Chapter 1

I’m an average kinda Joe, except that’s not my name. Mark James, so that makes me an average Mark. I’m 5’8”, in moderate shape, okay – a little bit overweight. I’ve been in this job for fourteen years. I’m an adjudicator. That’s what I blame for my lack of exercise: sit at a desk all day, and you get flabby. I am thirty-five. For every year, since college, I’ve been married way out of my league. Kathy Ellis is a Victoria’s Secret quality model. Only she’s not a model. She’s a stock broker. She uses her original name – that’s how she refers to it – in her work. I don’t really care. She has a long lean body, 6’3” in the stilettos that she always wears. Beautiful blonde hair that curls around her shoulders. She doesn’t wear the negligees that the models wear. She comes to bed nude, in her birthday suit. She’d kick off her high-heeled slippers and get into bed; every night.

She’s amazing. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for fourteen years. So why did she marry me? I give up. I’m a nice guy, I guess. She went through college boys like a dose of salts. I rescued her at a frat party, where she was about to be the main course for the football team’s after-game sex-party.

Of course, the fact that I was wearing a campus police uniform when I knocked on the door made all the difference. The goliaths of the football team would have made me the non-inflatable tackle dummy – except that I was a student monitor, which made me a police officer – junior police officer, but still on the force. And if they trounced me, they’d get suspended for the rest of the year. Or maybe forever, if they trounced me enough. Forty big, really big, guys had Kathy backed into a corner. From what I could see, there were no other women at the ‘party.’

Moses at the Red Sea was nothing when I walked in to the team’s sex party, walked over to the girl, who was wearing a torn blouse that was tucked into the waistband of a rucked-up skirt, and had a glazed look on her face. I’d seen a couple of drugged-up girls before and this one was holding on to her consciousness by a thread.

“Come along, miss. I think it’s time you got back to your room.” I grabbed her wrist and she took a step toward me. Just then a couple of other campus bears arrived, and suddenly there were only about five guys in the room. Said I, to the more senior officers, “I’m going to take this woman to the campus clinic. I think she’s had her limit ... of everything.”

She came along like she was handcuffed to me. We got out to the four-wheeler little tram that was my ride, and she sat. Her arms and legs flopped open and I finally got a good look at her. She could have been the star for our campus’s College Girls of Virginia web display. I mean, I could even see the pair of nearly-touching moles on her left breast. She was out of it: head lolling against the seat, eyes closed. I made an attempt to pull her blouse closed but it was a lost cause. In her condition, and for her safety, I employed the little used seat-belt. So what if it required me to have my face near those moles a little longer? Hey, safety first. I ran around to the driver’s seat and tore through frat row at a bat-out-of-hell two miles per hour.

Eventually, I got her to the clinic, where a nurse took over. I filled out a form, and went back to my assigned route. Neither snow, nor sleet, nor gloom of night shall keep me from my rounds. Or whatever that slogan said.

Three days later, a thoroughly re-sheveled beauty knocked on my apartment door. I opened it and she laid a (perfectly placed, but entirely chaste) kiss on me. Of course, I recognized her. Once I regained my senses, I stumbled out a, “Wha ... Uh...”

It seems that she was grateful for the rescue and wanted to buy me a dinner to thank me.

Well, long story short. She dated me for the rest of the year. Through the holiday and into the spring. She was graduating at the end of the year, and going to work for the second largest Atlanta bank, in their financial services business. I was going to work for the Feds, as a junior adjudicator, in the mediation department of the Atlanta Branch of the DOJ (Department of Justice).

I was stunned that she bedded me over the Christmas break, and moved into my apartment soon thereafter. She dwarfed me in everything. Physically, looks, social ability. The only place I held my own was in the bedroom: she’d try anything I wanted to do ... and I’d try anything she wanted. We were very happy. Well... she seemed to be very happy. I was delirious. Who wouldn’t be?

Well, that’s how I met my goddess. I felt like she adopted me, sorta. Eventually, I got to feel like Sally Fields at the Academy Awards: “She likes me, she really likes me.” And I stopped waiting for her to take her anointed place in life, and send me to the garbage can.

Fourteen and a half years of sex, four or six times per week, an uncounted number of parties where I was her arm warmer and keeper-awayer of various males who wanted to take my place, and an interwoven relationship where we’d finish each other’s thoughts. Sometimes we just sat in the living room of our Atlanta condo, quietly reading the day’s homework. Or sometimes just touching each other slowly and softly, watching the fire crackle.

It was magic; we were mentally inside each other.

Until Thursday, March 14, of my 35^th year. I came home at the same time; usually I was home a half-hour to an hour before her. I opened the door, tossed my keys into the bowl by the door, and saw her, sitting primly on the chair by the fireplace. She never sat on the chair, preferring a cozy seat near me. I came to a stop.

