Chapter 4: David's Unexpected Visit
Erin’s dorm room smelled of lavender laundry spray and stale regret. She had scrubbed it clean three times in a frantic, pointless ritual, as if she could scour the memory of Will from the sheets, from the air, from the very grain of the cheap particleboard desk. The framed photo of David, taken on a windswept cliffside during his visit last summer, smiled its perpetual, trusting smile from her bookshelf. She avoided its gaze, focusing instead on the slow creep of afternoon light across her rumpled duvet.
The knock at the door was ordinary, two polite raps. Probably her roommate, Sam, forgetting her key again. Erin padded across the small room, pulling the door open with a sigh that died in her throat.
David stood in the hallway.
He was thinner than she remembered, his shoulders sharp under a worn leather jacket she didn’t recognize. His dark hair was longer, curling at his neck, and his face held a new, quiet intensity. But his smile, the second it broke across his features, was utterly, devastatingly the same.
“Surprise,” he said, his voice a warm, familiar blanket.
The world tilted. Her brain, still humming with the phantom sensation of Will’s hands and the searing line of the guitar neck, short-circuited. For a horrific second, she was certain her guilt was written in phosphorescent ink across her face, that the smell of sex and betrayal was pouring from her pores. She froze, her hand on the doorframe whitening.
“David? What… how are you here?”
“Finished my project early. Got a last-minute flight. Wanted to see you.” His eyes scanned her face, concern flickering in their hazel depths. “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I am one, she thought. She forced her muscles to move, stepping aside. “I’m just… shocked. Come in.”
He dropped his backpack with a thud and pulled her into a hug. He smelled of airplane air and his familiar, clean soap. It was a good smell, a safe smell. It made her want to vomit. She hugged him back, her arms wooden. His body felt both alien and achingly familiar. He kissed her temple, then her lips. His kiss was soft, questioning. She answered it, pouring every ounce of her performative energy into making it feel real, trying to lose herself in the script of a girlfriend happy to see her boyfriend. It felt like kissing through a pane of thick glass.
“I missed you so much,” he murmured against her mouth. His hands came up to cradle her face, his thumbs brushing her cheeks. One brushed the fading, yellowed edge of the bruise on her throat.
He stilled. He pulled back just enough to look, his brow furrowing. His touch turned clinical. “What’s this? Erin, what happened?”
The lie came automatically, slick and rehearsed. “Oh, that. I was… volunteering at the theatre department. Moving a flat. The corner of it caught me right in the neck. Looks worse than it is.” She gave a shaky laugh. “Clumsy.”
He studied it, his photographer’s eye missing nothing. The bruise was thin, linear, unmistakably the imprint of an object. Not a corner. A neck. Of a guitar. His gaze lifted to hers, but she was already pulling him toward the bed, chattering, filling the deadly silence with noise.
“When did you land? How long can you stay? You should have texted!”
He let her steer him, settling onto the edge of her bed—the bed where, seventy-two hours prior, Will had held her hips and emptied himself into her with a sound like a sob. She sat beside him, a careful inch of space between them. He told her about his flight, the lack of sleep, a funny story about customs. She laughed in all the right places. Her heart was a frantic animal beating against her ribs. Every cell in her body was screaming, poisoned, a traitor in its own skin.
He unpacked a gift for her—a beautiful, hand-blown glass paperweight from a studio in Prague. She held its cool weight in her palm, her fingers trembling. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and meant it. Its perfection shamed her.
“I have a meeting,” he said, checking his watch. “Just a portfolio review with a professor here, set it up last minute. Should only be an hour, two at most. Wait for me? We’ll get proper dinner. I want to hear everything.”
Everything. The word hung in the air, a grenade with the pin pulled. “Of course,” she said, her voice brittle.
He kissed her again, deeper this time. His hand slid to her waist, under her shirt, his palm warm on her skin. It was a loving, possessive gesture. Her stomach clenched. She felt Will’s grip there, harder, demanding. She kissed David back with a desperate fervor, trying to use his touch to cauterize the other, to reclaim her own body. When he pulled away, his eyes were bright with love and jet-lag. “God, it’s good to be here.”
Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him, taking the scent of safety with him.
The silence he left was absolute. Erin sat on the bed, the paperweight heating in her fist. The ghost of his kiss was on her lips. The ghost of Will was everywhere else, a staining presence. She looked at David’s backpack leaning against her desk. She looked at his photo. She saw the indentation his body had left on her duvet.
A different knock sounded. This one wasn’t polite. It was a single, confident rap, followed by the turn of the handle. The door opened just enough, and Will slipped inside.
He didn’t look at her. He closed the door, locked it, and leaned against it, his head falling back with a soft thud. He looked exhausted, hollowed out. The silence between them was a living, shared organism, pulsing with what they’d done, what he’d saved.
“He’s here,” she said, the words toneless.
“I saw him. Walking across the quad. Looked happy.” Will’s voice was gravel. He finally looked at her, his eyes traveling from her face down to the bed, to the dent left by David. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“He has a meeting. He’ll be back in an hour.”
“An hour.” Will pushed off the door. He walked to the bed, his movements predatory and weary all at once. He stopped in front of her. “Get up.”
She didn’t move. “Will…”
“Get. Up.” The command was quiet, absolute.
She stood. He gripped the duvet in both hands and ripped it back, exposing the sheets beneath—the sheets she had washed, the sheets that smelled only of detergent now. He looked at them, then at her. His expression was unreadable.
“He was just here,” he stated.
“Yes.”
“On this bed.”
“Yes.”
Will’s hand shot out, grabbing a handful of her shirt at her collarbone. He didn’t yank her, just held her there, the fabric taut. “Did he touch you?”
“He kissed me.”
His eyes darkened. “Where?”
“Will, don’t.”
“Where?” His voice dropped to a vicious whisper.
“Here,” she said, her own anger flaring, hot and defensive. She touched her own lips. “Like a normal boyfriend. Which is what he is. Which is what you’re not.”
He released her shirt as if burned. He let out a short, harsh laugh. “No. I’m definitely not.” He looked at the rumpled space on the bed again. “Take your clothes off. Now.”
The fight drained out of her, replaced by a dark, swelling torrent of need. The need to disobey David’s ghost. The need to let Will erase him, again. She pulled her shirt over her head, let her shorts and underwear pool at her feet. She stood naked before him, shivering in the cool room air.
Will’s gaze was a physical scrape. He reached out and traced the faded bruise on her throat with a single, cold finger. Then his hand slid down, over her breast, her stomach, between her legs. He cupped her there, his palm hard. She was already wet. He always knew.
“Slut,” he breathed, the word not an insult but a dark, thrilled acknowledgment. He pushed two fingers inside her, curling them, and she gasped, her knees buckling. He held her up, his stare locked on hers. “You’re soaked. Thinking about him? Or thinking about me fucking you on the bed he just blessed with his presence?”
“Both,” she admitted, the truth a sharp relief.
He withdrew his fingers, brought them to his mouth, and tasted her. His eyes closed for a second. When they opened, they were black with intent. “On the bed. On his spot. On your back.”
She obeyed, lying back into the impression of David’s body. The sheets were cool. Will stripped off his jeans and shirt, his cock already thick and angry. He didn’t join her. He stood at the edge of the bed, looking down at her splayed form.
“Turn over,” he said. “I don’t want to see your face.”
The coldness of it was a new kind of thrill. She rolled onto her stomach, then pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, facing the headboard, presenting herself to him. She heard his sharp intake of breath. Then his hands were on her hips, his thumb rubbing slow, deliberate circles over the still-tender skin of her ass, where his grip had bruised her days before.
“You want it like this?” he asked, his voice thick. “Like an animal? While your sweet, talented boyfriend talks about apertures and exposures across campus?”
“Yes,” she moaned, pushing her ass back against him.
He positioned himself, the head of his cock pressing against her slick entrance. He didn’t enter her. He just held it there, a tormenting pressure. One of his hands left her hip. She heard the soft, clean sound of his palm connecting with his own saliva. Then his hand came down on her ass in a sharp, stinging slap.
