Chapter 1

“You’re sure?” I asked.

The room was starting to spin for me as she confirmed the test results. Dr. Phyllis Sebastian had been my doctor since I was ten.

“Quite sure, Rand,” she said sternly.

She’d earned the right to that tone. She’d been like family. She’d been to my wedding. It seemed fitting that she was present for the end of my marriage.

“You’ll have to alert your sexual partners. Have them come in and we’ll have them tested and start treatment.”

“Phyllis, my wife is the only sexual partner I’ve had since before the day I married her, if I have an STD, then...”

I told her, my eyes tearing up. I trailed off, unable to say the words.

“Oh!” she said, realization dawning on her that she’d just told me that Beth had a lover.

“Rand, I’m so sorry! You’ll have to bring her in to start treatment.”

I nodded at her statement and took the prescription from her. She gave me a pamphlet and drilled me on the importance of following the instructions to the letter. She stressed that I should avoid alcohol while taking the medication.

“Then, if it’s all the same to you, Phyllis, I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to start taking them. I think, right now, I need to be drunk.”

I buried my face in my hands, my life crumbling to dust in the last few minutes. She looked at me with sympathy.

“Talk to her, Randy,” she told me gently. She was practically the only person allowed to call me Randy. “It might not be as bad as you’ve built it up to be in your head.”

I laughed shakily at that, the sound tinged with an edge of madness that made her wince.

“It can be worse than sitting in my doctor’s office finding out my wife brought home an STD from her lover?” I asked, my teeth starting to chatter as shock set in. “I suppose she could be pregnant, right? That’d be just perfect, wouldn’t it?”

She stayed with me for a few minutes, looking at me with the powerless look of a bystander seeing the train-wreck, but being unable to stop it.

“It could have been a one-time mistake,” she suggested. “Too much to drink and a moment of weakness have led to situations like this before. Marriages have survived this kind of crisis. As your friend, I’m telling you that you should talk to her and get her side of the story.”

I shrugged. The room was still spinning, and I was starting to tremble. It’s amazing how detailed your awareness is in moments like that. I could hear her pen scribble on the scrip pad as she wrote out another prescription. She pressed it into my hand with the first one.

“That’s for Valium,” she said. “It’ll help keep you calm through the next few days. If you’re still overwhelmed when that runs out, we’ll talk some more.”

I nodded and got to my feet. I had to go home. I had to do something about this. I didn’t know what yet, but something. I got in my car and drove to the pharmacy to get my medication. I silently thanked my wife for the necessity of having to listen to the pharmacist drill me about the medication to clear up the case of the Clap she’d brought home to me.

I zoned out and thought about loading our shotgun when I got home. We’d gotten it for home defense. I silently thought a chastity belt would have protected us a whole lot better. I finally took the bag with my new pills and got out of there. I was late getting home, but I still beat her home by a country mile. She was probably in some motel with her feet pointed at the ceiling.

I hated those thoughts. And I hated the darker ones, where I used that shotgun on her and then on her lover. I got out of the car, after realizing that I’d been sitting behind the wheel for some time, and went inside with my medication. I looked at the bottles and put them in my desk drawer for now. I sat in my study off the living room, staring at nothing in particular until I heard the front door open. It was after 9PM. There was no reason for her to be this late.

“Rand?” she called out curiously from the doorway.

I reluctantly got to my feet and went to meet her, starting the recording app on my phone before putting it in my shirt pocket. She looked tired. She’d looked like that a lot lately. Now I looked at her in a new light. She looked like someone had worn her out.

“Where have you been?” I asked her tonelessly.

She groaned and launched into a story about how there’d been an emergency at work, and she had to stay late to try to fix a problem with a report that she’d been working on for weeks. She rambled on and on as she kicked off her shoes and hung up her coat, her voice becoming more and more enthusiastic about the lie she was telling me. I thought I could smell the stench of sex on her.

“It seems to be printing for us now, but it still looks very irregular. Not at all the way it’s supposed to look.”

