Chapter 4: The Cuckolding
The key clicked in the lock with a sound like a bone snapping. Bernadette pushed the door open, the familiar squeak of its hinge a ghost from a life she’d already left. The apartment smelled of stale popcorn and regret.
He was at the kitchen table, hunched over, a flimsy stack of papers spread before him. The divorce documents. His shoulders shook silently. An empty mixing bowl sat nearby, a smear of raw brownie batter on its side. He’d been trying to cook. The sight of it, that pathetic, hopeful smear, was worse than the tears.
She set her keys down on the side table too softly, but he heard. His head snapped up. His face was a ruined map of red, swollen tracks. “Bernie?”
“I’m just here for the rest of my things.” Her voice was flat, a clinical instrument. She moved past him toward the bedroom, avoiding the wreckage of his eyes.
“You’re really doing this?” The question was a wet, choked thing. He stood up, the chair legs scraping the linoleum. “You’re really leaving me for… for that guy? That arrogant, trust-fund asshole?”
She kept walking. “It’s not about him, Howard.”
“Bullshit!” The word exploded, a rare flash of anger. He followed her into the bedroom, where half-packed cardboard boxes yawned open like graves. “It’s completely about him! Did you fuck him in our bed? Was that it? Did his big, fancy dick make you forget seven years?”
She flinched, turning to face him. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t say it? It’s true, isn’t it?” He was crying openly now, ugly, heaving sobs. “I loved you, Bernie. I built my whole fucking world around you. And you just… you walk out one night and you don’t come back? You send me lawyer papers?”
“You signed them.” She folded a sweater, her hands steady. Inside, something was cracking, a fine fissure spreading through her resolve.
“Because you wanted me to! Because you were already gone!” He grabbed her arm, his grip weak, pleading. “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix it. I’ll do anything. I’ll go to therapy. I’ll listen more. I’ll… I’ll learn about your stupid bacteria!”
She shook him off. “It’s too late.”
“It’s not! It can’t be!” He was kneeling now, wrapping his arms around her legs, his face pressed against her thighs. “Please. Bernie, please. I can’t breathe without you.”
Her composure shattered. A hot tear escaped, tracing a path through her carefully applied makeup. She hated him in that moment. Hated him for his weakness, for making her the villain, for forcing her to feel this corrosive pity. “Howard, let go.”
The front door opened.
Neither of them had heard footsteps in the hall. There was just the smooth, silent turn of the lock—a lock Joshua must have had copied—and then he was there, filling the bedroom doorway. He wore a dark, tailored coat, his hands in his pockets. He looked like a panther that had wandered into a pet store.
Howard scrambled to his feet, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “What the hell? Get out of my house!”
Joshua ignored him. His gaze was fixed on Bernadette. “You’re taking too long.”
“I… there were more things than I remembered,” she said, her voice small.
He stepped into the room. His presence compressed the air, sucking the oxygen out of it. Howard shrank back against the dresser. “I mean it, man. Get out before I call the cops.”
Joshua finally looked at Howard. His smile was a cold, thin slit. “Call them. Explain to them why your soon-to-be-ex-wife is packing her things. It’s a fascinating story. Tell them about the nights you fell asleep watching MythBusters while she cried in the other room. Tell them about the anniversary you forgot because you were busy 3D-printing a life-sized replica of C-3PO’s head.” He took another step. “Tell them how it feels to know she comes harder on my cock than she ever did with you.”
Howard made a sound like a stepped-on dog. He lunged, a clumsy, hopeless swing. Joshua caught his fist mid-air, effortlessly, his fingers tightening until Howard’s knuckles cracked. Howard yelped, dropping to his knees.
“Don’t touch me,” Joshua said, releasing him with a look of distaste, as if discarding a soiled tissue.
He turned back to Bernadette. “You’re done here. Leave the boxes.”
“They’re my—”
“They’re trash.” He took her by the wrist, his grip iron. “The life in them is trash.” He pulled her from the room, past Howard who was now curled on the floor, sobbing into the carpet.
In the kitchen, Bernadette tried to plant her feet. “Joshua, stop—”
He spun her, pushed her back against the refrigerator. The cold seeped through her thin blouse. His body pinned her there, a wall of heat and intent. His eyes scanned her face, seeing the tear tracks. “Crying for him?”
“No,” she whispered, the lie transparent.
He leaned in, his mouth grazing her ear. “You belong to me. Your tears belong to me. Your pleasure, your pain, your brilliant, fucking mind—mine. This?” He glanced back toward the bedroom, where Howard’s sobs were a miserable soundtrack. “This is just sentimental drainage.”
He kissed her, a hard, claiming kiss that tasted of possession and expensive coffee. She resisted for a fraction of a second, a final twitch of the old Bernadette, before her mouth opened under his. A moan vibrated in her throat.
“See?” he breathed against her lips. “Your body knows the truth. It arches for me. It weeps for me.”
