “screamers” during sex but I guess they could be. Anyway, the suddenly noisy sex play got me on my feet and moving away. I was afraid it would attract someone to come see what was going on.I started to walk back to my rental across the street but I paused behind the son of a bitch’s car while I thought for a long moment. I turned and walked down the sidewalk past all the motel doors. I looked carefully under the eaves, then stepped away from the building to examine the roof and every light pole in sight. I was looking for any outside security cameras the motel might have. I found a place down at the far corner of the structure where there were some unconnected wires and an empty mounting bracket, but I didn’t see any cameras.I crossed the parking lot and stood next to the rental car, looking at the empty, abandoned restaurant. There were surely no spy cameras over there. There were some apartment buildings I could see on down this side street, but they were far away. On the main thoroughfare, I couldn’t see any businesses that would logically be protected by surveillance cameras pointed in this direction. I made sure the cap was securely fastened over the lens and put my camera in the back seat for safekeeping.Walking purposefully, I went back to where my wife…and whoever he was…were parked. I pulled the pocketknife out of my jeans and opened it while I debated with myself the wisdom of doing what I was thinking of. Then I shrugged and bent low beside lover boy’s rear tires.It took a stronger thrust than I’d thought it would, but I soon found the right amount of velocity and power to shove the blade deep into the tire. I was afraid my grip would slip and I’d cut myself badly, but that didn’t happen. The hissing of the air escaping from the expensive set of tires seemed terribly loud, but no one came out to investigate. Encouraged, I took care of all four tires on his SUV, and then all my wife’s tires too.I guess it was a c***dish gesture. It didn’t solve anything and it very well could make it clear to the cheating duo that someone was on to them. I decided they wouldn’t think that. They were too cocky. I wanted to do more, but I didn’t.A hundred years ago, I could have smashed down the door and put a bullet in each of their brains and no jury would have ever convicted me. Two hundred years ago, I could have challenged him to a duel and killed him in front of his friends and family. Those were acceptable ways back then for a man to salvage his honor in situations like this. Ahhhhh, but we’re so much more civilized now. A cuckold has so few options open to him these days. I did what I could.Feeling a little better, and not in the least guilty about the damage I’d done, I walked back to my rental and got in, slamming the door and not caring if anyone heard. I’d taken the first steps to rid myself of a faithless wife and regain some self-respect. There was little remaining yet to do. Monday would come soon and I’d have a long talk with my lawyer.Chapter 3Sunday comes before Monday, though, and Saturday before that. Sherri came home well before midnight, pissed off because some SOB had slashed the tires on her car “outside the club.” Three teens had been seeing running away, she said. Then she’d had to wait three hours for the AAA folks to get there. Apparently, I’d not been observed destroying the tires on the cars and someone else was suspected. I actually had no idea whether the ‘three teens’ story had any legitimacy, but the three-hour wait sounded about right. I shrugged. None of it mattered in the least.I was surprised she was home that early though. I’d thought she’d be out a lot later with her fuck toy. If she was outside waiting for the wrecker for any time at all, it meant her tryst with the new man in her life had been a short one—not that it made any difference.I said a few consoling words to calm her down. She got in bed and went to sleep shortly after coming in. She hadn’t wanted any cuddling. I knew why. The odor of cheap motel soap on her body was strong enough to make me gag.********Sunday afternoon and evening, Sherri got very affectionate and wanted me close to her. It was impossible to tell from looking at her that she’d been out fucking some other man on Friday night. She showed no sign of feeling guilty about anything at all. If anything, she was more relaxed and pleasant than she’d been in months.That, I had read, was one of the classic signs a spouse is cheating. Whether they showed it or not, they usually felt some degree of guilt and would try to “make it up” to their dishonored spouse.I had talked to my attorney earlier today while Sherri was fixing lunch—he’d said to call him at home if I needed to. He was all set, he said. All he needed was my signature on the paperwork and he’d file them at the courthouse before noon tomorrow. The pictures were bargaining chips if Sherrie contested the divorce. Tomorrow afternoon, I was going to be a free man, in a sense. The divorce wouldn’t actually be final for six months, but I’d be separated from the woman who’d brought me so much pain.That night, Sherri put on a black lace nightgown she knew I liked and glided seductively across the carpet to where I sat on the bed. I didn’t want her, not after I’d seeing what I had Friday night. I was trying to come up with an excuse not to have anything to do with her tonight.I was sick to my stomach again just at the thought of touching her. I sat on the bed and tried to look uninterested. She stayed with it, though, the very image of a loving wife who wanted some loving from her husband. She exposed a breast, round and pale in the dim light, capped with a dark circle and a proud, partially erect nipple. Coming closer, she rubbed her breasts against my face in a move she knew usually aroused me. Even though I didn’t want to—even though I could barely bring myself to be civil to her, her strokes and caresses were beginning to have a visible effect on me. She smirked, knowing the power she had over me. It pissed me off.Abruptly, I changed my mind. Without any thought at all, much less a careful consideration of the consequences, I knew I was going to give my dear, deceitful young wife the sex she wanted, and more. It would be one last fuck before we separated forever. If I were rational at that moment, I would have known what I was going to try to do to her was rooted in my own humiliation. There was, perhaps, some arrogance mixed in also. But, at the moment, all I wanted to do was exact a small measure of vengeance for the disgrace that this woman had heaped on me.Carefully, I built up an image in my mind of a street prostitute. I envisioned a whore who deserved no consideration and who was nothing more than a receptacle for me to use and discard. I would masturbate, using her pussy, when I was ready, but my revenge was going to be a little more subtle than that. If it worked, she wouldn’t even understand it as retribution for a long time. I let Sherrie’s face blend into the faceless features of the whore I had just constructed. Having dehumanized Sherrie sufficiently enough for my purposes, I was ready.I stood up and pulled her close. I bent to find the lips I’d kissed so many times before. I started gently, our lips barely touching before I drew back. Once, twice, a third time, and more before I became more demanding. When I came back again, I found her lips open and waiting for me. I pushed my tongue inside, searchingly. I flicked my tongue at hers, teasing her and making it clear I wanted more.I let my hands roam, sweeping them down her arms to her fingertips in a slow caress. Abandoning her arms, I cupped a hip in each hand and stroked her smooth skin through the silky material. My thumbs stroked the soft hollow inside the hip and moved across what they could reach of her lower belly. She sighed into my mouth as my hands moved behind her to take each ass cheek and knead it gently, massaging them and pulling her tight against my body at the same time. I traced the line of her backbone from bottom to top and then brought my hands back down in a smooth stroke from between her shoulder blades to her ass.I checked. Her eyes were closed now. She was swaying gently, searching for my mouth every time our lips separated. Her hands fell to my forearms to lie there softly while my assault continued. Her nightie had a wide, scoop neck and I pushed one side off her shoulders.Leaning over, I touched my