The Grass is Always Greener

Neither type appealed to me. I wasn't a babe in the woods even then. At 32 years old, I'd been around the block a few times and I knew what I didn't want in a man. This time around the track, if I was going around the track again, it would be for someone who really loved me and made me feel good about myself.

My first husband had been all about himself. He often told me that I wasn't pretty enough and I should be glad to be with him no matter what he did. My ass was too big and since I was over thirty my tits would be on the floor soon. I was also too short and my legs were too thick. After hearing it for over ten years, I have to admit he got to me and I believed it.

I wish I could say that I was strong and I extracted myself from that situation immediately, but I can't. I put up with it for far longer than I should have. But once I decided to go, I moved quickly and decisively.

So there I was at the Cruise. I was sitting next to Eleanor, wearing a t-shirt that I'd bought at the Cruise that morning and my favorite, comfortable, old, too-tight jeans. I got up from my folding chair for a hot second to go and get something to eat. When I started back I saw this guy going up and down both sides of the display area. He was taking pictures of all of the cars. He also spoke to almost every one of the owners of the cars. I thought he was cute and I was kind of looking forward to him talking to me and taking pictures of Ellie.

So I put my sunglasses on and leaned back in one of my most seductive poses to wait. It didn't take long. He got to the car next to mine, a really nice 2010 V6 convertible in a custom shade of red with a contrasting interior. This guy was cool. Just from listening to the way he spoke to the car's owner I got the impression that he just loved Mustangs. He wasn't a snob about it, he loved them all. He liked V6's just as much as their more high powered cousins and he seemed to appreciate all eras of the pony car.

I loved his voice and the enthusiasm he got in it when he talked about the cars that we both loved. For the last five years of my marriage, I don't think I was ever actually turned on. I think it had gotten to the point where I just endured it. So it came as a shock to me that listening to this guy talking to the sixty year old guy who owned that red Mustang had my panties dripping.

I heard him thank the guy for talking to him and shake his hand and then I saw him head towards me and walk right by. To say that I was crushed was an understatement. It just made no fucking sense. I tried to figure out why he'd skipped me. I looked across from me and saw him talking to a guy with a sweet black and Red early 90's 5.0 GT. It was a nice car but not nearly as rare or as cool as my Eleanor. I decided that there was no reason for him not to take pictures of my car and I got pissed. I went back to the booth halfway down the block to get something to drink. Fuck him I thought. No sooner than I left though he must've made a beeline for my car. He was taking pictures of it from almost every angle. Several times I saw him just stop and shake his head.

Just from the way he was looking at my car, I got jealous. I headed back from the food stand and saw him jet away from her and start talking to the guy on the other side again. I had an idea. I grabbed the arm of a guy walking down the street.

"Which one is your car?" I asked him. He looked at me crazily.

"I don't have a car in this show," he said. "But boy I'd like to. As soon as I get a job, I'm getting a Mustang."

"Great," I said. "I'm sure that Ford will love you. How would you like a chance to pick up some women? Maybe you'll have a better chance of getting a car with a girlfriend."

He looked at me then and smiled. "Not me," I said quickly. "You need someone younger and prettier."

"What do I have to do?" he asked.

"See the car over there?" I pointed at my Eleanor. "I just need you to go over there and stand next to that car for a little while. I have a seat next to it. Sit down in the chair. If a guy comes over and asks you about it, tell him it's your car but your sister was watching it for you."

He nodded and went and sat next to Ellie. It took less than 20 seconds. As soon as he sat down, Billy was on him. I was sure that he had tons of questions for the guy. On one hand I felt better. It validated my theory that my car was indeed special and beautiful so I was happy. On the other hand I wondered what the hell was wrong with me, that a guy that I didn't even know disliked me so much that he'd skip my car to avoid me?

* * * * * *

Billy

I looked over at Bobby. He took a long pull on his beer and laughed at me. He burped loudly and looked at my bowl.

"Cantaloupe, honey dew melon, pineapple, green grapes and cherries, that's one of her favorite concoctions," he said. "She even has you trained in the way you eat. Okay, we don't have all day. Let's hear this story of why you don't love your wife...I mean my sister."

