Hall Past

Geek Pride time again! For this one, I decided to go for "movie geek," albeit with a sprinkling of general geek culture. And, given the origin of the term, what better archetype to play with than the hall pass? I hope you enjoy it. And now, on with the show!

--

The silence struck me first. No sounds of arguing children reached my ears, a rarity in a house with two tweens. A heavenly scent came next; Courtney had prepared my favorite meal, a pan-roasted chicken and mushroom recipe she'd stumbled across while we were still dating.

My wife of nearly fifteen years poked her head out of the kitchen entryway, her chestnut hair freshly styled in a long bob, and her heart-shaped face made up for a night on the town. The form-fitting black dress completed the effect, showing off her modest but pleasant curves. They might have grown softer and ever-so-slightly more generous since we'd met almost two decades before, but I still enjoyed exploring them. Given the way she'd dolled herself up, I expected to be planting the flag once more later that night.

"Dinner's almost done, handsome."

I dropped my laptop bag on the foyer floor, then moved in for a kiss. She returned it happily before pulling back to giggle and run a thumb across my lips. "I think this color looks better on me." When I tried for another, she ducked backwards with a playful admonishment. "Gregory Taylor! Unless you want that chicken to burn, you--"

I silenced her protestations with a kiss, albeit a shorter one than I would have preferred. When I'd finished--for the moment, at least--I chuckled, "Go on, you," waiting until her back was turned to lightly slap her pert little butt. That elicited a cry of fake outrage from my wife, followed by a wiggle of said derriere.

I went to set the table, but she'd beaten me to it. Courtney had laid out two place settings of the good china on our kitchen table. A small, intimate dinner, then, complete with a lit taper as the centerpiece. That explained the absence of the children. "Where are Tyler and Zoe?"

"My folks have them." She looked over one shoulder, a coquettish set to her features. "For the weekend."

"For the weekend?" Court had gone to a lot of effort. I found that strange, given that we'd gone out just the week before to the theater; strange, but certainly not unwelcome. Perhaps a little concerning, though. Had I forgotten an important date? No, that didn't make any sense. It wasn't her birthday or mine, and our anniversary had passed only a few months before.

For a moment, I thought about guessing, but that had never been the way in our relationship. We didn't play those silly games, instead choosing to honestly admit when one or the other of us might have screwed up. "Did I, ah, forget something? I mean, this is great, but..."

Courtney half-turned towards me, and I saw something disquieting flicker across her face. Not anger or irritation, something more like... Sadness? Regret, maybe? I couldn't quite define it. Not a happy emotion, and one she quickly abandoned, only to replace it with a too-bright smile that didn't quite match her tone. "No, no, not at all. I just... I wanted to do something nice tonight for you. For, uh, for us."

For the first time that evening, I felt truly unsettled. This wasn't like her. Don't misunderstand; I could easily see Courtney whipping up a special meal or even planning a surprise adults-only weekend at home, at least every once in a while. She did her best to show her love for me with gestures like these when time and energy permitted.

No, it wasn't the surprise itself that concerned me. It was the expression that had flickered across her face, or rather my belated recognition of its nature: guilt.

"Court..."

My wife turned away and opened the oven. "I need to get the chicken out. Can you pour the wine? Please?" The last word came out differently from the rest. Quiet. Afraid. As if, had I answered "no," her life might fall apart.

I did as Courtney bade, noting that she'd gotten the perfect bottle of wine as well, a sauvignon blanc that should pair well with our meal. My brow furrowed when I read the label. She'd made an extravagant selection; the vintage was too old, the brand too premium for a simple candlelit dinner for two, even one meant to kick off a weekend alone together. It wasn't a "just because" purchase; it was a "because" one.

At first, I thought the "because" must be one not of her making: an illness, or a layoff, or some other tragedy that might harm our family. Perhaps the guilt she displayed wasn't for something she'd done, but because of what was being done to us, and for her role as bearer of bad news.

That didn't make sense, though. Courtney had given me unwelcome news in the past, and I'd never shot the messenger then. She didn't go through this kind of rigamarole, either, always preferring to rip the band-aid off.

Then, I thought perhaps she wanted to do something that would require forgiveness or permission. That didn't make much more sense, either. I couldn't remember the last time she'd buttered me up. I don't mean that in a "it had been so long" sense; I literally couldn't remember her ever buttering me up for something. As I've already stated, our relationship had always been more honest than that.

Or so I thought.

Courtney served as I sat, plating my meal first, then hers, the pained smile still plastered on her face. This hadn't gone as she'd planned; any fool, even I, could see that. She put the pan in the sink and sat, then raised her glass. "To us."

Frowning, I raised mine and clinked it against hers. "To us."

She drank far too deeply and far too fast, emptying half the glass in one go, before taking a deep breath to enthuse, "Let's dig in!"

"No," I said, but Court had already taken up fork and knife, carving into her chicken breast with laser-like focus. "Courtney, I said, 'No.' Stop ignoring me and tell me what's going on."

The tightness in her voice could easily be either anger or fear. Funny how close those sometimes are. "Please. Please, can we eat and- and go to bed? I wanted to talk about it tomorrow, to-"

My tone softened. "Honey, just tell me. I love you. Whatever it is, it'll be okay." I was so certain of that. So foolishly, foolishly certain.

Courtney looked down at the table for the span of several heartbeats before nodding once, as if half to herself and half in answer. Then she stood, her gaze remaining firmly fixed away from me as she left the room without a word.

I listened, but her stockinged footfalls gave no sound to indicate which direction she'd headed. When my wife returned a minute later, one hand behind her back, her face bore an expression that I can only describe as "stoic." It was the face of a woman staring into the eyes of her executioner; or, perhaps, of the executioner staring into the eyes of the condemned.

As Courtney sat once more, she took the item which her body had concealed from my view and placed it on the table, her hand still covering most of it. What I could see, the edges of a laminated piece of cardboard a bit larger than a playing card, stirred a distant memory, one almost forgotten. She slid the index card across the table to me, her palm atop it the whole time. It must have taken no more than a couple of seconds to reach me, but the slow, dawning realization of what it was and what it meant turned those seconds to hours in my head.

"No," I mouthed, willing it to be anything other than the document I remembered. Courtney nodded, unhappiness coloring the stoicism she'd affected, then removed her hand from the table. I recoiled from the card as if from a venomous serpent. In truth, I would have preferred the snake; a cobra's venom can still your heart, but it can't kill your soul. What this damned thing represented could do both.

I remembered that the opposite side held drunken scrawl instead of my wife's normally immaculate penmanship, arranged in lines upon lines of rules and clarifications. The obverse bore my signature as well, similarly impaired by my inebriation that evening thirteen--hah, thirteen! How appropriate--years ago. However, the text on the front of the card, written in large, bold, block letters with a red sharpie, said everything that really needed to be said:

HALL PASS

"Courtney..." I searched for more words, so lost in what its presence there meant. Nothing came, though, just a strangled noise cut short by confusion and horror. My brain tried to run through all the things I could say, desperately searching for a way out of the nightmare it had stumbled into.

'Is this a joke?' Obviously not; everything she'd done that evening, every emotion she displayed or tried to hide, attested to the deadly seriousness of the matter.

'Why?' came to the fore, but I couldn't imagine what answer might satisfy me. It was closer to what I needed, though.

'When?' Yes. Yes! That was the right question, or at least it led to the right statement. Combine 'when' and 'why' to create 'wait.' I could find a way to forestall this foolishness, buy myself time to walk us back from the brink of oblivion.

I cleared my throat. "Courtney, we can talk about this. You don't need to- whatever you're not happy with, or, or, whatever you think you're missing, whatever's going on, we can talk about it. You don't have to do this, hon. Whatever it is, we can--"

The look of pity on her face almost killed me. Her words, spoken softly, as if to a beloved pet being put down, might as well have. "I already did, Greg. Months ago."

The world became white noise. She said my name again; I know that much. Over and over, actually, her expression and body language moving from sadness to worry to near-panic.

It's funny, the way a person's mind works. Even as the love of my life tried to reach me, I could only think of movies we'd seen in our youth, and of silly, sexy games we'd played back then.

--

Watchmen bubbled up to the surface first. Courtney and I had seen it together not long before we married. The two of us both loved movies, and almost every one of our dates back then revolved around them. We saw everything that came out, regardless of genre. Hell, regardless of quality, too, good, bad, or indifferent.

We usually agreed on which movies fell into each of those categories, at least in the broad strokes. Watchmen was one of the few we didn't. I'd read the landmark graphic novel it was based on and saw a pale imitation, one which aped the book's imagery without understanding its themes. She hadn't and instead saw a beautifully shot spectacle that could stand well enough on its own.

That difference of opinion isn't why I thought of it, though.

In both versions, the heroes beard the villainous Ozymandias in his lair near the end of the story. He fights them to a standstill while explaining his diabolical plan, one which will see the deaths of millions to avert a nuclear war that would kill billions. When one of the heroes says that they can't let him do that, he responds, "'Do that?' I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

I knew it was coming before he said it. Courtney didn't; I heard her audible gasp at the revelation. The villain had won. The heroes had lost. Everything they'd done over the previous two hours was for naught. Worse, Ozymandias had made them complicit in his scheme; if they tried to bring him to justice, the sacrifice of millions would mean nothing, and they'd likely spark the very genocide he'd averted.

When Courtney told me she'd already used her pass, my brain unwillingly recalled the scene. "'Do it,' Greg? I already destroyed our marriage months ago." Only this time, she knew it was coming, and I didn't. I couldn't even gasp at the revelation, merely shrink into myself.

Somewhere in the hazy present, I registered Courtney's attempts to snap me out of my fugue state. Unfortunately for her, I wasn't done with my internal sojourn.

My head slowly swiveled towards the strip of plastic-filmed paper she'd given me. I think I laughed at it, or at least giggled. She'd given it to me, but I'd given it to her first, over a decade before. Made myself complicit, like the doomed, flawed protagonists of Watchmen.

Hall Pass came next. Such a mediocre film to have left the cultural impact it did. According to the internet, the term "hall pass" in the context of a one-time extra-marital sexual liaison, typically with a celebrity, didn't show up until 2011, about the time the Farelly brothers' comedy hit theaters. But who knows? The internet is full of shit anyways.

What I do know is that, drunk, high, and lazing around our one-bedroom apartment shortly after our first anniversary, my young bride and I got into a discussion about the idea.

We initially approached the conversation like two knife fighters at the beginning of a duel, circling and feinting, always looking for an opening. Neither of us wanted to be the first to admit that we, a pair of oversexed twentysomethings, might maybe, kind of, sort of, want to fuck some of the most beautiful people in the world, so long as we avoided any kind of consequences afterwards.

She copped to it first, saying that, if I okayed it, sure, she'd reluctantly consider banging Zac Efron. That let me admit that, oh, I dunno, maybe I might not kick Margot Robbie out of bed. Things went from there.

It was all a lark; we knew that it would never happen. I love Courtney, but she was maybe a 7, and I barely qualified as a 6. The notion that a supermodel or rock star might pick either of us out of a crowd for a night of meaningless sex was laughable.

From that starting point, though, we talked about exes and about crushes that had never quite managed to become smashes. Neither of us had many one-night stands, since we both much preferred sex with people we cared about, but we discussed those as well.

Sharing these thoughts felt strangely intimate, the honesty we'd always valued in each other taken to a level that might have inspired jealousy in other circumstances. However, there and then, it had the opposite effect; we both knew we were talking about our pasts and our fantasies, not the very real future we'd promised to spend together. To a pair of irresponsible children, it all felt awfully mature.

High on both THC and the euphoria of the moment, we started talking about deeper concepts like monogamy, then when and where we each might be able to forgive infidelity. We'd talked about these things before getting married, too, but only in the most perfunctory, "Cheating's bad, right? You don't cheat on me and I won't cheat on you" way. The default setting of the modern American marriage, if you will.

This time, though, the emotional intimacy of the moment allowed her to say, "As long as it happened once, I think I could forgive you. No, no, I know I could. I love you too much not to."

I thought about it for a while, then slowly nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I... I think I could, too. I mean, I'd like to think I could. People make mistakes. They're human. I'm not saying.... Like, this absolutely isn't me encouraging you to go out and--"

"No, of course not!"

"But if it happened once, with no emotional investment, and..." I laughed. "Shit, I don't know. It feels weird to think about it, but I love you, Court. I can't imagine my life without you in it, at least not over one night."

My wife leaned in and brushed her lips against mine, then went further into a deep, soulful kiss that seemed to go on for hours. When she broke away, Courtney breathed, "I love you, Greg. I can't imagine losing you, either. Not over something like that.

"In fact," she grinned, "I'll prove it."

"What?"

Court hopped out of bed and grabbed some index cards and a pen off her "desk," a rickety card table that her laptop perched upon. On one, she wrote HALL PASS, then handed it to me. "There. One bonafide 'get out of jail free' card. Break glass only in case of emergency." My bride waggled her eyebrows. "Or extreme, irresistible fuckability."

I laughed, "If you say so."

"No, babe, I'm serious! If, sometime down the road, a supermodel comes up to you in a club and says she wants to suck your dick, go for it! Or..." She smiled a little sadly. "... if, you know, years from now, you get drunk and make a mistake, I'll forgive that, too." Then the million-watt grin I'd fallen in love with returned. "I'd prefer it if you dicked down ScarJo, though. That sounds way hotter."

"Huh." I tilted my head to one side. "Like, what exactly do you mean by 'get out of jail free?'"

We were both gamers, which meant that we both knew from long experience that rules could be misinterpreted to the benefit of one side or the other. I had no intention of ever using my hall pass, but the part of my brain that looked at weaknesses in systems took over, the same one that had made my dungeon master in high school angrily stomp out after my barbarian killed the big bad of his meticulously planned year-long campaign before the villain could even speak.

Courtney had always been the more freeform of the two of us. After I'd convinced her to join me in my hobby, she'd been the roleplayer, more concerned with the improvisational theater aspect of the game. I, on the other hand, was a roll-player, the guy there to fight monsters, roll dice, and show off his tactical acumen. Still, she'd spent enough time with me for my inclination toward rules-lawyering to rub off on her, and thus began a spirited, playful discussion of what exactly a "hall pass" would entail.

I didn't go as hard as I might have in other circumstances; I was under the influence, for one, which meant even if I'd been at my most pedantic, I doubt I'd have succeeded in creating some ironclad devil's bargain. Beyond that, I still looked at the whole thing as more of a thought experiment than anything else.

Most importantly, the woman I adored more than life itself was giving me this pass, so I didn't see the need to make its stipulations incredibly arduous. I was never, ever going to use it in a million years. Expending the effort to perfect its language seemed pointless. "Good enough" was more than fine.

Still, it was fun to argue about it, for both of us, and we went through a dozen index cards that evening. The specifics eluded present-day Greg, going through his crisis of faith in a fugue state, but I remembered the broad strokes:

The giver of the hall pass would absolve the bearer of any infidelities that took place within one 24-hour period, with no recriminations or guilt trips. The giver of the hall pass could ask questions about the specifics of said 24-hour period, but the bearer had sole discretion as to what they would and would not disclose. The bearer would use condoms and undergo testing for STDs before resuming sexual intimacy with the giver. The giver would stay married to the bearer, and the two would continue to love each other to the end of their days.

Simple. Easy. Unbelievably naïve.

After Courtney had filled out the final version of the card, signed it, and presented it to me, I felt self-conscious. I'd promised her the same thing, hadn't I? To forgive her if she strayed once? She smiled at me, but not expectantly; this was a gift she'd freely given to me, not a transaction between the two of us.

Which, of course, made me feel like an asshole.

After staring between my wife and the pass she'd given to me a couple of times, I put my own smile on--it felt honest at the time--and said, "Why don't you fill out another one so I can sign it?"

The night we exchanged the passes marked the best lovemaking of our relationship to that point. Not the best sex or the best fucking; when we got going, we really got going, and we knew how to press each other's buttons better than anyone else ever had. That night, though, and well into the morning, we took things slow, with some of the most vanilla sex possible yielding an experience we've only occasionally replicated in the years since.

The next day I felt weird about the whole thing. Yes, what I'd said about forgiveness was true. I felt certain about that. While "cheaters cheat" is generally solid advice, I've never completely subscribed to the notion that everyone who cheats is a cheater.

I'd played a couple hands of blackjack in Vegas, then got bored and wandered off; did that make me a gambler? No. I'd gone hunting with a buddy once and found it not to my liking; did that miserable experience of sitting out in the cold for hours while waiting to ambush an unsuspecting deer make me a hunter? No.

If Courtney cheated once but confessed it to me immediately, would that make her a cheater? I didn't think so. Sure, it would hurt, and it might take some time for me to get over it. We'd probably have to go to counseling, and I'd need assurances that it would never happen again, but I loved her with all my heart.

Our commitment to forgive a one-time dalliance didn't bother me; the physical hall passes did, especially the faux-legalese written on them. They felt so crass, like their existence diminished what we'd shared, turning our deep conversation and connection into a tacky souvenir. "Come on down and see the terrifying Marital Landmine! Free stickers for the kids!"

I didn't say anything about it, though. We were still buzzing from the night before, still united in our connection and the resultant sexual bliss. Why rock the boat? Even later that week, when she presented my hall pass to me once more, now encased in plastic through surreptitious usage of the laminating machine at her office, I simply accepted it with a smile and a shrug.

And that was that, for the most part. It became a joke in our relationship here and there over the next couple of years. She'd see a particularly gorgeous girl out dancing and say, "Want to trade in your hall pass?" with a waggle of her eyebrows. I'd feign outrage about her messiness around the apartment and threaten, "Woman, don't make me use my hall pass!" which typically led to an eyeroll and a makeout session as she "convinced" me to not cash it in.

