Chapter 21
MADDOX
Istared at my computer screen, trying to focus on the quarterly earnings report I was supposed to be reviewing. The numbers blurred together as I rubbed my tired eyes.
It was my last day in the office before traveling to Nightshade Cove tomorrow with Callie, and there was still way too much to tie up.
My incoming text notification dinged. Gwen again! Enough of this. I snatched my phone and hastily pounded out a response I should have sent her long ago.
I told my wife everything. I don’t want to see you anymore. Don’t contact me again.
I hit send and returned to my work, but it was only seconds until the phone dinged again.
That frigid wife will never satisfy you.
Rage burned through me at the insult to Callie.
My wife is a thousand times the woman you’ll ever be. She’s everything and you’re nothing. I wish I’d realized the reason you only fuck married men is because no man would ever want you for real. The time I spent with you is the biggest mistake of my life.
I waited for that one to show as delivered, and then immediately blocked her.
It was a relief to have that persistent background irritation resolved, at least. The week since Callie had allowed me into her memory had been particularly brutal.
After that night, she made two changes: she went back to speaking to me only to give commands, and she started tackling her list of men from the apps with much more abandon.
She’d had a different man over every single night, and I’d heard every wild, explosive orgasm they brought her to (sometimes several per evening).
Every morning and every night, before each meal I served her, I asked her if I could apologize again, and every time she simply shook her head no.
She was becoming a true master of how to punish me by denying me release, in more ways than one.
She could see how desperately I wanted to express my regret, and she would not give me that chance.
Instead, she was going to trap all my newfound self-loathing inside me with nowhere to go. I’d never felt worse about myself.
Every minute of every day, it just played on a loop in my mind: I was trash, I had the perfect wife and I’d shattered her, I deserved to be miserable forever for what I’d done.
The most damning fact of all was that I had no understanding of how I had become this contemptible piece of shit.
How could my inflated self-image have been so completely detached from the reality?
As I looked back, my actions were clearly indefensible.
But how had I never felt the slightest awareness of that until now?
Why had I treated her so terribly? Obviously, on some level I had always known what the right things were.
Be honest. Be faithful. Don’t make commitments you can’t or won’t keep. Don’t betray people.
Yet I had done all those things, repeatedly, to a person who loved me more than anything. And I had no clue how I had justified all of it so easily.
I was jarred to catch sight of the clock and see how much time had gone by with me blankly staring at the earnings report, thinking about nothing beyond my own failings. My work performance was growing worse by the day.
My obsessive thoughts about how badly I’d fucked it all up kept bringing me back to this same place. I understood I was awful, but not why or how to get better.
So far, I’d had only one idea about how to address this, and for the last few days I’d been desperately trying to think of something, anything else to try. Unfortunately, it was time to admit that I’d run out the clock on that, and I would not come up with anything better.
I took a deep, unsteady breath and went to close my office door. With heavy steps, I returned to my desk and called… a therapist’s office.
My entire life, I’d always thought therapy was the idiotic last resort of navel-gazing losers who needed to pay someone to listen to them whine. I struggled to think of anything I wanted to do less than go into some weirdo’s office to talk about my feelings.
But I knew that therapy was what you were supposed to do if you were horrible and couldn’t figure out why, or if you were trying to change and didn’t know how to do it. So… fuck it. I had to try something.
The receptionist who took the call was pleasant and efficient and made it all feel much less daunting than I had feared, and before I knew it I had an appointment scheduled for my lunch hour on our first day back from the Nightshade Cove trip.
I was relieved at least that they could get me in so quickly. Now that I’d committed to this path, I didn’t want to slow-walk it.
I hung up at the perfect moment, just as Duke and Ryder knocked at my door. I called for them to come in, and they both entered wearing somber expressions.
“Damn, who died?” I meant it jokingly, but the weighted look they exchanged told me this was serious.
“We don’t know yet,” was Duke’s downbeat reply. “But there has been a death.”
“There’s an announcement about it in the conference room. We have to get over there,” Ryder explained.
My heart rate immediately sped up. If it was one of the higher-ups, who knew who would be brought in to fill the void and how that might change the dynamic here.
With everything else I had going on, I had no energy left to navigate shifting office politics.
I needed this job to stay on coast mode as much as possible while everything else about my life was on fire.
A moment later, it occurred to me that this reaction was probably another example of my awfulness. I’d just been told someone had died, and my only thoughts were how this might affect me. Something else to bring to the therapist, I guess.
I jumped up and hustled down the hall with Duke and Ryder, but as soon as we arrived at the conference room, my back went tense. Something was up.
The only employees here were our extended crew. The other guys (and handful of women) in the office who were around our age and level.
And every fucking one of them was smirking and snickering, which only got louder when I arrived.
At the front of the room was some kind of poster board or painting on an easel, covered with a black sheet.
