Prologue to a Problem - Continued

Chapter 6

Judy and Ann had just finished their 2nd Bloody Mary, when Mark poked his head around the corner.

"Anyone home?" he asked with big smile on his face.

Judy introduced him to Ann.

Well, I can certainly see why she finds him attractive, Ann thought.

Mark was 6'1". Maybe 200 lbs. Lean. Sinewy. Ripped. Big smile, tight tee shirt, tan, gorgeous legs, hazel eyes, and thick brown hair.

The three sat around and visited. Finally, Judy convinced everyone to put on their suits and head down to the dock for a boat ride.

The three boated, swam, lounged about, and of course drank quite a bit. Ann was the third wheel, but she didn't feel like they were trying to get rid of her. About 10:00 pm Judy did excuse herself to the bedroom and Mark quickly followed. Ann was grateful to be alone and spent the time updating Facebook and sending Phil a few pictures.

About midnight, Mark came back into the kitchen for some water. Ann was at the breakfast table scrolling through her phone. "Hi."

"Damn. You scared me," Mark said as he jumped.

"Sorry," replied Ann. "I couldn't sleep and there was no chair in my room."

"Today was fun," Mark said.

"Yeah, it was," Ann replied. "More so than I thought."

"What do you mean?"

"Really Mark? You're a smart boy. Did you really think I was looking forward to hanging out with the lovebirds? This whole thing's fucked up. You know that right?"

"Yeah, it is."

"So why do you continue it?"

"I don't know. Now that it's started, I don't want it to stop. It's like an obsession.

"What?" Mark continued noticing the startled expression on Ann's face.

"Oh, nothing," Ann said. "It's just that you're the second person I've talked to in the last two weeks that has compared infidelity to an uncontrollable obsession."

The two were quiet for a moment.

"Come here," Ann commanded.

Mark obeyed and slid his chair closer.

Ann grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. He was startled, but quickly regained his composure and returned the kiss with a fervor that surprised Ann given he had just left Judy's bed.

Within moments Mark's hands started roaming, finding and squeezing her breasts. Ann broke the kiss.

"That's enough."

The look on Mark's face was priceless.

She reached down and squeezed his considerable erection. "I'm sorry big boy, I just wanted to be reminded what a 23-year-old college boy tasted like," she said.

"And...?"

"Not bad," Ann smiled as she got up, flushed from having left behind, for the second time in this very kitchen, a fully erect, aroused young man.

Chapter 7

Judy and Ann were back on the patio Sunday morning.

"What time you leaving?" Judy asked Ann.

"In just a few hours. I still need to shower and pack. What about you?"

"Mark and I will spend most of the day here. Mark has to be back in Norman tonight. I'm not going back to Dallas until tomorrow."

Both ladies said nothing for some time. Both were thinking about what awaited them at home.

Finally, Judy broke the silence. "I guess you probably surmised this, but I want to tell you anyway. I want you to hear it directly from me.

"As you know, Steve and I got married right after that spring break. We had to. At some point during that week, I got pregnant."

Ann nodded. This was not new news. Steve was one of the OU swimmers, and although Judy and Steve were not dating prior to that spring break, they got married shortly afterwards.

"Why are you telling me all this? I know the story," Ann replied somewhat distantly.

Judy continued, "Well, then you know that Steve could be the father, but we're not certain. He was like a puppy dog after that week, madly in love with me. I didn't want an abortion and I also didn't want to raise a kid alone at 22. So, when he offered to marry me, I thought it was sweet and I said yes. Our son looks like us so we leave it alone. Since then, I've had no regrets. We've built a good life and raised two wonderful sons."

"And yet here we are once again," Ann said as she spread her arms expansively. "Right back in the middle of some fucked-up shit."

"Ann, are you mad at me?"

"No. Goddamn it Judy! I'm not mad at you. I'm really not. It's just that I feel fucking lost and I'm looking for some answers."

"Maybe the answer is give yourself a break. Give yourself permission to not live in fear of your past," Judy said as she pressed on. "Steve is acutely aware that I have fucked more guys than just him. He was in this same house with you and me for a week for Christs sake. He survived. We've made it work. Ann, you should know this, none of us are innocent. Not you, not me, not any man I have ever known," Judy said looking directly at Ann.

