She hurried back to her car and drove home to wait for her husband.
—-
When Max got home an hour later, Ella was sitting on an easy chair drinking a beer. She never drank beer.
“We need to talk,” she said.
No man on Earth ever wants to hear those words from his woman.
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Something’s definitely not right,” she said. “Get yourself a beer. Get me one too.”
Max went to the kitchen and pulled a couple bottles out from the back of the fridge. It was ice-cold back there. He uncapped them and carried them back to the living room, handed one to Ella and sat on the couch facing her.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
“How’s Hannah?” she said.
Silent lightning struck. Max’s face whitened, his body stiffened. He felt fear like he couldn’t remember feeling. Except maybe that time when he was eleven years old and got caught smoking in the boy’s room by that old math teacher, Mr. Pickens. He was kicked out of school for three days, and never smoked again, and never forgot. But now what?
Max stared at his shoes. He felt bad, his eyes watered, he wanted to cry. He couldn’t lie.
“I’m so sorry, Ella. I love you. How did you find out?”
“I went over to see her today, to talk to her. But I didn’t get to see her because there was a minor snag at the time: Your dick was inside her. I was glad to see that you took off your socks before you fucked her.”
“Ella. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you, I almost did a number of times. I’ll end it. I love you.”
“That’s good, I love you too. How, when did it start?”
Max took his first drink of beer, a long one. In a microsecond, it all flashed through his head. How the hell had he ended up here? He took a deep breath.
“It started the night before our wedding. By accident. All of you girls went off to the bachelorette party. Hannah invited me over to her house for a drink, said I shouldn’t be alone the night before we got married. So I went, we had some drinks. We talked about many things, personal things. She made a joke about the I.O.U. you gave me. I told her about us talking about having a threesome with her. I don’t know, she was just so easy to talk to. We hugged. I started to leave, I was in the driveway ready to get in the car. But I went back. She was horny, said it had been a while.
“So, I let it happen. I told myself it was no big deal because you and I were going to have her in our bed before long anyway. Then… we kept doing it. I’m sorry.”
He sat back and drained his beer. He told her he needed another one and walked to the kitchen and back to the couch and sat down.
“Can you forgive me?” he asked.
Ella was dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She was crying, partly because of the story she was just told, but moreso because of the story she was about to tell.
“Max, I love you. You are my husband, Hannah is my stepmother. Of course I will forgive you. But my first reaction when I found out today, was anger. But that didn’t last long. I felt sad. And I felt jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Yes, jealous. Because I wasn’t in bed with the two of you.”