Chapter 1

We’d just finished having sex when my wife started the conversation that ended our marriage. I was lying on my back, trying to catch my breath for round two and she was curled up against me, her fingers playing with my chest hair idly, like she always did when she had something on her mind.

“John,” she said finally, getting my attention. “I want you to take a mistress.”

I raised my head to look at her funny. “What?!!?”

She had the good grace to blush under my gaze. “Seriously,” she said, impressing upon me that she wasn’t joking. “Isn’t there anyone you’ve had random daydreams about screwing?”

“No,” I said immediately. “I mean, everyone LOOKS once in a while, but I never give it any thought. Why would you WANT me to screw around on you?”

She sighed. “I’m just trying to be fair to you,” she said. That was a red flag.

I suppose I should describe myself and my wife. Barb was twenty-seven when this conversation happened. I was a year younger. We were both in fair shape, I suppose. Barb’s blonde and blue-eyed, she stands about 5’5” and she would never tell me what she weighs, but she has a sort of an hourglass figure with a slender waist, round hips, a bubble-butt and a set of Double-D’s that don’t quit. She oozed sex appeal. I’d had jealousy issues when we first got together, but she was able to convince me that I was the only man she loved. Her sex appeal made her extremely successful as a real-estate agent. She was the top seller in the state, the last four years in a row. She made more than I did, a LOT more. I’m 6’2” and I weigh 205 give or take a cheeseburger. I worked as an architect, but I was also pretty active. I’d been on the wrestling team in high school and college and started into MMA training after college. I wasn’t good enough to make it to the top. I lacked the killer instinct at that point in my life, but I fought in the smaller promotions and had a winning record of 13-5-0. I have brown hair and eyes and I haven’t had my face messed up in a fight.

“Fair?” I repeated, my guard going up. “What’s going on, Barb?”

She sighed again and patted my chest. “Look, don’t get mad,” she said soothingly. That’s the point in any conversation where it’s agreed that you have every right to be pissed and rampage through the city like Godzilla. “I’ve ... I’ve been having an affair for a while and I feel like you should have the same opportunity,” she said all in a rush.

“You’re cheating on me?!” I blurted, sitting bolt-upright and staring at her in disbelief.

She got a pained look on her face. “It’s not as bad as all that,” she said. “It’s just experimentation.”

I didn’t even know this woman any more. “How long is ‘a while’?” I growled, starting to get pissed.

“It started last summer,” she admitted, wincing in anticipation of my response.

“Who?” I demanded. I felt like I had a right to know who’d been fucking my wife for nearly a year.

“You don’t know him,” she said quickly. “I met him through work. Look, I still love you,” she told me, as if that made the difference. “This is just something different. It’s no different than you having two sparring partners at the gym. They don’t get possessive that you’re working up a sweat with the other one, do they? Think of this like me having a sparring partner. It makes me a better lover at home.”

That was bullshit. I hadn’t seen any improvement in her sexual skills in years. I’m not saying Barb was a terrible lay, but there hadn’t been anything different about our sex in the past year.

“So you’re not going to tell me who he is then?” I clarified, trying to keep myself from punching her in the face. The only thing that was holding me back was that douche-bag, War Machine, that had beaten up his porn star girlfriend for leaving him. I had no desire to be the next headline showing how dangerous and unstable MMA fighters were.

“John,” she said in a tone that said I was being unreasonable. “If I told you who it was, you’d track him down, go to his house and beat the living shit out of him. I don’t want him to end up in the hospital, I don’t want you to end up in jail and I don’t want any of this to end up in the news. Okay? Maybe once you settle down, we’ll talk about it more.”

“So for the past year, you’ve been screwing around behind my back and now, all of a sudden, you want to clear the air and ‘be fair’ to me!” I repeated, using air-quotes. “Why? I don’t fucking buy this crap about wanting it to be fair. Fair would have been if you’d come to me and told me that you wanted this arrangement before you got involved with someone else.”

She winced, like she’d eaten something rotten, but answered me. “You’re right. I should have done this a long time ago. I started feeling guilty about it. I mean, I tried to make it up to you, to make sure that you weren’t feeling neglected or that I wasn’t taking time away from you, but it kind of gnawed at me that I had that extra support on the side and you didn’t.”

She loved him. Her assurance that she still loved me hadn’t stressed that she ONLY loved me, just that she still did. Calling her affair ‘extra support’ was another red flag. She was telling me half-truths and hoping I wouldn’t dig, especially if she held out the carrot of a mistress to sooth my wounded ego.

“Bullshit,” I told her. “If you were getting a guilty conscience, it would have been after a month or two, not a YEAR!” I sneered. “So what changed? What went wrong that you CAN’T keep covering it up?”

“It’s really not LIKE that, John!” she protested, reaching out to try to hug me again. I got out of bed to get away from her instead. “Nothing changed. It was just past time that you had a chance to find someone for yourself. Think of it like having a toy or a sports car.”

