The Long Fall

by Daniel Quentin Steele

  “Come on, Debbie, you’re an established professional. Your major earning years are ahead of you and while you’re not earning what he is, you’re in the same ballpark. You’re not some little homemaker who is going to be destitute if you don’t get maintenance every month.”

  “Not pertinent, Lew,” Joyce said. “He does make considerably more than she does and your client’s actions have damaged her future earning potential and her career. The law is on our side in this one and you’re smart enough to know that. The only reason for your client to even make an issue of maintenance is to continue to try to punish her for seeking a divorce.”

  “That’s not the way he sees it. We could fight this out, draw things out, let it get very ugly.”

  “And you’d still lose, Lew,” Joyce said briskly. “I bow to no one in my admiration for your legal skills, but you have a dog of a case here. You’ll lose and all your client will do is spend more of his money fighting the inevitable.”

  Lew looked down at the table for a minute as if thinking, then raised his gaze to Debbie.

  “Debbie, can we talk privately for a minute?”

  “Why?” Debbie and Joyce said simultaneously.

  “I’d rather not go into that, Debbie. It’s personal. No offense Joyce, but I’m not sure and I believe that Debbie is not going to want you around for this discussion.”

  “Debbie, I’d advise you against-“

  Debbie waved her hand and said, “It’s okay Joyce. I’m not going to sign anything or commit to anything before I get your input. I’m not stupid. I am curious about all this cloak and dagger. Bill’s already warned me he had some heavy artillery of his own and I’m curious to see what he thinks he’s got. Give us some time, okay?”

  When Joyce had left, the two of them stared at each other. Debbie took a deep breath and let it out, her breasts jiggling with the motion. She watched his eyes. He noticed. She had to fight to avoid looking down to see if she could spot his lap. Was he getting hard?

  “It’s a waste of time, Debbie. Even if I got hard, I can think with an erection. Or are you , or have you become, so much of a slut that you automatically work on guys’ dicks without a second thought?”

  She smiled at him and made her titties jiggle some more. Was he sweating a little more heavily?

  “Why don’t you be honest about your feelings, Lew? You’re mad at me for divorcing your friend?”

  “I’m mad at you for breaking his heart and cutting his balls off. He’s a good guy and he doesn’t deserve what you’ve done to him.”

  “He’s a good guy? He’s a good guy? Oh, he’s a saint. Defender of the oppressed and downtrodden, bringer of justice to the violated? You want me to sing a hymn? How about his role as a husband and father? How about being away from home more than he’s been home in years. How about putting everybody’s life ahead of the people he says he cares about the most.”

  “I spend a lot of time away from home, and Bill’s got obligations and duties like nothing I could imagine. People’s lives depend on what he does and what he decides.”

  “When you are home, Lew, you ever slip it to Mona? You ever come up behind her, pull her panties down and fuck her until she screams? Care to guess how long it’s been since Bill did that to me? When Mona is underneath you and you’re pounding your dick inside her, does she feel the roll of fat around your stomach rubbing on her. That’s a real turn-on, you know.”

  “He got fat and out of shape, Debbie. It’s not a crime. You were able to make time to keep yourself in shape. You couldn’t have pushed him, or lured him, into a gym? I got a feeling, you could probably deliver a blow job that would convince any guy to do anything you wanted.”

  “Would you like to find out?”

  She stared at him and she wondered if he could tell if she was serious?

  “Lock the door and unzip and I’ll let you judge for yourself.”

  He shook his head, but he did seem to be sweating more.

  “Why do you do that, Debbie? You think I didn’t notice you showing your tits off to me when I’d come over with Mona? I never did think you were serious, but why? You’re a gorgeous woman, a walking wet dream. Why do you have to prove to yourself that every guy wants you? To answer your question, if Bill wasn’t my friend and I wasn’t married, I’d be in your mouth right now. But he is and I am. So can we stop the game playing?”

  “You know that Mona doesn’t know how lucky she is?”

  “I hope she does.”

  “In answer to your question, I tried, Lew. I tried for years. I asked him to go with me. I made appointments for him with personal trainers. Shit, I tried to get him jealous by flirting with young hunks on the rare occasions when I could get him to go with me. But there was always something that needed doing downtown, some case that had to be attended to, something more important to him than me.

  “Finally I accepted the fact that his job was more important than I was. A woman I could compete with. Any woman. But how do you fight a job?”

  She looked down at the floor for a minute then up at Lew sitting in his immaculately tailored suit.

  “Stand up, Lew.”

  “Um why?”

  “Just stand up.”

  After a moment, he did.

  “Turn around.”

  “Why?”

  “Please, just do it.”

  He did and then turned back to face her.

  She got up and walked around the table toward him. He looked like he was going to back up but he held his ground. Finally she was standing in front of him and she reached out with her left hand. He looked like he was going to flinch but he stood still. She laid her palm flat on his abdomen, then ran it down his stomach but stopped well above the swell that was developing between his legs.

  She pushed with her hand and he took the unspoken command and turned. With his back to her, she reached down and grabbed his ass. He almost jumped but stood still again.

  “Turn around, Lew.”

