phone Deborah screamed and grabbed the sheets-- our sheets, the ones I'd chosen to complement my aesthetics and Alan's tastes--to cover herself.
"Honey," Alan stammered. "What are you doing home so early?"
"The same thing you're doing with this bitch. Fucking around," I retorted.
"Now, now, I know you're not happy, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this--"
"I know, I heard. She just fell out of the roof."
"Are you kidding?" she said. "I don't weigh enough to break beams. You, on the other hand--"
"Get the cunt out of my house," I said, trying not to break down. Holding on to the one thought in my head--revenge--and working out how to change my plans around this fact--how would a true cool bitch do it, how would a "bad girl" use this to her advantage? I couldn’t be a meek little Stepford wife anymore. Move past the pain, get angry .
“I hope you know you just ruined his life,” I said, watching Deborah dress. I don’t normally go for humiliating other women, having experienced plenty of it myself, but if anybody deserved to feel bad it was a woman who would fuck her married lover in the wife’s bed. “Your panties are inside-out,” I told her.
She turned red and put on her jeans and ran out the door, sobbing, holding her shoes. “A real man would’ve stood up for you!” I shouted after her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Alan snarled, snapping himself out of bed. “That’s no way to treat a lady!”
“This—” I shouted, pointing at his naked, lanky body, and the shriveled, wilted cock that only a week ago had astounded me with its size, “—is no way to treat your wife!”
He remembered himself, and reached for his shirt, tying it around his waist. “You wouldn’t understand,” he grumbled.
“You know what, you’re right. I don’t understand how I could have been as faithful and devoted a wife as I have been to such a loser and a horndog as you.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. Quiet, little Evelyn Goodman actually had some balls after all—that was a good thing, because my plan would require that I do things that I’d never done before. “If I have one regret in my life, it’s not marrying you, actually. It’s letting you think that you can get away with treating me the way you do.”
“Is that a threat?” he asked, his face turning a shade of reddish-purple that was somewhere between “ridiculous” and “dangerous”.
“I would never threaten my husband,” I said, turning around and leaving him to stew in his own indignation. And I was true—I wouldn’t. Warning him about the storm that was coming—well, that was just a courtesy. And I am a lady.
My plan was simple: slip away, preferably in the middle of the night. While leaving my soldering gun on, and near a puddle of turpentine. It was a careless mistake—I’d made it myself a few times already, luckily always catching it before any serious damage could be done. And a perfectly understandable one, too—because the on-off switch was on the stand, and not on the gun, and the “on” indicator would go off by itself if you just left it alone. It was a well-documented problem with that particular model, but it was cheap, and the point was tiny, so people just kept using it and hoping for the best.
I’d already put out a story that I’d been invited to a gallery opening, which would be believed because I had sold some pieces already, after all, and I did have a website and the gallery opening was real. But I’d told them—the people running the gallery opening—that I wouldn’t be able to go, because my husband and I were going through marriage troubles and about to enter counseling. I’d gone so far as to book an appointment with one Dr. Sheldon, adding it to Alan’s calendar (which he never looked at—he had assistants to do that for him)—we’d synced our
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