Chapter 41
Lincoln's POV
It’s Sunday morning, and I didn’t have to work out today, because my body railing Sarah is workout enough. She likes it very hard and rough in the mornings.
Feels great.
I watch her ass jiggle as I slam into her. She’s on her knees, bent over the sofa cushions, face resting on them, and I’m on my knees behind her, holding her waist as I go fast.
She showed up here early in the morning. It was kind of crazy because it was only 40 minutes after Gabby left.
Gabby is exhausting sometimes, but I can’t even blame her for being upset. I really wanted to move past all of this, and I’m always wondering if hiring her was a good idea.
I feel like I owe it to her, of course, but maybe living in the same house is not a great idea. Not if she’s going to constantly bring up the past all the time. Maybe it’s still very much the present for her.
Maybe I’m entitled, but I wish we could just exist in the house together the way we did when we were married. When we’re not fighting, it almost feels like that.
When I opened my eyes to her standing over me, I wondered what she was doing.
Any normal man probably would be terrified thinking she was trying to stab him in his sleep, but even though it was dark, I could make out the look of tenderness on her face.
And my brain processed, when it happened, that she had touched me.
But she had crossed that boundary she agreed not to. She caressed my forehead or something.
The memory was so welcome and familiar and sweet that I actually thought it was part of my dream.
Weird thing is, I had been dreaming about lying in bed with her on a Sunday morning right before making love.
We would lie facing each other, and she would cup my face like that or brush my hair back with her finger…
only for me to wake up and see her doing exactly that.
Why did she do that?
She says she doesn’t care about me anymore, but obviously she doesn’t mean it. She’s probably just really angry, and of course anybody would be. I’ve never been cheated on, and I can only imagine in my mind what it would feel like, but I’ve never actually lived it.
I tried to rationalize my mind so many times to justify why I slipped. It was just a very human moment, and I made a mistake, but the thing is I kept making the mistake over and over. I should have cut it off at the source.
Sarah screams as she comes around my dick. Her screams pull me out of my thoughts, causing me to come too. I can hold off pretty long with her, since she prefers long sessions. I had to learn and train myself not to come too quickly. For Sarah, 20 minutes is coming too quickly.
Now I’m tired.
Sarah grunts as she backs her ass up into me, smiling and laughing in satisfaction. “Did you come?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I reply.
“You did? When?”
“Right after you did.” My cock throbs twice with its latent spasms. “See.”
“You were so quiet. Why don't you make any noise when you do it?” Sarah asks, getting off her knees and standing on them so she’s almost the same height as me. She throws her arms around me, pulling me in for a kiss before leaning back, waiting for the answer.
I shrug one shoulder. “I don't know. I don't feel the need to.”
“The first time you and I did it you were pretty loud.”
“Yeah, because it was a really big bust.”
“So why don't you have one like that again? What? Was it only super hot because you were married at the time and you knew you shouldn't have been doing it?”
Sarah smiles impishly, but this feels like a kick in my heart. Maybe she’s on the money. It was really hot because I shouldn’t have been doing it. My cum was so forceful that day because I was giving in to a forbidden fruit.
Shame washes over me. No matter how hot it was, it wasn’t worth the fallout.
It wasn’t worth losing the only thing that was ever really that important to me.
I love my job, love what we’re working on, love being part of history that will spearhead humanity into the future they only dreamed about in sci-fi movies.
And I still derive joy from that… I share that joy with Sarah but it’s not the same. She doesn’t have the look of wonderment in her eyes the way Gabby did.
I used to think Gabby didn’t care because she didn’t understand what I did.
Sarah convinced me that nobody outside of our field could truly understand.
And for some stupid reason, I believed that.
But even though Gabby didn’t understand, there was something I saw in her eyes that I didn’t see in Sarah’s or anybody else’s.
Pride.
Awe.
My mind flashes back.
I had just finished making this tiny little circuit, nothing special by Helion standards now, but back then it was everything to me.
It was a small table-top robot, barely larger than my hand, and it could pick up a berry from one end of the counter and move it to the other.
We were still dating. That memory comes back so vividly I can almost smell the solder.
Gabby had walked into the kitchen, wide-eyed, watching the little machine wobble along with its berry.
“How do you do that?” she asked, her voice full of amazement.
I lit up instantly and started explaining how I programmed the microcontroller, how the servos responded to the input voltage, how I calibrated the grip strength so the berry didn’t get crushed, how I mapped the surface with a primitive distance sensor.
Just rambling excitedly, waving my hands, showing her every tiny part.
Then I realized she was staring at me completely lost.
“You don't get a word I'm saying, do you?” I said.
“Everything that you're saying to me sounds like gibberish,” she said back, and then she laughed… this… sweet warm laugh… and threw her arms around me, kissing me right on the mouth.
I can almost feel her hand on my cheek again when she grabbed my face gently, made me look at her, and said:
“You have the most beautiful mind I've ever seen. Being with you is like a piece of heaven. I might not understand everything you say, but I'm grateful to share it with you. And… I'm so… so proud of you. You're going to be a badass inventor or something one day.”
