Ethan was good in bed. Electrifyingly good. He knew exactly what turned her on, which buttons to push, and didn’t ever miss a chance to take her screaming over the edge into oblivion.

Constantine hadn’t been awful. He’d actually been pretty good. A little wider than Ethan in terms of penis girth (she was a bit sore), and she’d been exactly right about those long fingers and what they could do and how they would feel.

The thing was, as much as she hated to admit it, no one else would ever be quite good enough for her. Ethan was mind-blowingly spectacular in the bedroom. There was some truth to the old adage, it’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion in the ocean. Ethan may not have had the biggest dick on the planet, but man, oh, man, did he know how to use it.

The first year they were together, Sutton made a small dot in her journal every time they had sex. They were so far above average it wasn’t even funny; she stopped keeping track.

The second year, she started tracking again, and noticed it had dropped off. The third year, well, that was the year of the first incident, the house, and that little cunt, so it shouldn’t have counted at all.

Because inevitably, Ethan’s eye began to wander. He was beautiful, with a great accent, a sharp wit, and a brilliant mind, and he was being pushed up against pretty young things at the conferences and book signings and private teaching gigs, and he was a man, after all. A man like any other, designed to go forth and propagate his seed in every available fertile vagina.

Did he have any other children?

The thought brought her up short. Nausea spiked. She’d never thought to ask, or to accuse. Except for the one time, he always denied cheating on her, but she knew he lied. It was nice of him, in a way, to try to protect her feelings by not openly admitting the humiliation. She expected the worst of it happened while she was in the hospital (that damnable place) when they wouldn’t let him in to see her for a week. She’d been in bad shape and had made it very clear she didn’t want him to see her this way, and the staff listened. When she got home there was a pair of skimpy undies under the bed. Red. Thong. Barely anything but string and a scrap of lace. The kind an expensive whore would wear, or perhaps a graduate student in English wanting to impress her favorite writer by showing him how very inventive and free she was.