Chapter 1: Guilty Pleasures
Tom stayed downstairs.
Not because there was anything to do.
There was, in fact, pointedly nothing to do. The room had gone absurdly ordinary in the aftermath. The film was off. The wine glasses still sat on the coffee table. The blankets were tangled from where both of you had been, and a single cushion had fallen onto the rug as if it, too, had decided to remove itself from the situation.
Tom stared at it.
Then at the ceiling.
Then at absolutely nothing.
“Right,” he said to the room. “Good. Very dignified.”
His body, apparently not party to the moral conversation, remained interested.
Tom looked down, then immediately away, as if he could shame himself by refusing to acknowledge it.
“No.”
Nothing changed.
He exhaled through his nose.
“We’ve discussed this.”
Still nothing.
“At length, actually.”
He pressed two fingers to his eyes.
Wonderful.
Excellent.
He had stopped. He had done the right thing, or at least the nearest available thing to it. He had told you it could not continue. You had gone upstairs. You had kissed his cheek, thanked him for looking after the children, and left him standing there with his whole life leaning very visibly in the wrong direction.
And his body had apparently taken from that: lovely, when are we resuming?
“Unbelievable,” he muttered.
He gathered the wine glasses because standing still felt dangerous. Then he took them to the kitchen. Then he rinsed them. Then he wiped the counter that did not need wiping. Then he checked the lunchboxes again, though there was no earthly reason for it.
Mia.
Ellie.
Luka.
The small dinosaur beside Luka’s name looked back at him with innocent accusation.
Tom stared at it.
“Don’t start.”
The dinosaur, being ink, wisely refrained.
He leaned both hands on the counter and lowered his head.
You were upstairs.
In his house.
In the guest room.
Wearing very little.
No.
No.
That was not an acceptable direction of thought.
He straightened abruptly.
“Bed,” he said. “Sleep. Perfectly ordinary human activities. Let’s attempt those.”
He turned off the lights downstairs one by one, moving through the house with exaggerated quiet. In the hallway, he paused beneath the stairs.
Everything above was still.
Children asleep.
You asleep, perhaps.
Or not.
He shut his eyes.
“Absolutely not.”
Then he went upstairs.
His room felt too familiar when he entered it. Too much like the life he already had. Clothes over the chair. Books on the bedside table. A script with pencil markings he had forgotten to finish. His phone, which he had carried up with him without meaning to, landed face down beside the bed.
For a moment he just stood there.
Then he undressed with unnecessary efficiency, pulled on pyjama bottoms, got into bed, and turned off the lamp.
Darkness.
Silence.
Good.
Fine.
Sleep.
He lay on his back and stared upward.
His body did not sleep.
His mind, traitorous and badly disciplined, replayed the whole evening with the loving precision of a sadist.
Your face when you saw the lunchboxes.
Your laugh over takeaway.
Your damp hair.
Your hand on his jaw.
Your mouth.
Your hand under his shirt.
Tom turned onto his side.
No improvement.
He turned onto his other side.
Worse, for reasons that felt personally vindictive.
He rolled onto his back again and dragged both hands down his face.
“For God’s sake.”
The house remained silent.
He tried thinking about work.
A scene. Lines. Marks. Lighting. Anything technical. Anything sterile.
But even that betrayed him, because the last conversation you’d had before everything fell apart had been about acting kisses, about making intimacy technical, about wanting and pretending and the difference between the two.
He tried thinking about Liliana.
He did it deliberately. Punitively.
Her face. Her hand in his. The wedding. The woman he had been with for years. The woman who deserved honesty. The woman downstairs in the moral architecture of his life, waiting to become either his wife or his wound.
He tried to place her clearly in his mind.
And for one horrible second, he almost did.
Then your voice cut through it.
Tom went completely still.
His eyes opened in the dark.
“Oh, that is low,” he muttered, though he had no idea who he was accusing. His mind. His body. God. Theatre. The sofa.
Probably the sofa.
He breathed in slowly.
Then out.
It did not help.
Heat sat low in him, stubborn and humiliating. Not adolescent exactly, though it was behaving with about that much sophistication. It was want, yes, but worse because it was tangled with tenderness. With guilt. With the strange, devastating pride of having stopped. With the awful knowledge that stopping had not made him want you less.
Only more carefully.
Only with more ache.
His hand moved over his stomach, then stopped.
He closed his eyes.
“No.”
A pause.
His body disagreed.
Violently.
Tom opened his eyes again.
He lay there for another minute.
Then two.
Then some unknown, ridiculous stretch of time in which he was apparently expected to outwit biology through moral disappointment alone.
Eventually, he gave a soft, defeated laugh into the dark.
“Oh, fuck me.”
The words hung there.
He immediately winced.
He turned his face into the pillow, mortified by himself, by the situation, by the simple fact of still having a body when a conscience would have been inconvenient enough on its own.