Ann held her stare. She knows, Ann realized. She fucking knows.

Neither woman spoke. Seeing Judy had been necessary; cathartic if you will. But Ann instinctively realized it would be their last time together. Too many shared secrets. Too many painful lies.

Chapter 8

Phil spent Sunday morning looking at some photos Ann had sent last night. There was one of Judy driving the boat, smiling and waving. One of the lake contrasted against a bright blue perfect sky.

And one that made Phil sick to his stomach.

It was another selfie of the two of them on the boat. But his engineering self immediately knew the picture was not taken with one of their outstretched arms. It was too far away for one and the angle was all wrong. Even if they had had a selfie stick, the picture could not have been taken at that exact angle.

Earlier this morning Phil had casually texted Ann, "Who else is there?"

"Nobody. Why?" she had immediately answered.

More lies.

"Nothing," Phil texted, choosing to postpone the fight for later. "Safe travels. Text me when you get to the gate in Dallas and when you land."

For the next several hours, Phil did nothing but stew. She'd be home from the airport any minute, so he steeled himself for the confrontation that was coming. "This time," he said out loud and with conviction, "I'm going to get the fucking truth."

About that time, a text arrived from his colleague John in Dallas.

"Hey Phil. Yesterday you were asking me about that spring break party. It got me thinking and I went through some old college keepsake boxes and found this old Polaroid of the group that was there. I thought you might know some of the folks so here you go. The girl on the right was the one that owned the place. Trust me she's way hotter than even this picture shows. The volleyball chick is the one on the left. Good luck with the Cessna project."

Phill stared at the picture. That left only Ann. There were only three girls! So, by process of elimination, his wife was the one looking for a glass of water in the middle of the night. His wife was the one in a tee shirt and nothing else. His wife was the one coming out of the bedroom, recently fucked. His wife was the one allowing a stranger to grab her bare ass, and whatever the fuck else he did as they "fooled around a bit."

Phil stared at the photo. Seven smiling, young, tan, vibrant college kids, in swimsuits, with arms draped over each other, staring out from the past at the camera without a care in the world, delivering a nightmare message directly to Phil all these years later.

Chapter 9

Ann was circumspect as it related to the divorce. The oft used phrase 'it is what it is' came to mind.

She thought back two years ago to Phil's rage when she returned from Judy's. Somehow, he was in possession of some random picture that the SMU swimmer had taken and somehow, he had known about her encounter in the kitchen with him. He had also rightly guessed that she had just left the bed of another guy. It was all a bit surreal.

But despite Phil's accurate recount of events and his demand that she confess, she never did. She denied every assertion he made. Every accusation he hurled. Every plea he offered for her to just come clean.

Ann thought back to just how vigorously and viciously she defended her many lies.

"So, you're going to divorce me because some random guy from SMU grabbed my ass and groped me without my goddamn permission?" Ann had yelled during one of their many fights.

"Don't give me that shit Ann! I am so tired of you lying. He said he didn't just grab your ass but that he also made out with you and that you had just been fucked by some dude at the house!" Phil yelled in return.

"He grabbed my ass, and I slapped him. Don't you think he might also be capable of making up some bullshit story about me having sex? For Christ's sake Phil, he even admitted he didn't see anything."

"Yeah, but he heard!" Phil spat.

"Phil, don't you do this. Don't throw away our marriage based on some bullshit hearsay from over 20 years ago!"

But in the end, after days of mutual yelling and crying, and the eventual forced admission from Ann that 'yes' her and Judy weren't alone at the lake; and 'yes' Judy was having an affair and had arranged for her boyfriend to meet her there; and 'no' she had not known about it in advance; but 'yes' she knew it was a bad idea and yet she stayed anyway; he said he was done.

As she thought back on the painful days and weeks that followed the weekend with Judy and the dissolution of her marriage, she decided she couldn't blame Phil for walking away. Their marriage was in part based on a lie. If he had known she had cheated on him during spring break he would have never dated her after spring break. That is why she kept it a secret and why she committed to him so completely. She was certain not just Phil, but no one would date her, let alone marry her, if they knew the truth about Lake Texoma. And the truth was far worse than even what Phil had been able to piece together in his vivid imagination.

