PROLOGUE:
Miranda--Andi--sits up, bolt upright, as the hotel-room door latch clicks closed behind her illicit lover. "What the f...?" she mutters staring at the familiar phone tossed so casually onto the bed. And, while she has never, ever uttered obscenities in front of her fiancé, the gravity of her situation finally dawns on her with the subtlety of a hammer blow. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK, and double-FUUUUCCKKK!!!"
Andi is completely mortified at the appalling realization of her gullibility--catastrophic gullibility. Gingerly, she picks up the offending device and studies it like it was some kind of alien shit. Then, wracking her brain to recall her fiancé's password, she finds that it is no longer password-protected--and gets into it easily. Opening the talk and text histories she finds exactly what she was afraid she would: a detailed account--in both printed word and photographic illustrations--of her adulterous betrayal!
Suddenly, she can feel her whole body flush, suffusing with heat and colour, blushing from her tits to her toes, from her scalp to her heart. She feels terribly, helplessly guilty. How is she ever going to face Kirkland, her husband-to-be?
Andi climbs off the bed slowly, cursing the indignity she allowed herself to participate in, and trying to separate the intense chagrin from the very recent memories of the intense arousal and sexual satisfaction experienced during the afternoon just past. How could she have been so embarrassingly naïve? How could she have been so stupid to have fallen for something like that? And how could she never, in all her life, have experienced anything even half as thrilling as her anonymous assignation had been?
With all those questions flying around in her head, she gets dressed like an automaton, and, after covering the hotel charges on her own card, hiding them, as it were, from Kirk, she reluctantly heads for home, certain she'll be facing the music in the next little while.
Andi does her best to put on a happy face when she greets Kirk, picking him up at the airport upon his return from his business trip--with limited success. On the ride home, she is completely out of sorts. She hardly speaks to her fiancé, responding to his increasingly concerned questions with short abrupt answers, feeling that, if she starts talking, she'll just blurt out the whole sordid account of her shameful betrayal. Barely able to cope, she, somehow manages to say virtually nothing, concentrating, apparently, on her driving, the entire way home.
Understandably, Kirkland misinterprets her silence as annoyance at his negligence; because he didn't text or call her the entire trip. "I'm sorry--okay?" he says, trying to minimize the import of the incidence. "I misplaced--or lost--my phone, so I couldn't contact you." As Miranda shows no sign of softening her attitude, he throws up his hands in frustration. "Jesus! I'm sorry, already!" and, not knowing what else to do, he turns, giving her the cold shoulder right back.
But as they pull into the garage and let themselves into the kitchen, Kirk backs down. Turning to his fiancée, with a look of stark worry he asks, "What is it dear? Are you having second having thoughts?"
"What?" Andi eyes him up and down, totally puzzled.
"Are you having second thoughts about marrying me?"
"What? No." Relief floods her body, making her giddy. Throwing her arms around his neck, kissing him hard. "Of course not, Silly! Whatever would make you think that?" His response was stifled by more passionate kisses.
"You seemed rather upset or unhappy when you first picked me up. I was wondering... is all... is anything wrong?"
"No. No," she explains, "I was just feeling a little... a little... what? I guess you'd say a little off. No quite right." Then, as if to kiss it all better, she concluded, through another set of sloppy kisses, "It's all right, now!"
The secret, persistent humiliation and guilt Andi feels plagues her for a long time. She consistently tries to deny experiencing any thrill, and almost has herself believing it--if it weren't for the flash recollections of an erotic intensity she didn't know she was capable of. Notwithstanding, eventually, even those begin to fade, like a bad dream, dissipating like smoke in the wind, until she can almost convince herself that the whole thing, the whole day, the whole lascivious betrayal, didn't actually happen.
With a heavy feeling of foreboding in the pit of her stomach, Andi, giving no reason, announces that she intends to forego sex for the five-month run-up to the wedding. Straightening his shoulders, Kirk is silently proud of her decision, as he sees it as the next best thing to actually being virginal.
The wedding goes off without a hitch--and is, indeed, a huge success. So, after a quiet honeymoon in Mexico, as they settle comfortably into being married, Andi feels she can finally relax. Now, she finds that she is able to put the infidelity completely out of her mind; any memory of her cheating incident is blocked--her deep-seated chagrin forgotten, and the exhibitionist kink she had discovered about herself is erased from her memory--totally denied--or so she thinks.
EIGHT YEARS LATER
Miranda feels content. Happily married, as she continually tells herself, she has settled into a domestic routine. She and her husband have taken on the traditional husband and wife roles. Or, at least, she accepted said traditional, albeit sadly outdated, sexist role of 'good wife' that her husband had simply presumed to be the only 'proper' role.
Despite her blocked, erased, denied memories, Andi, still entertaining a merciless and amorphous sense of guilt, lets her husband, Kirkland, make all the decisions. Andi is ever-agreeable. Although she won't admit it--even to herself--she makes it her mission to do everything within her power to make her husband happy and keep his life stress free.
That is her penance, she believes, for the terrible sexual betrayal she has committed. And what makes it so much worse, in her eyes, looking through the vague, dimly discernable memories--try as she might to forget it--is how much she had enjoyed it. In fact, much to her never-ending chagrin, she still experiences recollections during not entirely infrequent warm, gushy dreams. Indeed, it is her on-going dilemma that she cannot reveal her past experience, and cannot suggest any sexual variations, as hubby, no doubt, would question where on earth she got those slutty ideas; hence, she has settled into a pretty mundane life, telling herself to be satisfied with what she hasn't lost through her own lascivious stupidity.
As they--Miranda and Kirkland--the Greens have decided to wait on starting a family, they--Andi and Kirk--have rather Puritan sex once or twice a week--just, you understand--to stay in practice: Sundays and sometimes Fridays, and the very odd Wednesday, if they are feeling a bit frisky. It is, Andi admits to herself, generally pleasant; but never spectacular, as, deep down in her repressed memories, she knows sex can be.
Kirk has made it clear, on several occasions, that he wants no surprises, so they always used a condom--"a diving suit," as he calls it.