  When he was facing her again, she said, “You’ve got a flat stomach. Maybe a little bulge but not much. And your ass, God it’s tight and firm. Bill’s told me you’re out and on the road and away from home more than he’s away. I know you’re younger than him, but how do you managed to keep your stomach and ass that way?”

  He shrugged.

  “There are gyms anywhere. And aerobic exercises you can do anywhere. And like you said, Bill’s got 10 years on me.”

  “Why do you do it? Why stay in shape? It’s not for other women, I don’t think. Bill says you’re a one-woman man and the fact you could ignore my tits convinces me he’s telling the truth.”

  “I do it for Mona, I guess. For myself but I want to keep her hot.”

  She backed away from him, continuing to look up into his eyes. She took her hands cupped her breasts held them up to him and pinched the nipples between her fingers. She hefted them, then ran her hands down her legs and cupped her groin and ran her fingers under her skirt and between her legs.

  When she brought her hand her there was an oily sheen on her fingers.

  “Just this little bit of talking nasty has got me wet, and to be honest I was thinking about Doug’s big dick before you got here. Look at me, Lew. I’m what the kids at UNF call a MILF, a mother you’d love to fuck, and I am what my generation would call a prime piece of ass.

  “This is what Bill had in his bed every night for years. He could have had me, up the ass or any other way he wanted it. He could have been stuffing my mouth every night, or at least a lot. There are some nights when no woman is going to be in the mood, of course, but there were a hell of a lot of nights this was available and willing and horny as hell and he was nowhere to be found.

  “There are guys that would climb naked over barbed wire just to sniff my panties and HE COULDN’T GET UP THE ENERGY TO GO TO THE FRIGGING GYM AND STAY IN SHAPE!”

  She hadn’t realized she was screaming the last until she heard steps and Joyce stuck her head in the door with a worried exp
ression.

  “Everything okay.”

  Debbie backed away from Lew and said, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I kinda of lost it for a minute.”

  When the door shut she walked back to her seat and said, “It wasn’t my responsibility to get him hot enough to get off his ass and stay in shape. He should have done it for me. For himself.”

  “We could argue that, Debbie, but you got a sweet young stud, his house, his kids and the life he used to have. He’s got his job and a place he sleeps. He came out with the short end of the stick. And he’s not going to pay you alimony.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Lew. He is, whether he wants to or not.”

  Lew looked at her funny.

  “It’s not that cut and dried, Debbie.”

  “Oh, so you’ve got his secret weapon? Unfortunately for you, I never screwed around on him. There are no photos of me leaving Doug and our love nest. There are no love letters, no tape recordings of hot whispered nothings. He and you have shit.”

  “That’s something I’ve wondered about Debbie. He told me about that ‘when we were married’ slip and about your kissing Doug that night coming back from UNF. And about the way you acted with Doug at UNF that night. You still swear up and down that you guys were just platonic friends?”

  She took a sip of her bottled water and suddenly felt very tired.

  “Once again, Bill has a screw loose. I made a simple slip. I don’t know what I was thinking, but only Bill would have blown that up into an accusation that I was cheating on him. And I didn’t kiss Doug that night, or at least I don’t think I did. I might have reached over and given him a peck on the cheek, but I’ve given hotter kisses to neighbors at Christmas parties. It was nothing.

  She looked down at the table, thinking about that Friday night at UNF.

  “Looking back, I guess it did look pretty bad, that night at UNF. Doug was excited and happy and since I was his mentor, I was kind of basking in his glory. Bill had been acting like a shithead for weeks, we hadn’t had sex in months, and a young handsome guy was treating me like his date for the prom. I plead guilty to acting like a stupid young girl. But it wasn’t anything more than that.”

  “And that kiss?”

  “That was a big mistake. That wasn’t planned. They had called him up to receive his plaque and he wanted me beside me and all of a sudden he was kissing me. I shouldn’t have done it. God knows I shouldn’t have given him tongue, but I was so damned horny all of a sudden it’s a wonder I didn’t drag him down on the podium and have my way with him. If I’d been getting what I needed at home, if you were in my bed instead of Bill, I would have laughed that kiss off.”

  She stared at the briefcase he had pulled up onto the table and said, “Don’t leave me in suspense, Lew. Hit me with your best shot.”

  He snapped the briefcase open and pulled out a manila folder. He flipped it open and she saw a thin stack of papers. He glanced through the pile and then pulled one out and put it on the table and shoved it in her direction. She picked it up and looked at it curiously.

  What in the world could…

  Deb to Lance: That’s indelicate, Lance, you pig. :) But you’re right. Consummating is like....what Bill and I do. Oh, God, I can’t believe I wrote that. But...it’s been so long since I’ve been really FUCKED that sometimes I forget what it was like. I think we used to have that, if I can remember that far back. But now...Bill was never huge to be honest, but the last few years I think he’s shrunk. I’ll kill you if you ever let a word of this slip. And he gets winded in five or six minutes.

  She closed her eyes and tried to shake off a feeling of vertigo, as if the building were spinning around her. She had never fainted in her life, didn’t even know what the feeling would be like, but it must be like this. After a moment she opened her eyes warily and looked down. The paper was still there. The words were still there. She grabbed her bottle of water and emptied it in gulps.

