“Elizabeth…” The stolid, comforting tones of Maggie, the receptionist who was the honorary office housemother, had everyone’s heads turned her way. She was holding her phone out, displaying a picture that Chase was too far away to see clearly. “That isn’t Chase. It can’t be.”
“Mags…” Bizzy’s voice was ragged, and she just shook her head wearily. “I love you, but please don’t–”
“Dear, you need to stop talking now.” Maggie closed the distance between herself and the dissolving couple, and Chase saw what the picture was. A group shot of Chase’s personal team holding up champagne flutes in a toast. He remembered that day, when they’d closed the biggest deal of their firm’s relatively brief history. “December 20. 2 PM.”
Maggie’s eyes bored holes into Bizzy, but the scorned woman’s righteous anger stopped her from seeing it. “So what? So he ran back home after and had a real celebration. This doesn’t change–”
“1400 is 2 PM!” Maggie’s outthrust finger pointed quaveringly at the timestamp on the video. “Jesus girl, how has a programmer of your brilliance never learned the twenty-four hour clock?”
It was like a bad comedy. Chase watched his wife’s eyes widen as a whole cascade of revelations hit her at once. Bizzy looked from the pic on the phone, to the video on the screen, then back, then again… her neck was practically a rubber band. “No. It… can’t… I didn’t…” She flattened her palms to her forehead, and her head shaking increased even as the strength in her legs gave out and she collapsed onto the floor. “Oh no. Oh… oh god…”
“OH GOD!”
Chase was sure for a heartbeat that it must all be a dream, otherwise, how could he have heard the same words, in the same voice, but coming from two different places? He didn’t realize that that heartbeat would be the last, fleeting oasis of hope he had before his world burned around him completely.
“Fuck me with that big fucking dick!” Bizzy’s scream issuing from the speakers forced Chase’s eyes from their present home and the gibbering mess that his wife had become, to the past… and the different kind of gibbering mess she was then.
It was clear as day, Elizabeth Ventris, his bride of four years and the love of his life since he was sixteen, was on their bed, her hands gripping the sheets to the side, her sculpted legs bare and wrapped around the waist of a man that wasn’t him, slamming her hips into his with a need that was frightening. The pair writhed with pure abandon; he grunting like a wild beast, she screaming her way through an orgasm… a real one. Chase knew what his wife sounded like when she climaxed, and there was nothing fake about this performance.
“Do it… ohhhh yessss… do it you fucking stud! Take what he threw away!” Her golden head was whipping back and forth, and the words came in-between a series of kisses she plastered to any inch of skin on the man she could reach. “Fill me up… make me yours…” She undulated her pelvis in that oh so special way that had always driven Chase crazy.
He knew for a certainty that right then she was engaging in that complicated, Tantric muscle-rhythm thing they’d learned together in college, milking the cock within her with patterned tightening and loosening of her lower muscles designed to drive the man insane with sensation. That had been her gift to him, reciprocation for all the techniques he’d picked up to lavish her with. It had been… theirs.
All that didn’t matter, not anymore. The move was re-gifted and corrupted, but it still worked. “Ungh! Ungh! Fuuuuckkkk…” On screen, Bizzy’s whole body shuddered as her lover hunched his back and hilted himself fully within her welcoming channel. He was coming too, in buckets, and Chase had no doubt that, whoever he was, he was thanking every lucky star in the sky that he’d gotten a taste of the goddess beneath him. “Yesss…” Bizzy positively purred under that fucking prick, and she cupped his still-obscured head in her hands to plaster her mouth against his in a long, loving kiss.
When they separated, him rolling off her to the side so that her magnificent breasts, sweat-sheened and glistening bare under the bedroom’s lights, sprawled across her heaving chest, she gave a breathy laugh. “Holy hell. I know I said this was just to get even… but… wow. I think… I think I just discovered my new favorite workout.” The man began to sit up then, and that was when the horrifying bubble that had captured the entire room was finally popped.
“No!” Suddenly, the Bizzy of the present shot to her feet, the catatonia of the last minute or so finally clearing enough for her to realize what was happening. She lurched for the fallen remote, frantically crashing her thumb into it to try to end the bigger-than-life view of her debasement. All she managed to do was hit pause; her tortured mind was incapable then of focusing on turning it off completely.
She turned to her husband, her lips trembling and tears streaming from her eyes. “Cheese… I’m so sorry. Please, please…” She took a step towards him, her hand raising tremulously. Every inch of her screamed out how utterly terrified she was in that moment, like she was made of glass and Chase was holding a hammer. “God, I can’t even say… I was so stupid…”
“This… this was revenge?” Chase just watched her like she was a movie monster rising from a black bog. “You… you made a fucking movie to show to everyone to get back at me?”
“I thought… I was sure…” Bizzy swallowed. “Cheese, my heart was broken! I lost my mind! You have to know that it didn’t mean–”
Without looking at the screen, without needing to because he’d already seen it, but just hadn’t let himself face it, he pointed to the timestamp of the second video. “That was four days after the first. Christmas Eve. You decided not to trust me, and give yourself to another man when I was out buying that last minute gift for your mom that you insisted I had to.” He felt sick. “Bizzy… that was almost two months ago. Tell me you haven’t… that it was just…”
His wife could never lie to him, and her lack of answer and quick look down at the carpet told him all he needed to know. Two fucking months… she’s been fucking him for two fucking months! Now all the coldness, all the rebuffing, every weird instance of her acting aloof, even arrogant, in the recent past finally made sense. Hell, at the office, he’d convinced himself he was seeing things when he caught her laughing at him with… with…
Interrupted by the continuing shit show, in yet a further blast of fucked-up luck, Bizzy’s sob made her thumb jerk on the remote, and the vid picked right back up. She whipped around in a panic and turned it off fully this time, but not before he’d seen the other face on that bed, along with everyone else.
“Oh Shane, you stupid fucker.” Hearing Maggie, in that mournful tone, drop an f-bomb for the first time ever was a perfect, succinct representation of every nightmarish second since Bizzy had turned on the TV.
With mutters of, I’m out, and, don’t really wanna have to give a statement to the cops, the onlookers shuffled out the front door, most shooting sympathetic looks at Chase and shaking their heads at Bizzy, who watched them leave like they were a rescue party that was giving up the search. Maggie was the last to go, though she did stop to squeeze Chase’s hand in reassurance, and, shockingly, give a commiserating pat on Bizzy’s shoulder. To Shane, who’d backed against a wall and was watching his lover’s seething husband like a deer in the headlights, she just flipped the bird.