Turning Towards Ohio

Hey Folks. Here's another tale of broken hearts and broken dreams. But also of getting up and getting on with it. Once again my gibberish is cleaned, polished and bejeweled by the GREAT (he claims he isn't legendary) Barney-R. This one isn't as long as the one from two weeks ago but I think it's still a good story. For any of you who speak with a Southern accent, please don't take offense to my tongue in cheek versions of it. I used it not to insult or pick fun but because women with southern accents are the sexiest things on God's green earth.

No sex between characters who are under 18 appears in this story, there are no characters who are under 18 in the story. Nuff said. SS06

* * * * * *

6 a.m. The Sun was just beginning to come up as I roared down the freeway. Last night I couldn't get to sleep at all. No, I wasn't thinking about the song from Marilyn Mcoo and Billy Davis. There was a jumble of all kinds of thoughts going through my head. They were all disjointed and most of them were about all kinds of subjects.

I thought about my new Goodyear supercar tires, their grip was much better than the tires I had before. I thought about Newton's laws of physics. I thought about how my life was in limbo. My iridium spark plugs did seem to make my 2009 45th anniversary Mustang GT peppier. I wondered why there were no cops on the freeway. I wondered why I was driving 145 miles per hour which immediately made me glad I had cross drilled and slotted rotors with oversized calipers.

I stomped on the brake pedal and brought my wild pony to an abrupt stop. The only sound in my ears was the incessant thrumming of my Mustang's motor. My pony wanted to run. She hated stopping and the sound of the motor let me know that she was impatient to be on our way.

I had stopped in the middle of the freeway. Luckily for me it was deserted. It was a summer Sunday morning, so no one was going to work. If it had been a busy Monday or another weekday, stopping could have gotten me killed, or gotten me into an accident at the very least.

I was fifty yards in front of a double fork in the road. I could go in any of three directions. The road to the center would take me West towards my new job and I suppose my future. When I left the motel that morning I was sure I was going that way. The road to the right would take me south and the left path would take me off of the freeway and back home.

I'm not accustomed to being indecisive. I'm at a point in my life where I usually move quickly and make decisions just as fast, but just this once, as I sat there in my car I had no idea where to go.

I'm a manufacturing Engineer and a pretty good one at that. I'm also forty years old. Being forty is like being in limbo. At forty, you're not exactly a young man any more. Most people no longer expect you to be wet behind the ears. They expect you to know what you're doing and what you're talking about.

On the other hand, at forty, you're not exactly old either. That means that no one is going to give you any kind of senior citizen discounts or perks. They're also not going to simply take things you say as coming from a position of age or wisdom. It's kind of fucked up. You're too young to be old and too old to be young.

My name is Robert Playne. As mentioned before, I'm forty years old. I've been married to my wife, Jane, for twenty years. Our daughter, Cassandra, is in her third year of college. She's in the nursing program at Michigan State and sucking money out of me left and right. She'll be getting married soon. She's been engaged to a really nice kid for about a year now. I think they're both waiting to graduate with their degrees before they tie the big knot.

Things are different for kids these days. I guess the sensible ones want to make sure they have all of the things they need BEFORE marriage and kids. I've tried several times to explain to Sandy, that her mom and I got hitched at only twenty years old because we had to. I mean we WERE in love, but we didn't have time to wait because we wanted to be married when SHE was born.

We had a few rough times early on and had to pinch our pennies. But our life turned out great. We have a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood. We have all of the creature comforts we could ever need and money in the bank.

We've talked about retiring early, so we can travel together while we're still fit enough to do so. And then we'll settle down and spoil the shit out of our grand kids.

At least that was the way it was supposed to work out. We had puttered along on the same path for almost twenty years. I love Jane more than anything I can think of. I feel the same way about Cassandra. I have a great job, great friends, and a very rich life. My life was an object in a state of uniform motion.

I loved Jane and I was confident that she felt the same. At forty we weren't kids anymore, but we were still deeply in love. We still did all of the little things that said so.

If we could have continued on that way, I'd have gone to my grave a happy camper.

