Chapter 7
EXHALING
Miranda calls just after dawn and I put her on speakerphone.
I’m already awake—I’ve been awake since four, sitting on the kitchen island with my feet on the stool and my phone in my lap, watching the numbers climb.
The clip hit two million views before I got home from the arena.
By midnight it was six. Now—twelve million people have heard my husband moan on a leather couch with his patient.
I keep waiting to feel something specific.
Triumph, maybe. Or guilt. Or the crash after adrenaline burns out.
What I feel instead is a strange, humming stillness—like the silence after an explosion, when the air is still vibrating but the sound is gone.
My body is electric and exhausted at the same time.
My pulse has been running fast since yesterday afternoon, a low-grade hum in my wrists and temples that won’t settle.
I slept maybe forty minutes. I don’t feel tired. I feel like I could run through a wall.
“The divorce was served twenty minutes ago,” Miranda says. “Process server caught him at the Marriott downtown. He accepted the papers and closed the door.”
“Good.”
“The licensing board complaint went in at seven sharp. Emergency review. The criminal referral is with the DA—I spoke to their intake coordinator last night.”
“Last night?”
“I watched the livestream, Nadia.” A pause. Something almost warm beneath the professional armor. “Then I made some calls.”
My phone vibrates against my thigh. A text from Harper—seventeen exclamation points and a link to a news article I don’t need to read because I lived it. Below that, notification after notification—outlets requesting comment, producers requesting interviews. I swipe them all away.
He’s lost everything. I scrolled past a headline an hour ago—his publisher already invoked the morality clause, pulled all five books from distribution.
His show’s cancelled. Jenna went public overnight, full statement, her name attached.
Other women are already coming forward in the comments, in the replies, in the places where silence finally breaks.
It shouldn’t be long before the board suspends his license.
I slide off the island. The granite is cold under my palms as I push away, and my bare feet hit the kitchen floor, and I’m standing in this house—my house, I realize, for the first time in fifteen years it’s just mine—and something unlocks in my chest. Not a sob.
Not a laugh. Something structural, like a load-bearing wall giving way, except instead of collapse there’s just—space. Room I didn’t know I was missing.
My hands are steady. I hold them out in front of me and watch them.
Flat, still, not a tremor. These hands shook for twenty-one days.
They shook while I passed Reid the salt.
They shook while I gripped a podium and told twenty-five thousand people who my husband really was.
Now they’re quiet. The shaking has stopped and it’s not coming back.
The house is so silent I can hear the refrigerator cycle on.
The baseboard tick as the heat kicks in.
Ordinary sounds. The sounds of a Tuesday morning in a house where nothing dramatic is supposed to happen, except the woman standing in the kitchen just detonated a career on live television and can still feel the stage lights on her skin and the microphone vibration in her fingertips.
My phone buzzes. Mrs. Novak, I’m a producer at—Delete. Nadia, we’d love to have you on—Delete. The vultures are circling, and they’re not wrong to circle, but I’m not carrion. I’m the one who set the fire.
I pour coffee. The machine gurgles, doing its job the way it always does.
I wrap both hands around the mug and feel the heat soak into my palms, and I stand at the counter where Reid dropped the word perform three weeks ago, and the memory doesn’t sting.
It doesn’t land at all. It’s just a thing that happened in another woman’s life—a woman who stood in this kitchen and swallowed it and went upstairs and lay in the dark and wondered what was wrong with her marriage.
Nothing was wrong with her marriage. Everything was wrong with her husband. And now millions of people know it.
I carry my coffee to the living room window. The front yard is still—manicured hedges, slate walkway, the mailbox with our name on it. Novak. I’m having that changed this week.
The sun is fully up now. A jogger passes on the sidewalk, earbuds in, oblivious.
The world keeps turning. My phone keeps buzzing.
Somewhere in a hotel room downtown, a man in yesterday’s suit is holding divorce papers and trying to figure out how the woman who smiled beside him for fifteen years became the woman who burned him down in front of an arena.
I take a sip of coffee. It’s hot and bitter and perfect. My hands don’t shake.
I’m done performing. The rest is just life.
