by Cynthia Dane
“Mrs. Andrews…”
“That’s right.” Lana found her bearings and approached, not giving a shit if her robe slipped open and Chloe saw the boss’s bouncing tits beneath a thin white T-shirt. “Mrs. Fucking Andrews. Care to tell me what the fuck you are doing here, little girl?”
Chloe really did look little and girlish. She looked like a teenager caught sneaking out, or a small child caught peeking a look at the gifts beneath the Christmas Tree. But she wasn’t a child. She was a grown-ass woman. A grown, sexualized woman caught going through the master’s belongings.
Or had that key been given to her? Not even Lana had a key to her husband’s desk. She knew where to find it, but had never been given one…
“I’m so sorry… Mr. Andrews told me to…”
“Told you to what? Oh, I bet this is rich.” Here it was. Here came the confession. Chloe couldn’t deny it any longer. Either she was up to something too nefarious for words, or she was cheating with Lana’s bastard of a husband.
“He told me to pick up and drop things off here. I’ve been helping him with a project, ma’am.”
“What project?”
“I’m so sorry!”
Lana was no match for how tiny this girl was. Chloe was able to slip easily past her, bolting into the hallway with the key still clasped in her hand. No matter how loudly Lana called after her, she could not convince the girl to stop, confess her sins, and meet her fate.
You’re kidding me!
Lana went into her husband’s office, slamming the door behind her. I will expose this asshole. She went to the coat closet full of tax files and receipts. There, on the top shelf, was an inconspicuous box that Ken kept some valuables in. Sure enough, she quickly found a tiny ring of keys, one of which was sure to go to his desk.
I may regret this, but I don’t care. Lana tried one key after the other, crouched low between desk and office chair. No matter which key she tried, however, nothing was making the lock budge.
Not until she reached the second to last key, which snapped everything open.
Lana gasped, mentally preparing herself for whatever she might find. Love letters? Dirty books? Presents exchanged between master and mistress? Whatever was in here, it was not meant for Lana’s eyes… but for some reason Chloe was more than invited to partake.
That alone was enough to give Lana the strength to pry it open.
She looked upon a mess of books and papers. Neatly organized, yes, but a mess nonetheless. Piles of Ken’s stationery, neatly covered in his handwriting, stared back at her. Spiral bound books and what looked like a manuscript proof were crammed into the corner. Everything was covered in colorful sticky notes, some of them with Ken’s handwriting, and others with what looked like… Chloe’s.
What the fuck? Lana pulled out the top stack of papers. They were neatly creased in the middle, the perfect size of Chloe’s bag that she packed around the house when she went about her job. They even smelled like her, if that was possible. Sure enough, Lana found a pink sticky note on top written in girly handwriting. “This is really beautiful!!!”
“I’ll show her a beautiful bruise…” Lana ripped off the note, crumpled it in her hand, and began reading the sordid love letter her husband wrote the maid.
“The first time I met my wife, I thought I was crushed by the weight of the universe and sent to the afterlife. That’s because she looked like a glamorous angel come to deliver either very good or very bad news about my soul’s fate. Instead, she came up to me and asked if I knew where the women’s restroom was. She was one of the only women there, which should have tipped me off regarding how deliriously intelligent and bullheaded she is.”
What the hell?
“Lana Losers was definitely not a loser, no matter how much people made fun of her for her name or for being a woman, let alone a conventionally beautiful one. She was a winner through and through. In that first hour meeting her, I learned that she had dominated her internship at one of the biggest real estate agencies in the city. There were vicious rumors that she slept her way to the position. These are lies, meant to slander my wife. But, even if she had, it didn’t demean her in any way to me. She proved her merit when she showed me her portfolio of one-hundred high class sales… all within the past year!”
Lana flipped through the first half of the papers. Her name showed up at least once on every single one of them.
“What. The. Fuck.”
