April Fools Phone Pran

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Author's Note

This was a story I wrote quickly just to prove to myself that I can still write something with less than a hundred thousand words.

This story did not go to my usual beta-reading and editing team, so all mistakes are mine alone.

You may not copy this story off of this site. You may not use this story as screen-read audio on a YouTube video. I will file a copyright strike. You may not use this story to train any AI or machine-learning construct.

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Last Christmas, my wife Melissa and I re-upped our cell phone contract and with that, we both got identical new phones. They were the latest and greatest Apple Phone with "AI features". This was not a big deal for me because I rarely used mine. This was a major event for my wife Melissa, however.

She is a very social creature, and her phone was the center of her social life. Between texts, emails, social media, and something called Discord, she kept in contact with everything and everyone.

"Please Peter," begged Melissa. "I want to spend a little extra to get this phone. It is my lifeline to the entire universe and I want to have the top-model for once."

After we came home from the store, her phone rarely left her hand. She confessed to me that her new phone was one of the greatest gifts she'd ever received.

Knowing this, on April Fools' day, my nine-year-old and six-year-old daughters decided to have some fun at our expense. They switched the cases on our phones and deliberately swapped their positions in their charging trays.

That was why when Melissa and I left the house the next morning, I had Melissa's phone in my pocket and she had mine in her purse. They got us good.

I never noticed. As I said, I only use my phone if there is an emergency. Melissa, however, figured it out just after she got to work. She called my office from her own and chewed me out for three minutes or so for picking up the wrong phone before we figured out that the cases being swapped meant our precious little daughters successfully pranked us both. She was surprisingly apologetic afterwards. Transparently, this was to butter me up.

My job was managing a team of software engineers who all work remotely, so I have a lot of latitude to step out of the office when I need to. Melissa's job, however, is managing three teams of workers at the HemaFast blood bank, which serviced the nine hospitals in the Tri-State area. Unlike me, she must be in the office when she is on duty. She asked me to make the twenty-five minute drive from my office to hers to swap our phones back.

That day, however, I couldn't. I was stuck in the office because our hosting platform vendor was having a critical infrastructure outage and we were pulling out all the stops to keep our biggest customer online. I apologized to my wife, and told her why I couldn't. She wasn't pleased, but she knew it wasn't my fault.

By three in the afternoon, I knew I was going to be late home from work. I called Melissa at her office and told her I wouldn't be home before seven. She groused, but again recognized it was out of my control.

In a minor miracle, I actually stepped through the door to my house fifteen minutes earlier than my estimate. Being a Thursday night and a school night, I expected my kids to be at the kitchen table doing their homework, and my wife scrambling to get ready for her ladies' night out. She had a group of friends she'd known for years. On Thursdays, they went out for a few drinks at a wine bar and then went to Jane's house where they played cards until midnight. They'd been doing that for years.

When I got home, I was surprised to find the house dark and empty. I called my wife at her office and she answered on the first ring. A train accident filled all of the local hospitals. Her regular night staff was a skeleton crew and they were overwhelmed with demand to dispatch units of blood. She called in an emergency shift. Whenever an emergency shift is deployed, the policy at HemaFast was that the on-call manager had to be on-site. Melissa just so happened to be the on-call manager that week, so she had to stay in the office until a coworker would relieve her at midnight.

Knowing that I was stuck in the meeting from hell, she called her mother and had her take the kids for the night.

She begged me to bring her phone to her. "I've got nothing to do," she complained. "My teams don't want me screwing anything up, so they won't let me help. I'm dying here without my phone, Peter. Please bring it to me!"

I needed to run out to get dinner anyway, so I agreed to bring the phone to her.

When I got into the car, I popped the phone into the cradle on the dash. When I turned the car on, the phone flashed awake and said, "Suggested Destination: Sandals Tiki Bar. Light traffic. Expected arrival 7:20."

It took me a second to realize her phone was predicting, based on the time and the date, that she'd be heading off to the Sandals Tiki Bar. This was damned peculiar, because her ladies group always went to the Grape Escape, which was only five minutes from our house, not across town to Sandals Tiki Bar.

