Kira
"Get the fuck away from me," In most cases, my gaze alone would have been enough to scare most people away from me without a single word being necessary. But Jeff's supercilious grin reminded me of both his amusement at my attempts to be hard, and the fact that he wasn't most cases.
"Kira, I need to talk to you," he smiled, shifting his grin to another level. That smile would have melted most girls. But not me, I knew the monster that lurked behind it.
He sat down at a table and picked up a menu. "Hmm," he said. "What looks good to eat in this shit hole?"
"What the fuck do you want, Jeff?" I growled.
"Wow, so much talk about fucking," he said. "Most people would think that you wanted me back."
"Never in life," I said calmly. The bastard was trying to rile me up. He was trying to control my emotions to lure me into doing something that he wanted.
"I'm not THAT big of an idiot," I said. "I know you want something from me. And whatever you want is totally irrelevant to me."
"I want my God damned girlfriend back," he hissed. "It's embarrassing. She's chasing your ex all over town. She has even started making cow eyes at him. From talking to some of her friends, I've learned that she started out just trying to make me jealous. She just wanted to rub it in my fuckin' face that she had dumped me. But the more time she spends with your idiot boyfriend the worse it gets. Do you realize that her parents like him? People all over town think THEY make a good couple. They have a bright future, people claim. He works on machines; she works on people. It's a weird type of symmetry."
"You sound jealous," I laughed. "How does it feel to have someone take one of your toys away? Or did you really love her as much as you claimed? I really hope so. I hope that you can feel just a little bit of what I'm feeling."
"Hardly," he smirked. "But I see another case where the two of us should join together to get what we both want. You want your fucking boyfriend back, and I want Lana back for however short a time that it lasts."
"I see no reason ever to believe you again, asshole," I hissed. "Look what happened last time I listened to you. I lost the only person that made my life bearable. And you did it just for the hell of it. You didn't miss Lana. You just saw me as easy pussy. Lana wasn't giving it to you, so you just went after the dumb old trailer park girl. And I was so weak ... I missed Terry so much that I fell for it. But my eyes are open now. I know that there are snakes in the grass so I have to bear the path in front of me so I don't get bitten again. I'm sure you put something in that drink.
And don't think I don't remember the things you said about me. Terry played that tape for me. Your own words have condemned you. Now get the fuck out of here or order something."
"Fuck you," he spat. "I'll get her back without you. And I'll make sure that asshole boyfriend of yours doesn't even pay you any attention."
"Out of idle curiosity," I said. "You don't really love Lana. I don't think you love anyone except for yourself. So why do you want her back so badly?"
"That's an easy one," he smirked, "The bitch dumped me. No one dumps me. I'm the dumper not the dumpee. I need her back so I can dump HER." Then he walked away. I wanted to laugh, but I was in so much pain.
I never believed in metaphysical concepts. But the one thing that this entire situation told me was that losing Terry was going to kill me. I know my pain was emotional in origin, but it had spread and become physical. I ached all over. My broken heart had metastasized. It spread to my physical body the way cancer spreads. I was sure that if I didn't get Terry back I was going to die. It probably wouldn't happen overnight, but it would happen.
I was also sure that Lana didn't really love Terry. She just wanted him because HE didn't want HER. It was like a magpie going after a shiny rock. Eventually, Terry would forgive me. I just hoped he wouldn't wait until I was dead.
Every time I saw him with Lana draped all over him, it took another piece of my soul.
* * * * * *
Greg
After the after lunch meeting with Donna and her lawyer, I decided to never have another after lunch meeting. If I'd thought that reading the report from the PI had been awful, hearing from Donna's own lips, the things she had done and her stupid reasons for destroying our life together, and our family had been worse.
I don't know what I expected. There really is no good reason for cheating on your spouse. The funny thing about it is that I searched my mind and my heart to try to find one. However, that was before the meeting. That was before hearing how selfish her reasons were.
And that bullshit about how she had done it to save the town was utterly ridiculous. She made it seem as if she was some sort of super heroine. Maybe she ran around in see through booty shorts, masquerading as "Golden Pussy." She uses her magic vagina to solve crimes and right the wrongs of society.
Without even realizing it, she had told us why she really did it. She'd said it herself, I was away at school, and she was horny. She also needed more than she thought that I could give her. Not that she'd actually tried telling me about it. When she was twenty, I was an eighteen-year old college student. They don't make enough pussy to keep an eighteen-year-old down.
And if she was going to cheat on me, at least she should have upgraded. She should have gone for a guy with something that I couldn't give her. I'd still have been angry, but I could have at least seen the logic of her cheating on me with a guy who had a foot-long dick. Or if I was really old, and she had the chance at some hot young stud. But Donna gave me the impression that it didn't matter who the guy had been or what he had. She was a dick seeking missile, and any dick would do.
My job was to drag my ass home from college in the weekends to service her. During the week, she got someone else to fill in.
