Paul And Paula

Regardless, in less than three days, she'd be home and it would be impossible to avoid her any more. Everything would come to a head. Unless...

As soon as the idea came to him, he went online to check on something he'd just remembered.

Twenty minutes later he was in the office of Howard Jennings, president of the university.

"Chicago? With only 30 minutes notice? Paul, you know what I think of you and the contribution you've made to this place, but how can I justify spending funds to send you to Chicago for a week-long conference out of nowhere, especially when I'm going to have to scramble to find someone to fill your shoes while you're gone?"

"This is an international conference of public relations officers from colleges and universities on four continents. There will be seminars and papers on cutting edge technology and trends that do affect us because other colleges and universities are going to be there. As to why I'm making this appeal at the last minute...I thought that I was going to have some personal issues that would make it impossible to go, but I worked them out."

"...but still-"

"I'll pay for the trip and my lodgings myself, Howard. That's how important I think this conference is. I just want the university to sponsor me so that I'll have your backing while I'm there. And Richard can fill in for me while I'm gone. He's filled in before, just not for a week. He can do it."

Jennings steepled his fingers in front of him on his desk and gave him a curious look.

"Alright, I guess, Paul, if it's that important to you. I'll okay it. Charge your airfare to the university and any fees and you handle the hotel? Is that fair?"

"More than fair."

As he walked back to his office he stopped by Sherry's desk. As he'd expected, she was waiting there for him.

"He went for it?"

"Yeah. Now remember, Sherry, when she calls, this was a last minute decision betwene the university and myself. And she's told nothing else."

She shook her head sadly.

"You know that isn't going to solve anything, don't you. You can't keep running from her forever."

"Not forever, Sherry. Just for a little while longer. I'll figure out what I need to do before too much longer."

"Alright, I'll do it for you. But I'm going to hate it. I'd like to rip her eyes out."

He was heading for his office but stopped and walked back to where she stood. He reached out to cup the side of her face, not really caring if any last minute stragglers saw anything.

"What you said earlier was true, Sherry. We've been dancing around each other and – our feelings – for a long time. But, what you don't realize is that it's not just that I'm married and I love – loved – Paula. You're too good for me."

She started to say something and he touched his fingers to her lips stopping her.

"No, it's true. I'm older than you and I'm married and I've had my kids. You still want and deserve children, but I'm through with that part of my life. We could go to bed and the sex would probably be great. Hell, I know it would if I could keep up with you. But besides having a great ass, you're a good person. You're loyal and loving and funny. If we had met ten years ago and I was unattached, I would have been all over you. But you need somebody closer to your age that can give you kids and love you the way you deserve to be loved. I'd love sex with you, but all it would do is stroke my ego and mess up your head and heart. It would be a selfish damn thing to do to a woman I really like."

Tears glistened in her eyes as she smiled and said, 'You know you've got a really shitty way of discouraging a girl from falling in love with you."

"It's the truth, and you know it."

"It may be, but how many guys would say that to a woman they know is dying to go down on them. Not that many."

At 3 p.m. Saturday Paul picked up two suitcases and walked to the front door. The cab was waiting outside. He'd be flying out in three hours and be in Chicago by 6 p.m. Chicago time. He took a last look around. He was almost certainly going to be coming back here, but somehow, it felt as if he were leaving for the last time. He felt that he was saying goodbye: to the couch where Paula had knelt while he spurted into her mouth and tried not to scream loud enough to scare the neighbors, to the entertainment center that held their marriage photo and the one-year photos of Ben and Patricia, to the floor where he had fucked his luscious, loving wife so many times over the years when they couldn't make it to the bed, to a life that seemed more precious than he could even imagine now.

He closed the door, feeling something die inside him.

**********************************************************

PAULA – Monday morning.

She dropped the carry-on handle to take out her house keys and unlocked the front door. As she stepped inside, dragging the two attached suitcases on wheel behind her, she took a deep breath and inhaled the scents of home. The house had a particular smell, the scented candles the two of them loved and kept going all the time until the smell had permeated the walls, the pinewood floors they had selected in preference to carpet ten years ago.

