Well-Intentioned

Regardless of my mentors' various reasons, I do know that, in the first ten or so months of home ownership, I learned more real world skills than I had in four years of college. My neighbors turned me from a shy geek that stammered his way through a conversation with a beautiful woman to a confident, well-groomed, and charming home- and business-owner.

They took a chance on me professionally, too. Several chances, in fact; I designed or redesigned websites and later apps for the businesses owned by most of the men and a few of the women, giving them a greater internet presence. In gratitude, they referred me to their friends, who referred me to their friends.

My sex life, the utmost concern for a man in his early twenties, shot through the roof. Single, young, homeowner, entrepreneur, and able to dance, cook, and hold conversations about topics besides twenty-something guy stuff? I was beating them off with a stick.

The neighbors found the revolving door on the front of my house endlessly amusing. Mrs. Alvarez winked at me one morning as I walked the previous night's date to her car, and Ella once laughed, "My, I didn't know you slept with the windows open!" on another occasion. I didn't "sleep" with the windows open again.

For what my neighbors taught me, for the shot in the arm they gave my love life and the leg up in business, I can't thank them enough. I'll always be grateful for the time and effort they invested in me there at the beginning.

For everything that came later? Not so much.

My downfall amongst the tribe of King's Forest began with a simple mistake on my part: I woke up on a Tuesday and thought it was a Wednesday. My software consulting business had started to take off, and I spent so much time burning the midnight oil on projects that the days often bled into one another.

On that fateful Tuesday morning, I roused myself only a few minutes before noon, having slept through my alarm. My Crossfit appointments with Ella started at one in the afternoon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I began the mad dash to be clean, lightly fed, and somewhat presentable before hurrying down the street to her and Lance's house.

I rang the bell, but no one answered. Listening closely, though, I heard muffled sounds of straining coming from inside. That didn't surprise me too much, since Ella often warmed up before I arrived. Figuring she had her earbuds in, I made my way around to the backyard, planning to knock on the sliding glass door. Instead, I found it slightly ajar.

That's not all I found.

"Yeah, bitch, fucking take it!" I heard his voice before I saw the two of them; he'd been quiet up until that crude exclamation. Ella was anything but quiet though, whimpering and grunting and crying out nonsense words. I froze, unsure of what to do next, but then she made a noise that couldn't be anything but pain, so I turned the corner, ready to help my friend.

She had about all the help she needed, though. Yeah, it had been a pained noise, but that was because the greaseball had grabbed her ponytail and was yanking on it as he railed her from behind, which she quite obviously and very vocally appreciated.

He didn't look like anything special. Just some guy. A little older than me, a little fitter, a little scruffier. The angle didn't give me a view of his equipment, but I didn't see anything particularly special about the way he fucked, either, or even in the effect he had on her. Ella was loud and clearly into it, but she didn't seem any moreso than the random dates I brought home on the weekends.

But my God, she was everything I'd fantasized about while guiltily rubbing one out to her. Absolutely incredible: perfect body glowing with light perspiration, teardrop tits slapping together as she received thrust after thrust from the douchebag, and that smoky voice begging and moaning as she came like a freight train.

They hadn't bothered to undress; instead, he'd pushed her shirt and sports bra up to maul one tit, and she'd lowered her yoga pants--no panties--just enough to give him access. The word that flashed through my mind as I watched them was "rutting."

I stood there for what had to be a couple of minutes, a flood of conflicting emotions drowning out my ability to react. Disbelief at what I saw; lust for Ella; anger on behalf of Lance; jealousy directed toward the nameless douchebag. Why would she do this? Why with him? Why not with me? What did this shitstain have that I didn't?

The latter few shamed me later, but I couldn't help what I felt. She and I had become close over the previous months, and while I assured myself I wouldn't have slept with her due to my views on adultery, it still rankled.

It was a dumb take, but I was barely 23. I was allowed some dumb takes. Of course she wouldn't have approached me for this; I could upend her life if she did and if I wasn't amenable. But still. It stung a little. Even if you don't want to dance, it's nice to be asked.

