12. The Bitch

THE BITCH

I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I think of this before? I left her neighborhood and headed to the airport. I knew where they were arriving from due to all the posts she’d made on social media, so it should be easy to blend in with other people there to pick up their friends and family.

In some part of my mind, I knew I was acting weird; something felt off. But something has felt off since the first moment I realized I was losing him to her, and I haven’t been able to stop it or change it. It feels like I’m out of control like someone else is leading me around by the nose, and I can’t stick to the plans I had in mind because nothing was going the way I expected or foresaw.

I think maybe I relaxed too soon, and that’s why this is happening, but how could I know that he’d go back to her or that she’d take him? She always seemed so aloof, like all those women I graduated with who wouldn’t give me the time of day now because they were all afraid their men would find me more appealing, which most of them did.

By the time we graduated, I had slept with at least five of their men and wasn’t shy about letting it be known. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. But I never had any intentions of keeping any of them; that was never part of my game plan back then, so it didn’t matter if they knew or not. But things were different with Justin. With him, I could see forever.

Those other boys and men were just like cutting teeth before the real thing, and he was the real thing. I’d worked so hard on him, given him the best time of his life, I’m sure. What could an old, dried-up woman who’s already birthed three kids have on me?

I never gave birth and had a tight-fit body that was partly bought, but so what? I looked better than her washed-up ass, and he wanted it. He wanted it bad. I played him like a fiddle, getting some pointers from online forums of all places, where women discussed their affairs and how to go about doing things the right way.

I needed that because up until now, all of my conquests had been young high school or college men, and this was the big leagues. I knew that I couldn’t rely on my old trusted ways of just throwing some pussy at them, so I got some new pointers, especially how not to move too fast and how to play coy, never letting on that I was after everything he had and then some.

It’s much harder to convince a man in his thirties to leave his wife and kids than it is to convince college boys just looking to get laid to take the risk. I knew that a background check back then would’ve destroyed any one of those earlier relationships, so I used them mostly as learning experiences, but now, with years and distance between my family and me, it was going to be much easier. It was time.

Justin, unlike those other men and boys, was a grown man who didn’t need Mommy’s approval to marry whoever he wanted, or so I thought. But that’s a different story for another time. Let’s just say his mother refused to meet me or even let me into her home in the time we’ve been together. The way she’d acted, you’d have thought Callie was her kid instead of Justin, something that pissed me off no end.

I’d met her a handful of times at their parties, and she always seemed very nice and personable. We’d even had a few conversations, nothing enlightening, but enough for me to learn that she was one of those upper-crust types who took family values very seriously.

Seeing the relationship between her and Callie, as well as her and Justin, I was almost certain that she’d come around at some point since she loved her son so much, but I was wrong. She’d stopped talking to him for the longest time before and after the divorce, and I was almost certain that it was Callie who talked her around for the kids’ sake or some such crap.

I hate these women who use their kids to hold onto men who want to be free. That’s what I’d found all over the forums and what I prepared for. I’d convinced Justin that I could be the perfect stepmother by volunteering some weekends with the Big Sister organization and regaling him with made-up stories of my time spent volunteering with kids of all ages. I hate fucking kids.

But I was more than ready to have one or two if it meant I would make out like Callie did in the divorce. I snooped and found out how much he was paying in alimony and child support, and that bitch was making more in a month than I do in three, working my ass off. A hell of a lot more.

In the beginning, when I brought it up with Justin, he’d griped and agreed with me that it was too much and he should see about getting it lowered, but coming on to the end, when I mentioned it again, he’d cut me off harshly and warned me not to get involved with anything to do with his kids.

I think that was the moment I realized that things were really not going well for us, for me. But that was only the first of many red flags. Since then, everything seemed to be going her way, and things were getting away from me more and more. First, she refused to give me the satisfaction that fueled my desires.

One of the best parts of stealing a woman’s man is watching her disintegrate. I get such a rush from seeing other women cry and scream and make a fool of themselves, all the while knowing there’s nothing they can do because I’ve got my hooks into their man.

