An Issue of Trust

Just a quick, and I do mean quick, as in I thought of the idea, wrote it and had CTC edit it in one day. Thanks Lovey.

I think it's a unique plot but if I'm wrong, I'm sorry for the bum steer.

You can thank Charlie for the title, I do.

No sex, just consequences.

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IN A DAZE, not even realising I was doing it, I stepped down off the little ladder I'd dragged from my closet and staggered back toward the bed. When it hit the back of my knees, I sat heavily; staring at the thing revealed by the open, dangling cover of the smoke detector. All the implications of why and how the object of my stare had gotten to be where it was, and exactly what it meant, flooded my mind.

I'm not absolutely sure when the suspicion firmed in my head that Veronica, my wife of three years, was cheating on me, but firmed it had. From the research I'd done, she was showing many of the classic signs of an adulterer.

The sudden change from never having to go away on overnight trips for her job, to having to go away for the whole weekend, as she was right now, just solidified what had been making me nervous for a while. I mean, who leaves for a work trip on Friday afternoon? Or to put things in their correct timeline, three hours ago. At least the last short-notice two-day trip she'd taken had been a less socially disruptive mid-week one.

Looking back on it, the suspicions probably began to raise their ugly heads around a month ago. I'd come back from a trip of my own to find Ronnie suddenly changed. Colder, more emotionally detached than before, less affectionate by a large factor.

We always had sex after I came back from a trip, but this time she made her excuses and begged off. I'd tried for a couple of nights after that but was rebuffed. Considerate guy that I was, I stopped nagging; hoping she would come out of whatever funk she was in. I realised that here we were, a month later, and we hadn't made love since the night before the first trip. Peering up at the smoke detector above the bed in the bedroom of our apartment, I now knew why.

The sudden change in one behaviour prompted me to look for other differences. With my eyes opened, there was no shortage of clues. I caught her looking at me when she thought I was otherwise occupied, then she would look away when I glanced toward her.

Was it my imagination or did her, 'I love you's' seem a little forced these days?

Further, many aspects of her routine had changed recently. Ranging from a dramatic increase in girls-nights-out, suddenly guarding her computer and changing the password, taking phone calls, then walking out of earshot while speaking, to conversations with her best friend, Julie, in the kitchen ceasing abruptly when I walked in the house.

They were all there, and all reinforced my mounting paranoia. Not wanting to accept what I now strongly suspected, I began cataloguing when I thought she had the opportunity. I followed her on her next girl's night and was pleasantly surprised she was exactly where she was supposed to be, behaving exactly how a wife should.

In a fit of minor spite, I changed my login password as well. If she was going to keep secrets, I'd be damned if I'd give her free access to my stuff.

Her actions and attitude affected me. Some nights I couldn't guarantee I was calm enough to pretend normality at home, so I stayed later at the office, or went to have a drink with friends.

I hated what she'd reduced me to. Things like, I'd taken to ringing her desk phone at lunch times. I hated even more seeing, over a series of weeks, a pattern form. Where she'd previously always taken a bare half for lunch, she now took an hour or more most days. Plenty of time for lunch with a lover. Just enough time for a quickie? Unfortunately, part of my job description was to cover the reception and phones over the lunch hour, so I could never stake out Ronnie's work to follow her. I suppose I could have taken a day off I suppose, but subconsciously I was afraid of what I'd uncover.

I was frustrated that our finances didn't stretch to hiring a P.I. to follow her on her first ever overnight work trip, two weeks ago. Ringing her at all hours while she was away, she never failed to answer promptly and never seemed out of breath, but I knew she was a smart woman.

How smart was revealed by the object exposed by the dangling smoke detector cover over the bed. One sight of that object, and I knew instantly not only that she was cheating on me, but that she was going to extraordinary lengths to make sure I didn't find out.

All my suspicions coalesced that afternoon. Wanting to see my wife before she left to see her lover for the weekend—I suppose in the vain hope I could remind her enough that I loved her to stop the plan—I came home a little early, timing it so she was home from the office, but had yet to leave for the airport.

