Tom had become quite used to seeing extraordinary and impossible things. He had just come from a touring zoological exhibition featuring a rare alien bird who engendered a low-level telepathy in any creature within thirty feet. He had looked across the floor at a curvy redhaired girl and suddenly received an incredibly vivid image of what she wanted to do to him, which he had felt immediately shameful about. All the past weeks, the travel away from Earth and his immersion in the knowledge of the universe, had left him totally bewildered at the physical possibilities of the world around him. But somehow finding another woman in Kayleigh's bed was more impossible than any of this.
There were a lot of shocks to process. The shock of Kayleigh with a girl, the shock of that girl being his friendly neighbour Caroline, and the mixture of lust and mortification that he had never experienced before. But most of all, Kayleigh was cheating on him. Kayleigh, the girl he knew for a fact he was going to marry, the girl he had unknowingly waited all his life for. This was something that didn't, could not happen.
Kayleigh looked at him, her alarmed eyes as wide as dinner plates. Caroline still had her head buried in his girlfriend's lap. Kayleigh was fumbling around for a sheet, as if that would disguise anything. He had seen Kayleigh crying out her release, enraptured in pleasure, making the same noises and screams that she had when thrusting up around his cock. He had seen Caroline's blonde hair scattered around Kayleigh's thighs, girlcum sticking the glimmering strands to skin. He had heard, above Kayleigh's pornographic moans, the eager slurping and smacking of Caroline's lips pressed against that sacred part of Kayleigh that Tom thought belonged only to him.
There were a lot of emotions a man was expected to feel in this situation. Rage, for sure. Sadness, probably. But Tom was long out of practice with these feelings, and the sting of betrayal was completely knew to him. He had lived a charmed life, all things considered, making the agony all the deeper for its freshness. So the same bewildered wonder he had been experiencing ever since that night with the UFO took over Tom.
"Kayleigh. Why are you... why are you doing this?" It was an honest question, asked in the spirit of scientific enquiry.
Caroline turned over, with a grin on her face – that same playful grin he had once found so endearing but now seemed an instrument of torture. "Oh hey Tom. You want to join in?" That was it for her – no sense of shame, just animal lust. Maybe she wasn't really human anymore. How could she be, with the way she went along with that monster?
"Why are you doing this to me?" Tom found himself saying.
Kayleigh was crying, another oddity. He should be the one crying. "Tom, I... I fucked up. I fucked up a lot."
"But why?" Tom said, still more curious than demanding. "How?"
Kayleigh let out a sigh that seemed to go on forever. "Tom, go downstairs. I'll get dressed and come down and explain things to me."
It was the domestic tone of command that he had become accustomed to – but all of a sudden, its authority was absent. "No," Tom said. "Talk to me now. Right away."
Caroline frowned like she had just tasted something sour. "Tommy, why do you have to be a spoilsport? We were just having fun. Believe me, nobody got hurt."
It had to be her fault. And then came the anger, late to the party but coming in force. Tom grabbed Caroline by her naked shoulder and whirled her around until her face was inches from his. "Leave, you-- you slut!" The word was unfamiliar and uncomfortable on his tongue. Caroline recoiled, clutching her shoulder. She darted into the thin gap between Tom and the doorway and hurried down the stairs. She left her clothing behind, bright stains on the hardwood floor. Tom imagined Caroline running through the square nude, and thought that it was only appropriate for the whole floor to see her and know her shame.
Kayleigh stood in front of him now, mustering a little bit of fury. "Tom – I've never seen you like this. You shouldn't have said that to Caroline. She was only trying to--"
"To what? Fuck you? Or was she just looking for a quarter you lost in your cunt?"
Kayleigh flinched. "I'm sorry. But at least she..."
"She wasn't the first, was she Kayleigh? How many women have you fucked?"
Kayleigh tore away. She was beginning to cry, and some small time-lagged part of Todd felt a burning need to comfort her. "She was the first woman, but... there were men. Before that. Richard, I... back on Earth, we just started doing it at a conference. It just felt so easy. No one was getting hurt. And the guy on that spaceship..."
