Chapter 1 Missed Opportunities I met Loraine at my local gym; she joined a few months after me. We got to recognise each other as people do in that situation and would say hello when passing at the gym, or smile and nod if we saw each other in the street but that was it. She was very classy, the kind of woman who drove a late registration Mercedes sports c...
Dave Calahan was lucky to still own his Mattress Store. After a nasty divorce his e-wife got everything else. The arrangement got so bad that he secretly lived in his store just to keep it open. With no house to call home he was forced to utilize his own place of employ to lay his weary bones. It was either that or impose on his Sister Lucinda and her family...
The ugly little plastic gargoyle perched on my computer screen has bright blue eyes now. They used to be beady little black eyes, but I found a bottle of glittery nail polish (don't ask) and fixed them. Much better. Now it'll remind me of what happened yesterday. I should explain. The gargoyle is part of a nameplate like you'd find on somebody's desk. The n...
I failed. After receiving the divorce papers from a civil server, I felt my world would never be the same. I never knew how it got this bad in the first place? My husband was truly a good man. He needed a better wife, anyways. I was lost, helpless at work, and sat at my desk in my little cubicle, crying. I never in my life felt so all alone or misunderstood....
Her passing had been very sudden. We had been sat together watching nothing in particular on the TV and she had slipped into a sleep that I realised, eventually, was death. The family had been caring, the funeral sensitive and then followed the lowliness -- that awful sense that something was missing in my life. Our children had all left home, but living c...
Dear friends-earlier this year, I befriended Nurse Sally, also an author here. We wrote to each other every day, and shared many fantasies. I consider her a great, dear friend. One thing we did, was to write stories for each other exclusively. I wrote this story for Sally in June and I sent it to her as a gift. Last week I asked her if I could share it with...
"So, this guy just kept on calling me, insisting that the number he was calling was the number this girl at a bar gave him," Andrea was saying. She rolled her eyes. "What a lame line. I finally got Greg to pretend to be the angry boyfriend. That stopped him from calling." "What a fucking nutcase," I said. "How hard is it to find a decent cute guy in this fu...
I woke up to the sound of chatter and clanking of cutlery and porcelain in the kitchen. James and the girls were getting breakfasts ready and the table set up. Strangely, I felt there was someone missing from the group. "Morning," I said, my eyes narrow slits, still adjusting to the morning light. "Morning," the girls greeted in almost perfect sync as they...
I sat at the very back of the sparsely peopled lecture theatre, high up, my long legs forced apart by the narrow gap between one row of seats and the next. The lecturer started, his low mellifluous tones warmly bathing the room. I closed my eyes and leaned back enjoying that slow, sexy voice and ignoring the content it was delivering. I was drifting into a d...
Considering it was summer, the weather in Western Washington didn't understand the concept of heat. It had been raining solidly for days, a cold drizzle accompanied by just enough wind to demonstrate that the gods were having a good time. It was supposed to be her vacation, a week of camping and hiking in the mountains, a getaway from computers and phones, a...