Just Once...i Don't Thin So

In April 2021,

Kalimaxos asked

how readers would complete his open-ended hall pass story, Just Once...If You Don't Mind? To keep my mind clear I didn't read any of the many responses before writing my own (but will afterwards). So I may be telling the same story as other writers, but I've set myself the task of doing it in exactly 750 words. To keep it that short I've written this as the next chapter in

Kalimaxos's story

, so you'll need to read his story first to understand what's going on.

Just Once...I Don't Think So

"So, Rick? What do we do?"

My back fence neighbor, the shared-wife, Leslie Nielsen, had just finished explaining how she was here to fuck my brains out, while my wife Marcy did the same thing with a doctor colleague during a six-week medical mission to South America.

What I did was think. Fast. One thing that had made me successful in Military Intelligence was my combat helicopter experience. Flying Apaches over the sands of Kuwait required taking in loads of information and acting on it immediately. It turned out I could do the same with intelligence, quickly spotting the real dangers and plotting ways past them.

Now I thought I had enough intel to plot my course out of the airspace of a marriage I suddenly found full of dangerous fires.

Leslie took another drink of wine, eyeing me over the rim of her glass.

"You're not interested in taking me up on my offer, are you?"

"No. Especially not the way it's all come about."

She nodded thoughtfully, got to her feet and stepped to the back door. "Good luck, Rick," she said simply before walking that killer ass out of my life.

Shoulda tapped that! But I stood firm against the hypocrisy of fucking Marcy's conscience offering. Besides, it would weaken my case.

I drank more wine as I read Marcy's letter again. I took its contents and the things she'd said to me during our phone call from hell and made my analysis.

- She apparently hadn't cheated on me before, even when I was in Korea.

- However, she felt so strongly that I'd cheated on her, that I "broke [her] heart" and by implication, drove her to this.

o She was right about Diedre Kiel in Iraq, but damn it, I was tired of carrying that guilt. We'd just faced death in a roadside ambush and in the adrenaline rush after, I gave in to temptation. But I didn't touch her again after that one slip.

o If Marcy and Trey had got caught up in some Colombian revolutionary shit and fell into bed together, one time, in the immediate aftermath, I could have got past it. But they didn't. Instead, she was using the cover of their medical mission to give in to Dr. Asshole's advances "by my own choice and free will." The two things were not comparable.

- She'd written that sex with Trey would, "be nothing but a memory when I return." But they'd still be working together in the O.R. where she'd already told me the high pressure led to aggressive flirting. Working together under those conditions wouldn't lead to reliving South America?

- Leslie said Marcy had agreed to me fucking her weeks ago. Why didn't Marcy bring me the idea then? Even Leslie didn't go behind her voyeuristic husband's back, but mine had snuck out of the house without a word.

- Conflating her desire for professional accomplishment with the "icing on the cake" of being able to fuck Trey was bullshit. I was proud of her professional growth and would have gladly supported this trip if it hadn't come under a 4-month shadow of her relationship with Trey. When I deployed, I never asked her to accept that I would also be fucking strangers as part of my reward for going off to save the world.

- Her leaving Leslie to "rock my world" was not going to erase the feeling of betrayal and ongoing lack of trust that would surely dog our marriage from now on.

With the points tallied, the best way ahead was clear.

She'd asked me to walk away without a scene, which was fine with me, except for one point. Her cheating wouldn't affect the split of our property or my military pension, but it could affect the time I had to serve in purgatory. If I filed for divorce due to infidelity, with her letter as proof, I could skip the state-required separation and counseling. With an at-fault divorce, she would have to be served. An asshole would do it at the luggage carousel in the airport, but I figured my guy could just meet her in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in my place.

Course decided, I had one immediate task. It wasn't a call I was eager to make, but it's one I would certainly want to receive if our positions were reversed.

Going to my phone, I called up the contact for Penny and Josh Washington again.