Poison Eve

Tell me about surprises…

I’m closing in on fifty now, and it was only last year, after nearly a decade together, that my wife and I finally married. When we first met, she was twenty-five, slightly chubby, and had a sweet, girlish face that undid me on sight. It was love from that first moment, no hesitation, no slow warming into it. And yet, as the two of us came to know one another, I found a woman far more complicated than my first glimpses of her had let on. She was, it turned out, quite experienced, but her quiet, low-profile, almost yielding, almost obedient manner came bound up with a heavy freight of insecurity about her own body. Insecurities whose source, at least in those early days, I simply could not trace.

Ok, yes, she was not the sort of woman who turned heads, but her girl-next-door charm did stand out, and accompanied by her girlish sweetness, did make my heart melt like butter. It was only as we grew into each other that I began, at last, to understand. Her sense of herself had been poisoned at the root by a warped image of her body, always measured, and always unkindly, against the bodies of some of her friends. She was in no way obese; she was simply chubby, and only slightly so. And as if to twist the knife, her bosom sat a shade fuller than her frame seemed built to carry, so that even the ordinary, wholly natural sag of her breasts became, in her own eyes, one more cross laid on her to bear.

She did work out, regularly and in earnest, and she managed to shed a few pounds, only to realize with horror that going any further would thin her face along with the rest of her. Cursing her luck, she gave up trying to lose the rest.

Even though I’d been on this earth almost fifteen years longer than her, when it came to sex, she was far more experienced than me, but I never dwelled upon that. After all, my teenage years were the late ‘80s, while hers ran well into the new century, or, as the Romans had it, ‘O tempora, o mores’

Eve—that’s her English name, short for Evangeline—came from a pretty wealthy family, so before the wedding, there was a prenup I had to sign. I hate this kind of shit, but it was take it or leave it if I wanted to marry her, so I dutifully passed it on to my lawyer for review. No hidden traps, no fine print. It stated, plainly and simply, that if the “unthinkable” ever happened, we’d part our merry ways—what was mine staying mine, what was hers staying hers.

The prenup also covered children. If we had one or more, then unless certain circumstances applied—adultery, for example—we’d share custody, splitting our time equally, each of us providing for the kids at a minimum set by our finances. And since, as I said, her family was pretty wealthy, on the matter of schooling we agreed on a quarter from me and three-quarters from her—a quarter being the most I could afford for the very expensive private school we’d be sending our children to.

Eve also had an older brother, Nate, who lived permanently in London, working as an econometrician at a well-known bank. He’d come back to Greece at least a week a year to spend time with the family, who live in Crete—Heraklion, to be specific. Sometimes we’d all go down together, since I’m quite fond of my in-laws; sometimes, when our calendars didn’t align, Eve went alone with her brother.

We had a quiet, normal life—routine, after a decade together—when the walls came crumbling down on me.

How, you ask?

I found out, by pure chance, that Eve was cheating on me. And I felt like the Gauls; the sky had fallen on my head!

Yeah, I can almost hear your skepticism. “There must have been signs, and you blissfully ignored them.”

THERE WERE NO FUCKING SIGNS!

When Eve wasn’t at work, she was home. When she went out, she always went exactly where she said she would. And no, I didn’t spy on her to know that; it was one of her phobias. She insisted that I should know, at any moment, exactly where she was, so I could find her if something unfortunate ever happened to her.

I didn’t share her phobia, but I shared my location too, because at the end of the day, why not? I didn’t see it as an invasion of my privacy. I saw it exactly for what it was: my wife had a certain phobia, and I made her comfortable by also sharing my location.

And I can hear your thoughts again: “That sounds like some elaborate plan to spy on me and control me, masquerading as a phobia.”

Nope. It was a true phobia, born of a real incident. When she was five, she got separated from her nanny and wandered off, frightened and alone, until a gentle old man found her, called the police, and sat beside her, managing to calm her down. The nanny was detained for child endangerment—and fired on the spot, of course—but the damage had been done.

Secondly: no apparent changes in our sex life. Sure, we no longer fucked like rabbits the way we did our first two years, but we had sex at least once a week, and it was as great as our first times. Her bottom, almost submissive, tendencies hadn’t changed. She was always eager; she always swallowed if I came in her mouth; she never complained if I finished all over her face or her bosom, if I felt like it. I liked taking her anally, and though I always prepared her and used healthy doses of lube, there was always an initial discomfort, sometimes bordering on suffering. She never stopped it—actually, it was me who stopped, whenever I felt her discomfort wasn’t subsiding, and over the years I lost count of how many times I ended up all but yelling at her, “TELL ME TO STOP, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.”

“You like it. I would rather not spoil it for you,” was her excuse.

Yeah, she was a people pleaser, and while I loved her longing to please me, I wanted her to enjoy what we did for herself, not just for my sake. Okay, the initial discomfort of anal was a spice to my mildly sadistic tastes, but I did not want her suffering for me; I mean, the most extreme thing we ever did was light spanking, and that was only because she enjoyed it too.

(Actually, it was always light spanking first, and then we’d try taking her anally. And since nature intended the ass as “output only,” we kept it moderate; no more than once or twice a month.)

Thirdly, as I said earlier, she had a rich past, and she was a great storyteller. I’m voyeuristic, and I had cuckolding fantasies—

I can hear your thoughts again. “Cuckolding fantasies, hmmm?”

Yeah, I had such fantasies, and I had no intention whatsoever of making them real. Why, you ask? For the same fucking reason that women with rape fantasies don’t actually fancy being raped. Fantasies are fantasies!!!

And I know it firsthand. Even before I met Eve, back when I was doing my mandatory military service in the Greek Army, my then-girlfriend cheated on me. I didn’t get horny. I wanted to skin her and her lover alive. Is that answer enough for you?

