A Whore and a Thief

That was even more proof of the selfish nature of, not our decision, but Claire's decision, that we didn't need kids. She got her maternal fix on a daily basis. She spent eight or more hours a day with kids. Perhaps that was a part of it. She got to be a sort of pseudo greatest hits mom. She got to be with the kids when they were at their best. She didn't have to deal with them when they were sick or injured. When they acted out, she simply sent them away to detention or called security.

I know that I am not a perfect person. The situation I'm in right now only serves to prove it. When faced with something difficult or unfamiliar, I remove myself from the situation. Even at work, I have a tendency to sequester myself away from the rest of the staff and concentrate on my current project or assignment to the exclusion of everything else.

There have only been two important things in my life for longer than I care to remember. Those two thing have always been Claire first and my Mustang second.

And I have tended to let Claire make the decisions in our relationship. But that was more about my love for her and my need to make her happy than anything else.

Perhaps that was why I found myself seething with anger over her double betrayal. When I saw that checkbook and the amount of money in that account, I knew immediately where and when it had come from. Even with her Master's degree, Claire was only a high school teacher. She wouldn't have made that much money in her lifetime. And I make a decent living as an engineer. I make close to twice what Claire makes. We live in a very nice neighborhood. We have a nice house and we take a lot of vacations. That's probably why we haven't amassed a huge amount of savings. We both have retirement accounts, so we'll be comfortable on our old age, but there was only one reason and one place that Claire would have come up with that kind of money.

My loving wife HAD gone behind my back and fucked Ambrose. And as if the betrayal wasn't bad enough she had lied to me about it repeatedly over the years.

I had felt so badly about it after the fact. I had known that I was right about her not doing it. But when I walked through that door and saw that she hadn't done it, I'd felt guilty about accusing her. I had also been overwhelmed with relief that she hadn't done it. At the time it had only underscored the fact that she loved me enough not to do something that she wanted to do. So I guess in retrospect, Claire didn't love me as much as she claimed.

We had spent the past ten years together, living a lie. Claire had in fact stolen my life twice. The first time was our first thirteen years together when I could have been with a woman that I could have had kids with. I had knowingly entered into that contract because I loved her so God damned much. But Claire had sworn in church to love me and be faithful to me all the days of our lives. There hadn't been a loophole that said until some rich guy who wants to fuck you comes along.

The second time had been worse. I had been prepared to divorce her and move on. I could have had ten good years with someone else. I would have had those years if Claire hadn't lied to me about what she'd done.

I had no control over my emotions. I was running hot and cold. I had moments when I wanted to kill someone and others when I was more cold and calculating than I had ever been.

I wandered away from the fountain and left the kids to their play. The big question going through my mind was what to do about it. What should I do? What could I do? And most importantly what did I want to do?

Both of them needed to suffer the way that I was suffering now. After a life during which I had proven that away from engineering I wasn't very smart, I made a smart decision. I decided to do nothing, yet. Claire had taken over twenty years of my life. Now that I knew what she'd done, I had time to truly look at my wife and figure out how best to hurt her. Then there was the even more difficult part. Marcus Ambrose had destroyed my marriage on a whim. He needed to pay as well. But how does an ordinary guy like myself get to a billionaire like Ambrose?

Obviously I couldn't do this the way they'd do it in a movie. I couldn't just Arnold Schwarzenegger up and go kick his ass. No matter how many pairs of big boy pants I put on, I was not going to get past his security team or bodyguards. But what did they say about terrorists? If a determined individual wants to get to you badly enough and is willing to do anything to do so, even the strongest defenses can be breached.

The problem was me of course. Was I determined enough to hurt Ambrose that I was willing to do anything to get to him? That question was easy to answer. Fuck yes! Even if it meant a few years in jail. Or shit, what exactly did I have to live for anyway?