tongue to her right nipple, flicking at it gently before swirling all around its circumference. I made her nipple and aureole wet with my saliva, sweeping my tongue around and around the blood-engorged nipple. Then I sucked her nipple into my mouth and touched my teeth to it. I wasn’t biting—just letting her feel the hardness of the enamel against her sensitive skin.Sherrie was not a very vocal lover. Her commentary was mostly limited to low murmurs that were unintelligible and the occasional “Oh, my precious” when we were making love. Tonight she was confining herself to soft moans and appreciative groans when I touched a particularly sensitive place. It was just enough for me to figure out where to go next. I’d given up trying to get her to talk to me during sex and tell me what she wanted, much less talk dirty.My left hand was stroking low on her belly and then between her legs. I’d thought she’d be sensitive there, considering the hammering I’d seen her blond fuck toy give her Friday night. But if she was sore, she gave no sign of it. I slipped my hand beneath the short nightie and stroked the outside of her thighs before working my way back inside and up to her vulva.Easing my head back a little to focus on her face, I gently put a finger inside her outer lips, but she only shifted her weight to one side and moved her legs farther apart. Evidently, she was not in the least tender down there. Suddenly, I had contempt for her boyfriend. If I’d been pounding her like I’d seen him do it, she’d have had a puffy, bruised pussy for a week.I pushed the other side of the nightgown off her other shoulder and cupped her left breast in my right hand. I squeezed it tenderly, gently tweaking the nipple with my thumb. The nipple grew rock hard quickly and I added my index finger, twirling the hard nub between them. I held her breast in my hand; the hardened point poked into my palm. I kissed her right nipple, slathering my tongue all around her aureole and then the rest of her breast. I paid close attention to the soft underside, knowing she loved to be kissed there. Sherrie’s breathing grew more ragged as I worked to bring her body to a hard boil.Bent over as I was, licking and tonguing her breasts, I was in an awkward posture. My back began to ache so I sat on the edge of the bed. Taking her breasts in my hands, I manipulated them a little more firmly while my tongue traced a line down her breastbone and further below to her belly. I got to her bellybutton and paid it close attention, thrusting my tongue repeatedly into it and swirling my tongue around it before moving lower.I had to release her breasts now; I was stooping over too far over to keep them in my hands. I felt Sherrie’s hands leave my wrists and cup her own breasts, manipulating them far more energetically than I had. I pulled the nightie completely off my wife’s body and dropped it to lie in a dark pool about her feet.Slipping off the bed to my knees in front of her, I put little butterfly kisses around her lower belly while my hands molded her butt cheeks, squeezing and massaging them firmly. I found the hollow of her hips with my lips and kissed from the point of her hip inside and down to where her thigh met her vulva; then I did the same on the other side.I stood. Using my hands on her hips for leverage, I turned Sherrie around and gently pressed her down on the bed. Pushing her flat on the bed with her knees just at the edge, I lay beside her and took some time to kiss her lips once more. I took each nipple into my mouth in turn, sucking at it and trailing kisses down each side of her breasts before tonguing my way down her abdomen. Sliding back down onto my knees on the floor, I spread her legs and bent to kiss her lower belly.Pulling back and straightening my back for a moment, my hands gently stroked the inside of her thighs in long, sweeping moves. Leaning over, I replaced my right hand with my lips and kissed her inner thighs from knee to groin and back again. My tongue brushed the lower opening of her slit when I went from one leg to the other, making her gasp and twitch each time. Gradually, I paid less and less attention to her thighs and more to her vulva.Sherrie had a beautiful pussy. She was proud of the fact that her inner lips didn’t protrude beyond the outer ones. She trimmed her pubic hair but had never shaved it for me. I’d asked many times earlier in our marriage but she always said she’d feel naked with out that patch of hair. I’d never understood her reasoning; she’d have to actually BE naked for me to see her pubes under any circumstances…but there it was. It was her body. I had eventually quit asking. I let the memory slide away.I leaned in to touch my tongue to the lowest part of Sherrie’s labia majora. Tracing the outside of her right labia, my tongue swept up to the top of her slit and back down the left. Sherrie sucked in a short breath and her thighs quivered in reaction to my touch. Reversing course, my tongue worked back up the left side and came down the right. Her fingers clamped down on my forearms like vices. My hands had been resting on the tops of her thighs, but now I began caressing and stroking the sensitive insides and underneath.Abandoning any further attempt at teasing, I urged her outer lips apart with my tongue and slipped it inside to rake the length of the more tender labia minora. Sherrie’s legs jerked spasmodically. She pulled her knees up as she fought to push my mouth away from her sensitive inner flesh, but simultaneously she was pulling me closer. Her feet waved in the air, kicking out as nerve endings fired randomly. She wasn’t aware of what her lower body was doing, nor was she in control of it.I licked my way up the left side of her blood engorged inner lips and down the right. I lapped up juices spilling from her vagina, spending a moment or so at the bottom of her slit just because I liked to do that. Then I licked from bottom to top on the left and back down the right side. I felt her struggle up onto her elbows to look down the length of her body at me.When Sherrie saw what I was doing, it made her all the wilder. Her body rocked from side to side as she tried to anticipate where my tongue would be next. She was wriggling all over the bed now, unable to keep still under the non-stop stimulation of the most sensitive parts of her body. It was hard to keep her fixed well enough in position so that I could continue my oral assault.After a few more strokes from my tongue up and down her hot, drenched pussy, I moved up and used my tongue to search for, and locate the little nubbin of a clit peeking out of its concealing hood at the top of her opening. When I touched it with the tip of my tongue, Sherrie’s whole body convulsed. Her hands clamped down on mine so fiercely I had to tug them free. She began humming a faint, high-pitched little whine. When I touched her clitty again, she grunted as if I’d sucker punched her. If she had been writhing before, her body tried to twist itself into a pretzel now. It was difficult to keep my mouth plastered to her vulva. I lapped up her juices as fast as they poured from inside her cunt.Her clit tried to hide as I played with it, but I coaxed it out into the open with my fingers and tongue. With it more clearly exposed, I attacked it, playing with it with the tip of my tongue and twirling my tongue in circles all around the hood that shielded it. While I did that, I slipped my right forefinger beneath my chin and into the drenched flesh at the bottom of her slit to moisten it with her own juices. It took no time at all to coat my finger with the fluids pouring from her cunt.I slowly inserted that finger inside her vagina and leisurely withdrew it, only to slide it back in—deeper this time. I built up a steady rhythm, moving slowly but adding speed as her vagina opened more. I added another finger and pressed both inside her pussy. Sherrie’s legs spread even wider and she began to moan and whimper at the sensations sweeping up from her groin.I stopped working my tongue around her clit long enough to move more to her side. From here, I could resume my assault on her clitoris with my head at an angle that left plenty of room at the bottom of her pussy for me to press two fingers inside her with my palm up. Working them in and out slowly, I found that sensitive little place on the front wall of her vagina they call the G-spot. I made sure my fingertips