Her telling me stories from her “spotty youth” while I built mental images and used them as she pleased me orally, that was my safe release for that kind of fantasy.

So yes, the sky fell on my head.

Eve, my beloved, introverted, low-profile wife, turned out to be a cheater. And, I shit you not, that was far from the worst of it.

Oh, no, no, no!

“What could possibly be worse than that?” you may ask. Well, judge for yourselves.

---

We lived in the suburbs, in a house owned by her family. It sat on a good stretch of land, walled all around, with a state-of-the-art alarm system—because of course it had one.

That included a CCTV security system: the external cameras ran permanently, and the internal ones kicked in as soon as the alarm was armed.

But the system had a bug, one we always said we’d fix and always forgot. In case of a blackout we had a generator, and the alarm system even had a third, private battery of its own, in case the generator gave out before the blackout ended. When that happened, the system shut off the internal cameras to save juice for the external ones—and the sensors, of course. But when the power came back, it turned the internal cameras back on, even if the alarm wasn’t armed.

And on that fateful day, that’s precisely what happened.

Being part of a state-of-the-art alarm system, the cameras didn’t exactly broadcast their presence; that would defeat the purpose. So the only way to know they were on was either the alerts they sent when they caught movement or opening the mobile app and happening to see live feeds from twelve different cameras inside the house.

It was early August, and Nate came back to Greece to spend his week with the family. This time the schedules didn’t align, so he’d spend two days with us, then travel alone to Crete for the rest of the week. After that he’d swing back through Athens for one more day, then carry on with his holidays with his girlfriend—Majorca, I think, was the plan that year.

We both went to the airport to pick him up and stopped for a beer on the way back. But when we got home, the power was out, and we were running on the generator; apparently it had gone out just a little after we’d left for the airport. I sat up with them until almost midnight, then left the two of them to catch up and went to bed. When Eve came to bed, at give-or-take two o’clock, we were still on the generator.

By the next morning the generator had given out, and the power still hadn’t come back. Eve had taken two days off to be able to spend them with her brother, but that morning Nate asked to ride along with me so I could drop him at Marousi—near my work—where he’d take the metro downtown for some business he had.

At eleven o’clock the power came back to the house, and I knew because that’s when I started getting movement alerts from the cameras. And that’s what finally bit Eve in the ass. While I could watch the camera feeds, I had no administrative rights over them. I couldn’t shut them off from the phone app; only Eve could do that, from her own account.

And Eve, wanting to stay off the grid for those two days, had turned her notifications off.

Call it poetic justice!

It was a slow day at work, early August, as I said, so, having nothing better to do, I opened the app and watched Eve in the kitchen. She was at the sink, washing the glasses we’d used the night before for our second—or more accurately, fifth, sixth, and seventh—round of beers after the three of us got home.

She appeared on the camera near the kitchen window, almost straight-on to her face. She had her glasses on, a plain white cami top, and her night shorts. No bra, her boobs showed clearly through the light fabric, and as she washed the glasses, they moved along with her. I stood there watching, mesmerized.

Yeah, in ten years I’d seen her every possible way a man can see a woman, but still! Add my touch of voyeurism to that, and I think we understand each other.

She went back to the living room, and I stopped watching. It may have been August, but team calls—the bane of my existence—never got the memo. I turned the app notifications off, making a mental note to reset the camera settings when I got home, and joined the call.

And of course, by the end of it, I’d totally forgotten.

At around three o’clock, Nate called to say he’d finished his business and asked if I could take the rest of the day as, quote, “work from home,” unquote. Of course I could. I picked him up from the metro station; we drove home, changed clothes, and all three of us went down to Vouliagmeni for a beer and a swim, finding this “work from home” arrangement very much to my liking.

Nate, as I said, stayed one more day, and on Thursday morning we drove him to the airport to catch his flight to Crete.

It would take another week for my world to collapse.

It was Wednesday morning, and Eve told me she wasn’t feeling well and would take the day off. I asked if she’d like me to work from home and look after her, but she tenderly waved me off. Truth be told, Eve was a bit of a crybaby when she felt unwell, and while I’d have stayed and tended to her if she hadn’t refused, I preferred a slow August day at the office to a day of her whining.

Yeah, shoot me!

Okay, I might sound grumpy, but I did love my wife. While at work, I remembered that neither of us had reset the CCTV. I re-enabled the notifications, cleared the alerts with their captured photos without looking at them, and brought up our bedroom camera, the one directly over our bed.

And there, in all her glory, was Eve: holding her phone in one hand and playing with herself with the other.

WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?

I’m all for her playing with herself, and even more for me watching her do it; we’d done that time and again. But her watching a video while she did it? That was something else entirely, because for all that she was far more adventurous—and experienced—than me, from day one she’d made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she hated erotic videos. Watching one, let alone watching one and then fucking, was out of the question.

So… WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?

I had to find some way to see what she was watching, and good luck with that. It wasn’t that she tried to hide her phone from me; any time she needed something, she’d unlock it and hand it to me without a second thought. But remember: wealthy family, banking apps; you see where I’m going? Her phone was a mobile Fort Knox.

I’d never bothered to memorize her unlock pattern, and I didn’t know her Google account password—she hated iPhones with a passion bordering on obsession—why would I?

That left me two things to do. The first was obvious: I’d find some excuse to get her to unlock her phone, and I’d memorize the pattern. Then came the hard part: somehow getting hold of the phone without her being any the wiser, and searching her gallery, or the history of whatever video apps she might have used, hoping I’d turn up some record of what she’d watched.

Because somehow, I seriously doubted she’d been masturbating to YouTube.

As chance would have it, the universe helped me with the first part. We had the same phone model, and Samsung decided it was time for the monthly security patch. I did mine, then started nagging Eve to do hers while she was trying to watch one of her then-favorite series on Netflix. Having had enough of me, she unlocked her phone and handed it over, thoroughly annoyed, asking me to please stop bothering her.

