Honesty Above All

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A confrontation delayed.
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NoTalentHack
NoTalentHack
2,340 Followers

I was ready for the week to be over. Long meetings, sleepless nights, too many connecting flights, and an oppressive amount of jetlag all added up to one thing: a very tired Kyle. Even when I was a young man, this kind of week would have been exhausting. But at forty-eight? It was making me regret some life choices. Thank God I only had to travel like this occasionally, unlike the bad old days.

When I opened the front door to my home, I'd been hoping to smell dinner all ready to go and maybe to receive a welcoming kiss from Samantha, my wife of nearly twenty-five years.The former was commonplace; the latter only slightly less so. But I found neither awaiting me. Instead, the house was mostly dark, with the only light being in the entryway, along with a dim glow coming from the kitchen doorway.

"Sam?" I called out her name as I hung my coat and arranged my luggage on the floor of the foyer.

"I'm in the kitchen." Her voice sounded strained, as if she was angry or had been crying. When I entered the kitchen and found her sitting at our small breakfast nook, I could clearly see that it was both. My wife's brown eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but also filled with a furious light. Her normally immaculate chestnut hair was disheveled; her ponytail and the strands that had escaped it put me in mind of a slowly fraying rope.

All of this was indicative of the type of conversation we were about to have, but the final detail cinched it: two manila envelopes on the table in front of her.

"Kyle, we need to talk."

I was too tired to put up with any crap, but this would have to be handled sooner or later. Sliding into the chair opposite her, I wearily said, "Sure. What about?"

Samantha wordlessly pushed one of the envelopes over to me. Inside, I found a selection of photographs. Despite their poor quality, they told quite the story: me dining with a gorgeous blonde woman little more than half my age; the two of us holding hands as we walked down the street; she and I locked in a passionate embrace in front of an apartment door, my hand sliding up under a curve-hugging red minidress to cup her nearly bare ass.

The timestamps printed on the photos then jumped to the next morning, with us saying goodbye as I copped one last feel, squeezing her small, firm tit through the negligee she had worn to see me off. The last shot was of me looking a little regretful as I left, but it was clear that I was disappointed to be leaving, not guilty for what I had done inside.

With a level, almost pleasant voice I inquired, "Where did you get these?"

"What does that matter?" There was no reciprocity in her tone, nothing even approaching congeniality. She was outraged, and I was mildly curious as to which made her most upset: that I had cheated, that my first response was to ask the source of her intel, or that I didn't seem at all perturbed.

With a flick of the wrist, I tossed the evidence of my affair back onto the table. "Well, mostly because they're not very good. Jenna looks way hotter in person, and she likes to leave the blinds partway open when we make love; any decent PI could have--"

"What is wrong with you!?" There were tears mixed in with the rage now.

I shrugged. "I'm cost conscious. Sue me. Oh, wait; you were planning to, right? After all, I assume those are divorce papers in the other envelope."

Sam was starting to sob. "What the fuck, Kyle? Is this a- a fucking joke to you?" I don't think this was the way she intended it to go. It's funny how people can have such different expectations, all based on what facts they do and don't have available to them.

"Oh, no, not at all. I'm sure it's tearing you up. It feels awful, I know." Leaning forward, I favored her with a particularly unpleasant grimace. "It just about killed me back then."

"What?" A small change in her tone; the wind hadn't gone out of her sails yet, but it was starting to shift.

"You know. When you cheated on me. Or at least when I found out about it."

Samantha's face went slack for a moment, glistening streams of salt and water still dripping from it. A new hesitancy followed the sudden realization that what she knew-- or even what she could prove-- didn't matter; it had always been about what I knew. And I knew damn near everything. Well, everything that really mattered, anyways.

My wife stuttered, "I- I- I- "

"'I' what, Sam? 'I didn't cheat?' 'I don't know what you're talking about?' 'I didn't mean anything by it?' 'I'm sorry?' Which 'I' were you going for there? Oh, I know, 'I should never have fucked Ronnie Perkins.' Was that it?"

"You knew?" Her tone was strangled, and I couldn't help but laugh. She sounded betrayed, even more than she had when I first sat down across from her. "Stop laughing at me! You knew!"

