Soon-to-Be-Ex

She's an idiot. Let me take that back, she's a

fucking

idiot! What's worse, is she's a very smart woman, so she had to work very, very hard to become an idiot. The woman in question is my wife, very soon to become my ex-wife. Almost the standard story, cheated on me and got caught. Well, she doesn't know she got caught, but she'll find that out in the next few days.

If you read stories on the internet, cheating spouses aren't that uncommon. Hell, in real life they aren't that uncommon. Half of all marriages end in divorce nowadays, and infidelity seems to come hand-in-hand with the rest of the marital decay. At least half the husbands I know try to 'get a little on the side' and about the same number of wives seem to want to play, too.

I know that for a fact, because a lot of my friend's wives have done a little flirting with me and have indicated that they weren't averse to taking it beyond the flirting stage. Discretely, and with tact of course, but still quite definitely an offer of an extramarital affair.

I haven't taken any of them up on it, though. For one reason, I'm still married and have some decided ideas on the need for fidelity in marriage. Actually, let me add to that statement... Infidelity has no place in a marriage. In my opinion, if you're unhappy in your marriage, you either tell your spouse you're unhappy and you both decide to work on it or, if you're not going to work on it, you get divorced and try again.

Well, those are two possibilities but there's a third, I guess. You decide you aren't cut out for marriage and you'd prefer to remain single and and play the field. Still, you tell your partner before you start to play that field. If you don't plan in getting married again, you don't need a divorce but it would be polite. Your spouse might want have one. Any way you choose, pick an option and live with it. I personally have never seen an 'open' marriage work. I've seen some work if you define 'work' as staying married even though their lives are separate. Nothing that matched my definition of marriage, two people functioning and living as a team.

I suppose I should introduce myself before I get started on my story. I'm Brandon, Brandon Martin. I'm thirty-four, about an inch-and-a-half over six feet tall, weigh the same as I did in high-school, one ninety-six, and I've got green eyes and red hair. I'd consider myself moderately attractive to the ladies, but nothing special. That may be changing as I get older, though. I mentioned that a lot of my wife's friends have hit on me, didn't I?

It seems a lot of husbands in our circle of friends haven't kept themselves in the same sort of shape I have. If you run a couple of miles every weekday morning and five to ten on weekends, you tend to stay in shape. It's not a hardship, running has been my hobby since childhood. Between that and simple genetics, I'm still in shape and probably always will be. Unless I break a leg or something.

There seems to be a gender-based difference in how husbands and wives deal with self-esteem issues. While the husbands get their senses of self-esteem bolstered by being business successes and furnishing their wives with comfortable lifestyles, the wives in our circle of friends seem to get more of a boost to their self-esteems out of looking good. Where the husbands concentrate on being successful and being good providers, the wives concentrate on how they look to bolster their self-esteem. Some also have jobs and careers of which they're proud, but even they spend a lot of time with diet and exercise keeping themselves fit and looking good. They're quite successful at it, too.

OK, some of it is trying to preserve what they have. An older, pudgy, semi-balding guy with money has a fairly good chance of hooking up with a good-looking 'replacement' for the wife he just dumped. A middle thirties or early forties female 'dumpee' has more trouble, unless she's wealthy in her own right. Another reason for the effort is that women tend to compete with each other about how they look.

Men tend to compete with status and success, women compete more with their looks. Not entirely, and there are some significant exceptions, but I think it's true as a general rule.

Anyway, most of the wives seem to look better than their husbands. The husbands all tend to be a bit out of shape. Not the 'three hundred pounds on a five-eight frame' kind of out of shape, more like an extra twenty or thirty pounds around the midsection, but even a moderately sagging midsection looks bad. In our circle of friends, 'trophy wives' haven't started to appear, but I think that some of the wives keep in shape to forestall that possibility. Protecting their 'turf', as you could put it. It does tend to result in the wives looking better than their husbands, though. Maybe the discrepancy between how I look and how my male peers look is another reason their wives tend to flirt with me and send the occasional discrete 'I'm available' message. I don't do anything with the message, but it still gets sent.