It showed up in the bedroom a few times, too, although always with her as the initiator. She'd ask me what I'd do to the starlet of whatever movie we'd seen most recently; then, later that night, we'd pretend that I'd cashed in my pass while Courtney imitated the actress in question. Afterwards, she'd revert to herself, "forgiving" me as I detailed what I'd done with my imaginary ingenue, before engaging in another round of explosive "makeup" sex.

The memory of my wife on Halloween the year we exchanged passes pushed itself to the fore. Court, dressed as Black Widow, dragged me into an unused bedroom at a party, unzipped my pants, and gave me an incredible blowjob before begging me to finish on her face. Looking up at me after, she affected a terrible Russian accent to deadpan, "Do not fret, comrade. This will not count as your hall pass."

Something inside me went wild when she did that; I pulled Courtney roughly to her feet, then flipped her around and pressed her against the wall. Rough sex had never been her thing, and she started to protest; once I managed to pull her pants down and slip my cock inside her gushing pussy, those feeble complaints ceased. Hell, I had to cover her mouth to hide her ecstatic moans and screams as we fucked in time to the thumping bass of the music downstairs.

I couldn't believe I'd forgotten that. I hadn't entirely, of course, but it had been over a decade. We fucked like rabbits in the early years of our marriage, and individual memories, even ones as exciting as that, had to jockey for position in my brain.

After a while, the novelty of the joke wore off. I couldn't remember the last time we referenced the hall passes, anymore than I could think of the last time I imitated the "whazzup" guys from that old beer commercial. That type of humor only has so much mileage.

Hell, I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen her pass. Mine, either, for that matter. Years, certainly; some time before Tyler was born. It seemed like the type of childish thing we'd have tossed out when moving from our tiny apartment to the home we now lived in, the one we'd bought in preparation for our first child.

We were becoming responsible adults, after all. Legally, we might have counted as "adults" when we first married, but certainly not "responsible," instead just two kids faking it 'til we made it. But children? Home ownership? That had to mean we'd made it, right? Responsible adults don't do stupid things like give out hall passes. Responsible adults sure as hell don't try to cash them in. Responsible adults know when a joke's gone too far.

Turns out maybe we hadn't made it after all.

--

"A joke." The words came out in a whisper.

Courtney's face softened. Her body relaxed ever-so-slightly as she discarded panic in favor of concern. Soothingly, almost guiltily, she said, "No, Greg. I'm not joking. I wouldn't joke about this."

She didn't understand. The whole thing was a joke.

The whole thing except the fact that she'd fucked someone else.

"Right." A short, sharp noise escaped my lungs. Not quite a laugh, but the beginning of one, cut short.

I picked up the card and looked at it. The eight letters on the front stared back at me, mocking me, so I flipped it over to look at the other side. My eyes skipped across lines and lines of rules without really seeing them, but they caught the first few words of each sentence. 'I promise,' began one. 'I vow,' read another.

'I hurt,' screamed my heart.

The pain, edging past the numbness, drove the first questions I asked. I needed to understand this. I needed her to help me understand it. "Why? When?" Quietly, more fearfully, "Who?"

Courtney bit her lip, worrying at it. "I... I don't want to talk about it. I'm sorry. I don't think it will help to give details. And- and the rules, well... they say I'm allowed to not answer."

She tried on a sad smile, speaking earnestly in a transparent attempt to reassure me. "I know this might hurt, but I also know how much you love me. Please, please, understand that I love you and only you. I want to spend this weekend showing you how much I do, however I can."

I'd lived my life by rules, and I spent a lot of time thinking about them as a result. It's part of why I could be such a frustratingly difficult player in roleplaying games when I was younger, turning something that should be a fun and collaborative experience into a chance to egotistically display my intellect, at least until Courtney came into my life. She'd smoothed a good chunk of those rough edges off, making me a better man and a better friend on the way to becoming her husband.

Now, rules I'd written had come back to bite me. My trust in her, that softening that made me write the "contract" on our hall passes in a way more open-ended than the younger me would have, meant I could find no solace in rules at a time when I could have most used it.

Dully, I replied, "Okay." I lived my life by rules, even ones I never should have signed onto. I'd agreed to this, no matter how foolish that agreement might have been. "The rules do say that."

"So... you forgive me?"

My shoulders rose and fell in a noncommittal shrug. "That's what the rules say."

"That's..." She picked at her next few words, hesitant. So far, I hadn't blown up, but I also hadn't said what she wanted to hear. Needed to hear, given the fear in her voice that she tried in vain to hide. "Yes. That's what they say. But do you forgive me?"

"I'm a man of my word," I snapped, speaking louder and faster than I'd meant to. Courtney started to object to my non-answer, but I stepped on whatever complaint she might have. "So, yeah, I guess I have to. I guess I will."

She wanted to press for more; even in my near-dissociative state, I could see that. She also saw how counterproductive it would be. My wife had hurt me. Regardless of what any piece of paper said, and regardless of the fact that I'd long ago promised to forgive, pushing would only make forgiveness more unattainable.

Instead, Courtney whispered, "Thank you." She opened her mouth as if to say something else but seemed to think better of it. Instead, she returned to her chair and picked up her utensils once more.

We didn't talk, not even to pass the salt. Courtney had cooked the chicken perfectly, and the wine she'd chosen paired exquisitely with the meal. Didn't matter; it all tasted like ash in my mouth.

When we finished, she offered to clear the table, but I just grunted and did my half of the work. Once all the dishes and glasses were gone, only one item remained: that damned hall pass. It had lain there, on my side of the table, throughout the meal. What did she expect me to do with it? Hold onto it as proof that she'd slept with someone else? Fucking frame it?

I picked it up and looked at it again, really looked at it this time, flipping it over and over in my hands. I'd correctly remembered the substance of the rules written on the back, but not their exact phrasing. In other circumstances, I might have laughed at the tweeness of some of the language she'd used. Even as hurt as I was--or perhaps precisely because of how hurt--the core sentence of the document provoked a snort of derision.

I promise to forgive any series of marital misdeeds lasting no more than 24 hours.

"'Marital misdeeds,'" I muttered under my breath. "Marital fucking misdeeds."

"What?" Courtney had been just out of earshot. I glanced up at her, first seeing the curiosity in her eyes, then the dread when she saw me holding the pass.

I shook my head and walked to the garbage can. "Nothing," I lied, staring down into the trash as I threw my promise away.

"Would you, um, would you like some dessert?" she lamely suggested.

More ash didn't sound appealing. My gaze shifted from the now-soiled pass to my now-soiled wife. "I think I'm just gonna go to bed."

"Oh!" She tried to give me her best bedroom smile. I wondered if she gave it to him, too. "That sounds nice, actually. Maybe we can--"

Dead-voiced, I interrupted, "Did you use condoms?"

Her smile dissolved. "Yes, of course I did."

"Get tested afterwards?"

"Yes. I did everything I was supposed to."

Except not fuck someone else. "Do you have the results?"

Courtney's brow furrowed. "They were clean. I wouldn't--"

"Can I see them?" I cut my unfaithful spouse off, unwilling to listen to claims of what she wouldn't do. I thought I'd known that before, so her reassurances meant little to me now.

"I threw them out. It was months--"

"Months ago. Right. Right." I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying my hardest to keep myself together. "Well, let me know when you get another set of tests run. Make sure you keep the results this time so I can look at them."

"Greg, please. You know that I wouldn't- that I- that..." My impassive face derailed that train of thought, and Courtney's eyes misted with tears. "We've been together since then, Greg. There's no reason to-" Her tone turned from the pleading towards the accusatory. "You said you'd forgive me."

"Yeah, I did. I will. I just... I'm going to need some time, and I need..." I need to not feel completely out of control. I need to not feel utterly lost. "I need to know you followed the rules, too. You won't answer the questions I have about who or when or why; that's your prerogative, I suppose. I don't know why you won't tell me, but it hurts. It hurts a lot." And I want to hurt you, too. "So if I can't have those answers, I want this, at least. Prove to me... Prove..."

What? That she loved me? How could she possibly do that now? Hell, from her point of view, why should she? I was the idiot that was supposed to prove that I loved her by moving past this. All I could do now was hurt her back, pushing me even further from the promise I'd made all those years ago.

Instead of saying anything more, I shook my head and turned away to walk down the hall, past our bedroom. I opened the door to my son's room, entered, then closed and locked it behind me with a loud click. Court quietly wept somewhere on the other side; if she listened close, maybe she heard me doing the same.

--

I couldn't sleep. By midnight, I started to wonder why I'd even tried. The oppressive silence in the house left only my thoughts to occupy me, and occupy me they did. I live by rules, but I live in rules, too: puzzles, games, software development. In almost every aspect of my life, other than my love for my wife and family, I'm most comfortable when I can eliminate ambiguity through logic.

'How can I improve this algorithm?'

''What is the best strategy to utilize in this combat?'

'Where, when, and why did my wife fuck someone else? Who, for that matter?'

The first two I had likely answers to pretty quickly. "Months ago," she'd said. That was specific; not "years ago" or "weeks ago." Thinking back and looking for times when her behavior changed, I hit upon the probable location and timeframe almost immediately: the trade show she'd attended five months before.

Courtney had fucked me into the mattress the night before she flew to Denver, but that wasn't too out of the ordinary; neither of us traveled often, but when we did, we made sure to leave the other with a smile on their face before we left.

However, she didn't fuck me into the mattress when she got back, or at least not for a couple of weeks, and that was entirely out of the ordinary. In the same way we wanted to leave the other person smiling, we wanted to put a big ol' grin on their face when we got back.

This time, however, my wife complained of headaches, or that she was tired, or that she had her period. Admittedly, that last one was a good excuse, but the first two were out of character.

Two weeks would have left plenty of room to get tested for STDs and get the results back.

After those two weeks, she more than made up for the lack of homecoming sex, and that continued all the way until the night before her revelation. I'd chalked the increased affection up to a bunch of different stuff: our youngest, Zoe, getting older, and therefore unlikely to climb into bed with us if she had a nightmare; less stress at work for both of us; a new exercise regimen she'd started not long after the trade show.

A suddenly guilty conscience had never even crossed my mind, but the signs were all there, like how she'd become much more focused on my pleasure. It's not like Courtney had been a slouch in that category before, but she'd gone from "not slouching" to "standing at attention like she had a drill sergeant screaming in her face." Instead of blowjobs to completion maybe once every couple weeks, I came in her mouth or painted her face almost every session. She'd even said yes to anal the couple of times I'd asked, a sexual favor normally reserved for special occasions.

So. That knocked "when" out. "Where," too; she'd posted pictures of her at her company's booth during the trade show throughout the trip, so it's not like she could have used it as a way to hide a cruise or something. We'd talked most nights, too. All nights but the last, actually, which meant... Yeah, that nailed down "where" and "when" pretty well, didn't it?

Nothing I could think of pointed to "who," though. Someone from her office? An old ex? A friend of ours that had made the trip specifically? Just some rando? That last seemed unlikely, given her sexual history, but that was the whole point of a hall pass, wasn't it? A new experience.

Endless possibilities presented themselves, each with varying levels of humiliation and embarrassment attached. Different levels of potential danger going forward, too; would she see the guy every day? Would he try to talk her into it again?

Would he succeed?

"Who" took up center stage for far too long, and it added "how" to the mix in ways that made me want to vomit up Courtney's perfectly prepared meal. New movies filled my mind, but not the kind filmed in Hollywood, or at least not the kind that win Oscars. Maybe an AVN in the MILF category, though.

Snippets of action, take after take mixed and remixed together into different narratives with a panoply of leading men, played on a seemingly endless loop in my head, like a Mad Libs of depravity with only one constant proper noun: Courtney.

My own personal imp of the perverse, dressed as Cecille B. Demille, sat on my shoulder asking, "Pick a person. Now, pick a sexual act. Great, now an orifice. A position. And, lastly, a verb. Right, I think we've got enough to get started!

"Let's see, this time we'll go with 'Courtney's BOSS FUCKS her ASS in DOGGY while she FORGETS you.' Hrm, how about another? 'Courtney's HIGH SCHOOL BOYFRIEND EATS her CUNT in FACESITTING while she MOCKS you.' Close, but not quite. Wait, wait! 'Courtney's FAVORITE FOOTBALL TEAM RUNS A TRAIN ON her HOLES in EVERY POSITION IMAGINABLE while she LAUGHS AT you.' Oh, that's it, baby! Cut! Print!"

Yeah, it took a long while to get past that "how." I didn't really get past it at all, truth be told, just tried to ignore the dark thoughts it evoked. However, I eventually recognized a problem I couldn't solve with the clues I had. I also knew that, while the "how" troubled me, it wasn't inherently the biggest issue.

Ignoring the hall pass bullshit, I'd meant every word I'd said about forgiving a single assignation with someone to whom she had no emotional attachment. Thinking of her with a faceless stranger hurt, but I could get past that particular "who." But if it was a stranger, why not tell me at least that much?

A co-worker, then? A friend? God forbid, a relative of mine? That brought me to a much worse set of "how" questions. How the fuck would I deal with that? How could she do that to me? How could I ever forgive her if she did?

That left "why," which kept me up until nearly dawn. I had absolutely no clue what had inspired this betrayal. Worse, in the absence of any direction, I spiraled. Was it me? Was it something I did or didn't do? I knew that I'd let myself get a little out of shape, but I didn't look bad. At least, I didn't think I did. Was it something with her hormones, and, if it was, would it get better? Would it get worse? Was this the only time or just the first time? Hell, was it even the first time? Was she still cheating and about to get caught? Did she only use her hall pass to throw me off the scent?

My mind drifted back to the facts I almost certainly knew, the "when" and "where." The longer I sat with them, the angrier I got.

Five months.

Five months!

Five fucking months!

My wife had been gaslighting me--another term inherited from an eponymous movie--that whole time. If Courtney was playing this straight, why the hell did she decide to sit on her infidelity for that long? Telling me ahead of time--or failing that, immediately afterward--might not have been required by the letter of the rules, but it sure as hell was in the spirit of them. I'd given her this gift, and she'd chosen to play fast and loose with it.

That absolutely enraged me.

Fine. You wanna try to rules lawyer me, bitch? Two can play that game, and I can play it a whole fuck of a lot better than you.

I should have realized, when my thinking reached that level of rancor, that I needed to cool off; in my defense, I'd only managed to get about fifteen minutes of sleep. I was in emotional anguish, sore from laying on an uncomfortably small bed, and so keyed up from mentally running in circles all night that all I could think about was getting "who," how," and "why" from her, no matter what the cost. In my rage and singlemindedness, I couldn't manage even the slightest sliver of empathy.

And that's when I rolled out of bed and wrenched the door open, only to almost run over Courtney as I exited.

--

My wife looked like I felt, eyes bloodshot and with dark circles underneath. Exhausted, too, just like me. Not angry, though; that was just me, so angry that I was almost vibrating. Courtney tried a feeble smile to defuse the situation. Instead, it only served to infuriate me.

"Good morning," she said a bit too cheerily.

"So, five fucking months?" Her tired eyes shot open. "Yeah, turns out I'm not so goddamned stupid after all."

"Greg, I've never thought--"

"Bullshit. Bull! Shit! You lied to me for months--"

"I never lied!"

"-- fucking LIED TO ME!" I shouted, making her jump. Barely able to get my voice back under control, I continued, "And now you won't even tell me what the fuck you did! Who the fuck you did! Who, Courtney? Someone you work with? One of our friends? My brother?"

Now she got angry, nostrils flaring and eyes narrowing. "How dare you! I would never do something so- so awful!"

"Nah, you'd just fuck someone else and lie to me about it for months. But hey, at least I've got one candidate marked off the list. Do I have to keep guessing who, or are you going to tell me?"

Courtney snarled, "I don't want to talk about it! The rules say--"

No Country for Old Men. We'd rewatched it a few weeks before, after the kids went to bed. As she tried to use those goddamned rules to shield herself, the devil on my shoulder transformed into Anton Chirugh, Javier Bardem's dead-eyed psychopath, taunting, "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

And.

I.

Saw.

Red.

I don't clearly remember what I said next, or even for the next five minutes. What started as a rant by an angry husband quickly turned into a bellowing fusillade of rage from a wounded beast. I know that I called her just about every name I could think of, accused her of gaslighting me, called the hall passes a joke gone too far, and even suggested the possibility that Tyler and Zoe might not be mine. I tore into the goddamned rules, into her cowardice in trying to hide behind them, and into the audacious cruelty of telling me in the way she did: namely by only telling me enough to hurt me more.

Eventually, the red drained away, and I truly saw Courtney again, instead of a mere target for my anger. The love of my life cowered away from me, away from my clenched fists and the corded muscle in my neck, away from the venom that poured off my tongue and the hate in my eyes. Somewhere over the course of my verbal assault, she'd slowly slid down the wall and hid her face in her hands, sobbing incoherently, terrified of the monster that wore her husband's face.

In that moment, I felt more shame than I ever had in my life. I'd never made my wife cry before. Never frightened her before, either. I hated the idea that I could be that person; I'd certainly never believed myself capable of it. The last twelve hours had disabused me of a lot of notions, though.

I knew I should apologize, but I couldn't. I still hurt too much, and that mix of guilt and pain stilled my tongue. Instead, without another word, I stalked away, heading into the living room, then through the sliding glass door into the backyard.

There, I sat on our deck, legs dangling over the side. I stared off into the distance, simultaneously not really thinking about anything and unable to stop thinking about everything, stuck in that jumbled state where lack of sleep and emotional overload collide. The anger still swirled around in my head, but it felt more distant. Less real. Sadness welled up in its place, both at what Courtney had done and how I'd torn into her that morning. Disappointment, too. I'd gotten no answers, and I didn't see any way that I would. Hell, I didn't know if we'd even be on speaking terms by the time the kids came back on Sunday.

