Broken Vows

Todd:

So here I sit. Across from my marriage counselor and next to my wife of 26 years. Confused, depressed, and angry are a few of the emotions I felt were bursting to get out of me. The other I just cannot describe. The one thing I am is void of any feeling towards the woman next to me. Sitting grimly, thinking to myself, should I continue to try, or should I just let everything go and take the easy way out. Divorce. I guess, I will make that decision after I hear what she has to say.

I guess I should give you a little of my back story before I go any further. My name is Todd Smith. I am 50 years old. I have been married to my wife Stacy for about 26 years, and we have two wonderful children, Mike and Terry. Mike is a freshman at a small private Division 2 school studying engineering and on a baseball scholarship,. Terry is the older of the two. She is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina and is successfully on her way towards a degree in pharmacy. Stacy and I could not be prouder of our children.

I guess you could say that Stacy and I met like most people did in the late 80's. At a party during my junior year of college. It was at an open fraternity party. I was hanging in the back yard with some friends listening to a band when I saw her come out for a cigarette on the back porch. I was about 20 meters away, but from where I was standing it was obvious that she was a thing of beauty. Long brown hair, slim athletic figure, long luxurious legs, about 120 lbs with a perfect 36C chest. However, that is not what drew me in. It was her eyes. Even from the distance I was at, I could see her perfect blue eyes. Like deep pools of an endless ocean, they pulled me in the second I saw her.

As my friends continued to talk to me, all I could do was stare at her. Looking back, I really looked like a drunk idiot standing there. Finally, after about 3 minutes, my best friend Shawn spoke up and asked me if I was going to go and talk to her, or just stalk her all night. I tried to compose myself (as best as I could after all the drinks I had had) and snapped out of my trance and started to get ready to make my move. She looked up towards me, smiled, and then turned her head and walked back into the party.

Shawn called me a fool, and told me to get in there and get her number, before I lost her. As drunk as I was, I understood this could blow this opportunity, so I began to chase after her. After about 15 minutes of pushing through people, I stepped out onto the front porch, and finally spotted her. She was getting into a Honda Accord with some girls and was getting ready to drive away. As she looked out the window towards me, I caught a quick smile, as she looked me dead in the eyes, and that was the last I saw of her for almost two years. I thought of her smile and beautiful eyes from time to time.

Let me start out by saying that the University of Georgia is a very large place. So large in fact, that on an average day, I almost never run into any of my friends, unless they are in the same major as me. That did not stop me from looking for Stacy. I would spend a little bit everyday looking at people walking across campus to see if I could spot her. When that failed, I asked Shawn to help me. When that failed, we started eating in the different lunch areas on campus. When that failed, I started studying in the different lunch areas for hours just on the hope that I would see her again, and get her name. But it was not to be. The year went by, and I never got another chance to meet her again.

As I started my senior year,I decided it was time to start focusing on something besides my non-existent love life with the magical girl with the deep blue eyes. I was on track to complete my finance degree, and come spring, I expected a top paying job from a major firm in the Atlanta area. My stars were aligning. I was focused. Ready to get out of UGA and get on with conquering the world. I was top of my class, the offers were starting to pour in, and all I had to do was choose my next step.

And then it happened. Fate stepped in.

I was sitting at a stoplight waiting for the light to turn, when something caught my eye. She was sitting with her back to me about 200 yards away with another girl at a table smoking a cigarette. I continued to stare, wondering if it was the same girl from the porch about 15 months ago. I sat there, hoping she would turn towards me so I could see her face. But no luck. Until the light turned green. I did not move and the cars behind me started to honk their horn. Repeatedly. So much so, that my mystery girl turned and looked in my general direction to see what all the commotion was about. This allowed me to get a good look at her face, and instantly, all my hopes and dreams were on hold. I needed to meet this girl and get her to talk to me.

I guess it was silly, or some would say stupid, but I put my car in park, turned it off, and got out and walked towards her. The people in the line of cars behind me were now yelling and honking and I could have cared less. I had to meet this girl.

