The Love Boat

I guess I'd never really been in love so I didn't know what I was supposed to feel. But I'd never cheated on her and I'd been faithful and true to her in every way since we'd met. She couldn't say the same in either case. She'd been screwing around on me the whole time apparently and she'd come into the relationship with mercenary intentions. She was only in this for the cash.

I decided that I'd simply let this be a very expensive lesson. As soon as we got back I'd file for an annulment. I wouldn't even need a divorce because she'd been dishonest the whole time and the marriage would last less than a week.

By the terms of our pre-nup, if the marriage lasted less than 3 years and there were no children, she got nothing any way.

I spent the evening wandering around the ship, watching people and trying to fill the hole in my heart. At around midnight, I went back to our cabin. Danni was there with a couple of crew members and Emma.

"Caleb, where the fuck have you been?" she screamed. There were tears running down her cheeks. The security men from the crew who had been about to organize a quiet search for me smiled and began backing out of the room.

"Sorry, I was at the clinic," I said. "I guess I should have told you that I don't like ships or boats or whatever this is. I got really sick. They gave me something to settle my stomach and I guess it put me right out. I still feel queasy."

The security men laughed. "Told ya," said one. "Usually about ten percent of the passengers get sick in the first two days. About half of them end up flying home."

"Honey, why didn't you tell me about this?" asked Danni. Her fake concern was really convincing. "We could have flown or done something else."

"Because, I love you Danni," I said. Shit if she could lie, so the fuck could I. "You wanted to go on a cruise so badly. I'd do anything for you, so getting used to a boat is nothing."

"Awww," cried Emma. She looked evilly at Danni and shook her head.

"I'm going to go and lie down," I said. Danni just nodded.

"I'll be right in sweetheart," she said. As soon as the door closed, I strained my ears trying to hear them.

"Danni, you're a bitch," hissed Emma. "You don't deserve him. I hope this all comes back to bite you on your ass. That way it'll hurt."

"Uhm Emma, don't forget your place sweetie," hissed Danni right back. "If it wasn't for me you'd be back at that little shit hole of an apartment of ours crying in your beer because yet another loser has dumped you. And it hurts to get bitten anywhere."

"Yeah, but your ass is the only thing on you that hasn't been tucked or implanted," smirked Emma. "It's the only real thing on you, so it would hurt more."

A few minutes later Danni breezed into our cabin's bedroom. She started taking off her clothes and leaned over me. Her breasts squeezed their way tantalizingly out of her top and hung over me like two ripe melons waiting to be plucked.

"Come and get it sweetie," she crooned. To be honest, I intended to spend the rest of the trip fucking her. I don't mean gently and passionately making love to her either. I meant fucking her. I was going to have every hole on her body and try my God damnedest to make some new ones. I intended to do every foul, disgusting and humiliating thing to her I could think of for the duration of the trip. That would be her way of paying me back for the cost of the trip. Whether she knew it or not I intended to do things to her that would make a crack whore blush.

I figured that she deserved it after what she was trying to do to me. After all why should I have to go without sex? Until we got home, we were married. I saw no reason for my sex life to suffer because the woman I thought loved me, turned out to simply be a high priced whore.

When you got down to it, that's what she really was. She basically sold herself to me. She got a good life and not having to bust her ass anymore, I got sex. It was a business deal, no more, no less. The only thing wrong with the deal was the fact that both parties weren't aware of the parameters of the deal. From now on, I intended to treat it as such. But that night, I was too hurt to do anything other than lay there in that bed and wonder what I'd done to deserve it.

For my entire life I'd been the good guy. I'd never forced myself on a woman. I'd never taken anything that wasn't mine. I helped out when I could, whoever I could. And I'd spent my entire life working very hard at both my education and my career.

Just because I'd been fortunate enough to end up in a position where that hard work had paid off financially didn't make me a bad guy or a target. Fuck her.

"Danni, I'm sorry," I said. "But I really don't feel good."

"Oh Honey," she said sadly. "Don't worry about it."

She took off the rest of her clothes and got under the covers with me. I amazed myself. I was in bed with that body and I showed no signs of a reaction at all.