Wiping a tear from my eye, I managed to downshift from laughter to a chuckle. "Not at first. Not when you did it. Not for the four months you fucked him, not right after you stopped, not even for another year after that. I'd say you did a good job of hiding it, but you didn't. I just wasn't looking."

Now it was my turn to sound betrayed, as my finger jabbed angrily at her. "Because I trusted you! Because we agreed, we had ALWAYS agreed that the most important thing in a marriage, above fidelity or trust or even love, was honesty. That you can't have any of those unless you always tell each other the truth about the big things, no matter how painful it might be." Sam looked away so quickly that my words might as well have been a slap.

Shaking my head, I continued. "But Matt was a freshman in high school when I found out, and Riley had just turned twelve. I didn't want to ruin their lives."

My laughter then went beyond self-deprecating straight into flat-out disgust. "No, that's not quite right. God, it's gotten so easy to lie to you. I hate that. I hate that I can lie to my wife, and I hate that I can only do it so easily because I know how long she's lied to me.

"The truth is that I didn't want to be a part-time dad, and so I put up with knowing what I knew. I desperately hoped that maybe you'd eventually remember how important honesty was supposed to be in a marriage. Did you even realize how blatantly, openly unhappy I was there for a few months? Or did you even give a shit about me by then?"

She croaked, "I did. I've always loved you--"

"Fuck right off." It was said flatly and without affect. "You don't do that to someone you love, or at least not someone you're in love with."

Her eyes snapped back to me. "I did! I really did! I made a mistake, okay? I was lonely, and he was charismatic and--"

"Yeah, yeah. 'Oh, my husband is away all the time because he's got to work!' 'Oh, I'm sooooo lonely!' 'Oh, it's so boring now that the kids are at school!'"

"Stop mocking me!"

I snorted, "Oh, I'm sorry, was that too contemptuous? How unkind of me. I mean, it's not like you didn't treat me with contempt for a decade, but--"

"I did not!" She was trying to build a head of steam back up. Fuck it; let her rant. I knew who'd already won: neither of us. But I'd have lost a lot less by the time all this was done. "I made a mistake! Yes, I was lonely, and I was bored, and I was unhappy! I shouldn't have cheated, but it wasn't done out of contempt!" Sam's shoulders sagged, the energy animating her seeming to have left once more. "I was weak. I know that. I do, and I'm sorry."

Seeing that she'd at least paused-- and oh, how that disappointed me, how I wanted a fight after all these years and all her lies-- I continued to lay out her failures, trying to draw my wife out of her worthlessly contrite self-pity. "Let's put aside whether the cheating was contemptuous; I say it was, and I'm the wronged party--" With a broad smile, I waved my hand at the photos of my young lover. "--Well, I was then. Maybe not so much now.

"But what about hiding it from me? Not letting me decide what I wanted to do after you cheated on me? Are you saying that was treating me with respect? Really?"

Sam was breathing heavily, whether from fear or anger or panic, I wasn't sure. "It wasn't meant to be disrespectful or even dishonest. I loved you. Please, I did. It wasn't-- I had already fucked up. I didn't want to make it worse and hurt you more. I was never going to do it again, and I did everything I could to make it up to you."

"Except treat me like a fucking adult. Or even--" I laughed. "No, not even like an adult. Just like another person. Like a real human being, someone you respected enough to..." I drummed my fingers on the table. "Do you remember when Riley broke that vase? She was, what, six?"

"Five." Sam rubbed her arm while looking away. She knew where this was going and didn't like it.

"Right. Five. And then she tried to hide it from us. What did she get in the most trouble for? Hiding it, right? And you know what? She wailed and cried and said that wasn't fair, but you told her-- YOU told her-- that good people admit to their mistakes, regardless of the consequences to themselves."

"That's not the same--"

Stepping right on top of my wife's words, batting aside her defense, I continued, "And do you remember how proud we were of her after she got into that fender bender when she was sixteen? Riley had all sorts of outs on that one; it was dark, the streets had been slick, someone could have had their brights on. There were a hundred lies she could have told us and gotten away with it.

"But, no, our daughter remembered the lesson that we-- that you-- taught her and admitted that she'd gotten distracted by her phone. She took her punishment without complaint. I was so proud of her, that she had learned the lessons you taught her. That she did the right thing."

