Once a Cheater...

All the calls out of the way I made one more pass through the house looking for stuff of Bea's and then I fixed myself some lunch. I'd just finished eating when the guys from Apex Security showed up. Not trusting Bea in the least and having absolutely no doubt that she would violate the restraining order and try to get in the house I'd decided to put a security system in the house complete with cameras.

When the guys from Apex were gone I flipped a mental coin -- the bookshelf that I was working on in my woodworking shop or the 1934 Ford three window coupe that I was restoring out in the garage. The Ford won and I got busy.

Thursday at work I told Stella that we were good to go for the weekend. She smiled and said:

"Tomorrow night then. Dinner and dancing?"

"For a start."

I had to smile when I got home. Bea had done just what I had known she would do. She had used her garage door opener to get into the garage to get some of her things and then had broken into the house through the connecting door from the garage. She trashed the kitchen. There were broken dishes and glasses all over the floor and she had broken several lamps in the living room. The cameras caught it all.

The one that really made me smile was the one where she took all my clothes out of the closet, piled them on the floor and then squatted over them and pissed on them. Why did that make me smile? All on tape and evidence that she had not only violated the restraining order, but had been maliciously destructive. Evidence that I could use in the restraining order hearing.

I called Josh and he called the police. The police showed up and took a report and some pictures and the next day Bea was arrested at work and taken to jail. She was finger printed, had her picture taken and was hustled in front of a judge. She was charged with violating the restraining order and willful destruction of private property. The judge set a hearing date and released Bea on her own recognizance and quite frankly I was surprised that it even went that far.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

My date with Stella was fun and we made a second date for Saturday. It also went well and we went out again Sunday on a picnic.

Monday the hearing was held on the restraining order and when the judge saw the tapes from the security system he not only made the restraining order permanent, but he ordered Bea to replace all of the destroyed items, pay for the dry cleaning of my clothes and pay for the cleaning of the bedroom since some of her urine had gone into the carpet. He gave her ten days to get it done or be jailed for contempt of court.

Just to be an asshole about it I hired the most expensive cleaning company I could find to do the work. Bea disappointed me. She actually came up with the money to do all that the judge ordered. I was so looking forward to her being locked up for contempt of court.

The next two weeks went by and Stella and I dated frequently, but there wasn't much more going on other than some kissing -- some of it pretty intense -- because neither of use felt comfortable about the fact that I was still a married man, but we were slowly approaching the point where things were going to get serious.

++++++++++++++++++++

Bea didn't fight the divorce and in six months it was final. It was your standard no fault with everything being split fifty-fifty. I refinanced the house and bought out Bea. I still made out much better than Bea on the deal. I'd been putting money aside in a separate account to pay for a surprise around the world trip on our twentieth anniversary and since she didn't know about it I didn't give her a dime of it. She also didn't know about the last two certificates of deposit I had put into the safe deposit box. I'd bought them with my last two bonus checks.

I had one more small victory. Bea was awarded alimony for two years or until she remarried, but it was only set at one hundred dollars a week instead of the five hundred she was trying for. It was unexpected and Josh told me that it was because we had gotten extremely lucky in the judges that my cases were assigned to. The judge who sat for the restraining order hearing and the judge who oversaw the divorce were not only cousins who apparently discussed their cases, but both had cheating wives in their backgrounds. Neither believed that the innocent husband should be penalized for the cheating wife's behavior and while they would follow the law they would not go one step farther than the law dictated.

Whatever Bea had with Noble apparently wasn't all that strong because seven months after the divorce was final she was living with her parents.

+++++++++++++++++++++

It was eight months after the divorce became final and I was sitting at the bar in the Hilton having a beer and a steak sandwich for lunch when someone sat down on the stool next to me and a voice asked:

"Buy you a beer?"

I looked over and saw my ex wife's ex lover.

"Would like to have a word or two with you" he said.

Being curious I told him to go ahead and he waved Agnes over and ordered us both a beer. She brought them over and he took a pull on his, set it down on the bar and looked at it for several seconds and then started to peel the label off the bottle. As the little pile grew in front of him he said:

"I didn't mean to fuck over you."

His eyes still on the bottle he went on, "She wasn't wearing her wedding rings the night I met her so I didn't know she was married and she sure didn't act like a married woman. She was in Bud's Bar with a group of girls that she worked with and I asked her to dance and she said yes.

"I bought her a drink and she invited me to sit with her and the other girls. I danced with her three more times and asked her for a date and she said yes. I fell for her big time and inside of a month we were having sex whenever we could get together. When we started we had to use motels because I was sharing an apartment with two roommates and one of them was always around. We couldn't use her place because she said she was living with her invalided mother. That was also the reason she used as why we couldn't get together more often. She had to take care of her mother and could only get out when someone else was available to watch dear old mom.

"I finally got my own apartment so we wouldn't have to use motels any more and even though our getting together was irregular and spotty I had fallen in love with her and was about to ask her to marry me. I was going to buy a house big enough for us and her mother, but before I could pop the question a guy I know asked me why I was fucking around with a cheating whore. I was all set to whip his ass when he told me that Bea was married and was cheating on her husband and that it wasn't the first time.

"It seems that two years before she had been cheating on you with his brother. When his brother found out that she was married he broke up with her. I was still having trouble believing it when I got your letter. I sat on it for a week and then I confronted her with it and she broke down crying. She didn't love you. You were an abusive drunk and you beat her physically and abused her mentally. She hated you, but was afraid to leave you because you had told her that if she ever did you would hunt her down and kill her and whoever she was with.

"By then I had done some checking and I knew that she was lying and all thoughts of asking her to marry me were gone, but she was good pussy and you had kicked her out so I let her move in with me. As long as she was willing to fuck me things were okay, but when the divorce was final and she started talking marriage I shot her down. My parents split up because my mom cheated on my dad. She got custody of me and later remarried and then she got caught cheating on him too. She remarried a third time and cheated again.

"I am a firm believer in the saying that once a cheater always a cheater and I told Bea that. Told her that as long as she was good with a live in friends with benefits relationship we were okay, but that is as far as I was willing to go. About three weeks after I told her that I came home from work and she was gone."

He took another pull on his beer and said, "Rumor has it that you knew all along that she and I were doing it. How come you let it go on and didn't divorce her?"

"You said it yourself. She was damned good pussy. I figured to hell with it; just leave things alone and I'd have pussy and have someone to cook, clean the house and do my laundry. Things would probably still be that way if she hadn't told me that she was leaving me and wanted a divorce."

He took another pull on his beer and then said, "I never thought I'd be saying this, let alone to you, but I miss not having her in my bed."

He finished his beer, stood up, took something out of his pocket and set it down on the bar and slid it over to me.

"What's that?"

"That lottery ticket you gave me? It was a winner. That's your half. I waited until now to give it to you so you wouldn't have to give her half in the divorce. See you around" and he left.

I picked it up and looked at it. It was a cashier's check for a large amount. A very, very large amount.

When I got back to the office Jean, my PA, said, you look like the cat that just ate the canary. Lunch was that good?"

"Lunch was spectacular."

Oh. Right. Jean my PA. Stella didn't work for me any more.

At least not in the office. She was home painting the room that was going to be the nursery when the twins arrived.