I woke up one morning last week, feeling heat in my nether region. Jane as usual had fallen asleep wrapped around me. I woke up and that heat had me thinking about wake-up sex.

I reached between us and cupped her pubic mound. The soft curls were still damp with the residue of what we'd done the night before. She was sticky and moist but still warm and I started to gently rub her down there.

"Didn't you get enough of that last night?" she asked. Her voice was scratchy and she was just coming awake.

"I don't think I could ever get enough of this," I said.

"Well you're going to have to wait," she laughed. "Both of us have to work today and one of us is on the early shift." She kissed me, unleashing the dragon of her morning breath. As much as I loved her, I had never gotten used to her breath in the morning. Although I had never said anything about it to avoid hurting her feelings, Jane's morning breath was awful. It smelled like she ate peanut butter and shit sandwiches before getting into bed and they had fermented over night.

I reached for her butt as she got out of the bed. I squeezed it and she giggled. She turned around and dangled her boobs over my head, just out of reach. As quick as a cat, I lunged for her and dragged her back into bed with me.

"You know what happens to women who tease men, right?" I asked.

"What," she asked, smiling from ear to ear?

"Sooner or later, they end up getting fucked," I said. She laughed.

"That sounds so funny when you say it," she laughed. "When you say getting fucked, it sounds like something brutal and unpleasant. It's like you're describing a punishment. But you're so gentle and so loving that when we do it, it's the most pleasurable thing I can imagine. It's more of a reward. And I promise you can reward me all you want tonight. But I have to get my ass to the office, or Hank is going to fire me."

"Hank is your uncle," I laughed. "Besides, he and everyone else there, know that you only work there to help him out. He should be paying you a lot more."

"Yeah," she said. "But Uncle Hank is family. And besides, I only work at the office to give me something to do. You're at work most of the day and Cassandra is away at college. Being at the office gives me something to do."

"It gives you a chance to flirt with all of those God damned salesmen," I snapped.

She laughed so hard she fell on the bed beside me. "You think it's funny," I said. "But..."

Before I could finish my sentence she covered my mouth with hers, dragon breath and all.

"I don't think it's funny at all," she said. I noticed a tear in the corner of her eye. "I think it's the sweetest, most romantic thing ever. I can't believe you still get jealous after all of this time. You still act like I'm some hot young girl and you don't want anyone else near me."

Sometimes it's best not to say anything, so I didn't. "I love you, Bob," she gushed. "Now go brush your teeth, while I shower, so your next kiss won't taste like feet." I swatted her on her substantial ass as she walked away.

Jane was no longer the svelte girl/woman that she'd been when we first got together, but after twenty years, two Mustangs, three houses, a full grown daughter and a lifetime of triumphs and tragedies, I still loved her the same as I did then.

I lay there in the bed, imagining what the next few years of our lives would be like. Now that our daughter was an adult, we could begin the next phase. There were so many places we had always wanted to see and things we'd wanted to do.

"Hey, I thought you were supposed to be getting your lazy ass up and brushing those teeth," she said. "Hurry up, I'm not kissing you goodbye until you get that taste out of your mouth. I'll be downstairs waiting for you mister."

As she said it, she grabbed her boobs and squeezed them, and then let them fall back into place. Her blouse was tight enough to outline her boobs, even though it was buttoned all the way up so that not even a hint of cleavage showed. At work she was totally professional; at home she was an outrageous tease.

I hopped up and ran into the bathroom. I quickly brushed my teeth and also took the time to shave. When I hurried down the stairs, Jane was on the computer. I noticed that she had her email account open and quickly closed it as I came into the room. "Just checking the list of ingredients for the special treat I'm making you for dinner tonight, Honey," she smiled.

That was it. It's often the little things, like a crack in a huge dam that let us know that a huge problem is right behind them. Jane had just lied to me. In the twenty years that we'd been married, I had never checked up on her. I had never invaded her privacy in any way. Sure she considered herself to be keeping a tight leash on me, but I trusted her. She'd never given me any reason not to. But that morning, Jane had just given me a reason. She had looked me right in the eye, smiled at me, and lied. I didn't care about her emailing her friends. There was no reason to hide it or to lie about it. Or was there?

