“What?” I could barely believe my ears. Bob's revelation stunned me; he was not only complicit in hiding Ella's secrets, but he had convinced our neighbors, too?

Bob nodded. “Not all of them. Some of them had already decided to… well, to do nothing, I suppose. Some of them just wanted to mind their own business. Others, like Mary Taylor, had their own reasons, and if their spouses weren’t already of the same mind, they mostly convinced them. And, if I’m honest, I think one or two people either are having or have had affairs; I have no proof of that, though. Just a feeling.”

After taking another drink, he gloomily continued, “Some, though, thought we had to tell him. That it was the right thing to do. It was; it is. I know that. But it’s also the wrong thing to do.” Bob pointed the neck of his bottle toward me. “Which brings me back to you, and what you’re wrestling with.”

Nodding, I replied, “Yeah. Yeah, I am. She’s my friend, but he is, too. I know that’s not true with all of you; it seems like most of the folks here like Ella a whole lot more than Lance, but–”

Bob all but slammed his bottle down on the table. “That is not true!” He glanced to the side for a moment, then shrugged, before admitting, “Alright, it is for some, I’m sure. It’s not for me, though. And it’s not the reason I argued so strongly in favor of keeping it from him. I…” 

He stopped, then took in a deep breath and let it out slowly before rising from the table to look out the window. “Kathy didn’t come with me today, because she knew I’d probably get around to telling this story. It’s upsetting to her. To me, too, but…” He shook his head. “I’m doing everything I can to keep this from him because of what happened twenty-odd years ago, and what I could so easily see happening again.

“Not long after I became an elder, Black Monday struck. You’re too young to remember it, but the long and the short of it is that back in 1987, the stock market had the single largest one-day plunge in history. Almost 25% of the Dow Jones disappeared in one day. People thought we were looking at a new Great Depression.

“A young family had started attending our services maybe a year or so before. Nice folks. Parents very much in love with each other; adorable young children. The father didn’t lose his job when the recession hit, but it was a narrow thing. 

“Being young and lacking seniority, his job was at risk, though, and he had to do whatever he could to keep it. So, he worked long hours, and he came home stressed. Tempers frayed. I didn’t know at the time, though; so many people were struggling in the community, and, to be honest, my own job was hanging by a thread, and I was already putting my oldest through college.

“I didn’t learn how bad things had gotten for them until the wife came to me maybe eight or nine months after the crash. She’d… strayed. It happened a few times before her conscience got the best of her, and she asked for my advice.

“My first instinct was for her to confess immediately. I felt… outrage, I suppose, for her husband. Sympathy for her, too, but I knew she was in the wrong. Knew it to my core; she cheated, after all. And, even now… Even now, I still feel that way. I feel that way about what Ella is doing, too.

“I grappled with what to tell her for days, but ultimately decided I needed input from others. I spoke with my fellow elders and the pastor. We went round and round about it for hours, but the consensus was that I should counsel her to keep her on the straight and narrow. Once things had settled down, I’d bring them both in for marital counseling together, and she could tell him then.

“That’s not what happened, though. I don’t know if it was… If I had been too hellfire and brimstone when we first met, or if her conscience became too much for her, or if…” The old man–looking almost ancient then–swallowed. 

“She told him. And he… He killed her. Shot her. Then he drove across town to the other man’s house and shot him on his front doorstep, just a few yards from the man’s own family, before turning the gun on himself.” His voice caught. “They were so young. God, all so young. Their whole lives ahead of them.”

I’d never seen Bob like this. His shoulders stooped as the weight of the tale dragged them down. I almost spoke up, but he pulled himself upright and continued on. His gaze never met mine, though, even in the reflection of the window. “Two families destroyed, not just because of an infidelity, but also because of a confession. Because of the stress already on all of them, and because of my indecisiveness.”

“Bob… Bob, you can’t blame yourself for that. That wasn’t–”

The man who had become, in many ways, a surrogate father figure over the last year, struggled to answer. He wasn’t crying–I doubted that he ever cried, outside of maybe a funeral–but his voice broke as he tried to continue. “I do, though. Not for all of it. Not even most of it. But I played my part; I could have… should have done more. And that’s why I argued against Ella telling Lance.”

“But she kept cheating on him! She’s still cheating on him!”

He nodded grimly. “I know. I’m disappointed in her; she’s disappointed in herself, for that matter. I know that. I talk with her about it, try to… to help her find other ways to deal with her own stress and fear. 

“I remembered how quickly the nation bounced back from Black Friday, and I felt sure this would be the same way, that we’d be long past the crash by now. But it wasn’t. And because it wasn’t, Ella… Well, she couldn’t manage.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Her cheating is now, if I’m being honest, the lesser secret.”

My brows furrowed at this statement. “How do you figure?”

Bob sat back down and took another drink of his beer, shifting in his manner back towards the steady, thoughtful mentor. “Because now it’s not just her secret. It’s gone on too long. Now it’s our secret, all of ours. If one of us tells him, eventually he’ll figure out that more of us know, that maybe all of us do, and that we’ve known for a while. Then it’s not just her betrayal. It’s ours, too.

“Put yourself in his shoes. Your whole neighborhood knows your wife is cheating on you. They’ve known for almost a year, and they’ve kept it secret. It doesn’t matter that we had the best of intentions when we started, or that she planned to confess when things were better. All you would see–all he will see–is that betrayal. What will that do to him?” 

He looked down at his hands, now flat on the table. “I can’t be responsible for another young man taking his life. Or destroying it through drinking or some other twisted way of coping. I won’t.”

“Bob–”

Finally, his gaze fully met mine for the first time since he’d begun, his eyes boring into me. “I am begging you, Doug: don’t tell him. You might think you’re doing the right thing, and from a certain point of view, you would be. I’ll admit that. 

“But it would be like letting a man drown because of a sign that says ‘No swimming.’ It’ll be a right thing that leads to a greater wrong. I know I made a mistake here. I know I should have found another way to handle this. When I looked at them, though, I saw that young family from 20 years ago. Don’t punish them because this blind old fool of a man took a bad situation and made it worse.”

