Chapter 6: Familiar Sounds
The steam from the shower still clung to Aaron’s skin as he stood in the hallway, the towel knotted loosely at his hips. The guest room door was shut tight behind him, a silent tomb holding everything he’d just ruined. From under the crack, no light shone.
He turned toward the master bedroom. Each step was a labor, his body feeling both heavy and terrifyingly empty. He pushed the door open gently.
The room was a warm cave, the golden curtains diffusing the mid-morning sun into a drowsy glow. Amanda was a curled shape under the emerald sheets, her fiery hair a vivid explosion against the pillow. She stirred at his entry, rolling onto her back with a low, sleepy groan.
“There you are,” she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep and last night’s wine. She blinked up at him, her smile soft and unguarded. “I had a weird dream you were up making pancakes for hours.”
The casual, trusting words were a knife twist. He managed a dry chuckle that scraped his throat. “Just a long shower. Trying to drown the hangover.”
“Come here,” she sighed, peeling back the sheets in invitation. The space beside her was warm, indented from her body. It smelled like her lavender sleep oil and home.
He dropped the towel and slid in, the fabric of the sheets cool against his shower-damp legs. She immediately rolled into him, her head finding its familiar place in the hollow of his shoulder, her arm draping across his chest. Her skin was sleep-warm, her touch proprietary and easy. He forced his muscles to relax, wrapping an arm around her, his fingers sinking into the familiar silk of her hair.
“You feel clean,” she murmured, nuzzling against his neck. “Nice.”
Her hand drifted down his stomach, her touch idle, affectionate. He felt himself flinch internally, his body a traitorous wire of mixed signals—exhausted, sated from Kelly, yet sparked to a confused alert by his girlfriend’s familiar caress.
“You okay?” she asked, her fingers stilling.
“Yeah. Just tired. That whiskey last night was brutal.”
“Tell me about it,” she laughed, a soft puff of air against his skin. Her hand resumed its journey, lower now, her intention shifting from casual to conscious. “I feel better though. Lazy Sunday.”
Her palm cupped him, and he responded, a purely physical reaction that filled him with a shame so profound it was dizzying. This was his life, his love, his choice. And yet, beneath her touch, all he could feel was the ghost of Kelly’s legs around his waist, the sound of her choked gasp in the steamy air.
Amanda took his response as encouragement. She shifted, rolling halfway on top of him, her hair a curtain that smelled of their shared shampoo as she kissed him. Her mouth was soft, yielding, a little sour from sleep. He kissed her back, pouring every ounce of performed normalcy into it, trying to lose himself in the known topography of her lips.
It was tender. It was slow. It was everything their frantic encounters in the other room had not been. She whispered his name against his mouth, a sigh of contentment. He moved over her, his movements practiced, a well-rehearsed dance. He was careful, attentive, mapping the familiar curves he loved. He murmured to her, sweet nothings that felt like ashes on his tongue. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and he meant it, even as the image of blonde hair fanned across a guest pillow flashed behind his eyes.
Her soft cries began, delicate sounds that were somehow louder than any scream. They built in the quiet room, a sweet, rising soundtrack to his damnation. He focused on her face, on the freckles across her nose, on the way her brow furrowed in pleasure. He tried to anchor himself there, in this act of love, to use it to burn away the other memory.
When her climax hit, she arched under him with a quiet, shuddering gasp, her fingers tightening in his hair. He followed swiftly, mechanically, a release that felt less like pleasure and more like a necessary bodily purge. He collapsed beside her, pulling her close, her sweat mingling with his.
“Wow,” she breathed, tucking her head under his chin. “Good morning.”
He kissed her forehead, his lips numb. “Yeah.”
They lay in silence for a long moment. He stared at the ceiling, listening to her breathing steady. In the wall behind his head, the plumbing gave a faint knock. The guest room shared that wall.
Amanda giggled suddenly, tracing a pattern on his chest. “I hope we didn’t wake Kelly. Though after the tequila she put away, a nuclear strike probably wouldn’t wake her.”
Aaron’s blood turned to ice. He held perfectly still. “Yeah,” he managed. “Probably not.”
In the guest room, Kelly was not asleep.
She lay on her side, curled into a tight fist, the emerald sheets from the master bedroom’s visual twin now tangled around her legs here. She had heard every step in the hall, the soft click of his door, the low murmur of voices.
Then the other sounds had started.
The creak of the bedframe, so much more rhythmic and familiar than the frantic noise from this same mattress. Amanda’s soft, happy sighs, muffled but unmistakable. The deep, resonant timbre of Aaron’s voice, saying words she couldn’t make out but whose tender tone was a weapon.
She had pressed her face into the pillow, the one that still smelled like him, like them. A hot, sick jealousy coiled in her gut, thick and choking. It was wrong, it was monstrous, but it was there. He was in there, giving to Amanda what he had just taken from her. Performing the version of himself that belonged to this house, to this life.
Her body, still humming from the shocks he’d delivered, betrayed her completely. Between her legs, a deep, aching throb persisted, a physical memory that refused to fade. Each muted cry from the other room seemed to sync with the pulse there.
Her hand slid down, under the waistband of the sweatpants she’d pulled on. Her own touch felt foreign, impatient. She tried to mimic the pressure of his hands, the specific rhythm he’d used against the tiles, but it was a poor imitation. It was just friction, a desperate, lonely attempt to reclaim a feeling that was already curdling inside her.
She closed her eyes, and it wasn’t Amanda’s face she saw behind her lids. It was his—the look of sheer wrecked anguish in the bathroom mirror, the way his mouth had found hers in the guest room with a sort of hopeless finality. She thought of him moving inside her, a claiming that felt more true than any vow.
A sharp, stifled cry from the other room—Amanda’s climax. Kelly’s own body clenched in a painful, silent mimicry of release, a shudder that left her emptier than before. Tears, hot and sudden, welled in her eyes, slipping sideways into the pillow.
The house fell quiet. A profound, listening silence.
She heard Amanda’s giggle, bright and clear through the wall. The joke about not waking her. Then Aaron’s voice, a low, non-committal rumble.
Kelly withdrew her hand, wiping it on the sheet, disgusted with herself, with him, with the entire beautiful, broken morning. She was the ghost here. The echo. The secret stinking up the pristine edges of their happy home.
She lay perfectly still, waiting for the sound of their bedroom door opening. Waiting for the facade of a normal Sunday to begin, where she would have to sit at their table, drink their coffee, and meet his eyes across the ruins of everything.