I walked back to the parking lot. As I approached my car, as usual I saw several pairs of eyes looking with lust over the bright yellow paint and my shiny chrome rims. The looks of lust became clearly gazes of jealousy to outright covetousness when I fired the engine and allowed a symphony of pistons to play a parking lot sonata as I idled there. I lowered the black tinted glass so they could see me as I put on my Ray Bans. I stepped on the gas once or twice hinting at the power beneath the hood.

As I sat there in the car, necks all over the parking lot craned to look at me, knowing what would come next. They all expected or wanted it. They needed a tire shredding orgasm of mechanical muscle that would leave two smoking trails of rubber across the parking lot.

I smiled thinking about it. Who was I to deprive them? I lit the tires up in a screaming cacophony of rage and joy. In the rearview mirror I saw men and boys getting out of their cars with expressions of almost worship on their faces.

Ford would sell a lot more Mustangs among those guys and a few of the women too.

As my tires gained traction, the Mustang's Flowmaster exhaust system's deep growl put the cherry on top. That growl was heard long after I had left the area, headed for home and all of my problems.

When I drove up into my driveway, Archie was waiting for me. "Hey Buddy," he said. "Betty thought that you were going to take me out for a drive with you."

"Sorry Arch," I said. "I had some things that I needed to think about."

He nodded and looked away for a second. That made me wonder exactly how much he knew about what had happened all those years before.

As I got out of the car and walked towards my house I started to realize that I wasn't really sure of exactly who I could trust. It HAD been Archie who had convinced me to go home back then. Supposedly I was going back there to get clothes so he and I could have a drink and talk about what Claire had done. Had he known already what she was planning on doing? Or was Archie simply a dupe like myself. Did Betty know? And had she simply convinced Archie to do anything necessary to get me to come back to Claire.

Not being able to trust my best friends made me feel even more isolated. There were so many possibilities going through my head. In one scenario I saw Archie and Betty in cahoots with Claire for a share of the money. I could see them all laughing at me for years about how easily they had fooled me. But to what end? What did they gain by the deception? I'm a nobody. They got nothing from fooling me and apparently they already had the money. So why continue the joke?

On the other hand, Archie and Betty could have been exactly what they seemed. They could have been merely concerned friends who didn't want to see Claire and me, split up. I had no idea which side they were on and that complicated things because I wasn't sure if I could trust them. But I really wished I had someone I could talk to.

And then she was there. Her presence overwhelmed everything in the room. The only thing I could concentrate on was HER. I had often thought that as time went on I'd get used to her or bored with her. But it simply hadn't happened.

"Where'd you go, Honey?" she asked. I looked at her critically for the first time. I saw lines on her face that I had never noticed before, but the whole was more than the sum of the parts. No matter how I tried to see her as less than beautiful, I failed. I had to give her that. But at the same time as I considered the fact that she had not only cheated on me and lied to me about it, but that she'd kept up the deception for more than ten years, I was awed and a little afraid of her.

As she stepped closer to me, I recoiled. I thought that I had caught myself before she had noticed it, but I was wrong.

"What's wrong, Honey?" she asked immediately.

"I'm having some problems at work," I said.

"Bullshit, Ray," she said. "I've been in love with you for twenty three years. I know you better than your mother did. If you were having problems at work you'd be moving towards me not jumping back from me. What did I do? Or what did you do that has you moving away from me? That hurts me."

I realized then that I was going to have to up my game. Claire had been pretending to love me for twenty three years and pretending that she hadn't stabbed me in the back for ten years after that. She was an actress on a scale that the world had never seen. The women who starred in movies and on TV only had to play their roles while they were on camera. Claire had done it twenty four hours a day for more than twenty years.

If I was to have my revenge against her, I had to be at least as good while I was around her.

I tried to pretend that I didn't know what I knew. I tried to pretend that I still loved her, which wasn't very hard. And I began to truly watch her to see which things I did that she really enjoyed. Like when we were first dating I began cataloguing everything that she truly loved. I did this for the noblest of reasons this time. Unlike the first time, when I was trying to get her to like me. Once I was sure that she did like me ... or love me, I had thought, I stopped taking notes. But this time I needed to find everything that she truly loved so I could take them all away from her.

