It's strange the things that you miss. For Sara Markham, it had been the coffee. Her husband had always made better coffee than her, and she had looked forward to drinking it every morning. She wasn't sure what his secret was, but it always turned out perfectly each time. The aroma that had filled their kitchen had been her wake up call lifting her out of sleep. In the seven years they had been together, Sara had lost track of how many cups of his coffee she had enjoyed.
She wouldn't taste it again.
Sara sat the steaming cup in her hand aside still wincing from the bitter flavor on her tongue. Kyle might have been a wizard with ground roast, but she most certainly was not. The sunlight shining through the small kitchen window was too bright by half making her eyes ache, and she slammed the blinds down with a loud crack. Her bare feet made only the smallest whisper of a sound as she walked back over to her dining room table picking up the envelope for the tenth time since it had arrived the day before, and once again sitting it down without opening it.
In her mind to see it all in black and white would make it real, and she wasn't ready for that, not yet.
What had her mom said to her on her wedding day?
The memory was hazy now, but something about being careful not to depend too much on Kyle to be there. Her mother had never been a Kyle Markham fan, so the comment hadn't been that big of a surprise even coming on what was supposed to be the happiest day of Sara's life. Sara had ignored her mom's doom and gloom. The ceremony had been perfect. In her mind, she could picture it so clearly like it had all happened just the day before not many years ago.
The first year had been wonderful, precisely as she had imagined it would be. She and Kyle had been happy and content in their life. Well, at least that was what Sara had believed. As it turned out, Kyle was leading a double life, one that he kept carefully hidden from his new spouse. Sara had spent years being blissfully unaware of her husband's extra-curricular activities. This was especially annoying in light of the fact that she was a school teacher, and typically very adept at spotting a lie.
Who knows how long it might have continued if it hadn't been for one innocent phone call. Sara had reached out to the wife of Kyle's best friend, Mark, to help her arrange a surprise party for Kyle's upcoming thirty-fifth birthday. Kyle and Mark were supposed to have been out on a fishing trip, so Sara thought it was the perfect time to sit down with Mark's wife, Janine, and make plans. There was only one problem. When Janine had answered the phone, she had no idea what Sara was talking about at all. Mark wasn't with Kyle fishing. He had just run up to the store for groceries, and Janine assured Sara that he had not even seen Kyle that weekend.
Sara had cut off the conversation staring numbly into space.
Where was her husband?
Why had he lied about the trip with Mark?
That one phone call had started a boulder rolling downhill that every day after seem to pick up more stray rocks along with it until Sara felt that she was going to be buried under a deluge of lies. It turned out that her husband had been concealing a whole plethora of sins from her. A simple check of his computer had revealed profiles on a number of popular dating sites. Then she had started to turn the house upside down and discovered receipts for things they had never bought, souvenirs hidden away from trips they had never taken.
The notes had been concealed in a manila envelope beneath a pile of old fishing magazines in Kyle's desk. Sara had sat on the floor her face a mask of disgust and anger as she read through letters and cards thanking her husband for the hours of sexual pleasure he had given to women whose names were foreign to her. She had read and cried and then read some more not quite able to make herself stop. By the time Kyle returned from his trip on Sunday he had found his bags backed in the entryway.
The crazy thing was he hadn't even tried to deny it or make up some story to save himself. In the end, he tried to lay the blame on Sara. He spouted off a laundry list of ways that she had been inadequate as a partner, or even more to the point as a lover. Kyle had been vague about why he had not come to her with his problems in an effort to fix things.
If he had indeed been so unhappy shouldn't he have at least said something to her about it?
It seemed a reasonable thing to ask, but Kyle hadn't been able to provide an answer. The truth was it had never been about her at all.
The ensuing months had brought more revelations to Sara to the point that she began to go numb after a while.
How could she have been so wrong about the man she married?
The humiliation of discovering that her husband had been a closet sex addict had done little to assuage her guilt. It seemed to Sara that she should have known. She should have seen the signs long before she did.
Sara had watched her husband walk away down the winding sidewalk that rainy Sunday five months earlier to get in his car not fully comprehending that her marriage was over. The envelope on the table would make that official. She picked it up once more turning it over in her hands feeling the weight of it. Then again she dropped it on the table.
"Not yet..." she thought absently.
The ringing of her phone jerked her out of her dark thoughts.
"Hello?"
"Sara. It's Marie. I was wondering if you could give me a ride to school this morning my car won't start."
"Oh...Yeah...I guess, Marie, give me a few minutes o.k.?"
"Sure, and thanks you're a lifesaver!"
School...
Sara had almost forgotten that she was supposed to teach that day. It seemed a bit ridiculous in hindsight, but perhaps she could be forgiven in light of all that had happened to her in the past months. She made a beeline for her bedroom throwing off her robe and hunting in her top drawer for a bra and panties. The reflection of her in the mirror made her stop for just a moment. She stood staring at the naked body that her husband had rejected.
It wasn't all that bad, was it?
Sara was no college kid anymore, and the years had taken a small toll on her curvy figure. She had gained a pound or two here and there on her thirty-six-year-old frame, nothing egregious, but the extra weight had added a few more curves to the picture. It helped that she was a tall woman close to five-foot-ten inches giving her more real estate to spread things around. Her hands strayed momentarily to the substantial bosoms that rested on her chest. She lifted them a bit remembering a time when they had stood a hair firmer than they did now. They were still holding up pretty well all things considered. A bit larger than a good-sized cantaloupe, each fair-skinned mound was capped with a wide, light pink areola of bumpy, soft flesh. The center of each sported a thick nipple about as big as a sewing thimble, the flesh a bit darker than the surrounding skin.
Sara's fingers moved downward toward a stomach that was still mostly flat then further south to the curly, dark blond hairs of her Venus mound that nearly matched the ash-blond hair on her head. She had thought about shaving the thick nest of hair, but Kyle had always told her he liked it.
"I wonder if his girlfriends are shaved bare?" she whispered.
Could that have been the problem all along?
She shook her head laughing at herself, "This is silly."
The smiling face looking back at her in the mirror didn't show the years as much as its owner probably imagined it did. Sara still had smooth, youthful skin with just a few wrinkles around her green eyes. Her generous mouth was filled with rows of perfectly even white teeth, and if she had to criticize anything, it would have been her nose which was perhaps a bit too big for the space it occupied on her long, narrow face.