An hour later, remorseful for her outburst and “finding me tense,” she threw her hair into a messy bun and offered to “relax me, the way I like.”

Truth be told, while I very much enjoyed her blowjobs—she wasn’t merely good, she was an artist!—right then I didn’t especially feel like it. But I didn’t want to alarm her either, so I let her go on, and her jaw was nearly cramping before I finally managed to finish.

Anyway, to get back to the story, I watched carefully as she unlocked her phone, and to be safe, I checked it again later that day against the CCTV footage to verify the pattern. Then I opened the CCTV app and cleared all the existing in-app notifications, in case she opened it accidentally and I didn’t reset the cameras; I left them running.

Do you know what I found over the next few days?

Whenever I was out of the house longer than an hour, for any reason at all, she repeated the same routine: unlocked her phone and played with herself while watching whatever it was she watched.

No video calls. So it definitely wasn’t her talking to another man or another woman—Eve swung both ways. Which meant it wasn’t that.

I finally decided to stop torturing myself, and after that week, I reset the cameras. I even faked a business trip so I’d be away from home for two days, trying to catch her in the act with a lover; that is, if there was any lover to catch.

Nope!

No one entered the house, and for the two days I was away, she went from home to work and from work back home. No unexplained outings. One day she went to the supermarket and stayed there no more than half an hour before returning home. Her only other outing was coffee with her friend at “Best Friends,” her favorite cafe in Politeia, exactly as she had told me over the phone.

Finally, two days after coming back from the fake business trip—and I’d had to actually fucking travel to Thessaloniki, since I share my location too—I found my chance to be alone with her phone. She came home late from work, exhausted, and despite it being a hot summer day, she declared she needed a hot bath.

And by “hot,” I mean “scalding”; there was a reason I jokingly called her “a hell spawn.”

Long story short: while she was in the bath, I frantically opened her phone and started searching for clues.

• No weird messages
• No weird history in her browser
• No weird pictures or videos in her gallery, her downloads, or anywhere else on the phone
• No weird apps

And then it hit me: her Secure Folder.

And the fucking thing asked for biometrics, PIN, or password. Not a pattern. I had three guesses; I couldn’t risk a fourth.

I got it on the second: 13101990. Her birthday. The Secure Folder environment opened, and I began searching, even more frantically.

• No weird apps in the environment, only her e-banking ones.
• A browser that had never been opened.
• No weird pictures or videos in the environment’s gallery.

I opened the environment’s video player… and that’s precisely when the sky fell on my head.

The video seemed to be shot on a mobile phone. Her face, smiling, looking up past the camera. The image panned out. She was naked from the waist up, kneeling. A blur of movement as the man filming sat down. Eve, kneeling between two male legs. A hand fondled her right boob, pinching her hard nipple. She nodded, as if agreeing to something, and that’s when I realized the sound was muted. I turned the volume up a little, just in time to hear a male moan as she eagerly took his junk into her mouth.

I stopped the video and checked the file information to find its storage location, and I found that it was a year old. And I was not the man in it.

I almost dropped the phone as my mind tried to absorb the apocalypse in front of my eyes. My wife—my lovely wife—was cheating on me.

But it would get even worse.

I unpaused the video and watched my wife blowing another man. Then the frame zoomed out, away from her mouth devouring him. And as it widened, it shifted focus, and I saw my wife from behind, kneeling in front of a couch, still servicing him. What the fuck? Was there a second person recording?

A mirror. It was a mirror, and the guy was simply filming through it. The shot settled on her buttocks, her head bobbing. I felt my insides turn to ice as the image panned further and the man’s face appeared, in all his fucking glory…

Nate.

I stood frozen, unable to stop watching, mouth agape and in real danger of swallowing any unfortunate passing insect—and we live in the suburbs, forest literally across from our home. His other hand, which until then had rested on his leg, found its way onto her head, guiding it. The bobbing became more intense—and then he stopped her, moaning.

You can understand why.

And to add insult to injury, when he’d finished, she opened her mouth to show him the results of his… labor.

And then she swallowed.

She smiled at him, and he tenderly stroked her cheek, and she nestled into his palm like a kitten.

“You’re mine. You’ll always be mine,” I heard him say.

“I’m yours, only yours,” she replied. “Any time you want me. Any way you want me.”

I opened the Files application of the Secure Folder and navigated to the location of the video. There, I found an impressive collection spanning the last seventeen years. I opened the oldest one, timestamped December 2009. Another blowjob, in the bathroom of their home in Heraklion—I recognized it immediately. Next video, one day later, same bathroom. Another blowjob, but they didn’t stop there. He helped her up, bent her over, and took her anally. No preparation. No lube.

And judging by the video, Eve truly enjoyed it. Okay, Nate’s pecker was quite a bit smaller than mine, but still.

Then I heard a sound, and I panicked. I hadn’t managed to copy a single video. All my panicked brain could do was reopen the video Eve had last played, restoring the player to the state she’d left it in and muting the sound again, before frantically closing the app and the Secure Folder.

My heart was pounding, and though the sound wasn’t her coming back to the living room, I’d lost my nerve.

I just sat on the couch, devastated, my mind trying hard to process what my eyes had just seen.

And to make things worse, Eve called me from the bathroom. I walked there like a robot, stopped outside the door, and took deep breaths to compose myself. I closed my eyes, took one final breath, and went in. She was lying in the bathtub, filled almost to capacity, and she smiled at me.

“Care to join me, lover boy?” she asked in a sultry voice.

What I really cared to do was drown her in our fucking bathtub with my own fucking hands. But I managed not to lose my composure.

“I’ll let you take me the way you like,” she added with a knowing wink—and my mind flipped.

“Okay,” I replied, and undressed.

“Go get the lube, babe.”