She got up from the computer after closing her web page and quickly pulled me in for a kiss. I was too shocked to respond the way I normally did, but I guess her nervousness matched mine.

"I'll see you tonight," she said, before snatching up her purse and walking out of the door.

I quickly opened up a new tab on the Google chrome browser that Jane had left open. One thing about Chrome is that it is designed to be very user friendly. If you close a tab, but leave the browser open, you can go back to the previous sites that you were at without having to re-enter your passwords, especially when you close the tabs before actually signing out. So by going back to AOL, I was able to access Jane's email account. I saw nothing suspicious. When I looked at her bookmarks she really did have a hell of a lot of recipes saved.

I looked in her in-box and nothing suspicious leaped out at me. She had email from her mom and several from her sister. There was one from one of the men she worked with and I got angry. So I did what any husband would have done. Yeah, okay, I'm an asshole. I violated her privacy. I read her fucking email and felt like an ass.

The guy had just gotten married and wanted Jane to come over so she could meet his new wife. From reading between the lines, I got the message that the guy wanted something I had. But it wasn't Jane. Apparently the guy was seriously considering buying a Mustang and really wanted to talk to me about it. I was so relieved. I quickly went back to her in-box and marked the message "keep as new." With any luck, Jane would never know that I had read it.

Then I noticed that Jane had been so busy closing her e-mail, that she had forgotten to close another one of her tabs. I clicked on it and it opened to her Facebook page. I was shocked because I didn't even know that she had one. Since, I'm not really a Facebook user, I had to get used to the layout of the page. Jane apparently had over a hundred friends. Most of them were her family or people she worked with, but there were a few people that I didn't recognize. The hair on the back of my neck stood up

I saw the messages section near the top and noticed that she'd been having a long conversation with someone named Jason. That was when I began to get angry. Jason was a guy she had dated long before she met me. From hearing her talk about him with her mom and sister, they had been together for a long time and were really hot and heavy. Jason had apparently been Jane's first true love and they had always planned on getting married.

The way I heard it, Jason had gone off to the army and while he was away, Jane had left the area they lived in. She had met me; we fell in love, got married, and had a kid, end of story.

Over the years, I hadn't heard much about Jason, except that Jane's parents had never liked him. And since old Jason was in the past, I had never given him much thought. But here he was sending messages to Jane.

Yeah, I read the fucking messages. I started from the beginning. There were hundreds of them. They started out innocently enough. They started out like two old friends re-connecting. They talked about things they'd done when they were younger and their lives. But somewhere in the middle the guy started talking about how much he missed her and wished that they had stayed together.

It took a few messages but Jane had begun telling him that she wondered how her life would have been if they HAD stayed together. It took a few more weeks for it to come out but he told her that he still loved her. At first she didn't respond to that. She told him that she was a happily married woman and that she loved me.

A few messages later and she was telling him that she loved him too, but only as a friend. They kept reminiscing about days gone by and the things they used to do, which apparently included a lot of sex, and the next thing I knew she was telling him she loved him too.

Then he started hinting that she should come to visit. He had it all worked out. She could come to visit him on the pretense that she was visiting her parents and family in town. While she was there, she could tell her parents that she was visiting her aging aunt, Tilly. She could tell Aunt Tilly that she was visiting her parents. That way the two of them could spend their time together.

At that moment I wanted to find that motherfucker and choke the life out of him. Jane of course said, "NO," it would never happen. But I was sure that if he kept trying to persuade her, eventually he would get his way. There I was standing there in my home office, angry as hell at the woman who only an hour before I had been sure that I would love forever.

I was also late for work. I quickly called the plant and explained that I'd had car trouble and would be in. I called a colleague of mine who worked in IT and owed me a favor. I got him to come over to the house right then.

Rick was happily married, like I thought I was. He got there and by the look on my face he could tell I was pissed.

