Chapter 4
I wake slowly. My thighs are sore and my pussy is tender. I was too exhausted to shower last night so there’s dried cum on my skin. Evidence everywhere, and I don’t want to wash any of it off.
I don’t feel shame. I feel powerful.
The sheets beside me are cool. Robert is already up. The smell of coffee drifts upstairs. He must have been up for a while.
I stretch, and the soreness spreads through my body. My inner thighs protest when I move my legs apart.
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling fan making its lazy circles, waiting for the familiar guilt to land.
It doesn’t.
I take inventory instead. Not of the damage, but of the woman who earned it.
I’m different now, and it takes a minute to name how. For weeks, I’ve been circling around what I’m becoming. Is this a phase? Will I snap out of it one day and go back to being the old me?
That question is gone. It vanished somewhere between Adrian’s denial and Robert’s mouth on my pussy, and it’s not coming back.
I know who I am.
I get up and pull on Robert’s t-shirt. It smells like him, clean skin, warm cotton.
I catch my reflection in the bedroom mirror and stop.
My hair is a mess. There’s mascara smudged under one eye.
The bruise on my hip peeks out below the hem of his shirt.
I look like a woman who was mercilessly fucked by three different men in the span of six hours.
I look good.
I pad downstairs on bare feet. He’s at the kitchen table, scrolling his phone with a mug of coffee in his other hand. A second mug sits steaming across from him.
“Hey, you.” He looks up when I come in. His smile is warm and lazy, and I love this man so hard my chest hurts.
“Hey.”
I sit down and wrap my hands around the warm mug. Take a sip. Perfect.
We sit in comfortable silence. Sunlight pours through the kitchen windows, and the backyard looks impossibly normal.
“Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“I need to say something, and I need you to hear it.”
He sets down his phone. Gives me his full attention. This is the Robert I fell in love with, the one who listens like you’re the only person in the world.
“I’m a hotwife.”
The words hang in the air between us.
“I don’t want to pretend this is just experimenting anymore.
It’s not a phase. It’s not me going through something.
” I meet his eyes, and my voice doesn’t waver.
“This is who I am. I’m a woman who fucks other men and comes home to her husband and tells him everything.
I’m a woman who gets off on being denied and used.
And I’m done apologizing for it or pretending it’s temporary. ”
Robert doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He just looks at me.
Then he reaches across the table and takes my hand.
“Say it again.”
“I’m a hotwife.”
“Again.”
“I’m a hotwife.” My pussy clenches at the word like she’s claiming it too. I smile at him, and it’s the realest smile I’ve worn in years. “And you’re the one who made me this way.”
He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses my knuckles. “Damn right I did.” His voice roughens. “My hotwife.”
He’s quiet for a beat, and when he speaks again, his voice is different.
Stripped down. “You know what I keep thinking about? All those years you sat next to me at dinners and fundraisers, smiling that smile, saying the right things. I always knew you were performing. I just thought that was who you were, the performance.” He squeezes my hand.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen you not performing.
Last night, this morning, right now. You’re just… you.”
My eyes sting. Fifteen years, and he’s just now telling me he saw through me the whole time.
“That’s why I want to be in the room,” he says. “Not because I need to see other men fuck you. Because I need to see you like this. Real. Alive. Not the woman everyone else gets.”
“Robert—”
“Mine.” He holds my gaze. I want to bottle the look on his face. Pride. Desire. Love so deep it makes me dizzy. “Yours. Always.”
We finish breakfast. Robert goes to refill his coffee. Everything is warm and golden.
My phone buzzes on the table.
I glance at it, expecting Wellington Foundation committee spam or a reminder about something I’ve agreed to and forgotten.
Tony: Someone’s been asking about you.
Every nerve in my body goes still. I go cold so fast it’s like someone opened a window in January.
A second message. An image this time, grainy, clearly from a security camera. A man at the bar, leaning in to talk to someone out of frame.
I recognize him immediately.
James Whitmore. Robert’s colleague. Robert’s friend. The man who offered to take Robert home from the Wellington Foundation Gala, the same gala that started all of this.
A third message:
Tony: His name is James Whitmore. He described you pretty well. Said he saw you at the bar before heading to the elevator. Asked Diana if she’d seen a woman matching your description around the casino. She played dumb.
I stare at the screen. My hands have gone cold. The phone is shaking, or maybe my hands are shaking. I can’t tell.
James was at the casino. James saw me. James asked about me by name.
My mind spins through possibilities. He could have been there gambling. He could have seen me in passing and thought nothing of it. He could have—
He noticed me going to the elevator. How much does he know? How much can he guess?
My stomach lurches, and for one awful second I think I’m going to be sick right here at the kitchen table. I press my hand flat against the surface to stop the trembling. My ring catches the light.
If James tells Robert he saw me at the casino, that’s fine. Robert knows I go to the casino.
But if James saw me when I came back down from Tony’s office… if he noticed the wrecked hair, the smeared makeup, and connected the dots…
“Everything okay?”
Robert is watching me from across the table with his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. His gray eyes are attentive. Concerned.
Tell him.
The thought is loud and obvious. Tell him right now. Show him the texts. He knows about Tony and Adrian. He’ll understand why James being there is a problem, and together you can figure out what to do.
Tell him, Shannon. This is what you promised. This is what makes everything else work. Since when does Shannon Matthews lie to the man she loves?
I open my mouth.
The first word is right there—sitting on my tongue, ready to drop into the space between us. I’ll turn the phone toward Robert, and we’ll look at James’s face on that grainy security footage together. We’ll figure this out the way we figure everything out now. Together.
And selfishness hits me right in the ribs.
Because if I tell Robert that his colleague was at the casino asking about me, Robert might decide the risk is too high.
He might want me to stop. He could suggest finding somewhere else, someone else, and the thought of never walking down that hallway to Tony’s brass nameplate again, of never feeling Adrian’s hands grip my hips or having him deny me…
My mouth closes.
“Fine.” I paste on a smile. It’s the same angle I’ve perfected through fifteen years as Mrs. Robert Matthews. “Just committee stuff.”
The lie comes out smooth. Easy. Natural.
And it makes me want to throw up.
Robert studies me for a beat longer than I’d like. Then he nods and returns to his phone. I’ve been performing for fifteen years, for Catherine Wellington and Carol Price and every charity board and country club function. I know how to wear a mask. I just never thought I’d wear one to lie to him.
I pick up my coffee with both hands to hide the trembling. The ceramic is still warm. Grounding.
I’m supposed to be honest with him. That’s the foundation underneath the hotwife label I just claimed with such confidence ten minutes ago. The reason this works, the reason we’re closer than we’ve been in years, is because I’m supposed to tell him everything.
Everything except the business conversations I overheard. Everything except this.
Two lies now. Two secrets sitting in my stomach like stones.
I stare out the kitchen window at our manicured backyard. The perfect lawn. The perfect house.
I’m a hotwife. I said it three times this morning and meant it with my whole heart.
I’m also a liar. And the worst part is how easily those two things coexist inside me.
I told Robert I’d always come home to him. I told him I’d share every detail. And I meant all of it.
But I also know, with a certainty that sits like ice in my belly, that I’m not going to stop going to the casino. Not for James. Not for anyone. What I found in Tony’s office is the first thing that’s made me feel alive in a decade, and I will not give it up.
I feel like an addict protecting her supply.
Just one more time.
I drain the last of my coffee. I’ll figure out what James knows. I’ll handle it. And then I’ll come clean.
That’s the lie I’m choosing to tell myself.
One more time.
The End