I leaned forward over the table again, pointing accusingly. "But you. You couldn't do it. You couldn't be even as responsible or as honest as a sixteen year old girl."

"It was different! It wasn't just-- It wouldn't have been just me facing the consequences! You would have been hurt, and then the kids could have gotten caught up in it if we couldn't..." She sighed. "If you couldn't forgive me."

"I guess we'll never know. But here are some things I do know." I began to tick them off on my fingers. "One. You say you were bored. But you were the one that wanted to be a stay at home mom even after the kids were in school. That was on you."

"You agreed to that!"

"Only because you wanted to! I would have been fine with-- no, happy with you going back to work! We could have used the money, and I could have cut back at my job! I could have been home!

"Which leads to point two: you were lonely. Join the fucking club! You had the kids, and you had your friends. Hell, your family lived nearby! When I was on the road, I was alone all the damn time. I was so desperately lonely that I wanted to cry some nights. But I still didn't fuck anyone else! I was loyal, and I was faithful. And, on top of that, I was only on the road because of point one: you didn't want to work!"

"That's not--"

"Shut up! I'm not done! I've waited eight fucking years to say my piece, you cheating whore, and you're goddamned well going to listen!" Sam flinched; I'd never called her names before and rarely raised my voice to anyone.

"Point three. Unhappy. You were fucking unhappy? I was working backbreaking hours, my wife was pulling away from me, I barely got to see my kids, and none of that was my choice. I needed to support my family, because I was the only one that was going to! All of this-- ALL of this!-- Is on you wanting to be Suzy Fucking Homemaker. ALL OF IT!"

Samantha looked at the table. "I know that. I was selfish. I was. I didn't-- I should have realized it was hurting you as much as it was me. More, even. But I was... tunnel-visioned. Listening to the wrong people."

"That worthless bitch Jeanie, right?" Sam's idiot friend had been with her since high school. Thrice divorced. All of them somehow not her fault, even though she cheated on at least two of them. Always claimed she'd only ever cheated after everything had fallen apart; Sam never wanted to hear how unlikely that was, though, at least not until Jeanie disappeared from our life shortly after my wife's affair.

Sam nodded unhappily. "She... I met Ronnie through her. She had been seeing him after her last divorce and said he was great. A good listener. That's all she said I needed, another person to listen to me, a male opinion on things. I didn't... I only planned to talk with him."

"Clearly."

"It's true." My wife's voice was small. Weak. Like her. "I... All we did was talk at first. But he convinced me that..." She swallowed. "I don't... you know what I did, it sounds like. I don't want to go into it."

I did know. Not all of the details, but enough that I felt no need to rehash it at that table. Not yet, at least. I'd had most of a decade to plan for some sort of confrontation, and while there were certain variables I couldn't account for, I now knew the general direction we were headed.

"Yeah. I know what you did." I looked away from her. "I just don't know why."

She quietly said, "I told you why."

"No, you told me... You told me what you did, or at least enough of it. You told me how you felt, what led you to that point. But I don't understand..." I hadn't cried over her affair in a long time, but I suddenly felt a lump in my throat. "I don't understand why you didn't come to me. Talk to me. If you had been honest, if you had..."

Even though the weight of the secret I'd borne had finally been lifted, my shoulders slumped. "Such a goddamned waste. I loved you so much; I would have... I don't know. Tried to figure it out. Gone to counseling with you. And after..." A sidelong glance told me Sam was watching me intently. "If you had told me, I can't promise I would have been able to... to forgive. To get through it. But I would have tried. I still loved you then."

The tears fell from her eyes once more. "'Then.' Not now?"

I nodded.

She hissed, "Fuck you."

"Excuse me?"

There was so much pain in her features, so much rage and anguish in the look she gave me. "You cheated, too! You lied, too!"

The fatigue was pressing down on me, but the fight wasn't over. With a quick crack of my neck, I pulled myself back up straight. I could go a few more rounds; I owed us both that much. "Not until after you did."

Sam came out swinging. "And that excuses it?! You could have come to me, too! You knew I'd done it, but you didn't say anything, just went off and banged that blonde bitch--"

A quick verbal counterpunch halted her flurry. "She wasn't the first."

"What?"

"She wasn't the first. Not even the tenth." Sam didn't speak, just stared at me, mouth uselessly flapping; I hadn't landed a knockout, but she was staggering.