"Jesus Christ, Kayleigh." Tom should have known. All those late nights, working at the lab with Richard, Richard, always Richard. He was the consummate cuckold, sitting at home watching TV, thinking about his girlfriend's genius and her immense future while meanwhile she was riding some sleazy professor's cock. How many months had that gone on? How many years?
Kayleigh's eyes were bubbling up with tears, and her red chest was heaving as she struggled to take breaths. She was gulping oxygen like someone who had just been saved from drowning. Tom had never thought her naked body could look so unerotic, but there it was, a shrivelled and pathetic thing stewed in the juices of its own sin.
"You stupid whore," Tom said. They were someone else's words for someone else's situation. His wrists trembled. He shouldn't slap her. He shouldn't give her the satisfaction of being the victim.
Kayleigh looked up at him. There was a kind of sad contempt in her eyes, but it might have just been Tom's reflection. "I think I should leave," Kayleigh mumbled."
"Then do it," Tom said. "And never come back."
--
Kayleigh's appointed house, nearly identical to Tom's, was virtually untouched. She had spent most of her night's at Tom's, and most of her days at Caroline's. The air was stale, the furniture in undisturbed showroom condition. She felt like smashing all of it, but she doubted she had the strength.
She was furious, but not at anyone – it was more of a roiling, directionless fury slowly burning up her insides. She guessed she was mad at herself, for succumbing to temptation over and over again, until the point where she was reckless enough to cheat on Tom in his own bed. But even this seemed to be an evasion – she had not succumbed to anything. She had acted, cheating on Tom, betraying the one man who had ever loved her with all his heart.
But maybe she was mad at Tom a little bit too. He had been like a dog, always staring at her with those lost, lovesick eyes. Easy to love, with his uncomplicated devotion, but also impossible to respect. And hadn't he checked out of the relationship long before she had, with his sci-fi tapes and XP system? If he wasn't such a loser, he probably would have done the same things she had. What cause did he have to be so self-righteous?
For a brief moment Kayleigh considered going back to Tom's house and telling him these things, but she knew that her sentiments would dissolve on her tongue and she would just stand there doe-eyed as he berated her once again. How could he talk to her like that and use such vile slurs? No, it was best to stay away from Tom, at least for now. Maybe forever. The abduction had made them dependent on each other, their only social links within a couple dozen light-years, but strangely it had also given them the tools to drift further apart than ever.
So she wasn't going to see Tom. Now what?
Without Tom, without Caroline and without the endless grind of lab work and graduate study, Kayleigh really had no idea what to do with herself. She wasn't like Tom, who had a lot of hobbies and interests and an indelible curiosity that fuelled them. She just did what was put in front of her, with all the focus of a power drill. And ever since that fateful night, there had been nothing in front of her.
Kayleigh decided to go outside. The sun was shining, as it always did in Madrid's perpetually perfect spring day. The grass was the kind of verdant green you only saw in lawn-care commercials. But it all seemed equally miserable to Kayleigh.
She went over to Richard's house, but of course he wasn't there. Kayleigh felt bad for her earlier conversation with him. Who was she to try and visit shame on someone for not resisting their inner vices? She hoped that Richard wouldn't avoid her. She didn't really want a relationship with him, but at least now they would be free to fuck.
There she went again. Such a whore.
No, not a whore. A whore got paid. She was nothing more than a common gutter slut.
So Kayleigh went back to her stoop. She couldn't face the world, especially not the strange alien world that awaited her outside of this enclave of artificial normality. There were days when she enjoyed going out and having her mind boggled by the strangeness, but today she couldn't take it.
And then there was Caroline, her blonde hair still shining with an apparently supernatural radiance. She didn't seem to be at all diminished by Tom's words, let alone feeling lost and unmoored like Kayleigh was. Maybe she was just repressing it, or maybe she was actually one of those emotionally invincible people that were so amazing and so irritating. She had put on another set of clothes, a blue blouse and a peasant skirt, and didn't seem at all perturbed that the entire floor could have seen her walking naked from one home to the next.
Caroline sat down next to Kayleigh on the stoop. "How are you feeling?"
Kayleigh looked up and flicked a strand of chestnut hair out of her face. "Honestly? Like a piece of shit."
Caroline gave Kayleigh a pat on the back. "You're not a piece of shit, Kay. You're just... a little more advanced than Tom is right now."