As I proceeded to walk towards her, she just stared at me with a look of confusion on her face that made her all the more attractive to me. As I got closer, I could see the light go off in her head. She knew me. But the look of confusion continued. As I closed within, 15 feet, she stood, crushed her cigarette under her foot, walked toward me and stopped about 12 inches from my face. Her friend sat and watched as the moment silently happened.

She did not say anything for maybe 20 seconds. She just stared into my face. I could tell her mind was trying to think about where we had met, and probably trying to think if I posed a threat, since I had just abandoned my car in an intersection to come meet with her. We stared into each other eyes, and then I saw a slight movement in the edge of her smile. She had it, she figured out where she knew me from.

She said, "I'm Stacy, you should have found me before I got into the car and got my number". Dumbfounded, I told her I tried, and all I had seen was her drive away with her friends. She pulled out a pad, wrote her number on it, and told me not to lose it. She then told me, "If we were going to go out, we will need a car. Go get yours out of the intersection before it gets towed." I smiled, turned, to walk away, and she spun me around and without any warning kissed me hard on the lips. Staring at me, she said, "Now, get out of here and I want to hear from you soon."

When I called later that night, Stacy and I talked for hours. It was a fluke she was on campus that day. She had met her best friend Toni for lunch and they had just stepped out for a smoke, a habit she told me she was trying hard to quit. She was a marketing major and even though we shared the same side of campus she had not seen me since that night at the party. Then she confessed that she had been casually looking for me too. We laughed because her searching for me on campus had eventually lead to the demise of her relationship with her boyfriend. He got pissed that she was always pre-occupied talking to Toni about "that guy at the party, that got away".

I asked her out she readily accepted and we went out that next night. The date lasted until 2 am when the bar we were at closed and I walked her home. We finished the night with a kiss at her door, and she told me she had had a wonderful time and hoped we could do it again sometime soon. I drove home thinking that this would be the girl I would spend the rest of my life with.

The next morning, right after I got up I gave her a call. She started out by asking why it had taken me so long to call her after our first date. Taken aback, I did not know what to say. It had only been 7 hours since I had kissed her on her doorstep. Silently I thought, until she broke the ice by laughing and saying she was only kidding and was hoping I would call soon. She told me that she had had the most wonderful time on our date and had been up to 5 am talking with bet friend Toni about it. This brought a smile to my face. I immediately asked her out again that night, and she quickly accepted.

The date was better than the first. We had just finished eating at a little pizzeria off campus and we started walking towards the local bars. All of a sudden, Stacy stopped, looked at me and asked if I would prefer to go to her apartment instead of out to a bar. Her blue eyes glistened when she spoke and she quickly convinced me that talking at her place would be much quieter and more intimate. She had a bottle of wine on ice already, and more importantly, we would be closer to her bed, should I decide to take her for the night. With a look that closely resembled the shocked look I gave her the first time she kissed me, I shook my head and followed her home.

We never finished the bottle of wine that we opened when we got to her place. Well, I guess technically, we did when we got out of bed 2 days later. Making love to her the first time was a magical experience. I had been with girls before, but never had I had such an experience. She knew things. She knew how to take me to a high that I had never felt before. She made my body do things I did not think were even possible. When we finished the third time in 18 hours, I was done. I slept for 10 hours straight with her, and had not been for Toni coming in and waking us up, we would have probably missed classes that Monday.

We continued to date, and soon afterward, I was spending all my time at Stacy and Toni's apartment. My best friend and roommate Shawn, was really happy about this. He and his new girlfriend Beth could have the privacy they needed to walk around our apartment naked all the time smoking pot. What can I say, they were pretty free spirits, who liked to be naked a lot.

