24 hours, 5 years, 10 months(romantic story series)

[romantic_story]

"Oh yea. Works for both men and women, but it usually hit guys hardest. At least that's what Bill and a couple of other guys have told me. After 6 months of being married, your partner doesn't have to treat you as good as before. The honeymoon is over. Living together, it doesn't work that way. It's the marriage that makes the difference, not even living together for a couple of years.

Marriage is different. You move to real life, not courting. They don't love you less, but they don't have to go the extra step. My married girl friends have said that's when they stopped swallowing. The number of blow jobs starts to rapidly diminish too." She chuckled at this one, I groaned. It was true for me too but it started at 3 months.

"Well anyway, he changed. Not a little bit, but a lot. By the time we were married 9 months, he was into verbal tirades. By a year, he slapped me. Apologized for it afterwards and didn't do it again until we were out and that's when Terry and Bill saw it.

"I won't bore you with the interventions we had. His parents, our friends, the counseling. If it wasn't for a LCSW I went to, Genevieve..."

"Gene Hallon?" Marie nodded yes with a surprised look on her face. "Is she still off of Van Buren? I remember she wanted to move her office."

"You know her too?"

"She was helpful in getting me to the point where I could get on with my life. She helped when I showed up in town and then during and after my divorce. Pretty nice lady. You used her too I take it?"

Marie looked at me with something in her eyes. Like a memory or a thought. She physically shook her head to clear it. Marie's determination to finish took back over.

"Well, the short of it. He kept this under control most of his life. But being married didn't allow him enough alone time to continue to keep it under wraps. He needs meds. In our sessions I found out that he tried a series of them. Side effects are awful sometimes. The couple that actually worked for him took away his sex drive. He said in one of our final sessions that he'd rather be fucking and crazy then not fucking at all." She quietly laughed a very sad laugh to herself. "He bolted after that and we filed soon afterward.

"I also used Gene to work out things in my life from this marriage and our near marriage, my fucking around. One of the things I realized was that I've been punishing myself for what I did to you. When I started getting verbally abused, then hit the first time, I thought it was a righteous punishment for me. I wasn't going to do anything about it if it happened again. Only because he did it in front of Bill and Theresa and they pulled me out of there, was I forced to realize what I was doing.

"I haven't been in the dating scene for over a year, and these two good friends of mine tried to fix me up with somebody that they approved of. They even took extra care this time."

She paused a minute and her face now showed real pain. "I have to talk about cheating on you and thinking nothing of it." She screwed up her face with the pain we both knew was coming. "When I said that it was just sex and it meant nothing, I was telling you my truth. It was not the truth for reality, not for the world, not for you, just my twisted truth in the land of pretend.

"I could try to blame this all on Tammy. She was cheating on Jeff for a couple of months. No one would know, it doesn't hurt anybody, all that bullshit. It was exciting for her, and then for me to listen to it.

"I was able to talk with my Dad's mother Rosa a couple of years before she died. She was a very pious woman and a good listener. We talked about what I had done. For some reason she started telling me that she stopped listening to Rush on the radio. This was out of left field and I started wondering if she was starting to lose it. She heard the concern in my voice and asked for a couple of minutes to be patient.

"One day my father, who tends to be not political at all, was over at her apartment when Rush came on. While she was saying the rosary and listening to Rush, he asked her a question. Is this someone that does what Jesus would do and be? Then he stated to actually repeat what Rush was saying and implying. This was not her faith that she was listening to. Her faith kept her going over 5 years after my grandfather died. She said that after hearing so clearly from her son's mouth repeating all the messages Rush was saying, she never listened to Rush again.

[For those of you who would like to get upset about this political/religious issue, this situation actually happened as reported by a friend of mine. Some minor liberties were taken, but the core of what is here is what happened. Get upset about the reality, not about its use in explaining human nature in this story.]

"She told me that it's easy to listen to people and do things that make us feel good, and never question anything about it. My grandmother said that she was addicted to the 'He's got them now' to never hear his whole message. She said that the same thing happened to me.

"I liked the excitement, the thrill of what I was hearing, I never looked at the entire message. I didn't see you, I only saw me. Thank god you didn't marry me. I am so sorry that I have caused so much grief in your life." At that, she started crying again.

I was an afterthought to her, to Gail. I wasn't important enough to be considered as anything. Trust took a back seat to sexual thrills. That's not a marriage. But Marie thinks differently, she's not Gail, just looks like her. It's hard, and not hard to see that the people that we were 5 years ago are not the same people we are today. At least I hope that this is true.