She had smiled at me like I hung the moon.
And the look in her eyes every time I talked about something technical made me feel like some outer-space alien or a god to her, something she didn’t understand but could glorify.
I loved it.
But then, when I had to work with Sarah and the others at Helion… people who didn’t stare at me blankly, who actually spoke the language I spoke, who could meet me thought-for-thought and concept-for-concept, it felt like I had found my tribe.
Found my calling.
My words weren’t wasted on them, because they understood every single one.
And then Sarah came. I’d never seen a woman that beautiful, with lips like hers, speak the way she does about tech. Maybe it’s sexist on my part, but that’s the experience I had. Most women I met were like Gabby, especially if they were pretty like Gabby.
It is what it is.
Most women don’t go into tech fields, and even if they do, they don’t usually end up in the same upper levels as the people at Helion. And if they do, they’re usually not the ones who look like they could be on the cover of a magazine.
So for me, Sarah was an anomaly.
Exotic.
And that turned me on, especially when I realized that woman was interested in me. As much as I was trying to be faithful, and even though I knew it was wrong, I started justifying little touches here and there even after I said the boundaries.
The thing is I didn’t even say anything to Gabby about Sarah liking me. Not like that. It was when Gabby made it plain that I was talking about Sarah a lot.
Sarah this.
Sarah that.
I hadn’t realized at the time that I was doing it, but because I worked with Sarah all the time and I was quite amazed by her, naturally she came out in my speech.
Gabby called me out on it. Called me out on things that I mentioned Sarah doing for me or saying to me. She was actually the one who let me know that Sarah had a crush on me.
As soon as my wife put that in my head, and I knew it was possible that this woman might actually like me, everything changed.
It’s not Gabby’s fault. Because I already started having those weird feelings.
That flutter in my chest whenever Sarah would show up.
I tried to hide it. That little flicker of horniness.
That tiny increase in blood flow in my cock whenever Sarah was around, always wearing those form-fitting clothes that showed every curve of her body.
That one time she wore a short shirt and leggings to work and I could see the print of her tiny pussy through it… Christ. How hard it was to focus on my job after that. I gulp remembering all the times I had to go to the bathroom at work to get one off just so I could focus.
And then what made it worse is that even though I made love to my wife at home, merely half an hour to an hour later I would steal away to the bathroom or something just to cum in two minutes thinking about Sarah.
Or I would look through Sarah’s social media, where she posed in provocative ways in her posts. I beat off to them so many times trying to convince myself it was superficial, and it was absolutely maddening working so close to this woman and not being able to touch her the way I wanted to.
Having her tease me and say shit to me that I couldn’t stop thinking about even while I was with my wife.
How I looked forward to going to work just so I could see Sarah and be around her and fantasize.
And all of it was lust. Because I never loved Sarah. She was an idea for me.
Even now, after fucking her, I feel so empty. Whenever I would make love to my wife, especially in the beginning, all I wanted to do was stay in bed with her and hold her.
Sometimes she would cry when she was vulnerable, and it would make me want to cry too.
This beautiful, gorgeous, regal woman who looked at me with such adoration, who would move the world for me.
Who, when I passed out from heat exhaustion that one time we went backpacking together, somehow…
I have no fucking idea how… was able to get me back down the mountain on her fucking back.
I don’t remember half of it, but accounts from other people told me, “your wife carried you on her back.”
Most people would never know it, but that’s why Gabby gets flare-ups sometimes from her lower back. She’s so much better now, but goddamn. I remember being in and out, her voice telling me, “stay with me Link. I love you, don’t you dare.”
She had said she remembered pushing herself hard. And I was carrying so much gear. She was hot too, but she said she could keep going. But I had already been exerting myself by setting up everything and… it was just too much.
The first thing I remember is my heart beating out of my chest and suddenly breathing so fast. The only thing I could do was throw off the gear in an attempt to breathe. And I felt like throwing up. Gabby claimed I did, but I don’t actually remember doing it.
Gabby fought for me. Broke her little body to save me because our phone didn’t work up where we were. She’s the one who had told me that we should invest in a satellite phone.
We promptly got one after that.
It’s crazy to think about, but I could have died that day. Even if she couldn’t have gotten us down the mountain, I know and I trust my wife enough to know she would have done everything in her power to keep me alive or to prevent me from going into heat stroke.
The love I feel right now, just at the memory of her doing everything she could for me, all the things I took for granted, all the things I missed and conveniently forgot when I started working at this job… it’s almost suffocating.
It’s the worst hell anyone could go through, someone dangling in your face all of the riches you had, just for you to chuck them over a cliff, not even realizing that’s what you were doing.
I wonder if she’s resting. What she’s doing right now. It’s so good seeing her, just having her under the same roof.
Even if for the rest of our lives we ended up arguing, I would still be grateful just to know that there is a world with Gabrielle still in it.
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