As always I'd like to thank my editor Erik Thread for his hard work and advise. This isn't the story I wrote the first time, or the second or even the third. However, the last one Erik saw was the third, so I know I've made errors since he last fixed this.
I'd also like to thank
fdkman262
who gave me some great insight into what I'd written as opposed to what I needed to write. It's a much better story because of his advise and skill as a writer.
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I was lying on our bed, lost in an erotic glow when I heard the garage door activate. 'Shit!" I blurted. Vaulting to my feet, I glanced at the clock 10:45! No! She couldn't be home yet! "Oh Shit! Shit! Shit! SHIT!"
I looked at our bedroom, the rose petals, the champagne and wondered if my whole life was about to crumble around me...
I'm an architect, and I'd been on my own for about a year. I'd been working incredible hours because with only one client, my staff consisted of me, myself and I. My office was in an abandoned gas station. I'd tried to have an office at home, but I found I was taking too many breaks to spend time with Judy and the girls. We had identical twin girls who were born nine weeks before I graduated from the University of Texas six years ago. They hadn't been planned, but we were overjoyed.
We both wanted a large family, but something had gone wrong during the birth process, and she'd had never been able to get pregnant again. We'd tried some fertility treatments, but although the doctors had been certain some of the newer techniques would be successful, we'd decided to put them off because of expenses when I struck out on my own.
Judy had stayed home with the girls until I opened my office. Money was tight, and we'd needed an extra salary. So, without complaint she started working for an oil company as an executive assistant. Judy thought her job had the prefect hours for a working mother. Monday to Thursday she didn't go in until nine and she was off at three. Great hours, except on Fridays when she had to be at the airport for a 7:10 AM flight to Dallas to facilitate her boss's weekly meetings. The airport was a twenty-minute mad dash from our house, or thirty if you drove the speed limit.
It made for a long day because they didn't leave Dallas until 6:25 and Judy rarely walked in the door before 8:15. Then, almost four months ago, it got much worse. Judy's boss got a promotion and the meetings started running longer. After they missed a few planes and had to pay a premium, they began to simply schedule the final flight, which didn't arrive in Midland until 9:55. It was generally close to eleven when Judy got home. I hadn't been happy about it but since Judy didn't complain, I didn't say anything.
Tonight was supposed be pure fun and great sex! Now... now it looked like everything was going to be ruined! I glanced at the clock, again, 10:45! No, she couldn't be home!
I heard her car pulling into the garage. Why was she arriving home now, the time when she'd get in if the plane landed on time? But I knew the plane wasn't on time, because, out of character, I'd checked on the flight. I had wanted everything timed perfectly for when she walked through the door.
In a disoriented fog, I glanced around the room one more time. I saw the bowl of rose petals I'd planned to strew across the bedspread. The champagne in the ice bucket I'd rented from the liquor store. I thought of the "caramelized pecan apple pie" I bought at HEB. It took an hour to cook the frozen pie and I'd only put it in the oven a half hour ago. I'd also picked up the HEB store brand "1905 vanilla ice cream" to top it. Hot apple pie with ice cream is Judy's favorite dessert, and it was one of the few things I could cook.
For a few precious seconds I was distraught that she'd ruined my surprise for her. This was a big day for us. I had learned today that the first house I'd designed had won a Frank Lloyd Wright prize! For an architect that's like... like winning the Nobel Prize!
I'd debated announcing the prize at a family dinner, but I'd decided I wanted to make my announcement to Judy alone, make it the start of a romantic weekend before we again started the very un-sexy process of the fertility treatments. With all the business the prize would generate we should be able to afford the very best. I hoped Judy would be delighted.
So, the twins were with my folks on one of their weekend RV trips to sightsee. I had told them I'd have big news when we all went out for dinner Sunday night.
I heard the garage door activate to close, but Judy shouldn't be here yet. My long denied suspicions formed ranks and began a brutal assault on both my head and my heart. While my gut had been telling me she was having an affair, my heart continued to deny it.
