Chapter 25
Lincoln’s POV
By the time the segment ends, my face is still plastered on every screen in the Helion atrium. Reporters shouting questions, executives shaking hands, investors buzzing like they’ve just witnessed the second coming of consumer technology. It’s loud and everything Helion wanted the launch to be.
But, shit I’m exhausted.
Ever since Auralis went live, my workdays have been a blur.
Testing updates, recording micro-interaction sequences, sitting through three-hour meetings where everyone pretends they understand what “implicit forgiveness signals” actually means.
There’s this constant stream of post-launch patches, telemetry readouts, behavior-drift audits.
Everyone wants a piece of me. Everyone wants a quote, a soundbite, a statement for the company feed.
I get congratulated so much that the words don’t sound like words anymore. It’s all just noise. Brain-rattling noise.
By the time I drive out of Hudson Vale and toward the outskirts into New Denver, I feel like I’ve finally exhaled. The city lights fade behind me, swallowed into the violet evening. My house sits quietly tucked behind a row of wind-bent birch trees. It’s half the size of the one I lived in before.
I couldn’t stay in that house after… after she left.
The lock clicks open, and before I’ve even kicked off my shoes I hear the soft mew. Morris barrels toward me. Seven inches tall, all fluff, big green eyes like he’s permanently surprised.
“Hey buddy.” I scoop him up. His little purr motor starts immediately, rumbling against me.
Lifting him higher, I kiss his nose. He butts his forehead into my chin and curls into my palm like he’s been mine forever.
I don’t know how a cat I rescued a week ago already feels like home. But the little guy does.
I set him down and he follows me everywhere.
If I'm in the kitchen he's there.
Going to the hallway? Right behind me.
I need to watch where I step. Every time I decide to make the mistake to back up he's right there, tail straight up like he’s the prince of my domain.
Well I'm the king so I guess that makes sense.
I swap into workout clothes. Even after launch day, discipline doesn’t stop. My mind’s too wired to just sit still anyway.
The workout is quick.
Forty minutes of weights, pull-ups, and then sweating on the treadmill. Enough to burn off the static in my head. Morris watches from the doorway like I’m the most interesting thing he’s ever seen.
Such a silly boy.
Afterward, I head into the bathroom. The shower blasts steam against the glass, fogging everything into soft white haze. My muscles finally unwind. I brace both hands on the tile and just breathe.
Breathe.
When I finish, I towel off and lean closer to the mirror. My hair’s gotten a little wild the past few weeks, so I trim it up.
Steady hands, slow motions with the clippers. Just a little cleaning up of the edges before I push my hair back. Should have done this before my shower. I miss wearing it out like before. Before everything got… complicated.
Morris meows from the sink, supervising the whole thing.
“Yeah, I know,” I mutter to him, flicking a bit of hair off my cheek. “I needed it.”
He blinks like he’s agreeing.
I look at my reflection for a moment too long. The launch, the cameras, the congratulations.
Even though I'm far removed from all the action I can still hear it rattling around in my skull.
Sarah's laughter breaks through all of it.
Sarah.
She’s been such a quiet strength throughout all of this. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without her. Maybe I would have had another assistant, but our chemistry is quite spectacular.
There’s a soft chime on my phone. Heading back to the bedroom, I take it off the nightstand. It’s a text.
Sarah: want me to come over?
I smile softly, more tired than anything else.
Honestly, after Gabrielle left… there was a small part of me that held out hope that she would come back.
She left most of her stuff at my house anyway.
But she never did. I tried reaching out to her, saying that I would ship her things to her or move them or do whatever she needed, but she straight up blocked me, at least I believe so.
However, that was put to rest when I realized she was in fact reading my texts.
After sending a question, the message would deliver and then the status would change to “read.”
There had only been a few times where I’d seen those three dots moving as she typed from her end, only for them to come to a standstill and disappear.
The anxiety I felt during those times honestly overshadowed the anxiety I feel with work.
She never spoke to me.
Maybe that’s for the best. She deserves happiness.
Checking her social media usually showed up bare, and the only thing I could gather a couple of years ago, when I was stalking her on there, was that she was traveling. Probably restless from everything I put her through.
Honestly, I’ve tried to move on, and pining after her hurt way too much. Not like I had the time to.
Work swallowed all of my attention, and then whenever I did have some personal time to myself, Sarah made herself a part of it.
There was a time I didn’t want to talk to her, but we worked together, so that was impossible.
She was very professional. She had apologized for playing a part in tearing apart my marriage, but I couldn’t let her walk away with that credit.
It was all me. I allowed my boundaries to be blurred and broken and crossed a few myself.
So it is what it is. And the September following the last time I saw Gabrielle, days after, it was her birthday and I’d left her that voicemail wishing her so, Sarah came over to keep me company at my house.
Sarah had initiated, but despite my body wanting that closeness and that release… despite how sexual I started to feel when Sarah took off her shirt and her bra, I stopped it.
“Not here,” I had said.
For all the disrespect I’d shown my wife, even though she didn’t live in our marriage house anymore, I wasn’t going to fuck another woman in our home. At the time, it still felt like our home. At the time, I still had hope she would come back.
Not to give myself credit or anything, but I did hold out for quite a while.
It was May of the next year when I finally gave in and had sex with Sarah again, when I was sure there was no hope of Gabby coming back.
