Lettie's Wager

***

Thanks

Special thanks to my beta read and proofreading crew TedL, MormonJack, and LPN.

I am grateful for the time and attention they put into this story. Any mistakes you see in the text were my fault. It means I screwed up integrating their edits into the text.

***

Author's note:

In the intro segment to the story Marriage is a House, the author TX Tall Tales wrote, "I never understand stories where the husband sees his wife on the verge of cheating and just watches to see what will happen."

This statement resonated with me. In an about-to-cheat story, inaction or passivity in that scenario can have only one result. As they say, silence means consent. At the very least, a husband that is passive in that scenario is non-verbally communicating to his wife that he doesn't think she's worth fighting for. As such, when I see spousal passivity in that scenario, I question whether the intent of the author is to subtly express the husband is basically giving permission or is secretly willing his spouse to stray.

My favorite flavor of about-to-cheat story is what I call the "near miss" story. In a "near miss" story, the wife is severely tempted and has a plan to cheat, but doesn't. To me, the best of these stories are when the husband takes decisive action to stop her plan before it can be executed.

The challenge of the "near miss" story is contriving a scenario where the plan to cheat is thwarted, but the marriage remains worth salvaging in the reader's eyes. I've read hundreds of LW stories on this site, but "near-miss" stories are uncommon. I think that this is because a "near-miss" story is a de facto reconciliation story. The wife must be forgiven for her intent to cheat if they are to continue as a true couple. There seems to be a sharp division within the LW readership when it comes to reconciliation, even when physical cheating did not take place.

***

My wife Lettie was handcuffed to a stout kitchen chair. She looked the way I felt.

I was ashamed to be using the handcuffs. She tried to run out on me and I overreacted. The keys were upstairs and not handy. I would live with that decision for the time being.

Her fancy makeup was ruined from crying. A vomit stain covered the left breast of her little black dress. The smell of partially digested wine and bile wafted over to where I was standing next to the sink.

When Lettie noticed I returned home early, she was so shocked and distressed that she immediately ran to the toilet to vomit.

She didn't quite make it.

While my wife was busy losing her lunch, I was rather shocked and distressed myself. That morning, she'd ostensibly departed for a trade show in Atlanta. Lettie wasn't due to return until late Sunday evening. She kissed me goodbye at seven AM and left for the four-hour drive to Atlanta.

Mid-morning, a semi trying to make a tight turn clipped the electrical pole outside of my shop and brought it down. It caused a power outage. My cinderblock gun shop didn't have any windows by design and it was pretty warm that day. Within an hour, we were all sweating our butts off in the dark and my employees loudly demanded hazard pay. They were only half joking.

We were still waiting for the electric co-op work crew when Lettie called me. In her chipper sing-song tone, she said, "Hey honey. I made it to Atlanta. Same hotel as last time. I'm sharing a room with one of the girls and it's in her name. I'm at the convention center right now. We are putting the booth in order. We open at 2:00 PM. After that, don't call me, I won't answer. I'll call you each night when I get relieved to go to dinner. Oops, got to run. Bye honey!"

A few minutes later, the electric co-op's work crew finally rolled up. Not long after, the crew boss stepped into my shop and reported that they brought the wrong sized pole and it would be another three hours before they would restore the power. I closed the store and gave everyone Friday afternoon off. I drove straight home dreaming of a long cool shower.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into my bedroom and Lettie was standing there next to the bed. She was wearing the expensive lingerie set I bought her from a high-end boutique during our honeymoon. It was the one with the matching demi-cup bra, garter belt, and satin thong-- all in dark red. My wife only wore it for me a couple of times since I gave it to her seven years ago.

My wife didn't see me walk in because she was shimmying her tight little black dress over her boobs and the dress covered her head.

Lettie was strangely unsteady on her feet. I have a sensitive nose and I smelled wine and arousal. I spotted an open bottle of Chardonnay on the dresser behind her. Next to it, in a small puddle of spilled wine, sat a glass with just a swallow or two remaining. I estimated that there was one heavy-pour glass left in the bottle. That meant she drank at least three heavy pour glasses herself, which was heavy consumption for her.

