When his wife started working again part-time, the house became quite a mess, so Cody hired a housekeeper, a pretty young thing. Before long they were having an affair. He’d return home at lunch hour and they’d fuck, after which she’d strip the bed and do the laundry while he went back to the office. It added a novel twist to his days, and the house was clean too.
         But he couldn’t see a way to convince Erica that they should have the girl three days a week instead of only two. There just wasn’t all that much more to do around the place. Maybe in the summer, when Aiden and Finn were home more of the day, but during the school year there was no point. She would remind him that she’d been against the idea in the first place. So he had no choice but to rent a motel room a couple times a week, which was another expense of course, and itself made for a few more difficulties. He couldn’t let Erica know about the new credit card, for instance, and she had eyes on their bank account too. Plus by now he was well into the habit of buying little gifts for the girl, and she’d started going on about how she wanted to move out of her shitty apartment. So he began to embezzle from the company, and kept the money in a secret account at a new bank.
         One thing just led to another. An old boyfriend reappeared and had to be paid off. Then it turned out that the girl had a young son he hadn’t known about. The boy needed new school clothes. He needed someone to watch him while she was at work (her mother, her usual source of childcare, had died), so now there were daycare expenses again, and now and then, out of a sense of panicked economy, he would call in sick and watch the boy himself for a day. The boy, a hellion, ran around the new spendy apartment and made a mess of everything.
         He was put under internal investigation. Then he was fired. Dark hints of legal action were voiced, and now he made sure to collect the mail before Erica did, to remove any serious-looking correspondence. By this time he was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. He got a DUI while he was driving her kid and that was a hard thing to keep secret from Erica.
         The girl hooked him up with some people and one afternoon they came over and installed six internet routers in out-of-the-way closets. He watched as they logged in two, three pages’ worth of ISP addresses. He would get texts on his secret phone telling him to pick stuff up from person A and deliver it to person B. He tried a bit of the meth himself, but some residual fart of good sense kept him from going too deeply into that.
         The special requests started. Go to this person, dress this way. (He was still young, fit and attractive). At first it was older ladies, then younger men who wanted him to dress like a lady, and those clothes weren’t cheap. But at least he was keeping his head above water. Out of fear of giving her a disease, he stopped having sex with the girl (he and Erica had stopped a long time earlier). If she minded, she didn’t say anything.
         Eventually it all came crashing down. Erica left with the kids. His friends disowned him. He was due in court soon, to face the first of several charges, and the legal heat had spooked off his employers and the jobs dried up.
         As he sat on the motel room bed, contemplating the shambles he had made of his life, he wondered aloud if all that mediocre pussy had been worth it. I listened patiently as long as I could. An awful shame, I agreed. Now take off your panties.
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