"Ann, have you seen my tie clasp?" came a cross voice from the bathroom, and then her husband was standing in the doorway, fiddling with his tie, his shock of graying hair falling forward over his forehead. He was clad only in his underwear and his shirt, and her eyes locked unavoidably on the spot where his genitals nestled between his legs, but as usual, there was no tell-tale bulge there to encourage her to expect more than a peck on the cheek for a good-bye.

"No, I haven't dear," sighed Ann and tried to help him find it by looking around in the bedroom a little, but she couldn't find it amongst her feminine debris littering the dresser tops and the bathroom. "Guess you're just going to have to settle for a bow tie, Carl." Finally he changed his tie and Ann slipped a housecoat over her glowing body and went to the kitchen to start breakfast.

As she broke eggs into the frying pan alongside the spitting bacon, Ann could not help but wonder if this was the life she chose or if this was simply her fate. For a moment, she listened to her husband in his study just off the living room rattling his paper and throwing books into his already-over-stuffed briefcase. Turning the bacon with a fork, wincing as it shot a flying speck of burning grease onto her hand, Ann felt the same surging, growing resentment well in her chest as it had for the past two years of marriage to the near middle-aged, professorial husband who had unwittingly ensnared her with security and his intellectualism, qualities she'd always treasured – until she found out that in the end, it all balances out, and every tidbit of intellectualism seemed to rob the sensual character of her husband.

Love him? Yes, oddly enough, she knew that she still did in some ridiculous sort of way. But what she had in mind, what had begun as a mere student-professor relationship until he'd asked her to marry him. In the beginning, she had hope for their marriage, but the sexual frustrations had quickly extinguished those hopes, leaving some sort of sterile bond between them.