The Final Curtain

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Some battles have no winners.
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It all started as I returned home from work, that fateful Friday evening. Me, tired from work, energy depleted from meetings with assholes that I have to be polite to and tight-rope balances to keep all day long. All that before I return home to my loving wife. Yes, that was sarcasm at its finest.

"Bob, we need to talk."

There is probably very little good that ever came out of these five words. For starters, I am the formerly happy owner of the name "Bob" which also happens to be the very first word out of the said five. The person who said those five words to me was Alice, my wife. All this started right as I entered the house. All in all, pretty unsettling.

"Sure" I said. "what is it about?"

"Would you please sit down... when you are settled?" she said, gesturing towards a chair at the kitchen table. I did the menial tasks one does upon arrival, taking the coat off, hanging it, taking the shoes off, putting slippers on, washing hands etc. When I was all set and ready, I sat as instructed.

Silence.

Here it comes, I thought.

"Well? What is this about?" I asked.

A bit more silence. A slight fidgeting, small eye movements, as if she wanted to say something that she didn't know how.

"I am all ears, Alice. What's up?"

More silence.

"Bob, I... I don't know how to say this. Well..."

"Alice, you are starting to scare me. Something happened?"

Silence and indecision from her part. Maybe it was not about what I was sure it would be about? A health issue, perhaps? Damn it...

"What is going on? Is it about your tests? Tell me, already!"

"Oh No, no, God no, it is not about the tests. They are all fine, I have nothing. No, really Bob, I am fine. I mean... health-wise... I am fine. Really."

"Is everyone OK? Something happened?!"

"Oh God no, everyone is fine. Really, don't worry, all is good. Really, no."

"Then what on Earth is wrong, Alice? I am seriously worried here! Come on! Tell me!" I said. I started feeling that shitty sinking thing. It was time. This was it.

More indecision from her part. Turned her eyes downward. I truly started to hate how this played out. Even rehearsed, I started to feel solid fear. And anxiety. Focus, man! Don't forget your preparation!

"Bob, I... I truly don't know how to say this. I..."

"What, Alice? Tell me!"

Hesitation. Still looking downward.

"Bob, I am not happy."

Deafening silence.

"What?"

She looked at me in the eye. No indecision this time. Right in the eye.

"I am not happy."

"What... what do you mean?" I said, starting to feel the fear solidify. I knew this would come, but it still felt like all the preparation I had done was for nothing. Focus, asshole! "Did I do something? Did I mistreat you in any way?" I blurted, with an almost trembling voice.

"Oh, God no, Bob, no, it is not about something you did. Or... or something you didn't do" she hastened to reply. She looked down again. "You didn't do something. This... isn't about you" she hesitantly continued. "It is about... this is about me. I am... just... not happy."

"But... I... I don't understand. What in your life makes you unhappy? Did I neglect you? Or... or pressure you, or..."

"God, no Bob, no. I already told you, it is not about you. It... it is me. I am not happy. It isn't you that doesn't make me happy. It is just that... I... am not... happy. I'm just... not..."

"Alice, I am sorry but I've lost you here. What in your life makes you unhappy?"

More hesitation, eyes looking downward.

"All of it."

Now if one called this the surprise of the century, that would have been an understatement. Even my preparation had not prepared me for... this.

"All of it?"

She nodded.

"Alice, I don't understand. I... I don't get it. We have a great life, at least I... I think it is. We have two kids in college. We have a good home, we don't owe a dime to anyone, we have our vacation every year, I do fine professionally, your work with the charities is going strong, I... I just don't understand. What is missing?"

"You wouldn't understand" she muttered, still looking downward. This was the trigger for my preparation to kick in. Turn on the offensive.

"Well, you are right, Alice. If you don't explain it to me in plain English, how am I supposed to understand?" I said in exasperation.

Silence.

"Now that I think of it, I should be the one to be fully qualified for being unhappy in our marriage. But I cannot think of why YOU wouldn't be happy in it!" I said.

"What?!" a surprised and angered Alice asked.

"Yes, Alice, I have my reasons to be unhappy. And you know them, as I have been vocal about them quite a few times. If anything, I am the one who has been systematically rejected for the two decades we have been together. On all levels actually."

