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  Smoothing my skirt back down my hips and easing the straps of my bodice back over my shoulders, I tucked the wrinkled cash into my cleavage and combed my fingers through the copper skein of my hair. To ease the slightly bitter taste in my mouth, I swilled the last of the wine and leaned my face toward the crack in the window, gulping in fresh, though hot, air. The glass in the car was completely steamed over, and I looked at the sky through the crack of open window as Brody tried, several times, to form a sentence.

  “What?” His words slurred slightly. “Why? Why are you doing this? Any of this?”

  Though guilt blanketed me at the question, I wasn’t about to tell him. Wasn’t sure I could spit the words out.

  Though memories of that afternoon swirled just below the surface of my consciousness, I wasn’t even entirely sure myself why I was doing it, only that, no matter how my mind knew that it was wrong, I couldn’t seem to tell it no.

  Chapter Three

  I’D NEVER DONE my spring cleaning in the spring. I always started to think about it in March, but it was inevitably June or July by the time that my procrastinating rear end finally got around to it.

  This year was no different. I let the clutter and the dust pile up until its very presence began to affect my ability to think, to be.

  It had to go.

  With classes for the year finally over, and the knowledge that I would be free from learning about psychology in any form for another few months, I finally felt the urge to tidy up the pigsty that Kyle and I called home.

  I didn’t at all enjoy scrubbing at the beard bristles that my fiancé, Kyle, left in the tile grout in both bathrooms, but somebody had to do it. I was especially perturbed about it right then because we’d had a major fight, just that morning, about how often he was gone for work. A pharmaceutical sales rep, he was away from home more often than not. Though I truly believed that he was doing it to save up money for our future, the similarity to the relationship I’d had with my ex-husband Steve had me missing him horribly when he was gone and punishing him by being nasty when he was home.

  I suspected that my sudden urge to clean had to do with needing to put my life in order. Psychoanalyzing myself would get me nowhere, though, and so I found myself sitting on the floor of our spacious bedroom, sorting through stacks of DVDs, trying to match them to their cases, which were scattered here, there, and everywhere. Neither of us had ever been able to keep the promises that we made to each other to put a DVD back once it had been watched, and the mess represented nearly a year’s worth of viewing pleasure.

  But I was almost done. Just a handful of discs remained: ones burned on our computer, silver discs that had no cases. As I began to slip them into cases, my fingers touched the slick surface of one that was unlabeled, which I found strange. We might be messy, but we’d both always been vigilant about labeling our home-burned discs with a black marker.

  Shrugging, I slipped the mystery disc into the DVD player and pressed the button to turn on the flat-screen TV which, though it was entirely too large for the room, Kyle had insisted upon. Crawling on all fours to my bedside table as the disc loaded, I rummaged through a pile of expired condoms that neither of us had bothered to throw out—I’d add those to the trash bag in a minute—and other miscellaneous junk in search of a felt marker.

  The static unique to a home movie didn’t filter through my consciousness at first. It wasn’t until I turned around, marker clutched triumphantly in my left hand, that I began to realize what, exactly, the disc contained.

  The sounds of sex and the sight of Kyle’s rather pale ass clued me in quickly enough.

  Mesmerized, I moved toward the screen, fingers reaching out to touch. My first inclination was toward anger—when had Kyle filmed us fucking, and why had he hidden it from me? This was a secret that just shouldn’t be kept in a committed relationship.

  The longer I watched, though, the more I came to see that Kyle had a bigger secret, even, than homemade porn. Oh yes, indeed he did, and I was watching it right that moment.

  I was watching a movie, time-stamped one week earlier, of my fiancé getting hot and heavy with a curvaceous brunette, a woman that I didn’t think I’d ever met but who looked somewhat familiar.

  The realization hit me hard enough to knock me back on my ass. I rocked, drawing my knees up to my chest, telling my frozen fingers to turn the image off. But, like people passing by a car wreck, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Couldn’t stop from gaping at the horrid spectacle that was unfolding before me.

  Kyle was cheating on me. Oh, and how.

  I watched as he moved out of the frame of the screen for a moment, leaving me with a clear view of his partner. Inky black waves of silk cascaded over the face that was pressed into the bed, falling nearly to the ass that was raised and quivering in the air. The side of a luscious-looking, peach-toned breast plumped out underneath an arm that was bound to the bedpost—the iron post of my very own bed, the one that I was sitting next to at that moment. I assumed that the other arm was tied down as well, as both ankles were also shackled, leaving her spread and open, pink and ready.

  Kyle moved back into the frame, settled his weight on the bed. The woman moaned as he did so, the movement of an extra body on the slick satin sheets—my sheets!—sliding her ass closer to his hard thighs, which he spread on either side of hers as he knelt behind her.

  What was this? Since when was he into bondage? Why hadn’t he ever asked me to indulge his fantasy instead of turning to another woman?

  Sick to my stomach, I buried my face into the bony planes of my knees, pressing the newly clammy skin of my forehead against them. But the lightning crack of flesh hitting against flesh had me jerking my chin back up, gluing my eyes once again to the screen.

  A large, cupped palm, one that had explored every inch of my own body, lashed out to strike the quivering globes of the woman’s ass, which turned a pretty pink under the blows. She screamed at what must have been intense pain, for he wasn’t being gentle as he smacked her again and again, but there was an undeniable edge of excitement in her voice, a sharp knife of pleasure that slid smoothly through the sounds of pain.

  Again and again, he smacked the flat of his hand against her ass; over and over she screamed. I wanted to scream myself. Where had I been that day? Why was this happening?

  What had I done to deserve it?

  My numb brain turned over that question as I heard the crinkle of foil and saw Kyle roll a tube of latex—and thank goodness for that, at least—over the cock that had fucked me a thousand times. Bracing the woman’s thighs farther apart than they already were, he dipped into her wide-open cunt once, twice, before sliding up, up the crease of her ass to press against the pucker that lay hidden deep within.

  Oh God. No. I couldn’t watch this. I couldn’t stop watching it. I knew we’d had arguments about sex before, about a lackluster sex life, about my need for slow yet sensuous love, about Kyle’s wanting to try things that he didn’t think I’d like. But he hadn’t told me what those things were. I wasn’t sure how I would have reacted if he had, but I’d never, never thought that he’d turn away from me to someone else to obtain his pleasure.

  But it certainly seemed that he had. My eyes glazed over a bit as I watched his cock slide, bit by tiny bit, into the crease of the woman’s ass. His breath hissed in, hers came out in a hot moan as he hit home and began to move, slowly, in a sensual dance.

  I was ashamed enough to feel tears prick at the backs of my eyes when my traitorous cunt grew damp at the steamy scene playing out before me.

  Reaching for the remote, I unfolded my legs and moved to turn the set off. I’d seen enough. But the wobble of the camera caught my eye then, a sharp vibration before the perfect stillness of the frame.

  Had someone else been holding the camera?

  I received my answer when another man moved out from behind the tripod that the camera now obviously sat on. The warm light of the bedside lamp washed over tawny skin and hard muscles, and a n