Newtonian Mediation

This short story is the sequel to Schrödingers Bitch. It might just make sense as a stand-alone, but I'd suggest that you read them in order. The choice, of course, is yours. There is zero sexual content in this story but Literotica policy does not allow LW sequels in the non-erotic category.

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"Hello Francis: is it okay if I call you Francis?" the counsellor asked.

I told her that it was fine.

"Then you can call me Valerie or Val," she commented as she led me towards her office. "I know that even being here is already uncomfortable for most of my clients, so why make it worse by standing on ceremony?"

She opened the door. "Carole is waiting for us in here."

I swallowed as Carole, my lovely wife - for now, stood to greet me. "Hello, Francis," she said softly. "You look well."

I looked at her more carefully. "You too," I lied.

She stood, hesitantly, waiting for something. Val watched as I wondered what it might be. Then I noticed the look of longing in Carole's eyes; I realised what she wanted. I opened my arms and she stepped in for a hug. She felt familiar but different as I held her. She had definitely lost weight since I moved in with my brother last month. The day before Valentine's Day. The day I found that she'd been cheating for four years.

Val coughed dicreetly and my wife reluctantly released me and returned to her chair. Val took her own seat and invited me to take my own so that we formed a nice equilateral triangle, each facing the other two.

Val began. "Let's first understand why we're all here," she suggested. "I'll start. I am only here to mediate so that you both get the most that you can from this session. Afterwards you can decide if you want to continue separately, together or both." She leaned forward to emphasise. "I'm not here to judge or arbitrate," she reminded us. "I may ask questions, but only you two have the answers. My role is to guide you to them." She sat back. "So Francis, why are you here? What do you want from this session?"

I had wondered this myself. I was as honest as I could be. "I'm here because my wife agreed to accept the financial separation terms that I offered, if I agreed to attend this one session." I paused. "What I want, is to understand how I failed as a husband and drove my wife into another man's bed."

Val nodded and made a note on her pad. "Carole?"

My wife blew her nose and looked at me through tear filled eyes. "I'm here to reassure my husband that the failings were mine not his. What I want is irrelevant because it can't happen."

Val frowned and made as if to challenge my wife's negativity but stopped, made a note and then addressed Carole again. "Bear in mind that all I know, is that your husband has initiated a divorce. You tell me that you are to blame so, to prevent me making unfair assumptions, why don't you explain the circumstances."

Looking uncertainly at me as she began, Carole did. To her credit what she told Val was the truth. All of it. Four years ago she had attended an annual conference on Estate Management, in her case university properties, and an old friend from her student days had been a delegate too. They had spent the evening reminiscing and catching up and the rest of the night re-enacting their short physical relationship.

Had that been a one and done infidelity, I would never have known, but it seemed to have continued over the following two events and would have this year too, had I not loved her too much. An incautious comment by a receptionist at the venue, as I made arrangements to send Carole roses to show my love on our first Valentine's Day apart, exposed her affair.

When I confronted her the day before she was due to leave for this year's event, she admitted everything, claiming that this was to be the last time as her lover's partner was pregnant and we were talking about starting our own family. Five lives destroyed by a handful of catch-up fucks.

She finished her account and sat quietly as we watched Val finish making notes. Carole saw me glance at her and mouthed, "I'm so sorry." I nodded. I was sorry too; I thought we had something special.

Val seemed to consider for a moment. "Carole," she said gently. "Can you explain what you were thinking as you progressed from just greeting an old friend to actually sleeping with him?"

My wife looked nervously at me. "I've given my behaviour a lot of thought and, for my husband's benefit, decided to explain it like this: there was a personal inertia resulting in an interpersonal reaction with a low activation energy, catalysed by the presence of ethanol."

Val looked to me to see if I found Carole's explanation as baffling as she did. I considered what she had implied. I nodded in approval. "Nicely constructed summary," I conceded

Val broke in. "At the risk of sounding stupid or flippant, would someone please rearrange those words to make sense?"

