Treble-Edged

After an intentionally brutal workout, Jim bent to tie his wing-tips, already feeling stiffening soreness. He had to tell her tonight. Guilt was carving his insides like a blade separating cantaloupe from its rind.

Weeks before, lovemaking ended with the mutual disinterest of apathy. They lay on their sides, spooning in sleepwear in the master of their fashionable condo. Silence awaited his puncture, despite the gentleness of phrasing he‘d rehearsed in the shower at the gym.

He sighed and slowly inhaled.

"Don’t.” Celeste whispered, “I know about you two…everything.”

He groped for the nightstand lamp. Celeste’s confident whisper was infused with clairvoyance-informed surety possessed by women with a cheating spouse.

“The first time Stephanie invited me up,“ Celeste smiled, “she seduced me, too. We got crazy wild. We're still lovers.”

With every muscle’s pained report, Jim untwined to right himself out of the bed.

“We watched videotapes I shot of you two from the closet,” she said, and mocked, “’Oh puss-y-cat,’ you pa-thetically whined in one episode. We replayed that one over and over, howling with laughter, Jim!”

In shadows of a lamp-lit stare-down, Celeste rolled onto his pillow to deliver the quietus.

“Steffie leased the penthouse. She took a job in L.A. and I’m going with her…. You may want to start packing, because we leave, Sunday. And you can’t afford this place on your own.”

Jim gulped painfully, embarrassed she heard it.

“The couch is that way,” she pointed, retracting her arm to twist the lamp switch. “On second thought," she said, stopping him," why don’t you stay here. I’ll go up and crawl in with Stephanie. I've got a key.”