She wasn't expecting me, obviously, and came out of the bedroom looking guilty as hell. I sat on the bed until she had no choice but to go into the bathroom to finish her make-up. Then, I subtly checked the closet and under the bed; nothing. Then checked her phone was still protected by an unknown password and carefully lifted enough clothes from her suitcase to ascertain there was no suspicious lingerie or cocktail dresses packed.

This puzzled me. She'd definitely been up to no good in this room when I walked into the house. After that, I checked the trunk of her car for other bags. Nothing, but then she's a very smart woman.

Instead of allaying my fears and lessening my suspicions that my loving wife was doing the dirty on me, the lack of evidence increased them. It infuriated me that she was outsmarting me.

I came up with a plan to catch her that was within my budget. I would invent a work trip away of my own, next week. Maybe Veronica would take that opportunity to invite her lover over while I was away. I would install a tiny camera in the smoke detector above the bed to record the action. It was only a one-bedroom apartment, so one camera was all I needed. Once my suspicions were confirmed, I knew exactly what to do to dissolve this joke of a marriage without being financially raped.

Thus it was, three hours after Veronica left on her second overnight, 'business trip', I'd moved the bed aside, dragged our little three-step household ladder under the centrally located smoke alarm and released the little clip on the side of the device, causing the cover to open and hang down on its hinge.

Inside was an identical camera to the one held in my left hand. A camera that broadcast a signal to a little transponder, that could be secreted just about anywhere. A transponder that in turn relayed a signal to either a monitor for live, or a recorder for later, viewing. I knew with certainty that my wife would have gone for a combination of the two.

So, not only was she having an affair, but was monitoring my whereabouts and behaviour while she was doing it to watch for signs I suspected her. I rose and walked into the lounge. There was another smoke detector, and, sure enough, it contained another camera.

Just to confirm my suspicions beyond a shadow of a doubt, I went over my car with a fine-toothed comb. It took me a quarter of an hour to find the tiny GPS tracker.

I rested my hands on the bonnet, chin on chest, sickened at the thought that right at that very moment, my wife was in another city, being fucked by an unknown stranger. Or was she? Suddenly, I remembered how stridently Veronica had refused my offers to drop her at the airport. I lifted my head, staring sightlessly at the garage door, while my thoughts raced. Could it be she hadn't flown anywhere? Could she be somewhere in town right now, overflowing with her lover's cum?

No. The woman I knew was way too smart not to make the guy wear a rubber. Too much chance of passing on an STD to me.

I shook my head, realising I was distracting myself; deferring the inevitable conversation with myself. Could I forgive my wife sleeping around on me? Never! There, conversation over. I'm an impatient bugger. The thought of waiting till she returned on Sunday night to confront her wasn't an option. I needed to find her and get it over with immediately.

Veronica handled all the family finances. I pulled all the latest bank statements from the filing cabinet and looked at the last month. Nothing unusual until I got to the line, 'transferred to account number XYZ', an amount of $500. Logging on to Netbank, I plugged in the given account number. I looked in the little notebook, where my wife kept coded passwords, found an unfamiliar one, then guessed the code on the third attempt.

The account was a credit card I didn't know she owned. The latest transaction was not three hours old. At a budget chain motel not a ten-minute drive away.

For some reason, the knowledge that she was footing the bill for her tryst with her lover, made me angry. The knowledge that she was effectively stealing our money to do it, made me livid.

Further up the statement was a record from the same motel that coincided with her first supposed trip out of town. Further above that, the entry from when she'd bought her surveillance equipment. Ironically, she'd bought it from the same store I did. A glance at the statement showed she'd made the purchase three days after I'd returned from my last trip. So, she'd probably met the cunt while I was away. That made sense.

I knew if I went over there in anywhere near my current frame of mind, I might kill someone, so I sat down and took some deliberate deep breaths. Time to think. Did Veronica know I'd found her cameras? Did she have her laptop continually feeding footage as she lay on her back being ploughed by whoever he was? Unlikely. I couldn't see her being as heartless as that. After all, I knew one of her motivations for taking such extraordinary lengths to prevent me discovering her affair was to save me pain. It must have been, otherwise she was far from the loving person I thought her to be.