We sat there for a while. Bob stared at me, but his gaze moved away now and then, as if to give me relief. I rolled everything he said around in my head, trying to see some angle that he and the others hadn’t, some way out of this trap that they’d put themselves into. I didn’t find one. Finally, I said, “I’ll… I’ll need to think about it. I won’t say anything to him today, though. I promise.”

He nodded; this was the best he was likely to get. Then, rising, he said, “I understand. Like I said, Doug, you’re a good man. I hate that you’ve been put in this position, but you have. And now…” He stopped, mouth opened slightly, then closed it and shook his head before favoring me with a weary smile. “Well, now it’s up to you. Let your conscience be your guide. I’m sure you’ll make the right call.”

Yes, he smiled, but I could tell it was forced as we said our goodbyes. The subtext was perfectly clear: the right choice was his choice, and he wasn’t sure I’d make that one. I wasn’t, either.

When I’d gone from Ella’s to Mary’s earlier in the day, I thought I was going for advice on how to approach telling Lance: tell him myself, give Ella an ultimatum, or some other strategy. I’d hoped that Mary could give me a new point of view, maybe help me figure out a different way to approach the problem. By the time Bob had finished speaking that night, everything seemed so much more complicated. 

What Ella had done–was doing–was wrong. Everyone agreed on that. But everyone, eventually, also agreed that telling Lance would be the wrong approach. Everyone except me, anyways. Maybe. All I had to do was hold my tongue, and the worst case scenario was… what? Lance eventually finds out, and I’d be just one more face in the crowd of folks who didn’t say anything? 

Anyways, it sounded like this was a temporary thing; maybe a temporary thing that had gone on too long, but temporary nonetheless. Maybe he’d never find out, and he could live the rest of his life happily oblivious about the year his wife had been fucking another man. Year? No, years, probably, from how the economy was looking.

But if I opened my mouth, I didn’t see how the outcome could be anything but catastrophic. Even in my worst imaginings, I couldn’t see Lance ever hurting Ella, Bob’s traumatic story notwithstanding. How much would my speaking up hurt Lance, though? Even at that age, I knew what divorce for a guy in our state looked like, especially with a stay-at-home wife, and “unfavorable” didn’t even begin to cover it. 

Would he choose to forgive so he could keep his home and his kids, particularly with the Great Recession in full swing? If he did, would Ella stop sleeping around? If not, would Lance try to turn a blind eye and pretend it wasn’t happening or maybe even be forced to embrace his status as a cuckold? What would any of those scenarios do to their kids? 

I tossed and turned the whole night, but that didn’t help, nor did trying to focus on work the next day. When lunchtime rolled around, my phone helpfully reminded me that, yes, this was a Wednesday, and I needed to get ready to go over to Ella’s for my workout. Thanks, Steve Jobs. Super helpful.

I didn’t go over to her house, nor did she come to mine. I didn’t hear from her at all, and no further neighbors came over to talk to me about the situation. In fact, nobody stopped by at all that day or the next; it wasn’t until later that I realized everyone was giving me space to make a decision. Team Speak No Evil had sent their representative, and any further discussion would muddy the water; more importantly, it would undercut Bob’s “I’m sure you’ll make the right call.”

Slowly, I started to come around to the idea that maybe it was the right call. By Friday, I’d stewed long enough for the initial shock to wear off, both at Ella’s actions and everyone else’s inaction, and I had started to see the wisdom of both Bob and Mary’s words. Maybe Bob’s fears about the severity of Lance’s potential reaction were overblown, but Mary’s seemed like they might be right on target. I knew that if I was in his position and found out that both my wife and neighbors had kept something like this from me, I’d be hard-pressed not to tear our lives down; consequences be damned.

More importantly, I had started to fall into the pattern I’d gotten used to over the previous year in King’s Forest. When I had a dilemma, I sought my neighbors’ advice and then followed said advice. Their wisdom hadn’t served me wrong yet. Why should this be different? Sure, I felt awful about keeping the secret, but so did everyone else. Bob and Mary had presented it as the best of a bunch of bad choices, and I could see their point of view.

That weekend, I saw Lance and Ella at an afternoon barbecue, one of the rare ones that both were able to attend. People chatted with the couple, and their warmth towards Lance didn’t feel like it was for show. No one made any comments that I could remotely interpret as demeaning; no one gossiped behind his back, and no one cast pitying stares at him. I avoided him, but I did so as unobtrusively as possible, instead volunteering to do little errands: a beer run here, helping Mrs. Alvarez in the kitchen there, and so on. 

It was on one of those errands, fetching spare lawn chairs from the garage, that Ella caught me alone. Her voice startled me. “Hey.”

I turned to face her, setting down the stack I’d just picked up. “Hey.” Her face looked so different from the sunny happy one I’d grown used to, the one she presented to everyone. It had a haunted quality to it, and I wondered if I was seeing the real Ella for the first time. “I suppose you want to talk about—”

She made a little shushing notion with one hand while closing the door to the garage with the other. “Yes. No.” Ella sighed. “God, I don’t know. It sounds like Bob already did. Mary, too. But I wanted you to… to hear it from me. To understand.”

“What’s there to understand? He’s working his fingers to the bone, and you’re fucking around on him. It’s not like housewives cheating on their unsuspecting husbands is a new thing. I just didn’t expect…” I sighed. “Whatever. Make your case for why I shouldn’t tell him.”

Ella opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Then, once more, a little strangled sound came out. Then, on her third try, “You probably should. He deserves better; I know that. It’s just… it was just sex. I’ve ended it with Tony. Not because you found me with him, but because… a lot of reasons, I suppose.

She sat on the corner of George Alvarez’s woodworking table. “I can explain what I did, but that doesn’t excuse it. Still, you asked me to make my case, so you should hear all the testimony, right?” Ella shot a rueful grin my way; then her gaze drifted to the floor. “Maybe you can find a reason to grant clemency.