"Alright," I said.

"This all started back when I was twenty four. I met this girl at a party after work. Her name was Irene and we kind of fell for each other. We started dating and got married. We had a great life or so I thought. At first, we did everything together. We were almost never apart. She was everything to me. As time went on though, I guess like most couples we kind of settled in for the long haul. Things weren't new and fresh anymore, in fact they were kind of boring."

"I guess that our marriage was like most things in life. You spend all of your time and energy trying to get something. Then once you have it, you get used to it and pretty soon it isn't nearly as special or important as it once was. Over the years, Irene had settled in too. Don't get me wrong, we still loved each other but maybe we'd just gotten used to each other.

It wasn't my fault or her fault; it was just the way things go. I'm sure that I'd spent far too much time building up my business and making us financially secure. I often worked sixty plus hour weeks back in those days. So she probably resented the time I spent at work. She'd told me more than once that I was married more to my business than I was to her.

On the other hand, I was in love with success. After scraping and barely getting by for a number of years, I finally had enough cash flow to do whatever I wanted. I bought that first Mustang back then and was in love with it. Since I was a kid I'd always been into Muscle cars and Mustangs in particular. So that first Mustang, the Black one, that's out there in my garage even now, was important to me.

I'd also started running marathons, so I was in pretty good shape when I wasn't complaining about my injuries or how much my legs hurt.

I guess it was me that messed everything up, because I looked at my life and at my marriage and didn't think that I had everything I deserved. I was especially disappointed in the way Irene turned out.

Irene was really cute when we first met. She was short and petite. She was kind of pixyish. But over the years, she'd picked up a few pounds here and there. She wasn't built like Sarah, so the extra weight didn't look good on her. On the other hand, she also just didn't give a damn about her appearance. She didn't do anything with her hair so for convenience she just chopped it off short. Also, as she went past thirty, she started wearing these huge unflattering glasses. She wasn't really unattractive, she was just frumpy.

I guess she figured that we already had each other, so we had no one to impress. We were comfortable with each other. Maybe that was what made everything boring. In fact, when I think about it, our life wasn't really bad at all, it was just boring. And in retrospect, I am at least 50 percent to blame for it. Maybe if I'd taken more time away from work or taken more of an interest in Irene, things would have been different. But I didn't so they aren't.

You know that old saying the grass is always greener somewhere else? Well, it was that greener grass that is partially responsible for fucking up my marriage.

In those days, I worked really hard drumming up new clients for my business. Anywhere and everywhere that I went, if I saw or heard about someone who might be a potential customer, I was on them. At the same time, I was still the same old guy I used to be. I still hung out with a lot of my friends from both college and high-school.

One of my best friends at that time was James Kirk. Kirk and I had played little league and high-school baseball together. When we got older we'd chased girls together. Kirk had been married and divorce three times by the time he was 28. Kirk was a notorious pussy hound. Anyway, Kirk and I were having lunch and talking about old times in an outdoor cafeteria near my office when I first saw HER.

When she breezed into the café, every guy in the place followed her with their eyes. Like most of those guys, I was smitten. Rebecca was simply amazing in the weirdest way. She wasn't one of those twenty year old, blonde, Nordic, goddess, swimsuit models with an amazing rack and piercing blue eyes.

In fact, she was almost the opposite of that. She was kind of pretty in a girl next door sort of way. She had short, brown hair in one those flip under styles. Her breasts weren't huge or even large and she was a few years older than me. She was probably about 36 or 37, maybe even older, but that was how old she looked. But there was just something about the way she smiled and the way she walked that got everyone's attention.

She had this way of having her eyes kind of half open and half closed and just scanning the room and smiling at every man there. But each and every guy thought that she was smiling only at him. If I knew then what I know now things would be different. I'd have thrown some money on the table and walked away from there.

Anyway, that day she sat down to eat her lunch with one of her girlfriends and an obsession was born. I started eating lunch in that café every day just to catch a glimpse of her. Without ever once having spoken to her, I fell head over heels completely in love with what I thought she was like.

