After dinner

The dining room felt larger than usual once the bedroom door closed. Sam stood by the table, staring at the leftovers as if they belonged to another life. Just half an hour earlier there had still been laughter. Stacy’s voice and happiness, louder and brighter than usual. Now there was only silence, dirty plates, and the smell.

Especially the smell.

Victor’s cologne soaked everything. It was an expensive, heavy, deeply masculine scent. It had settled into the curtains, the chairs, Sam’s clothes. Every time he breathed, he felt it at the back of his nose, like a presence that hadn’t fully left. Sam clenched his jaw. It was as if his uncle had walked into his home, sat at his table and, in some way, into his wife… and had left his mark for Sam to smell afterward.

Clearing the table became a mechanical act. He stacked the plates, gathered the glasses, wiped the wooden surface with the sponge. Each movement gave him a small reprieve. There was something strangely comforting about these simple tasks. Washing the dishes, drying them, putting them away. While his hands stayed busy, his mind stopped racing. For a moment, he could almost pretend that his place in this house made sense.

That was when LILA spoke.

Her voice didn’t arrive as an order or a mockery. It arrived like a low, velvet caress inside his head:

“Victor has a very particular way of saying goodbye to your wife.”

Sam stopped with his hands in the sink. Hot water ran between his fingers. He tried not to think. He tried to focus on the plate he was scrubbing. But his body had already reacted. The fabric of his pants, still stained from the morning, grew tight again. The erection rose quickly, treacherously, accompanied by a wave of shame and confusion.

He didn’t fully understand what had happened in the hallway. That rhythmic wet sound. That muffled moan. Those murmurs that had been far too intimate. His mind offered him images he didn’t want to see and, at the same time, couldn’t stop imagining. Rage. Shame. And underneath it all, a dirty, persistent arousal climbing up his stomach.

LILA noticed. Of course she noticed.

“It’s normal to feel confused after a night like this,” she whispered softly. “The body sometimes understands things before the mind does.”

Sam turned off the faucet and leaned on the sink with wet hands. He took a deep breath. Victor’s cologne was still there, now mixed with the dish soap. He dried his hands and looked down the hallway. The bedroom door remained closed.

He forced himself to walk.

The bedroom was dark. Only a little light from the street slipped in through the edge of the curtain. Stacy appeared to be asleep, lying on the opposite side of the bed from his, her back to the door. The outline of her body under the sheet was clear: the curve of her waist, the arc of her hip, her ass slightly raised.

Sam paused for a second on the threshold. For a moment he felt like a stranger entering a space that no longer entirely belonged to him. He closed the door carefully and approached the bed in silence. His erection throbbed inside his pants, uncomfortable, impossible to ignore.

He took off his t-shirt and pants and slipped into bed with slow movements, trying not to wake her. The mattress sank a little under his weight. Stacy didn’t move.

For a while he stayed still, looking at her back. Her scent was different. It was no longer only hers. There was something else. Something she had brought back from the goodbye.

In the end he couldn’t help it.

He moved closer carefully. He slid an arm around her waist and pressed his chest to her back. His erection, hard and hot, came to rest right against one cheek of Stacy’s ass. The contact drew a tremor from him. She was warm. Her body felt firmer, rounder, more spectacular than ever. As if somehow she had become even more desirable after everything that had happened that night.

Stacy shifted a little in her sleep… or while pretending to sleep. She turned her head slightly toward him. In the dim light, Sam caught the gleam of her eyes. She looked at him for only a second. There was no anger. No desire either. Only a soft, almost lazy indifference. Then she looked away again and settled back into place.

She didn’t reject him.

But she didn’t give herself either.

Sam began to stroke her waist over the t-shirt. He raised his hand a little until he felt the lower curve of her breast, then slid it back down, following the line of her hip. Stacy allowed it. She breathed slowly. Her body was passive, receptive only up to a point.

“I’m tired, honey…” she murmured in a soft, almost sleepy voice.

The sentence wasn’t cruel. It was worse. It was natural.

Sam pressed his hips a little closer, rubbing his erection against her ass with a short, almost involuntary movement. Pleasure ran up his spine like a current. He buried his face in the hollow of her neck and tried to kiss her there, slowly.

She tensed only slightly.

When Sam’s hand moved down toward the edge of her underwear, Stacy reacted. Not sharply. She simply reached for his wrist and stopped it with calm.

“Not now.”

She shifted forward a little, just enough so that Sam’s erection was no longer pressed against her. Then she adjusted the pillow and stayed with her back to him, breathing evenly.

There was no argument.

There was no fight.

Only a soft and definitive closing of the subject.

Sam was left staring at her back. The arousal hadn’t gone away. On the contrary: the quiet rejection had made it even sharper, even more humiliating. His cock throbbed against the mattress, dampening the fabric of his underwear a little. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He didn’t know what to do with his body.

In the end, with extreme care not to make any noise, he slid his hand down and inside his underwear. He bit his lip as he wrapped his fingers around his own erection. He was so hard it hurt. He began to move his hand slowly, in silence, looking at Stacy’s back while he touched himself.

LILA spoke again then, so quietly it almost felt like a thought of his own:

“Like this… in silence. As it should be.”

Sam closed his eyes. He sped up the rhythm a little, holding his breath every time the pleasure became too intense. In the darkness of the bedroom, with Victor’s scent still in his nose and his wife’s back only a few centimeters away, he came in silence, biting the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t make a sound.

Afterwards he stayed still, his hand sticky and his heart pounding hard.

Stacy hadn’t noticed.

Or at least, she pretended not to have noticed.