Author's note:
I recently read a story here in LW about a couple who had been married for many happy years. Then the wife meets a much younger man and is irresistibly drawn to him. They have sex, just one long afternoon of fucking. Some days later, guilt causes her to confess the affair to her husband. He is outraged, but in the end is convinced in therapy and by his wife to forgive her and even to treat her young lover with civility.
Oh, hell, no. I was pissed. This was the worst kind of RAAC. The guilty are not punished in any way. Only the wronged husband suffers.
I have provided below my modest attempt, which can be read as an alternate ending or an immediate sequel, to rehabilitate the husband and to reattach his scrotum by letting him BTB.
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He came in the front door on Saturday morning, shutting it loudly behind him, and went directly to the stairs. He did not acknowledge his wife sitting in the front room. Startled, she rose abruptly, spilling red wine all over the arm of her shirt and the wood floor.
Not too long before, he would have been worried about the stain and the fact that she was drinking at eleven o'clock in the morning.
Now he just didn't give a shit.
"Honey," she said, ignoring the wetness on her arm in her rush to intercept him. "Where have you been?"
It had been three days since he gathered some clothes and left their house. He had ghosted her since, not returning her texts or answering her calls.
He took the stairs in pairs and went into their bedroom. He contemplated the neatly made bed, shook his head, and picked up the mattress by one side.
King mattresses are heavy as fuck, he thought. This one doubly so. He had to think about something else to bring himself to even touch it, but he was soon dragging it out into the hall and pointing it down the stairs.
"Honey--" she said pleadingly. It looked like she wanted to take his arm but held back.
He slid the mattress down the staircase, his maniacal energy the only way he was able to shift the mass. He grunted as he manhandled it out the back door, down the porch steps, and into the garden.
He pulled it past the planting beds and out into the field beyond where he finally allowed the monolithic bastard to pancake to earth in a big puff of dust. He put his hands on his knees and panted for a minute, then he went to the shed and grabbed a container of gasoline.
He poured about a pint onto the mattress and searched his pockets for the matchbook. He didn't smoke, so the book of matches had been a deliberate purchase. Worth the dime.
"Wh-- what are you doing?" his wife asked. He had never heard that tone in her voice before. She was afraid of him.
He frowned. Twenty-five years of holy matrimony. Never a cross word or a raised hand, and now she was afraid?
Too little. Too late.
"I'm burning this damn mattress," he said, rather cheerfully. "I thought that would have been obvious by now." He had finally found and held the matches aloft.
She cried out as if in pain. "But... why?"
"Because he fucked you on this mattress. And he fucked you in the shower, but tile doesn't burn."
He opened the matches and tried to pick one out. In spite of his confident manner of speaking, his hands trembled.
She could not help it. She had to say it. "Do you know how much that cost?"
He tore out a paper strip, red-ended and dangerous-looking. He stepped back from the gasoline fumes rolling across the alfalfa stubble and struck it against the black of the book. It flared.
"I know exactly how much this mattress cost. One marriage."
He flung the tiny yellow flame at the thing he used to find rest and joy and comfort on and the air above it exploded into flame. A vigorous mushroom cloud of flame and gas and white. Quickly the fire found the foam below and the smoke became black and acrid.
She retreated until her legs bumped into a bale of hay and she sat down, staring at the roaring fire.
"I don't think that can hurt us anymore," he said, laughing with no humor in it.
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. "Why?"
He drew himself up as tall as he could manage.
"Why? Did you really just ask me why?"
She nodded slowly.
"Oh, I don't know. Let me see. Was it because you gave your cunt to a boy not much older than our son? Was it because you let him fuck you unprotected in the bed of a happily married couple? Was it because you lied about it over and over? Stop me when any of these ring a bell, dear."
"I didn't lie."
"No, technically you did not directly lie to me. But did you come to me immediately and say, oh husband of mine, I have made a terrible error in judgement and I need your forgiveness?"
She shook her head.
"That's right. You did not. And would you be fucking him still if I had not guessed something was wrong with you? With us?"
She made no movement.