rubbed it gently with each stroke.I leaned back for a moment to get a breath of air and watched Sherrie as she worked up to a hard climax. Her abdominal muscles had taken on a life of their own, contracting and relaxing in random patterns all across her belly and groin. Her legs erratically spread wide and then scissored shut again. Her hands were in constant motion, unable to find a place to rest. Her face and upper chest were flushed. My dear, loving wife was fast approaching what I planed to be only her first sexual climax tonight.Just seeing her this way was affecting me too. Realizing she was at so high a pitch of sexual excitement made me more aroused too. I didn’t look down, but I could feel I was hard as a steel rod and as lengthy as I’d ever been. Tensing my lower groin muscles, I could feel my penis bob up and down in response.I wiggled my hips for just a moment, letting the underside of my hardness rub lightly across the fabric of the bedspread. I reveled in the thought that I had a strong, hard cock and I could do anything with it that I wanted…in spite of the humiliations that had been heaped on me. Tonight was not about me though. Tonight was to give my wife a lesson she would never forget.Bending back down to her pussy, my lips fastened around her clitoris. I sucked carefully at its tip, alternating this with swirling my tongue around its tiny circumference over and over again. In seconds, my darling wife was in the throws of a monumental orgasm. Her groin pushed up into my face trying ataşehir escort for an even tighter union between her clit and my lips. Rubbing her cunt around my mouth made it hard for me to continue sucking the petite organ but I stayed with it. Every so often, I let it go so my tongue could slather the sensitive flesh all around.Sherrie went berserk. The high pitched keening that had been coming from her lips changed to gasping moans interspersed with small unintelligible cries.”Unnnnnnngh – unnnnnnngh,” she groaned. Her hips began to rotate in tiny circles. She stopped to hump my fingers at an ever-increasing rate. Taking her faster movements as a signal, I sped up the pace with which I was fucking my fingers in and out. It was all I could do to keep my lips in place around her clitoris.”Unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnnnnngh.” Sherrie could breath only in quick, short gasps now. Her hands had gathered up sections of the comforter and she clinched the material in her fists, alternately yanking at it and pounding the mattress. My fingers began rubbing her G-spot almost non-stop while I sucked madly at her clitoris. She couldn’t take much of that.”OH GOD!” she shrieked. She didn’t have enough breath to get the whole word out but she kept trying. “RON!” “RONNIE!!!” she cried. Her feet scrambled to find a purchase on the slick bedcover but they slid off the edge. Her hips came up off the bed as she arched her back at an impossible angle. Her vagina tightened around my fingers, virtually trapping them inside. Muscle contractions rippled across her abdomen, racing each other from top to bottom. For a moment, her body hung in the air, supported only by her shoulders and her feet. She held her breath for a few seconds and then let it out with a sigh.Her eyes closed, she settled slowly back to the surface of the bed. Over stressed muscles began to relax. Her breathing was fast and shallow, interrupted at times by short, quick inhalations that she held in as residual waves of pleasure swept through her body.Moving as slowly and carefully as I could, I extracted my fingers from her vagina but, gently as the motion was, it set off another round of muscle contractions and irregular breathing. Bringing my fingers to my lips as she watched, I licked her juices from them, taking care to get every drop. I could see her watching me. I wanted her to. I wanted her to see what she’d be missing, beginning tomorrow.I stroked the outside of her thighs for a minute or too, occasionally leaning in to plant little kisses across her mons while she cooled down a little. She kept urging me to come up beside her by pulling on my wrists but I wouldn’t budge. In a short while, I made my cool down kisses a little more fervent, increasing the intensity slowly, but very surely. Before she had truly caught her breath from her first orgasm, she was on her way to a second.When her hips quit rolling from side to side from that one, I worked on bringing her body back up to a fever pitch again. Sherrie protested, she tried to push my head away but I was on a mission. I kept going. Before she realized it, she was in the throes of a third climax and wiggling her lower body all across the bed.I didn’t ease off after this one at all. I kept sucking at her clitoris and stroking two and sometimes three fingers in and out of her cunt. She was soon bucking her hips off the bed, screaming my name and rubbing her pussy against my face for all she was worth.Before I was through with licking her pussy, I counted five orgasms and there might have been another. She was in no condition to tell me. I knew one, and possibly two, of those five was a G-spot orgasm, because her fluids flooded my mouth and face. I drank it down, smirking, as I lapped it up. This woman was out of control because of what I was doing to her. Her body was not her own tonight. I was the one who commanded it in the dimness of our bedroom. She would remember this night in the coming months and years. But I would be gone.After she and I rested for a short time, I got to my knees and settled between her thighs. Supporting myself on one hand and my knees, I held my cock in my right hand and began rubbing the head along her slit. Sherrie was not ready for more stimulation. She moaned a plea for me to slow down. Normally I wouldn’t have done this to her so quickly after she’d come so recently, but this was not a normal occasion. Shortly, her body was responding in spite of her need to rest. Her thighs parted widely to give me better access.Bumping the tip of my penis against her clitoris made her suck in her breath. Her body was soon trembling with renewed arousal and anticipation. She began trying to time my manipulations and hunch her cunt up to me. I adjusted my position minutely and pressed myself inside her outer labia and then through her inner lips. Smoothly, and slowly, I pushed inside her vagina, moving deeper with each stroke. She was sopping wet; she could probably have taken a baseball bat inside her but I worked myself into her pussy as if she’d been completely dry and her vagina still unready for me.In moments, her thighs were sawing back and forth on the outside of my legs in a steady rhythm and her fingernails were lightly scr****g the flesh on my chest. She was pinching my nipples every so often. From time to time, some sensation would get to her and her hands would clinch tight on me before she could relax them. I increased the tempo at which I was feeding my cock into her cunt, making the thrusts stronger and deeper. Sherrie couldn’t control her hip movements any more; I was nailing her to the bed on my downstrokes and she was slinging her ass up at me trying to keep me tucked deep inside her when I pulled out.She humping me hard now, thrusting her hips up at me and grinding her cunt against my groin. We were both in a frenzy. I could feel the hot semen bubbling slowly up deep inside me. The pleasure was so powerful it was almost painful. I tried to stop it; I tensed every muscle in my groin that I had control of, and some I did not. I fought to not come; I willed my body to hold off my release until I was ready for it. I groaned aloud with the strain.”Unnnnnnngh – unnnnnnngh,” she moaned with me. “Unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnngh, unnnnnngh.”Sherrie was clutching at the bedcovers, my body, the bedpost…anything that would give her something to hold on to. Then her hands fluttered over my chest and shoulders, and slipped under my arms to cup my ass cheeks and pull me harder and more strongly into her hot cunt. I bumped her cervix several times and tried to ease up—I had no overwhelming desire to cause her physical pain, but Sherrie would have none of that. I drove hard and deep with each plunge, banging against the opening to her womb with each thrust.Sherrie’s heels were soon locked around my waist. My strokes became shorter, but faster. It wasn’t long before my attempts to stave