Chapter 3: Celebration
The smell of their apartment—roasted garlic, Kate’s lemongrass candle, the faint must of old books—hit Billy like a physical barrier. It felt impossibly small, shabby, a diorama of a life he’d just stepped out of. Kate was at the stove, her back to him, humming along to a jazz standard on the radio. Her blonde hair was piled in a messy bun, and she wore his old college sweatpants.
“Hey,” he said, his voice sounding foreign.
She turned, a smile already lighting her face. “There you are. I was starting to think you’d gotten lost in the edit bay again. Hungry? I’m making the pasta.”
“Kate. I got it.”
“Got what?” She wiped her hands on a towel, her brow furrowed.
“The promotion. The senior production coordinator job. On the twenty-second floor.” The words fell out of him, flat and rehearsed. “With the window office.”
Her face went still, then erupted. She let out a sharp, joyful cry and launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “Billy! Oh my god! That’s incredible!” She pulled back, her eyes searching his. “Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost? This is everything you wanted!”
He forced a smile, feeling the muscles in his face protest. “I know. It’s just… a lot. It happened so fast. Bloodstone herself offered it to me.”
“Marla Bloodstone?” Kate’s eyes widened with impressed reverence. “The Ice Queen of the Clamp Centre? She actually knows your name?”
“Yeah.” He tasted bile. “She knows my name.”
The celebration was homemade. They opened a bottle of Prosecco they’d been saving, ate the pasta, and Kate chattered about what the raise could mean—a real vacation, maybe starting that savings account for a place with a second bedroom. Her hope was a bright, painful light. Billy nodded, drank, and felt the phantom smear of lipstick on his cock like a burn.
Later, in the soft dark of their bedroom, she reached for him. Her touch was familiar, a language written in the gentle calluses on her fingertips from her pottery studio. She kissed him, and he kissed back, pouring all his chaotic guilt into a performance of passion.
“I’m so proud of you,” she whispered against his lips, her hands pulling his t-shirt over his head.
He pushed her gently back onto the bed, following her down, letting the weight of his body anchor him to this reality, to her. He kissed her neck, her collarbone, slid the strap of her tank top down. Her skin was warm, smelled of clay and lavender lotion. It was the smell of home, of sanity.
But when he closed his eyes, he didn’t see Kate.
He saw a cascade of red curls against white marble. Saw green eyes locked on his, commanding, degrading him. He heard the wet, greedy sounds of a mouth that took everything.
“Fuck me, Billy,” Kate breathed, arching her back as he peeled her underwear down. “I want to feel you.”
He entered her, and she gasped, wrapping her legs around his hips. Her cunt was tight and welcoming, a silken heat so different from the aggressive suction of a throat. He moved, setting a rhythm that was years in the making, a dance he knew by heart. Kate moaned, her nails digging into his shoulders, her face a mask of earnest, loving pleasure.
He was split in two.
One part of him was here, with the woman he loved, feeling the genuine, building crest of his own physical response. The other part was on his knees in a marble tomb, being consumed.
“Oh, god… yes…” Kate chanted, her hips meeting his thrusts.
Billy’s mind shattered. He saw the lipstick. The smeared, crimson evidence. He imagined it staining Kate from the inside, tainting her, marking his betrayal in a place she could never see. The image, vile and explosive, coiled the tension in his gut to a breaking point.
“You like that?” he grunted, his voice rough, foreign even to his own ears. It wasn’t his question. It was an echo.
“Yes! Don’t stop!”
He drove into her, harder, faster, chasing the ghost in his mind. He wasn’t making love to Kate anymore. He was fucking the memory out of his system, using her body as an exorcism. The bedframe knocked a steady, frantic beat against the wall.
“I’m gonna come,” he warned, a snarl in his throat.
“Come inside me,” she pleaded, lost in her own ecstasy, completely trusting. “Fill me up.”
With a final, brutal thrust, he did. His release was a violence, a punch that emptied him. He cried out, a raw sound torn from his chest, his vision whiting out. Beneath him, Kate shuddered through her own climax, her inner muscles pulsing around him.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing mixing in the dark. He collapsed beside her, slick with sweat. She curled into him immediately, her head on his chest, a contented sigh warming his skin.
“That was… wow,” she murmured, already drifting. “The promotion power. I could get used to that.”
He said nothing. He stared at the water stain on the ceiling he’d been meaning to fix.
Within minutes, her breathing evened out into the soft, regular rhythm of sleep. Peace smoothed her features. She was happy. She was safe. She believed in him.
Billy lay rigid, Marla’s name screaming silently in his skull. The taste of expensive whisky was gone. All he could taste now was the cheap Prosecco, sour and thin, and beneath it, the metallic, coppery permanence of his own lie. The city’s light bled around the edges of their blinds, casting barred shadows across the bed. Across Kate’s sleeping face. Across the empty space inside him where his loyalty used to live.