More likely was that she was recording the camera footage. Going back out to my car, I took down the details of the GPS tracker and googled it. Sure enough, it had a software function that could alarm to a cell phone when the unit was on the move. So, no need to disturb her lover's and her consciences by having feed from our house up on the screen the whole time. All she had to do was keep an ear out for that alarm. Sneaky bitch.

My mind then turned to what I'd done or not done to keep her faithful to me. My mind flashed to all the usual reasons I suppose all people in my position thought. Was my cock too small? Was I unsatisfying in bed? I didn't think so. Until she'd cut me off, I thought she'd fully enjoyed my efforts. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was actually crap in bed and she'd been faking it the whole time. Boy, was I doubting my manhood.

All these thoughts were making me angrier, not calmer, so I turned my mind to the possibilities. What was she doing right now? What if I was wrong? What would she do if she'd already seen my discovery of her camera? Kick her boyfriend out from their love nest? Accelerate their plans to dump me, clean me out, and have her ride off into the sunset with him? Or was she simply sitting there, with or without him, thinking of a convincing reason why she should keep me under surveillance? Assuming she was monitoring the cameras, did she have any reason to suspect I knew where she was? Glancing around, I assessed the viewing scope of the lounge camera. By my guess she could see me sitting on the couch but was unlikely to have seen me digging through the filing cabinet and working at the desk in the corner. She would have seen frantic activity but could have no idea what it was all about.

For the rather vindictive reason of cutting down on their or her planning time, and for no other, I decided to confront her now. Anger or no anger on my part.

Banking on there being no camera in the kitchen, I went in there and left the house by that door. Opening the side door to the garage, I removed the tracker and put it on the shelf next to the car, presuming it wasn't sensitive enough to detect such a small movement.

Driving to the cheap motel on the highway out of town, I parked just down the road. Walking through the darkness, I found her car tucked away behind the main building; invisible from the highway. There were only four cars in the carpark and none within five spaces of hers. The room directly in front of her car was also the only one with a light still shining inside. Looking around for witnesses, before creeping to the window, I probed to see if there was a view into the room. There wasn't.

Steeling my ego for what I might discover, I raised my hand, making a fist and prepared to knock. Before knuckles could make contact with wood, I saw the headlights of a car coming around the corner. Thinking it could be her lover, I strolled away from the door, pretending to be looking for my room. A compact vehicle, bearing the name of a local pizza joint pulled up beside my wife's car. I idly thought she was eating late, but then remembered that on a Friday night, you could wait up to three hours for a pizza delivery in this town.

A teenager got out of the car, retrieved a pizza box and a bottle of soft drink from the back seat and knocked on the door. Veronica opened it, dressed exactly as she'd been when she left our house, handed over some cash, then accepted the goods. From the shadows I watched as the delivery man walked back to his car. My wife left the door open while she carried the pizza in one hand and the drink in the other to set them beside the bed. Once her hands were free, she turned back toward the door to close it.

She gasped as she saw me standing in the doorway, then her eyes flitted back toward the bed.

Slightly confused by the evidence of tears on her face, my eyes took in the rest of the room. The bed was rumpled, but only like a person had been lying on top of the covers. Her laptop was open on the bedside table, the screen split, one side showing our lounge, the other, our bedroom.

Without a word, I continued into the room. Walking into the bathroom, I checked it was empty, with only her toiletries laid out on the sink. Returning to the main room, I looked into the closet; empty; then knelt down to look under the bed; nothing. That exhausted all the places of concealment in the tiny motel room.

I flopped onto the hard office chair, stored under the tiny desk. So, I'd been right. She'd seen me discovering her cameras, told her lover to leave and been crying when she realised that her tryst had been rumbled. That was good news wasn't it? Surely that meant she was remorseful for what she'd done to me; to us.