I stood and moved to the fridge, then looked over at her. "Beer?" No response. The caps came off of two bottles, and I put one down in front of her, then took a long pull off the other. "I found out a little over a year after you cheated. Well, after you ended the affair, anyways; so I guess about a year and a half after you broke your vows to me.

"Do you remember when we wanted to give your old iPad to Riley?" A small nod, finally, one that belied the sickening realization that must have been creeping up on her. "You hadn't used it in a while, so it was a good 'starter' tablet for her. But it needed to be cleaned off first." I chuckled as understanding bloomed on her face, followed quickly by horror. "Thank God I did that, for all our sakes. I didn't need her learning sex ed from your emails.

"That's when I found out. I had taken the tablet with me when I traveled. It made sense for me to deal with it; you've never been very tech savvy, have you? You didn't know that the emails and the messages would stay on the tablet even after you'd erased them from your phone unless you put the tablet back online after you did it. I had bought you a new one for our anniversary, remember?" She dully nodded once more.

"So, yeah, there were all your emails to him and to Jeanie, and..." I shook my head. "I had at least the outline of the affair. When it started, when it ended, why it ended, all of that. And, once I synced the tablet with your account again-- after I saved all of those incriminating messages off someplace safe-- " Sam winced. "I saw that you'd deleted the evidence of your affair.

"Didn't see any new ones, either, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. You could have just gotten smarter. You'd cheated once; why wouldn't you cheat again? Or maybe you had done it before. Maybe Ronnie wasn't the first one to cuckold me?"

"It was the only time." Her voice was muted; was it pain for herself or for me? For knowing how long I'd lived with the knowledge of what she'd done? I wanted to think it was more the latter, but the most recent evidence told me it was more the former. Or maybe it was a mix of both. I didn't think Sam was truly evil, just weak, spoiled, and dishonest.

"I know that now. By the time..." I sighed. "By the time I found out, we were doing better financially. Not so good that I could hire a detective then, but enough that I could be home a bit more often if I chose; I was going to surprise you with that after the trip where I found out." I looked away. "But once I learned what you'd done, that was the last thing I wanted. I'd gotten used to not being around the kids by then; I hated that, but I had. And I knew that I wanted as little to do with you as possible, so I was able to prioritize them when I was home."

I pursed my lips, trying to fight the lump forming in my throat again. "I was a mess pretty much that whole trip. Any time I wasn't working, I was either crying or drinking. Or drinking and crying. It's a miracle I didn't lose those clients." A sneer appeared. "But, hell, I traveled more than just about anyone else on my team. I was the best fucking salesman there. And all it cost me was my marriage. Didn't have to, but that's what you wanted."

"I didn't want it!" She angrily sobbed, "I wanted you home! I wanted you with us, with me!"

"But not enough to do anything productive about it. Not enough to tell me how unhappy you were, that you were so miserable you were willing to spread your legs for the first sympathetic ear with a dick attached to it. Not enough to get a job yourself."

She started to speak, but I waved her words away. "It doesn't matter. What happened happened. You can't fix it, and I don't want to hear your excuses. This is about me now, Sam. What I did. What I did, because of what you did.

"You fucked another man. Not once, not as a drunken mistake. No from what I can tell, you fucked him at least thirty times in four months. Wait, no. That was the number of times you were with him; I have no idea how many times you two actually fucked. Fifty? A hundred? More?"

I shook my head. "Doesn't matter. You did it, you did it willingly, and you did it repeatedly. I knew I couldn't be around you any more than I had to. That's why there was a sudden flurry of trips there for a bit, when I had been trying to get out of them before. Remember that?

"'Oh, just a little bit more, and then I'll be able to be home more often.' It was true, in its way. Not because it was going to secure my position; I'd already done that. It was so that I could have time to plan and then, for a while, to stomach being around you."

The condensation from my beer was making a ring on the table; I probably should have used a coaster, but I couldn't give a fuck what happened to it. Not like it was going to be mine anymore. "First, I tried to figure out if there was some way I could stay with you, some way I could approach you with the evidence, but I couldn't see a way to. You had lied to me all that time, and getting you to confess wasn't the same thing as you confessing on your own.

NoTalentHack
NoTalentHack
2,340 Followers