Chapter 10: Forced Devotion
The drive home was a blur of streetlights and guilty silence. Emily’s body still hummed with the aftershocks of Nathan’s possession, a foreign electricity beneath her skin. She could still smell his cologne, a dark spice mingled with her own scent. She stopped at a twenty-four-hour drugstore, bought mint gum and a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash, scrubbing the taste of gin and him from her mouth in the fluorescent-lit bathroom. It felt absurd, this pathetic attempt at erasure.
When she let herself into the darkened house, it was just past nine. Mark wasn't there yet, so she hurried inside, got undressed, and slipped into bed. She could still feel Nathan's cum seeping out of her swollen pussy as she laid there, feigning sleep.
Meanwhile Mark was in a daze driving home, his mind doing cartwheels thinking about everything that had happened tonight. His ass was throbbing from the pounding he had gotten and his throat was sore from deep throating all those cocks. He felt totally humiliated, and dehumanized.
To make matters worse, Sarah had gleefully informed him that Emily had been having sex with another man while he was getting gangbanged. After all, why wouldn't she want a real man instead of some pathetic faggot bottom boy.
Sarah had given him very clear instructions to follow if he didn't want those videos she took published online. He was not to confront Emily, or even let her know he was aware of her affair. He was to go down on his wife when he got home and satisfy her orally while telling her how good she tastes. He was instructed not to fuck her, but only to please her.
If, for any reason, Emily told him about the affair, he was to tell her how much it turned him on and encourage her to do it again.
Mark's mind was spinning and conflicted. His prim and proper wife of 10 years had cheated on him with another man. But was he really a man himself. How could he blame her for finding a real man when he was so pathetic.
The key turned in the lock with a sound like a bone breaking.
Mark stood in the foyer, the quiet of his own home feeling alien and accusatory. The memory of rough hands and mocking laughter still echoed in his muscles, a dull ache competing with the sharper, persistent throb between his legs. He hung his jacket, the ordinary motion feeling like a pantomime performed by a stranger. He could still smell the warehouse on his skin—stale cigarettes, sweat, and something bitter he couldn’t name.
He climbed the stairs, each step a leaden effort. The master bedroom door was ajar, a slice of lamplight cutting across the hall carpet. He pushed it open. Emily was a shape under the covers, turned away, her breathing deliberately even. The room smelled of her jasmine shower gel, but underneath it, coiling in the warm air, was something muskier, something foreign.
Sarah’s command was a looped tape in his skull. Taste her. Tell her she’s incredible. Don’t fuck her.
His own wife. The scent of another man’s work was unmistakable. A hot, shameful twist in his gut wasn’t anger; it was a sickening pang of confirmation. She’d been with someone. She’d been fucked. While he was on his knees. The symmetry of it was perverse.
“Em?” he whispered, his voice sandpaper-rough.
She stirred, a convincing mimicry of sleep. “Hmm? You’re home.” She didn’t turn over.
He stood beside the bed, looking down at the curve of her shoulder. Obedience was a habit now, etched deep by the night’s violations. He didn’t speak. He simply pulled back the duvet. She was wearing one of his old t-shirts, the cotton soft and thin. He put a hand on her ankle. She flinched, a tiny, genuine spasm.
“Mark, I’m really tired,” she said, but her protest was weak, threaded with her own guilt.
“Just let me,” he murmured, the words tasting of ash.
He pushed the hem of the t-shirt up her legs, his movements methodical, devoid of his usual tentative affection. Her thighs were tense. He parted them. In the lamplight, he could see the slight redness, the swollen look of her. The scent intensified, rich and salty and unequivocally other.
The humiliation was a live wire in his chest. He lowered his head.
His first touch of his tongue was a clinical probe. The flavor exploded across his senses—a tangy, complex bitterness that was not her own. It was the proof, viscous and real. Nathan. The name lodged in his mind like a shard of glass. He felt Emily’s whole body stiffen, a silent gasp trapped in her ribs.
He had to do it. Sarah was watching. Somewhere, a camera was blinking.
He pressed his mouth fully against her, his tongue delving into the slick, used heat of her. He lapped at her, swallowing the bitter-salty evidence of another man’s climax. It was the most debasing act of a night full of them. A low moan vibrated in his throat, not from pleasure, but from a profound, gut-deep disgrace.
“Oh, fuck,” Emily breathed out, her hand flying to his hair, not to push him away, but to clutch. Her hips lifted involuntarily. Shame and a startling, residual arousal were warring inside her, and her body was betraying her. “Mark…”
He increased his pace, his tongue circling her clit with a practiced desperation he’d learned elsewhere tonight. He was good at this. He’d been graded on it. He flicked and sucked, his nose buried in the musk of her infidelity. The images flashed: Nathan, someone larger, darker, pounding into her against that window. The thought should have killed his momentum. Instead, a filthy, bewildering current of arousal shot through him.
“You taste,” he moaned against her wet flesh, the words forced out by his programming, “so fucking incredible. God, Em, you taste divine.”
It was the truth wrapped in a lie. She did taste powerful, corrupt, completely unlike herself. It was the taste of his own obsolescence. He drove her higher, using every shameful trick he now knew. Her thighs clamped around his ears. Her cries grew sharp, fractured.
She came with a choked, shuddering wail, her back arching off the bed. He tasted the change in her, the clean, sharp burst of her own pleasure cutting through the lingering residue of the other man. He didn’t stop until her clutching hands went limp.
He pulled away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked up at her. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide with a shocked, glassy satisfaction. And beneath that, a dawning horror at what had just happened, at what he had just willingly consumed.
He knelt there between her legs, his own untouched erection straining against his zipper. A punishment. The silence screamed.
Emily finally looked at him, really looked. His eyes were hollow, his mouth damp. “Mark…” she began, the confession bubbling up. “I have to tell you something. Tonight, I—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted, his voice eerily calm. He climbed onto the bed, lying beside her but not touching. He stared at the ceiling. “I don’t need to know. But if you… if you see him again.” He turned his head, and the look he gave her was a grotesque parody of arousal. “Tell me about it. While I do that to you. It would be so hot.”
The words, Sarah’s words, fell between them like stones. Emily’s breath hitched. The man beside her was a stranger, speaking in a language she didn’t understand.
Down the hall, in the guest room they never used, the faint green light on a small digital recorder blinked once, and went dark.