by A. M Khalifa
“Of course.”
“We’re in a room at the Palace Hotel and she asked to talk to you. You’re on speaker phone, by the way.”
“Hey Ashley,” Melinda said casually.
“Go ahead, Ashley, speak. I believe you had something you wanted to share with Melinda?”
Ashley had turned into a wax statue, and those don’t usually tend to say much.
“Seems Ashley is a bit lost for words, baby.”
“Of course she is. My hubby's a stud. You must have overwhelmed her.”
“Yes. She and I just had earth-shattering sex. That’s what she wanted to tell you.”
“Okay, great. Do you know what time you’ll be back, the babysitter needs to know? No rush though, take your time.”
“I’m on my way home now.”
“Righto.”
“And you?”
“I need to pass by the lab for a few hours. Can you pick up some yogurt and eggs? I think we're out.”
“Will do. Before you hang up, how was your evening?”
“Meh. Huge disappointment. I think I got the short end of the stick, literally and figuratively.”
“Sounds like it from what Ashley has been telling me. Tiny down there?”
“Yeah, but that wasn't even the problem. Serious performance issues. Couldn’t get it up most of the time. We cuddled, he cried a little, we cuddled again, he cried some more, then he left. Sweet guy though. Much more mellow than when I first met him. How was Ashley?”
“What are you both talking about?” Ashley finally said.
I shrugged. “Isn't it obvious?”
She cupped her mouth.
“Jake,” Melinda volunteered.
“What about him?”
“Melinda was in room at the Ritz Carlton with him. They were planning to fuck, Ashley. Sounds like they didn’t get up to much.”
Ashley morphed into every color I knew.
Sometimes despite every effort you exert to avoid hurting people, they just goad you into doing it. Sometimes when you try to be the better man, you have no option but to be the rascal.
After all was said and done, the underdogs got the final laugh. Melinda and I never set out to vanquish Ashley and Jake. It all started out as an experiment.
Jake will probably be fine if he remains ignorant of the larger truths. His mediocre life will chug along at its mediocre pace until he and Ashley walk away from the marriage, if they don’t kill each other first.
Ashley however may never recover from this.
Let me tell you what really happened, because unlike Ashley, you deserve to know.
Driving back home from the class reunion, I was quiet and contemplative.
“Are you okay?” Melinda asked, rubbing my arm.
“There’s something I need to tell you about Ashley, the woman we just met.”
“I'm listening.”
“She broke my heart.”
There was a long silence.
“I knew it.”
“She used me to help her out with her computer science assignments then chucked me in the trash.”
“Go on.”
“There’s something else you need to know. Something happened tonight,” I said.
“Wait, I have to tell you something as well.”
“What?”
“You're not the only one who was used and abused in high school.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Jake did exactly the same thing to me. He was failing chemistry and I tutored him for four weeks. Got him up from a D average to B.”
"They had a pact!” I screeched.
“Maybe. Trading the promise of sex for other life-critical advantages is part of our survival manual. We’re wired for it.”
“She slipped me a note with her number when she was hugging me, Melinda. She wants to meet me privately.”
“Jake didn’t have a pen, so he made me memorize his email address. We’re in the same boat”
“When exactly were you planning on telling me this?”
A flood of emotions rushed through my brain, jealousy not being one of them. Ashley and Jake had scammed us once as a pair, and were now trying it again as free agents, both potentially willing to cheat on each other. They wanted to use us to spice up their lives. Relive their past glory.
I exited the highway and drove to the closest coffee shop.
“I have the craziest idea,” I told Melinda.
Over two steaming coffees, Melinda and I began to scheme.
“Sex and sexual attraction are the hardest aspects of human intelligence to replicate. The wires and the impulses required to get us buzzing are complex beyond comprehension. We’re working on the infidelity module at work, but the machines are just not grasping it.”
“What do you mean?”
“People cheat for a variety of reasons, none of which is quantifiable or easily to replicate.”
“Go on.”
“If you're married and getting plenty of sex at home, why would you cheat?”
“The thrill?”
“Try getting a computer to distinguish between the thrill of having sex with your spouse, and that of cheating on them with someone else. For the last two years, we’ve only ever gotten an artificial brain to cheat once, and I think it was a fluke.”