The next morning, I was up before the sun came up. I looked across the bed at the woman I thought that I'd be spending the rest of my life with. I wondered what it was about her that had drawn me in the first place. I can't say that I didn't sleep that night, because I did. But throughout the night I woke several times and wondered, "Why me?"

I wasn't exactly broken hearted, but I was upset. I was pissed by her betrayal on multiple levels. On one level, she'd always professed her undying love for me. She'd been the one to say it first. I remember her looking across the table at me, weepy eyed after one of our little arguments. It had only been one of those stupid misunderstandings that all couples go through. But she was crying like her dog had died or she'd blown a head gasket. I couldn't understand it.

"Why are you so upset, Danni," I'd asked her. "It's over, we're fine."

"You just don't understand," she'd told me. "I love you. I can't be without you." Those three little words, though I didn't understand what she felt and I truly can't say that I felt it, still rocked my world.

There are guys out there who won't understand this. Love fucks everything up. I know that you're thinking, "Okay, she loves you", so what. You can get more out of her. Or that's cool; you get all of the benefits without having any of the weaknesses yourself.

They imagined me as being some lucky guy who would be able to simply break up with her whenever I got bored without being hurt myself. On paper, that all sounds great, the reality is, however, very different. I was born with this terrible thing they call a conscience. Immediately upon hearing those three terrible little words it went into over drive.

I immediately felt weird. There was this amazing feeling running through me as if just having the knowledge that someone, another living, breathing human being loved me. I became a completely different person in that second that it took for her to utter those three words. I became responsible for her health and well-being. It was like being a gardener, when you never wanted to be.

You leave your house to go out and cut down the unsightly weeds so you can pour concrete. Once you get there you discover a rare and beautiful flower. You didn't plant it and you didn't want it, but since it's there you feel compelled to take care of it. What you really should do to make your life the way you planned is to just cut the fucking thing down, but you can't. So you start watering it and keeping it trimmed and feeding it. Before too long, regardless of what you planned, you're a gardener.

I started taking the relationship with her far more seriously after that. After all, my choices were limited. If I did anything to piss her off or to fuck up the relationship, I went back to being just another shlub. As long as her love survived, I was special, I was LOVED. Things got really worse after a while because it wasn't enough for her to tell me that she loved me. She started expecting me to tell it back to her. It was really fucking hard at first. My mouth didn't know how to make that sound. That word is really fucking hard to say, especially if you're not sure you mean it.

I finally forced myself to say it, expecting lightning to strike me at any second for the lie. After I said it, I felt at first that I'd violated the rules of some cosmic game. I had said the "L" word untruthfully. But then I saw the power that small word has. After I clumsily uttered, "Luv ya tu," her face just exploded in the biggest smile I'd ever seen. She pounced on me in the middle of the street. I was sure she was going to strip down and fuck me right there on the sidewalk.

Anyway, I wasn't heart broken, but I was upset at the betrayal and the lies. Not only because she'd been the one to use the "L" word untruthfully, but because she'd lied. She increased my self esteem so much by the usage of that word. She conned me into doing things for her that I never would have done. And all the time, she was also betraying me by fucking other guys. Who knew what kind of diseases I could have even now?

Thinking about that possibility brought my anger to the forefront. I rolled over away from her. Danni was in the habit of draping her arms and legs all over me while we slept. I used to think that it was cute. She said it was because even in sleep she liked us to be touching each other. I now realized that it wasn't cute at all. She just wanted to keep tabs on me, even in her sleep.

I debated my next action. On one hand I wanted to get my first shipboard run in. That way I could decide where I'd be running for the remainder of the trip. On the other I was thinking about fucking her. No romance, no foreplay, just pull her legs apart and take her without warning. It would serve her ass right. For the rest of this trip I was using her for sex alone and as soon as we got back to port I was filing for an annulment. Sometime during the trip I'd alert my lawyer and have the papers waiting for us when the ship hit port. In the best case scenario, I could have my annulment before the bitch got the sea air out of her cheating nostrils.