I realized that Marie has been looking directly at my eyes, attempting to see my response to what she said. I understood and smiled, then I chuckled then I began to laugh. I saw Marie getting upset and hurt. She didn't understand. "Marie, before anything more happens, remember, we've both gone to Gene. One of her biggest things in therapy was to get us to completely own what and why we did something.

"When I was getting up to leave at the start of dinner on Wednesday, you immediately let me know what you did. You owned it in front of me, in front of them. You just did it now. You're not pretending, you're real. I haven't gotten the chance to own what I did yet..."

"Yes you have, you said.."

"Not the way I need to. You have. I believe you, I trust what you are saying. I'm laughing because we both learned this from Gene." I stopped a few seconds, "we're on the same page right now, we've connected, we're there. Do you understand that? After 5 years, one dinner and hanging in this back booth in this bar that is starting to get a bit noisy, we're there."

We both stopped talking to understand what I just said. I understood that she wasn't finished. There was no way to be finished at this stage. But she gave it her shot, she gave it from her inner soul. There is always so much more to do and say and ask questions. But I got enough for now. She looked at me and we both understood, and we communicated in silence.

"I guess that it's my turn, isn't it." She nodded and leaned forward on the chair. It was my turn to be honest and put myself on the table like she had. I also had been thinking about it over these years. Not as hard as she did, but still, never the less. It was in the background.

"I got to work that day and the new copiers weren't ready and the client wasn't ready for them either. I fixed one of them and decided to come home for lunch. Driving past our block, I saw two cars in the driveway. Yours and an SUV. I tried to talk myself out of thinking you'd be unfaithful, but knew I had to know." Marie started to cry, she was holding her face in her hands. I stopped talking and waited. I've waited for five years now. I needed to see her face when I told her what she did to me. She used the bandana that I gave her to wipe her eyes. Then she looked back up to me and motioned for me to continue.

"I parked at the back of the shopping center. When I got to the back door, I saw clothes. Your clothes and his clothes over the first floor. I got into the house and to be honest with you, my baseball bat where we hung our coats came into view. Neither of you would have been able to stop me." Her eyes were wide, she never thought that her having 'only sex' could ever lead to injury or even murder.

"I had my phone primed to take pictures. It was all over for us when I saw those clothes. That's when I grabbed the marbles in the vase. If anybody was going to run after me, I was going to make sure they'd be sprawled on the floor or down the stairs. I found your phone, then his. Got them primed for recording you two.

"Just hearing you two go at it was enough to make me sick. Having to watch 10 minutes of it to send out to everybody, I put up with it. You took our future away from me, and I knew that I was going to take both of yours away too."

At this point Marie began to sob and I had to stop. I wasn't stopping to punish her for what she had done, although that ended up being a part of it. I stopped because I needed to tell her, to her face, for her to hear, for me to get it all out. She needed to understand it from my side, to hear it from me. Pain was part of it, not to inflict, but to share for the first time with her. It wasn't to give pain her, it was to share the pain with her. I think we both knew this. I listened to what she had gone through and understood what I had done too. I took a sip of my beer. Unfortunately, all I tasted was bitterness. The bad taste in my mouth overcame everything.

After a few minutes, I began again. "I captured enough video to explain why the wedding was over and went back downstairs. Pulled out the emails that had long email address lists, work emails, family ones and face book too. Set up your phone the same way too. Then I sent them all out, dialed a sex chat line for him and silenced his phone as well as possible. Yours I kept, after all, I owned it.

"Then I went into the basement and waited for you two to leave. Called people up and moved all your stuff onto the driveway. I had some friends go through all your communications.

"You learned all of this from Tammy, didn't you?" She weakly nodded to me. "I had somebody go through all your stuff and when Jeff came to pick up your things, we told him and gave him some of those pictures she sent of her and her lover to you. He thought it was happening, hoped it wasn't.

"I had said goodbye to your father earlier that day. I was shutting down but I was smart enough to keep good people around me. I didn't do anything stupid. Stupid is defined as something to go to jail for. I realized that I was going to leave town, leave this whole fucking mess behind me. I knew from my job that I could transfer out. Barry's wife was a realtor and I knew I could get rid of my house real quick, the market was hot and the school system wasn't so bad.

I paused and took another gulp of the beer. It still tasted bitter to me. I knew I had to continue talking about the important things now.

"You have no idea how much your betrayal hurt. How could it be just sex? How could my being, my love, my hopes and dreams for both of us be so worthless to you? Maybe there are people out there who don't think twice about sleeping around. They're in their own world. That's not my world. I've been on my own since I was 18 when my last parent died. I wanted to make a new life, a life with somebody who would have my back, and I'd have theirs.

