I never would have let her tie me up. I was so humiliated that I never confessed the violation to anyone, not even to Melanie.
By that time Melanie had all but moved in with me. She had quit stripping altogether and she lived off of her apparently vast savings and she spent her time with Sarah shopping and cooking and cleaning for me. During this time she experienced a strange but understandable emotional pattern in which she would be sweet and loving at the beginning of the week but would day by day grow listless and finally she would become malicious towards me only to become loving and sweet all over again, overnight, in the early part of the week. Beginning Sunday morning Melanie was as sweet to me as a girl could be going out of her way to do the little things to show me that she loved me, like baking chocolate-chip cookies, my favorite, or stopping out at my jobsite with a thermos full of hot coffee, or by simply making love to me in the most tender fashion. But as the weekend approached, knowing that Amber would soon be calling, Melanie would become agitated and short tempered. How could I blame her? For all she knew I was enjoying the sexual sessions with Amber. That is not to say that I deny experiencing orgasms with Amber; I did, but at what price? I was a victim. I had been systematically raped and sexually abused much as she had been as a child. But Melanie probably thought that given our history of a years worth of titillating phone conversations that I actually looked forward to being Amber’s subject. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Melanie did try to reason with Amber, asking her to back-off out of friendship and to let us be a happy couple, but Amber had responded in her catty fashion with the suggestion that the three of us ‘get it on’ together. I suppose any normal woman would have left me under those circumstances; would have turned me in and tossed me to the hounds. But Melanie was a damaged human-being and I was her first male lover. But she grew less intolerant with each passing week. I couldn’t understand why Melanie stood by me throughout the whole ordeal because to be truthful her logic defied me. Had our situations been reversed, had she been the one who was forced to sleep with another man, I could not have stood by her. I would have gone insane with jealousy. It is beyond my comprehension that she tolerated my confederation with Amber; which is why I first suspected her when I woke up to find Amber dead in my bed.
On the night she was murdered, Amber, for the first time since we had been sleeping together, had arranged to spend the night with me by telling her husband that she was spending the night at her sister’s house.
I suspected that Amber had chosen to spend the night with me because she knew that it would cause Melanie a great deal of emotional pain. To give me up for a few hours a week for a physical encounter was one thing but to spend the night with me suggested a more intimate involvement. Amber knew that it would get under Melanie’s skin which lent credence to my suspicion that Melanie had killed Amber. And given the bloody nature of the crime it seemed likely that Amber’s assassination was an act of rage. Amber’s throat had been slit, saturating the mattress and the bed sheets completely, and then the knife had been thrust downward into the area where her heart would have been had she been born with one. It was only natural that my first inclination was to think that Melanie had killed her; but that she did so while I slept on the very same bed spoke volumes about the indignation that she must have realized and the animosity that she felt towards me as well. And who could have blamed Melanie for killing Amber (except perhaps a jury of her peers). Amber had trifled Melanie beyond the human threshold and when Amber decided to spend the night with me, coveting an intimacy that she had to that point not demanded, Melanie had simply snapped. She had brooded, back in her home, like a festering volcano until her imagination got the best of her and she popped a rivet. She stormed over in the middle of the night, used the key which I had long ago given her, to sneak into the house, took a knife from the kitchen drawer and stealthily crept into my room and sliced Amber’s throat where she slept. Like I said before, if our roles had been reversed I would have been a jealous mess. I might have done the same. And the worst of it was that I was the one who stood to lose the most. I would, of course, be blamed; I would be labeled a serial-killer; a repeat offender, tried, convicted and put to death. Once the beast has tasted human blood…
But given the weapon of choice, a serrated knife plucked from the kitchen silverware drawer, I should have known right away that Sarah had done the evil deed. The knife was the very same knife (we only had one large knife in the house with a serrated edge) that Sarah had pointed threatingly toward me the night that I came home drunk from Melanie’s house. Amber, in the midst of a sound sleep, would have been an easy victim even for Sarah.
Sarah had chosen to stay home with me that night rather than stay with Melanie at her house. It was one thing, I suppose, for Sarah to be apart from me until the early hours of morning, but another thing altogether to be apart from me for the entire night. The interesting verity of the matter was that despite the fact that Melanie regularly spent the night in my bed Sarah didn’t seem to have any animosity at all towards Melanie. They were the best of friends. I suppose that Melanie recognized the close relationship which Sarah and I shared and she made pains to let Sarah know that she would not interfere with our kinship; that she posed no threat to her. Melanie, unlike either Catherine or Amber, went out of her way to involve Sarah in every aspect of our relationship except for sex. Melanie welcomed her in our bed in the morning and at night before bedtime and made her the “pickle in the middle”. Melanie and I did not date. If we went to a movie Sarah came too. If we went to a restaurant so did Sarah. Melanie included her in everything we did. Amber, on the other hand, on the nights she would stop by, used every manipulation to get Sarah to go to sleep so that she could have me to herself. Sarah’s resentment of this was no secret. Sarah grew wise and she forced herself to stay awake as long as her little body would let her so as to interfere with Amber’s ambitions. Sarah would deliberately take naps (something she normally refused to do) so that she would be well rested when Amber arrived; and this tactic sometimes resulted in reducing our copulations to one per encounter depending on Sarah’s endurance and resolve.
That Friday night before Melanie left for the shelter of her home we had a miserable argument. I had just come home from work and apparently Melanie had only moments previously answered the phone when Amber called.
“Tell Mathew that I’ll be spending the whole night tonight dear.” Amber had said as though Melanie were the maid.
“Fuck you.”
“So you’ve finally come to your senses! You’re going to join us then?”
Melanie hung up the telephone as I stood across from her in the kitchen covered from head to toe in soot from a hard days work. “That was your slut!” her eyes were red with rage, “She’ll be spending the night tonight.”
“What?”
“Yes, she invited me to join the two of you. I bet you’d like that wouldn’t you?”
I walked up to her and tried to comfort her but she pushed me away, “I’m sorry. What am I supposed to do? Tell her no?”
“Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to tell her that you can’t fuck her anymore. That’s what any loving boyfriend would do.”
“Any loving boyfriend who wasn’t facing life in prison maybe!”
I stormed into the bathroom and ran my bath while I washed the grime from my hands and face while cursing under my breath. Sarah came into the bathroom and tried to hug my leg. “Ah ah! I’m covered in dirt honey. You’ll get it all over your clothes. Wait until I clean up and then we’ll hug, okay?”