The Confession

            Rachel was a woman of sophistication and beauty. She was a very intelligent woman with her master’s degree in medicine. Rachel was always a loner until she met her husband Daniel. He was her night in shining armor who had come to rescue her from a life of loneliness. They met one night at the local bar in downtown Seattle. She was there, as usual, alone while he was there with one of his college buddies. Daniel and Rachel both experienced love at first sight that night.

         Daniel’s attention was grabbed by the thought of seeing such a beautiful woman sitting alone in a bar on a Friday night. She had shoulder length, curly dark-brown hair with a hint of ligh-brown highlights. Her lips were full and her skin texture was smooth and flawless. Rachel was a woman of natural beauty. Her hands and nails were perfectly manicured.  He became curious and decided to walk over to introduce himself to her.

         “Excuse me, but would you mind if I have a seat next to you?” he said as he flashed one of his famous flirtatious smiles.

         Rachel never even looking up at him said, “Sure, it’s an empty seat.”

         That’s when the smell of his cologne caught her attention. As she looked up to see who the man was behind that scent her mouth slowly opened with shock as she tried to control herself. She thought he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen before. He was tall, dark-skinned, and had deep dark-brown eyes that she could stare in for days. They both enjoyed a nice conversation that later led to them deciding to start dating. After almost two years of dating, Daniel proposed marriage to Rachel and she gladly accepted.

          The couple were married and things seemed to be going perfect for them. They had the house with the white picket fence, the two-car garage and had plans to have children within the next year. That’s when Rachel noticed the sudden change in Daniel.

         “Hey Rachel, I’m going to be late working at the office again tonight so you can just start dinner without me, okay.” Daniel yelled to Rachel from behind the shower door.

         Rachel already knew why Daniel was doing all the working late, but she was too hurt to say anything to him about it. She continued rinsing her face in the sink and said, “ Okay baby. Just let me know when you’re on your way and I’ll try to have your dinner warmed for you.”

                It had been one of those days that Rachel started to develop a gut feeling that something was not right with her marriage. Daniel had begun to come straight home from work and hit the shower as if trying to scrub off unclean evidence of something. Rachel's suspensions began to rise by seeing him do this only twice a week which happened to be the days that he said he was working late.

              One day, Rachel decided to calll Daniel's job on the day that he claimed to have been working late. Not to her surprise, one of his colleagues explained to her that the office was always locked up at a certain time every night and the boss wasn't allowing for anyone to work after hours at the office. Her suspension of Daniel cheating was confirmed once she followed him around one day. He told her his usual excuse of having to work late, but this time she would find out the truth.

              Rachel followed Daniel from his office to a local cafe in downtown. He parked his car on a side street and got out of his car with his cellphone to his ear. Rachel then decided to try and call Daniel's phone, but he didn't answer. She saw him take the phone from his ear, look at the screen and put it back to his ear. She knew that he was avoiding her phone call and she was determined to find out why. Daniel hung up the phone and continued to walk inside the cafe. His looking down at his watch and out of the window was evidence that he was waiting on someone.That's when she noticed a tall, dark-skinned woman walking toward the cafe's door. The woman walked in and Daniel stood up to greet her. The warm, romantic embrace is what tipped Rachel off that this was the mistress that her husband was cheating on her with. The pain of seeing this brought nothing but anger to Rachel.

              Daniel used his “working late” excuse on Rachel almost every Tuesday and Friday for the past six months and she was tired of it. There were many times that Rachel had followed Daniel and saw exactly where he was going and who he was with. Being at the office wasn’t one of the places.

         Daniel opened the shower door, grabbed his towel and wrapped it around his body as he got out of the shower. It pained Rachel to know that her husband was giving that sexy body to another woman. It also angered her deep down inside. She walked over to him half-naked and grabbed him by the towel to pull him in closer to her body. He snatched away as if he was no longer turned on by her.

         “I’m going to probably be late coming home myself tonight so we may just get home around the same time,” she whispered to him.

         Daniel, sounding nervous, said, “So where are you going to be?”

         “Oh, just have a few errands to run and a little surprise for you also,” she said with a smile on her face.

         The day played out as it always did. Daniel left for work on a Friday and didn’t call Rachel all day long. She already knew where he was going so she had plans to let him have his fun before giving him his surprise. For six months Daniel had been cheating on Rachel with one of his co-workers named Belinda Myers. Belinda was younger than Rachel and lived on the other side of town in a two-story townhouse. Rachel followed Daniel to Belinda’s place and sat out in the car until he was finished with his late night of working. Three hours later Daniel left Belinda’s house, but Rachel decided to stay. This would be the night that she would give Daniel his surprise.

         “Hey baby,” Rachel said to Daniel as she walked into the bedroom. “So how was your day, or shall I say night?”

         Daniel was bending over to take off his shoes. He looked up and said, “Well, you know just the usual work stuff happened. I’m probably going to have to work late again sometime next week too.”

         Rachel smiled as she walked over and rubbed him on his back. Daniel stood up to start taking his shirt and tie off.

         “You may not have to work late anymore baby,” she said.

         “What do you mean by that?” he asked with a half smile on his face, “You’re going to start doing my work for me?” He laughed out loud.

