Jane sat before the mirror, applying lipstick to her rosy lips. Her fiancé Paul watched her thoughtfully.
"Why do you need all that, just to see your sisters?" He asked.
"Paul, you know what Emily and Lynn are like, they'd jump on me if they saw the slightest imperfection!"
Paul shook his head. He loved Jane but he would never understand her relationship with her sisters. The Clark sisters seemed to bring out the worst in Jane. He disliked how they inflamed her competitive streak. Once, they had dared her to dye her hair the colours of the flag. She'd done it, knowing full well that she'd lose her job for contravening the prohibition on 'unnatural hair colorants'! She was the brain in the family, but even she could lose all perspective where they were concerned.
Actually Emily wasn't too bad and Paul was usually able to get along with her. Unfairly God had neither blessed her with looks or brains. The combination meant that she was vain, insecure and apt to follow either of her sisters' crazy plans.
Lynn was the one he disliked. She knew she was the hot one. Jane, the youngest sister, was classically beautiful but Lynn, even at 35, always looked as if she could have just come in from nude modelling at the beach or something. She had come tops in the height and breast department too. In Paul's opinion, she dressed like a tramp. She ran her own business and was very successful too. He had heard somewhere that some business people often tested with mild symptoms of psychopathology and he could believe it of Lynn. Her determination and drive were scary and there was a hard look in her eyes sometimes, like no one else existed.
+++++++
When Jane got to the house she found Emily trying to console a tearful Lynn.
"What's the matter?" Jane asked Emily, after Lynn had been unable to answer her due to the floods of tears.
"Graeme is cheating on her, she thinks." Emily replied quietly.
"I think he's been having an affair since he found out he was sterile. All the heat's gone from my marriage and I can't do anything about it." Lynn sputtered between sobs.
"She's not going to ask Graeme about it. She's too scared what his answer will be!" Added Emily.
"Paul would never be unfaithful to me." Jane added, a trace of smugness in her voice.
Well, thought Lynn, if you can't count on family for support, who can you count on? She stopped crying at once and fixed a steely gaze on her sisters.
"Time for liquor I think!"
After a short while, and several shots later Lynn leant over to Jane,
"What do you mean that Paul would never be unfaithful?"
"Me and Paul tell each other everything right? I think I shocked him when I told him I'd cheated on Brad Carmichael, remember him?"
The sisters nodded; casting their minds back to the pimply teenager Jane had dated.
"I was a bit puzzled by how upset Paul was. He only settled down when I told him I was 16 and I'd never done anything like that since." Jane continued,
"Well then he told me that his father had cheated on his mum, left her for another woman and broke her heart. He swore at the age of fifteen that he would never be the type of man that let his penis rule his heart. He's never cheated on a single girlfriend."
"Jane, do you have to say penis? It's so middle-class respectable." Complained Lynn, "what about Simon, Emily?"
"Oh, I don't know. Ummm possibly..."