I idly wondered how many times you'd have to go to a destination to have it suggested by the iPhone. I was trying to figure that out when a text message popped up on the screen. The text was from "Creston Medical Services. It read "Candlewood room 320". No sooner had the messaging notification disappeared when the next one came up. It was a picture of a hotel bed with the covers pulled down. The sheets were covered with rose petals. The text attached to the picture read, "Can't wait. Send ETA."

"Fuck!" I said out loud, There was no denying what that meant.

I decided I needed to find out more. I tried to open her phone. The Facial ID didn't work for me, which was unexpected. The sales clerk at the store laboriously helped us set up alternate appearances so we could access each other's phones using facial ID. That my face didn't work meant she disabled my access. I typed in her passcode instead and it didn't work either. The fact that she'd removed me from her phone, more than anything else, convinced me Melissa was having an affair.

My mind raced and I came up with a plan. I put the car into gear and I drove a few miles to my sister-in-law's town home. Melissa's younger sister Taylor was pretty filthy-minded and she loved to be in on a practical joke. I knocked on her door. "Peter!" she said. "What brings you here?"

I explained to Taylor how the kids pranked us by switching our phones. She thought this was great and, as predicted, laughed her ass off. "I want to prank Melissa too, but I need your help," I said.

"What do you want to do?" she asked.

"Have you ever seen the 'Wood on the bed' picture?" I asked. "I want to set it as her Home Screen picture.

With her own phone, she googled the picture and ended up laughing her ass off. She laughed so hard, she squealed.

"How can I help you do this?" she asked excitedly.

"I need you to unlock her phone." I said.

When we'd first gotten the phones, Melissa and Taylor discovered that they looked close enough to each other to fool the facial ID. Once I got Taylor to unlock Melissa's phone with her face, I knew Melissa had a note in the notes app which contained all of her passcodes. I warned her that this list was a serious security vulnerability, but she ignored my advice. It would work to my advantage now.

I held the phone up for Taylor. She got in. I went straight to notes. Again, I was asked for facial recognition. I held the phone up again for Taylor and I got to the notes app. Her passcode to her phone was the same with a different trailing digit. It was easy to remember.

In front of Taylor, I reset the desktop image to be 'Wood on the Bed'. I locked the phone and handed it to her. "You try it," I said.

She used Facial ID to open the phone and boom, the screen was filled with 'Wood on the Bed'. Taylor laughed so hard that she squealed again.

"Thanks for making me a part of this," she enthused.

"I'm going to go take this to her," I said.

As soon as I got back in my car, I unlocked the phone to read the text messages. There were precisely two messages from 'Creston Medical Services'. They were the ones I'd already seen. I guessed that Melissa was deleting the messages as they went along. I went into the trash folder and there were over a dozen messages from 'Creston Medical Services' there. All were from the previous two days.

The oldest one, sent at 7:00 AM yesterday morning, read, "My Telegram password got locked out. Will use text instead of Telegram."

I jumped to read the latest one, which had been sent and deleted at 11:00 PM the previous night. It read, "We have been lovers in spirit for some time. By this time tomorrow, we will be lovers in body as well as in spirit. Don't lose courage! I want to skip Sandals and go straight to the hotel. I will text you the room number tomorrow."

My stomach roiled.

I started to restore all of those messages one-by-one. After about the fifth one, the iPhone presented me with a screen that said, "I see that you are trying to restore recently deleted items. Do you wish to restore all of them?"

I clicked on the "Yes" button. After a minute. I got a report that showed 19 texts, 12 emails, 200 Telegram messages, and 10 photos were restored. Melissa had done some serious cleaning last night.

Each item was hyperlinked, I clicked on a hyperlink for the restored photos and it was a mix of dick pics from some guy and selfies from Melissa. Melissa's selfies were bathroom mirror shots. In most of them, she was in lacy underwear and the picture was Melissa from the neck down. In the final two photos, however, she was fully naked with her face showing. One showed her front and the other showed her ass with her looking over her shoulder and smiling.

My blood practically boiled.

