The End of an Affair

As is usual in my stories, the places and descriptions are real, but the characters are not; any resemblance to any person, living, dead or undead, is purely coincidental. The characters are all in their thirties, well over the age of consent.

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

I was trying to figure out where I was, as my eyes would just barely open, as though they were stuck together with gunk. Then I heard a woman's voice, saying, "Mr Barnett, move slowly please. I'll help you."

Her image was fuzzy, but I could tell that she was wearing hospital scrubs and a mask. "You're just out of surgery, Mr Barnett, and in recovery. You've got stitches in your abdomen and a cast on your left arm. Try not to move, and I'll get you the help you need."

"What happened?" I managed to croak out.

"You were attacked outside of the Texas Roadhouse, remember?"

It started coming back to me. Some absolute clown yelled that he was going to kill me, and charged up swinging a tire iron. He'd slipped or something, so he didn't get in a clean blow, and I'd warded it off with my arm. He fell down, and I pounced on him, and I had the advantage, beating the shit out of him, before my buddies pulled me off of him. Still, I shouldn't hurt like this.

"Anyway, you've got a severely sprained wrist that the doctor immobilized, and I guess that you fell in the sharp end of a tire iron, the way I heard it, and stabbed yourself in the liver. You're in Lehigh Valley Hospital, where the ambulance brought you."

"What about the guy who attacked me?"

She laughed. "You don't know? I guess that you beat him pretty badly, despite your injuries. He's still in the OR, way I understand it, undergoing some pretty major facial reconstruction. We just now got a plastic surgeon in to fix him up, and there's a police guard on him.

It was a few more hours, and skipping ICU entirely, I was transferred up to the 6K Med-Surg wing. That was really nice, because the hospital had some really cute nurses working there. The first one was this cute blonde, her hair cut so that it stopped short of her shoulders, with bright blue eyes and a pretty smile. I guess that all of the nurses wear the same dark blue scrub uniform, with the hospital name embroidered on it, and Jane's - that's her name - fit her very well.

Of course, it was a bit difficult to appreciate it as much, as the pain meds were wearing off. She told me that I did have morphine ordered as needed for pain, but there was a delay as I asked if there was something I could get that wasn't a narcotic. I guess that I stunned her asking for something that wasn't a narc; apparently nobody does that!

They'd brought me what passed for dinner when the police arrived. It was a 'clear liquid' diet, I suppose because of my belly wound, meaning chicken broth, lemon flavored jello, and decaffeinated coffee. Why on earth anyone would pull the caffeine out of coffee was a mystery to me. It's like O'Douls, the alcohol-free beer; what's the point?

"Mr Barnett, I'm Sergeant O'Riley, and this is Officer Murphy. We'd like to ask you a few questions about the attack."

"I'll tell you what I remember; it all happened in a few seconds. I guess that it was caught by the security cameras outside the restaurant?"

"Yeah, it was. There's plenty of evidence that the other guy attacked you, and you were just defending yourself, though it looks like you defended yourself very ably." The officer was smiling at that. "The other guy is going to look like he went through a windshield, and rumor is he'll probably be wearing dentures from now on. So, what brought on the attack?"

"I don't know, Sergeant, I've never seen this guy before in my life."

"So, you don't know him?"

"No, sir, I don't, don't know what his beef was. Maybe he mistook me for someone else?"

"You don't know a man named Danny McMahon?"

Oh, shit, yeah I did. "Yeah, I guess I know who he is now, it's just that I'd never seen him before, is all."

"So, why did he attack you?"

Nothing to do but tell the truth. "I guess it was because I'd been fucking his wife."

To say that the police and prosecutors were less than sympathetic after I confessed to that was an understatement. I could have pressed charges, and gotten him locked up for a couple of years, maybe. After all, attacking me with a tire iron was assault with a deadly weapon. But the prosecutor, a pretty but very prim and proper brunette, with a nice if still slight figure under her pinstriped pantsuit, stressed that, once the judge heard why he assaulted me, he'd probably get a very light sentence, if a jury would convict him at all.

