Confession Backlash

Fair warning, this one is more of a fun romp than a serious documentary on the state of two marriages. I've tagged it appropriately, for your own safety, as I like to throw in a little shock value from time to time...

* * * * * | * * * * * | * * * * *

Mary was crying when I walked into her room that morning. She, like the rest of us, had mostly come to accept that her time on Earth was drawing to an end, so it was no longer normal to find her like that.

"What's wrong? Do you need more pain meds?"

She shook her head without looking up at me. "I need to make a confession. I had always planned to take this secret to my grave, but now that I'm on my deathbed, I have to come clean. You'll probably hate me, but maybe that will make my death easier for you to take."

I pulled the chair up by her bed and took her hand. "Nothing you could say will make that any easier."

She looked up at me, only to start bawling. When she finally got herself mostly under control, her voice was shaky. She turned her head and stared at a random spot on the ceiling, refusing to look at me.

"Jack and I had an affair for over twenty years, up until my cancer forced us to stop. Living next door and carpooling to the same office, nobody thought twice about us always coming and going together. Nobody had a clue how many lunch breaks we spent in a motel rather than a restaurant."

I just quietly held her hand and let her talk.

"We did our best to be perfect spouses when we were home, limiting our affair to when work had already forced us to be away.

"It wasn't something that we had planned. It just kind of grew out of all the time we spent together. We were already friends, and it was just the two of us in the car, so we could talk about anything during our commute. The more we talked, the fewer subjects we avoided, until we were telling each other everything.

"Sometimes, one of us would reach over and hold the other's hand to provide support when they shared something difficult. If the conversation got especially rough, we'd sneak a hug after we parked. The hugs got longer, and things just kept progressing."

She turned back to look at me again. Her pain was clear on her face as she paused. I wasn't sure if she was building up courage to tell me more, or if she was waiting for me to say something. Several things went through my mind, but I settled on a simple, "I know."

Her eyes got big, and she shouted, "What‽" An alarm went off on one of the machines attached to her and a nurse came running into the room. She cleared the alarm and checked on Mary, then admonished me not to upset her, but I just shrugged my shoulders. The nurse glared at me, then left in a huff. I guess it was her first deathbed confession.

* * * * *

Once Mary had managed to calm down a bit, she stared at my face. "What do you mean, 'I know?'"

It was my turn to stare off into space as I confessed. "I don't know how long it had been going on, but one day LeAnne came storming over from next door. My work was slow, so when I saw her coming across the yard, I went AFK and met her at the back door. She was fit to be tied, but I managed to get her calmed down enough that I could mostly understand her. I tried to get her to sit down, but she just kept pacing around the kitchen as she ranted.

"Something had happened at a motel a couple of days earlier. The cops didn't go room-to-room looking for witnesses, but they took down all of the license plates in the parking lot. She was distraught, as she had just got the call to see if either of them had witnessed what happened."

Mary's eyes got big again. "I remember that day. When we were ready to go back to work, there were cops all over the place. We had to call the office and say we had car trouble, then we hid in the room until the cops left. But, that was only like the fifth time we had sex.

"You've known this entire time? Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you stop me?" She got a panicked look on her face again. "Why didn't you divorce me?"

I just smiled a sad smile.

"LeAnne was fit to be tied. She was so passionate about what she was going to do to Jack, and how his balls were going to look hanging above her mantle. I was angry as well, and the next thing I knew, she was bent over our kitchen table, her dress around her waist and her panties around her ankles, while I pounded her in a rage-fueled fuck. By the time I finally released my fury deep inside her, she had gone from moaning and screaming to just mumbling as she twitched on the table. I collapsed back in a chair and watched, mesmerized, as her body continued to shudder for several minutes.

"I swear my intentions were to help her to the bathroom to clean up, but somehow we ended up naked in the guest room instead. We eventually made it into the shower, together, but we got dirty again before we got clean. I still can't believe how many times I came that day.

"It turned out that our sexual compatibility was off the charts. While the two of you had lunch breaks and business trips, we had all of the time that you were gone. My work was flexible, and so was Annie."

Mary was in shock, but managed to ask, "Why didn't the two of you divorce us and marry each other?"

I had to frown again. "We talked about it, and we even contacted a lawyer to start the process. You didn't even notice, but that's when I started calling her Annie instead of LeAnne." I had to pause as Mary gasped. "However, we discovered that while we were good as friends and great as lovers, we sucked at everything in between. There was no real love there, certainly nothing that could compare to the love we still had for our spouses, even as damaged as it was by your affair.

* * * * *

Mary lay back, lost in her thoughts for a bit. She continued staring at the ceiling as she spoke again. "It gets worse. There's a good chance that the twins aren't actually yours."

She turned her head and stared at me in shock when I just chuckled.

"Yeah, I never assumed they were. For the record, they aren't."

"What? How?"

"Well, your sudden change of heart, demanding I start trying to knock you up immediately, would have raised some concerns even if I hadn't already known about the affair. Confirmation had to wait until more recently, when DNA testing became readily available and affordable. Luckily, they look so much like you that nobody notices the little bits of Jack in them."

"You knew, and you still raised them as your own?"

"Well, Annie was already pregnant, so I would have been a hypocrite if I said anything."

She just stared at me for a moment before her eyes widened again. "Charlie is your son?"