“I love Lance. I love him with all my heart; him and the kids, that is. The whole world could burn, and I wouldn’t care, as long as I had them. But…” She chewed her lip. “The couple of years before you moved to the neighborhood, things got… bad. Really bad. 

“We bought too much house when we moved here, because we wanted to have another kid or two, and the market…” Ella sighed. “We were like everyone else, thought we were getting a deal on the place. Thought the market was going to go nowhere but up. He’d started his company, and it was going gangbusters, we were flush with cash, had two beautiful kids… Everything was great. 

“Then business dried up. We argued, fought, really. I mean, screaming-and-crying fought for the first time ever. We talked about downsizing, but we were underwater on the mortgage. He worked longer hours. I did everything I could to make his reduced income go further. We talked about me getting a job, but when we looked at it, the cost of daycare would have almost entirely eaten it up, and the extra gas and the like would have taken the rest.

“So, since I couldn’t help out financially, I decided to be Superwife. The ladies in the neighborhood….” She chuckled. “...Well, you’ve joked before that you’re their project. I was their project before that. We were. They lived through the dot-com bubble, and Black Monday, and something called ‘stagflation,’ and a bunch of other hard times. 

“The other housewives all gave me a bunch of tips on cutting costs while still cooking well, dressing well, and so on. They showed me…” Ella waved a hand dismissively. “Ah, you know, like they did with you. A bunch of stuff. Different from what they taught you, probably, but you know what good friends they are, how helpful they want to be. But mostly, they just made things easier for me, so that I could make things easier for him. 

“That was the key, they said. ‘Make sure he’s as happy as you can make him because he’s killing himself to provide for your family.’ So I did. As he worked longer hours, I took over the yard work, the budget, and anything I could do so he wouldn’t have to. Dressed sexy for him and did almost anything he wanted to when we were alone at night. Just whatever I could do to make him happier.”

She glanced up at me with a fragile smile. “And it worked. We were happy again, like we’d been before we moved here, before the recession.” Her pretty face contorted into a frown. “For a while, anyway.”

Ella looked up at the ceiling as if she could find the answers to why things had gone so wrong in her life there. “The recession got worse. Or, I guess, it started to really hit us. We cut our costs to the bone, but that just made him more frustrated. He compared himself to our neighbors, to the men who… They were all established, you know? Comfortable in their careers, had seniority or safe positions or savings to fall back on, or… whatever. I tried to tell him that, but… I don’t know. I think it made him feel more insecure.

“I fell back on what had worked so far, making his life… more. Better. Showing him this didn’t have to beat him, to beat us. Asked Julia to watch the kids so I could get to the gym–the only extravagance I allowed myself–and got myself back in shape. Like, really in shape. Like…” 

Her eyes drifted toward me, and that adorable grin came back for a moment. “Well, I know how you look at me.” The frown returned, and she couldn’t hold my gaze. “How they all look at me.”

A slow breath in, then a slower one out. “One of the girls at the gym suggested I give personal training a shot. The certification’s quick and easy, and I was good at it. It was a way to supplement our income, and it didn’t require full-time daycare, you know? I thought it was great. Lance was less enthusiastic, but I showed him how I could make a good amount of money with almost no expenses, and he reluctantly agreed.

“At first, it went great. The little bit of extra money coming in made it so we could ease up a little. So… so I could ease up a little. I’ll admit, I let things slip some. It had gotten so hard, feeling like my family’s happiness rested on my shoulders, like if I let myself be less than perfect, that it would all crumble. I hadn’t realized how much it wore on me.

“Anyway. I had my own job again for the first time in years, one I was good at. New friends outside the neighborhood. Men… men looking at me like men do. That shouldn’t have meant anything, because I loved Lance so much, but it’s nice to feel wanted. Desired. You know?”

The thoughts I had when I saw her with the scumbag–Tony, she’d called him–echoed back in my mind, then formed on my lips. “Even if you don’t want to dance, it’s nice to be asked.”

Ella stared at me for a moment, comprehending, I think, that I wasn’t just speaking for her, before slowly nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t want to cheat on my husband, but I liked knowing that other men wanted me. That they might even ask–and a few did–but that I could say no, because I was a good wife. But still, like you said. It’s nice to be… not necessarily asked, but at least considered. The best of both worlds: I knew they wanted me, they knew they wanted me, they knew they could never have me, so they didn’t ask.”

“Except Tony did.”

She nodded glumly. “Except Tony did. He’d hit on me before, and he was the first to line up when I started out as a trainer. I made it clear, though, that I loved my husband, and if he wanted anything more than training, he should go somewhere else. He didn’t, though, and while he’d still stare… Well, I liked that. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

Her head hung low. “I forgot, somewhere in there, why I’d started doing all this. Who I was doing it for. Or, maybe, I just let myself forget. Lance and I started arguing again, and I thought it was just jealousy, that I’d managed to make something for myself that wasn’t either dependent on him or in service to him. I think…. Honestly, I still think that was some of it. That he’d had Superwife for a while, and having just-a-wife wasn’t enough anymore.

“We fought one day before he went on a trip. Normally, we’d…” She chuckled. “Well, like I said, I tried to keep him happy, so we usually had fun making up. We didn’t makeup, though, and we hadn’t made love the whole week before that because he’d been so tired. He’d gotten really out of shape, by then. Not that I minded that–I really didn’t, I’d love him no matter how he looked–but it meant he was too tired for bedroom time after long days at work, while my job energized me. So I was, ah, constantly, ah…”

“DTF?” I volunteered, and she laughed loudly, her cheeks blushing a bright red. A memory of her flushed skin as Tony pounded into her floated to the surface; I viciously pushed it from my mind.

With a snort, she said, “Yeah. It’s nice that… You know, most of the ladies in the neighborhood would be scandalized if I said ‘down to fuck’ around them. I’m glad that I have you to…” She shook her head. “I hope I still do. That we’re still friends after this, I mean.” 