I let her talk herself out as I nodded slowly. When she started to go upstairs, I blinked.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I just want a shower and bed,” she said with a tired smile. “We ordered in for dinner since we were working so late.”

I nodded.

“I think we need to talk first,” I said.

“Can it wait until I’m out of the shower?” she asked, her eyes pleading.

“I don’t think it should,” I said.

I turned on the light in the living room, moving into the room and waiting for her to join me. She looked irritated, but came, and sat in one of the chairs when I took the sofa. I found that telling.

“I went to see Dr. Sebastian today,” I told her. “I haven’t been feeling right lately. She ran some tests and told me that I’m sick.”

That was precisely true. It was also exactly how people broke it to their loved ones that they had cancer or something equally fatal. It was a little cruel, but then again, getting the Clap from your wife’s lover, second-hand, wasn’t particularly kind. I could see the blood drain out of her face.

“Oh my God!” she whispered, staring at me in shock.

“She suggested I come home and talk to you about it before I made any decisions,” I said. “I didn’t think there’d be much to discuss after she gave me the diagnosis, but she insisted that it was survivable.”

Part of me was actually enjoying this, making her think I was dying of something awful while she undoubtedly had more diseased cum staining her panties as she sat there, staring at me.

“Oh my God!” she repeated. “Why didn’t you call me to go with you?!!?”

She was starting to tremble, like I had earlier.

“Until I got the tests back, it was just a feeling. Until I knew something, I didn’t suspect it would be ... this.”

“Oh God! She said it’s survivable though, right? What do we have to do?”

“I’m not sure she was as hopeful as she was telling me,” I said. “It’s all a matter of how far it’s gone. If it only just started, then maybe. If it’s been growing for a while though, I can’t see it turning out well.”

She bit her lip and trembled but stayed where she was. I’d guessed that she’d been with her lover less than an hour ago. She hadn’t had a chance to shower, so that meant her lover was a co-worker, or her boss, otherwise she’d have had access to a motel shower at least. He seemed like the type. Stan Weaver was in his fifties with a trophy wife who was only a year out of high school and looked like a high-end prostitute. He smiled too much and let his eyes linger where they shouldn’t. I’d noticed that he’d had an eye for Beth at the last Christmas party.

“Well, whatever we need to do, that’s not even a question. I wish you’d called me when you got the news. I’d have come home, and the report be damned.”

“Beth,” I said. “It’s not that simple.”

“Is it the expense? We’ll sell the house. I don’t care. We can live in an apartment! We’ll fight this. You’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t think I am.”

I told her softly, looking at her seriously.

“Beth, I’m not dying. What I have is treatable, but the implications are too devastating for me to contemplate.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, searching my face. “What’s going on?”

“Dr. Sebastian told me that I have the Clap. The only person who could have given me the Clap is you, since I’ve never cheated on you. The only way you could have given me the Clap is if you’d had it when we met, and I miraculously avoided getting it until now, or if you contracted it more recently. I think we both know there was no report at work and the reason you want a shower is because you’re leaking.”

She stared at me for the longest time, her face as white as a ghost.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said faintly.

Another lie.

“Take off your clothes, Beth,” I told her evenly.

“No!” she said, regaining some of her composure. “This is ridiculous. There has to be another explanation. Someone ... People sometimes have sex in the bathroom. They must not have cleaned up,” she said lamely.

She got to her feet.

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to this!” she told me.

I got to my feet too.

“You’ll do as you’re told, or the next conversation we have will be very unpleasant for all involved.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she wanted to know.

“That means that if I have to load the shotgun and go have a talk with Stan, I won’t come home with any shells left,” I told her.

There it was. She wilted. The admission was on her face.

“Strip. Now.”

She hung her head and disrobed there in the living room. I could see the bite marks around her breasts that I hadn’t put there. The hickey on her left breast enraged me. Off came her skirt and she was standing there in just her panties and stockings. Her panties were soaked through.

“I’ll take those,” I said as she stepped out of them.

She looked to the floor in shame but passed them to me. There was a lot of cum in them. I took them out to the kitchen and sealed them in a plastic bag before I came back.

