Out of Love Ch. 04

"Because, well, we just wanted to get high. It was nothing more than that. Given your reaction to the night before, we figured you were on board already. It wouldn't be a problem. The girls were already talking about how much they wanted to take you for a spin, based on what Chloe had told them about how good you were," said Mark.

"So I come back, I'm tired and grumpy, I have a bath, you ply me drinks and then I just pass out in the middle of sex position charades. Wow, that must have put a crimp in your plans huh? Or not."

There was silence for a moment and then Jim said, "We'd been building up to it all day. We only had one more day there, and....we fucked up. The booze was too much. We tried to wake you but you were just out. We rationalized it that we'd party and you'd get all the girls to yourself later, to make it up to you. You'd be ok with it."

"Ah yes, the sloppy seconds defense," I said. Everyone looked away except Wendy who said, "No, it wasn't like that J. We were going to make your fantasies come true. Even Chloe wanted that."

I said, in a tight voice, "Wendy, whatever you thought it was, whatever fantasies you thought you were fulfilling, it would have been sloppy seconds to me. And no amount of other women being pushed on me makes up for my wife breaking her wedding vows to me, on an assumption that no one had thought through."

There was silence after that – there was no possible response to that and everyone knew it. After a beat I carried on.

"So you carried on playing charades, got into the duo thing, clothes must have come off and it just kicked off. With the idiot over here sleeping on the couch right in front of you."

More silence. More gaze avoidance.

"And then I woke up, and saw what I saw. I left, in a daze. After I had gone, you guys eventually realized I was gone. Chloe here falls into a panic and you all suddenly realize that I must have woken up, seen something that would affect me, and that I took off. You don't know exactly what it was, but it must have been bad for me to take off, right? So operation 'Find J' commences. Someone brings Chloe home, to the road, and gets to the point where you get a phone signal. She frantically calls, and when she gets home, she finds I'm gone and well, it's not good, yes?"

Everyone looked at everyone else and eventually Mark said, "Pretty much."

Jim added "We looked for you for days. We called the cops, but they had no evidence that anything bad had happened, just that you'd left and there is no law against that. We hired a PI and it took him a couple of days to find you, in Portland."

"Then you came back," picked up Kathy, "and you talked to Chloe."

I nodded. "Yes, I did. I imagine that up till then, you really didn't know my mindset or what I'd seen. And I came back and laid it all out for you. What I'd seen, how it had affected me, and how I was reacting to it. Right?" I directed the last to Chloe. She just nodded, a single tear on her face.

"Once Chloe told us what you'd said, we just.... We were just devastated," said Wendy.

"Not as much as I was, I'll warrant." I couldn't stop myself saying.

"Well, obviously," said Wendy, throwing a four letter stare at me. "We understood right then what we'd done. We did this. Not you, us. We'd fucked up, pushing too hard, too fast, drunk, stupid, the whole thing. We... didn't know what to do. You'd gone. Chloe was alone and frantic. And none of us could blame you. I mean, it was horrible. And we hadn't thought at all."

There was more silence.

"And then we come to Doctor Ingram here," I said, looking at Amy. I shook my head. "This is exactly the kind of stupid harebrained scheme you guys would come up with, wasn't it? Without me there to stop you."

"We couldn't leave it J," said Mark, "We fucked up your marriage. We destroyed a couple who we all love dearly. You are the best of us and we destroyed it. We couldnotjust leave it. Wehadto do something."

"So you hired the best. Ingram and Associates, covert rehabilitation. That's what it says on your business cards, right Doctor Ingram? Your specialty is rehabilitation, in situations where the subject doesn't know they are in rehabilitation. From what I have been led to believe, you tend to specialize in returning troops, particularly those involved in black ops?" I said.

"Yes," said Amy/Jessica. "They hired me, to pull you back together again and try and get you back with your wife."

"Tell me Doctor, did you come up with the plan to follow, or was it these idiots?" I said, gesturing at the others.