“No lube,” I said, in a tone that left no room for argument. “Your mouth. Only.” And God knows how I managed not to say your fucking blowhole, you fucking whore.

She simply nodded and pulled the bathtub plug. I joined her—at full sail, mind you—and she knelt and took me into her mouth.

The fucking bitch! She pulled out all her artistry to make me lose my mind and forget her promise to let me have her the way I wanted.

(Or she was simply trying to make it as good for me as she could—as she always did—but I was too enraged to give her the benefit of the doubt.)

This time it hurt her, and it hurt a lot. I took her without mercy, and she simply surrendered.

And then she started enjoying it. Her moans of pain turned into pleasure ones.

But I was past the point of no return, and I didn’t stop; I just couldn’t. The more she moaned, the more enraged I got, and I couldn’t put a fucking stop to it.

“Wow,” she told me, breathless, after I finished. “I don’t know what got into you, but… I LOVED IT,” she said, a big smile on her face.

I don’t know where the hell I found the strength not to slap her so hard her head would spin twice. The only thing I know is that, somehow, I managed to smile back.

“Love you!” she told me, and I felt like I’d been stabbed in the heart.

Because I did fucking love her. Because I couldn’t fucking imagine my life without her. Because, at the same time, I wanted to fucking strangle her.

Somehow I managed a “love you too” and walked out of the bathroom.

I wanted to destroy her. I wanted her to suffer the way I was suffering. And yet, at the same time, I didn’t know how to do it. I loved her—I just fucking loved her. Nate? Him, I’d kill with my bare hands, right here, right now. But not Eve… not Eve.

Even if I could somehow, miraculously, forgive her, if I ever saw Nate again, I wasn’t sure I could hold myself back.

I didn’t want to end up in jail and destroy my life even further than it was already destroyed. The only thing I could do was divorce her, gather what was left of myself, and try to recover from the blow.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” they say. This would not make me stronger. This would make me a survivor, nothing more. Poisoned, unable to ever let myself attach to another woman.

I got burned back in the Army, and I recovered. But Eve? That was it…the end of the line.

The next days were among the hardest of my life. On the one hand pretending normality, on the other making my preparations for the coming divorce. And Chris, my lawyer, being also a childhood friend, made things even worse. He knew her! He’d been a guest at our wedding! We went out together; hell, three years ago we’d vacationed together at his family’s old place on Alonnisos.

How could I tell him the truth? Not only had Eve cheated on me, she’d cheated with her own fucking brother!

His eyes bulged as I told him what had happened, but he stayed calm. He’s not a divorce lawyer, so he referred me to a trusted colleague, but more importantly, he had the presence of mind to ask the obvious: did I have any tangible proof that I had legal access to?

Which meant that even if I managed to get her phone again, the videos in the Secure Folder were out of the question. If I produced those, their family lawyer would bury me so deep I’d be utterly destroyed. And then, only then, I remembered the CCTV. I’d totally fucking forgotten about it. It was my only hope of finding any incriminating evidence.

The thing is, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see that kind of evidence. Of the three videos I’d watched, one was somewhere I didn’t recognize, and the others were in their family home. There was an excellent chance some of their videos had been recorded in our very fucking home, but I had no proof of that.

And seeing her somewhere else is one thing. Seeing her in your own home or, worse, in your marital bed…

Since we didn’t have any children, the adultery clause didn’t apply. We’d contributed equally to our joint savings account, and we’d split it equally. What was hers would remain hers; what was mine would remain mine. Sure, we’d paid together for the kitchen renovation, the TV, and the other appliances, and I stood a perfect chance of winning if we went to court. But I didn’t want to go to court. I didn’t want anything from that house anymore.

Yeah… money burnt on nothing. But money is just money. Our true currency is time, and time I couldn’t get back.

I just wanted a divorce. And while I wanted to destroy Nate, I couldn’t do it without destroying both her and her parents along with him and… I just didn’t have it in me.

I wanted her parents to know the end of our marriage was her fault. Yet if they ever learned the truth, it would devastate them—and as I said, I very much liked my in-laws.

We’d part ways, and I’d try to bury her existence, knowing full well I’d never manage it.

But to accomplish that, I had to find the evidence. I had to be able to deny Eve the narrative of our divorce. I had to be able to tell her, “I know, and I can prove it.” I had to be able to hand her a choice that was no choice at all. “One way or another, your parents will know you cheated on me. The only thing you get to decide is whether they hear a curated admission from you… or the truth from me.”

---

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find.

It wasn’t difficult after all. I didn’t have to watch endless hours of recordings; Nate had stayed alone with Eve just the one day, and the cameras recorded on movement.

The first video from that fateful day was me waking up. Then me going to the bathroom. Then me coming out of the bathroom. Then me back in our bedroom, getting dressed. Kissing Eve goodbye while she slept. Then me crossing the living room and taking the stairs down to the garage.

An hour later: Nate waking up in his room. Nate is going to the bathroom. Nate is coming out and walking to our room.

My heart skipped a beat.

Him smiling, watching Eve sleep, then stepping carefully out so as not to wake her. He is in the kitchen, making coffee. He is back in the living room, opening his phone. Some minutes later, leaving the phone on the table and going to his room. Returning with his laptop.

Next video: our bedroom. Eve wakes up. She’s wearing the same clothes I’d seen her in the day before, in the kitchen. She leaves the bedroom and goes to the living room. Says good morning to Nate. Nate asks if she wants coffee. She says yes and disappears a few minutes into the bathroom for her morning routine. Nate makes the coffee. She comes back and sits down next to him.

The two of them are chatting like a normal brother and sister.

Drag the slider forward half an hour. Eve has changed position—sitting back against the couch now, legs tucked to the side. Nate is still at a healthy distance from her.

Drag the slider again and… I found what I was looking for.