Some time later--at least half an hour, but probably more--I heard the door slide closed with a thunk, jarring me awake. I must have dozed off while sitting up, not quite leaning far enough to tumble off the deck or onto my side. I didn't look back; it had to be Courtney, and I didn't want to see her, both because of my hurt and for fear of how she might look at me now.

When her hand appeared to place a steaming mug of coffee on the deck next to me, I couldn't help but be surprised. She compounded that surprise by sitting next to me and running her hand over my back in small circles while murmuring, "I'm sorry."

I wanted to say the same, but I still hurt too much. Instead, I picked up the mug and took a sip; she'd made it just the way I liked it. "Thanks," I mumbled, the extent of my gratitude opaque both to her and to me. For the caffeine, sure. For her apology? Hard to say.

We sat there for a few minutes, Courtney drinking her coffee and me drinking mine. I wasn't sure where to even begin, and she seemed to be in the same boat. Finally, her voice softly asked, "Did you mean what you said?"

Yes. No. I don't know. "Some of it, yeah." Almost inaudibly, "A lot of it."

Courtney sighed, clearly frustrated but trying to not let it show. "What does that mean? You... you don't..." Her voice, already hoarse from crying, creaked with barely suppressed emotion. "You can't believe that I'd... that Tyler and Zoe aren't yours?" A statement, but with the rising, trembling intonation of a question she feared the answer to.

"No," I admitted, staring into my cup. "But... But I wondered for a while last night. I really did."

"Oh." A single syllable, infused with as much despair as any Dogme 95 miseryfest.

Neither of us said anything again until I heard a tiny intake of breath and glanced over to see my wife's shoulders rising and falling in silent sobs, her face wet with tears. She noticed me looking over and turned away; when I reached out to touch her, the quiet gasps became hiccuping pleas. "I- sorry- so- sorry- ruined- everything- hate- myself - love- you- please- please- don't- hate- me!" The final word broke into a long, tortured wail.

I pulled her in for a hug. "I don't hate you. I just... I'm hurting so bad right now, Court." Finally, I could say what I'd wanted to before. "I'm sorry for this morning. For scaring you."

I don't know if it was the reminder of what I'd done or of what had brought me to that state, but she wept even louder. I did, too, then realized I'd been crying since she'd put her hand on my back to comfort me as she had so many times before: a wife's gentle touch, meant to show that she loved me regardless of what either of us had done. I loved her, too. None of this would have hurt nearly as much if I didn't.

When she'd eased back from sobbing to gentle weeping, Court reluctantly pulled away. We each dried our eyes. She used a tissue secreted in her robe, while I resorted to the sleeve of my button-down shirt. I noticed then that I had never actually changed out of my clothes the night before, even wearing my shoes to bed. Strange what shock will do to a person.

"You were right about some of it," Courtney almost whispered. My gaze snapped back to her, and she put a hand up to placate me. "Not... not about... This is the only time I ever did it. Ever. Please, I need you to believe that."

I willed away the angry grimace that tried to sneak onto my face. "I want to, Courtney. I really do. But..." My voice cracked, but force of will kept it from breaking. "You lied to me. You lied to me for... God, for like half a year."

"I know. I tried not to think of it that way, but you're right. I'm sorry." A rueful chuckle escaped her lips. "I feel like I'm going to be saying 'sorry' a lot. It's true, though. I didn't mean to... That wasn't what I'd intended, with any of this. I never meant to... to keep it from you for so long. I just..." Her words faded away.

"Just what?"

Courtney fished about in the pockets of her robe and pulled out the hall pass, then tried to hand it to me. I regarded it with a cool affect, trying to fight the fire rising inside. "Get that fucking thing away from me. I threw it in the trash for a reason."

She shook her head. "No, it's not mine. It's the one I gave you. Gave you years ago, I mean."

"I still don't want it."

My wife's head tilted to one side. "Did you ever?"

"Not really."

"Then why--"

"I meant what I said the night we exchanged them, that I'd forgive you for a one-time thing, but... No, I've never liked the passes themselves. I appreciated the gesture when you gave it to me, but that was never what I wanted. A 'get out of jail free' card, I mean."

"But we were talking about hall passes that whole night!"

"No, we started the night talking about them, and then we stopped! We started talking about... about our pasts and our fantasies, and forgiveness, and about just so much other stuff! I didn't give a damn about some celebrity hall pass bullshit by then. I cared about... about us. About how strong our marriage was, that we could forgive each other for being... human, I guess. Flawed."

"Oh," she said again, but tears didn't follow this time.

"Where did you even find them? I thought we threw them out when we moved."

Disappointment--in me or in herself, or maybe just in us--radiated from Courtney as she quietly answered. "I've always known where they were. I put them in my jewelry box, both of them, when we were packing up our apartment, so we didn't lose them. So... So that I could see them every day. As a little reminder of how strong our marriage is. I loved them. The one from you to me, especially."

"Why?"

She sniffled, wiping her eyes and nose with the tissue once more. "Everyone takes vows, but they're always about best-case scenarios, you know? 'I'll always be faithful, and I'll never falter, no matter what happens.'

"But how many people tell each other, 'Even if you're imperfect, I'll forgive you?' How many people can point to a gift that says, 'The person I married loves me so much that he's promised to forgive me even if I screw up in the worst way?' Not many, I'd bet. But I did. I had proof that if I failed to be the person I'd promised to be, you'd still love me. I looked at them almost every day and thought, 'How wonderful to be so loved.'"

Her head turned towards me, and tear-filled eyes found mine. "Maybe they were silly to you. A joke, like you said; I know we joked about them after that night, but I never thought of the passes themselves as a joke."

She raised the scrap of cardboard and plastic. "To me, the pass you gave me was the sweetest, most romantic, most loving gift I've ever received. Which is why I didn't tell you when I used it. Because I was ashamed."

"Ashamed?"

Courtney nodded, looking away again. "Yeah. It's why I didn't want to tell you about... about what I'd done when you asked last night, either. What I'd specifically done, I mean. I still don't, really. But... I dunno, maybe it doesn't matter. If it never meant to you what it did to me, maybe... maybe none of it matters."

I flashed back to our friendly argument after the first time we saw Watchmen, the one about spectacle versus meaning. "Court... It's not..." I reached out, took her hand, and started again. "Hon." She stole a glance at me. "The passes... they're like our marriage certificate. Our marriage certificate is a thing that says 'these people are married.' But it's not our marriage. Our rings aren't our marriage. Even our vows aren't our marriage.

"The hall pass I gave you... it's just a symbol. A souvenir. I treated it as a joke because it made me uncomfortable to reduce what we'd shared that night to a bunch of silly rules that two drunks wrote on a piece of paper. To... to sully that, I guess."

"I loved that about them. That we'd written them together, I mean."

Shaking my head, I replied, "I loved that we talked about everything we did that night, how honest and open we were. But the hall passes, and the rules on them... No. Not at all.

"It's like our vows. We used the standard ones, and there's a reason for that: they say what they mean, with no... dissembling. 'In sickness or in health,' not 'in sickness, except' or 'in health, unless.' I was happy to leave it at 'I'll do my best to forgive you if you stray once,' because that was all that needed to be said.

"And, yeah, I'm the one that said 'What are the rules?' but I meant that as... like, as a game for us to play that night. We were laughing the whole time we argued about them, remember? I didn't take them seriously, because I didn't think they were a thing to take seriously. And then I woke up the next morning, and I'd signed my name to them.

"I treated the hall passes like a joke because I wanted them to be a joke. If I treated them that way, maybe you would, too, because I regretted making them. I resented them not because I didn't mean what I said that night, but because of how the 'rules' limited my ability to follow through. And I'm only understanding that now because... because of the way you've used those rules against me.

"You say that the pass means so much to you, and yet you basically did everything you could to only follow the letter of the rules, not the spirit. I want to forgive you. I want to try to find a way to, but you hid behind those stupid rules instead of talking to me. It felt like... No, it feels like you're taking advantage of me. Of my love for you and that gift that you claim to cherish."

"That's not what I was trying to do," she protested.

"Then what were you trying to do? Because I want to get past this, Courtney, but I don't know how, because I don't know what I'm trying to get past, other than the fact that you cheated on me and then lied to me for months. And that... I'll be honest. I don't know if I can. The cheating all by itself hurts a lot, but, like I said, I promised to forgive. The lying, though? That's a whole different thing. It makes me wonder what else you've been hiding from me."

"I'm not! I haven't!" Her other hand grabbed mine, as if she were trying to keep me from leaving. Desperation colored her voice. "I've never lied to you before about anything! Not even little things! I didn't mean to lie to you about this, but... but I..."

Courtney all but launched herself at me, hands climbing up my arm and across my body, pulling me against her. If she'd been trying to keep me from leaving before, now she clung to me like a life preserver. "Please, Greg. I can't- I don't know what I'd do if you left me. I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry, and I'll do anything to prove it."

I wrapped an arm around her, albeit somewhat reluctantly, and tried to strike a balance between comforting and insistent as I spoke. "Then start by telling me the truth. Everything. Who, what, when, where, why, all of it."

"Okay." She squeezed me once, tightly, then pulled away. "Okay."

Staring out across our yard, Courtney took a sip of her now-lukewarm coffee, and began with, "More than anything, I want you to know that it wasn't because of anything you did or didn't do. It was... selfish. Foolish. When I say that I'm ashamed, I mean it. I had you, and... and I still did it.

"I was feeling old. I still don't entirely know why I did it, but I do know that was part of it. Feeling less attractive. Wait, stop. I know what you're going to say. You've always told me you think I'm beautiful. You always have. I love that you do. But it's... I'm not saying you're doing that just because you're my husband, but be honest: some of it was. If I was a random woman out on the street, and you saw a twenty-five-year-old hardbody and me, who'd get the second glance?"

"I'm getting older, too," I protested.

"It's different for guys, though. If they take care of themselves, guys get more attractive as they age. I know you've always said that you punched up when we got together and... well, I didn't agree with it then, but I definitely don't agree with it now."

She waved a hand to forestall further argument over this point. "Anyways. Anyways. That's not the point. I'm not talking about what's true and what's not, I'm talking about how I felt. And I felt... old. Invisible. Please don't misunderstand, I love being your wife, and I love that you tell me I'm beautiful, but there's a point where women reach a certain age, and a certain shape, and the insecurities start to really dig in.

Courtney swallowed, struggling to move to the next part. "I didn't intend to do anything at all that night. I certainly didn't intend to use my hall pass. We'd finished up the last night of the trade show, and I was feeling down about things. I'd planned to just go up to my room, but then I thought, 'Maybe I'll get a drink at the bar.'

"It was crowded, though, and kind of sleazy looking, with lots of folks from the trade show there trying to hook up, so I decided to head down the street to another place. Still a little sleazy, but less crowded. A younger crowd, too, which I thought might cheer me up a little. Like reminiscing about the old days? Didn't work, though. Just left me feeling even older and more invisible, as all the pretty young things soaked up the attention.

"I was going to have a drink or two, then head back up to the room, order room service, and call you." She smiled sadly, staring down into her cup. "I wish I had. I wish I'd done everything differently.

"I'd almost finished my second drink when a third appeared. When I told the bartender I hadn't ordered it, he indicated the man who'd just come to sit on the stool next to me. I recognized him as one of the guys that stopped by our booth earlier in the week. His name was Jared, but I don't remember his last name. He'd been pleasant back at the show, a little flirtatious, but nothing too far beyond the pale.

"The conversation wasn't particularly interesting at first. I was still looking at him as a business contact, so I accepted the drink with thanks. He flirted a little more, and... I don't know. Like I said, I'm pushing forty, I was feeling invisible, and this young man, who probably could have sat down with any woman there and at least gotten her number, was doing his best to charm the, ah, the pants off me." She grimaced as she began that last statement, but pushed her way through. The bastard had already managed it, so why mince words?

"Three drinks became four, and I felt comfortable. Very buzzed, but not quite drunk. He got more... open in what he wanted, and I was flattered. And... I'm sorry, turned on, too. My mind kept drifting back to the hall pass, and I started spinning up all sorts of sexy scenarios in my mind."

"'Sexy scenarios?'"

Courtney had the good grace to look ashamed as she spoke. "That... I don't know. That I'd use my hall pass with this guy, tell you about it when I got home, tease you until the tests came back and then blow your mind when we could be together again."

I looked at her like she'd grown horns; ironic, given that she'd hung a set on me. "What on earth would make you think I'd even vaguely be into that? At all? I've never- there's never been a single time, in all the years we've been together, where I've even hinted at wanting to think about you with another man!"

"I know! I know. It was dumb. I was convincing myself. I know that now. That wasn't the only one, though. Next I thought, 'Well, maybe he'll get mad and use his hall pass, go bang some gym bunny or something and tell me about it,' and that... did something to me. Like, got me super charged up. I was fantasizing about you fucking this one blonde college girl sitting a few stools down, and that's right when he asked me to go up to his room.

"The whole way there, I tried to think of it like that, like this was a thing that you and I were doing together, even if you weren't there. We both had hall passes, and I was going to use mine, and you could use yours."

Getting the details of what she was thinking should have made me feel... not necessarily better, but at least more able to understand. Everything she said just seemed to push me further from that, though. "Again, have I ever given you the idea I wanted to use mine?"

"No." Quietly, almost afraid. "No, but it's what I told myself in the elevator. It's what I told myself all the way through to- to when..." Her furtive expression told me we'd reached the moment of truth.

"Just... tell me. I don't need a ton of detail, but--"

"Why? Why do you need to know this part?"

The anger rose again. "Because I've been laying awake in our son's bed all night with all these horrible movies of you fucking other people playing in my head! Because if I don't hear it from you, I'm just going to keep imagining you doing any and every goddamned thing you could for some fucking sex god with a twelve inch dick and endless stamina, and I don't want that! At least if you tell me, I can..." I sighed, too tired to let the rage ride me for long. "Maybe I can live with- with knowing that I only have to imagine one set of scenes, instead of a whole edit bay's worth. For fuck's sake, I don't even know what the guy looks like."

Courtney's gaze flitted to me. For a moment, it seemed as if she were weighing her words, fearful for some reason. I wondered, as the seconds stretched, what she might still be hiding, but then she shook her head and answered. "Young, like I said. Mid-twenties. Handsome. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tall and broad-shouldered, but with a runner's build."

"And later?"

"Later?" She tilted her head, confused, so I stared until she understood my meaning. "Oh! Um, he was... fine. Not small, but not as, um, nice as you."

I peered at her, my eyes narrowing with suspicion. "What is it you're not saying? Was he an incredible fuck? Did he get you off all night? Did you do shit with him you don't with me? What?" Meanness spilled into my voice, and I didn't quite know where it had come from. Frustration at her renewed evasion, sure, but something else, too. Something in the back of my sleep-deprived head that I should know but couldn't quite put my finger on.

"It wasn't... Like I said, I was ashamed, and part of that is down to what happened in his room. Mechanically, the sex was... fine. Good, even. I went down on him, and he went down on me; I had a little orgasm from that, but nothing special. Then we did it missionary, and that was all.

"But there was no spark there, at least not like you and I have. Some excitement at the beginning, an illicit thrill, but it didn't last. The longer it went on, and the more I sobered up, the worse I felt.

"By the end, I laid there, waiting for him to get off, trying not to cry, thinking about the hall pass again. Thinking about... about how I'd squandered the most beautiful gift anyone had ever given me on... this. This empty fuck with a selfish, rutting boy, when I had a man that I loved at home, one who loved me, too. Who loved me enough to forgive me for... for this. This stupid, stupid choice I'd made."

The tears started up once more. "By the time he rolled off me, maybe half an hour after we got to the room, I wanted to curl up in a ball and die. What I'd hoped would be a fun adventure had turned out gross and tawdry instead. I felt so guilty afterwards, and... cheap. I felt cheap.

"And then, when I imagined trying to tell you that I'd wasted the gift you'd given me, it made me want to throw up, especially when he tried to get me to... to clean him so we could 'go again,' as he put it.

"I pushed him away, got up, and dressed as quickly as I could, then ran back to my room and showered. I didn't even take my clothes off before I got in, just turned the water on and stripped in there, because I needed so badly to feel clean again. I wished I'd never done it. And as I thought about it and thought about it, I realized I'd do just about anything to never tell you about what I'd done with the gift you'd given me."

Wiping her cheeks, she sighed a deep, long sigh, as though the act of confession had exhausted her. "So, as I laid in bed that night, that's exactly what I decided to do. Talked myself into doing, really. Looking at the pass had always been a comfort to me, so I knew the rules we'd written by heart, and nowhere in them did it say when the pass had to be turned in.

"I already knew that I'd never, ever do anything like that again, and telling you how poorly I'd used the gift would only upset you, so why put you through that? Instead, I decided to live with the shame of what I'd done. If you somehow found out about it later, I'd turn the pass in then, and you'd forgive me, because it had been just one night. Like... like the pass said. Like we agreed.

"Then I came home, feigned illness for a couple of weeks--although maybe not as much as you're thinking, because I felt physically ill more than once at the thought of that night--and did everything I could to make it up to you, even if you didn't know why.

"I started working out so I could get in better shape for you, tried to catch any of your household chores before you had to, and did my best to show you how much I desire you in bed. I love you, Greg. I made a terrible, terrible mistake, and I'm so sorry for it, but I love you, and I will until the day I die."

When she finished speaking, I felt so tired. Disgusted, too. I didn't try to disguise either when I asked, "So, why the fuck did you tell me now? If you wanted to keep from hurting me, why tell me at all? And why do it in the bullshit way you did last night?"

