The rising sun made its presence felt with shimmering brilliance as it set the dark shades of night on fire. A flicker of red, a dab of orange, turning white hot as the veils of blue succumbed to a show of light that announced the start of day.
Will never thought he would dread watching the sun rise. He was oblivious to the awe inspired in many by the majestic sight of the angry red orb as it turned the sea molten gold. The magnificent view offered by the presidential suite on the liner apparently the reason he'd paid the 30% premium demanded by the cruise operators for the suite.
He thought of all the nights he had spent mulling over the situation with Ashley. The indecision, the wavering. All invariably countered by the pain, the humiliation and the rage.
In the six weeks that they had spent on their holiday, only that first week spent at the bed and breakfast on the outskirts of their college town had been free from memories and thoughts which complicated all issues. For the first time since the affair, Ashley and Will felt they had rekindled the passion and the love that ran pure and unadulterated when they progressed from couple to lovers and then man and wife. Before the trials and fatigue of mundane everyday life wore them down, disillusioned them and left Ashley vulnerable to temptation and straying.
Things changed when they reached California to visit his mother-in-law. There had been an undefined tension between Will and Ashley's mother. She appeared on tenterhooks and treaded carefully around him. She also seemed to sense that Will had plans other than a simple holiday.
On the last night, she had taken Will aside after dinner and pleaded with him to give Ashley another chance. “Will, I know it hurts. But if you go ahead with what you've planned, I'm afraid you'll tear your relationship apart. It will be irreparable. You'll tear each other apart."
Will had nodded and had pondered over her words. Words that were drowned by the restless rage that demanded vengeance for all he'd suffered.
Will stared at the closed door that led to the bedroom. Ashley was still asleep, exhausted from the fucking he'd initiated yet again. She seemed unaware of how he'd chosen to fuck her in ways that mirrored the sessions she'd had with Jackass. The germ of that idea occurred to him back when he'd first started planning the test. He'd considered using Ashley's former car and even Jackass' old house but discarded the idea almost as soon as it arose. It wouldn't do to arouse Ashley's suspicion before his plan was put into action. Revisiting the crime scene was out of the question. So he had her car trashed instead and had already purchased Jackass' house through a shell he'd set up as a subsidiary of his own holding company. He had other plans for that house and the former residents, apparently friends of Jackass, had happily taken the premium offered and vacated the house the week he and Ashley had spent in California.
Yes, things were falling in place.
The gleam that appeared in his eyes might have made any observer extremely uncomfortable. Yet, he was oblivious to the reflection that the mirrors around him showed. All he saw were flashbacks of his humiliation the day he'd confronted the adulterous pair, the fight and the scar that had been left on his cheek, faded but constantly throbbing with the pain of a heart torn out, shredded and stomped into the dust.
Perhaps Ashley was right, she had come through with scars and their marriage seemed to have risen from the flames and ashes like a phoenix. Except she hadn't noticed the real phoenix that rose from the flames. The phoenix that was the new Will.
The Will she'd forced him to become was one who delighted in fucking her in the car when they'd done a supermarket run. Will thought it a fine sense of irony when he'd made her park near the drugstore and fucked her the way she'd described the second betrayal. A mere week after she'd first hopped into the arms of her fuckbuddy. When she'd climaxed for the third time after he fucked her repeatedly against the steering wheel, the driver's seat and in the backseat, he'd recalled the worry and suspicion that besieged him the weekend she'd made the drugstore run in a desperate bid to fuck Jackass again. He remembered how his naive determination to push aside all the suspicion that had risen in his mind was really his refusal to believe his loving wife had so easily betrayed him with that scruffy neighbour who reminded him of her last boyfriend in college before he started seeing her.
Intermingled with her cries of satisfaction were the screams of pain that he'd suppressed all the months he'd spent spying on Ashley's therapy sessions including the hypnotherapy sessions when she'd first been induced to reveal her deepest secrets and thoughts.
They never made it back in time for dinner but he hadn't had the stomach for dinner anyway. After all, the feeling of scorn for the slut Ashley showed herself to be made his stomach burn with an acid that obliterated his appetite. She didn't notice how he'd maneuvered her into positions she should have recognised, mirrors of her own adulterous behaviour she seemed blithely unaware of.
Secure in the knowledge that she didn't recall details of the affair she'd had, it emboldened him to take matters further when they'd settled into the top suite on the cruise. The very cruise she'd wanted to go on that led him to take all those extra classes that deepened the friction between them and gave Ashley the first chance to betray him. His obsessive attention to detail that made him a successful author enabled him to recreate almost down to the last bits Ashley's first betrayal, including the beer, food and the couch. Will had even remarked on how he enjoyed watching himself drip from her which made her blush and giggle like a college student again.
He'd listened to her journal entry via his phone using the beta version of the app the nerds had designed. Despite graduating and going to separate universities, the group had stayed in touch. After working on a series of different ideas, the nerds had remembered Will's questions back when he taught them. Though they had been curious and had their own suspicions based on the rumours spreading in the community, they were respectful enough to have refrained from probing.
Grateful for their assistance and discretion, Will had continued to keep up with the group. When they pitched the idea to Will about forming a start-up to further develop their ideas, Will had been happy to fork out a tidy sum that was to act as seed capital. He saw it as nothing more than helping out students who had been there for him when his world had crashed down around him. The students were astounded however by his generosity and insisted on giving him shares in the new venture. He'd refused but they bugged him till he was exasperated. To ensure no one got short changed, he had his lawyer look over the papers necessary for the start-up to be registered as a legal entity. The nerds were surprised and respected him even more when they saw how he watched their backs instead of potentially adopting the 'use and discard' tactic that was just too common in the industry. Though he provided the money, Will gave himself the same equity share as each of the nerds who hadn't had any money to contribute to their new company. Furthermore, Will agreed to act as sounding board and beta tester for their apps, the voice of the 'normal end user'. That was how Ante was born. It was such a bad joke that Will groaned when he heard how that name was created. While the original intention had been to name the venture after some variation of Nerds and Teach, there was no agreement till the Asian student doodled 'NT' and looked at the whorls he'd drawn around the letters and decided on ANTE since the pronunciation of both the word and letters were basically the same. The nerds had laughed at Will's mock dismay at their creative reinvention of a homophone.
Ante’s integration of surveillance strategies and online storage capability in that app meant that Will no longer had to ensure he didn't run out of computing capacity or loss of data since the server automatically backed up information. That was going to prove crucial for the plans he'd coming up for Ashley.
His lips had curled when Ashley showed she didn't connect what he was doing with the adulterous sex she'd claimed was the best of her life and instead thought these were signs that the turmoil was behind them. He wasn't sure if this meant Ashley was simply a slut or if his strategies had worked and the fantasies and memories were slowly losing their grip over her. The uncertainty made him hesitate for a day or two. Yet the same uncertainty made him decide to proceed.
No I'm not living with this anymore. I can't keep wondering. This ends once and for all.
He sat fingering the pack of documents and staring at the sunrise till Ashley made her way out of the bedroom.
****