Eve is lying back against the couch, and they’re kissing. Passionately. His left hand fondles her right breast over the light fabric of her cami top. Moments later she pulls the cami off herself, and Nate continues on her bare chest, switching from fondling to pinching her nipples and back. She moans, and her nipples harden.

I hit pause, bracing myself for what I’m sure will get worse. Much, much worse.

Nate stops her and commands her to kneel in front of the couch. She obeys, eagerly. She raises her gaze to him, smiling. He smiles back. He takes his phone and starts recording. He asks her to rise a little so the camera can catch her naked chest, and she obeys again. Then he commands her to pull down his shorts. I closed my eyes for a few moments. Opened them again. She plays with him with her tongue for a little, then takes him fully into her mouth.

I stop the video and download it to my laptop. Seeking back and forth is much faster on a local file than on the web. I find the point where they start kissing. Mark the time. Forward and forward and forward. They’re sitting on the couch again, her still naked. Go back. Play. He moans and holds her still. No theatrics this time; she just swallows and gives a little kiss to the head of his pecker. She rises from her knees and sits next to him. Mark the time.

Open Google: how to cut a video from one time point to another. First result: ffmpeg—whatever the hell that is. Google’s AI happily guides me: where to find it, how to use it to cut video, and change formats. It suggests .mp4. It hands me the full command for PowerShell. I download ffmpeg and install it. “Command not found.” I have to add it to the path says the AI, or use the executable’s full path. I find where it lives and try the full path. Nada, command not found. Ask Google again. If the path has spaces, it needs double quotes. Double quotes. Still nothing. Apparently PowerShell also wanted an ampersand in front of the path, because naturally what my life lacked at that moment was punctuation.

Fuck my life.

After some experimentation and a healthy dose of profanity, it finally works. I open Obsidian and save the command in a new note.

My head is already spinning, and all this was just the beginning.

Then some buried procedural part of my numbed brain kicks back in, and I panic. Had I just altered the original file? Destroyed its metadata? Turned the only legally usable evidence I had into an edited video that Eve’s lawyer could dismiss?

No. Google had given me an input file and a separate output file. The original hadn’t been touched. And even if it had, I could simply download it again from the CCTV system.

My brain is in shambles. It fires alarms first and checks whether there is a fire afterward. Still, better safe than sorry. I create two folders, one with the original downloaded file and the other for the director’s cut, as I’m pretty sure that I will do this again and again…

… and again.

Next video: both of them going into the bathroom. No cameras in there, so I can only assume the party continued. Or maybe they just bathed—Nate, as Eve had once told me, and very rare for a man, is also a “hell spawn.”

A snort escapes me. I can’t not appreciate the fucking irony of that statement.

Next video: coming out of the bathroom, fully naked. No towels. Nate slaps Eve’s buttocks with a wet palm, and she jumps; he’s caught her off guard. They both laugh. Eve heads to our bedroom, and Nate goes back to his. In one feed, Eve lies naked on our bed. In the other, Nate opens his bag and rummages for something; condoms, I assume. Thank God for small favors.

I go back to the bedroom feed. Nate enters. Commands her to the edge of the bed. She obeys. He rubs his junk all over her face, and once he’s fully erect, Eve takes him into her mouth again and goes for a while. He stops her. They switch; he sits on the edge of the bed, Eve kneels, and resumes.

Forward. Forward. Forward. BACK! BACK!

Eve is lying on her back now, and Nate is returning the oral favor. All these years, she’d always stopped me after a while—receiving oral was never high on her list. Or so it seemed. I gulp and keep watching. One minute… two minutes… five.

She stops him. If nothing else, she’s consistent. Nate stays flat; apparently he’s not a big fan either. He moves closer. She’s still lying there, but she turns her head and takes him into her mouth again and goes for a little while. Then Nate stops her, moves over her, and enters her.

HE’S NOT WEARING A FUCKING CONDOM!

He starts moving slowly. Almost tenderly. They kiss. She wraps her arms around him, her legs too. He keeps that slow rhythm.

They’re not fucking. They’re making love.

Of everything I have watched them do, this realization is what hits me hardest.

I can’t watch anymore. I will just download the whole video, and I’ll come back to it later. Searching on, I find another two incriminating videos to cut later. Then everything returns to normal. At four o’clock he cooks, and they chat. Then back to the living room, fully clothed, still chatting. At six o’clock, I come home. At twelve, I went to our bedroom to sleep. They finish their drinks, and she comes to our bedroom, Nate to his.

The next morning we both wake to the alarm as we have to take Nate to the airport.

And that’s it. I kept two of her masturbating-at-her-phone videos for the record, but since I couldn’t see what she was watching, they couldn’t serve as evidence, should the need arise.

The masquerade continued a few more days until I found the courage to go back to the uncut videos.

First stop: the scene in our bedroom.

Great stamina, I’ll give him that. I forwarded almost twenty-five minutes before finding them hugging in our bed. Rewind a little. A little more. Play. Loud moans from both.

“I’m cumming! I’m cumming!” he all but screams.

“Yes, baby! Yes! Yes!” she answers, at the peak of her own climax.

Do I need to remind you he wasn’t wearing a fucking condom?

“Totally worth it,” he says, lying down next to her.

“Yeah…” she replies. “The next day pill is gonna screw up my period, but yes…”

“Imagine staying pregnant how much would that screw up your period,” he jokes, and they both laugh like maniacs.

Mark the end and cut.

Second round, again in our bed. He lies on his back. My wife is blowing him—again. Forward, forward. She is still blowing him, but before I can drag further, he stops her. Commands her to get on all fours.

“I missed your ass, baby.”

“My ass is yours! Everything of mine is yours!”

No lube. He spits in his hand, rubs his pecker, and just like that starts pushing. He’s not patient like me; he forces his way in, and Eve screams in pain.

Then Nate pauses. “Eve, babe?” asks suddenly tender.

“Don’t stop!”

“You sure?”

“Please. Don’t stop.”

