While You Sleep

He and his team scout and cover areas where snipers could hit their targets from. It's a nearly impossible job but they do it to the best of their ability. No American president has ever been seriously injured on foreign soil. Most of the assassination attempts happened in US cities. So that says something about the job they do. It also says something about Rick.

He has this instinct for when something isn't right. He also tends to put all of his energy and concentration into one thing at a time. He has this sort of tunnel vision that allows him to block out everything except the prize. I guess that's how he got me, but it's also what led to our downfall.

Let me backtrack. My name is Danielle Mitner. I guess it's Danielle Hammond right now, since I'm still married to Rick legally. That, "legally," is a word that I hate.

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, I'm thirty years old and I wasn't always like this. All throughout high school and college, I was a cheerleader and I had a really nice body. There were all kinds of guys hitting on me all the time. I didn't settle for any of them though, because I'd decided at a very early age that I had to wait for someone special. I wanted a man who was going to amount to something.

Okay, I wasn't a whore. When I say amount to something I meant a man who was going to have high standards and provide for his family. We didn't necessarily have to be rich, but my husband had to love me and our kids and provide at least a comfortable life for us. I didn't think that was too much to ask for.

As pretty as I was, I could have just married one of those cheesy old rich guys who were always sniffing around me after football games. Right now I haven't convinced you yet have I? As you're listening to me, your mind is still saying whore, right?

Well, let me put it into context for you. When you look at me nine years ago you'd see Miss Michigan, a beauty pageant winner who had the chance to go on to become Miss America. You saw a beautiful twenty one year old girl with the world on a string.

What you wouldn't see and probably never heard about was the fact that the beautiful girl grew up in a fucking trailer park as one of six kids. My parents never got married and one day my mother got tired of it all and just left.

At the time I guess I couldn't blame her, we never had very much of anything. The only thing we had was each other and we didn't really have that. We couldn't stand the shit out of each other. My mother and father constantly argued about everything. They argued about not having any money and any time they got some they argued about what to do with it.

When you put that with the fact that both of my parents had roving eyes, things start to come into focus. My dad would fuck anything he saw, but then so would my mother. The difference was that my dad was good at covering his tracks. My mother was just a whore. Thinking back on it, more than one of their arguments started out with, "So what, I gave him some pussy."

It was after one of those arguments that my mother disappeared. We were too young to really understand what had happened and they didn't tell us the whole story at first. They'd had their argument about my dad finding out that my mom had slept with some guy and at the time I didn't know anything about sex. I thought that sleeping with someone; literally meant sleeping with them. So I really didn't understand what the fuss was about.

So after the argument, my mother stormed out of the trailer. Apparently, she went walking down the road and several people saw her get into a car with another man. She never came back. I do remember my dad crying his eyes out for about three days straight after she was gone. That was also when things went from bad to worse because he just stopped going to work. Whatever it was had just drained the life out of my father and he was never the same. In my own mind, I decided that he shouldn't have gotten so angry about her sleeping with people.

We ended up being evicted. All of the kids were separated and sent to live with different family members on both sides of the family. What I didn't realize was that not all of us had the same fathers. My sister Claudia, whom I'd always thought was beautiful and was the only one of my siblings that I really loved, wasn't taken by my grandfather who'd taken me. When I begged him to take Claudia too, he just shook his head.

"Grandpa, she doesn't take up much space and I'll share my food with her," I cried. "She's my sister. She's my best sister."

"Hush up girl," he'd said. "You can call her your sister if you want. But she ain't my granddaughter. There's no way I'm taking some black guy's kid home with me. My son was stupid for putting up with your mother's whoring."

The break-up of my family colored a lot of my thoughts and opinions throughout my life. I decided that when I did get married, I'd never sleep with anyone except my husband and that I would never try to raise my family in a trailer.

Until I was old enough to realize what she'd done, I never blamed any of it on my mother. I put everything on my father's shoulders. I always thought that someday she'd be back for us and she'd find all of her children scattered all over wherever we were and we'd all get back together. I thought that my daddy would find us too and he'd forgive mommy and we'd be happy again.

That fantasy was like armor for me. I wrapped myself in it as I grew older. I held onto that fantasy until I found out the truth when I was about sixteen. I had a cousin who knew the whole story and she told me during a visit.

Grandpa didn't take me to see my daddy, because my daddy had died the year before. He'd died in the nuthouse my cousin had told me. Then she told me that my daddy had gone to the nuthouse because he'd checked out when he found out that my mother had been murdered. My father wasn't coming back to get us and neither was my mother.

My cousin even told me that the whole thing wasn't my daddy's fault, it was my mother's. After the last argument, my mother had gotten into a car with a strange man. She wanted to rub it in my daddy's face. But the man had, in my cousin's words, fucked her, then killed her and left her by the side of the road. They'd never caught him. My cousin said that was God's way of punishing her.

I understood then what my daddy had been crying about and why he went crazy. Even though my mother had done what she'd done he loved her too much to try to live without her. Grandpa often said that my mother was a whore. But I told him later on that both of them had cheated. Grandpa just looked at me and shook his head. He told me that my dad had only started sleeping with other women after the third or fourth time that my mother did it. He figured that he's show her what it felt like. He told me that the real tragedy was that they got together too young and had nothing going for them. They had no jobs, no skills and no education. Even though they were never legally married they could never leave each other. It was like some weird Shakespearian tragedy.