"Yeah," I said with a grin. "Pumping an ovulating woman full of sperm all afternoon will do that. We were too angry to think about birth control.

"I did wonder at first if you knew I had knocked up Annie; if letting Jack knock you up was payback. I eventually decided that wasn't the case, but I never did figure out why you let him do it."

"It wasn't supposed to happen," she said as she looked down again, "but a condom broke. It was the worst time of the month for it to happen, so I panicked. I cleaned myself out as best I could, but all I could think of was to get home and add your swimmers to the mix. They got a late start, as I had to go back to work, but I still hoped one of yours had been the winner. Maybe if I had taken the afternoon off and went right home..."

She faded off as she started crying. I rubbed her hand until she got herself under control again. She smiled weakly. "That actually makes the next part easier. I was going to ask you not to abandon the twins now that you know they're not yours." She chuckled ruefully. "I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore.

"They are going to need you though. I woke up last night while they were both sitting in here with me. They were talking quietly, but I could still hear them just fine. Apparently, they both have been seeing the same guy. It sounded like they'd both gotten pretty serious about him. I don't want him to come between them, but he can only marry one. Of course, I don't think either of them should marry him, but they're going to be hurt no matter what happens."

I just shook my head. "Don't worry. He can't marry either of them, but I'm sure they'll be okay."

Mary frowned again. "Why? Is he already married?"

"Yes, but not for much longer, although that's not why he can't marry either of them."

"Oh," Mary said. "Why can't they get married?"

"Because you put my name on their birth certificates."

You'd think she'd have stopped being surprised by anything I said, but her eyes went wide and her jaw dropped open. "You fucked your own daughters‽"

It was my turn to be outraged. "Of course not. I would never do that."

Confusion was clear on her face as she tried to figure things out. "But you just said..."

"Oh, I've fucked Jack's daughters many times. They remind me so much of you at that age, and they love being able to live out their daddy fantasies." She was still confused, so I continued. "Annie promised to give me two kids for each one you gave Jack. That's why she was so insistent on having four. I knew from the start that they were mine, but I went ahead and had them tested along with the twins."

"How? Jack often had to beg off with me because she was wearing him out while trying to get pregnant."

"Oh, that was easy. When it was time to clean up before the two of you got home, she'd put in her diaphragm, trapping my sperm inside her, while keeping his out. She also poured out all of their regular lube, then refilled the bottles with one containing a spermicide. She didn't want to take any chances with something so precious as her children's genetics, but she also had to make sure he believed they were his."

Mary collapsed back in her bed. She had intended to set her mind at ease with her confession, not have her entire world crumble around her.

* * * * *

EPILOGUE

Mary wanted to tell Jack everything, but I convinced her it would be best not to. Annie and I had stopped our affair when Mary's cancer put an end to theirs, long before she went into the hospice facility. With Mary out of the picture, Annie wanted to refocus with Jack on spending the rest of their lives together. There was still no future for Annie and me as a couple, so breaking them up would have just made everybody even more miserable.

It had been shortly after Mary went into hospice when I got home one night to find the twins in it. I guess they had noticed more than I realized, as they had their own DNA results in hand. Junior was immediately ready to go, having lost access to both Mary and Annie, but I managed to resist for a bit. They led with the DNA, then pouted when I told them I already knew. I don't know any man who could have resisted naked and pouting twins giving him puppy-dog eyes while calling him daddy and saying that they needed to be spanked for being naughty. It certainly wasn't me.

They wanted to remove me from their birth certificates, but I pointed out that my marriage license would still link me to them, and the government would still call it incest. It would also have raised some uncomfortable questions if Jack or Annie's kids saw us acting like a throuple. That didn't stop us from having a lot of fun in private, as I'd had the snip and didn't have to worry about any hard-to-explain children. That snip was also why I wasn't surprised when the lure of motherhood finally sent them off searching for virile husbands their own age to settle down with.

My four biological children continued to call me Uncle and treat the twins like cousins. I didn't get to see them as much as I would have liked, but that had been true since Charlie first left for college. I was invited to almost everything that Jack and Annie attended, so I really didn't miss much. The worst was not getting to walk my biological daughters down the aisle like I had with Mary's, but that was just the price of keeping secrets. I thought it was strange when they both added an uncle-niece dance right after the father-daughter one, but our two families had always been so close that it didn't even raise any eyebrows with the other guests. It wasn't until Jack passed away that my kids started calling me dad. It turned out that the twins hadn't been the only kids suspicious enough to submit DNA for testing.

Annie had been serious about reconnecting with Jack, so she took his death pretty hard. Her youngest son was still single at the time, so he stayed with her for a while, until she met Jack's doppelganger at a church potluck. We were all concerned it was just superficial, as his name was even Jack, but he turned out to be a really good guy. They got married and were very happy together. People who saw both wedding photos often asked if the later one was from a rededication ceremony or if they had gotten divorced and remarried.

As for me, I never married again, but that's because I fell in love with a woman who wanted everything except the marriage certificate. She had no kids of her own, so she was happy to be welcomed into the family by all six of mine.

Annie and I came clean to our new partners, not wanting to keep secrets again. They already knew most of it, as they knew who fathered which kids, but we didn't want some little detail biting us later. I'm sure they kept a close eye on us for a while, especially since we still lived next door to each other, but that chapter of our lives had closed when our original spouses' affair ended.