He resumes. She moans, still in pain. He picks up speed. Slowly but surely her muffled cries turn to pleasure, and near the end, to something like pure bliss.

“FUCK ME! RIP MY ASS! FUCK ME! FUCK ME!” she cries, again and again. Nate goes even faster.

Yup. The bastard has stamina. It went on for ten more minutes…

He pulls out gently, and Eve nearly stumbles in her run to the bathroom while Nate snorts. He sits back against the headboard. Five minutes later, she returns.

“Clean me,” he commands. He hadn’t gone to the bathroom to clean himself.

Eve lies on her front and takes him into her mouth…

She never did that for me, not even once. I asked once, asked a second, then stopped asking. If she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to.

What started as cleaning ended as a blowjob. A full one. To the end.

And while Eve was pleasuring him, he lit a cigarette and started smoking IN MY OWN FUCKING BEDROOM.

I hit my desk so hard I nearly broke my fucking hand. And of everything I had watched, the one thing I could not get out of my mind was that: him smoking like he owned the place, while my wife—his own fucking sister—dutifully worked to make him come again in her mouth.

---

The lawyer Chris had referred to me called, and we met at his office. I handed him the prenup; he gave it a quick read to get the gist, then asked for some time to go through it carefully. I told him that since we didn’t have children, the infidelity clause didn’t apply and that what I really wanted was a quick divorce.

Marriage law had been simplified over the years, and provided there were no disputes requiring court time, it was a fast procedure.

“So, what do you want?” he asked.

“To be done with it,” I replied simply.

He didn’t ask if I wanted to reconsider. No one in their right mind would.

“If we ever end up in court, you’ll need to justify why you searched the CCTV feed. You can’t use seeing her masturbate as your excuse, and you must never, ever mention that you searched her phone.”

“Blind chance,” I replied. “The logs will show it wasn’t me who brought the cameras online when the power came back and that it was me who reset them to normal operation days later. I can claim, and no one can prove otherwise, that I saw them doing inappropriate things and justifiably went back through the feeds for the period her brother stayed with us.”

“Fine. But if we do go to court, you’d better be prepared. Her family is very well known; every law firm under the sun will happily take their money, and they’ll pick the meanest, most able one.”

“I know. But as I said, I want a quick divorce; I don’t want court. The prenup is airtight, and cheating is not prosecuted under Greek law.”

“Incest is,” he reminded me.

“Cheating is why I want a divorce, Mr. Athanasiou, not whom she cheated on me with. And surprising as it may seem to you, I like her parents—a lot. Sometimes ignorance is indeed bliss.”

I could see his mind running behind his eyes, but in the end, he just nodded.

And then there were none. The time had come for the hardest part of all: confronting my wife and trying not to lose my composure. I know I can be violent. I know I have rage in me. And Eve knows exactly how to press my buttons.

Truth be told, she never did. But I know she could, and cornered animals are not exactly examples of sangfroid. She might very well go straight for my throat, and I needed, above all, not to do the same.

It took me another three days to find the courage to do the actual talking. To make things worse, Eve came home from work in a cheerful mood, and when she tried to kiss me, I took a step back.

“George?” she asked, clearly taken aback by my behavior.

“We need to talk,” I replied, adding to her confusion.

“About what?” she asked, still confused, and I couldn’t help but notice a hint of concern in her eyes.

“About us,” I told her, while my innards all but screamed to say, ‘About you fucking your own brother.’ “I want a divorce.”

“WHAT?” she almost screamed.

“Sit down!” I told her in a tone that left no room for argument.

“George, what the hell is happening?” she asked once she sat on the couch, noticing that I did not sit next to her.

“What is happening is that I want a quiet divorce.”

“Why—” she tried, but I cut her off completely.

“Because I know, Eve, and I don’t play second fiddle.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” she asked, raising her voice.

“You know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. I saw things I can’t unsee,” I said, and then chuckled despite the severity. “Fuck is the right word, isn’t it?” I asked and looked her straight in the eyes.

She didn’t flinch, not even a bit. But I hadn’t met her yesterday, and no matter that there were depths in her I couldn’t even imagine, I knew her well enough to see her mind racing behind her eyes.

“Do not try to insult my intelligence.”

“I don’t—” she tried to respond, but I cut her off again.

“Look into my eyes, Eve,” I said in a commanding voice. “I KNOW,” I said, emphasizing both words. “I. KNOW,” I repeated, slower, with the same emphasis.

Her mind raced even faster, and I knew she understood what I was talking about, so I decided to speed things up.

“You and Nate,” I told her, and while I was sure she had already grasped that I knew, for a few moments she sat stunned, as if I’d punched her in the face.

She sat still, trying hard to regain her composure.

“I won’t ask why. I don’t give a fuck why,” I continued, trying to stay as calm as I could. “What I want is out of this marriage—fast.”

She stared at me without speaking, so I went on.

“Whether you and Nate continue to...” I paused for a few moments, deciding how to finish. I took a deep breath. “...to do what you are doing will no longer be my business.”

She lowered her gaze.

“So, while there are plenty of questions I could ask, for my peace of mind I need only one answered, and I want the truth. Nothing less.”

She didn’t reply, and I wasn’t expecting her to.

“What was I to you, Eve?”

Her gaze stayed on her feet. I waited a few moments. Still no answer.

“Well, I guess your silence is answer enough,” I sighed. “As I said, I want a fast way out, so let’s not drag this any further. We have an airtight prenup, not that it applies to this particular clusterfuck, but in any case, I want nothing from you. With one exception. And it’s not a choice; it’s take it or leave it.”

“What exception?” she asked in a harsh voice.

“You will tell your parents that the cause of our divorce is that you cheated on me. I like them a lot; I am not at fault here, and I don’t want them to even think for a moment that I was the villain.”

She finally raised her gaze at me, but I didn’t let her reply.

