Peacetime

Peacetime

I have found my peace, and that is something I never thought would come. It has been a long road to walk down, with many quirks and kinks. I would never have imagined that this is how it would be, and how content I am.

I was always a hard-charging guy. I had a great career in the Air Force, doing Public Affairs. I never got shot at, but I felt that I had contributed something. It was more than a little like show business, and I excelled at it.

I got out at twenty, and had a lot going for me. I married another Air Force Officer along the way, and there were two pensions, and I had a nice cushy job at one of the big Aerospace Giants that sold things back to the Service I had served.

Civilian life was not what I expected it to be, though, and I began to lose my way. There were more temptations, and there was a younger woman in the office who caught my eye. There was a huge contract involving aerial tankers- the flying gas stations- and we often worked long hours together, and many weekends.

Vivian was a marvelous looking woman, slim and petite. Not much in the way of boobs, but she had a curvy ass, and the way she wore her sweater sets sans bra featured her prominent nipples. I had to pretend not to notice. She had a demur enough demeanor, very professional, and with the grown-up strand of pearls and her elegantly coiffed long blonde hair.

There was one thing that was striking about her, besides the fair skin and deep blue eyes: she had a prominent nose, almost hawk-like. I thought idly that she was a ringer for a raptor, a bird of prey.

I should have stuck with that, and kept my dick in my pants, but that was really not my call.

My wife was working long hours as well, and doing well with a competitor to my company. There are only so many outfits in this line of work, and the need to keep proprietary information away from one another added a strain. There was travel, as well, and I sensed we were drifting apart. I am not a bad guy, but I do have a streak that could come across as arrogant or high-handed. It was a couple decades working around fighter pilots that did it, and the veneer of the military culture.

One weekend I logged onto the computer at home to check the office messages on Webmail, and I found a draft of a note that my wife had been sending to a co-worker, something about looking forward to having some "special time" in Seattle around a convention they were going to be working.

I was smart enough to not confront her about it, but it stung. After all the success, it looked like I was just another civilian headed for the rocks. All our money was in a fancy house, and I could not get out from under it for the amount of money we owed. If I wound up moving out- and the state where we lived was not very progressive about that- I was going to be in some tiny apartment somewhere, licking my wounds.

I bottled it up, and tried to spark up the relationship, but it was clear that there was a distance between us that had never existing while we were on active duty.

As I say, I have my pride, and I resented being relegated to second place. She was cool and distant.

I started stopping at happy hour at a place down the block from the office before I went home, and one night Vivian and a couple other people from the office went along as an impromptu office birthday party. I had a couple Manhattans, and then another. Vivian was looking particularly good at that point. Bob and Dolores looked at the fresh glass in front of me and announced that they were taking off to get home, and I found myself sitting in the booth across from Vivian.

Her eyes were exactly the color of a deep mountain lake, and I thought I might fall into them.

She asked me directly, leaning forward to be heard over the din of the mating dance in the bar. "You don't seem to be yourself these days. Is everything OK?"

Trust me on this- I had no intention of blowing up my life and throwing it away. It was just good to talk to someone. Once the words started to pour out of my mouth they would not stop. I was surprised by the vehemence in my tone. I did not know how much anger I had bottled up inside me.

She listened intently. I thought it was concern, but it was something more. When I ran out of words, she had some of her own. She told me that her husband- he was an older guy, a retired General- had been treated over the past year for prostate problems. It looked like he was going to be OK, but between the chemo and the alcohol he was self-dosing himself with his libido was long gone.

I took that on board dully, my thinking not completely in order. Like I say, I am not a bad guy, and we eventually got up and went home separately, where I had a sharp encounter with the little woman, followed by icy silence and a night on the couch. Over that weekend, the significance of what Vivian had said began to come clear.

If I was correct, she was opening a door to something that could satisfy my wounded ego, and be perfectly harmless. We could be friends and coworkers with an extra benefit.