What do I really know?
I asked myself.
Her recent habit of going straight to the hot tub when she got home on Friday started about the time of the late flights. She wouldn't even change into a bathing suit first, she'd just hop in wearing her bra and panties. She called it "Momma's come down time." I now felt sure it was a terrible play on words; Judy had always been clever that way.
Since the late flights began, we never make love on Fridays when she comes home. She's too tired from work. But before the late flights began, when she arrived only a couple hours earlier, she practically attacked me when she got home from Dallas. If I hadn't been so pleasantly shocked, I would asked her about it. Before those Fridays, I could count on the fingers of one hand the times she'd initiated sex, and still have fingers and a thumb left over. Yet for over a month, she'd barely waited until the girls were down.
After she'd started the late flights, it never happened again. She was still as responsive as ever when I wanted to fool around, but never on Fridays. Of course that could make sense after putting in an eighteen hour day... but...
Her prattle about work had changed too. So had our social life. When she first started working, we frequently went to small gatherings with her co-workers, and she would rave about how wonderful her boss was. I remembered being jealous when I kept hearing about his incredible business acumen, or when I listened to her drone on and on about his resemblance to Sean Connery, in his prime, of course. Then about three or four months ago, she stopped talking about him, and we stopped seeing her co-workers. I remember being relieved because my own hectic schedule left me too drained to enjoy the evenings out. Now, I was certain it she changed because of a more sinister reason.
As the reasons continued to percolate, the most damning of all surfaced. I couldn't remember the last time she'd told me she loved me. The last time she'd given me one of her loving pecks on the cheek or and unsolicited hug. Judy had always been a demonstrative woman, and now she wasn't. At least not with me!
I froze mid-thought. I wanted to scream my denial. Judy, my Judy, the woman who taught me the difference between making love and fucking, the only woman I'd ever made love to, couldn't be about to walk in soiled from her lover's bed! That image threatened to overwhelm me. Then she called out, "Matt, where are you? I'm so glad to be home!" Her voice sounded so normal, her tone just didn't fit the mental image I'd formed.
I shook my head, it couldn't be, not my Judy, maybe I'd been looking at the wrong flight. Or maybe the plane had made up the time somehow.
In three strides I was at the computer in our bedroom. I hit the escape button and the screen saver cleared. I clicked the refresh button. There, displayed on the screen, was her flight number with the notation. It was going to be another half hour before it landed! I looked back at our bed, rumpled from where I'd been lying, and for a second I wanted to run away. I wanted to retreat back to the land of denial, but I'm not made that way. The question was in the open now and I had to have an answer.
Tumbling down the stairs, I knew I wasn't speaking, but I felt a guttural sound forming deep in my throat. When I got to the enclosed deck Judy had already shed her blouse and was unzipping her slacks. I came up behind her and grabbed her in a rough bear hug.
"Matt, please you know how tired I am when I get back, let me relax until tomor..." As I began to push my hand into her panties she began to squirm in my arms.
"No Matt, maybe later... NO MATT! She was squirming harder but as my hand worked its way toward her thatch she became frantic. Twisting violently and with surprising strength, she burst free and shouted, "DAMN IT. I SAID NO!" She stood there panting from the effort and glaring at me. I moved toward her, my intention clear. Her eyes got very big and she said in a quiet voice that stopped me in my tracks. "No Matt, not this way. I won't let you find out this way."
I don't think I'd actually processed what I was doing until that second. Those thirteen words, left me as pole-axed as a bull at a slaughter house. I was as surely in medical shock as if she'd shot me. I looked at her and... I felt nothing. I couldn't understand it. I knew my world had just been destroyed yet I felt nothing. I was preternaturally calm. I tried to feel something, anything, but there was nothing there.
In a voice so calm I had trouble believing it was mine I said, "You wouldn't do this to us unless you loved him. Did you ever love me?"