"Oh, come on Bob! You are not going to start the 'love and sex complaints' thing again, are you? Oh please no, not this time..." she said, in mock desperation.

"Well, it may be just a tiring thing for you, but it is something that truly hurts me, and has been hurting me for all these years. It may seem like whining to you, but it is true hurt for me. It is bonafide rejection, as far as I am concerned. You make something that should be all about love and joy, the actual celebration of love between a man and a woman, seem the most tiresome thing in the world, a chore!"

"That is not true, Bob! How can you say such a thing?!" she interjected with a self-righteous attitude. "You tell me that you did not enjoy intimacy with me?"

"On the contrary Alice, I say that YOU probably did not enjoy intimacy with ME, and that was possibly the reason why you cut me off!" I countered. "It starts becoming clear now. You really must have been unhappy for quite a while to treat me like that. I have been feeling like a reject for twenty years, save the period from when we met until we tied the knot. And that probably was because..."

"Because what, Bob?!" she shouted. They way things were going was starting to irritate her by the second, I could tell.

"..because I was not going to marry you, Alice! That is why!"

Explosive silence. If her looks could kill, I would be toast. But she isn't from Krypton, so I lived to continue.

"It was YOU that wanted to marry ME! I was going to marry Helen! But I fucked all that up, didn't I? Royally so, since I cheated on her with YOU! You don't remember that?"

"What the hell?! I am to blame that you cheated on Helen?!" she shouted. "And in all this, what? You regret having married me? You got the raw end of the deal here, ME instead of her?! So I ended up victimizing you?! Oh, poor little Bobby!" she exclaimed, raising her hands in the air. "Do you realize how utterly humiliating this is for me? And for you as well? You, the poor little victim of my charms? Me victimizing you?! God!!"

"Well, you surely victimized HER, and, to be honest, so did I, in a worse way; I cheated on her with YOU! Not with someone else! With you! 'I so desperately want to marry you, and I will stop at NOTHING to get you!', you said to me! You forgot already? Was it a lie?"

Silence.

"No, it was true" she said. "But you wanted me as I much as I wanted you! If you didn't want me, you could very well not do anything with me! You were not a child! You were a grown man! You cannot take responsibilities for your actions? Which supposedly come 'directly from your heart', as you said? And you throw them in my face now, twenty years later? How manly of you, Bob! Unbelievable! Unbelievably pathetic, actually!"

"Of course you are right, Alice. We both know that I cannot blame you for my actions. Only that your actions inflated my ego hugely, but most of all, they clouded my judgment to such an extent that I completely fell for you. You mesmerized me, to the point that I dumped my future bride and married you instead!"

"Oh, so I am a diabolical siren now! Bob, If you keep this up, I will vomit, I swear" she said. "This is whole new level of low for you. I cannot believe this!"

"Oh, I know, it truly does sound so fucking pathetic that I want to punch myself in the face just for having said it! I agree with you! As if you are to blame that I cheated on Helen, even if it was with you. Well... In all honesty, actually yes, it truly WAS part your fault. If we are being honest here, you are the one who set her sights on an engaged man, who was ready to tie the knot with another woman, a good woman in fact, no, make that a solid gold woman, and stole him away. If we are being honest here, this deed alone basically makes you an unethical piece of trash that steals men from other women. There is no sweet-talking this. This is all you."

"What did you say?!!" she exclaimed. She stared at me with mouth and eyes wide open. She just couldn't believe I just said that, I could tell. So I continued.

"You heard me. However, in all fairness, the man involved, in this case, ME, could have had a set of balls to begin with and could have sent you away. I didn't, so I am a thousand times worse than you. A cheater, a nothing. A fucking zero, with a hole in the middle as big as the fucking Universe. This part is definitely not yours. It is squarely mine. I was not strong enough to resist you. But I was so... entranced, hypnotized by the whole affair with you that I canceled the wedding with Helen and tied the knot with you in a heartbeat! And you know very well how she took that, right? She was devastated, heartbroken beyond words. And you know I couldn't bear myself for years because of all this. Hell, she forgave me much faster than I forgave myself! And you know what she said?"

I left a bit of a silence there, for emphasis. She did not take the chance to say something, so I continued.

