Note - this really did happen to me the other day - I was suddenly listening in on my wife's quite innocuous cell phone call she made in her car while I was in mine...take care out there, folks! My entry in the "brand new way to find out" sweepstakes. And I was also motivated by rereading some of Richard Gerald's new (and older) stories and his kind of intelligent, educated, apparently powerful women who can't quite get away with casual infidelity and lead the kind of lives they want to. Or something. Not much explicit sex in this one. Just another classic loving wife. And this IS a complete, standalone story.
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I was following my wife to the auto dealership to get the very first 7500 mile oil change on our new Tahoe. I was listening to Rush on the radio when suddenly I realized I was listening in on a call my wife just got in her Lexus on her cellphone.
"Hello. Hello? That's weird. My phone didn't automatically link with my radio like it normally does... Why are you calling me now on this phone?" I heard her ask.
A man replied, in a deep masculine voice I instinctively disliked immediately. The hairs on the back of my neck actually stood up.
"I can't make it tonight. I'm almost at the airport right now and have to fly to D.C. Kind of a mini-crisis. I wanted to give you a heads up and maybe a chance to actually do your alibi for a change - maybe a real night out with your girlfriends, if you wanted to."
"OK. That's a sweet thought. Call me normally when you want to get together again. Bye now."
I suddenly had a lot to think about. My wife occasionally drove the Tahoe though it was normally "my" vehicle as the man of the house, and she liked her own smaller and nimbler Lexus sedan.
As a lawyer - and a modern woman - she practically lived with her cellphone grafted onto her body someplace, and had linked her phone to the Tahoe's radio first time she was in it. I had no idea the Bluetooth range was that good, and through the metal of both vehicles even, and I wasn't even tailgating her car. I have no idea why her phone linked with the Tahoe instead of her own Lexus - maybe it was as simple as I had cranked the Tahoe first in our driveway. We were both going to the dealer because there was already a recall on the Tahoe and that would require about 4 hours total service, and we could both be spending a little "quality time" together this Friday afternoon, with our 4 year old daughter Kaylie already at her grandmother's house.
I didn't recognize the man's voice and no names were mentioned and nothing was really spelled out - but obviously my wife was lying to me about something...meeting a man instead of girlfriends for a night out "relaxation". If it was all innocent why the subterfuge? I wasn't a particularly jealous acting man, I thought. I also thought my wife was planning on our "quality time" being "playful bed time" with me this afternoon. She would do that before meeting her - possible - lover tonight? We had scheduled this time together 4 days ago. Obviously her other "date" had already been scheduled as well. Shoot, she told me Monday, that this Friday was set-up with Suzy and Sherry for sure, Gloria and Sandy "working on it." I knew all these women and none of them were wild divorcees or singles. Just nice professional women, 4 out of 5 married and the other one engaged.
Was this normal? Having sex with me then her "other man" the same day? And me again later tonight? Well, not likely if we spent two or three hours in bed this afternoon...hmmm...what better way to defuse a refusal of intimacy later tonight?
Who the hell knew? Guess I was beyond clueless about my own wife. We had been married for seven years now. Seven year itch? I wasn't feeling that and was generally very happy and satisfied and I thought Jan was also.
Jan was a very beautiful woman at 32 years old. She was naturally thin and delicate, with "small bones" but quite noticeable female attributes - front and back - chest and ass. She was five feet eight and weighed less than 120 lbs. She looked sexy and could act flirty and sexy quite well whenever she wanted too. I loved her "thigh gap" between her actually well-muscled dancer's legs.
She was a lawyer in a mid-sized Atlanta firm after initially working as an ADA in the Forsyth County's District Attorney's office for 4 years.
We had met in 2009, introduced by mutual friends. It wasn't exactly love at first sight, and we really didn't seem to have a lot in common. She was younger than I and seemed very vibrant. I was a few years older and was still recovering from my years as a Marine and the injury that ended my career aspirations as an NCO lifer. The injury occurred in Fallujah in 2004 and was combat related - but wasn't quite purple heart worthy.
I won't claim any PTSD problems, but I was now most comfortable with a plain and even boring life. I was merely a custom woodworker and furniture maker. I had bought an older "fixer upper" farmhouse with barn on about 5 acres of former farm land, broken out and sold separately from the surrounding 200 acres still being farmed by the relatives of the former owners - who had retired themselves and moved to Florida. I had converted the barn to my workshop and most of the furniture I made using recovered old barn, fence, and shack weathered hardwoods or pine heartwood. I supplemented my income often by reselling this now pretty valuable wood when I acquired more than I could use myself in a short time frame. At ten dollars or more a "board foot" - which is literally one cubic foot of board or 144 cubic inches (a 1 foot wide board 1 foot long and 1 inch thick - 4/4 standard unfinished wood thickness measurement - is one board foot), well it can add up to some pretty good cash pretty quickly, for no more effort than tearing an old barn down and loading it up and whatever the barn's owner wanted - sometimes they were just happy to have it go away.
After 3 dates with Jan over 3 weeks I wasn't feeling any sparks and decided to just drop it - but then out of the blue it was like she started pursuing me and her "sparkiness" around me certainly picked up. She requested that I be her date for one of her cousin's wedding the next weekend after our third Friday night date. OK, that seemed innocent enough - but the focused attention she spent on me at the reception and the makeout session we had that night was anything but. Nothing like the handshakes and chaste kiss on the cheek that ended all our other dates. What was this sea change all about?
Soon enough we were totally intimate and a couple. I certainly thought at that point we were exclusive. And we were married in just 3 months. "Why wait?" she told anyone who asked.
And who was I to complain? If she had an ulterior motive I couldn't see it. She certainly wasn't marrying me for my money or property. I probably did make more than she realized, but I was sure her own earnings potential was higher than mine. I knew she wasn't making much as an ADA, maybe $55,000 or so a year at that point, but as long as she didn't really ever screw-up she was making a lot of contacts and good "networking" for either running for office herself or moving seamlessly into a much more lucrative private practice. Forsythe County was north of Atlanta and borderline "the sticks" but still part of the Atlanta Metro area and many of the richest Atlantans had estates there. Professional athletes and business CEO's. Those types.
She seemed to be a very successful young professional and as far as I knew had a great working relationship with everyone she came into contact with, even the opposing defense counsel "opponents".
We did socialize with her coworkers quite a bit and I never got any real bad vibes from anyone - just a little bit of quite normal lack of attention paid me - since I wasn't a lawyer or cop or even a degree'd professional. I was more a blue collar guy and I didn't even drink a lot, nor dance and otherwise "party-hearty". Those days for me were long gone.
I did meet a few people I really liked and who seemed more "sympatico". One of the DA's office special investigators, Guy Williamson, noticed my Marine Corp. tat on my upper arm at one of the annual summer BBQ's. He raised an eyebrow and just softly said "Semper Fi." And I smiled back at him.
"You too?" I asked.