I saw a wet spot on the gusset of her panties. She was clearly aroused. When Lettie is excited, her aroma reminds me of peach cobbler, warm from the oven. That smell filled my nostrils.

In an instant, I took in that my wife was tipsy, turned on, and putting on her "come fuck me" outfit. I got an immediate thrill that I was going to have a night to remember. This only lasted for a second before I remembered Lettie was supposed to be in Atlanta right now. I instantly inferred she was getting ready to wear her CFM duds for someone else-- someone here in the county. When her dress popped down to reveal her face, her horrified reaction at seeing me was something I will never forget. My bride coughed out the word "sorry" just as she started to heave. She bolted for the bathroom.

Watching Lettie vomit up most of a bottle of Chardonnay along with the remains of her lunch dispelled the possibility that she was planning a special surprise for me.

Even as my heart sank and my universe crumbled, I couldn't look away from the spectacle of her curvaceous silhouette in a tight dress as she vomited. Her figure is that compelling.

I was certain that Boden Teague also felt her figure was compelling. Teague was the scumbag marketing director of Everpart, the car parts manufacturer where Lettie worked. When you put a few good-looking women on the exhibition booth floor in cute jeans and tight fitting blouses, the traffic in the booth quintuples and the extra orders pour in. This put Lettie solidly on his radar screen.

A few years back, Teague brought in a van load of strippers to staff the booth. He referred to them as his 'booth candy'. When Everparts' HR and Legal collectively found out, they had a class five melt down. Mr. Cope, the owner of Everpart, is shamefully indulgent of Teague, but even he couldn't overlook this violation.

Mr. Cope now requires Teague to staff the booth only with full time employees. Consequently, Teague recruits his 'booth candy' from the available office staff. He asks Lettie and a half-dozen other shapely and good-looking women to man the floor at the trade show. The deal he worked out with Mr. Cope was that he calls his recruits "volunteers" and secretly pays them a thousand dollars in cash under under the table for every day they work. Nobody complains to management about wearing a tight blouse when they are receiving a grand of cash a day, tax free just to talk with people.

In her day job, Lettie is an accountant-- a very good one. The irony was that she had to work almost a whole month at the office to make what she got on a single trade show weekend. It was an interesting demonstration of the law of supply and demand.

I hated that Lettie had to work at all, but we needed her salary to make ends meet. My father was a wealthy man when he passed away last year. Pa despised trust fund a-holes and insisted that his kids would grow up knowing the meaning of a dollar. He set it up so that each of his kids had to start their own businesses and live off only what they earned until age thirty. Only then would they be eligible to dip into their share of the family trust. My brother and sister, both several years older than me, had managed it and assured me that it was a worthwhile experience. They vowed to continue the tradition with their own children. As the youngest of Pa's children, I still had two years to go.

Lettie and I got by with the salary she earned and with what I could bring in from my gun shop. I know that the phrase 'my gun shop' sounds lucrative. In rural Georgia it isn't. The shop belonged to my Uncle Kevin and was more of a hobby business than a profitable concern. Uncle Kevin loved to hunt and the shop gave him the opportunity to pick the brains of the best hunters in our part of the state.

The shop was mine because Uncle Kevin had a stroke a couple of months before I graduated with a business degree from Georgia Tech. Rather than forcing me to start a new business from the ground up, as my brother and sister had, Pa gave me the option of taking over ownership of the store. The upside was that I didn't have to bootstrap a new business during an economic downturn when loans were nearly unobtainable. The downside was that there was limited growth potential.

The day Lettie's vomited on our bathroom floor, I owned the store for seven years and was the world's foremost expert in limited growth potential. I was inordinately proud there were no missed paychecks for any of my five employees due to the crappy economy and the vagaries of Covid. I was certain I could make the shop a more profitable business with some capital improvements, but I couldn't qualify for the loans. I didn't have enough collateral to offset the risk and lending institutions were extremely risk averse when it came to financing firearms sales.