The dick pics were nothing impressive. It was a standard issue white guy's circumcised cock. It was clear that his wasn't as big as mine. I had him on both length and girth. What ever this affair was about, it wasn't about seeking out a monster cock. I thought to myself, "Thank God for small favors."

I then looked at the emails. The emails were exchanges between Jane and Melissa. Jane was Melissa's best friend and was begging her to knock off fooling around with some guy named "Ryan Creston."

Jane wrote, "You will ruin your marriage and it will devastate Peter. You know that Ryan is a lothario and he is on the make. He is playing a game of chance while using your marriage as the stakes. He doesn't really care about you and he will ruin your life. Don't be a fool! Don't do it!"

Melissa's reply said it all: "It will be just this one time and Peter will never know. I know Ryan's a lothario, but not with me. The friendship we have is real. I've looked into his eyes and I know I'm not just another conquest to him.

"Even if I am nothing more than a notch on his belt, I want to do this. He is just so damned sexy! For just once in my life, I want to know what it is like to be Cinderella dancing with the prince at the ball. I don't want to spend the rest of my life wondering what might have been if I turned him down. I promise you, it will be just the one time and Peter will never know."

I sighed. Jane's heart had been in the right place to oppose Melissa's self destruction, but she fell short because the most productive thing she could have done was warn me and she didn't.

I ran a search on the phone for the name "Ryan Creston". A bunch of work emails popped up. In a few minutes of skimming the emails, I discovered that Ryan Creston was the account rep for a major national medical supply company. He'd become the account manager for HemaFast four months ago and had been making bi-weekly sales calls. She's signed two very large contracts with him in the last month.

I also looked at her Linked In. She was linked with Ryan Creston. His bio on Linked In said he was married with a kid. Not three days ago, she'd endorsed him for his contact management, sales, and professionalism skills.

The telegram messages were their primary means of private communication. I skimmed a sampling of them. The earliest ones were simple exchanges of dates and times for meetings away from the office.

Starting about three months ago, they began to eat lunches together at swanky places a couple of times a week. No doubt, he paid for those on an expense account.

Starting six weeks ago, they began to meet at Sandals Tiki bar for drinks on Thursday nights. She skipped drinks at the Grape Escape with her friends and would drink with Creston at the Tiki Bar instead. Afterwards, she would show up to Jane's place and join the card games late to launder her nights out with Asshole.

Their later messages to each other were flirty and seductive. The last twenty messages or so openly discussed the possibility of infidelity.

I started to forward all of these messages to my email by using copy and paste. Again, the phone popped up a message. "I see you are forwarding all of these messages to email. Do you want me to do this for you?"

I clicked, "Yes" and a minute later, I had all of the message history in my emails account. I did the same with the photos and the emails.

I was trying to figure out what to do next, when another text came in. It was a dick pick with the text, "ETA, please. I'm dying here."His dick was so erect it was purple.

I texted back: "On the way. Held up at office due to train accident. Be there by 9:00 PM. I didn't get dinner. I'm having food delivered to the hotel just before I arrive. They said you'll have to go down to the lobby to pick it up. Can you cover me? I'll pay you back when I get there."

I had enough time to get some food before I headed over there. At my favorite pizza shop, I bought a large Pepperoni and a bottle of soda to go. I paid one of the idle drivers twenty bucks in cash for his store hat.

I ate two of the slices in the parking lot of the hotel and drank the soda. I walked into the lobby holding the pizza box with the hat on.

I approached the front desk. "Can you call the guy in room 320 and tell him his pizza is here?"

I walked over to the waiting area of the hotel and found a secluded spot. A few minutes later, a young white guy stepped off the elevator wearing track pants and a wife-beater tee shirt. He saw me in the waiting area and made a bee line for me.

As Ryan Creston approached, I took stock of him. He was shorter than me with a slight build. He looked like a dancer rather than a contact-sport athlete. I was four inches taller and I had fifty pounds of muscle on him. He was in the kind of shape you only got with a lot of time in the gym working out on isolation machines while staring into mirrors.

I had the kind of shape that comes from doing the Daily Sixteen every day without fail for fifteen years. The Corps got me in the habit of doing the Daily Sixteen when I was an eighteen year old recruit and I never lost the habit.

