Thou Shalt Not Covet

Six months later, Traci moved into her own small apartment after she and Jim Fielding called it quits. One week after that, she was reassigned to be the admin for one of the newer attorneys. She knew the reassignment was coming, but the money and benefits stayed the same, so she actually welcomed the change.

Her new direct boss was a handsome young graduate of Georgetown Law School, with the attitude of a hotshot attorney on the way up, Traci thought. She wondered to herself if the attitude came with the jurisprudence degree.

It took all of two weeks before Mr. Hotshot put his lips gently to Traci's. She promised herself she wasn't going to allow him to get to her, but she apparently lied to herself. Six weeks after beginning work for the new guy, 52-year-old Traci had her ankles over the 31-year-old lawyer's shoulders as he pounded her in his bed.

"Did I tell you that MILF was a helluva good fuck?" Fielding asked the young attorney a couple of weeks later.

"That painting over your bar was just a tease. She is awfully good," Mr. Hotshot agreed.

"Got rid of that painting," Fielding said. "Donated it to a fancy-assed strip club about an hour from here for $5,000 cash. I will write off the full $15,000 purchase price on my taxes."

The two lawyers laughed conspiratorially.

The Playpen was not normally the kind of place Dusty would have found himself on a Friday night, but when Jerry Kubiak, his oldest son's best man, had planned the bachelor party, he figured he needed to invite Dusty out of respect. He figured the older man would stay for the obligatory length of time, then head out before things got going heavily.

The party of 15 arrived at the high-end club en masse. After being checked at the door for proper identification, they headed down a corridor before turning into the main part of the club. It was on the wall right before they stepped into the open main room. Jerry, acting as host for the evening, spotted it first.

"Oh fuck, look at that babe! That might be the hottest painting I've ever seen in my life!"

"All of my women have that look after I'm done with them!" yelled Willie Aguilar, another of Robbie's groomsmen.

"Holy fuck! It can't be!" Jerry yelled, pulling up short after reading the nametag attached to the photo.

Jerry went silent, but Willie, not even thinking about what he was looking at, read the tag out loud for the whole group to hear.

"Thou Shalt Not Covet," Willie yelled. "Traci Dustman, as painted by Emile Gaultier.

"Hey Robbie, she's got the same name..."

Realizing what he was reading, Willie went silent. The others in the group pushed forward to see what the card said.

Robbie's face went white as he read the card and looked at the painting. He immediately turned around and looked at his father, then at his younger brother.

Dusty shrugged as Mike's face turned crimson.

"Been there, seen that," Dusty said to both boys as he kept on walking.

The sons looked at each other. They and the rest of the party gathered at three tables on one side of the stage. Everybody was waiting on Dusty to explain.

"This is how your mother and her scum-sucking attorney lover broke the news to me that she was cheating on me. This was mounted on the wall behind his bar at his house. It didn't have a card on it, but I knew immediately what and who I was looking at. They had the fucking painter color her hair black to be cute, but I knew who that was right away.

"It was at a Christmas party at his home, and apparently everybody at the law firm knew they had been fucking and had seen the painting. Your mother and her scum-sucker both thought my finding out was hysterical.

"I don't know how the painting got here."

"Dad, you've got to get them to take that down! That's Mom!" Mike hissed at his father.

"I'll go talk to the manager, but you didn't seem too concerned with what she was doing when I first told you several years ago. I seem to recall you wondering what I did to make her mad at me."

Mike looked sheepish as most of the group looked at him with an accusing look.

"Please, Dad. Do something," he urged.

Dusty seemed to be the calmest person in the group. He quietly got up, went to the bar and asked to speak to the manager. There was a lot of gesticulating and some raised voices before Dusty came back to the group, which was mostly sitting quietly as opposed to what most groups like that do at a strip club.

"The manager says the owner bought the painting from a private individual, and it has been a popular addition to the club. If I want it down, I can buy it for 10 grand," Dusty said. "I told him I had no inclination to spend 10 grand on an erotic painting of my cheating whore ex-wife."

"Dad!" both Robbie and Mike wailed.

The evening's activities were over at that point.

Both of Dusty's sons headed straight to their mother's apartment when they got back to Chicago. Dusty went back to his own apartment and slept like a baby.

Traci looked like hell as she sat down in the groom's parents' row a few minutes before the wedding was to start, Dusty thought. He guessed her spending several hours explaining an erotic, nude, post-coital painting on a strip club wall to his sons was tougher than he thought.

"Last night wasn't too awkward," Dusty said sarcastically to his ex-wife as she sat down a few feet away from him in the church pew. "Did you know scum-sucker sold that painting?"

"Not until last night I didn't," she answered as she blushed furiously.

The former spouses had spent hardly any time in each other's presence since the divorce five years earlier. Dusty had to admit that Traci still looked good, aside from the red, cried-out eyes.

After the ceremony and the mother-son dance, Traci was a popular dance partner at the reception, particularly with Robbie's friends. After talking to Robbie and Mike the night previous, she knew the reason why, and was prepared when several of the 20-somethings tried to pull her in too close or let their hands wander.

