Chapter 10 — Ruined

Morning arrived with the softness of a punch to the stomach. I woke in my office, where I had slept, or tried to sleep, after coming home the night before with Lara’s scent still imprinted on my skin. My phone vibrated incessantly on the desk, an irritating buzz that seemed to echo the tremor in my nerves.

“Dorian?” Sarah’s voice came from the door, strangely restrained. “You need to… See this.”

She was pale, holding her iPad with trembling hands. Her eyes, normally so clear and open, were red and avoiding mine.

“Sarah, what happened?” I asked, rising to my feet. My heart began to race faster, a sensation of impending disaster.

She didn’t answer, just placed the tablet on my desk. The screen showed an anonymous email with a link and a single line of text:

“Everyone deserves to know the real Professor Caine.”

I clicked the link with stiff fingers. The video loaded. Grainy, but unmistakable. The interior of my car. Lara on her knees. My own guttural moans coming from the speakers.

“Oh, God,” the word escaped like a breath as my world crumbled around me.

Sarah stared at me, and for the first time in our marriage, I saw something beyond love in her eyes. Disgust.

“Is it you?” she asked, her voice broken. “Tell me it’s not you.”

But I couldn’t deny it. There I was, in all my depraved glory, betraying the woman I loved with a college girl in a dark alley.

“Sarah, I can explain…” I lied, knowing there was no possible explanation.

She recoiled as if I had spit on her.

“Explain?” Her laugh was a horrible sound, full of despair. “Explain what, Dorian? How you fuck a young woman who could be your daughter? How you lied to me every single day?”

My phone exploded with messages. Colleagues. Friends. The university’s administration. Everyone had received the video. My life, our life, had ended with an email.

“I don’t know what happened,” I tried again, reaching for her.

She pushed my hand away as if it were poison.

“Don’t touch me. Never touch me again.”

As she fled the room, my phone rang again. It was the administration.

“Dorian…” her voice was ice-cold, professional. “You are suspended, effective immediately. The police have been notified. Please do not approach the university.”

I hung up, letting the phone slide from my numb fingers. Outside, I heard Sarah crying. A muffled, devastating sound that echoed through the house we had built together.

I opened my email. Hundreds of messages. Some concerned, most horrified, several filled with pure hatred. News from other outlets was already coming in.

“Professor in Sexual Scandal with College Student.”

And then I saw it. A message from Lara. Subject:

“Now you’re all mine.”

I opened it. It contained only three words:

“You belong to me.”

And from somewhere in the depths of my ruined soul, a part of me—the part she had corrupted, the part that still desired her through the shame—whispered that she was right.

I was hers. And always would be.

…

The motel smelled of cheap disinfectant. The neon glow from the sign outside flickered in shades of pink and red through the thin curtains, painting sickly stripes across our naked skin.

I was no longer Professor Caine. I was just a broken man, lying in dirty sheets with the young woman who destroyed my life.

“You’re even more beautiful like this,” Lara whispered, her fingers tracing the deep circles under my eyes. “Ruined. Only mine.”

She was on top of me, her hips moving with agonizing slowness, each movement a mixture of pleasure and punishment. Her black dress lay on the floor, along with what remained of my dignity.

“Shut up,” I growled, turning her forcefully and burying my cock in her ass.

She screamed, a mixture of pain and triumph, as I fucked her with a rage that came from the depths of my own destruction.

The thin walls didn’t hide the moans, ours and those of the other inhabitants of this cheap purgatory.

“Was this what you wanted?” I shouted, pulling her hair until her head tilted back. “To see me like this? The fucking of a motel guest screwing his student?”

“Yes!” she cried, her nails digging into the sheets. “You’re perfect like this. Cruel. Real.”

My fingers found her throat, squeezing just enough to make her eyes widen.

“I hate you.”

She laughed, a hoarse, broken sound.

“You love me. You love me so much you destroyed everything for me.”

She was right. I loved and hated her with an intensity that frightened me. When I came, it was with an animal growl, biting her shoulder until I tasted the flavor of her blood on my tongue.

Afterward, lying side by side on the soaked bed, she lit a cigarette. The lighter’s flare illuminated her face. So young, so innocent, so completely depraved.

“They kicked me out of the house,” she said, blowing smoke at the moldy ceiling. “My parents finally noticed I exist.”

I turned my face to the side.

“Congratulations.”

She laughed, a humorless sound.

“Don’t worry. Now we have all the time in the world.”

My phone vibrated. It was Sarah—my Sarah—for the tenth time that night. Lara grabbed the phone, her fingers dancing across the screen before I could stop her.

“Dear wife…” she dictated as she typed. “Stop calling. He’s busy eating his student’s pussy.”

She threw the phone on the bed, her smile a knife cut.

“I don’t think she’ll call anymore.”

The rage that surged through me was so fast and violent that I didn’t even realize what I was doing. Before I knew it, my hands were around her neck, pressing her against the headboard.

“You ruined everything,” I grunted, my vision turning red. “Everything I had.”

She didn’t struggle. She just looked at me, her eyes gleaming with tears and something like pride.

“Finally,” she whispered, her voice hoarse, almost disappearing. “The real you.”

I released her as if her skin burned me. She fell back on the pillows, massaging her neck where my fingerprints were already appearing in red.

“I’m sorry,” I said, the horror of my own violence hitting me.

She crawled back to me, her bloody smile.

“Don’t apologize. I like it.”

Pushing me back on the mattress, she mounted me again, her eyes flooded with tears. Or were they mine? I could no longer tell where I ended and she began.

We were two monsters on a motel bed, destroying each other because it was the only thing that made us feel alive.

The next morning, I woke alone. Lara had gone, leaving behind only the smell of her cigarettes and a note on the pillow:

"Meet me here tomorrow. Don’t be late.

Yours."

I folded the note, tucking it into my pocket like the condemned man I was. She was right, of course. I would return. Because in this filthy motel, between these dirty walls, I wasn’t a failed husband or a disgraced professor.

I was just hers.