Monday at the office the signs were unmistakable. I sat at the end of the conference table, and as we went around the table with our reports and plans for the week ahead, I could see her looking at me with those deep eyes, her hands doing something quite remarkable to the Starbucks cup in front of her, up and down in a languid motion that shouted out raw sexual energy.

I think only I could see. I don't know for sure, since subtlety is the first thing to go.

I'll cut to the chase, though the dance was exquisite enough that I did not feel at all like a fish being reeling in. We wound up in a sort of dance of intimacy. It started with a blow-job in the car in the garage. It included fucking in the office itself, her bent forward over my desk to let me take her from behind, her fair arms spread across the desk blotter.

We fucked in one of the cubicles, she grabbing the top of the divider while I thrust at her with my pants still on. It must have been near her period, since there was blood on my suit-pants when we were done, and it was awkward to clean up when the passion was done.

But the urgency and passion of the whole thing was a drug from which I could not free myself, and I couldn't have stopped if I wanted to, since Vivian was aggressive as hell about getting it.

There were a remarkable number of positions we tried. Sometimes she would get on her knees and blow me while I sat in my office chair. I noticed how remarkable she was then, since she had propped a mirror against the wall behind her, so I could see that she had removed her panties, and her dripping pussy was reflected for my entertainment as she bobbed up and down on my rigid cock.

She really thought things through, I thought at the time, though of course we were not thinking at all.

It was rash and dangerous behavior, but we did not have anywhere else to go. We talked about a lot of options, and even got motel rooms a few times. I don't know how we were not caught, and it would not have gone without significant consequence.

The wild affair went on for nearly a year. I thought I was quite clever about it, but women know these things, and even men have a vague clue.

One evening as I walked up my drive, a little fellow jumped out of a beat-up Camry and rushed up to me. He asked my name, and I nodded, not knowing what to think. He handed me a thick sheaf of papers and told me I had been served.

My wife was not home. I mixed a drink and sat down in the den to look at what had been handed to me. It was disaster. The papers announced that the County Court had directed that most of my income be handed over to the wife, and the house, and more than half of my pension.

I ran the numbers. I knew the bank account was going to be cleaned out before I even logged on to check. It was ruin. I could not sell my car for the amount of money I owed on it. I could not even get a decent apartment for the amount of money I had left.

The wife let me stew for a couple days. Vivian was concerned. I could not get an erection up to save my life, and things were testy between us, which made the office a tense place to be.

Eventually my wife called. I told her I would do anything to make it up to her, which was a crock of shit, since it was her little fling that started this all. I tried, though, and at our icy first meeting, She announced a list of non-negotiable demands, and the first one was that I had to tell Vivian it was all over and I would never see her again. She handed me the phone to make the call with a look of triumph.

It was the crappiest thing I ever did in my life, though there was a lot more crap to come. Vivian was crying as I hung up, and the magnitude of what my wife had done with military precision became clear. Just to ensure that all the bases were covered, she had opened up a dialogue with the old man that Vivian was married to. There was gong to be so much shit flying at their house that there would be no place to run to, no moving out together since her money would have been harvested the same way mine had been.

A more courageous guy would have got up and taken his chances, but I had never seen combat for all my time in the service, and I folded, and entered into Hell on earth.

I saw Vivian again, briefly, the next Monday at the office. She was giving her notice. She had an ultimatum that she had to resign, or she was going to lose her equity in her house. She was crying the last time I saw her, though there was something terrifying about the depth of those blue eyes.

I should have known that the consequences of cowardice are bitter. There was no going back to anything like the marital relationship we had before, even the distant one that we shared after she began to stray. In the end, I wound up in the crappy apartment that I had feared so much, and the car went and I started to drink a lot, and some guy from the competition wound up living in my nice house.

It took months, and I felt my self-esteem constantly lowering. Eventually, the job went, by mutual agreement, and I took a store manager's position with a muffler shop to keep the rent paid. Life sucked.

