Episode 3
1598 Words
Sasha's POV
Five years? The boy was three, maybe four. The math arranged itself without my permission.
"You're Sasha, right?" she continued, still smiling. "Ben talks about you. He said you're his sister."
I chuckled in disbelief, completely speechless. The situation had moved past the edges of what I had prepared for.
I turned to Ben. He was speechless. Completely, and I understood that whatever scripts he had prepared, whatever explanations he had been arranging in his head for ten hours on that plane, none of them had accounted for her being here.
"Say something," the woman said to him. Her voice had changed slightly, picking up on something she couldn't name yet.
He said nothing.
"So you lied to me," I said. "You weren't planning to marry someone else. You were already married."
I looked at the little boy, who was watching all of us with the wide unbothered eyes of a child too young to understand. I watched him run to Ben and called him 'daddy.'
"Was she the one you gave my money to?" I asked.
The woman's smile faltered. "What money?"
Ben still didn't speak.
"So you're suddenly dumb," I said to him.
Before anything else could happen the mansion door opened.
A maid stepped out, greeted us and said that Mrs Stones was expecting everyone inside.
I turned and walked in without another word.
I had come here for Ben's father, and that was still the only thing that mattered.
The wife, the child, the whole lies he fed me, all of that was information I would process later, in private.
Behind me I heard her voice rise. Sharp now, the warmth gone out of it entirely. "Benjamin. What money is she talking about? Ben. Look at me. What money?"
I kept walking until we got to the living room. "Mrs Stones said you can wait for her here," the maid said politely.
"I'm not here for Mrs Stones," I said. "I'm here to see Mr Stones."
"Oh." The maid's smile didn't waver. "He isn't in yet ma, but I can show you to a room where you can wait for him."
"That's fine."
I followed her through the mansion, barely registering the hallways. I was too tired to be impressed and too angry to care.
She stopped in front of a door, opened it, told me to make myself comfortable and that she would let me know the moment Mr Stones arrived.
She left before I could respond. I stepped inside and stopped. I looked around slowly.
There was a watch on the nightstand. A man's watch. A pair of cufflinks beside it. A jacket thrown over the back of the chair in the corner, broad shouldered, clearly not a woman's. A cologne bottle on the dresser.
I turned and looked at the door. I almost went back to call the maid. But my heels were already off my feet and my body was making decisions my mind was too exhausted to argue with.
I told myself I would sort it out after. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. I was asleep almost immediately.
A stranger appeared the way things do in dreams, without warning and without explanation.
I couldn't hold his face clearly but I felt everything else, the warmth of him, and that my sleeping mind accepted without question.
I wasn't thinking about Ben or the woman on the doorstep. I was somewhere outside all of that.
Everything happened very fast. I remembered the sheets twisting in my hands.
I remembered his breath at my neck. I remembered my own voice screaming that he f***s me harder, and not being ashamed of it at all.
Then everything softened and went dark and I fell into a very deep sleep.
When I opened my eyes I was still thinking about the dream.
What kind of dream was that, I thought. I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling. Then I turned over.
And there he was. The man from my dream. Lying right beside me, asleep, the sheets at his waist, his chest bare, his face relaxed in a way that made him almost unbearably handsome up close.
I stopped breathing. I looked at him. Then I looked down at myself. I was naked.
My heart slammed so hard against my chest I felt it everywhere at once. I snatched the sheets up to my chin.
My eyes swept the room, the cologne bottles, the watch, the man's jacket still thrown over the chair, and everything I had half noticed before falling asleep came back to me with a horrible clarity.
I had known something was off about this room. I had known it and I had been too tired to act on it and now I was sitting here naked next to a stranger in my father-in-law's mansion.
I pressed my hand flat against my mouth.
Then the man stirred, he opened his eyes slowly, without alarm, without the disorientation I would have expected from someone waking up to find a strange woman in his bed clutching his sheets like a shield.
He just looked at me. His eyes were dark and very still, the kind of eyes that took everything in without giving much back.
He said nothing for a moment. Just looked.
"I—" I started.
"Good afternoon," he said. His voice was deep, like a man who had woken up in complicated situations before and had made his peace with it.
Something about his calmness made my humiliation sharpen into something closer to rage.
"Do you understand what has happened?" My voice was low and tight. "Do you have any idea? I don't even know who you are. I was shown to this room by a maid, I lay down to rest, and now I am.... we are...." I stopped and exhaled.
"This is unacceptable. This is completely unacceptable."
He watched me say all of this with the same quiet attention, his head slightly tilted, like he was genuinely trying to follow.
Then he asked, calmly, "Who are you?"
I stared at him. "And what exactly," he continued, "happened between us?"
My mouth fell open. "Are you serious?"
He sat up slowly, and I looked away immediately, fixing my eyes on the wall. I heard him reach for something on the nightstand.
Then I heard the dull sound of something rolling, and I glanced back involuntarily to see him picking up an empty wine bottle from the floor beside the bed.
He looked at it for a moment. "Ah," he said quietly.
"Ah?" I repeated. "That's all you have to say?"
"I was drunk," he said, with the straightforward simplicity of a man stating a weather condition. "I'm sorry. I thought—"
He paused, rubbed the back of his neck. "There was a girl I met at the club last night. I thought she had somehow—"
He looked at me, then at the room, then back at me. "I thought you were her."
The silence that followed was enormous. "You thought I was someone from a club," I said.
"I apologize. I genuinely—"
I was already moving. I grabbed my dress from wherever it had ended up, turned away from him to pull it on, found my shoes, found my bag.
My hands were shaking but I refused to let them slow me down. I would not spend one more second in this room.
"Wait—" he started.
I walked out and pulled the door shut behind me.
The first empty room I found I slipped inside and locked the door and stood with my back against it for a moment, just breathing.
Then I found the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as it would go.
It didn't help. If anything the heat and the silence made it worse; every detail of the s*x I had been too disoriented to take in came back with the water.
I stood there and let it run over me and told myself it meant nothing. It was an accident.
A maid's mistake and a strange man and a body too exhausted to know the difference between sleeping and dreaming.
I turned the shower off. I got dressed carefully, the way I always dressed when I needed to feel like myself.
Then I unlocked the door and walked out.
The hallway was bright with afternoon light. I had slept longer than I intended. I smoothed my jacket and started toward the stairs.
A maid appeared at the end of the hallway, slightly breathless. "Ma, I was just coming to find you. The family meeting has started. They're all waiting for you downstairs."
I straightened my spine. "Lead the way," I said, but my heart started beating fast.
I followed her down the stairs. The door to the meeting room opened and I walked in.
Ben was the first person I saw. My anger returned instantly, like a fire that had never actually gone out.
Beside him sat his father, Mr Stones, the man I had come all this way to face. His mother was there too, her expression unreadable, her hands folded neatly on the table.
And then I saw the woman from the doorstep, seated at that table like she had every right to be there.
I held my face still. I pulled out a chair and was about to sit when I looked up one last time.
My breath left my body. The man from the room was sitting at the table too.
- Writer
