Page 48 of Cursing My Cheating Husband

Maddox still loves me. Maddox still wants to start a family with me. It’s just that his job is burning him out. That’s all it is. But that’s going to change tonight.

Then came the sound that made her whole body light up with anticipation—the front door opening as I returned home. The surge of excitement that went through her was achingly pure and intense.

“I’m upstairs, babe! I have a surprise for you!” she called out.

I heard her internally reprimand herself not to sound too eager, felt how her heart hammered as she tried to arrange herself perfectly. She was practically vibrating with anticipation, adjusting her pose several times in the seconds it took me to climb the stairs.

And then I walked in.

I hadn’t thought it was possible to be more disgusted with myself, but when I experienced the love and trust and adoration that surged through Callie at the first sight of me…

The force of it was incredible, shocking me with its intensity. This was real love. Unconditional, all-consuming, selfless love. The admiration she felt for me, the lust… she looked at me like I was everything to her. Like I was her whole world. Every cell in her body was yearning to feel my touch. The depth of her emotion was staggering. It wasn’t just attraction or affection or fondness. It was a devotion so pure and beautiful, I didn’t even have the words to begin to capture it.

But I immediately grasped that I had never truly understood what love was until this moment of experiencing Callie’s feelings for me.

And I had been so fucking oblivious! Not only was I not returning even a fraction of what she was giving me, I wasn’t even recognizing it! She had been giving me the most incredible gift, and… oh fuck.

A moment before Callie’s memory caught up to this point, I recalled my own memory of how disinterested I had been in her advances, how entirely focused on my nasty mistress I had remained throughout her efforts to snag my attention.

And now, to know that in the seconds before I drove the knife in, all this was what had been going on in her heart?

I wished there were some way to stop this, but there wasn’t. I was only a passenger. This had all already happened, and it was too late for me to change anything. It was too late for me to protect her… from me.

And then it happened. My past self took in her cute, sweet, sexy cheerleader look, and it was brutal to view the cruelty in my own eyes. I could not have looked colder or more disinterested. My gaze swept over her as if she were nothing, eventually making eye contact with undisguised annoyance.

“Oh. What’s this?”

The dismissive tone hit her—hit me—like a physical blow. I felt her confidence crumble as hot shame flooded her body. All that hope, all that desperate desire to connect with me, shattered in an instant. The humiliation was suffocating.

He couldn’t care less. He couldn’t care less! I want to crawl into a hole and die. This was supposed to be his thing. His passion. I’ve made myself into the perfect sports wife, and it doesn’t tempt him even a little.

Enduring Callie’s struggle to keep it together as she watched my past self make his way to the shower was excruciating.

Now she was alone on the bed, and the sound of running water and my angry music thumped through the door. She was staring at my phone where I’d left it, and I felt the war inside her. The desperate need to trust me battled against the growing certainty that something was wrong.

And hearing her thoughts, I was stunned to learn that she had known my passcode for years. I had assumed she’d only learned it recently.

All that time, I had been completely confident that I had my illicit communications locked up such that she could never get at them, no matter how hard she tried. When the truth was she could have searched my phone at any moment. When I’d been patting myself on the back for how clever I was, it was actually only her trust in me that had kept me from being discovered.

The pressure of my shame was becoming unbearable.

Her hand reached for the phone, trembling. I felt her disgust at herself for looking, the way she hated that she was about to violate my privacy.

That I had made her feel disgusted at herself, merely for finally getting wise to my betrayal? I was a disgrace.

She entered the passcode, and the nude selfie of Gwen filled the screen.

The pain that tore through her was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It wasn’t just hurt. It was annihilation. A complete gutting.

Everything she’d built her life around, everything she’d believed about us, about me, about our future together, it all disintegrated in that moment. The betrayal was a bullet to the chest, stopping her heart.

Her body convulsed with the force of it, and I felt the tears exploding from her eyes and her throat constricting as she tried not to scream.

But she kept scrolling! I desperately willed her to stop, so badly wanting to pull her away from seeing the explicit details of my disgusting behavior. But of course, this was devastation I’d already inflicted. I was far past the point where there was anything I could do to stop it.

The memory again moved forward in time, to after I’d left the house. Callie stumbled down the hall to my office, reeling.

Four years, she thought. Four years of my life, trying to make him happy. Four years of being the perfect wife, of setting aside my magic, my family, my entire world. For what?