"If you must know, it was a combination of them and me. Once they contacted me and explained the situation, we met and they gave me a profile of you. My team spent 3 days going over it with them. I have to admit, I was intrigued. To be honest, and I'm not flattering you here Jace, people like you generally don't exist. Everyone has their issues where they are not the nicest people in the world. You, you treat everyone nicely. You have standards and you actually stand by them. You actually are everything it says on the tin. I had to find out if you were everything they said you were." Amy/Jessica was speaking more passionately now.

"And was I?" I asked, my voice heavy with intent, "I am keen to know if I measured up."

She looked at me and away and said quietly, "Yes. If you must know."

Then she turned back and said, "Since we are talking about this, and it's out in the open, please know that it wasn't just a job. It was to start with – you were a mess, but I really... came to have feelings. It made it really hard to get the job done sometimes. What I wanted to do and what I needed to do where very different things and it, well, it sucked sometimes. You are a very decent human being and towards the end... it was... hard."

I looked at her; she looked away, then back, then away. For the first time she was acting more like a woman than a PhD in psychology.

"So, let me get this straight. The plan was to have Dr. Ingram here to pull me back together, then put Chloe here in an awkward situation, and have me ride to her rescue, right? You didn't actually expect me to come back, did you Jessica? That's why you had changed your look and why it took you 3 days to get back to me. You didn't think I'd come back. I wasn't supposed to, was I?"

Jessica shook her head and said, simply, "No. From everything that had been occurring, the profile stated you'd stay. I was in DC when you returned."

"Only I didn't."

She nodded. "Your own decency basically worked against the profile. We aren't used to people who actually stand by what they say they do. We had some indication of possibility that you would do what you considered the right thing, but no one at the office really expected you would. Practical experience, I'm afraid," she said, apologetically.

I then swung around to confront Mark and Jim. "And right, since we are now on that subject. WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING STICKING THAT ASSHOLE IN MY EX-WIFES HOUSE? Who the FUCK thought that was a good idea?" I had actually raised my voice, breaking my promise to Chloe. I felt every muscle in my body clench and had to actively force myself to relax a bit. I also realized I was going to smash the beer bottle in my hand and so I put it down.

Both Mark and Jim looked nervously at each other and Jim fidgeted with his hands. Wendy and Kathy wouldn't look at me either. No one looked at me until Mark did and when he did, I saw it all in his eyes. He was apologetic, terrified, sad, didn't know what to say. But he did try; I'll give him that.

"That... That was really another mistake. The concept – the plan, was to put someone who was somewhat bad news in there and give you the impetuous to come back and sort it out. You'd had time to get your head together, now you needed to come home. To see that Chloe needed you. You'd toss this guy out and see your place was here and it would all be great."

"J..." joined in Jim, "I... look, we didn't know he was that much of an asshole. We honestly didn't know about his rap sheet. Wedidtake steps though. We went back to the bikers – remember them? – If you hadn't come after the second email, they were going to sort it out. He was gone either way."

"But I did come back," I said.

Mark nodded. "When I came to see you the bar, every word was the truth. I was concerned. You needed to deal with it."

"Well, every word you spoke was the truth eh Mark? What you didn't say...Well....."

He sighed. "I don't really have any excuse. None of us do."

Wendy suddenly spoke up, "J, for what its worth, what you did was... everything we knew you to be. Yet again you proved what a decent and stand up guy you were. When you left, and you called Mark, we went straight over and Chloe told us everything. She was an utter disaster. For the first time she really realized you were lost. Till then she'd been holding out hope..."

I looked over at Chloe, who was crying and shaking silently. I was trying to make a point of not asking her anything or even looking at her because I honestly didn't want to see something I couldn't recover from, but couldn't help it.

"So what, council of war?" I said.

Jim nodded. "We contacted Dr. Ingram – I have a friend in the state department who used her group a few years ago and told me stories about them - and she came here. We sat down, talked about next steps. The thing is, we had figured that this would either work or it wouldn't. It didn't, at least in terms of how we thought the initial plan would work out. But in doing so, you made it so we couldn't stop either, you bastard. Yet again we looked like assholes, felt like shit, had fucked it up again and you just carried on being fucking impeccable in your behavior. We couldn't stop then. We needed to fix this. We needed to do whatever was necessary. We all agreed that. We'd started this, we'd made it worse, we needed to fix this."