She reached back in and pulled out more papers. “For our wedding, Lana wanted to have only three bridesmaids, which pleased my mother greatly, since I have exactly three brothers. However, the drama that erupted because I chose two friends over two of my brothers almost caused us to elope in Vegas. I brought it up more than once. It would have been easy enough to do… hop a plane and get married at the nearest Elvis Station. Yet I knew how much a family affair meant to my wife, and convinced her to take on two more bridesmaids. She ended up picking a pair of cousins she hadn’t talked to since she was nineteen. I think they thought they had stepped into Cinderella’s castle on our wedding day. I couldn’t blame them. I thought she looked like a princess as well.”
Lana fell to her knees in front of the open drawer. There were more pages – pages upon pages – with Ken’s meticulous handwriting scribbling his thoughts on his wife, marriage, and even bits and pieces about his career and home life. “The first thing she told me when I asked her to be my girlfriend was that she didn’t want to have children. Was I okay with that? Would I pressure her in ten years to give me an heir? You have to understand, if you’re not in our society, it can be confusing… but women don’t have a lot of freedom regarding children. It’s mandatory in many of the more conservative families to have an heir, preferably a boy or two. You know the saying – an heir and a spare. Lana was upfront saying she was going to get her tubes tied or ablated, or whatever, and never consider motherhood again. It wasn’t for her. Until then, I had been on the fence about children, assuming that my wife would make the final decision. Well, she did, didn’t she? I wouldn’t take a gaggle of perfect children in exchange for my wife.”
More words. More praise. Tiny criticisms, like how she often spat her toothpaste into the sink and didn’t wash it down all the way. Or how she mumbled in her sleep, usually about the most nonsensical things. “She can be harsh to our staff sometimes, but she’s also very generous come Christmas and birthdays, or because something made her think of someone working in our house or office. Lana simply expects excellence from everyone around her. If any of our staff thinks she’s tough on them, imagine how she is on me! If I screw something up, I hear about it for months, sometimes years. She wants me to improve myself. In turn, I challenge her as well.”
Sometimes things were crossed out. Other times there were tiny notes in the margins, usually in Chloe’s curly handwriting. “You’re so sweet, Mr. Andrews.” “I’m not sure Mrs. Andrews would like the word ‘beastly’ in reference to her flirting…” “Do you have a picture to go with this passage? I think the audience would like a visual reference. I know I do!”
“Lana!”
Papers crumpled in her hands as Lana turned, heart thumping wildly in her chest. “Ken!”
There he stood, in his office doorway, suit jacket tossed over his arm and tie loose around his neck. The look he gave his wife was both one of shock and horror. “What are you doing in my private drawer?”
Lana dropped what she held, but the damage was already done. She and her husband kept few secrets between them, but one thing they acknowledged was private correspondence and spaces. They didn’t go through each other’s mail, electronic or physical. They didn’t intrude on meetings unless previously given permission. And they sure as hell stayed out of each other’s locked drawers. Lana had violated more than her husband’s trust by rooting through his locked desk drawer.
“I had to know what was going on!” Already she was on the defensive, determined to clear her besmirched name be
fore her husband even had the chance to besmirch it. “Things had been so shady around here… you and Chloe…”
“What about me and Chloe?”
She saw the look on her husband’s face. He knew instantly what she had suspected, and it was more than betrayal coloring his cheekbones. Lana bent over the yellow stationery scattered on the floor… and cried.
They were tears of relief and fear. Relief that her paranoia was just that, and her husband was not cheating on her. But the fear. The fear! I fucked up badly! Now Ken knew how crazy she was. Not only had she suspected something as heinous as infidelity, but she had rooted through his private stashes in search of something against him. Had the tables been turned? Lana would have never forgiven him.
Ken stayed far away from her for a minute. Lana could not see his face through her shameful tears, but she could feel his aura from so far away. “How could you, Lana?” He wasn’t angry. He was sad. The woman he had written so highly of in these papers was sobbing on his office floor after being caught like Chloe was.