“That’s just great. You’re trying to get artificial intelligence to inherit cheating!”
“We’re not building angels. We need to emulate the entire gamut of the human condition. If I can’t get my computer to cheat, then I won’t be able to make it strive to be loyal.”
“What do you want?”
“We have two willing guinea pigs, male and female, begging to be experimented on.”
“Who?”
“Jake and Ashley of course, who else?”
Melinda broke out in laughter and in the process splashed my face with soy latte.
“You’re insane! You can’t play with people’s emotions like that. That’s against the rules.”
“All’s fair in love and war. They fucked with our minds back then, and still want to. Fifteen years later and they’re back at it, wanting to break a perfectly good marriage.” I reached out and caressed her face.
“Hmmm. Machiavelli always turns me one…”
“All I am asking is that we just respond to their advances in a manner that encourages them, and document how they respond back. I will feed the data to our infidelity module and try to write an algorithm that may help us crack it.”
Melinda nodded. “You and I would be the control variables, since we are technically cheating as we indulge them, but also not really cheating since we both know what’s happening.”
“True, but we’re only going to indulge them as far as the intent to cheat, and then extrapolate anything that happens after from the overall data sets.”
As we both sipped our coffees, an elephant walked in the room and sat next to us, but neither of us dared acknowledge it. It was Melinda who caved in first.
“Shall I say it?”
“I’d prefer it, yes. I’m the one slinging a penis in this relationship, so if it comes out of my lips first, you’ll always doubt my integrity.”
“That’s sexist. You could just as well worry that I am manipulating you to get what I want.”
“Baby, we are both scientists. Just say the damn thing!”
“Fine… In order for this experiment to be viable, we need to indulge them all the way to the bedroom and really get them to cheat on each other. If possible, we also need to find out how they justified the cheating in their heads. Not what they are saying, but the truth. Safe sex would be a given of course.”
“Shit. That sounds terrible.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Forget it.”
“No, it's the only way. What if...”
Melinda ran her hand through her hair. “What if we treat the sex part as a fringe benefit, and remove any guilt attached to it?”
“What do
you mean?” I said.
“I don’t know about you, but that dickhead really hurt me. My entire transformation after high school was inspired by that experience.”
“Ditto.”
“When I saw him today at the class reunion, and after he approached me, I felt a little bitter, but a little flattered.”
“So did I.”
“What if the only way to get these two out of our systems is to do what we were promised back in high school, but never got?”
“That sounds good in theory, but it’s still cheating. I don’t want to cheat on you. I don't want you sleeping with another guy, least of all that numbskull.”
“This is anything but cheating.”
“Swinging?”
“Not even. This is redemption.”
“You just want to fuck Jake!” I said jokingly then planted a kiss on her lips.
“I do, but not any more than what you want to do to Ashley. Let’s be honest.”
"I always say the universe hates vacuums, and is constantly balancing inequalities.”
“Exactly.”
“You and I could have very well slept with Ashley and Jake back then, but we didn't. There is an imbalance of justice looming over us, and we have a chance to fix it. Help nature course correct rather than work against it.”
"Exactly. And if we were always meant to sleep with them, it shouldn't matter if it happened back then, or will happen in the future. Time is an irrelevant variable here."
The science was sound, but the potential pitfalls scared me.
“What if we sleep with them and end up loving it? Wouldn’t it end up ruining our relationship?”
“It could, but I'd be happy with that. I’d rather know now that there’s someone out there you would prefer to be with, than five years down the line.”
“You’re brutal.”
“I’m rational.”
“You’re a robot.”
“I’m your wife. The geneticist in me has a theory too, you know.”
“What theory?”
“I’m betting that stripped of the rush of doing dirty things in the dark, the sex we may end up having with these two will not be good enough to force us to question our relationship.”
“What if she makes it extra dirty for me? What if Jake is hung like a donkey and reads Fifty Shades?”
“None of that will matter. You know what will though, no matter how much we try to rise above it?”
“What?”
“Revenge.”
“That’s another thorny model. But one step at a time, Dr. Brand.”
“One step at a time indeed, Herb."
Melinda got up and sat on my lap, kissed me. For anyone caring to look, we could have been high school lovers unable to keep our hands to ourselves.
