Well-Intentioned

"Except Tony did."

She nodded glumly. "Except Tony did. He'd hit on me before, and he was the first to line up when I started out as a trainer. I made it clear, though, that I loved my husband, and if he wanted anything more than training that he should go somewhere else. He didn't, though, and while he'd still stare... Well, I liked that. I shouldn't have, but I did."

Her head hung low. "I forgot, somewhere in there, why I'd started doing all this. Who I was doing it for. Or, maybe, I just let myself forget. Lance and I started arguing again, and I thought it was just jealousy, that I'd managed to make something for myself that wasn't either dependent on him or in service to him. I think.... Honestly, I still think that was some of it. That he'd had Superwife for a while, and having just-a-wife wasn't enough anymore.

"We fought one day before he went on a trip. Normally, we'd..." She chuckled. "Well, like I said, I tried to keep him happy, so we usually had fun making up. We didn't make up, though, and we hadn't made love the whole week before that because he'd been so tired. He'd gotten really out of shape, by then. Not that I minded that--I really didn't, I'd love him no matter how he looked--but it meant he was too tired for bedroom time after long days at work, while my job energized me. So I was, ah, constantly, ah..."

"DTF?" I volunteered, and she laughed loudly, her cheeks blushing a bright red. A memory of her flushed skin as Tony pounded into her floated to the surface; I viciously pushed it from my mind.

With a snort, she said, "Yeah. It's nice that... You know, most of the ladies in the neighborhood would be scandalized if I said 'down to fuck' around them. I'm glad that I have you to..." She shook her head. "I hope I still do. That we're still friends after this, I mean."

I grunted, unwilling to render a verdict just yet, and she continued her story. "Anyway. We fought over something stupid the night before he left on a trip, and we hadn't had sex in a week, even though I was pretty much ready to go every night. That next morning, he didn't tell me he loved me before he left. Didn't even give me a kiss on the cheek. Hell, he barely spoke to me. Just total disregard. I was mad, just so, so fucking mad at him, and I was horny, and... and Tony tried his luck. I don't know if he had just been waiting for his shot, but..."

She sighed. "It wasn't great sex. It almost never was with him; always good, but rarely great. Not like with Lance. But I felt angry, and entitled, and horny, and... And afterwards, I just wanted to fucking die, but I also felt so much more relaxed than I had been in months. Like, now that I knew I could never be perfect, I didn't have to try to be anymore. I wasn't Superwife. I couldn't be; how could Superwife cheat on her husband?

"When Lance got back, I put all my energy into making him happy. Thank God that I'd made Tony wear a rubber, so I at least didn't feel worried that I might give Lance an STD. I fucked Lance into the ground, woke him up with a blowjob every morning, gave him..." She blushed again. "Gave him, ah, something he'd always wanted but hadn't asked for since we'd dated."

The notion of a blowjob from those perfect lips, of this suburban sex goddess giving up her virgin ass, made my cock stir. An image forced its way into my mind, one of her kneeling before me, taking me into her mouth, and lubing my dick up with her saliva before moving onto hands and knees and spreading her cheeks for me. I shifted uncomfortably; the real Ella watched me, and I had no doubt she knew what she'd done, intentionally or not.

Ella's gaze moved briefly to my crotch, then she turned her face away. "Anyway. I gave myself to Lance in every way. Devoted myself to him and our family. Acted like Superwife without feeling the pressure to actually be that, you know? I couldn't be perfect, but I could fake it, and I did, because Lance deserved the perfect wife. Especially... especially after what I'd done.

"And, a month or so later, when I felt... unloved. Unappreciated. When Lance let his anger with our situation get to him, and when he chose to be angry with me instead of that situation.... Well, that made me angry, too, but I didn't fight back. I didn't make things worse between my husband and myself, didn't make things worse for my family. I didn't add to his stress. It was easy to fall back on being imperfect.

"I let myself... be imperfect, let myself get fucked by some asshole I didn't care about instead of letting my family's shitty situation and my husband's shitty reaction to it fuck our lives. The pressure valve of a decent fuck by a fit guy combined with the guilt of being a bad, selfish wife for half an hour gave me the strength to be a great wife, almost the perfect wife, when it really mattered."

"Bullshit. It's not... That's not how it works."