"There was a time when you would have put a stop to this pretty quickly," she said to Dusty when she came back to the table after having danced with her fifth handsy partner.

"There was a time when you were my wife and my concern," Dusty said quietly. "Then you became somebody else's concern. Now I guess the concern is yours alone.

"But from what I remember and the rumor mill says, you like them young. Just try to be somewhat discreet tonight, for the boys' sake."

Traci's face showed her irritation, but nothing came out of her mouth. She knew that almost all of her sexual liaisons since her divorce were with men closer to the ages of her sons than her own age. She just didn't know how her ex-husband knew this, as well.

When she wasn't dancing and was sitting at the table with Dusty and several other family members, Traci couldn't help but watch her ex-husband out of the corner of her eye. She noted that the past five years had been good to him, with the only noticeable changes being a few lines in his face and the graying of about half of his hair. His blue eyes remained as piercing as always and the line of his jaw was every bit as striking as it was when the pair first met a lifetime ago.

"God, I left this man for what, a little more sex? A little more aggressive sex? Aarrgghh! What an idiot," Traci thought to herself.

"Yeah, Sis, you blew it big-time," said Traci's sister in her ear, causing Traci to break from her reverie.

"Tell me I just didn't say that out loud," she said to Hannah.

Her sister giggled before replying quietly.

"No, but the looks you've been giving Dusty haven't been too subtle," Hannah responded. "You might as well just ask him to fuck you silly while we're all sitting here."

"Actually, not fuck me silly. Just to make slow passionate love to me, like we used to do. Then cuddle together after. Nobody has done that to me since we split."

"Maybe if you asked him nicely," Hannah said. "After all, it is Dusty, the nicest guy in the world. If he still loves you half as much as he used to..."

If asked, "the nicest guy in the world" would have admitted to still loving his ex-wife, at least to some extent. He was also smart enough to know, though, that he would never trust Traci again, nor would he be able to recover from her betrayal with Fielding.

Dusty didn't even attempt to date for the first year after his divorce, although there were several women in his workplace who made it known they would welcome his advances once they found out he was a single man. In the next few years, he came to find out that single women significantly outnumbered single men in his age range. Finding dates was not a problem. Getting over his trust issues was the problem.

Dusty did in fact wake up in his apartment the morning after the wedding with a beautiful big-boobed blonde. Kristin Alford, aunt of Robbie's bride, was sitting at the Alford family table watching various young men dancing and groping the groom's mother. She kept looking back and forth between the dancing and Dusty's reaction to it--or rather his lack of reaction. She and virtually everyone else at the wedding had heard the tale of Robbie's parents, and she was trying to gauge the continuing level of love Robbie's handsome father had for his ex.

Discerning that Dusty wasn't carrying a torch for his ex, Kristin made her way over to the Dustmans' family table and asked the Dustman patriarch if he wanted to dance. Upon looking at her, Dusty was greeted with the sight of a 5-7 blonde beauty with long legs wearing a dark blue dress that ended mid-thigh and looked to be tailored to her every curve. When he saw that she had no rings on her left hand, he smiled and got out of his chair.

Thanks to Traci's love of dancing, Dusty had taken lessons early in their marriage and was quite adept on the floor. The pair cut a dashing figure. They even got in some talking during the slow songs as "Aunt Kristin" snuggled in close.

Dusty didn't spend too much time at the groom's family table after that. When he and Kristin weren't dancing, they were seated together at the bride's family table, and their eyes seemed to be only for each other. He found out that the 52-year-old Kristin taught high school about an hour away from Chicago, and had been divorced for 20 years from an abusive husband.

"If you don't mind me asking, how does a beautiful woman like yourself stay on the market for 20 years?" Dusty asked.

"Major trust issues for one, plus I don't just jump into bed with any man because I need an orgasm," she answered matter-of-factly.

"Good answer," said a smiling Dusty.

Dusty and Kristin started working on their trust issues together when they woke up the next day. About a year later, there was a second wedding knotting the Dustman and Alford families. Robbie stood up as best man for his father.

Internal Revenue Service Special Agent Michael Dustman made sure that James Fielding was audited 12 years in a row, costing the attorney more than $1 million in additional taxes and fines.

Fielding was a few minutes late heading into the IRS building for his 12^th straight audit. His accountant was already inside. Fielding knew that somebody must have targeted him with the IRS, but he had so many enemies the list was long, and he didn't have the time to check them all out.

These IRS bozos were costing him plenty, Fielding thought as he walked toward the building. If he ever found who ratted him out, there would be hell to pay, because he was James Fielding, and nobody fucked with him. He was inside his own head pretty good, and wasn't paying complete attention to his surroundings when a man wearing a baseball hat and dark sunglasses reached out with his left hand as he and Fielding passed each other.

Fielding crumpled to the ground a split second after he felt the pain in his testicles. He had barely heard the crackle of the stun gun. Robbie grinned as he put the weapon back in his hoodie pocket and kept walking.