Chapter 8: wife takes it
The cold night air was a slap, but it didn’t cleanse. It merely sealed the filth onto me. I drove home through empty streets, the smell of their sex, of my own complicity, trapped in the car with me. His dried spend crackled on my skin beneath my kameez, a grotesque tattoo. My fingers, which had been inside me as I watched them, still carried the scent.
My house was a tomb. Silent, orderly, smelling of lemon polish and untouched bedsheets. Ravi was asleep, a gentle snore rising from our bedroom. I walked past the door and went directly to the bathroom. I locked it.
Under the scalding spray of the shower, I scrubbed. I used a rough loofah, scraping my skin until it burned pink. But the feeling wasn’t of purification. It was of erosion. I was scrubbing away a layer of myself, the woman who had believed Vishal’s whispers, who had mistaken frantic friction for passion. The water pooled at my feet, swirling with soap, but I felt permanently stained.
I remembered Swati’s face in that final moment of her climax, a mask of furious, perfect ecstasy. I remembered Vishal’s look of shattered devotion. “Aisa… haan… mere saath.” The words echoed. That was love. Messy, brutal, forgiving, all-consuming. It was a language I didn’t speak.
Wrapped in a towel, I stared at my reflection. The woman looking back was hollow-eyed. Beautiful, perhaps, but empty. A vessel waiting to be filled with any feeling strong enough to crack the monotony. Rome had been a spark. Tonight was a wildfire, and I had been burned to ash in the watching of it.
I slipped into bed beside Ravi. His body radiated a familiar, sleeping warmth. He murmured and turned, his hand flopping onto my waist in a habit of unconscious ownership. I lay rigid, staring at the ceiling. The contrast was a physical ache. His innocent, trusting touch felt like a lie. Our sex life was a polite, quiet transaction. A mutual release with the emotional resonance of a handshake. He would touch me, I would arch, we would finish, and sleep. There were no screams, no sobs, no filthy words that bound us tighter. There was certainly no watching.
I was an idiot. I had traded the potential for that—for a love that could survive betrayal and transmute it into something even more potent—for fumbled gropes in hotel rooms and the constant fear of discovery. Vishal hadn’t been my lover. He had been my escape from a quiet life. Swati was his destination.
Sleep didn’t come. The images played on a loop. Swati’s foot on his shoulder. The obscene, loving slurp of her mouth on him. The way she’d commanded him to look at me as he came. That was the true punishment. Not the humiliation, but the revelation. I wasn’t the other woman. I was the prop.
A sick, restless energy buzzed in my veins. Just before dawn, I got up. I made tea, the mechanical routine soothing. In the grey light, I scrolled through my phone, a mindless gesture. A message notification glowed. Vishal.
It was sent three hours after I’d left.
‘I am so sorry. For everything. She… she knows everything. About Rome. About before. It’s over.’
The words were like stones. Cold, final. There was no plea, no secret promise. Just a statement of fact. It’s over. I felt nothing. No grief, no anger. Just a vast, echoing emptiness where my fantasy had lived.
The reply was easy to type. ‘I know. It was never anything.’ I sent it and blocked his number.
The action was shockingly painless. It was like cutting away a dead limb. The phantom itch would remain, but the infected flesh was gone.
Ravi emerged, yawning, his hair sticking up. “You’re up early.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, handing him a cup of tea.
He smiled, that kind, uncomplicated smile. “Big night at Swati’s? She always throws good parties.”
A laugh, brittle and sharp, escaped me. “Yes. It was… unforgettable.”
He nodded, sipping his tea, oblivious to the cataclysm that had reshaped his wife just hours before, just feet away from where he slept. “We should have them over soon. Return the favor.”
The idea was so grotesque, so perfectly normal, that I had to grip the counter. “Maybe,” I said.
He showered, dressed, kissed my cheek. The routine was a play, and we were both actors. But I had forgotten my lines. I watched him leave, a good man, a provider, a gentle soul. And I felt absolutely nothing.