The thing I didn't understand was why she married me in the first place. Why take our wedding vows if she had no intention of keeping them? Why put herself in a position where she had to lie over and over again, every day for more than twenty years?
I decided to think about something else. I had abruptly left the meeting before I could even tell Donna and her attorney about my plans. I'd had to get out of there because I wasn't sure how long I was going to be able to hold onto my lunch. Everything she said brought food further and further up my esophagus. One or two more words would have brought about projectile vomiting on a large scale.
But listening to her, brought about something more than the need to vomit. It brought forth the need to retreat and think. Some like to think, while lying on couch or lying on a beach. Others find solace in people watching or while gardening.
I did my best thinking while driving. I took the older car out this time. That car had a manual transmission and a lot more horsepower. I didn't need the modern independent rear suspension, or the silky-smooth automatic transmission. I wanted to shift the gears myself and enjoy the feeling of being a part of the mechanical workings of the car.
As I drove, locked in the interplay of shifting and working the pedals, I let all of my problems slide away. I thought about everything. I tried to examine the problem from all sides. I thought about Debbie. I wondered what made her my daughter, when her two older siblings were someone else's children.
I examined my feelings for her and found them almost identical to my feelings for the other two. My love for Debbie was unique, but no stronger than my love for Sherry or Terry. They were all my children. The only thing different about Debbie was that she, and I shared a love for running. But Terry and I shared an almost religious devotion to Mustangs. And Sherry and I loved very spicy foods while the rest of the family hated them.
Were we still a family? I had no idea. That was one of those things we would have to talk about.
And Terry, I thought about him a lot during this time. I really needed to have a talk with my son. Terry was still my son. He'd never had another father, so I would do the job until he told me that I couldn't.
I saw a lot of anger in Terry. He hated Donna for what she'd done to our family. And finding out that he wasn't my biological child had caused him to hate her even more. Terry had a huge capacity to hate. I really believed that a lot of his hatred was just his reaction to what had happened to him and Kira.
And speaking of Kira, I really needed to talk to that girl. Kira was the only person in town who was as miserable as I was. She walked around town like a fuckin' zombie, crying her eyes out every time she saw Terry with Lana.
The funny thing was that despite having the prettiest girl in town throwing herself at him, Terry still loved Kira. He was angry as hell at her, but the love was still there. I could tell because while everyone, we ran into was cooing about how cute he and Lana looked together, I could tell in the way that only a parent can that he was wishing he was with someone else.
As I rounded a bend and noticed that the border to Ohio was coming up and with it the beginnings of Ohio's toll roads, I quickly exited the freeway and got back on going north towards home.
Driving back, I wondered about the status of my family. How would the kids handle the news? I had two ideas about how to handle things between Donna and I. Neither of them involved forgiving her and remaining married to her.
When I got back into town after driving for almost two hours, I knew exactly what I had to do. I drove straight to Debbie's school and picked her up. She was grinning from ear to ear at all of her friends staring at the Mustang. I guess they were used to Donna's car.
We stopped off for ice cream on the way home, and I broke the news to her. At 13, she was amazingly bright and very mature for her age.
"Debs, your mom and I both love you very much," I said. "But she and I are facing some problems, and it just seems that the problems are bad enough that we can't be together anymore." If I expected tears, I was pleasantly surprised.
"You caught her, huh?" she said between licks of her ice cream cone.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You caught Mom and Mr. Norton," she said matter of factly.
"You knew!" I said in surprise. "Honey, why didn't you say something?"
"Because I love you, Daddy," she said timidly. "Mommy told me that if I ever told anyone, it would break our family apart, and it would hurt you badly and it would be all my fault."
"Well Mommy was wrong," I said. "It's not going to break up our family, at least not all of us. And it's not your fault at all. You did nothing wrong. It's just the way things are sometimes. Sometimes we need different things. Sometimes we all see things differently. And right now Mommy and Daddy are seeing things very differently."
"I know how this works, Daddy," she said. "I have some friends whose parents are divorced. They hardly ever see their fathers, and their fathers and mothers argue a lot. And they all hate their mother's new boyfriends. Whenever they do see their fathers, they great presents. But after a while, the visits get farther apart, and the presents don't matter."
My eyes were beginning to fill up with tears.
"Their mothers become angrier and some of them go through a lot of boyfriends. I have a couple of friends whose mother's boyfriends look at them funny," she continued.
"Well none of that is going to happen to you," I said. "Just watch. I have a plan. I've got two plans as a matter of fact."
I called the house to see if Terry was there. I spoke to him for a few moments and then called Sherry to ask her to come over to the house. I toId Mark to bring her because she was still really upset.
A few moments after we got to the house, Sherry and Mark arrived. Sherry was so broken up that she couldn't even look me in the eyes. Her eyes were red from crying, and Mark didn't look happy either.
