As always, my team has been awesome. My editing team is Girlinthemoon, Hal, Pixel the Cat, GeorgeAnderson and Norafares. I love you all. Harddaysknight is my mentor and gives +ve critical review. SBrooks103x also gives me a prepost read.
There is no graphic sex described in this story. If you want that, you'll have to wait for my next story. This story is about the consequences of cheating. If you want to make the world safe for cheaters, you should read something else. Okay, let's try the "burning the bastard" variant of "BTB." If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, here it is If not, best stop now. If you continue, I warned you.
*****
Being married isn't easy. I've always known that. I know it's not easy being married to me. I'm picky. I like things the way I like them. I spend way too much time doing things I want to do and way too little time doing things my husband wants to do. I fall into a book and read for three hours straight, leaving Brandon to do what he does. I spend too much time on the computer. I have people I write to, sites I like to browse and I write. I write novels, short stories, and essays, all for my own amusement. I also sell them, and I've been doing well. I spend a lot of time working out at the gym by myself, just me and my music. Brandon is more of an outdoor exercise kind of guy. I'm as stubborn as a mule if I think I'm right and I fight dirty in an argument. I don't admire any of those things in myself, but I don't put any more effort into changing them than Brandon does the things about him that irritate me.
He has a roving eye. There's not a decent looking woman that passes him without being ogled. That pisses me off incredibly. I just learned to put up with it. The thing that really irritates me is very few of them are better looking than I am. Other men stare at me; Brandon stares at other women. I'm five ten and weigh 130 pounds. I have small C-cup breasts and they aren't saggy, either. My butt is the same size and shape it was when I was a freshman in college. I have long blue-black hair that hangs down to the middle of my butt. My skin is pale and creamy and I like my face. I have blue eyes and, as I said, I get a lot of attention from other men. They hit on me all the time. Brandon looks at other women.
He drinks too much, goes to too many parties, flirts with any woman who will let him and spends money like water. We'd learned what to expect from each other. I thought we were happy together. We'd been married for five years, and had a three year old daughter. She was amazing, and I was under the impression that we both loved her dearly. We made love from two to seven or eight times a week. We were both in good shape, exercised a lot and kept ourselves attractive. It seems like it should be easy. You just love each other and that's it, but we did things that get on each other's nerves. Brandon did those things that irritate me, and I'm sure I irritated him. We didn't mean to, it just happens. It seemed like we'd been irritating each other a lot, recently. That's just how it is. Living with someone, all the things that irritate you are magnified. Our lives hadn't been bad lately, but they hadn't been good, either.
Brandon came into my office the morning it all fell apart and brought me a second cup of coffee. He sat down in the leather chair beside my desk. "Smith, I want to talk to you," he said. That's my name, Smith Givens. Yes, I'd heard all the jokes about having two last names. My parents were weird like that. My maiden name was Johnson. I was used to it, and I liked my name.
"Hmm?" I murmured, sort of half paying attention.
"Stop typing and look at me," he said.
I grudgingly swiveled my chair around. I hated it when he did that. See, one of those irritating things.
"What?" I asked.
"Don't get an attitude," he said. Of course, I immediately got an attitude. If you don't want someone to get an attitude, don't tell them not to get an attitude. "I want to talk to you about us."
Now, I really got an attitude. "What about us?" I said, defensively.
"Are you happy with the way things have been going with us?" he asked.
"Generally, yes," I said. "I wish you didn't try to piss me off all the time, but yeah, I'm happy."
"I'm not," he said. "I don't try to piss you off. You're pissed off all the time without me helping. I think we need to do something."
"Okay, what do you suggest?" I asked. "Do we need a vacation, a date night, counseling? What do you want to do? I'm willing to try stuff. I know I've been kind of short tempered. Some of this is on you, though."
"Okay, I'm willing to take some of the blame," he said. "I don't think any of that stuff with work for us, though. I think we need to rev up our marriage."
"What the hell does that even mean?" I asked. "You want to dress up like Bozo the clown and tie me up or something?"
He laughed. "Or something," he said. "I've been talking to Dianne. Her and Bill went through something like this."
