Chapter 1: Introduction
Liz is a wonderful woman, she's not great at house work or cooking, but Roy loves doing all of the domestic stuff, she has a high powered job that takes her away from home for around two weeks a month. But when she's home she's all Roy's they spend as much time together as they can and they have a great sex life. The only down side is that Roy tends to drink a little too much when she's away but he makes sure he doesn't drink when she's at home.
He's a good man, a little naive maybe, but he's got a heart of gold and he loves Liz more than anything in the world.
Roy's living room is a cozy, lived-in space, a reflection of his personality. The worn-out couch is a testament to the countless hours he's spent watching TV, the cluttered coffee table a shrine to his love for music. His guitar leans against the wall, a silent reminder of his unfulfilled dreams. The large, flat-screen TV dominates one wall, its black screen reflecting the dim light from the nearby lamp, casting long shadows across the room.
The house is quiet, too quiet.
Liz is away on another one of her business trips, leaving Roy alone with his thoughts and the hum of the refrigerator. He's been trying to keep himself busy, cleaning the house, practicing his guitar, but nothing seems to fill the void that Liz's absence leaves behind.
He flops down on the couch, the springs creaking under his weight, and grabs the remote. The TV flickers to life, casting a blue glow over his face. He flips through the channels, settling on an old black and white movie. But his mind is elsewhere, wandering down the familiar path of wondering what Liz is doing, if she's thinking of him.
As the movie plays, Roy's eyelids grow heavy.
He's been up since dawn, and the late night hours have caught up with him. He leans back into the couch, his head resting on the armrest, and lets his eyes drift closed. The sound of the TV is a soothing lullaby, but his mind is still racing.
The sound of the TV is a soothing lullaby, but his mind is still racing. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knows, the remote is slipping from his hand and clattering onto the floor. He jerks awake, disoriented, the blue light of the screen painting the room in an alien wash.
He fumbles for the remote, his fingers clumsy with sleep. He must have pressed something when he dropped it. The black and white movie is gone. In its place is a menu screen for a streaming service he doesn’t recognize, with thumbnails of lurid, suggestive images.
“What the hell?” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes. Liz must have subscribed to something new. He aims the remote, intending to exit back to the regular guide. His thumb hits the central select button instead.
The screen goes black for a heartbeat. Then it fills with a brilliant, painfully clear image.
Roy freezes.
The image is crisp, unnaturally vivid. It’s a bedroom, but not theirs. The walls are a stark, featureless grey. The lighting is bright and clinical, coming from off-screen.
And there she is.
Liz.
Her hair, that familiar shade of honey blonde, is fanned out over a plain black pillow. Her face is turned toward the camera, her eyes glazed, her mouth slightly open. She’s making a sound, a high, breathy whimper that Roy has never heard before. It’s not pleasure, not exactly. It’s something emptied out.
Roy’s breath hitches in his throat. It’s a trapped, painful sound.
The camera pulls back.
A man is behind her. He is enormous, a mountain of carved muscle and sinew, his back a topographic map of exertion. He moves with a slow, punishing rhythm. His head is shaved. His face, in profile, is sharp and merciless.
Roy knows that face. He’s seen it in a photograph tucked in the back of Liz’s old college yearbook. Frank. Her ex. The one she said was a “loser” and a “dead end.”
Frank is not a loser now. He is a spectacle of brutal anatomy. Every thrust is a deliberate event, a piston driving home. Liz’s body jolts with each one, her scripted cries dissolving into raw, guttural noises. Words break apart in her mouth.
“Ohgodohgodfuh—fuh—mmph—”
It’s incoherent. A slurry of sound and spit. Her eyes are rolled back, showing the whites. A string of drool connects her lower lip to the pillowcase. She looks dazed, broken apart, like a complex machine reduced to a single, overloaded function.
Frank leans down, his mouth near her ear. His voice is a rough gravel. “Who owns this, Liz? Who turns you into this dumb cunt?”
Her response is a wet, choked sob. “You. You d-do.”
“Say it pretty.”
“I’m… I’m your bimbo slut.” The line is delivered with a frightening vacancy, a hollow chant. She’s not acting. The person she is with Roy—the funny, sharp-witted woman who runs boardroom meetings—is not here. This is someone emptied out and reprogrammed, a bimbo slut indeed, mouth slack, mind blissfully shattered.
Roy feels the room tip sideways. The coffee table, the guitar, the lamp—they all swim in his vision. A cold nausea, sharp as glass, climbs from his stomach into his chest. He can’t look away. It’s a car crash in slow motion, starring the center of his universe.
He sees details in merciless 4K clarity. The sweat gleaming on Frank’s shoulders. The red pressure marks on Liz’s hips where his hands grip her, possessive and hard. The sheer, staggering size of Frank, a grotesque exaggeration of manhood that makes Roy feel instantly, utterly insignificant. A pretender in his own home, on his own couch.
