Tonight he’s going to make me pay for my sins.
The terms of the agreement were simple, my body for his silence. Because he’d found me out on the town with someone else, with someone who wasn’t my husband, and now he was calling in my debt.
But the truth is so much more complicated than that simple little lie. It’s tied up with obligations and intentions. It’s confused with need and hunger.
What is the truth worth if you can’t prove a word of it? What is the value of fidelity if you never wanted it in the first place? What is the punishment for a cheater if she just couldn’t help herself?
Because I can’t help myself anymore and I know it. The control he has over me is meaningless, vastly outweighed by how much I’ve lost my own control.
And how quickly I’m going to lose myself in him. In this hard man who wants to use my body for his own pleasure then callously cast me aside. But maybe that’s just what I need…
After all, I haven’t been used like that in a long, long time.
Excerpt
About an hour after I’d first noticed him at the party my phone pinged and I slipped away from a conversation to check the message, somehow knowing it would be from him.
“I see Greg across the room from me now. Should I be going over to say hello to him, or would you like to say hello first?”
I swallowed hard, my eyes darting from side to side as I checked the people around me to see whether any of them were noticing me or noticing anything odd about me. My fingers trembled as I typed in the message, knowing what it would mean, and then my thumb hovered over the button to send it.
Eyes closed. Let go. Leap forward. Let it happen.
The message flew from my phone to his and though it passed through the air unseen I felt somehow that every single person around me knew what I’d said. My cheeks burned as I slipped my phone away and stepped quickly out of the crowd, sliding between the gaps in groups and making my way out of the party and towards the stairs that led to the upper floor of the house.
“Meet me in my bedroom,” I’d sent him by way of a response, the implication clear and evident.
Yet when I got to my bedroom he wasn’t there. I waited and I knew he was coming but every moment felt like an eternity as I struggled and fought against the fears welling up in me and telling me that he had changed his mind, that he had pulled Greg aside and was showing him the pictures, showing him my message, telling him what I’d done. That the door to my bedroom would never open because I’d made the wrong choice even though everything in me, every part of my body, was screaming out that I’d done the right thing.
No, not the right thing. God knows what the right thing would be but cheating wasn’t it. No I hadn’t done the right thing, but I’d done the only thing I could.
In my room, he comes to me and I close my eyes and it’s just the two of us. I feel him on my body and my first thought is to think of Greg. To think of the night that I first played pretend and the night that I made my choice to do this. I feel Aiden behind me and I wonder how I could ever confuse the two of them.
Wordless this man works on my body. His breath is hot on my skin and his fingers are nimble and sure as he tugs so hard at my dress that he nearly tears it. He pulls it from my body with ragged and rough movements and he casts it aside the moment he has it off of me.
I expect that he’ll do what all men seem to do with me. That this man will let his hands wander over my body finally touching the curves of me that he’s always wanted to touch. That maybe he will be rougher than the other men but that ultimately he’ll want what all of them want, to feel the warmth of my skin and the softness of my most sensitive places.
I am wrong.