off coming were becoming increasingly futile as Sherrie’s vagina gripped my cock tightly. Suddenly, hot white fluid burst from the little slit in the tip of my cock and into my wife’s hungry cunt. I’m sure she felt it.When the first spurt splashed against the walls of her vagina, she humped her lower body up into mine and then wrenched herself back down again. I shoved my cock back down into her, trying to get as deep inside her as I could get. Her vagina clamped down on my penis and I couldn’t hold back a second spray of semen deep inside her. Her thighs tightened around me; I couldn’t have backed out of her if I’d wanted to.”PLEEEEEEEEESE…RONNIE,” she shouted. Her body seemed to be in convulsions. Her head was thrown back; she rolled it back and forth on the pillow.She bucked back up at me again and we strained against each other. Her vagina milked my cock, pulling every droplet of sperm laden fluid out of my balls. Sherrie’s body spasmed, every muscle in her belly seemed to contract at the same time. She froze, not even breathing for a few long seconds. I could feel the muscular walls of her cunt rippling in haphazard patterns…and then the contractions eased. Sherrie’s body relaxed and she lay there peacefully. I could see small quakes twitching her belly muscles for a while before they died away.Sherrie was expecting me to get off her and lay beside her for some cuddling but I didn’t intend to allow that tonight. I never took my cock out of her. Instead, after a few minutes, I began pumping in and out of her again…slow and steady in the beginning but stronger and more energetically moments later. The tightness of her sheath had kept me hard while I recharged. Ten minutes later, I brought her to another screaming orgasm that seemed about to rip her insides apart.One more time—I made my wife accept a third orgasm from my cock and I was done. I hadn’t come these last two times. I refused to. As I finally pulled my cock out of her, I reached out to sweep my hand swiftly down the front of her body from her breastbone to pubic mound. Her body convulsed through one final orgasm.When her body relaxed this time, I let her lay there unm*****ed. Exhausted myself, I stretched my body out on the bed beside my wife. Our only contact was my fingers around her wrist. After a while, Sherri rolled over and cuddled against me, putting her head on my shoulder.”Oh God, honey,” she breathed into my chest. “If only you’d—”Her voice faded away before completing whatever she’d been about to say. I didn’t care any more. I didn’t ask her what she meant.”All you had to do was be here with me,” I answered. I trusted it was enigmatic enough for her to remember tomorrow. She stirred a little, nodding her head as if in reply to what I’d said, and then she slipped quickly into a deep sleep. I got up and took a long, very hot shower.When I finished, I walked down the hall to the guest room and lay down on the bed. Sherrie had not moved when I walked past our bedroom…her bedroom door now. I doubt she knew I wasn’t there. She was sleeping on the wet spot, something that she did not like. She would be irritated when she woke up the next morning.I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night; I knew what the coming day would bring and I dreaded it even as I welcomed it, knowing it would bring me release from the demons that had haunted me for the last month.********Next morning, I was dressed and gone before Sherrie woke up. I didn’t doubt she was upset by my unexplained absence, but I had no desire to be around her. It was too painful. Three hours after she left, I was back at the house with a U-Haul truck.I’d already delivered the camera to my attorney’s office and one of his assistants had printed two copies of everything. The sympathy the young woman felt when she brought them back into the inner office was evident in her eyes. I appreciated it, I guess, but I was suspicious there might have been some pity there too. I didn’t want pity.At home again, and after a couple cups of coffee, I got busy packing up my clothing and the few personal possessions I had brought to the marriage. There were even fewer items we’d bought together I wanted to keep. While one of my original goals had been to salvage some of the furniture for my own use, I found I didn’t want anything more than the DVD player, a 25-inch TV, and a few music CDs. Nothing else caught my eye. I made a backup of everything on the computer, opened the case, and disconnected the backup hard drive. I put it in my briefcase. I’d buy another computer somewhere to put it in.Before I left, I s**ttered a dozen prints of the pictures I’d taken last Friday night on the top of her dresser. I used the computer one final time to print my darling wife a short note in the biggest font I could use and still fit the whole text on the page.ENJOY THE MEMORIES OF LAST NIGHT, DEAR!THEY’RE THE LAST YOU’LL HAVE OF METhis was the second c***dish thing I’d done in the last four days and I didn’t get any good feelings from this one in the cold light of morning, as it were. But I’d worked hard last night for the opportunity to say this to her and I wasn’t going to back down now.Taping the message to the mirror, I turned around and left what had been our bedroom, down the hall and out the garage door. I didn’t bother locking the place up. It was no longer my responsibility.Chapter 4I’d thought once divorce papers had been served on Sherrie, our attorney’s would talk and work out the division of our property and other assets. Then, I figured we’d sign the paperwork, go before the judge and it would all be over with. Silly me. It seemed discussions between attorneys was necessarily a long, drawn out process that became negotiations about the most inconsequential of things.For instance I know the lawyers spent one whole lunch hour—I paid for it, I’m sure—on the question of whether I should return the TV I’d taken with me or did it constitute my share of the electronic equipment in the house? Who gave a flyin’…? Well, anyway, it was taking forever.What it finally all boiled down to was that the house and all the furnishings were to be sold and the proceeds divided equally—after the lawyers got their share, of course. Sherrie and I would identify any furniture or other things in the home that we particularly wanted and, if the other didn’t protest, that item was theirs—up to a total value of five thousand dollars. I didn’t care. I’d already made my selection. I told my attorney just to get on with it.********A few weeks after the petition for divorce was filed, but before our first court date, I went over to Cal and Melissa’s house to see if I could get some answers to the question of how this whole thing started. Melissa had been Sherrie’s best friend in college and I’d had known Cal slightly. Over the past few years, we had all become very close. Melissa had become as good a friend of mine as she was Sherrie’s. I realized, belatedly, that Cal and Melissa had not come to our house, nor had they invited us to theirs, since the Vegas trip. Thinking of how Connie had spoken of Vegas, I wanted to see if Cal and Melissa could shed any light on the problem.They were outside in the back yard when I arrived. When I rang the doorbell, Cal came around the side of the house and escorted me back, handing me a cold beer before having me sit in the shade of a big pecan tree that was growing in the far corner of their yard. We sat for a couple of awkward moments.”So…” I said finally. Melissa burst into tears and got up to run in the house. Cal and I stared at the door through which she’d disappeared and then at each other.”She’s a little emotional sometimes,” Cal muttered.”I know,” I said, smiling a little in spite of all the pain everyone was feeling. Melissa was up front in everything she did and I loved her for it. In many ways, she was closer to me than my deceased sister ever had been. I took a long swallow of Coors’ finest.”Ron…” Cal said at length, “Melissa and me are just as sorry as we can be that you and Sherrie are breaking up, but we didn’t know what to do, you know?” I looked at him questioningly. I could see comprehension spreading across his face.”You don’t know,” he said. I shook my head. He got two more beers from the ice chest beside him and handed one to me.”We didn’t know whether to tell you when we got back from Vegas or not,” he remarked sadly. “We thought that surely Sherrie