TICK… TICK… TICK…

by Vandemonium1

I was rereading my old story, ‘Deafening Silence’ the other day and figured I may have overdeveloped the cheated upon husband. I wrote this one as a bit of a laugh. As the world goes through a very troubling time, a laugh and a little distraction can do no harm.

WARNING: I’ve crammed in as many clichés as I could think of below but packaged them in what I hope is a unique way.

Myself and my partner/editor, CreativityTakesCourage, hope you enjoy it and wish you all the best.

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I thought I was arriving early at the lawyer’s office but by the time my attorney turned up and we were led into the conference room, Dave and his lady advocate were already there. This prompted the jealous reaction that always consumed me when I saw him interact in any way with a beautiful woman. I suspected that deep down I’d always felt a little inferior to him. He was a brilliant catch for any woman. At forty-eight, he was more handsome than he’d been at twenty, tall and muscular, owned his own successful business, and headed the local chamber of commerce. I shuddered at the thought that if today didn’t go well, I might never feel his big, comforting arms around me ever again.

Dave hardly glanced up as I followed my attorney into the room. My face, I know, blanched, as the slim, red-headed, classically beautiful attorney bitch reached over and squeezed my husband’s left forearm, just above the wrist, a gesture of reassurance that she was there for him. It was a little out of place in that setting, but not inappropriate. Officially, it was just her reassuring her client and settling him down. I, however, interpreted it as, “Let’s get this shit out of the way so I can drop you as a client and check out that bulge in your pants.” I knew from long experience that she was in for a treat if that happened. My husband was endowed better than most and knew how to use it.

Dave turned to her and smiled his beaming, familiar, jovial smile but his face was well on its way to neutral before turning and glancing at me again. I wanted to throw myself at his feet and scream that I was a stupid bitch that would spend the rest of my life spoiling him rotten if only he forgave me the one serious mistake I’d made in our twenty-eight-year marriage.

That wasn’t the way I’d negotiated it happening though. Frustrated at Dave’s determination not to speak to me at all, I’d been forced to this meeting.

My attorney began chatting to the red-headed bitch while I lowered myself into the seat opposite Dave, took the manila folder from my over-large purse, opened it, and spread my prepared, two-page script in front of me. I glanced up and caught Dave smiling faintly. After knowing me for thirty years, he knew that I prepared for everything important. He opened the laptop computer that rested on the table in front of him before plugging in a couple of small speakers, then lay a single sheet of paper and a biro beside it. Then, very offputtingly, he rested his hands on the table and looked at me with a horribly bland face. Totally emotionless. No anger. No hate. No grief. No nothing.

I’d prepared for this meeting for three days and I knew my script by heart. I’d used my intimate knowledge of David Brown to tailor it to tug precisely on his heart strings.

At that point, the two attorneys stopped chatting and the bitch brought the meeting to order.

“Well, we all know why we’re here. The respondent, Mrs. Julieanne Brown, has agreed to sign the divorce petition, as presented, if my client, David Brown, will listen to her for a period of no less than one hour. If everyone is ready, I suggest that the hour begins now.”

She turned the dial of a small kitchen timer on the table in front of her. It began a loud ticking which accentuated the silence around the room. I was still annoyed that Dave hadn’t agreed for this meeting to happen in private but insisted on his lawyer being present. I was proposing to bare my soul over the next forty-five minutes, before getting Dave to admit he’d done some things to partially justify my unjustifiable behaviour. All embarrassing enough with just the two of us present. Humiliating in front of strangers as well.

Oh well, no point in dwelling on the negatives. It wasn’t like I had a choice. I glanced at my entirely redundant notes on the table and crossed my fingers. My friend, Sonya, had used my opening gambit to talk her husband into not throwing her out when he caught her cheating. “Their ego is damaged,” she said. “Start by repairing that.” I cleared my throat.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me today, Dave. I’d just like to say from the outset that I was wrong in what I did and none of it was due to any failing on your part, but was all down to me being a self-centred, selfish bitch.”