Anyway, back to my soon-to-be ex-wife. Aelish (That's an Irish name, by the way. It's pronounced Ah-lish, with the accent on the first syllable.) was five years younger than I was and I met her when she moved to Texas after graduation. I married her about two years later, so we'd only been married for three years. She might not want to lose her comfortable lifestyle, but she was still 'shopping around' for my replacement. I suppose that occasionally works, the phrase is 'the husband is the last to know' wouldn't be a cliché if it didn't work.

It doesn't work often enough to be a certainty, though. Especially when, as in my wife's case, the one doing the 'shopping' is not significantly more intelligent than the one that she has started considering replaceable.

That's really the root of Aelish's problem. She thinks she's smarter and more capable than her poor, stupid husband. She somehow decided that her Bachelor's degree in English Literature from an Ivy League school meant she was more intelligent than someone with a Masters degree in Engineering from a technically oriented non-Ivy school.

I suppose that has a lot to do with the way she looked, as Aelish was a cheerleader and a prom queen in high-school, a member of the 'beautiful people' clique. Her folks had money, too. Those qualities had more to do with her acceptance at an Ivy League school than her scholastic aptitude. She got the advantages that came with looks and wealth.

I didn't. I wasn't exactly a nerd in high-school, but I was close. If my school had boasted a winning sports team, I would have been 'second tier', or lower. Without competition from jocks because of their 'loser' status, the fact that I was a reasonably proficient dancer, got good grades and wasn't terminally shy was enough to let me socialize on a more-or-less equal basis with the 'popular' set. It also helped that I 'tutored' a lot of that set. (Not exactly tutoring, because it was more like writing papers and reports for them and helping them with their homework assignments. Not

quite

doing their work myself, but almost.) It also earned me my spending money, enough of it that I didn't have to do any other work.

Aelish didn't have to work at being successful academically, either. Most teachers in high-school will assume a well-dressed, articulate and attractive person is smart, unless that person goes out of their way to correct that mistake. Aelish didn't bother to do so, and managed to float her way through high-school and university with 'good enough' grades in a not-too-impressive major.

On the other hand, after high-school, I was a National Merit Scholar at one of the better Engineering Schools in the country. A state school, but a good one. I got through under-grad and grad schools with that, part-time work, some more tutoring and student loans. I got a job in Information Technology with a large firm Headquartered in Dallas when I graduated.

The fact that I had worked as an unpaid intern the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, and as a salaried temporary employee the subsequent summers helped me get that job. I didn't get the job because I 'knew someone', I got it because I was damn good at what I did.

Aelish became a junior-assistant-copywriter at an advertising agency that did business with her father when she graduated. (By the way, translate that job title of hers into English as 'flunky', the person that gets coffee at meetings and makes xerographic copies for those who have real jobs. That probably contributed to why she had wanted to quit working when we got married.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, ten years after graduation my salary was a little over two hundred thousand a year, and my title was 'Senior Design Implementation Engineer'. The title is misleading, and intentionally so. What I actually do is head the department that handles our computer security and penetration tests.

Pen testing, as it's called in the common parlance, involves checking and securing computer networks from attack by unauthorized persons. These 'persons' could be hackers who attempt to bypass security protocols out of curiosity, computer 'vandals' who cause damage out of spite or malice, or professionals who commit industrial espionage for business reasons.

That's pretty much the same type of security as is needed by the various agencies of government, but they have both the responsibility to defend against attack and to collect evidence for future prosecution.

My department did not have to worry about evidence collection. Our company (and I'm intentionally not mentioning its name, as I don't want to give any hints away to those who might attempt penetrations of our security) had decided, after a few failed attempts at filing suit against those responsible for attacks, to handle it in another way. Basically, in addition to making our network as impossible to penetrate as we could, we placed strategic 'booby traps' for interlopers.

They had to be placed carefully, because they were more than just the real-world equivalent of the cartoon's mousetraps-in-cookie-jars, they would do real damage to the computer networks that did the trespassing. That's why 'computer security' is part of the confidential description of my department's job.