Lettie took the job at Everpart because they are the only company in the county big enough to need a full time CPA. Consequently, Lettie is extremely underpaid for her qualifications. Between Lettie's salary and what I bring home from the store, we made ends meet. Truth be told, we were doing better than most in the county and we had nothing to complain about. However, when life threw its wrinkles at us, like when the hot water heater sprung a leak, or the starter went out on my pickup, we tightened our belts and made do with less just like everyone else. Lettie's trade show cash payouts made a huge difference to our quality of life. When Boden Teague asked her if she wanted to work a show, she never refused.

***

It took ten minutes for me and Lettie to clean her vomit from the bathroom floor. We worked quietly. Neither of us said a word.

Lettie didn't want to have to explain what she was doing at home getting dressed for another man.

I didn't trust myself to contain my temper.

I was usually slow to anger and sanguine, but on those rare occasions that I got really upset, I have real issues with self-control. Today was one of those occasions. I'd learned it was a lot easier to not lose my temper in the first place than it was to reel it in once I blew a gasket. I'd been working on that for years.

When we were finished cleaning, I wanted to us go to the family room and calmly talk it out. Lettie said that she had to get going or she was going to be late. When I asked where she had to be, she closed her mouth and set her jaw. She can be incredibly stubborn.

After fifteen minutes of me asking increasingly hostile questions, all of which she refused to answer, she told me that she needed to go the restroom. I caught her two minutes later trying to sneak out to the garage carrying a fresh dress on a hanger. She almost made it out the door without me noticing.

That's when I overreacted. A few minutes later, she was handcuffed to a kitchen chair, and I was hoarse from screaming at her. The one good thing that came from this was that I finally had her full attention. She'd seen me lose my tempter but had never been the object of it. She was physically safe-- my anger never included violence, but Lettie didn't know that. I scared her half to death, which made me feel like a world class shit heel. The silver lining to handcuffing her to that chair was that she then understood she was going nowhere and had better talk.

I asked her, "Where were you going? The answer better not be some bullshit fake trade show in Atlanta."

That's when she started crying.

***

Later, I asked her, "Of all people, you picked Boden Teague? That man is a pig and you absolutely despise him."

"I do. I hate him. I can't stand him."

I knew this was true. Lettie's accounting responsibility covered Teague's marketing department. She had to interact with him on a weekly basis. He was decent to her, but she hated how he treated the rest of the women in the office. She practically danced in joy when one of the inventory supervisors reported him to HR for harassment. That wasn't his first accusation of harassment either. Mr. Cope placed Teague on probation. Teague should have been fired, but Mr. Cope thought he was a magician at marketing. Even though Teague kept his job, it was the last straw for his wife. She left him when she found out. She took their two young children with her.

I asked, "If you can't stand him, why the hell were you going over to his house?"

"I wasn't going to his house, I was going to a hotel."

"Just answer the fucking question, Lettie!"

"I lost a bet."

"A bet?"

"Yes. A bet. I bet him that Georgia would beat Clemson last week."

Clemson won that game. Technically speaking, Clemson didn't just win the game, they also beat the spread-- a more than two touchdown spread. It wasn't a surprise because Georgia was in a rebuilding year. They lost five games prior to Clemson and were certifiably awful by typical Georgia standards.

The story was finally starting to make sense. Lettie has four older brothers. All five siblings were born around a year apart. Having four older brothers as rivals turned her into the most epic hyper-competitive trash-talking female I'd ever met. Her given name was Violet, but she wasn't shrinking in any way-- she would get into a guy's face in a heartbeat. The more she hated someone, the more trash she talked. Thus, her family started calling her Lettie instead.

As a Georgia alum, she also like to brag about, and apparently bet on, her precious Bulldogs. That was a dangerous pastime for someone with nothing more than a casual interest in sports.

"What exactly were the stakes, Lettie?"

She sobbed before she spoke.

"A trip to the British Virgin Islands. Ten days at an all-inclusive resort, and a dinner cruise on a sailboat. Boden used to take his wife and kids there every year. I would get their trip in February for you and me."

That was very high stakes gambling for us.

"That's if you won. What if he won?"

"The original stakes were that if he won, he would get me for an entire weekend."

"Get you for a weekend? What does that mean?"