Carole looked to me but I shook my head. "No. This is your analogy; you explain it."

She took a deep breath and dived in. "Craig and I were part of the same circle of friends for over a year. Some weekends we'd be the only ones about. We'd date. A few times we even slept together. We were never exclusive, never even a couple as such, so we never actually broke up. Our relationship, such as it was," She stopped and gave me a sad smile. "Well, it never concluded, we just lost touch."

She wiped her eyes and carried on more strongly. "I'm not excusing my behaviour; it was wrong, but this was the inertia. When Craig and I were alone away from home as students, we were close enough that we could keep each other company. We were safe, comfortable. And, just like at Uni, there in the hotel, we did what we used to do when it was just the two of us; we hung out."

She was twisting the rings on her hand, just as she had when I confronted her. I had taken mine off once I realised that I'd been betrayed. I wondered if she had noticed. Carole continued. "As for the next part, I'll explain it like this. Imagine Alice and Bob." I almost laughed out loud. So she had been listening when I tried to explain quantum cryptography. Alice and Bob were the personifications we used when discussing transmitting a secret message.

She saw my expression and gave a wry smile. "Yes, I listened. Anyway," she continued for Val's benefit. "Suppose Alice has had a massive fight with her partner, Bob. Or perhaps he's selfish or perhaps he's boring in bed. So she sets out to cheat. She buys some sexy underwear; she seeks out men that attract her; she makes it plain that she's available to them; they need a time and place; they have to be discreet." Val seemed to be following.

Carole carried on. "So this is a big investment of time and energy and it carries a risk. At any point Alice is likely to think is this worth it? But I, in her place, had no incentive to do any of that. Francis and I were really happy; but this where the alcohol came in. Craig and I had already been casually intimate, there was no deliberate preparation, there was no massive leap required to take us from chatting to sex; that emotional threshold had been crossed years ago." She shook her head in sorrow. "What little barrier there was, the alcohol acted as a catalyst and reduced even further."

"The activation energy," Val inferred.

"Exactly," my wife agreed. Some reactions need a huge input of energy to start them but, if you have a gas leak, then even a tiny spark of static electricity could trigger an explosion that would destroy your entire home. That was us after an evening catching up in the pub."

"So, in the presence of alcohol, your past relationship with your old University friend had such a low emotional threshold that you slipped into your habitual behaviours with virtually no additional emotional effort," Val summarised.

"Yes," Carole admitted. "There was a familiarity about the situation and, without thinking of the consequences, we behaved the way we always had done. This is why it reflects on me not Francis." She turned to me. "This is why I asked you to come, for this one time. I needed you to hear that what I did was totally due to my shortcomings, not yours."

"But you carried on," Val pointed out.

"We did," my wife admitted. "Not that first time. We spent the second night apart. But, yes. A year later, the same thing happened, we caught up and I spent the night with Craig, because I could. It became, apparently, what we did. It was as though whenever we met we our paths changed." Carole studied me to see if I understood. "I've had a lot of time to think," she explained. "And I decided to try to explain my behaviour in less emotional language."

I thought about what she had said. "So when you and Craig met up that first time, you each had your own trajectory but your combined history diverted you onto a new path. Newton's Second Law."

"Exactly!"

"And thereafter, you followed your new direction whenever you were together."

"Yes." She took a huge breath and tried to continue. "We shared a room last year, but this year, though we were intending to sleep together again, we had agreed that it would be the last time."

"Were you not worried about pregnancy? STIs?" asked Val.

"No." Carole was adamant. "I was on the pill, but we still used condoms. I obviously have poor moral judgement, but even I wouldn't go back to my husband with another man's semen inside me."

"Did you wonder," I asked, "why he had condoms to hand?"

"Well, no," she admitted. "It was sheer bad luck," she added bitterly. "As God is my witness, if Craig hadn't had them we would not have had sex. I assume they were in his overnight bag for trips with Jenna."