She took a second deep breath and felt some of the tension seep out of her bones as she did so. Not that it was a bad tension. Her pussy was still sore from the pounding Greg had given her over and over, but it was a good sore. Her breasts were sore despite her precautions to make sure he didn't leave any noticeable bruises. She felt good and sore and used, but still, it had been a hectic week of meetings and business and all-out fucking.

It would probably be the last time with Greg for awhile. He was getting too serious. He was magnificent in bed and he had that huge cock, but she had to cool him down before he did something stupid like tell his wife and Paul about their affair. Of course, Greg had no idea that he was only one of many she enjoyed, and there was no reason to hurt his feelings with the truth. She'd cool it and uncouple herself as she had done so often. It was almost down to an art now. Men were great at fucking, but their hearts kept screwing things up.

The house was quiet, and cool, the soft sussurrus of the big grandfather clock that Paul had loved and insisted they buy despite almost precipitating a monumental fight with her ticking softly in the background. Despite herself, the damn thing had grown on her and now she had a hard time sleeping in hotels without its background noise.

The first thing that caught her eye as she walked past it was the wedding picture of her and Paul on the entertainment center, flanked by photos of Ben and Patricia at one year of age apiece and then the grown up pictures of their children. Shit, somehow she'd have to talk Paul into replacing it and moving the pictures somewhere where they wouldn't always be the first thing she saw after walking in from a frenzied week of fucking another man.

"I shouldn't feel guilty," she thought, "so why do those fucking pictures always bring me down when I come home."

She smiled to herself, remembering a bushy bearded history prof she'd fucked for an 'A' back in the day who would have said that she was merely dealing with the lingering hangover of "bourgeois morality" The smile vanished as she told herself that Paul was the very living definition of "bourgeois" and they could have put his picture in the dictionary to define it. He was such a sweet man, but shit, he was also such a cliché.

In her bedroom she unpacked and put her clothing away. The fancy and sexy stuff was packed away in a locker that Paul would never know about and all the clothing that had semen and her own juices smeared all over them had been washed thoroughly before she ever left the hotel where Greg had fucked her to screaming climax after climax until Sunday morning when she called a halt to the proceedings. She'd kept him happy with four blow jobs until Monday morning when she flew out, but blowjobs didn't leave incriminating evidence for oblivious husbands to notice.

Not, she thought with a twinge of anger, that Paul would notice if she walked in naked with cum dripping down her legs. He'd probably come up with some damn reasonable explanation. Like maybe she'd been kidnapped by horny aliens. Anything to avoid the obvious conclusion that his loving wife was fucking around on him.

Why was he like that? She pondered it for the millionth time. Was he that stupid? But he wasn't that stupid about anything else. It was just about her that he was clueless, had been ever since college.

She remembered a conversation she had had with Greg, when she had let her inner feelings about Paul out. As she had talked about him, she realized for the first time in years she'd been talking honestly about he husband of 20 years. As she had talked about him with venom in her voice she couldn't believe as she heard herself, she realized that she was being honest with Greg as well as herself.

They were the feelings that had been bouncing around deep inside herself as she fucked other men behind her husband's back, felt up his colleagues and made them come in their slacks at campus parties when her husband was only a few feet away in another room. They weren't new. They'd been growing all through the years of building a second, secret life for herself, of watching Paul sitting there fat, happy and ignorant and knowing how far distant he came up as a lover compared to the men who had deposited their cum inside her pussy and mouth and ass in some cases only minutes before she walked back into his life.

"It's not your fault," she told herself, talking to an imaginary Paul. "It's just that your dick isn't that big and you don't fuck me with passion anymore and I don't get wet around you the way I do around Greg, or any of the other guys I fuck because they're better than you."

She sat down suddenly on the couch in their den.