would tell you what happened—it couldn’t be kept hidden—and, after a while it seemed she had and the two of you had everything all worked it out.””Worked what out?” I asked quietly.Cal took a deep breath and spent the next twenty minutes explaining how Sherrie had gotten sloppy drunk the first night in Vegas. Tired and mad because I’d had to cancel at the last minute, Sherrie had told the other two couples that if I wasn’t going to be there when she needed me, she was going to find someone who would be. Sherrie spent the rest of the night gulping down hard liquor while dancing and flirting with every man who caught her eye. At some point, Sherrie and some blond guy managed to disappear even with both of the other couples trying hard to keep track of where Sherrie and the guy went in the casino. No one saw Sherrie until the next day.That afternoon, Saturday, Melissa and Connie had gone to Sherrie’s room and hammered on the door until Sherrie finally answered. She looked like she’d been rode hard and put up wet, according to what Melissa had told Cal. The blond guy had been in the bathroom, but had come out.Sherrie had been defensive, but also drunk and defiant. The guy had acted completely unconcerned about the whole thing. He left eventually, but since Sherrie didn’t join Melissa, Cal, Connie, and Tom that Saturday evening, they were pretty sure Sherrie and the unknown man had hooked up again.Actually, other than that one meeting Saturday afternoon, none of the four saw Sherrie until late Sunday afternoon when she showed up at the airport to board the flight home. They hadn’t seen how she got to the terminal so they couldn’t say her boyfriend had brought her. They hadn’t cared. I didn’t blame them.Melissa had come back outside wiping her eyes and was standing behind my chair with her hands on the tops of my shoulders. Every so often, she would pat me as one consoles an unhappy c***d. I’m not so sure that wasn’t exactly what I was at that moment. When Cal finished, I sat looking into space.”I wish you’d told me,” I said after a while. “I don’t know what good it would’ve done, but some of the lying and the cheating might not have occurred.” I sighed and bit my lip. “But the damage had already been done, I guess. It wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run.””How did you find out about Vegas?” Melissa asked gently. I craned my neck back to look up at her.”Ya’ll just told me,” I replied. She was confused.”Well, how did you find out, then,” she asked. I took her hand in mine and patted it gently.”I saw them in Sherrie’s car on the street a few weeks ago and that blond guy had his hand up her skirt so far I knew he had to have his fingers inside her,” I said tersely. Both their faces blanched; they winced in sympathy.”Oh, you poor man,” Melissa said. “What a horrible way to find out.” I shrugged.”I’m not sure there is a good way, ‘Lissa,” I said. “But it’s over and done with now.” I looked down at the grass about my feet so I wouldn’t have to admit to the sting of tears that had suddenly rushed to my eyes.Sherrie had evidently come over to tell them of the divorce a few days ago. Melissa said Sherrie had been mad as hell that Melissa wouldn’t support her. It had been just a horrible mistake, according to Sherrie. When Melissa had called her a hussy and some other things, Sherrie had left in a huff. That was my Sherrie, all right. Blame everyone but the two people who committed the adultery.Cal, Melissa, and I talked for another hour or so before I left. Their eighteen-month old baby needed attention and I wouldn’t have been good company at dinner, though they tried hard to get me to stay.********Three and a half months into the “negotiations,” the question of the pictures I’d taken of Sherrie and Blondie came up. Sherrie was afraid I was going to put them on the Internet. I thought their suggestion was a good one and I started to look for a website that would handle them. I offered to send copies to everyone at Sherrie’s office and all her friends too. I didn’t intend to do that, but it sure got the talks moving again.There would have been some legal complications if I’d tried to do as I threatened. For one thing, there was the invasion of privacy thing since I’d taken the pics through the motel window and without permission from the motel or the participants. I told my attorney I’d go ahead and chance a law suit if something didn’t nice happen real soon.The next day, Sherrie’s lawyer reopened the question of how to divide the house and offered me 60% of the sale price if I would turn over all copies of the pictures, but I refused. After a while, they offered 55% of the proceeds if I would agree to keep only one copy of the pictures and agree that I would never transmit them over the Internet in any way. And, oh by the way, Sherrie demanded a closed-door meeting between just the two of us. I made a counter offer of 60%, I’d keep only one set of prints, no digital copies, and a maximum of 30 minutes with her.We eventually settled on the 60% of the house, two sets of the pictures (one for me and one, surprisingly, for Sherrie), no digital copies, and a one-hour closed-door meeting. They withdrew all of their motions before the court and agreed to a no-fault divorce at the earliest possible moment. A court order was obtained recognizing Sherrie and I were no longer living together as man and wife pending a final divorce decree. Texas does not have “legal separations” and this was as close as the attorney’s could get to one. It was fine with me. The sale of the residence and furnishings could move forward, the mandatory wait time for the divorce would not be interrupted, and things would be over in another two months.Meanwhile, I’d made a particularly strong effort to keep my divorce from affecting my job. In fact, I took refuge in my work. I was the first one to arrive in the morning and the last to leave that night. Maybe because he noticed my renewed dedication to the firm, the big boss made me the interim director for the R&D branch. He gave me all the problems to solve, but none of the pay increase for that position. I didn’t care that much. I just made sure the disaster of my personal life never hurt my professional career.*******I got there about ten minutes early. I’d hoped the traffic would be heavy and make me late, but it was not to be. The meeting between Sherrie and me was to take place in a temporarily vacant office in my attorney’s suite. I was hustled into that office and ushered me into the big chair behind the desk. That would have a considerable psychological impact on Sherrie, they said. It would put her at a disadvantage. One of my lawyer’s legal aides, the young woman who’d been so sympathetic when I’d initiated the divorce papers, fussed over me for a few minutes, straightening my tie and brushing at some imaginary lint.She leaned in very close to me as I sat there. I could smell her perfume and if I’d let my eyes fall from hers, I’d have had a superb view down her open-necked blouse. When everyone else had left the room to greet the arriving party with my wife, she impulsively kissed my forehead and told me to “hang in there,” and squeezed my hand encouragingly. Standing, she turned and walked through the doorway, but she looked back and smiled before she disappeared.When everyone was gone, I got up and moved to a seat at the short conference table that butted up against the front of the big desk. I didn’t think I needed any props or artificial barriers. My wife had committed adultery, I caught her, and I was getting rid of her. I didn’t see things as any more complicated than that.When Sherrie came in, she found me sitting there calmly placing 5 X 7 prints on the table of her and her blond fuck toy hammering away at each other on the hotel bed. I was going for neat rows of six pictures in each row but the photos tended to slide on the slick tabletop. It was a lot of effort to make each line of pics to line up. I worked while Sherrie settled herself. When I looked up, there was a flush across her face.She was an attractive woman—not beautiful in the classical sense, but more than just pretty. I knew that under the bulky sweater top and knee length, dark blue skirt, there was a very exciting body. I looked into the face I’d loved for the more than six years we’d been together—four of them as a married couple. She’d been so warm and affectionate through most of those