Caught Between Her Legs and My Love

I woke to thirty-seven missed calls and sixty-three text messages. All from David. I deleted them without reading a single one and blocked his number. The hotel room felt sterile and empty, but it was better than the suffocating lies of what I'd thought was our home.

Two days later, Sarah called.

"Emma, you need to look outside."

I pulled back the curtains of my new apartment—a temporary refuge Sarah had helped me secure—and froze. There in the sky, written in massive white letters: "I'M SORRY EMMA."

"He hired skywriters," Sarah explained unnecessarily. "It's all over social media."

I let the curtain fall back into place. "He's wasting his money."

"There's more," Sarah hesitated. "He sold his parents' house. And his car. He's liquidating everything."

A hollow laugh escaped me. "Good. He'll need money for his divorce lawyer."

The next morning, I returned to work, desperate for normalcy. I'd barely settled at my desk when the delivery began.

"Ms. Emma?" The receptionist's voice crackled over the intercom. "There's a delivery for you."

I walked to the lobby to find it transformed into a greenhouse—roses in every shade of red imaginable, filling every surface.

"One thousand roses," the delivery man announced proudly, handing me a card. "The gentleman said you'd understand."

I didn't open the card. Instead, I turned to my assistant who had followed me, curiosity written across her face.

"Call every hospital within twenty miles," I instructed. "Ask if they'd like flower donations for their patients."

The roses came every day after that. One thousand, like clockwork. Building security eventually had to intervene, establishing a special protocol just for my deliveries. Each day, I sent them away without reading the cards.

"You're ice cold," my assistant remarked after the fifth day. "I kind of love it."

But I wasn't cold. I was burning—with rage, with grief, with the scorching pain of betrayal.

On the seventh night, my phone lit up with a text from an unknown number. I knew it was David before I even opened it.

The image loaded, and my stomach lurched. Blood. David's wrist, slashed open, crimson streaming across pale skin. The message below it simple: *I can't live without you.*

My hands shook as I dialed 911, giving them his address in a voice that sounded distant even to my own ears.

"Are you going to the hospital?" Sarah asked when I called her after.

"No."

"Emma..."

"Let him suffer like I did," I whispered, surprising myself with the ice in my voice.

He survived, of course. And tried again three days later. This time standing on the roof of his office building, livestreaming on Instagram, slurring about how he couldn't live without me. Again, I called emergency services. Again, I refused to see him.

The third time, it was pills. An ambulance. A stomach pump. A psychiatric hold that lasted forty-eight hours.

I hired a private investigator the day after the first suicide attempt. Not because I doubted what I already knew, but because I needed ammunition for the divorce.

"I have the preliminary report," Gerald, the investigator, said when we met at a quiet café across town. His expression told me everything before he even opened the folder.

"How bad?" I asked, wrapping my hands around my coffee mug to stop them from trembling.

"Worse than you thought." He slid the folder across the table. "Not just Lisa. There were others. At least five that I could confirm."

I flipped through the pages, each one a new knife in my heart. Photos. Hotel receipts. Text messages. A decade of betrayal documented in clinical detail.

Then I turned to a page that made my blood freeze.

"Paternity tests?" I looked up at Gerald, confusion warring with fresh rage.

"Three of them," he confirmed. "All conducted secretly. All confirming he is the father."

My son. My beautiful boy. David had doubted he was even his? The thought made me physically ill.

"There's more," Gerald continued, his voice gentle. "Financial records. He's been using your joint accounts to fund these... relationships. Including paying the rent on Lisa's apartment for the past eight years."

I closed the folder, suddenly exhausted beyond words. The David I thought I knew—the man I believed had sacrificed everything for me—had never existed at all.

As I drove home, my phone chimed with another text from an unknown number. Another of David's burner phones, no doubt. I almost ignored it, but something made me glance down at a red light.

It wasn't David.

*We need to talk,* the message read. *About your husband and what he did to me after you left. -Lisa*

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as the light turned green. What new hell was this?