Every Man has His Limits Ch. 01-02

Not your usual Loving Wife story so if all you want is alpha males and BTB this story is probably not for you.

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It was 8pm when I pulled into the driveway and heaved a sigh of relief. Home at last after a six-hour drive and two days early from a two-week Army Reserve camp. I hadn't called her because I wanted it to be a surprise ... but the surprise was on me.

Being released early was somewhat unusual but then we were a highly unusual unit. We paraded one night a week, one weekend a month and two weeks every year just like most other Army Reserve units but there was no one under the rank of Sergeant in the unit and every one of us had come from one particular unit in the regular Army.

Despite all that unusual stuff I had been released for no other reason than I had completed everything that was on my 'to-do' list for that detachment, and I would have been sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for the end of the camp. And it helped that The Boss thought he owed me a favour and I wasn't about to argue with him.

So, I got to go home early and spend some quality time with my beautiful wife, Sarah.

She had been the only reason I wasn't still in the regular Army. After two years of marriage Sarah sat me down one Friday night and pointed out that I had been away on overseas assignments for a total of 18 months in the last 24, 18 months where, for operational reasons, she never heard from me, could never contact me, and could never get me sent home if an emergency arose.

I knew that life must have been tough for her but there was an end in sight. When we first married, I had been told that my trips overseas would only go on for another six months, but things changed, as they always do in the army. Other people resigned their commissions, the unit was left short-handed, it would only be another six months, and then another six months ... I'm sure you get the picture.

And now she had had enough, "It's the Army or me Danny!"

By the end of the next week I had been re-assigned to an Army Reserve unit that mirrored the Regular Army unit I was already in. They too had guys disappear on assignment for months at a time, but I was being moved into an analyst's position that didn't require me to go overseas.

I also had a suspicion that my last psych report had not been as good as it should have been. Months of living on the edge and staying one step ahead of certain death can get to you and I knew that it was starting to get to me.

The Army could have just shown me the door, but I had skills that they needed so they offered me the Army Reserve and, like a loyal little minion, I took it and that seemed to placate Sarah.

For the next two years I fulfilled my Army Reserve commitments and worked for a security firm that snapped me up the moment they heard that I was looking for work. This was a company that seemed to employ a lot of ex-Army guys in roles that were far removed from normal security work, but nobody asked questions as long as we produced outcomes that met our clients' needs.

Sarah was happy to have me home and I enjoyed being at home with her and I was definitely looking forward to taking her in my arms and feeling her lips on mine as we kissed as I turned into the driveway.

Sadly, I could quickly tell that I was going to have to wait a little longer for those pleasures because the house was in darkness even though Sarah's car was in the garage; a little unusual I thought, but I drove in and parked my car next to hers. I closed the garage door and went through the door that connected the garage to the kitchen and the rest of the house and flicked on a few lights.

There were dirty plates stacked in the kitchen sink and things strewn around the kitchen bench, again that was unusual for Sarah usually kept the kitchen spotless and dirty plates always went straight into the dishwasher.

I walked through into the living room and was surprised to see a blouse and skirt thrown on the floor along with a bra and a pair of her panties. They hadn't been dropped in a pile but spread around the room. Her bra was over the back of one of the single lounge chairs, her panties were metres away on the floor while her blouse and skirt were at either end of the couch.

I wasn't jumping to conclusions but I was certainly limbering up.

I went through the entire house but there was no sign of her, although there were definite signs of where she had been and what she had been doing. Sarah hated a messy bed and she always made sure that the bed was made, but not that day.

The doona was thrown in a heap on the floor at the end of the bed, just as it often was when we had been in a hurry to get into bed and fuck our brains out. And then there was the large wet spot in the middle of the bed.

My desire to hold her and kiss her was beginning to fade as the analytical side of my brain began to take over and start measuring the runups I would need for those jumps.

I wandered back downstairs and spotted Sarah's phone on the table when I walked back into the kitchen. She rarely went anywhere without that phone so she must have been rather distracted when she left the house that evening.

Of course I picked it up and checked it, something that I almost never had a chance to do because she never went anywhere without it. Sadly, Sarah had been careless and within seconds I knew more than I wanted to know about how she had been spending her time while I was away, where she was tonight, and the fact that there was no innocent explanation for where she was.

There were no names, just initials and nicknames but I knew that one of those nicknames was likely to come walking through the door with Sarah later that night.

I tossed her phone back onto the table, took my bag into the laundry and, without thinking, loaded my dirty clothes into the washing machine and then went upstairs and repacked it with clean clothes. I thought about changing out of my uniform that I had travelled home in but didn't see the point.

After one last scan of the living room, I turned off the lights and then I settled down to wait. My plan was simple, if Sarah came home by herself, we would have a brief discussion and then I would walk out and never return.

Divorce in Australia was based on a no-fault system where all you had to do was declare that the marriage had broken down and there was no reasonable chance of the parties getting back together so that would be easy.

We had separate bank accounts so that wasn't a worry, and she could have whatever was in the joint account that we used for mortgage payments and other joint bills. We had no kids so we would sell the house and our assets would be divided 50/50 and there would be no support for her.

