Michael was sitting in his patio taking in some of the cool night breeze and moonlight when I pulled into his driveway. I got out the car and walked over to where he was sitting handing him his car keys as I sat down.
"So is Sharon cheating on you?"
I paused before answering Michael's question. I could not say yes with any degree of certainty but from what I had seen with my own eyes I could not give him a definitive no either. My silence alerted him to the possibility that something negative had occurred and that I had seen something that had disturbed to me.
"She went to our favourite restaurant with one of the overseas directors of her company and from what I saw she was making it very easy for the man to flirt with her."
I was deliberately vague not wishing to taint Sharon's good reputation at this early stage of the game. I was also embarrassed to tell Michael that my wife had taken off her clothes in a car being driven by a strange man and that I had witnessed the man kissing Sharon on her lips and had seen him run his hand seductively over her voluptuous ass.
"Well that does not sound too bad if all you caught her doing was flirting. The first time I followed my slut of an ex-wife I caught her red handed being fucked in the back seat of a car that my hard earned money had bought."
I felt fortunate that my night had not turned out like that. Michael had acted very calmly in the face of Margaret's indiscretion. I doubted very much that I would have been as controlled as Michael had I witnessed the stranger fucking Sharon in the back seat of the BMW he was driving or anywhere else as a matter of fact.
I have gotten into physical confrontations for far less than that before and I was certain my night would have gone far differently had I witnessed Sharon engaged as Margaret had been.
"The man was all over her and she was eating up the attention he was giving her."
My friendship with Michael went back about three decades so he knew me almost as well as I knew myself. Michael understood that if he wanted specifics about what I had seen he would have to ask me specific questions.
"So did you actually see him touch her breasts and ass or did he run his hand between her legs?"
That was as specific as it got so I had no choice but to give Michael an accurate answer to his query.
"Truth is I don't know if the man touched her breasts or if he fingered her pussy but I did see him run his hand over her ass and he kissed her on the lips when they entered the elevator at the hotel."
Michael shook his head gravely as he mentally weighed the information I had given him.
"The old people have a saying that if you see mice running around in the day there is a good possibility that rats will be running around in the night."
I understood perfectly what Michael was telling me. Being touched on the ass and kissing on the lips were very intimate acts. Those two acts by themselves did not prove that Sharon had spread her legs for the stranger tonight or at any time in the past but it did suggest that there was a strong possibility that she was open to the idea.
"Outside of actually catching her in the act you can't be certain that she is fucking this man but there is definitely something going on between them."
I was inclined to agree with Michael that my wife had crossed the line with her dinner companion. I was beginning to regret my decision not to have seen my stake out through to the end. I had abandoned my mission without achieving my mission objective which was to discover what Sharon was up to.
A quick glance at my watch suggested that there might still be time to go back and check on my wife and her companion. The risk of my being caught spying on Sharon and the stranger would be greater however since I would have to return to the scene unaware of their location.
"I am such a pussy. I should have seen it through to the end one way or the other. I guess I will never know what happened now unless she tells me."
Michael looked at me with a great measure of disbelief.
"Don't count on her telling you shit. Women know how to conceal their dirt. They are like the government when it comes to hiding facts they don't want in the public domain."
I had just watched the movie 'He is not that into you' and a scene flashed into my mind. A woman was giving an account of the philandering habits of her two husbands. The first one had been very careless and she had caught him easily. The second one was far more discrete and she only found out about his affairs after his death.
The punch line in the woman's monologue was that the real master of cheating in her marriages was in fact her. She confessed to having numerous lovers and boyfriends and never once being caught by any of her husbands.
Sharon travelled so frequently that if she wanted to cheat it would be so easy for her. Even in my unemployed state it was impossible for me to jump on a plane to accompany her on her numerous trips outside the island. I was a little surprise that she had been so careless with her companion.
She could have met him outside of Barbados and I would have been totally ignorant of the meeting. Anonymity is another country would have given them all the freedom they needed to explore whatever sexual fantasies they had involving each other.
In spite of what I had seen I still had a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that there was more to what I had seen than met the eye. I just could not bring myself to believe that I had misread Sharon so badly and that she was no better than Margaret with respect to honesty and forthrightness.