"Jenna checked his bag when I rang her, the same way that I checked yours. She found a box of twelve condoms in his wash bag." Carole looked down in shame. I hadn't finished. "The receipt was in the box. It was dated this January." I paused. "Along with just eight condoms."

Carole grasped the implication at once and nodded sadly. "So I'm not just a whore, I'm a gullible whore." She leaned back in her seat, staring at the ceiling. Silent now.

I was impressed by the effort she had made to explain the apparent ease with which she had slept with another man. Was it just an excuse? I admit that I had wanted to understand, and any explanation would sound like self-justification. To be fair, she sounded regretful and freely admitted her culpability.

She had obviously prepared well too. Using Newton's First and Second laws was a clever metaphor. Unfortunately, the Third law had a part to play too. 'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction'. Carole's attraction to Craig had the effect of repelling me.

Valerie turned to me. "Well Francis. First of all, do you accept Carole's account as honest?"

I conceded that I did.

"Without asking you to condone her behaviour, do you see a material difference between a spouse setting out looking for a sexual adventure and two people resuming a relationship that never formally ended?"

I really had to think about that.

"Let me reframe that," Val suggested. "Have you heard anything here that makes you believe that anything could have or should have done as a husband would have changed what Carole did?"

The two women sat silently as I considered. That fateful afternoon, I had checked the bag she had already packed for her conference. It was her everyday clothes and underwear. She had packed nothing for Craig that she hadn't worn for me. In fact, there were some rather flimsy items of lingerie still in her bedroom drawers. Her affair, such as it was, seemed somewhat mundane and tawdry rather than a wild erotic adventure.

Our sex life had not experienced peaks or troughs as the conferences approached. And my wife seemed content with our lovemaking, offering but not demanding to push boundaries if I wished. I took delight in her pleasure, as she did in mine and neither refused the other anything.

I looked up. "No," I replied to Val's question. "I believe Carole did what she did for her own reasons, irrespective of me."

"When we began," Val said. "I asked you what you wanted. You said you wanted to know how you failed as a husband." She paused to let that reminder sink in. "Do you still believe you failed?"

I shook my head. What happened was a consequence of a past that I had no part of. Carole should have recognised the dangers and avoided the situation. She hadn't. That was down to her.

"No. Without knowing or understanding their relationship, there was nothing I could have done," I acknowledged.

Val turned to face my wife. "Carole, your aim was to to reassure your husband that it was not a failing on his part that pushed you away: you've heard his response. Are you satisfied that you've achieved that goal?"

"Yes," she whispered.

Val looked at her notes. "You also said that what you wanted was irrelevant. Why is that?"

Carole looked sadly at me. "Because my husband is a rational man and he will listen carefully to the advice of the people he respects. One person in particular has already made a comment that applies in this case." She faced Valerie to answer her question. "What I want is for my husband to take me back but, however badly I want that, his hero, Albert Einstein, made it clear he should not." Again, Val looked puzzled. Again, I thought that I understood.

Carole blew her nose gently and gazed at me through red rimmed eyes as she explained for the counsellor's benefit. "Though some people question whether they were actually his words, Einstein supposedly said, 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results'." She shrugged helplessly. "With advice like that from someone he truly admires, why on earth would Francis even consider giving me another chance?"

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An invitation from the author

Francis is still hurting badly, even though Carole is contrite. In the first chapter I assumed that their marriage was over, done.

But then, when this chapter was almost complete, I read a couple of comments on the earlier story suggesting that some readers, though admittedly not many, thought that Carole could still be redeemed.

My initial intent was to end this story here with Carole conceding that there was no possibility that her husband would consider forgiving her. Now I'm just prepared to believe that he might; but I can't write that story convincingly. Perhaps another author could. Perhaps yet another author sees her as a manipulative bitch just pretending to be contrite. That would be interesting too.

Either way, I,'d like to see their situation resolved so, if any of you writers out there want to FTDS (finish the damn story), have at it with my blessing. No caveats other than to link to the original, and please yourself whether to use scientific analogies in your version.

Either way, I'd love to read your ideas.