“Is Stan the only donor in this sample?” I asked.

She nodded, getting more miserable.

“I can’t hear you,” I barked.

“Yes!” she spat. “It’s just Stan! You think I’m some sort of slut?!!?”

“You came home with your panties full of diseased sperm and gave me an STD and you think I’m out of line to wonder if he’s the only guy you’re fucking? You’re clearly not the only woman he’s fucking. How long has this been going on? Choose very carefully whether you should lie to me about this. You don’t know how long I’ve suspected or how long I’ve been feeling the effects of the STD,” I reminded her.

“Just before the Christmas party,” she admitted. “I was working late, and he was paying a lot of attention to me. You and I weren’t getting along all that well, so I found myself enjoying it. I’m ... I’m sorry, Rand! It’s just that, lately we’ve been drifting. You’ve felt it too. Sex with Stan was exciting where sex between us had become routine.”

I stood there and stared at her, stunned. She was trying to turn this around so that it was my fault. I took my phone out of my pocket and switched to the camera and took several pictures of the bites on her breasts and the hickey without stopping the recording. On a whim, I snapped one of her vagina, which was still leaking. They must have fucked all afternoon.

“What are you doing?” she asked, shocked that I’d taken photos of her naked like that.

“The bite marks aren’t going to match my dental impressions, but they’re a perfect match to Stan.”

The implication of that hit her like a brick.

“What are you going to do?!!?” she wanted to know.

“Well, with DNA evidence,” I held up the bag with her panties, “and photographic evidence, I figure that I can persuade a judge to rule against him for the damage to my health and my marriage. His business is fucked too. There are strict laws about employers having sex with employees.”

“Rand, stop!” she urged me. “He’s not the bad guy in all of this! Punish me if you have to, but other people work there. They’ll lose their jobs over this if the company shuts down.”

“You have sex with the boss,” I told her. “You do it in the office. They help keep it quiet. You’ll understand if I don’t feel a great deal of pity for them.”

“I didn’t know you were this petty, Rand,” she said, sounding disappointed with me.

“If our roles were reversed and I’d cheated on you and brought home a disease from my lover and given it to you, you’d be out for blood. You’d carve me up with a knife to find out who the whore was and then you’d have gone and cut her up too,” I told her in an angry growl.

“You can get down off your soap-box.” She returned a growl of her own.

“You can hardly claim the moral high-ground while you have another man’s cum running down your legs.” I replied.

She colored furiously about that.

“I’ve been trying to spare you the gory details!” she pointed out hotly.

“No, you’ve been trying to cover it up, so you could keep doing it,” I argued. “How were you going to explain the hickey and the bite marks? Were you going to start another fight and then put on your heaviest nightgown and pretend you were angry for three days until they went away? How many gory little details did you spare me by treating me like shit the past six months? You remember Christmas? I remember being yelled at for two days straight about how the decorations weren’t the way you wanted them and then treated to the cold shoulder until after New Year’s. What did he do that you had to cover up that time?!!? Huh?”

She hung her head and nodded. “He ... he likes to bite. It’s his fetish.”

“So, to indulge him, you’ve frozen me out of your heart, so I wouldn’t find out you’d do anything he asked. Do you even know what it’s been like to live with you the past six months?” I sneered. “You’ve been a rotten, rancid bitch to me just about every day and now I find out the worst thing you did to me was to relent and act like my wife on my birthday. That was the only time we’ve had sex this year. You’ve been his whore 100% of the time and the one time you let me back into your cunt, you laid there like it was terrible and for a birthday present you gave me the Clap in the bargain!”

“You don’t do any of the cooking around here anymore. You do your own laundry, so I won’t see your panties before they’re washed. I clean up around here more than you do. You know the funny thing? This is really going to make you laugh. When Phyllis told me I had the Clap, she was pissed at me. She thought I’d brought it home to you. And after all that. After everything you put me through, I was still crushed when I realized the only way I could have gotten it, was if you’d had sex with someone else.”

