(No actual sex in this story, just a lot of thinking about it.)

John lifted the cell phone laying on the computer desk and looked at it. He had already programmed the number in and his finger hovered over the "send" button. With a defeated sigh he laid the phone back down. Again.

How many times had he done this, he wondered. At least six times, just in this session of sitting in front of the computer, scanning over his late wife's computer files. So much to learn. So much he hadn't known about her.

Were all women like this? In spite of 23 years of marriage to Deborah, it was pretty obvious that she had possessed hidden depths he hadn't even suspected about her. Certainly not the least of which was she had been having an online affair with another woman.

How much simple little decisions change our lives, he thought. That morning, three months ago, when Deborah had stuck her head out of the front door and announced they were out of milk and did he want to run to the store or should she? He was busy cutting the lawn and had only raised an eyebrow at her question. Two minutes later she had pulled out of the garage. She had blown him a kiss and he had waved back.

He finished the front yard and had gone into the house for some water when the police car arrived. As it happened, the officer was an old friend of his and for one moment John had thought he was just stopping by for a visit. But the look on Bob's face said everything. Without a word being spoken, John knew something awful had happened.

The worst thing about the accident was that he couldn't even hate the other driver. A one in a million freak hose failure had deprived the driver of the 18 wheeler of his brakes. Employing his skills, the man had almost managed to pull off a miracle. But the wheel jumped out of his hands as he tried to ride up and over the curb to take his runaway truck into an open field. It veered back to the left and smashed into Deborah's car.

The driver came to the funeral home but had been unable to make himself go in. Finally his wife entered, hesitantly introduced herself and told John about her husband. John knew that he wasn't the best of men. But he had somehow found it in him to go outside and hold the other man in his arms as they both broke down.

Days and weeks blurred. The children had come by to try to help their father but they had their own lives to lead. Although they kept up the calls and the visits he was alone now. Slowly he had tried to get on with life. He had managed to pack a few things away. Hungrily he had seized on anything of hers she had written; letters, greeting cards she had given him, a notebook she had jotted in off and on about different things that caught her fancy.

One afternoon he booted up the computer to pay bills. He started to automatically log on with his user name and then paused. He had never really considered looking on through her files on the computer. "Her side" she had called it. He had always respected that. But there might be something there he wanted to know. She had been the one who had really used the computer to surf the net. He liked looking for items for his book collection and had a sneaky fondness for fan fiction, but she chatted online, shopped and had called him all the time to look at something interesting or funny she had found. He would like to see funny things now, laughter was at a premium lately.

He found she had dozens of files. And the number chat friends, wow. He looked through reams of saved conversations with people all over the world. He smiled as he read some of them. Even in electronic print, her warmth and wit came through as clear as it had in person. He began making notes on a piece of paper. Somehow he would have to find a way to let these friends know she wouldn't be back.

Finishing the file he had been browsing through, he clicked the next one. Instead of opening, a window popped up. "Please enter password".

Well, that was strange. He looked at the file folder's title. It innocuously read "Safety Issues". What could possibly need to be safeguarded in that?

Off and on for the next week he tried various combinations. He knew the odds were he'd never find it. Then he remembered Deborah's day planner. She had once told him she had the worst time recalling passwords, so she hid them in plain sight in the address section. He found the planner in a box he had stored different papers in and flipped through it.

There it was, under the letter "S". It read "Safety Issues - See Mimie on 7/12". Mimie wasn't a person, but rather the name of their dog. July the 12th was when they had brought her home.

John went to computer and brought up the file folder. When prompted he entered "Mimie7/12". "Incorrect Password, Please Re-enter", came up. Hmmmm. He tried "Mimie712". The folder opened and he was confronted by a number of sub-folders.

He ran his eyes over the titles. They all seemed innocuous. Among others, there were two folders labeled "Stories". No, one was "Other's Stories". He clicked that one and browsed through the titles of the files. They were listed by what appeared to be title and author. He was more the bookworm than she had been but he didn't recognize any of them.

"Joyride by Lucky-E-Eleven". "Gangster's Ball by Colleen Thomas"."Heather's Baptism by Matriarch"."Drifting by Katherine-T"."Sisters In Army Green by Ann Douglas"."After School by Dotrice." Who were all these people? He had never heard of them.