I decided then that I needed to go to college and any man that I married had to love me as much as my daddy loved my mother but he also had to have an education. So things started out well. I was beautiful and popular but I rarely dated because my standards were too high. It was in my second year of college that a group of people I knew brought a guy I'd never seen before around. He took one look at me and sparks flew between us.

As our friends talked about us, I could see disappointment in his eyes and he looked away from me. All kinds of things went through my mind. I found out that we were both from the state of Michigan and I thought that maybe the well-crafted lies that I told everyone about my background had been detected. I also thought that maybe once he'd discovered what I was that he was no longer interested. He probably thought I'd show up soon on an episode of Jerry Springer. He was as bright and shiny as a new penny and I was sure that he didn't want anything to do with me.

He even left the cafeteria and waited for my friends to take him back to the dorms outside. I had to find out why he looked so low, so I followed him.

"Your name is Richard isn't it?" I asked him.

"Yep," he said looking down. I noticed then that he was bigger than me but he wasn't a huge guy. He was very muscular and he moved with a sort of masculine animalistic grace that just did something to me.

It sounds stupid but when I looked into his eyes I could see his soul. He wanted me badly but he didn't just want me for sex. He wanted all of me. He wanted my whole life.

"Why don't you like me?" I asked. He looked at me with the stupidest expression on his face.

"Who said I don't like YOU?" he asked. "You're a beauty queen. You're going to be in the Miss America pageant and on TV. I just didn't think you'd want to waste your time on someone like me."

"But aren't you supposed to be a big time quarterback for the football team?" I asked laughing.

"I guess," he said. "But I don't even go to school here yet. I'm eighteen years old and still in high school. I'll start here in the fall. They're just taking me around and getting me used to the place. I guess it isn't too late for me to pick a different school."

"Why would you want to do that?" I asked.

"Shit, I can play football at any school in the country," he said. "I got a lot of offers, but I just don't think I'd like to be around here and have to watch you with other guys."

"So how do you know that it wouldn't be you here with me?" I asked. "Are you going to let the fact that I'm a few years older than you get in your way?"

That was all it took. From that day we were joined at the hip. Rick was unlike any other man I'd ever known. He didn't ever lie to me. He rarely swore and he always treated me like I was a princess.

He was angrier than I was about what happened in the Miss America pageant. Everyone thought that I was a shoe in, except for some of those bitches I competed against. I looked great and I felt great. My first problem came when I had to do the world famous promenade of states. That's where all the contestants march across the stage and introduce themselves and tell which state they're from. You wear a costume that represents some of the great things about your home state.

As I was walking across the stage swinging my ass back and forth and just about to say, "My name is Danielle Mitner and I'm from the great state of Michigan," the heel on both of my shoes broke and I fell on my ass. I tried to play it off by taking my shoes off and looking at them to show that I'd had a wardrobe malfunction but the camera had zoomed in on the next contestant. The only thing the audience remembered was me falling on my ass.

I still managed to make it into the next round on my looks alone but any question about me being graceful was ruined. That fall alone had probably robbed me of the chance to be Miss America, but I kept going. I thought that I'd make up some points in the talent contest but there again, I met with disaster. I played the violin. Unfortunately someone had gotten backstage and loosed the tuning pegs on my violin. I later found out that they'd also super-glued the hairs on my bow together so it wouldn't vibrate the strings correctly either.

My violin solo sounded like a couple of cats in heat. I have to admit that I drew out emotions in the audience. Some of them cried because it sounded so awful, other laughed because the look on my face as I played was funny as hell.

After the contest was over my coach took my shoes and my violin to the promoter of the contest to show what had been done to them. He just looked at her and smiled.

"Is this her first big contest?" he asked. We nodded our heads thinking he was sympathetic.

"Okay," he said smiling. "We'll just call everyone back and have a do-over." We looked at him in shock.

"Seriously?" I asked.

"Of course not," he spat. "Listen girlie. It's like those rap guys always say, "Bitches be crazy. Next time you're in one of these things, keep an eye on all of your stuff. Every girl in these contests would do ANYTHING to win. So fucking your pretty little shoes up, or messing with your fiddle don't mean shit. The hardest part for me is keeping these whores from screwing the judges for more points. Now if you'll excuse me..."

But I was still Rick's beauty queen and he proposed to me that night. He told me that he was sorry that I lost, but he was also glad that I lost. He'd be worried about me traveling all over the world during my reign and the two of us not seeing each other.

That was also the night that we first had sex and we never looked back from then. It must have been four months later that the wheels came off of our trip through Candy land. I discovered that I was pregnant. Rick was as happy as he could be. Of course, we got married immediately. There was no way that we could wait two more years for Rick to graduate. And as I got bigger and bigger my speaking engagements as a former beauty queen dried up.