I had just opened my mouth to say something, or maybe shout it, when the douchebag grunted, "Yeah, baby, who owns this fucking cunt? Ain't that cuck husband of yours, so it's gotta be--"

Ella moved almost faster than I could follow; I guess that Crossfit really did pay off. In one smooth motion, she whipped off his cock, pivoted around, pried his fingers off her ponytail with one hand, and slapped him across the face with the other. "I told you, don't ever say shit like that about Lance! You're a convenience, at best. I'd pick him over you every day of the fucking week if I could. If you ever disrespect him again--"

I missed the rest of her words, as I'd stepped back when she swung around, hoping she hadn't seen me. However, the angry voices that I heard as I snuck out the sliding glass door and closed it behind me told me that playtime was likely over.

The venom in her tone as she defended Lance left me more confused than ever. She was cheating on him! Then, I thought, 'Wait, she was cheating on him, right? Or do they have an open marriage?' I didn't know any cuckolds, or at least I didn't think I did, but I never got a weird vibe off of either of them. Besides, Ella had reacted so viscerally to the term that I couldn't square the idea of Lance being a willing cuck.

I speedwalked away from her house and into the alley just around the bend, trying to figure out what to do next. Tell Lance? Confront Ella? Sit on the info until I had more to go on? Or... no, of course: do what I'd been doing since I arrived in King's Forest. Go talk to one of the folks that had been helping me for months, and who also had known Ella and Lance for years longer than I had. The Alvarezes' house was closer, but she watched Ella's kids when she ran errands. The next nearest was the Taylors', so off I went to ruin Mary Taylor's Tuesday afternoon.

I glanced over my shoulder after ringing her doorbell, nervously looking over my shoulder like an East Berlin contact in an old spy thriller. You know, the guy that gets killed in the opening ten minutes.

Mary opened the door and reacted to my distress. "Heavens, Doug, what's wrong?"

"Mrs. Taylor--"

"Mary, Doug. You make me feel like an old lady when you say 'Mrs. Taylor.'"

I threw another glance towards Ella's house. "Mary, please. I need to talk to someone."

"Well, come on in, then. Always happy to lend an ear." I ducked in the door as soon as she stepped aside, trying to figure out how to open the conversation. She placed a palm on my shoulder and gave me a reassuring smile as she steered me towards her couch. "Doug. Honey. Whatever it is, it's going to be okay."

Concerted, I couldn't hold it in anymore. "Ella is cheating on Lance!"

Mary's smile froze, then came back sweeter than ever. More disingenuous, too, but I scarcely noticed at the time. "Why, sweetie, whatever are you talking about?"

"It's Wednesday. We're supposed to work out today, and I--"

"Doug, sweetie, it's Tuesday."

"Just listen!" She recoiled from my vehemence and, abashed, I apologized. "I'm sorry. It's... Okay, it's Tuesday, but I thought it was Wednesday. We work out every Wednesday at one, so when I knocked and Ella didn't open the door, I went around to the back and through the sliding glass door. And that's when I found... them. Her and some guy."

"Are you sure they were...?"

With a snort, I replied, "Unless she's added two-person half-naked yoga to her repertoire, yes. They were clearly having sex, and it sounded like it wasn't the first time."

Mary chewed on her lip. "Did she see you?"

"I don't think so." I sighed, staring off into space. "I can't believe she's cheating on him. She always acts like she thinks Lance hung the moon and the stars."

Slowly, she said, "Well, you know, maybe she does?" My head snapped towards her, mouth opened and ready to object, but she continued. "No, hear me out. Maybe she does love him. Maybe... maybe she just has some needs that he's not able to fill right now, and--"

"Okay, no! Just- just no. That's-- no one who loves their spouse can cheat on him like that. Even if-- even if--"

She leaned in slightly. "Even if?"

I looked off to one side, embarrassed at the language I'd have to use around an older woman; it felt like cursing in front of my mom. "While they were... coupling, the guy called Lance a cuck, and Ella slapped the hell out of him. Told him to never say anything like that again, or else. Said she'd pick Lance over the other guy every day of the week if she could."

"Mmm." Mary seemed to give this some thought. "Seems like you heard it from the horse's mouth, then. Doug..." She laid her hand on my knee. "Sometimes people, women and men alike, they can't get what they need from the ones they love when they need it. Lance works such long hours, and, like I said, she's a young woman with needs. If he can't meet them..."

My jaw dropped. She couldn't possibly be suggesting what I thought she was.