Dejected, Courtney replied, "The guilt became too much. Every time I'd open my jewelry box, I'd see our passes there, and a little voice whispered, 'You're a liar and a whore and a coward, and you don't deserve this. You never deserved it. And you never deserved him, if you just keep smiling and pretending you didn't use your pass. His belongs in here. Yours doesn't. Not anymore.' I tried to ignore it, kept telling myself that all of that may be true, but keeping it from you and dealing with the guilt was something I could bear to protect you.

"Then, we went to the theater last weekend, and just for a second, I thought I saw him. Jared. It wasn't him, but I got scared that somehow--I don't know how--you'd find out from someone other than me. And when I thought about that, I knew that, no matter what I told myself, I hadn't hidden it for you; I'd hidden it for me. You deserved better than that. So, I planned the rest of the week for what I should do, cooked up last night, and then..."

She breathed in deep again, let it out slowly again, hid her face in shame again. "I thought you'd be... not happy, necessarily. Maybe excited, or even jealous and wanting to use your pass. Even angry, maybe, but not... numb. I hoped you were just processing, but once you asked about the STD tests, and then when you went to Tyler's room, I knew--I thought I knew--how badly I'd misjudged.

"Please believe me. I thought by keeping within the lines of the rules, I could protect you. Split the difference. I'd still feel guilty about wasting your gift, but I could keep my stupidity from hurting you. But if I let you think that I'd used it on some amazing experience, then maybe we could... I don't know. Like I said, maybe have you use your pass and then tell me all about it, or, if you chose, keep the specifics from me. We could be even then, at least in your mind, even if I knew we weren't."

I scoffed, "So, still lying to me."

"No!" Then she sighed and admitted, "Yes, I guess. I wouldn't... If you'd pressed, if you'd told me you needed to know, I would have told you all of it. I didn't want to lie; other than by omission, I mean. Which, I know, I know, is still a lie. Talking it out now, rather than just letting it run around in my head, I can see how dumb the idea was. But please..."

My wife's tortured countenance turned once more towards me. "Please, believe that I didn't do anything out of malice. I was frazzled and guilt-ridden and afraid. I screwed up, a lot, but I didn't do any of this to hurt you, and everything after... after that night was done out of a hope of preventing harm."

My head hurt. Spun, too, for that matter. A scant few minutes of sleep and a belly full of caffeine didn't do much to counterbalance the exhaustion I felt. Courtney's revelations made sense--a twisted sort of sense, admittedly--but something still nagged at me. She watched me, looking for some sort of reaction, but I couldn't offer much. The night before, I'd been numb with shock. Now, I was just numb from weariness. All I could offer was, "I need some time to think."

"Take as much as you need. Just... just know that I love you, and I'll be here, ready to do anything to make it up to you."

I wanted to snap at her with some cutting retort, but I couldn't even think of one to make. Beyond that, I knew, even in my fatigued, wrung-out state, that lashing out could only hurt, not help. Setting her spiraling would mean more tears, maybe from both of us, and I didn't have anything left in the tank to deal with that. Instead, I just mumbled, "I'm gonna go take a shower."

Courtney looked perplexed at that, but she simply nodded before offering, "If you need to talk..." Her words fell away when I waved my hand in annoyance. We'd talked enough, at least for now.

I don't remember stripping my clothes off or getting in the shower. I stepped in while the water was still cold, hoping it would wake me up; instead, I ended up cold and exhausted instead of simply exhausted. Eventually, the shower warmed up, and I stood under the spray, trying to think but mostly failing.

After I exited the shower, though, I had an epiphany. Not immediately, but once I looked at myself in the mirror. As the fog faded away from my reflection, so too did it fade from my brain. I had sudden clarity of thought regarding at least one aspect of my wife's confession: my odd annoyance at her description of Jared. I mean, I'd have been pissed whether she'd fucked Quasimodo, Adonis, or anywhere in between, but I realized, looking at myself, that my wife had done something both oddly complimentary and uniquely emasculating.

A tall man with dark hair and eyes and a runner's build stared back at me. Handsome--at least for a certain value of "handsome"--and broad-shouldered. A little bit of a paunch these days, the first flecks of gray showing, and a few wrinkles here and there. But when you got right down to it, Courtney's description of the guy that picked her up in the bar matched the man she'd fallen in love with almost two decades before.

--

I stood there, stunned at the revelation. My wife had cheated on me with a younger version of the idiot gawping at himself in the mirror.

That assumed, of course, that she'd told the truth at all. My brain wasn't firing on all cylinders but it was at least up to evaluating that likelihood. Probably.

I worked through the possibilities as I dripped on the tile of our bathroom, but it ultimately came down to a variation of those "w" questions I'd asked myself the night before. One in particular, actually.

Why?

Why lie? And why lie in this specific way? If she wasn't telling the truth, what did she gain by telling me anything at all? What else could she possibly hide with this lie that both would be worse than what she'd told me and wouldn't be exposed when I started picking at threads like she knew I would?

Nothing. Nothing could.

A series of flings? If she could hide any of them, she could probably hide all of them, so confessing to this one made no sense. A long affair? I'd find it out, especially if I went to the trouble of hiring a PI and scrutinizing everything she'd ever done. The kids? Nah. I was pissed at her, but I couldn't believe she'd possibly do that. It didn't scan either logically or logistically.

I was shivering by the time I'd meandered through all the options I could think of, and none of them fit. I planned to do some light snooping later, but I already had about 99% certainty I wouldn't find anything there. Every path I followed led me back to those damned hall passes.

Once I came to that conclusion, I couldn't help but take another look at myself in the mirror. A different "why" came up then: why wasn't I enough? Yeah, yeah, she said it had nothing to do with me and that I hadn't done anything wrong, but if that was the case, why go fuck a younger, presumably fitter version of me?

I poked at my midsection. Not as firm as it used to be. Less muscle tone. I'd never had the six-pack, but I had at least six in all the other places women are supposed to want: feet, figures, and inches. Why the fuck wasn't any of it--any of me--enough to keep her from straying?

Courtney lightly knocked at the door. "Greg? Are you alright in there? I've made breakfast."

"I'm fine," I lied. I wasn't alright, nor fine. What, then? Certainly not good. Apparently not good enough for her, either. Not in the way that mattered. Not when it really counted.

My reflection and I stared at each other for a long time, and the longer I looked, the less I liked. I was every protagonist in every middling mid-budget midlife crisis dramedy, gazing into the mirror and wondering what had happened to the promise of my youth, pathetic in my mediocrity.

That's something I think folks who've never been cheated on can't really understand, the way it shakes you to your very core. Logically, I knew I was still a catch, that anything wrong in this equation had to be with her. Hell, she even admitted as much.

However, seeing myself there and knowing she'd chosen a fling with a younger doppelgänger over her fidelity to me triggered a primal urge to reclaim... something. Not her. Not really. She'd come back to me, right? Tried to show me how much she loved me by lying, and then later by fessing up?

But she didn't. Not really. She lied once to hide her infidelity, then tried to hide behind the pass to conceal most of the details, and then glossed over the most damning element of those details. Her reluctance in describing her boytoy meant... what? Probably that she knew me and knew I'd react like this, filled with doubt even as she insisted how much better I was.

Which, of course, could be another lie.

That's the problem with breaking trust: there are so many jagged edges to cut yourself on.

Breakfast tasted like ash, too, but eggs, bacon, toast, and more coffee at least gave me energy. Courtney remained quiet throughout, silently but enthusiastically serving me like a maid in some 18th century baron's mansion. Her obsequiousness grated on my nerves, as if the idea that bowing and scraping might speed me towards forgiveness instead of reminding me of why she needed to be forgiven. To be honest, anything she did would likely have angered me. It was a no-win situation for her. But hey, fair's fair: she'd put me in one, too.

Courtney tried to bus my dishes, but I waved her off and handled them myself, then went back to the bedroom. I'd changed into shorts and a t-shirt after the shower, but now added running shoes to the mix. My fitness had fallen off over the last decade; in my youth, I'd managed a full marathon once, but now I'd be hard-pressed to make a decent time in a 5K, and my body showed it. That needed to change. A lot of things needed to change.

Without a word to my wife, I left the house and broke into a jog. Running gives you ample time to think, even if you're trying to focus on your form like I was.

As I tried to pick up speed, two things happened. First, my body promptly chastised me for running on a full stomach, slowing my progress to something only slightly north of a walk for the first half of my course. Second, I began to see one of the problems inherent in my vague plan of "reclaiming myself," namely that any physical improvements I made benefitted her, too.

I didn't want to get in better shape to compete with the young asshole that had picked Courtney up in a bar--not consciously, at least--but that would happen regardless. She'd allowed herself to be bedded by a younger, more physically impressive version of myself; since I imagined we'd eventually get around to having sex again, even if the thought of touching her made my skin crawl right then, anything I did to increase my fitness level would perversely benefit her, too. While I'd promised to forgive, there's "forgiving" and there's "incentivizing," and I sure as hell didn't want to do the latter. I needed some distance from Courtney, not specifically as a punishment to her, but as a way back to myself without rewarding what she'd done.

Toward that end, I thought about hobbies that had fallen by the wayside since the kids came along. I hadn't played Magic: the Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons in over a decade, and while I didn't miss the expense sometimes involved, I did miss the social aspect. My life centered around my family, as it should, but with the kids getting a little older and this new... wrinkle... in my marriage, being a little more selfish with my time seemed more than reasonable. And if it wasn't? Courtney could fucking deal.

Still, I realized I'd missed running as well, really running instead of the occasional half-assed jogs I'd grown accustomed to. There was no sense in cutting off my nose to spite my face, so I resolved to keep that up. If it had some knock-on bonus effects for her, so be it. It still gave me a reason to put some distance between us, space I already knew that I'd need before I could let her cheating go. Yes, yes, forgiveness rewarded her, too, but I'd already foolishly signed up for that years before.

For the first time since she'd slapped that index card down on the table, thinking about the passes brought a grin to my face. Now that I'd reacquainted myself with their rules, I realized they gave me as much latitude as they had her; maybe more. I'd stay married to her, I'd forgive her, and I wouldn't guilt trip her. Fine. But, just as we hadn't specified a timeline for when she'd reveal her infidelity to me, the amount of time I took to forgive was left up in the air, too. With a little more malice than I'm proud to admit, I took comfort in that fact. She'd get her forgiveness, but I'd decide when.

Once I returned home, much later than I liked given the distance I'd run, I rinsed off, changed into jeans and a polo, and again headed out the door with nary a word. I did grab the sandwich she'd made for me off the plate on the way out, though; I imagined that her fawning attempts to work her way back into my good graces would peter out eventually, so why not make hay while the sun shone?

I'd only been into my local game store a handful of times in the past decade, mostly to purchase the odd gift, but that was going to change. The clientele at The Android's Dungeon that morning didn't surprise me, although I think it would many people whose only exposure to nerd culture came from The Big Bang Theory.

Yes, one could find smelly teenaged misanthropes amongst the crowd browsing the comic racks on one wall or hunched over a table arguing about trivia, but no more than in any other hobby. Instead, the culture had blossomed to include younger and older folks, along with families; the clientele of The Android's Dungeon was no different.

Judging by the sample in my local game store, nerdery had drawn in a surprisingly high number of attractive single women in the last decade, too. I won't say that I'd stopped looking at women during my married years; I wasn't dead, after all. But now, with the revelation that not only had my wife taken the hall passes we'd made seriously but had cashed hers in, my gaze took on a more distinctly interested aspect. What's good for the goose and all, even if the goose claimed it hadn't been particularly good for her.

After taking a gander about, I started my trip down the nostalgia hole with Magic. If you're unfamiliar with the game, imagine a cross between trading cards and poker, except that you spend all your money before you even start playing, trying to chase down specific cards to build the strongest deck you can. Like poker, it's a game that combines skill and luck, but the old joke that the most powerful card in the game is a credit card isn't too far off the mark.

After grabbing a pre-built Commander deck, made for the most casual of the game's formats, I settled in at a table of four: Dan, a fellow middle-aged-dad type; his teenaged son, Blake; and a cute girl in her early twenties named Jess.

Within minutes, they thoroughly stomped my ass.

They were all good sports about it, though, with Dan even letting me play one of his way, way more refined decks in the second match. It didn't help much, although I didn't completely embarrass myself that time.

Blake couldn't help but openly stare at Jess, which she kindly ignored. I couldn't blame the kid; at his age, I'd have done the same. At my age, though? I felt like a creepy old man, regardless of my newly roving eye. No, if I did go down the road of using my pass, I'd follow the conventional advice of half my age plus seven. That meant... let's see, twenty-six at a minimum. Twenty-seven after my next birthday, the big 4-0.

Even with that filtering, I still saw numerous possibilities around the room while I waited in between my turns and after I'd been knocked out of the game. Those possibilities, I'll admit, did take a little bit of the sting out. Not much, but some. Especially since, well...

Look, something many folks don't realize: nerd girls are, on average, way kinkier than the general population. Like, just super freaky in bed. Turns out that having a hefty dose of imagination, an eagerness to do what's fun for themselves instead of going along with what's conventionally acceptable, and an improvisational mindset born of collaborative storytelling makes for a helluva good time. My wilder years had shown that over and over again.

This nonconformist streak often translates into their outward appearance, with visible tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair not too uncommon. However, even if your aesthetic tastes don't run in that direction, you'd be surprised how often you can find a girl next door with a hunger for both slaying demons and, say, being tied up or indulging in risky public sex.

Luckily for me, I have broad tastes, and by the end of the second game the room looked like a smorgasbord. If I ever chose to cash in my pass, I felt like my odds were good, especially since my appreciative glances garnered a surprising number in return.

When the rest of the folks at the table got to talking about how much their decks cost, dream builds for future decks, individual card prices, and all the rest, I decided this particular hobby had gotten too rich for my blood. While I did grab a few more Commander decks before I left in order to introduce Tyler and Zoe to the game, this was one hobby I'd happily leave as an occasional, unserious indulgence. If I was going to waste money during my particular midlife crisis, it wouldn't be on pieces of cardboard.

Thinking back, I can now find that grimly amusing; after all, a piece of cardboard had triggered it in the first place.

Dungeons and Dragons was a whole different story. It had been my first real geeky love, but the last time I'd played regularly, the much maligned fourth edition of the game had split the fandom. I understood the hate, although I didn't share it; however, given everything going on in my life at the time--marriage, a kid on the way, a new house--letting the game slip away was the easy choice. That whole "responsible grown-up" thing again.

Well, fuck that. I had my responsible grown-up bona fides now, and if I wanted to sit around a table, roll dice, and kill imaginary monsters, who the hell was going to tell me otherwise? Certainly not Courtney. She probably wouldn't have given me any grief anyways, but now? Hell no. Not after she'd chucked "responsible" out the window entirely.

The Android's Dungeon helpfully maintained a directory of players looking for gaming groups and vice versa, so I browsed through it looking for a likely match, took down contact info, then dropped a few hundred bucks on books, dice, and figures. Not exactly buying a cherry red Mustang convertible, but at least a similar impulse.

Look, you have your midlife crisis how you want to have yours, and I'll have mine how I want to have mine.

I had a lot of fun that afternoon, even if I knew I was only delaying the inevitable. Had I wrested back the reins of my fate? No. But getting my mind off of my troubles for a while helped me feel a little less despondent about the whole "my wife fucked another guy" thing. Not much, but a little, and certainly better than getting drunk or sitting on my porch staring off into space would have.

--

Still, I had to head home eventually. I needed to tell her some things, and she needed to listen. That's how this was going to go, at least for a while, and she needed to get used to that now before the kids returned the next day.

Once I got there, I found that Courtney had laid out another meal--slow cooker pot roast with potatoes and carrots, another favorite of mine--albeit without the romantic set dressing of the previous evening.

"Hey," came her meek greeting when I entered the kitchen. I idly wondered how long she'd been sitting there waiting for me.

"Hey." Then, I begrudgingly added, "Smells good."

"Thanks. I wasn't sure if you were coming home or..."

"Yeah. I..." Sighing, I slumped into the chair opposite her. "Look. I'm not happy. I don't expect I'll be happy anytime soon." Courtney tried to talk, but I raised a hand to stop her. "Don't. Just... just don't. This isn't a ploy for sympathy. I'm telling you how it's going to be. I'll forgive you eventually, just like I promised. I don't know when, and I'm not entirely sure how, but like I said last night, I keep my word.

"That said, I am dead serious about getting yourself tested again, and about wanting to see the results. I'm going to do the same. I just can't believe..." I fought the anger back down before it could rise too high. "Not telling me was... God, Court, that was almost unforgivably reckless. Do you not remember sex ed? There's shit that might not show up for months. Yeah, yeah, it'll probably be fine, but still. Go get it done."

She'd paled during my rant. Maybe she really had forgotten the unit on STDs. "Okay. I will. I'm sorry--"

"Again, just don't. I don't want to hear how sorry you are. I'm not going to guilt trip you--another promise I plan to keep--but I'm not going to prop you up, either. You're sorry? Great. Show, don't tell."

"How?"

With a shrug, I picked up the serving spoon. "You're smart. Figure it out."

The meal that night passed as quietly as the one before had, but this time the silence was doleful rather than apprehensive. The bomb had already gone off; now all that remained was to pick up the pieces and mourn the dead.

Mostly.

After we cleared the plates, the exhaustion that I'd staved off for most of the day slammed down on me. "I'm going to head to bed."

"Do you... is it okay if I join you?"

"It's your bedroom, too." Then, almost as an afterthought, I added, "Oh, and I'd like my hall pass back. Who knows? Maybe I will find someone to use it with. You thought that would be fun when you were sitting at the bar with Jared, right? Might as well find out." Without waiting for a response, I turned my back on my wife and headed to our room. She didn't say anything. What could she, without sounding like a hypocrite?

