Chapter 18: The Fight Within
The drive home was a silent, twenty-minute stretch of purgatory. Derek sat slumped in the passenger seat, still wrapped in Elena’s oversized coat, the lace of his thong digging into his hips.He hadn’t spoken. He just stared out the window at the passing streetlights, his face a ruin of dried mascara and quiet shame. The scent of sex and latex clung to them both, a thick, undeniable miasma inside the car.
Elena’s hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Her body hummed with a sick, residual energy.Her thighs were still sticky. Every time she glanced at Derek’s profile—the false curve of the breast under the coat, the glint of a stockings top near his belt line—a hot, sharp thrill cut through her disgust. It felt like a heart arrhythmia, a missed beat followed by a frantic, pounding rush.She despised it. She craved it.
They entered their own home, a place that suddenly felt like a museum of a forgotten life. The throw pillows on the sofa, the framed photo of them hiking, Derek’s weights neatly stacked in the corner—it all seemed staged, an echo.
“I need a shower,” Derek whispered, his voice raw.It was his first sentence since the loft.
“Okay,” Elena said, her own voice foreign to her.
He shuffled to their bathroom, and she listened to the sound of the lock clicking.Not to keep her out.To hide. She stood in the living room, arms wrapped around herself.The silence was crushing. Then, from behind the bathroom door, she heard it: a choked, muffled sob, followed by the violent, wet sound of vomiting.
Her feet moved before her mind could form a thought.She was at the door. “Derek?”
The retching subsided.The shower turned on. “Go away, Elena.” His voice was flat, dead.She didn’t go away.She pressed her forehead against the cool wood. The image of him on his hands and knees, ass in the air, presenting himself, flashed behind her eyes. Her cunt clenched, empty and aching. A fresh wave of shame washed over her, but beneath it, the arousal pulsed, persistent as a second heartbeat.
She went to the kitchen, poured a vodka, and drank it straight.The burn was a clean, focused pain.It didn’t help.
An hour later, Derek emerged. He had scrubbed his face pink, but faint traces of eyeliner lingered in his lashes. He wore his own clothes—sweatpants and a t-shirt—but he moved differently.A hesitant, delicate gait.He avoided her eyes.
“We should talk,” she said, the vodka making her tongue thick.
“What is there to say?” He didn’t look at her. He was staring at his own hands, turning them over as if they belonged to someone else.“He broke me.You saw it. You felt it.” The last word was an accusation.
“I didn’t want—”
“You came,” he interrupted, his gaze finally snapping to hers.It was hollow, shattered.“I felt you. You came while he made me… while I…”
Elena had no defense. The truth was a stone in her throat.“Something’s happening to me too.He… planted something in my head. When I look at you now, I…”
“You what?” Derek took a step forward, and for a second, the old Derek was there—angry, confrontational.
“I want you,” she blurted, the confession torn from her.“But not like… before. I look at you and I see… I see her.The bimbo. And it… god help me, it turns me on so much I can’t breathe.” She was crying now, hot, angry tears. “He did this to us both.”
Derek stood very still. The conflict warred on his face—revulsion, and beneath it, a flicker of that same desperate need. His hands twitched at his sides. “It’s in my head too,” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear.“A voice.It’s not my voice.It’s high. It’s giggly.It keeps saying… ‘Be pretty.Get fucked. Be a good girl.’” He shuddered. “I can’t make it stop.”
They were across the room from each other, a canyon of violated trust between them. Yet the air crackled with a new, terrible charge.“Show me,” Elena heard herself say. The words came from a dark, wet place inside her that Marcus had unlocked.“What?”
“The voice. Show me what it wants.”
Derek shook his head, a frantic, lost motion.“No. No, Elena, I can’t—”
“You can,” she breathed, taking a step toward him. The programming, his and hers, was a live wire connecting them.“I feel it, Derek. It’s in me, too.It wants to see. It wants her.”
His resistance was a thin shell.She saw it fracture.His shoulders slumped. A low, whimpering sound escaped his lips, and when he looked up, his expression had shifted. The terror was still there, but layered over it was a vapid, pleading want.It was the look from the loft.
Without a word, he turned and walked unsteadily toward their bedroom.She followed.
In the soft light of their bedside lamp, he stood with his back to her. His hands went to the hem of his t-shirt. He pulled it over his head in a slow, striptease motion that was utterly alien to the man she’d married. His back was still powerfully masculine, but the movement was all feminine affectation. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his sweatpants and pushed them down, stepping out of them with an awkward, model-like precision.
He stood there in just the black lace thong and the garter belt, the stockings shearing his legs. The utilitarian male underwear was gone, replaced by the delicate, humiliating harness. His erection strained against the flimsy lace, making the fabric dark with pre-cum.