I grunted, unwilling to render a verdict just yet, and she continued her story. “Anyway. We fought over something stupid the night before he left on a trip, and we hadn’t had sex in a week, even though I was pretty much ready to go every night. That next morning, he didn’t tell me he loved me before he left. Didn’t even give me a kiss on the cheek. Hell, he barely spoke to me. Just total disregard. I was mad, just so, so fucking mad at him, and I was horny, and… and Tony tried his luck. I don’t know if he had just been waiting for his shot, but…”

She sighed. “It wasn’t great sex. It almost never was with him; always good, but rarely great. Not like with Lance. But I felt angry, and entitled, and horny, and… And afterward, I just wanted to fucking die, but I also felt so much more relaxed than I had been in months. Like, now that I knew I could never be perfect, I didn’t have to try to be anymore. I wasn’t Superwife. I couldn’t be; how could Superwife cheat on her husband?

“When Lance got back, I put all my energy into making him happy. Thank God that I’d made Tony wear a rubber, so I at least didn’t feel worried that I might give Lance an STD. I fucked Lance into the ground, woke him up with a blowjob every morning, gave him…” She blushed again. “Gave him, ah, something he’d always wanted but hadn’t asked for since we’d dated.”

The notion of a blowjob from those perfect lips, of this suburban sex goddess giving up her virgin ass, made my cock stir. An image forced its way into my mind, one of her kneeling before me, taking me into her mouth, and lubing my dick up with her saliva before moving onto hands and knees and spreading her cheeks for me. I shifted uncomfortably; the real Ella watched me, and I had no doubt she knew what she’d done, intentionally or not.

Ella’s gaze moved briefly to my crotch; then she turned her face away. “Anyway. I gave myself to Lance in every way. Devoted myself to him and our family. Acted like Superwife without feeling the pressure to actually be that, you know? I couldn’t be perfect, but I could fake it, and I did, because Lance deserved the perfect wife. Especially… especially after what I’d done.

“And, a month or so later, when I felt… unloved. Unappreciated. When Lance let his anger with our situation get to him, and when he chose to be angry with me instead of that situation…. Well, that made me angry, too, but I didn’t fight back. I didn’t make things worse between my husband and myself, didn’t make things worse for my family. I didn’t add to his stress. It was easy to fall back on being imperfect. 

“I let myself… be imperfect, let myself get fucked by some asshole I didn’t care about instead of letting my family’s shitty situation and my husband’s shitty reaction to it fuck our lives. The pressure valve of a decent fuck by a fit guy combined with the guilt of being a bad, selfish wife for half an hour gave me the strength to be a great wife, almost the perfect wife, when it really mattered.”

“Bullshit. It’s not… That’s not how it works.”

Ella shrugged. “It’s not how it should work, but it is how it has worked. Two years ago, Lance and I were probably on our way to divorce. Today, my husband is happier than he’s ever been. We have a fulfilling, loving relationship, with more sex than he can handle, in any form he wants it. I’m a mother to his children, doting wife in public, his maid in the home, a chef in the kitchen, and whore in the bedroom. He gets nothing but constant affection and adoration from me. 

“And I do adore him. I really do. I know, no matter what foibles he may have, that I’m lucky to have him. He’s lucky to have me, too, though. Ask any man in this neighborhood whether they’d trade places with him. Some might hem and haw, some might lie or clutch their pearls, but they would.

“I mean, look at me.” She stood up straight and gestured at her gorgeous form. “I’m beautiful and fit, and I stay this way for him. I’m sexually available anytime he wants, and I initiate as much as I can. I handle all the household chores that I’m able to. I’m a goddamned fantasy woman, and they all know it.

“In every way, I can and will do anything for my husband and family, even at the cost of my own self-esteem and happiness. Because let’s be clear: the only satisfaction I really get out of this is from their happiness, other than a pretty good fuck now and again.”

Ella sighed. “I’m not even going to get that anymore, after the shit Tony pulled. Mary told me what you walked in on, but even before I talked to her, I’d told him to hit the road. He threatened to tell Lance, but then I’ll tell his wife–and boy, let me tell you how pissed off I was when I found out he was married after, like, the fifth time we fucked–and he can’t have that.”

Shrugging, she continued, “Doesn’t matter anyways. Things have stabilized with Lance’s business. He has plenty of clients coming in, and he’s cutting back on his hours to spend time with us. I can prune my personal training clients down to the ones that I actually want to keep training, and I won’t need the pressure valve anymore, since I won’t be burning the candle at both ends, and neither will Lance. 

“We can just be the happy couple with the happy kids, and the only lasting harm that there needs to be is the guilt I’m carrying. If…” She nodded at me. “Well, if you can, just let us.”

“Do you think that’s how Lance would see it if he knew?”

Ella shrugged again. “I know it’s not, but he doesn’t have to. That’s the point. The whole neighborhood has kept my secret, our secret, for a year. No drunken slip-ups, no gossiping, no snide comments from the men, none of it. If you hadn’t walked in on Tony and me, you wouldn’t even know.”

The MILF I’d fantasized about from the moment we met walked towards me. She didn’t slink seductively, hips swaying like a runway model, didn’t try to beguile me with her charms. When she laid her hand on my upper arm, it was with a gentle squeeze, not a light touch meant to arouse. Her manner was that of a friend asking for a favor, not a succubus trying to steal my soul. 

That didn’t matter; my body responded just the same. If she’d asked for my soul right then, I might have considered it a bargain. I believed her when she said any of the men in the neighborhood who knew her secret would trade places with her husband. I would have, especially as the arrogant voice whispered in my mind, ‘I could do better than he did. I could have kept her from straying. I wouldn’t have taken her for granted, no matter how bad things got.’

Her cupid bow lips parted, words falling from them in a plaintive tone. “Please, Doug. Please don’t tell him. I know you want to do the right thing, but telling him isn’t the right thing. I love Lance. I love our family. Keep the secret, and I promise that I will spend the rest of my life being everything to him. What I’ve done hasn’t hurt him, not yet. Whether he gets hurt is down to you now. I’m begging you, don’t do that to him.”

