I watched another girl leave my front door. It was another sad affair, but it was inevitable. I have had this happen many times now. Most of them when they hear the news just get up and tell me they can't deal with this and leave. You see I have something I wish I didn't have. HIV.

I can thank my ex-wife for that. She saw fit to run bareback throughout her affairs with me none the wiser. Her final gift to me was the gift that just keeps giving.

We were married for five years, things I thought were going well, but they were going much better for her. I came home from work one evening to find her sitting in the kitchen with a pale face and what looked like dried tears. She looked up at me and gave me the look. 'We have to talk.'

I sat down. I was afraid of what she had done or what had I done. Had I done something wrong? I wracked my brain for issues that she might have been upset over. There were the lottery tickets I continued to buy even though she wanted me to put the extra money into savings. But I didn't think that would warrant the look on her face.

She sighed and tried to pull herself together.

"Tom, I just came back from the doctor. I'm sick."

I was scared. I knew she hadn't been eating well lately and always seemed to be fighting a cold. I had urged her to see a doctor for sometime now, but she always blamed it on overworking.

"What is it? It's serious, isn't it?"

She nodded.

"We can fight this together. I'm here for you," I grabbed her hands and held them.

She took a deep breath.

"Tom, I don't know how to tell you this, but I have to. I have contracted HIV."

"Aids?" I said. My hands gripped her hands tighter.

She nodded.

Stupid dense me, I started trying to figure out when she last had a shot at the doctor's office. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was some sort of medical accident. We would sue the pants off them.

"Tom," she stopped me. "You need to get tested as well."

"What?" I blurted out. All of a sudden I realized that there was a very good chance that I had contracted it from her. My life was in real danger. Oh shit.

She started crying. I came around the table and held her. Consoled her and told her I loved her. This made her cry more. She held me firmly, like her life depended on it.

"Oh Tom, I'm so scared!"

"Shhhhhhhhh, we'll fight this."

"There's more I need to tell you Tom," she sobbed.

That's when I knew. It wasn't a medical accident.

I slept in the guest room that night. I was so angry with her. How could she? The next morning I went into the doctor's office and felt like everyone was laughing at me as I went through the process of having the lab draw blood and check me for all types of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, including HIV. It would take a week to get the results back.

I spoke with our doctor and he filled me in on what Jessy, my wife, would be going through and what I would have to be careful of, regardless of if I had HIV or not. No unprotected sex, of course. No blood transfer, so treating any cuts or wounds would have to be dealt with rubber gloves. Jessy was going on the cocktail soon and because of that her eating habits would change drastically.

The unprotected sex was not much of an issue since I wasn't sure if I would ever look at Jessy in a sexual manner again. The test results would certainly throw me into action. I wasn't sure what our future held, right now I was numb and angry. But what I really fixated on was my health. I prayed every moment to not have contracted anything from her.

I was in pain, and I lashed out at her often over that week of limbo. It seemed that Jessy had the onerous task of contacting all her "partners" to let them know what she contracted. I told her to do that when I wasn't home as I didn't want to hear her tell her fuck buddies what a dirty diseased slut she was.

The results were posted in the mail and when I received them I discovered that Jessy had indeed given my HIV. My darling wife, not only had the gall to go and fuck behind my back but she then brought this back to our house. Divorce proceedings started immediately. She tried to talk me out of it, but I would not change my mind. I had loved her and she had shit on me when she had shit on herself. Nice, huh?

She moved back home to her parents house and they wound up taking care of her. They had looked forward to traveling around the country with their new motorhome when the news hit. Now their retirement plans had been changed. Instead of Devil's tower and the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and Yosemite, they had doctor's visits and nursing to look forward to.

I lived alone for a while as I wallowed in my self pity. My health was good and for all intents and purposes I was in good shape. I guess I was in remission. I continued the cocktail which was a hideous combination of vitamins and drugs and it was pretty brutal on my stomach and insides. I tried to stay in as good shape as possible.

It was because of the shape I stayed in that I started to get noticed by other women. They flirted with me and hey, I'm human so I flirted back. Soon I was asking and accepting dates as I found out there was life after Jessy. I would not put myself into a situation where I was intimate, but I was lonely and enjoyed the company of women.

Joan was the first woman to break down my defenses and get me back into her apartment, where we made out something fierce. She started to rub my hard cock and then to unzip it when I started to draw back.