I did not talk to Vivian, though what I had done to her, and what she had done to me was always on my mind. As the months turned into more than a year, I came to think that it was me that bore the blame.

She wanted sex, and she wanted to be loved, and I went into it dick-hard and ready to go. The villain was my ex and her fucking attorney, though in the end I couldn't keep my anger going about anyone except the lawyer, that dried up old bitch.

She made a living slicing up sleek, confident fellows like me.

And the sleekness and confidence are what went first. I felt myself sinking into a slough of despair. I worked, that was the one thing that kept me focused. I was lucky to get the job. The franchise owner wanted to support vets, and I told him I was a divorce survivor and he gave me a chance.

I was not too far gone then, and could still muster something like what I used to have when I put on my suit for the Aerospace company. It was an effort to pull it together, and so much easier to let the fog of depression wrap me in its gray wool.

I would get up early, head hurting from the whiskey that I drank steadily to kill the depression. I would open up the store, the Mexicans waiting in the darkness to get down in the oil pit or man the lifts for the mufflers. I could keep it straight, sort of, and it was busy without being too complex. There was an accountant who took care of the books, and the staffing took care of itself, since there were always undocumented guys to fill in.

I decided that if the drinking deadened the pain in the evening it was good, and if it killed me, at least the pain would go away.

I had established a comfortable enough rhythm in that when I saw something in the paper that caught me up short. It was in the obituary section. It was a short account of the sad passing of The General. It said that there would be a military ceremony at the local Catholic Church, and his sole survivor was his beloved wife, Vivian.

The General might have been dead, but he was still in the phone book. My hands were shaking when I turned the pages to find the entry. There he was, big as life in death. I took a deep breath. Then I wrote down the number on a yellow sticky, which I then folded and placed in my pocket.

I would never have called that number while he was alive, and I was not sure I could call it now. I took a deep breath, and wrote up a ticket for a replacement muffler for a 1998 Toyota on the computer screen. It was good that I could do this job with about half a brain.

Vivian Recherché

I don't have a real telephone any more. Sometimes the shop needs to get hold of me, and a cheap plan on a cell phone is what I can afford. When I got home that night I could think of little else than what I had lost. I got the bottle of whiskey down from the cabinet to start my process of self-anesthetization.

I cut the brown liquid with ginger ale and plenty of ice. That way I don't just slump unconscious in my chair in front of the little tube-type television. It is not digital, and that is something else I have to worry about. When they stop broadcasting analog signals I am going to be in trouble.

The apartment is a depressing place, but it suits me. I had a drink, and felt the warm glow start to spread through me. I poured another and changed out of the perma-press chinos and monogrammed shirt I wear at the shop. I got into some sweats, baggy and nondescript that just fit my mood. I smoked and drank for a while.

I turned on the television, though I could not focus on what was on. The noise was comforting. I thought about the General, and I thought about how unfair life was. And then I started thinking about Vivian. I was still thinking about her a drink or two later, and looked over at the battered bureau where my cell phone and keys lay next to the note I had made earlier.

Of course I called. I was filled with longing for something I had lost, and she was part of it. The phone beeped five times and kicked over to voice mail. It was the General's voice, of course, and I was startled enough that I could think of nothing to say, except the I was sorry that he was dead, which was not at all what I meant, since I was happy that the bastard was gone, but that I was sorry for her, and for me and for all that had happened.

It was lame and pathetic. I hung up and threw the phone across the room.

I think I slept in the chair, though I found myself on the mattress in the morning. I could have used a scalding shower to clear my head, but the crappy water pressure got me only a tepid trickle. My mood was as foul as I got ready to head out. I found the phone on the floor, and was mildly relieved that it had not broken. There was something else. A little yellow envelope in the screen indicated I had a message waiting.

It was Her, of course. The message was brief, and succinct. Her voice told me that she was very busy closing out her husband's affairs, and was surprised to hear from me, considering what a pathetic excuse for a man I was. My shoulders slumped as I heard the words.