“Uh.Oh,” I thought. “This doesn’t look good.” Now, I’ve been trained to say nothing when faced with a hostile witness. Let them carry the water, first. It won’t get resolved until everybody gets to say his piece, so there’s no rush.

I took my jacket off, hung it in the closet and dropped my tie on the table. I looked at her, and she was taking a sip of the drink she’d poured for herself. There was a tumbler of bourbon in front of what was clearly going to be my seat. I didn’t need any alcohol tonight, I was pretty sure. I went to the bar area, poured myself a glass of water and took my seat.

I still hadn’t said a word.

After five minutes she couldn’t take the silence any more. “Sweetie,” she said. She cleared her throat. “The key thing to remember is that nothing between us is going to change.”

With that one sentence, I knew that everything was going to change and that most likely my marriage was over. Fourteen plus years means it was time for me to fall off of Mount Olympus. It was a long way to the bottom.

She carried on, “I’ve met someone. He’s a client and an Important Man.” I could hear the capital ‘I M’ in what she said. “It just happened. But it doesn’t mean anything. I love you. Since that day you got me out of the frat party, I’ve loved you. And only you.”

But not any more, I thought.

“And I still love you. I’ve never denied you anything and I never will. We can keep on with the wonderful life we’ve got. This is just an add-on for me. Something I do now and then.”

Now and then? I wondered how long this kind of thing was going on. Whatever ‘this kind of thing’ was.

She interrupted my mental wandering. “I just got tired of trying to keep it from you. And after all these months of an afternoon here or there, Lucas wants a weekend. So that’s why I’m here. To explain it to you. Why this doesn’t matter to us at all. We’ll still be Mr. and Mrs. James. We’ll still do things together on the weekend. And on weekdays, too. It’s just one weekend.”

Only not this weekend, right Mrs. James? My mind was going in ten directions, but I couldn’t say anything. She was still talking, and I wasn’t going to interrupt. And what did she mean ‘something I do now and then?’

“I understand that this hurts you. But I will make it up to you. For five months, nothing has slacked off in our sex life, has it? No. It hasn’t. I’ve made sure of that.”

Five months, eh? And then two months ago, you announced that it was time to have a baby. You said it was time for us. Only it wasn’t just us, huh?

I still hadn’t said anything ... nothing at all.

“Come on! You’re the one with the words. You’re so good with words...”

Nothing from me. I took a drink of water, and the ice cubes clinking against the glass were the only sounds.

“This has to hurt. I’m so sorry. I just ... he was there. At the Christmas party for his company. He’s tall, bigger than you. IT DOESN’T MATTER. I STILL LOVE YOU. You still ring my chimes in bed, honest to god you do. Look ... we did it just last night. Do you think I could fake that? That I could cum so much I peed the bed? You are still my man, my numero uno.”

Too many thoughts: Until recently there was no numero dos. If he’s still in position two. Maybe he’d moved up in the list. My mind went back to the ‘now and then’ comment. Taller than me? Sure. But bigger? That hurts. I looked at her. I could see the love I used to have flowing out onto the rug. Like menstrual blood that flowed from her lying cunt.

My stomach rumbled, reminding me that it was a long time since the hoagie I’d had for lunch. I was looking forward to a nice dinner with a spinach salad and fish that I’d caught last summer, and which was laying in the freezer ever since.

I looked at her slender neck. I wondered if I could get away with killing her. No, probably not. If I knew a contract killer, maybe. But I didn’t know anyone. Fall out the balcony? First of all, there wasn’t any assurance that the fall would do her in. She’d fight, so there’d be DNA evidence.

As these thoughts ran through my mind, it must have been on my face, for she gasped.

Then she took another drink. “SAY SOMETHING, DAMN YOU. Is it so hard to just talk to me?”

I got to my feet. She shrank back in the chair. Never fear, Kathy dearest, I won’t hit you. I’ll find another way to hurt you. And maybe ‘Lucas,’ too.

I went to the closet and recovered my leather jacket; the one I wore when I rode the motorcycle.

“No! I won’t let you ride that thing with the thoughts that must be going through your head. PROMISE ME.” She ran to the door, spread-eagling herself across it, barring my exit.

I cursed my inadequate size. That and my lack of fitness. I was simply not going to be able to manhandle her out of my way. She was taller – although to be fair, some of that was due to the stilettos she always wore -- fitter, due to her incessant visits to the gym. I wondered if she actually went to the gym or if she used the excuse to go see her paramour. Lucas, was it? Or paramours plural. ‘Now and then.’ How many ‘thens’ where there?