Mad Monday
by Pan
Chapter 37:
At 6am, I finally stopped staring out the window, and went downstairs to get some coffee. I wasn’t going to be able to rest until my wife got home; of that, I was certain.
When I wasn’t looking outside, frantically awaiting the return of my wife, I was staring at my phone. Mary and I have “Find My Friend” activated.
It hadn’t helped—for whatever reason, Belle hadn’t taken her mother’s phone with her.
It was the first time I’d actually wished my daughter was incapable of spending fifteen seconds away from the damned device.
But the street remained empty, and the dot remained downstairs. I hadn’t wanted to go down and find the phone—the risk of getting caught by my wife’s body sneaking back into the house was too great. That would be an impossibly awkward conversation on both sides, and I knew that Mary and I would need to strategize before we confronted her.
And so I was more than a little surprised when I entered the kitchen and was greeted by the sight of my wife. As in, my wife’s body. Her eyes were red (although she certainly didn’t look as tired as I must have), but she greeted me with a smile.
“Hey honey-chicken,” Belle said, surprising me with a peck on the cheek. “You look like you didn’t get much sleep.”
“No,” I croaked in response, staring at her in shock. “Did…you?”
“Some,” she shrugged. “You want a coffee? I just made a fresh batch.”
It’s pretty common for kids to drink coffee these days (a fact which is still weird to me; I wasn’t allowed near the stuff until I left home) so our daughter does actually know how to use the machine.
Better than my wife, if I’m being honest.
“Please,” I grunted, sitting down at the table. My head was spinning. How had she managed to sneak back inside without me noticing?
I glanced at the door behind her, and almost slapped myself in frustration. Of course—there was more than one entrance to the damn house. Belle must’ve had Spike drop her off at the park behind our place, and then sneaked back in while I was staring intently at an empty road.
I eyed my wife’s body carefully, trying to work out if she had the appearance of someone who had only just come back inside…or if she’d been back for hours. It didn’t take me long to conlcude that…I had no idea.
Sherlock, I ain’t.
Her hair didn’t look wet, so she hadn’t showered…at least, in the last half-hour or so. And there were no signs that she’d recently been in a threesome with a pair of teens…but I had no idea what those signs would have looked like if they had been there.
No, the only thing that I could definitively conclude was that she was…there.
And possibly had been for hours. I could have spent the night awake for absolutely no reason.
Great.
As she was pouring the coffee, I held up one hand. “Wait,” I said, my voice crackling with a lack of sleep. “I should get some more rest.”
“Okay,” she said, a huge smile on her face.
Cliché as it may have been to say, she looked happy. Too happy.
My heart sank as I realized what that must have meant.
She’d done it. My daughter had used my wife’s body to fuck a teenager. No, two—a drug-dealing teenager and his slutty, cheating girlfriend.
My wife’s body had been used for a threesome.
I wanted to be jealous. I wanted the jealousy to fill me with energy. I had no idea what I would have done with the energy—found Skip and stomped his stupid head in, perhaps—but anything, anything would have been better than how I felt in that moment.
Exhausted. Fatigued. And completely, utterly flat.
My wife had just cheated on me. In body, if not in mind. After twenty years of marriage, after twenty years of fidelity, my daughter had taken the body of the woman I loved…and used it to have a stupid, tawdry threesome with some kids from her school.
I felt completely and utterly crushed, and my footsteps were heavy as I made my way back to my bed, and fell into a long, dreamless sleep
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