u/mbhotwife19

Chapter 2

The next morning I got up early with the alarm on my phone set for 5. I'd already taken a shower. I grabbed a suit from our bedroom closet, slipped out the door without stopping for coffee and in other words, got out of Dodge while the getting was good.

I didn't bother to turn on the light in the den but I could see a dark shape huddled under a blanket on the huge sectional couch that was the main feature of the room. That along with the largest television allowed under the law, an enormous flat-screen Melissa had complained about for a week after I bought it.

As I walked past the door to the darkened room, I tried to remember the last time we'd made out on that couch.

I couldn't remember.

When I got to work I quickly slipped into the usual routine. Or at least I tried to.

There were emails waiting, messages from people who apparently thought the world would stop turning if I didn't call them back immediately, files waiting for review and enough work to keep me occupied until well past dinner if I let it.

Normally that was exactly what I wanted. Work was something I understood. Facts, evidence, decisions. There was always a problem in front of me and usually some recognizable path toward solving it.

Melissa wasn't like that.

All morning, no matter what I was working on, part of my mind kept circling back to the night before.

When we were married.

The words had sounded just as bad in daylight as they had in bed.

Then there was everything afterward. Her suddenly becoming affectionate. The shaved pussy I hadn't known about. Her trying to start the kind of sex life we hadn't had in years almost immediately after realizing she'd scared the hell out of me.

And finally the look on her face when I'd asked if she was fucking somebody else.

Maybe I really had gone crazy.

Maybe she'd made a stupid verbal mistake and I'd spent the rest of the night prosecuting my own wife.

By lunchtime I hadn't gotten any closer to deciding which possibility frightened me more.

As usual I didn't have time to get out of my office, so I ordered a Camel Rider sub with cheese and chopped up hamburger and onions and had it delivered about 1 p.m.

When Cheryl, my assistant for the last five years, brought the lunch in, I told her to call the front desk and tell them that unless God called in with an emergency over the next hour, all my calls were to be held.

She stepped back into the office and looked at me expectantly.

I never held calls like that.

I looked her over. Five foot six, red haired, dressed demurely in a light red dress that was short enough to be provocative but not enough to be slutty and out of place in a work environment. She wore glasses and her hair up in a bun, but I'd been around a few times when she let her hair down, figuratively and literally, and I knew there was a wild mane of red hair almost down to her ass that was almost hypnotically strokable.

"Do you need anything else Mr. Reynolds?" she asked.

"Take off the secretary hat, Cheryl, and I'll take off my boss hat. I'd like to talk to you for a minute."

She looked at me oddly for a minute, then relaxed. We'd been to a few office parties and I'd seen her on her ass drunk and even taken her home once and she knew I'd never touched her when I probably could have touched her anywhere I wanted. She'd never said anything overt, but I got the impression she admired me for not messing with her when I could have.

"What's wrong, Jason?"

"Something has to be wrong for me to talk to one of my favorite secretaries," I said, trying to smile.

"You never hold your calls for an hour, I can't remember the last time you asked me in here for some private time, and anyone in here can take one look at you and tell something is bothering you."

That hurt my pride.

"I'm that transparent? And I was priding myself on my poker face."

"Usually you are pretty inscrutable. But when you walked in the door this morning, I knew something was up. And knowing you, it's personal. You are too cool when it comes to legal stuff. So it's either the kids or Melissa, and if I were a betting woman I'd say Melissa. You guys have a fight?"

I looked down at the Camel Rider and tried to make myself acquire an appetite. I needed some food inside me.

"I wish."

An alarmed expression flashed across her face and she quickly grabbed a chair and pulled it up to within a foot of my desk, close enough she could reach out and touch me.

"Oh, shit, Jason. Is it that bad?"

"I think it could be."

"Tell me."

I thought about it, but in the light of day I couldn't bring myself to give her the details. The more I thought about it, the whole fuss over a single word seemed even crazier than Melissa had said last night. If you weren't there, if you couldn't see her eyes, couldn't hear her voice, it did seem like I was very much exaggerating what had happened.

"We just had a – a – like a fight. Over something stupid. But..."

"What?"

"It doesn't matter. But, I want you to answer me honestly. I'm going to ask you a few questions. Can you do that. I won't get mad. Or upset. I need a woman to talk to, honestly."

She licked her red lips for a moment before answering.

"I hate this kind of thing, Jason. You say you won't get upset, but honesty always hurts."

"I need brutal honesty, Cheryl. I think I've been a good boss, and a good friend. And I think I proved to you that I like and respect you enough not to do anything – that would jeopardize our friendship. I'd like you to do the same."

She reached out and took one my hands in hers.

"You have been a good guy, Jason. Ask away."

"Have you ever thought – when you weren't drunk – about going to bed with me? Would you sleep with me if I really hit on you hard? And do I excite you – as a man – at all?"

She just stared at me for a moment.

"I swear to God I'm not hitting on you. But I need to know."

She looked down at the table, then faced me squarely.

"A few times. When I was between boyfriends or really, really horny. But honestly, I never thought about you seriously. You're not on my short list. You're male. But, you don't – shit this is hard – you really don't excite me. I admire you. I like you. But, I don't get – I don't want to be indelicate, but I don't get wet thinking about you. I guess the bottom line is I could see us in a situation where we might wind up in bed. Another office party might do it. But it would only be a one-time thing."

"So I don't really excite you? I'm not a hunk?"

This time she looked down at the desk a lot longer before raising her eyes to mine.

"You're not a hunk, Jason. Sorry. You're a little overweight, and flabby, and you're losing your hair and no matter what women say, that's important. Bald is not beautiful to most of us. You're a tiger in the courtroom, and professionally everybody looks up to you, but in the bedroom...I'd say you're just another out of shape middle aged guy."

She squeezed my hand and looked for a moment like she wanted to cry.

"That was probably too much honesty, right? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."

I was able to smile at her, even though it had hurt.

"What about Melissa. And I want you to be just as honest. Is she as hot as I think she is? And have you ever seen guys hitting on her at parties? How did she act when they did?"

This time she took a lot longer to answer.

"She's hot, Jason. What can I say. She's tall and blonde and she's got those big boobs and gorgeous legs. Every party I've ever been at where the two of you were there, guys hit on her all the time when you're not around."