"What's the matter darlin'? Is he shy?" She giggled. I didn't find it funny.

She had knelt down between my legs and was ready to suck in my cock when I told her no.

"I'm not clean," I said. My face flushed red.

"Well, let's take a shower then. We'll both be clean after that!"

I shock my head.

"No, that won't do anything. I'm not clean. It's not safe."

Her face frowned. She pulled herself up and sat next to me as I pulled my pants back up and buckled them. The mood was broken.

"I'm sorry," I said. I thought about how to make a graceful exit.

"Want to talk about it?" she asked.

I hesitated for a moment, wondering whether I wanted to say anything. What the hell, I'd gone this far.

"Let's just say that my ex-wife gave me a going away present before I divorced her ass."

"Oh," she said.

I got up to leave. She made no attempt to stop me. As soon as I had closed her door, I broke down in tears as I stumbled my way back to my car.

I had handled that horribly and started seeking advice on how to break the news to a partner better. I found some support groups recommended by my doctor and sat in with them.

A few weeks later I was out with another woman, Wendy and we just clicked. She was attracted to me, and I just couldn't keep my focus off her deep brown eyes. I got lost in them. She invited me in for a nightcap when I dropped her off, and I declined. She seemed a little confused as she thought the date had gone rather well. I quickly asked her for another date to allay her fears that I wasn't into her. She accepted. A chaste kiss on the lips and I was gone.

We dated for two weeks, five times I walked her to her door and excused myself. This evening I accepted her invite and she was eager to get me on her couch. Coffee was good but as we started to kiss and become more passionate I needed to speak with her.

"Wendy, I want to tell you something," I said.

She looked at me and before I could speak again she spoke.

"I feel it too. I don't know what it is about you Tom, but I think you are very special as well. I might even be falling for you."

I gulped. That wasn't what I had planned.

"Uhhh, Wendy..." Her face dropped.

"Oh crap, I did it again, didn't I? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you off."

I shook my head.

"No, no, no. That was just not what I was going to tell you."

Yeah that made things better!

A single tear crept out of her beautiful brown eyes.

I shook my head. "No Wendy, please don't, I have something to tell, it's important."

She tried to pull herself together. This was going to be tough.

"Wendy, I feel something for you as well. Really. But I have to tell you something before we go any further."

She got a startled look in her face.

"I'm HIV positive," I said.

Nothing.

She just sat there for a long moment.

"Oh shit," she said.

"Oh, shit."

"FUCK!" She wiped her face, her lips and looked at me in horror.

"You kissed me!"

I nodded.

"I swapped spit with you!"

"It's safe, you can't get it that way," I said.

"Say's you, why should I trust you?" Her voice had risen to a frantic pitch. Those brown eyes of hers had turned black and ugly.

"It's safe to kiss," I told her. She didn't seem to believe me.

"Why the fuck didn't you tell me before?" She screamed.

"I wanted to get to know you first," I said.

"That's not fair," she screamed. "You should have told me before! You lied to me!"

I had no answer to that. Maybe I should preface every introduction with, "Hi! My name is Tom. I'm HIV positive, you wanna date?"

That was the last I saw of Wendy. I went into hermit mode and the next six months I focused on myself. I was happy, sort of.

The problem with focusing on yourself is that you become more interesting to others. I don't know why, but when you don't act interested in others, they become interested in you. I had believed that life alone and with friends was what I had left, and so I concentrated on making it as filled with interests and new experiences as possible. I had a death sentence, I didn't know when it would come due, but I knew that I had one and during dark times I would dwell on the unfairness of it.

Without the pressure of attracting members of the opposite sex, I was free to be a better person. This turned out to be very attractive to others. The more I tried to resist, the more attractive I looked. Soon I realized that I could project my 'don't care, have fun' attitude on the women to scare them off.

Hannah, was the first I tried this with. It was a noisy party where I regaled the group with my recent daredevil story of rock climbing in Utah, when Hannah cornered me in the kitchen as I grabbed another beer.

She dropped some line about getting to know me better, and as I was a little tipsy from the beer, I don't do much drinking anymore, I winked at her and just said, "Lot's of luck you ya, toots! I'm HIV positive, so now that I've scared you off, you got the rest of the evening to find someone else."