WHEN WERE MARRIED - BOOK ONE - THE LONG FALL

FOUR LITTLE WORDS Part 3

If she had looked up then, I know she would have known and the game would have been over and our lives would have gone very differently. Because my eyes flooded with tears as I realized the shit that our marriage had become while I was too blind to see it happening in front of me. If she had looked me in the eye then she would have known something was terribly wrong and I would have told her the truth about what I was thinking and our marriage would have changed forever- one way or other.

But she didn't and I was able to squelch the emotions and quickly wipe my eyes with my free hand.

She kept her face tightly against the back of my hand and kissed it again. Without looking at me, she said, "I'm sorry for saying it that way, Bill. You know I love you. You're the only man in my life. I love you more now than when we married. You're the father of my children. This is crazy. It was just a slip of the tongue and it didn't mean anything."

But I couldn't take my prosecutor hat off. I wondered why she wouldn't look at me when she professed her undying love. And I found myself listening to and weighing her words, her tone. I'd listened to thousands of depositions and thousands of witnesses on witness stands. And I found the professional side of my mind, not the husband, weighing her words.

And over and over, my mind went back to the same question. It told me that when she said, "When we were married," she was talking in the past tense. That meant in the present tense, in the now, we weren't married. At least in her mind. Or was it that she simply didn't WANT to be married to me anymore. Or was she planning to make herself un-married in the near future? Was a divorce in the offing?

Which inevitably led to the question: was she simply tired of me and ready to toss me in the garbage and make a new life for herself with another man? Or had she already found my replacement? Was she fucking another guy right now? Was that why our sex life was infrequent, so boring, so bland, so..vanilla. Was that why we had been mom and dad a hundred times more than we'd been lovers, sex partners.

Of course, a part of me kept telling me this whole train of thought was stupid. She had just mixed up her words. Tomorrow morning things would be back to normal and in a day or two I'd laugh at my own paranoia. I had simply been a prosecutor too many years looking deep into the worst of humanity, and it colored the way I looked at everything, even my wife and my marriage.

I wanted to believe that, but everything felt...wrong. It was a simple mistake, but why had she reacted the way she had? If it was nothing she'd simply have laughed it off, went back to her reading and teased me about taking it the wrong way. But she hadn't. She had acted worried, disturbed and now she was acting in an unusually loving manner.

She let my hand go and put the magazine on the drawer by her side of our king-sized waterbed. She reached up and turned off the nightlight on her side and told me, "Turn the light off, honey." As I reached over to my right to turn off the light on my side I saw her stand up out of the corner of my eye and I held off turning off the light.

By the time I had rolled back to her the robe had dropped and she was stepping out of her panties. Her heavy breasts had fallen with age and gravity, but they were still incredibly swollen and juicy melons even with the nipples pointing down at a 45-degree angle. But I lost focus on my favorite part of her when my eyes drifted down to her pussy.

I couldn't understand what I was looking at first. I found myself looking for the golden fuzz that surrounded her vagina, but it was gone. It was as smooth as baby's bottom. Just the pink of her outer lips and a hint of the red interior. After a minute I realized she had shaved down there. Gotten rid of all her public hair. Why, and for whom, I wondered. I had never suggested it. I'd heard about it from friends, married and bachelor, and it might have been nice but it was never anything I would have brought up. Not in recent years, anyway.

She looked at me, read the expression on my face, and said with a timid smile, "Do you like it? A lot of the girls at the school, especially the younger and single ones, told me this is really hot and men love it."

I just looked at her for a moment, and then I couldn't stop myself from saying, "I bet they do. Have you gotten any compliments?"