Now I was pissed off. Bill and Dianne were friends of ours, but what the hell was Brandon doing discussing our marriage with Dianne? "Jesus, Christ, Brandon, what in the hell makes you think it would be okay for you to talk to her about things that are between you and me? Did I mention that that would be okay?"
"I don't have to ask you about everything," he said.
"Well, you sure as hell have to ask me about stuff like that," I fumed. "I wouldn't talk to anyone about our marriage. It's no one else's business. If we were going to a counselor or something, it would be something we decided together. Dianne sure as hell isn't a counselor."
"No, but they had the same problems we have," he said. "I thought she might have some insight."
"Just how, exactly, do you know they had these 'problems'?" I asked.
"Well, she just mentioned that she wondered if we were having problems," he explained.
"And, of course you just said yes? What's wrong with you, Brandon? What do you imagine made it okay for you to do that?"
"This isn't what I wanted to talk to you about," he said. "Bill and Dianne are coming over in a few minutes to talk to us. They found solutions to their problems and we're going to talk about if they would work for us."
I was stunned! He'd invited them over? This was some kind of ambush shit and I wasn't having any of it. I decided I'd see what the lay of the land was. We were going to see some heavy hitting after I got a clue about what was going on. "Okay, Brandon, you let me know when they get here," I turned back to the computer. My brain was spinning a million miles an hour. In the ten minutes before they got there, I thought of a million things and I was fuming. When I heard the doorbell, I waited for Brandon to come and get me.
Dianne and Bill were sitting on the sofa and drinking coffee when I walked in. She got up and kissed my cheek before going back to sit down. I sat in my club chair and said nothing. This was their show; let them sweat. They made small talk, but I didn't say a word. They were becoming more and more uncomfortable and you could have cut the tension in the air with a knife. Finally, Brandon worked up his nerve.
"Smith," he said, "Dianne and Bill have been our friends for a long time. They're here to talk to us about how they worked together to resolve some problems they were having in their marriage. Will you listen to what they have to say?"
"To tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about their marriage or how they solved their 'problems'." I said. "As far as I'm concerned, you two are on really thin ice. You're meddling in things that aren't any of your business and Brandon is in a lot of hot water over this whole scenario."
"Honey, we love you two and we just want to help." Dianne smiled at me in what I'm sure was supposed to be a reassuring manner. It failed in its object.
"Okay, do your thing," I said.
I guess Dianne was the designated speaker. "Smith, about five years ago we started having some problems," she began. She reached over and took Bill's hand and they smiled a fake, "loving smile" at each other. "We were fighting a lot and it just seemed like the spark had gone out of our marriage. We talked about it and discussed it with some friends of ours. What we discovered has made our marriage so much stronger and so much better that we thought it would help you and Brandon. Can we tell you about it?"
This should be rich. "Sure, knock yourself out," I said.
She seemed to be thrown a little off stride by my answer, but she quickly recovered. "Well, we decided that if we were going to bring back the spark in our marriage, we were going to have to be open to new ideas," she said. "Our friends introduced us to couple's date nights."
"So you and Bill go out on dates?" I asked.
She swallowed nervously. "Not exactly," she said. "I mean we go out, but not with each other, like you meant."
"You go out, but not with your husband?" I asked. "With whom do you go?"
"Other couples in the group," she said. "We switch and go out with the other couple's partners. We're all into the lifestyle and it's been so good for us. Bill and I hardly ever have the fights like we did before, and our love life is just explosive."
I was beginning to get the picture. "So by the 'lifestyle' you mean you fuck people besides each other," I said.
Now she was really nervous. "Well, we explore other partners," she said. "We've become so open minded and it's been such a liberating experience for us. We think it would do the same thing for your marriage it's done for ours."
"So, by 'liberating' and 'open minded' you mean you fuck other people's husbands?" I asked. "Bill fucks other people's wives?"
"Why do you have to say it like that, Smith?" Brandon asked. "You make it sound so cheap and vulgar."
"It is cheap and vulgar," I said. "It doesn't need me to make it sound that way. Brandon, did you know this? Is that why you set up this 'meeting'? Do you have the hots for Dianne? What do you get out of this, Bill?"
"It's not like that at all," Brandon protested. "Jesus, Smith, why do you always have to paint everything so black and white?"