Ella shrugged. "It's not how it should work, but it is how it has worked. Two years ago, Lance and I were probably on our way to divorce. Today, my husband is happier than he's ever been. We have a fulfilling, loving relationship, with more sex than he can handle, in any form he wants it. I'm mother to his children, doting wife in public, his maid in the home, chef in the kitchen, and whore in the bedroom. He gets nothing but constant affection and adoration from me.

"And I do adore him. I really do. I know, no matter what foibles he may have, that I'm lucky to have him. He's lucky to have me, too, though. Ask any man in this neighborhood whether they'd trade places with him. Some might hem and haw, some might lie or clutch their pearls, but they would.

"I mean, look at me." She stood up straight and gestured at her gorgeous form. "I'm beautiful and fit, and I stay this way for him. I'm sexually available anytime he wants, and I initiate as much as I can. I handle all the household chores that I'm able to. I'm a goddamned fantasy woman, and they all know it.

"In every way, I can and will do anything for my husband and family, even at the cost of my own self-esteem and happiness. Because let's be clear: the only satisfaction I really get out of this is from their happiness, other than a pretty good fuck now and again."

Ella sighed. "I'm not even going to get that anymore, after the shit Tony pulled. Mary told me what you walked in on, but even before I talked to her, I'd told him to hit the road. He threatened to tell Lance, but then I'll tell his wife--and boy, let me tell you how pissed off I was when I found out he was married after, like, the fifth time we fucked--and he can't have that."

Shrugging, she continued, "Doesn't matter anyways. Things have stabilized with Lance's business. He has plenty of clients coming in, and he's cutting back on his hours to spend time with us. I can prune my personal training clients down to the ones that I actually want to keep training, and I won't need the pressure valve anymore, since I won't be burning the candle at both ends, and neither will Lance.

"We can just be the happy couple with the happy kids, and the only lasting harm that there needs to be is the guilt I'm carrying. If..." She nodded at me. "Well, if you can just let us."

"Do you think that's how Lance would see it if he knew?"

Ella shrugged again. "I know it's not, but he doesn't have to. That's the point. The whole neighborhood has kept my secret, our secret, for a year. No drunken slip-ups, no gossiping, no snide comments from the men, none of it. If you hadn't walked in on Tony and me, you wouldn't even know."

The MILF I'd fantasized about from the moment we met walked towards me. She didn't slink seductively, hips swaying like a runway model, didn't try to beguile me with her charms. When she laid her hand on my upper arm, it was with a gentle squeeze, not a light touch meant to arouse. Her manner was that of a friend asking for a favor, not a succubus trying to steal my soul.

That didn't matter; my body responded just the same. If she'd asked for my soul right then, I might have considered it a bargain. I believed her when she said any of the men in the neighborhood who knew her secret would trade places with her husband. I would have, especially as the arrogant voice whispered in my mind, 'I could do better than he did. I could have kept her from straying. I wouldn't have taken her for granted, no matter how bad things got.'

Her cupid bow lips parted, words falling from them in a plaintive tone. "Please, Doug. Please don't tell him. I know you want to do the right thing, but telling him isn't the right thing. I love Lance. I love our family. Keep the secret, and I promise that I will spend the rest of my life being everything to him. What I've done hasn't hurt him; not yet. Whether he gets hurt is down to you now. I'm begging you, don't do that to him."

Then she smiled sadly, kissed my cheek, and pulled back to look at me. With a chuckle, she licked her thumb and rubbed away the lipstick she'd left behind. "Don't want people talking, right?"

I laughed, too, without meaning to. "No, I suppose not."

She almost responded, but then seemed to think better of it, instead picking up half the stack of chairs I'd come to the garage for. "Get the door? I'll help you carry them back."

Lance didn't seem to notice her absence, or if he did, it didn't register as anything worthy of his concern. Ella returned to his side, wrapping her arm around his waist and barely sparing a glance backwards towards me.

I watched him for the rest of the party, although I tried to be discreet. Watched all of them, actually, Lance and Ella and their kids. I saw a man completely enamored with his wife and content in his life. He chased Hunter and Zoe around, stole a kiss from Ella when he thought no one was looking--and was usually rewarded with a longer, lingering one in return--and talked and laughed with the older dads.

