Chapter 5
The drive home is forty-two minutes of slow-motion fear. Tony’s cum is inside me. I don’t stop to clean up because I deserve the discomfort. At a red light, I open the center console and grab my ring. I slide it back on. It still fits like nothing happened.
Every other time I’ve made this drive, I was buzzing and picturing Robert’s face when I gave him every detail. I knew what Robert was going to do to me when I walked through that door.
Tonight I drive in silence, white-knuckling the wheel, my eyes burning.
I love fucking other men. I’m not going to lie to myself about that. But it only worked because Robert gave his enthusiastic consent. Because we were in it together.
Take that away, and I’m not a hotwife exploring anything. I’m just a woman who cheats and comes harder because of it.
I can’t be that person.
The lights are on at the house and Robert’s car is in the garage. My gut clenches. I was hoping he wouldn’t be home yet.
My legs shake as I walk into the house, and I stop in the kitchen doorway. Robert is at the table. Same table. Same chair. But now it’s whiskey, not coffee, and he looks at me and knows exactly where I’ve been.
“You went to the casino.”
“Yes.”
“Was it Tony?”
“Yes.”
Robert takes a slow sip of his whiskey. The ice clinks against the glass in the quiet of the kitchen. “I called you.”
What? My knees go liquid. He called while I was busy getting destroyed on the casino rooftop. I didn’t even think to look at my phone in the car.
I open my mouth, and he raises his hand before I can speak. “Don’t. I can’t do this tonight.”
He pushes back from the table and walks past me. Close enough that I catch his cologne. My hand almost reaches for him. Almost.
He stops halfway up the stairs, hand on the banister, and I think he’s going to turn around.
“I called you twice, Shannon.”
He doesn’t turn around.
The spare room door closes. I stare at the kitchen table for a long time. His whiskey glass is sweating condensation, the ice shrinking into nothing.
I did it. I wrecked the only thing that mattered.
Three days of Robert performing husband. He comes home at six and eats dinner at the table and loads the dishwasher and doesn’t say a word to me that isn’t necessary. The disconnect is killing me. It sits in my chest like a bruise I keep pressing to see if it still hurts. It always does.
He’s moved to the spare room permanently.
Two nights ago, I tried the vibrator, not because I was turned on but because I needed to know my body still worked.
I lay there in our empty bed with it buzzing between my legs and couldn’t even get a flutter.
I tried the app with the escalating patterns, the one that usually gets me there in four minutes flat. Nothing.
My pussy is telling me I really fucked up.
On the fourth day, I come home from the neighborhood committee meeting to a dark kitchen.
The leftovers I plated for Robert are still wrapped in the fridge.
The living room light is on. He’s on the couch with the TV off, and he looks like shit.
Whatever’s been happening inside his head for the last four days has finally caught up.
He glances up when I come in, and I stop in the doorway because Robert’s eyes are wrong. He hasn’t met my gaze directly in days and only talked to the side of my face, or found the window behind me very interesting. Now he’s staring right at me, and I almost wish he’d go back to the window.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit on the far end of the couch from him. There’s one cushion between us and about fifteen years of marriage I’ve spent the last three weeks setting on fire.
“I knew what I signed up for.” He stops and clears his throat.
“Tony, Adrian, all of it. I wanted you to have that.” His voice has a crack in it I’ve never heard before.
“But you lied to me, Shannon. You fed me the version of you that works at cocktail parties, and I ate it. And I can’t—“ He swallows. “I don’t know who you are right now. That’s what I can’t handle. ”
My whole chest goes tight.
I slide across the cushion and put my hand over his fist where it’s pressing into his own thigh. His knuckles are warm. He doesn’t pull away.
I’ll take it.
“Can we talk?” I barely get it out. “Really talk. The way we did when you first brought up the arrangement.”
Robert holds my eyes long enough that I can hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Then he nods once.
“Okay.”
He has the facts. What I never told him was why.
“I went back Sunday because the silence in the house was too loud.” My voice is shaking, but I don’t try to steady it. “I couldn’t stand it.”
He’s quiet. I keep going because if I stop, I’ll never start again.
“And that was wrong and I knew it was wrong and it made me wet anyway.” My thighs press together, and I hate that my body is doing this right now, in the middle of the worst conversation of my marriage. “I was wet before I walked through the door. That’s the part I can’t forgive myself for.”
Robert clenches his jaw. I watch the muscle flex, and my stomach drops.
“It wasn’t Tony. It wasn’t the sex.” I’m shaking so hard my hands won’t stay still in my lap. “I came harder than I ever have in my life that night, and I hated myself while it was still happening. It didn’t make me stop wanting it.”
I make myself say the rest.
“I didn’t just lie to you. I got off on lying to you.”
I wait for him to say something. The quiet stretches until I want to crawl out of my own skin.
Then Robert clears his throat.
“I need to tell you something, too.” He’s staring at his hands in his lap. “When you come home and tell me what happened. What they did to you. What you felt.” He swallows. “That’s the most aroused I’ve ever been. More than anything we’ve done together in fifteen years.”
Holy shit. On some level, I always knew. But hearing him say it out loud is different.
“And I’m scared of what it means that I need that.” He’s still not looking at me. “That without it, we go back to what we were.”
He finally looks up.
“When you lie to me, I can’t tell what’s real anymore. And I need this to be real. Even the parts that scare me.”
Even the parts that scare me. He said those words to me on the living room floor after I told him about Tony and Adrian. His mouth against my hair, his heart hammering.
I don’t know if he still means it. But he said it.
“I’m sorry.” It comes out cracked. “Robert, I’m so sorry. For all of it.”
He doesn’t say anything. My gut tightens because this is where he tells me he wants a divorce and fifteen years of marriage gets boxed up and I spend the rest of my life in a condo somewhere telling people my ex-husband is a wonderful man and I ruined him.
“I have a condition,” he says.
A condition. Not a goodbye. I grab onto that word like a rope.
“You don’t do this without me again. Ever.” He’s looking at me and his eyes are unwavering. “No more going to the casino alone. If this happens, I’m in the room.”
“You’re not—” My voice breaks. “You don’t want—”
“A divorce?” He almost laughs. It’s the saddest sound I’ve ever heard. “Shannon, I just told you that listening to you describe fucking other men is the most turned on I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t want a divorce. I want to be there. And I need to know you’ll never cut me out or lie again.”
I break open.
“Okay,” I say.
And then I’m crying. My face crumples, and I’m making sounds that aren’t words.
Robert takes my hand. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds on and lets me be a mess. When I’m done, his hand is still there.
“We’re going to figure this out,” he says quietly.
I look down at our hands. My ring pressing into his fingers. My nose is running and my mascara is probably halfway to my chin after five minutes of ugly-crying, and I’m closer to this man right now than I was on our wedding night.
I spent weeks destroying this man’s trust and he’s still holding my hand.