1. Amanda

AMANDA

My husband betrayed me in the worst way possible, and I don’t think I will get over it. We’d been together since middle school. Of course, in the beginning, our relationship consisted of doing our homework together at my kitchen table, Saturday matinees with my older sister as chaperone and we were always there for each other’s birthday parties.

As we got older, it was a given that if you saw one of us, the other wasn’t too far behind. I’m a planner, and by the time we were fifteen, I’d had our whole lives mapped out. We would go to college together, get good-paying jobs in our chosen fields, get married, buy our first home before we turned thirty, and then settle down to have kids.

We were each other’s first at eighteen our first semester away at college because I wasn’t ready before then, not to mention my fear that my parents would somehow find out, which back then to me was mortifying.

Everything was on track. I got a job in finance while he became a professor, the way he’d always dreamed of. We knew it might take a while for him to become tenured, but with our academic record, we were both doing really well and were on the fast track to fulfilling our goals.

We got married at twenty-four, bought our first home at twenty-seven, and by then, with promotions and raises, our bank accounts were healthy and more than capable of supporting a family of three. And that’s where we met our first hiccup.

Three years after first trying for a baby, there was still no news in that department. I wasn’t too worried since, in my mind, these things take time, and there were no preexisting issues that would keep either of us from reproducing.

There was a lot of pressure from his mom, especially because she wanted a grandchild. I’m not sure what was wrong with the four she already had from his siblings, but I’d always suspected that my husband was her favorite, so obviously, a child from him would be somehow more special in her eyes.

After three years of trying and failing, we decided to see a specialist to find out what the issue was. Unbeknownst to me, my husband was very stressed by this because, as he put it, he was afraid that the fault was with him.

I had no idea that he was struggling with this because he never told me, and I was under the impression that we told each other everything. Well, in his misery, he found a shoulder to cry on. A twenty-two-year-old TA, who apparently did a lot more than listen to his woes.

As I guess you can imagine, she turned up pregnant. I’ve never known so much pain as the day he and his mother sat me down to tell me the news. I’d thought she was coming over to discuss that year’s family vacation because she’d sounded so excited on the phone, and I know how she gets about traveling.

I think I blanked out for the first few minutes after she asked me to sit down and broke the news to me. I remember looking at Dan and hoping he’d be wearing one of his stupid grins and saying something like Gotcha, but instead, he sat with his head hanging down, looking defeated.

“How…?” I couldn’t get the words out because there was a burning coal in my lungs, and my vision was blurry to boot.

“Now Amanda, don’t make a big deal out of this. Look at the bright side; you can’t have children, and now Dan will have one of his own blood.”

I looked at my mother-in-law as if she were some alien species that landed in my house and parked herself on my couch. Her words seemed so reasonable, except for the fact that they had just unilaterally destroyed my whole existence.

“Dan?”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry baby, you gotta believe me, I never meant for this to happen. She means nothing to me. I was just lonely, I guess, and scared.”

“What were you scared of?” Now, you’ve got to understand; at this point, I was still in shock. Not only that, but this was my best friend, the person I trusted more than anyone else on this earth, so, of course, I wanted to believe that he hadn’t just ripped my heart out of my chest for shits and giggles.

“I thought that I was the one who couldn’t… I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“But now we know that it was you who had the problem.” His mom said with what sounded like glee in her tone.

“Get you, get out of my house.”

“This is my son’s house, too; you can’t just make him leave.”

“Mom…”

“No, she has to act like an adult sometime. The reality is there’s a child involved, my grandchild, so she’s going to have to buckle up and get with it or…”

“I meant you, not him; I want you out of my house right now.”

They both tried to argue, and that’s when I snapped out of it and snapped. I don’t recall what all was said and done, but I know by the time I calmed down, she was gone, and Dan was trying to hold me. We were both in tears at this point, and I knew what it felt like to want to die.

I wished for death as the most excruciating pain ate away at my insides, and I fell to the floor, bawling my eyes out and trying not to throw up on myself. We had sex right there on the floor in the hallway. It was wild and hot, and I came so hard, harder than ever before, I think.

That night, we had sex three more times, and each time, I cried throughout and felt numb and empty after. Trauma bonding, now I know what that feels like.

I called out of work the next day because I felt worse than the night before. Dan had gone off to work, and I laid in bed staring up at the ceiling, wishing for this chapter in my life to come to a quick end.

Dan had told me about the affair this morning over coffee. I wanted to know everything, and yet I didn’t. I listened to his pleas for forgiveness and his reassurance that he didn’t love this other person, that it was just a stupid mistake and would never happen again.

I believed him because I needed to. There was no one I could turn to. I couldn’t tell my family and friends about this, not yet. I felt so stupid, but worse alone. The person I turned to for comfort and solace was the one who had gutted me.

I cried every day as soon as Dan walked out the door and lived on pins and needles until he came back home. That first week, I didn’t leave the house and didn’t answer the phone. I spent my days trying to be the perfect wife. It was as if I were in competition with myself.

I had to get everything just right because one wrong move and he might leave me. I walked on eggshells of my own making. At night we’d sit down at the table together, having dinner and talking like old times, ignoring the hippopotamus in the room.

Two weeks later, I fell and hit my head while at work and was rushed to the hospital. I was dehydrated and didn’t know it, and that’s what brought on the dizzy spell that took me down. Dan was there when I woke up, holding my hand as he read something on his phone.

For the first few seconds, I forgot the hell that my life had become. “Hi!” I smiled at him and saw the look of surprise on his face as he, too, broke into a smile. You see, I hadn’t smiled at him in a while, not since the day he told me. When your betrayed wife cries during and after sex, you pretty much know she’s not in the mood to smile.

It didn’t take long for it all to come rushing back, and when it did, I fought to hold onto that smile because this was my best friend. How do I separate these two? The cheating husband from the friend who’d held my hand through thick and thin.

He leaned over and kissed me, and I accepted his tongue in my mouth and his hand on my nipple. We’d been getting friskier lately, doing things we didn’t do even in our youth. We heard the nurse coming and pulled apart just in time to be decent, but I didn’t miss the bulge in my husband’s pants.

I was released and sent home and we decided that Dan would drive me to work the next day where my car had been left. As we drove with the windows down and the wind in my hair, my breath became choppy as my heartbeat accelerated.

“Pull off on the next side road we pass.” All around us were cornfields on both sides. We knew this area well since we’d grown up here and had planned to spend the rest of our lives together here. Before he could even make the turn, I was unzipping him. “Shit, Mandy.”

I licked his cockhead, sipping the little bead of precum from the tip before taking him into my mouth. I sucked him to full hardness, and by the time he pulled into one of the fields, I was raising my skirt and pushing my panties down off my hips.

I straddled him in the twilight that descended upon us and took his length deep in me. He tore the buttons of my silk blouse and pushed my bra up under my chin so he could suck my nipple into his mouth. I rocked harder on his cock as I came with a scream and kept going.

“I’m cumming, I’m cumming.” In my head, I was thinking, I bet she never made you cum this hard or this fast, but I couldn’t say those words out loud. I was too ashamed. “What has gotten into you?” He grinned as I slid off of him and got back in my seat.

“Should we stop and pick up something to eat or do you prefer delivery?”

“Let’s get something delivered.” You see, we were having a normal conversation like usual; nothing had changed, nothing needed to change.

How wrong I was about that. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That night we ate pizza and drank beer like we used to in college and then fucked like bunnies for the rest of the night. Had I known that night would be the last night of peace I’d have in that house, I maybe would’ve done things a little bit differently.