Betrayed (a story of love, lust and revenge) (2 page)

On the third day she woke up with a new found vigor. She turned her melancholy into anger and directed it at Lenny. She had been nice, nothing but a saint, and he had fucked someone else behind her back. She realized it didn’t matter that she had lost him, because the Lenny that she was mourning over wasn’t the real Lenny. The real Lenny was a cheating, backstabbing piece of shit and she was happy that she avoided spending any more of her valuable life with that waste of time.

She decided to check his messages, an abundance of texts and voicemails. They started by begging for forgiveness, then, as they days progressed and as she had continued to ignore them, he had become increasingly annoyed. The final message she had received was a text that read:
Fine then. Fuck you.

She laughed at that, felt much better for having woken to a new day, a day free from regret and misery, a day when she turned over a new leaf and stomped that steaming turd from her life. She grinned at the message, imagining how angry he must have been when he wrote it, how angry and frustrated he probably still was.

She was still smiling when she phone rang. She stared at it at first, at the picture of Lenny which flashed up to indicate that he was calling her. She waited to see if a flicker of loss or regret worked its way back into her mind on seeing his face, a face she used to adore, but she stamped out whatever emotions tried to surface and answered the phone.

“What do you want?” she snapped.

He seemed surprised that she had answered. He also sounded drunk, even though it was barely dinner time.

“I want you back,” he said in an annoyed tone, as if he knew what her answer was going to be.

“Fuck you.”

He growled down the phone.

“Listen,” he began. “What I--”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said bluntly. “Fuck off back to your whore and stay out of my life. You make me sick.”

“You need me,” he jumped in.

“I don’t fucking think--”

“Take me back, or else,” he warned.

She laughed, couldn’t help herself. This was what he was resorting to, this was the sort of person she was dealing with. At that moment she knew everything was going to be okay, she knew that if she ever felt anything for him ever again, she would just think back to his idle, drunken, idiotic threats. “I’m not taking you back, Lenny,” she told him.

“I’ll make you regret it,” he snapped. He said it in an intimidating tone, hoping to scare her, but it made her laugh derisively.

“Fuck you Lenny,” she told him bluntly. “You can do what you like, I no longer give a shit.”

She hung up on him, beaming the widest smile she had smiled in days. That felt good. That would teach him, let him know that she didn’t need him, didn’t want him, even if she still reserved a spot for him in the back of her heart.

He tried to ring her again. She received three missed calls before he eventually gave up.

That evening she toasted to her success with a glass of wine and some television. She felt truly happy, she felt that she had closure. A part of him was still inside of her, but that would pass with time. It was already fading quickly and if it ever resurfaced she only needed to think about what he had done to her, what he had said to her.

She fell asleep in front of the television and was awoken a few hours later by the buzzing of her phone. She bolted awake, kicked out her heels and dropped the empty glass in her hand. She had been dreaming about Lenny, just before she awoke he had her hands around her, was growling at her, frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog, as he squeezed the life from her.

She rubbed her eyes, looked at the clock on the wall. It was nearly midnight. She looked to the phone, alight with the promises of new messages. She groaned when she saw they were from Lenny. She was in high spirits, the sleep and the dream making her even more confident that she never wanted to see him again.

She opened it, read it:

I told you that you’d regret it.

She frowned. That was it, no more words, no--

She paused. A picture was still downloading. It appeared below the text. She swiped her finger down, scrolled down the page. At first she just saw flesh and thought Lenny, probably drunk, had been sending pictures of himself naked, or of him fucking his slutty girlfriend. But when she zoomed out, saw the whole picture, she realized it wasn’t Lenny or his girlfriend. It was her. He had sent back the pictures that she had sent him before they broke up, the ones his two-bit tart of a girlfriend had seen.

There was more text below the picture:
you’re gonna be famous.

She didn’t know what he was playing at, then more messages came through. She opened the first to see a long list of website addresses and nothing else. A second and third message displayed the same. He was filling his text messages with what seemed like rows and rows of spam.

She picked up on a few words in the Urls:
sex, amateur, girlfriends, naughty, hardcore
,
homemade
. She assumed they were porn sites. It didn’t sink in until she opened one of them and saw her pictures pasted there for all to see.

Her heart stopped, her face dropped.

She opened another link, and another. Her pictures were all there, some of them on the home-pages. Some people had commented on them, sickening, perverted comments.

The links were still coming through, her phone vibrating with every heart-stopping list. The internet was awash with her naked body, a body that, until Lenny, had only been seen by a handful of people.

With trembling fingers she read all the messages, saw all the links. The lists stopped after eight or nine messages, she stopped counting. When the phone rang she instinctively answered it, unable to speak, barely able to breathe into the mouth piece.

“Did you like that?” It was Lenny. He sounded drunk, happy, malicious. “I told you, bitch. You should--”

She hung up. Turned her phone off, threw it across the room. It shattered against the wall, the sound echoed violently throughout the room, followed by a throat-tearing, ear piercing scream.