Once in bed, she asked, "I know you want me to get tested, but... Well, we've already been intimate since then. Would you like--"

"No."

"It doesn't have to be... I'll do all the work. I'll ride you, blow you, whatever you want. I love you, Greg. I'm sor--" She stopped short, avoiding the "s" word just in time. "I want to do whatever I can to show you that I do love you."

"Then let me sleep."

A long pause, then a subdued, "Okay." Her acquiescent tone made me angry again. What I wanted, if I'm honest with myself, was for her to give me more reasons to be mad at her. I wanted her to act unreasonable and aggrieved, but she just... wouldn't. Instead, when I turned my back to her, she touched my shoulder gently and asked, "Do you want... Can I hug you?"

"Not tonight."

"Okay," again without anything even resembling reproach. "I love you. Thank you for... Well, just thank you for keeping your promise. I'm going to say it one more time, then I'll try not to anymore: I'm sorry. I hope you believe that, and also that I love you enough to wait as long as it takes for you to forgive me."

I didn't sleep well that night. I should have, as exhausted as I was. Instead, nightmares of my wife with another man tormented me.

Someone had strapped me to a chair with the sort of paper chains that children make at Christmas to hang on the tree, but with links forged from dozens of copies of Courtney's hall pass rather than brightly colored construction paper. No matter how I strained, I couldn't free myself, nor could I close my eyes. A younger version of me fucked my wife from behind, pulling her hair and laughing at my predicament as he made her beg and moan and tell him she'd never had better and never would.

I knew it was a nightmare, but no matter what I did, no matter how I shouted at my sleeping self, I couldn't wake up. The tableau repeated itself for what felt like hours, with only positions and sex acts changing. Just as the paper chains bound me to the chair, something bound me to my slumber.

And then I was awake, screaming and drenched in sweat. Courtney tried to soothe me--she'd been trying for a while, judging from her agitated state--but I instead pushed her away and fled the room. How the hell could she soothe me when she'd caused the harm in the first place? No, better to sleep elsewhere. She didn't follow me, so I camped out on the couch instead of returning to Tyler's short twin bed. I didn't sleep much more that night, but at least I could stretch my legs.

When I woke the next morning, I found she'd left my hall pass on my bedside table. I tucked it away, just out of sight, buried at the bottom of my sock drawer; I didn't want to be constantly reminded that its mate had been used.

That my mate had been used.

The chill between us remained throughout Sunday morning, albeit not from her lack of trying. Courtney asked about the hefty array of purchases from The Android's Dungeon, "Thinking about getting back into gaming?"

"Yeah."

"That'll be fun. Magic and D&D both, or?"

"Yeah. Well, D&D. The Magic decks are just for playing with the kids."

"Oh!" she replied brightly. "That'll be fun. Can I play, too? Help teach them?"

"Sure."

"Yay! What about D&D?"

"I might teach them that, too, if they're interested. That stuff's mostly for me, though. I'm going to look for a group."

"That sounds fun. Maybe I could join in!"

After a beat of staring at her, I firmly but evenly replied, "No."

"What?"

"No. That's something... I want that for myself." To put a finer point on it, I added, "Not with you."

"Oh. Oh, well. Um, that's... that's okay." It wasn't. It clearly wasn't.

Imagine the wife of a zealous sports fan, one who had spent years getting her to not just tolerate but to embrace his team with the same level of devotion, suddenly telling her he no longer wanted her to attend matches with him. That's essentially what I'd just done to her.

Courtney had probably expected me to push her away sexually, or at least she'd prepared herself for that eventuality. This was different, though, not directly related to the arena in which she'd betrayed me. It represented, in its way, an almost more personal rebuke: I didn't want to share something that had been a huge part of my life when I was younger, and which I wanted to re-engage with. I'd never intentionally segmented any portion of my life from hers before. Now I was, at least in this specific case. She had to wonder: what other ones might I extend that rebuff to?

Truth be told, so did I.

Court picked up the kids in the afternoon; I didn't come along. While I had the house to myself for a couple of hours, I did some of the cursory snooping I'd thought about the day before. We'd always had an open device policy in our house; I had no secrets to hide, and up until about twenty-four hours before, I didn't believe that she did either.

It turned out that belief still proved true, unless Courtney was much, much better at hiding things than I thought she was. I logged into her laptop and looked around, then her tablet, which she'd linked to her phone account. Nada. No encrypted messaging apps, secondary accounts, hidden folders, or any of the other stuff one would think to look for. She could have deleted any of these--she'd had time, after all--but I looked at her cloud backups and didn't find any evidence there, either. If she'd hidden anything else, she'd done it masterfully.

Next, I went looking for this "Jared" motherfucker to confirm my suspicions about his appearance. Her company had posted tons of pictures from the trade show, so all it took was scanning through their social media accounts to find what I was looking for: a picture of my wife talking with him in her company's booth. Thanks, whoever posted the images in such a high resolution that I could read the name on his badge.

Have you ever seen one of those listicles that shows how Hollywood keeps picking nearly indistinguishable leading men? It was like that. Yeah, if someone put present-day him and twenty-five-year-old me side-by-side, you could have told us apart, if just barely. But if Jared ever went on a crime spree and I got pulled into a lineup, the only thing saving me would be our age difference.

I slammed my laptop shut just as Courtney's car pulled in, plastered a big smile on my face--made easier by the fact that I'd really missed the kids--and went to greet my family. My ruminations could wait until later. Returning to the mantra of "don't cut off your nose to spite your face," I hung out with Tyler and Zoe as much as they'd allow that evening, watching movies and cooking dinner together. Mom looked on, perhaps feeling a little left out, but not complaining.

Over the coming weeks, I don't think the kids noticed any issues. Partly, that's because Courtney and I presented a united front when it came to them. Mostly, though, they'd reached that age where they'd started to have far less interest in their parents than whatever pastime tickled their fancy. Unless we went full-on Mr. & Mrs. Smith, trying to stab each other with butcher knives in the kitchen, I don't know they would have noticed anything was up.

However, that didn't change the fact that I still wanted to freeze her out in some places. I hadn't forgiven her yet, and I wanted her to know that. I also wanted some of my old self back without sharing it with her, maybe indefinitely. Starting on a couch-to-5K plan helped there, since the time running gave me about an hour every other day I could spend alone with my thoughts.

More importantly, though, Saturday night became Dad's game night.

--

Finding a good gaming group is like dating. It's best if a friend can set you up with folks they think you'll be compatible with, but if I had friends who still regularly rolled dice and slew imaginary dragons, I'd play with them. Instead, I reached out to contacts on The Android's Dungeon list. The first couple flaked, but it turned out the third time was quite the charm.

Younger groups often play at their local game store, but older folks usually get together at someone's house or apartment if possible; after all, drinking in public is generally frowned upon. However, people with the sense that god gave a goose typically want to vet strangers before inviting them to their homes--as do the people visiting said homes--so I met the contact for this particular group at the store.

She told me her height (about 5'10"), a basic description, and that she'd be wearing a biker jacket and jeans. I got there early both to make a good impression and to scope her out, just in case of any immediately visible red flags.

Good thing, too, since I needed the time to pick my jaw up off the floor.

I didn't drool; that would have probably knocked me out of the running entirely. Maybe not, though, because I got the feeling my contact was used to men drooling over her, and probably a not-insignificant number of women, too.

Black, curly hair framed a gorgeous, classically Hellenistic face: high cheekbones, Greek nose, deep brown eyes, and luscious, full lips. Her face could have launched a thousand ships, but combined with her long legs, ample breasts, and perfectly formed bubble butt? We'd be lucky to avoid Armageddon if men went to war over her.

Then she spoke, and I completely understood how the sirens could lure men to their deaths. "Greg? It's nice to meet you. I'm Briana."

Well, tie me to the mast and call me Odysseus.

I'd have put her age at about thirty, which wasn't far off. A twenty-nine-year-old single mother of one, Briana hosted the game at her apartment on Saturdays from around four in the afternoon to around eight in the evening. They'd lost one player when she'd moved away and were looking for a mature, responsible replacement who didn't take the game too seriously but also wouldn't miss sessions. Well, too many, at least. We were all parents, and family came first.

Even if their contact hadn't looked like Wonder Woman-as-young-MILF, I'd have been on board. Their general attitude sounded right up my alley, and, thankfully, Briana didn't seem to find me off-putting or creepy. After we exchanged numbers, she gave me her address and explained the power level of the campaign I'd be coming into, along with some general info on the other players' characters, all with a pleasant, if slightly aloof manner, as befitted a meeting where each person came into it worried the other might be an axe murderer.

I arrived promptly at her apartment the following Saturday afternoon, with character sheet, dice, and books in hand. While she hosted the game, Briana wasn't the dungeonmaster, which is a sort of combination referee and storyteller. Instead, that role fell to Gordon, a veteran DM around Briana's age. His wife, Miranda, also played at the table, as did an older married couple, Ben and Maria.

The group had a mascot, too, Briana's cat, a goofy orange tabby named Butterball that regularly flopped down on top of one of our rulebooks or batted a die off the table. Lastly, hovering around the edges was Layla, Briana's daughter; however, much like my own children, she avoided the grownups and did her own thing.

I had a blast that night. There's always a risk when joining a new group that, no matter how well a newcomer should mesh with them on paper, they simply don't. Instead, I experienced the opposite of that, and by the second hour it felt like I'd been playing with them for years. While I didn't necessarily get all the in-jokes, they did everything they could to make me feel welcome, and I, in turn, did everything I could to fit in with the group's vibe.

With Briana, I didn't even need to try; it felt like we were on the same wavelength from the get-go. Part of that I can ascribe to my choice of character, a dour, tanky paladin that complemented hers, a devil-may-care bard, in both tactics and personality.

I hadn't designed him toward that end; it was just a lucky coincidence. I've always liked playing the guy out front taking hits for the rest of the party. However, our characters' abilities meshed well in combat, and my stodgy holy knight proved to be the perfect straight man to her wisecracking former bar wench-cum-wannabe rock star.

That night, I began to understand firsthand how easily two actors in a film could fall for each other. While there's a certain amount of separation in professional acting, on-screen chemistry usually translates to off-screen chemistry. This is true even in platonic relationships; anyone who's seen Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds on a publicity tour can see they genuinely both like each other and like taking the piss out of each other.

However, Briana's attitude towards my character and, by osmosis, me, read nothing at all like two buddies just hanging out. While the table we played at wasn't a group of hornballs--our party's adventures were about as sexless as a typical PG-13 action movie--Briana played the role of incorrigible flirt to my devout crusader so well that they might as well have been the two lead characters in a will they/won't they romantic comedy.

"It's time for bed. I must prepare for tomorrow," my character, Kerwyn, would say, heading up the tavern's stairs.

Jennala, her bard, would call out, "Need any help 'polishing your sword?'"

Or, when he complained about squeezing through a crevasse that hid the entrance to a dungeon, she'd taunt, "C'mon, this can't be the tightest gap you've been in. Or maybe this is your first time?"

I would have found it hard to leave that energy at the table even if my roleplaying partner wasn't an absolute knockout. More importantly, as we chatted about this and that in between our turns, I found that I genuinely liked her for her, and she seemed to feel the same about me. Other than Courtney, I don't think I've ever gelled with anyone so effortlessly.

After the game, I stayed to help clean up, and we talked about our everyday lives, albeit in shallow terms. With just the two of us, and away from the game, her flirtations mostly ceased, but the warmth remained.

Briana worked as a personal assistant at a software consultancy, so while not a technical person herself, she knew enough to understand the less esoteric aspects of what I did for a living. We talked about our kids, and she asked about Courtney; I was circumspect in my language regarding my wife, which Briana picked up on, but she didn't push. Similarly, I didn't ask about important but likely touchy aspects of her past, such as the whereabouts of Layla's father.

Looking back now, it felt a lot like a first date.

--

I came home from that first session in a great mood, which Courtney picked up on pretty quickly. "Good game?"

"Yeah, I had a fun time."

"Nice group?"

"Uh-huh. One married couple a little older than us, another married couple in their early thirties, and one other player a little younger." I didn't mention names or genders. She neither needed nor deserved more than vague generalities.

Courtney knew me; normally, if I really enjoyed something, I could and would go on for hours about it. Given the grin I'd been wearing when I walked through the door, I'd chosen to shut her out. I could see that it stung her and enjoyed that perhaps more than I should have.

Trying to camouflage her hurt, she brightly said, "Well, I'm glad you had fun." Then, with a wink, she asked, "Want to have some more?"

I paused for a moment to contemplate this. We'd gotten back our STD tests the week before. Each night since, she'd offered herself to me. That's how it seemed, too: an offer. She didn't push, at least not anymore than she had the first night we slept next to each other again. My wife was just letting me know she was available for the taking.

So that night, I did.

"Sure."

Courtney tried to make it good for me; I know that. I didn't concern myself too much with her pleasure, instead allowing my wife to show her contrition on her knees. Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling it. At first, thoughts of her time with Jared slipped into my head, but I closed my eyes and willed them away. When they left, however, something needed to fill the void.

Something did.

Someone did.

Briana.

As my wife's head bobbed up and down in my lap, I didn't think of the woman I'd loved for almost twenty years who was enthusiastically, almost desperately, fellating me in our marital bed. Instead, I imagined my new, sexy acquaintance, the one who in a few hours had already sped her way toward being my friend.

I tried to imagine what Bri would look like out of her jeans and t-shirt, how her lips would feel on mine, the way her breasts might fill my hands. Would she moan when she came? Or was she a talker instead, or maybe a foul-mouthed screamer who'd beg me to fill her full of cum while she clawed at my back?

For the first time since we'd left our small apartment behind, back when Courtney sometimes pretended to be a Hollywood starlet seducing me in our bed, I ejaculated in my wife's mouth while fantasizing about another woman, idly wondering--hoping, really--if Briana was perhaps thinking of me and getting herself off with her own fingers.

While the woman I'd married tried to show me she loved me, I climaxed to fantasies that I fervently wanted to turn into adulterous reality.

After Courtney got me hard again, I flipped her onto her stomach and fucked her. The coupling wasn't a cruel thing; she seemed to enjoy herself, having at least one small orgasm. Unless she faked it, that is. I'd never known her to, but she'd shaken my confidence in her so thoroughly--in myself, too, for that matter--that I wondered about the possibility for the first time. Instead of worrying about it, though, I kept my eyes closed, imagining she was someone else. When I finished, it took an effort of will to not moan out Briana's name.

Afterwards, Courtney's description of her tryst with Jared drifted back to me: "Mechanically, the sex was... fine. Good, even. But there was no spark." The fire in our bed that night came in spite of my wife's presence, not because of it. Even if she'd enjoyed it, she knew something was off; the look in her eyes once I'd rolled off of her told me that.

We lay together afterwards, neither speaking. Her head rested on my chest, and my arm was around her. If someone saw a picture of us, they'd say we were cuddling, but we weren't. Just as when we'd had sex, the physical was there, but the emotional wasn't, or at least not the right kind of emotion. Later, after we separated, and I'd turned my back to her, the almost imperceptible sound of my wife's gentle weeping followed me into my dreams. I wish that had bothered me more than it did.

--

The next few weeks were tense, but things didn't come to a head until maybe two months after that night. Courtney continued to play the role of the perfect wife to the hilt, but my performance as the loving husband wouldn't have won any awards. The kids didn't seem to notice, though. Sunday through Friday, I went to work and spent time with my family. I ran three days a week and even added some bodyweight exercises to the mix; already, I was probably in better shape than I'd been since Tyler was born.

Saturdays, though, were when I could take a break from one fantasy world and escape to another, one where my companions were always true and our bond unbreakable. My mood on those days was almost always better than during the week, and Courtney noticed. When I returned from my game nights, we coupled much like we had that first night, thankfully without the tears this time, but still with the notional other woman there, too.

At first, I think my good mood and sexual vigor on those nights buoyed her hopes; perhaps she believed that giving me this time alone to indulge in the fancies of my youth could heal us. I didn't disabuse her of this notion, and even bought into it myself. A little, anyways.

That's not how it worked out, though.

Within a month, Courtney and I were further apart than ever, while I grew closer and closer to Briana. I'd be lying if I said that the last happened by accident. I liked her, and while I can ascribe a certain amount of that to lust, that made up a smaller portion of my affection for her than one might expect; impressive, given how mightily I did lust after her.

Briana had a wicked sense of humor, a kind manner, and a sharp mind. She didn't gossip, either, even when Miranda and Maria got a little tipsy and started talking about drama in the local gaming scene. I appreciated that discretion, particularly given the likelihood I'd want to confide in her about the whole hall pass debacle at some point and perhaps gauge her willingness to help me indulge in some consequence-free infidelity.

In the meantime, I used my infatuation with her to fuel my libido. Each Saturday, I'd go spend time with my friends, then stay after with Briana to "help clean up." That usually meant fifteen minutes of labor, followed by an hour or two of hanging out, watching Netflix, and generally shooting the shit. Afterwards, I'd return to my home and fuck my wife while mentally making love to my crush.

As I got to know Bri, I realized that she, like many roleplayers, had made a character that was essentially an amplified version of herself. By then, our in-game, in-character flirtation had broken containment and stayed through to the post-game. It was milder--more playful goofing around than anything else--but it was there.

The warmth between us grew, as did my affection for her, even as it transformed into something somewhat less focused on sexual interest and more on the whole package. In that time, we learned how much we had in common even outside of our shared hobby. What had started as a crush on a hot geek girl became... well, I still had a crush on her; let's be honest here. But it deepened into something far more nuanced.

Something far more dangerous.