“I don’t have time for whatever bullshit this is,” I snarled.
I turned to exit, but Ryder blocked the door as Duke moved to the front of the room.
“Calm down, Mad Dog. We’ve all gathered to grieve together.” At that, Duke whipped the sheet off the easel.
Revealing that beneath it was a black poster board with a giant illustration of a grave! And written on the headstone: “In Memoriam: Mad Dog’s Hard-Ons.”
The entire room burst into hysterical, deafening laughter. “We heard about the curse on your dick,” giddy Duke yelled, projecting to be heard above the roaring shrieks of glee.
The sensation of being so completely exposed…
I was dizzy. My neck snapped around as I took in who was here.
If you made a list of all the people I most wanted to keep this news from, every one of them was present.
All the guys who would absolutely never allow me to live this down.
Veins popped on my forehead and sweat poured down my back as I charged to the front of the room. “You motherfuckers!” I roared.
I grabbed the poster board and ripped it in half—
When I was stopped by an icy female voice from the back of the room. “Put that down.”
I hadn’t noticed her in the corner, but Callie now stepped forward, looking as gorgeous as I’d ever seen her. She wore a skintight crimson dress that emphasized the lusciousness of every curve, with a plunging neckline that instantly seized the eye of every man in the room.
Magic sparkled on her fingertips as she gestured my way, and the ripped poster board immediately mended itself and levitated back onto the easel.
“Duke, Ryder, and I took a lot of care in putting that together. Have some respect,” she said.
The assembled crowd laughed even louder.
“I didn’t even know you talked to each other?” I stammered stupidly. As far as I knew, Callie had only chatted with Duke and Ryder in passing at the office Christmas parties.
“They reached out after you confessed to them about cheating on me. To offer their sympathy and apologies,” Callie chuckled.
“And to let her know we’re on her side,” Ryder said.
“And think she can do so much better,” Duke rushed to add.
“It was very sweet of you boys,” Callie cooed.
As I struggled to process, the room became a cacophony of everyone yelling nasty jokes at me.
“Aww, look at his face! Let’s call him Sad Dog now.”
“Looks like your job performance isn’t the only limp thing about you!”
“This is not appropriate workplace behavior,” I protested pathetically.
“Hey, don’t try to tell us what’s appropriate,” Duke said.
Ryder slapped me on the back. “Yeah, this gathering is HR-approved.”
“That’s correct,” confirmed Nancy, our HR head, who I hadn’t noticed in the crowd. “The company considers this an official wellness event.”
“How is this a wellness event?” I blurted in exasperation.
“It promotes wellness if the staff knows they might get cursed with sexual dysfunction if they’re stupid enough to cheat on a witch,” Nancy answered reasonably, before giving me a disgusted scowl. “Also, I really hate cheaters.”
Others in the group cheered and applauded that proclamation.
I did my best to block it out and focus on Callie, the only person here that truly mattered.
The humiliation I felt was painful and intense, and if it was only Duke and Ryder behind it, I’d have been gone.
But Callie… she was more than entitled to subject me to this. To worse than this, if she wanted.
Of course, I jinxed myself with that thought. Because it got worse immediately. Callie seductively slid her way right between Duke and Ryder, who both put a protective arm around her.
“I gotta say, Maddox, it was really a turn-on to hear from your buddies about how disgusted they were by your infidelity,” she said, locking her eyes on mine.
“We still feel terrible we didn’t realize what he was doing,” Ryder said, addressing Callie and ignoring me.
“If we’d understood, we would have told you right away,” Duke added, right into Callie’s ear.
“Boys, boys, do not blame yourselves!” Callie said, as the three of them folded tighter into each other. “I certainly know how convincing his lies can be.”
Their touches were growing more sensual and caressing. Envy burned through me. I was so desperate to touch Callie again, and to feel her touch, and to see my two buddies/rivals so freely enjoying what I’ll never have again…
I swallowed. “Are you guys… are you guys fucking?” I said, my voice small.
“Oh no,” Callie laughed, giving me a millisecond of hope that this wasn’t what it looked like.
Just a millisecond.
“Not yet, anyway,” she added.
“Not until tonight!” Duke crowed.
“I thought my first three-way would make the perfect send-off before the trip,” Callie beamed.
“No…” I whispered faintly.
“Yes!” Callie exclaimed. “I hope you packed already. You’ll have a lot of cooking to do this evening.”
“Yeah, we’ll be working up an appetite,” Ryder cackled.
“Preach!” added Duke, as the two of them fist bumped.
As dark dread surged within me, all I could do was struggle not to vomit. Throughout this nightmare, the only tiny consolation had been that no one else knew what was happening to me.
But now everyone in my world knew about my curse… and the fact that my two best “friends” were about to spend the night fucking the woman I loved, and forcing me to listen.