Thankfully, the trial was little more than a formality. I walked from the courthouse a free man, albeit a man with a heavy cloud over his head. I was cleared of the grievous bodily harm of my girlfriend by a jury of five men, four women and three non-binaries. The accusation levelled at me by the prosecution was that I had set out to purposely and maliciously cause traumatic head injuries to my girlfriend. My defence was that it was a sex game gone wrong, accidental injury by misadventure.
Luckily for me there was no way that the jury could have avoided my story in the media before the trial. Let me start by explaining a little about myself. I'd reunited with and started dating my childhood sweetheart back in 2035 and had four relatively happy years living together. I say 'happy', there were the usual ups and downs, she'd had three affairs already which I was less than enthused about. In fact, if I were pushed, I might go as so far as to call her bit of a hussy, if you'd pardon my French. I'm sorry for using such profane language but sometimes my anger issues get the better of me.
Even more annoyingly, she did little to hide her indiscretions. It almost felt as if she'd wanted to get caught. The last time I caught her, she was in bed with a man on a Saturday afternoon, when I wasn't even at work! Obviously, I apologised for bursting in the door and disturbing them, then swiftly left the room in embarrassment. Outside the door, I'd had a second thought and politely knocked my way back in to ask if I could watch...
"No!" she snapped, "Get the fuck out!"
"Okay, sorry," I said, rather peeved, and went to the kitchen to bake some blueberry muffins. 'Freshly baked muffins would be lovely,' I thought, 'but I hope HE doesn't hang around too long afterwards.'
That night I confronted my girlfriend in the strongest possible terms and asked her why she felt the need to have repeated affairs. She told me that I wasn't sexually adventurous enough and that she was bored and would leave me unless I changed. I took heed of this warning and hatched a plan to spice up our marriage. I am a big, big fan of classic literature so obviously, I'd read all fifty books of the '50 Shades' series. I decided to work in some of that excitement into our conjugal relations. When she arrived home from work the following Friday I had everything in place. I had purchased a ball gag for her and a blindfold for myself. I'd set up a camera to record our exhilarating tryst and perhaps, hopefully one day, show our grandchildren how I met their grandmother.
After the formalities of foreplay which consisted of me performing cunnilingus on her while she flicked herself off watching gay porn (that was her thing), I introduced the ball-gag and blindfold. I fornicated her from behind while she was on all-fours, in what I now know to be termed the 'doggy style'. Everything was going tickety-boo until I suddenly realised that her body had gone limp and I felt like I was shagging a bag of potatoes. I instantly took off my blindfold and, to my horror, witnessed what looked like an axe attack crime scene.
Blood from my girlfriend's head covered the wall and the bed. In my over-zealous enthusiasm, and with all my love, I had been slamming her head-first into the brick wall. I did hear her muffled moans through the gag but I thought those were moans of pleasure, not agony. 'Oh, my God, what have I done?' I took the gag out, cleared her airways and called 9119991120145145 for an ambulance. Luckily, the ambulance arrived before I'd finished dialling.
Tipped off by the ambulance crew, the police came to investigate. They treated my house like a crime scene and I was in hot water for interfering with potential evidence. It was a nightmare and I thought that things couldn't get any worse. The police took, as evidence, the video of our sexual misadventure. 'At least that will save me', I thought to myself. Somehow... and I don't want to point fingers at the police because, despite the fact that they held me for a week, beat me and clearly tried to stitch me up, despite all of that, I still believe the police do a remarkable job... but somehow, someone at the police station released the video of what had happened onto the web.
I watched it myself for the first time and was quite pleased with how slim I looked from the side, which was some consolation out of this tragic event, I suppose. It was a spectacle to behold mind you, my girlfriend on all-fours and gagged, me behind her pumping her ass, blind-folded with my head moving in the air like a blind keyboard player as I tried to 'see' what was happening with my ears. I genuinely thought she was moaning and groaning in pleasure, even though the only moaning I'd ever experienced from her was the annoying type of, daily basis, moaning. Perhaps, in retrospect I should have been a little more cautious. What I had thought was an orgasmic leg shake, was in fact, as I was later told by a medical professional, actually a reaction of the spinal cord triggered when the brain was shutting down. Her leg kick was not a sexual climax but, rather ironically, the biggest anti-climax of her life as her brain was dying. I was so bad in bed that I had literally put her into a coma.
The video went viral and within a week practically everyone on the planet had seen it. I was an international laughing stock. People were selling t-shirts which said 'Shag her like Sherman' and 'This is what you get for moaning, you bitch'.
'Not tonight Dear, I've got a bloody headache' was another one I read on a t-shirt, which I thought was particularly unnecessary. Daily life was becoming unbearable as people on the street would do an exaggerated hip thrust gesture at me and laugh when they recognised me so I stayed indoors until the trial.
The trial was not stressful because of the legalities and my possible incarceration but it was stressful because of the sniggering and innuendo which the judiciary seemed all too willing to indulge in. Whatever about the process, the outcome was a good result for me as I was cleared of any wrongdoing. I had cleared my name in the eyes of the law but to everyone else I was known as 'Shag 'er Hard Sherman.' It was not a pleasant situation to have been in but I felt even sorrier for my girlfriend who was lying in intensive care for the past year.
One of the conditions of my bail, before and during the trial, was that I was not allowed to visit my girlfriend or to even set foot in the hospital. Once I was cleared, my lawyer told me that the ban was lifted and I was free to visit her. The day after the trial I went to the hospital. Ironically, before this life-changing event this was the hospital where she worked as a nurse. Now she was a patient in the intensive care unit along with the other 'braindead mongs' as she would have so eloquently put it herself, were she still alive. Well, she was alive, but couldn't talk...or think...probably... One of us was at peace though, and I felt very guilty for feeling that way, under the circumstances.
My personal ID card gained me as far as the intensive care wing but I was stopped and confronted at reception by the matron who had recognised me from my viral video and refused to let me pass any further. An altercation started as I attempted to burst my way in and the matron ended up falling back onto her arse and screaming so loudly that I'm surprise she didn't wake any of the patients up from their comas. She obviously had thought the worst about me having heard my reputation. I paused to help her to her feet and I was suddenly grabbed from behind by hospital security. A male voice addressed me:
"What the devil is going on here?"
I recognised the handsome fellow's face as the man who had been having sex with my girlfriend, in our bed that time I'd walked in on her. He looked more modest than the time I'd seen him naked in my bed and, by the way he was dressed, I deduced that he was probably a doctor, although that was mostly based on the stethoscope around his neck. I instantly realised what was going on and that my girlfriend had been having an affair with her colleague, the doctor. 'A doctor?' I thought, 'well done you!', inexplicably proud of her high standards. But I wasn't surprised, she did always like to aim high.
