Michael - His Life

This is a work of fiction.

No real person is in this story.

The inspiration for this story came from a trip I made to Scotland this year to visit that beautiful country and research some of my family background.

My own forefathers fought at the Battle of Culloden, sadly, on the losing side.

Notwithstanding that initial defeat, the warrior tradition runs deep in my family, so it got me thinking.

Towards the end of my trip, I was on a train to Glasgow from Edinburgh and noticed a beautiful woman, in her early thirties, travelling by herself.

Just before the train arrived in Glasgow, she finished the drink and snack she had purchased, put away her book that she had been reading, brushed her hair and checked her lip gloss and then took her wedding and engagement rings off and put them in a zipped compartment of her bag.

When she arrived at the station, she was met by a man.

They embraced and kissed, he took her overnight bag and they went their way, holding hands.

Was she coming home?

Probably not, since she had removed her rings before arriving in Glasgow.

Where was her husband? Back in Edinburgh?

Who was she meeting? A lover?

Only she has the answers to all these questions.

But it all made me think about infidelity and how it takes place.

If you like this story, let me know.

Spelling and grammatical errors are mine.

Since I'm my own editor, I rely on Microsoft Word to help me there.

I appreciate constructive comments, but if you just want to personally insult me, I will delete your comment.

I hope you enjoy the story.

**********

The Start

Michael

Hello, I'm Michael Stuart. I used to live in Washington, DC, in the suburb of Georgetown. I work (or rather worked) for a three-letter federal government agency. My official title is that of 'Policy Administrator,' that's just a way of saying that I do whatever task I'm given to do. Normally, I'm a fixer. I fix problems. Complex problems that this particular three-letter agency would rather see go away. And go away quietly and not come back. Now don't go thinking I'm a James Bond or Jack Ryan type, I'm not. Those fictional characters are excellent creations to feed the imagination of the public. They're really good creations, and I've seen every Bond movie and Jack Ryan movie and the Amazon series and enjoyed them all. No, I do more mundane things, but all the same, it means that I travel a lot. A lot.

I'm 35 and used to be an Army officer. I got out of the Army a couple of years ago, about a year after I got promoted to Major. I was working in the Pentagon when the three-letter agency came to the Army looking for people with the right qualifications and made several candidates very good offers. I took the offer because I wanted a new challenge.

I was an infantry officer, and the deployments were getting repetitious, and all too often involved dodging IEDs and snipers. Asymmetric warfare is a challenge, but it's pretty much all I've ever known. The battle against our enemies now is very different than it used to be when our fathers and grandfathers served. Now we operate in an environment where we are constantly surrounded by the threat. It makes you paranoid after a while and you start to see an enemy around every corner, even when you're not in your uniform. It was time for me to move on to do something else. I had two choices: either leave the Army or stay and became a lifer; I chose to leave.

My education was in political science. Yes, the social sciences; please don't mock me too much. I wasn't a technician. But I was trained to read, understand, analyze, and think through complex problems and find solutions, communicate the answers, make plans and then to put those plans into action. The army was good at teaching me to use my own innate common sense to find practical solutions, so I always looked for the simplest way to fix something. That was usually the best way.

My education included an undergraduate degree in political science and a master's degree in international relations. Political science is about understanding power and people and the relationship between them. There are many forms of power: political, social, religious, cultural, economic, military, and more. Most of the plays for control involve a mixture of these, but the desire for control, or power, usually is the overarching string that binds it all together. It's what makes us humans as a species so unique and a challenge. Throw in some ego, personal ambition and frequently greed, you sometimes get a war.

I come from a good family that have been successful in the business world. My heritage is Scottish and goes back hundreds of years to the time of the Battle of Culloden where my forefathers fought the British in 1746. My forefathers lost that battle and eventually emigrated to Ireland and then the United States; but the Scottish are still fighting today for independence from the British. They're winning now.

