Chapter 2
ROXANA
Ishut the bathroom door behind me, coming face-to-face with my reflection in the mirror.
Only the small light fixture on top of it is turned on, glowing softly orange, revealing warmer undertones in the tangled mess of my ebony-black hair.
I run my fingers through it to smooth it, but I abandon the effort when they catch in some of the more persistent knots.
I study my face briefly; my dark brown eyes dripping with unsatisfied lust, the aquiline slope of my nose set between high cheekbones, my mouth with its full upper lip that makes it look perpetually poised for a kiss .
.. My cheeks have hollowed out in recent years, my features sharpening in a way I find attractive. I only wish others found it so as well.
I set my phone on the side of the sink, and as I hit the play button, music fills the small, mosaic-tiled room. I turn up the volume. It’s not like Silas doesn’t know what I’m about to do here, but I don’t need him listening in.
I open my side of the washbasin cabinet and take out my pink rabbit vibrator and lube from behind my various body lotions and tubs of bath foam. I only spread a small amount of lube over the silicone surface since there’s already more than enough of it sloshed all over my entrance.
I tug the polka dot shower curtain out and away from the bathtub before lowering myself into it.
Lying back, I prop my legs on each side of its rim.
I spread the lips of my pussy, and I push the vibrator as far in as it will go, pressing the clitoral stimulator firmly against the needy bud.
The toy whirrs to life with the press of a button, and I groan with relief as pleasure ripples violently through my whole body.
My breath shortens, and I close my eyes.
And when I do, my mind wanders where it always goes when I’m like this, spread-eagled in a tub, fucking myself with a purring rubbery stick, giving myself a release that my husband is either unable or unwilling to give me, and I’m too proud to beg for.
Infallibly, my imagination puts up only the feeblest of fights before it gives in to the memories of Silas.
Not as he is now. Not even as he was ten years ago, but rather to the idea I had of him ten years ago.
He seemed so large to me back then, larger than life itself.
I was already an adult, too, of course, but in a way that still felt very much like I was just pretending to be one, whilst Silas was properly adult.
He was so direct about what he wanted, and he knew exactly how to get it from me.
There was not a thing in the world he wouldn’t know, not a problem he couldn’t solve.
He was like a giant, and all the boys I had known before him simply vanished in his shadow.
With two clicks, I ramp up the vibration intensity from low to high, skipping medium.
With my ankles propped firmly against the cold ceramic, I buck my hips, occasionally pulling the dildo out and sliding it back in to feel the thicker, quivering head press against the lower portion of my unloved cunt, bliss trailing through the cavity like an aggressive shiver.
And in my mind’s eye, I see Silas towering over me, sitting sideways on the edge of the tub and looking down on me.
“That’s it, baby,” the vision croons. “That’s it. Fuck yourself good for me. Show me how beautiful you are when you shatter.”
Squeezing my glutes tight in an up and down motion, grinding over the vibrator’s artificial length, I run my spare hand down my thigh, imagining that it’s him caressing me, and I hate both him and myself.
God, I’d love to cheat on Silas. I have thought about it often enough.
And it’s not like I haven’t had opportunities.
But the problem is that it only ever appealed to me as a way of getting back at Silas.
I’ve only ever fantasised about doing that so that he would find out.
And then what? Realise he didn’t want to lose me and make amends?
Feel at least a fraction of my outrage? Kick me out?
In any case, and with only one exception to note, no other man has ever featured in that scenario as anything more than a dildo like the one currently in my hand, to be used for one purpose only and then discarded.
Which is why I haven’t done it. Because Silas would still be winning. He’s ever the winner in this disguised duel of ours, this fight that started as a dance and somehow escalated into something hostile, a push-and-pull, a vicious quid-pro-quo.
As it often does, feeling bitter distracts me and kills my building euphoria with the efficacy of an executioner’s swinging axe.
Try as I might, applying pressure to all the same spots, all sensation is gone.
All that’s left is mechanical whirring and the soulless tousling of my flesh inside that’s triggering absolutely no reaction in me, bar self-loathing.
