by T. L. Tate
Her only response was, “Hmm.”
I drifted to sleep wondering how many more nights this cold war would last.
The next morning I awoke to the sounds of shuffling. I climbed down the stairs to see Rachel fully dressed and dragging a suitcase behind her.
“What’s going on?”
She looked up at me and smiled, which didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Good morning, Jake. Sorry but I just got an email this morning from my boss telling me that I have to attend this weekend conference in San Francisco. I’ll be gone until Monday morning.”
I was floored. “You just found out? That doesn’t make any sense.”
She continued moving around, with the suitcase in tow. I had to follow her around like a dog on a leash just to talk with her.
“It’s just a conference. You could say no. They could send anybody. You don’t have to go.”
She stopped abruptly. “Ugh! Can we not do this? It’s a work thing. Okay? Work. I have to go.”
“What the hell? You could decline and you know it.” This arguing was getting us nowhere. I placed my hands on her shoulder and forced her to look at me. I spoke as sincerely as I could manage. “Please, Rachel. My birthday is tomorrow. Have you forgotten?”
“N-no! I haven’t forgotten!”
I couldn’t believe it. She had completely forgotten that it was my birthday. Despite what she said, the panic in her eyes gave it away. Still, I tried to help her save face. “Okay, fine. Well, it is and I want to spend it with you. Please don’t go, honey. Please.”
It was just for a moment, but I saw her eyes soften but then it was replaced by a more stern and selfish look. She tilted her nose up at me and said, “You’ll have another birthday next year. It’s not a big deal if we can’t spend them all together. Now, I’ve got to go. Excuse me.”
She left without kissing me goodbye. I watched her pull out of the driveway and head towards the airport.
To say that I felt deflated wouldn’t be enough. My heart felt like it had been stomped on and rode over by a train. Fortunately, no one in the office expected me today. I started my new job on Monday so it was expected that I take a long weekend to get ready.
I turned off the lights and closed the shades. I sat in a prematurely darkened living room while trying to piece together how my life had ended up like this.
At a quarter past 3, there was a knock at my door. I ignored it initially, but the person refused to go away. Angry, I marched to the door and swung it open without even looking through the partition.
“What!” I bellowed.
A small, voluptuous and beautiful woman stood there, shock evident on her face.
“Jesus, Jacob” she wrung her ear out with her finger. “No need to be so bitchy.”
I felt foolish. Sheepishly, I smiled, “Sorry, Toni.” Stepping aside I invited her in.
She looked around, “Wow. It’s a little dark in here. Don’t you think?”
I shrugged, “Sorry. Let me go turn on a light.”
I walked round the living room opening shades and turning on lamps. Soon the room was as bright as a field in summer.
Toni continued to look around. “Where’s my sister? Where’s Rachel?”
I felt like I was chewing on stones. “Rachel left. She said she had a conference she had to attend.” I held my head down, feeling sorry for myself.
I could feel heat radiating from Toni. She plopped onto a chair and growled, “That selfish little cunt! I can’t believe she actually left. Fuck!”
I wasn’t used to Toni talking about her sister in this way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use the c-word before. I looked at her in shock.
She was muttering something under her breath and I couldn’t make it out. Before I could ask her what was wrong she popped her head up and jumped out of the chair. She was pacing back and forth.
“I didn’t think she would actually do it. God, I’m such a fool! No! She’s the fool. She’s a goddamn fool.” Now she turned to me as if she just noticed I was still sitting there. She crouched in front of me and I stared into her wild eyes. “Jacob, there’s something you need to know. I don’t know how to tell you but someone has to. I thought Rachel would say something. I really did.”
I knew this was going to be one of those things that I really didn’t want to hear but still had to face. My heart was thumping a mile-a-minute and my hands started to sweat. Still, I had to know. “What is it, Toni? What do you need to tell me?”
She shook her head and reached in her pocket. When she pulled her hand out she was grasping her phone.
Shaking her head to the side, she explained, “I don’t want to be the one to say it. I knew you wouldn’t believe me so I recorded this.”
She set her phone on the coffee table and opened her voice memos. She picked a saved file and the screen blinked dark and then it began to play. As it played, Toni stood up and backed a few steps away as if she was afraid I would blow up or something.
“What the fuck did you just say?” That was Toni. Her honey-coated voice was distinctive in her anger.
“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic.” That was Rachel, her voice nasal, as if she was speaking to a petulant child.
“You don’t get to call me melodramatic when you’ve been doing what you say you have. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you give a shit anyway? It’s my life.”
“You’re married, Rachel. Married.”
“Yeah? Like I’m really the first person to ever have an affair.”
At the mention of the word ‘affair’ my mind spun out of control. My heart felt like it fell into the base of my stomach and I wanted to vomit. So that was why she had been so distant. That was why things seemed to have changed so completely. She was sleeping with another man.
“How long, Rachel?” Toni’s voice seemed to radiate rage.
“How long, what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. How long have you been seeing him and who the hell is he?”