"Doug, listen. You've said it yourself: she adores Lance. He adores her, and the children, and the life they have together. Is what she's doing right? No, I wouldn't go that far. But if having the occasional tryst with some Crossfit guy to blow off steam every once in a while is how she manages to... fulfill her needs when Lance is too busy, as long as she's careful, which is the greater harm? Her infidelity or you telling him?"

She fucking was. I stammered out, "H- how... how can you defend it?"

"Oh, sweetie, listen. I'm not defending her cheating, I'm defending their happiness, Lance's included. If he found out about this, that would be the end of their marriage."

"Maybe it should be!"

"Doug, you don't mean that. She loves him, and he loves her. And their kids... Can you imagine what that would do to them? Divorce is awful for children. It's always hardest on them, even though the parents rarely can see that; I should know."

"What do you mean?"

"My folks split up when I was about Hunter's age. It was awful. Their divorce became this knockdown, drag-out thing. I didn't understand any of it at the time, why Mama suddenly hated Daddy and why I could only see Daddy once a month, and he lived in this tiny apartment and... God, he'd lost so much weight and his smile just wasn't..." Mary's voice cracked. "It wasn't..."

She pulled a tissue from the box on her coffee table and dabbed at her eyes. "I didn't know it at the time, but Daddy had cheated and Mama wanted to extract as much blood as she could. She did, too, just tore his ass up in the divorce. Pardon my language." An embarrassed grimace snuck onto Mary's face at her minor faux pas, but I just chuckled and motioned for her to continue.

Mary looked down at the soiled tissue in her hands. "My older sister, she had a better inkling of what was going on, and she took Mama's side. She was old enough to understand that Daddy was cheating, although she didn't have a grown-up notion of what that meant."

Her gaze drifted toward me. "She didn't have a grown-up notion of... of why someone might cheat, either. And with only a couple of days a month with us, and no way to explain to her why he'd been 'kissing another lady,' as she put it, well... I mean, it's not like he could say to his eight-year-old girl, 'Mommy hasn't wanted to be intimate since your sister was born, and I was at the end of my tether, and I made a bad choice.'

"I was a Daddy's girl, so I stayed in his corner, but Sharon--my sister--didn't, and it caused rifts. Between me and her and between her and Daddy. Between me and Mama, too, once I was old enough to 'understand' in her eyes and still didn't take her side. Most of them... most of them healed eventually, but the scars are still there. To this day, I think Mama trusts my sister more than me, and I know Sharon resents Daddy for cheating, even if she knows why now."

Mary sighed. "I wish Daddy hadn't cheated. It was wrong, and I know that. But I wish Mama had the grace to understand why he did, how unhappy he'd been." She shook her head. "But that's not Lance and Ella's marriage. Theirs is a happy one; please, don't mess that up for them. Things are getting better. The economy's getting better, slowly but surely, and he's home more often now."

I felt uneasy. Realization had slowly crept up on me throughout the conversation, but as I mulled her words over, something suddenly clicked. "I never said he was 'some Crossfit guy.' You've known about this for a while, haven't you?"

A brief pause before she admitted, "I have."

"How did you find out? Did she come to you, or did you catch them together, or...?"

My neighbor delicately picked her way through her next words. "No. No, I found out secondhand. Julia Alvarez... discovered them when she had an emergency and had to drop Hunter and Zoe back off early with Ella."

"... And she told you?"

"No. She told Theresa, who... well, Theresa is who she is. She told a few other folks, including me."

I blinked a few times before responding. "'A few others?' For God's sake, how many people know about this?"

"Maybe... maybe a dozen."

"A dozen people know about this?!"

"Couples. A dozen couples." She bit her lip, wincing slightly. "Give or take."

A dozen fucking couples. I slumped back on the couch, more agog at this new information than I was about Ella's affair. Twenty-four people--give or goddamned take--my friends and neighbors, knew that our friend was cheating on her husband and hadn't told him.

Or me! It bothered me that they'd kept the secret from him; no matter how Mary might have justified it to herself, it wasn't right. But it hurt me to know that everyone else around me had this secret and they had kept me on the outside, too. If it had been closely guarded, that would be one thing, but goddamned near everyone that mattered to me in my neighborhood had known. I felt like a fool for believing that they'd seen me as a peer or even a near-peer.