"I'm not surprised she's popular. She is hot. Now for the $64,000 question. And this is where I need you to be honest. What does she do when they hit on her?"

She looked down again.

"I really don't want to answer this, Jason. Please don't make me."

"I need to know."

"Is this what it's all about. You think she's – with somebody?"

"I don't know, but I think she could be."

"I guess I've been at six or seven office parties where you guys have shown up, and there was that one year you invited me and my date to that Christmas party at UNF. Like I said, guys are always hitting on her, putting their arms around her, patting her ass, trying to sneak a kiss. Usually she just shrugs it off, puts their hands where they're supposed to be, gets them laughing and walks away. She's pretty good.

"A few times, very few, I've seen her in what seemed to a pretty good clinch in a corner or a hallway, but it's not a deep throat and the guys don't have their hands inside her clothes. I've seen a few of them petting her. But, Jason, to be honest, unless you want to walk about with a cattle prod most women have had that happen to them. That's why you wear stiletto heels. They're wonderful for cooling off guys who get too hot.

"And to answer what I think your real question is, I've never seen her jerkin off a guy or rubbing his dick. I've never seen her out of control to where it looked like some guy could talk her into leaving the party with him. I can't say for sure she hasn't done anything wrong, but I've never seen her do anything you'd divorce her over. And that's what we're talking about here, right?"

She reached out to grab my hand again and squeezed.

"She is a very beautiful woman, and very hot. Trust me when I say that she's like most hot women. She could have a different man every night without doing more than giving them the right kind of smile. And if she was doing that, I don't think there's any way you wouldn't have found out by now. Maybe she's cheating on you, but if she is, being very careful and selective, and I really don't think she is. Just an impression."

I leaned back in my chair and let out a deep breath. I couldn't eat a bite because I had no appetite.

"But what you're telling me is she is a very hot woman who has guys throw themselves at her every time I'm not around, and I'm a dull, sexually unattractive, old man who doesn't excite women. Something seem out of kilter about that picture?"

"People don't stay together just for sex. They stay together for love and companionship and their kids. You guys have built a life together. You think she'd throw that away just for sex?"

"Women do it every day, Cheryl So do men. It may be only sex, but it's the glue that holds marriages together. And we don't have it anymore."

She just looked at me sadly.

I guess there's a limit to how encouraging you can be when you're facing a really shitty situation.

For the first time since I'd walked into the office that morning, I stopped wondering whether I'd imagined the whole thing.

Cheryl hadn't told me Melissa was cheating.

If anything, she'd told me the opposite.

But she'd confirmed something else I hadn't really wanted confirmed.

My wife was still an extremely desirable woman. Men noticed her. Men pursued her. Given the slightest encouragement, she had options.

A hell of a lot of options.

And me?

Apparently I was a good boss, a good friend, a good prosecutor and an out of shape middle aged guy women might sleep with under the right circumstances but wouldn't spend much time fantasizing about.

It shouldn't have mattered.

Melissa wasn't some woman I was trying to pick up. She was my wife. We'd been married seventeen years. We'd raised two kids together and built a life together.

Except that was exactly Cheryl's point.

People stayed together for love, companionship and children.

And sometime during the last seventeen years I'd apparently started relying on all three of those things while forgetting that Melissa was still a woman.

A woman other men wanted.

I looked at the untouched Camel Rider sitting on my desk.

Then those four words came back again.

When we were married.

And suddenly I wasn't hungry anymore.

Chapter 2

The next morning I got up early with the alarm on my phone set for 5. I'd already taken a shower. I grabbed a suit from our bedroom closet, slipped out the door without stopping for coffee and in other words, got out of Dodge while the getting was good.

I didn't bother to turn on the light in the den but I could see a dark shape huddled under a blanket on the huge sectional couch that was the main feature of the room. That along with the largest television allowed under the law, an enormous flat-screen Melissa had complained about for a week after I bought it.

As I walked past the door to the darkened room, I tried to remember the last time we'd made out on that couch.

I couldn't remember.

When I got to work I quickly slipped into the usual routine. Or at least I tried to.

There were emails waiting, messages from people who apparently thought the world would stop turning if I didn't call them back immediately, files waiting for review and enough work to keep me occupied until well past dinner if I let it.

Normally that was exactly what I wanted. Work was something I understood. Facts, evidence, decisions. There was always a problem in front of me and usually some recognizable path toward solving it.

Melissa wasn't like that.

All morning, no matter what I was working on, part of my mind kept circling back to the night before.

When we were married.

The words had sounded just as bad in daylight as they had in bed.

Then there was everything afterward. Her suddenly becoming affectionate. The shaved pussy I hadn't known about. Her trying to start the kind of sex life we hadn't had in years almost immediately after realizing she'd scared the hell out of me.

And finally the look on her face when I'd asked if she was fucking somebody else.

Maybe I really had gone crazy.

Maybe she'd made a stupid verbal mistake and I'd spent the rest of the night prosecuting my own wife.

By lunchtime I hadn't gotten any closer to deciding which possibility frightened me more.

As usual I didn't have time to get out of my office, so I ordered a Camel Rider sub with cheese and chopped up hamburger and onions and had it delivered about 1 p.m.

When Cheryl, my assistant for the last five years, brought the lunch in, I told her to call the front desk and tell them that unless God called in with an emergency over the next hour, all my calls were to be held.

She stepped back into the office and looked at me expectantly.

I never held calls like that.

I looked her over. Five foot six, red haired, dressed demurely in a light red dress that was short enough to be provocative but not enough to be slutty and out of place in a work environment. She wore glasses and her hair up in a bun, but I'd been around a few times when she let her hair down, figuratively and literally, and I knew there was a wild mane of red hair almost down to her ass that was almost hypnotically strokable.

"Do you need anything else Mr. Reynolds?" she asked.

"Take off the secretary hat, Cheryl, and I'll take off my boss hat. I'd like to talk to you for a minute."

She looked at me oddly for a minute, then relaxed. We'd been to a few office parties and I'd seen her on her ass drunk and even taken her home once and she knew I'd never touched her when I probably could have touched her anywhere I wanted. She'd never said anything overt, but I got the impression she admired me for not messing with her when I could have.

