6 - THE SCALES FALL
Lacey
I finished charting the last admission a little before three, with an hour still to kill before my afternoon consults.
The lounge was loud, resident doctors laughing over vending-machine sandwiches, a nurse stirring instant coffee with one hand and scrolling with the other, so I took my hour back to my office instead and shut the door.
I pulled out the chair and sat, then opened my phone to check the time. Two fifty-eight. The cat cam icon sat in the corner of the screen. I hadn't looked at the feed since I'd angled the camera this morning. My thumb hovered. Then I tapped the app.
The feed loaded. The living room in afternoon light, the couch we watched television on, the cat bowl by the kitchen doorway, still full.
Then movement in the hall, and Brad walked into the frame.
His shirt was untucked, sleeves pushed to his elbows. Two women came in behind him. Young. College-age. One of them blonde, the other brunette, both of them moving around him with loose familiarity.
Students. They had to be his students.
My mouth went dry. I told myself I was misreading it, that this was a study group, an office hour, anything.
And then the blonde reached up and tugged at his collar, easy as breathing, and the brunette fit herself against his back with her chin on his shoulder, and he turned his head and kissed her the way you kiss someone for the hundredth time.
I almost closed the app. My thumb was right there on the screen. Instead I dug my earbuds out of my desk drawer where I'd left them last week, pushed them in, and turned the sound up, because I needed to hear it and I needed it to not be true.
The blonde dropped onto the couch and patted the cushion beside her. He sat. The other one came down onto his lap. His hands at her waist. The blonde already on her knees on our living room floor.
"Why not the bed?" the blonde asked.
"Couch is fine." His voice came through my earbuds exactly as it was, the measured voice from the kitchen table. "I don't want smells on the bed. You know the rules."
The brunette laughed against his ear. "Always so careful."
The rules.
Then the brunette shifted and took the room over without seeming to move.
She reached out and wound her hand into the blonde's hair, and for half a second, I thought she was angry, and then she pulled, slow, and leaned close and said something the mic almost caught, and the blonde's whole face changed. Went soft. Went pleased.
"Your turn," the brunette said, louder, amused. "Ass up. Face right here." She settled back against the arm of my couch, spread her knees, and pointed. The blonde went to it at once, folding down with her face where she'd been put. She'd been waiting to be told.
"You take the other end," the brunette said to Brad, not even looking at him.
And Brad obeyed. My husband, who negotiated the temperature of a room, who'd called my one small request a hard boundary, got behind her and took her by the hips and did exactly as he was told.
Then I focused on the blonde, her mouth on the other woman's sex, being taken by Brad. She was an object for pleasure.
It hit me low, wrong, entirely inappropriate, a throb, answering the video. By the time I caught up to what had happened I was already there, already wet, watching my marriage end.
I recoiled from it. Flinched, alone in my locked office, as if I could get away from my own body. No. Not this, not now. What was wrong with me? I pressed my thighs together to make it stop but it did not stop.
I was crying. My husband. Two students. Our couch.
The full cat bowl in the corner of the frame, the reason I'd put the camera there in the first place.
And underneath my crying some twisted thing in me was enjoying it, and I hated it with everything I had.
I was devastated. I was wet. It felt wrong and awful and I couldn't stop either.
Some part of me that was still functioning reached over and started the recording. I watched the small red dot appear in the corner of my screen as though someone else had pressed it.
I should have looked away, but I didn't. I watched every minute, with my hand pressed hard over my own mouth and the tears running down into it and that other ache sitting low, patient, and unbearably wrong.
When they were finished, he stood and tucked his shirt in and smoothed his hair down with both hands. "You two should go," he said.
They dressed and left with almost nothing to say to each other. The living room emptied. The couch. The coffee table. The cat bowl, still full. As though none of it had happened.
Almost too late I grabbed the trash can and vomited, again and again, hearing my retches, worried distantly that someone would hear and come. Then I wiped my mouth. Clean up, my mind said, but I just sat.
I don't know how long I sat with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them. When I made myself look at the clock it said 3:51. Break was nearly over. Somewhere in the building there were children who needed the competent version of me.
I stood. I smoothed my white coat.
The antiseptic met me in the hallway, the same as it met me every day, the smell of the one place where I was good at what I did and sure of myself and nobody's fool.
I walked back into it. I had consults at four and a marriage that had turned out, sometime between breakfast and three o'clock, to be a lie.
I kept walking.