Echoes 01

Chase Ventris looked at his wife, Elizabeth, with a small, puzzled grin on his face. "Bizzy, don't you think this is a weird time to play a movie?" He gave a slight wave of the hand that wasn't holding the glass of scotch, indicating the ten other guests in their home who were obviously having a good time socializing. "Let's at least wait till the buzz wears off." His laughing hazel eyes widened as an exciting thought occurred to him. "Unless you got some bootleg of that new Marvel flick coming out..."

The room full of inveterate geeks perked right up at that. Except her, his Bizzy. Standing in front of the TV with the clicker in her hand, dressed to the nines in that slinky, sultry, body-cleaving black dress with the slit up the leg that went all the way past her firm thigh to her slim hip, the swooping neck parted just enough in the middle to show the inner curve of those perfect C-cups, even as the open arms gave a hint of the outer, with her golden hair up in that cascading...

Good god, snap out of it man.

Chase laughed to himself and forcibly came back to reality.

She probably won't find it all that romantic if you drool in front of everyone, she's weird that way.

He more than appreciated how utterly devastating his wife had made herself for this get-together of their employees; it'd been weeks, maybe even longer, since he'd seen her wear more than sweats and a ratty t-shirt around the house. The vision before him now had him so revved up, he wasn't sure he'd felt as much even on their honeymoon, four years previous.

The effect was enough that he seriously wondered if this was why Bizzy had been so standoffish these last weeks. Some kind of attempt at delayed gratification. If so, then he planned on showing her just what her experiment had produced the second their last friend was out the door tonight. He hoped that dress wasn't too expensive, because there was no chance in hell that it would survive till next morning.

"Marvel... that's a word you could use." Bizzy tilted her head playfully, a little grin curling her ruby lips as her sapphire eyes danced. "Bootleg... sure, I guess. No shaky cam though, it's pretty steady. I guess I'd personally call it a prequel, if you want to get technical, Chase."

"Damn Elizabeth, you got us all on edge now." Shane flashed that stupid smirk that Chase hated so much. The one that said he was in on a joke that no one else was. "Hit play!"

Chase tried not to let the cocky jerk get to him. In any workplace, liking every single one of your co-workers was pretty much unheard of, even in a company you and your wife founded yourselves. Neither of them could stand the man, but Shane was good at what he did. Not the best, that was Bizzy, followed by himself, but too good to let get away. Cyber Security was a competitive field, and losing even a small advantage could come back and bite them in the ass, especially in these early days.

At Shane's encouragement, Bizzy flashed the man a bright smile and a grateful nod of her head, but she hesitated. "Chase, you should do the honors." She extended her arm and proffered the clicker.

"Very mysterious." Chase chuckled as he put down his glass and took the remote. He paused as it occurred to him that, twice now, Bizzy had called him Chase, and not Cheese, her long-standing nickname for her husband. That was a new one. Ever since the first day they'd met in high school, when he'd cracked the worst joke anyone in history had ever heard, he'd been

Cheese

to her.

Little odd...

Oh well. All part of her plan, he was sure. In the meantime, he could play along, and did so, pressing play as he aimed the remote at their smart TV and whatever it was she'd uploaded to it.

His first thought as the... well, the

porno...

began to play was;

holy shit, she's really jumping the gun here! Wait till we're alone, Bizzy!

Then came his second when he got a better look at the pair on the bed. He knew that bed. It was

his

bed.

What. The. Fuck.

Chase spurted out the first thing that came to him, heedless of being far from alone with his wife. "Bizzy, why are two strangers having sex in our bedroom?"

"Strangers?" That single word was pure ice, and Chase thought he could almost hear her teeth grind together. "Strangers!?"

Chase, utterly confused about every aspect of what was happening, looked back to the screen. The lighting was not great, and there were a lot of shadows, but he could make out a man turned away from the camera, head off-screen, in good shape but pretty nondescript all in all, and a woman with dark hair veiling her face who was on her hands and knees getting it from behind. She also could have been anyone, except for a birthmark in the rough shape of Mickey Mouse, of all things, on her taut, rippling ass. Even on a third look, Chase had no idea who either of them were. "...yeah. Strangers. Bizzy, what the hell--"

"You're watching two people fuck on

our

bed, using

our

secret naughty-time camera, and you have the motherfucking gall to call them

strangers

!" The shriek from his heretofore kindhearted wife was all the shriller from being the only sound in the suddenly dead silent living room. Well, dead silent except for the over-the-top soundtrack provided by the literal fuckers on the screen. They at least were pretending to have fun, if no one else was.