I could be free and clear in maybe 15 months. It was all going to be too easy.

If Sarah brought the guy she was shagging back to the house things would be a little different. I had never been one for pinning all the blame for an affair, or a fling, on the female. It takes two to tango and there was no way I was going to let the guy leave without feeling at least a little of my anger.

Yes, I was prepared, I had a plan and all I had to do was execute it when they arrived. But the longer they took to get back to the house the more time I had time to review my plan and start to think about what had gone wrong with our marriage ... and who was to blame.

Sarah and I had met at a friend's birthday party, she was a stunning brunette who arrived on the arm of a guy who really did not appreciate how lucky he was. I think it was her soft smile that caught my eye the moment she walked in the door, and I couldn't believe that the guy she was with left her the moment they arrived and headed for the bar where his mates had already gathered.

She was 5'6" of pure eye candy. Long black hair that fell almost to her waist framed a perfectly shaped face that was neither round nor long, but just right. Her green eyes sparkled, and that soft smile was always there.

It wasn't hard to tell that she wasn't wearing a bra but then her perfectly shaped C-cups clearly didn't need the support of one. Her hips were the sort that made you think of how good it would be to hold them while you fucked her from behind and the way her tight dress curved around her arse was enough to make most men, me included, drool.

Her legs were shapely and there was a lot of them to see thanks to the little black dress she was wearing. I was to learn later that the term for her dress was micro-mini, and Sarah had quite a few micro-mini skirts and dresses that left little to the imagination for she liked to tease guys around her, and it certainly worked that night for she was soon surrounded by guys.

I didn't join the crowd around her, perhaps some might call me shy, but I prefer to think of myself as reserved. I like to stand back and admire a beautiful woman from a distance and there was plenty to admire about this young woman.

I admit that I'm not much of a party animal and, after an hour or two I decided to slip away. I had come alone, greeted the birthday boy, chatted to a couple of guys I knew, and carried on a polite conversation with a couple of girls but wasn't sorry to see them wander off with other guys so, when the time was right, I headed for the door.

I had managed to make it through the front door when someone came up behind me and slipped their arm through mine. When I looked there was Sarah hanging onto my arm as if her life depended on it.

"Please Dan, get me out of here," she almost begged so I hustled her into my car, and we drove off just as the guy she had come with lurched onto the footpath out the front of the party house.

"Ugh, I don't know why I agreed to go out with him," she said, "all he did was drink and then called me a slut because all those guys wouldn't leave me alone."

"So, how did you know my name?" Finding someone I didn't know who knew my name had sent a cold shiver down my spine and I had to remind myself that I was safe back home in Australia and not on an operation in some foreign country.

She laughed, "I'm Sarah and I asked one of the guys you had been talking with who the handsome loner was who was standing over in the corner. I was about to head in your direction when I saw you make a break for the door and decided that I needed to get away too."

We had ended up at a quiet little wine bar I knew where we talked and talked. She was a high school Science teacher while I admitted to being in the Army but was deliberately vague about what I did there.

She was interested in the things that I was interested in, and we discovered that our interests meshed almost perfectly. She wasn't a mad football supporter, but she loved cricket. My god, did she love cricket!

She could rattle off batting averages and strike rates. She knew the names of the next generation of upcoming cricketers and could discuss tactics and why the Poms needed to stop whining about losing and get on and start picking players who could actually bat because their bowlers couldn't do all the work.

I hadn't quite reached the point in my life where I had given up looking for the woman of my dreams but until that night, I think I was close. After that night I knew I had found her, and I wasn't about to let her get away and that was the start of a relationship that kept going ahead in leaps and bounds.

She later told me that I had her hooked that first night when I escorted her to her door but made no effort go beyond a soft kiss. From there on our relationship grew at a fast pace and after four months she moved in with me and a further six months down the track saw us married.

We seemed to be totally besotted with one another and it was a wonder that our lovemaking didn't blister the paint on the walls. But then operations in the real world picked up and I disappeared for a month, was home for a week and then gone again for another two months and so it went on.

Each time I came home after a trip away we would start ripping our clothes off the moment I was through the front door. Sometimes we made it to the bed and sometimes we didn't but where we did it didn't really matter; we went at each other like two wild animals desperate for sex.

At first, she seemed to handle my frequent absences well and wouldn't hear of me resigning my commission and leaving the Army even though I was beginning to struggle with being away from her for such long periods of time, but it wasn't long before we had our little talk and I moved to the Army Reserve.

Sarah never erased a thing from her mobile phone and I went back to her phone for a second look. As I looked back through a long series of text messages I realised that by the time we had that talk the damage had already been done and she was already looking outside the marriage for the love and support I should have been giving her.

I could see text messages between Sarah and at least two different guys although one of them had seemed to stop over about a year after I left the Regs but the other one continued on ... but when did they see each other? I was always home ... or so I thought ... but then I saw the pattern.

It looked as though they were seeing each other one night a week, one weekend a month and two weeks a year. While I was doing my Army thing, she was doing another guy, but the rest of the time Sarah was totally mine.