         Rachel looked deep into his eyes and said, “ You'd better sit down. I have something to tell you. It’s the surprise that I’ve been planning for you for some time now. I went for a drive tonight...to your mistress's house.”

         Daniel jumped up from the bed.
         “What are you talking about? I don’t have a mistress and you know that.”

         Rachel sat down beside him and calmly said,
          “ Yes you do baby and  I've known about her for weeks. And, you know, it wasn't as difficult as I'd imagined it would be. She didn't utter a sound when it hit. I hadn't really expected her to. Her eyes merely took on a fleeting expression of...shock-as if she couldn't comprehend what was happening and was absolutely petrified by it all-and then...it was over. All it took was one shot. It was what a pro might call "a real clean job," though now I know that pros don't mean the same thing when they say "clean" as we amateurs are likely to think. Actually, it was quite messy. You know, Daniel, people like me-average, everyday folks, who've never had occasion to handle firearms (previously, that is)-tend to think of them as instruments that drill neat little holes into people and that's that. For some reason we visualize no blood; we imagine no gore. How naive we are, Daniel!”

         Rachel got up from the bed and started walking around the room. Daniel just stood there in shock, but he knew that now was not the time to say anything to her.

Rachel continued explaining her surprise to Daniel.

“ That's not at all the way it is! In fact, it's terribly shocking the first time you look down at that...corpse...covered in real, red, blood-the kind you could never stand the sight of-and staring, like something out of a horror movie, at...nothing. And it's eerie the way it lies so still, exactly the way it fell. You keep expecting it to move, to look up at you and say something...but it doesn't. It just lies there...staring. Well, baby, I stood there looking down at her...at it...for a while-a few minutes, perhaps-to be sure that she was dead. But, no, that wasn't the reason. I knew she was dead. I suppose I simply couldn't draw myself away. After all, I'd never killed anyone before. You must understand, Daniel. I hadn't wanted to kill her. As they say: In other circumstances, we might have been the best of friends. But try to imagine what it must be like to lose the one you love most in life, the one who supplies the little sunshine there is in your drab existence, the only one you've ever trusted!”

Rachel wiped the tears away from her face just before they dropped to the floor. She knew by the silence with Daniel that he was listening to every word that came from her mouth. She slowly lifted her eyes to make contact with Daniel’s eyes as she said,
“Daniel, you know that you were the very air that I breathed. You were my all and you knew this from the day we first met. I trusted you with all of me and you betrayed my trust. Have you any idea how it feels to have that trust betrayed? But how could you, Daniel? You've never had the misfortune to experience it. If you had, you'd understand that the act was committed in desperation. You'd see why I had to do it.”

         Daniel let tears roll down his face as he thought about the action his wife had taken. He had fell in love with Belinda almost as much as he loved Rachel. He shed tears  not only for Belinda, but also for his wife. He had drove her to kill an innocent woman. Belinda knew nothing about him having a wife. His indiscretions cost the life of a woman who only wanted to be loved by him.

Daniel walked over towards the bedroom door and took a look at Rachel.

“I’m so sorry for hurting you like I did, but you have to believe me when I say that she didn’t know that I was married. I never told her about you. I only told her that I was single.”

Daniel wiped more tears from his eyes.
He said in a watery voice, “ You killed an innocent woman because of me. I can’t live with myself knowing that.”

Rachel became almost speechless at that point. She never intended on hurting an innocent woman. Maybe they could’ve become best friends if she had only given her a chance to explain. Belinda tried to tell Rachel that she had no idea Daniel was married, but she wanted to hear nothing come from her mouth except for the plea for her life. She wanted to make the home-wrecker suffer for all the time that she herself had suffered through Daniel’s infidelity.

Rachel got down on bended knees in front of Daniel as if to beg for forgiveness and understanding. Peering into his watery eyes assured her that she had did the right thing by ridding him of a woman that wasn’t her, his wife.
She slowly lifted herself from her knees and walked back to the bed.

She stared him straight in the eyes and said,
“I freely admit that I went to her house for the express purpose of killing her. But I wasn't responsible for my actions. You've no idea how the hatred and jealousy seethed in me as I left the house earlier this evening. The emotions were beyond my control; they'd grown and multiplied since the first day I learned of your affair, until I simply had no choice but to satisfy them. They drove me to an act I would never even have contemplated before they dominated my life.”

Daniel was still standing by the doorway with an empty look on his face. Rachel walked over to him and stood right up in his face. Daniel, not knowing her frame of mind, backed up just a little from her. She gently caressed his smooth face with her hand and stopped once she reached his chin.

She grabbed his chin with two fingers and whispered in his ear, “I did it because I loved you, baby. But, you know what's funny? Tonight I discovered something infinitely more satisfying than love.”

She waited for Daniel’s response, but his eyes only moved to look into her eyes.
“Can you guess what it is, baby?” she asked.

Daniel gently shook his head no.
Rachel grabbed him almost forcefully by the chin and turned his face towards her and said, “  Yes, that's right-revenge!”

Rachel backed away from Daniel while saying, “Good-bye, Daniel.”

Just that quick Rachel was gone out of the room, out of the house and out of Daniel’s life for good.