"After what I did to her, which was to betray her in the worst possible way, shattering her dreams of living with the man she loved and chose for life partner - the, as proven, unworthy ME? Who proved unworthy even of spit? She said that I deserved better than you! Not that SHE deserved INFINITELY better than ME, the backstabbing son-of-a-bitch that I TRULY was to her, but that I deserved better than YOU! Can you believe that?! She saw right through you! She understood that what you presented was a facade that no real woman can ever hope to compete against."

"She saw right through me?! A facade?! What the...?! Wait... Let me get this straight. So, apart from being a siren directly from the fiery pits of hell that mesmerized you, an unethical piece of man-stealing trash seducing the innocent and virginal, pure you from the Golden Goddess Helen, who, by the way, was always bad-mouthing you every chance she got, in private AND public, something that I never even imagined of doing - another level of royal bitch that she was - now I am a phony too? A con artist? A scammer?! What. The. Fuck. Bob?!" she said, visibly exasperated.

"Oh yes, my dear Alice. You truly WERE phony, but I don't think you did it deliberately" I said, which was like a slap in the face for her. "You did create an image that was custom made to be an inhumanly perfect fit for me. I believe you did this subconsciously, to entice me to leave her for you. And you succeeded. You presented a so impossibly perfect fit for me that I couldn't in any way resist. I was powerless, which means I was even less of a zero than I already was. Helen, to her infinite credit, actually tried to rationalize it with me even back then, in a vain attempt to salvage our wedding. 'None of us is perfect, Bob', she said, 'I know I am not perfect. I know she seems perfect in your eyes. I can see that, I can see how you look at her. You never looked at me like that. But I do have to tell you something as a woman to a blinded man, who I happen to love and who used to love me back. What you see in me is the real me, the imperfect but real Helen. What you see in her is not real! What you see has nothing to do with what she really is! You are living in a cloud, Bob. She is not what you think she is. You will regret this for life. Not today, but someday. Please don't destroy us for something that is not real!', she said, begging me to stay. Yes, she badmouthed me, but the truth is that I wasn't much more than a completely immature youngster back then! A stupid boy! However she did try to reason with me, even if she knew it would be in vain. And she did beg me to stay, she really did. Still, I ditched her and married you. You know why? Of course you do! Because she was so right - I WAS in a cloud! You were amazing in everything! You molded with me! We could talk about anything! Love-making with you was out of this world! We could talk for hours on end about anything, and we could communicate on a level I had never experienced before. And that included sex, intimacy, humor... fucking everything! It was like E.S.P.! I had never before felt that. Instant connection, from brain to brain, on all levels. Utter bliss."

"Oh, I am SO SORRY, my oh poor Bob! I apologize profusely, in fact I am so, very utterly sorry for trying my very best to be the perfect woman for you! Do you even realize how pathetic you sound complaining about how perfect I actually was for you?" she said, in a mildly disgusted tone of voice. "This is a new level of pathetic!"

"Oh, don't even go there, Alice! If this was the truth about us, I wouldn't complain! I would cherish this happiness, this bliss, and take it to my grave, where I would die a happy, smiling man! However, when we married, and you got pregnant, and we had the twins, it was precisely then that EVERYTHING changed! I instantly became a pariah in my own household almost overnight! All previous instant connection severed. Actually, the very opposite of what we had before: no connection in anything whatsoever! A completely different Alice in every single respect, belittling me as a man, as a personality, as...as everything, every chance you got. Even going as far as undermining the most sacred thing out there: my relationship with my children!"

She just looked at me, wide-eyed. It most probably was a surprise for her, but it was well-rehearsed from my part. And I was not nearly done. Of course, the comment about the children was a bait that she took, hook, line and sinker.

"What?! How can you even say that, Bob?! I never bad-mouthed you to our kids! I always set you as an example to them!" interjected Alice, obviously very irritated.

"Bull-crap, Alice! Your words were truly as you say, but your actions were the exact opposite! It was like you were the boss, taking all the decisions, and I was the second-class parent in my own home! Even now, that they are in college, how many times do they contact you, and how many times do they contact me? You, all the time! Me, if they need money!"

"So I am to blame that I have a better relationship with our children than you? Are you out of your mind, Bob?!" she shouted back.