My hands are sticky with lube, and my finger keeps slipping as I struggle to change the vibrator’s mode, circling from long-to-short vibration to slow-and-quick.
I generally don’t enjoy these as much as a continuous tempo, feeling that the abrupt jabs and vacant pauses prolong the approach of my climax, and in this position—alone in a cold fucking bathtub—I want to get things done as quickly as possible.
But what these irregular, changing modes do achieve well is a change, jerking me out of my slump.
So that when I switch back to my preferred, continuous, high-intensity mode, ecstasy soars through me sharp and fast, and I have to bite my fist to stop myself from moaning out loud.
With my thumb, I push and drag the clitoral stimulator up, bending it until the whole bean-shaped bundle rests flat between my folds, and its impact against my clit is nothing short of brutal. I suck my breath in, gasping, tremors cutting through me.
But Silas—not the real one, the one made of recollections and fantasies—won’t let me be.
The rich crown of his hair that shows no sign of thinning is between my legs.
I can almost feel the tantalising scratch of his beard from memory.
My thighs are thrown over his back, even their fleshier apex trim and delicate-looking against the broad expanse of his shoulders.
And the vision of him is so real that for a moment I forget that it’s just me fucking myself, and it’s like he’s working at me again the way he used to.
It was a revelation for me back then, the way he insisted every time that he wouldn’t put his dick inside me until I’d come on his face at least once.
I don’t think any of my boyfriends ever even remotely considered the possibility of a female orgasm.
Before I met Silas, sex was something you did, something you let be done to you, solely to please a man.
When Silas said for the first time that he wanted to make me come with his tongue, I kept refusing, horribly embarrassed and feeling the same way I did once when a teacher at my school confused my name with someone else’s and tried to give me a prize for a competition I hadn’t participated in.
But Silas didn’t relent, and he was so good to me, insisting that it was just as much for him as it was for me, that I couldn’t expect him to stay sane until I let him taste me.
And so I did. And the next time I burst through his office door after hours, I barely closed it shut behind me before I was begging him to do it again.
Silas showed me that not only could my own enjoyment be an integral part of sex, but that it could even be its main purpose.
He took so much pride in always giving me pleasure.
Until he didn’t.
Groaning, I pull myself up and kneel in the tub.
I lower myself with my legs wide apart, until the backs of my thighs rest on my heels, and I no longer have to hold the vibrator because it’s propped on the base of the tub and held in place firmly by my spasming pussy.
I hold on to the bathtub’s rim tight and rock my hips lightly, imagining myself riding Silas’s cock, which is something he never really liked, but let me do occasionally with words promising delicious danger.
I can almost hear him, rasping, “Go on then, baby, play at being in control. Just so that later I can show you how much you are not.”
Not wanting to do it out loud for fear that he would hear me, I mouth his name, over and over, jerking and gyrating, tearing myself apart with ecstasy, potent even though solitary.
“There’s no prettier sight than your body falling apart underneath my touch,” I recall him saying, and my throat constricts at the memory. “Always so readily, so voraciously. The way you react to me, Roxana ... sometimes I think I was put on this Earth to ruin you.”
The inherent issue with marrying and settling down young is that it feels like the other person has been your whole life.
Because, really, he has! And if things don’t work out, there’s nothing to go back to.
The fact that I’ve no income to speak of and no work experience makes it as good as impossible to leave unless I’m willing to move back in with my mother in Romania.
And I’d rather go and take a nap on railroad tracks than ever do that.
“That’s right, beautiful,” my vision fuses with my imagination and croons, cruelly this time, like he’s relishing my anguish. “You can never leave me, can you? There is absolutely nowhere for you to go.”
Whimpers roll from my lips, and I throw my head back, because stern Silas, Silas the tormentor, oh he never fails to tap into the darkest part of my soul and push me into a freefall.
Heat explodes deep within me, and a single tear rolls down my cheek as I ride out my orgasm, my release quaking through my body in ripples before dying out all too soon.
I pull the vibrator out and switch it off, but I stay crouched in the tub for a while longer, listening to a song without hearing any of its lyrics.