Chapter 5

My wife loved me. The women I had married because I couldn’t get her to sleep with me first loved me. I had no idea how to handle that. I didn’t know how to react at all, and in that one moment, she utterly destroyed me.

A few days later I called Teresa, who had read my letter. She was pissed.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she spat over the phone. “After I told you about Rob and everything.”

I wondered briefly how she could have missed the obvious clues a second time. Maybe it was because she had known me longer. Or that I was a better actor. Or that she was obtuse.

I took the abuse. She promised to rat me out to the rest of the sci-fi club. I agreed that she should. “How would you feel if I called up your wife and told her what you’ve been doing?” she asked at one point.

“Too late - I already told her,” I said.

She paused for a second, then gained her wind back. “And what did she say?” I’m not sure if she believed me or not.

“She told me I wasn’t leaving.”

“Well,” Teresa went on. She had already been having horrible morning sickness, and expected me to pay. If her brother hadn’t been stopped by her, I’d be dead by a shotgun. On and on, and I took every ounce of cursing and abuse. Because I knew I deserved every word, and every word she said was true.

I never went back to the sci-fi club. I didn’t see any of the members, except for a few times, and each time in a mall around some of the geek stores - a bookstore, a computer store, a Japanese import store. The first recognized me after a minute. I heard her telling her boyfriend as she left “That’s the guy I told you about.”

The second was another girl who caught me walking out of a store. We paused, looking at each other a minute. “Oh my God!” she cried out.

“Hi,” I mumbled, and kept right on.

“That’s right - you keep right on walking,” she called after me.

The third time it was a guy who thought he recognized me. I convinced him it wasn’t me. I tried calling Teresa later, but she told me to never call her again, and that she was going to take care of the baby herself, and I was to have nothing to do with it, it was her baby. I wasn’t going to argue. I just wanted it to be over.

The oddest thing? It wasn’t that I got better. I still jerk off a couple of times a day, though I try to keep it down. I don’t flirt anymore, or if I do, it’s only after I proudly display my wedding ring and mention “my wife” and “my children” several times as a warning.

I miss my friends. Every damn day, I miss those folks at the sci-fi club. It’s funny. I never missed anything before. When I left home after I was tired of getting beaten every day, I didn’t miss my family. Never wrote home until I came back to let them meet the woman I was going to marry.