"Damn you, Chase Ventris. Damn you to every stinking hell that's ever been imagined. I can't believe you're going to stand there and act like you haven't destroyed every good thing in our lives by sticking your dick in whoever that slut is! Goddamn you!" Bizzy's eyes were shining with tears by that point, born of rage, despair, and probably a few emotions that had been invented on the spot.

"You think that's me!" Chase sputtered, and this time the drool actually did make an appearance. He was absolutely floored by her words. Her unadulterated hate.

"Just shut up." Bizzy began pacing and waving her arms dramatically. "When that note was slid under my office door two months ago, I couldn't bring myself to believe it. I mean, it was a hand-written note! On paper! Who does that? It had to be a joke. It told me to check the time stamp from a camera no one else should have known about. So I humored my mystery prankster and looked it up; December 20

th

at... whatever 1400 is. Then I wanted to die." She nearly spit then. "What happened Chase, did you piss off your whore enough for her to get some revenge? Maybe you were so pathetic in the sack, she had to teach you a lesson. That's our guess."

Ignoring the increasing tempo of the people who were about to ruin his life with their badly-faked cries of passion, Chase shook his head vigorously. "Bizzy, that isn't--"

"No! You don't call me that! Not anymore... you... you killed Bizzy." Despite her accusations and the words that were custom-made to rip his heart out, the look of utter sadness in her eyes nearly overwhelmed him, and he actually took a step towards her, dropping the clicker to the floor and holding arms out to enfold her. To comfort her as he'd done so, so many times before. When she lurched back, he could feel the knife twist in his chest.

"Elizabeth..." The stolid, comforting tones of Maggie, the receptionist who was the honorary office housemother, had everyone's heads turned her way. She was holding her phone out, displaying a picture that Chase was too far away to see clearly. "That isn't Chase. It can't be."

"Mags..." Bizzy's voice was ragged, and she just shook her head wearily. "I love you, but please don't--"

"Dear, you need to stop talking now." Maggie closed the distance between herself and the dissolving couple, and Chase saw what the picture was. A group shot of Chase's personal team holding up champagne flutes in a toast. He remembered that day, when they'd closed the biggest deal of their firm's relatively brief history. "December 20. 2 PM."

Maggie's eyes bored holes into Bizzy, but the scorned woman's righteous anger stopped her from seeing it. "So what? So he ran back home after and had a real celebration. This doesn't change--"

"1400 is 2 PM!" Maggie's outthrust finger pointed quaveringly at the timestamp on the video. "Jesus girl, how has a programmer of your brilliance never learned the twenty-four hour clock?"

It was like a bad comedy. Chase watched his wife's eyes widen as a whole cascade of revelations hit her at once. Bizzy looked from the pic on the phone, to the video on the screen, then back, then again... her neck was practically a rubber band. "No. It... can't... I didn't..." She flattened her palms to her forehead, and her head shaking increased even as the strength in her legs gave out and she collapsed onto the floor. "Oh no. Oh... oh god..."

"OH GOD!"

Chase was sure for a heartbeat that it must all be a dream, otherwise, how could he have heard the same words, in the same voice, but coming from two different places? He didn't realize that that heartbeat would be the last, fleeting oasis of hope he had before his world burned around him completely.

"Fuck me with that big fucking dick!" Bizzy's scream issuing from the speakers forced Chase's eyes from their present home and the gibbering mess that his wife had become, to the past... and the different kind of gibbering mess she was then.

It was clear as day, Elizabeth Ventris, his bride of four years and the love of his life since he was sixteen, was on their bed, her hands gripping the sheets to the side, her sculpted legs bare and wrapped around the waist of a man that wasn't him, slamming her hips into his with a need that was frightening. The pair writhed with pure abandon; he grunting like a wild beast, she screaming her way through an orgasm... a real one. Chase knew what his wife sounded like when she climaxed, and there was nothing fake about

this

performance.

