Chapter 5

Eventually Dusty was able to find and move into his new apartment.

Regardless of how he looked like on the outside to anyone, he was finding it hard to stay civil when every fiber of his being wanted to throttle Lindsey whenever she was near, and it was slowly starting to get to him.

Going to the gym and getting into a good scrap at first seemed to help with his frustrations, but lately as the months drug on that was starting to not be enough.

There were times during that last month that he almost snapped and screamed at her, and it looked like to him that Lindsey was waiting for him to do it.

It always seemed like she was always pushing him into an argument which was a change of her tactics from the previous months of continually trying to seduce him.

He finally figured she might have been thinking that if he would just blow up at her, maybe hit her a time or two to punish her, then they could get over this and have some make up sex and go on with their lives.

But as far as he was concerned this was not to be.

Because every time Lindsey tried anything to get Dusty to want her that way again, he couldn't help but think each and every time "Funny how having someone possibly give you a death sentence kills all your interest in sex with them!" as he waited for his HIV test to come back each month.

But nothing he did or said could ever persuade Lindsey to give up in her futile attempts to win him back.

The hardest was the night he told Lindsey he was going to be moving out in a couple days.

She laid on the floor in front of his closed room door and seemed to cry all night. It was really pitiful to hear. He had put a better lock on the door after she kept trying to crawl into bed naked with him during the first couple weeks, so she couldn't get in that night.

He wasn't heartless and it did pull at his heart to hear her crying as she did that night, but he knew that he couldn't ever have sex with her again.

And if he couldn't do that, then they didn't really have a future. Not to mention the lack of trust he would always have after this. He would forever be suspicious of all her actions from this point forward.

She had totally killed his attraction for her and she completely destroyed any trust in their relationship cheating on him as long as she did, so all of this was really for the best.

He did feel he took the cowards way out when took a day off of work to move his stuff out of the apartment while she was at work.

He wanted to be in his new apartment before night fall and to get past some of the drama he knew was coming once she realized he was really leaving. He didn't want to have to fend Lindsey off from trying to grab at his stuff the whole time as he tried to move out what little he wanted to keep.

He only took a few things like his stereo, clothes, and the extra furniture from the back room.

The rest of the furniture, the TV's, and appliances he left for her. He didn't want to take everything from her. He would gradually furnish his new apartment with things that didn't remind him of his time with her. And he would be better than Chad when he left.

But he did wait for her to get home that night once he finished.

When she came in rushing to make him dinner once again, he called out to her and then gave her his half of the rent for the next three months, his key to the apartment, and thanked her for the time they spent together as he then turned and headed for the door.

Lindsey grabbed him from behind and started to break down, but he carried her over to the couch and put her there. She curled up in the fetal position and cried and cried.

He left her there as he slowly closed the door.

That might have been the end of it but fate rarely quits having a good chuckle at others misfortunes.

Three months later after Dusty finally got his last test back negative for HIV he was almost happy.

He found out that his sperm count was probably never going to be really that high ever again and his swimmers weren't as active as they should have been the doctor said, but it was entirely possible that he might one day be able to father children. They still seemed to be getting stronger as the months went on.

With that almost good news he decided to go and do something he rarely did. He was going to have a drink!

He went to a bar alone that Lindsey and he often frequented.

While he still had some friends, this wasn't news that he really wanted to spread around. The news made him feel that he was almost a man again, but still an incomplete one.

And it was here that he ran into Grace.

Grace's divorce was final a few days previous.

She tried hard to fight it, but her husband basically went for the no fault divorce since they lived in Indiana.

Since they had no kids, and because Grace worked at a nice job making almost as much as he did, her husband asked for nothing from the marriage except no maintenance paid to her, his own salary, his 401K, and just his health benefits.

He would walk away from the marriage with basically the clothes on his back.

Grace did try hard to keep her husband Peter from divorcing her, but because the settlement was so heavily "one sided" in her favor it seemed to go through without much of a problem.

Her ex-husband's lawyer tried to get him to amend what he asked for. He knew with the adultery and the STD's he could get more than Peter was asking for. But Peter just wanted out of the marriage and away from Grace as quickly as possible at all cost.

And at some point during the divorce proceedings he requested and received a job transfer out of state as far away from her as he could get. He wouldn't even tell her where it was.

But he did come back for the divorce proceedings he was really worried that it would be held up with as hard as Grace was working to stop it.

Even the judge hesitated to grant such a clearly one sided divorce, until Peter asked to tell the judge in open court why he wanted it so badly this way and that he didn't want the divorce held up for any reason.