We started texting back and forth regularly. That took only ten or fifteen minutes out of my day, but it was enough to brighten my mood. Courtney noticed me using my phone more often but didn't say anything.

After all, it's not like I was trying to hide it from her. I didn't change my passcode or turn the screen away from her when she sat next to me. People having an affair would do that, and I wasn't having an affair. Right?

My wife frowned the first time she saw my crush's name on the screen as we lay in bed one night. "Who's that?"

"Huh?"

"Briana." She said the name with studied neutrality, pretending mere curiosity, but her expression didn't match her tone.

"Oh." I felt a momentary sting of guilt, quickly pushed aside. Why should I feel guilty? It's not like I was fucking her. And, hell, even if I did, I still had my hall pass. What could my wayward wife legitimately complain about? "She's in my D&D group."

"You didn't mention her."

"Yeah, I did. I told you I was playing with two married couples and one other person. She's the other person." The other woman. "We play at her place so she won't have to pay for a babysitter."

"She's a single mom?"

"Yes."

"I see." A beat later, "Why didn't you mention her before?"

"I just told you, I did."

"That she was a single woman, I mean."

My shrug was insouciant. Defiant, even. "Didn't come up. I told you that this time, my D&D time, is something I want for myself."

Courtney opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Then, seemingly certain she wanted to ask the question--or at least certain it needed to be asked--she said, "And is that all you want for yourself?"

"If you want to say something, say it."

I stared at her, feeling the anger starting to rise. She mirrored that mood. "Do you want to fuck her?"

I could have lied. I could have pretended that I hadn't thought about her damn near every time I'd gotten off with Courtney, that the fantasy of blowing my load inside my stupidly hot friend-currently-without-benefits didn't ever fail to get me hard, but why should I? "Yeah. Yeah, if the opportunity presented itself, I'd love to."

Maybe I should have stopped there; hell, maybe I should have stopped even before that. Unfortunately for both of us, my wife's hypocritical line of inquiry had brought the resentment simmering below the surface for months back up to a boil, and I wanted her to burn in it, too. "She's twenty-nine, single, gorgeous and, if I told her about my hall pass, I think she'd be down. We've gotten to know each other playing together. I like her, and she likes me. But I haven't done anything about it yet. She's just a friend." Then, one more scalding dig. "For now, anyways. Maybe I'll bring it up after our game this week."

That shut her up, if only for a moment. "That's not..." Courtney chewed her lip. "That's not what the hall pass is supposed to be for. It's... We said people without emotional attachments. If she's your friend, then--"

"Oh, fuck you." She tried to talk, but I wouldn't let her. "Are you telling me that you didn't feel some kind of connection to Jared? It's not like you picked up a male escort, Court. You let him flirt with you at the trade show without shutting him down, maybe all week, then sat there at the bar and flirted with him some more until you felt comfortable enough to drop your fucking panties for him. 'No emotional attachments,' my ass."

"That's not the same! I'm never going to see him again!"

"Oh, is that in the rules now, too? And, again, I call bullshit. You were at a damned trade show. Trade. Show. You know, the kind of show that people in and around a specific trade go to? The kind you go to a couple of times a year? Are you telling me it's not just the same folks over and over again?" She frowned, mouth tightly shut, unwilling or unable to respond; that, in itself, answered the question. "Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought. You'll see him at the next one, or the one after that, and he'll start sniffing around. Hell, he'll probably tell his friends he got you to spread your legs, and they'll want to shoot their shot, too. Don't even try to pretend that won't happen."

Now, exasperated, she snapped, "For God's sake, Greg. Guys try to get in my pants all the time, and I always tell them no!"

"'Always,'" I scoffed, the sarcastic quotes audible in my tone. "'Always,' except for just this once. 'Always,' except for this one guy that looks exactly like me, except younger." She stiffened at the revelation that I knew. "Yeah, thought you might slip that past me?"

For a woman lying in bed, she sure did her best to backpedal. "I wasn't trying to--"

"To be fair, you did manage to slip it past me, but that's because I was still in shock after finding out my wife had fucked another man. Once I had my wits about me again, I looked him up." I snorted derisively, both at her and at myself. "Do you have any idea how fucking emasculating that is?"

Ignoring her string of objections--how it wasn't meant that way, how she didn't mean to hurt me like that, and a bunch of similar bullshit--I flipped through apps on my phone, then showed her a picture of Briana in a tight black graphic t-shirt. The image on the shirt, a pair of twenty-sided dice both showing their twenty faces, curved around her incredible tits, and the caption above them read, 'Yes, they're natural.' No other woman who'd ever worn it had more right to.

With a snarl, I said, "At least when I do fuck her, it's going to be because she looks like sex on a stick and makes me feel like the only guy in the room. It's not going to be because you aren't enough for me anymore. Sorry that I wasn't enough for you, I guess."

Courtney put her hand to her mouth, the anger that had welled up in her eyes now replaced with fat tears threatening to cascade downwards. "I didn't- it wasn't..."

"Just... Just spare me, Court. I'm not an idiot. Or, hell, maybe I am. Maybe I thought you loved me enough to..." I shook my head. "Whatever. 'No guilt trips, no recriminations,' right? Guess I'm not quite as good at following the rules as you. Something else you've got over me. Congratulations. Maybe we'll just count my little outbursts as my 'marital misdeeds,' huh?"

Then I put a finger to my chin, as if I'd just thought of something; in truth, my inner rules lawyer had been poring over those lines of text for months, looking for every possible angle it could find. "Wait, we didn't specify twenty-four consecutive hours of marital misdeeds, did we? How long did Jared take to get you into bed? Thirty minutes? An hour? Maybe the boys on the trade show circuit are in luck after all!"

She croaked out something else, but I didn't want to hear it anymore. I'd already said too much myself, and, while I didn't feel bad about any of it, I knew how short a distance lay between "too much" and "more than she could bear." With the way the conversation was going, I'd have hit that second marker and blasted right through if I kept talking for even another minute. Instead, I got out of bed, stalked to the closet, grabbed a blanket, and headed for the living room couch.

I tossed and turned for a while, angry both at her and at myself for lashing out again. I hadn't screamed at her until she'd cowered before me this time, though. So, you know, baby steps. I'd finally whipped the cloak of invisibility off the Jared-shaped elephant in the room, too, but none of that exchange had made me particularly happy. Just like her idiotic, half-assed plan for minimizing my pain when she revealed what she'd done, I could have handled the whole thing better.

I needed to handle... everything better. I knew that. If I didn't, there might not still be a marriage by the time I figured out how to forgive. The juvenile outburst might have been cathartic, but catharsis isn't always positive; sometimes it's just the prelude to an end.

--

Sleep didn't come easily, and when it did, new, dark films played out in the private theater of my dreams. Jared and Courtney's eternal fuckfest had haunted my nights twice since that first time, although I hadn't woken up screaming again. This night, however, the same stars played the same roles, just with a different plot.

We were outdoors, on a beach, under a blistering midday sun. I still found myself chained with paper, but the chains were now connected to manacles around my wrists and staked to a pin stuck in a cliff wall. Instead of Jared fucking a rapturous Courtney, he held her by the throat as she whimpered with fear, her pleading eyes locked on mine. Laughing like the villain in an old black and white film, he taunted, "I'm done with the slut now. If you want her, come and get her."

I cursed and strained against my bonds, trying to reach them, but in vain. Jared's lips curled into a sneer. "No? Well, I suppose if neither of us wants her..." He began to march into the sea, dragging her behind. I begged him to stop, to not do this to us, but he merely laughed again, not even looking back. Just as Courtney's head disappeared beneath the waves, I woke, drenched in sweat.

When I tried to wipe away the sleep from my eyes, I found tears there. The clock on my phone read 3:37 A. M. and, knowing I'd be unlikely to find any more rest, I decided to get an extra run in. I stole into the bedroom to grab my shorts and running shoes, but upon opening the dresser, I heard Courtney softly call, "Greg?"

"Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you."

She shifted in bed behind me. "Don't be sorry. I'm glad you're here. I missed you last night. I've missed... I've missed us. We're not right, and I know that, and I don't know what to do about it. Please, sit and talk with me?"

My eyes stayed focused on the half-opened drawer. "That didn't go so well last time."

"No, it didn't." She let out a long, slow sigh. "I'm sorry. You were right. I was being a hypocrite. I didn't mean to be, but I was. I just... I can't stand the thought of losing you to someone else, and I see you on your phone all the time, and..."

Courtney must have seen the change in my posture, the stiffening of my form or the way I squared my shoulders, and quickly added, "Please, I'm not trying to fight. You're right that I abused the rules. I did. I wasn't trying to... What I mean to say is that I didn't intend to do that. I didn't set out to do it, but I did anyways. Please, come and sit with me? If you want to get up and go in the middle of it, I'll understand, but let me explain?"

I bit back the obvious retort, 'Are you actually going to explain or just make shit up?' instead turning to face her, then crossing to sit on the corner of the bed, as far from her as I could. "I don't know what you could possibly say to make me feel better about... any of this."

Courtney nodded a few times, reluctantly admitting, "I don't, either. But let me start by saying that I don't think you're an idiot. I know that you're not. You're... brilliant. I don't just mean that you're smart, but you... sometimes you see things I don't. But that doesn't mean you always see them correctly.

"I told you that I don't know why I did what I did; feeling older and invisible, being a little tipsy, thinking about the hall pass... they all entered into it, but they weren't why. And it wasn't... I think it had something to do with him looking so much like you, but it wasn't why, either. Not in the way you said last night."

She reached forward to touch my hand, the sheets falling away to display her body to me. I didn't pull away. "I could never replace you. It didn't even enter into my mind, consciously, when I went with him, how much he looked like you. I mean, I knew that he did, but it wasn't... I didn't think that had anything to do with it. I have a type; you know that. And in the months after, I tried to forget about the whole thing as much as I could. I just didn't want to think about it.

"But since then, especially after your reaction, I've thought about it a lot more, both the night I went with him and why I did. Why him, too. I wasn't trying to hide that he looked so much like you; I really wasn't. I wanted to get past it, past all of it, and focusing on any one detail seemed like it would make that harder.

"I thought maybe you might react badly to the details, and I was worried about that, but you didn't, or at least you didn't say anything then, so I fig which is why I tried to avoid talking about them altogether, but you didn't even flinch at the fact that he looked like you, so I figured... like, why focus on it?

"I didn't know that it bothered you so much, and you wouldn't let me talk about it with you last night; you just kept interrupting me, and then you said all those..." She looked away from me. "... those hurtful things."

"Court--"

Her eyes snapped back to me. "Don't. I'm still angry, but I don't want to fight. I know I'm not as pretty or fit as I used to be. Or as sexy, either. I sure as hell don't match up to whatever her name is. Britney?"

"Briana."

She huffed. "Right, of course. She even sounds like a porn star." I felt an urge to defend Bri, but Courtney cut me off. "I'm not saying she is, or that she's some homewrecker or... I don't know her. That's part of the problem: I don't know her.

"But I do know you, even if I've made some big mistakes in that regard lately. I know you're doing some of the things that you're doing specifically to put distance between us. I don't know if it's meant to punish me, or if it's something you need to do for yourself. Do you?"

I thought about it for a few moments, then replied, "A bit of both, really. Mostly because I needed to feel..." The words didn't come as readily as I thought they might; I'd been so happy to throw Briana in Courtney's face the night before as a way to hurt her, but telling her the whole truth meant admitting, "... I need to feel like my happiness doesn't depend on you. That I have things that are mine, just mine, so that I'll have a refuge the next time you decide that your fun is worth hurting me for."

"Oh, Greg." She tried to cross the distance on hands and knees, but I pulled back. She'd been letting me do that for months, but not this time. Instead, she kept coming until her arms wrapped around me and one hand tilted my head to her chest. "Oh, my love. My love. I'm so, so sorry. I know you don't want to hear those words, but they're true. I will never hurt you like this again. If I live to be a hundred, I won't. I won't, I won't, I won't. I promise you that. Seeing you like this is killing me, too."

My words were muffled by her embrace. "I wish I could believe you."

"Let's start with this, then: why did I do it, why then, and why with him? And I think... I think some of it goes back to that night when we gave each other the hall passes and for a few years after."

I pulled back to look at her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She searched my eyes for a few moments, then hesitantly asked, "Do you remember who gave the first one?"

"You did."

"Right. And I'm the one that got them laminated. I'm the one that talked about them first, usually, if they ever came up. If we joked about them, it was always about you using yours, not me. And when we roleplayed, it was always me forgiving you for using yours, never the reverse."

I thought about it, then admitted, "Yeah, that's probably true."

"I didn't... I found the idea of you using yours kind of exciting, like you'd be going off on this big adventure but still coming back to me. That last bit was what really mattered, that you'd be coming back to me. That no matter how hot or sexy the girl was, that you'd come back to me, and you'd still love me. I think I kind of romanticized that. Maybe told myself it would be the same for you. And it wasn't, but..." She shrugged.

"So, when I was alone in that bar, feeling old and invisible, and this guy that looked so much like you came up to me, choosing me over the other, prettier, younger girls... I think maybe that kind of triggered something in me. It felt... I won't say it didn't feel like cheating, but it felt less like cheating. Like a younger you still picking an older me.

"And I know, maybe that's not much comfort to you, but it's the truth. I didn't think..." She sighed and shook her head. "I didn't understand how much it would hurt you until I realized, for myself, that wasn't what it felt like at all. Hell, I didn't really understand it until I told you and you blew up at me and I had time to think about that, too, but in the back of my head I had that... inkling even that night when I ran back to my room afterwards."

The scowl on my face came out in my voice. "So you cheated on me with me, because it would feel like not cheating? Really?"

Courtney scoffed, answering with a self-deprecating tone. "After four drinks and a dozen years of building up the hall passes in my head? Yeah. It was dumb; I won't deny that. But it's how things felt. I should've known before that it wasn't real, but it's how I felt."

Her hand smoothed my hair. "I still feel so stupid. You're... God, Greg, you're everything to me. Everything I could want." She must have seen the disbelief in my eyes. Easy words to say, but her actions hadn't borne that out. "You are. I'm sorry I lost sight of that, however I did.

"And another thing. You're right that I've been hiding behind the rules. I didn't mean to, not really. But you're right that I obsessed over the rules instead of what they meant. And because of that--and because I do want to show you that I do love you and trust you, no matter what--I'm going to amend the rules on your pass."

"Amend?"

"Yeah. Or... What's the opposite? Excise? Whatever. The long and the short of it is this: if you want to use your pass, with your friend or- or whoever, feel free. Whenever, wherever, whoever, for twenty-four hours. I trust you to make a decision that won't hurt us." She looked away from me, shame written on her face. "A damn sight more than I trust myself, all things considered."

I weighed this offer in my mind, rolling it around before finally saying, "Okay. I want one other thing, though."

Her gaze returned to me, curious, but not defensive. "What?"

"Stop trying to be perfect. I appreciate that you're trying to make things up to me, but every time you go above and beyond, it just reminds me again that you're trying to make something up to me. I'm not saying it's disingenuous, but it's not helping me get past... it."

Courtney gave me a wan smile and stroked my cheek. "Alright. I will. I mean, it's not disingenuous; I really do want to be a better wife, because you do mean that much to me, even if I lost sight of it that night. But if it's bothering you, I'll tone it down."

"Thanks." I pulled away from her and stood. "I'm, ah, still gonna go for my run."

"Okay. I'm going to try to get back to sleep. Thank you for listening and... well, just for everything."

Once I'd laced up my shoes, I looked down at my wife as she lay in our bed watching me. I felt the urge to lean over and kiss Courtney's forehead. It was a trivial thing, a small tenderness not seen in our house since the night she confessed, but I realized then how much I'd missed it. And so, I didn't suppress it, instead brushing my lips against her brow.

Her small, hopeful smile became a broad grin; not the brittle thing she'd kept in place while waiting for the other shoe to fall, but something more honest and real. Unburdened. Truly loving, not the pantomime of the penitent, unworthy sinner she'd acted for months.

Courtney said, "I love you," as she told me every morning.

My mouth opened and closed a couple of times before I finally managed, "I love you, too." It was the first time I'd said it to her since that awful weekend months before. I meant the words, but saying them still made me uncomfortable, as if I'd given her more than I was ready to. Before she could respond--and hopefully before she could see the look on my face--I turned and fled our bedroom, then the house, running off and away down the street.

--

Over the course of the next few weeks, I came to some conclusions. First, that I needed to fully commit to forgiving Courtney and healing our marriage. We'd already established that she couldn't coax forgiveness from me; it had to be something I granted, and I would do my best. I committed to the role of the good husband, instead of phoning it in.

Courtney made that easier on me where she could. She started attending therapy as discussed, and while she gained no immediate insight into what had driven her to use her pass, knowing that she was working towards that goal made me feel more at ease. She backed off on trying to be perfect, too, downshifting to merely great. I could ask for more--or less, I suppose--but instead I chose to enjoy the happy medium: slightly more engaged and eager to please than she'd been before she strayed, but without the manic desperation.

Second, I needed to decide what to do about Briana. That answer came to me quickly: nothing. As pissed as I'd been at Courtney when she objected to my choice of Bri, she hadn't been entirely wrong. I'd already been toeing the line of an emotional affair there, maybe even stepping a foot over it. Having sex with her, even for just one night, would likely body me right into long-term-infidelity territory. Assuming she was even half as good as my fantasies, I wasn't sure I'd be able to give that particular drug up after one taste.

I'd never managed a real friendship with benefits. Every time I'd tried it, we ended up in at least a short-term relationship. I knew that I wasn't the kind of guy that usually enjoyed one-night stands, and I didn't see a clear way to maintain our friendship if I did choose to use my pass with Bri, assuming she even wanted to be the recipient of said pass. Given her flirtation and our connection, I thought she might, but I also possessed enough awareness to know I might insult her instead. Better to not risk it, or my marriage.