"I always heard that the husband was the last one to know. I suppose he still will be, but..." I shook my head, chuckling mirthlessly.

Mary reached out to touch my shoulder. "Doug, please don't misunderstand. No one was trying to hide this from you because we wanted to exclude you. We think the world of you. All of us. That's the reason we didn't tell you. We didn't want to burden you with the secret; if you didn't know, you wouldn't have to do anything about it.

"You still don't, though. I hope you understand that, too. We've chosen, as a group, to not say anything to her because we want their family to be happy. We know you do, too, but also that..." She smiled, a bit melancholy. "When you're young, it's easy to think of things as black and white. We didn't want you to have to wrestle with the grey in between; not on this."

After ruminating silently for a few moments, I stood, and Mary stood with me. "Doug, please don't--"

I cut her off, speaking with a touch more curtness than I'd intended. "I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I won't... I'm not going to do anything tonight. But I need to go for a walk and clear my head." She made as if to hug me, but I moved away. That hurt her; I could see it. 'Good,' I thought petulantly. 'She can see how it feels to be held at arm's length.'

Mrs. Taylor--it was hard to think of her as Mary when it became clear she didn't think of me as an adult--followed me to her front door, asking once more that I not tell Lance. I didn't bother to respond, instead mumbling a goodbye before letting the storm door swing freely behind me to shut in her face.

I walked aimlessly through the subdivision, trying to clear my head. Twenty-four people, at least. More, probably; did the whole goddamned subdivision know? How could that many people not say anything? The answer came to me immediately: because everyone loved Ella, and, at best, they liked Lance. No one loved Lance.

'Maybe not even his wife,' I thought gloomily. How could a loving wife do that to her husband? I just couldn't understand it. If this were a mutual thing, like if they were swingers or in an open marriage or even a cuck/hotwife thing, I could sort of understand it, but not this.

I knew that Ella loved Lance, though. It wasn't a put-on; I'd spent enough time with her to know how devoted she was to him. She was always excited to talk about him and his work, their college days, and their family. Once, when she and I were hanging out at a party, after she'd had one too many, she even bragged about what a good lover he was. I had literally never heard her complain about him, at all, other than that she wished he could be home more often. Even those comments, though, were peppered with appreciation for the sacrifices he made for his family.

I was so lost in thought that I didn't even notice that my feet had carried me back to my front stoop. I stole a glance toward Lance and Ella's house, but the whole block was quiet; it usually was during that time of day, in the early afternoon before the neighborhood kids got home from school.

Work barely managed to occupy me. The previous night's coding binge had given me plenty of breathing room, and without the pressure of a deadline to motivate me, I found it almost impossible to keep my mind on my job. I tried making a late lunch instead, something more filling than the breakfast bar I'd grabbed before racing over to find Ella with her fuckbuddy, but I wasn't particularly hungry, either. Yardwork was out, too; I'd mowed and trimmed two days previous, and anything I did out there would be busywork.

The longer I tried to find something to distract me, the more it surprised me that Ella didn't come by to talk. She had to know by then that I'd seen her, even if she hadn't spotted me at the time. Mary Taylor relying on my goodwill alone to protect our neighbor's secret seemed an unlikely answer. I thought perhaps that Ella was giving me time to decompress, or to get her story straight, or maybe even to confess to Lance. I hoped for that last one; it would have made my life so much easier.

Still, when the doorbell rang, I wasn't surprised. What did surprise me was who had rung. Bob Grayson smiled broadly when I opened the door, six-pack of my favorite beer in hand. "I think you might need someone to talk to right about now."

Of course he knew. If anyone would know about an open secret in the neighborhood, the Graysons would. The feeling of being excluded needled at me harder than ever, but I took the proffered bottles. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I do."

We sat at my kitchen table. Neither of us spoke until after we'd popped the caps off and taken a few pulls; after that, he asked me to sum up what I knew and what Mary had told me. He nodded sagely as I went along, asking a question here and there to clarify. When I finished, he sat back in his chair, took another swig, stifled a belch, and sighed, "Hell."

"Pretty much."

"Doug... Son, I know Mary told you this already, but I want you to hear it from me: we weren't trying to shut you out because we didn't trust you. That wasn't it at all. It's like she said: we didn't want you to have to deal with knowing. Knowing something like this, it weighs on a man, whether he acts on the knowledge or not.