[romantic_story]

"This is who I am and will be till I die. Even with Bill, we've been good friends for over a year and a half. I'd go to hell and back for him if he'd ask, or if he'd need it and wouldn't ask. That trust in another made your betrayal so devastating, that's why I needed to hurt you as much as I was hurting. It's been good that we haven't even known where the other was for the past 5 years, and I haven't looked. It's taken that long to heal and to grow.

"If I should marry again and that wife decides to do something as shitty as you did, it would still hurt. But I wouldn't be devastated by it. I wouldn't hurt her as bad as what I did to you. I'm older and I now have a sense of integrity, a sense of being, a ... sense of self. We both learned from Gene to own what we did to others. I know that I'd never try to destroy somebody else again, no matter how nasty they were to me."

I stopped talking and took another gulp of the beer. I was able to start tasting it now. It wasn't vile like it had been minutes ago. I looked over and saw Marie wipe the tears from her eyes. She was still stunned, but she knew what I was saying. She knew what I was feeling and that she was the one that destroyed our near marriage. We sat in outward silence for a few minutes, there was no quite on my inside.

"The next day, you showed up with your mother. You really believed that it was only just sex. Were you really that shallow?"

She nodded yes. "I was pretty stupid and shallow too. Never looked beyond the present. No way to take it back, none, impossible. All I've done with my life since then is to be the most upstanding and honest person I could be." She wiped her eyes again. "It took me 6 months to fully and honestly apologize to my parents. For quite a while, they wouldn't even listen to me on the phone. I found out that there was a weekend they were supposed to be home and I showed up at 7 in the morning. If I could have found sack cloth and ashes, I would have done it. We talked till noon and they welcomed me back as their daughter.

"One year after it happened, I wrote a sincere letter of apology to Mary, Jay's wife. I asked my father to contact her and deliver it. I got a phone call back from her. Appears that he'd been roaming for a while. The mass emails only put it out for everybody to see. The divorce was actually a relief for her. She was able to start a new life without that millstone of a husband around her neck. He moved to Florida and she hadn't heard from or of him for a year when I had apologized to her. We still send each other Christmas cards and a note.

"Marie, let me get back to what happened to me. I got a transfer to Milwaukee. Lucky for me, the housing market tanked later that year and I was renting. I waited another year to buy again. It was a repo house that demanded my extra time. For the money I got from the house and what I saved, I moved up in houses. So for that I should thank you." I stopped and took a long drink of my beer. The beer was tasting better than before.

"Jim, you never sent me a bill for the wedding. You ate all those costs. Why? I was the one who tossed it all away. Why didn't you do it?"

"Marie, I was pretty dangerous for quite a while. I didn't want to tempt fate. Then I actually started a new life up here, moved up here pretty quickly. After a couple of months I found Gene. Somebody recommended her to me. I learned a lot in those next 5 months.

"During that time, I started studying to be a network Sys Admin and getting the certifications. Copiers are printers and are part of networks now and I had enough experience to understand what I was getting into. I was also getting tired of breathing in the copier fumes.

[romantic_story]

"I started dating again and I met Charlene. After a year, we got serious and 6 months after that, we married in a small ceremony. It was 6 months into the marriage we were having problems. I am very happy to say that we both tried hard to work it out. I started seeing Gene again and then we saw somebody else together. We faced facts and parted on good terms.

"It was nice to end a relationship working with someone, not blowing up at them. I haven't gone out much after that and then this idiot friend of mine kept pestering me to see this Marie friend of his wife's. I wasn't much interested but I agreed anyway. I gave him polite grief all the time about it, whenever I could. He said that she had a hard time in life. Guess he was afraid that I'd be mean or nasty. I told him that I'd be a gentleman in meeting her after her atrocious divorce. I would make him proud.

"Twenty feet from the table I saw your back, you were talking with Terry. That's when you made a hand gesture, a Gail hand gesture. At 5 feet, I heard your voice. It was you. I had to be the first out to talk. I wasn't going to blow your cover if you had one. The fear on your face when I appeared was only second to the fear that I felt inside. Then I asked if I could join you Marie, not Gail.

"After a couple of minutes, I realized that this really wasn't working and that's when I said I should leave. You had other ideas. The thing that kept me there was your owning what you did, and doing it right away. Never realized that you'd been seeing Gene too. That admission opened the door. I had to admit what I did too. I guess we studied under the same Master teacher." I paused and took some more beer. It was downright tasty this time.

"Do you think that I've done Bill proud?"

She nodded yes, but we both sat there in silence. We were both drained. Like when I cried last Wednesday night in the car. Years of emotions had spilled out and the vessels were light and empty now, but not very strong.