Which left me with my third decision, namely what to do with my hall pass. The answer there was pretty simple, even if I wrestled with it for a while: also nothing. For now, at least. After Courtney cheated on me, I'd been beyond pissed, and while I still got angry sometimes when I thought too long about it, I knew my drive to use the pass had been more about getting even than using it for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Therefore, I decided to leave it where it lay, under my socks, until such an occasion came to pass.

Once I'd made these decisions--combined with Courtney's newer, less lovebomby demeanor--I was able to begin moving on with my life and my marriage. More and more often, I showed real affection to Courtney, both in front of our kids and when we were alone. Our fucking became lovemaking, eventually going from only one session a week after my game nights to two and then occasionally three times a week. I won't pretend that Briana didn't pop into my head from time to time during those sessions, but that became more of a rarity, and the dreams of Jared and my wife disappeared entirely.

Still, something still felt not quite right in our marriage. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was there. I felt unaccountable anger at odd times; maybe I'd see the pass in my sock drawer, or we'd watch a movie that featured one of my theoretical hall pass recipients from that drunken discussion from a decade before, and I'd go into a funk. Once, in the middle of an argument about some bit of rules minutiae with Gordon, I got so mad I needed to leave the room, then apologize to everyone afterwards.

Anger, mixed with something else I couldn't readily define, weighed down my interactions with Courtney for a few days afterwards each time. It didn't put us back to square one, but the feelings just kept cropping up, and I couldn't find a way to make them stop.

I cast about blindly for a while, seeking for a solution. Sometimes I hid my attempts from Courtney, and sometimes I was open, but neither seemed to matter. I even tried pulling back from my friendship with Briana, thinking perhaps it represented an obstacle I was too close to see, but that did nothing; in fact, it probably made things worse for the week or two I tried it. Once I'd returned to regularly texting and occasionally phoning with her, things seemed to pick back up between Courtney and me, too. Ultimately, I tried to tell myself that time would resolve the issue, but I don't know that I ever really believed it.

The next few months blurred together. I went to work. I spent time with the kids. I ran. I gamed with my D&D group. All the while, I grew closer to Briana, even as the somewhat narrower but still extant rift between my wife and myself stubbornly refused to close.

Then, maybe half a year after Courtney dropped her bombshell, Bri dropped one of her own.

--

Layla was off at a sleepover, and the conversation turned to Briana's love life. That wasn't entirely atypical; once I'd decided she would be a friend and no more, I offered a couple of times to set her up with younger guys that I knew, thinking they might be a good fit for her. She'd always demurred, citing her need to focus on her daughter and her job.

This night, though, we'd both had a little too much to drink, and when I offered it once more, she looked me right in the eye and said, "There is no way in hell I'm ever going to let a man ruin my life again."

"What?" I knew from earlier chats that Layla's father was named Drew, and that he'd been a shitty husband, but not much more.

Under her breath, Briana muttered, "Fuck," then waved her hand dismissively. "Nothing. It's... Really, I appreciate it, Greg, but... Look, I'm fucked up. Like, really, really fucked up. I don't need to be inflicting myself on some poor guy."

"What are you talking about? You're great."

She chuckled, taking another sip before responding, "Oh, I know that. But I also know that I'm fucked up. Look, this is supposed to be my fun time, my night to let down my hair and just... pretend. Pretend to be someone awesome with no problems who gets to save lives and slay monsters. Pretend that..." She shook her head, a self-deprecating smile on her lips. "Pretend that I don't have a fucked up past that's left me equally fucked up."

"Bri, look... You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but I'm here for the same thing. There was a reason I hadn't played in a decade before this, and I didn't get back to it just because my life suddenly got less hectic; it's because it got more fucked up. But it's... I won't say it's completely better, but I'm working through it, and one of the things that has really helped me through it is you."

Briana rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on."

"It's true. I needed... Look, I have literally told no one about any of this. At all. And if you don't want to know, or you don't want to tell me what's going on with you, that's fine. But it's one hundred percent the truth: if I hadn't met you and... figured some things out, I don't know that my marriage would have survived. I'm still not a hundred percent sure it will, but I'm trying. We both are."

She leaned forward, expression half-conspiratorial and half-concerned, and said, "Okay, now I have to know."

I took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it all out in a slow exhalation. "Courtney cheated on me." A tension in my shoulders and neck, one that I hadn't realized I'd been holding for months, released all at once.

"What? No way."

"Yeah. It's... There's a whole story there, but the short version is that she cheated on me, and I needed an escape from... from her. From our marriage, and from having to be around her and pretend everything was okay. I needed to just be some-fucking-where else at least one day a week.

"It turned out I needed more than that, though. You were a big part of how I got through that time, even from the beginning, and then you became... more. A friend, even if we don't get to hang out the rest of the week. If it were just the game, I don't think I'd have gotten as far as I have in putting myself back together. So, if I can help you, even if it's just to listen, I'd like to."

"Hang on, I'm still trying to get this through my head. Why the hell would Courtney cheat on you?"

Affecting a terrible Anthony Hopkins impression, I tutted, "Ah ah ah. Quid pro quo, Clarice. Thpthpthpthp."

After she got done snorting red wine out of her nose and cursing at me for that indignity, Briana began her story. "Drew was... He was a lot worse than just a bad husband, but this all goes further back than that. I made some bad choices after high school, and he was just the worst." Bri smirked at her own words. "I mean, he was just the worst, period, but he was also the worst choice I made.

She reclined, putting her feet up on the coffee table. "So, I was raised hyper religious. Like, 'Handmaid's Tale' religious. Hated every second of it, but knew better than to openly rebel. Once I managed a scholarship, I got the fuck away from my family, ending up at a state college about five hours away.

"I, ah, I kinda went nuts then. I mean, full-on stereotypical preacher's daughter gone wild: drinking, drugs--nothing too hard, just pot and molly--and, of course, tons of sex that... well, let's just say 'of many varieties.'"

Briana's expression turned contemplative and her tone nostalgic, if somewhat boozy, too. "I won't say that it was all bad. I had some great times, and I managed to keep my grades up. My regrets from that time... well, I have some, yeah, but mostly when things went beyond merely excessive and into Caligula territory. I learned a lot about myself and what I liked. Honestly, if that's all that had happened, I'd probably have a much rosier view of that time.

"But then I met Drew. He was... magnetic. I'd never met someone like him before: confident, seemingly successful, and laser focused on me. Also ten years older, which should have been a red flag. Like I said, though, I was raised in a very sheltered environment, and in the early days he made me feel like a cross between a Disney princess and some kind of pagan sex goddess. I couldn't get enough of him.

"A lot of the excess I mentioned sprung from that time, but even as he dragged me further and further out of my comfort zone, he was always this steady presence telling me I was still worthy of love, regardless of the kinky shit I enjoyed."

Bri took a sip from her glass, then quietly scoffed. "Worthy of love by him alone, of course. I didn't know what a narcissist looked like, or what lovebombing was, or how much he'd started separating me from my friends and the few family members I still talked with.

"He told me I should go off the pill, and that we could pull out or use Plan B, because it would make everything a lot more intense." She let out a little self-deprecating chuckle. "Admittedly, he was right. I knew it was a risk, but I trusted him. I trusted that, if things went wrong, he'd still take care of me.

"Things did go wrong. Or wrong for me, but right for him. He 'accidentally' didn't pull out at the right time of the month, after Plan B would have still worked, and knocked me up. I didn't realize he'd done it on purpose until he got drunk and gloated about it years after the fact. Drew wanted to have me under his thumb, and he got it. He proposed, and... well, like I said. Disney princess. I thought it was my fairytale come to life, even if I'd gotten there in a very non-Disney way.

"Then he said he had a new business opportunity out in California. I didn't want to drop out of school, but he told me I could transfer to a new school once we got there. And then..."

Brianna shook her head in disgust. "Eh, you can probably guess. He handled our finances, convinced me to put off my education, told me I'd have time to make friends later, and that I should be focused on him and Layla, in that order. Just went straight down the abusive husband checklist until we inevitably got to 'I wouldn't have hit you if you hadn't made me mad.' Even tried to convince me it wasn't a big deal because I liked it rough, and..." She blanched suddenly. "Oh my God, TMI! I'm sorry! I didn't--"

"It's okay, Bri." I raised my hands and spoke in a soothing tone. "It's... I'm so sorry you went through that, and I promise I won't tell a soul. Whatever you get up to is your business, and it sure as hell isn't an excuse for someone to..." My voice trailed off, leaving only an angry, disgusted expression on my face.

"Thank you," she quietly replied. "I know it's not, but some people... Well, you'd be surprised how often someone doesn't get the distinction, or how often they tried to play devil's advocate in the early days."

"They're assholes, then. Devil's got enough advocates already."

With a nod and a rueful grin, she continued. "Anyways, I took it for a year or so, squirreling away money here and there for an emergency. Even as naive as I was, part of me knew I was headed for one.

"Then, a little after Layla turned two, I woke up one night with him standing over her crib, drunkenly muttering, 'If I didn't have you to feed, I'd be fine.' The way he sounded... God, it scared the shit out of me. I led him away and, ah, distracted him that night. Then the next day, while he was out, I packed everything I could into a suitcase, took the cash I'd hidden, and bought a bus ticket back here, with her riding on my lap the entire way."

Briana downed the rest of her drink and put the glass to one side. "After that, I moved in with my brother for a while--the grey sheep of the family, since I was the black one--filed for divorce, finished my degree at nights and on weekends, and tried to put my life back together. Drew ended up getting popped by the cops a little while later for embezzlement; found that out when a couple FBI agents showed up at my door with some questions.

"So, yeah, that whole episode kinda left me with some trust issues. Therapy's helped some, but... I dunno. Every time I start to get serious now, the fear is still there, still holding me back, like maybe I'm just getting taken in by another abusive asshole and putting Layla in danger.

"So, for now, and maybe forever, I stick to, uh, solo stuff. I tried Tinder a couple of times, but... Hah, what's the saying? 'The odds are good, but the goods are odd.'

"And, I mean, it's not like I'm lonely. I have my friends, my brother, and some co-workers I enjoy spending time with. Plenty of good male influences for Layla, too, so she's not suffering there, either. I just... I know I'm kind of damaged, and I don't want to inflict that on anyone else, because I know I'm probably never going to be ready to take that final step with them."

She leaned forward with a lazy, self-assured grin. "Honestly? You've helped me, too. I haven't really had an outlet for flirting that was, well, safe. Just guys trying to get into my pants or, worse, into a relationship." Her smile widened at my own guilty frown. "Or was it not safe, and I just thought it was?"

With a sigh, I said, "It probably was, but I didn't want to think that at the time. I was so mad at Courtney, and so hurt, and I just... I wanted to hurt her back. I still do, occasionally, but not as much now. I dunno. Maybe... Honestly, if you'd offered early on, it wouldn't have been all that safe. I just... Being 'safe' had bit me pretty hard in the ass, so being something else sounded pretty good, you know?"

"Maybe." The grin softened to something more comforting. "Want to talk about it?"

"Well, since you've told me about the lambs, I guess it's only fair."

I let her in on basically everything. It took over an hour; she asked occasional questions to clarify, but mostly just let me ramble. By the end, Briana knew just about the whole damned mess: the hall passes, the gulf of difference in my and Courtney's attitudes toward them, Court using hers, the confession and showdown, the details about Jared, everything, all the way up to the conversation we were holding at that moment.

I only skimped on a few details, things like the extent of my unbridled lust for Bri in the early days of our friendship--now more or less bridled--and the way I'd fantasized about her while in bed with Courtney. There's being honest and then there's being creepy, after all. However, I did tell her how much having a beautiful woman flirt with me, even filtered sometimes through our game and the characters we played, helped me feel a bit more hopeful about things. It let me know that the notion of me finding someone to use my pass with who was actually worth cashing it in for--not necessarily her, but someone--didn't fall outside the realm of possibility.

When I finished, she sat back in her chair. "Wow. Just wow."

"Yeah. It's funny, I have told literally no one else about this. Court has her therapist, but I've had no one. I mean, I've had her, but..."

Briana nodded sagely, and a bit more soberly, too. "I get it. Hard to talk reasonably with the person who's responsible for hurting you. I... Honestly, it means a lot that you'd share it with me. And I'm happy to talk with you about it."

"Just talk, huh?" I chuckled, stopping her before she could respond. "Don't, don't, I'm kidding. Like I told you, I know that it would hurt Courtney if you and I, ah..."

"Fucked like a pair of coked up bonobos?"

"... Sure, let's go with that. Besides, I also know, now at least, that I was, um, overly optimistic in my assessment of our early interactions."

"How diplomatically put!" she said with a laugh. "And completely wrong, to boot. Look, I don't mess around with married men. Ever. But... Well, there's a reason I flirt with you and not Gordon or Ben. I mean, besides the fact that their wives are sitting right there, and I don't want to cause any friction. It's because... It's because, if things were different... they'd be different."

I couldn't help but snort. "Come on."

"You said it yourself: we have chemistry. If you didn't have a ring on when you came to the table... Honestly, I probably would have made a really stupid choice and screwed up my Saturday night D&D game.

"I know you might not believe it so much coming from your wife these days, but take it from me: there's not a damned thing wrong with you. Cute, smart, tall, kind, loyal, funny, sexy, good dad, good friend? Hell, let me rephrase: damn near everything is right with you."

"Sexy, huh?"

Briana rolled her eyes. "Of course that's what you focused on. Yes, doofus. You've got real Daddy vibes going on, and I am far from immune to them."

"Well, ah, thanks. That really, ah..." Like, how the hell do you even respond to that?

She laughed as I floundered, before throwing me a line. "So, it sounds like you're still struggling with... what? Moving on? Forgiving her?"

After taking a moment to think, I replied, "Yeah. Well, sort of, I think? But... You know, it's strange. As much as I hate the hall passes, not having the choice of whether to forgive her or not is oddly freeing." I held my hand up. "Yes, yes, I know I could still choose to not forgive her, but I signed my name on the dotted line. Even before that, I promised I'd try, but having a 'contract' of sorts means I'll do everything I can."

"So why haven't you?"

I stared into my wineglass for an even longer time to ponder that. "I don't know. I keep thinking I have, but then I get so angry at the weirdest times and for the weirdest reasons. Not even about anything she did, just... mad. And then surly afterwards. Court gives me space while still letting me know she's there for me, but nothing she does either way helps. I just have to ride it out on my own each time, with no idea why I got so pissed."

"Are you sure it's her you're mad at?"

"Yeah? I mean, sometimes it's Jared, but he was just an opportunistic little shit. When I do get mad about him, it's mostly muted. Like it's more about what he represents than anything else. Like, that the current me isn't enough for..." A shrug and a drink finished the sentence.

"Do you have a picture of him?"

"Um. Not on me, but I'm sure I could find one."

Briana inclined her head at my phone, so I went hunting for the shot of him and Courtney from the trade show. Once I'd found it, I passed the device to her. She looked at his smiling, thoroughly punchable face--punchable to me, at least--then at mine, then back to him, then to me. "That really is uncanny. Still," she said as she handed the phone back to me, "I'd pick you over him any day, even if I was just looking at two strangers in a bar. He sounds like a run-of-the-mill fuckboy."

"Hah! Well, it's nice of you to say--"

"It's honest of me to say," she interrupted.

"--but like I said, I'm not mad at him. Not really. I mean, if I saw him on the street, I'd be tempted to kick him in the balls, but I could probably rein it in. Probably."

"Impressive self-restraint." Then, she quietly said, "There's another possibility, you know."

"Oh?"

"If you're not angry at her--or at least you think you've forgiven her--and you're not really angry at him, that really only leaves one person."

It took me a long moment to understand her insinuation. "Me? Seriously? Why would I be mad at me? I mean, yeah, I blew up at Courtney, but I think that's pretty understandable, given the circumstances."

"It is. That's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is..."

She got a contemplative look in her eyes, like she was trying to weigh how to approach the subject. "So, I didn't get into therapy until three years after I left Drew. Had to make sure I hit all the lower rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy for me and Layla--you know: food, water, shelter, and so on--before I could spend the time and resources getting my head straight. More than that, I didn't want to dredge it all back up again. It wasn't until Layla got too old for me to weasel out of the 'where's my dad' kind of questions that I started trying to find someone to talk to.

"The first therapist didn't work out so well. Big on forgiveness as a healing step. Not a terrible option for some folks, but awful for me. Because, seriously, fuck Drew. I couldn't imagine forgiving him for what he'd done. He didn't deserve forgiveness, but this geriatric jackass in his fucking turtleneck and wire-rim glasses wouldn't stop pushing it.

"The second one, Amanda, was better. She suggested forgiveness but relented when it became clear that wasn't going to happen. We talked about moving past what Drew had done to me without holding onto my anger; functionally the same thing, but without me having to get through the mental block of the word 'forgiveness.'

"Just like you, though, I still found myself being angry, even after I thought I'd moved on. Some of that is normal; we're human, you know? Every once in a while, I still get mad at that bitch Meg Jenkins for stealing my boyfriend in junior high, too.

"But this was a different kind of anger. I know that mine is partially from C-PTSD, so I'll probably never be 100% past it, but I couldn't find any readily identifiable triggers for these sudden, intense bouts of anger that cropped up every once in a while. They just... happened.

"I'd be out at a club with co-workers and see some girl grinding on a guy on the dancefloor, and I'd get mad. Or I'd watch a Disney movie with Layla and feel absolutely enraged when the princess got together with the prince. All these random, unrelated moments that made me angry for seemingly no reason.