When his hand finally moved, he hated himself a little for it.
Not enough to stop.
That was the wretched part.
He tried, once more, to think of Liliana.
He really did.
Her perfume. Her bare shoulder in the morning. The shape of her beside him in bed.
Nothing.
Not nothing, exactly.
Worse.
Wrong.
His mind slid away from her with such immediate, awful refusal that his stomach clenched.
“Great,” he whispered, breath uneven. “Now that too. Fantastic.”
He shut his eyes tighter.
But there you were.
Not naked. Not even deliberately seductive. That would have been easier to condemn.
You were on his sofa, touching his face like you were asking permission from the most damaged part of him and somehow receiving it.
Then your mouth at his cheek.
Brief.
Soft.
Absolutely ruinous.
He pressed his head back into the pillow, jaw clenched, breath catching despite himself.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
He did not know who he meant.
Liliana.
You.
Himself.
All of you, perhaps.
Or none.
The fabric of his pyjama bottoms was already damp when he eventually hooked his thumbs beneath the fabric and dragged them down, the elastic snapping against his thighs with a sharp, accusing sound.
His cock sprang free, heavy and flushed, the tip already slick with precum that glistened in the faint moonlight filtering through the curtains. He hissed as the cool air hit his skin, his body arching slightly at the contact, his fingers tightening around the base as if he could somehow contain the need that had been building for hours.
The bedsheets were still tangled from his restlessness, the fabric rough against his bare skin as he shifted, his free hand gripping the pillow beside him. He could still taste the wine from earlier, bitter and lingering, but it was your laugh that filled his head now—the way it had caught in your throat when he’d pulled away, the way your fingers had curled into his shirt before you let go.
"Okay. Great," he muttered as he wrapped
his fingers around his cock, the heat of his palm almost too much against the oversensitive skin. "Just going to take care of this. Perfectly normal. Perfectly—*fuck*—"
His hips jerked involuntarily when he gave himself a slow, deliberate stroke. The friction was maddening, the slickness of his own arousal making his grip slide just enough to send a jolt of pleasure straight through him. He bit down on his lower lip, his other hand clutching the pillow like it was the only thing keeping him from drowning.
He tried to focus on the mechanics of it. Just a release. Just something to get this out of his system.
Something quick. Clean. *Okay?*
It was not okay.
His thumb circled the head, smearing the slickness over the sensitive skin, and he groaned, low and desperate, his hips lifting off the bed as if he were trying to fuck his own hand.
In his mind, he saw your face. Not your eyes. Not your smile. Your *mouth*—the way it had parted before he kissed you back.
The feel of your teeth against his lower lip. The taste of you—wine and something sweet, something *you*—and the way you had *whimpered* into the kiss when he had finally given in.
His cock throbbed in his grip, the head glistening, the vein running down the underside pulsing with every heartbeat. He worked himself harder, pulling back from the base with a tight, squeezing motion that made his balls draw up tight to his body. The sound of the mattress frame creaking beneath him was loud in the dark, but no louder than the shameful, wet *slap* of his hand against his own flesh as he sped up.
"Fuck," he gasped, his voice raw as he thought about the scent of your hair —like vanilla and something darker, something that made him want to bury his face in your neck and *breathe you in* until he forgot his own name.
His cock jerked in his grip, the tip leaking steadily now, the slickness making his strokes smoother, filthier. He imagined your hands on him instead of his own, your fingers curling around the base, your thumb pressing just beneath the head where he was most sensitive. He could almost feel the way your nails might dig into his thighs if you were straddling him, the way your breath would hitch when you saw how hard he was for you, how *desperate*.
The fantasy was so vivid it made his cock twitch violently in his grip, a fresh bead of precum welling at the tip before dripping down over his knuckles.
He tried to think of his fiancee
.
He tried to think of anything else.
But the moment he did, his mind rebelled, dragging him right back to you—your hands on his chest, your nails scraping lightly over his nipples as you leaned in, your breath hot against his ear.
"Don't stop."
The words echoed in his memory.. His hips bucked upward, his hand tightening around his shaft as he imagined your lips brushing the shell of his ear, your teeth on -
"Fuck," he
gasped, his voice breaking as the orgasm tore through him with brutal suddenness. His cock pulsed violently in his grip, his entire body seizing as the first thick rope of cum shot across his stomach, hot and obscene in the dark. Another followed immediately, splattering against his chest, his fingers still working him through the aftershocks as his breath came in ragged, shameful gasps.
The release was so intense it left him trembling, his muscles twitching with the force of it. He could feel the sticky warmth spreading across his skin, the scent of it sharp in the air. His hand finally stilled, his cock still half-hard in his grip, the last few drops of cum dripping onto his stomach.
For a long moment, he just lay there, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. His mind was a mess of conflicting emotions - relief, guilt, and a lingering, desperate hunger that hadn't been satisfied at all.