[Entry into the
Literotica April Fools Story Contest 2025
- please vote! Names have been changed to protect the innocent. But only the innocent]
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I guess the guys wanted to take matters into their own hands. It wasn't a prank, but then, it wasn't especially well-thought-out either. But it was my birthday, and it was my favourite restaurant and my favourite bar just down the street. Guys aren't geniuses; we generally find a plan that works and we stick to it.
I'd been building up to the birthday with trepidation. It was a big one, but not in the same way that turning forty had been a big one. This was going to be the first one that I woke up alone.
I went downstairs, as usual, did the same things as always: opened up the back door to let the dogs out, made myself a mug of tea, fed the dogs, checked the weather. The sound of my movements echoed through the beautiful open-plan living area, reflecting off the polished stone benchtops that my wife had insisted on. I always noticed the echoes. Half the furniture was missing because Eloise had taken it.
There were messages, even a video. My parents had sent a card because they were still clinging to a stubborn faith in the postal service. It was nice to get a card. The kids would get up soon too, and then we'd have the usual circus of breakfast, a couple of presents, and it would almost, just almost, feel like it had always done.
There was a message from Eloise. She wished me happy birthday, as in 'Happy Birthday, hope you have a good day!' That was it. At least she didn't run straight into asking when I'd be dropping the kids back to her. At least she had the grace to separate the two statements.
In the silence of the house, surrounded by the remnants of fifteen years of marriage, I wondered what she was doing, how she was feeling about all of this. Then, I found out.
My phone pinged again. It was Eloise, asking what time I'd be dropping the kids off.
---
It started in such a small way, and I put it out of my mind at first. I mean, we're both professional people, Eloise and I. We finished degrees, went into corporate jobs, met on the job, fell in love, got married, a mortgage, two kids. There isn't anything remarkable about it, looking back. We were comfortable enough, nice holidays, good car, solid careers. But even recalling that tells me why it imploded in the end. A life full of the little things, standing by each other whenever there was a speedbump like Dalia, our eldest, going off the rails at thirteen, or Sam, our second child, Eloise's baby, not getting into the football team after all.
We all got along, and the flow of life was marked by the steady ticking down of the mortgage on the house. Then Dalia turned sixteen and started wearing make-up.
Eloise took it as a direct challenge, and they fought constantly about it, leaving Sam and I to retreat to the bunker, or in this case, the media room. We'd be playing some shoot-em-up while the females in the household circled each other. Eloise challenged me on that, but I told her that I backed her, and that it was important for our son not to feel pushed to the periphery because his older sister was acting up and getting all the attention.
It turns out that I missed something fundamental. I've had plenty of time to think about it since, and any way I run the scenarios, I don't honestly think we would have come out any differently.
It was a combination of factors, coming together in a perfect storm that ripped right through the middle of our marriage. Firstly, sex had tailed off between us. She didn't seem interested anymore, and the last few occasions had been pretty lukewarm at best, like she was doing it because I wanted to. That led to me feeling guilty for asking, and later, like I was nagging. The last time we tried to make love, I could see it in her body language. I'd been rock-hard but then I just sort of deflated. An awkward silence settled down, and we went to sleep. From that night onwards, it had been Dead Bedroom syndrome.
Still, we both soldiered on. The kids seemed to be filling all available space anyway, but that led to the second factor, the thing that I missed completely. Dalia had blossomed, which I think is the accepted term. She was slim, bright, light grey eyes in a delicate face, dirty-blonde hair like her mother. When she wore short skirts, she flashed legs that were not the spindly kid legs of my daughter, but the legs of a woman. The make-up wasn't the start of something, it was the end of the process: now, a child in a woman's body.
Dalia was being dictated to by an older version of herself, who was struggling with her daughter's attitude and clothing choices and something more fundamental, something I never actually realised until it was all too late.
My wife was struggling with gravity. Her full, plump breasts were hanging lower, nipples thick from breastfeeding two kids. There were faint silver lines on her tummy from where her abdomen had been stretched twice, her bottom not as pert and rounded anymore. Eloise was looking in the mirror every morning, and then at her daughter every day. For someone who had been able to stop traffic at twenty-one, the comparison would have been hard to take.
That's the other thing about teenagers: you can't hire babysitters anymore and you can't trust them on their own. They're in that awkward middle ground and so we defaulted to tag-teaming. If I had something on after work, Eloise would make sure she was home, and vice versa. The calendar became a closely-watched item in the house, operating on a first-in-best-dressed arrangement. Eloise usually won, given her uncanny ability to schedule months in advance, like she was playing the game on a different level to me. I didn't mind too much, I just slotted into the gaps. We crossed paths a lot more and spent time together a lot less.
When she changed jobs at work and was thrust into a new team, I guess it was only a matter of time. Her new team was large, and there always seemed to be birthday drinks, or end-of-project celebrations, or the big boss coming to town, or strategy days. Then there were strategy away-days. Durant attended these as well.
I'd been introduced to him when my wife invited me to stop into drinks after work. He was a little younger, dark-haired, serious, not at all my wife's type. I talked to him for a little while, and he seemed like a good enough sort of guy to have a drink with, but maybe a little too earnest for me. We drifted onto deeper subjects than an after-work mingling session would normally have covered.
It turned out that Eloise liked talking about the deeper subjects. She liked having someone's undivided attention for once. She liked staring into his warm brown eyes. She confessed afterwards that she liked being seen.
---
I put on a shirt and pants, because it was my birthday. I'd dropped the kids off with Eloise in plenty of time. She'd found a place ten minutes away, and as I stood in the hallway I did the quick scan around. Either she was living alone, or she'd tidied because she knew I was coming. Or he was careful not to leave a trace, was the third option. She'd opened up enough under questioning to tell me that Durant was unattached.
Maybe it was casual, something she was keeping from the kids. I looked around the hallway and felt that weight settling so I left as soon as the handover was complete. I didn't need a birthday kiss or a how-was-your-day, I was straight in and out. What she did was her own business.
The restaurant was within walking distance, and it gave me time to think, or more accurately, to brood. Curiously, I didn't have any particular animosity to Durant. He'd known she was married, that she had a family, but Eloise would have needed to cross that line herself. If you fly a plane into a mountain on purpose, who's more to blame? The mountain, or the back-stabbing pilot? And, if it wasn't that mountain, it would have been another one eventually, or worse: we could have kept in level flight.
That had been the insight that saved me from staring up at the bedroom ceiling. Cheating had been bad, but the worse thing would have been to just have kept on going. Some people do that, carry on for years, sometimes their whole lives, stuck in a compromise that makes nobody happy.
I picked up the pace because I wanted to make sure I was the first to arrive. It was my birthday after all. What was this then? Bailed out, I needed to stick the landing. I needed to get back in the air and weather the patches of clear air turbulence. Maybe I would put my profile online this week, have a few beers, get the words down. I'd said that to myself before, though.
The restaurant was busy enough, some spare tables on a Thursday. It served the finest Indian cuisine in town because the guy who ran it was a genius. His wife worked the front-of-house and greeted me as I entered. She was middle-aged and bustling, black hair gone to grey, pulled back in a no-nonsense bun. I suspected that the continued existence of the restaurant was more down to her than her husband. She always struck me as the practical one.
"Mike, so good to see you. Special occasion, is it?"
"Hi Neera. Maybe."
"I put you up on the long table next to the kitchen, if that's okay."