“So, the choice is this: you can tell them a curated version of your transgression, or...” I paused. “They will learn the truth from me.”

She tried to protest. “You can’t—” she started, but for the third time I cut her off completely.

“I can, and I will,” I said. “Think about it. How do you suppose I found out about you and Nate?”

She didn’t respond yet again, so I stood up to conclude our little chat. I could start packing today; there was plenty of work ahead of me. I had already begun looking for an apartment, but for now, for some days at least, I would stay at a hotel, so for today I would pack lightly.

“I’m moving out today. I’ll come back once more for the rest of my things, so until then, please don’t change the alarm. I’ll let you know beforehand, and I would appreciate you not being present. It’s your house, though, so... whatever floats your boat.”

“I do love you,” she said, as I started toward our former bedroom to pack.

“What?” I asked, surprised that she had finally decided to answer, not because I hadn’t heard her.

“I do love you, George,” she murmured, and then she raised her gaze, looked me straight in the eyes, and went on. “You told me you wanted the truth. So here it is, plain and simple. I. DO. LOVE. YOU.”

“You chose a very peculiar way of showing it, Eve,” I answered with all the irony I had left.

“Be that as it may, it’s still the truth,” she insisted.

I felt a twinge in my heart because, despite her brutal betrayal, I couldn’t make my heart hate her. Oh, how much I wished I could. How can anyone despise and, at the same time, still love another person? How can a heart be stabbed and go on beating for the one who stabbed it?

As far as I could read her, she wasn’t trying to manipulate me. Trust, however, is something that once gone, it never comes back. And yet, I chose to believe her because...

Because, the truth is, I needed to believe her.

“Be that as it may,” I finally replied, and again turned to leave.

“For the sake of all the years we lived together, I owe you an explanation,” she said, making me turn once more to face her.

“What you truly owe me is something you cannot give back,” I replied bitterly. “Ten years of my life, Eve. Ten fucking years,” I said, my voice rising at the end.

She lowered her head again, this time totally defeated, and I felt another pang deep in my chest.

I sighed and sat back down on the couch. “I did love you, Eve. I loved you more than any woman in my life,” I said, more to myself than to her. “You destroyed me.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“All this time since I learned... since I learned of your betrayal, I think I have felt every ugly thing a man can feel. A wheel of emotions. From rage to numbness, from betrayal to self-doubt, from contempt to loathing...”

I took a deep breath.

“But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself hate you.”

My eyes suddenly stung, and I paused for a beat to regain my composure.

“I will leave today and try to recover as much of myself as I can. I don’t want to see your face again. I don’t want to hear your voice again.”

I sighed, deeper this time.

“But I can’t hate you.”

“Please, let me explain to you,” she said with pleading eyes, and then, realizing she was asking me to trust her to explain the inexplicable, she added, “or at least try to...”

“Okay,” I replied, giving up for one final time.

She gave me a slow, resigned nod and started talking without looking at me at the beginning.

“Both I and... him,” she began, avoiding even his name, “were raised by nannies. Our parents, while they did love us and care for us, were mostly absent, from the dawn of the day to its dusk.”

I knew all that, so I nodded to continue.

“Slowly but surely...” she started, then swallowed hard. “Nate,” she continued, “became the center of my very existence.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Growing older, things got worse. Much worse,” she said, giving me a knowing look. “The fat rich girl...” she murmured.

I had seen her photos from all the years, elementary through her PhD, and I wanted to tell her she was never fat, merely slightly, YES, SLIGHTLY, chubby. But what good would that have done? I had chosen to listen, and it was her interpretation that mattered, not mine.

“I... I failed to see what Nate kept warning me about, that my so-called friends were not friends at all, not really. But... but I needed, I ached, to belong. I tried, George, I really tried, but ultimately I found myself as lonely as ever.”

She raised her gaze to me. “Do you know what the most devastating part was?” she asked and answered without waiting. “Finding out that Nate had been right all along. That my so-called friends, my popularity, all of it was a house of cards. And in my second year of high school, it collapsed exactly like one.”

She took a deep breath and continued. “You see, Nate was a popular boy. Almost every girl in school had a crush on him.”

She didn’t need to spell it out: access to Nate, through her, had been the source of her popularity all along.

“The walls come crumbling down on you. It’s a real bitch, isn’t it?” I asked, full of bitter irony, unable to hold myself back.

“Yup,” she replied, one word, choosing not to take the bait.

“Anyway,” she went on, “as I said, Nate was very popular, and I tried not to be a burden. It made no difference. Nate wasn’t having any of it; he refused to let me navigate the labyrinth of teenage drama alone.”

She smiled, as if remembering something funny. “And I had plenty of that. I liked some boys. I even found the courage, God knows where, to ask one to go steady with me.” She smiled again. “He was tender about it. He explained that he didn’t see me the way I saw him.”

She sighed. “But the damage had been done. Fat, alone... unwanted by anyone but Nate.”

My gaze, full of suspicion, made her hurry. “George, it’s not what you think,” she said.

“And pray tell, how do you know what I’m thinking?” I asked, mocking.

“I can’t read your mind, but I know you well enough to make an educated guess,” she replied matter-of-factly. “No. He did not groom me. His love was fierce, but he loved me like a brother.”

“Don’t I know it…” I told her dismissively.

“He never looked at me another way, George. Not once. Not until I made him,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I was the one who initiated it...” she continued and then stopped abruptly, as if she’d suddenly lost her nerve.

I stared at her, mouth almost agape, because this was absolutely the last thing I would have imagined, having watched, in full 1080p, her submissive surrender to him. His ‘You are mine.’ Her ‘I’m yours; everything of mine is yours.’