I looked at her beautiful smiling face and those big fake titties and decided to go for the run. Seeing her reminded me of a song. Everything reminds me of music but this line from the song was particularly poignant. "A plastic girl with a plastic heart, can never love you, it's true. She's got me going, got me falling apart. So tell me, what can I do?"

The line was from the funniest God damned rock and roll song I'd ever heard. It was a song called, "Ugly Girls" by an unknown band from Michigan called Mark Flash. I'd seen one of their concerts at a park while I was in college. The band never made it big but boy were they explosive. They had the typical cutesy boy singer that all of the bands had. Their lead guitarist was a black guy who was a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. His fiendish and off the wall riffing was probably 90% of their sound. He also wrote all of their original songs. Their bass player was a beautiful Costa Rican woman. Every time I saw them play they had a different drummer. They had all of the pieces to really make it big, but their offstage behavior was as explosive as their music. They disappeared, swallowed up by internal and external forces. I always wished I had a tape of one of their concerts.

I decided to go for the run. I dressed in the darkness so I wouldn't awaken Danni, although that really wasn't a possibility. Danni could probably sleep through a stampede.

I left the cabin and made my way out onto the deck. I went up to the upper deck near the top of the ship where the track was. I saw very few crew members out this early in the morning. I guess at this time of day only a skeleton crew ran the ship. The view of the ocean and sky was awe inspiring, with the sun rising over the ocean. There was just enough light for visibility. The soft pinkish hues of daylight had yet to turn to an angrier, bright yellowish white.

The rubberized running surface that formed a perfect oval around the deck beckoned to me. I made it wait though as I started my iPod and stretched first. I always ran with an iPod shuffle, it was the tiniest and cheapest of the iPods, but it's perfect for runners.

As I got ready for those first few exploratory strides on the rubber track I felt it before I heard it. It was a very light and steady clip clopping sound. By the time I looked up, she'd already run past me. I smiled as I strained my eyes to see her. This would make things interesting. I enjoyed competition on any level. Now, instead of just aimlessly running laps, I had a target.

I took off slowly, allowing myself to get use to the surface I was running on. It felt different from running on pavement or dirt. I was sure that the rubberized surface covered the same carpet that floored the rest of the ship and beneath that was a metal deck.

Over the first few yards I gauged my pace based on her position and the distance between us. I started running relatively easily and noticed that I wasn't decreasing the distance. So, I upped my pace just a notch. I still wasn't running as fast as I normally would but I was gaining. As I got closer to her, I began to make out her features and details, at least from the back.

The first thing that struck me was how tiny she was. She was barely 5' tall, if that. She had very short pixie-like hair. Her legs were curvy and perfectly proportioned to the rest of her. It was strange. Before now I'd thought that Danni had beautiful legs, but after seeing these, I realized that Danni's legs were just thin. It's amazing how most of us men see a woman with long thin legs, like the fashion models and just go crazy.

This woman had legs that were nowhere near as long or as thin as Danni's. In fact they were just on that border between perfect and muscular. There wasn't a gram of fat anywhere on those legs. Both her calves and her thighs got my salmon swimming upstream.

Then like the cherry on top of a perfect sundae, he ass rested atop those legs. Thinking about her ass causes me to get light headed. Looking at her that first day made me wonder who the hell gives women's clothing items their names. She was running in what they call boy-shorts. Who the fuck would call them that? Those half-moons of perfect ass cheek that stuck out beneath them announced to anyone who saw them that there was no way she could be a boy.

The motion of that ass as she ran was hypnotic. I completely gave up trying to pass her and just settled in at her pace, staying a few yards behind her. To this day I'm not sure how I was able to run without tripping over my tongue.

After a couple of lockstep laps around the deck, I noticed that she was slowing down. To keep the distance between us constant, I slowed down as well. Finally she just stopped. She did it so quickly that I almost ran over her.

I was barely able to arrest my forward momentum in time to prevent a collision. As it was I ended up stopping mere inches from her smiling face. And what a face it was. She had the biggest smile and the bluest eyes I've ever seen. Everything about that face was beautiful. She was very tan, but it was a healthy tan. It was like she'd been lightly toasted by the sun, instead of that bizarre orange color that you get from tanning salons.