Caleb’s voice on the phone is careful. “I wasn’t sure if I should call you.”
I’m standing at my kitchen counter, third cup of coffee, bare feet on the cold tile. It’s been two days since the Summit. Two days of phone calls from Miranda and notifications I keep swiping away and a quiet house that’s slowly starting to feel like mine instead of a set piece.
“No, it’s good you called.” My fingers trace the rim of the mug. “I want to see you.”
A pause. I can hear him breathing.
“Come over?” he asks, then gives me his address when I say yes.
It doesn’t take me long to get to Caleb’s place. I knock once. He opens the door and stands there—T-shirt, jeans, bare feet—and the sight of him does something physical to my chest. A release. A softening of the thing that’s been clenched tight behind my ribs for six weeks.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
I step inside and the door closes behind me and we stand in his narrow hallway three feet apart, and the distance feels absurd.
All those weeks of crisis and conspiracy and almost-kisses and six inches of expensive real estate on his couch—all of it building toward this ordinary moment in a hallway that smells like coffee and clean laundry, and I don’t want to talk.
I don’t want to debrief. I don’t want to process the fallout or plan the next move or be strategic about a single thing.
I close the distance. My hands find the front of his shirt. I pull him down and kiss him.
Not like the almost-kiss on his couch. Not tentative, not a question.
I kiss him like a woman who just blew up her entire life and is standing in the wreckage feeling lighter than she has in years.
His hands come to my waist and his mouth opens against mine and the taste of him—coffee, warmth, someone new—sends a jolt through my whole body.
I haven’t kissed a man who wasn’t Reid in nearly twenty years, and the unfamiliarity is dizzying.
Different pressure. Different rhythm. His lower lip is fuller than I’m used to, and his hands grip my waist with a sureness that says I know what I want without a single word.
“Take me to bed,” I say against his mouth.
He walks me backward down the hall, his hands sliding to my hips, his mouth still on mine.
My shoulder blades hit the bedroom doorframe and he presses me into it—his chest against mine, his hips against mine—and I can feel him getting hard through his jeans and the heat of it floods through me, a rush of want so sudden it makes my knees unreliable.
I pull his shirt over his head. His skin is warm under my palms and I spread my hands across his chest and the sensation is startling—new muscle, new texture, new body under my fingers for the first time in almost two decades.
My hands want to be everywhere at once. He unclasps my bra and dips his head and takes my nipple into his mouth and the sound I make surprises me—sharper, more desperate than I expected.
His tongue circles and flicks and his stubble drags against the curve of my breast, a rough-soft friction that’s completely unfamiliar, and my hips push forward into him involuntarily because my body has already made decisions my brain hasn’t caught up to.
We shed the rest standing up—jeans, underwear, everything kicked into a pile between the doorframe and the bed.
I’m naked with a man who isn’t my husband for the first time in eighteen years, and the vulnerability should terrify me but what I feel is unlocked.
Cracked open. The air on my bare skin feels like freedom and his eyes traveling down my body feel like permission.
He pulls me onto the bed. His hand slides between my thighs and his fingers find me already wet, slick, aching, and the groan he makes against my neck—low, reverent, hungry—makes my clit pulse under his fingertips.
“I’ve thought about this,” he murmurs against my throat. His fingers stroke through my folds, parting me, circling my clit in slow passes. “A long time.”
“Stop thinking,” I say. “Start doing.”
He sinks down my body. His mouth presses against my inner thigh, my hip, the crease of my leg, and then his tongue drags flat and slow over my clit and my back arches off the mattress.
His mouth is different—softer, wetter, more patient than anything I’m used to.
He eats my pussy like he has nowhere else to be, his tongue circling, flicking, pressing flat and dragging slow while two fingers slide inside me and curl forward.
The stretch is different—his fingers are thicker, and the angle he finds sends sparks up my spine that make me grip the sheets and gasp.
“Oh,” I breathe. “Oh, that’s—God. Do that again.”
He does it again. His fingers stroke that spot in a steady rhythm while his mouth works my clit, and the orgasm builds from somewhere deep—not the surface-level, perfunctory releases I’ve been giving myself in the shower for years.
