Steven was engaged in a mindless discussion with his wife at a diner one evening when he noticed a group of young Hispanics looking at Janelle curiously. He knew why too, but figured that the longer Janelle didn't know, the better. God only knew she would pitch the fit from hell if she did. He was just glad his name had been kept out of things so far. Truthfully, he didn't care what was said about Janelle. It was hard to feel sorry for her when she'd brought on her own problems all by herself. He just didn't want to be dragged through the mud along with her.
“Excuse me,” said a young Hispanic girl who was perhaps in her early twenties.
Janelle's head turned in her direction.
“Yeah?” Janelle asked.
“Are you that lady from the news?”
Janelle blinked with confusion as a young guy tried to discourage the girl from questioning her with a disapproving look on his face that she couldn't see from her angle. “The news?”
The girl nodded.
“No,” said Janelle.
Without saying anything more, the girl returned to the four or five others she was dining with. The group glanced in Janelle's direction with suspicion every now and then. Janelle didn't notice, though, as her husband did because her back was mostly facing the group.
Janelle quickly put the girl’s question out of her mind without thinking anything of it as she dove into the food they were soon delivered.
A couple of hours later, they were back home when Janelle's friend Byron called. Steven could overhear enough of his wife's conversation to know that Byron had seen her on the news and figured it was only a matter of time before Janelle caught on. However, he would play dumb for as long as he could. That much he was willing to give her but not so much to spare her any grief as much as to spare himself from having to deal with the rage that would come from hearing the media label her the baby killer that got away with it.
“That's so weird,” he heard her say from the other room. “Someone asked me in the restaurant earlier if I was some lady from the news.”
A moment of silence and then Janelle spoke again.
“Well, it couldn't have been me. No one's asked me to do any interviews or anything so I'm sure it's either someone who looks like me or has a similar name because no one’s said anything to me.”
When Janelle mentioned it to Steven after she hung up, he tried to brush it off as much as he could without actually lying. “You know how it works,” he told her. “Just like there was a news article in the paper back east when you got in trouble for disorderly conduct, they typically mention most of the cases that go through the courts.”
“Yeah, but according to what a friend of his told him that I've met before, my face was on TV. Yet I don't remember any cameras in the courtroom so it couldn't have been me they saw.”
Again, ignorance was bliss for Janelle and Steven knew this and was going to enjoy it for however long he could. Regardless, if one’s nightmares were any indication that trouble was ahead, Steven had been warned.
He had all kinds of strange, violent, and deadly dreams involving his wife. They seemed so real and nothing he wouldn’t put past her to do if she were in the exact situation as in the dreams. Only the other people in the dreams did things they might not ordinarily do. Like the way the cops put a piece of paper to the vent in the bottom of her bedroom door to staunch the flow of the evaporative cooler. This was because they had come to arrest her while she was asleep and the officers were afraid to startle her and cause things to spiral out of control quickly and dangerously. In the dream, he told the officers that Janelle awoke easily to unexpected sounds or if it got too warm. So in order to make it warm enough to wake her up and draw her out of the room in curiosity, they blocked the airflow.
But the dream officers quickly realized that this was a silly and time-consuming thing to do and that it was best to simply burst into the bedroom and take her by surprise.
Just as Steven warned the police officers would be the case since Janelle startled very easily, she jumped up from bed screaming a millisecond after the cops threw open the door, pointed their guns at her, and demanded she get up. Everything happened in a fraction of a second... Janelle grabbed the gun from one officer and fired it. The bullet passed through him and into his partner, killing them both instantly. Janelle screamed hysterically, blood splattered all over her, playing the victim as usual and swearing that she thought they were home invaders.
In another nightmare, a couple of young guys broke in through the front door while they were sitting in the living room, Janelle in a satiny knee-length nightgown that had seen better days.
Janelle instantly punched one of the guys unconscious and the other swore he was going to rape her in the name of revenge.
“No, you're not!” Janelle screamed loudly as she grabbed and body-slammed the guy onto his back on the middle of her floor while Steven watched in horror as the guy went from angry to fearing for his life. “My husband doesn't do me; you ain't doing me!”
Straddling the guy, she began throwing punches at him, and then she stopped. Next, she lifted her gown up and ground her crotch into the guy's face in the most unsexy of manners and shouted, “Do you want it now? Huh? Do you?!”
The dream faded out with the guy screaming, “NO!” and trying not to gag. “God, no!”
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