She had changed. Or had she? Melissa had never been all that excited over sex, had she? John had thought it was merely his fault, mainly his ineptitude. Now, he wondered it had been his fault, ever. He'd, after all, learned a lot in Nam, sexual things not being the least of his acquired knowledge. He had come back confident that Melissa would be pleased to find her husband miraculously converted from bumbling kid to experienced lover. He had thought she'd been hoping he would improve when she had written a reply to his first guilty confession of infidelity.

"Don't worry about it, John. War makes strange bedfellows, after all; and, I certainly never expected you to remain celibate during your whole term of service. You've gone off to battle, not to a monastery. Do anything you think necessary to relieve the tensions of that mess over there, knowing that I'm not going to be here, ready to stamp a scarlet 'A' on your chest the minute you step off your plane…"

But, as time progressed, it became more and more apparent that Melissa didn't want a competent lover or a humbling one. She obviously didn't want any lover at all.

John had thought there was someone else. He had laid traps, listened in on Melissa's phone conversations, interrupted his schedule to drop in unexpectedly on Melissa's tennis lessons at the club, on her lunches with Geraldine Pinkton or one of the other girls, on her visits to see her ailing father. John had never found his wife anywhere but where she had said she would be. He had found no studs, waiting off in secluded nooks, waiting to service his wife while he didn't. He had found no women, with closets full of dildos, waiting to eat his wife's cunt or bump pussies.

John looked up as Melissa entered the bedroom and switched off the lights in the dressing room behind her.

Damn it, John wished Melissa didn't affect him the way she did. He would have done anything to be able to shrug his shoulders and care less that his wife was more happy with John out of her bed than in it.