“I think you’re lying to me. Something’s changed or is about to change and you can’t hide it anymore,” I told her. “I already know you love him. You might as well go all-in and show your hand.”

She flinched, like I’d hit her when I brought up loving him. She hung her head. “That’s what’s different,” she admitted and then looked up at me with a pleading look on her face. “I still love YOU though! JUST as much as I did before! I swear, I do!”

“Just not enough to stay out of someone else’s bed,” I clarified. “Or do you get together here when I’m at work or the gym? You certainly don’t love me enough to respect me for this past year and you don’t love me to make me the only person there’s room for in your heart.”

“He’s never been here!” she swore, pouncing on that. “We both knew that would be a slap in the face to you and we’d never do that. He’s never been in the house. I promise.”

“So you go to him,” I said flatly. “At times when you tell me that you’re out with the girls or at meetings or showing houses, you’re sneaking around with the man you’ve fallen in love with.”

“I know!” she said, hanging her head again. “It’s awful that I’ve lied to you about it for a year. You don’t know how sorry I am about that. I want things to be perfectly honest between us.”

“By ‘us’, do you mean you and me or do you include HIM too now. I don’t know what ‘us’ even means anymore, Barb,” I pointed out to her.

“I mean you and me!” she said, upset at how this conversation was going. That made two of us. “GOD, John! It’s always been you and me!”

“Until this past year,” I said dully. “Now I graciously share my wife with someone I don’t even know and trust to your sense of decency to make sure that you use protection and don’t bring anything revolting home from him like a disease or a fertilized egg.”

“He’s been tested, John!” she said, starting to get angry at how I was reacting. “And I’m still on my birth control. If I was going to get pregnant, don’t you think it’s something I’d talk to you about?”

“Considering that this conversation is a year too late to show me any respect?” I asked. “I’d say you’d probably get around to telling me that you’d slipped on the birth control. Whether or not you told me which of the men you love was the father? You’ve ruined our marriage, Barb. I don’t know whether he’s married and there’ll be fallout when he has this conversation with his wife or if he’s a comfortable bachelor and you’re the love of his life, but this,” I gestured around the room, “is destroyed. You’ve put it on my head whether to try to salvage it and rebuild or burn it to the ground and move on. Thanks for that.”

“Why are you being so fucking dramatic about this, John?!!?” she barked at me, frustrated and probably hurt.

“Because it fucking HURTS!” I bellowed at her, losing my temper for the first time. “I married you, promising you and all our friends and family that I’d love you and ONLY you, that I’d honor you and cherish you and forsake all others for you. I DID THAT! I loved you and only you. I honored you with every action I took every day. I turned down women at the gym. I worked hard to try to provide for us. I trained hard so that you’d be proud of me when we were out in public and so that you’d be thrilled with me when we were in bed. I worshiped your body and held you in my heart. There was never any ROOM for another woman in my heart or my life or my bed. If I had anything to give, I GAVE IT TO YOU! You say you love me JUST as much as always, but if that’s true, that meant there was ALWAYS part of your heart I never had. You had all of me! Now I have to wonder if I had even half of you, or if there’s a third of your heart waiting for Plan C or a quarter of it waiting for Plan D. That’s not what I signed up for. It’s not what you promised me and it fucking hurts to know that you’ve been betraying me like this for a fucking year,” I spat miserably, my voice twisting with emotion.

She sat there and stared at me, dumbfounded. She was naked and beautiful and the thought of touching her revolted me to the depths of my soul. She was so shocked that she didn’t have any response to the bitter rage I’d screamed at her.

I didn’t say anything else. I just went into the bathroom and showered, scrubbing at my skin to try to cleanse myself of any trace of her. I felt filthy, like I could feel their stink soaked into my skin. I knew that was ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake the feeling, so I scrubbed until I was raw. When I got out of the shower, I dried off and then stood, looking at myself in the vanity mirror. I looked like I’d aged ten years in the past hour. I suppose finding out that my life was over was a good reason. I went out to the bedroom and she was sitting there, waiting for me.

“Now that you’ve had a chance to cool down, let’s talk about it,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. “I never meant for any of this to hurt you,” she said.

“Fuck off and die,” I told her and went to the closet. We had a huge walk-in closet and her clothes dominated, but I still had my own section where mine were hung up. I grabbed as much as I could carry and brought them back to the bed, laying them out while I went to get my suitcases.

“What are you doing?!!?” she said, stricken by seeing me packing.

“I’m packing,” I told her, tossing my largest suitcase onto the bed and opening it. I filled most of it with the contents of my bureau, leaving enough room to hang my suits from the ring at the top.

“John! Wait! PLEASE! Talk to me!” she pleaded, starting to get genuinely upset for the first time. “Don’t do this! We have to talk about it!”

