It started with my wife coming home from the doctor's and telling me that she had to have a hysterectomy. No biggie, happens to women all the time, right? Emotionally, it was of no concern for either of us because she was long past the age for having children and beside, I'd already had a vasectomy. My major concern was what the operation was going to do to our sex life. Ashton and I, even in our mid-forties, had a very active sex life and she told me that the doctor had assured her that the operation wouldn't change a thing.

He lied!

Ashton had the operation and then lost all interest in sex. She never said no to me, but it was plain to me that she was just lying there to accommodate me and waiting for me to finish. After a month or two it became apparent to me that all I was doing was using her as a form of masturbation and I loved her too much to treat her that way. She stopped caring what she looked like, put on a few too many pounds and we got on with life. The love was still there, expressed in the form of hugging, kissing, snuggling and cuddling - but no sex.

I still had a need for sexual release, but looking for sex outside the house was out of the question. Ashton was one of those who believed that love and sex were the same thing - inseparable - and that to have sex with somebody else was the same thing as telling your partner that you did not love them any more. Once, I had broken my leg and Ashton and I couldn't have sex for a while and I suggested that she take a lover until I could take care of her and she went off on me like you wouldn't believe. The fastest way for me to get to divorce court would be to get caught having sex with some one else - and I would get caught! Other men might be able to get away with something like that, but not me. So I turned into a porn junkie. I bought sex magazines, 8mm porno films and X-rated videos when they became popular and I used all of it to masturbate to. Videos and magazines got old after a while and I began looking for other ways to get turned on. For a while I wrote bogus letters to magazines like Gallery, Penthouse Letters and Turn-Ons. I had "Letter of the Month" a couple of times and even won a few small cash awards. But the thing that turned me on the most was engaging in erotic correspondence with others.

The ad was in a swingers magazine that I can't even remember the name of now and it said, "Happily married housewife wishes to exchange erotic correspondence. You tell me your fantasy and I'll tell you mine."

I answered the ad and had so much fun that I placed a similar ad in five other magazines and by the end of the year I was corresponding with twenty-eight people. My favorite was a lady from Boise, Idaho who wrote a chapter for a sex novel and sent it to me. She asked me to take her chapter and build on it and send it back to her. It got to eighteen chapters before she sold it to Greenleaf press. She sent me half the money and we did two more just like it before I stopped hearing from her. This was my sex life for almost four years, right up to the day my upstairs toilet backed up.

Ashton called me at work and told me the toilet in the master bedroom had overflowed. I told her to shut off the tank valve and that I'd run a snake down the drain when I got home. Ashton wasn't home when I got there because it was one of her card nights. She plays bridge on Tuesdays with a group of friends and Pinochle on Thursdays with some girls she went to college with. She had mopped up the mess so I went out to the garage and got my drain auger and started working on the toilet. I felt the auger bite into something and in a moment or so the water level in the toilet started to go down to it's normal level. I wound the auger back onto its reel and as the screw head came into the bowl I got a bit of a shock. Instead of the wad of toilet paper and hair that I expected I found that the auger had brought back a wad of toilet paper, hair and condoms. I hadn't used condoms in over fifteen years so how did they get in my drain? There was only one answer of course, but I had a hard time accepting it. Some time during the day while I was at work or on Wednesdays and Fridays, which were my bowling nights, Ashton was fucking somebody else. To say I was upset would be an understatement. For years I had been going without and Ashton was getting laid by some other asshole. I cleaned up the mess and put the evidence in a plastic bag and hid it in the garage. When Ashton came home that night I didn't say a thing about what I had found or about what I intended to find.

The next day, a Wednesday, I left the house at my regular time and then used my cell phone to call work and arrange for the rest of the week off. I drove to an Avis, rented a car and then drove back to my neighborhood and parked just down the block from my place. It was a long day; I sat there from nine in the morning until two-fifteen in the afternoon before seeing a black pick up truck pull into the driveway. A man got out and walked up to the house and rang the doorbell. Ashton opened the door and the man leaned forward and kissed her before following her into the house. I normally got home from work around five-thirty so I was not surprised to see the man leave about ten to five. I drove the Avis car back to where I had parked my car and swapped them and then drove home. Ashton was fixing dinner when I walked into the kitchen and I went upstairs to change and get ready to go bowling and I pulled the bed covers and saw the fluid stains on the sheets. Since she hadn't changed them it meant, to me at least, that she intended to use the bed again and then put clean ones on the bed before I got home from the bowling alley. Earlier in the day I had called the captains of the teams I bowled on and told them that some personal problems had come and I wouldn't be able to bowl and to arrange for substitutes. After dinner I left the house at my usual time and parked down the street. Half an hour later the same black truck pulled into the drive and the same man got out of it and went into the house. When he had been inside for about twenty minutes I went over to his truck. It was unlocked and I found his registration in the glove box and I wrote down his name and address. He came out forty-five minutes before I was due to be home and I followed Frank to some apartments on the other side of town and made a note of the number of the unit he went into. When I got home and climbed into bed I was not surprised to find clean sheets on the bed. When Ashton snuggled up next to me it was all I could do not to pull away from her.