I sat there and watched renewed tears stream down her face. Was she regretting that the discovery of her assignation had hurt me? With a hardening heart I realised that the reason for the tears was irrelevant. We were broken beyond repair.

Staring at her, I just asked, "Why?"

To my mind at the time there was only one motivation for that question. I wanted to know why she felt it was acceptable to lie to me and organise to meet another guy behind my back. That's why her response confused me. I eventually realised she was answering another question. One I hadn't asked - Why was she spying on me?

"I'm sorry, John. I had to know."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Veronica?"

"When you came back from that trip about a month ago, you were different, quieter, more distant. Like something was on your mind. I... I thought you'd been unfaithful while you were away. Then you started suddenly working late and supposedly going out with your friends. When I saw you'd changed the password on the computer, I was sure.

"I changed my password before that, I know. I didn't want you to see that I'd been researching signs of a cheating husband. I deleted the search history, but you know more about computers than I do; I didn't know if you could still see what I'd been looking at.

"When you first came back, I just couldn't imagine having sex with you, thinking you'd been with another woman. Then I decided I could use sex as a test. If you weren't getting it from me, you must be getting it elsewhere. You only asked me for some a couple more times and then gave up. We've never gone that long before.

"Then you started ringing me three or four times during my lunch break, to make sure I was there and not spying on you, I suppose, so you could safely meet your lover. My desk phone records all missed calls. I took to taking longer lunch breaks and seeing if your car was still at your work.

"Julie has been giving me advice all through this. You almost caught us talking about it one day in our kitchen, remember? For the record, she thinks I'm just being paranoid.

"It's eating me up not knowing for certain. Tonight, when you came home early and almost caught me changing the battery on the camera in the bedroom, I thought I'd faint with the stress.

"I felt sure you were cheating on me, but I needed evidence. I bought the cameras and the GPS tracker to get that evidence and end my dilemma. I still don't know for sure. I know you just stayed home alone when I went on that first trip, but I thought that was just because it was during the week. I planned this weekend away so you had more time.

"Please, whether you're having an affair or not, can you just tell me? The uncertainty is killing me."

I looked at her anguished, tortured face, my mind in absolute turmoil as I watched her agony.

My self-image as an essentially honest and honourable person had completely deluded me that there was only one solution to the clues I'd been given. The thought that those same clues were explained by my wife believing I was being unfaithful to her, hadn't been able to be inserted even edgeways into my consciousness. The pain on her face, more than her words, convinced me beyond doubt that she was telling the truth. I'd been so devastated thinking she was screwing around on me that I'd missed all the signs that she thought I was doing the dirty on her.

My mind was suddenly full of empathy for her. I remembered the horror and self-doubt I'd felt when I imagined her in the arms of another man. She'd been suffering the exact same torture. Enough to lie and set up the situation where I could meet my lover just so she could have closure.

I realised the looks I'd interpreted as guilt were, in fact, silent assessments of my trustworthiness. Her detachment, pain at what she'd perceived as my betrayal. No wonder there'd been no genuine verbal affirmations of her love in the last month. How could she speak words of a love to a man she suspected of stabbing her in the back? It was clear to me I'd only caught a glimpse of the pain that she'd suffered through for a month.

Suddenly, a horrible thought crossed my mind.

"Do you think Dave and Allison felt like this?"

"What? What do Dave and Allison have to do with this?"

"Do you think that your ex-husband and my ex-wife felt pain and fear and doubt like we have when she caught us in bed together and told him? No wonder neither of them ever gave any thought to forgiving us. They were just too devastated."

I could tell from the renewed look of horror on Veronica's face, that the full impact of how we'd hurt our former spouses, people we'd supposedly loved, assaulted her. Her knees buckled and she fell back onto the bed.

EPILOGUE

Two weeks later, we began negotiations on how to go our separate ways with the minimum of fuss.

It was clear from the ease with which she'd believed me capable of betraying her and vise versa, that we both had major trust issues. She was a cheater, as was I, in a relationship born of cheating.