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stroking her hair and kissing the top of her head, more content than he ever expected to be in this lifetime.
    ***
    They had met at a turbulent time in both of their lives, and both upsets involved the ends of their marriages – hers to a much older man that her father had chosen for her, and his to a good woman who decided that she didn’t have any interest in being married to anyone any longer. There was no animosity between Brandt and Kelly. He knew he hadn’t given all of himself to her; that him coming back from a tour in Iraq and getting out of active duty and into the reserves, then trying to get a job would have been a trying time for even the healthiest of relationships. And theirs had never really been that, despite the fact that the both of them had done their best to try to make it work. He’d been gone, she’d been involved in her own work, and it had just fallen apart – no harm, no foul.
    Lita couldn’t say the same thing. She had been married off to a man who was nearly twice her age, who was apparently, for all intents, impotent. He claimed her virginity on their wedding night, but never touched her after that. Although, he managed to inflict psychological and emotional damage because of it, blaming her for his lack of ability, and their resulting lack of children, with his constant criticism and digs aimed at the heart of her – how she didn’t keep the house or herself the way he preferred, when she had been raised to think of her husband’s wants and needs above her own.
    Brandt met Lita at his sister’s house when she had finally broken loose of all of those bonds that had held her in mental and emotional bondage. She divorced her husband – and, in doing so, her entire family who immediately disowned her – got a job and a place of her own for the first time her life, and began to really live .
    They worked at the same place, his sister and Lita, and, although Marielle had been known to matchmake for her brother occasionally, it had actually been pure coincidence that the two of them were in her house right around dinnertime. They were, of course, invited to eat with her boisterous family of four boys, and she wasn’t exactly sure whether she was glad or not when they both accepted her invitation.
    Brandt, of course, had cornered her in the kitchen about how she was trying to throw another woman at him, and he was surprised at just how vehemently she denied it. “Even though it’s been a couple of years since her divorce, she’s still much too fragile to handle someone like you. In fact, I want you to stay away from her. She’s so stunted in so many ways that it’s not funny, so keep your paws to yourself. Go to Swingers and find some slut to sleep with if you’re horny. Leave Lita alone.”
    He’d colored, because he had been spending the occasional evening at Swingers – a well-known place for hookups in Albuquerque. But Brandt found those encounters – even when his rampant desires had been eased – to be hollow and unfulfilling on other levels. Yes, he’d gotten his rocks off, but then what? Another night spent being slowly deafened by music he hated, drinking watered down drinks and talking to a woman he wasn’t much interested in talking to, really.
    He wanted more. Even though he and Kelly hadn’t worked out, he liked being married. He wasn’t the type who got into what many of his friends did – a parade of women through his bed that he had no connection to. There wasn’t a one among them that he had slept with in the past year whose number he’d kept, or that he’d ever had the compulsion to call and just hang out with.
    But Lita – who was smaller and rounder than most of the women who pranced by him at Swingers – dressed in a skirt that fell between her knees and her ankles, wearing a pretty, matching shirt that nonetheless buttoned up to her neck, intrigued him to no end. Mindful of his sister’s words, he didn’t pounce as he might have. Instead, he sat