Ann had slept with all four swimmers that week and had made out with the fifth one. She would have no doubt fucked him as well if someone hadn't opened a door to go to the bathroom. No group sex or public sex, nothing gross like that, but if pressed she probably wouldn't be able to give you an exact number of times she had been passed around. The boys were elite athletes and fun-loving raging hormone machines.

The week had started long before with a lot of planning. Although Phil wasn't sure why he and Ann went separate ways that spring break, Ann was. She and Judy had orchestrated the whole thing. Judy and Ann had met three OU swimmers at a bar. One of the boys had a girlfriend that was on scholarship on the volleyball team. By the end of the evening, they were all best friends and had agreed to all get together for spring break. Ann had started dating Phil, but it wasn't too serious, and he wasn't with her that night, so it was easy to get caught up in the moment.

The next day, as Ann thought about Phil, she became a little more reluctant to move ahead with the plans.

"Ann, don't you dare back out on me," Judy implored.

"It's just so spur of the moment, and I don't know what to tell Phil."

"Tell him the truth, that you're going on spring break with me, and he's on his own," Judy answered.

"Besides, how many times are we going to get to hang out with gorgeous swimmers?" Judy said with a mischievous smile.

So, Ann relented, and the three boys and three girls made plans for Lake Texoma. Ann was a little worried about the sleeping arrangements. One of the swimmers was bringing his girlfriend and Judy had her eye on another one. That left Ann with the third. Again, Ann was no prude, but she also wasn't completely comfortable with the automatic assumption that she would be paired up with one of the guys and all that entailed. But Judy's enthusiasm, her date's good looks, and the naughtiness of the whole trip built momentum leading up to that week that Ann chose not to fight.

Once there, Ann found that she liked her "date." He was funny, good looking, and very confident with women. It was night two when Ann relented and slept with him. With that out of the way she began to relax and enjoy herself more.

There was just one awkward problem. A fourth OU swimmer showed up. He was not supposed to be there. He was not part of the original paired-up plan. He came last minute, uninvited, and was odd man out as he did not bring a girlfriend. Rather than catch the hint and leave, he stayed and hung out. His name was Steve, Judy's eventual husband.

On the third night of the week Steve was playfully pouting around the fire pit in front of all the others. He bemoaned his blue balls and how hard it was to be around all these smoking hot girls with no relief, and how hard it was to sleep with all the noise. Judy laughed and took pity on him, got up from her chair and sat in his lap.

"Steve it must be miserable for you just sitting here and watching us parade around in skimpy bikinis," she teased in a breathy Marilyn Monroe like voice as she ground her ass into his lap.

"Damn straight Judy. It's not fair and it really hurts," he said with his best puppy dog eyes.

"Oh my God ladies! Can you believe this sad sack?" Judy asked all the others with a drunken grin.

"Well, we can't have you suffering. That would be cruel," Judy soothed.

So, in front of everyone they began to kiss.

While the PDA with Judy and Steve was going on, the boy Ann had been with got up to piss, so the boy whose lap Judy had just vacated slipped over to Ann's chair and started kissing her.

"No way I'm going to be fourth man out," he said.

This playful move started a whole musical chairs thing. Before they had all left the fire pit that night, each girl had made out with each boy. Before the morning came, each girl had slept with a new boy.

The next day the floodgates were open. By the time Steve got his SMU buddy to drive up mid-week, each girl was pretty much available to any boy at any time. Clothing around the house was mostly optional. The girls had completely busted through all their learned, Christian, self-restraint and got caught up in the primal sexual frenzy of being desired, taken and shared at will. It was like the fantasy FreeUse porn sites before it had a name or like Woodstock must have been, but without the acid.

Regardless, to anyone looking in from the outside the level of debauchery would be shocking. Unforgivable. Yet while they were in the middle of it, it just seemed like wild college drunken fun. Not forbidden. Not demeaning. Not life altering. Not even shameful.

Yet it was the shame that Ann never fully reconciled - good girls don't live their lives in a manner in which they can be used in the same sentence as the disgusting phrase "sloppy seconds," she thought for the thousandth time having slept with different guys on the same day. Good girls don't go to sleep with more than one man's semen in their stomach. Good girls don't let one man coat his fingers with another's man's cum found deep inside you. And yet all these things had happened to her.

Good girls also don't sleep with their friend's lover.