Yeah, I could see that. I was less concerned with getting him thrown in jail than I was with him having a felony conviction, so that he couldn't legally own a gun. After his tire iron stupidity failed, he might decide that the only way he could get his revenge on me was with a .38 caliber bullet. After all, I was a lot bigger than him.

The prosecutor was interested in that idea. Like law enforcement officers everywhere, she hated that the public had the right to keep and bear arms. She said that she'd talk with McMahon's public defender, and work out a plea deal that gets him the lowest class felony conviction but just probation, no jail time. She appreciated my concerns in this, though it was clear that she thought that I had deserved to get my ass kicked.

Not that she said that last part out loud.

A puncture wound from a tire iron is pretty serious, and I was in the hospital a few days. At least once I had tolerated the clear liquids dinner, they allowed me full liquids for breakfast and then a regular diet for lunch. That wasn't too bad.

My buddies came to visit me, and by Sunday - the attack had been Friday evening - I could laugh without too much pain. Fortunately, I had a white-collar job with the Carbon County property assessment and building inspection office that I could still do while recovering.

It also meant that I had a lot of friends in both the county sheriff's office and with the Jim Thorpe Borough Police Department. I thought that might turn out to be necessary.

The attack actually took place in Whitehall, a suburb of Allentown, in Lehigh, the next county over. There are plenty of restaurants in Jim Thorpe and neighboring Lehighton, and even some bars, but despite being a tourist trap area, well, let's just say that I had been to every eatery in Jim Thorpe, and was tired of all of them. My buddies and I had gone to the Texas Roadhouse on Grape Street, and that's where McMahon found me.

Asshole must've followed me, is the only thing I could figure, and either watched us from inside, or set outside waiting; who really knows? If he'd had a gun, he'd have had plenty of time to set up a shot, that's for sure, because we'd gotten a table by one of the outside windows. He could have simply plugged me through the glass and run off if he had been packing heat.

The more I thought about that, the luckier I realized I was. Once we went into the restaurant and gotten a table, it would have been obvious that we'd be there a while. If he'd had a gun, he could have driven away, parked his car a couple of streets away, covered up his head with a hoodie, and covered his face with a handkerchief. Then he could have just walked up to the window, shot me through the glass, and run off into the dark, probably never getting caught.

My buddies in the Police Department kept tabs: the case wasn't local, but they got the records of the arraignment and stuff. After he'd gotten out of the hospital, he'd been in jail for two days, pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony, which usually means 3½ to 7 years in prison, but, because of the nature of the offense was sentenced to five years probation, with credit for the two days he'd been in jail. Most importantly, he was now legally barred from buying a firearm. He received a $5,000 fine, but that was held in abeyance until his probation was up; if he kept his nose clean, the fine would be cancelled.

That was important to me, because as far as I knew, he was still supporting Emma.

oo0oo

Ahhh, Emma! I pretty much got the idea that she never wanted to see me again, in that she never visited me in the hospital, and never called me. That made a lot of sense, really; he was her husband, while I'd just been her lover. I don't think that she was looking to leave McMahon, but even if she had been thinking like that, I sure wasn't planning on marrying her. Let's be honest here: she was the kind of wife who would cheat on her husband!

But she was also a babe! Three years younger than me at 32, she'd kept her figure better than a lot of women her age. She was naturally thin, with pretty blue eyes, and you might have guessed her age as in her mid-twenties had it not been that she was going prematurely grey.

I had, let's be honest here, picked her up on one of Jim Thorpe's tourist trap weekends. She was standing on the bank of the Lehigh River, which runs through the middle of town, watching as one of the river adventure companies was putting its clients into kayaks for a guided trip. She looked like she wanted to go, but hadn't signed up at the boat company's office up on Route 903.

I hadn't planned on going kayaking; it's something I'd done many times before. But it was still always nice watching the cute girls in bathing suits and short shorts getting ready to set off for their little trip.

So, I took a chance, and approached her, suggesting that if she wanted to take the trip, I had two kayaks up at my house, across the bridge on the east side of town. I guess that the bold approach interested her, and after a quick trip to my place, I took her not back to the river in town, but to a good place to put the boats in at Glen Onoko, which was upstream. That way, when we were done with the trip, she could drive me up to get my truck. It would all work out well.