It had taken me days of introspection to come to that conclusion and I knew Dave would welcome my honesty. It was critical that it looked like I was taking all the blame before subtly placing thoughts that he may have contributed somewhat in his head. I firmly believed that Dave wanted with all his heart to forgive me but needed an excuse to do so. My whole speech was geared to giving him that excuse. If the kids had still been at home, I would have played the, ‘oh, Dave, you can’t break up the family’, card, which would have been a guaranteed winner. Oh well, you can only piss with the dick you have, as Dave would say.

I glanced at his face to see how my speech was being received and was taken aback by his reaction.  In the ticking silence of the room, Dave’s expression was still neutral. He wasn’t even looking at me. He just lifted the biro and put a tick beside the first sentence of his notes.

That almost threw me completely. With my opening words, I’d obviously said exactly what he’d expected me to say and that shook my confidence. In my arrogance I’d forgotten that not only did I tailor my argument based on thirty-years of knowledge of him, but he’d spent those thirty-years looking back at me. I’m not ashamed to say I was rattled. So much so that I kept entirely to my script.

“Um, as I said, Dave, it was all down to me and some stupid, selfish choices I made. I was feeling lost with the kids gone and a little old, unattractive, and useless when I met Jason through my work on the church committee. He was subtle and was also obviously a master seducer. He knew exactly which buttons to press and when.

“He started off pretending he was just a friend, listening to all my problems after the church meetings. That was when you were away a lot last year. Then one day they kicked us out of the church straight after the meeting, so Jason suggested we go to a coffee shop and I stupidly agreed. It all seemed so harmless and he appeared to be a good friend, so I didn’t realise that he was very skilled at getting under a woman’s defences.

“Well, coffee shops led to restaurants where he complained that his wife didn’t understand him. I know that’s an old cliché, but by then I trusted him. The restaurants became classier and classier, the gifts he bought me nicer and nicer. Oh, Dave, you have no idea how complimentary it is to have a guy fifteen years your junior trying to woo you. You would have been proud of me, though; it was over four months ago that he asked me to sleep with him and I turned him down.

“I know I should have refused to see him after that, once his intentions were clear and all, but by then I’d become kind of dependent on the effect his compliments and attention had on my ego and confidence.”

I paused and sniffed at this point, rubbing my eyes with the finger I’d rubbed on the piece of onion in my pocket. It stung like a bitch, so much so that I dared not rub the other eye. One eye streaming tears would have to be enough. I halted, re-started, stammered, and hesitated.

“Oh, darling, I’m so ashamed I didn’t break it off with him. He took me to a restaurant and bought me a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Grange, even though he doesn’t drink wine. Rather than waste it, I ended up drinking just about all of it. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he wanted. I was too tiddly to resist him when we left the restaurant. He offered to drive me home and I stupidly agreed. Once in our driveway, he leaned over and kissed me, and I was too drunk to stop him. You know how I get after a wine or two. Then he started rubbing my, er, breasts. My logic was all screwed up at this point and I remember just thinking I had to get him out of my driveway so the neighbours didn’t see us. That’s also the reason I opened the garage door and got him to park inside.”

I was taking a little bit of a punt with my admission that even in the car I thought Jason might be staying for a while and certainly didn’t want the neighbours to see a strange car in the driveway the next morning. But it was all a calculated risk on my part. I knew enough about men in general to know being cuckolded is a severe blow to a man’s ego and I wanted Dave reassured no one else would ever know about it. Well, apart from the two lawyers, that is.

“Well, Jason got out of his car, as the garage door was closing and began kissing me again. Like I said, I’d had most of a bottle of Grange and was ripe for the plucking. He grabbed my key and led me inside. I steered him into one of the spare bedrooms and, I’ll be embarrassed about this till the day I die, let him have his way with me. I’m so sorry, Dave. My only saving grace is I was with it enough to make him wear a condom.”

