Page 50 of Cursing My Cheating Husband

I had brutally and completely betrayed the only person who’d ever loved me.

And there was nothing I could do to ever make it right.

CHAPTER 21

MADDOX

Istared at my computer screen, trying to focus on the quarterly earnings report I was supposed to be reviewing. The numbers blurred together as I rubbed my tired eyes.

It was my last day in the office before traveling to Nightshade Cove tomorrow with Callie, and there was still way too much to tie up.

My incoming text notification dinged. Gwen again! Enough of this. I snatched my phone and hastily pounded out a response I should have sent her long ago.

I told my wife everything. I don’t want to see you anymore. Don’t contact me again.

I hit send and returned to my work, but it was only seconds until the phone dinged again.

That frigid wife will never satisfy you.

Rage burned through me at the insult to Callie.

My wife is a thousand times the woman you’ll ever be. She’s everything and you’re nothing. I wish I’d realized the reason you only fuck married men is because no man would ever want you for real. The time I spent with you is the biggest mistake of my life.

I waited for that one to show as delivered, and then immediately blocked her.

It was a relief to have that persistent background irritation resolved, at least. The week since Callie had allowed me into her memory had been particularly brutal. After that night, she made two changes: she went back to speaking to me only to give commands, and she started tackling her list of men from the apps with much more abandon. She’d had a different man over every single night, and I’d heard every wild, explosive orgasm they brought her to (sometimes several per evening).

Every morning and every night, before each meal I served her, I asked her if I could apologize again, and every time she simply shook her head no.

She was becoming a true master of how to punish me by denying me release, in more ways than one. She could see how desperately I wanted to express my regret, and she would not give me that chance. Instead, she was going to trap all my newfound self-loathing inside me with nowhere to go. I’d never felt worse about myself.

Every minute of every day, it just played on a loop in my mind: I was trash, I had the perfect wife and I’d shattered her, I deserved to be miserable forever for what I’d done.

The most damning fact of all was that I had no understanding of how I had become this contemptible piece of shit. How could my inflated self-image have been so completely detached from the reality? As I looked back, my actions were clearly indefensible. But how had I never felt the slightest awareness of that until now? Why had I treated her so terribly? Obviously, on some level I had always known what the right things were. Be honest. Be faithful. Don’t make commitments you can’t or won’t keep. Don’t betray people.

Yet I had done all those things, repeatedly, to a person who loved me more than anything. And I had no clue how I had justified all of it so easily.

I was jarred to catch sight of the clock and see how much time had gone by with me blankly staring at the earnings report, thinking about nothing beyond my own failings. My work performance was growing worse by the day.

My obsessive thoughts about how badly I’d fucked it all up kept bringing me back to this same place. I understood I was awful, but not why or how to get better.

So far, I’d had only one idea about how to address this, and for the last few days I’d been desperately trying to think of something, anything else to try. Unfortunately, it was time to admit that I’d run out the clock on that, and I would not come up with anything better.

I took a deep, unsteady breath and went to close my office door. With heavy steps, I returned to my desk and called… a therapist’s office.

My entire life, I’d always thought therapy was the idiotic last resort of navel-gazing losers who needed to pay someone to listen to them whine. I struggled to think of anything I wanted to do less than go into some weirdo’s office to talk about my feelings.

But I knew that therapy was what you were supposed to do if you were horrible and couldn’t figure out why, or if you were trying to change and didn’t know how to do it. So… fuck it. I had to try something.

The receptionist who took the call was pleasant and efficient and made it all feel much less daunting than I had feared, and before I knew it I had an appointment scheduled for my lunch hour on our first day back from the Nightshade Cove trip.

I was relieved at least that they could get me in so quickly. Now that I’d committed to this path, I didn’t want to slow-walk it.

I hung up at the perfect moment, just as Duke and Ryder knocked at my door. I called for them to come in, and they both entered wearing somber expressions.

“Damn, who died?” I meant it jokingly, but the weighted look they exchanged told me this was serious.

“We don’t know yet,” was Duke’s downbeat reply. “But there has been a death.”