This builds from my spine. From my hips.
From the place that’s been holding tension for fifteen years and is finally, finally unclenching.
I come with his name in my teeth and both hands in his hair, my thighs shaking against his shoulders.
The pleasure rolls through me in waves and I hear myself making sounds I don’t recognize—broken, animal, unperformed.
He gentles his mouth as I come down, his fingers still moving in slow strokes, extending every pulse.
He rises over me. His lips are slick with me and I pull him down and taste myself on his mouth and reach between us.
His cock is hard and hot in my hand—the first cock I’ve touched that isn’t Reid’s since I was twenty-six years old—and the newness of the shape, the weight, sends a shock of arousal through me so intense my inner muscles clench around nothing.
“Protection,” I say.
He rolls a condom on and settles between my thighs. The head of his cock nudges against my entrance and I’m so wet he slides the first inch in without effort, and we both go still. His forehead drops to mine. Our breath mingles.
“Look at me,” I whisper.
He does.
I tilt my hips and take him deeper, inch by inch, and the stretch pulls a moan from somewhere in my chest that doesn’t sound like the woman I’ve been for fifteen years.
He’s thick. The fullness borders on too much and lands exactly right, and when he bottoms out I wrap my legs around his back and hold him there, buried to the hilt, and feel my body adjust around him—a new fit, a new feeling, a different kind of full.
He starts to move. Slow at first—long strokes that let me feel everything, every inch of him dragging against my walls. His hand cups the back of my knee, changes the angle, and the next thrust hits something electric that makes me cry out.
“Right there,” I gasp. “Right—fuck. Right there.”
His pace builds. Deeper. Harder. The sound of skin against skin fills the bedroom and I’m matching him thrust for thrust, my hips rising to meet his, my nails scoring lines down his back. The headboard knocks the wall and neither of us cares.
The second orgasm is closing in already, building at the base of my spine, tightening my thighs—and I want more. I push against his chest.
“Wait—hold on.”
He pulls out, breathing hard, eyes questioning. I push him onto his back and swing my leg over. His cock is slick with me, jutting up against his stomach, and I reach back and line him up and sink down onto him in one slow drop.
“Fuck,” he groans. His hands grip my hips. His head falls back against the pillow.
This angle. God, this angle. He hits a spot inside me that makes my thighs quake, and I can control the depth, the speed, the grind.
I roll my hips—slow, deliberate—finding the rhythm that drags his cock against exactly where I need it.
His hands slide up my ribs to my tits, thumbs circling my nipples, and the dual sensation—the fullness inside me, his hands on my breasts—makes my head drop back.
“You feel incredible,” he says, his voice wrecked. “You look—Christ, Nadia.”
I plant my hands on his chest and ride him harder.
Faster. My thighs burn and I don’t care.
His hips thrust up to meet me and every collision sends a jolt through my clit.
I’m climbing again, my whole body tightening, and I grind down against him and stay there—circling my hips, pressing my clit against the base of his cock, chasing it.
“I’m going to come,” I say. “Don’t move. Just—right there—”
His hands dig into my hips, holding me in place.
I grind against him and the orgasm slams through me—the strongest one, full-body, clenching around his cock in rhythmic pulses while a sound tears out of me that I couldn’t perform if I tried.
He follows me over with a groan that vibrates through his chest into my palms, his hips driving up once, twice, his fingers bruising my hips, and then we’re both still.
I collapse forward onto his chest. His heart hammers against my cheek.
My body is shaking—not from nerves, not from fear.
From release. The kind that isn’t just physical, that lives in the muscles and the bones and the part of you that’s been holding yourself in a certain shape for so long you forgot you were doing it.
His arms come around me. I press my face into his neck and breathe him in—soap, sweat, warmth. A new scent. A new body against mine.
This isn’t forever. I know that with the same clarity I know the sun will come up and Miranda will call again and the legal machinery will keep grinding.
This is tonight. The first night of whatever comes next—the first night in fifteen years where I’m lying in someone’s arms and I’m not performing a single thing.
This is the life I’m choosing.
Thank you for reading!