30. The Wedding Anniversary
The Wedding Anniversary
Nadja slipped quietly out of Karl's apartment and pulled the old wooden door shut behind her.
The hallway lay silent and ice-cold in the early morning.
The blind lust that had just torn through her body ebbed like a sticky tide and left behind a familiar, bitter emptiness.
The brief feeling of relief, of filthy satisfaction, for which she had smashed through every fucking boundary, lasted only a few minutes.
Now there was nothing left but raw regret, clamping her stomach shut with the ice-cold, crystal-clear awareness of what she had just ordered him to do.
For the first time, she had let him shoot his thick cum deep into her pussy without the slightest protection.
It wasn't comparable to that first time, when she had still been able to tell herself in panic that maybe her pill would somehow still work.
Nadja drew a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and brutally shoved the consequences aside. She could think about that later.
Right now, she had to go back into her own apartment and face everything. She didn't want to live in regret anymore. Not in secrecy. Not in this nightly self-hatred.
She didn't want to be the hypocrite Karl had seen straight through. And now her husband was finally going to confess what had really happened last night too.
Nadja opened the apartment door. Her entire body was tense, ready for a fight.
But the apartment lay completely silent.
She walked into the bedroom, eyes flickering, prepared to meet a cold, hateful stare.
But Markus was still lying motionless on the mattress with his back to her. Eyes closed. His breathing rose and fell slowly. Calmly. Evenly.
He was still asleep. Deeply. Nothing about him looked as though he had ever been awake at all.
Nadja stopped in the middle of the room and stared at his back. All the anger she had built inside herself during the short walk home suddenly seemed ridiculous.
No confrontation. No interrogation. Only a deeply sleeping husband who had absolutely no idea what bed his wife had just crawled back from.
Slowly, she exhaled. If he didn't know, then… it could wait.
She didn't want to face that inner tribunal just yet. A cowardly part of her almost sighed with relief. And she hated that disgusting feeling from the bottom of her soul.
Her body screamed for a shower.
Deep inside her pussy, everything was slick and sticky. Another man's semen—Karl's—was still slowly leaking out of her, clinging warm between her thighs.
She turned toward the bathroom. She wanted to rinse away all the filth of that morning—just as she had tried, again and again, in vain, to wash away her guilt.
Nadja stopped in the bathroom. Her gaze landed on Markus's phone lying motionless on the shelf.
Then a thought stabbed through her mind.
The lipstick. The strange whorish perfume. His short, evasive answer the night before.
If Markus really had cheated on her the way she had cheated on him, then the proof had to be inside that damn phone.
Nadja picked it up. The screen lit and asked for the six-digit passcode.
She didn't have to think. She entered the date of their wedding anniversary.
A soft click. The phone unlocked immediately.
That painful ease made her hand freeze.
Markus hadn't changed the passcode. It was still the exact same sequence of numbers.
A man planning an affair changed his passcode first.
Markus hadn't. He had left his entire life open to her, exactly the way he had on their wedding day.
Nadja bit hard into her lip and shoved the thought away. She was looking for proof of his guilt. Not reasons to excuse him.
She opened the messages app. A woman's name immediately jumped out at her.
Leonie.
The corners of Nadja's mouth pulled into a bitter smile. There she was. A young slut. Just as she had suspected.
A sick, twisted satisfaction coursed through her veins. At least she wasn't the only filthy one. Her husband was too.
She opened the conversation. The last message had been sent at midnight.
"I'm sorry about yesterday. I was way too drunk. You really are a decent man—almost annoyingly decent. Let's pretend nothing happened. Still colleagues, okay?"
Nadja read the line a second time. A third. Her heart hammered so violently it felt ready to tear out of her chest.
No. She didn't believe it.
Her thumb trembled slightly over the screen. Then her thumb began scrolling upward quickly.
The message history stretched back weeks. Months.
Leonie asked about a deadline with a winking emoji. Markus answered with exactly three lines about the deadline. No emoji.
Leonie sent a photo of a cocktail on Friday night and asked whether the boss ever went to places like that. Markus: "Get some rest. We have an early meeting Monday."
Leonie wrote that she was lonely and asked whether he had eaten yet. Markus replied with something about a report that was still missing figures.
Some of Leonie's messages had been sent at ten at night. Markus answered the next morning at exactly seven. Again, nothing but fucking work.
Nadja's finger moved faster.
She desperately searched for something. A joke that was too casual. An intimate late-night message. A heart emoji that absolutely did not belong there. Anything.
Nothing.
Dozens of times, that girl had thrown out bait. Dozens of times, her husband had answered like an ice-cold accountant. Steady. Boring. Correct to the point of absolute frustration—exactly what the other slut had eventually written herself.
One night can be an act. But nobody kept up that kind of consistency for months in a chat he had no way of knowing his wife would ever read.
The phone grew heavy as lead in Nadja's hand.
There was only one answer. He hadn't cheated on her.
There had been a young woman. A perfect opportunity. Maybe even a moment when he had almost caved.
But he had pulled the ripcord. He had come home.
The lipstick stains she had turned into an absolute verdict since last night were only the mark of a temptation he had firmly rejected.
And at the same time, the second devastating truth struck her.
She had used that exact stain as a cheap excuse. The excuse: He's filthy too, so I'm not the only one.
That was the thought that had driven her straight to Karl at dawn. It had given her permission to do everything she had just done—right up to the final boundary she had never allowed before.
She had clung to a lie she had invented herself in order to justify the deepest, filthiest fall of her life.
While he had gritted his teeth for her sake and held the damned line, she had torn down her own last line with both hands that same night.
Nadja's knees gave out. She slid down along the edge of the sofa to the floor as though the whole scaffolding had been pulled out of her body.
The phone lay heavily in her hand, the bright screen still showing Leonie's name and that boring, correct message history that destroyed everything Nadja had wanted to believe about herself.
Deep between her thighs, the sticky cum of a disgusting old man reminded her without mercy of what she had done.
Her entire body began to shake.
Regret rose inside her like a massive tidal wave and tore through her almost as uncontrollably as the orgasm Karl had just given her.
Only this time, it hurt like hell. Guilty. To the very core.
A few yards away, behind the bedroom door left ajar, lay the man she had just condemned completely unfairly. The man she naively believed was still asleep and knew nothing.
She had no idea that behind that door, Markus's breathing had long since stopped sounding calm like a sleeping man's.
Behind the door, Markus slowly opened his eyes too.
They were bloodshot. Whether from bottomless hatred or devastating pain was impossible to tell.
To be continued in Book 3.