"What's wrong, Jason?"

"Something has to be wrong for me to talk to one of my favorite secretaries," I said, trying to smile.

"You never hold your calls for an hour, I can't remember the last time you asked me in here for some private time, and anyone in here can take one look at you and tell something is bothering you."

That hurt my pride.

"I'm that transparent? And I was priding myself on my poker face."

"Usually you are pretty inscrutable. But when you walked in the door this morning, I knew something was up. And knowing you, it's personal. You are too cool when it comes to legal stuff. So it's either the kids or Melissa, and if I were a betting woman I'd say Melissa. You guys have a fight?"

I looked down at the Camel Rider and tried to make myself acquire an appetite. I needed some food inside me.

"I wish."

An alarmed expression flashed across her face and she quickly grabbed a chair and pulled it up to within a foot of my desk, close enough she could reach out and touch me.

"Oh, shit, Jason. Is it that bad?"

"I think it could be."

"Tell me."

I thought about it, but in the light of day I couldn't bring myself to give her the details. The more I thought about it, the whole fuss over a single word seemed even crazier than Melissa had said last night. If you weren't there, if you couldn't see her eyes, couldn't hear her voice, it did seem like I was very much exaggerating what had happened.

"We just had a – a – like a fight. Over something stupid. But..."

"What?"

"It doesn't matter. But, I want you to answer me honestly. I'm going to ask you a few questions. Can you do that. I won't get mad. Or upset. I need a woman to talk to, honestly."

She licked her red lips for a moment before answering.

"I hate this kind of thing, Jason. You say you won't get upset, but honesty always hurts."

"I need brutal honesty, Cheryl. I think I've been a good boss, and a good friend. And I think I proved to you that I like and respect you enough not to do anything – that would jeopardize our friendship. I'd like you to do the same."

She reached out and took one my hands in hers.

"You have been a good guy, Jason. Ask away."

"Have you ever thought – when you weren't drunk – about going to bed with me? Would you sleep with me if I really hit on you hard? And do I excite you – as a man – at all?"

She just stared at me for a moment.

"I swear to God I'm not hitting on you. But I need to know."

She looked down at the table, then faced me squarely.

"A few times. When I was between boyfriends or really, really horny. But honestly, I never thought about you seriously. You're not on my short list. You're male. But, you don't – shit this is hard – you really don't excite me. I admire you. I like you. But, I don't get – I don't want to be indelicate, but I don't get wet thinking about you. I guess the bottom line is I could see us in a situation where we might wind up in bed. Another office party might do it. But it would only be a one-time thing."

"So I don't really excite you? I'm not a hunk?"

This time she looked down at the desk a lot longer before raising her eyes to mine.

"You're not a hunk, Jason. Sorry. You're a little overweight, and flabby, and you're losing your hair and no matter what women say, that's important. Bald is not beautiful to most of us. You're a tiger in the courtroom, and professionally everybody looks up to you, but in the bedroom...I'd say you're just another out of shape middle aged guy."

She squeezed my hand and looked for a moment like she wanted to cry.

"That was probably too much honesty, right? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."

I was able to smile at her, even though it had hurt.

"What about Melissa. And I want you to be just as honest. Is she as hot as I think she is? And have you ever seen guys hitting on her at parties? How did she act when they did?"

This time she took a lot longer to answer.

"She's hot, Jason. What can I say. She's tall and blonde and she's got those big boobs and gorgeous legs. Every party I've ever been at where the two of you were there, guys hit on her all the time when you're not around."

"I'm not surprised she's popular. She is hot. Now for the $64,000 question. And this is where I need you to be honest. What does she do when they hit on her?"

She looked down again.

"I really don't want to answer this, Jason. Please don't make me."

"I need to know."

"Is this what it's all about. You think she's – with somebody?"

"I don't know, but I think she could be."

"I guess I've been at six or seven office parties where you guys have shown up, and there was that one year you invited me and my date to that Christmas party at UNF. Like I said, guys are always hitting on her, putting their arms around her, patting her ass, trying to sneak a kiss. Usually she just shrugs it off, puts their hands where they're supposed to be, gets them laughing and walks away. She's pretty good.

"A few times, very few, I've seen her in what seemed to a pretty good clinch in a corner or a hallway, but it's not a deep throat and the guys don't have their hands inside her clothes. I've seen a few of them petting her. But, Jason, to be honest, unless you want to walk about with a cattle prod most women have had that happen to them. That's why you wear stiletto heels. They're wonderful for cooling off guys who get too hot.

"And to answer what I think your real question is, I've never seen her jerkin off a guy or rubbing his dick. I've never seen her out of control to where it looked like some guy could talk her into leaving the party with him. I can't say for sure she hasn't done anything wrong, but I've never seen her do anything you'd divorce her over. And that's what we're talking about here, right?"

She reached out to grab my hand again and squeezed.

"She is a very beautiful woman, and very hot. Trust me when I say that she's like most hot women. She could have a different man every night without doing more than giving them the right kind of smile. And if she was doing that, I don't think there's any way you wouldn't have found out by now. Maybe she's cheating on you, but if she is, being very careful and selective, and I really don't think she is. Just an impression."

I leaned back in my chair and let out a deep breath. I couldn't eat a bite because I had no appetite.

"But what you're telling me is she is a very hot woman who has guys throw themselves at her every time I'm not around, and I'm a dull, sexually unattractive, old man who doesn't excite women. Something seem out of kilter about that picture?"

"People don't stay together just for sex. They stay together for love and companionship and their kids. You guys have built a life together. You think she'd throw that away just for sex?"

"Women do it every day, Cheryl So do men. It may be only sex, but it's the glue that holds marriages together. And we don't have it anymore."

She just looked at me sadly.

I guess there's a limit to how encouraging you can be when you're facing a really shitty situation.

For the first time since I'd walked into the office that morning, I stopped wondering whether I'd imagined the whole thing.

Cheryl hadn't told me Melissa was cheating.

If anything, she'd told me the opposite.

But she'd confirmed something else I hadn't really wanted confirmed.

My wife was still an extremely desirable woman. Men noticed her. Men pursued her. Given the slightest encouragement, she had options.

A hell of a lot of options.

And me?