I chuckled to myself. "Good thing I'm an idiot then eh? Gotta give you your due, Jessica. You were awesome. I never suspected a thing." Suddenly a thought gripped me. "That was what all that sex was about before I left, wasn't it? 'Give me a reason to come back' my ass – that was you getting in the last jollies before I didn't come back, wasn't it?"

Jessica had the grace to color just a bit and gave me a tight smile.

"That's why we did what we did. You showed your true colors right then, because it didn't matter any more. I'm such an idiot."

Jessica pursed her lips and said, "J, I'm very, very good at this. Don't blame yourself here. This is the result of years of training and practice. In some ways, I really hate what I do. In others though... I help people. It's unorthodox, but it does work. You are only here, exposing everything, because I put you back together to be able to. And let's face it; it wasn't the most unpleasant set of events in the world, was it? For either of us."

She turned to Chloe and said, "I know this is a strange thing to say and you may not want to hear it, given the circumstances of how I know, but you are one lucky woman Chloe. Jace is a very good lover and actually cares about the women he makes love to. I don't know how experienced you are, but I would hold onto him because men like this don't come along very often."

"Well great, Doctor Ingram," I said, "You know what? You're right. And one day I might even forgive you for the way you've gone about it. But not today." I ended the sentence a bit more bitterly than I should have, but fuck it. I was pissed and with good reason.

"So then what? You came up with a new plan?" I said, turning back to Mark and Jim.

"We decided to keep trying. We needed to keep trying. So we can up with Doctor Ingram returning and carrying on, and then Chloe made up her own mind and came to you."

"Remember Jace," said Jessica, "All of this was also necessary. It was all true and right. Chloe did need your forgiveness and you needed to forgive her. You also needed to be reminded of why she was your wife. Having her come to me meant you had to face it. There was no option. We had to go with it."

I nodded, "Oh, I see it Doctor. I totally see it. It's a masterful plan, I have to concede you that."

"So that went on, and it went well, and then we come to Halloween," I said. "I have to admit, I am totally confused by that. We went to that club, what happened, happened, and then you send me home to be with Chloe? I don't understand that at all..."

Jessica sighed. "It was an opportunity to kill several birds with one stone. It was an opportunity to show you that a group scene wasn't the worst thing imaginable – to sever the association with being cheated on. To try and isolate that feeling and remove its association. It was also justifying allowing you to play with Chloe, and also, it had been suggested to me that you should be shown a good time. You'd had enough shitty things happen to you, and were about to happen, and there needed to be balanced restored."

I nodded, understanding. "Ah, I see it now. Wow, there was almost nothing we did that wasn't carefully considered, was there?"

Jessica at least had the decency to look away and said faintly, "No, not really."

"So then, the events at the hotel? Those were a set up too, I presume? You were playing a dangerous game there, breaking my heart again."

She bit her lip and said "That was a calculated risk. We had to do something that would push you back to Chloe. Everything had been arranged so it would be the natural thing for you to do. This time though, we were ready for your chivalry. We didn't know if you'd show up at the hotel, but we were ready if you did. And you did."

"Yes, I particularly like the 'calculated risk' part there. Given that the risk is 100% on my part and not yours. Thank you for risking that for me. If it had backfired, I'm sure you would have been beside yourself. Incidentally, I did idly wonder – did you actually get laid? I did notice that it was all set up to make me think you had, but I never saw any evidence of that?" I said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"No," said Doctor Ingram, with a small tight smile. "That was Todd, my executive assistant. The only person there that night who would have gotten laid with him is you, J."

I laughed nastily and said, "Yeah. Makes me wonder if I should try that. I'll bet they don't fuck you over as much as women seem to."

"So that pretty much brings us up to date, doesn't it?" I said. "Many thanks to you Mark for sending Wendy over. I do hope you get to see that lingerie. It's pretty fucking sweet."

I winked at Wendy and she actually blushed. With all this shit going on and manipulation on an epic level being revealed, she actually honest-to-god blushed.