 “After Jason, um, climaxed, I think we both fell asleep. Me, because I was drunk, and him because he must have been exhausted after a four- or five-month chase. I do know that I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t drunk and would have been mortified when I woke up and I most definitely would have kicked him to the kerb immediately.

Instead, you came in. When you entered the room and turned the lights on, I’ve never felt so ashamed in all my life. The look of pain on your face just killed me. I realised what damage I’d done to you and us with one simple lapse of judgement.”

With tears still tricking from one of them, I turned beseeching eyes toward my husband. After a lifetime together, I knew I could read his expression like an open book and would be able to judge how my plea was going. Wrong! His expression was still neutral. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. Bizarrely, he was fiddling with the bloody laptop in front of him. I thought he was writing notes until he must have clicked on a link on his screen. A voice came from the speakers. My voice.

“Ugh, don’t kiss me, your breath reeks of beer.”

Followed by Jason’s voice, “What about you, rotten grape breath?”

“What? I had one lousy glass of the house white.”

The audio clip stopped and a thunderous silence filled the room. I think that’s what happened anyway. The roaring sound in my head drowned out everything else. Yes, I’d felt embarrassed and humiliated when Dave caught me that night with Jason; before hauling Jason upright by his hair and beating the hell out of his naked body. But that paled into insignificance compared to having been caught in a huge lie like I’d just been. It completely threw me. I’d been so confident my script would work.

My eyes flitted around the room. Dave’s bitch of a lawyer had a faint smile on her face. Mine looked slightly embarrassed. Dave was just looking at me, expectantly, with that damn blank expression.

Later, I would never understand why I didn’t fully process what it all meant. What the hell? Dave had an audio recording of my time that night with Jason. In the heat of the moment, it never occurred to me to follow up the logic of that. Why did he have a recorder there unless he knew beforehand it might record something? What else had we said? All this went right over my head in the humiliation of being sprung so quickly, easily and… unemotionally.

The silence dragged on uncomfortably long and I looked at the cryptic shorthand of my notes and, stupidly in hindsight, plunged on with my prepared script. I clung to it the way a drowning man will cling to a scrap of flotsam.

“It was just the once. It would never have happened again, nothing like it. Please believe that. I just wasn’t strong enough to resist him, but I…I wasn’t out of control enough that I didn’t make him use a condom or allow him to take me on our bed. He wanted to, you know. But I would never do that, no matter how drunk I was. You saw us right; we were in Karen’s old room?”

Dave just looked at me sadly and I didn’t know what was worse; his sad face or the emotionless one. He shook his head, then turned to face his computer. I sensed rather than heard him double clicking on an icon and cringed until…, in Jason’s voice.

“I just love seeing my cum dripping out of your pussy. It is sooo hot.”

Then, as soon as that finished, another double click. Again, Jason’s voice.

“When can I fuck you in that clueless husband of yours bed again? That was so cool.”

This time, Dave clicked and cut the clip off short, then just looked at me. Silently. Accusingly.

What could I say? Every bullshit thing I’d said had been blown out of the water. Not by anything Dave could have said, but by my own words. The condoms; this being a one-time drunken mistake; not cuckolding my husband in his own bed; all exposed as the lies they were in just thirty-odd self-condemning words.

Tick, tick, tick.

I was struck speechless. Although it was embarrassing, I glanced at Dave, looking for some sort of clue. His neutral stare still gave nothing away. In my peripheral vision, I saw my lawyer glance at his watch. This focused my thoughts on the loudly ticking timer and the knowledge that the sixty minutes I’d sold to try to retrieve my marriage were passing rapidly and, I must admit, spectacularly badly thus far. I forced my panic down.

“I’m sorry for lying, Dave. About that being the first time, I mean. I…I just didn’t want to hurt you any more than I had already. I thought if I could convince you it was only the one time, and it was for the reason I said, you wouldn’t be so hurt.”