Mentally he shrugged and opened the first story. He finished it and opened the next story, then another and another. He read all the way through the entire list, his astonishment growing with every paragraph. The astonishment was matched by his shock and his disbelief. Just what the hell was going on.

He closed the folder. He hesitated over the next folder, the one that read only "Stories". If the other included stories written by others, he supposed that this one contained stories that Deborah herself had written. What would she have written about? Would they all be like the ones he had just read? Would they all be stories of women longing for, loving and being loved by other women?

He pushed back the chair and lit a cigarette with hands that trembled slightly. As he drew the acrid smoke into his lungs, a vagrant thought wandered through his mind. Deborah would kick him if she knew that he had started smoking again. But the routine helped calm him. He started back the day of the funeral. He decided he would come back to Deborah's stories. He selected another file titled "Import/Export".

This one shocked him. It was pictures. Pictures of women kissing, women touching, women engaged in sex with each other. John's finger stabbed the On/Off button on the monitor.

"My God," he thought. Had Deborah been a closet lesbian? If so, how long had it been going on? He wracked his brains.

Like many guys, the idea of two women together was in itself erotic, he admitted it. He knew that most porn films included at least one Female/Female scene and it wasn't to appeal to the women who might be watching. There was something insidiously seductive about two women making love. Like most guys though, he strongly suspected, the idea that your wife was one of the women involved, was not so very appealing.

He turned the monitor back on, swiftly closed the folders and shut down the computer. He had enough shocks for one day. He went to bed but didn't sleep, tossing and turning most of the night as images filled his mind. He finally gave up around 5 in the morning and got up. He made coffee and sat out on the front porch, watching the sun come up.

After a while he gave a huge sigh and went back into the house. He booted the computer up. He didn't know if this was some masochistic urge or what, but he needed to follow this trail to the end. He had lost sight somewhere of the woman he had been married to for so long and he needed to find her.

He read her stories next. He found that not all of them were Lesbian tales, although a fair number were. He noted that the earlier ones of that genre usually involved a married woman, but the later ones didn't. He found that he enjoyed several of her more romantic type stories about men and women together and surprised himself by laughing aloud at a comic piece of hers.

He also noticed something else. When Deborah had written those earlier stories about married women having affairs with other women, she never made the husband out to be the cause of the whole thing. There was even one where the affair was discovered and the woman accepted full responsibility for it. Wow.

Now he was uncomfortable though. He shut down and took time to think. He wrestled with his thoughts over the next few days, at work and at home.

Had she had an affair with another woman? Was that where that story had come from? Was she nerving herself up to tell him, or to have plausible reasoning ready if he should have caught her?

John cast his mind back. Well, sure, there would have been opportunities. Deborah went out with the girls sometimes. She had lots of friends, of both sexes. He had never thought anything of even the mixed get-togethers she sometimes went to after work. He had joined some of those and she had always been delighted to see him. Hadn't see?

Now he wondered. He tried to think back and see any signs that she might have been closer to one of her friends than he could have suspected. How about Teresa, the divorced woman in her early fifties? Or Christy, the slightly heavy-set tall brunette? She had never been married. Or Rebecca, the heavily bosomed single mom who wore her clothes just a bit too tight and too short? Maybe it was Janey, the petite, young, bubbly blonde.

He suddenly cursed aloud and scolded himself. He didn't know anything yet and was reaching for conclusions out of thin air. After all, he had never worried about her cheating on him with other men. Why should he assume that she would with another woman, attracted to them or not? Maybe when he read the last folder, the one that was marked "Correspondence", he would know more.

That night he couldn't sleep, again. He tossed back the covers and stared at the ceiling. Had he become some stumbling block for Deborah, someone standing in the way of her wants and needs? All that he had found so far pointed to this attraction being of fairly recent origin, perhaps two years at the most. Had things changed between them? He couldn't think of any signs or signals. They still had a hearty sex life. Only days before the accident she had surprised him in the shower. He couldn't recall her insisting on different positions, or closing her eyes when she kissed him. They still snuggled on the couch on Sunday afternoons, a time that had been "theirs" all the way back to before they had even married.