six years. Looking at her now, I couldn’t say when the woman I used to know had disappeared, or where she’d gone.”You got me really good didn’t you?” she said bitterly, interrupting my train of thought. Her face was twisted into a mask of irritation, something I’d come to expect from her more often than not lately. “I’ll bet you’re soooo proud of yourself, aren’t you?”I snorted. The puff of air moved three prints sideways and I urged them back into place with a fingernail.”Nah,” I said quietly. “You got yourself,” I told her. I glanced up to see her still glaring at me. She opened her mouth to say something I figured would be spiteful. I beat her to the punch.”And no…I am definitely not proud pendik escort of having caught a slut whore fucking around on me. I thought the woman I was married to would never, ever screw some strange man. Exactly why would you think I’d be proud to find out differently, huh?”It took the wind out of her sails and she sat with a blank expression on her face for a time. I held up my left forearm and checked my watch in as ostentatiously as I could.”I was told you wanted to talk to me…so talk. We’ve got just about fifty-five minutes left.” I leaned back in my chair. I was tired of playing with the pictures. Sherrie made an effort to keep her eyes from straying to the pictures and look only at me. She took a deep breath.”Ron, honey, I—””Whoa…huh uh…back up there!” I said quickly.She pulled back, surprised at my vehemence.”You don’t have any right to call me “honey,” “sugar,” or “sweetheart” or anything else,” I told her. “You gave that up when you started playing with your little fuck toy in Vegas.” She flinched and swallowed hard. She couldn’t meet my eyes, but she couldn’t look at the pics either. The wall behind me was suddenly being given her complete attention.”I didn’t mean to…to step over any boundaries here,” she said finally.”Okay,” I said, “just so we understand each other.” She nodded.”Ron…” she paused and looked at me, expecting me to object again, I guess.”Ron,” she continued, “first…I want to say I’m so sorry about all this. I never meant to hurt you, you’ve got to believe that.””I don’t have to believe any such thing,” I retorted. “What the hell would make you think you could fuck around behind my back and not have it hurt me?” She looked at me for a long moment.”I never meant for you to find out,” she said in a low voice. “And if you hadn’t found out, you wouldn’t have been hurt.” I snorted again disbelievingly.”What? No harm, no foul? Sherrie, either you are pretty damn stupid…or you think I am. From what “our” friends are telling me, you were dry fucking this guy on the dance floor and in the casino. You went off somewhere; they couldn’t find you and didn’t manage to corner you until the next afternoon. Fuck toy was there in your room with you and you didn’t even try to hide it. Just how the hell did you think you were going to keep me from finding out eventually?”She sat looking at me without saying anything for a bit.”Then why didn’t you stop me?” she asked sharply.”What?” I said. “I wasn’t there, Sherrie.” She shook her head.”When we came back, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you stop me from seeing him again?” She was getting worked up but I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. “Why didn’t you fight for me? You’re supposed to love me,” she blurted. I shook my head in confusion. This was hard enough without her talking in riddles.”Sherrie,” I said wearily. I didn’t know what you were doing. How could I stop you…read your mind?” Then it struck me.”Oh—Sherrie, Melissa and Cal didn’t tell me about Vegas until I’d already caught you with your fuck toy.” She winced at my repeated description of the blond guy but I wasn’t in any mood to be gentle. “You want to know how I caught you?” I asked challengingly. She nodded. There was a small tear at the corner of her left eye.”I saw you and fuck toy while I was sitting in a van at a stop light,” I said shortly. “He had his hand so far up your skirt, I’m surprised his fingers weren’t coming out of your mouth,” I told her. Her posture changed. From one that had been aggressive, she slumped into one of despair and pain. I waited. I’d said my piece.”I am so sorry you saw that, Ron,” she said finally. “I’m sorry I let him do it…I’m sorry all of this happened.””You sure didn’t look like you were sorry that day,” I told her. “In fact, you looked like you were having a ball,” I said, “no pun intended.” She cringed in her seat before straightening up.”I came here to be honest with you and I’m going to do it,” she said. “I was enjoying it,” she said. “God help me, I was…but no more than I would have if it were my fingers in there, or…uh…a dildo, Ron,” she said.”But they weren’t your fingers, Sherrie,” I said softly, “it wasn’t a dildo and they sure as hell weren’t my fingers. They were his and his had no damn business being there.”I slammed my hand down on the polished tabletop, my open palm making a loud, smacking thud echo off the law books in the shelves all around.”I had an exclusive rights contract with you, Sherrie,” I said. “It’s called a marriage. No one else in this whole world had any right to put his hands down there except me, dammit to hell!”I sat back, trembling with anger. I fought to keep my temper from exploding. The twenty-four pictures on the table had all skittered across the surface of the table. To occupy my hands and mind, I began picking them up and placing them in a neat stack in front of me.”I’m sorry, Ron,” she said after a while. “You’re right. I should not have done anything with that man. I know that. I don’t have any excuses at all—””For the first time today, I agree with you,” I said, cutting off whatever she was going to say.”Yeah…” she said, “I know.” She took a deep breath.”Ron, would it make any difference if I told you that the night you took all these pictures…that I told him I wasn’t going to see him any more?” I glanced up from my pile of photos. She held my eyes with her own. I shrugged.”No, not a hell of a lot,” I said evenly. She was startled. She’d thought she had something important to throw into the mix.”Sherrie, you cheated on me in Las Vegas, right in front of our friends. When you came home, you didn’t come to me and tell me about it…and then you fucked him three, four, five…a dozen times more here in our town. You didn’t stop when you came home.”What’s that saying? ‘What goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas?’ Boy that sure didn’t apply to you, did it? Not one damn bit! Hell, you were like that energizer bunny—you just kept going and going and going.”You know what, Sherrie? I’ve been told cheating gets easier every time you do it. Apparently, it is. You sure didn’t seem to have any trouble finding places and times to fuck your blond guy. I doubt you would have ever stopped if I hadn’t nailed you with some really good pictures…and then filed for divorce.” I looked up from my mound of pics.”You tell me you weren’t going to see him any more but, to put it bluntly, I don’t believe you,” I told her emphatically. “I think you’re lying in your teeth.””It’s true!” she snapped. “Right after we went into the room, I told him this would be our last time…I’d already decided to stop seeing him…I was feeling guilty and ashamed and I wanted to end it.” She reached out, snagged one of the pictures, and held it up in front of my eyes.”You see this?” she demanded. “He’s trying to hurt me here, slamming in to me really hard. He was punishing me for telling him I wasn’t going to be with him anymore. A little bit after you took this, I got away and kicked the SOB in his balls.”I shook my head. I didn’t want to see what she was trying to show me…and it really didn’t matter.”It looks to me like you’re getting a little rough sex there, and you were liking it,” I said. I held up my hand to stop her from saying something.”But let’s say you’re telling the gospel truth.” I leaned on my elbows partly across the table. “If it’s true you wanted to stop fucking him, Sherrie, why the hell didn’t you give him a call and tell him? Why was it necessary to give him a good-bye fuck?” She hung her head.”I know. It was wrong, but—””Don’t bother, Sherrie! I don’t want to hear it! Even if I accepted what you say at face value, I don’t believe—and I never will believe it—that you would ever have stopped so long as your slutty secret life was still a secret