Rick's family offered to help us, but Rick thought that we should take responsibility for what we'd done. He dropped out of school and kissed his chance at pro football goodbye for me and our baby. He decided to join the military because it would give him a salary and pay for college after his tour as well.

While going through the tests for the army, Rick was contacted by a different branch of the government. Rick made a deal to start working for the secret service. They paid for the rest of his college classes and paid him a salary while he trained.

We immediately moved into our beautiful little detached apartment here and thought that we were on our way to greatness. The first few years were just that. They were great. But as the years wore on and Rick started being occasionally posted out of not only the state but the country, I started to resent it.

To me it seemed like Rick was advancing in his career and traveling all over the world. But I was stuck at home doing nothing. At the same time, some of it was my fault. Even after Katrina was old enough to go into daycare, I didn't work out or try to get myself back into shape. I'd gained some weight during the pregnancy and piled more on afterwards as well.

Rick was ecstatic with our life. He loved me, I can never say enough about that. During that time I felt more loved than any woman has a right to be. But he was just away so often. Rick was also the best father I know and he still is. We were talking about buying a house and having another baby. It was a great time until I fucked it up.

Maybe I was more like my mother than I ever suspected, but I fell for a line from a really smooth operator in our neighborhood. Rick had been out of town for a week and I was very lonely. I invited him in for a cup of coffee after he'd volunteered to cut our grass. I gave him a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. Before he left he'd also had a piece of ass. I was so stupid.

The sex wasn't very good. If I'd been curious about what being with a man other than Rick was like, I knew then. On the physical side it was pretty much the same. On the emotional side it was very lacking. I told myself that I would never do it again. But I did. And I did it again after that. And Rick caught me. It was the same old story. He came home early and beat the shit out of the guy. I realized then exactly what Rick did for a living. He put the man in the hospital and wasn't even scratched himself.

Rick actually called the police and they took the guy to the hospital. The poor man went through a couple of surgeries and a long recovery just for trying to keep me from being lonely. I guess I knew what I'd done was wrong, but I didn't see the harm in it.

The man was no threat to my marriage. I didn't love him, I just fucked him. It was no more serious to me than if we'd just played cards. Rick didn't see it that way. We got into a huge argument while I tried to explain it to him.

"So I gave him some pussy, so what?" I said. "It's not like you were here to get it. It's not like you lost anything, Honey." On some levels I think I was glad that I'd gotten caught because it allowed me to push for what I really wanted. I wanted Rick to stop traveling and just take a desk job. In my mind he made enough money and I'd be happier if he was just home all of the time. I guess as much as I thought I knew my husband, I'd forgotten about how honest he was. Rick had never lied to me even when it was unpleasant to tell the truth. So I guess I should have considered the fact that he'd be a lot less likely to accept dishonesty from anyone else either.

"Danielle," he said to me and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he was crying. Shit if the pussy meant that much to him, he could have some right then. "That's where you got it wrong. I didn't lose ANYTHING. I lost EVERYTHING." He just left me standing there and went up to our room and started packing.

"You're an asshole," I screamed. I was glad that my daughter was still at daycare. "You come home after being gone for a week. You beat a man senseless because he decided to comfort me when you couldn't. You get into a big argument with me and then before we've settled anything you go back out of town on another fucking assignment. When you get back, there will probably be another man here." I swear to God I didn't mean it. I was just angry.

"Wrong again, Danielle," he said calmly. I think his calmness pissed me off more than anything else. But he couldn't help that. A quarterback has to be calm and assess everything around him while large, quick, brutal men are trying to throw him to the ground. Rick was just being Rick.

"I'm not fucking wrong, " I screamed. "I can give this pussy to anyone I want. I always say it's yours but if you aren't here to use it, someone else can."

"You're right about that," he said. "It was the other things that you were wrong about. You said that when I got back there'd be another man here. The first place that you were wrong is that you thought I was going on assignment; I'm not. I'm just leaving here. I won't live with a whore. And the second thing was that when I got back there'd be another man here. You were wrong there because I won't be back. I'll call you and we'll arrange for me to pick Rina up for my visits. We should probably both do the rest of our talking through lawyers. Goodbye Danielle. And congratulations, you wanted to hurt me and you did. You ripped my heart out through my throat and shit down the hole. I loved you so much and we had a good life, but I guess you deserved better." I was in shock at what he was saying. He was doing it all wrong.

"I just wanted you to know one thing though," he said. "My life away from you isn't anything like what you think. You're bored here and you want to do things. I like having it that way for you and that's why I work so hard. I want you fat and bored and...SAFE. People outside of the country don't always like us very much despite how much money we give to help support other countries. In a lot of the places we go to, we get spit upon and called names and have rocks thrown at us or we get shot at. There are times when I have to hurt people just to make sure that my team or the people we're trying to protect aren't hurt. But I do that so we can have a nice life. If I'd stuck to playing football, I'd be safer and a hell of a lot richer."

After that he was gone. I couldn't believe that I'd driven my husband away from me over some mediocre sex with a man who simply fucked me because he was as bored as I was. He also couldn't do the things he did to me to his wife. I'd realized a long time ago that I was no better than a prostitute to him. The only difference was that he'd have had to pay a hooker.