3

She always had a perfect body, through no real merit of her own. She never went to the gym, didn’t really pay attention to what she was eating. Her figure hadn’t changed since she was sixteen, but now she was putting on weight.

She grabbed at the roll of fat around her midriff, poked and prodded it as if it was an alien being. She looked at the ice cream tub in her lap. It had sat there, equally poked and prodded, for a couple of hours. The chocolate concoction had melted into a brown sludge.

She put it down on the floor, next to the other detritus, of which there were many: crisp packets, biscuit and chocolate wrappers. She was living in her own filth, eating a diet of toxic shit that was seemingly sticking to her, giving her fat in places she had never had fat. And then there was the alcohol. It was just wine at first, going through the bottles she had stored in the fridge and the cupboards, the ones given to her by the dick head who won’t be named, and the ones bought for her birthday and for Christmas by his friends. She didn’t really have any friends of her own, the ones she did have had drifted away when she devoted her time to Lenny. Once the wine was gone she had moved onto the vodka. Then she’d scraped together what money she could to buy some more. It was cheap and nasty, but it did the trick.

A knock at the door interrupted her empty thoughts. She stared at the darkness of the room, at the nothingness and the filth. Then she heard the doorbell, once, twice, three times. Whoever it was they were persistent.

She groaned heavily, dragged herself out of her chair. When she opened the door, blinked away the offending light, she saw a smiling man there. He didn’t look familiar, she hadn’t seen him before, but, judging by the grin on his face, he seemed to recognize her.

“Hey, he said.

She groaned.

“I’m Andrew. Your neighbor?”

She frowned, remembered the eyes through the fence the other day, or week. She couldn’t remember when it was but she remembered him and his voice.

“What do you want?”

He hesitated, seemed to get stuck in his words. She watched him as he fumbled. He was young, twenty-five or twenty-six, not much older than her. He had short hair, a buzz-cut that failed to expose his color. He was neatly shaved; deep cheek bones; thin lips. He looked perpetually nervous, but she thought it was cute, then she hated herself for thinking that. She remembered Lenny, remembered how great she used to think he was as well.

“What do you want?” she repeated, interrupting his mumblings.

“I just came over to see how you were?”

She looked bemused. “Excuse me?”

He smiled a shy smile, ran a hand through his bristly hair. He looked away from her, down at the floor, as he spoke. “I’ve seen you around. I mean, not in a stalking way,” he laughed, looked at her, coughed, cleared his throat. “You seem to go out quite a bit, and then, well, you didn’t.” He raised his eyes to meet hers. She saw a softness behind them. She suddenly felt very self conscious in her dirty, stinking clothes.

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t seen you around, haven’t heard from you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. That you weren’t lying dead, or--” he paused, changed his words. “That sounds horrible. I don’t mean dead, I --”

“Thank you,” she said honestly.

“Excuse me?” the nervous, bumbling man said.

“Thank you,” she repeated. “But I’m fine.” She closed the door. She saw him through the glass, still standing there, running his nervous hand through his hair, mumbling to himself. Then he left and retuned to her hovel, feeling a little happier.

She saw him again in the garden the next day, his face poking through the fence to wish her a good morning. She smiled at him, mumbled something in return, suddenly shy in his presence. He was cute, there was something very affable and pleasant about him.

“How are you today?” Andrew asked. “Feeling better?”

She was. It didn’t matter what Lenny had done, she had cried, eaten and drank that out of her system. So what if a couple of hundred perverts had seen her pictures? There was nothing she could do about it. What annoyed her more than that, more than all those perverts masturbating over her without consent, was the fact that Lenny had done it to hurt her when she had done nothing to him. She had finished him, but she had her reasons, what he did was pure malice, pure evil and that was what annoyed her more than anything. She would like to get her revenge, would like to humiliate him like he tried to do with her, would like to make him suffer like she had suffered, but she knew that she just needed to let him go. There was nothing she could do except incite more damage, he still had her pictures, if she left him alone he might not do anything more, if she started a war, he might start printing flyers and posting them through her neighbor's doors--

Her heart caught in her throat as she wondered if he’d already done that. She looked towards the street just as a young lad walked by, his trousers halfway down his legs, earphones stuck in his ears. He looked up at her, noticed the worried expression on her face with curiosity and then turned away, disinterested. She got the same reaction from a young mother on the other side of the street.

She breathed a sigh of relief, glad that he hadn’t sunk that low just yet.

“Are you okay?”

She turned to the fence. Her neighbor was standing on his tiptoes to see over, staring at her with a worried expression. “You seemed distant for a moment there,” he noted.

“I’m fine,” she smiled, walking towards him. “Just tired.”

He seemed happy as she approached and looked up at him, her arms folded, a pleasant expression on her face. She liked him, didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed him before. He was very cute.