Clean Me Up - A Cuck Angst Story

The bathroom is fogged, tile slick under my bare feet. She leaves the door open, so steam rushes the hallway. I hesitate in the doorway because her silhouette is right there, behind the semi-frosted glass, one hand braced against the tile and the other fumbling with her hair. She sees me, I know she does, because her body turns three-quarters, never quite hiding or inviting. Just naked, just wet.

I close the door behind me and walk in, but not too fast. My head is still scrambled from last night. Maybe she wants to talk, maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she wants me to clean up her mess.

I stand there, shivering in my flannel pajama pants and ratty T-shirt, the same ones I wore to bed after she climbed off me and rolled away without a word.

She’s still showering.

I rest against the bathroom counter, arms folded, chin tucked, watching the glass pulse with the slap of water and the movement of her hips. She’s not soaping up. She’s rinsing, methodical, as if the temperature can cook last night off her. There’s a slow, deliberate rhythm to her hands: shampoo, scalp, neck, tracing the bruises at her shoulder. The imprint of a palm.

The shower door slides open an inch. “Mark. You coming in or not?”

I can’t see her face, just the outline. Her tits, her belly, the hard triangle where her thighs meet. There’s nothing coy or seductive in her voice. She sounds tired. Maybe hungover. Maybe spent in a way I’ll never understand.

I peel off the pajamas and shirt, dropping them in a damp pile by the sink. I push open the shower door. The water is hotter than hell, but I step in anyway. Steam billows around us. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t move.

She just says, “Shut the door. I’m cold.”

The skin around her neck is raw, pink, almost scalded. Her lips are split at the corner, probably from the way she bit them last night. Her breasts are heavy and flushed, the nipple bitten or maybe just chafed. There’s a line of purple fingerprints ringing her left hip. Some men leave jewelry.

She gestures with her head. “You going to wash my back, or are you just going to stand there staring?”

I reach around her, almost gentle, almost afraid. I pick up the soap and lather my palms, then run them over her shoulders and spine. Her skin is impossibly soft but covered in bumps, a thousand gooseflesh reactions to my clumsy touch. She doesn’t speak while I wash her, but her breathing gets shallower, higher in her chest, as if every swipe of my hands is both relief and accusation.

When I reach her lower back, she flinches. “Easy. I’m sore.”

I nod, but she doesn’t see. I kneel, getting water in my eyes, and scrub the backs of her thighs, her calves. When I look up, the water is running down her ass in thick rivulets, pooling between her legs before washing away. There are bruises there, too. One on the inside of her thigh, the perfect shape of a bite.

She turns, abruptly, and faces me. For the first time this morning she really looks at me. Her eyes are glassy, rimmed red. She’s been crying, but she’ll never admit it.

She lifts my chin with two fingers. “Mark,” she says. “You want to know what it felt like.”

I try to say no. I try to look away. But I don’t. I nod, my knees still planted on the tile, water beating down on my back.

She leans against the wall, one arm overhead, letting her body stretch and show every new mark. “He didn’t even ask,” she says. “Just bent me over the minibar. Didn’t care if the whole floor heard.”