Marriage Roulette

We checked in at the airport with plenty of time before our flight. We sat in the concourse lounge with margaritas.

I presented my opening statement before the jury of one.

"You know that what Quill did to us is something he's done before?"

"What do you mean?"

"The beer loosened his tongue at lunch yesterday. He said that what was happening with us felt like déjà vu, just like what happened to him once before."

Her raised eyebrows asked me to continue.

"He fell in love with a white married women before, just like he did with you, and shortly after her wedding too. He admitted that he liked bullying her jealous husband, and you heard him try to bully me. He said the other woman fell in love with him too."

"What happened to her?"

"She caught him with another woman and ended it. They were engaged. I don't know if she was still married, like you, but he said it tore him up and that it was the biggest mistake of his life."

"And you think he might do it again, even after all that?"

"I can't say that, but I don't have any doubt that he was trying to make you fall in love with him."

"Well, it worked."

"It did. Do you think it will be the last time?"

She paused, "You don't?"

"I don't know, but maybe. I wonder if he'd let you be with another guy if you wanted to."

"I don't want to."

"That was what you said when we got engaged. There are a lot of interesting men out there ..." I grabbed her hand, "... some of them even bigger than Quill."

She knew what bigger I was referring to, and I sowed the seeds of doubt in her mind. Hopefully those seeds would be enough to make the jury of one start looking for overlooked evidence and Quill warts. As she listened and pondered, we each had three margaritas.

We were both feeling good by the time we found our last-row seats on our cross-country flight back home. On our side of the aisle, I got the window, Elke sat in the middle seat, and after we were all seated, I introduced myself and Elke introduced herself to our seatmate, Connor, an African-American Stanford graduate student.

Connor was extroverted, funny, and physically impressive. He also found my wife fascinating, and not just due to her conversation with him about their alma-mater connection. After two more margaritas, he also found my hand fascinating when it traced the inside of my bride's thigh. She encouraged his interest in what my hand was doing by spreading her knees by about a foot while she smiled at him. We were more than halfway home, both on the flight and on our way to inebriation, when she moved my hand under her skirt onto her wet panties. My touch induced a comment that was just loud enough for Collin to hear.

"I can't wait for Quill to fuck me again and again, honey."

Collin looked at me, "I'm sorry, I told you my name was Collin. It's really Quill."

Our laughter was loud and prolonged, and for the rest of the flight it continued. Collin's endless bag of jokes kept us rolling, but it did not stop his eyes from tracking my hand as it continued to traverse the insides of each thigh, never again reaching the promised land. I noticed her eyes frequently tracking the impressive lump in his pants too, and I had a feeling that her contention that she would not want anybody else was on shaky ground.

That supposition was reinforced when they shared a tight and lengthy hug in the aisle before deplaning, and he continued to make us laugh all the way to baggage claim. They exchanged phones and typed in more than their numbers while we waited for our bags, but after we did, her final-departure hug also included a passionate kiss on the lips.

From beginning to end, it had been a memorable and, especially for Elke, satisfying honeymoon. We had several times played with pregnancy-risk sex ourselves in the year before our wedding, but we had also often discussed the thrill that pregnancy-risk sex with another man might provide. The 'another man' she found meant the risk could not get any more thrilling than this.

There had been no mention from either of us about a morning-after pill since that first infidelity pillow talk, but we had talked many times about her potential pregnancy. Our concourse margaritas uncovered identical wishes, and both of us were ready to let it play out naturally. If her pregnancy was confirmed soon, that would only be the start of the thrill because the unknown-father danger would then continue for another nine months. There would be no doubt of the father at birth, especially if it was not my seed that germinated. Everybody would know immediately.

Even if the most likely marksman found the bullseye, and Quill was the father, I was not sure that he would follow through on our contract. I was committed, and if he still was, my marriage would be short-lived, but nine months is a long time. I thought he was a player, and I had my doubts about him following through every weekend for that long. If he reneged, I would be thrilled to be Elke's husband and the father of her baby for life, especially if Quill fathered him.

Regardless, we agreed to play the game out. On the way home, we had the taxi stop so I could run into CVS to buy a half dozen pregnancy test kits. I did not buy any morning-after pills.

Elke and I had resonated over the thrill-seeking rush from every spin of that cylinder and subsequent pull of the trigger each time Quill's sperm spewed inside her, but there was also the nerve-wracking thrill from a constant-angst danger that our wedlock might have already been dissolved. The first thrill would rush through when we find out whether a live bullet already found the target, and that would be soon, but the prolonged and enduring thrill would be during the entire gestation-period wait. The birth would induce a rush that might cause me to conk out irrespective of father, and I was unsure which outcome would bring the greater rush.

It was the ultimate game of Marriage Roulette, and if I lost, I would not know whether it was a murder or a suicide.