The remote control slips from his hand again. This time it doesn’t clatter. It lands soundlessly on the rug.
On screen, the scene reaches its brutal, noisy conclusion. Frank’s final movements are animalistic, a claiming. Liz’s body convulses, then goes utterly limp, a puppet with cut strings. She just lies there, wrecked and staring at nothing, a smile on her face that is utterly, terrifyingly stupid.
She just lies there, wrecked and staring at nothing, a smile on her face that is utterly, terrifyingly stupid.
Roy’s hands are trembling. A high-pitched ringing has taken up residence in his ears, drowning out the tinny moans from the television speakers. He tries to swallow, but his throat is made of sandpaper and ash. He thinks he might be sick. He should move. He should turn it off. He should smash the screen.
He does nothing.
On screen, Frank rolls off of her with a grunt. The camera, static until now, zooms in slowly on Liz’s face. Her eyes are unfocused, pupils wide. She licks her lips—a slow, deliberate drag of her tongue—and turns her head toward the camera. She smiles directly into the lens. It’s a vacant, post-fuck smile Roy has never seen.
“That was… wow,” she slurs, her voice thick and dreamy. “I can’t even think.”
Frank’s hand enters the frame, cupping her jaw roughly, turning her face toward him. “You’re not supposed to think, baby. That’s my job. Your job is to look pretty and take it.” He slaps her ass, hard. The crack is sharp through the speakers. Liz yelps, then giggles. Giggles.
“Hey, you promised we could do the thing,” she says, her voice dipping into a pout that isn’t hers. “The thing for the fans.”
Frank’s smirk is all teeth. “Oh yeah. The hubby thing.”
The word hits Roy in the solar plexus. Hubby. The air leaves the room.
Frank leans over, grabs something off-camera, and holds it up. It’s Roy’s blue flannel shirt. The one he’d been missing for weeks. The one Liz said she must have accidentally donated. Frank brings it to his nose and takes an exaggerated sniff.
“Mmm. Still smells like him. Like disappointment and laminate flooring.” He laughs, a sharp, mean sound. “You wanna hold it, while I go again? Give the cucks at home a little show?”
Liz takes the shirt. She doesn’t look at it with guilt or sadness. She hugs it to her chest like a stuffed animal, nuzzling the fabric. “Hi, hubby,” she whispers to the shirt, her voice a babyish coo. “You watching? You seeing what a real man does to your wife? How he makes her his dumb little piss-hole?”
Roy makes a sound. A wounded, animal noise from deep in his gut. His face is wet. He didn’t feel himself start crying.
On screen, Frank is getting hard again. Liz is stroking him, talking to the shirt in her arms, her words a filthy, loving whisper meant for an audience of strangers. Meant, he now understands with dawning, catastrophic horror, for men exactly like him. Men who sit in the dark, watching.
A new, hotter feeling ignites underneath the ice in his veins. It’s shame, but it’s threaded with something else, something dark and electrical that coils in his stomach. His heart isn’t just breaking; it’s hammering against his ribs, a frantic drum. He is horrified. He is riveted.
He cannot look away.
The scene shifts. Frank stands by the bed, a colossal, terrifying monument. He orders Liz onto her knees. She goes willingly, still clutching the blue flannel to her cheek, looking up at Frank with an adoration so complete it vaporizes every memory Roy has of her looking at him that way.
“This is what she’s built for,” Frank says, addressing the camera directly now, his eyes sharp and knowing, as if he can see every solitary, shattered viewer. “This is her purpose. You get the leftovers. The tired hugs. The laundry. I get this. I own this.”
Liz makes a pleading sound and leans forward.
Roy’s body betrays him. A jolt of unwanted, searing arousal mixes with the acid of his disgust. The collision is psychological violence. He grinds his palms into his eyes, but the afterimage is burned there—his wife, his happy, funny wife, reduced to a worshipful thing at the feet of a monster, holding his shirt as a prop in her own humiliation.
And he is here. Watching. His breath is coming in short, sharp gasps. A terrible, crushing weight settles on his chest, but lower, in his groin, a traitorous heat persists. The conflict is tearing him in two. The love he felt moments ago is curdling, reforming into something grotesque and fascinated.
He is outside of himself. He is floating near the ceiling, watching a man named Roy sit frozen on a couch, unable to stop watching the worst moment of his life. That man’s hand is moving. It’s down the front of his sweatpants. He’s touching himself while he stares, tears cutting clean tracks through the stubble on his cheeks.
The realization is a final, internal collapse. The foundations of his marriage, his identity, his very sense of reality, give way all at once.
He is not a husband discovering a betrayal.
He is a spectator. A consumer. A cuckold, panting in the dark, complicit in his own annihilation.
Frank’s laugh booms from the speakers, rich and contemptuous. “Yeah. That’s it. You all know it. This is the truth. Everything else is just the lie she lives to get here.”
The video fades to black.