I stumbled back to silence. Did I now confess I’d been seeing Jason several times a week for over half a year? The trouble was, I didn’t know what Dave did and didn’t know. He knew from the recorded conversations that the night he walked in on Jason and I wasn’t our first and only time, but how much more did he know? The fact that he’d hidden a recorder where I usually did the deed with Jason suggested he suspected at least one other time. I just didn’t know. I did know, however, that if I was caught in one more lie, it was all over. Oh well, Julieanne, old girl, time to be vague, avoid details and stick to facts.

“The truth is Jason did seduce me and it did take a while. He has a thing for older women and it’s very true that a woman my age gets a huge ego boost being pursued by a man almost the age of her children, and I just wasn’t strong enough to resist. I admit. I was weak and needy.”

I considered telling him that I’d only ever used the master bed once and that was the first time. It would be a lie but one that would paint me in a far better light than I currently was. I kept coming back to the fact that I hadn’t a clue how long Dave had known about my extramarital activities. I decided to remain silent on the issue.

Tick, tick, tick.

I couldn’t remain silent on all the issues though. I had a shortening amount of time to turn this disastrous situation around. With no clue what to do, I glanced at my notes. Discarding the first few points after where I’d been hijacked, I focused on a couple of words I’d highlighted with capitals.

“I never stopped loving or respecting you, though, Dave. I never gave you any less love than I always have. Jason was just an extra dimension to my life that took nothing away from you. Just the overflow, if I can describe it that way.”

When I paused, Dave looked back at the screen of his laptop. He frowned. He seemed to be having trouble finding something, and for a brief second or so, his expression changed from neutral to confused, but then he relaxed again. After hearing the recording, an extension of the soundtrack he’d paused before, I realised his frown signified he’d been looking for an icon on the screen before realising it was one of the already opened files. I wished he hadn’t made the realisation. He obviously re-started from the beginning of the clip. I listened again to Jason’s question about screwing me in the marital bed. Same as the first time, I cringed. And, again, my own words condemned me.

“I told you before, never again. Not after the last time when Dave came out of the shower that night and stood on a big blob of cum that must have leaked out of my pussy onto the carpet. I could smell it from where I was. Thank god, Dave swallowed my story that I’d sneezed and it was snot.”

I sunk lower in my seat, knowing what words were coming next. At the time I spoke them I felt smug. That was no longer the case.

“Me offering to clean it off his foot, then giving him a blowjob distracted him, though.”

“You’ve got to admit, baby doll, your husband does sound like a clueless dick sometimes. How we got away with it that time he came home early and I had to hide in the cupboard. What a dickhead.”

“Yes, but he’s my dickhead. When we first started our thing here, I thought it was cute that he trusted me so much that he never saw even the most obvious of clues. Now, though, I agree with you; he’s just a clueless schmuck. I sometimes wonder if you and I could fuck right here while he was in our room and see if he noticed.”

The sneer I heard in my voice, as much as the actual words, made me realise I was flogging a dead horse here. With those words and tone, I couldn’t even convince myself I still loved and respected my husband, never mind him. Once again I was thrown into a flat spin of confusion. Before this meeting, I’d convinced myself I still loved and respected Dave, but after what I’d done and said, how was that possible?

Tick, Tick, Tick.

In the ticking, loaded silence after the latest nail in my coffin, Dave turned to look at me. I couldn’t face him so I turned to his lawyer. She had such a look of contempt on her face that I actually flinched. If I had any doubts that Dave was more than just another client to her, they were blown apart by the emotion in that expression. I averted my gaze from her as well which left me looking at my lawyer. He wasn’t quite quick enough to mask his look of contempt either.