Apparently I was a good boss, a good friend, a good prosecutor and an out of shape middle aged guy women might sleep with under the right circumstances but wouldn't spend much time fantasizing about.

It shouldn't have mattered.

Melissa wasn't some woman I was trying to pick up. She was my wife. We'd been married seventeen years. We'd raised two kids together and built a life together.

Except that was exactly Cheryl's point.

People stayed together for love, companionship and children.

And sometime during the last seventeen years I'd apparently started relying on all three of those things while forgetting that Melissa was still a woman.

A woman other men wanted.

I looked at the untouched Camel Rider sitting on my desk.

Then those four words came back again.

When we were married.

And suddenly I wasn't hungry anymore.

April, 2023

Four words wrecked my marriage and my life. And they're not the four words you're probably thinking about.

Not "we have to talk," or "baby, I've met somebody" or "our sex life sucks" or even "You're not giving me enough." Actually that last is five words, but hey, who's counting.

It was a lot stranger, and simpler than that. I had come into our bedroom on a Tuesday night after finishing a "Law and Order" re-run I'd been streaming downstairs and was getting ready to take a shower. I tend to watch a lot of cop and lawyer shows. Coals to Newcastle, really.

I should have gotten enough of that stuff in my day job as an Assistant State Attorney in the Duval County State Attorney's Office. To northerners, that's the same as the District Attorney's Office. We are the people who prosecute bad guys and put them away when we can. Anyway, I like those kinds of cop shows. Even after 10 years on the job, I still like what I do.

Anyway, Melissa was in bed, lying back on a scrunched up pillow, scrolling through some travel article on her tablet. She usually brings back a ton of student assignments to grade from UNF where she's an associate professor in the Coggin College of Business. Most of it gets submitted online these days, and she can spend a couple to three hours working through it on her laptop. But she's conscientious and it was 11 p.m. and she was relaxing.

I enjoyed the view. Even though we had been married 17 years, I still enjoyed looking at her. A tall blonde, her hair cut in long fashionable layers that framed her face, she looked 10 years younger than her true age of 39. The robe she wore was as sexy as a potato sack, but I could still see the curve of her D-cup breasts underneath it. I could also envision her long legs.

I thought about trying to get a real look between them, but stopped myself. She insisted I take my evening shower and brush my teeth before I even tried and she was usually too tired on weeknights to even consider the idea. I looked down at myself. I was five foot nine, Melissa five-ten, and where she was still fairly svelte from working out at the gym, I'd already developed the classic middle aged paunch of a guy whose only exercise was getting out on the links every few months. And I only did that when office politics absolutely demanded it.

I walked into the bathroom and stripped off my tee shirt and shorts that I generally wore around the house. We had a full length mirror and I took inspection. Hair thinning and a real bald spot was beginning to develop where I could barely see it at the rear of my scalp.

Then I look at my midsection. Jesus, pasty white and flabby. No wonder Melissa preferred on the increasingly infrequent times when we did have sex to keep the lights off. I looked like a fucking old lawyer. I looked like those old guys my friends and I used to laugh at when I'd started lawyering. I was only 41, not 61. I made up my mind at that point. I'd always told myself that I didn't have the time to join a gym and I had gently teased Melissa about being a little vain. To hell with that. If I was a woman, I sure as hell wouldn't be too eager to have sex with me.

I took my shower and came out freshly scrubbed, but I didn't wear my normal underwear and white tee-shirt. I came out with a towel around my middle and found a pajamas set in the drawer on my side of the bed. I thought Melissa glanced over at me and there might have been a little smile flickering on her face, but that might have been my imagination.

With my pot covered, I slid into bed next to her. I leaned over to kiss her. I tried for the lips but she moved her head slightly so I planted a kiss on the side of her face. She smiled absent mindedly at me.

"The kids asleep?"

J.J. was 14 and Kelly was 16. J.J. I'd left sprawled in the den scrolling through skateboarding videos on YouTube and TikTok, but I was pretty sure at fourteen there were plenty of things online he wasn't telling his father about. What the hell, he was 14 and had discovered that girls were delightfully different creatures. Between the home Wi-Fi, their phones and computers, I had parental controls set up where I thought they were reasonable. I trusted the kids, but I'd been prosecuting scum too long to be happy and ignorant about what they were doing online.

Kelly was, I'm pretty sure from the way she'd lowered her voice and moved as far away from me as she could and still stay in the den, talking to one of her boyfriends on her phone. I know she had more than one because she was already becoming a younger version of her mother and apparently half the boys at school had noticed.

"No, but they know the rules. I'm sure they'll be in bed in an hour or so. Hey, those were great pictures. Where was that beach, the one with the Tiki hut things near the water?"

"Oh."

She glanced over at me as if surprised that I'd noticed what she was reading. She held the tablet out to me. It was some travel site with an article called "The best beaches you've never heard of." The beach was on an island I'd never heard of and I couldn't even pronounce the name.

"Man, that is beautiful. What about it, would you like to go there this summer when the school is on break? I know you weren't planning on teaching this summer."

She looked at me as if surprised.

"That's – sweet, Jason...but...I had meant to talk to you. I was thinking about teaching this summer. Larry Carter usually teaches the summer session but his wife talked him into taking her to Hawaii and they need someone to fill in."

"When did this come up? I hadn't heard a word about it."

She looked into my eyes and then away with an expression I couldn't place.

"About a month ago. I'd meant to mention it, but I kept forgetting. Sorry. I didn't think we had any firm plans. You're always working on some case or other. And we haven't gone anywhere exotic in a long time."

"I know, but-"

She dropped the tablet to her hip, then rolled a little so one big luscious breast bulged out against her robe and said, "I'm sorry Jason, I pretty much already told them I'd take the summer session. But, look, we went to some wonderful places when we were married and next summer I promise I'll leave time so we can go somewhere nice."

No one at the office has ever accused me of being slow on the uptake, but it took me a minute after she finished patting me on the hand and then picked the tablet back up before it sunk in.

I said the words to myself silently and ran them over and over, jumbling them up and trying to figure out how I had misunderstood my loving, blonde and very sexy wife.

"...when we were married?"

She looked back at me from the tablet with a slightly puzzled expression on her face as if she'd only heard part of what I said, and asked, "What did you say?"