If I didn't know any better, I'd swear he had the exact life I wanted to be living in a decade. I did know better, though. Ella knew that I knew, too, and every once in a while, she'd glance at me with a brittle, pleading smile, one that said, "Please don't ruin this. Don't destroy his happiness, our happiness."

Bob ambled up to me with two beers in the late afternoon, handing me one. We mostly talked about my business and how it had boomed; he and the others had turned me onto so many new clients that I'd started looking at farming out some of the scut work to a subcontractor.

During a lull, though, he tipped the neck of his beer at Lance and said, "I hear his is going well, too. Sounds like he's just about out of the woods. It's good to see him back out here with his family." Nothing more overt than that, just a little nudge towards the outcome he, Ella, Mary, and apparently everyone else desired. He'd said everything he needed to, and he knew it. Instead of pressing the point, he held up his empty bottle. "Get you another?"

I shook my head. "No, I think I'm gonna go home. Like I said, work's backing up, and I need to strike while the iron is hot." Trying to move away from the subject we danced around, I drawled, in my worst John Wayne impression, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."

Bob guffawed at my terrible Duke, then frowned. "Make sure you take the time to enjoy your successes, son. It's far too easy to forget why we work as hard as we do." Turning his gaze back to Lance, he continued, "He did, I think, for a while, but now he's back where he belongs, part of our big, happy family." Then, shaking himself out of the serious mood, he smiled, clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Make a plate before you go. Julia and George are going to have leftovers for days." College wasn't so far gone that I'd turn down free food, so I took his advice.

Ella gave me a small, hopeful wave as I made my way towards the door with my overladen plate, and, after hesitating for a moment, I returned it. She tilted her head on one side, as if to ask, 'So?' After another few moments, I nodded a few times while wearing a resigned grimace. I would keep her secret. Excitedly, she mouthed, 'Really?' I nodded again and mouthed back, 'Yes.' The relieved grin on her face made my heart ache, partly because she was so beautiful, but partly because I felt like I really had sold a bit of my soul to earn it.

It wasn't her fearful, hopeful manner that decided for me, nor Bob's words, nor Mary's, although I'll admit they all influenced my decision. It was Lance himself. I'd never seen him that relaxed. He always seemed happy around Ella and the kids, but that day, I saw a whole new man, one unburdened by the strain that had weighed him down the entire time I'd known him.

I understood then that it wasn't that the people in the neighborhood weren't his friends; it was that he'd always been too tightly wound to let loose. Lance acted no differently that day at the barbecue than anyone else in the neighborhood, palling around with the other dads, sharing beers and laughs, and taking his turn at the grill. He seemed completely satisfied in his life. He seemed complete. Whatever he and Ella had done to make it through the wilderness, they'd come out the other side together, and he deserved his happiness.

If what Bob said was right, and Lance's business had finally reached a point where he could be present in his home life more often; and if Ella had told the truth about why she cheated, as seemed likely from what I'd seen with the scumbag; and if everyone else could live with the shameful secret to keep the young family together and happy; then I could, too. I would be Lance's friend, even though I knew he'd likely hate me if he ever found out what I'd done in the name of that friendship. What we all had done.

I fell asleep easily that night. My conscience wasn't clear; I don't think there was any way it could have been, no matter what I'd chosen. I'd made my decision, though, and I made my peace with what it meant for my own sense of myself as an ethical and moral person, as a man, and as a friend.

Ella filled my dreams. In them, I was the man that had comforted her through the lean times. I was the one that hammered into her cheating cunt, that pulled her hair and made her moan and scream and beg for more. I dreamt she came harder with me than she ever had, with Tony or with Lance or with anyone else. Nameless, shadowy figures milled around in the dreamscape of her bedroom, men and women both, some simply watching with disinterest, others leering at our naked, sweaty, rutting display and masturbating at the spectacle.

After I awoke, alone in my bed, an empty feeling gnawed at me. I attempted to push it aside first through force of will, then through manual labor, mowing and edging and doing every single other task I could think of. I tried to tell myself it worked, but the dreams came again the following night, and with them, the empty feeling upon waking.

