Chapter 20
MADDOX
Callie’s ominous warning rang through my head as she placed her hands on my temples. I took a deep breath and straightened my back, bracing myself. I was about to ask what this would feel like…
When I was suddenly somewhere else entirely. I was in the bedroom, feeling the deeply unpleasant sensation of suddenly being incredibly small. The weight distribution, the center of gravity shifted impossibly low, the way my—her—arms hung light and narrow at my sides… everything felt wrong.
Was this what it always felt like to be in Callie’s body?
My instinct was to straighten to my full height, to take up space the way I always had, but this body simply didn’t have that presence.
It was like being compressed. I never realized how much I relied on the authority granted by my imposing height and broad shoulders until this moment, when it was suddenly gone.
The vulnerability of it made my skin crawl.
Experiencing these moments through Callie’s perception was far more overwhelming than I was prepared for.
It was the day she would discover my cheating, but still early in the evening. She stood in front of our full-length mirror in her underwear, holding up the cheerleader outfit. As I looked through her eyes at her own reflection, what I saw made me sick to my stomach.
This couldn’t be Callie. The woman in the mirror looked so defeated and drained.
Her skin was sallow, and dark circles hung under her dull eyes.
Callie had a gorgeous figure, but in this reflection she looked so misshapen it could have been a funhouse mirror.
Every flaw was magnified tenfold. She looked like someone in the advanced stages of a horrible disease.
Maybe this will work, her thoughts echoed through my consciousness. If I can look good in this, he’ll want me again.
She pulled on the cheerleader skirt, and I felt her suck in her stomach, felt her distaste for how it looked as she struggled to adjust it to land just right.
Is this stupid? Do I look ridiculous? she worried. Do I look like I’m pretending to be twenty-one again? Is he going to just laugh at me?
The horror of it crashed over me. This was what I’d done to her. My neglect, my lack of attention, my constant rejection… all of it had broken her down until she couldn’t even see herself anymore. My stunning, vibrant wife had been reduced in her own mind to this sad, unappealing ghoul.
Just try harder, she told herself. I just need to try harder. And be better for him. Be someone he wants so badly that he’ll rip this outfit off of me.
The insecurity radiating through her made me want to scream. This was my fault. I had put all this doubt and self-hatred there.
The memory shifted as we jumped forward a few hours. She was now dressed. In her reflection, she looked much better than she had earlier, but still much worse than I’d ever seen her look through my own eyes.
The yawning insecurity I’d felt within her moments ago had been forcibly suppressed, and in its place was the most desperate, yearning, painful hope. Her thoughts as she tried to reassure herself of my love were even more agonizing to hear.
Maddox still loves me. Maddox still wants to start a family with me. It’s just that his job is burning him out. That’s all it is. But that’s going to change tonight.
Then came the sound that made her whole body light up with anticipation—the front door opening as I returned home. The surge of excitement that went through her was achingly pure and intense.
“I’m upstairs, babe! I have a surprise for you!” she called out.
I heard her internally reprimand herself not to sound too eager, felt how her heart hammered as she tried to arrange herself perfectly. She was practically vibrating with anticipation, adjusting her pose several times in the seconds it took me to climb the stairs.
And then I walked in.
I hadn’t thought it was possible to be more disgusted with myself, but when I experienced the love and trust and adoration that surged through Callie at the first sight of me…
The force of it was incredible, shocking me with its intensity.
This was real love. Unconditional, all-consuming, selfless love.
The admiration she felt for me, the lust…
she looked at me like I was everything to her.
Like I was her whole world. Every cell in her body was yearning to feel my touch.
The depth of her emotion was staggering.
It wasn’t just attraction or affection or fondness.
It was a devotion so pure and beautiful, I didn’t even have the words to begin to capture it.
But I immediately grasped that I had never truly understood what love was until this moment of experiencing Callie’s feelings for me.
And I had been so fucking oblivious! Not only was I not returning even a fraction of what she was giving me, I wasn’t even recognizing it! She had been giving me the most incredible gift, and… oh fuck.
A moment before Callie’s memory caught up to this point, I recalled my own memory of how disinterested I had been in her advances, how entirely focused on my nasty mistress I had remained throughout her efforts to snag my attention.
And now, to know that in the seconds before I drove the knife in, all this was what had been going on in her heart?
I wished there were some way to stop this, but there wasn’t. I was only a passenger. This had all already happened, and it was too late for me to change anything. It was too late for me to protect her… from me.
And then it happened. My past self took in her cute, sweet, sexy cheerleader look, and it was brutal to view the cruelty in my own eyes. I could not have looked colder or more disinterested. My gaze swept over her as if she were nothing, eventually making eye contact with undisguised annoyance.
“Oh. What’s this?”
The dismissive tone hit her—hit me—like a physical blow. I felt her confidence crumble as hot shame flooded her body. All that hope, all that desperate desire to connect with me, shattered in an instant. The humiliation was suffocating.
He couldn’t care less. He couldn’t care less! I want to crawl into a hole and die. This was supposed to be his thing. His passion. I’ve made myself into the perfect sports wife, and it doesn’t tempt him even a little.
Enduring Callie’s struggle to keep it together as she watched my past self make his way to the shower was excruciating.