"I guess you are wondering how I figured it all out?" I looked around. There was curiosity present I could see, but no one said anything.

"Well, at the cost of impressing you with my own cleverness, I knew from moment one that you were a phony Dr. Ingram. Oh I had no idea who you really were – I deliberately didn't look too deeply into it – but it didn't take much of an internet background search to discover that your identity wasn't real. Tie that with the fact at you obviously had therapist training of some kind and I knew that everything as it was presented to me wasn't quite right. But I still bought into it. I have to say it. I did – even though I knew it wasn't on the up and up, I bought into it anyway because I knew I needed it. I did have thoughts of you on the run, or in witness protection or some such, but the truth of the matter was that I just didn't want to look too deeply.

So well done everyone – kudos, you were all quite right. But the kicker was driving back from being dumped, in Seattle. I sat there, driving back, marveling at how Amy, sorry,Doctor Ingram, had been exactly what I needed, and now there were two extremely hot women waiting for me at home in lingerie."

Wendy blushed again.

"And how lucky could one guy be? It was just so obviously meant to be. And then I thought, what if that's exactly what it was? Meant to be? And then I started to think about Amy showing up in the first place, how she'd not let me go, how she'd been into the same things I was, so we'd have something to talk about, but how she really didn't know that much about the subjects. At the time I thought it was just because Ididknow about this stuff and was able to impress her, but what if she knew about this stuff just to give me that opportunity?

Then I thought about those emails I got, urging me to go back home. I did find the proxy server they used, and didn't look harder. So I did look harder, and I found where they came from. From your email server Jim. Now I know you are an idiot when it comes to this stuff, so how had that happened? So I talked to my buddy, the one Mark asked for. Turns out, he set it up for you as part of the contract you set him. He had no idea it was aimed at me – and he's pretty pissed off with you about that Mark, just a warning. Don't set my own friends against me – it never works out.

So, we have emails from you guys to me, we have the concept that our Lovely Amy here is a plant. How do I find out if that is true? Well, let me tell you again, you are a bitch to find Doctor Ingram. No website, no digital presence at all. You wanna know how I found you? Well, I didn't. The crowd did. Remember that app I was working on? Where you ask the world questions? Well, guess who was in charge of coming up with some calibration questions? You guessed it – this guy."

I nodded at myself with both thumbs.

"So I added a question and asked, 'If I needed a private service to help facilitate behavioral adjustments, that might involve sex, but had to be done complete confidentially and without the target subject knowing, where would I go?' And damn if two people didn't finger you immediately I had no idea if anything would come in at all, but there it was. It took some digging to get a picture of the Doctor Ingram – incidentally, you are all over a conference website you went to in 2008 Doctor, you might want to do something about that – and once I had that, I had most of it. Your group isveryexclusive, so I've found Doctor."

I stopped and took a breath. There was absolute silence in the room – everyone was hanging on every word.

"I sent you an email from Marks' company over here, once I knew what your domain was called – incidentally Mark, you have a couple of new email filters on your server that I installed. The protection job my buddy did on your IT structure is really good, but once you have the password, it is easy to get past. He really is mad at you by the way. The email queried some detail of billing and your people at Ingram's replied to straighten it out, which gave me the link between you and them. The only detail remaining to get you here was another spoofed email, asking you to come here today to review the case and asking you not to call because 'J was around and might hear the call.' All in all, once I had it figured, it wasn't as hard as you might think to break it all down."

There was silence and I took another swig of beer and continued, "Which rather brings me to the final two things. Firstly, what do I do about this now I know?"

Everyone sat and stared at me and no one said anything. "How do I make it entirely clear to you guys that not only did you fuck up initially, but you compounded that fuck up with manipulation, lying, cheating me, and putting my ex wife potentially in danger of rape?"

My voice was quiet, but steel. I was very, very, very angry and I was doing my very best to keep it under control. "How do I make it clear to you that, as friends, you've done just about everything you can possibly do to make me want to make your lives as miserable as you've made mine? And what should I do about that? I could beat you, do the typical cheated husband stuff. God knows I have cause."