That night as I made love to Claire, I imagined that it was the last time that we would be together. It was a very tender moment and I gave her everything I had. When it was over I looked into her eyes as she lay beside me caressing me. For the life of me, I couldn't find any trace of fabrication or deceit in those eyes. It was almost as if she had fooled herself into believing that she really did love me.

"Ray, I think I know what you got upset about today," she said softly. "You saw HIM on the news, didn't you?"

I tensed up. I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. But I had the idea that I needed to act a certain way. I wasn't sure whether or not this was some type of test she was giving me. I wondered how many she'd given me over the years and what my responses had been.

As it was, tensing up was the exact correct response.

"Big deal," she said. "Marcus Ambrose has decided to run for the senate. Why the hell do we care? So he once made us an offer. We have no connection to him. He means nothing to us and we mean nothing to him." She saw the look on my face and what she saw there, the hatred, I didn't have to act for that to be convincing.

"Ray, I know how you are," she said. "You're not the kind of man who likes to share his toys. But just like that stupid yellow car outside, I am all yours. Ambrose never came close to taking me away from you. He can't and didn't come between us. "

"He almost did," I said. "I was so close to divorcing you. I had already seen a lawyer. I was in so much pain. My heart was already broken, but I was ready to pull the trigger."

"Ray, you were seriously going to divorce me?" she asked. I nodded without the slightest hesitation. "Why? You'd have had to just marry me all over again." I shook my head.

"If you had done it, we wouldn't even know each other right now," I said. The look of pain that crossed her face made me feel good. "We'd have no connection. Hopefully, I'd have built another life with someone else. And you'd probably be with Ambrose. Just think instead of being here in our comfy little house, you'd be helping your husband get ready for his senate run."

"That would never, EVER happen," she spat. "You and I belong together and I love our house. I love you more, but our house is great. Can we not talk about that idiot anymore? Let's have a rule, we don't ever mention him anymore. We already have a rule about not talking about his offer. Let's just put that whole thing to bed."

I could see why she didn't want to talk about him anymore. It was probably her guilt. She probably figured that if we didn't talk about it, maybe it would all go away.

I played the game. I tried to act as if nothing had happened between us. But inside it was hard because I knew what she had done and I knew that it had changed everything between us.

I finally decided what to do about my feelings. As much as I hated to admit it, I could never hurt Claire. The only thing I could do was take the one thing away from her that she claimed to love...me.

I figured that I deserved something for the life...the lives that she had stolen from me. So I decided to take the money too. I came home for lunch daily and went to her closet. Claire never took her purse to work with her. She carried her laptop and all of her belongings in a big shoulder bag that she could also carry her graded papers, lesson plans and other belongings in.

So every day, I'd pop in and head to the bank. I had set up another account of my own over the internet. I set the account up in a different name to make it harder for her to track me when the time came. I knew to the minute exactly how much time I had. Over the years Claire had developed a pattern. She only checked the balance in the account once a year, on her birthday. Since her birthday had been two weeks before I discovered the account, I had almost a year to drain it.

Taking that much money isn't nearly as easy as it sounds. Any withdrawal or check written that is more than five thousand dollars has to be reported. So I was constantly taking forty five hundred dollars at a time from the account. After about three months I had almost a half a million dollars. After six months I was at about eight hundred thousand.

The funny thing though was the fact that when we talked, when we spent time together, when we did everything, I would never have guessed that Claire didn't love me. She was the best actress I had ever seen. The pressure on me to keep my feelings hidden and not just come out and tell her that I knew was immense.

And there were times when I couldn't hide it. Like the time that we were at Archie and Betty's for a nice dinner and game night. While we were playing scrabble, the TV was on in the background. One of Ambrose's campaign commercials came on and I went ballistic.