Rebecca was, in my mind, the woman that I should have married. She was perfect and pure, but in the bedroom, I was sure that once unlocked she'd behave like a perfect whore. I always stayed in the back of the café, hoping that she wouldn't notice me. I watched her for six months before I really went crazy. I made up all kinds of little fantasy scenarios about the way that we would meet. I imagined what she'd say and how she'd act. I was behaving kind of like a fifteen year old girl does with her first crush.

The only thing missing was me getting a notebook and writing our names and making little hearts around them. Part of the reason why I couldn't do that was because I didn't know her name yet.

So every day I was sitting there watching my perfect dream princess eat and imagining how perfect our life together would be. But every night I was going home to a woman that I was simply tired of and bored with. Irene never did anything wrong. In fact, her only crime was that she wasn't Rebecca.

Suddenly, she was too short for me and her legs weren't long enough. Her hair wasn't dark enough and it wasn't styled correctly. Anything she wanted to talk about didn't interest me. And, of course, none of it was really her fault. It was all me and my fantasy.

Kirk and I had lunch again and he noticed my interest. "She's a player," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"She's the kind of girl you could have for a while if you wanted her," he told me.

Then he told me to watch her very carefully. A guy walked past her table and dropped something. I couldn't tell whether it was a napkin, a rolled up piece of paper or a business card, but she looked at him and then picked it up and slipped it into her purse.

"Tell you what," he said. "Your birthday is coming up. I'll get you some info." Before I could say anything, Kirk got up and walked over to their table. Without any preamble or introduction, Kirk went into action. He walked right over to their table and sat down next to Rebecca. He pushed her away from him as if she was crowding him and stared directly into her friend's eyes.

Rebecca's friend, whose name I later found out was Bonnie, was an interesting woman. She was on paper far prettier than Rebecca and built better. She was also younger and nicer but around Rebecca, she was always the odd one out. It was like Rebecca just exuded sex appeal beyond her actual physical beauty and made most of the women in her vicinity just null.

Kirk had somehow sensed that and just went straight to the heart of the problem. He grabbed Bonnie's hand and stared into her beautiful blue eyes. She was so taken with Kirk ignoring Rebecca, which almost never happened, that she'd have done anything he wanted.

She gave Kirk her phone number on the spot and agreed to see him that evening. As Kirk returned to our table all smiles, I noticed Rebecca's laser like gaze on him and then me. She smiled at me from across the room and I was hooked even further though I didn't really understand what was going on.

The very next day, Kirk came into my office, though he didn't work for me and told me all about Rebecca. He told me her name and that believe it or not she was forty years old. She was also married and very unhappy in her marriage and yes she fucked around; a lot.

I couldn't believe that she was forty, but I didn't care. I couldn't believe that she was married, but in the end I didn't care. And I was sure that there were reasons for her fucking around. I was sure that once we got together she'd stop.

It's really funny that Kirk had the idea that I was just after a quick piece of Rebecca's ass and after I'd gotten it I'd go back to my marriage happier and fulfilled. And he was even more convinced that Rebecca was, as he'd first called, her a player. After he got his info on her, he always got this sneer in his tone when he talked about her. I guess in his mind he thought of her as just a sperm dump.

On the other hand, I still saw her as my fairy princess. Sure her halo had been dented a bit but I was sure that I could save her, make her happy and we'd have this perfect life together. I started imagining all of the scenarios around us meeting and getting together. I'd take her away from her husband who I imagined to be some brutish asshole that abused her and didn't deserve her.

There was only one fly in the ointment of my perfect fantasy life with Rebecca. I had to find a way to get Irene out of the picture.

* * * * * *

Sarah

So, as I saw Bill go over to the jobless wonder that I had sitting next to my car, I was pissed. The closer I got the more I found the situation funny. Bill was asking the guy all kinds of questions that he simply couldn't answer.

"Is this car a reproduction or a restored original?" he asked the guy.

"It's a Mustang," said the guy, smiling proudly.

