I can hear them from down the hall. I can remember the faces of the people staring at me. I know what’s happening, I know what she’s doing, but I need to see this for myself.
If you knew my wife now, you’d never believe the woman she used to be. She’s become someone so different from the person she was in college. Become a woman who uses the desire men feel for her to her advantage.
But in college she was the awkward one. She was the one who wasn’t invited to parties unless she was the punchline. Pranked and humiliated time and again, and always by him.
I can’t believe my eyes. I can’t believe she’s with him now. After all the humiliation and pain he caused her he still has such a hold over her.
All he needed to do was ask and she was on her knees for him.
It’s like a compulsion with her, a sucker for punishment. She knows who he is and she knows what she’s doing to me but she’s compelled by the hold he has on her. The hold that he has always had.
She sees me now and it’s obvious she doesn’t care. She made her choice and she chose him. She chose to give him her body and her soul.
All the things that he did. All the pain that he caused her.
She was his all along.
Excerpt
By the time I turned back to them with drinks in hand they were gone. The crowd had shifted slightly and I stepped into it, walking around people and searching for them in the mass of people that was starting to feel an awful lot like a crush of them.
So dense that I felt like I was suffocating. So thick that I felt like I was wading through them.
And while I felt like it might have been my imagination at first, more and more I had the sensation like I was being watched. Like people were staring at me without trying to let me know, looking at me from out of the corner of their eyes and watching my every move.
And in their gaze was pity and understanding. And all of a sudden I felt it, a connection to who April used to be, the understanding of how she was humiliated time and again and the understanding of why she kept coming back for more.
Not a compulsion like I’d believed for so long. Not ignorance or because it felt good.
But because I was drawn to it, drawn to her. Because no matter what happened I wanted to be close to her, to be near her, to be a part of her life.
She was my Will, and I would do anything to keep her happy.
Finally someone had sympathy for me, stepping into my path as I walked the floor aimlessly searching. He had that same pity in his eyes but that sympathy drew him into me rather than repelled him into whispered judgment like the others.
Stepping up to me, a moment of indecision crossed his face before he leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “Outside and to the right. I’m sorry.”
Then he was gone just as quickly.
More even than moving with purpose I felt myself drawn. Drawn towards the exit with the crowd almost parting before me to let me through. Their gazes burned into the back of my head, burning me with shame and humiliation that was hot in my cheeks as I stepped through the doors and turned to my right.
One foot in front of the other down the empty hallway. Drawn inexorably forward and out of my own control, drawn through the hall with the identical doors and the empty walls as April pulled me to her.
And in the hall all I could hear was the echo of my footsteps at first, a rhythm that was slow and plodding just like me.
How could I not see this? How could I not have anticipated this?
I knew her and I knew what she was like and I should have expected that this would happen.
Betrayal, that was what this was. Her betraying me. Her using me. Her leading me on like this.
Her making me witness every last bit of this happening.
I started to hear them at first. The sounds that could only mean one thing. I knew what was happening from the moans and the grunts and the lilts of laughter. I knew that she was with him and I knew precisely what they were doing.
It should have been enough and I should have walked away. I knew, after all, knew it in my bones.
But a part of me needed to witness it for myself.
I could hear my heart pounding as I walked up to the door, my head dizzy as the world raced around me. My blood was rushing in my ears but still I moved forward, drawn into it without any thought or concern to anything but seeing.
Stepping up to the window and peering through, confirming my suspicions without any need to.
She was on her knees for him, on the floor staring up at him with that fucking smile on his face. Like he had won. Like he was taking his victory lap. Like he knew what this meant to her and that was enough for him.
Sex was a competition for a man like Will. It was a game of dominance and submission, an interplay of power and pleasure. Sport hunting, with one party the hunter and the other the hunted.
He was finding his joy in the fact that she was submitting to him so fully. Taking his joy in the fact that she was attached, that he was fracturing the bond between us and pushing his way into the cracks.
I couldn’t look away.