She was right, of course, and I was astonished to hear at the end that she would permit me to call at her home, since she had some issues to settle. Her voice was crisp as she set a time.

I would have to take the bus, but I could figure it out.

She said she would be leaving town just as soon as the estate cleared. She gave me the address, which was in one of the fashionable neighborhoods where senior military officers could afford to live. Not ritzy, but comfortable.

Later, at the shop, I studied the bus routes. It looked like the 17H would get me relatively close and I could walk the mile or so to the house from there. I looked at the clock, and wished I drank at the office. That was one of the rules I had not broken yet, and then I decided that I did. I got a pint at the liquor store on my break, and kept it in the cabinet under the counter and sipped at it all day.

The hands on the clock crawled. We close at seven-thirty on weeknights to cover the people who work real jobs. When I closed the place up I knew it would be tight to make it there at the appointed time, and I was nervous as I waited with some Hispanic people at the bus shelter. My hands trembled as I fed two one-dollar bills into the hopper next to the driver, who scowled at me.

I got off in front of a strip mall in the suburbs and began to trudge toward the Ridge Road.

According to the little time mark on my phone, I was about fifteen minutes late when I stood in front of the dark wooden door of the low two story bungalow. The lights of Capital City were bright below. I rang the buzzer, stomach in a knot and nothing happened for the longest time. I almost turned to go when I heard steps approaching inside, firm ones. The door swung inward, and there she stood in all her glory.

Jesus, I had forgotten how striking her eyes were. They blazed as if illuminated from within. I could see nothing else except those eyes.

"You are late, asshole. Get in here."

I swallowed hard and said I was sorry. She nodded, and gestured for me to enter.

The living room was bathed in warm yellow light from a floor lamp in the corner. Cardboard boxes were stacked neatly along the wall. The door closed firmly behind me, and I stopped, uncertain.

"Sit down. We have some things to talk about." There was only one option, a formal couch that did not look particularly comfortable. I sat down as I was told. She looked fabulous. She was wearing jeans that showed off her pert ass and inviting pubic mound, and a full peasant blouse. Her hair was as blonde as I remembered. Were her tits bigger? They seemed so.

She put her hands on her hips, standing before me.

"You know that you came close to ruining my life, right?"

"Yes," I stammered. "I understand that. But mine hasn't been any bed of roses, either. Do you have anything to drink?"

"That is about the last thing you need. You stink of alcohol. But you have a point. Wait here." She turned and left the room. I put my hands on my knees as I heard the clink of a glass against glass. She came back into the room holding what had been a small mayonnaise jar quarter-filled with brown liquor. She handed it to me with a frown.

"You don't need ice. You just want your medicine." There was nothing to say to that, and I took a deep sip and the whiskey burned as it went down and the odor filled my nostrils.

"I had to come back to this place and live with a monster who wanted to break me. He wanted to suffocate me, but I managed to take control of my life again, and I am a free woman and a winner. You are a loser."

I nodded and took a drink. There was not much to say to that.

"I learned many things in this prison, and I became first a trustee, and then I became the warden, and now my oppressor is dead, and I own the place. I am proud of what I accomplished. And that is why I wanted to see you."

"I did what I had to do. My wife was going to ruin me. I had to break it off," I said with resignation. "I knew I hurt you. I didn't have any choice."

"Hurt me? You chump. You were sex, and excitement and a way to keep going with that pompous fuck the General. What you did was have the gall to inconvenience me."

"I'm sorry."

"You can never make that up. You might want to remember that. Women never forget anything."

She glared at me with those wonderful and frightening eyes. "But in what you did to me, you did something unintentional but very good. I am willing to give you a chance to make it up to me. Are you willing?"

"God, yes. I would do anything to try to make this right. Anything."

"I don't think you know what you are saying. Let me give you some idea about what I am going to ask you to do. It will take a minute, so get comfortable."