She does it because she has begun to tire of being the other woman. She has a sudden urge to sabotage everything. She wishes he’d never told her about how he takes his kids to the fancy cafe with the average coffee every Saturday morning for breakfast. She wishes she’d never had to picture them sitting around the big, farmhouse style table, eating pancakes and playing happy families.

So one Saturday, she decides not to picture it. One Saturday, she decides to watch.

It is not how she imagined. They do, it’s true, sit at the big farmhouse table, him, his beautiful wife, his teenage daughter and his three-year old twins. But it is far from a happy families situation. The teenager – insolent as fuck – answers back to everything anyone says to her. That’s bad, but the twins, are worse. The twins are the reason why, for the whole hour that she sits and watches, hidden at a corner table, behind a large plant, she doesn’t hear him say anything other than the same two words, over and over again.

‘Stop hitting.’

‘Stop hitting.’

‘Stop hitting.’

She should be impressed, perhaps, that he never loses his temper. That he clearly isn’t just some dude who works in finance, he’s also an ok person and a good parent. But she feels like her act of self-sabotage has gone further than she meant it to: instead of the satisfying burn of envy, all she feels is mildly repulsed by his real life.

She needs a way to spice things up between them again, to remind herself of the spark that was there when they first met: the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong, but that they were going to do it anyway.

Which is why, the next time they fuck, the next time he slaps her tits, the way he knows she likes it, she grabs his wrist, looks him in the eye, and calmly says. ‘Stop hitting.’