This story is the continuation and conclusion to 'Prologue to a Problem,' a short 750-word story entry from several months ago. Please read it if you haven't, as it is essential for introducing the characters and plot for this story.
In all my stories a conflicted female main character engages in a torrid affair, but in none of my stories does she initiate it. I tried once to write a story where the wife was the instigator, but I eventually put the project aside as I could not find the words.
I have no data, but I wonder if that is largely true in real life, where the cheating wife's descent into another man's bed is mostly unplanned and opportunistic.
As it relates to the wife's cheating, in my story 'FS-The Details Matter,' the husband knew about the infidelity. It played out in front of his very eyes. In 'I Need a New Plaything,' the husband never knew. In this story, the husband knows deep down, but has no proof. I think I feel sorry for this husband most of all.
Enjoy.
Chapter 1
The silence was indeed awkward.
It was also short lived, as Ann's phone lit up with an incoming call.
"Oh my God. Judy how are you! I've been meaning to call but we've been so busy."
Ann spent the next few minutes of the drive home catching up with Judy, an old friend from college. The call ended with the promise to get together soon.
"Who was that?" Phil asked.
"Do you remember my sophomore college roommate Judy? She was at our wedding."
Phil's face remained blank.
Ann persisted. "She's a little taller than me. Striking features. Long blonde hair. Beautiful. She was very popular at Oklahoma. All the boys wanted to go out with her. I was always enamored with her and, to be honest, also a little jealous."
Still nothing from Phil.
"Really? You don't remember her? She got married right out of college. She married Steve Johnson, a swimmer at OU?"
"She's not ringing a bell," Phil said.
Phil, however, was lying. He remembered Judy very well. Phil started dating Ann winter of senior year at Oklahoma. By this time Ann was no longer rooming with Judy. For some reason that he couldn't remember, he and Ann went separate ways for spring break that year. Phil road tripped with some fraternity brothers and Ann spent the week with Judy at her parent's lake house on Lake Texoma, a large man-made reservoir that straddles the border between Texas and Oklahoma.
Rumors of what happened at the lake reached Phil's ears the moment he was back in Norman. It was supposedly an epic party with lots of drinking and lots of hook ups. Phil pressed Ann hard for details back then, but she demurred.
Yes, there were a lot of people and yes people got drunk, Phil remembers Ann telling him. But no admission of sex.
Denials aside, that party gnawed at Phil ever since. Maybe at the time it was the insecurity of being a relatively new boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe it was the insecurity given Ann's looks. She was petite, 5' 4", slim, rich brunette hair, beautiful brown eyes, fun loving, and always up for and adventure. Maybe it was the insecurity of knowing that most of the rumors swirled around the OU swim team. Phil at 5' 8" was an engineer and an occasional golfer. Never in his life had anyone mistaken him for a serious athlete or, as in the case of college swimmers, thought of him as a gorgeous male specimen.
Whatever the reason, Phil never shook the deep unease he felt when he thought back on that spring break. In the weeks that followed his return from spring break he couldn't think of anything else. Needing to know what happened that week consumed him. And yet, he was stymied. Despite all his efforts, he couldn't get any firsthand information. The only person he knew that was there was Ann, and she wasn't talking.
So eventually, he dropped it and would have let it be if it hadn't been for the fact that it came up on two separate occasions long after college.
The first was his bachelor party. He was with his friends in Scottsdale playing golf and drinking. One of his groomsmen knew Ann had been at the party and drunkenly brought it up one night. That spark was all it took to get his friends going, with each sharing some half-remembered, tall-tale rumor of the mythical "Lake Texoma orgy." The teasing was good natured, and admittedly made-up as none of the young men had been present at the party, but for Phil it was like ripping a scab off an almost healed wound. He knew his friends were busting his chops, but he also knew that inside salacious gossip was often a kernel of truth.
He desperately wanted to know what happened that week, and for some reason Ann's reluctance to talk about it, and her unwavering insistence that nothing happened, made things worse not better.
The second occasion was several years ago in Dallas and much more troubling than the first. His electrical engineering firm did work across the Midwest and southwest and had offices in Omaha, Dallas, and Phoenix. At the firm's annual meeting in Dallas, he had found himself at the bar after the company dinner with John, a colleague that worked out of the Dallas office. John was about Phil's age and had swum collegiately at SMU. When he learned Phil went to OU, he said he had never been to Norman but was friends with some people who swam there.
He also commented that OU girls were hot and easy. To support his contention, he said one of his OU swim buddies had invited him to Lake Texoma for a spring break party that was, as he put it, "just sick." He said he was only there for one night but had slept with one girl and had seriously made out with a second one. "It was nuts," he had said. "And, if I had stayed, I am sure I could have fucked every girl there," Phil vividly remembered him saying.
When Phil got home from his trip, he had attempted to good-naturedly bring up the party with Ann. He didn't mention his colleague by name, but he did say that over drinks folks were swapping spring break stories and he had told them how his wife had so much fun on her spring break that he wasn't even allowed to know about it.
Ann didn't take the bait. In fact, she was perturbed and told him as much, "I don't know what you think I did that week, but I'm getting tired of having to defend myself. For the last time, nothing happened so please drop it" she had said as she turned her back on him and left the room.
Phil was no athletic god, but he was an excellent engineer, and he knew instinctively when things did not add up.
Something had happened at that lake party, of this Phil was certain. Yet throughout their entire marriage, Ann refused to tell him what that something was.
And that, in a nutshell, was Phil's dilemma: believe Ann, confront her and call her a liar, or push all his personal torment way down in his psyche and leave it be. Up to this point, Phil had chosen the latter.
But now that wasn't possible. Now, all these years later, Judy's call to Ann ripped off his protective seal, and brought all the lingering doubt Phil felt towards Ann flooding back. All his past anxiety, fear, and jealously was rapidly bubbling to the surface, not five minutes after Ann told him the only reason she wouldn't cheat was because she was busy and didn't want the stress of potentially being caught.