A mile down from the Glen we were thoroughly soaked and laughing, having tipped the boats a couple of times each. We pulled into a little beach area, and that was where I pulled into her.

It was a great time! By then, I already knew that she was married, since she was wearing a wedding ring, but that didn't bother me. She was cute, we were having fun, and it was summer clothes weather; Emma's not-quite-Daisy-Dukes showed off a lot of very nice leg, and even though she was pretty short at around 5'3", those legs looked really nice. Her t-shirt was soaked through, and, unfortunately, she was wearing a bra, but the wet t-shirt clung to her now, and there was no doubt at all about how nicely shaped she was.

The t-shirt, and the bra, were soon enough on the ground. Her shorts and panties quickly followed, as did all of my clothes.

She was horny! Yeah, she was pretty much drenched from head to her red painted toenails, but the moisture between her legs was definitely not just water.

There were few preliminaries. Normally, if I'm about to get lucky with a woman, I'll go down on her first, to really get her motor revving. Then again, normally when I'm about to get lucky, we're in a bedroom or someplace private, not on the side of a public river. There was some kissing, passionate kissing, but for only a dozen or so seconds before she just plain grabbed my cock and pulled me inside of her.

And Emma sure didn't need me to give her head to get her motor revving! We hadn't been screwing for thirty seconds when her first orgasm hit her. She cried out, then clapped her hand over her mouth, I guess realizing that hey, we were out in public! Emma hardly seemed to come down from that one when another was building up inside of her, and after that one hit her, I pulled out, motioned for her to get on her hands and knees, and then I took her from behind.

I don't know why, but some women I've met don't really care for dog style; one girl I knew said it made her feel too much like she was just being used, kind of like Daenerys Targaryen when she's taken by Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones. There's this one scene later, where she insists of being taken facing her husband, and I guess that's what some women need.

Not Emma; she absolutely loved it, and I did too. There was nothing in this that might be seen as making love; this was just raw, animal fucking! She screamed at that, too, not bothering to cover her mouth this time, and it was at that point that I stopped holding back and emptied my balls deep within her.

oo0oo

Yeah, Emma was a great fuck, but there was also the issue of her dumbass husband having to support her. She was an office clerk in a dentist's office, making more than minimum wage but not a lot more. I had never inquired about her husband's job, but now that he had that felony conviction I wanted him to get, it occurred to me that that conviction might just cost him his job. I was a local government worker, and I knew that if he worked for local or state government, that felony would get him fired. Maybe I should have just told the prosecutor to drop the charges?

Well, that was where having friends on the police force was helpful. The Jim Thorpe Police Department is definitely a small-town force, but they had the contacts to check on Lehigh County records. It turned out that McMahon was a truck driver, and since he didn't lose his CDL, he kept his job. He wasn't an over-the-road driver, but drove a box truck on local deliveries, getting him home every night.

Still, he was on probation now, and Emma and he lived in Lehighton, the next town over, in Carbon County, just like Jim Thorpe. The local probation officer is a real prick, and neither a friend nor an enemy of mine. We knew each other, in passing, but that was all.

But the probation officer, Bill Simmons, if a real prick, is also very thorough. He had an outsized impression of the importance of his own job, which was actually a good thing, in that so many others are just paper shufflers who never check up on anything; if it doesn't hit the police blotter, it didn't happen as far as most of them are concerned.

Simmons did check on things, including things I didn't think he had the authority to check. Given that McMahon had assaulted a government worker, he had the Lehighton Police keep tabs on McMahon, tabs which included a GPS covertly installed on his personal vehicle. McMahon was restricted from coming within 500 feet of me, and since I worked in the Carbon County Courthouse, the probation officer was appropriately concerned; the last thing he wanted on his watch was one of his parolees coming into the county courthouse and shooting up the place while gunning for me.

I was interested enough to check those GPS records, which I was able to get through my buddies on the police force. McMahon pretty much stayed in his own town, other than driving to where he worked in Allentown. He parked in front of Emma's and his house on Iron Street in Lehighton every night.