She stood there and took it as I ranted at her. I was angry, and hurt, and humiliated, and nauseated. She hung her head in shame or contrition or maybe just the hope that I’d stop if she looked chastised. I didn’t really know. I didn’t really care.

“What do we do now, Rand?” she asked in a very small voice.

“We haven’t been doing much of anything together lately, Beth,” I reminded her. “At this point, divorce, and suing the shit out of everyone I can, sounds like a solid plan for me. I think your first stop should be Dr. Sebastian to get treated.”

She flinched at the mention of a divorce.

“Are you really going to divorce me over this?” she asked, ashen-faced. “After all we’ve meant to each other?”

“What, exactly, do we mean to each other?!!?” I sneered. “You’re the one that told me you started the affair because we were drifting. I was just too boring for you. Maybe you’ve changed your mind because this conversation has been much more exciting than our normal talks. Those have consisted of you starting a fight you don’t really care about, so I won’t see your body covered in marks from your boss’s teeth. What other gory details do I need to hear about? He convince you to get into a threesome with whoever else is letting him bite her?”

“NO!” she protested. “It’s only ever been Stan. No one else.”

“You do all the dirty little things with him that you’d never do for me, though. Right? How many times have you come home and kissed me with his cum still in your mouth?”

She flinched, and I knew that it was too often. A kiss when she got home from work was the extent of our affection these days.

“You’re acting like it was all aimed at you and it wasn’t! I swear!”

“You’re another man’s wife,” I told her flatly. “That’s part of the thrill for him. He gets what I don’t and then when you kiss me, he gets a laugh that you’re feeding me his cum. We have a scum-bucket like that in my office too. You know Stan brags about you to his buddies, right? For that matter, that big, blustery production he made of meeting me at the Christmas party? Why do you think he did that? Getting me to shake hands with the guy that was having more sex with my wife that week than I’ve gotten since. That was his way of laughing in my face. And you stood by, watched, and then you went back for more.”

“I never meant for you to get hurt by this! You have to believe me. It was just a little harmless sex. There was never any love in it. It was just like masturbation only with someone else’s body instead of a toy.”

“But it wasn’t harmless. I’ve been irrevocably harmed by it, both medically and emotionally. How can you continue to delude yourself into thinking it was harmless? You’ve inflicted long-term mental cruelty on me to keep me from seeing the evidence on your body. You’ve inflicted a disease on me because you didn’t use protection with him. You’ve damaged my ability to trust and to love with the lies, and the betrayal, and the hate you’ve spewed at me. You can tell yourself that you don’t hate me, that you love me, but could you ever believe I loved you if I’d done this to you? Could you ever trust that I was faithful to you again, that I was telling you the truth ever again? I don’t think you could.”

She looked at me with anguish on her face.

“Please, Rand! I’ll make this up to you! I swear! Just give me a chance!”

“I’m not making a decision tonight,” I told her. “I’m devastated, and betrayed, and a thousand other emotions. Right now, I kind of hate what you’ve become. I don’t know that it’s fair to either of us to try to climb out of a hole this deep. It’d be easier for you to just take the divorce and move on with life.”

“You can’t mean that!” she argued. “Of course, I want to try! I don’t want to lose you!”

“At the risk of wallowing in self-pity, why? What difference does it make if I’m gone? You won’t have to fight when you get home, you won’t have to hide what you’re doing, or make up excuses for working late. Best of all, you won’t have to put up with how boring I am. You can have the excitement you want, and you don’t have to hide it to protect poor Rand-dull.”

“I’m sorry, Rand!” she said again. “I didn’t mean that you were dull, just that sex had become routine for us. I should have come to you when I started feeling like I wanted something different, but I didn’t even know myself until after I’d already cheated the first time.”

“Thank you for that,” I told her dryly. “That’s very comforting. Was it Stan’s idea for you to stop having sex with me altogether?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“We never talked about it, but he keeps doing things that you’ll see if we have sex. Your birthday, I held him off for the week leading up to it, so I wouldn’t have any marks on me.”