Here I was, in a room, fighting for my future, surrounded by people who thought I was something they’d stepped in at the dog park, and one of those was supposed to be on my side. My confidence evaporated like dew under the midday sun. My self-respect wasn’t far behind. That is, maybe, why I looked at my notes again and decided to go on the offensive.

“You have to admit, Dave, that over the last half year or so, you’ve been paying me less and less attention, taking me for granted, going out of town on business more often, and, dare I say it, drifting away from me. All this at the exact time the kids left home and I started feeling lost. You were never there when I needed you. You weren’t there telling me I wasn’t as old and unattractive as I was feeling. You weren’t there reassuring me when I needed it most.”

I paused and Dave’s eyes went back to his damned screen. Once again his fingers danced and I cringed. This file he selected opened with Jason speaking. I recognised it as being just after our second round of bunny-fucking on that horrible night, not long before Dave sprung us.

“Sorry about that, doll, but we haven’t been together for nearly two weeks.”

“Oooo, you know I like it rough.”

“No, seriously, two weeks is too long. Can’t we see each other more often?”

“Oh, stop whining. It’s been two weeks for me as well and I have needs too; especially as you asked me to cut down on Dave’s rations. He had a three-day trip planned last week and we could have snuck away somewhere, but that got cancelled at the last minute. You’re only getting some tonight because of an urgent meeting he had to go to. I wish he would go out of town more as well, darling, believe me.”

“Well, I want more,” said a petulant Jason.

“You’ll get what I choose to give you.”

Again, the clip was terminated. Ashamedly, I looked down at the table to avoid what I knew would be three condemning stares and remembered my state of mind at the time of that last conversation.

The truth was that the novelty of having a lover, even one as young and energetic as Jason, had begun to pall. Jason’s and my actions in betraying my husband were causing me to lose respect for Dave and that, if nothing else, was starting to hurt my conscience. The loss of respect, more than anything, I think, was the cause of my pulling away from my husband emotionally.

Even as I’d prepared for this meeting, fully intending to accuse him of pulling away from me, I’d realised it was hokum. To allow myself to keep betraying him, I’d been emotionally divorcing Dave. Cutting him off in bed had been an easy decision simply because Dave’s loving caresses were so different to Jason’s impatience that it was impossible to confuse the two. That reinforced to me that what I was doing was very, very wrong.

So, I’d started turning my husband’s advances down. He’d pushed for a while, then… stopped. All of a sudden, I comprehended what should have been screaming for my attention months ago. Dave had abruptly given up his sex life around the same time he’d started working longer hours and going away more. I’d thought at the time he was emotionally distancing himself from me as well. I closed my eyes, now thoroughly confused as to who was distancing themselves from who.

And then it clicked. Dave must have known for a while. That’s why he knew to secrete a recorder in Karen’s room.

Hell! My whole approach to this meeting had been to minimise my crime. Heal Dave’s wounded pride. Eat some humble pie. All to get the life and future back that I so desperately wanted.

I thought I was assuaging a recently wounded bull. But if I was right about him knowing for at least two weeks before he discovered, no, confronted me, then he was way more devious than I thought possible and I was wasting my time appealing to his emotions.

Tick, tick, tick.

In summary, I didn’t have a clue what to do. I’m much better when I plan than when I adlib; hence the two pages of notes. But I had to do something, time was running out; the ticking clock reinforced that.

In desperation, I picked up my notes and looked for hope. The pounding in my head made absorption of the words a very slow process. Nothing leapt out. Then, I realised that the notes were a distraction as the game had changed so much. If Dave had known I was stepping out for a while, what was his state of mind? He’d be hurt at my betrayal, of course, but mainly he’d be worried about my motivation. Was I not satisfied by the quantity and quality of his lovemaking? Did I find him boring and want to explore my kinky side? Did I love Jason? Was I planning to run away with him? These fears and doubts I could fix.

