“Sparks kind of flew,” Dave remembers. “We weren’t making out in the parking lot, but right then and there we exchanged phone numbers and expressed our interest in each other.”
He hadn’t dated anyone but Liz in the past month, the month she had insisted should belong exclusively to the two of them. While Liz seemed to be desperately holding onto the idea that the monogamous month would seal them as a couple, he didn’t pay much attention to it. He’d gotten very tired of Liz nagging him about it, and had half-heartedly agreed to shut her up.
No, he had not dated anyone else in the last weeks, but not because of a sense of obligation. He’d been busy. Between work, his kids, and the hours Liz gobbled up, there wasn’t time for much else. Their exclusive month was almost up, and if she thought he was going to drop to one knee and profess his undying devotion toward her, she was about to be very disappointed.
Dave was excited about Cari and was looking forward to seeing her, but he did have an obligation to Liz. It was not a commitment to a lifetime together but a promise of a date Liz had made with him weeks earlier when she got tickets to the Freaker’s Ball. Hosted by Z-92s Todd N Tyler Radio Empire, the Freaker’s Ball was a big Halloween bash at Harrah’s Council Bluffs Casino and Hotel. The doors opened at 7:30 P.M. on Friday, October 26, 2012, and partygoers danced to music played by the band, The Vybe, “bobbed for bullets,” and competed for best costume in a contest sponsored by Coors Light Beer. The generous prizes included a thousand-dollar award for the best costumed pair.
Liz fashioned their costumes, togas made partly from white sheets. Dave wore a gold armband, gold sash, and incongruous blue tennis shoes that peeked out beneath his floor-length getup in a snapshot. “We handed our cell phones to someone and asked them to take pictures of us,” Dave remembers. The pair, with Liz cuddled close to Dave, are forever frozen in that instant. Liz’s chest looks so huge she’s top heavy, and her toga is strategically draped to show off her high heels with the long, gold straps crisscrossing up her shapely calves.
The costumes weren’t authentic, and they didn’t win any prizes, but if Liz’s goal was to present herself and Dave as a couple, she succeeded. The Roman themed outfits left no question that they were a matched set. At least for the night of the Freaker’s Ball, Liz got what she wanted. But just as Cinderella’s magic night at the ball ended when her magnificent coach morphed back into a pumpkin, Liz’s ball, too, came to a disappointing end. As the night wound down, Dave did not exactly behave like a besotted Prince Charming. Sure, he was as into the sex as he always was. She knew just how to touch him to drive him wild, and at the end of their date, she made sure he was satiated. But afterward he seemed more distracted than usual. If Liz suspected he had another woman on his mind, she was right.
CHAPTER FOUR
MONDAY NIGHT, three nights after The Freaker’s Ball, Dave and Cari had their first date. They met at Applebee’s Bar & Grill at Omaha’s Oak View Mall. It was fun from the moment Dave sat down across the table from Cari. She was witty, and she not only made him laugh, she laughed at his quips, too. They ordered drinks, and as they sipped, conversation flowed naturally.
He learned that she was a computer programmer with an expertise in coding. She worked for West Corporation, a developer of technology-enabled communication, with offices less than half a mile from his apartment. She had been hired in May, so it was still relatively new to her. She was twice divorced, thirty-seven, and lived with her teenage son, Maxwell, in Macedonia, Iowa, a small country town where she had grown up, about thirty miles east of Omaha. It was a long commute to work, she told him, but she enjoyed her job.
They had an excellent rapport, and the more Dave got to know Cari, the better he liked her. “Then my phone started blowing up with texts and phone calls.” He tried to ignore the distraction, but in a ten-minute period, he received about twenty texts and calls. He glanced at his phone and saw Liz’s number. He wasn’t going to answer her in the