That's why I got paid the big bucks. Last year I made three hundred fifty thousand, counting the bonuses I got after successfully handling five different attempts at penetration. Those bonuses reflected almost half of my compensation package. Unfortunately, (Well, for me at least!) these attempts had been decreasing over the last few years. Evidently, the word had gotten around and our company was considered 'too dangerous to mess with' by our opposition.

I wasn't unduly concerned, though. Next year, my current 'number two' was taking my old job and I was going to be promoted to Vice President of Computer Operations, primarily because I had taken the opportunity, provided by the lessening of penetration attempts, to 'help out' with other departments. I had demonstrated my understanding of the entirety of our company's efforts and I was the logical replacement for the current head of Comp-Ops. My base salary for the new position was to be five hundred thou a year with stock options and lots of perks like a company car, a bigger office with my own secretary and PA, a country-club membership and lot of other benefits. As I've mentioned, I'm good at what I do.

That promotion lent a certain urgency to the situation with my idiot soon-to-be ex-wife. No-fault divorce laws in this state meant I would be splitting my assets with her and probably paying alimony because she wasn't currently working. (Excuse me, it's now being called 'spousal maintenance' in a lot of states, isn't the current trend towards political correctness just 'oh-so-precious'? Thankfully, Texans aren't usually counted in that mealy-mouthed group. I've always called a spade a spade, and I see no reason why others should have problems with the concept. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.)

Not a big problem now, but it would get worse after my promotion. You see, right now, my base salary was one hundred thirty thousand, after taxes, and my bonuses had been paid to a corporation in the Cayman Islands. I owned the corporation, but because of the off-shore nature of my assets (and the fact that Aelish had no idea they even existed) they were not going to be considered as part of our marital assets.

Sure, a real shark of a divorce lawyer might be able to find them and try to get them considered as such, but the likelihood of that happening was slim. One thirty was pretty normal for a Senior Engineer at a computer company, and I'd never mentioned exactly what my job entailed, or any bonuses. We rented our condo and leased our cars. No kids, maybe sixty thousand in ordinary investments, and we both had equivalent retirement accounts.

I had to fund her account, because her income was non-existent, but the fact that they both contained the same amount meant that there wouldn't be a problem with her attaching part of my retirement funds. (People in jobs that involve security matters tend to be a little on the cautious side. 'Professional Paranoids' might be a fitting title for my type of people.)

Even with the worst probable settlement, I wouldn't be on the hook for more than half the investments she could find and alimony if she managed to convince the judge to grant it. Still, my offshore corporation had assets of six million, and I wasn't really in the mood to split it with her. (Ten years of bonuses and smart reinvestment tends to increase any amount. Plus, as it was paid off-shore and stayed there, I didn't owe taxes on it until I moved it to the states. It's legal, look it up.)

So, if I offered her a thirty percent of the investments she knew about, plus paying the leases on her car and the condo for a year and a living allowance of two thousand a month, I think her attorney would jump at it, and it would only cost me ninety grand.

Actually, I knew he would, if she used the guy I thought she would. That would be the little shit that she'd been having her current affair with. (You have probably encountered one of his breed of lawyers if you have ever had the misfortune to get involved in a divorce. He's the type of lawyer that would have to request that you spell the word 'ethics' if you used it in conversation so that he could look it up.)

Hell, I'd even pay a reasonable amount to him to cover her legal fees, if I had to. Let him think I was an idiot, who cares? I'd get to keep my six million, and the divorce would be over with before I got my big raise. As soon as the divorce was final, I could 'discover' that he'd been fucking her while he was representing her, I could sue him, get my money back and probably get him disbarred. OK, I'm a bit of a hard-ass, and maybe I do carry a bit of a grudge, but so what? I'm entitled to a bit of retaliation. At least in my opinion.

Was the cheating his idea his or hers? Was it an affair or preparations for a divorce and, if it was preparation, was the whole cheating-and-then-divorce thing his idea? Who cares? He's lucky it hadn't occurred in my grandparents' day. Then, I could have gotten away with taking a bull-whip to his ass, or just shooting the asshole. Nobody would have said a word about it except to maybe congratulate me on taking care of the abatement of a public nuisance. This

is

Texas, after all!