from me.”Oh, you might mean what you say. You might have even done it for a week…a month…six months, maybe. But you’d have gone back to him…or found someone else…the first damn time you got pissed off at me again, or you had car trouble, or when you had a fucking bad hair day!”Sooner or later, you’d have had that urge to get a little “strange” and pay me back for every real and imaginary problem we’ve ever had, wouldn’t you? Isn’t that what you were doing, Sherrie?” I had worked myself up again. I had to pull back. I slouched in my chair and tried to look more impassive than I felt. Sherrie was crying again.”You don’t have to talk to me like that,” she whispered. “I’m your wife.” I looked away in disgust.”Not for very long,” I said cruelly. “We’re separated, the courts have recognized it, and all we have to do it wait another 52 days and it’s all over with. And besides…I talk to sluts and whores a lot differently from the way I would to my faithful wife, assuming I ever have one again.” The tears were rolling now.”Ron…I’m trying to say I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Can’t you understand that? I’m sorry!” I shook my head. Abruptly, I was weary of the whole thing.”Okay, Sherrie, you’re sorry. I’m sorry too. Hell, everybody involved in this damned mess is sorry. So what? Where does that get us?” We sat quietly for a while.”Sherrie,” I said slowly. “You’ve ripped the heart right out of me.” I tapped my chest. “Right here—there’s a big hole, a whole lot of emptiness inside me where I used to keep the image of a woman I loved more than life itself…a woman I trusted with my most private secrets…someone I could count on to be good to me when the whole world was against me.”You were my friend, someone I could talk to…trade opinions about anything under the sun. You were my lover; the one woman in the world I would ever make love to for the rest of my life and the only woman I wanted to make love to me. You took that all away and I can’t get it back,” I told her. My voice cracked on the last few words and I had to stop. Sherrie was crying harder.”Ron—”I interrupted her.”Sherrie,” I said slowly and carefully, “you’ve half-killed me, fucking that guy…betraying me, betraying yourself, and betraying our marriage.” I took a deep breath.”I sure hope whatever you got out of it was worth wrecking our marriage and his…’cause I heard this morning his wife kicked his ass out and is filing for divorce too.” That was true.An investigator working for my attorney had tracked down the garage that had sent a wrecker to pick up two sets of slashed tires from a motel, take them back to the shop for repair and return the tires to the motel and mount them on two vehicles. The wrecker driver had remembered a furious brunette woman and a subdued blond man as owners of the cars.Each of the billing reports had included the license plate number of the vehicle involved and, once he had that, it was c***d’s play for the investigator to find out the man’s name and all kinds of personal information. When my attorney told me the guy’s identity, I found a phone number for his home and got in touch with his wife. She became enraged when I told her what I knew. I wasn’t surprised she had filed for a divorce too.Curiously, it seemed there actually had been three teens who had run away from the motel when Sherrie walked out of her room. They may have been involved in some other mischief, but I knew they hadn’t done the tires.I watched my wife cry inconsolably for a while. I wanted to take her in my arms…but she wasn’t my woman anymore. She was a stranger.”Will you tell me why you did it?” I asked. It took her a long time to smother the tears and get control of herself. Melissa and Cal had told me some of what she’d said in Las Vegas. I wanted to see if she could add anything to that.”I don’t know, Ron,” she said a little bitterly. “It’s like a whole other world in out there. It didn’t feel real from the minute I got off the plane. Then I got drunk…the lights were so bright. It was like they hypnotized me. You weren’t there and I was mad you wouldn’t come with me. Then P—he…was talking to me so nice, telling me how sad it was that I was alone. After a while, I just gave in, Ron.” The last phrase was wailed rather than spoken. I looked at her and for the first time I felt contempt.”Well, that’s just…” I said, trying to find the words to tell her how I felt. I gave up. They wouldn’t come.”God damn it, none of that is any fucking excuse!” I said, finally exploding. “First of all, I had to go to Denver and fix that damned glitch in the proposed power delivery system. If I hadn’t gone, I’d have been fired and if I didn’t have a job, we couldn’t make the payments on that nice big house you just had to have a couple years back. I couldn’t be with you in Vegas, dammit! It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to. Don’t you think I would have if I could?”What else was it? Oh yeah. You got drunk. Well excuse the hell out of me, sugar pie honey bunch, but who the hell told you to get drunk in the first place. Are you a c***d that someone has to take a glass of rum out of your hands when you shouldn’t be drinking it? Fuck you! You had no business even thinking of getting drunk if you can’t control who you let shove a cock up your damned cunt when you do!”Bright lights? Hypnotized? What the shit does that mean, Sherrie? Should everyone treat you like you had some kind of mental problem because you might be…uh…hypnotized by the pretty lights? Give me a break!” I took some deep breaths and leaned heavily on the left arm of my chair. Then something else she’d said made me mad all over again. I sat up straight and leaned across the table toward her.”And…you said he was talking to you real nice. Isn’t that just precious? You’re an attractive woman, Sherrie. Of course, men are going to come on to you! So what? Who the God-damned hell told you a married woman has a right to even think about letting some strange guy console you and flatter you and tell you how rotten it was that your husband wasn’t there, huh? That’s what he did, didn’t he, Sherrie? He told you I was a sorry son of a bitch for not being there for you, didn’t he?” She nodded, mopping up some of her tears with an already sodden tissue.”Yeah,” I said contemptuously, “and you lapped it up, didn’t you?” I shook my head in disgust.”Dammit, Sherrie…you talked about being drunk and drinking. You were married. A married woman…or a man…hell, it applies to all of us. The fact is you were supposed to act like you were a recovering alcoholic. I mean that. A married person is like someone who can never touch alcohol…ever!”But you did. You know what? The first time you danced with him too close…the first time you let him touch your arm in a possessive way, you were an alcoholic breaking your vow to never touch the stuff. Our marriage vows said we would forsake all others, Sherrie…forsake all others. What the hell did you not understand about that?”Do you think I’m so ugly and unattractive, so inept in bed that I couldn’t have been doing what you did? Don’t you understand I get chances to spend a night or two with strange women every, single time I go on a trip?”Dammit, I have to travel seven or eight times a year and every place I go, there’s a secretary in the office, a professional woman from down the hall, a waitress in a restaurant or a woman in the hotel bar where I go for a nightcap. Maybe it’s just a girl I pass in the corridor going to my room, but every time I go somewhere, there’s a woman who I might be able to fuck, but you know what? I never have! I’ve been propositioned ten times…I mean by ten women…this last year alone I think, and I’ve never even given one of them a second’s worth of consideration because I had my loving woman at home.””Guess you fooled me, huh?” I said bitterly. “If I’d only known.”I shook my head disgustedly. There was no sound but crying in the room for a long while. Sherrie just sat there hunched over. Her shoulders were shaking from the sobs she didn’t want me to see. I didn’t know why Sherrie had wanted to talk to me but it was I getting in most of the talking. I started up again, breaking the long silence.”You should never have let that SOB touch you at all, Sherrie,” I said, starting in again. I couldn’t let this topic die—it was killing me.”The first time he did, and you let him get away with it, you took a swallow from the cup that you