Ann thought back to the Sunday morning at the lake as she was saying goodbye to Judy. Judy had confessed the story about her and Steve and had gone out of her way to say that no man was innocent when it comes to keeping secrets. To an outsider, it would appear that Judy was talking about her husband Steve, and providing Ann an olive branch, some peace of mind and forgiveness for having slept with Steve, who was one of the four OU swimmers all those years ago.

But Ann wasn't an outsider. She knew that Judy's comments didn't pertain to Steve at all. That morning Judy wasn't talking about what happened at the house over two decades before with her husband Steve. No, she was talking about what had happened at the house the night before with her lover Mark:

There was a light knock on the bedroom door, but Mark didn't wait for Ann to answer before opening it and letting himself in.

"You awake?" Mark asked Ann.

"Yes, but you need to leave right now."

"Don't be like that. You just kissed me and then left me hanging."

"I don't give a shit what you've got hanging. If you need relief, you need to take your ass down the hall and go wake up Judy."

Mark ignored her and sat down on the bed.

"Did you not hear me?" Ann hissed.

"Just help me out and I'll leave."

"Mark, I'm married with two kids. I'm old enough to be your mother. I'm also friends with your best friend's mom and I am not going to "help you out"," Ann said. "God! this whole thing is fucked up. Just leave."

But Mark didn't. In fact, he laid down, laced his fingers behind his head, and stretched out to his full length on the bed.

"Hey this is pretty comfortable," he teased with a big grin.

Fuck, what is it about young male athletes that makes them so damned entitled, arrogant and insufferable, Ann thought.

"Fine," Ann said as she got up. "You stay and I'll leave. You can explain to Judy in the morning why you are in my bed and not hers."

Ann slid to the edge of the bed and was about to stand up when Mark pulled her back down and kissed her. His kiss was purposeful without any trace of hesitation.

Ann slapped him, just like she had done to the SMU swimmer all those years ago. But just like her friend Karen, whose affair started with a kiss, Ann was similarly flustered and a little lightheaded. She hadn't been kissed like that in a very, very long time.

"I deserved that," Mark said with downcast eyes. "I'm sorry," he muttered as he got up to leave.

"Wait," Ann said grabbing his hand. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have hit you. It's just that you startled me."

Ann patted the mattress beside her, and Mark sat back down. Like her friend Karen, in that moment, all of Ann's suppressed desires, denials, insecurities, second guesses, and what-ifs came rushing to the surface and she did something that she had not planned and had not done since she had left Lake Texoma the last time - she touched a penis that did not belong to her husband Phil.

Ann reached inside Mark's gym shorts and began slowly stroking his growing erection. Ann could barely breath, but she had no problem rationalizing: what's the harm in a hand job? It's technically not cheating, she allowed. With her dissonance quickly resolved, she appraised what was in her hand. Mark was larger and thicker than Phil. He was also much harder. Ann had forgotten just how rigid a young man's penis could be when compared to the middle-aged version and the thought made her shiver.

Mark was clearly enjoying the attention as he laid back. He lifted his hips and allowed Ann to pull his shorts and underwear completely off.

There he was in all his glory and Ann was enthralled and very wet.

With his pants off and Ann's hand moving rhythmically up and down his shaft, Mark turned his attention to Ann's chest. He reached out with his long muscular arms and began massaging her breasts.

"Screw it," Ann said as she lifted off the top of her pajamas. "If you're going to play with them you might as well do it right."

He then leaned in for another kiss. It was at that moment Ann began to lose control and realized that this encounter might move beyond more than just "helping him out" as she originally intended.

The kiss felt great. His tongue was insistent, a little clumsy, but ohhh so sexy. She was lost in the sensations of his hard body, his kiss, his stubble, his smell, his soft moans, his newness, the feel of his cock, his caresses, his youth, and remembered briefly thinking, this must be what Karen felt like.

The kissing went on for some time when Mark suddenly pushed her back onto the mattress without warning and grabbed the waist of her pajama bottoms, and before she could argue, he pulled them off in one swoop along with her panties. She was now completely naked with another man. Before she could process her situation and say no, he pushed her knees apart and began licking and kissing her. Within a few minutes two fingers entered her and along with the constant assault from his tongue she had an overwhelming orgasm.