“Lana.” That stern voice was not sexual. Rarely did Lana hear this side of him and not be the submissive end to his domination. No, this was matrimonial, sure, but for all the wrong reasons. “I am not sleeping with our maid.”
“I know!” she cried through her sobs, each one more heinous than the last. They wracked her body… a body purging itself of the negativity, the paranoia, and her will to destroy a marriage that seemed too good to be true for so long. And yet here she was, destroying the best thing that had ever happened to her. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry would never be enough for her unwarranted suspicions. Of course Ken had not cheated on her. Why would he? Was she really so dumb, so foolhardy as to believe this man who let her get away with murder would be any less than faithful to a fault? For fuck’s sake, they were swingers! If he was happy, why would he cheat? Because he was a man? Because men always cheated? What sort of disgusting half-truths had Lana swallowed over the years? Did she really have so little faith in her marriage?
I didn’t confront him about the maid because deep down I knew it was baseless. Like her therapist told her, she had only been concerned with dismantling her own marriage, finding every little fault as an excuse to get a divorce. Except to what end? Did she really need Ken to prove his love to her every ten years? Would she still be playing this game with herself at eighty?
“I can’t believe you went through my things.” Now he came to her, swiftly, his polished leather shoes appearing beside her huddling, shaking body.
“I had to know…” It was all she could say. “I had to know what you were up to. Everyone was being so secretive, I couldn’t take it anymore!”
“You didn’t even ask me?”
“How could I have…” What? Trusted him? Lana cut off that thought before she completely embarrassed herself even further. “I wanted to see it for myself. Kenneth…” She held up the tattered papers. “What is this?”
He bent down, hands snatching the papers away and putting them back in neat order. “A manuscript.” The papers slid back into his desk drawer, where he plucked out one of the bound proofs and held it above his wife’s head. “I wrote a book. A memoir.”
“What?”
Her tears had abated. Now she saw her husband through puffy eyes. She saw a man disappointed with himself, his wife, and whatever this project was that he held in his hands. “It was going to be a surprise, Bunny.” It surprised Lana to hear her nickname. “I was going to show you this proof while we were on our honeymoon. It’s being published in a couple of months.”
Lana couldn’t believe her ears. “A memoir?” She didn’t even know Kenneth wrote outside of legal documents and the occasional note to somebody. The man had their personal assistant at work transcribe most of his letters. “Since when have you been writing a memoir?”
“Since a year ago. One of my old college buddies is a publisher in New York. He approached me saying he wanted to do a line of memoirs from successful businessmen and women. He was interested in you writing one too, or us writing one together, but I suggested I write one about you, in a way. He agreed. Now here I am, the biggest fool in the universe.”
“You’re not…”
“I must be, for not foreseeing this. If I hadn’t been wearing my blinders that said this should be a surprise… I should have told you about it the moment I finished the first draft.”
“And Chloe?”
“Chloe?” Ken laughed. “She was one of my first readers. All the others, including the editor, were men. I wanted a woman’s view. Who else would I have asked if not you? Roberta?”
“The package…”
“…That I got by the pool that day? Forget it all, Lana, that was the proof! I didn’t want you to see it yet.”
“And those letters from you were really your handwritten drafts…” Holy shit. She was terrible. “And you gave her a key to your desk so she could…”
“…Put back what she finished commenting on and take out the next parts. Yes. I wanted to change the lock anyway, and was going to after this project was finished. It won’t matter if she makes a copy of the key, because it won’t work in a few months anyway.” Ken snorted. “Apparently I need to find a new hiding spot for my keys.”
“I’m so sorry!” Lana was on the verge of tears again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She couldn’t hold back the drops falling from her eyes. She tasted salt. Bitter. Sour. Everything was sent up from her heart for the sole purpose of making her throw up.
“Ken…”
He put a hand on her shoulder. Tender. Firm. “I don’t know what to say, Lana. I never in a million years expected this from you.”
