Nothing much

Lana showers first. She does not ask him to join her. Adam showers after. They eat breakfast standing up. Neither of them says Kyler’s name over breakfast.

They both leave for work.

Adam sits through a meeting and does not check his phone. At noon his phone lights up. Mia. Not a call. A text.

Watched it. Came three times. Lana did a good job.

He reads it twice in a bathroom stall and puts the phone away. He does not answer with anything filthy. He answers good girl and goes back to his desk.

Lana’s day is a spreadsheet and the knowledge that Mia has the video. She does not text first. She waits. When Mia’s message comes, it is meaner in the way Mia is mean when she is pleased.

Crawling was the best. Her head in your hand while he finished was next.

Lana reads it in the stairwell. She smiles at the concrete.

They are home within twenty minutes of each other. She starts the water for pasta. Dinner is ordinary. Sauce. A salad she forgets the salt in and he does not mention. Her phone is beside her plate, face down, until she turns it over.

“Mia texted,” she says.

Adam looks up.

“About the video. She loved it. She said the crawl was the part she loved. And the throat. And when I pulled Kyler’s head up while you were on her. She said I did the job properly.”

Lana is trying not to look as pleased as she is. It shows in her mouth anyway.

Adam sets his fork down. “She texted me at noon. Said she came three times watching it.”

Lana’s lips part. Then she smiles, small, real.

“Three?”

“Three.”

“So I did a good job.”

“You did a good job,” Adam says. “She doesn’t cum three times on a video that misses the point. The glasses were where she would have been. That’s what she wanted. You gave it to her.”

Lana sits with that. The pretend wife, graded by the real one, and the grade is filthy and excellent. She eats the rest of her pasta quieter. Warmer. She tells him nothing from work.

The night is still in the room: Kyler’s used cunt, the crawl, Lana’s fist in her hair, Mia cumming in a hotel to the recording of all of it.

They finish. He clears the table. The ordinary sound of a marriage that is not quite a marriage and is doing the dishes anyway. Lana takes the clothes hamper down the hall. She opens the dryer. Shakes out a sheet. Bends to load it. The domestic thing Mia left a list for, done without being asked.

She is about to turn around.

Adam is already there. He comes up behind her, chest to her back, hands on her hips, mouth at her ear. The dryer door is still open. The kitchen light reaches the hall. She can feel him, hard, against her.

“It’s time for your reward,” he says.