I damn well knew what it meant. I wanted her to own it.

"Andy, it would mean that he would have me at his disposal."

"At his disposal to do what, Lettie? Cook for him? Clean his toilets? Paint his house?"

She looked down and away from me. In a small voice she said, "To do anything he wanted to. You know, in the bedroom."

"Are you talking about sex?"

She flushed red, "Yes, Andy, meaning sex."

I took three full breaths before I asked in as mild a tone as I could manage, "Lettie, don't you think you should have led with the sex angle?"

"I'm ashamed Andy."

She started to tear up again.

Before she could get going I said, "Let's back this up a bit. Earlier, you said 'original stakes'? What does that mean?'

She really didn't want to answer that question.

I started to lose control again. I let Lettie get a good look at the anger building inside me. She started talking immediately.

"We went double or nothing. If I won, he'd also provide first class airfare for two, and two thousand in cash."

"And if he won?"

"I'd do everything I said before, but also I'd have to agree to... "

She had a really hard time getting this next part out.

"...I'd agree to take a different drug for him each day. He teases me about being Mrs. Goodie Two Shoes. He said he wanted to see me cut loose and let my hair down."

"Drugs? Are you kidding me? He wanted to get you willingly doped up before you let him fuck you? What drugs was he going to give you?"

"Something called Molly tonight. I'm not sure what that is. A line of cocaine on Saturday. Marijuana on Sunday morning. That's all. He promised I'd be stone-cold sober by Sunday afternoon."

The hardest drug Lettie ever ingested was a frozen Margarita, and she didn't do that very often.

I didn't want to ask this question, but I had to. "Who won the original bet that led you into double or nothing?"

She said, "I did."

She had the BVI trip won, and then doubled down to get airline tickets and spending cash. She picked this year's down-cycle Bulldogs on a bet with stakes of that magnitude? I put my hand over my face and stepped out onto the deck behind our house. Lettie gambled her virtue, won, then doubled down. That was brutally hard to take. I had to walk around in the cool evening air for a few minutes before I could speak in a civil tongue again.

When I came back inside, I said, "You're not going anywhere. The bet is off. Your body belongs to me, and my body belongs to you. You can't wager something you don't own, just like I can't wager my Uncle Kevin's farm.

"Andy! I can't possibly welsh! He tried to welsh so many times and I always call him out for it in front of his department. I roasted him and humiliated him. He'll do the same to me."

"How many bets is 'so many', Lettie?"

"Twenty-four. I've won twenty-four straight bets over the last two years."

She was ridiculously proud of this. She told me about some of the bets. They were all top-twenty teams going up against cellar teams. Boden always picked the cellar team. Until the game last week.

I asked, "And then you lost the twenty fifth bet. The one with stakes that included your fidelity to me and consumption of hard drugs. During this, you never once considered whether you were being set up?"

"Why would I? That loser is so bad at betting, he'd never beaten me until last week."

"Lettie, you were being set up. Every single team he bet on until the end was a guaranteed loser. He was deliberately losing."

I was proud of how calmly I said that.

I asked, "What were the stakes to those twenty-four bets?"

She said, "A Target gift card was our standard bet. Twenty dollars at first. A hundred dollars the last six or seven times."

Target! She fucking loved Target. She almost destroyed our marriage over fucking Target.

I poured out the rest of my beer and pulled the bourbon out of the cabinet above the fridge. I poured two fingers over a couple of ice cubes.

While I did this, I replied, "After twenty-four consecutive small dollar bets, which were easy to conceal from me, he suddenly raised the stakes to ten days in an all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean. You weren't suspicious about that?"

Her eyes got big. She clearly hadn't looked at it that way.

"Boden said that after his wife left him, he didn't want to go on their annual trip. He said he'd already paid for it, and it would be wasted otherwise. It made sense for him to use it in a bet. Wouldn't that be a reasonable explanation?"

It was obvious that Teague had caught Lettie between the horns of her own ego and her own avarice. Her expression was self explanatory. At least she had the decency to be abashed about it.

I enquired, "What was the cash value on that vacation? Enough that his wife would want to claim half of the value of it in her divorce action?"