His hands went to her waist, yanking her skirt up. His fingers hooked into the waistband of her underwear and pulled, the fabric tearing at the sides. A gasp escaped her, swallowed by his mouth. He unfastened his own trousers, freeing his cock, already thick and heavy in his hand. He pressed the head against her, finding her wet despite everything, despite the man weeping on the floor of the next room.
Howard appeared in the doorway, his face a mask of snot and horror. “No… Bernadette, don’t…”
Joshua didn’t look at him. He kept his eyes locked on Bernadette’s. “Tell him,” he commanded, his voice low.
“Howard, go,” she managed, her voice strangled.
“Tell him why he should go.”
She looked over Joshua’s shoulder at her husband, at his trembling, broken form. Something sharp and final crystallized inside her. “Because I want this.”
Joshua drove into her. It was a deep, unforgiving thrust, a reclamation. She cried out, her head thudding back against the fridge door. He set a brutal pace immediately, each slam of his hips pushing a shocked grunt from her lungs. He fucked her with a focused, demonstrative violence, the sounds obscenely loud in the small kitchen.
Howard made a wounded noise. “Stop… please…”
Joshua’s hand came down hard on Bernadette’s ass. The sharp crack echoed. A bloom of heat spread through the sting. “This is what real possession looks like, engineer,” Joshua snarled, not turning around. He spanked her again, the force jolting her forward onto him, making her yelp. “You owned a share in a lease. I own her soul.”
“Joshua, please,” Bernadette whimpered, but it wasn’t a plea for him to stop. It was a plea for more, for the degradation to sear away the last of her guilt.
“Please what?” He pistoned into her, his grip on her hips bruising.
“Fuck me. Fuck me harder. Ruin me.” The words tumbled out, filthy and true, a confession meant for Howard’s ears.
Howard let out a strangled sob and slid down the doorframe, collapsing into a heap, hiding his face.
Joshua smiled, a feral, triumphant sight. He pulled her blouse open, buttons pinging onto the linoleum. He took her breast in his rough hand, squeezing, pinching her nipple until she cried out. The pain was a bright, clarifying light. He bent her over further, one hand flattening between her shoulder blades, pressings her cheek against the cold stainless steel of the fridge. The new angle was deeper, more invasive. He pounded into her, each impact a punctuation mark on the end of her marriage.
She could hear Howard’s broken whimpers, a pathetic counter-rhythm to the wet, slapping sounds of her body being taken. The humiliation was complete, a public execution of her old self. And with it came a terrifying, soaring freedom. She clenched around him, her orgasm erupting in a silent, shuddering wave, her mouth open in a soundless scream against the metal.
Feeling her convulse, Joshua growled, his rhythm fracturing into desperate, final thrusts. He came inside her with a harsh groan, his body jerking against hers, filling her. He stayed there, buried to the hilt, breathing heavily against her neck.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breath. Howard was silent, catatonic.
Joshua pulled out. He tucked himself away, zipped his trousers with a calm, precise motion. He smoothed her skirt down over her bare ass, a grotesquely tender gesture. He took her face in his hands, turning her to look at him. Her vision was blurred, her cheeks wet.
“Look at me,” he commanded softly.
She focused on his eyes, dark and absolute.
“That,” he said, thumbing a tear from her cheek, “was the last tear you shed for anything but me.”
He took her hand and led her toward the door. She didn’t look back at Howard, at the mixing bowl, at the boxes of her abandoned life. She stepped over the threshold.
Joshua paused, turning one last time to the kitchen. Howard had not moved.
“The papers are signed,” Joshua said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “Courier will pick them up tomorrow. Don’t be here.”
He closed the apartment door softly behind them. The corridor was silent, empty. Bernadette leaned against the wall, her legs shaking. Joshua watched her, waiting.
“Can you walk?” he asked, not unkindly.
She nodded, pushing herself upright. He offered his arm, not for support, but as a statement. She took it. They walked down the hall, past the familiar doors of 4B and 4C, toward the elevator. Her heels clicked a funeral march on the tile.
As they waited for the elevator, she finally spoke, her voice raw. “You copied my key.”
“Yes.”
“You planned that.”
He looked at the descending floor numbers. “I observed. The opportunity presented itself.” The doors opened. He guided her in. “A final calibration. He needed to see what he lost. You needed to see what you chose.”
The elevator descended. She stared at their reflection in the brass doors: a disheveled woman in torn clothes, held by a man of impossible, polished calm. A monster and his creator.
On the sidewalk, his town car idled at the curb. He opened the door for her. Before she got in, she looked up at the building, at the window of 4A. The curtain was closed.
“It’s done,” Joshua said, his hand on the small of her back.
She got in the car. As it pulled away, she didn’t look back. She looked ahead, at the city streaming past, a river of light leading to a tower of black glass. Her new cage. Her new world.