My father, Edward Stuart, is well off, he's a commercial banker, and my older brother, Charles Stuart, is a Wall Street investment banker that is making money, so fast that even he can't keep track of it; or so he says. I know for a fact that he knows where every nickel is all the time. So, I've given my brother part of my military salary to invest for me and without knowing how much I had in my account when I left the army, I was floored when he handed me a financial statement. Holy cripes!

I lived frugally, when I was in the Army, so had put about 20% of my salary into my investment account, so by my simple math, I had put away about $200,000 over the ten-year period. Well, my dear brother had invested well and my meagre nest-egg had become just over $4 million. What the hell? I accused him of all manner of illegal hokey-pokey but at the end of the day was gob-smacked that I was, what I considered to be, rich. Now, my brother was mega-rich, by comparison, but that was another issue and none of my business. It was all obtained legally, so, as the realization of my financial situation settled into my mind, I was very happy. It meant that my wife would be happy when we could buy a nice place to live. Oh yeah, I have a wife.

My wife is Amanda Windsor. She, as you might surmise from her name is of British heritage. I met her at Columbia University when I was attending a summer course there, three years ago, while I was on leave. I was working on my master's degree and there was a visiting professor there teaching a course that I wanted to take. The course was going to be useful to me in the writing of my thesis. So, I took a month off and stayed at the university residence and crammed the course in as quickly as I could.

I met Amanda, who at the time was a third law student, at the library coffee shop. We struck up a friendship and then actually went on a couple of dates for food and barhopping before I had to go back to work at Fort Lewis. We lived at opposite ends of the country so I figured that when I left NYC, I wouldn't likely see her again. I was wrong.

Amanda is tall, about 5'10", slender, long dark brown hair, very good looking and comes from a New York family with a long tradition of creating lawyers and money. My relationship to her was fleeting and from what little she told me, her family would not likely be terribly impressed with a soldier as a mate for her. So, I managed my expectations and at the conclusion of the course, we exchanged e-mail and cellphone numbers, said my goodbyes and got back to work.

Amanda wasn't a prude by any stretch of the imagination, and we had sex a few times during the month. It was intense, sheet tangling, sweaty, and really, really, fantastic. Trying to squeeze in sex with a hot woman, all the while trying not to waste my time and a lot of my own money with the course; well, you can see that I hadn't planned on forming any lasting relationships. My plan was, as we say on operations, 'get in, get out, and don't muck about.'

Amanda was studying environmental law. It was a growing field, what with global warming about to doom our planet, and many governments ignoring the effects of our collective stupidity. If the people of planet earth didn't wake up soon, there wasn't going to be a place to live. We needed to make big changes to the way that we lived, but that was costly, and as we all know, it's about the money. It's about power; money is power on planet earth.

When Amanda graduated, she went to work for a firm in NYC, Woodward-Johnson-Goldstein, or something like that. Her brother, Emmett, was a lawyer at the same firm, but in a different city. She worked for one of the senior lawyers for the year after she graduated so that she could get through the Bar Exam and be licensed to practice law in New York State. It was the normal path for new lawyers.

Let's go back in time for a few minutes as I explain some pertinent detail. What I hadn't planned after my short summer course, in NYC at Columbia, was for Amanda to call me.

It was early October, after I was back at work, I was getting ready for a short deployment out of Fort Lewis to Australia. I was part of the group that was planning a series of military training exercises that would train the military staffs of other partner nations to work with the US. It was as boring as dog shit but had to be done if the US Army were to operate in a multi-national setting. Our allies that had professional military training, like Australia, Canada, and the UK were a pleasure to operate with, but there were lots of challenges when it came to working with some of the military forces of other nations that were formerly led by regimes that worked to suppress the people, not defend them. Go figure.

So, it came as a big surprise when my cell phone chirped one night and when I looked at it, I didn't recognize the number. I figured that it was just a scammer calling to tell me that my computer was giving off errors and if I would turn over control of it to them, and pay them $200, they would be happy to fix it. Hmmm. I let it go to voicemail. Later when I checked my messages, I was very surprised to hear Amanda's voice.

