Chapter 1: The Moring After (Present Day)

I lay on my side in the spare bedroom, eyes closed and breathing slowly, the way I used to fake sleep when Nicole was little and checked on me. The sheet was pulled up to my chest. My boxers were stiff and crusted against my skin from the last time I had come, and the ones before that. If Sarah opened the door, I wanted her to see a man who had slept through everything. I needed the time to think.

I still couldn’t make the night line up with the woman I had been married to for the last twelve years. Sarah hadn’t just let it happen. She had sounded like she was coming apart from it. Then this morning she had been on her knees in the kitchen with Ryan’s cock in her mouth, bobbing her head, one hand between her legs. She had told me for years that she hated giving head. I was lucky if I got one a year, and even then she stopped me before I finished. I had never once come in her mouth. She had never swallowed for me. From the way Ryan talked to her, this was not the first time she had done it for him. The knowledge sat in my chest like a stone.

Had last night even been the first time they fucked? Or had it been going on longer? I did not know what to think anymore. The sounds she had made last night kept replaying in my head while waves of jealousy and envy rolled through me. Under them was something much worse: I had stood in the hallway and listened. I had come in my hand more times than I could count while she begged and screamed and came in ways she had never cum for me. I had not walked in. I had not stopped it. I had not kicked him out. I had stayed and gotten off on it. The memory made me feel pathetic and weak and, somehow, hard again.