That spring we all graduated together, and as expected all five of us (including Beth) ended up securing good positions in Atlanta. I was the number two accountant with a mid-sized industrial firm. Stacy got hired on as an entry level marketing exec. Toni took a different route. She got accepted to Emory School of Law, and graduated a few years later. On the first try, she passed the bar, and found a great paying position as a lawyer in the Atlanta downtown district. The two that shocked us the most were Shawn and Beth. After graduating with degrees in business and economics, they took jobs with the Atlanta PD. Yeah, we were all shocked too when Shawn told me they were accepted to the Police Force. I thought for sure that their carefree lifestyle would have prevented them from passing a standard employment drug screen. However, he told me that he and Beth accepted that it was time to grow up and become adults, and there was no better place to do that then in law enforcement.

As you could guess, our group were the best of friends. We got together weekly, except in football season when we saw each other more. Especially every Saturday for Bulldog football. We would BBQ, hang out and play games, go out to eat, go to movies, and do things the best of friends would do with each other. Life was pretty good for us all.

Fast forward a few years later. Stacy and I were sitting on the back porch of our house looking at all we had been blessed with. We had money. A beautiful home. Nice cars. We went on great vacations by ourselves and with our friends. I was the VP of finance at my company, and was looking at the corner office in 10 years. Stacy was head of marketing in the southeast for a large athletic shoe company and could not be happier. Or so I thought. As she took a sip of her sparkling water, she looked over at me and with that twinkle in her eye I had come to love, asked me if I had noticed that she had quit smoking a few months earlier. I said, yes, but I had not planned on saying anything to her about it, just in case she wanted to start again. She told me that was not the only thing she had quit in the last few months. She told me that she had also quit taking her birth control pills and very soon, we would be having a baby together. And thus, we began the next phase of our lives together.

Fast forward about 20 year more. I am now the president of our "little" company. We have expanded to about 150 million in sales annually, and are doing extremely well in all areas we were in. We were growing at a level of greater than 15% annually, and the returns were amazing. I was getting a great salary and my annual bonus was usually more than 200% my base. Most said our success was due to my keen mind, but I like to think it was my willingness to take risks that vaulted us to levels never before seen. Stacie was now the Senior VP of marketing with the same shoe company she started with. Things were going great for her at work too. She had a massive team and control of the entire US market.

On a personal side, we had invested wisely in the market and often made more on an average day than our yearly salaries brought in. We had over 18 million dollars in the bank and our future looked very bright. Our kids, who had been the focus of lives for the past 22 years, were both out of the house in universities, and were moving on towards successful careers of their own.

Once again fate stepped into our lives, but this time, she was not as pleasant as the last time we had met.

It was a Friday night and I was sitting on the back porch relaxing with a pint of my favorite brew. On the radio was to some blues music and I was winding down from a hard week. My eyes were closed, so I did not see Stacy walk out. She had been at a week-long retreat in Chattahoochee National Forest in North Georgia with her firm. I really hated when they went to this retreat location, as there was no cell service in the most of the National Forest. We had been out of contact the entire time. I just heard her as she put down her wine glass on the table next to me and she surprised me when I heard her light up a cigarette. This was something she had not done in close to 20 years. Curious, I opened my eyes, turned and looked at her. It was instantly obvious that something was wrong. The blue pools that I had adored and looked into for the last 27 years, had an emptiness in them that I had never seen before. I said nothing and waited, knowing that she had something she had to say. It was not going to be good. As she took a large sip of her wine, pulled hard on her cigarette, she looked me square in the eye, and said, "I cheated on you, I am so, so sorry."

Emotions flew through my head! Confusion! Anger! Pain! Anguish! What did she just say? Did she just say she had cheated on me!? Did I hear her correctly? I looked at her and said, "Repeat that?!?"

She looked down, and in a whisper, she said again, "I cheated on you, I am so sorry."

