The Bad Test: Playing with Fire & a Wife's Desire

Chapter 4: Daniel's Decision

Back at the country club, Daniel was totally enwrapped in the images before him.

A text message from Emily glowed on his phone: 

"Repair going well, but might take a few days.
We can discuss tonight. What time will you be back?"

He thought about his options for a reply. Should he run home and bust her? Stay here and trust her? 

He did not understand why his cock surged at the latter. He couldn't figure out what he wanted: did he really want to see his wife ravaged on camera? Or did he design all of this as some sort of bad test of their relationship?

As he pondered this, he downloaded the recording and made screenshots of his favorite moments ... especially the one of his bride standing totally naked in front of a man she had never met a few hours earlier!

"What the fuck am I doing?!," he asked the universe. 

He thought back to all the times in his life where, for good or ill, his thoughts had become his reality. And he wondered if he had intentionally but unconsciously created this moment.

His wife -- who had spent years undoing the entanglements of his Catholic upbringing -- was convinced that he had some kind of spiritual power. 

"✨Manifestation✨," she called it.

He laughed and replied, "That's a word that hippies use to avoid hard work."

But deep down, he also knew that his greatest "breaks" had not come from working hard but from letting go. 

Could this be another such moment?

As he sat there sipping scotch in the fading minutes of the late morning, his thoughts turned back to their undergrad days when she had first told him about her spiritual ideas. And he recalled how using them had helped him to secure the breakthrough internship that kickstarted his career. 

The opportunity had emerged as soon as he took a break from frantically filling out applications for summer jobs that he didn't want. He had called Emily in her dorm room (this was before the days of cell phones in everyone's hands!) and she had suggested he take a break.

"Let go and stop trying to make it happen," she had advised him. "Let it be whatever it needs to be."

She had encouraged him to get off the phone and go kayaking -- his favorite pastime, which he had rarely afforded himself time to enjoy this semester. He had agreed and headed out to the lake, his kayak still strapped to the top of the car from the last time that he had used it a month ago.

He had been surprised by how easily he found a parking spot right near his favorite put-in. Within a few moments, he had paddled to the middle of the lake ... where he had turned around to see the sun setting against the hills. 

He had never been much of a meditator but it had struck him that, when the sun was this low against the horizon, he could stare into it and not lose his eyesight. 

Emily had been inviting him for weeks to do a "sunset meditation" with her, but he had always declined. But somehow, sitting alone in his kayak on the edge of despair, he had decided to give it a chance.

So he had drawn a breath, closed his eyes, and opened them with a deep sigh ... a low rumble that felt like it had come up from his toes to shake his chest before rattling out across the lake towards the horizon.

As the last flames of the Spring sunset had faded beneath the edge of the world, he had imagined that one timeline was ending and a whole new life was beginning.