But I did notice something curious: he was making a trip to the bank in the Carbon Plaza almost every day. That seemed odd to me.

And then I realized it: he was draining money from whatever joint accounts Emma and he had! He was preparing to leave her, and take as much of their money as he could away with him.

If he hired an attorney to divorce Emma, or had filed for divorce, his probation officer would have been notified, so I was guessing that he hadn't gone that far, not yet. I didn't know how much money they had together, but I did know one thing: withdrawing too much money, at one time, would cause him problems. When banks see a pattern like that, they have reporting regulations they have to follow, and with McMahon being a convicted felon, they pay attention to things like that. He might get away with pulling out $50 one day and $75 another, but over the course of 26 banking days a month he might squirrel away $1,500 or more a month. Keep that up for three or four months, and he could make a sizable dent in whatever savings they had. Throw in some ATM withdrawals, and who knows how much money he could steal from Emma.

But, I didn't know how much money they had in the first place. I did know their address, so, one day, being the county building inspector, I had a perfect right to drive down Iron Street . . . and check out their house.

Maybe that wouldn't be an exact way of figuring out how wealthy they were, but seeing the condition of someone's house is usually a good indicator. Turns out they lived in one half of a decent looking brick duplex, and the yard looked well-kept. That was clue number one.

Clue number two was Zillow.com, the real estate website. Their house was listed as not being on the market, but the estimated worth was $110,000, pretty reasonable for that neighborhood. The sales history said that it had last been sold in 2010 for $86,000, a pretty good price in the middle of the housing market crash.

I needed to face facts: I sucked as an amateur sleuth! I was guessing when it came to what Emma's husband was doing, and I was guessing at their net worth, and I was guessing at every fucking thing! Somehow, I needed to let Emma know that her husband was going to the bank too frequently, so she could, at the very least, protect herself.

But Emma hadn't contacted me at all since her husband attacked me. I still had her cell number, but if I called her, my number would come up, and that wouldn't be good.

Believe it or not, there are still some pay phones around. Oh, not many of them, but a few, and so I swung by one and called her number. It turned out that she didn't answer, but when it went to voicemail, it was still her greeting, so I knew that the number was still good.

It was almost the end of summer, the Monday before Labor Day, when I figured out what to do, and called her again. The dentist's office was closed on Mondays, so I knew that she'd be off, and her husband should be at work. Again, I used a pay phone, and this time she answered. "Hi, Emma, this is Matt. Meet me at Sunny Rest at one."

That was it; I got off the phone quick. If for some reason she had company, even her husband, she could just say that it was a wrong number.

oo0oo

Sunny Rest! Who would have guessed that there'd be a nudist resort in a place like Carbon County, but heck, there's even a gay nudist camp around here. Sunny Rest isn't gay, though. It was the weekend after Emma and I had met, a sunny Saturday, and how about that, her husband had a load to haul. I had suggested trying Sunny Rest, and she was intrigued. She had heard of it, of course, but had never been there. I picked her up at ten, and it's just a short drive away, near Bowmanstown. Her eyes got kind of big when we walked into the office to check in as day visitors. Once we'd checked in, we went out to the pool area, and fortunately it was still early enough in the day for us to get a shaded spot. It was going to be sunny and hot, and the last thing she needed was an all-over sunburn. There was an outdoor bar, and I suppose that there must be some sort of state law saying that the bartenders cannot be naked, because the bartendress was wearing a bikini that was nothing but big-holed macramé. Everything she had was on display!

A Corona for me and a pinot grigio for Emma, and we made our way back to our towels.

The place was filling up fast, and Emma seemed fine with it, though she noted with a little discomfort that she was just about the only woman there who hadn't shaved off all of her pubes. There were tats and nipple rings and fully bronzed bodies, though it seemed as though we were, at 35 and 32, one of the younger couples there. Most seemed to be in their mid-forties to mid-fifties.

Emma didn't complain when I sunscreened her, including rubbing the lotion thoroughly into her ass, even though others could see us. We played in the pool, we ate overpriced hamburgers in Streakers, the resort's restaurant, and we played a little handsy, but, sad to say, unless you had one of the cabins or hotel rooms, there was no place to fuck.