Chapter 5 — Not For Him #2
“Aren’t you going to check?” he pressed.
I walked to the table, my legs unsteady. I pulled out my phone. The screen glowed in the dim room.
Two messages. Both from Leo.
The first: I can’t stop thinking about you.
The second, sent just seconds later: I know it’s late. Can I see you?
Ben was beside me in an instant, reading the messages over my shoulder. His breath hitched. I felt a perverse thrill, followed immediately by a wave of nausea.
“Perfect,” Ben breathed, the word thick with venom and a twisted kind of triumph. “Answer him.”
My thumb hovered over the screen. The cool glass felt like the lid of a coffin. This was the threshold. If I crossed it, I would be doing what Ben wanted. I would be orchestrating a scene for his consumption. I would be pulling Leo back into the frame.
But if I didn’t…
If I didn’t, what was I saying? That Leo and I had something private, something that couldn’t withstand the glare of Ben’s gaze? That it was more?
Leo’s words glowed up at me: I know it’s late. Can I see you?
I thought of his hands, his mouth, the way he looked only at me. The direct line of his want. The hunger in me, newly awakened, yawned wide and desperate. It didn’t care about Ben’s pain, about the marriage rearranging itself like tectonic plates. It just wanted to be fed.
Ben was watching me, waiting. The watcher, desperate for one more show, even if it killed him. Even if it killed us.
My fingers moved before my mind could catch up. I typed a reply, the letters stark and final on the screen.
My husband knows. He’s here. He wants you to come over.
I hit send.
The whoosh of the message leaving my phone sounded like a door slamming shut.
Ben let out a long, slow breath. He looked at me, a strange, shattered light in his eyes. He had gotten his way. He was back in the director’s chair.
But as I looked at the three dots appear on Leo’s end, indicating he was typing a reply, I knew with a cold, certain clarity that Ben was wrong.
This wasn’t a return to the old script. This was something new, and far more dangerous.
We weren’t re-staging the past. We were stepping into a future where the lines had been erased, where the watcher was no longer a privileged spectator but a ghost in the room, and where the only thing guiding me was a hunger I no longer knew how to control.
My phone buzzed once more in my hand.
Leo’s reply was simple.
On my way.
Two words. No question, no hesitation.
I held the phone out so Ben could see the screen. He stared at it, his face a mask of something I couldn’t name—triumph, despair, a horrible fascination. He’d won. He’d forced the scene. But the victory was ashes in his mouth; I could taste it in the air between us.
“He’ll be here in twenty minutes,” I said, my voice flat. “He lives ten minutes away.”
Ben nodded, a sharp, jerky motion. He turned and walked toward our bedroom. “Then we should get ready.”
I didn’t move. The weight of what I’d set in motion pressed down on me, a physical force. The perfumed scent of my own infidelity still clung to my skin. I needed a shower. I needed to wash Leo off me before I invited him back onto me. The irony was a sick joke.
In the bedroom, Ben was moving with a frenetic, procedural energy.
He stripped the comforter from the bed, leaving only the crisp white sheets.
He adjusted the dimmer switch on the wall, lowering the overhead lights until the room was bathed in a soft, theatrical gloom.
He went to his closet and pulled out the chair from his desk—a plain, utilitarian thing—and placed it at the foot of the bed, just outside the direct pool of light from the bedside lamp.
His director’s chair.
I watched from the doorway, a ghost in my own home. “You’re not going to… participate?”
He didn’t look at me. “No. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Something real. Unstaged. I’m just the audience.” The bitterness in his tone was corrosive. “Go shower. You smell like him.”
The hot water did nothing to scour the feeling from my skin.
It plastered my hair to my neck and turned my skin pink, but inside, I remained cold, a knot of dread and a low, insistent thrum of anticipation.
I scrubbed with my vanilla-scented soap, trying to erase the memory of Leo’s sandalwood, but it was embedded in my synapses, not my pores.
When I stepped out, Ben was sitting on the edge of the bed, still fully dressed in his jeans and t-shirt. He’d opened the bedroom window a crack; the cool night air whispered in, carrying the distant sound of traffic. He held a glass of amber liquid—whiskey, neat. He didn’t offer me one.
“What are the rules?” I asked, wrapping a towel around myself.
He took a sip, his eyes on the window. “There are no rules. You made sure of that.”
“Ben.”
He finally looked at me. His gaze was hollow. “Do what you would do if I weren’t here. That’s the point, right? To show me what real looks like.”