So, thirty thousand for her share of the investments she knew about, a year's car lease at fourteen thousand, the apartment at twenty-four, another twenty for an allowance and chump change to the asshole (temporarily), round it off and call it ninety thousand. That would be a very generous offer. She got ninety thousand and I got to keep what was left (and my six million) and get a big raise after the divorce.

Sounds fair enough to me. (I'm a bit of an asshole, but not a big one. Ninety thousand for three years was a good settlement if they didn't know any better. I could afford it.)

Besides, a mistress would have cost a bit more over that same period of time and probably wouldn't have been nearly as good. She may have been a bit of an idiot, but she was damn good-looking, reasonably pleasant to be around and gave a hell of a blow-job. So I'm not much of a romantic, so what? Accountants and businessmen aren't the only ones that are comfortable with the concept of cost-benefit analysis. Engineers do it, too. Sometimes it's necessary to cut out the deadwood, and I can't think of anything that's less necessary than a cheating wife.

Anyway, the problem wasn't the settlement, the problem was how to convince her to 'pull the trigger' soon. It would go easier if she thought she was dumping me. I'd make her an attractive enough settlement offer, but not so attractive that her lawyer boyfriend would smell a rat and start searching for other assets. I just wanted her to make her move before I got my new position and salary.

If she asked for the divorce, she would be trying to get me to go along with it, not the other way around. Oh, she'd probable ask for the sun and the moon as part of any settlement, but that would be just the first offer. My counter-offer would be better than she or dip-shit expected, and they'd grab it and run. The only problem was how to get her to start things.

I suppose some of my readers think I'm being awfully cold-blooded about this. I wouldn't say that. I'm just a little more of a planner than most people. I see a problem, analyze it and solve it. That's the skill-set that made me become an engineer and got me working with computers. That's how I approached this problem, and I think I'm just being realistic.

I knew she was cheating on me, and I didn't see any reason to fight for something I'd already lost. (You might be wondering how I knew I had already lost. Think about it. My job was dealing with people who penetrated computer networks, and I certainly knew how to go about doing it myself. I'm not an idiot. I noticed the initial cooling of our relationship when it started, and it was a logical next step to do some investigating. Let's just say I knew about everything soon after it started happening.)

Dip-shit had a security system in his condo, I had one in mine, and the hotel rooms they frequented also had them. You fill in the blanks. Of course, 'officially' I only knew about what was said and done in my own condo, but that was enough. Any other information I 'stumbled' across wasn't legally obtained and I couldn't introduce it in court. Still, I had a plan to address that deficiency. I'd only bother to fight for my marriage if there was still something there worth fighting for, and there wasn't. (You did notice that I said 'current' affair, didn't you? I think this one was number three, but I might have missed one.)

The plan I came up with was to do something that would inconvenience her, and then take advantage of her objections to the inconveniences. Since we had offices all around the world, I was going to be 'transferred' to Alaska and she hates the cold. It was only fall, but the nights were still chilly. I could even make the transfer look legitimate.

One, the company loved me and the way I did my job, so they'd go along with anything I wanted to do. Two, it would be no real hardship for them, because I could do my job equally well from Alaska, as internet access let me teleconference with colleagues and monitor the network from anywhere. Three, it was only temporary because I could be 'transferred' back as soon as the divorce was settled. That would be mean I'd be back well before I was due to assume my new role as a Vice President.

Advantages to me? Well, as much as I liked Texas, I liked the idea of visiting Alaska. I liked hiking, hunting and fishing, and I knew from buddies that had made trips there that the scenery, hunting and fishing there was fantastic. I'd been told the nightlife in Anchorage was pretty good, too. Quite a few very nice restaurants, especially if you like seafood, and I did. Some nice clubs with live music and some nice places to dance also sounded interesting. I'd also been told about a few nice bars, but they didn't interest me much. (I'm not much of a drinker. If I'm in a social situation, I might have a Campari-and-Soda or two, but that's about it. I've been drunk exactly once in my life, and didn't enjoy the results. Hangovers weren't my idea of a good time.)