She was silent for a moment, trying to decide what to give away and what to keep to herself. “We’ve only been intimate for about 4 months. He’s just some guy at work. We flirted around for a little while but a few months ago things got serious and we started fucking, okay. Happy?” Four months? Jesus, that was around the time when her sleepless nights started. So that’s why? It was all guilt induced.
“No. I’m not fucking happy. You’ve got a great guy. Jacob would give you the moon if you asked him. Why are you stepping out on him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s great and everything but I just feel kind of bored. Everything with him is so easy. I wanted a little danger. You know?”
“What do you mean by danger?”
“God, you’re such a child. I just wanted to mix things up. That’s all. Just to give myself a challenge. Jake is the guy you marry but he’s too…sweet. I want someone on the side that is more of a challenge. Someone who makes me feel dangerous.”
They were silent again.
“This will kill, Jacob. He completely loves you.”
“Psht! Jake will never find out. I had the guy in here the other night, right under his nose and Jake never even realized. All it took was a little BJ to get his attention long enough for my guy to sneak out.” So that was why she was so odd and rushed. I came home in the middle of her little fling.
“You’re a real piece of shit. Do you know that? What the hell happened to you?”
“Fuck you, Antoinette!”
“It’s Toni! And fuck you, bitch. You are outside of your mind thinking that you need another man. Do you love him? Does he fuck better than Jacob? Huh? Why do you feel the need to cheat on him when he’s seriously the best fucking man in the world and you don’t even deserve it?”
“You’re such a child. No, I don’t love him. He’s just a piece of dick on the side. I can toss him away whenever I feel like it. And not that it’s any of your business, but while he might not be a
s good in bed as Jake, he’s still plenty capable at getting me off.”
“You bitch.”
“Fuck you.”
“You need to tell Jacob.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Tell him, Rachel. Please.”
“Fine. I’ll tell him on Monday.”
“Wait? Why Monday?” There wasn’t an answer so Toni asked again. “Why Monday, Rachel?”
“I sort of have weekend plans.”
“Oh! I get it. You’re doing stuff with Jacob and don’t want to ruin it.”
“Uh, no. I’m going to Vegas with him.”
“Him?”
“Yeah, you know. Him.”
“Wait. So you’re saying that you’re going to abandon your husband so you can go slut your way up and down Sunset Boulevard? Fucking shit, Rachel!”
“Oh shut up. This is the last time. I swear. I’ll do it this last time and then I’ll cut him off. I’ll talk to Jacob about it on Monday.”
“No.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, Toni.”
“To hell with that. If you don’t tell him, I will!”
“Like hell you will!”
“Try to stop me!”
“You’re my sister. You’re supposed to have my back.”
“He doesn’t deserve this. He deserves someone way better than you.”
“Oh yeah? Like who? Huh? He loves me. He still thinks I’m this innocent little college girl he fell in love with. He doesn’t even realize that I’ve changed. I’m the one that deserves someone better. I deserve someone who gets me.”
Toni was quiet for a time. When she spoke, her voice was firm but sad. “You know. I bet that if you would’ve just talked to him the two of you could’ve figured something out. But instead you played him over and over again. You slept with another man in your own bed. How would you feel if he did the same thing to you? Huh?”
“Bitch please. He doesn’t have the balls. He’s too much of a goodie-two-shoes.”
“You don’t know him as well as you think, sister.”
“Whatever! But like I said you’d better keep your fucking mouth shut!”
“Don’t tell me…” Just then there was the sound of a door closing followed by the increasing sound of dress shoes against hardwood floors.
I heard my own voice, “Hey honey. Hey Toni” and then the recording stopped.
The room was deafly silent. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a meteor to crash down on my house, destroying everything with an explosive embrace. Toni was quiet. I was quiet. What could either of us say? It was all there right on her phone.
Rachel had decided to abandon me, on my birthday, to spend it shacked up with another man. Maybe she was right. Maybe I didn’t understand her. Maybe I didn’t know her any more because the woman I knew—the woman I married would never have done such a thing. I devoted my life to making her happy and making certain that she had everything she could want. I thought I did everything right but I still somehow lost her. I still lost the one person in this entire crazy world that I could trust.
I was broken. I was a broken and battered man. I was a fool who, even after finding out about the affair and coming to grips with the fact that my wife didn’t love me, couldn’t stop loving her. I hated that part of me. I hated it to the point where I thought taking a knife to my heart would be less painful.
I felt Toni move instead of hearing her. Her hand touched my shoulder and I looked into her tear-filled eyes. “I’m so sorry, Jacob. I’m so very sorry.”
I knew she was. I knew that she wasn’t putting on a show for me but I wasn’t ready to accept things as they were. I wasn’t able to accept her apology.
My voice was so low that she had to lean in as I repeated myself, “Please leave.”
“B-but Jacob…I don’t think you should be alone right now.”
“Please go, Toni. Please just leave me alone.”
Toni looked like she wanted to argue. Normally, she would. It wasn’t in her nature to mindlessly follow orders but after unveiling my life and revealing the destroyed foundation of my marriage, she had no choice but to obey. She walked out of my living room and I heard the front door close. I was alone and wallowing.
