Chapter 1: Problem Scope

I listened to friends talk about their husbands as I sipped my coffee.

Eight hot women sat around the outdoor tables at Libby’s – a luncheon place. Everybody had made the Saturday gathering for a change, including our newest ‘member’, Crystal.

We were mostly neighbors in the same development, married, and within four years of age thirty. I had just turned twenty-eight and was the youngest, and I really looked to the other women as role models. I thought we were all pretty and even ‘hot’ when we wore the right outfits.

To verify the ‘hot’ label, we were at two sidewalk tables we’d pushed together. Much of the foot traffic by our table were young lawyers from the large law firm in the adjacent building. They were slow in going by and checked out each one of us. While feeling like raw meat, I liked being leered at.

The topic for lunch that day seemed to be a gripe of some kind about husbands. This had come up before, and I realized that an important mission of this group was going to be to solve these ‘husband’ problems.

Molly complained about how Jake, her spouse, took her for granted, and had become generally inattentive. Julie nodded in total agreement with Molly’s beef regarding Steve, her mate.

Allison complained about her husband’s severe work ethic. He was a workaholic. When she complained, he brought work home, and then worked on it at home in a ‘not to be disturbed’ part of the house.

Sheri claimed she was a ‘golf widow’. Deb was in the same boat with Mitch, her husband, since the two husbands played golf together. Sheri also commented that Myron, her partner, was fucking his secretary, who she claimed had a single-digit IQ. How she knew that important fact, I didn’t know. In any case, it left him with not enough gas in the tank to please her.

Lois was mostly quiet, but commented in a low-key way that Gordon, her husband, really just wanted a slave that he could order around and occasionally fuck. She also commented that he was angry about a lot of things in life including her.

Crystal was single and new to the group as of that May morning. She had a long-term, live-in boyfriend named Dave, and no complaints were voiced. What made her unique was that she lived in her boyfriend’s father’s house.

I also had no complaints, so I just shrugged when I was expected to jump on the gripe pile. Dax and I were at the other end of the spectrum from the complaints and he wasn’t a golfer. We’d been married for a year and we were still super attentive to each other. We just sensed each other’s moods and even what the other was going to say.

Moreover, we had come to think that the word ‘fuck’ had been invented especially for us. We fucked, or at least did something highly sexual, what seemed like a dozen times a day, and that was with both of us working at different jobs.

Dax and I met in our last year of college six years earlier. His name was Dackson Morrison. He told me that Dackson had become Dacks, and that morphed to Dacs, and then to Dax as he progressed through school. I always liked any of his names. I loved him. He fit the description tall, dark, and handsome to a tee. He was my six-foot-two hunk of ‘hot’ athletic male.

Dax studied in a crazy five-year program to become an engineer with both a BS degree in computer science, and a BA degree majoring in psychology and business. He had a keen brain and an almost straight-’A’ GPA.

Dax had joined ROTC on campus since doing that helped with tuition, so right after graduation, he had to put in a two-year stint in the Army as a second lieutenant. Most of his military time was stateside, but he was in Germany for six months on assignment flying and maintaining surveillance drones flown out of the middle east somewhere. He was good with technology.

I waited for Dax to finish his Army ‘tour’ after graduation. We were into each other in a big way. I told my mother that we were having sex, she rolled her eyes, and told us that each couple thinks that they discovered ‘real sex’ and that no one else has.

I took my BA in English and got a job as an editor for New York book publisher, even though I was living in Sarasota, Florida. I could work remotely from home. I was a little over five years into the job and I was rated as a senior editor and valuable employee. I had started to get ‘name brand’ author’s submissions to edit with them. More than meeting celebs, the one thing I loved about the job was that I had a lot of flexibility in my schedule. Usually, if I wanted beach time, I could just pack up and go.

After his stint on active duty, Dax got a job with a local company that did point-of-sale systems used by hundreds of stores in the Gulf Coast area – really, all over Florida. He was often on the road going from location to location during the day in one of the company minivans that was loaded with equipment that he knew how to use.

With the money we’d each saved, plus a small inheritance from Dax’s grandmother, we got married and bought a small house in the Harbor Acres development. Since we moved in, I’d met more and more of our neighbors, and that led to my being part of the Wednesday Girls’ Lunch Group.

Allison and Bill Kirby lived next door, and Molly and Jake two doors down. Allison was an assistant in a local insurance agency. Molly and Deborah were housewives looking for work; Sheri, a real estate agent; and Lois, an aspiring author and house wife.

Crystal, we learned at lunch that day, had a burgeoning business doing local photography – portraits, weddings, school photos, pet photos, and such. Julie worked in a chic boutique with clothing prices just out of reach for most of us.

Our girls’ group tried to have lunch every Wednesday, but not all of us always made every luncheon. We moved around from restaurant to restaurant, too.

Having only been married for a few months and still madly in love with my new husband, I found myself aghast at some of the comments my friends made about their mates and also how openly they talked about their relationships, and even the sex they shared.

Dax and I had lived together in a small apartment until we wed, so we thought of ourselves as having been married longer than only a year. That said, I should have had some complaints, but I didn’t.

The lunch discussion that day wandered around. Molly entertained us by telling how Jake, her husband, had confessed that he would like to see her with another man. I mean actually fucking another man. I had heard of a cuckold. As an English Lit major, I recalled the term from the Canterbury Tales that had been written in the fourteenth century. The girls laughed when I told them of my literary recollection.

Allison spoke of how she and her husband were constantly having sex, and both still wanted more. She labeled herself a nymphomaniac. I admitted to similar feelings and an abundance of romance in my marriage. Several of the others admitted to feeling they were in the same state, but felt more unfulfilled. I think we all felt we could enjoy more sex.

Dax was the beneficiary of my nymphomania when he got home from work each day. I’d jump his bones, or he’d jump mine. We usually fucked before dinner, and certainly afterwards. We’d missed each other since our wake-up session.

When the lunch conversation lagged, I asked Sheri, “Are you going to divorce him because Myron’s cheating on you?”

Sheri looked shocked at the thought. “Divorce him? Fuck, no. Kit, I love him and he loves me. If he loves his secretary that’s okay, too. We all have the capacity to love many more than one person, society just doesn’t think that we should. No, divorce is not on the table. Last night, I suggested that he bring her home so I could make love to her, too. Now, that surprised the shit out of him. He’s thinking about my proposition.”