She cried out, the pain bright and shocking, mixing instantly with a surge of molten pleasure.
“That’s for thinking his kiss mattered,” Will snarled. He slapped the other cheek, harder. The sound was obscenely loud in the quiet room. “And that’s for letting him touch you in my room.”
His room. The claim was absolute. He owned her here, in this space he’d poisoned.
Before the sting could fade, he drove into her, a single, brutal thrust that buried him to the root. Erin screamed, a guttural sound muffled by the duvet. He filled her completely, a brutal, familiar invasion. He set a punishing rhythm immediately, each thrust a slam that shook the bedframe, that pushed her hands forward into the pillows.
His hand cracked down on her ass again, punctuating a thrust. “You’re a filthy, cheating slut,” he grunted, his voice strained with the force of his movements. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes!” she sobbed, the admission pulled from her core.
Another slap. “You love this. You love being my dirty secret. My fuck.”
“Yes, God, Will, yes!”
He leaned over her, his chest hot against her back, his mouth at her ear. His pace never faltered, a machine of pure, degrading friction. “He’s probably showing some professor a picture of a sunset right now. And you’re here, taking my cock in the bed he slept in last night. Your pussy is mine. Say it.”
“It’s yours!” she chanted, the words a desperate mantra. “It’s yours, it’s yours, it’s yours!”
His fingers dug into the flesh of her hips, sure to leave new marks over the old. The slapping of skin on skin, the wet, rhythmic sound of his cock plunging into her, the creak of the bed—it was a symphony of their mutual ruin. She was hurtling toward the edge, her vision blurring, every thought scorched away except the feel of him, the degrading, perfect rightness of it.
He was close. She could feel it in the jerk of his hips, the ragged tear of his breath. “Come for me, you slut,” he commanded, his voice breaking. “Come all over my cock and then I’m going to fill this cheating cunt up. He can have what’s left.”
It was the last, vicious push she needed. Her orgasm detonated, a white-hot seizure that clenched around him, milking him violently. With a final, deep thrust and a strangled groan, he came, pulsing deep inside her, marking what he claimed was already his. He collapsed partway over her, his weight hot and heavy, his breath gusting against her neck.
They stayed locked like that, joined, sweating, ruined. The absence of sound was a physical weight. He slowly softened and slipped out of her. The immediate, shameful trickle of him onto the sheets–David’s sheets–followed.
Will rolled off her, lying on his back beside her on the ravaged bed. He stared at the ceiling. Erin lowered herself, feeling raw, used, utterly empty and yet horrifyingly sated. The sting on her ass was a beacon.
After a long minute, Will sat up. He dressed in silence, his movements efficient. He didn’t look at her. He walked to her desk, picked up her phone. He tapped the screen, opened something, and set it back down.
“You should wash up,” he said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “He’ll be back soon.”
Then he was at the door. He unlocked it, opened it, and was gone.
Erin lay in the wreckage of the bed. The scent of sex, of him, was overwhelming. She forced herself to move, her limbs leaden. She went to her phone.
On the screen, paused, was a video. A close-up. It took her a moment to understand the angle, the dim light. It was from the practice room floor. It showed her legs, her ass, and Will’s hands gripping her hips as he took her from behind. It was a silent, damning fragment of their mutual destruction. He had transferred it. He had left it for her.
A key turned in the door.
Panic, pure and electrocuting, shot through her. She fumbled with her phone, jamming her thumb on the button to lock the screen, plunging the image into blackness. She threw it onto the bed as the door opened.
David stepped in, a smile on his face. “Professor Keating is incredible, he actually—” He stopped. His smile faltered. His nostrils flared almost imperceptibly. His photographer’s eyes, so precise, took in the room: the violently turned-back duvet, her nakedness hastily covered by a crumpled sheet, the flushed, guilty fever on her skin, the unfamiliar, musky scent now layered over the lavender.
His gaze landed on her phone, dark and inert on the rumpled sheets. Then it lifted slowly to meet hers. The warmth in his eyes was gone, replaced by a dawning, chilling clarity.
“Erin,” he said, and his voice was very, very quiet. “What happened in here?”