It was all on me. I knew all about Cookie and what she’d done before I married her and put the rings on her finger anyway. Why? Because we were in love and I believed her when she told me her wild days were behind her.

I understood where she was coming from when she explained she had wanted to look around and do things while she was still young and free. She knew from being exposed to her parents’ relationship for twenty-one years that what she wanted to do and experience wasn’t something she could do once you were married and raising children.

I understood because I was her mirror image. From the age of sixteen she had gone through boyfriends like a young kid would go through a bag of candy. I’d done the same thing although it had been a hell of a lot easier for her to do it than me.

She had lost her virginity following senior prom and so had I. During her college years she had been a wild child and had fallen in with a bunch of even wilder girlfriends who were her sorority sisters. Again the mirror image. My frat brothers and I were a bit on the wild side.

She had been involved in twosomes, threesomes, foursomes and gangbangs, but then so had I although, once again, it had been a lot easier for her to do it than it had been for me.

The curious thing is that even though we had attended the same college at the same time we had experienced all of the above we never met until after we had graduated and gone to work.

We still mirrored each other after leaving college. Cookie met John Carver during her senior year and they planned on getting married after they graduated. They both got jobs and started looking for a house. A month before the wedding Carver’s company offered him a promotion if he’d be willing to move to their Cleveland office. He took the job and left without taking Cookie with him and she never heard from him again.

I’d met Holly during my senior year, fallen hard for her and when we left college we intended to get married. We found jobs and started to plan the wedding. The big day arrived and I was at the church on time only Holly was a no show. I found out later she’d met some guy and left town with him. I also heard later that when she told him she was pregnant he told her he was sterile so the kid couldn’t be his and he’d kicked her to the curb. And didn’t that just break my heart when I heard about it.

It was two years after we had both graduated that we met each other. My company had sent me to one of our customers to look into a problem they were having with a system we had sold them. My point of contact was a Miss Fredericks. I asked for her when I got to the reception desk, she was paged and when she came into the room and we were introduced it was a case of “She had me at Hello.”

I’d found and fixed the problem by lunch time and not being familiar with that part of town I asked Miss Frederick (please call me Cookie) if there was a decent place close by where I could have lunch. She told me I was in luck because she was just getting ready to go to lunch at her favorite place and I could follow her over.

Over lunch we talked and discovered that we were both graduates from the same school and were shocked to realize we had both been there at the same time and had never run into each other. But as we talked a few things that Cookie mentioned as we tried to figure out why we had never encountered each other made me realize that even though I’d never met her I’d heard of her.

If she was the Cookie I’d heard about she had been known as the ‘mattress queen of Kappa Beta Chi which, given as many gangbangs as I had been a part of, made it even more weird that we had never met since I had attended a couple of gangbangs at Kappa Beta Rho. Of course she might not have been that Cookie, but even if she was I’d never bring it up.

But I’m not going to lie and say that the chance she might have been that Cookie didn’t play a part in my asking Cookie to have dinner with me some evening. I was pleasantly surprised when she said yes and we made a dinner date for the next evening.

The talk over dinner the next evening was more about our time at school, the things we did (other than sexual) and the people we knew as we tried to figure out why we had spent four years at the same place at the same time and had not run into each other. We even knew some of the same people. Finally she said:

“Enough of this. Tell me about yourself.”

So I gave her the condensed version. Graduated from high school and went into the Army. Spent some time in Japan, Korea, Virginia, Texas and California.

“Took my discharge and went to school using the G I Bill, received a degree in Electrical Engineering and went to work at Curtis Engineering and they sent me to Marlowe’s so I could meet you. What’s your story?”

“Not as exciting as yours. I didn’t get to travel any. Married right out of high school. We both got jobs: me as a waitress and him as a carpenter and we started saving up to buy a house. Three years into the marriage he hooked up with some bimbo and they took off for Florida or someplace south of here. Got about sixty miles before a semi driver had a heart attack, lost control of his rig and crossed over the center line and hit Mike’s car head on.

“Between his life insurance and the trucking company’s settlement I had enough to go to school and get a degree in Business Management. The degree got me the job at Marlowe’s in time for me to be there for when you showed up. I guess the next question is where do we go from here?”

The answer to that question was the New Hope Lutheran Church eight months later where we took our vows.

During the lead up to that day a few things happened. At least two of my friends confirmed that Cookie was indeed the ‘mattress queen Cookie’ of Kappa Beta Rho when they tried to talk me out of marrying her. Their biggest concern was her reputation in college and that someone with that background couldn’t just turn it off. I brushed it aside with a “Why not? I did.”