I didn't realize it then, but from the expression that slowly grew on her face I realized a storm cloud must have appeared on mine as I slowly, with great emphasis and the beginnings of real anger, said, "You said we went some nice places WHEN WE WERE MARRIED. Is there something going on I don't know about?"

An expression consisting of equal parts surprise, embarrassment and what appeared to be shock appeared on her face.

"What are you talking about Jason? You must have misunderstood what I said."

"No. You said it very clearly and distinctly. WHEN WE WERE MARRIED! I kind of thought we were married. That's why I asked if there was something I wasn't aware of."

She shook her head and tried to look me in the eyes.

"I couldn't have said that, Jason. That's crazy. "

"No, just weird. I know we're married, babe, so where did that come from?"

"I don't – oh. I must have meant we've been some nice places since we've been married. That's what I meant to say."

"Oh."

I rolled it around inside my head and I knew she was lying. 'Since we were married,' and "when we were married" aren't close enough to make that kind of mistake. And she hadn't been thinking when she said it. It had popped out without her thinking about it or apparently even realizing what she was saying.

In the office we call those Freudian give-aways. Most people call them Freudian slips. When people's mouths outrun the control of their minds, they can say things that wind up sending them to prison or the death chamber at Raiford.

Any prosecutor or cop knows that no matter how tightly controlled a person may be, the unconscious mind is always perking away down below. And when you're guilty about something, what the unconscious mind is doing is trying to confess something the conscious mind wants to keep hidden.

What was she thinking about, I thought, glancing at her beautiful face and realizing she was still focused in with a laser-like stare on my eyes. She was trying to read me the way I was reading her. Only I was better at it because I'd done it for a living for a long time.

And then I realized with an acidic burn in the pit of my stomach, I'd never looked at her in our 17 years of marriage and two years of dating before that this way: the way I'd stare at a suspect, a scum bag, a perp as our brethren cops dubbed them. I didn't like the feeling I had about her.

I made myself laugh, although it came out as a dry chuckle.

"You're right, babe. Anybody can garble their words. I even do it once in a while. I have to admit, you gave me a fright there. I was wondering if we'd ever been legally married. Was there a problem with our marriage license? Or did you secretly divorce me?"

I tried to make myself laugh again but all that came out was a dry cough.

She searched my eyes intently as if trying to see if I was telling the truth. But after ten years of working a courtroom, I've got that poker-stare down pat. She wouldn't get any hints from my face.

She reached over and did something that shocked and scared me a little. She took my hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it. Such a simple thing. But I couldn't remember the last time she had ever done it. Even when we were getting ready for sex it was kissing on the lips and her jerking my dick and my licking her luscious pussy until she was wet and ready.

But a simple gesture like kissing the back of my hand....it was something lovers did. And I realized we hadn't been lovers in forever.

If she had looked up then, I know she would have known and the game would have been over and our lives would have gone very differently. Because my eyes flooded with tears as I realized the shit that our marriage had become while I was too blind to see it happening in front of me. If she had looked me in the eye then she would have known something was terribly wrong and I would have told her the truth about what I was thinking and our marriage would have changed forever- one way or other.

But she didn't and I was able to squelch the emotions and quickly wipe my eyes with my free hand.

She kept her face tightly against the back of my hand and kissed it again. Without looking at me, she said, "I'm sorry for saying it that way, Jason. You know I love you. You're the only man in my life. I love you more now than when we married. You're the father of my children. This is crazy. It was just a slip of the tongue and it didn't mean anything."

But I couldn't take my prosecutor hat off. I wondered why she wouldn't look at me when she professed her undying love. And I found myself listening to and weighing her words, her tone. I'd listened to thousands of depositions and thousands of witnesses on witness stands. And I found the professional side of my mind, not the husband, weighing her words.

And over and over, my mind went back to the same question. It told me that when she said, "When we were married," she was talking in the past tense. That meant in the present tense, in the now, we weren't married. At least in her mind. Or was it that she simply didn't WANT to be married to me anymore. Or was she planning to make herself un-married in the near future? Was a divorce in the offing?

Which inevitably led to the question: was she simply tired of me and ready to toss me in the garbage and make a new life for herself with another man? Or had she already found my replacement? Was she fucking another guy right now? Was that why our sex life was infrequent, so boring, so bland, so..vanilla. Was that why we had been mom and dad a hundred times more than we'd been lovers, sex partners.

Of course, a part of me kept telling me this whole train of thought was stupid. She had just mixed up her words. Tomorrow morning things would be back to normal and in a day or two I'd laugh at my own paranoia. I had simply been a prosecutor too many years looking deep into the worst of humanity, and it colored the way I looked at everything, even my wife and my marriage.

I wanted to believe that, but everything felt...wrong. It was a simple mistake, but why had she reacted the way she had? If it was nothing she'd simply have laughed it off, went back to her reading and teased me about taking it the wrong way. But she hadn't. She had acted worried, disturbed and now she was acting in an unusually loving manner.

She let my hand go and put the tablet on the nightstand by her side of our king sized bed. She reached up and turned off the bedside lamp on her side and told me, "Turn the light off, honey." As I reached over to my right to turn off the light on my side I saw her stand up out of the corner of my eye and I held off turning off the light.

By the time I had rolled back to her the robe had dropped and she was stepping out of her panties. Her heavy breasts had fallen with age and gravity, but they were still incredibly swollen and juicy melons even with the nipples pointing down at a 45 degree angle. But I lost focus on my favorite part of her when my eyes drifted down to her pussy.

I couldn't understand what I was looking at first. I found myself looking for the golden fuzz that surrounded her vagina, but it was gone. It was as smooth as baby's bottom. Just the pink of her outer lips and a hint of the red interior. After a minute I realized she had shaved down there. Gotten rid of all her pubic hair. Why, and for whom, I wondered. I had never suggested it. I'd heard about it from friends, married and bachelor, and it might have been nice but it was never anything I would have brought up. Not in recent years, anyway.

She looked at me, read the expression on my face, and said with a timid smile, "Do you like it? A lot of the girls at the school, especially the younger and single ones, told me this is really hot and men love it."

I just looked at her for a moment, and then I couldn't stop myself from saying, "I bet they do. Have you gotten any compliments?"

