I started this story at work for fun. In between answering phone calls and talking with students, I chipped away at it.

It started out as one story, but then morphed into a different story. Oh well. Maybe someday I'll go back and fix it.

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Roast Beef

Caitlin picks at her peas with her fork, drawing a harsh gaze from her mother. She pretends not to notice, and continues wheeling a pea around the edges of the plate. Her mother resumes talking with her father, sitting at the end of the table with a vacant expression on his face.

"Ronald, do you ever listen to me? I'm talking to you. Be polite and listen to me when I'm speaking at you." she says.

He turns his head, catching a brief glimpse of the Monday Night Football game on the living room television. The mother sighs loudly and stabs her fork into the chunk of roast beef on her plate.

"I swear that no one ever listens to me in this fucking house," she says under her breath.

"Susanne, the language. Not in front of Caitlin," he corrects her.

"Oh, so now you're listening to me?" she asks. "Maybe I should cuss more often."

Ronald smiles.

"Fuck fuckity fuck fuck shit," she says, her voice projecting throughout the dining room.

Caitlin smiles and bites down into a piece of butter covered bread, the staple of every meal she's had since she was 12 year old. The past 2 and a half years have seen lots of bread. Looking through eyes that all but bulge out of their sockets, Susanne looks at her daughter and lifts her spoon off the plate.

"Don't make me use this on you, child," she says.

Caitlin looks at the raised spoon, and laughs. Realizing her mistake, the mother slams the spoon down on the table, almost knocking over the coffee mug serving as gravy receptacle. She picks up the knife and holds the tip of it in the flame of the candle. She removes the knife from the flame, and puts the blackened tip of the knife onto the half-eaten roast beef on her plate. The roast-beef, at least a tiny portion of it, recooks. Caitlin gets the point and rightens herself.

"I wake up and fix both of your breakfasts, I put up with a boss who openly wants to fuck me, and I wait through 2 hours of the worst traffic Dallas has to offer, just so that I can come home and fix you two your fucking meals," Susanne says, still holding the knife to the roast-beef. Cool gravy runs over the knife, cooling it quickly. "I can at least, at the very fucking least, expect some fucking decent dinner conversation when I get home."

Ronald picks up his plate. "I'll eat Pop Tarts for now on." He walks into the living room and turns up the volume on the game. John Madden's voice echoes throughout the house.

"I'll eat Lucky Char..."

"Knock if off," interrupts the mother.

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Facing three-pages of innumerable Algebra equations, Caitlin halts halfway through finding the point-slope form, and turns her attention to her pharmacology homework.

Caitlin locks her bedroom door and takes off her vintage Star Trek shirt. She throws it into the pile of shirts, underwear, and skirts at the foot of her bed. She takes the crumpled tissue from her bra and places it next to her Hello Kitty light on her nightstand.

She reaches for her nightstand drawer and opens it. Quickly finding what she's looking for, she places the joint in her mouth and flips open the zippo. The smoke lazily, and clumsily, makes its way out of her open window.

Caitlin sits on her bed, and practices opening her toes as far apart as they can go. She's become quite proficient at this exercise, all the boys at school tell her so.

Her foot beginning to cramp, she lays herself down on top of her sheets. She finds the softest spot of the pillow, and evaporates there.

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Despite it all, Susanne manages to get off three times a night; once in the shower, once during sex, and once more back in the shower during post sex clean-up. She basks in the satisfaction that at least there's one area of this house where she shines above all others. At least she hopes so anyways; she *is* only here in the evenings and the early mornings. Ronald, having a job 2 miles from home, gets to spend countless hours alone in the house, far outnumberring her in that area. Everybody has their weighs and measures. And Caitlin??? She pushes all thoughts of her alone time out of her brain.

Susanne watches her husband snore underneath the sheets on their bed. His chest rises slowly, and then descends a few millimeters-per-hour faster. She slowly makes her way out of the bedroom, and into the office down the hall.

There's already an Instant Message prompt waiting for her when she enters the room. It's from RobertsWay943. She met him at work, not in that they work together, but that she happened upon a "Bored with your spouse" chat room when she googled "Bored with your spouse" in hopes that she would find a series of "self help" books. They've spoken before, once at work and once last weekend, but both instances were brief, and under the watchful eye of the boss or the husband.

Sneaking out of the room excited her some, but trying to type so quietly that Ronald didn't wake up excited her more. As they typed away to one another, she grew more and more excited. And for the fourth time that evening, she climaxed. She was the queen of her domain, this was undisputed.

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matt out