Then she smiled sadly, kissed my cheek, and pulled back to look at me. With a chuckle, she licked her thumb and rubbed away the lipstick she’d left behind. “Don’t want people talking, right?” 

I laughed, too, without meaning to. “No, I suppose not.”

She almost responded, but then seemed to think better of it, instead picking up half the stack of chairs I’d come to the garage for. “Get the door? I’ll help you carry them back.”

Lance didn’t seem to notice her absence, or if he did, it didn’t register as anything worthy of his concern. Ella returned to his side, wrapping her arm around his waist and barely sparing a glance backward towards me. 

I watched him for the rest of the party, although I tried to be discreet. Watched all of them, actually, Lance and Ella and their kids. I saw a man completely enamored with his wife and content in his life. He chased Hunter and Zoe around, stole a kiss from Ella when he thought no one was looking–and was usually rewarded with a longer, lingering one in return–and talked and laughed with the older dads. 

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he had the exact life I wanted to be living in a decade. I did know better, though. Ella knew that I knew, too, and every once in a while, she’d glance at me with a brittle, pleading smile, one that said, “Please don’t ruin this. Don’t destroy his happiness, our happiness.”

Bob ambled up to me with two beers in the late afternoon, handing me one. We mostly talked about my business and how it had boomed; he and the others had turned me onto so many new clients that I’d started looking at farming out some of the scut work to a subcontractor. 

During a lull, though, he tipped the neck of his beer at Lance and said, “I hear his is going well, too. Sounds like he’s just about out of the woods. It’s good to see him back out here with his family.” Nothing more overt than that, just a little nudge towards the outcome he, Ella, Mary, and apparently everyone else desired. He’d said everything he needed to, and he knew it. Instead of pressing the point, he held up his empty bottle. “Get you another?”

I shook my head. “No, I think I’m gonna go home. Like I said, work’s backing up, and I need to strike while the iron is hot.” Trying to move away from the subject we danced around, I drawled, in my worst John Wayne impression, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

Bob guffawed at my terrible Duke, then frowned. “Make sure you take the time to enjoy your successes, son. It’s far too easy to forget why we work as hard as we do.” Turning his gaze back to Lance, he continued, “He did, I think, for a while, but now he’s back where he belongs, part of our big, happy family.” Then, shaking himself out of the serious mood, he smiled, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Make a plate before you go. Julia and George are going to have leftovers for days.” College wasn’t so far gone that I’d turn down free food, so I took his advice. 

Ella gave me a small, hopeful wave as I made my way towards the door with my overladen plate, and, after hesitating for a moment, I returned it. She tilted her head to one side as if to ask, ‘So?’

After another few moments, I nodded a few times while wearing a resigned grimace. I would keep her secret.

Excitedly, she mouthed, ‘Really?’

I nodded again and mouthed back, ‘Yes.’ The relieved grin on her face made my heart ache, partly because she was so beautiful, but partly because I felt like I really had sold a bit of my soul to earn it.

It wasn’t her fearful, hopeful manner that decided for me, nor Bob’s words, nor Mary’s, although I’ll admit they all influenced my decision. It was Lance himself. I’d never seen him that relaxed. He always seemed happy around Ella and the kids, but that day, I saw a whole new man, one unburdened by the strain that had weighed him down the entire time I’d known him. 

I understood then that it wasn’t that the people in the neighborhood weren’t his friends; it was that he’d always been too tightly wound to let loose. Lance acted no differently that day at the barbecue than anyone else in the neighborhood, palling around with the other dads, sharing beers and laughs, and taking his turn at the grill. He seemed completely satisfied in his life. He seemed complete. Whatever he and Ella had done to make it through the wilderness, they’d come out the other side together, and he deserved his happiness.

If what Bob said was right, and Lance’s business had finally reached a point where he could be present in his home life more often, and if Ella had told the truth about why she cheated, as seemed likely from what I’d seen with the scumbag; and if everyone else could live with the shameful secret to keep the young family together and happy; then I could, too. I would be Lance’s friend, even though I knew he’d likely hate me if he ever found out what I’d done in the name of that friendship. What we all had done.

I fell asleep easily that night. My conscience wasn’t clear; I don’t think there was any way it could have been, no matter what I’d chosen. I’d made my decision, though, and I made my peace with what it meant for my own sense of myself as an ethical and moral person, as a man, and as a friend. 

Ella filled my dreams. In them, I was the man who had comforted her through the lean times. I was the one that hammered into her cheating cunt, pulled her hair, and made her moan and scream and beg for more. I dreamt she came harder with me than she ever had, with Tony or with Lance or with anyone else. Nameless, shadowy figures milled around in the dreamscape of her bedroom, men and women both, some simply watching with disinterest, others leering at our naked, sweaty, rutting display and masturbating at the spectacle. 

After I awoke, alone in my bed, an empty feeling gnawed at me. I attempted to push it aside first through force of will, then through manual labor, mowing and edging, and doing every single other task I could think of. I tried to tell myself it worked, but the dreams came again the following night, and with them, the empty feeling upon waking.

Monday morning’s work helped me ignore the uneasy emptiness. When the alarm on my phone sounded, telling me to get ready for my workout with Ella, the feeling returned with a vengeance. I told myself once more that I was doing the right thing, or, at any rate, the least bad thing. Everyone agreed. Everyone that I trusted. ‘Doing the right thing is hard,’ I told myself. ‘That’s all this is. Suck it up. Do it for them.’ 

When I saw Ella on the street, I waved a perfunctory wave and gave a perfunctory greeting, then used my work as an excuse to flee before she could move on to discussing anything more serious. I knew that could only work for so long, but by Friday, the dream had ceased to plague my nights. Surely, the empty feeling would follow suit.