"Do it... ohhhh yessss... do it you fucking stud! Take what he threw away!" Her golden head was whipping back and forth, and the words came in-between a series of kisses she plastered to any inch of skin on the man she could reach. "Fill me up... make me yours..." She undulated her pelvis in that oh so special way that had always driven Chase crazy.

He knew for a certainty that right then she was engaging in that complicated, Tantric muscle-rhythm thing they'd learned together in college, milking the cock within her with patterned tightening and loosening of her lower muscles designed to drive the man insane with sensation. That had been her gift to him, reciprocation for all the techniques he'd picked up to lavish her with. It had been... theirs.

All that didn't matter, not anymore. The move was re-gifted and corrupted, but it still worked. "Ungh! Ungh! Fuuuuckkkk..." On screen, Bizzy's whole body shuddered as her lover hunched his back and hilted himself fully within her welcoming channel. He was coming too, in buckets, and Chase had no doubt that, whoever he was, he was thanking every lucky star in the sky that he'd gotten a taste of the goddess beneath him. "Yesss..." Bizzy positively purred under that fucking prick, and she cupped his still-obscured head in her hands to plaster her mouth against his in a long, loving kiss.

When they separated, him rolling off her to the side so that her magnificent breasts, sweat-sheened and glistening bare under the bedroom's lights, sprawled across her heaving chest, she gave a breathy laugh. "Holy hell. I know I said this was just to get even... but... wow. I think... I think I just discovered my new favorite workout." The man began to sit up then, and that was when the horrifying bubble that had captured the entire room was finally popped.

"No!" Suddenly, the Bizzy of the present shot to her feet, the catatonia of the last minute or so finally clearing enough for her to realize what was happening. She lurched for the fallen remote, frantically crashing her thumb into it to try to end the bigger-than-life view of her debasement. All she managed to do was hit pause; her tortured mind was incapable then of focusing on turning it off completely.

She turned to her husband, her lips trembling and tears streaming from her eyes. "Cheese... I'm so sorry. Please, please..." She took a step towards him, her hand raising tremulously. Every inch of her screamed out how utterly terrified she was in that moment, like she was made of glass and Chase was holding a hammer. "God, I can't even say... I was so stupid..."

"This... this was revenge?" Chase just watched her like she was a movie monster rising from a black bog. "You... you made a fucking movie to show to everyone to get back at me?"

"I thought... I was sure..." Bizzy swallowed. "Cheese, my heart was broken! I lost my mind! You have to know that it didn't mean--"

Without looking at the screen, without needing to because he'd already seen it, but just hadn't let himself face it, he pointed to the timestamp of the second video. "That was four days after the first. Christmas Eve. You decided not to trust me, and give yourself to another man when I was out buying that last minute gift for your mom that you insisted I had to." He felt sick. "Bizzy... that was almost two months ago. Tell me you haven't... that it was just..."

His wife could never lie to him, and her lack of answer and quick look down at the carpet told him all he needed to know.

Two fucking months... she's been fucking him for two fucking months!

Now all the coldness, all the rebuffing, every weird instance of her acting aloof, even arrogant, in the recent past finally made sense. Hell, at the office, he'd convinced himself he was seeing things when he caught her laughing at him with... with...

Interrupted by the continuing shit show, in yet a further blast of fucked-up luck, Bizzy's sob made her thumb jerk on the remote, and the vid picked right back up. She whipped around in a panic and turned it off fully this time, but not before he'd seen the other face on that bed, along with everyone else.

"Oh Shane, you stupid fucker." Hearing Maggie, in that mournful tone, drop an f-bomb for the first time ever was a perfect, succinct representation of every nightmarish second since Bizzy had turned on the TV.

With mutters of,

I'm out,

and,

don't really wanna have to give a statement to the cops,

the onlookers shuffled out the front door, most shooting sympathetic looks at Chase and shaking their heads at Bizzy, who watched them leave like they were a rescue party that was giving up the search. Maggie was the last to go, though she did stop to squeeze Chase's hand in reassurance, and, shockingly, give a commiserating pat on Bizzy's shoulder. To Shane, who'd backed against a wall and was watching his lover's seething husband like a deer in the headlights, she just flipped the bird.

