Chapter 1: The Debate Downstairs (Present Day)

I stood in the doorway longer than I meant to. One hand rested on the wooden frame, as if it were the only solid thing in my life. My other hand hung loosely at my side, mirroring how I felt, alone and empty, with nothing to hold on to. The house was quiet. Upstairs, I would hear the occasional sound as Sarah moved around—soft footsteps, the faint scrape of something on wood, then silence again. She probably thought I was still asleep and was trying to be quiet enough that I stayed that way. If she knew I’d been awake for the last half hour, listening to every sound that carried down the stairs and through the walls, she would have come down already, or locked herself in the bathroom and stayed there.

The front of my fresh boxers were already damp, and parts were starting to stiffen against my skin. I’d changed them once already and thrown on a pair of track pants from the dryer. Still, the clean pair of boxers were already becoming soiled from the erection that seemed unwilling to go away and had become a constant reminder of what happened last night, and the humiliation of that was devastating.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her on her knees in the kitchen, her blonde hair waving in conjunction with her head moving forward and back as her lips stretched over Ryan’s cock, one of her hands between her legs winding in tight circles around her clit while she moaned on his cock. The wet sounds had been loud and vulgar, and when he was ready to cum, she had swallowed as he told her to. I still could not believe that, almost as much as I could not believe that when he told her she would be a good cocksucker soon, she had not stood up and slapped him like the Sarah I thought I had known for the past twelve years of marriage; instead, her head had just bobbed faster.

I should go up. I should slam open the bedroom door, look at the ruined sheets, smell what I already knew was there, and demand to know what the fuck had happened. That is what an innocent man whose wife just cheated on him would do. But I wasn’t innocent, and frankly, right now, I don’t know if I can even consider myself much of a man.

Every time I started walking toward the stairs, my pulse would go through the roof, my heart would race, and my stomach would start doing flips until I stopped. What would I say when she looked at me? What would I see in her face? Would I see the woman who had promised to love me for the rest of her life on the day of our wedding, or the one who had cried into my shirt the morning before the pool party, small and scared and telling me she hated it here, or would it be the woman from last night who had pushed her ass back and begged Ryan not to stop? At the same time, the headboard slammed against the wall hard enough to rattle the picture frames.