"What the fuck am I doing here?" she asked herself. She looked at the picture of them on their wedding day. "Why do I keep coming back to you, dammit? Why don't I stay with Greg, the way he wants me to? Or with some other man that makes me come in quarts instead of coming back over and over to your sweet, caring goddamn boring fucking. Whoever said love had to last forever. I don't love you any more, you bastard."

She took a deep breath and buried her face in her hands. She realized what was happening. It had happened before, but maybe never this violently. It was the feeling of being trapped. She came back time after time because she couldn't stand the look she'd see on his face when he learned what she'd been doing behind his back for years. She didn't think she could do it. It would be like clubbing a baby seal. It was so damned pathetic. She was held to her husband by pity. What the hell kind of basis for a marriage was that.

How had she gotten here. How had she wound up trapped at the age of 40, trapped in a marriage that should have ended years ago. It should have ended when she started looking at him with contempt, ended when he was young enough to make a new life for himself. Not that 42 was ancient, but she wondered how he'd be able to bounce back when she left him.

"And I will leave you," she told the picture on the entertainment center. "I know it and it's coming closer every day."

She didn't cry. She had never cried over any man in her life. But she wished she could.

The saddest part of it all was that it was the part of him that drove her crazy, that had driven her to other men, was what had attracted her to him in the first place. It was that calm, that maturity, that air of being older and more grownup than anyone around them.

She could still remember the first few times she had seen him. He was in one of the Primo fraternities on the UF campus. He was a senior, herself a sophomore. Despite the fact that he didn't come from money and wasn't a jock, he was the kind of guy that everybody looked up to and wanted to be a friend to. Despite the fact that he was only 22, everybody went to him when they were in trouble, when they needed a cool head. And he never lost it.

Just as she'd never seen him drunk. While his friends were baying at the moon, dancing on tables or dashing naked through the campus, he sat back with a quiet smile, sipping on a drink and looking at his friends like they were overeager kindergartners.

While she was just the opposite. She loved the crazy feeling of losing control after she been drinking non-stop for hours, the rush of being stripped and tossed on a bed in some brother's room and in the middle of being fucked feeling a strange cock shoved in her mouth or up her ass and having absolutely no control, just bouncing along for an orgasmic ride.

And despite her being the wild child and his being Captain Cool, the two of them had been drawn together as irresistably as iron filings to a magnet.

"And this is where we end up 20 years later," she said to herself, returning to the present.

She made herself get up from the couch. She had to settle back into the routine of being Mrs. Paula Donnally, to put on, as she often told herself, her loving wife face over her true slut face.

She got up and walked over to the liquor cabinet. A good stiff brandy, even at 11 a.m. in the morning, was what she needed right now. She pulled the cabinet door open and realized the brandy was gone. There were a few bottles of white wine, an old bottle of Jim Beam, but not the brandy. She stared at the bottles, puzzled. She had had a drink before leaving. Paul never drank at all except at parties. The bottle had been almost full. Where had it gone?

Without even realizing what she was doing, she found herself walking to the kitchen and looked into the trashcan near the back door. The brandy bottle was there. She reached in and pulled it out, then realized it was covered with dried slime. Shit. She dropped it and pulled her hand back but even a whiff was enough to make her realize it was dried vomit. Someone had been hurling and drinking.

What the fuck. She'd been married 20 years to Paul and even the night his father had died and she'd held him while he cried, he hadn't touched liquor. He'd never have gotten drunk, wiped out a bottle of brandy and vomited it back up. He could as easily had jumped up and flown.

She started looking around uneasily. It was strange, but the house...felt..different. She couldn't put her finger on it, but it wasn't a good feeling. She thought for a moment and then walked into the first of two bathrooms, the closest to the den. She looked at the toilet, the sink, then knelt down beside the toilet. There was nothing on or around the toilet, but around the base, there was a discoloration. She put her finger to it and then smelled. Dried vomit.

Which meant that Paul had gone to the trouble of cleaning up the bathroom, but like most men, he hadn't been thorough enough.

