Blue: Prologue

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”

I expected it—the interrogation. The question protruded from her lips like a terrier snapping at my ankles. Fuck, I wasn’t one foot through the door and into our home before the words had completely escaped her mouth.

My wife stood in the middle of the room, wearing only a thin white camisole. Her brown hair laid across her chest, barely covering the peachy skin that led to her breasts. She was beautiful—when she wasn’t being a bitch.

With her eyes wide, she stuck her chin out, trying to bait me into giving her an answer. She seared her head back when I didn’t respond straight away, rolling it with unequal motion as her impatience grew. Then the frown came, disapproval and accusation wedged between the lines of her forehead. I fucking hated it when she did that. When she looked like that.

The red wine swished around the glass she held as she waltzed towards me. Despite her need to be closer, I decided we needed more space, so I headed to the kitchen sink.

“I went for a run,” I said, staring at the tiled wall in front of me. She could see I was dressed in my workout gear. But no, perhaps that was too blatantly obvious for her. She needed words. The why, where, and was I alone? Shit, the fucking coordinates, probably.

“A run?” she asked, but it wasn’t a question. Not really.

I felt her presence move closer, heard her wine glass clink on the counter, and then her arms were wrapping around my waist from behind. Her cheek pressed against my back, holding me tight to her. Her breasts pushed into me, causing the dampness of my sweaty T-shirt to mould onto my skin.

“Sophia,” I grunted, pouring myself a glass of water. I knew what came next. She wouldn’t stop until she got what she believed to be her version of the truth.

I took a gulp of water and then attempted to shake her away. Except she held on too tightly. I wasn’t the only one at fault here, but she had a habit of making me feel like I was to blame. Like it was solely my fault our marriage was dying.

The rhythm of her heart accelerated between us as she moved up on her tiptoes, her nose skimming the bottom of my neck as she inhaled my scent.

“You smell like her,” she whispered.

“I went for a run,” I repeated. “I smell like sweat.” I slammed my glass against the kitchen counter. It cracked with my strength, but it didn’t break.

“Don’t lie to me, Walker.”

My knuckles whitened as I clenched the cracked glass still in my grip. “Go back to bed, Sophia. You’re drunk and deluded,” I added after a beat. “This shit–it’s another fake scenario you’ve made up in your head.”

My patience for her, for what was left of our relationship, was barely held together by a fray. What more was there to say to a woman who always thought the worst of me?

“It’s our wedding anniversary. You should have been here with me. Not her.”

I sucked my teeth. “You’re projecting your guilt onto me, throwing accusation after accusation at me. When it was you who went against our arrangement. It was you who made that choice.”

“It was a one-time thing. I’ve said I’m sorry. Why do you have to call it an arrangement? It’s a marriage, Walker. Our marriage.”

“Shit, I don’t want to keep doing this,” I said, setting my glass into the sink before turning it into shards. “I can’t keep having this conversation with you.”

I turned in her hold to face her, and she allowed her hands to drop between us. She pursed her lips, tilting her face up towards mine.

A second passed, and then, “Who is she?”

My frustration wallowed in my blood like cancer. I knew better than to continue the same argument we’d been having for the past however many months now. But I couldn’t help myself.

“When are you going to get it into your pretty fucking skull that I’ve been nothing but loyal, despite the farce of the last eleven years?”

“I don’t believe you,” she said, her fingernails digging into my chest. “You’re lying.”

“No,” I sighed. “You’re just deaf to the truth.”

My nostrils flared as her hand travelled down to the waistband of my shorts, and then she slid her hand underneath them and into my boxers. Her nails scratched my skin as she moved to wrap her hand around my flaccid cock.

“For fuck’s sake, Sophia, what are you doing?”

“I’m checking for signs of your infidelity,” she said simply, as if it was normal.

And I guess it was for us. This wasn’t the first time she sought answers to the bullshit she had created in her head. I’d caught her checking my phone on numerous occasions.

Our relationship was past the point of return. I was exhausted fighting it. There was nothing left to hold on to. And I’d only have to be smiled at by another woman before the interrogation began.

“Do you know her?”

“Why did you smile back if you don’t know her?”

“Shit, Sophia, stop this. If this were a real marriage, it would be me seeking answers after what you did.”