I swore him to secrecy, which was easy as hell and the reason I had picked Rick out of all the guys I knew in IT. Although Rick was happily married, he entertained fantasies of being a spy or a PI. He was one of the best computer guys I know, but he dreamed of being 007.

"Rick, can you..." I began.

"Steal the whore's passwords for you and rig it so that the computer explodes if she ever emails that guy again?" he blurted out. He had an excited look on his face. "How big do you want the explosion to be? I can probably rig it so that HIS computer fries its hard drive, but without getting into his house, I can't get you an explosion on his end. And it's really..."

"Rick," I said calmly. "I was hoping to put the reins on him before he got away from me. If she changes her password or notices that I've been in her account, I'd be out of luck. Can you just rig it so that copies ... copies mind you, of her emails and Facebook messages get sent to my account?"

"Piece of cake," he said. "I'm just wondering why she didn't have all of this stuff sent to her account at work."

"For the same reason that I don't want you to send it to my email account at work," I said. "Because guys like you, get paid to snoop through people's accounts to find evidence of them doing things they shouldn't be doing at work."

"That makes sense," he said. He set me up a completely separate Yahoo email account and sent copies of all of Jane's email and Facebook messages to that account. Then both of us went to the plant to work, the difference was Rick went back so charged up that he could barely function. To him it had been a dream come true. He was wrapped up finally in the world of secrets, lies and counterespionage, albeit on a smaller scale that he had always dreamed of.

For me it was a much different feeling. I felt as if I had been punched in the gut repeatedly. My entire world had changed. My life was no longer an object at a steady rate of motion.

* * * * * *

Jane

I had nearly gotten caught that morning. It was stupid. I was stupid. But after passing forty, I'd begun to just feel like life was passing me by. At first I thought it was just empty nest syndrome, with Cassandra going off to college. But once I started working in my Uncle Hank's office, it got worse. All day long I listened to the other women there, talking about all the things they did and I was jealous.

I wasn't jealous that they were single. I love being married to Bob. He is the kindest, most loving man I know. I guess what I missed was the excitement we had when we were younger. Excitement isn't really the word for it. I think what I'm missing is that sense of desperation; the thrill of living on the edge. They say that youth is wasted on the young. I understand that now.

That feeling of not knowing what is going to happen to you next, or just taking what life throws at you and winning your way through by the skin of your teeth is so exhilarating.

A few months ago I got on Facebook because everyone else at the office did it. I occasionally got messages and friend requests from people I hadn't heard from in years. One of them was my old boyfriend. I'd been sure that I was going to marry Jason. The fact that my parents hated him only made things better between us. I guess that's that idea of living on the edge again.

Jason and I never really broke up. We just went in different directions by mutual agreement. Out of the blue, I got a call from him and he told me that he had decided to join the military and he'd be gone for a few years. I was shocked to say the least. He had never mentioned enlisting before. In fact, Jason was about the most undisciplined man I knew. He hated the idea of being told what to do. I guess to be truthful, Jason was lazy.

But signing up, was a very mature step and I swore to him that I would wait for him and remain faithful. Strangely enough, he told me that it wouldn't be necessary. He would be traveling to far off places and he wanted to experience everything life could throw at him. Being tied into such a severe promise while we were only twenty years old wasn't fair to either of us. So Jason joined up and I moved to Michigan to help care for my Uncle Hank's wife, Aunt Kate. I met Bob and fell in love with him and we've been together ever since.

But hearing from Jason was like re-igniting a flame that had been allowed to die. It took a while, but I found myself telling him things that I shouldn't have. I also found myself comparing him to Bob. And lately, in my comparisons, I've begun to realize that Bob probably wasn't the better man between the two of them.

When I was with Jason, I felt freer and more alive. It seemed like every new day brought new experiences and new challenges. The air seemed to smell better, the grass was greener, and the sex was far more thrilling. It was just...BETTER. I found myself dreaming about what my life could have been like with Jason. But I was an old married woman. It was too late to find out. I should probably just chalk it up to what should have been. I was stuck in a rut, with no way out.