Fireworks


Beautiful, explosive, captivating. Fireworks in the night sky can make even the most brilliant of men forget for a moment, the warmth of the gentle flame awaiting them faithfully at home.


The welcoming embrace of their home overwhelms him as he enters quietly through the front door, so overwhelming that he has to fight the urge to cry. Every step he takes inside their home makes his heart feel comforted, but a look to their living room fireplace causes his gut to clench and fall into what he could only describe as despair.

Despair, because the warmth is bound to end soon.

He walks up the stairs and his ridiculously sharp hearing catches his wife's soft snoring from their bedroom across the hall. Even such a simple thing invokes love in him, but the pain that follows is incomparable. The pain of imagining what it'd be like to walk into their room at night and not find her there. The thought cripples him.

He walks straight past their bedroom, not even peeking in. He will not allow himself to lay eyes on her pure, beautiful form, not while The Woman's imposing scent is still on him. Flashes of what happened earlier cloud his mind again, and he all but runs to the guest bedroom's bathroom.

He sheds his clothes and he barely makes it to the shower stall before he succumbs to his urges once again, and starts stroking himself. It all comes back to him: The way she bit him, her nails scratching him, her breasts bouncing enticingly as she moves up and down his manhood. Her smooth back, the way she arched when he grabbed her hips and entered her from behind, the way she clenched around him when his fingers perched on her throbbing pearl.

He finds his arousal's paramount when he recalls the challenging way she texted him, the challenging way she seduced him, the challenging way she deduced him. His hand moves faster and faster, his groans filling the shower room just as the steam does, and he's close, he's so close…

The word Woman is just about to erupt from his lips when, through his haze, through the grunts he's making and through the water's noise, he hears it. He hears Molly. Her soft snore. All the way from the bedroom across the hall…?

His brain is pretty sure he's imagining it, but his heart doesn't seem to care. It's there, the sound, repeatedly blocking out the Woman's text alert from his mind palace. He hears her sigh his name in her sleep, once again an illusion of his own heart, and he starts to idly wonder as his hand slow down its pace. Did the Woman scream, sigh, moan, or at least say his name during their… during dinner? He's sure she did. Sherlock, Mr. Holmes, probably even detective.

He has no recollection of it.

He wonders why he doesn't care.

His hand continues, but this time… his mind is filled by his wife's sighs. The look in her eyes when she's turned on, and the look in her eyes after they've both been satiated. The scar on the left side of her torso. The way she chuckles when he kisses along her ribcage. The way he worries if he had hurt her in the times when he can't help but be rough, and the way she smiles and ensures him that she loved it. The way her chest rises and falls and he's reminded that she's alive, and breathing, and there. With him.

The way she says she loves him. The way he honestly says the words back.

He explodes.

He sits there, on the floor against the shower room wall, panting from his release. It hadn't been intense, or urgent, or wild like his peaks with the Woman, but he feels… better. More complete.

Happier.

For some reason, his two releases that had been courtesy of the Woman, he doesn't even count the last one, the first two at least satisfied his body, the last one almost disgusts him, had only left him with physical satiation, and a sense of triumph that she had found him as attractive as he did, her. His body wanted more sex, not necessarily more sex with her, and his brain hadn't been challenged by the act itself.

Almost as if… he didn't really care if he was pleasuring her or not. She pleasured him, and whether she was pleasured in return… he couldn't be bothered to bother himself with that.

His heart had crumbled, his spirits dampened, his soul lost. And it's cold, so very cold.


Note: What else is there to say? In such a troubled time of her life, the author wonders why she'd keep writing something that would break her even more. The readers' reviews make it a bit easier, though, and the author's gratitude is soaring.