She just stared at me until what I'd said sunk in. Now the tears appeared in her eyes.

"How can you say that, Jason. God, how can you say something that mean...when I did this for you?"

The anger that was percolating inside me was coming out and I couldn't stop it.

"And just when were you going to show me your new look, baby? After you finished your article? Or watched the late news. Or were you going to just strip and jump on me, the way you usually do. Oh, that's right, I forgot. You never do that. If I'm going to get any action, I have to give you notice, shower, shave and brush my teeth and get you in the mood first. When was the last time you just stripped and jumped me?"

I pretended to think.

"Oh, yeah. Never. So what's different about tonight. Oh and how long ago did you shave it?"

She climbed onto the bed on her hands and knees, her breasts dangling down like ripe fruit. She knew that almost made me hard as a rock. She reached out and closed her hand on my cock. It was already rigid and I couldn't help release a little groan of pleasure.

"I don't want to fight, Jason. I want you. Inside me. The way it used to be. I'm sorry I've let things slide. I've been so busy with the kids and work and friends that I let the main thing in my life go unattended to. And that's you. I shaved because I wanted to excite you. I wanted you to grab me and throw me down, spread my legs and fuck me the way you used to. We used to love it, remember?"

And I wanted to believe her. I wanted to remember those nights when we were first married and I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to believe she had shaved herself for me. I wanted to believe that she had been planning to surprise me with incredibly hot sex out of the blue tonight.

Unfortunately, I couldn't. I grabbed her hand and pulled it off my rock hard cock. It was probably the hardest thing I'd ever had to do.

She looked at me as if I'd gone crazy, and she probably thought I had.

"Babe, I really don't know what's going through your mind right now. I don't even know if I know you anymore. One thing I do know. There was no way in hell you were planning on having hot sex with me tonight. You'd have gotten rid of the kids somehow. It's easy enough to farm them off on somebody. You wouldn't have let me waste the night in front of the tube. You wouldn't have been in bed with your –no touch- robe on. You'd have had me shaved and cleaned up a long time ago.

"No, this was just an average, every day kind of night. The kind of night a middle aged, long married couple spend most nights; reading, television, maybe a cuddle, then check on the kids and get enough sleep to get going tomorrow. That's been our life."

I looked at her curiously. She wasn't crying, just looked stunned.

"Everything changed a few minutes ago. When you said those four words....you started loving on me, stripped, showed me that new shaved pussy of yours I had no idea existed, and then you grabbed and started to jerk. I can't remember the last time you ever did that.

"I don't know what's going on, Melissa, but something is. Are you going to tell me what it is?"

She put her hands together and cupped her fists as she tried to hold my gaze and then dropped her eyes.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Jason. I just wanted to ...to make love to my husband. You're acting so crazy over what's nothing."

"Are you fucking somebody else?"

At that she did cry. Then she wiped the tears from her eyes, got off the bed and slipped her robe back on. There was real anger on her face.

"You are an asshole. I try to make love to you, to bring us a little closer because God knows we've drifted so far apart, and you accuse me of cheating on you. Fucking another man, to use your words. That you could say that, that you could even think it, shows me our marriage is in really, really bad shape."

I didn't say anything, because she had said it all.

"I'm going downstairs to sleep on the couch in the den, you bastard. I don't think I could stand looking at you or touching you tonight. And tomorrow, try to get out of here without saying a word to me or even looking at me. You think you can do that?"

"I think so."

And she was out the door.

April, 2023

Four words wrecked my marriage and my life. And they're not the four words you're probably thinking about.

Not "we have to talk," or "baby, I've met somebody" or "our sex life sucks" or even "You're not giving me enough." Actually that last is five words, but hey, who's counting.

It was a lot stranger, and simpler than that. I had come into our bedroom on a Tuesday night after finishing a "Law and Order" re-run I'd been streaming downstairs and was getting ready to take a shower. I tend to watch a lot of cop and lawyer shows. Coals to Newcastle, really.

I should have gotten enough of that stuff in my day job as an Assistant State Attorney in the Duval County State Attorney's Office. To northerners, that's the same as the District Attorney's Office. We are the people who prosecute bad guys and put them away when we can. Anyway, I like those kinds of cop shows. Even after 10 years on the job, I still like what I do.

Anyway, Melissa was in bed, lying back on a scrunched up pillow, scrolling through some travel article on her tablet. She usually brings back a ton of student assignments to grade from UNF where she's an associate professor in the Coggin College of Business. Most of it gets submitted online these days, and she can spend a couple to three hours working through it on her laptop. But she's conscientious and it was 11 p.m. and she was relaxing.

I enjoyed the view. Even though we had been married 17 years, I still enjoyed looking at her. A tall blonde, her hair cut in long fashionable layers that framed her face, she looked 10 years younger than her true age of 39. The robe she wore was as sexy as a potato sack, but I could still see the curve of her D-cup breasts underneath it. I could also envision her long legs.

I thought about trying to get a real look between them, but stopped myself. She insisted I take my evening shower and brush my teeth before I even tried and she was usually too tired on weeknights to even consider the idea. I looked down at myself. I was five foot nine, Melissa five-ten, and where she was still fairly svelte from working out at the gym, I'd already developed the classic middle aged paunch of a guy whose only exercise was getting out on the links every few months. And I only did that when office politics absolutely demanded it.

I walked into the bathroom and stripped off my tee shirt and shorts that I generally wore around the house. We had a full length mirror and I took inspection. Hair thinning and a real bald spot was beginning to develop where I could barely see it at the rear of my scalp.

Then I look at my midsection. Jesus, pasty white and flabby. No wonder Melissa preferred on the increasingly infrequent times when we did have sex to keep the lights off. I looked like a fucking old lawyer. I looked like those old guys my friends and I used to laugh at when I'd started lawyering. I was only 41, not 61. I made up my mind at that point. I'd always told myself that I didn't have the time to join a gym and I had gently teased Melissa about being a little vain. To hell with that. If I was a woman, I sure as hell wouldn't be too eager to have sex with me.

I took my shower and came out freshly scrubbed, but I didn't wear my normal underwear and white tee-shirt. I came out with a towel around my middle and found a pajamas set in the drawer on my side of the bed. I thought Melissa glanced over at me and there might have been a little smile flickering on her face, but that might have been my imagination.