Chase took one step before Bizzy grabbed his arm. "Cheese, we can fix this... I love you more than anything... please, I fucked up so hard, I can't even say it in words." Her pull became more insistent with every step her husband took, and it fed the fire in him like she'd tossed in a batch of plutonium. "Cheeeeeese, oh god, don't do something stupid... just let him go..."

The plaintive, reedy whine was what finally made him stop. "Fucking hell Bizzy! After all this, you're still choosing him? Fuck! Does he have some kind of magic fucking dick?"

"No!" She gripped his arm tighter and pressed her face to his shoulder for a second before looking up at him with desperation. "Never, never think he was... that you aren't..." She grimaced, her eyes rolling around, trying to order her thoughts. "Cheese, you know Shane, he's an asshole. He won't just leave us--"

Chase had never gotten assaultive in the slightest with the light of his life, and he managed to hold himself back now from doing anything horrible, barely, but that didn't mean he could just let her touch him with those filthy hands. He put his palm on her chest and shoved her back, and her grip was so hard that his sleeve ripped off as she staggered away. "He's an asshole? Is that why you fucked him, or why you

kept

fucking him?"

"Chase, man. Just cool off. She wanted it, and I was there to give it. It's not my--"

Chase didn't even need to look away from where Bizzy was holding up his lost sleeve to her face like a security blanket. He could

hear

that same old smirk in Shane's voice.

Even as his body went into motion, his bare arm hurtling across the space that separated him from the man who'd cuckolded him, flashes of the last months, of seeing Bizzy and Shane joking together in the office, of them having closed-door meetings for no real reason, of catching her texting nearly every day with someone she didn't name, of Bizzy taking her own car to work instead of driving with him, then arriving home late two or three days a week...

...Of coming home two days ago to hear scrambling in their bedroom before she opened it and blocked his view of the inside, short of breath, with a shit-eating grin on her face, telling him she needed "me" time, so he should go play some videogames...

...They all coalesced together to pummel him ten times harder than his fist did to Shane's face.

God, love really did make you a fucking blind moron.

Detachedly, Chase marveled at the sounds being blended in his ears. There was the wet

thud

of his knuckles colliding again and again with Shane's soft tissue, Bizzy's wails, Shane's rattling wheeze of mortal terror... and Chase's own sobs as he trumpeted his misery from the end of his fist. But it was a sound he hadn't expected that finally made him stop and look one last time at his wife.

Bizzy was leaning against a wall, her head lolling over the puddle she'd made on the floor when she'd puked her guts out, wisps of golden hair clinging pathetically to her tear-moistened face. She gave out a low moan, turned to lock eyes with her husband, and then raan right out the front door, which had been left open by one of the departing guests.

Chase just watched her leave; he truly did not have it in him to say a word. He had no idea what to do, or even what he wanted to do; his heart was in his wife's hands as she ran, even as his mind roared after her to keep going and never come back. As a compromise, he wandered over to the door and just looked out, into the empty night.

A gurgling sound brought him back to the situation at hand. With a calm that took every ounce of his willpower, Chase casually walked up to Shane and looked down at his demolished nemesis. "Here's the deal. I'm going to let you live. You're going to leave. Tomorrow, you're going to disappear."

"F... fuc..." The denial was aborted from the pain of birthing it, and Shane gritted his remaining teeth. "...cops..."

Chase bent down and took a fistful of Shane's tawny hair, wrenching the broken man's head up to pin him with his gaze. "If you call the cops, I will begin a campaign of poisoning every aspect of your life. Completely. FBI flags, sex offender lists, IRS audits, spyware, compromised accounts... do I need to keep going? You know how good I am, do you believe I can do it?"

Shane's one working eye widened, and he nodded through his agony.

"Good. Take the deal."

He assumed the

yes

when Shane wobbled to his feet through a series of groans, leaving a smear of blood on the carpet and wall behind him, and staggered out the front door. This time, Chase didn't feel even the slightest need to take a look, and instead, in a fog, shuffled over to the glass of scotch he'd set down a lifetime ago. Picking it up, he peered at the amber liquid held in his crimson fist and laughed. "I should put you on a shelf as a memento. You're the last thing I touched when I still had a life."

After a second, he downed the spirit, then went looking to finish off its entire family.