I lied on the couch and cried.
Hours went back and as my tears drained out of me my heartbreak morphed into rage. I went online to book a ticket to Vegas, consumed with the fantasy of checking every hotel room in that entire city until I found her and him and crushed them under my foot. I didn’t purchase the ticket. There was no way I could search all of Vegas for her in two days. She already broke my heart and our marriage. I wasn’t going to let her break my pocketbook, too. I went through the house making a list of all of her shit, ready to destroy it in the back yard. But when I entered the bedroom our king sized bed took up my attention. She had had sex with another man on these sheets. I started there. I took the sheets off the bed and threw them into the back yard. Grabbing my grill, I doused them in starter fluid and set them ablaze. A nice cheery fire erupted, making me feel gleeful in my anger. I planned on doing more but just the act of striping the bed wore me out in my depressed state. I put new sheets on my bed and fell on top of it. Sometime after 10 I drifted off into sleep.
It was dark and my body felt heavy as something shook me back and forth.
“Hey, wake up! Jacob, wake up!”
My eyes peeled open but in the gloom it was too dark to see.
I heard her voice again, “Jacob? Are you up?”
I was so hysterical that I called out the first name in my head, “Rachel?”
There was silence and then the side lamp clicked on. Standing next to the lamp and bathed in bright light, stood Toni. Her hair was pinned on top of her head. Her lips were glossy and moist. Her cheeks were flushed and her body was draped in a heavy coat…much too heavy for that time of year.
I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. “T-Toni? What are you doing here? What time is it?”
She stepped closer to the bed. For the first time in a long time she looked uncertain of herself. When she spoke even her voice had lost its normal self-assured air. “I’m sorry to wake you, Jacob. It’s 12:01.”
I kept rubbing my eyes, trying to rouse myself enough to understand. “12:01? Why are you here so late? How did you even get in?”
“Rachel gave me a key years ago. I’ve never had to use it but now…” Her voice trailed off as the weight of everything that happened the previous day fell on my chest like a ton of bricks.
I was suddenly breathless and was scratching at my throat for air. I couldn’t breathe. I felt Toni’s hand on my chest. “Here. Drink this.”
She materialized a cup of water, which I greedily drank. “Thank you.”
I sat up slowly as she stepped back away from the bed. There was something odd about this but I couldn’t figure it out. “Why are you here, Toni?”
She blushed and looked away. “I came to give you your present.”
“My present?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“This couldn’t wait until the morning?”
She shook her head. “If I waited till then I don’t think I'd have the courage to do it.”
“To do what?”
Her fingers closed around a large button on her long-sleeved asymmetric wool jacket. I watched confused as her small hands unclasped button after button. Once she was finished, the only thing keeping her coat cinched was a fabric belt. She gulped and then slowly untied the belt. When the coat hanged open at her sides she slipped it off and let it fall to the floor. There was only the slightest rustling as it touched the ground. I stared at her, my jaw hanging open.
She stood in front of me 5’3” of unadulterated goddess. Her body was barely covered by a midnight blue baby doll negligee. Spaghetti strings defied all logic and natural physics to hold the flimsy material against her curvy figure. Her large breasts were exposed through the shear material. Despite the roundness of her perky breasts, her
areolae were deceptively smaller than I would’ve guessed. However, her nipples were standing at attention, threatening to rip thru the lace. The gown opened up right beneath her breasts, fanning out to the sides and showing her midriff and the pair of matching midnight blue panties with a distracting bow at the center. I could make out the outline of her pubic hair through the thin material and a small dark spot was forming between her exposed camel-toe.
She shifted from foot to foot, obviously uncomfortable as I drank in the sight of her. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. After the day that I had I wouldn’t be surprised if I was going a little mad.
“Happy birthday, Jacob.”
“I-I don’t understand.”
She stepped closer to the bed. My body reacted to the sight of her standing there. She stopped at the edge of my bed and ran her fingers up and down my face.
“I am your present.”
Until yesterday, I never even thought about her sexually. Oh who am I kidding? Of course I have. She’s hot and I know it. She knows it. But this was wrong.
Despite the obvious growth of my manhood, I couldn’t do it. I held her hand, stopping their wanderings. “I’m sorry, Toni. But I’m married. I can’t do this.”
I saw the same look of determination in her eyes that I had become so familiar with. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I released her hand and she took a small step back. Her hands fell to her sides as she slowly brought them up to her waist. I didn’t notice before, but her panties were held together on each side by two cute bows. I watched as her left thumb and middle finger slowly pulled at the string causing the bow to collapse on itself. Half of her panties fell down and was barely held together by the right half. She raised her left leg onto the bed, her pussy placed right before my face. I could feel heat coming off her sex and it made my mouth water.
I tried to reason with her again. “I can’t do this, Toni. I know what she did was wrong but I still love her.”
She smiled, “Don’t worry, Jacob. I’m not trying to steal you from my sister. I’m just trying to help you. I want to take away some of your pain. I want you to forget about her for just a little while. Please, let me be there for you, Jacob. Let me help you.”
