HERS

“Easy there,” he said, and I felt his thudding heart against me for a moment before it slipped away.

“What?” I asked him, a little bit defiant, “I saw you checking me out. I know you think I’m hot. I know guys like you, too. If I wasn’t married you wouldn’t say no.”

“But you are married, Cassie,” he cautioned, I shrugged in response, “Okay well then let me list off the reasons why this is a terrible idea. We’re at my company retreat? Your husband or anyone else could come looking and find us at any moment?”

I shrugged again.

“Well then there is really only one last point I can think of right now and that is that I don’t trade sex for favors.”

I smiled this time, knowing that we were rounding the corner towards what should have clearly been the inevitable the moment he turned me away from the crowd.

“I think I know why you’re having trouble thinking,” I said, “It’s because all your blood is rushing somewhere other than your brain.”

I inclined my head down to the bulge in his pants and to his credit, the man didn’t shy away from it. He shrugged himself, not doing anything to hide his obvious and sizable arousal.

“Besides I’m not looking for favors,” I continued, “I’m just betting on something.”

“What’s that?” he asked, amused.

“Well you see, Dean, I am married. Rather well married at this point and tied at the hip to my husband. Where he goes, I go. And I’m assuming after you’re done with him and he loses this job that’ll be somewhere else. Some other city. Some other locale.”

I slowly, achingly slowly, closed the gap between us.

“That means I’m not going to be around anymore, and it means that you’ll be losing out. Losing out on something you’re not going to be able to give up after I’m done with you today.

“Because today I’m going to show you everything that I can give to you. I’m going to be like a drug, getting in under your skin. You’re going to be addicted to me and when we’re done you’re going to need to keep me around. To keep me close.”

Close was the right word. I was so close to him now. Staring up into those hard and determined and hungry eyes of his.

“Which is precisely what you won’t be able to do if you let my husband go.”

It was bravado. Sheer bravado. It was bluff and bluster.

It was working.

HIS

I listened to every word she said to him. I watched every moment.

I knew that I’d waited too long.

Watching Cassie kiss him struck me like a knife in the heart. It cut me to the core, knowing what was happening right in front of my eyes.

It hurt on so many levels.

That it was him, of all people, who had gotten her into this position. That this man who hated me for who I was and everything I stood for made it sting worse than if it had been anyone else.

Dean wanted to take everything from me and I would have let him if it only meant that I could keep her. But of course, he knew that. Of course, this was his plan from the start.

He wanted to burn my world to the ground and leave me with nothing. That sort of scorched earth policy had no mercy in it.

And then there was her. My dear and darling wife. The love of my life and the everything for me.

She had to know that it wasn’t my intention to lose it all. She had to know that I’d never set out to hurt her.

But she was setting out to hurt me.

I could see it in the way that she kissed him, the way that she teased him afterward. She was so eager and I knew that part of it was because she wanted to cause me pain for betraying her as I did. But I knew that part of it as well was about her own desire.

I have no illusions about who I am. Not a fit man. Not a strong man. Not a good lover and now not even a good provider.

Being with a man like Dean must have been such a thrill for her. It must give her such satisfaction, to be with the man she would have thought that I was when she said yes to my proposal.

Truthfully though, they couldn’t hurt me nearly as much as I could hurt myself.

The self-inflicted wounds are what really sting. A stabbing pain in my chest over and over with each of my failures.

Losing all of our money. Losing my job. But most of all losing my will to act.

When had I become such a coward? Was I always this way? Was I always the sort of man who hid in the shadows as another man kissed his wife? As he pulled her into his arms and took her and satisfied her in ways that I never could?

The fact that I’m here in the dirt and he’s up there with her makes me want to weep. Flailing myself and gnashing my teeth as I watch it all happen. As I can’t look away.

I know that I should stop this. I should have been up there a long time ago. I should have told her before we came here, the moment that I lost it all.

Now that I’m down here in the dirt I can’t move. If I walk around the corner they’ll see the mudstains on my knees and worse, they’ll see the thickening bulge in my pants.

So I stay. I tell myself that I’m staying because her actions might help me keep my job. That if I lose this job I lose her anyway, because I won’t find another and she won’t stand to be with me after this.

I tell myself that, but it’s a lie. The truth is in the way that I feel when I watch her kiss him again. When I watch him kiss her back now, his hungry hands roaming over her body as things move so rapidly in front of me.

I feel that hot heat in my cheeks, in my chest, in my groin. The heat of humiliation and arousal that’s becoming all tangled up in one another in a way that I know will never be undone.

I’m knotted inside, stuck in this place. Crouched in the dirt and watching it all happen.