Realising that we wouldn't be in this situation but for my Army service made me think again about what I planned on doing when she got home. I had no second thoughts about what I should do to the guy she came home with; he was still going to feel some serious pain, but I had to admit that some of the blame for the failure of my marriage was definitely down to me.

I began to think about how Sarah had acted each time I returned home to try and see if I had missed something but whenever I had been home from my long trips away she had always been the epitome of a loving wife. She never left my side except to go to work, she was always ready to share her body with me and eager to explore new ways to give and receive pleasure.

And since leaving the Regular army and being at home more, I had seen absolutely no sign of her being involved with anyone else ... but she obviously was.

Our love making had remained as intense as ever, we hugged, kissed and touched as much as we had when we first moved in together. We sent each other text messages and went out of our way to have lunch together on weekdays when we were working. I wracked my brain for some memory of her even giving a hint that there were other guys waiting over the horizon and couldn't find any indication of that at all.

If we had to do shopping then we did it together, if there were social functions at her school or the company I worked for we either went together or didn't go at all. She had no brothers or sisters, and her parents were dead so she never went to visit them and, while she had a couple of friends who now lived in other parts of Australia, she never went to visit them either.

Until that night there had been no signs of any kind that she was being unfaithful, but then I had never looked at her phone before and now that I had, there were plenty of indications that I wasn't the only man in her life.

And at that point a little thought popped into my mind. If we really had been so happy together, would she want to end our life together? What if she asked for forgiveness and a second chance?

At first, I dismissed the idea. She had been unfaithful; she didn't deserve a second chance and there was no way I was ever going to give her one. She had cheated and destroyed our marriage and I would never agree to putting myself in a position where I could be so humiliated by her again.

I'm sure that somewhere in my brain there was an image of me striking a heroic pose as I made that declaration because something triggered another part of my brain to start laughing at myself. I had never been one for heroic poses and how could I assume the high moral ground when I had left her alone for such long periods of time.

If I was totally honest with myself, I had to admit that my eyes had wandered at times while I had been away and, if the opportunity had ever arisen, I might have spent some time in the arms of another woman simply because I needed that human contact. So how could that be acceptable for me but not for Sarah?

On top of that there was another slight problem, behind the overlay of anger that I was feeling right now, I was still deeply in love with Sarah. She had brought so many good things to my life, and I couldn't really imagine life without her.

A little voice in the back of my brain was telling me that this whole thing didn't have to end in divorce. We could recover from here and while I should take my anger out on the other guy, whoever he was, I shouldn't set out to hurt Sarah physically or emotionally.

She was obviously entitled to a second chance if she wanted it and I needed to find out why she had cheated so that I could fix things so that she never needed to do it again ... and that was going to be a real challenge. The Army had taught me all the skills necessary to kill people quickly and quietly but there had been no one to teach me how to handle a fragile relationship that I wanted to hold together.

I can usually formulate a simple plan, review it and update it in a matter of minutes while more complex plans might take an hour of my time. I would start at Point A and end at Point B with a straight line between the two points, while not ignoring any variables that I might encounter along the way.

But trying to come up with a plan to save my marriage was so messed up with variables that, by the time I heard a car pull up outside the house, I still had no clear idea of what I was going to do to keep Sarah and me together.

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My car was parked in our two-car garage and the door was closed, just as it had been when I arrived home, so they wouldn't know that I was back unless they came in through the garage. Fortunately, they headed for the front door.

Sarah hadn't left any lights on so there was some giggling and fumbling for the key to the front door interspersed the sounds of two people making out. Soft moans from Sarah and a wicked chuckle from the guy followed by:

"God I can't wait to get you into bed," and a groan from Sarah, the same noise she made whenever I inserted a couple of digits into her cunt.

I did my best to ignore the groan and focus on those nine words because they told me who the guy was. He was my best mate and the Best Man at our wedding, Tom Greenhill. I had known Tom since our days in primary school and, until I joined the Army, we had been inseparable.

At that point I had gone to Duntroon, Afghanistan, various specialist training schools and a number of places we weren't officially supposed to be, while Tom had gone to Sydney University and come out with an Engineering Degree. Tom was supposedly married with two children, had a top paying job with a major Civil Engineering company and was living the dream ... and shagging my wife at the same time.

The key turned in the lock and Tom and Sarah almost fell into entrance foyer where there was some further making out before they got the front door closed and made it into the living room at ... which point I turned on the lights. For a moment the couple remained locked in a passionate kiss with Tom's hand pushing the hem of Sarah's micro-mini dress up so he could squeeze her butt cheek and then the scene collapsed as Sarah leapt back and screamed when she saw me standing there.

"What the ..." Tom never got to finish the question because Sarah cut him off.

"Oh my god! Danny! Danny it's not ..."

"Dan ... mate ..." Tom looked as though he had seen a ghost and shouted to be heard over Sarah, "Look I'm sorry ... it was just dinner ... she got me drunk and came on to me ... MATE I'M SORRY SHE JUST WOULDN'T LEAVE ME ALONE!"