Shane

Markayla couldn't stop thinking of Shane. Not even when she was in the presence of her husband, Jack. Her marriage to Jack was a very comfortable one. Perhaps a bit too comfortable. Over the course of their 16-year marriage, they'd gotten to know each other so well that there was no room left for surprises. Although she loved her ginger-haired husband dearly and had always been faithful to him despite an occasional crush on certain guys along the way, she couldn't remember the last time he'd excited her. As in really excited her. The fire had died to a spark and even that spark was just a faint ember of light now barely aglow in the dark of night. Jack was a few years older than her and had become lazy with age. While she looked forward to the security that would come of being together till the end, she missed having some real excitement in her life and often felt herself longing for something more. Something different. Something unexpected that would keep her guessing, curious and intrigued. She wanted to take a walk on the wild side and live on the edge. But Markayla was smart enough not to risk the good that they had. Besides, she was aging and didn't get out much during her free time. The older she got, the more content she was to spend the evenings at home on a Netflix binge. But there was just something about Shane that she couldn't erase from her mind. He had a mysterious air to him that Markayla felt drawn to. He was rather ordinary-looking by most people's standards, but to her, there was just something sexy about those icy yet soft and expressive eyes. She even liked the shape of his nose. She thought about the strange note he and his buddy had brought to her to interpret. It made no sense. There was just something fishy about the whole thing. Yet the call she'd put into her boss immediately after they'd left confirmed that they weren't psychopaths breaching security for some reason or another. They'd really needed the note translated right away, preferably by a human and not a machine. All her boss had said was that they worked in different places, namely in accounting and the lab. Was Shane an accountant, too? Or was he connected to the lab somehow as she'd originally suspected? Better yet, why did she have so many questions about a guy who was probably close to two decades her junior and off limits to her either way? Jack came into the bedroom that night as she was finishing up a book on her Kindle and announced that he would begin working graves at his job, managing one of the city's most popular upscale restaurants. So now she would be alone at night. With her wet and wild imagination.