Chapter 5: The Week

I sat at the nurses’ station with a chart open, and my phone face down beside it, contemplating the wreckage of my life with the same helpless fascination I used to reserve for traffic accidents or the high-speed freeway chases the news channels loved to play right up until the car spun out and crashed. On Saturday night I had limped home and talked with Amber until the color of the sky had gone from black to grey. I had fallen into bed still smiling, still sore, still telling myself that “thinking” was actually a plan that could somehow solve my infidelity crisis. Instead, I had ended up at Tyler’s again Saturday night and had to rush home early Sunday morning to try to somehow put myself together enough for Mike so that when he knocked on the door I looked like the woman he had been dating the last three years and not the two-bit whore she had recently become.

I had somehow been able to pull it off. The weather that early Nov day in San Francisco was overcast and chilly, a perfect excuse to wear long sleeves and a coat, convenient when you are trying to cover up two days of passion covering large swaths of your body.

Mike had arrived on time, and we had spent a wonderful day together. We enjoyed the City and each other’s company. We had walked the Embarcadero, made a picnic lunch in the grass by the St Francis Yacht Club, watching a few stay boats on the bay and the Golden Gate as a backdrop. We shopped, went to an arcade and played games, visited a couple of galleries, and then ended the day eating Italian food, where Mike commented how much he would love to have his grandmother’s lasagna again. We laughed, enjoyed each other’s company, and talked about upcoming events on our joint calendar. It was a wonderful day and the first time in weeks where thoughts of Tyler had not occupied almost every waking moment.

I had gotten home late enough that I was able to avoid Amber’s interrogation and slept well with dreams of Mike and not Tyler for a change.

On Monday my actual period arrived.

Not the lie I had given Mike on Saturday to keep his hands and his eyes off the evidence of my cheating. The actual thing, cramping and inconvenient and, in its way, a gift, but that did nothing to hamper my level of sexual excitement. While the marks on my body were fading, the blood gave me a layer of defense. Most men do not understand how periods work; hell, many women do not either. So for a period to last 5 days, 7days, whatever length, most men will just shrug and let my mouth take care of them. Mike was most men.

Around mid-morning, still reveling in the prior days’ activities, I had tried to do something that would prove I belonged only to him.

The guilt over how much space Tyler had been occupying in my mind had gotten so loud that I needed a counterweight. Something spicy. Something that said to Mike and me that “I still choose you.”

I locked a bathroom stall at work, unbuttoned my top, pulled my bra down, and took pictures of my breasts. My small, flushed nipples were already tight from the air and from the fact that I was doing it at all. I typed the caption with a grin I could feel in my cheeks. “I want to feel your mouth on me, I want your teeth grazing me.” I both wanted him to know I was thinking about him like that in the middle of a shift, but also to prove to myself I was still his.

I hit send and walked out feeling naughty in a way that still seemed almost wholesome.

Twenty minutes later, the notification dinged. I bent over the desk so no one else could see, a smile already forming in the corner of my mouth anticipating Mike’s reply.

It was not Mike.

Tyler’s cock filled the screen of my phone, thick and rigid, the head glossy, his hand around the base. The message underneath landed like a hand on the back of my neck.

“Looking forward to the next time I can wrap my mouth around those beautiful breasts and enjoy all your charms.”

Confusion hit me at first. Bright, blinding, and stupid confusion. Why was he talking about my breasts? Why was he sending me that? I opened my sent messages and felt the floor drop out from under me. I had somehow sent the pictures to Tyler. I would have sworn my thumb had found the picture of Mike’s face and clicked on it, but somehow, the thread had been sitting there since last Friday, warm and waiting, and my hands must have gone to the same place my mind now went first.

I forwarded the same photos to Mike with a weaker caption and a smile I did not feel. To Tyler, I stared at the keyboard until the letters blurred and then settled for sending a devil emoji and a string of water droplets because every actual sentence I thought of felt like I was stepping off a curb into oncoming traffic.

I was mad at myself.

I was also so turned on it made my mouth go dry. Two pictures. That was all it had taken for him to get that hard. Mike’s reply came later, kind and sincere. God, baby, you’re so sexy. I wish I were there. I read it. I meant to let it be enough. My mind kept sliding back to the other photo, to the three times I already knew what that cock could do, to the fact that I had just handed Tyler a piece of a gesture I had meant for someone else.

I went to dinner with Mike Monday night, and I wore the diamond studs because taking them out felt like I would be flinching, but leaving them on also felt like a collar I had put on myself.

Mike noticed, of course. He always noticed the small things. He reached across the table at dinner and touched one earring with the side of his thumb, gentle as if the stone might bruise.

“These always look good on you,” he said. “But I liked those little blue ones you had on Saturday too. You don’t have to wear these every time just because I bought them. Wear whatever you want, babe.”

The guilt was immediate and physical. Same sparkle. Same setting, or at least near enough. Only the origin story was different. Every time I pushed the posts through my ears, I thought of Tyler’s living room and the blue box sitting on the bookshelf beside the carved fork and the higher-grade stones nobody else would ever clock. I sat across from the man who had actually given me the first pair and smiled like I was not wearing a replacement funded by the man who had taken everything else.

After dinner he took me home. I went to my knees in my own living room and gave him a blowjob that was wild by our standards. It was wetter, faster, my eyes on his face the whole time as I could will a different vocabulary out of him. I wanted his hand to tighten on my hair, controlling, moving my head instead of my moving myself. I wanted him to name me, to tell me what I was, but Mike just stroked my hair and told me how beautiful I was and that he loved me, and then came with a groan of gratitude and no command. I swallowed everything and kissed his thigh and hip and felt that unfair flare again. He was not Tyler, and until three weeks ago, I had been glad of that. It was one of the reasons I loved him so much. Now here I was on my knees in front of him, wishing her would have treated me like the man I had up until recently despised.

That was how the week found its rhythm.

Tuesday morning, Tyler texted me asking what I had planned for him today. His directness and wanting me did not help me maintain my composure, and I soon found myself preparing to send him another picture. I tried to keep it playful. My scrub top and bra discarded, and a photo of my lean naked back with me looking back over my shoulder with my best approximation of a sultry expression. “Thinking about Saturday. Behave.” He sent back not long after, “Good girls don’t start this at 10 a.m. Show me what you’re hiding, beautiful.” I tried to hold out but lasted less than an hour. The next photo was from the front with nothing on from the waist up, my own hands and fingers in the frame cupping my breasts but not really showing anything. He answered with praise first, “You’re so gorgeous when you get naughty like this,” and then the other register. “Now be a good slut and show me. Pinch them for me. Pinch them harder than he would.”