Sunday 30th December 2018, mid-evening
“Wish me luck. Now for part two. I’ve got to go and talk to Callan.”
That’s what she’d said as she’d hurriedly finished dressing. I’d not had a chance to react or say anything before Jill was down the stairs and out the house. I closed my eyes, hardly able to believe the whirlwind of emotions I was being put through today. The nervous tension of the conversation with Jill, when she’d told me how she still loved me, but that what I’d done had changed everything. But that she wanted to work together to fix things.
And then this – Jill heading out the door to have a heart-to-heart with a guy who until recently I mainly thought of as one of our best friends. But who now was front and center in my mind as the man who Jill had loved before she’d known me. The man who I’d only won Jill away from by subterfuge and trickery. A trickery that had finally come back to haunt me twenty-five years later. The man whose baby Jill had been carrying, the baby she’d had terminated, leaving him a man who’d never known the life-defining experience of parenthood.
My eyes stayed screwed shut for a long time, as I tried to come to terms with this latest kick in the gut. Something that was all the more difficult to deal with as I had no reference point, no idea of how far the talk with Callan would go. If Jill had gone to Malcolm’s, I always knew pretty much what would happen.
But with Callan and Jill, I had no idea. Would the conversation stop with a simple ‘I’m really sorry, Dave had no right to do that, but we are where we are, let’s just all try and stay good friends?’ Maybe with a side-order of ‘yes I’m sorry, but you were the one who dumped me and broke my heart, get over it.’
But however much I tried to persuade myself this might be all Jill would say to Callan, I knew in my heart that this wasn’t Jill. She could never be this closed and calculating with a good friend, let alone with a guy who was both a good friend and someone she’d once loved deeply. I knew in my heart she’d inevitably feel a need to unburden herself about the unborn baby that she’d terminated. That without this act of confession she’d not feel even halfway whole, never be able to look Callan in the eye or retain a meaningful friendship with him.
Jill must have left a little before six, and she normally arrived at the club at around eight to nine this left me wondering what her plans were – whether her need to be at the club would bookend the time she had to talk to Callan or whether she’d call in and take a personal day.
What do they say? Waiting’s always the worst. Those words seemed etched into my brain by a powerful and painful industrial acid that evening. Or maybe carved in with the bluntest and most rusty of pocket knives. Whatever the metaphor, it was hard as hell to sit there at home, once again alone, wondering what was happening between Jill and her one-time boyfriend Callan. Conjuring in my mind all kinds of imagined scenes and outcomes – the ones that came to me naturally never-ending well, only counterbalanced by my rational mind’s much more two-dimensional monochrome happy endings. One a deeply felt and painful fear, the other an artificial and manufactured happy ending to cheer me up.
As I sat there stewing in my suffering, squeezing my hands and feeling my empty ring finger, I briefly toyed with calling or visiting Veronica, before remembering she’d be at work. So, the only practical thing I could think to do was to drive by the clubs and see if I could spot Jill’s car outside. (Strangely, this felt acceptable and less intrusive, whereas I told myself doing the same cruise by on Callan’s place would be a betrayal of Jill’s trust – the very thing that had gotten me into this mess all those years ago.)
Just over an hour later, I was back at home, with the unhappy realization that Jill had blown off work and was almost certainly still round at Callan’s place. I never thought I’d have felt happy to know that Jill was at the clubs with Malcolm – but that’s how I felt that Sunday evening. Malcolm, the lesser of two evils. How had my life, my marriage come to this?
However hard I tried, whatever distraction I came up with, none of them were the equal of the vivid, technicolor images that surfed into my brain one after the other. I’d seen so many real images of Jill with other guys over the last year, my brain had plenty of material to photoshop, to come up with pictures of what might be happening between Jill and Callan as I sat there imagining the worst.