could never drink from if you wanted to stay married to me. The first time you let him kiss you…you did it again. The second he put his hand on your ass…your breasts…ah, hell. What’s the point?”Abruptly, my rage left me. I slumped in my seat and tried to breathe slowly.”I don’t know else there is to say, Sherrie,” I said finally. “I just know you’ve ruined something that was really beautiful, you know that? Now, I don’t have anything but pain…and it won’t go away. I loved you with all my being. Hell, I still love you, I guess. I haven’t learned how to turn it off yet and then back on like a faucet the way you have.””Ron…” Sherrie said tentatively. “If you can still love me, we could try again…”She stopped when she saw me shaking my head.”But…you made love to me so…so good that Sunday before you left me,” she wailed, shaking her head in confusion.”Not hardly!” I said brusquely. “I wasn’t making love to you that night, Sherrie…I was fucking you and making you come over and over so you’d remember it when I left. I’m sorry I did it now. It was a mean thing to do—something c***dish, arrogant, and worthless. I’m sorry I did it,” I said. Sherrie looked shocked and then dismayed. She’d pinned her hopes on me having a desire to get back with her. We sat looking at each other for a time.”Oh, and no…I can’t try again,” I said, remembering the question.”I don’t have anything left to try with, Sherrie,” I said, at last. “I don’t believe a word you say. I know for a fact that you’ve lied in your teeth every day since you started fucking that bastard. You were deceiving me every minute of every day and that’s one cruel, heartless thing to do to someone who loves you.”I can’t possibly trust you anymore, Sherrie…I can’t imagine ever trusting you again out of my sight. I can’t live that way, Sherrie.” I sighed, leaning my head back on the back of the chair and looking up at the ceiling tiles.”I don’t know what I did to deserve this, Sherrie,” I said musingly. “Based on that last night of sex we had together, I seem to be able to satisfy you sexually. If I can’t, you’re one hell of an actress…I never saw so many fake orgasms all strung together that night if that’s what you were doing.” I was quiet for a bit, trying to get it all straight in my mind.”You know, Sherrie…I know I’m not perfect. I don’t always see when you’re unhappy about something. Sometimes I don’t pick up on your signals quick enough. I know there are times you want to talk to me and I’m wrapped up in something else and I don’t understand. There are times I don’t know have a clue what it is you want me to do…and I’ve never learned how to talk to you when you’re mad.”But—right off the top of my head—I’ve never shut myself off from you. I try to be considerate, even if I don’t succeed all the time. Hell, I only watch one football game a week on TV just to make room for a little extra time with you on weekends. I take you out when we can afford it, I bring you flowers or a little something every so often. I guess I don’t do everything I could, but I try. I guess there are a lot of times I’m not the man I’d like to be…but what the Goddamned hell did I ever do to you to make you do something like this?””Nothing…nothing at all, Ron,” Sherrie said in a rush. “It was just me, all right? I did something incredibly mean, and stupid, and spiteful…and I’m sorry for having hurt you. I’m so ashamed and I feel so…so…unclean…that I did those things with him. Ron…I feel guilty all the time now. I wish…I wish so bad that I could go back and stop myself…but I can’t, Ron. I can’t push some “undo” button and make it all go away. I wish I could.” She was quiet. I guess she was all cried out for the time being.”I can’t keep from wondering, Sherri,” I said in a voice barely above a whisper. “When did you make the decision that you could fuck him and it would be all right? And how did you make a decision like that, huh? What made it “okay” in your mind to use sex with someone else to solve a problem you had with me, huh?””I never made a decision to do any of that, Ron,” she said in the same voice. “If I had been making decisions, I wouldn’t have made this bad a mistake…it just happened…I didn’t want it…I didn’t go looking for it,” she said.That did it. I’d had enough. I straightened up in my chair and started gathering the pictures together and patting them into a neat stack. I was fed up with all the bullshit.”No…it didn’t just happen,” I said briskly. “Come on, Sherrie. You weren’t just walking through the casino that night and suddenly find a strange cock sticking out of your pussy. No sireee, Bob, that’s not what happened. You let this happen. Hell, Sherrie, let’s be frank here…you made it happen after you got back home. And, by the way, you damn sure did want it, and you most emphatically did go looking for it—at least here in the town we live in, even if I believe you when you say you didn’t in Vegas.”Shit, take a little responsibility for this, Sherrie. This wasn’t a lightning bolt coming out of a clear sky. You did it, you liked it, and you kept on doing it…period!” She just looked at me. She was in shock, I guess.”And it wasn’t a mistake, either,” I added. “A mistake is when you reach for a can of tomato soup on a supermarket shelf and you come away with mushroom instead. Hell, this is more like the mother of all catastrophes.”And…I guess that’s just the way it’s just going to have to be, Sherrie,” I told her. “I can’t live with a woman I can’t trust. They don’t have chastity belts any more…and I wouldn’t lock you in one if they did. If I have to worry every time I leave your side that you’re going to be fucking some guy when I’m out of sight…well, I’d rather just get out of the situation. I’ll leave you to every Tom, Dick, or Harry you want to fuck…or do all three of them at one time, for all I care.” I put the pictures in my inside jacket pocket and stood up.”I don’t have anything else to say, Sherrie, and the time we agreed to talk on is almost over. Do you have anything you need to say to me?” She stood and looked me in the eye across the table.”Just one thing, Ron…and then you can go if that’s what you want. I just thought I could explain to you what happened and…see if we might could find a way through this…”I snatched one of the pictures from my coat pocket. I held it by one corner and showed it to her.”Sherri, I don’t need an explanation. This is it. This is what happened! This one photograph tells me everything I need to know. If it didn’t, what Cal and Melissa told me would have done the job sooner or later. I don’t understand where you’re coming from.”Don’t you get it? When you went up to your room in Las Vegas with that man and closed the hotel door behind you, you shut me out of your life. You killed the marriage with just that one act. All the rest of it is just shit piled on top of more shit. There is nothing you can explain away. The facts are the facts…and nothing on God’s green earth is going to change them.”I don’t know what else I can say. Well, how about if I say there is no explanation that will change a damned thing. Does that make it any clearer?”She seemed to summon some last bit of courage. In the process, she completely ignored what I’d just said, I guess. She surely didn’t comment on it.”Ron…I love you and I will always love you…I want you to remember that,” she said. “I’ve been selfish, petty…I’ve screwed things up bad, but I won’t ever stop loving you…can you understand that Ron?” I nodded. I shrugged.I didn’t doubt she thought she did, standing with me in this room and at this moment. But it was an awfully one-dimensional, self-serving love if it was flexible enough to let her to do what she’d done. I pulled my jacket into a better fit across my shoulders and turned away from the woman who had been my wife.”Ron, I’m—””Sorry…yeah, I know,” I muttered, not looking at her. I didn’t say anything else, and neither did she.Sherrie didn’t try to touch me as I walked out the door. I was glad. Because I knew whatever she felt for me…deep inside, locked away in a vault I’d never open again, I still loved her as much as the day I’d married her.Love couldn’t overcome this. She’d dishonored our marriage and me. There was nothing left to salvage and it was best left behind. I shut the door behind me, closing it firmly but without making an echo boom down the corridor.Chapter 2 Coming Soon…..

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