5. Behind the Glass Wall #2
He gave her what she was waiting for without a word of instruction, and the sounds that came through my study’s speakers next arrived in high fidelity, no distortion, every wet, blunt sound rendered clean and close, like the microphone had been built for exactly this and nothing else.
I heard her throat working. I heard the low, filthy murmur she made around him, half-swallowed, words I had to strain to catch and then couldn’t unhear once I had them.
“Give me all of it,” she said, her voice thick, wrecked already, and she pulled him deeper with the words, as if she meant them as instruction and not request.
My jaw was tight enough to crack a tooth.
A low hum had started behind my eyes, a pressure that had nothing to do with the scotch and everything to do with the sounds coming through the speaker.
I pressed my free hand flat against the desk, an anchor against the part of me that was climbing loose and had no intention of settling back down.
I didn’t move. I just watched my wife kneel on another man’s floor and make sounds I’d spent eleven years never once hearing her make for me.
***
Charles pulled back after a while, unhurried the way he did everything, and drew her up by one arm to the low platform bed, and I watched the session move through its next phase with the same fixed attention I’d have given a closing call I couldn’t afford to lose the thread of.
The corporate language I’d started with fell away.
Asset deployment had nowhere left to live once I was watching her back arch off the leather, her thighs spread wide under Charles’s hands, a fine sheen of sweat starting to catch the amber light across her shoulder blades.
I catalogued it anyway, because cataloguing was the only thing I still knew how to do with my hands still flat against the desk, my scotch dead and untouched at my elbow.
The wide mount held her whole body in frame, every line of her open and offered, no part of her held back or guarded the way she’d have protected herself in our own bed with the lights off.
The detail-focus unit found her face and stayed there, and I watched her nostrils flare hard, again and again, no longer the fast involuntary tell I’d first caught across a dinner table three nights ago but something sustained now, something she wasn’t fighting to hide because there was nothing left in her that wanted to hide it.
Her eyes had gone past bright into something closer to unmoored, wide and wild and fixed somewhere past Charles’s shoulder, past the ceiling, past whatever the room actually contained.
Her mouth kept moving. I leaned toward the speaker without deciding to, needing to catch every word, and once I had them I understood there was no version of this I’d be able to set back down later and pretend I hadn’t heard.
“Fuck me,” she said, flat, certain, no shame riding under it and no plea either. “Use me. I’m paid for. Don’t stop.”
She wasn’t performing. That was the part that lodged deepest. There was no theatrical gasp, no breathless quality.
She said the words with the flat certainty of a person confirming an appointment, a plain statement of fact from a woman who had already decided, fully, that the words were simply true.
That realization hit me harder than any of the sounds she’d made before it.
Charles matched her register exactly. “Turn over,” he said, and she turned, no hesitation, her hands finding the edge of the platform and gripping it the way she’d gripped the headboard two nights earlier, except there was nothing of me left anywhere in the room this time.
“Show the camera,” he said, and she angled herself without being told twice, her spine curving into exactly the position the detail-focus lens wanted, like she’d already learned the geometry of what the camera needed from her and was giving it freely, generously, more freely than she’d ever given me anything in eleven years of marriage.
“Again. Show Barry how you comply,” Charles said.
My name, spoken in that flat tone in that room, landed like a punch to the throat.
Her body answered the command before I had fully processed it, no negotiation, no pause, nothing that resembled the woman who used to ask if our own door was locked twice before she’d let herself go quiet in the dark.
Between one position and the next, she turned her face directly into the detail-focus lens, and for a second I thought she might be looking for me specifically, the way she’d found the camera the moment she’d walked into the room and smiled that smile that wasn’t the one I’d married.
Her eyes were steady this time, wide but not wild, something almost businesslike settling into them even with her chest still heaving and her skin still damp.
“I’ll do anything you want,” she said, unprompted, in answer to a question no one had asked. “That’s what the contract says.”
She said it the way she might have read a line item off a page, calm, complete, and then she looked away from the lens and back to Charles, and whatever she’d offered the camera in that moment had already been filed and closed, another clause satisfied, another deliverable checked off a list only the two of them could see.
My collar had gone damp against my throat sometime in the last twenty minutes, and I hadn’t noticed until my hand came up on its own and tugged at it, the room suddenly airless.
My scotch sat exactly where I’d left it, the ice long melted into a thin amber ring at the bottom of the glass, untouched through all of it.
I didn’t reach for it now either. My mouth had gone dry in a way no drink was going to fix, and my pulse hadn’t settled once since the countdown clock had hit zero, still hammering somewhere up under my jaw, loud enough that I could feel it in my own teeth.
I didn’t look away. Not once, not for the length of a breath, not when Charles’s hand closed around the back of her neck and pressed her down flat, not when her voice broke into something wordless and raw as she came for him.
Not as her eyes met mine through the lens as Charles stiffened, hips pulsing slightly as he filled her.
I sat there in the dark with my hand still pressed flat against the desk, watching two feeds at once, wide and close, full body and face, cataloguing every flare of her nostrils and every wild flash in her eyes the way I’d catalogued her for years before I’d had a name for why.
The monitor’s glass held my faint reflection, my face ghosted over the amber-lit room.
I watched myself watching her. Behind my own reflected stare, the scene kept moving, unbroken.
I sat there in the locked study, my collar damp and my scotch gone flat, and understood the truth.
The thing I dreaded most wasn’t anything happening on the screen.
It was the moment the feed would finally cut to black.