AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story was submitted on another site as an entry into a contest with the theme, "What I did on summer vacation."
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Loneliness sucks.
Being alone is all right. Sometimes, it's preferable to being with people who bore you or annoy you. Sometimes you just want to be alone. That's okay. Everyone needs a little space now and then.
But I had been alone for a year. My solitude had progressed into abject loneliness, and it sucked. I decided to treat myself to a summer vacation. I was going alone, but, hopefully, a change of scenery would help.
When the initial anger of my breakup with Karen faded, being alone was something of a relief. Don't get me wrong – our relationship had been great for a while. Mutual friends had introduced us at a party, and we hit it off well that very first night. Well enough, anyway, that she went home with me, and we didn't get out of bed for much except food or the bathroom for the next two days.
We both had our own apartments with several months to go on our leases, and we had a lot of our own interests, so we kept our relationship on the date-and-fuck level for a while. We enjoyed the time we spent together, even when it was something as mundane as washing our cars or going grocery shopping.
We got to be friends as well as lovers, and eventually decided to share an apartment. We were comfortable together. Maybe that was the problem. We got a little too comfortable. The edge wore off.
I guess I'm either a little too trusting or a little too dumb for my own good. I didn't question it when Karen said she was going to start doing volunteer work one evening a week at an adult literacy program (something I had no interest in whatsoever). After a while, said she was going to do it two or three nights a week. I didn't mind that either, because it gave me time to pursue some interests of my own, hang out with the guys, or just chill at home after a rough day at work.
Looking back on it now, I see that I should have recognized the warning signs. After all, if I was so committed to this relationship, why was I almost glad Karen wasn't around three evenings a week? But I was blind, and I accepted the fact that she sometimes came home very late, with alcohol on her breath. Her explanation was that she and some of the other female volunteers at the adult education center liked to go out for a drink or two after teaching their classes.
For some reason, I didn't even think it was strange that she would always rush to the shower the minute she came home from her tutoring sessions, even though Karen had always taken her shower in the mornings before.
The fact that our sex life had dwindled to only one or two sessions a week didn't seem to mean that much to me either. After all, we had both just turned thirty – we weren't sex-crazed kids anymore. We worked very hard at our jobs, and our "extra-curricular" activities often meant that sleeping was what we needed to do when we went to bed on the nights she came home late.
One night, Mike, a good friend of mine from work, called me about an hour after Karen had left for her tutoring work. "Kevin, I want to buy you a beer," he said. "We need to talk."
"What's up?" I asked. He sounded pretty uncomfortable.
"I'm at the Highway Tavern on Route 1. You know the place?" he asked.
"Yeah, I know where it is. You sound upset. Are you all right?"
"Just get your ass over here. How soon can you be here?" Mike responded.
"Give me fifteen minutes."
"See you then," Mike said. He hung up without even saying goodbye.
"Uh oh," I thought. "He must be in some kind of trouble." I grabbed my wallet and keys.
When I walked into the tavern, Mike was sitting at a table with a beautiful woman. She looked very familiar, but I couldn't remember where I had seen her before. "Kevin, this is Marianne, Bob's wife," Mike said. He poured me a beer from the small pitcher on the table. Marianne had a half-empty glass of beer in front of her.
I remembered Bob, another guy Mike and I work with, introducing me to his wife, Marianne, at last year's company Christmas party. She had been the subject of some discussion among the guys there, with her gorgeous face, long wavy dark hair, and dynamite figure in that slinky little black dress. The general consensus had been that she was the embodiment of the term MILF, and was way too good for an asshole like Bob.
I shook her hand and said, "I'm sorry, I'm terrible with names, Marianne. I remember you now. How've you been?"
"Fine, Kevin, how about you?"
"Good, but I'm confused. Mike, what are we doing here? You sounded kind of upset on the phone."
"Drink your beer," was all he said. He seemed very interested in studying his fingernails.
I looked at Marianne, but she just shrugged her shoulders and took a sip from her glass. We sat there in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. I thought again that Mike must be in some kind of trouble, serious from the look on his face. But Marianne didn't fit in with any situation I could imagine.
