I sat down heavily in one of his desk chairs. “I have some bad news, Peter. I don’t want to be the one to pass this on, but I just don’t have a choice.”
“It’s alright,” he said, “you can tell me.”
I couldn’t look him in the eye. “This afternoon, Mr. Moffatt asked me to take some documents out to Scott’s home. When I got there, no one answered the doorbell, so I walked around outside his house and heard some noise. When I looked on his screened-in porch, this is what I saw.”
With that I turned on my cellphone to play back the video I’d taken, then handed it to Peter. When he saw Scott crouched beside the female figure lying on the chaise-lounge, he gave a harsh laugh. “So that’s what Scott calls ‘working from home,'” he said derisively. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”
He started to hand my phone back to me, but I pushed it back to him. “Keep watching,” I said in a low, sick voice.
I could tell whenthe brunette sat up and began to give Scott head because Peter’s face looked he’d been hit stabbed with a knife. I couldn’t help it: I began to cry. It’s a terrible thing to see a man’s illusions shattered before your eyes. His face registered shock, pain and anger, all at the same moment.
As he sat there in anguish, I quickly reached over and tried to take my phone out of his hands because I didn’t want him to hear what I knew was coming next. But he wouldn’t let the phone go. “There’s more, isn’t there?” he asked in a strained voice.
“You don’t want to watch it, Peter,” I said, but I knew that wouldn’t stop him.
Then we heard Peter’s wife gasping and moaning, and Scott’s voice goading her. When she began to talk about how good Scott was and how much she enjoyed screwing behind her husband’s back, Peter’s face went pale. I silently prayed I might never see anyone humiliated like that again.
Finally the video shut off, and Peter slumped in his chair. After a few moments he raised his head to stare at me with haggard eyes. “You know what really got to me the most? It wasn’t just that Callie cheated on me. That’s bad enough. But the way she held him and kissed him and caressed him. They weren’t just having sex, they were making love.”
I groped desperately for something to say that might ease his pain, but nothing would come to me. All I could do was repeat, “I’m so sorry, Peter, I’m so sorry.”
As he hung his head in despair, something that had been bothering me all afternoon suddenly came into focus, and I blurted out in a voice louder than I intended, “I just realized something, Peter. Scott must have wanted me to see him with Callie! He specifically asked Mr. Moffatt to have me deliver those papers. He wanted me to hear them and see them together, he wanted to embarrass me and to make me tell you!”
“That son-of-a-bitch,” Peter swore. “He’s always hated me and this is his way of getting back at me.”
“But why?” I asked. “I can understand that the two of you are rivals, but why would he be so vindictive?”
Peter sighed. “Back before you joined Magnetadyne, Scott used to report to me. I thought he was brilliant but somewhat impulsive. I even saved his job one time when he became hyper-defensive about an expense account he’d submitted. Audit asked a routine question about it and Scott flew off the handle. He wrote the head of Audit a snarky memo that essentially said ‘How dare you question me – go to hell!’ Scott copied me on the memo and I was able to stop it before it was delivered to the VP of Auditing. Then I calmed Scott down, got him to delete the memo and the whole thing went away as far as I was concerned. Sometime later the sales director job opened up, and I recommended Scott for the position.”
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