Then she went into the laundry room. As she'd expected, the washer was full of bedclothes and there was still that smell of vomit, only much stronger.

She couldn't believe what she was finding. Paul couldn't have done this. And he wouldn't have let Ben or Patricia do it in their house. Did he have a woman in here? Got a woman drunk? That made no sense either.

She walked into their bedroom and grabbed a copy of Van Gogh's "sunflowers" and pulled it forward, revealing a wall safe. She clicked the combination, Paul's birthday, and it swung open. Inside were some financial documents, jewelry and Paul's Glock automatic. He had bought it for her years ago when there had been a rash of home burglaries and he didn't want her to be without protection. She picked up the Glock. She'd taken gun handling classes and knew what to do with it. As she brought it to her face, she wasn't surprised to smell the familiar aroma of vomit.

Fifteen minutes later she sat at their kitchen table, trying to wrap her head around what she was finding. Paul didn't drink, never got drunk, yet somebody had spewed all over the bathroom, the bedroom and even knew the combination of their safe and only four people knew that combination. Two of them were off at college.

She swallowed hot coffee. Paul always left a brewed pot of coffee ready for her when she got in from trips. There was usually a note, some sweet little nothing by the coffee pot. Today there was nothing. No note and no coffee. She'd had to make her own. It was oddly disturbing. And that wasn't all, she realized.

She went out and looked through the house. They weren't there. Paul always left her roses, or flowers of some type, either in the den or the kitchen for her return home. He said it was his way of welcoming her home. There were no flowers anywhere.

It suddenly dawned on her. In the confusion spawned by her discoveries, she'd forgotten the other thing Paul always did. As she looked toward the phone sitting on the kitchen counter she noted with a warm flush of relief that at least one thing was normal. The whole morning had turned strange, but the blinking light indicated that he had left her a message.

His voice was always there when she walked in, telling her in that calm sweet voice that he missed her and loved her and couldn't wait to walk in the front door after work. There were times the expected sentiments almost irritated her. He always did the same thing. Flowers and coffee and a voice message. For a woman that secretly held him in contempt.

But today....It was okay to feel these feelings she told herself. She might not love him anymore, at least the way she had, but they had been together for 20 years and he was as much a part of her life as this house, as solid and dependable. It was alright to miss his presence, even if the feelings she had toward him were more of a brother than lover.

She picked up the phone and punched in the play button.

"Paula, hey. I wish I'd been able to reach you to tell you this another way. Especially after you were in Miami all last week. But something has come up. There's a huge conference in Chicago starting Monday. I'm flying out today – I'm leaving this message Saturday – so I can get settled in Sunday. This is going to be really hectic and they don't allow cell phones at the sessions, so I won't be able to talk to you much and you won't be able to reach me very easily. But I'll leave you messages if we can't talk directly. I think this will be over by Sunday and I'll be coming home. If anything changes, I'll call. I hope you had a good trip home. Bye."

There was a click and the call ended. After a minute she realized her jaw was hanging open. She shook her head as if trying to clear away a fog of even more confusion. He had just flown out without ever talking directly to her. Without telling her he'd be leaving. What the hell was going on?

She punched the play button and listened to the message again. And didn't understand anything any more the second time around. What the fuck, what the fuck. Vomit and empty liquor bottles and no flowers and no coffee and no welcome home telephone message and somebody had taken the Glock out of their safe and Paul hadn't talked to her in a week and now he had left town without the decency of talking to her directly.

Then it sank in on her. And despite the fact that it was early Fall and still felt like summer in Florida, she felt a cold chill run through her body. He hadn't said he loved her. She couldn't remember any time in the last 20 years that they had spoken and he hadn't added, 'I love you'."

He hadn't said 'I love you' and for all the emotion in his voice after being away from her for a week, he could have been reading the telephone book. She realized it was Paul's voice definitely, but it didn't sound like her husband. Something essential was missing.

She let the phone drop and there was a dull thud as it hit the table top.