Of course, it stung when she first told me she’d cheated, when she described how good it felt to be wanted by someone because she wasn’t wanted by me. How she thought she’d over-served her purpose. Though once that hurt subsided and I gave way to the anger, it seemed I no longer gave a single fuck. A part of me wondered if anything we ever had was real or whether the bigger picture had clouded my judgement. The sole reason we got together in the first place.

Still, somewhere, somehow, our relationship had diminished. And the apparent love I once held for my wife was long gone.

That’s if it ever truly existed at all.

I supposed I couldn’t blame her entirely. The intimacy she shared with a stranger really did feel like the least of our problems.

“I just need to know.” She pushed her head into my chest. “Who is she? Tell me. I’ll stop if you tell me. Are you paying her? What is she giving you that I can’t?”

She squeezed my cock in her hand, enough that I couldn’t help but become hard. It was human nature, I guess. We hadn’t been intimate for months. And amidst the atmosphere, the fighting, she was still my wife. My beautiful bitch of a wife.

“We made fucking vows, didn’t we? For better, for worse. As fake as they were, there’s no one else.” Yet, things were always getting worse, and I didn’t want to stay married for the sake of it any longer. I couldn’t love her–not the way she wanted–no matter how hard she fought me to.

Her warm breaths seeped through the material of my shirt as her hand began to stroke up and down my shaft, bringing out the masochist in me. I was probably harder now than I’d been in the past twelve months, when our marriage really began to splinter.

It was primarily mundane things to begin with.

Petty shit.

Things I couldn’t name while she was stroking my cock in our kitchen.

But those things grew into unhappiness that was tough to tunnel out from, which ultimately led to her infidelity, which of course, brought us to the here and now.

“Have you found what it is you’re looking for, Sophia? Is my cock hard enough for you?”

She groaned. “You’re lying, Walker. Do I know her? Is she employed at the club?” Her hand stroked from the base of my cock to the top, her fingers wiping a bead of pre-cum over its tip.

There was a time when I’d have fucked her on the kitchen counter, had my fingers in her ass and my tongue down her throat, but what was the point of any of it anymore? If it weren’t for the legal document which bound us together, we wouldn’t be together at all.

“Do I?” she asked again as her hand squeezed around my length.

“No,” I grit. “Because there’s no one but you.”

“Is this for her or for me?” She slowly ran her hand back and forth, squeezing every time she reached the top of my cock. She knew what I liked, knew what got me off.

“Fuck,” I rasped, and then I told her what she wanted to hear, just to get her off my back. “It’s for you, Soph.”

My words seemed to satisfy her, and then her hand began moving swiftly up and down. I felt my balls draw up with every pinch. Every tug.

I couldn’t tell her the truth—that I was only hard because it had been months since a hand that wasn’t my own had touched my cock. How was someone supposed to tell their wife that they could barely get it up for them anymore? That the constant accusations, the misunderstandings, and the confessions of her love only retained them fucking soft?

“Good, that’s good,” she whispered, speaking the words into my chest.

It was as if my denial was finally submerging. But I was past caring. I’d already decided I wanted out before I stepped through the door. It’s all I’d thought about when I was running laps around Hyde Park in the dark of the night. It was the penthouse I noticed for lease that cemented it. I needed out. And we needed time away from each other so we could both gain some clarity–not for our marriage, but for ourselves. I didn’t voice any of this, though. I decided I’d tell her once everything was in motion. Once I’d leased the property, with no time for her to attempt talking me out of it. Not that she’d succeed. My mind was made up.

My balls and spine tingled with satisfaction as my release took flight, and strings of my jizz covered her hand. Despite the moment of euphoria, I knew the arrangement we made all those years ago was stale. This would be the last time we shared even a resemblance of intimacy. Nothing between us would ever get back to the way things once were.

The euphoria was fleeting.

Our reality spoke the loudest.

For the last twelve months, or maybe even the last eleven years, I’d tried to convince myself the love I held for my wife was just warped. Bent and twisted out of shape, moulded that way because of the people we were. I often asked myself how was a man to know the difference if he’d only ever experienced one side of the coin? But that was then, and this was now.

Heads or tails, it didn’t make our outcome any different.

You couldn’t force a cat to bark.

I was confident I’d never been in love with my wife, but that created an issue–because irrespective of her infidelity, my wife just happened to be psychotically in love with me.