Monday morning's work helped me ignore the uneasy emptiness. When the alarm on my phone sounded, telling me to get ready for my workout with Ella, the feeling returned with a vengeance. I told myself once more that I was doing the right thing, or, at any rate, the least bad thing. Everyone agreed. Everyone that I trusted. 'Doing the right thing is hard,' I told myself. 'That's all this is. Suck it up. Do it for them.'

When I saw Ella on the street, I waved a perfunctory wave and gave a perfunctory greeting, then used my work as an excuse to flee before she could move on to discussing anything more serious. I knew that could only work for so long, but by Friday, the dream had ceased to plague my nights. Surely the empty feeling would follow suit.

In the few days between my discovery and my decision, the neighbors had largely left me alone. During the week after the barbecue, however, they returned in force, usually bearing gifts. The ladies of the neighborhood had always brought over extra cookies or cupcakes or leftovers, but that week they brought amounts that could only be "extra" if they had accidentally tried to feed a football team.

Their husbands came, too, bringing a strange assortment of offerings. At the low end, Troy Jeffries brought over a spare couple bags of fertilizer leftover from his last round of lawn maintenance. Some of the gifts bordered on the extravagant, though; Sam Henderson handed me a new-in-box current generation game console that he'd planned to give his son if only, and I quote, "my bitch of an ex-wife hadn't beat me to it."

That gave me an in to ask his reasoning for keeping the secret. It turned out that he'd been in Ella's shoes, although his affair fell well into "fling" territory, according to him, and lasted only a couple of weeks. He'd felt guilty about it and swore to himself to never do it again, but that didn't matter. Someone--he never learned who--told his wife about it months after the fact, and her vengeance destroyed both their lives and his relationship with his kid. He didn't want to put anyone else through that.

I didn't learn from all of my neighbors why they chose what they chose, but I learned enough to know that most of them had their own reasons. Some were angry that it dragged on for so long, as Bob had been, but most of them had more of an "in for a penny, in for a pound" attitude towards Ella's infidelity. "And besides," most of them told me in some form or fashion, "it's over now, right? She's not going to see that Tony asshole anymore, now that Lance's workload is lighter."

I skipped my Wednesday workout appointments, too. The alarm on my phone didn't go off; I'd silenced it by then. It didn't matter, though, since my internal clock reminded me: 'Hey, idiot, you're hungry and restless. Get your ass up, grab a snack, and go work out with your hot neighbor.' I couldn't do it, though. Even putting the dreams I'd had of her aside, I couldn't imagine walking into her living room and not thinking about the way I'd found her getting railed by her theoretically former affair partner.

Ultimately, it didn't matter. At 1 PM on the dot, my doorbell rang, and there stood Ella Jenkins, dressed in her usual workout gear and looking sexy as fuck, even with the mock-irritated scowl on her face. "You gonna keep ghosting me? Because I am not going to be responsible for you getting out of shape, mister."

"Ella..."

She smiled sympathetically. "I get it, Doug. I do. It's weird, especially since..." With a sigh, she asked, "Can I come in? I don't want to do this outside."

I stepped aside to allow her entrance, then closed the door and followed her to the living room. Our friendship that had developed over the previous year had meant she was always welcome in my home and that she should treat it as her own when visiting, but the way she just barged in and plunked her ass down on my couch miffed me a bit. Things had changed, hadn't they? How could she act so casually, as if our entire dynamic hadn't shifted?

Ella saw the beginnings of the frown on my face. "Doug... Look, if you don't want to be my friend anymore, I get that. It hurts, but I get it. I don't want that, though; other than losing Lance, that's about the worst outcome I can think of from this." She reached out to touch my hand, but I moved it away.

Hurt etched her face and laced her voice. "Please don't. I'm still me, hon. I'm... I'm flawed. Fucked up, even. I know that, and I think... I think maybe you didn't want to see it before. I know you've got a crush on me, and I... if I'm honest, I liked that. Like it. But I thought, beneath that, that we had a real connection."

"So did I, until I found out..." I shook my head.

"I didn't hide it from you because I didn't trust you, Doug. I did it mostly because too many people already knew, and I've lived in fear for months that one of them would tell Lance. But also... also because I wanted someone in this neighborhood, someone in my life, to look at me without seeing the big scarlet 'A.' I wanted someone who didn't know I was a cheating slut. Someone who- who saw the 'me' I was before that.