Too Curvy To Be A Side Piece

Chapter 2

Isla's pov

I caught myself against the wall, palm flat on the cool plaster, head spinning so hard the corridor lights smeared into streaks.

The laughter from the main room sounded far away, like it belonged to another life. Three years of scraping by, of stretching every pound, of believing we were in this together, and it had all been a game.

I stayed there until the dizziness eased enough that I could walk. Then I forced myself back toward the table.

“Here she comes,” someone whispered as I approached.

I sat down and the chair felt too hard under the soft weight of my body. I kept my eyes on the plate in front of me, fighting the tears that burned behind my lids.

Around me the conversation flowed like nothing had happened—forks scraping, glasses clinking, someone laughing at a joke I didn’t hear. The food on my plate had gone cold. I couldn’t remember taking a single bite.

Rhys’s voice cut through the noise. “What’s going on? You’ve been awfully quiet.”

I lifted my gaze. His face looked the same as it always did—handsome, easy, the man I had woken up next to for three years. For a second I almost convinced myself I had misheard everything in the hallway.

Almost.

I looked around the table at his friends. The same people who had looked at me all night like I was something unpleasant stuck to the bottom of a shoe. My pulse hammered in my throat.

“I heard something in the hallway,” I said. My voice came out thinner than I wanted.

Rhys’s eyebrow lifted. “Something like what?”

I swallowed, scanning everyone on the table. “Our marriage being a dare.”

Silence stretched for half a second. Then Rhys shrugged, almost bored.

“So what’s the problem?”

The casualness of it knocked the air from my lungs. He didn’t deny it, he didn’t even look surprised. He didn’t tell me I was crazy or that I’d misunderstood. He just sat there with his glass of wine and asked what the problem was, as if I’d complained about something simple.

“What do you mean?” My voice cracked. “Was that a joke, or is our marriage really a dare?”

Rhys laughed.

The sound was bright and sharp and completely wrong. The whole table joined him a second later, the laughter rolling around me like a wave of mockery.

“The moment we’ve all been waiting for,” one of the men murmured, grinning.

“I waited years for this,” a woman across from me said, eyes glittering with something mean.

Rhys’s expression shifted for a single heartbeat—something almost sober—then the laughter came again, louder this time, and he leaned back in his chair like this was the best entertainment he’d had all year.

“I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” he said. Then the smile turned cruel. “Actually… I’m not sorry. Did you really think someone like me would end up with a poor broke like you?”

The words landed like a slap.

I stared at him. My mind scrambled for an explanation that would make any of this make sense. Maybe he was putting on a show for them. Maybe this was some twisted joke he would explain later, once we were alone.

I had spent three years covering the rent when he claimed he couldn’t find steady work. I had taken extra shifts, sold the few pieces of jewelry my mother had left me, eaten cheap noodles for weeks at a time so he could “keep up appearances” with these people.

I had believed every soft apology, every promise that things would get better once he landed a real job.

And the entire time, he had been laughing.

My heart pounded so hard I thought it might crack my ribs. Something was wrong here. Something was so deeply, fundamentally wrong that my body refused to process it all at once.

“Something’s wrong here,” I said, the words coming out low and shaky. “We’ll see at home, Rhys.”

I stood. The chair scraped loudly against the floor. No one tried to stop me, a few of them were still smiling. I walked out of that room with my spine straight and my vision blurring, and I did not look back.

The ride home passed in a blur. I barely remembered unlocking the door to our small flat. Once inside, I sat on the edge of the bed fully dressed and stared at the wall. Minutes stretched into hours but Rhys did not come home.

The silence in the apartment felt heavier than it ever had. Every object in the room carried a memory that now felt poisoned—the cheap couch we’d bought secondhand, the chipped mugs we drank coffee from every morning, the wedding photo on the shelf that suddenly looked like a prop. I kept replaying his voice. “Did you really think someone like me would end up with a poor broke like you?”

I needed answers, real ones. The kind Rhys clearly had no intention of giving me.

Talia.

She was the only person who might know the full story. She had been Rhys’s closest friend for years—longer than I had known him. She had always been kind to me in that careful, distant way of hers. If anyone could tell me whether this was some cruel joke or the truth, it was her.

I grabbed my coat and left.

Talia’s building was only a short bus ride away. The night air bit at my face, but I barely felt it. My thoughts kept looping, the hallway conversation, the table’s laughter, the way Rhys’s eyes had looked when he said he wasn’t sorry.

By the time I reached her door, my hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the key she had given me months ago “in case of emergency.”

I pushed the door open without knocking.

The sitting room was dimly lit. Rhys’s shirt lay crumpled on the floor near the couch, the same dark blue button-down he had been wearing at the party.

My heart dropped.

I moved through the apartment on numb legs. Soft sounds drifted from upstairs—low voices, the creak of a mattress, a woman’s breathy moan. I climbed the stairs one step at a time, each one feeling like it might give way beneath me.

The bedroom door stood half open.

“f**k me like a man, Rhys—”

Talia’s voice drifted out.

I stepped closer and looked through the gap.

They were on the bed. Talia was on her hands and knees, dark hair spilling over one shoulder, back arched. Rhys was behind her, one hand fisted in her hair, the other gripping her hip as he drove into her with the same relentless rhythm he had used on me only hours earlier. The wet sound of skin meeting skin filled the room. Talia moaned again, louder this time, pushing back to meet every thrust.

“Harder,” she gasped. “God, just like that—”

Rhys’s face was turned toward the door. For a second I thought he might see me. His eyes were half-lidded, mouth parted, the exact expression he wore when he was close. He didn’t notice me at all. He was too busy f*****g his best friend in the bed I had never been allowed to see.

Something inside my chest cracked open so wide I couldn’t breathe.

I stood there longer than I should have, watching the man I had loved for three years take another woman with the kind of hungry intensity he had always saved for me. The same hands that had closed around my throat earlier that night were now digging into Talia’s hips. The same mouth that had whispered filthy things against my skin was now murmuring praise against her neck.

My wedding ring felt like a brand on my finger.