The day stretched, empty and endless. I cleaned what was already clean. I tried to read. The words were black marks on a page. My mind was a theater, and only one show was playing.
By afternoon, the numbness began to thaw, and what rose in its place was a seething, restless hunger. It wasn’t for Vishal. That was extinguished. It was for what he and Swati had. The intensity. The raw, unfiltered feeling. I didn’t just want to be fucked. I wanted to be seen, to be known in that ugly, glorious way. I wanted to scream and curse and forgive. I wanted a love that left marks.
Ravi could never give me that. Our foundation was built on pleasantries and shared responsibilities. We didn’t fight; we discussed. We didn’t ravage; we made love. It was a beautiful, empty house.
I found myself in the walk-in closet, my fingers trailing over Ravi’s orderly row of shirts. Then they moved to my own clothes. I pushed aside the sensible salwar kameez, the elegant sarees, and found what I was looking for. A dress I’d bought on a whim years ago and never worn. It was too tight, too short, too black. The kind of dress that didn’t belong in this closet, in this house, on this version of Priya Patel.
I took it out. I held it against myself in the full-length mirror. The woman holding the dress was a stranger with familiar eyes. Eyes that had seen too much.
The doorbell rang.
I jumped, guilt flashing through me as if I’d been caught. I shoved the dress back into the depths of the closet and smoothed my hair.
It was the courier with a package for Ravi. I signed, my hand steady, my heart a frantic drum. As I closed the door, my eyes fell on the family portrait in the hallway. Ravi, me, and our daughter, Anya, smiling from her university dorm. The perfect little trinity.
Anya. My bright, fierce daughter. She called her father ‘Papa’ with affection. She called me ‘Mom’ with a casual warmth. Did she have any idea of the hollow woman behind the title? Did she sense the void where a mother’s passionate core should be?
I went to my phone and did something impulsive, dangerous. I didn’t text Vishal. I unblocked his number and pulled up Swati’s contact instead. My thumbs hovered over the screen. What could I possibly say? Thank you for the lesson? I’m sorry I fucked your husband?
A different thought emerged, cold and clear. I didn’t type an apology. I typed a question. A single, stark line.
‘Does the hunger ever go away?’
I stared at it. It was a message in a bottle, thrown into a sea of hatred and triumph. She would likely ignore it, or fire back with more venom. But something in me needed to ask. She had seen the same void in me that I had only just recognized. She had weaponized it.
I deleted the text. I wasn’t brave enough.
Instead, I went back to the closet. I took the black dress out again. I didn’t try it on. I folded it carefully, placed it in a tote bag, and hid the bag under the spare linens in the hallway cupboard. A secret for a secret.
That night, when Ravi reached for me in bed, I didn’t arch politely. I turned to him, I looked into his kind, sleepy eyes in the dark, and I kissed him with a desperation that made him pull back.
“Priya? You okay?”
“I need you,” I whispered, and it was true, but not in the way he understood. I needed to feel something, anything. I climbed on top of him, my movements urgent, clumsy. I guided him inside me, riding him with a frantic rhythm borrowed from a memory that wasn’t mine. I thought of Swati’s sinuous control, her vocal, shameless pleasure. I tried to mimic it, a poor pantomime.
Ravi came quickly, overwhelmed by this unfamiliar version of his wife. He held me afterward, confused but pleased. “Wow,” he breathed. “That was… welcome home.”
I lay in his arms, the emptiness wider than ever. The performance had failed. I had merely gone through the motions of passion, and it had felt more hollow than our routine.
The real show was over. I had been a spectator in another woman’s marriage, and it had ruined me for my own. The curtain had fallen, leaving me alone on a stage I never built, speaking lines I didn’t believe, for an audience of one who was already asleep.
The hunger, I knew then, watching the shadows on the ceiling, did not go away. It grew. It was all I had left.