'Cream,' he replied in a dead voice. 'Cynthia Powski.'

Thomas woke with a start, his heart hammering. It was still dark. Sam was slender and warm beside him. His right ear ached. His pillow felt like an old woman's lap.

With his ears, he searched the dark hollows of his house for sound, heard nothing but hardwood quiet.

He closed his eyes, saw Cynthia Powski, her tongue trailing semen.

He felt a weight, as though a child stood upon his chest.

Shame.

Shame for weakness. Shame for stupid stupid lies. Shame for fucking a stranger while his children slept.

Shame for Cynthia Powski, for watching her as he…

With thumb and forefinger, he pinched tears from his eyes.

Shame for all those years. All those years!

All those years fucking. Being fucked.

Neil and Nora.

For a moment, it seemed he couldn't breathe.

Groaning, Thomas threw his feet over the side of the bed. He sat for a moment, slowly rubbed his chest.

He was a psychologist. He knew shame. He knew it was a so-called 'social emotion', that unlike guilt it involved one's self rather than one's acts. Shame was global, guilt local. This was why shame was typically unwarranted, a response all out of proportion to its situational triggers. Shame always had causes, but rarely any reasons. How many waifish, therapy-hungry undergrads had he told this to?

Knowledge—this was the heart of humanistic psychology. The faith that self-knowledge somehow made a difference. That knowing could heal…

Perhaps this was bullshit as well.

He stood in the darkness. His skin pimpled in the cool. He walked to the doorway, grasped the frame and leaned out as though over a balcony. The weight in his chest would not ease.

My heart is leaden, he thought inanely. Like people, it weighed more dead than alive.

The source of the shame—the real shame—was obvious enough. He was a cuckold. He'd had few illusions about his marriage with Nora, but fidelity was one of them. In their 15 years together he hadn't once cheated on her, and he'd simply assumed that this, which had been an unspoken point of pride for him, had been duly noted and reciprocated by her. Unlike so many men, he deserved her fidelity. Didn't he?

What had he done?

Betrayal was a funny thing. In tests, subjects consistently rated threats involving betrayal as more dangerous than threats involving happenstance, no matter what the degree of objective risk'. This was why people feared psychopaths more than driving to the corner store, even though the latter was thousands of times more likely to kill. Betrayal struck deeper than statistics. Perhaps because its losses had no measure. Perhaps because people were fucking idiots.

But Neil and Nora. Why should he feel shamed by their betrayal? Where was the self-righteous indignation? Where was the rage that blackened eyes and pulled triggers? The shame was theirs! Wasn't it?