In the few days between my discovery and my decision, the neighbors had largely left me alone. During the week after the barbecue, however, they returned in force, usually bearing gifts. The ladies of the neighborhood had always brought over extra cookies or cupcakes or leftovers, but that week they brought amounts that could only be “extra” if they had accidentally tried to feed a football team. 

Their husbands came, too, bringing a strange assortment of offerings. At the low end, Troy Jeffries brought over a spare couple bags of fertilizer leftover from his last round of lawn maintenance. Some of the gifts bordered on the extravagant, though; Sam Henderson handed me a new-in-box current generation game console that he’d planned to give his son if only, and I quote, “my bitch of an ex-wife hadn’t beat me to it.”

That gave me an in to ask his reasoning for keeping the secret. It turned out that he’d been in Ella’s shoes, although his affair fell well into “fling” territory, according to him, and lasted only a couple of weeks. He’d felt guilty about it and swore to himself to never do it again, but that didn’t matter. Someone—he never learned who—told his wife about it months after the fact, and her vengeance destroyed both their lives and his relationship with his kid. He didn’t want to put anyone else through that.

I didn’t learn from all of my neighbors why they chose what they chose, but I learned enough to know that most of them had their own reasons. Some were angry that it dragged on for so long, as Bob had been, but most of them had more of an “in for a penny, in for a pound” attitude towards Ella’s infidelity. “And besides,” most of them told me in some form or fashion, “it’s over now, right? She’s not going to see that Tony asshole anymore, now that Lance’s workload is lighter.”

I skipped my Wednesday workout appointments, too. The alarm on my phone didn’t go off; I’d silenced it by then. It didn’t matter, though, since my internal clock reminded me: ‘Hey, idiot, you’re hungry and restless. Get your ass up, grab a snack, and go work out with your hot neighbor.’ I couldn’t do it, though. Even putting the dreams I’d had of her aside, I couldn’t imagine walking into her living room and not thinking about the way I’d found her getting railed by her theoretically former affair partner.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. At 1 PM on the dot, my doorbell rang, and there stood Ella Jenkins, dressed in her usual workout gear and looking sexy as fuck, even with the mock-irritated scowl on her face. “You gonna keep ghosting me? Because I am not going to be responsible for you getting out of shape, mister.”

“Ella…”

She smiled sympathetically. “I get it, Doug. I do. It’s weird, especially since…” With a sigh, she asked, “Can I come in? I don’t want to do this outside.”

I stepped aside to allow her entrance, then closed the door and followed her to the living room. Our friendship that had developed over the previous year had meant she was always welcome in my home and that she should treat it as her own when visiting, but the way she just barged in and plunked her ass down on my couch miffed me a bit. Things had changed, hadn’t they? How could she act so casually, as if our entire dynamic hadn’t shifted? 

Ella saw the beginnings of the frown on my face. “Doug… Look, if you don’t want to be my friend anymore, I get that. It hurts, but I get it. I don’t want that, though; other than losing Lance, that’s about the worst outcome I can think of from this.” She reached out to touch my hand, but I moved it away. 

Hurt etched her face and laced her voice. “Please don’t. I’m still me, hon. I’m… I’m flawed. Fucked up, even. I know that, and I think… I think maybe you didn’t want to see it before. I know you’ve got a crush on me, and I… if I’m honest, I liked that. Like it. But I thought, beneath that, that we had a real connection.”

“So did I, until I found out…” I shook my head.

“I didn’t hide it from you because I didn’t trust you, Doug. I did it mostly because too many people already knew, and I’ve lived in fear for months that one of them would tell Lance. But also… also because I wanted someone in this neighborhood, someone in my life, to look at me without seeing the big scarlet ‘A.’ I wanted someone who didn’t know I was a cheating slut. Someone who- who saw the ‘me’ I was before that. 

“I never wanted to be put up on a pedestal by Lance or by anyone else, but then I put myself up there at the advice of the women in the neighborhood. Once I fell… I was so glad to meet you. Even with the crush, you still treated me like a human being, and it felt so… comforting, I guess. I didn’t have to be Superwife to Lance, or the slut whose secret a whole damned neighborhood had to keep, or the easy lay that Troy treated me like. 

“With you, I’m just… just ‘Ella, your friend.’” She chuckled. “Maybe, ‘Ella, spank bank entry’ sometimes, too, but you mostly stopped drooling around me after a while, so I tried to just take that as a compliment.” 

Ella fell silent for a few moments, then quietly said, “I’d really like to get back to that with you. If I can’t… okay, I understand, even if  I hate it. But if I can’t, then I at least need to get back to the point where I’m not ‘Ella, the leper,’ because otherwise, this isn’t going to work. Lance is going to figure out something weird’s going on.”

“... Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Then what I need you to do is get into your workout gear and drag your ass down to my house. Fake it til you make it, right? We get back onto the schedule, and maybe–”

“No.”

She tilted her head to one side. “What?”

“No. I can’t…” I sighed. “Look, maybe later, but when I think about going to work out in your house, all I can see is that scumbag fucking you in the middle of your living room. I know, one hundred percent, that if I go over there, and watch you sweat and grunt and strain in your yoga pants and your cutoff shirt…” I shook my head. “If the goal is to get back to ‘normal,’ then we need to change things up, as weird as that sounds.”

Ella slowly nodded as she took in my meaning. “Alright. What if… Hrm, what if we work out here? You don’t have all the equipment, but we could do bodyweight circuits. I’ll still…” She chuckled. “Well, I can’t do much about grunting and sweating and straining, but I also won’t hold it against you if that has, you know, an effect on you. Does that work?”

“I suppose we can give it a shot.”

We did give it a shot, and her body did have an effect on me, and she did let it go unremarked upon. “Awkward” doesn’t even begin to describe that first workout, or the second, or the third. By the fourth, though, my dick minded its own business, and by the fifth, we were back to joking and laughing in between sets. I won’t say that I forgot, but I did move on.