“Don’t you think I knew how unhealthy my feelings for my own brother were?” she asked bitterly. “Don’t you think I tried hard to bury them? How can a sister fall in love with her own brother? I wasn’t an evil seductress, George; I was just a fucking frustrated teenager. And the harder I tried to fucking bury my fucking feelings, the harder I fell,” she said, suddenly raising her voice, but she managed to find her composure fast.

“I even tried going out with a friend of his,” she continued with a bitter smile. “He was happy for me, George. ‘For today, I’m gonna be your older sister,’ he joked the day of my first date.”

“Do you know how it ended?” she asked and again continued without waiting for an answer. “He tried to kiss me, and while I didn’t like him, I let him. Then he groped my breast, and, panicked, I pushed him hard. He slapped me! He fucking slapped me. ‘Don’t play hard to get, bitch!’”

She stopped, clearly shaken by the memory, and it took her some time to compose herself.

“And I let him,” she continued. “I closed my eyes and let him grope my breasts, like I was under a spell, unable to move, unable to resist.”

She swallowed hard.

“Nate called to ask how it was going, and I found my chance to get out of it. I told him I was having a wonderful time, but it was getting late, and I asked if he could pick me up.”

She smiled. “Somehow he understood that nothing was right, and ten or twenty minutes later he came and found us waiting at a park bench, his friend at a respectful distance from me.”

Her face twisted with rage. “Sifis thought I would keep my mouth shut. Thought he could use my self-image as a weapon against me. The fucking idiot had no idea who he was dealing with.”

An ugly, gloating smile spread across her face.

“I told Nate, right then and there, what had happened. Sifis found himself with a broken nose and two missing teeth. I had never seen Nate so enraged. ‘If you ever go near her again, I will kill you where you stand,’ were his last words to someone he had, until then, considered one of his best friends.”

“Continue,” I told her in a neutral voice, or at least I tried to. It was the first time I had heard this story, and I both wondered and, at the same time, understood why she had never told me.

“Nate had just finished his third year of studying at EKPA when I passed the panhellenic exams and managed to enter NTUA’s School of Architecture. Those three years at lyceum, with him living in Athens, did nothing to make my feelings subside; if anything, they made me miss him like crazy.”

“Though we studied at different schools, as you understand, I moved into the apartment my parents had bought when he moved to Athens. In university I made friends; I had my first sexual encounter a little after my eighteenth birthday, and while I fell in love with my first true boyfriend, Nate was always at the back of my mind. I found myself fantasizing about him more and more, and my sexual awakening drove my frustration even higher.”

Since I had met her when she was twenty-five and having discovered that the first recording was made when she was nineteen, I understood that I wasn’t her first victim—only that I was probably the first one who had found out the ugly truth.

That being said, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for her first victim, even if he’d had at least the blessing of ignorance.

Assuming, of course, that she was still with him when…

“On my nineteenth birthday we all went out. Me, my then-boyfriend Petros, Nate—he was alone at the time—and some friends from university. We drank far too much, and while the plan was for Petros to sleep at our place, he nearly passed out, so we put him in a taxi and sent him home.”

Yup, he was…

“My inhibitions went straight out the window, and I almost jumped him when we finally got home. Nate initially resisted, but he was also drunk… and… as you can attest, I can be pretty… persuasive.”

“Okay, you blew him while drunk—” I tried to say, but it was her turn to cut me short.

“I did more than blow his pecker…” she said, her voice suddenly full of pride, as if a switch had flipped inside her mind. “I blew his mind.”

My eyes bulged. All of a sudden the frustrated girl was gone, and the black widow had taken her place.

Then, as if the same switch had turned off, her voice became sullen. She raised her eyes and looked me straight in the eyes.

“I did love you, George, and I still do love you. I know this is the end of the line, but I want you to know that I loved you more than anyone in my life…”

“Except Nate,” I said bitterly.

“Except Nate…” she replied and sighed. “And now you know.”

No, I didn’t. Her confession had opened more doors than the ones it closed, but I had reached my limit.

“Call your parents, Eve,” I told her, managing to regain my composure.

“Now?” she asked, panicked.

“As I said, I never want to see you again, and I need to hear you confessing, right here, right now, that the cause of our divorce is that you cheated on me.”

“Please, George, don’t ask me to do this right now. Please.”

I could clearly see the devastation in her eyes, and the twinge in my broken heart grew stronger. Yet I needed my closure.

Her eyes haunted me. Whatever she had done, I couldn’t… I just couldn’t…

“Okay,” I said after a few moments. “Change of plans. When I come back for the rest of my things, you will be here. You have until then to compose yourself and think of a curated version that won’t destroy them.”

“Thank you,” she said, nearly crying. “Thank you!”

“That being said, you are going to tell them that you cheated on me, and not some abstract reasons for going our merry ways. And I will be present.”

“I will do it.”

“Now, excuse me, I have to start packing. Please stay as far away as you can from our former bedroom.”

She closed her eyes, as if trying to regain her composure. “Okay, I’ll stay here,” she replied.

“You do that,” I replied, and, holding my head as high as I could, I walked out of the living room.

---

Late that night, sitting alone on the balcony of the hotel with a bottle of rum and no glass, I stared down at the street. A young couple passed, holding hands, laughing. The future is theirs—they think. I smiled bitterly and took another swig straight from the bottle.

My head had already started buzzing.

The ancient Greeks had a name for the dour Moira—the Fate—of the past: Atropos. The Unyielding.

The past cannot be changed, and the future does not exist. Our existence is an everlasting present, shaped by our past, all our wealth being what we have lived, and twenty square feet of earth.

There would be no vindication. Eve and Nate would most probably continue their unholy relationship, their future partners none the wiser.

You know what? Ignorance is bliss. I can fucking attest to that firsthand.

And then, just like that, I started sobbing—and I sobbed until I ran out of breath.

Why? Why did this happen to me?

Because.

We pray and curse and hope and blame, but the truth is simple, and it cuts like diamond.

The universe is not just. It just is.

(THE END)