I loved her since the first time I saw her. I loved her more than I could love anything in this world. I loved her with every bit of myself, and it proved to be my undoing.
When we were married we were poor, two students without two pennies to rub together. I spent my last cent on her ring, and we joined our lives together in a little ceremony at city hall.
From the first night everything went wrong.
He was watching us from the doorway, my rival and my roommate. He was watching us together and I read it all wrong.
She wasn’t upset, she was interested.
Bit by bit he stole her away from me. Bit by bit he turned her to him. Until she was his and mine no longer. Until the inner cruelty came out and I saw the truth of her while cowering in the darkness.
She’s not an angel sent from heaven above. She’s a demon sent to torture me, to show me how unworthy of her I am. She will have him if she wants him. She will stray from me because he can give her things that I never can.
I’m watching from the shadows. I can’t move a muscle.
I can’t look away.
Excerpt
“Where is your husband?” he asked her, practically spitting the word husband with mocking bile.
She looked up at him, tugging her robe closer to her chest and staring up at him and I couldn’t see her face from here but I knew it didn’t have the expression I wanted on it. I wanted it to be hard and aggressive. I wanted there to be hate written onto her face and I wanted her to tell him to go fuck himself and storm away.
But I know it was uncertainty, it was fear. I know that beneath it all there was need.
“He’s asleep,” she told him, shivering as he reached up and brushed a strand of blonde hair over her ear.
“Are you sure?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she told him, “He’s a deep sleeper. He’s down for the night and he won’t wake up.”
“Good,” he said with a menacing grin, “Then that means we can be as loud as we want.”
Mitchell was on her then, wrapping his meaty hand around the back of her head and pulling her into him. He pressed his lips against hers possessively, kissing her hard and firm as if he was showing her who was in charge, who was in command.
Her hands held tight to her chest, clinging her robe to her body as the last signal that she knew what she was doing was wrong even if every last stitch of her resolve was fading, melting away into nothingness and I was watching it.
Paralyzed, unable to intervene and unable even to say anything. Even if every instinct in my body told me to rise and shout, to scream and stop this. Even if I knew that the longer it went on the harder it would be to come back from this. That with each passing moment I was losing her more and more.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling this was right somehow. The sight of them together, the counter of her delicate grace with his overwhelming power. The force of his body against the willowy bend of hers. His darkness against her light just looked so engaging, so endearing and demanding that it made me want to watch, like watching an accident crash into death and destruction but knowing that the spectacle would be worth it in the end.
That both of them would burn the brighter for it.
One of my hands gripped the corner of the wall, the other pressed in a fist against the floor to steady myself as I watched him spin and pin her against the counter and she gasped and pressed her hands into it. She held onto that counter as if it was the only steady thing on this earth, as if it was the only thing to keep her head above water while the furious storm of her passionate need rocked her body.
He kissed his way down her neck and she moaned and pulled her head back. She gave him steady access to her body as the last remnants of her resolve melted away.
And when his fingers found the edges of her robe and began to tug it away from her I knew that she was lost to me. When her bare shoulders came into view I knew that she was never mine to begin with.
My ethereal beauty. My wife who I had always seen as something beyond me and who I could never understand fully had intended just this all along.
Because her bare back came into view and her robe slipped away and I knew that she was naked beneath it. That shuffling in our room had been her removing the panties and the shirt she was wearing. She had dressed herself up in that robe for him, wrapping herself up like a present to be unwrapped by him and he was eager with the gift that was on offer.