And never in a million years did Lana expect to snort at a statement like that. “Are you kidding? You know better than anyone what a vindictive bitch I am. I was ready to rip out that girl’s entrails and parade them in front of you!”
“You should probably go apologize to her. At least now I know why she’s being so skittish around us. Besides…” He nicked his finger against her chin. “I do know how vindictive you can be. Don’t think of it as being vindictive, though. It’s kind of hot that you’re possessive…”
“No it’s not. It’s messed up. Kenny, I…” Finally, she forced herself to look at the man she married. The man she didn’t trust. I can see the pain in his eyes. How could she do that to him? How could she become someone who didn’t trust her husband? Who was suspicious of everyone and everything around her? Didn’t she know how hard Ken worked for them to live like this? How compromising he was? He does it because he loves me. Who else would ever love her like that? “I’m not used to things being so good for so long. You’ve seen my family. They’re all some level of miserable. I don’t know anything else. My brain was looking for a thousand reasons to break up with you.”
His grip on her tightened. “You don’t want that, right? You don’t want to break up?”
Lana looked away. “No, baby.”
“And I would never do anything to compromise those feelings.” Ken cupped his hands around her cheeks, forcing her to look at him again. How can he look so cool and collected? She had confessed to thinking he was cheating on her! “You must believe me, Bunny.” His thumbs pushed into her flesh, soaking up her tears. “From the moment I met you, all other women paled in comparison. The day you married me was the day I first felt complete.”
Most women would cry to hear those words. Most. Lana was not like most women. She often shoved aside those fluttering feelings in order to be practical. To make rational decisions. When Ken asked her to marry him years ago, she didn’t say yes right away. She took the time to think it over – for a whole week. For Ken, it was surely torture.
So when she heard him say that, her first reaction wasn’t to sob – again – but to fold into his arms and hold him tightly, determined to make him feel complete once more.
“We’re good, right? You’
re not worried I’m going to cheat on you, right?”
Lana shook her head. “I ruined your surprise. I was so rude to that girl. I’m fucked up.”
“Don’t do that to yourself. Although…” Ken gathered her shirt into his fist, pulling against some skin, some hair, and every fiber of her being. “I can’t let you get away with this without suffering some consequences, Lana.”
He stood, hand lingering around her arm as he gently tugged on it and convinced her to stand up with him. Lana’s robe fell from her body, pooling at her feet. He shouldn’t be so transparent. Except then what would she love on all the time?
“You’ve been way out of line, Mrs. Andrews.” Ken took her by the hips, pushing her against his desk like he had weeks ago. My husband. My Master. Lana eased into it, feeling her legs open and her nipples harden beneath her T-shirt. I need help, all right. Just five minutes after nearly having her heart broken, she was ready to fuck the man who caught and married her ten years ago. “You’re going to have to be dealt with. Between terrorizing the help and daring to doubt my integrity, I’m not even sure where to begin with your punishment.”
Lana could hardly look him in the eye.
“Look at this woman I’ve married.” Ken plucked the hem of her shirt and lifted it up, revealing her bare breasts as they responded to the chilly air in her husband’s office. “She’s already aroused.” He pinched one of her nipples; Lana barely responded. “I wish I could say my reasons for marrying you were purely emotional, but I have to admit that your ability to go at any random moment played a huge part. What man wouldn’t want a woman ready to go whenever he pleased?”
Lana glanced up at him, her demeanor so demure that her husband looked as if he didn’t recognize her – but that look was one only Lana could recognize. To anyone else, Ken looked completely in control of the situation.
“Would you… be pleased to do it right now, Mr. Andrews?”
“Ah, she knows how to make it up to me.” Ken stood between her legs, hands rubbing her bare sides as his breathing increased and blood probably rushed to his cock. He’s got me cornered now. Cornered and in need of being published. For one of the first times ever, though, Lana completely felt it. She knew she needed marital disciplining. She had doubted her husband. She had feared he had turned on her, after so many years of good times and better understanding. How would she have felt were it the other way around? Horrible. I’d never let him live it down.