“WHY?!!?” I snapped. “You’ve already made all the fucking decisions. You picked out my replacement, you groomed him for a year to make sure that he was good enough and now you’re trying to get me to pick out a toy for my consolation prize while he gets my wife. What’s there to talk about? You made ALL the choices and now the only choice I have is to decide whether I can share my wife or not. I decided that’s not happening.”

“JOHN, STOP!” she screamed at me. “I don’t love him like THAT! He’s like ... a friend that I can talk to when I have a problem.”

I nodded. “So he was there for you when you needed someone to talk to? That’s fucking lovely. I always turned to YOU when I needed support. Tell you what, you want to talk about this so bad, give him a call and talk to him. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to know that the house isn’t off-limits anymore.”

“John! PLEASE! It’s not supposed to BE like this!” she declared.

That made me stop. “Okay, I’m curious. What WAS it supposed to be like? I’d really like to know how you thought this conversation was going to go. Let’s hear it.”

I stood, facing her as she slid off the bed to try to come to me. I backed up and put up my hand to warn her that I didn’t want her anywhere near me.

She sighed. “I knew you’d be angry, John,” she admitted, “but this isn’t a threat to you or our marriage. He’s not going to take your place. I’m not going to leave you to go to him. I love YOU! Yeah, I have feelings for him and yeah, that’s why we’re having this conversation. When it was just sex, it was JUST sex. It’s no different than masturbating. I want us to be out in the open about what it is and what it means.”

“And what DOES it mean to you?” I asked hotly.

“It means that we each have the freedom to take a lover,” she said, trying to keep things calm. “We never bring them back here and we keep them separate from our life together. We still love each other and this is our home, but we each have a friend that we can have discrete fun on the side with.”

“So that’s your utopia?” I asked. “You keep Plan B and I go out looking for a girlfriend?”

“Yes. It’s perfectly acceptable for you to have a girlfriend so long as she understands the situation and knows her place,” she said, smiling a little. I think she was sensing that my resolve was weakening. She was wrong.

I started packing again rather than speak.

She rolled her eyes. “Come on, John!” she complained. “This is the best of all worlds. Who doesn’t want a girlfriend on the side?”

“Me,” I told her. “If I wanted something on the side, I could have had it YEARS ago. If you’d had this conversation with me before your affair started, I might have listened. Then it would have been you and me making the decisions, but you and Plan B have been talking this particular problem out between you. I don’t get to even know he exists until he’s a big enough part of your life to be the person you turn to for support, but you get to dictate to me what the situation is. She has to understand the situation and know her place?”

“Okay!” she said, making calming gestures. “This is progress, John. Talk to me. We’ll bounce it back and forth and figure out what works for us.”

“So long as you get to hang onto Plan B?” I asked. “That’s your bottom line? He’s your line in the sand?”

“We’re trying to figure out what will make this right for YOU!” she said emphatically.

“Personally, I’d rather you’d taken out a gun and shot me in the head when my back was turned than make me know someone had taken my wife from me,” I told her. “How do you make that right? Your lover doesn’t give a shit about me. He’d be thrilled to find out that I was out of the picture. Don’t give me a line of bullshit that he’s enthusiastically trying to help you save our marriage. He’s spent the last year doing everything he can to destroy it.”

“John, that’s not true. He’s married too. He doesn’t want to lose his wife any more than I want to lose you.”

“That makes it much better,” I said bitterly. “Are you coaching him on how to break it to his wife that she has to share?”

“He doesn’t want to tell her,” she said carefully. “He’s afraid that she won’t understand.”

“He should be more afraid that she DOES understand,” I told her. “If she doesn’t understand, he can dazzle her with bullshit and convince her that you’re not a threat to her or their marriage and that everything’s going to be fine.”

“It’s not bullshit, John!” she said. “I sincerely love you and I don’t want to lose you. Things with him are just...” she trailed off, trying to find a way to explain it. “He just fits,” she said finally. “It’s not that you don’t, it’s just that he can be there when you’re busy.”

I snorted a laugh and shook my head. Once every six months, I went away overnight for a fight. I trained three nights a week and on Sundays. I rotated my workouts around anything she had going on. If she called me, I’d leave the gym. If she told me she wanted more time with me, I’d have dropped the whole thing and found a hobby we could do together.

“That’s a convenient excuse,” I told her. “I’d have stopped fighting if you told me you wanted more time with me and you know it. We’ve talked about it and you always said you supported me.”

“I DO support you!” she said. “I know you love to fight. I don’t want to take that away from you as much as I hate fighting, I know it’s important to you.”

“I’d have rather given up fighting than THIS,” I said bitterly. “But now I’m stuck with this.”

“Well, what would make it right for you?” she asked. “You asked me what my perfect world would be and I told you. What would your perfect world be? How do we get from where we are now to where we can both be happy?”