Chapter 29: The Return of the Ex
The rain was a relief. It washed the sweat from their skin, cooled the feverish memory of the last week’s filming, and muted the city into a grey, watercolor haze. Catriona leaned against the damp brick wall under the pub’s awning, the neon sign painting her face in intermittent reds and blues. Aidan stood beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. They weren’t touching. That was the rule for outside.
“I feel hollowed out,” she said, watching the rain needle the puddles on the cobblestones. “In a good way. Like everything noisy got fucked out of me.”
He chuckled, a low sound lost in the patter. “The client’s last email used the word ‘devotional’. Said the DP scene had a religious quality.”
She snorted. “Bullshit. It was just filthy. Beautifully filthy.” She sipped her whiskey, the heat of it a clean counterpoint to the damp chill. For a week, they’d lived in the glare of the softboxes, her body a testing ground for new angles, new toys, new depths. The double penetration request had been fulfilled with a meticulous, brutal grace. She’d taken the strap-on, a realistic, thick silicone thing, while Aidan filled her other channel, his voice a relentless, praising dirty talk in her ear. The resulting video was, according to the client, a masterpiece of obscene geometry. They’d collapsed afterwards, slept for fourteen hours, and now here they were, two ghosts in the rain, pretending to be normal.
“Dave would hate this whiskey,” Aidan said, almost to himself.
The name hung between them, a sudden, cold draft. They never said his name. It was an unspoken pact.
“Dave liked light beer. And those awful pumpkin ales in autumn.” Catriona’s voice was quiet. She hadn’t thought of his tastes in months. The memory felt like looking at a photograph of a stranger.
“He’d hate this whole place. Too much character. Not enough sports screens.”
She was about to reply, to deflect, when movement caught her eye. A figure emerged from the sheet of rain at the end of the alley, a dark silhouette against the glistening cobbles. He walked with a purpose that seemed at odds with the weather, shoulders hunched, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets. Something in the set of his head, the rhythm of his stride, made her stomach drop.
“Aidan,” she whispered.
He followed her gaze. The figure stopped under a streetlamp, and the yellow light fell on a face they both knew. David. His hair was plastered to his forehead, his glasses speckled with rain. He looked older, thinner. His eyes, wide and unblinking, were fixed on them.
“Oh, fuck,” Aidan breathed, straightening up.
David just stared. The rain poured down between them, a curtain of noise. Then he started walking again, each step deliberate. He stopped three feet away. The smell of wet wool and cold anger washed over them.
“Catriona,” he said. Her name wasn’t a greeting. It was an accusation.
“David.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was the voice she used at the library desk. Polite, distant. “What are you doing here?”
A bitter laugh escaped him, sharp and ugly. “What am I doing here? I tracked your phone, Cat. I’ve been tracking it for weeks. I saw you were in Vancouver. I put in for a transfer. I thought… I thought maybe you were in trouble. Or alone.” His eyes flicked to Aidan, then back to her, and the hurt in them hardened into something venomous. “But you’re not alone, are you? You’re with him. My best mate.”
“Dave, listen—” Aidan started, taking a half-step forward.
“Don’t you ‘Dave’ me!” David’s shout cut through the rain, startling a pigeon from a nearby ledge. “My best mate! And you…” He looked back at Catriona, his face crumbling for a second before reassembling into rage. “You just vanished. One text. ‘It’s not working. I’m sorry.’ Months of silence. And you’re here. With him.”
“It’s not what you think,” Catriona said, the lie automatic and feeble.
“Isn’t it?” David’s voice dropped to a poisoned whisper. He pulled his phone from his pocket, his hands shaking. The screen glowed. With a few jabbing taps, he turned it towards them.
It was a paused video frame. A high-definition, 4K shot. Her. Tied over the back of the sofa in their living room, her face a mask of ecstatic agony, mouth open in a silent scream. Aidan behind her, his hands gripping her hips, his body a study of controlled force. The angle was clinical, obscene, leaving nothing to the imagination about where he was buried inside her.
The world narrowed to the glowing rectangle in David’s hand. The sound of the rain became a roar in Catriona’s ears. She felt the blood drain from her face, a cold void opening in her chest.
“Where did you get that?” Aidan’s question was flat, dangerous.
