This has to be a joke. This can’t be real. This is crazy.

Who is this woman?

This isn’t my wife, my demure and innocent little wife. My naive wife who has never had a man inside her before me, whose only experience was a handful of kisses and one accidental hand job.

How did she learn to move like that?

I am entranced, following along in the wake of her like she’s cutting the only path I can walk. Drawn behind her like she’s a heavy weight on a bedspread and I am a marble tumbling down to meet her. I can’t not follow her. I need to follow her.

But this is madness. Fucking another man was never on the table and never in the cards. That joke, that damnable and stupid joke that I made that was just a joke and never meant to be taken seriously and I don’t, in any way, understand why I even said it.

I don’t want her to fuck someone else.

And yet as I follow along behind her I know that I could speak up and stop this but I can’t. I can’t put it into words and I don’t even know why I’m here and why I’m not sitting in my set while this happens, while this woman that I love and I need and I want to be mine gives her body to someone else.

All I can think of is the nightie.

White lace stained with off-white and her shocked face, blushing, at the thought and the sight and the evidence of what she’d done. My innocent little wife a little less innocent than she’d let on, a little less pure.

And now she was taking a dive off the deep end.

We pass through the divider between the cars, the world getting louder for a moment before we step into the next one and in this car it’s all walls, from floor to ceiling, and rooms running only along one side of the train. This is the sleeper car, clearly, and as Molly leads us down the aisle and us two men follow my eyes drift over to the left, spotting through the open doors the cramped but comfy-looking beds.

We stop in front of one of them.

“This will do,” the ticket inspector says, to no one in particular and all three of us at the same time, “You sit there. We’ll be in here.”

He’s pointed me at a stool sitting outside the booth, close enough that I can reach out and touch the door when I’m sitting and when it’s closed but clearly on one side of the door. Clearly on the opposite side of my wife.

“Molly-” I start, but she cuts me off with a look.

“No, Greg,” she says, stepping in close so she can hiss the words at me, “No I don’t want to hear it. This is your idea and your fault. You made us late. You made us miss our train. You suggested this as an alternative means of payment. Well fine then, I’m just doing what you told me to. I’m just obeying, that’s what you want, right?”

She’s so angry that she’s shaking, her rage burning me from the outside in. I could stop this with a word, I could beg and plead. Hell even if it meant throwing myself on the mercy of the court or pleading with this guy to give me the full punishment and spare my wife I could do that, but I don’t.

And I know why. I know the real truth. I know the reason more than anything, the reason why I hold my tongue and the reason why I can’t stop thinking of Molly’s delicate fingers wrapped around another man’s cock.

Even if I don’t want to know it, to admit it, I know.

Swallowing hard I bite my tongue and nod, chastised. As I sit on the too-small stool I don’t look her in the eye, I don’t look at him. I stare at the floor and at their feet as they step into the room and close the door behind them.

The moment they do my ears are working, sorting through the white noise of the train to find the bits of pieces of humanity here. Cutting through the grinding and shaking to find them.

If I can’t see this happen, you can be sure I’m going to hear it.