Turn Signal by Howard Owen Page B

he has become an expert navigator of temptation’s waters. He hasn’t strayed since Shannon was born. He was amazed, though, at how easy it would have been right then, how tempted and turned on he was. He has known Martha Sue Levens Bain since they were babies, and even when they were 18, there wasn’t much of a spark there. They had never shared more than a demure kiss. Why now?
    He reached around by instinct and put his left hand on her still shapely ass, and then, at perhaps the last second short of embarrassment or insult, he pulled his hand and his mouth away. She pulled back, too, and began a distracted search for her purse. They found it, over in a corner where she’d put it probably 12 hours earlier. Jack kissed her on her forehead. She smiled and told him to drive carefully.
    Jack slips out of his clothes, dumping them on the floor on his side of the bed, where he can properly hang them up in the morning.
    He’s still awake, a little revved up from his conversation with Gerald Prince and from Martha Sue’s kiss. He slides over next to Gina, who has not awakened and has her back turned to him. He smells the skin on the nape on her neck and slides closer, his erection touching her through his shorts and her panties.
    He used to wake her like this all the time, in the middle of the night, after he himself had awakened and was aroused by her closeness, her smell. And she would, without saying a word, slide her panties down and push herself backward into him, moaning, and they would do it right there, lying on their sides, sometimes more than once. They often would do this without saying a word, their conversation reduced to incoherent ecstasy. Sometimes, he would fall asleep still inside her. Sometimes, best of all, she would be the one to awaken him, her hand sliding slyly up his leg and then stroking his instantly hard cock. They would never even see each other in the pitch-dark of their bedroom at the farmhouse.
    Something, though, has changed the dynamics of all that. Jack figures he’s batting less than .500 on his midnight sorties since they’ve moved to Speakeasy Glen. More often than not, Gina groans rather than moans or thrashes about in her sleep, and he rolls back on his side of the bed. Not once, since they’ve moved, has Gina initiated what he used to refer to, at breakfast the next morning, as a dream-fuck.
    He pushes harder, hoping. But she jerks away from him and mumbles something unintelligible but unencouraging. He sees his average sliding farther downward.
    They still make love, although maybe it’s once or twice a week now instead of six or seven times, the way it was not that long ago. He is somewhat baffled, because their downward sexual spiral seems to have been exacerbated by the move from the old place, which Gina had truly come to dislike, with its antiquated plumbing and electrical system, its smell of liniment and age, to what she herself still calls her dream house.
    She continues to say she’s fine, really, about his little mid-life crisis that continues to deplete their bank account. She tells him he has to do what he thinks is best, that she has faith in him.
    Still, on a horny, sleepless night, he wonders.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    He knocks, waits, then knocks again, louder. Brady’s music—it feels like Lynyrd Skynyrd—is vibrating the walls. Finally, after enduring the midday sun another hot minute, Jack uses his penknife to flip the hook-and-eye screen-door latch and walks onto the porch.
    Jack’s grandfather built the house in 1920. His father, Kenneth, moved in with Ellen, his bride, in 1938. He was 20 and she was 17. Multiple generations of Stones have lived here, often three generations at once. It ends with Brady.
    This morning, Sandy called early, or what seemed early to her brother, and told him they had to be out of the house by 2 p.m., had to have Brady out as well. Definitely have to have Brady out, because there was a