By the time a month had gone by, we were palling around again sometimes. The atmosphere felt different, like a subtle electric charge constantly passing between us, but she also let that go unremarked upon. So did I. I think the others in the neighborhood might have noticed, but Lance didn’t seem to, even when he was there.

After three months had passed, “even when he was there” turned out to be “almost never.” As any small business owner learns, the reward for success is more work. Could Lance have turned some of it away? Maybe. Ella certainly thought so. I didn’t want to side against him, but the extra hours did seem excessive, especially when he had a wife like Ella at home and kids whose childhood he was missing. 

I get it, though, especially now; there’s always another expense coming up. More importantly, after a setback like the one they’d suffered, one that could have led to disaster, a powerful fear can take hold, a fear that there’s just another disaster around the corner. There was, just not the type he thought.

Ella grew increasingly frustrated with her husband. I knew, because of all the conversations we’d had around the subject of what had come before, that she’d often been frustrated but always hid it from him, or at least tried to. However, before she’d had the outlet of Tony and his good-but-rarely-great extramarital dick to fall back on. Without that, she found it difficult to hide her anger, even sometimes from her husband. 

This new Ella–or rather, the old Ella that I’d never seen–didn’t quite badmouth Lance when we hung out together, but she made her irritation known. Beneath those simmering resentments, though, I saw something new every once in a while, a gleam in her eye that I’d never noticed before. Or maybe it had never been there at all; I’d only met Ella after she was getting her needs met outside her marriage. On the occasions that gleam made an appearance, she put me in mind of a caged beast, pacing and growling at the bars as it waited to be fed.

I wish I could say that I saw what was coming. I think, if I’m being honest, that I subconsciously ignored the signs. Like I said, though, outside of the more charged atmosphere between us– which I ascribed to our newly shared secret–and the occasional hunger I saw in her eyes, things seemed like they’d almost gotten back to normal where she and I were concerned.

They hadn’t, though, even if I didn’t realize it. Our lives became further enmeshed as Lance’s travels kept him away from home more often. Hunter, now six, had gone into kindergarten, but Ella would regularly bring Zoe along to hang with “Unca Doug” when we spent time together, and I became a fixture in their home. 

Sometimes, I’d even cook dinner for the family when Lance was out of town. Of the skills the neighborhood women taught me, that ended up developing into a real hobby, and the Jenkins family benefited from my new obsession. Most of them, anyways.

The spot in Ella’s living room where I’d seen her and Tony fucking had largely lost its power over me, although we still worked out in my house; the bodyweight routine turned out to be a great change of pace for her, and coming over to my place gave her another excuse to get out and about. Little Zoe even sometimes joined in, and that gave Ella an idea for a “Yoga For Kids” program.

Between my business, neighborhood events, and Ella’s more prominent place in my life, I scarcely noticed as the conga line of young, single women to and from my front door dwindled first to the occasional minuet and then to night after night of solo interpretive dance. Every weekend, I’d mean to go out to get laid again, but something would come up, and I’d push it off. Besides, I had companionship, even if it wasn’t sexual, and there was plenty of time to get back out there when things slackened up a bit. Right?

Five months after my discovery, Ella knocked on my door. She’d showed up early for our Wednesday workout, but that wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary; we often socialized while I grabbed a snack or made a light lunch for her, Zoe, and myself. Today, though, Zoe hadn’t tagged along, and Ella seemed off. After a quick greeting, she stepped inside, glancing over her shoulder as she did. 

“El? Everything okay?”

She shook her head, frowning. “No. No, it’s not.” Shrugging out of her coat, she continued, “Nothing is okay. Lance… We fought again. Really fought, like back before… well, before.”

“I’m sorry, hon. Is there anything I can do?”

“That’s, um, that’s why I came here early. I- I need to ask just a huge favor from you.” She leaned closer to me, eyes lit up with that wild gleam, now overlaid with something else. Something needful. “You’re the only person I can ask. I wouldn’t, but–”

I interrupted her, pulling away as I did. “Hold up. Why don’t you go make yourself comfortable in the living room, and I’ll get us a couple of drinks. It sounds like you could use one.”

Ella nodded, a small frown on her face. “Yeah. Yeah, I probably do.”

A few minutes later, drinks in hand, I asked, “Where’s Zoe?”

“She’s with Julia. I told her…” She took the proffered Cosmo and sipped at it. “Thanks, that’s… mmm. God, that’s good. Thank you. Anyway, I told her that I needed to talk to you alone today. She’s such a godsend, you know?”

“Yeah, she’s great.” I sat down on the couch, not too close, but not too far, either. “So, what is it you needed to talk to me about? You know you can ask just about anything from me, Ella.”

She bit at her lip. “I know. And, like I said, I wouldn’t but… Well, I talked with some of the other ladies, and they agree this is probably the best option. That you are. That…” Her fingers curled and uncurled, forming themselves into fists and flattening out again. She shivered with nervous energy.

“Hey, it’s okay. Just say it.”

Ella squeezed her eyes shut, took a deep breath, and opened them again. The gleam was still there, but the needfulness had deepened to pleading. “I need… it… again. What I had with Tony, but- but not with Tony. Lance and I are fighting, and I almost took his head off this morning. I need to be… imperfect again. To get fucked and be guilty and save my marriage. And- and I want you to… help me.”

Before I could protest, she pushed through. “Please don’t say no! It makes sense. It does. You care about me and about Lance. I think… I think maybe you even love me. I’m not asking you to say that, and I don’t even mean it as romantic, but as a friend. And I love you, too, that way. Not like I love Lance, but if things…” 

She shook her head. “No, that’s- that’s not what this is about. It’s not about ‘what ifs.’ It’s about what is and what needs to be. You want what’s best for me and for my family. You’ve carried this huge secret for months, even though it pained you. I’ve always been able to rely on you, but these last few months… I’ve come to count on you for- for so much.

“I know you want me, Doug. I want you, too, and I have for a long time. Even before you knew–” She frowned. “–Before you knew what I’d done, I thought about approaching you for this help. I wanted to be with someone I actually liked, that I actually wanted in more than a sexual way. Someone who could be an actual friend with benefits instead of just a guy I fucked.”