"Michael, it's Amanda. I wanted to call to talk to you. How are you? I might be in Seattle in two weeks, so I wanted to see if you had time to get together. You likely are busy and have some young thing in your bed so if you can't that's okay. Give me a call when you get a chance. You have my number. Bye."

I was really surprised to hear from her. I wasn't expecting that our time together at Columbia would result in anything other than a nice memory. I had nothing to lose by returning her call. I didn't have a new woman in my bed, no real time for that just now. So, I called her back.

"Hi, it's Michael. Your message said that you might be coming to Seattle in a while. What's the occasion?"

"Hey Michael, the firm that I'm interning for is sending me there to meet with some of the bigger companies in Washington state to talk about pollution laws and ways that industry can reduce the shit they put in the environment. The big plane manufacturers are trying to be leaders in the push for fewer emissions coming out the exhausts of their airplanes, so it makes sense to get them to influence other big emitters in the northwest. If you have time would you like to get together? "

My brain did a fast search of my schedule for the next month and after remembering the dates I was going to be in Australia I answered, "I would love to see you. Just send me the time you are free, and I'll find something interesting for us to do. Bring hiking clothes." We talked some more until the pauses in the conversation got a bit awkward and then I said that I had to go.

Two days after I got back from Canberra, I had arranged to meet Amanda at her hotel in Seattle. Seattle is about 40 miles north of Fort Lewis and while it's not that far, the city traffic made it about a 90-minute drive. I decided that I would take a hotel room for the night since I didn't want to drive back late at night after having a couple of drinks. I took an overnight bag with me and planned to be up at 5 AM in time to drive back and get to my office. I packed my ACUs so that I could get dressed in the morning and not have to stop off at my apartment before going in to work. I had a tiny, very sparsely furnished apartment, close to the base. It was all I needed since I was never home.

We had a great night out in Seattle. Amanda had never been to the city before, so I took her on the walking tour of the downtown and waterfront area that is popular with the tourists. After, we went to a seafood place for dinner and then we walked back to her hotel. It was getting late and I didn't know what her schedule was so I didn't have any expectations that we might have sex. I was surprised when she invited me to her room.

"C'mon big guy, I need you tonight." That was all she really had to say, and I was convinced to spend the night with her.

"You must have a boyfriend, back in NYC, don't you?"

"What if I do? Doesn't mean that I don't want you to me fuck me."

I didn't get much sleep that night. Amanda's a very sexual woman who likes to take the lead in the bedroom. Sex for her is first a recreational activity, and second a way to express desire and affection. Some might confuse that for love. I wasn't in love with her and she wasn't in love with me. That didn't lessen my enjoyment of her. She knows what to do to make a man want her. Her eyes speak volumes and the curve of her mouth, her naughty grin, told me that she was ready to have fun. And we did. When we got in her hotel room it was if she was possessed by her need to fuck right then and there. It took her all of ten seconds to get naked and start ripping at my clothes to do the same.

My lips were on hers and our tongues were duelling for dominance. I could still taste the faint essence of the wine that we had but her own taste was mesmerizing. The feel of her breasts against my chest, and her ass, as my right hand grabbed at her delicious flesh. She was just how I remembered her from our brief time in NYC.

I guided her back to the bed and pushed her down on top of the duvet. Then I jumped on her to resume tasting her flesh, running my mouth to her neck and shoulders and then down to her breasts. Amanda's nipples were rock hard and I sucked on them enjoying the feel of them in my mouth. Some guys are tit men, some are ass men, some are leg guys. Me, I like the whole picture. For me, a woman must have the right proportions. Amanda fit that bill to the letter. I gently bit down on her nipples and then worked my way south to her navel and then down her abdomen to her pussy.