The interesting thing about it was neither Archie or Betty seemed to have any idea of where my animosity at Ambrose came from. My head hurt thinking about it. I felt like a junior high school Hamlet, who had just stepped on stage with the Royal Shakespearean acting company. I was nowhere near as good an actor as any of these people and yet, I had the starring fucking role.

But I smiled that night because earlier that day as I put the bank card back in Claire's purse I found something that I had never seen before. There was a flash drive in the same pocket that the checkbook and bank card were in. I copied its contents onto another drive and looked at it while I was back in my office at work.

After watching the video on that flash drive, I was even angrier, but at the same time some of my feelings were eased. But once I saw that commercial, an idea popped into my head. I now knew how an average Joe, could make a billionaire hurt. He took something from me. I now had the means to take something from him, and make him suffer the way that I had.

* * * * * *

Claire

For the past ten years, I had been a woman split in two. On one hand I was the best, most dedicated and loving wife I could possibly be. On the other, I felt like some sort of spy or secret agent. I loved my husband more than I loved breathing. I needed him more than I needed air but I had been lying to him for ten years. Over all of that time and before, I had only kept one secret from Ray. I had made one terrible mistake and it had almost cost me my husband.

When that asshole Ambrose had made us his offer ten years before, Ray and I had different opinions on it. Ray had been angry and had immediately turned Ambrose down. I was happy about that. But then I'd expected no less. Ray, loved me. End of story. He was always telling me that I was the most important and most special thing in the world to him. He had just proven it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Ray loved me so much that he was turning down a million dollars to give some rich idiot an hour or two between my legs. It was flattering and it made me love him even more. But at the same time, he was being stupid. There were so many things we could do with that money. I knew too many teachers who worked all of their lives only to live in poverty when they couldn't work anymore. Even with our retirement programs and the money we were saving our lifestyle would go down once we quit working.

So, like I had done most of the time that we were married. I made a decision for both of us. I decided to accept Ambrose's offer. What I didn't expect was how vehemently Ray was opposed to it. That made me angry and even more determined to do it. Ray had transformed from my kind and loving husband into some kind of Neanderthal who thought that he owned me and could control me.

I decided that the best way to do it would be to keep it a secret. I considered Ray to be acting like a child, so I would treat him like a child. I called Ambrose later that evening and told him that I would accept his offer. He wanted to know how my husband felt about it and I told him that Ray wasn't going to find out. He had simply laughed about that.

I did tell Ambrose that because Ray was against the idea and I didn't want to ruin my marriage, we couldn't do it Friday evening like he wanted. If he wanted me it had to be Thursday afternoon. He accepted immediately. I was tingling all over. I had always known that I was pretty. People had been telling me that for my entire life.

Even Ray told me that and we were married. It was different coming from Ray though because he loved me so much. It meant so much coming from him. And that was one of the reasons that I had to do everything I could to make sure that Ray and I would always be happy and would always have everything we needed. One afternoon of sex wouldn't change anything between Ray and I. He'd be angry at me for a while, but Ray loved me and eventually he'd come to his senses. It would take a few days but he'd realize that me screwing Ambrose wouldn't change anything.

In the worst case scenario, I'd buy him another Mustang. That would ease the blow to his ego and make things better.

The surprise came when I saw how angry Ray was as I tried to convince him that I loved only him and that Ambrose would never come between us. Ray was so stupid about it. I tried to remind him that until he and I got together, I really didn't even care very much about sex. I've told people many times that it was Ray who actually turned me into a sexual being even though I'd had a lot more experience than he did when we got together. I did things with Ray that I had never imagined doing in my life and did them willingly.

I almost died on Thursday morning when Ray wouldn't even speak to me before he left for work. I needed his arms around me and his kiss to give me strength before I went out to do what I had to do for both of us. Men can be so fucking stupid sometimes. Why couldn't he understand that there was a difference between pure physical sex and sex with an emotional connection?