"Actually, wife dearest, in this case, yes, you are to blame! Again in part, unfortunately for me. You are the one that whenever I wanted to do something with them, always said 'not now, daddy, we have planned something else!', or 'I don't think this is fitting for our children', or such bullshit, each and every time! And for the sake of peacekeeping, I swallowed it, again and again, each and every time. Even when I saw that people around us actually did on a large scale what I had proposed to do and you had turned down, and I brought that fact up, you dismissed it in front of the kids as 'it may well be for those children, but NOT for MINE!', and that was it. I had to apply to you for time and activities with my own kids! And this actually became a pattern. You basically molded them as you liked. As the years went by, I was just the sucker with the wallet for them, while you shaped them according to your own specifications. So yes, YOU are to blame! But, first and foremost, I am to mainly to blame here as well. You know what for? For tolerating your shit!! That's what for! For letting you run the show as you saw fit, and reducing myself to a spectator of your eradication of myself as a parent! That's what for!"

She just looked at me wide-eyed, open-mouthed, probably short-circuited.

"What a spineless piece of nothing I have been all this time. A sorry excuse of a man. No wonder you are unhappy. I have not been a man since we married. I let you emasculate me. What a fucking loser."

She composed herself a bit.

"I... I... I find it very unjust to use the kids against me in all this, and... and all these... awful things you say about me, Bob. You portray me like this... this super-villain bitch from hell that set out to destroy you! How can you do that? After twenty years living together as a family?" she asked, half-sobbing.

"It is all interconnected, Alice, on my end. I was a second-class citizen in my own home. Both as parent and as a husband. Undermined as a father. Unfulfilled as a partner in life. Deprived of all things that could give me happiness. I am not even going on love, sex and all that. No, scratch that; even just basic intimacy! The vary basic acts of affection. Nothing! Nothing, God damn it, Alice! And you, YOU are the unhappy one! Of course you would be! With the spineless asshole of the century, who has lost his balls to your whim, how could you ever end up happy? The funny thing is that, with my emasculation being your doing, you ended up depriving yourself of a man in your household, and in effect you killed your own happiness. Talking about shooting yourself in the foot! Literally you are your own sucker! Hahaha, how funny! Pathetic, really, but funny in a perverted way."

"How can you even say such horrible things?!" she half-cried. "If I have been that horrible, why have you stayed with me all these years?"

"Because I loved you! No, scratch that. I loved the girl you presented to me."

"You mean the man-grabbing, unethical piece of trash, princess of evil, scammer, siren girl?" she asked defiantly.

"Yup, that one, except the scammer part. If she were real, she would the one for me. She was my absolute perfect fit. I hoped that she, the girl I fell in desperate love with, my perfect better half, would prove not to be a fraud, and someday return to me. I have been patiently waiting for her for twenty years! Why else do you think I would endure all your shit for?! A Utopian dream of HER return! And, to be absolutely clear on this, SHE ain't YOU! YOU are not HER! You are someone else, someone that I did NOT sign up to live with for twenty years! SHE was EXACTLY that, YOU are NOT that AT ALL! But I was spineless enough to actually do that, stay with you instead of her, waiting in vain for her to take your place, and warm my life again. But of course she was just a facade. THIS is the real you. THIS is what I gave up everything for. What a stupid, spineless piece of shit I have been. I completely disgust myself. No wonder you are unhappy. I am a sorry excuse of a man", I said.

She went back to looking downward, silent. Clearly this was out of the blue for her. She probably planned to somehow make me be the bad guy here, but I took it and turned it on her, and in a big way. Didn't see it comin', did ya, sweet loving wife of mine?

"If I am so low as you say, why didn't you just toss me to the curb when you found out that this was all a scam, as you said?" she asked with some defiance.

"I am a honorable person, Alice. My love equals commitment to our marriage, to us. I committed to doing everything in my power to give you a good, comfortable, happy and fulfilling life, as much as my emasculated-by-you version of me would allow. I went out of my way to make sure you were free and uninhibited to do whatever you wanted. You tried a million different things before you finally settled with the charities. And I supported you in each and every one of them. And took care of the kids. And everything else. And did I even once complain? No, I didn't."