Instantly, anger was the emotion that won out. I had never felt so betrayed in my life. Sitting before me used to be the girl of my dreams. The only girl I had ever truly loved. The girl I would die for, and she just told me that she had slept with someone else. I could not speak. I could not think. I wanted to reach out and grab her by the throat. Shake her. Slap her. And I am ashamed to say, punch her. Knowing that I would do something stupid if I did not get control of myself, I got up and walked inside. Standing there is shock, all I could think to do was run...and run I did. I got up calmly, walked through the house, grabbed my wallet and keys, looked at my phone and decided to leave it as I got in my car and drove away from the house, leaving her on the back porch crying by herself.

The anger continued to get the best of me and it held me for hours. Forsaking all others. Mother of my children. Best friend. Lifelong partners. Fuck her! Fuck the horse she rode in on! Tears flowed down my cheeks as I continued to drive, and think about all the worst things a husband could in my situation. I had nowhere to go, and I did not want to get there fast. I drove late into the night and early into the morning before I finally stopped at a motel. I had already bought a bottle of Irish whiskey before checking in, and I started drinking and eventually crashed. I only found out the next day, I had driven to just outside Homestead, Florida.

Why Homestead? I don't know. I have never been there before. Nobody I knew lived in South Florida. I had just started South and kept going. This is where a full tank gas had gotten me. Why did I finally wake up? It was because the maid had opened the door and was telling me it was 2 pm and past my checkout time. Hurt and hungover, I got up, got back in my car and continued on south towards Key West, Florida. I thought what better place to go, hide and drink myself into a stupor.

Stacy:

I sat on the back porch for two hours crying. Waiting for Todd to return so we could talk about what I had done the previous night. I had first assumed he had gone in to make another drink. When he did not return, I assumed he had gone to bed without me. When I finally did go look for him, he was gone. A quick call to his cell phone, told me everything I needed to know. It was on the counter, and he did not want to speak to me, or know where he was. I had crushed the life out of him, our marriage and destroyed everything in my life that was worth any value.

After spending what felt like the entire night crying in my bed, I woke still in my clothes. I was alone in our home. My husband had left me. Todd had not returned, and I was starting to get scared. Only a few times in our 27 years together had we gone more than a day without talking to each other. This past week had been one of those times. That was just something people who loved each other did. However, people that loved each other did not sleep with other people they were not married to either.

I continued to cry on and off all morning. Eventually, I called Toni and asked her to come over to see me. She had been my best friend for almost 30 years, and she could immediately tell by the tone of my voice, that I was in trouble and she needed to be there now. As any best friend would do, she kissed her husband and told him, that I was in trouble and she was going to see me. She would be home as soon as she could. She would be in touch constantly, but she had to go help solve the serious problem that was tormenting me so.

An hour later, Toni let herself into my house with her key to find me in our bedroom crying. She could smell the smoke from my cigarettes and instantly knew that Todd must have left me. She came to me, held me in her arms, and asked if Todd had cheated on me with another woman. All I could do was turn and look at her and cry. She knew immediately from the look in my eyes, it was much worse. I was the one that had been the cheater. I had betrayed my husband. I was the one that had broken the trust. She held me in her arms for hours as I cried, until I finally passed out from shear exhaustion.

After 2 hours, I woke up and found Toni sitting in my room reading a magazine. She looked at me and softly asked if I wanted some food, something to drink, and to talk about it. I was certainly not hungry, but some Pino sounded perfect. I told her the whole story, from the time I left for the retreat until she came to my house. Not once did she ask any questions or give me any questionable looks. She listened to me vent, as a true friend should. At the end, she looked at me and told me that it was going to be OK, and that Todd and I would get through this somehow. She then reminded me that she and her husband, Beth and Shawn would all be there to help out however was necessary. That is what true friends were for.

After a few hours of us talking, it was clear that Todd was not coming home soon. I called my children and asked if either had heard from him, and they both said no. They questioned me why I was asking and I lied to them saying that I had returned from the retreat where I had had no cell service, and he was not home. I then brushed it off saying, that he was probably out with the guys for a weekend and had forgotten to leave a note and also was in an area without cell service. Both were a little angry at their father, for his behavior, but I assured them that he had probably told me and I had forgot to write it in my calendar.