Her hair, though short, was incredible. It was thick and wavy. She had wild bangs that kept falling over her eyes but the rest was very short and brushed back over her ears. What I'd originally thought were places that the sun had glinted off of the inky blackness of her hair, were actually highlights. She had locks and strands of blue feathered through her black hair.

She wore no makeup not even lipstick. Everything about her was real and genuine, including that awesome smile.

From her bee-sting breasts to that incredible ass, every single fucking thing on this woman was natural. I was floored. So floored in fact that I couldn't make out a word she was saying. I looked at her as she tried to point both of her index fingers at the sides of her head. I wondered what she was trying to tell me. Why didn't she just say it? Then suddenly it dawned on me that she was trying to tell me to take my ear buds out so I could hear her.

"Hi," she said. There was definitely a southern twang to her speech pattern. She had that way that Southerners stretch every word out so that even single syllable words take three days to hear. I've always been partial to southern accents. I think that of all of the American regional accents, it's the sexiest. In her case it was on top of a voice that was like honey dripping from a magnolia tree. Okay, I know that Magnolia trees don't produce honey, but shit that's what it sounded like.

Have you ever listened to someone talk and thought that you instantly knew what they did for a living. I have several friends like that. My friend, Dave, speaks in so clipped and efficient a manner that you can tell just by listening to him talk that he's an engineer. Carl peppers every sentence he utters and describes everything by its value, so you know he's a banker.

Just from the tone of this woman's voice I was sure she had to be a phone sex operator.

"Do you have any idea of how far we've run so far?" she asked.

I just stood there, taking her all in. She looked amused as I ran my eyes up and down her, examining her every feature and dimension. It took me a while to realize that I was being rude.

"Uhm, sorry," I said. "What was that again?"

She laughed and it wasn't one of those fake girly laughs. It was a robust and full bodied laugh, the kind of laugh that comes from a person who has nothing to hide and nothing to pretend. It spoke volumes about both her personality and her character.

"I asked if you knew how far we'd run," she said. As she spoke she curled an errant lock of hair back around the ear it had escaped from. "How far is each lap?" she asked. "We've done three laps and a half."

"I have no idea," I laughed. Just like that, we'd bonded over our mutual ignorance of how far we had to run or for how long.

"Well, then," she said. "We seem to be running at about the same pace. Let's just run until we feel like going to breakfast."

"That's the best offer I've had in ages," I said. We started out running and it was weird. There are so many things that I never hear when I run. I don't hear my breathing. I don't hear people near me. I don't even hear my own footfalls because I simply never run without music.

That first run together was a joyous occasion. I reveled in all of the things I'd never heard before. It was like suddenly being able to hear a complete new set of sounds. The most incredible of all of those sounds though was the sound of her voice.

We had our share of moments during that first run that were pure magic. Our names were a source of amusement. When she told me that her name was Skah, I was puzzled. I wondered who'd name a woman this beautiful something that crazy. What the fuck was a Skah?

"Skah," I said uncertainly. "Uhm that's unusual."

"Not Skaa," she laughed. "Skah." I just looked at her as if she was the prettiest girl in the nuthouse beauty pageant.

"ESS, KAY, Whah," she said. "Skah." Suddenly in a blast of recognition I understood.

"Oh, Sky," I said laughing. "It must be a Southern thing."

"What's your name funny man," she asked.

"Caleb, but everyone calls me Cal," I said.

"Caleb," she smirked. The way she said it stretched it out and made it completely different. "Now that's a Southern Baptist name. Wasn't there a guy in that movie "Deliverance" named Caleb? And let me guess. From the sound of your voice you're from California. And you call yourself Cal."

Even Cal was stretched out to twice its normal number of syllables when she said it. I have no idea how far we ran that morning or for how long. I only know that I'd never had a better time. I completely forgot about all of my problems and everything going on in my life. We went to breakfast and got there just as they were bringing out the first and freshest of the food. We sat at a small table and just chatted about whatever came to mind.