I pictured them together doing all manner of things. From the relatively simple act of just talking or reminiscing, through the painful thought that maybe they’d talk about what the child they’d never known might be like. Through to the possible rekindling of their love, which had once burned so bright, now relit by the thoughts of what might have been. These thoughts and their shared memories of love driving them back into each other’s arms, kissing and looking deep into each other’s eyes. Moving on to clothes hungrily ripped aside so they could once again feast on each other's bodies. Eyes inquisitively seeing how the years had treated them, comparing each other to their more youthful college-aged selves, no doubt each pleased that the years had passed without leaving too much of a mark. Memories giving way to current lust and need and touching, two sets of hands roaming and caressing and squeezing.
Until finally the inevitable would happen, and Jill and Callan would be reunited as lovers, just as they’d been long before Jill ever knew me as a friend or boyfriend or husband. Their two bodies writhing together in passion and lust, reliving their glory days from all those years ago, the memories almost as sweet as the real here-and-now pleasure they’d each be feeling. Jill enjoying anew the feeling of Callan’s long thick cock stretching her wide as time after time he plunged in and out of the depths of her body. Moaning and sighing, calling out his name as she wrapped him tight between her arms and legs, making sure that once escaped he was going nowhere this second time around. As Callan for his part enjoyed the soft skin and ripe femininity of Jill’s body, savoring the snug and moist heat of her pussy – comforting, enveloping, and stimulating every nerve-ending in his impressive and ramrod hard cock.
My mind spent the whole of that evening torn between terrible images like this and considering the long-term impact of these two age-old secrets on Jill and my life. Our life had been complicated enough before this, and these latest revelations might test our love and marriage beyond what even we could cope with.
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It was just before two a.m. when I saw the headlights of Jill’s car sweep up the drive. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, thinking how despite the torment I’d been through these last hours I needed to play it cool.
When Jill walked in through the doors, aside from looking tired and a little puffy-eyed she looked very similar to when she’d left eight hours ago. Our eyes met as she hung up her keys by the front door and then with a sad look she spoke.
“I’m sorry if it hurts you, honey. But after everything that’s happened, after what you did to him, after what I did to him, it just felt right. To start rebuilding, undoing some of the injustices, some of the hurt and pain.”
I couldn’t argue with Jill – the sum total of what we’d done together was a terrible hurt caused – but nonetheless, I felt sick to my core as Jill’s words sank in. Without spelling it out in so many words, she was telling me that yes, she had slept with Callan. And more frighteningly what she was also hinting at was that it wasn’t going to be one-off. Jill rarely if ever used words carelessly – and her use of the words ‘to start rebuilding’ told me that in her mind at least tonight between her and Callan wasn’t a mere one-off.
And just as I knew Jill was never careless with words, so Jill also knew that I always listened hard to parse and understand every nuance of what she meant. So, with our eyes still locked together Jill could see the sadness and the fear in my eyes, as she tried to read whether I would object or give-in to the future she was hinting at.
It was already late and this tense and traumatic evening ended in the most surreal of ways. As we turned off the lights and headed upstairs, Jill turned on the stairs and kissed me. “Take me to bed, honey. I need you to hold me.”
And that’s how we drifted off to sleep. Spooning and snuggling together, Jill at first restless before her tiredness from an evening with her ex-boyfriend finally won out and I was left listening to the steady cadence of her sleepy breathing. It was maybe another hour or so before I was able to find sleep. The mix of the images in my head and the aroma of Callan’s aftershave, still lingering in Jill’s hair and on her skin the perfect combination to stoke my fears and stop me sleeping. Once I was sure Jill was asleep, I extricated myself and took my pillow down to the sofa; where I slipped into a fitful sleep.
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That was how December 31st kicked off in the Foster household.
If Jill and my marriage had been congested and overpopulated before Christmas, as things moved into 2019 our social calendar started to feel like the arrivals and departures board at a Greyhound bus station. Finding time for Jill and me became a major logistical exercise, taking me right back to when we had three teenagers at home. When scheduling all the sports, social and extra-curricular pick-ups and drop-offs had needed a large sheet of paper on the Fridge as the family organizational bible for the week.
