The Pain of Letting Go

After the court cleared, I nodded at AJ. He'd done his part so I was dropping my suit against him. Getting me to drop my suit against him and getting a job were two of the bigger hoops he needed to juggle to get Laurie to take him back. My brother is an asshole, but Laurie loves him. They were back together less than a month after the trial. But she keeps him on a really short leash now.

As my thoughts clear I realize that Claudette is still standing in front of me waiting for an answer.

"I already told you that, more than once," I said to her. "It was hanging there off the edge of that cliff. My life passed in front of my eyes and I realized that for most of it I'd put up with shit from almost everyone around me. I was more afraid of being disliked or alone than I was of people taking advantage of me or being miserable. Sometimes you have to take a bit of pain to have a better life. Sometimes letting go is the better option no matter how much it hurts. I loved you Claudette, but when I look at the way things turned out between us, as much as letting you go hurts me, in the end I'll be better off without you in my life. Eventually I'll meet someone elseand move on and the pain will go away. You won't believe this, but I hope you meet someone else too and I hope you've learned your lesson and treat him better."

I did, for Laurie, agree to offer my brother a job after he'd been out of work for a while. And no I'm not giving in and forgiving him. I hired AJ as a minimum wage, night time custodian. I really did it in part to humiliate him. Now when he sees all of the people he used to work with and they see him sweeping the floors and cleaning the building, he remembers how he got himself into that position. Laurie also has access to all of our security cameras. So any time she thinks he's pulling something, she just calls him and tells him to go stand in front of a camera so she can verify that he is at work.

I guess the softies out there are going to whine about how Claudette only getting 20 percent of our cash and investments is horrendous after more than twenty years of marriage. Well, you guys can suck it. She actually didn't get that much. I took her to court in the fraud case for knowingly let me raise another man's child. It was very hard to prove. She finally admitted, thanks to the DNA, to cheating on me out of anger only months after we got married because I went out of town on business and didn't take her. I'd tried to explain that at that time I worked for a small company. And there wasn't money in the budget to take spouses along on business trips. But whenever she didn't get her way she got angry.

She just had sex with some random guy that she met at a bar and claimed that she'd regretted it almost immediately. When she discovered that she was pregnant, she'd known that there was a chance that the baby wasn't mine, but she'd put it out of her mind. And as the years went on she'd simply blocked it from her thoughts. The judge ruled in my favor. The amount that she gave me pretty much wiped out the twenty percent that the other judge had let Claudette keep.

I also sued her and her lover to recoup the cost of raising their child. Claudette lost that one too, her parents helped her hire a PI to try to find out who the father is, but that's a long shot since she doesn't even know his name. It was even more difficult because over the last twenty three years he could have moved or gone anywhere. She also didn't even know whether he lived in our town or not to begin with and that isn't likely since she's never seen or run into him again after all of these years.

Until she finds him and sues him for half of the costs she has to try to make the payments herself. With her job at the boutique as her only source of income, she's had to move back in with her parents. She can only afford to pay me about twenty-five dollars a week. At that rate, it'll take her over a hundred years to pay me back. Our teen-aged daughter makes more money as my assistant than Claudette does.

Claudette was a big part of my life for more than half of it and I've admitted that I still love her. The pain of letting her go was great but I've found a way to ease it. I tried dating, but I think it's just too early for me. I have trust issues.

Claudette is still trying to get me to try again. We've had several heart to heart talks and I got her to admit that she cheated on me with a total of four men over the length of our relationship. My brother, she claims was the only one who was more than a one night stand. I don't know whether to believe her or not. But in my opinion, even one man, one time was too many.

I think that in her own way, she probably does love me, so I'm letting her help me to get over her. She showed up one night, crying. I think she'd been out on a date that hadn't gone well. Anyway, she was miserable and I couldn't let her stand out there on my doorstep crying so I let her in. I ended up fucking her three times that night and she was back the next night for more.

Over the past few months we have dwindled down to two or three nights a week. If she's really good and Heather is away at college, I let her stay the night. Every time that she comes over, I take away one of her weekly payments. She keeps hoping that I'll ask her to move back in or something more permanent but it isn't ever going to happen. I'm honest with her on that subject, so she knows what is going on, but I can't seem to stop her from coming over.

Someday I'll met someone and move on with my life, but for now I'll keep fucking her, at least until the pain of letting go is something I can handle.

The end.