Those online forums go very in-depth about pussy techniques that are meant to bind a man to your side if you know what I mean, so there was never any danger of me losing him. There was no way she could compete against me in that department, I was sure.

I used to wait by the phone almost breathlessly, especially after the affair came to light, my panties already wet with anticipation because I knew that no matter how stoic she pretended to be, no woman was going to just let go of her husband, the man she’d been with for so long, without a fight. But nothing, there was nothing, not even a peep.

I think Justin was surprised as well by her indifference because some of his rants seemed to be more about her and wanting her to fight for them than it was about us finally being able to be together without the noose that was his wife and kids around his neck.

I, too, was so distracted that I didn’t find fault with his rages but instead let them slide, foolishly telling myself that he was just as surprised as I was by her behavior, and that’s why he was acting this way.

She didn’t do any of the things I expected, not even kicking up a fuss when I insisted on coming along for pickup time. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the only reason Justin gave in after fighting me on that was to make her jealous. It wasn’t about me at all. But by then, I had let so many things go over my head that it was too late to turn back the clock, and she got the upper hand.

That day when I went after her, I’d had enough of her shit. She never even looked in my direction when I came, not even when I made a point of getting out of the car, almost as if she thought I was beneath her. By that point, she and Justin weren’t even fighting, though he was always the one doing the fighting before and during the divorce.

I was tired of her disrespect and more so her damn kids’. Whenever they were around, Justin never had time for me; always up their ass like it was made of gold. I hated even more the way they were always asking for her when they were with us. Every little thing would start them crying and calling for her, and Justin would call her to calm them down over the phone.

The way I saw it, that was too much time spent talking to her, but when I complained, all he’d say was that his kids came first. Like, what the fuck? I’m supposed to come first. As far as I was concerned, the kids were an extension of her, a reminder of the life he had with her, and that was something I couldn’t live with.

But I took a wrong step that day that cost me. She got me trespassed, which meant I couldn’t come onto her property without facing heavy consequences, something I didn’t think about until it was too late, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

I’d only started to notice in the last few times we’d been there that something about her was changing. She didn’t look tired and haggard like I expected her to, not the way I imagined her being after I stole her man and left her with three young kids to raise.

In fact, she looked younger, fresher, more alive. Even when I attended parties at this home in the past, there was always a look of tiredness about her, as if life was kicking her ass. But she’d started looking better and better each time we came to get the kids.

I, of course, thought she was doing it to get Justin back, but she didn’t treat him any better than she treated me. It was hard to believe that those two had been married and had known each other for as long as they had the way she just acted like he was a stranger and not the man she shared kids with.

She never argued and never allowed the kids to be rude to him, though she didn’t care how they treated me, but what I didn’t realize was how her actions were affecting Justin. The more she ignored him and stuck to the custody handoff like a professional hired to do a job, the more irate he became.

In the weeks leading up to me being trespassed, he’d become more and more obsessed, and all of our weekends were spent with him going on and on about her while running around behind her kids, and I was too distracted myself by her behavior to notice the danger.

Once she got me trespassed, it was like needles under my skin each time he left to go to her place. It was bad enough that he hadn’t moved me in with him as yet; always promises of soon. I don’t see why the kids should care if I lived there or not since they’d already met me, but that was the excuse he’d used.

Then he started disappearing every lunch break with the excuse of going to business meetings in the beginning, but soon he stopped even giving me a reason. It was obvious that he no longer cared what I thought because if he did, he’d have realized that since we’d used our lunch breaks to fuck that with him disappearing like that, I’d suspect that he was doing the same thing again, only with someone else this time.

But when I searched through his phone, I found nothing, and there were no other signs of anything going on. But then she started coming to the office, and I got suspicious, which, as it turned out, was for the best because that’s how I learned that they were fucking, by listening in at the door. That was the day everything came crashing down around me, and my life started spiraling out of control.

Now I’m here at the airport trying to find them in a sea of people and strange faces with a gut full of rocks and fear.