"Please!" she begged. "If you just give me one last chance, I will spend every day for the rest of our lives trying like hell to win back your love."
He just stared at her. She did not like silences. Never did. A silence forced her to keep talking.
"I'll be your one and only whore. I'll let you date! I'll let you bring whatever women you want into our bedroom, and I'll go down on them, just for you, even though you know I can't stand the idea of doing that. I'll drink your sperm out of them, if you want! I'll let you beat me! But, please, please, please, please forgive me and take me back!"
Now came the weeping. Pathetic. He almost wanted to tell her to man up. Almost.
Instead, he said, "If you really want to convince me that your love is true, you'll agree to the divorce and give me all the joint property first. The house, the bank accounts, and the mutual funds. You can keep your retirement accounts, and I'll keep mine. No alimony. There is definitely no moving on into the future until we sort out the past."
He was proud of that last line, developed on the fly. He had agreed to talk to the slut on the condition that she was going to sign the property settlement agreement papers so they could get the divorce over with. The "talk" had instead devolved into weeping and begging. Hers not his. If he had let his emotions go, he would have punched her in the face until she was vomiting bloody tooth shards. So, he kept his emotions under control. She was not worth any jail time.
She had stopped crying when he started talking about money. No surprise. She was, at heart, a mercenary. He could almost hear the gear wheels clanking in her brain as she figured that she would soon win him, and the money, back again.
"OK," she said with a smile.
With that, he called his attorney into the room and told him to update the agreement. While the lawyer was out of the room, she began to speak again.
"You won't regret it," she said.
"Won't regret what?" he asked.
She looked confused.
"Taking me back."
"Who said I was taking you back?"
"Why do you think I agreed to give up my rights in the divorce?" she asked with growing anger.
"All I said," he replied, "was that 'if you really want to convince me that your love is true, you'll agree to the divorce and give me all the joint property first. There is definitely no moving on into the future until we sort out the past.' That's it. Getting the divorce sorted out is the first step to even thinking of the remotest possibility of looking at a future together."
Her brow knitted. This was not quite how she saw things going. She had cried, after all. He was a man. He was supposed to respond positively to that. He always had before. She looked like she was going to say something else, so he cut her off.
"The problem is that I don't trust you. Without trust there is nothing. If I took you back, the only thing I could trust you to do would be to cheat on me again. I don't intend to make the same mistake twice."
Her face relaxed as she began to see what she would have to do, or promise to do, to win him back.
"I'm just going to have to prove to you that you can trust me," she said with a sly smile.
He nodded and waited a moment, making it seem like he was considering that possibility.
"How?" he asked.
That stumped her. She had never thought that her promise would actually have an implementation phase.
"I don't know," she admitted. "What do you want me to do?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, it came to him. If he had a Snidely Whiplash moustache, he would have been twirling it.
"I'll be back in a moment," he told her.
He went off into his lawyer's office to do some research and some typing. After a bit, he came back to the conference room at the same time his lawyer and the lawyer's notary public did.
The slut had refused to get a lawyer, even though his own lawyer said she should. So, his lawyer videotaped the slut consciously agreeing to go forward and sign legal documents without having consulted an attorney. Thus, the property settlement agreement was signed and notarized and on its way for filing with the court. The divorce decree would now come along whenever the judge bothered to clear his docket. The lawyer had left the room, leaving only the two of them, plus the notary.
He then presented her with his conditions to rebuild trust. She read them as her frown grew bigger and bigger. She finally looked up at him.
"Are you serious?"
"Deadly serious. You're an accomplished liar. You lied for months. And you had help."
She looked at the paper again.
"If I agree to meet these conditions, then you'll get back together with me?" she asked with a smidgeon of hope.
"No," he corrected. Her face fell.
"All I promise is that I will think about it after one year. Take it or leave it."
Her shoulders sagged. Then, she rallied.
"I'll take it. And I'll prove to you that you can trust me, and then we'll be back together before you know it," she announced with a little-engine-that-could attitude as she signed two copies of the document that he had prepared.
"We are meant to be together," she said as the notary signed and sealed both copies and gave each of them one.
"We'll see," he said as he left, not giving her a chance to chase him and give him the kiss she wanted to.
Thus, it came to be that, nearly one year later, he sat at the desk in his home office late at night in the dark reviewing the most recent data.
He was proud that he had come up with such thorough coverage with just a few moments to think about it back then in the lawyer's office, but maybe he was just born paranoid, he thought.
The rules were burdensome on purpose. First, Fiona had to cut herself off from all contact with her friends and family forever. None of them had liked him, and they had all helped her cover up her cheating with her ex-boyfriend, the same guy who had broken up with her and broken her heart before she met and started dating Bob. Second, she had to set up digital security cameras on the exterior of her apartment that covered the door, the windows, and the balcony, and she had to give Bob access to the daily video feeds so he could track who, if anyone, was visiting. Third, from the time she got up in the morning until the time she went to bed, every thirty minutes on the tops and bottoms of the hours, she had to send Bob an update on her location using the My Current Location feature on her iPhone Messages app. He had thought of including language requiring her to pull off the road for safety reasons, if she was driving when it was time to do the update, but he realized that he did not really care if she had an accident, so he left that part silent. Fourth, she had to record her entire day outside the apartment using a GoPro camera and upload the video every night to a GoPro cloud account that Bob had access to. This fourth condition was the most onerous because she had to switch the battery about once an hour, and recording the whole day outside the apartment required two to three 128 GB SD cards that she had to swap out about once every four hours. She usually kept the GoPro on a bookshelf in the office that showed who was visiting her. For meetings or meals outside the office, or while driving, she had figured out how to have the camera down in her bag by the side of the chair or in the opposite seat, aimed at her. When driving, however, she did have to pull over to change batteries and SD cards in the GoPro. As a result, she only took short drives anymore.
Bathroom breaks were a bit trickier. He had no kinks running that way, so he decided that she could hang her handbag on the back of the stall door with the camera angled so that he could see the top of her head. This concession was possible because he knew she was such a germaphobe that the possibility of a sexual fidelity lapse in a public restroom was small.
Bob had realized early on that Fiona was using the hourly battery changes on the GoPro to try to communicate with him, telling him how much she still loved him, how sorry she was for her silly, six-month-long mistake of cheating, and how she was doing this all to win back his trust. Sometimes, too, she would start running her fingers down over her breasts and playing with her nipples through her blouses to entice him. Over the past few months, her bras had been getting sexier and the blouses more sheer. So, he figured out how to let the videos play in the background on his computer with the sound muted while he did other things, spot-checking to see that she was not deviating from her pledge of fidelity. More importantly, he wanted her to know that he had looked at the videos and other evidence so that she would know she was being watched. Even if he was not really watching her. Perception was everything.
"So, this is where you disappear to when I'm asleep," a female voice said behind him, surprising him. He had not heard her enter. Busted. He could not close the screens fast enough not to seem suspicious. He was going to have a confrontation he had hoped to avoid.
"What are you doing? Is this work? Is it porn?" she asked with growing alarm.
Then with mounting horror, she exhaled sharply as she spoke, "Oh my God! It's your ex! You're not back with that bitch, are you? Please tell me you're not! Oh, my God! It's worse! You're spying on her! You're some kind of pervert!"
"It's not what you think," he said. Lame, he thought. Cliché City.
"Convince me!" she said, standing at his side, arms akimbo as she gazed at the screen, showing his ex in her office at her desk, working away while caressing her chest.
