Chapter 42: The Quiet Vigil
The darkness in the walk-in closet was absolute, a velvety silence pressed against Catriona’s eardrums. She stood, her spine straight, one palm flat on the cool drywall, listening to the house settle around the secret it now contained. The faint, humid scent of sex—their sex, Aidan and Jenny’s—had drifted down the hall like a fog. It was different from the scent of their own marital coupling. Richer, younger, more urgent. She inhaled it, analyzing the notes.
She waited until she heard the soft, definitive snick of Jenny’s bedroom door closing. Then she counted to one hundred, the numbers crisp in her mind. She needed him marinating in it. In the afterglow, in the guilt, in the dizzying confusion.
Her own bed was cold and empty. She slipped her silk robe on, not tying it, and ghosted across the hall to his room.
The door was ajar. She pushed it open silently. The room was lit only by the dying amber in a whiskey glass on his nightstand, casting a weak, honeyed light that made the shadows in the rumpled sheets look deep enough to drown in. Aidan lay on his back, one arm flung over his eyes, the sheet tented at his waist. His chest rose and fell in a rhythm that wasn’t sleep.
She didn’t announce herself. She moved to the side of the bed and sat on the edge, the mattress dipping slightly under her weight. He stiffened, his arm lowering from his face. In the gloom, she saw the wet tracks gleaming on his temples, the stunned, hollow look in his eyes.
“Hey,” she whispered.
He couldn’t form a word. He just stared, a rabbit in the path of a quiet, oncoming car.
Her hand found his thigh through the sheet. The muscle was taut, wire-strung. She let her palm rest there, a warm, steady weight. “I heard you,” she said, her voice a low murmur, almost conversational. “Well, I didn’t hear you. Not the specifics. The house was too quiet for that. But I heard the silence. I heard her leave your room.”
Aidan’s breath hitched. “Cat, I—”
“Shhh.” Her fingers began to trace slow, absent circles on his leg. “I was in the closet. The one by the guest bath. I’d gone to fetch a sweater. I’d gotten cold.” It was a lie, smooth and effortless. “And I saw her come in here. I saw the look on her face. It was… devotional.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, a fresh tear escaping the corner.
“I didn’t mean to watch,” she continued, her hand drifting higher, up his thigh, under the hem of the sheet. “But I couldn’t look away. It was like seeing a sacred ritual. Or a car crash.” Her fingers brushed his hip, and she felt him jump. “You were crying, Aidan. At the end. I could see the lamplight on your cheeks from the crack in the door.”
“Please,” he managed, a broken syllable.
“Please what?” Her hand found him. He was already half-hard, his body betraying him anew, reacting to her touch, to the scandal of her words. She wrapped her fingers around him, a firm, knowing grip. He groaned, a sound of pure anguish. “Please stop? Or please keep going?” She leaned in, her auburn hair a curtain that brushed his shoulder. Her lips were a millimeter from his ear. “I want to know how it felt.”
“Catriona, for God’s sake—”
“Tell me,” she insisted, her voice hardening just a fraction, the designer insisting on a fabric swatch. She began to stroke him, a slow, patient rhythm. “Tell me how she feels. Is she tighter than me now? After today, after all that attention?” She was using her thumb on the tip, spreading the moisture that had already beaded there. His hips gave an infinitesimal jerk. “She must be. She’s so young. Everything is so… elastic.”
“Don’t do this.” But his body was arching into her hand.
“I’m not doing anything,” she breathed. “I’m just asking my husband about his day. About the girl who cleans our house and fucks you in our bed. It’s a simple question, Aidan. Does she feel different?”
He was panting now, his hands fisting in the sheets. The conflict on his face was exquisite. Shame, arousal, terror, and a dawning, horrific understanding. “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, she feels different.”
“How?” Catriona’s own breath was coming quicker. She could feel a corresponding heat building low in her own belly, a sharp, illicit thrill.
“Warmer. Tighter. Like… like she’s trying to memorize the shape.” The words were torn from him, each one a confession.
A soft, approving sound escaped Catriona’s throat. “She loves you.”
“She said that.”
“I know she did. I could read her lips. ‘Husband of my heart.’” Catriona repeated the phrase without mockery, with a kind of clinical awe. “That’s very potent, Aidan. That’s a powerful spell for a girl to cast. And you believed it.”
Her hand worked him faster, her own arousal a slick, secret fact between her legs. “And when you came inside her? While she was saying that? What was that like?”
He was thrusting into her fist now, losing the battle. “It was… it was like being unmade.”
“Good.” She said it with finality. “That’s what I wanted to know.” She released him suddenly, leaving him throbbing and desperate. He cried out, a strangled sound of protest.
She stood up, looking down at him. Her robe had fallen open. In the dim light, her body was a pale, elegant sculpture. “Next time,” she said, her tone shifting back to something almost light, almost wifely, “I don’t want to watch from a closet.”
Aidan lay utterly still, wrecked.
“I want to be in the room. I want to see the look on your face when you break. I want to see how her body takes you. I want to hear the exact sound she makes when you fill her up.” She tilted her head, a curator considering an acquisition. “It’s only fair, don’t you think? She’s using my things. My house. My husband. The least she can do is let me have a proper viewing.”
She turned and walked to the door, pausing at the threshold. She glanced back, her green eyes catching the last of the light, glowing like a cat’s. “Sleep well, my love. You’ve earned it.”
The door clicked shut.
Aidan lay in the profound silence, the smell of Jenny and his own shame and now his wife’s lavender soap merging into one incomprehensible scent. His body ached, throbbed, hummed with unmet need. The emptiness where Catriona’s hand had been was a void. He heard the soft tread of her feet retreating, not to her lonely bed, but he knew, with a chilling certainty, down the hall. Toward Jenny’s room.
To issue an invitation.