I risked looking up into those expressionless eyes, wondering if I should take a punt and risk telling more lies. If only I could remember what else Jason and I had talked about that fateful night. If only I could be sure that was the only night David had a recordings of. Surely the sequence must have been, suspect, set up recorders, confront. He can’t have been sure for long; he just wasn’t that good an actor.  

I wanted desperately to convince him of the truth; I did still love and respect him. My desperation to not have him leave me proved that; far above my fear of losing my very comfortable lifestyle. But how to convince him I still respected him after we’d all heard me calling him a dickhead in front of my lover? Where was the value in trying to justify denigrating him to my lover as a sop to my conscience and to create a shared bond between Jason and me? None that I could see. The same went for still loving him. If I’d caught him screwing around on me, wild horses wouldn’t have managed to drag a conclusion that I thought he still loved me out of me.

So, convincing him I still loved and respected him would have to come with time. Time bought by persuading him to not insist I sign the divorce papers. But how many ticks of that damned timer did I have left to convince him of that? One thing was for sure, my next few sentences had to score points. Lots of points. I steeled myself and looked across the table at Dave.

“I know it seems I lost my love and respect for you, Dave, but I assure you, I never did. I love you and our life together. I want to end my days with you, and only you. Having a glimpse of what life is like without you and the memory of the shame I felt when you caught me will keep me on the straight and narrow for the rest of my life, of that you can be assured.

“Jason was a distraction. A bit of a sugar hit when I was craving an ego boost. I didn’t love him and was certainly never going to run away with him. Yes, it was wrong; very wrong. Especially acceding to his suggestion that you and I make love less. I really don’t know why I went along with that, especially after I’d managed to convince myself that I was just giving him the excess that you couldn’t handle.

“He didn’t have any more stamina in bed than you did at his age, and he was far less skilled and considerate. I wasn’t motivated by anything but lust and selfishness. It was an ego trip. Yes, it was nice to be screwed to exhaustion by someone before my body loses interest in sex, but it was totally unemotional. It wasn’t as if I did all the kinky stuff with him I’d been denying you all these years…”

I stopped when, without breaking eye contact with me, Dave’s fingers hit a button they must have been hovering over in anticipation. Once again my voice filled the room, louder than life.

“That’s it, lover, stick that plastic cock in my cunt while you cum in my arse, I feel so fucking full, pound me, I’m almost theeeeerrrrrrreeee!”

They do say time slows down for those near death. The demise of a marriage must be like that as well because I saw everyone else in slowmo even though I was at normal speed.

My lawyer, on my left, threw his pen to the tabletop and turned toward me, a look of absolute disgust twisting his features, proving that at this point I couldn’t even pay someone to be on my side.

Dave’s lawyer leaned to the side so as to see the laptop screen better. I realised then that what Dave had been playing weren’t sound files as I’d assumed, but video clips. Somehow that made it worse. The bitch once again gripped my husband’s arm as a gesture of physical support.

Dave’s reaction couldn’t have hurt more if he’d tried. Thankfully, his eyes weren’t on me but on the screen in front of him. His neutral expression had slipped, but only a fraction. Now, there were undertones of the devastation he must have felt when he discovered the person who’s job it was to cover his back was spending inappropriate time on hers. I watched as a single tear escaped the eye closest to me, as its owner tortured himself. Or was he steeling himself by watching the screen?

The last vestiges of my controlled mind registered a couple of now irrelevant facts. The recording was from a session at least three weeks before the confrontation which meant Dave had been watching me betray him for a while. Enough to see a pattern. Enough to know that after sleeping off our second vaginal fuck, Jason usually woke me with a simulated forced anal fuck in the morning. A technique and kink of mine we’d discovered by accident when he took my anal cherry.  

We all remained silent as the speakers played me coming off a spectacular orgasm high while Jason unloaded into my unprotected arse. It had been so hot at the time, but now it just seemed sleazy. Sleazy and tawdry. Empty.

I stared at the table as my lawyer put the divorce papers in front of me.