With my pot covered, I slid into bed next to her. I leaned over to kiss her. I tried for the lips but she moved her head slightly so I planted a kiss on the side of her face. She smiled absent mindedly at me.

"The kids asleep?"

J.J. was 14 and Kelly was 16. J.J. I'd left sprawled in the den scrolling through skateboarding videos on YouTube and TikTok, but I was pretty sure at fourteen there were plenty of things online he wasn't telling his father about. What the hell, he was 14 and had discovered that girls were delightfully different creatures. Between the home Wi-Fi, their phones and computers, I had parental controls set up where I thought they were reasonable. I trusted the kids, but I'd been prosecuting scum too long to be happy and ignorant about what they were doing online.

Kelly was, I'm pretty sure from the way she'd lowered her voice and moved as far away from me as she could and still stay in the den, talking to one of her boyfriends on her phone. I know she had more than one because she was already becoming a younger version of her mother and apparently half the boys at school had noticed.

"No, but they know the rules. I'm sure they'll be in bed in an hour or so. Hey, those were great pictures. Where was that beach, the one with the Tiki hut things near the water?"

"Oh."

She glanced over at me as if surprised that I'd noticed what she was reading. She held the tablet out to me. It was some travel site with an article called "The best beaches you've never heard of." The beach was on an island I'd never heard of and I couldn't even pronounce the name.

"Man, that is beautiful. What about it, would you like to go there this summer when the school is on break? I know you weren't planning on teaching this summer."

She looked at me as if surprised.

"That's – sweet, Jason...but...I had meant to talk to you. I was thinking about teaching this summer. Larry Carter usually teaches the summer session but his wife talked him into taking her to Hawaii and they need someone to fill in."

"When did this come up? I hadn't heard a word about it."

She looked into my eyes and then away with an expression I couldn't place.

"About a month ago. I'd meant to mention it, but I kept forgetting. Sorry. I didn't think we had any firm plans. You're always working on some case or other. And we haven't gone anywhere exotic in a long time."

"I know, but-"

She dropped the tablet to her hip, then rolled a little so one big luscious breast bulged out against her robe and said, "I'm sorry Jason, I pretty much already told them I'd take the summer session. But, look, we went to some wonderful places when we were married and next summer I promise I'll leave time so we can go somewhere nice."

No one at the office has ever accused me of being slow on the uptake, but it took me a minute after she finished patting me on the hand and then picked the tablet back up before it sunk in.

I said the words to myself silently and ran them over and over, jumbling them up and trying to figure out how I had misunderstood my loving, blonde and very sexy wife.

"...when we were married?"

She looked back at me from the tablet with a slightly puzzled expression on her face as if she'd only heard part of what I said, and asked, "What did you say?"

I didn't realize it then, but from the expression that slowly grew on her face I realized a storm cloud must have appeared on mine as I slowly, with great emphasis and the beginnings of real anger, said, "You said we went some nice places WHEN WE WERE MARRIED. Is there something going on I don't know about?"

An expression consisting of equal parts surprise, embarrassment and what appeared to be shock appeared on her face.

"What are you talking about Jason? You must have misunderstood what I said."

"No. You said it very clearly and distinctly. WHEN WE WERE MARRIED! I kind of thought we were married. That's why I asked if there was something I wasn't aware of."

She shook her head and tried to look me in the eyes.

"I couldn't have said that, Jason. That's crazy. "

"No, just weird. I know we're married, babe, so where did that come from?"

"I don't – oh. I must have meant we've been some nice places since we've been married. That's what I meant to say."

"Oh."

I rolled it around inside my head and I knew she was lying. 'Since we were married,' and "when we were married" aren't close enough to make that kind of mistake. And she hadn't been thinking when she said it. It had popped out without her thinking about it or apparently even realizing what she was saying.

In the office we call those Freudian give-aways. Most people call them Freudian slips. When people's mouths outrun the control of their minds, they can say things that wind up sending them to prison or the death chamber at Raiford.

Any prosecutor or cop knows that no matter how tightly controlled a person may be, the unconscious mind is always perking away down below. And when you're guilty about something, what the unconscious mind is doing is trying to confess something the conscious mind wants to keep hidden.

What was she thinking about, I thought, glancing at her beautiful face and realizing she was still focused in with a laser-like stare on my eyes. She was trying to read me the way I was reading her. Only I was better at it because I'd done it for a living for a long time.

And then I realized with an acidic burn in the pit of my stomach, I'd never looked at her in our 17 years of marriage and two years of dating before that this way: the way I'd stare at a suspect, a scum bag, a perp as our brethren cops dubbed them. I didn't like the feeling I had about her.

I made myself laugh, although it came out as a dry chuckle.

"You're right, babe. Anybody can garble their words. I even do it once in a while. I have to admit, you gave me a fright there. I was wondering if we'd ever been legally married. Was there a problem with our marriage license? Or did you secretly divorce me?"

I tried to make myself laugh again but all that came out was a dry cough.

She searched my eyes intently as if trying to see if I was telling the truth. But after ten years of working a courtroom, I've got that poker-stare down pat. She wouldn't get any hints from my face.

She reached over and did something that shocked and scared me a little. She took my hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it. Such a simple thing. But I couldn't remember the last time she had ever done it. Even when we were getting ready for sex it was kissing on the lips and her jerking my dick and my licking her luscious pussy until she was wet and ready.

But a simple gesture like kissing the back of my hand....it was something lovers did. And I realized we hadn't been lovers in forever.

If she had looked up then, I know she would have known and the game would have been over and our lives would have gone very differently. Because my eyes flooded with tears as I realized the shit that our marriage had become while I was too blind to see it happening in front of me. If she had looked me in the eye then she would have known something was terribly wrong and I would have told her the truth about what I was thinking and our marriage would have changed forever- one way or other.

But she didn't and I was able to squelch the emotions and quickly wipe my eyes with my free hand.

She kept her face tightly against the back of my hand and kissed it again. Without looking at me, she said, "I'm sorry for saying it that way, Jason. You know I love you. You're the only man in my life. I love you more now than when we married. You're the father of my children. This is crazy. It was just a slip of the tongue and it didn't mean anything."