“Turn around,” Elena whispered.Her mouth was dry.He obeyed, slowly, letting her see the full effect. The way the thong framed his cock and balls. The way the straps of the garter accentuated the line of his hips. The faint shadow of stubble on his jaw, clashing grotesquely with the lingerie. The mental image of him, bent over, presenting, flashed again, and this time her arousal was a sharp, commanding pang.It wasn’t just a response. It was a demand.“Touch yourself,” she said, the command sounding twisted in her own ears. “Like you did there.”
A sob caught in Derek’s throat, but his hands were already moving. One hand rose to cup the nonexistent breast, a pantomime of feminine arousal. The other slid down his flat, hard stomach, over the lace, and palmed his cock. He gasped, his eyes squeezing shut.“Look at me,” Elena said, her voice hardening.
He opened his eyes.They were glazed, tears spilling over. His hand began to move, rubbing his hard-on through the lace.“I’m sorry,” he choked again.
“No,” she said, walking toward him.“Don’t be sorry.Be a slut. That’s what you are now, isn’t it?”
He nodded, a frantic little bob of the head. “Yes.A slut.Just a dumb slut.”
Elena reached him. She could smell his sweat, the clean soap from the shower, and underneath, the musk of his desperation. Her own need was a frantic drumbeat in her skull. She pushed his hand away from his cock and, with a rough tug, ripped the lace thong down his thighs. His cock sprang free, thick and leaking.She dropped to her knees in front of him.
“Elena, don’t—” he started, but it was a weak protest, swallowed by a moan as she took him into her mouth without hesitation.She didn’t suck him with wifely affection.She devoured him. She used her lips, her tongue, the back of her throat with a hungry, sloppy ferocity that she’d never possessed before.It was a performance.It was degradation. It was the hottest thing she had ever done. She looked up the line of his body, past the throbbing cock in her mouth, to where his hands now kneaded his chest, his head thrown back in ecstatic surrender.
“Fuck my face,” she growled, pulling off for a second, her lips slick with saliva and pre-cum. “Do it, you bitch.”
The obscenity triggered something in him.His hands fell to her head, not gentle, but clutching. He began to thrust, shallow at first, then deeper, fucking her mouth with a frantic, driving rhythm. The garter belt straps dug into her cheeks.He was muttering, a stream of broken filth.
“So good… such a good mouth… wanna be your good girl, please… gonna cum, fuck, gonna cum in your pretty mouth…”
She let him.She wanted him to. She wanted to taste his surrender, to make it part of her. His hips stuttered, his thighs tensed, and with a ragged, high-pitched cry, he emptied himself down her throat. She swallowed, taking every drop, the act feeling less like intimacy and more like a sacrament to their new, twisted dynamic.When he was spent, she stood up, wiping her mouth. He was trembling, collapsing onto the edge of the bed, a panting, ruined mess in his stockings.
Elena looked down at him, her own body screaming for release.The programming was complete. They weren’t fighting it anymore.They were feeding it.
“Get on the bed,” she said, her voice cold, clear.“On your hands and knees.”
Derek lifted his head. The last vestige of her husband was a faint ghost in his eyes, watching in horror as his body scrambled to obey. He crawled onto the bed, assuming the position from the loft, his back arched, his ass offered to her.Elena fetched the bottle of lube from the nightstand. She didn’t prepare him gently.She slicked her fingers and pushed one inside him, rough and quick. He cried out, a sharp yelp of pain that melted into a low, willing groan.
“You want this,” she stated, working a second finger in, scissoring him open.
“Yes,” he whimpered into the comforter.“Need it.Need to be fucked. Please.”
She positioned herself behind him, guiding her soaking wet cunt onto him. She didn’t mount him like a lover. She took him like an object, sinking down onto his cock with a single, powerful stroke, sheathing him inside her.They both gasped.
Then she rode him.Hard. Pounding down onto him, using him, her hands gripping his hips where the garter straps bit into his skin. The bed rocked, the headboard slamming against the wall in a steady, brutal rhythm.She watched his face, twisted in pleasure-pain, pressed into the mattress. She was claiming him.Not as her husband, but as her possession.Marcus’s creature. Her slut.Her orgasm built fast, a torrential wave drawn from a well of corruption. When it broke, it was seismic, dragging a guttural scream from her lungs. Her convulsions triggered his, and he came inside her a second time, his own cry muffled and submissive.
In the heavy, sweaty silence afterward, she stayed atop him, feeling his softened cock twitch inside her.Her mind was terrifyingly clear. The conflict was gone, burned away in the raw fire of use.
She leaned down, her lips close to his ear, her voice a satisfied whisper.“My good girl.”
Beneath her, Derek Holloway shivered. And then, so softly she almost missed it, he whispered back.
“Thank you.”