Mike drained his beer and poured the remainder of the small pitcher into his glass. He took a few more swallows, set his glass down, and looked at us. "Shit, I hate this," he said. He looked really miserable.
"Come on, buddy, talk to me. What's going on?" I said.
"Kevin, you've known me for years. You know how I am. You can tell Marianne that I'm not the kind to start trouble or get in the middle of something that's none of my business, right?"
"That's true. And I'd say that even if you weren't my friend. So, what's this all about?" I said.
He downed the rest of his beer. "Finish your beers. We're going for a short drive. Don't worry, I only had two glasses. I'm OK to drive. You two can ride with me."
None of us said anything as we went out to Mike' car, although Marianne and I exchanged some worried looks. Mike helped Marianne into the front passenger's seat, and I got in the back. He drove us a few blocks down the street and turned into the parking lot of a seedy-looking motel. We went around the back of the building and parked at the bottom of the lot, a short distance from the cars that were parked near the rooms. He turned off the engine and the lights, and then pounded his fist on the steering wheel. "I pray I'm wrong about this. I just hope you guys don't wind up hating me," he said.
I started to say, "Hating you for what?" but Marianne interrupted me with a sort of strangled scream.
"That's Bob's car!" she said.
"What? Where?" I asked.
"Straight in front of us, Kevin," Mike said. "Now look four spaces to the left of it."
I looked where he was pointing. There was no mistaking it. Karen had put that dent in the rear fender of her car a week earlier when she backed into the trash bin outside our apartment. "That's Karen's Honda. What the fuck?" I exclaimed.
Mike said, "I didn't know what to think when I first saw them together at the tavern about two months ago. They didn't see me, and they seemed to be involved in some kind of deep discussion, so I didn't go over to them. They left at the same time. I decided it didn't mean anything, and I kind of forgot about it until I saw them again the next week. Same thing that time. They didn't see me, and they were sitting together talking. Again, they left together. They each got in their own cars and drove off."
"Did they come here?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"I don't know. But two nights later, I decided to go to the tavern again. Bob was walking across the parking lot just as I went inside, so I waited for him. He seemed pretty shocked to see me, and he looked really nervous. He said he just stopped in to buy a 6-pack to go, and he walked up to the bar and ordered one. He got on his cell phone and made a call. As he was talking, I saw Karen's car pull in. She stopped in the middle of the parking lot, and then turned around and drove out, fast. I could see she went up the road going this way, which I knew was the opposite direction she would have gone if she was going home."
I was starting to feel a little sick to my stomach, and Marianne looked like she had just swallowed a bug.
Mike just kept on talking. "Bob left right after her with his beer, got in his car, and headed the same way. I went outside and saw him stopped at the light at the end of the block. He should have been in the left turn lane if he was going home, but he was going straight, the same direction Karen had gone. I jumped in my car and followed him. He pulled in here and drove around back. Karen's car was parked in front of one of the rooms. He went inside with her."
"Oh God," Marianne moaned.
"I'm so sorry about this," Mike said. "I didn't know what to think. Remember, Kevin, when I asked you which nights Karen did her volunteer work?"
"Yeah, I told you it was Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays," I said.
"Right," Kevin said, "and I asked you that on a Thursday morning. I had seen them here the night before around 7:30. So I came here and parked way off in the corner around 7 o'clock that night. About a half an hour later, they both pulled in and went into a room."
"That bastard!" Marianne hissed. "He told me he needed to stay late at the office a lot. Some shit about short staffing. I'm going to kill him!" She started to get out of the car.
Mike grabbed her arm. "Wait, Marianne, it way not mean anything. Maybe it's not what you think."
"Oh please! My husband is already playing me for a fool. Don't you start, too. Let go of me!" she growled, wrenching her arm free of Mike's grasp.
"Marianne!" I bailed out of Mike's car, ran after her, and spun her around to face me. "Don't do anything rash. We have no way of knowing what they're doing."
"What the hell do you think they're doing, Kevin? Trading baseball cards? Crocheting? Are you even more stupid than I am?" Karen said.
"But we don't really know anything," I said.