But I couldn't take my prosecutor hat off. I wondered why she wouldn't look at me when she professed her undying love. And I found myself listening to and weighing her words, her tone. I'd listened to thousands of depositions and thousands of witnesses on witness stands. And I found the professional side of my mind, not the husband, weighing her words.

And over and over, my mind went back to the same question. It told me that when she said, "When we were married," she was talking in the past tense. That meant in the present tense, in the now, we weren't married. At least in her mind. Or was it that she simply didn't WANT to be married to me anymore. Or was she planning to make herself un-married in the near future? Was a divorce in the offing?

Which inevitably led to the question: was she simply tired of me and ready to toss me in the garbage and make a new life for herself with another man? Or had she already found my replacement? Was she fucking another guy right now? Was that why our sex life was infrequent, so boring, so bland, so..vanilla. Was that why we had been mom and dad a hundred times more than we'd been lovers, sex partners.

Of course, a part of me kept telling me this whole train of thought was stupid. She had just mixed up her words. Tomorrow morning things would be back to normal and in a day or two I'd laugh at my own paranoia. I had simply been a prosecutor too many years looking deep into the worst of humanity, and it colored the way I looked at everything, even my wife and my marriage.

I wanted to believe that, but everything felt...wrong. It was a simple mistake, but why had she reacted the way she had? If it was nothing she'd simply have laughed it off, went back to her reading and teased me about taking it the wrong way. But she hadn't. She had acted worried, disturbed and now she was acting in an unusually loving manner.

She let my hand go and put the tablet on the nightstand by her side of our king sized bed. She reached up and turned off the bedside lamp on her side and told me, "Turn the light off, honey." As I reached over to my right to turn off the light on my side I saw her stand up out of the corner of my eye and I held off turning off the light.

By the time I had rolled back to her the robe had dropped and she was stepping out of her panties. Her heavy breasts had fallen with age and gravity, but they were still incredibly swollen and juicy melons even with the nipples pointing down at a 45 degree angle. But I lost focus on my favorite part of her when my eyes drifted down to her pussy.

I couldn't understand what I was looking at first. I found myself looking for the golden fuzz that surrounded her vagina, but it was gone. It was as smooth as baby's bottom. Just the pink of her outer lips and a hint of the red interior. After a minute I realized she had shaved down there. Gotten rid of all her pubic hair. Why, and for whom, I wondered. I had never suggested it. I'd heard about it from friends, married and bachelor, and it might have been nice but it was never anything I would have brought up. Not in recent years, anyway.

She looked at me, read the expression on my face, and said with a timid smile, "Do you like it? A lot of the girls at the school, especially the younger and single ones, told me this is really hot and men love it."

I just looked at her for a moment, and then I couldn't stop myself from saying, "I bet they do. Have you gotten any compliments?"

She just stared at me until what I'd said sunk in. Now the tears appeared in her eyes.

"How can you say that, Jason. God, how can you say something that mean...when I did this for you?"

The anger that was percolating inside me was coming out and I couldn't stop it.

"And just when were you going to show me your new look, baby? After you finished your article? Or watched the late news. Or were you going to just strip and jump on me, the way you usually do. Oh, that's right, I forgot. You never do that. If I'm going to get any action, I have to give you notice, shower, shave and brush my teeth and get you in the mood first. When was the last time you just stripped and jumped me?"

I pretended to think.

"Oh, yeah. Never. So what's different about tonight. Oh and how long ago did you shave it?"

She climbed onto the bed on her hands and knees, her breasts dangling down like ripe fruit. She knew that almost made me hard as a rock. She reached out and closed her hand on my cock. It was already rigid and I couldn't help release a little groan of pleasure.

"I don't want to fight, Jason. I want you. Inside me. The way it used to be. I'm sorry I've let things slide. I've been so busy with the kids and work and friends that I let the main thing in my life go unattended to. And that's you. I shaved because I wanted to excite you. I wanted you to grab me and throw me down, spread my legs and fuck me the way you used to. We used to love it, remember?"

And I wanted to believe her. I wanted to remember those nights when we were first married and I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to believe she had shaved herself for me. I wanted to believe that she had been planning to surprise me with incredibly hot sex out of the blue tonight.

Unfortunately, I couldn't. I grabbed her hand and pulled it off my rock hard cock. It was probably the hardest thing I'd ever had to do.

She looked at me as if I'd gone crazy, and she probably thought I had.

"Babe, I really don't know what's going through your mind right now. I don't even know if I know you anymore. One thing I do know. There was no way in hell you were planning on having hot sex with me tonight. You'd have gotten rid of the kids somehow. It's easy enough to farm them off on somebody. You wouldn't have let me waste the night in front of the tube. You wouldn't have been in bed with your –no touch- robe on. You'd have had me shaved and cleaned up a long time ago.

"No, this was just an average, every day kind of night. The kind of night a middle aged, long married couple spend most nights; reading, television, maybe a cuddle, then check on the kids and get enough sleep to get going tomorrow. That's been our life."

I looked at her curiously. She wasn't crying, just looked stunned.

"Everything changed a few minutes ago. When you said those four words....you started loving on me, stripped, showed me that new shaved pussy of yours I had no idea existed, and then you grabbed and started to jerk. I can't remember the last time you ever did that.

"I don't know what's going on, Melissa, but something is. Are you going to tell me what it is?"

She put her hands together and cupped her fists as she tried to hold my gaze and then dropped her eyes.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Jason. I just wanted to ...to make love to my husband. You're acting so crazy over what's nothing."

"Are you fucking somebody else?"

At that she did cry. Then she wiped the tears from her eyes, got off the bed and slipped her robe back on. There was real anger on her face.

"You are an asshole. I try to make love to you, to bring us a little closer because God knows we've drifted so far apart, and you accuse me of cheating on you. Fucking another man, to use your words. That you could say that, that you could even think it, shows me our marriage is in really, really bad shape."

I didn't say anything, because she had said it all.

"I'm going downstairs to sleep on the couch in the den, you bastard. I don't think I could stand looking at you or touching you tonight. And tomorrow, try to get out of here without saying a word to me or even looking at me. You think you can do that?"

"I think so."

And she was out the door.