Now she was alone on the bed, and the sound of running water and my angry music thumped through the door. She was staring at my phone where I’d left it, and I felt the war inside her. The desperate need to trust me battled against the growing certainty that something was wrong.
And hearing her thoughts, I was stunned to learn that she had known my passcode for years. I had assumed she’d only learned it recently.
All that time, I had been completely confident that I had my illicit communications locked up such that she could never get at them, no matter how hard she tried.
When the truth was she could have searched my phone at any moment.
When I’d been patting myself on the back for how clever I was, it was actually only her trust in me that had kept me from being discovered.
The pressure of my shame was becoming unbearable.
Her hand reached for the phone, trembling. I felt her disgust at herself for looking, the way she hated that she was about to violate my privacy.
That I had made her feel disgusted at herself, merely for finally getting wise to my betrayal? I was a disgrace.
She entered the passcode, and the nude selfie of Gwen filled the screen.
The pain that tore through her was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It wasn’t just hurt. It was annihilation. A complete gutting.
Everything she’d built her life around, everything she’d believed about us, about me, about our future together, it all disintegrated in that moment. The betrayal was a bullet to the chest, stopping her heart.
Her body convulsed with the force of it, and I felt the tears exploding from her eyes and her throat constricting as she tried not to scream.
But she kept scrolling! I desperately willed her to stop, so badly wanting to pull her away from seeing the explicit details of my disgusting behavior. But of course, this was devastation I’d already inflicted. I was far past the point where there was anything I could do to stop it.
The memory again moved forward in time, to after I’d left the house. Callie stumbled down the hall to my office, reeling.
Four years, she thought. Four years of my life, trying to make him happy. Four years of being the perfect wife, of setting aside my magic, my family, my entire world. For what?
I gave up everything for him. Everything. I’m so fucking stupid.
She wasn’t stupid. She’d only been a woman in love who thought she could trust her husband. And I’d taken that love and defiled it, exploited it to indulge my own selfishness.
She made it to my desk and took a deep breath as she opened my laptop and clicked into my messages app. No, please, don’t read them, I thought desperately.
As she dove into all my obscene sexts with the other women, disgrace scalded me.
I felt her processing the realization of just what a low man I was.
That I hadn’t just cheated, but that I’d been systematically lying to all the other women too.
I felt sick as I directly experienced her respect and adoration for me disintegrating, one vulgar adulterous sext at a time.
I needed this to be over. It was too much. Could I stop it? Please, Callie, I’ve seen enough, let me out of this, I’m so sorry, please, let me out, I thought, hoping she could sense my begging.
But this memory just kept driving forward into greater horrors, as Callie dove back into my long text history with Gwen.
How could I have been so arrogant to not at least delete my history?
Each message landed like a slap, particularly the mentions of “the wife” like she was some pathetic joke between us.
Can the wife do any positions other than missionary?
The text from Gwen sat there on the screen, mocking her. And underneath it, I felt Callie’s thoughts plunging into the darkest place yet.
I’m not enough. I was never enough. He needed all these other women because I’m boring. Because I’m not adventurous enough, or sexy enough, or interesting enough. Everything I gave him wasn’t worth anything because I’m not worth anything.
No! I wanted to scream at her. You were always enough! You were everything! I was just too dumb and pathetic to see it!
But of course she kept reading, my compounding betrayals confirming every horrible thing she’d ever thought about herself. Every insecurity I’d planted with my neglect was blooming into full poison now.
What the fuck had I done to this incredible woman?
The magic released, and I slammed back into my own body. I was still kneeling on the living room floor, and I pitched forward.
The pain—her pain—was pounding through me, and I felt it everywhere. I’d had no idea. No fucking idea what I’d done to her.
I’d thought cheating was just about sex. I’d thought it was separate from our marriage and separate from her. But feeling it from her side, experiencing the destruction I’d caused—
“Callie,” I gasped, but my voice broke completely. Tears were streaking down my face. My shirt was drenched with them. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know I was hurting you like that.”
She rose to her feet, her expression stone-cold.
“Please,” I begged, crawling toward her on my hands and knees. “I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I had. You loved me so much, and I just—I threw it away.”
Her face remained hard and unmoving.
The words were pouring out of me now. “You tried so hard. You gave me everything. You were so perfect, and I couldn’t even see it. I was so focused on myself, on what I wanted, I never even looked at what I was doing to you.”
She turned and walked toward the stairs. I crawled after her.
“I’m such a pathetic excuse for a man. I failed you completely.”
She kept moving, and I kept crawling.
“I can’t believe I treated you that way. I’m a fucking disgrace. You deserved everything, and I gave you nothing. I’m so sorry. I’ll never forgive myself.”
She glanced back at me. “Well, we have that in common. I’ll never forgive you either.”
And with that, she ascended the stairs, leaving me collapsed at the base of them, crushed under the weight of my guilt. Her pain was still pulsing through every inch of my body. I finally understood why she’d cursed me, why she’d taken everything from me, why she’d reduced me to her servant…
It wasn’t even close to enough punishment.
What I’d done to her—the betrayal, the humiliation, the complete disregard for her feelings—it was beyond unforgivable.
I lay there on the floor, my body wracked with sobs, finally understanding the truth.
I had been gifted the most incredible love from the most incredible woman, and I had spat on it.
I had brutally and completely betrayed the only person who’d ever loved me.
And there was nothing I could do to ever make it right.