The doorbell rang.
The sound was a shock to the system, a live wire dropped into the room. Ben’s eyes snapped to mine. For a second, I saw the boy I’d married, scared and lost. Then it was gone, replaced by the grim director.
“Answer it,” he said.
I pulled on a robe—silk, dark blue, one Ben had bought me for my birthday. A performer’s costume. I tied it loosely and walked barefoot to the front door. My heart was a frantic bird in my chest. Through the frosted glass, I saw the blurred shape of a man.
I opened the door.
Leo stood there, dressed in the same jeans and a different, darker t-shirt, a leather jacket shrugged over his shoulders.
His hair was slightly mussed, as if he’d run his hands through it on the drive over.
His eyes, those direct, unsettlingly focused eyes, found mine immediately.
There was no glance over my shoulder, no search for Ben. Just me.
“Hey,” he said, his voice low.
“Hey.”
He stepped inside, and I closed the door behind him. The familiar space of our entryway seemed to shrink, charged with an illicit energy. He smelled of the cool night and his own clean, male scent.
“Where is he?” Leo asked, his tone not wary, but simply… aware.
“Bedroom.”
He nodded, as if this was expected. Then he reached out and brushed a damp strand of hair from my temple. His fingertips were cool. “Are you okay?”
The question was so simple, so devastatingly off-script. It wasn’t Are you sure about this? or What does he want? It was about me. My state of being.
“No,” I whispered, the truth torn from me.
He cupped my cheek, his thumb stroking my skin. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do.”
He searched my face, and I knew he saw everything—the conflict, the dread, the dark, unwieldy want that had brought us here. “Then let’s go.”
He took my hand. His grip was warm and firm. He didn’t lead me; we walked together down the short hall to our bedroom. It felt like a perverse wedding procession.
Ben hadn’t moved from the bed. He sat, drink in hand, watching us appear in the doorway. His eyes went to our joined hands, and a muscle ticked in his jaw.
Leo didn’t let go. He stood just inside the room, his presence large and immediate. “Ben.”
“Leo.” Ben’s voice was a dry crackle. “Thanks for coming on such short notice.”
The politeness was grotesque.
“Talia said you wanted to see… this.” Leo’s gaze was steady on Ben, not challenging, but unflinching.
“I do.” Ben took another sip of whiskey. “Consider the fourth wall broken. Proceed.”
Leo looked at me. He brought my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles, a gesture so intimate and tender it made my breath catch. It was a declaration, a claiming, done right in front of my husband. It said, This is between us, and you are a witness, not a participant.
Then he turned his attention fully to me. “Take off your robe.”
The command was quiet, but absolute. It wasn’t for Ben’s benefit.
It was for ours. My fingers trembled as I undid the tie.
The silk whispered open, and I let it slide from my shoulders to pool on the floor at my feet.
I stood naked before both of them, the air from the window chilling my damp skin.
I felt exposed, but not in the way I had before.
This wasn’t a display. It was a surrender to the inevitable.
Leo’s eyes darkened. He drank me in, a slow, thorough look that felt like a physical touch. “You’re beautiful,” he said, the words meant only for me.
He shrugged out of his leather jacket, letting it fall carelessly to the floor. Then he pulled his t-shirt over his head. His chest was pale in the low light, the muscle defined. He undid his belt, the buckle clinking softly, and pushed his jeans and boxers down in one motion, stepping out of them.
He was already half-hard, his cock thickening as he stood before me, utterly unselfconscious. There was no performance in his stance, no glance toward the chair where Ben sat frozen. He stepped into my space, his body heat enveloping me.
“Touch me,” he said.
I reached out, my hands settling on his waist. His skin was warm, smooth over hard muscle. I slid my palms up his sides, over the flex of his ribs, to his shoulders. He was real, solid. My anchor in the storm of this room.
He leaned down and kissed me.
It was nothing like the kiss I’d described to Ben.
It wasn’t slow or exploratory. It was hungry, possessive, a reclaiming.
His tongue swept into my mouth, and I met it with my own, a moan catching in my throat.
His hands came up to frame my face, holding me there as he plundered my mouth.
I could taste the faint tang of whiskey on his tongue—he’d had a drink too, for courage, or for numbness.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Ben. He was statue-still, the glass clenched in his hand. He was watching, but his gaze was shattered, broken into a thousand painful pieces.
Leo broke the kiss, his breath hot against my lips. “The bed,” he murmured.