It was like one of those spy-thriller movies where the walls are pressing in from all sides. Jill’s job and relationship had been the two walls pressing in on our time together pre-Christmas. But that now felt positively idyllic and luxurious compared to how 2019 was shaping up. Two extra walls added and pressing in – Jill’s rekindled relationship with Callan and the not unreasonable requests from my new employers that I find a couple of days a week to be physically on-site in their L.A. headquarters.
It took us a few weeks to work it out and get into a new rhythm, but we eventually stumbled on a routine that sort of worked for us, at least as well any routine could work with so many demands on Jill and my time.
Jill still had Monday and Tuesdays as her days off and I made sure to be in Miami, now always able to work from home as Oasis didn’t have an office here in Miami. These two days were still the bedrock of the time Jill and I got to spend together. Then on Wednesday mornings, I’d head off to L.A. on the 6 AM early flight, spending Wednesday and Thursday nights in L.A. before heading back just after lunchtime on Friday, getting me back in Miami around nine-thirty on Friday night.
While I was in L.A., aside from working, Jill split her time between Callan and Malcolm. Wednesday nights stayed as one of Jill’s ‘Malcolm nights’, but with me now away on Thursday nights, instead of being in our family home Jill spent Thursday night sleeping over at Callan’s.
When we’d gradually morphed into this new schedule, I’d tried to persuade Jill (and through her Malcolm) to switch things around so that I’d see some more of Jill at the weekend. But claiming pressure and busyness at work, both of them held firm and insisted we leave things unchanged, with Jill still sleeping over with Malcolm on both Friday and Saturday nights.
And as if all of this wasn’t enough for our marriage to cope with, Luther was slowly pushing forward with his brainwave idea of ‘www.hotwifejanencuckydan.com’. He’d recorded and shared with me at least three other videos of Jill with Malcolm and some other guys, the only blessing being that as far as I knew the website wasn’t yet live to the general public. I could view the beta site, but it seemed Luther wanted to build a bigger pool of content before he launched. Either that or it was another part of his cat and mouse game with me, keeping me dangling there wondering when I had to start worrying about our friends and neighbors accidentally seeing Jill’s new career – interracial porn starlet.
By the end of January that was the pattern, we were living in. Sometimes I closed my eyes, so confused at the Kaleidoscope of relationships that was now our lot. A year and a half ago we’d had the most normal and conventional of marriages, and here we were living a life that would have been a good plot for a day time soap – all the ins and outs of different people in different beds, all the revolving doors of different relationships.
There were so many changing dynamics and changing relationships, that’s why I so often felt disoriented and confused – and all of this happening side-by-side with me trying to navigate the new relationships and people in my new job.
In these moments of confusion, I sometimes had to look at the ring which Jill had returned to my finger to convince myself that this wasn’t all some bad dream and that we were still together as a couple, despite all that had happened and all of the complexities of the other people involved in our lives.
Amongst all of this confusion and chaos, the relationship that I found most difficult to deal with was Jill’s newly re-kindled relationship with Callan. After the long-ago problems between him and Charlotte and Jill, through coaching our kids and other social circles Callan and Charlotte had both become some of the best friends we had. The kids looked upon them virtually as family – Uncle Callan and Aunty Charlotte – and yet Jill was now in a burgeoning romantic relationship with the guy who’d been her long-time boyfriend at college.
Because of their previous closeness, and the more recent close friendships between all four of us, Callan and Jill’s growing relationship had a totally different dynamic and feel to it than what she’d had with Chris and now had with Malcolm. Given the history, they shared, even at the get-go whenever I’d see them together or hear Jill talk about what they did I picked up a closeness that truly troubled me.
Whenever I’d seen Jill with Chris, I knew that even if they were close and they loved each other, I was always the one who truly held Jill’s heart. It was like I’d loaned her body and her heart to another guy – but always as a game, a temporary game which we both enjoyed – a game that would end when Jill came home.