The new neighbor 10 - FInal

The days that followed were a special kind of hell. The guilt was no longer a stone in my stomach; it was a living, breathing entity that sat beside me at the dinner table and lay between me and my wife in bed. Every time Kelly laughed, every time she touched my arm with simple, trusting affection, the memory of her screams of pleasure, born from my own selfish frustration, would flash in my mind. I was a fraud in my own home, an actor playing the part of a loving husband.

The opportunity, a cruel and tempting twist of fate, came on a Tuesday. It was a normal school day. The kids were gone, and Kelly had left for a long yoga class followed by a grocery run, giving me a solid three-hour window of an empty, silent house. I told myself not to do it. I told myself this was a chance to reset, to be the man my family deserved. But the addiction was a ravenous beast, and it knew this was a rare chance to feed. My hands, acting of their own accord, picked up my phone.

Are you home? And alone?

The reply was a single word. Yes.

A few minutes later, she slipped through my front door. There was no pretense this time, no jackets or lingerie. She was just in a simple t-shirt and jeans. She walked in, closed the door behind her, and we came together in the foyer, our mouths crashing together in a desperate, hungry kiss.

This wasn’t the frantic, desperate coupling of before. There was a deep, melancholic tenderness to it, as if we both knew, on some subconscious level, that this was the end of something. We moved to the bedroom, and we made love slowly, our bodies moving in a familiar, practiced rhythm. It was an act of savoring, of memorizing the feel of each other’s skin, the taste of each other’s mouths. It was a strange, beautiful, and deeply sad act of lovemaking, colored by the knowledge of its profound wrongness.

Afterward, we lay tangled in the sheets, the midday sun streaming through the window, creating a false sense of peace. Kristen was tracing a lazy line on my chest with her finger. I looked at her, at her beautiful, freckled face, and all I could see was Kelly’s trusting smile. The guilt, which had been a dull roar during our passion, came crashing back with the force of a tidal wave. I sat up, pulling away from her.

“Kristen,” I began, my voice thick with emotion. “I can’t do this anymore.”

She stopped tracing, her hand falling to the sheet. She didn’t look surprised.

“What we’ve done,” I continued, the words tumbling out in a torrent of self-loathing, “it’s eating me alive. The other night with my wife… I was a monster. I was angry and frustrated, and I took it out on her, and she thought it was passion. She thought it was for her. I can’t live like this. I’m destroying everything I love. It has to stop. This has to be the last time.”

I braced myself for an argument, for tears, for anger. Instead, she just nodded slowly, a sad, resigned expression on her face. “I know,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “I knew this was a fantasy. Something to make things feel… exciting again. I get it. I have a family too.” She finally looked at me, and her hazel eyes, which had held so much fire and lust, were now just tired. “Okay, Brian. The last time.”

We got dressed in a heavy, funereal silence. At the door, she paused, and for a moment, I thought she might say something else, but she just gave me a small, sad smile and left.

The aftermath was a cold, quiet war of avoidance. Life in the neighborhood became an exercise in logistics. If I saw her minivan turn onto our street, I’d wait in the garage. Our interactions, when unavoidable, were painfully stilted. A tight-lipped smile, a clipped “Morning.” The easy warmth was gone, replaced by a thick, suffocating tension.

This quiet, constant strain was unsustainable. The neighborhood now felt like a prison. About a month later, I came to Kelly with a proposal I’d been carefully crafting.

“Honey,” I began one evening. “I’ve been thinking. My commute to Cedars is brutal. I was looking at some houses over in West Hollywood… we could afford it, and I’d be home so much more. We could have dinner together every night.”

It was the perfect excuse, a lie wrapped in the loving truth of wanting to be a better husband and father. Her face lit up.

The day the moving truck came was surreal. As we were loading the last of the boxes, Kristen and Josh walked over. Josh shook my hand, wishing us the best of luck. Kelly and Kristen shared a long, genuine hug.

“I’m going to miss you guys,” Kelly said, her eyes tearing up.

“You too,” Kristen replied, her voice steady. “Don’t be strangers.”

Then, for a final, fleeting moment, Kristen’s eyes met mine over Kelly’s shoulder. There was a world of unspoken history in that final glance—the passion, the guilt, the regret, and a profound, shared sadness for the beautiful, toxic thing we had created and destroyed. It was a silent, final goodbye.

I nodded once, a barely perceptible acknowledgment, before turning away to help the movers. As we drove away, I didn’t look back. I was escaping the neighborhood, but I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that I would never truly escape the memory of what I had done there.