Amanda was ready for me to assault her clit with my lips and tongue and spread her long legs wide to give me total access to her clit and pussy lips. I sucked, nibbled, tongued and sucked some more. I coaxed her clit from behind the tiny hood that protected it from attack. My plan was a full-frontal assault with the objective her complete surrender. My plan worked. Amanda took only a few minutes to get to her first orgasm. It started deep in her vagina and worked its way outward to her clit and then up her body to her head. She's a very vocal woman and doesn't hold back when she's orgasming. Her entreaties to keep at her, and then to fuck her hard, had me rock hard and ready to score the final victory. I moved up her body, kissing her as I went, and when the head of my cock met with the lips of her vagina, I was ready to slide inside her and give her my best.

The final assault for round one was, for me, something that I both needed and was hesitant about. I unloaded my sperm into her womb with a ferocity that surprised even me. It had been months since I last had sex like this and this was a new high for me. The feeling that I had as I shot my load in her was indescribable. I thought that my head was going to explode, the big head that is; the other one further south had already shot-off like a howitzer.

We repeated this twice more during the night. When 5 AM came around I was exhausted but had to get dressed in my combat uniform and head south to work. Amanda had never seen me in uniform before and I could see by the look on her face that she was both impressed that the man that took her last night was a warrior and that she was surprised by that to some degree.

Her comment caught me a bit off-guard, "I've never seen you in an Army uniform before, you look...different, I like it."

"Hmmm, I wear it almost every day of the week. On weekends my uniform is a bit different."

"What do you wear on the weekends?"

"Whatever I want, but normally I only wear my tuxedo on Saturday night." I tried to say it with a deadpan expression, but she knew then that I was playing with her. I said, "Seriously, my hobbies dictate what I wear when I'm not working. Okay, I gotta go, duty calls."

I kissed her goodbye, thanked her for calling me and told her that I had a wonderful night and that I hoped she had a great night, too. Those eyes and that smile gave me the answer I was looking for. As I headed for my ride, I quietly thought to myself 'I hope that Amanda is using birth control because with the amount I came, I might have started something, last night, that we might not want.' I made a note to myself to text her later to say thank-you again for a wonderful night. Maybe even send flowers when she was back in NYC.

**********

The next few months were busy for me with another two trips to Australia and lots of small assignments to keep me very busy. In addition, I had started to take flying lessons with the local flying club located at the Air Force Base next door to Fort Lewis. I had finished up the classroom work and started the flying instruction part. The flying part is in a tiny single engine airplane, a Cessna 172. That airplane is almost impossible to crash if you followed the basics of powered flight. Checklists are key to any successful flight and I was determined to get a private pilot's license before the end of the year. The Army had taught me how to parachute out of airplanes, now I wanted to learn how to fly them.

I had sent a birthday card and more flowers to Amanda since I did know when her birthday was, December 21

st

. She had divulged that tidbit of personal information to me when I was in NYC earlier for that course at Columbia. I filed it away for future reference and was glad I did; women love small things that let them know that you're thinking of them. Besides, a sappy card was cheap, that and a stamp to mail it. I didn't put a return name or address on it just in case she had that boyfriend in NYC, and he saw the card from me. No point in being the cause of problems.

Flying lessons were under the category of fun for me. I also liked to mountain-bike in my spare time. I drive a Jeep Wrangler, the 4-door model, and on the back, I put a bike rack that slides into the trailer hitch. The Jeep's a kick-ass vehicle that will go just about any place I try to take it. It's no armoured fighting vehicle but it's the next best thing for the money. My other toy is a BMW adventure motorcycle. It's fitted out with a few items like heated grips, panniers, a GPS system and a helmet communications system if I take a passenger on the back. It's a great bike and I don't get a chance to ride it enough. Owning my own airplane someday is on my bucket list.

The next spring promotion from Captain to Major brought a nice raise in pay but also a lot more responsibility. I was sent to work in the Pentagon in the Army Contingency Planning Department. That's kind of a 'what if' job. The idea was to create a plan for just about every problem or situation that the Army might face and then figure out what to do about it. That included manpower, weaponry and equipment, and anything else that we figured might be needed to deal with the problem. It was while I was working in that job that I was approached with an offer to go to work for that previously mentioned three-letter agency. They liked the work that I did for the Army and so they wanted me to essentially do the same type of work for them.