Plus, Sarah was pulling away from me personally, and something about her being distant and sadder made me want to make her happy.
We couldn’t both be sad. If I could make one person happy, I would.
So I fucked her that day.
And then again and again until the guilt was no longer there.
The divorce had gone through anyway in December of the year Gabrielle left. No sense in hanging on.
As I settle in for bed, I type back to Sarah:
Me: no I’m really tired. see u tomorrow
Sarah sends me a wink instantly. I smile and then change tabs on my phone to go to my ex-wife’s social page. I haven’t been on here in a while. It’s been about five months, probably. She’s posted some new pictures of places she’s been. She rarely posts herself, and maybe it’s just for friends.
Obviously she blocked me on my previous account, the one I don’t really use that much except for family. So I made this new one just to follow her. It’s kind of fucked up, but I know my ex-wife. She probably got some of the unwanted attention from my popularity, and so she privated her account.
So I had to be creative with trying to follow her, and I put my profile picture as some random Black woman from a stock photo. Funny. Didn’t take her long to accept my follow request after that.
I liked a few of her pictures, places she had been. I wanted so badly to comment, and the only thing I did comment was on a photo where Gabrielle had revisited Timbuk Canyon.
Leaving a comment alongside the face of the Black woman I’m using as an imposter, I wrote:
“beautiful place. i had gone there with my spouse. live your best life”
The fact that Gabby hearted my comment told me she had no idea whatsoever that this was me using this account.
At the time, I even thought about concocting a friendship with her as this woman, but where the hell would that go? Maybe it would be for my own personal satisfaction, to get information out of her. But Gabby is also very private and wary of strangers.
She’s nice to everyone, especially if they’re respectful. But I wasn’t going to pry, because something tells me I didn’t want to know.
It’s not healthy anyway. It’s not like we’re ever going to get back together, so after I left that comment, I hadn’t gone on the social media platform for a while… until now.
Looking through her latest photos, there’s one of her.
She’s slick, because she didn’t actually take a picture of herself, just of herself through the reflection of the car driver-side door.
Just seeing the obscured silhouette of her, much thinner, her body holding the phone in front of her face, and her hair straightened or wavy down to her back, makes me feel a prick of longing.
Leaning back on the bed, I hold the phone in my left hand as I slide my right under the hem of my boxers to pull out my penis and start stroking.
I only have old pictures of her to go off of, but for whatever reason, the novelty of viewing this, knowing it’s the latest version of her, the most authentic and real version of her, the most live version of her that I can get right now, makes me miss her.
Most days when I’m quiet and alone, I miss her. I regret having hurt her, not because I got caught, but because I allowed myself to be stupid, to ruin the best thing I’ve ever had in my life. I know I’ll never find another love like that ever again.
It confused me just how easy it was to fall into the trap of cheating on my wife.
But honestly it was a trap I set for myself, because it could have easily been avoided.
Well, maybe not easily, since I spent all my time with Sarah.
But if I kept those boundaries in place and listened to my wife, none of this would have happened.
I wish I had been stronger.
“You look so good,” I whisper to her pic as I stroke myself harder to her mere reflection.
“I miss you so much Gabby. Do you miss me?” My whispers come out more stilted as my body shakes, orgasm getting closer.
It’s barely been a minute.
I haven’t even had much time to masturbate. And outside of that, I’m fucking Sarah anyway. But right now, when it’s quiet, when I can feel Morris curled up on the pillow next to me fast asleep, not a care in the world, my mind is fully awake.
Every part of it.
Every mistake and every success. Gabby was supposed to be a part of it. I was doing this for her. What good is it if she’s not here?
My dick gets harder as I close my eyes and stroke faster, not too fast. I want to imagine her here, sliding on me slowly the way she did that beautiful Sunday morning.
That beautiful Sunday morning right before everything went to shit.
Recalling how her body flowed as her wet pussy enveloped my dick.
“Mmm,” I moan, a hiccup escaping me as my breath catches.
For some reason, my mind melds the entire picture together, how jealous Gabby was when she realized I was on the phone with Sarah.
Then when we went to pick up Sarah, the tears Sarah shed and Sarah’s arms around me, only for me to notice the look of hurt on my wife’s face.
As fucked up as it sounds, even though I hurt her and I hate it, it turns me on knowing she was that possessive over me. My mind goes back to fucking Sarah, imagining my wife watching.
My ex-wife.
But she’s still my wife in the back of my mind. It feels… unholy calling her my ex anything.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, closing my eyes tighter, stroking faster, my thoughts solely on my wife.
Gabrielle.
My Gabrielle.
Gabrielle Teoni Faith Washington-Arnoldson.
She was mine, and I fucked up.
Is she under another guy right now? Is she keeping private because she has another relationship? Will that guy treat her better?
Then all at once, like I’ve done many times before, I imagine Gabrielle getting fucked by someone and me being in the position she was, walking in and finding her cheating on me.
Something I never entertained before.
Just the thought or the theory that she could be fucking someone else fills my heart with pain. Makes me feel empty and hollow. Makes me come so fucking hard.
Even though I’m alone in this house, I try to stay quiet as not to wake Morris.
My load is thick.
It’s all over my stomach, the rag I pulled out not having caught all of it.
Releasing a satisfied breath, I clean myself up with the rag, using some of the bottled water I have on my nightstand. Then I settle on my right side.
It’s so dark in this house.
So lonely.
So very lonely.
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