  Her eyes skipped down the page until she found:

  Deb to Lance: “No, and he never will. How can I tell him he doesn’t do it for me in bed anymore; hasn’t for a long time. That I have to use a big vibrator and shove it in there way further than he ever gets to climax. I fake it with him, but sometimes I think he must be able to tell the difference.”

  And...

  Deb to Lance: “I know you could have. You could have had me a month ago if you were an asshole like a lot of the younger guys around here are. But you’ve been a gentleman, a good man. That’s why I like you so much. I’ll just say that I hope you know just how special a friend you’ve become. And now I’ll sign off.”

  She felt like she was waking from a dream, or falling into a nightmare.

  “How—what—where did you...”

  She took a deep breath and tried to grab onto something, anything, to stem the rising feeling of panic inside her.

  “Those were my private, my personal-“

  “Oh yeah, very personal e-mails Debbie,” Lew said flatly with no discernible emotion. He shoved another paper toward her.

  “The worst of it is, I feel so much closer to you than I do to Bill. He’s my husband, but he doesn’t even know our marriage is dying slowly. He’s clueless. Such a smart, smart man, so skillful in the courtroom, but in real life, in our marriage, he’s a loser. He’s lost my lust, and my respect and slowly he’s losing my love.

  “I feel like an animal caught in a trap. I’ve tried a thousand times to think of some way to start breathing life back into our relationship, our marriage. I’ve thought about trying to invigorate our sexual life. But...dammit, I’m not that good an actress. I fake orgasms all the time, but I can’t fake excitement. And he doesn’t excite me anymore.

  She looked across the table, and for the first time she had a feeling for why Bill had called him a shark. There was a cold, hard expression on his face and he didn’t’ look like the man who had been smiling at her before.

  “Those were my personal messages. I deleted them all. How could he-“

  “I’m not going to give you the details, but he did. All of them. Going six months back until just before the Friday night blowout. You remember the message where you told Doug—sorry that’s ‘Lance’ - that you were getting ready to end your marriage but you would take time out to help him celebrate his big night?

  “Well, I can understand that. What’s a little thing like a nearly 20-year-marriage compared to a chance to go out and have a blowout with your new boyfriend?”

  Her mind was spinning. Somehow the question that came out was, “How long...,”

  “He trusted you, Debbie: shows you what an idiot he was. It was an automatic monitoring system. He’d never ever looked at your emails. Until that weekend you stayed out all night and he eventually found out you’d gone to your parents. He was alone all that weekend and he’d gotten suspicious and he started poking around. That’s what investigators do.”

  There was an emotion in his eyes deeper than contempt and harder than anger.

  “He were there all alone in that big house of yours while he learned what you really thought about him and his shrinking dick and read those messages talking about how hard lover boy’s dick was and those fabulous abs of his. He was alone while he learned how you were going out dancing with friends and guys because you just didn’t like being around him.

  “He was in that house that he paid for and worked his ass off for surrounded by pictures of the life he used to have. That’s why he left you that bloody ring. I’m glad he was able to get it off. I think he would have chopped it off if he had to. He didn’t have much love left in his heart for you that night.”

  She didn’t know what it was, maybe it was that image of him hunched over the big computer off their bedroom reading by the light of the computer screen in the dark house, but she lurched to her feet and mumbled something about being sick and raced out the door of the conference room and barely made it to the toilet in the closest bathroom. She was hunched over it heaving, but nothing coming out
, when she heard the door open and Joyce say, “Debbie, what’s the matter? What happened?”

  She tried to shake her head. Tears ran down her face and she gasped for air. Finally, she got out, “Sorry. Must have....been something...I ate. I’ll be okay.”

  Joyce finally backed out and closed the door and Debbie took deep breaths until the queasiness passed and the tears stopped. She tried to get her head straight. He had known. All the time since that weekend. It was as if he had opened a hole into her heart and soul and knew what she was thinking while she was pretending to be someone other than who she really was.

  Who she was, was a woman getting ready to walk out of a marriage where she felt trapped and unloved. She had thought she was wearing a mask around him, and in truth he had seen her as she really was.

  Why hadn’t he said anything? And then she understood his anger. For the first time. He really did think she had been fucking Doug all that time. She remembered the words she had read. If she’d intercepted emails from Bill to a woman with the same kind of language, she would never have believed he wasn’t having sex with her.

  They were the words of lovers, even though she would have sworn at the time that they were just friends.

  She walked back in to see Lew swallowing the last of his coffee. He looked up at her with eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  “Could I see them? All of them?”

  He passed her the folder. She opened it and began reading. It was like opening a door into the past. She had never read them as a whole. She had gotten them, read them and deleted them day by day. Now they told a story.

  Finally, she put them in the folder and closed it.

  “Can I have a copy?”

  “Keep that one. I’ve made other copies.”

  She finally raised her eyes to meet his. She noticed, not for the first time, his were a peculiar gray green combination. They were attractive, now cold eyes.

  “I understand now why he’s been so angry. But, Lew, they weren’t...it wasn’t...”

  “They are there in black and white. They are what they are.”