There was nothing I could do or say to combat the dastardly deeds my husband, my Dave, had discovered me doing. Then, with consummate ease, he’d destroyed all my rationalisation, minimisation, and pathetic attempts at reconciliation.

We were finished.

Like the conductor of an orchestra, Dave had never created anything here today. Just pointed at which section of the orchestra he wanted to play next, using their skills and talents. Without Dave ever having said a word, he’d executed me.

No, not Dave. Me. I’d walked up the scaffold all by myself, put my own blindfold on, looped the noose around my own next and kicked the lever. Dave just built the scaffold and walked away.

I realised that I’d never had a chance as soon as he triggered that last clip without hesitation and without looking. He knew exactly what I was going to say and when. I’d crafted my arguments through my intimate knowledge of him after observing him for three decades. I’d forgotten he’d been looking back at me for the same amount of time as well. Looking back with those intelligent, perceptive eyes.   

The shame and humiliation were unbearable, and finally triggered my flight response. Escape was what I needed. Escape back to the house that was still my home, at least until Dave enforced the eviction notice that was part of the settlement. Escape to children that hopefully would never know and would continue to love me unconditionally. The only route of escape went through signing away most of my life’s accumulations.

I picked up the pen, signed the two agreements then dropped the pen in one fluid movement.

I’d been surprised Dave’s business wasn’t worth more, but that’s what my lawyer’s evaluation had uncovered and surely Dave hadn’t known long enough to have hidden most of it away… Son of a bitch!

By that time, thankfully, the last recording had ended, and the ticking silence returned. My lawyer picked up the signed papers, handed one copy to the bitch and shuffled the rest into his briefcase, stood, and left the room. I sat there, frozen, wanting to run but wanting to leave with a positive message. An ember that would convince me, at least, I had a hope of fanning into a flame one day. Leave Dave knowing I still cared for his wellbeing.

Suddenly, the jarring rasp of the alarm spurred me into action.

I stood and said my positive piece. The jackal had both of her hands on Dave’s arm now.

“Don’t ruin your life by ending up in gaol after getting revenge on Jason when he reappears. Then I would never, ever forgive myself.”

Dave’s response to that was yet another bloody clip. This time, thankfully, not my voice, but another woman’s.

In near screeching tones, “The little creep did what? I’ll rip his fucking balls off if my brothers don’t get to him first.”

Mrs. Jason, I presume. I’d thought Jason’s silence after being beaten up by my husband was fear on his part. Now, I wondered. That he should end up divorced and penniless was a fitting end for a cheater. To end up dead because he slept with me was just another burden for my already overloaded conscience.

I just couldn’t face Dave as I stood to take my leave. Whether he had that damned expressionless face on, was laughing or crying, all would hurt me. Remind me what I’d done to this good man. He’d lost everything I had, apart from the house and money, of course, and had copped a huge emotional blow to boot. And I’d been the cause of it all. I deserved everything he threw at me.

I did manage a very teary, “Goodbye, darling”, as I shuffled to the door. My pathetic attempt to keep my old life swatted aside like the pestilent bug that it was. Maybe, my daughter, Megan, would come over while I drank myself into forgetful oblivion. If she wasn’t available, my son, Joel.

I had just started to push the door open when I heard voices behind me. Fantasies of last-minute phone calls to the firing squad emanated from the last skerrick of optimism I possessed. But it wasn’t a normal speaking voice, it was another damned recording.

An obviously emotional young male voice said, “Mum did what? The bitch.” A very familiar female voice chipped in, “Are you sure, Dad?”

I think I’ll be drinking alone tonight.

THE END

Now lighten the fuck up.

Wife: What are your plans for Easter, dear?

Husband: Same as Jesus.

Wife: What do you mean?

Husband: I will disappear on Friday and reappear on Monday.

Wife: If you do that I’ll do what Mary did.

Husband: Huh?

Wife: Show up pregnant, untouched by my husband.