Fat Barry's Good Girl: My Wife Ruined By Our Dirty Neighbour
Lily Corbett
His name is Barry. He's fifty-one. He smells of cigarettes and something that my body understood before my brain caught up. He's not handsome. He's not charming. He's not anything you'd put on a list of reasons to knock on a man's door. And yet the first time I stood in his porch and breathed the air coming out of his flat, something in me made a decision that the rest of me spent the next three weeks pretending wasn't already final. I changed my top before I went round. I told myself it was just being neighbourly.
What he did to me on that sofa, what I asked him to do, what I came back for again and again while my husband was twenty feet away on the other side of a none of it is what a good wife does. None of it is what the woman who made her vows six weeks ago expected of herself. But here is what I know now that I didn't know then. There is a version of yourself you don't get to meet until someone like Barry opens a door and stands aside and waits to see if you'll walk in. I walked in. And I kept walking.
My husband Ryan is the best man I know. Gentle, kind, completely devoted. And he was in the room for the last part. Because it turned out that what was happening to me was happening to both of us, in our different ways, and neither of us could stop it, and by the end neither of us tried. This is our story. It starts with a Saturday morning and a woman I didn't recognise walking out of a flat next door with her shoes in her hand. By the time you finish reading, you'll understand exactly what she looked like. Because I look like that now too.
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