He was the opposite of intimidating to me. As he came closer, I could see that he was six or seven years younger than Melissa and I. He had the kind of almost-feminine fine-featured looks that I associated with a young Rob Lowe.

When he got to me, he suddenly blanched. He recognized me and physically cringed. "Sit down, Asshole, or I'll make you sorry you were ever born," I said quietly.

He sat instantly.

"You recognize me, then?" I asked.

"You're Melissa's husband," he said. "I've seen your picture in her office."

"That's right," I replied. "It's good that you know that already. God help me, I don't know what I would have done if I had to explain it to you. Just murdering you would have been a hell of a lot easier than doing that."

Ryan started to rise up in a panic, but I pressed my hand back on his shoulder.

"Sit your ass back down, Asshole," I said with a quiet growl. "We're not done talking."

When he sat back down. I continued. "Melissa isn't coming tonight. The games you are playing with my wife are over, Creston. Understand that?"

He nodded. He caved immediately.

"I know you'll dump her now that the jig is up. That's what Assholes like you do."

He wouldn't look me in the face.

"I have all of your texts, telegram messages, and selfies you've been sending back and forth. I know all your plans and schemes going back to when you first met Melissa four months ago. I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to report your actions and behavior to your company. I'm going to report to your wife that her husband attempted to seduce a married woman. Likewise, I'm going to turn my wife into her company for negotiating and signing contracts with someone she intended to bed. Think those contracts will still be in place this time tomorrow? I don't."

Creston looked like he was going to be physically ill.

"I could have stealthily dropped this bomb on you," I said. "Maybe I should have? I was too tempted, though. I wanted to dangle reality over you tonight. I wanted you to spend tonight, the night you thought you'd finally get into Melissa's panties, sleepless in bed and miserable.

"I want you to wonder if you have a family to go home to," I said. "I want you to wonder if your bosses will hold you accountable for engaging in immoral and illicit activities with a representative of a valued client. I want you to wonder whether you will still have a job tomorrow. I want you to wonder when I'm going to show up at a time and place of my choosing and make you regret you'd ever been born."

I was getting bothered by his lack of eye contact, so I loomed over him and said, "You ruined my marriage, Asshole. I read through months worth of seductive messages back and forth between you and my wife on Telegram. There's no way in hell that I'm ever going to forgive Melissa for what she did to me and my family. She allowed you to talk her into cheating. That is something I will never forgive her for. You busted up a family just to get your rocks off. You are a horrible person. I hope that you get cancer and die young. I hope your wife divorces you and takes your money and child away from you. I hope that you die young, hopeless and alone."

I dumped the pizza box into his lap and left him in the lobby.

I walked back to my car. On the way home, I stopped at the big hardware store and bought new lock sets for the house.

After that I drove to my in-laws' home.

When I arrived, my daughters had just gone to bed, but they heard me. They jumped out of bed and swarmed me when Tiffany, my mother-in-law, let me in. It was an amazing comfort to be with them. After we'd hugged and chatted for a few minutes, Tiffany sent them back to bed and dragged me into the TV room where her husband Mark was watching a baseball game. She turned the TV off and quietly said, "What's going on, Peter? You look terrible and we didn't expect you tonight."

"The kids switched my phone with Melissa's this morning as an April Fools' prank," I reported. Melissa's parents smiled at the mischief of their perfect little granddaughters.

I took a deep breath and said, "I spent the day with her phone and I discovered that she's having an affair."

They both responded with instant denial, so I opened up the telegram app on her phone and let them read through the messages. I then showed them the naked selfies and showed them how Melissa had used the Telegram app to send them to her would-be lover. There was no denying it after that. Their resistance collapsed.

I also had them read through Melissa's email chain with Jane. They were utterly devastated by their daughter's unrepentant attitude.

"I'm sorry, Tiffany. I'm sorry, Mark. She's going to have to live here. I'll be damned if I will allow her to get close enough to me to bait me into a battery charge. The house is mine and was deeded to me by my folks before we married. It is not a shared marital asset. My name alone is on the papers and I'm keeping it."