"Then, this one time, a co-worker asked me to go to a potluck at his church. Not even a church service, just a lunch. So I went. Free food, right? And church lady food, too, all the stuff I loved when I was a kid. But when I walked through the door, I wanted to break down and cry. Like, I hated everything and everyone in the world, and I needed to be anywhere else but there. I think I might have taken a swing at someone if they'd said the wrong thing to me right then.

"I'd kinda tapered things off with Amanda, but I called her up first thing the next day and told her I needed a session ASAP." Briana leaned forward and took my hand in both of hers. Any trace of her usual delicious snark was gone, replaced by a profound earnestness. "What Amanda told me then made me even angrier at first, but she was right. And I think it might be right for you, too.

"She said, and I will never forget this, 'You don't have to forgive Drew, but you do need to forgive yourself. Not the version of you that's sitting with me here now, the strong, confident single mom who got her daughter out of that situation and put her life back together, but the naive college girl, away from home for the first time, who got taken in by a charming, narcissistic abuser.'"

Bri bit her lip, eyes misting up. "I needed to hear that. I needed to hear it so badly. It made me mad, yeah, but pretty quickly I realized I was mad at myself, and that I'd always been mad at myself, ever since things went wrong.

"I had friends who warned me about Drew, but I didn't listen. My brother told me he didn't like him the first time they met, and I ignored him. Even me; I had a little voice in the back of my head trying to sound the alarm, but I refused to pay attention to it.

"Drew abused me. I shouldn't have given him my trust, but I did, and he took advantage of it. I had internalized the idea for so long that everything that happened to me was due to his abuse, that I ignored the shame that I felt for being taken in by him. Shame that- that honestly, I shouldn't have felt.

"I knew, intellectually, that I was the victim in this, but I needed to hear the words from someone else: 'You made bad choices when you were younger, but you made them in good faith.' And, Greg, hon, your situation is different than mine, but you still made choices that you regret, ones you made in good faith, and those choices contributed to where you've ended up.

"Think about all the situations where you get mad without knowing why. They're reminders, not just of the hall pass, but of the ways you were complicit, first in its creation, and then in not speaking up about it afterwards. Even that argument with Gordon--which, let's be honest, you were right that time, because Gordon was being Gordon--it was you negotiating rules with someone else, just like that night with Courtney."

She reached forward once more, this time to move one hand to my cheek. "The 'other thing' you feel, the one that you can't identify? I couldn't either. Once Amanda clued me in, it made me so mad I walked out of her office and didn't go back until the next week, so please don't shoot the messenger, okay?"

Seeing this side of Brianna, her emotional openness and completely unmasked honesty, unnerved me a little. We'd shared things before, a lot of things, but this vulnerability felt intimate in ways I'd really only experienced with lovers. No, even that's not true. This level of trust? I could only ever remember feeling it with Courtney.

Nodding, I mumbled, "Okay." Then, more firmly, "Okay. I promise."

An understanding smile crept onto Briana's face, leavening her earnest tone. "Shame. It's shame. I was a smart girl, and I kept telling myself I should have known better, that a part of me did know better. But that's the present version of me judging the past version of me by the same standards. I was judging a naive girl by a scarred survivor's standards, and when that girl inevitably failed to measure up, I felt shame at who I'd been and what I'd done.

"I think you're feeling that, too. I think you've forgiven Courtney for what she's done--maybe not entirely, but enough--but you haven't forgiven yourself for your role in everything that happened: the hall pass talk, arguing over the rules, not speaking up the next day, going along with her when she'd joke about them or fantasize about using them.

"You said it yourself: responsible adults don't give each other hall passes, but you weren't a responsible adult then. You were little more than a kid, barely out of college, and so was she. Both of you were so convinced that you were forever and nothing could break you apart that you acted carelessly. In the beginning, love can seem unbreakable, but then it turns out to be... just so, so fragile. And you didn't get that, not the way you do now.

"But you're judging those kids, judging yourself from back then, by the standards of the 'you' that's hurting now, the older, wiser one. And that's not fair to either of you." Her thumb swiped away a tear from my cheek. "Hey. Hey. It's okay. You're going to be okay."

Embarrassed, I flinched away and dried my eyes with my sleeve, before nodding silently and sitting with what she'd told me. Words wouldn't come yet, even though I wanted to thank her. She'd been right, both about that hard-to-define other emotion and my initial reaction. I felt irrationally angry, both at her for seeing something I didn't and at myself for not seeing it in the first place. This one conversation wouldn't be enough to put paid to my anger--emotions are too slippery for that--but I knew she was right.

During that time, my friend sat with me, stroking my hand. That gentle touch, combined with her quiet, repeated affirmations, were what finally drew words from my mouth. "Man. You really are a great mom."

Snorting, Bri playfully shoved me. "Fucking asshole."

"Yeah, I suppose so." She made to pull away, but I took her hand again, my two clasping her one this time. "Seriously, though. I... I need some time to process, but I think you're right. And... and if you are, then from the bottom of my heart, thank you."

"Anytime. Can't let my favorite meat shield suffer."

From there, we let the conversation drift back to less serious matters. The low-stakes chat left me plenty of computing power in reserve to work at everything Briana had said about forgiving my younger self. There's always the danger of the false epiphany, and I wanted to avoid that. However, the longer I rolled her words around in my head, the more sure I became of Bri's read of the situation.

I needed to drive, so I switched back to water, but she kept on with wine for the rest of the evening. By the time I took our glasses to the sink, I was clear and sober. Briana might have been clear, but definitely not sober; she stood on unsteady legs to see me out. I expected she'd have a pretty decent hangover the next morning. Or, rather, that morning; until I looked at my phone, I hadn't realized we'd overshot the end of my usual visiting hours by two full passes of the little hand, and it was past midnight.

Bri walked me to the door and gave me a lingering, affectionate hug, which I returned. Her head resting on my shoulder, she murmured, "If you need to talk about, well, all we talked about with Courtney, feel free. I'm not ashamed of my past; not anymore. I just don't talk about it much." She tipsily giggled, "I mean, maybe skip the rough sex part, but if it can help you and her, ah, reconcile..."

"Thanks. I'll probably take you up on that."

She gave me another big squeeze, then pulled her head away to look into my eyes. Her stare was more than a bit glassy, but she clearly had something on her mind. "I- I just wanted to say... That is... I mean... For the record, I think I would have enjoyed being your hall pass." Bri chuckled and shook her head, lazily bringing her gaze back to me after, a glimmer of hunger in it now. "No. No, that's not true. I'm sure I would enjoy it."

My impression of a fish triggered a drunken laugh from my fantasy girl, but a strange, melancholic expression quickly replaced her mirth. In a romcom, this would be the moment where the protagonist--genderswapped, in my case--would kiss the best friend and profess a newly realized love, leaving the stick-in-the-mud secondary romantic lead to pick up the pieces of their broken heart.

For a moment, as the object of my months-long lust/unexpected new best friend stared up at me, lips parted, I almost accepted the unspoken invitation. An electric buzz surged through my body, and I felt myself hardening against her. The promise of the moment felt overwhelming.

I could have kissed Briana then, and I know she would have kissed me back. Then, I'd sweep her off her feet, carry her into her bedroom, and spend the night making love to one of the most beautiful women I'd ever met. In the morning, we'd all figure out a happily ever after; that's what my heart tried to tell my head, anyways.

But my life wasn't a movie, and there'd be no happy ending if I did that. If I slept with Briana, our friendship as it stood would be over, forever teetering on the edge of this single night. Between strained attempts to forget and the possibility of what might be if we only gave into temptation a second time, we'd lose us.

And even if Bri and I never got together again, Courtney and I wouldn't be okay, either, regardless of what some scrap of paper said. We might not divorce, but we'd never be whole, which meant our kids would suffer, too. Every single time I went over to my Saturday game nights, my wife would spend the evening wondering, and I'd end up defending myself, and we'd get back into the whole cycle of recriminations again, souring all three relationships.

I was certain a night spent with Briana would be bliss; I also knew that it could never be worth what I'd lose.

As the hamster wheel in my head spun, trying to figure out what to say next, Bri let me off the hook. She stood on tiptoe, planted a peck on my cheek, then stepped back. "Go on, you. Go talk to your wife." Then, with a giggle, she licked her thumb and scrubbed at my cheek. "Don't want to send you home with another woman's lipstick. Hard to explain that one."

"Bri, I--"

"It's okay, Greg. I know. I shouldn't have said that, but..." She shrugged. "It's true. But just because it's true, it doesn't have to mean anything."

"It doesn't have to," I answered. But then, I mirrored her earlier kiss, lightly brushing my lips over her cheek before stepping back. "But it does. Thank you. It, um, it means a lot. Knowing that I wasn't just being... dumb. A creep. Whatever."

"You weren't." She giggled again. "Well, maybe a little, if I hadn't been, y'know, checking your ass out every time you had your back turned."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, really. Now go. Go!" Briana shooed me out her door, then watched as I made my way down the steps of her building and out into the parking lot. Once I'd opened my car door, I turned back and gave her a little wave; she returned it, an affectionate, wan smile on her lips. Then she closed the door, and, a few moments later, turned off the outside light.

--

It was closer to one than midnight by the time I stepped into our darkened bedroom. I'd opened the door as quietly as I could; we needed to talk, but it could wait until the morning.

I needn't have bothered. "Greg?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you."

"You didn't." I heard the rustle of the sheets as Courtney sat up, just barely saw her in the pale light streaming in from behind the closed blinds. "I couldn't sleep. Did... Um, did you have a good night?" Her voice sounded strange. Strained.

"Yeah, it was..." My words trailed off as the word 'idiot' popped into my thick skull. She wasn't asking if the game was good; she was probing as to the reason for my late arrival home. I should have realized that, especially since I'd never stayed so long at Briana's apartment. In fairness to myself, I was tired, still feeling the very last lingering effects of the wine, and lost in my own thoughts. "The game was good. Sorry, I didn't mean to be so late. Bri and I talked for a while afterwards."

Court clicked the bedside light on; in the harsh light it cast, I saw an expression both dubious and hopeful. "Was it a good... talk?"

I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it once more, pivoting towards the dresser instead. After digging around in the top drawer and finding what I was looking for, I turned back to her. "Yes."

My wife looked towards me but not at me. Her eyes instead locked on the old, laminated piece of cardboard in my hand, the one she'd given me a decade and a half before and which I'd once thought long gone. A myriad of emotions played across her face as I crossed to the bed. When I sat and extended the pass to her, they coalesced into a pained acceptance.

She hesitated, then took it from me with a nod and a tight, "Okay. I'm glad it was... good."

"Court--"

"No. No, it's okay. You don't have to tell me." My wife gave me a brave smile. "I'm glad. I mean it."

"I'm not using my pass, Courtney. Or, I guess, I didn't use it."

"What? I thought..."

"All we did was talk; that wasn't a euphemism. We had a long, involved discussion about... about her ex-husband, and about the hall pass, and about getting past the things that we'd each done and the things done to us. Just talk; mostly, anyways. She gave me a kiss, but only on the cheek, and I gave her one, too. That's it, and that's all we're ever going to do."

Courtney's brows knit together. "Then why are you giving this to me?"

"Because I don't want it. I never wanted it. When I asked for it back, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted... No, I needed to make you feel the pain I felt when you used yours, and then when I realized who you'd used it with. That, all of it, still hurts me, even if I do forgive you.

"And I do. I can't forget, but I do forgive you, Courtney." She quietly gasped; I hadn't said the words before, even as our relationship had made its way back towards something approaching its old status quo. "I believe you when you said how much the pass meant to you, and I believe you about trying to protect me, even if you went about it in just about the most boneheaded way possible.

"Nothing you did was done in malice. But if I used mine, it would be. I'd be trying to get even, and I just... can't. I can't do that to you or to me." I took a deep breath, knowing what I said next would hurt her, but also knowing I needed to be honest. "Or to Briana, either. I care about her. A lot. Just as a friend, but I think... I think if we took that step, then maybe more. Maybe that friendship turns to love. Romantic love, I mean. If I'm honest, I think I already love her as my friend.

"So, we won't take that step. If we don't, she and I can keep any love that we do feel contained to friendship; I truly believe that. But if we slept together? Then I lose my friend, and maybe my wife and my marriage and my family. I lose my self-respect, too, because I'll have become something I never want to be: a cheater.

"Because that's what we're talking about, or at least what you and I were talking about that night, before we started arguing about rules and the like. We were saying 'if you made a mistake, I'd forgive you.' About cheating, not about being a cheater. You cheated, yeah, but if I used my pass with Bri, I'd be a cheater. I can't imagine I wouldn't think about trying for more than that one time. I'm sorry if that hurts, but it's the truth. And I don't want to make a mistake like that. I don't want you to have to go through what it would take to forgive me, if you even could."

I let out a deep sigh, tired due to both the lateness of the hour and the burden she'd placed on my shoulders, one I could finally admit to myself and to her that I'd just have to live with. "The last six months have torn me up, and I'm just not going to do that to you. If I love you--and I do--how could I, in good conscience, put you through even a quarter of what you put me through, much less something so much worse? I can't. I just can't, not and still be able to say 'I love you' and mean it."

"Greg..." Courtney started to talk, but I put my hand up. I needed to get through all of this, especially this next, hardest part.

"I forgive you for using your pass, and I forgive me for ever letting it get past that night when we got drunk and exchanged them in the first place. I should have said something the next morning, but I didn't.

"And because I didn't... Because I didn't, we're here now. Those hall passes are the most toxic thing we've ever let into our marriage. They're an invitation to disaster. Like Chekhov's Gun, you know? They exist to be used. If they're not used, what's the point in having them? And that was never what I wanted.

"When we talked about forgiving each other that night, that was one thing, because... because they were just words, you know? Words I meant--words I assume you meant, too--but words that at least treated the possibility of one of us cheating with some kind of gravity. The passes... They turned our fidelity into a commodity to be traded, instead of something to be protected.

"You wrote that bit about 'marital misdeeds' on them? That's why I'm giving you your pass back. I never should have accepted it, and I sure as hell shouldn't have given you one, too. Not speaking up was the greatest marital misdeed I've ever committed. I hope it's the worst one I ever do.

"So that's it. I'm sorry I let us get to this point. Sorry I didn't speak up then. Sorry I blew up at you, twice, and sorry I let myself get so close to destroying our marriage. I hope you can forgive me, too."

My wife's mouth hung open. Whatever she'd been expecting to hear from me, it wasn't that. The silence hung in the air for an uncomfortably long time. What was she thinking? Did I just make things worse? Why wasn't she--

Courtney was on me in a flash, her lips locked to mine, hands running across my back and into my hair. She said nothing with words, speaking with her body instead; it told me of desperation and forgiveness and love. It spoke to me--we spoke to each other--in ways we hadn't since back in our old apartment. We'd made love innumerable times since, and those moments had, for the most part, each been special in their own way. This blew them all out of the water. Tender and loving, but also passionate in a way our bedroom hadn't seen in years.

After quite some time, we lay together in a pile of tangled sheets and torn clothing. Courtney nuzzled into my neck, panting in between small nibbles before moving up to my lips. She kissed me again, not with the fierceness of the moment when she'd accepted my apology, but still with the same emotion.

My wife picked up the pass from her bedside table and said, "I've changed my mind. This is the most romantic, most loving gift anyone has ever given me. I love you. I am going to love you for the rest of my life. I mean, I already was, but this... I just... I can't find the words to say how much it means to me. And, look... I won't give it back to you--I think you're right about the passes being toxic, even if I didn't understand that before--but... God, Greg. I never want to find out, but honestly? I think I could forgive almost anything of you, especially now."

I chuckled and kissed the top of her head. "Thanks. But let's not find out, okay?"

She fell asleep not long after, still holding the pass in her hands, clutched close to her chest like a child with a teddy bear. Before, that might have annoyed me; now, however, I couldn't help but smile. Getting even--or trying to, at least--might have made me feel better in the moment, but it wouldn't have granted me the peace my decision had brought.

Did it still hurt, what she'd done? Yeah. It probably always would. But now, finally, I could clearly see the future for us, past the pain. And that would be enough.

--

One thing I've always liked about older movies: they knew how to just end. No epilogues or post-credits scenes, no trying to bring the viewers in for endless sequels and spinoffs, just 'THE END' and roll credits. I mean, what good would it have done The Graduate to have another twenty minutes of screentime, instead of the ambiguous shot of Ben and Elaine riding in the bus trying to figure out what came next? None at all.

Modern audiences don't seem to enjoy that as much, though. Or maybe the studios don't; I dunno. Who's leading who there? If the audiences reward that kind of thing, why wouldn't the execs give it to them? I mean, it's hard to argue with the box office returns. So, I guess I'll drop a couple of breadcrumbs here.

I'm not going to give you six fucking endings like Return of the King, though. Don't worry about that. You won't be hearing about the centerpieces at our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Yes, Briana and I managed to keep our friendship going. She and I talked about the evening, and she apologized for making the pass at me, also later apologizing to Courtney for it. However, as Courtney put it, "I was prepared for you to bang her brains out. Why on earth would I be mad that she sent you home to me instead?"

Hell, the two of them even managed to build a friendship of their own. Admittedly, Briana's first visit to our home gave me my own reasons to encourage it. After Bri left, Court asked, "You gave that up for me? Really?" before absolutely draining me dry once the kids were in bed. Given that almost every visit from Bri led to a repeat, albeit maybe not of quite the same magnitude... well, that was just another good reason to hang out together. I think Briana knew it, too, although she never directly commented on it.

And, yes, Bri did eventually get a happy ending of her own.

But that, as they say, is a story for another time.

--

Special thanks to elizaloo for beta reading and advice! Honestly, she deserves editor credit on this one. I can't thank her enough for her help.