“A client,” David spat the word. “A ‘satisfied customer’. Bragging on some encrypted forum about his custom pornstar. He was careful, no faces. But I’d know that birthmark on her shoulder anywhere. I’d know the pattern of that fucking rug in your flat. I’d know my girlfriend’s body.” His voice cracked. “My ex-girlfriend’s body, apparently. Being turned into a… a fucking anal whore by my best friend.”
The words were physical blows. Catriona flinched. Aidan moved fully in front of her now, a barrier.
“You don’t get to talk to her like that,” Aidan said, his Yorkshire accent thickening.
“Like what? Honestly?” David laughed, a raw, broken sound. “What’s the accurate term, Aidan? You’re pimping her out! You’ve got her making… what did the review say? ‘High-end filth for discerning perverts’?”
“It was my idea,” Catriona said, stepping out from behind Aidan. Her heart was a trapped bird against her ribs, but her voice was clear. “I asked him. I proposed it.”
David stared at her as if she’d spoken in another language. “What?”
“You weren’t enough.” The words came out quiet, final, and they hung in the air with a terrible, simple truth. “You’re a nice guy, Dave. You are. But you have a small cock and a smaller imagination. I was drowning. I needed this. I asked him for it.”
The color left David’s face. All the anger seemed to drain out of him, replaced by a devastation so complete it was hard to look at. “So this… this is what you needed? To be degraded on camera? For money?”
“For me,” she said. “It’s for me.”
He shook his head, unable to process it. His eyes found Aidan. “And you. You just went along with it? You fucked my girlfriend for content?”
“She’s not your girlfriend,” Aidan said, his voice low and steady. “And it’s not just content. I love her. I’m in love with her. I have been for years.”
The silence that followed was heavier than the rain. David looked back and forth between them, the last piece of his world snapping. He’d expected an affair. A sordid secret. He’d found a conspiracy, a new world order where he was obsolete.
“You love her,” he repeated, numb. “So you help her become a… a specialist. You’re sick. Both of you.”
“Maybe,” Aidan shrugged. “But she’s mine now. You need to walk away.”
Something in David’s eyes re-ignited. All the hurt crystallized into a pure, focused hatred for Aidan. “Yours? You don’t own her, you pathetic pimp.”
“Walk. Away.” Aidan’s posture changed, the relaxed engineer gone, replaced by the capable, physical man who could take apart machines and assemble horrors.
David didn’t walk away. He lunged. It wasn’t a skilled punch, just a wild, weightless swing born of heartbreak. Aidan sidestepped it easily, catching David’s arm and using his momentum to slam him against the wet brick wall. The air left David’s lungs in a whoosh.
“Don’t,” Aidan growled in his ear.
David struggled, but it was useless. Aidan had forty pounds of muscle on him. He thrashed, kicking out, his heel connecting with Aidan’s shin. Aidan grunted, his grip tightening, and drove a short, punishing fist into David’s ribs. Once. Twice. Catriona heard the dull, meaty thuds.
“Stop it!” she screamed.
David slid down the wall, gasping, clutching his side. He looked up at Aidan, tears mixing with the rain on his face. “You were my friend.”
Aidan stood over him, breathing heavily, his knuckles red. “I was. And I’m sorry. But this is where we are.” He turned, holding a hand out to Catriona. Not a question. A statement.
She looked at David crumpled on the ground, a good man shattered by a truth he could never understand. She saw the safe, small life he offered, the one that had felt like a slow death. Then she looked at Aidan’s hand, the hand that bound her, fucked her, held her afterwards. The hand that had just defended a truth that was ugly and glorious and entirely theirs.
She didn’t hesitate.
She took Aidan’s hand. Her fingers laced with his, warm and sure. She didn’t look back as they walked away, leaving David in the alley with the rain and the ghost of what he’d lost. They crossed the street, the neon signs blurring in the downpour.
“He’ll tell people,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm.
“Let him,” Aidan replied, squeezing her hand. “We’ve got the next scene to plan. The client wants an outdoor element. Somewhere with stone.”
She leaned into him, the weight of her choice settling not as a burden, but as an anchor. “Okay,” she said. And they kept walking, two shadows dissolving into the rainy dark, leaving the past washing away behind them on the glistening stones.