Ella scooted fractionally closer; I smelled her shampoo, a melange of floral scents. “I know it’s a lot to ask, another secret to keep, but I promise you that I’ll make it up to you. When I need to get fucked, I’ll… God, I’ll do just about anything you ask. You can make me feel like a dirty little whore, or you can treat me like a lover, or just bang me like one of those sluts you brought home from the clubs. However, you want me, as long as you can help me take the edge off.”

I inclined my head towards her with a chuckle. “And what if I want you when you don’t need to get fucked? What if I need to get laid instead? I get busy at work, and it’s hard to get out there and find some slut that just wants to fuck. If I’ve got you on tap, well…”

Her breath caught. “I, ah, I hadn’t thought about that. But… Yeah. Yeah, what I need… It’s a big ask, like I said. So, yeah, I can do that. I can, um, help you out, too.”

With a snort, I asked, “Would it be that much of an imposition?”

The hottest MILF I’d ever met leaned in closer and purred, “Nnno, I suppose not. I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. I’d be lying if I said that… Well, if you had asked before, back when I was still fucking Tony, I probably would have. It would have made my life a lot simpler. I just didn’t think you’d be so eager.” Her hand moved to my knee, then upwards. She squeezed gently. “But you’ve always been eager, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. From that first day we met. Have you? Honestly?”

“Always?” She grinned. “No. Not always. But for a long time, yeah. I’ve seen how you look at me, and it gets me so wet that I have to change after we work out. I’ll let you in on a little secret, too: the last maybe eight, nine months with Tony? I wished he was you.”

I brushed a strand of hair from her face. “You said that you talked to some of the others? Our neighbors? Who?”

“Oh, Julia, Mary, a few others. They know… Well, everyone knows what a good friend you’ve been to me, and they all appreciate that you kept my secret. Our secret, all of ours. They trust you to keep this one, too.” Ella chuckled again. “Like you said, if you’ve got me on tap…”

With a sheepish nod, I agreed, “Yeah. But what about the others? The ones you didn’t talk to?”

She sighed. “They’ll come around. I’ve talked to Kathy, and, well, Bob’s going to be pissed, but she’s sure she can get him to see my- our point of view.”

“Better the devil you know?”

Ella bit her lip sensually, eyes half-lidded, “Mmm, yeah. The devil I know. Maybe not biblically yet, but I want to fix that.” My cock jumped in my pants, and she let out a soft moan. “Fuck, it’s as nice as I thought, too.” 

My fantasy woman leaned in towards me, lips parted, eyes closed, and I didn’t stop her. Ella’s tongue probed between my lips, and her hand squeezed and stroked at my dick. She took my hand and put it between her legs, moaning as my fingers touched the damp fabric and felt the heat radiating behind it.

Breaking free, I gasped, “What about Lance?”

Ella’s panting turned her reply to a husky whisper. “Lance won’t know. He doesn’t need to. I’ll love him like I always have. I’ll just love you, too. Not in the same way, but… Mmm, God, baby, I’ll give you more than you can handle.”

“Will you let me go bareback? What if I want to cum in your slutty little married cunt?” The moan this provoked came long and loud, my friend with potential benefits nodding her head desperately as she writhed beneath my touch. 

Ella had cheated on her husband before, so any vows she’d made had already been broken. Our neighbors had kept her secret, and I’d kept all of theirs; they’d look the other way for this, too, I was certain. Her clueless husband would never find out; I could fuck his wife every single day if I wanted.

He wouldn’t stop me. Our neighbors wouldn’t stop me. Ella would never even think to stop me. No one would stop me.

No one but me.

Between my lust and my anger, I almost didn’t get the words out. “What if I get married? Will you still be my little cheating slut if I want you?”

Her half-closed eyes fluttered for a moment. “Oh, fuck, yes.”

My hand moved away from her crotch. “And what if there’s another recession, and I have to work like Lance does to support my family? Will you make sure my wife’s taken care of the way you want me to take care of you?”

“Wh- what?”

I snarled, “Will you help her cheat on me like the rest of our neighbors helped you cheat on Lance? Will you cover for her? Will they? Maybe find a nice young man to give her what I don’t have the time to?”

Ella stared at me, her voice trembling, “Doug, I would never… You’re my friend. I’d never do that to you.”

“Like Lance is everyone’s friend? Like they’d never do this to him?”

“Doug–”

I shook my head. “Stop. I covered for you before because you ended things with Tony, and I couldn’t see any good coming from telling him. But this…” My face turned away from her perfect body, now disgusted with my fantasy girl rather than enamored. “No. I won’t be part of it. Of any of it.”

Fear in her voice mixed with anger and the remnants of her need. “What does that mean?”

I sighed, just so fucking tired of all this. “Tell him. About Tony, about the secrets we’ve kept, about all of it. Stop cheating on him, and stop making me party to your infidelity.”

“I can’t tell him!”

I locked eyes with Ella and saw tears threatening to fall from them. “You will, or I will.” She gasped, then sobbed, and streaks of mascara painted her apple cheeks. I softened my tone. “Tell him, Ella. This… What you’re doing, what you offered me, isn’t love, no matter how you try to justify it to yourself.”

She shrieked, “I can’t!”

I stood, pulling her to her feet. She tried to hang off me, but I wouldn’t let her play the damsel-in-distress anymore. After all but dragging her to the front door, then draping her coat back across her heaving shoulders, I allowed myself–I allowed both of us–a moment of tenderness. 

Dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, I said softly, “If you really love him, do this. Tell him. Find a way forward if you can. But you have to tell him, or I will. I can give you until Sunday night, but if you haven’t told him by then…”

Ella looked at me in horror, then in rage. I opened the door and pointed. Her face twisted into a snarl as if to berate me, but I quietly ordered, “Out,” and the words died on her lips. My friend turned away from me and left my home for good.