"What kind of engine does it have?" asked Bill.

"Chrome," said the guy.

I stepped behind Bill and tapped him on the shoulder. "The car is a 67 Shelby GT500, but it originally wasn't an Eleanor. All of the parts for the conversion and the body kit were made by Shelby so in that regard it could be considered and original, but since there were actually only two Eleanor models made by Shelby this can't be considered an original."

"The engine is a Ford Racing performance modular V8. It puts out four hundred and twenty eight horse power."

He just looked at me with those green gray eyes of his and nodded his head and then he turned away.

"Hey, wait a minute," I said. "I answered your question, now you answer mine." He just nodded his head.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Every year that I bring my car to the show, mine is the Grabber Orange 09 GT over there. Anyway, I always take pictures of all of the cars in the show. I ask questions to give me an idea about mods that I might want to do to my car and for cars I might like to buy."

"Are you gay?" I asked him. "Or is it just that you don't like ugly, chunky girls."

"I'm not gay," he said. "But I can't really say that I like ugly, chunky girls either. Do you know any so I could figure out what an ugly, chunky girl looks like?"

"You know, like me," I said. He just laughed at me then.

"You're nowhere near ugly," he said. "And your tummy is too small to be chunky. You just have a lot of goodies. Most of the guys coming here today will be staring at your jeans."

"Then why..." I began.

"I just don't have any room in my life any more for women," he said. "I mean they're okay, but there are just too many problems with them. They're kind of like Lamborghini's. They're beautiful to look at but they're just not practical. Who wants a car that you have to pay more for a brake job than the down payment for another car?" He shrugged his shoulders.

"Maybe it's not even the case of practicality," he continued. "I appreciate them but I just don't want to own one."

When he'd said, "beautiful," he'd been looking right at me.

"Thanks for telling me about your car," he said softly. "It's probably the nicest car here." As he turned to walk away, something told me that he was the man I was destined to spend the rest of my life with. Just from looking at him and listening to the way he spoke, I was smitten.

"Hey babe, can we go get something to eat now?" asked my stand in, the jobless wonder.

"You go right ahead," I said.

"But I thought that we had something?" he said. "Maybe we could go for a ride later?"

"I wouldn't get your hopes up," I said.

"Is it because I don't have a camera?" he asked. I just shrugged my shoulders. "Man it's like those rap stars always say. Bitches be crazy." He walked away looking back at me and then he turned away and kept walking.

For the rest of the day I watched Billy as he walked up and down the entire display. He must've taken at least one picture and probably more of every one of the more than 600 Mustangs on display. His own car was a honey. It was a 2009 GT that had been heavily modified. It had black racing stripes and gloss black bar billet details everywhere. The upper and lower grills were black billet. He had a splitter in black that matched his stripes and contrasted nicely with the orange paint. He had a black rear diffuser. Even the rims on the car were a very glossy black in a split five spoke design.

His engine was all chromed with black details as well. His shaker hood system was the first time I'd seen one of those. The functional scoop amazed me. The black scoop rose through and above an opening in his hood. His spark plug wires were the same orange as the body of the car. His car also put out more horsepower than Ellie did. I had no doubt that it was probably faster as well. One of the things that amazed me the most was that even looking under his car everything I saw was black, orange or chrome. I was sure that I was in love.

I watched him through the early morning hours and he wasn't bullshitting or playing hard to get. He avoided women for the most part. He even avoided those mouth-watering little car show girls in the Ford booth and all of the other vendor's booths as well.

I did notice that though he froze out every woman I saw between 18 and 60, he was an angel personified to little girls and very old women. It took me a while to figure it out but someone must've hurt him really badly to make him this way.

Throughout the day, I made an ass out of myself with him. I'd ask him to go and get something to eat with me and he'd turn me down. But then I learned something. If I told him something that was totally car related and non-social he'd go for it. Like when I told him that the Ford mechanics were doing dyno testing on some of the cars they'd modified, his eyes got bigger. He even let me grab him by the hand and lead him over to the parking lot they were working in.