Free Breaking Point by Kit Power

hearing her clearly.
    A part of me, even now, wishes I could have stayed ignorant. But how can one switch off a lifetime of work and care, even if one wants to?
    She either misread my breathless silence following the kiss or, more likely, read it just so. Either way she laughed again, a laugh of relief it seemed to me; a laugh that seemed to speak of letting go of a guilty tension. Low and dirty.
    “Is the work on the conservatory done?” All my effort, all my will was summoned in an effort to make this sound light, conversational, but I’m sure my voice must have betrayed my inner turmoil, my eyes shown some of what boiled away beneath.  Her eyes narrowed and became half-lidded as she peered up at me. Her face showed annoyance, a peevish frustration that ordinarily would have me scrabbling for a witticism or apology. Not that evening though. Depending on how she answered, perhaps never again.
    I watched her - calculating, contemplating, irritation warring with some unknowable motive - and I realised I was holding my breath, utterly unconsciously. The tension across my shoulders was matched only by the near painful swelling in my trousers and, for the first time, I feared what I might do next – what her response might drive me to.
    Her eyes rolled to the ceiling in exasperation and, for a second, I imagined hitting her in the face. I pictured it with perfect, terrible clarity: my fist colliding with her mouth, feeling her teeth mash against my knuckles, seeing her lip swell and split with the impact, the blood flow as her head rolled back with the blow. My sure and certain damnation. The vision was so vivid, so complete, that it took me a moment to realise that it hadn’t happened and, in that moment, she chose to save me.
    “Yes, they finished the work. It was just that young man, actually.” She paused for a second and I saw her seeing him, holding him in her mind's eye, and I did the same, involuntarily. “He just had some tidying up to do really, but he was very thorough, all the same.”
    That was the point that I passed clear through rage, and into a cold calm.
    “Yes, most satisfactory work,” she said, and I saw it all so clearly as to be a vision. My wife, still in her nightclothes, still mostly asleep, forgetting that he had a key, walking into the kitchen to make her morning tea and seeing him there. The shock of it, the surprise, and then...
    And then the off-colour joke, the blushing nervous laugh in response, the lewd comment about her attire, the more nervous half-rebuff. He would have moved so quickly, of course he would, smooth operator, keeping the bored housewives happy. Wham bam thank you ma’am. He would have moved in very quickly, physically. He would not have been subtle, his hands would have been on her body, grabbing, kneading, tugging the silk loose to run over her flesh, her confused resistance gradually giving way as she was caught up in the wave of his animal lust, feeling her body respond involuntarily to his, until she was tearing at his clothing, licking, biting, scratching, he clawing at her underwear, shoving his fingers rudely into her, causing her to cry out, her hands gripping his throbbing, swollen member, pulling her into him, him laughing at her, turning her around roughly and shoving her over the breakfast table, and then taking her, savagely, brutally, both of them sweating and grunting like beasts in heat, her eyes screwed shut with shame and pleasure, being ridden by this grotesque greasy thug, this ugly, handsome, vile taker.
    I felt a shudder then and I used the coldness to suppress it, but not before the final image came to me: his arm muscles rippling rhythmically, causing the woman on his shoulder to gyrate her naked breasts in an obscene come on.
    “He... there was something about him that I didn’t really care for, you know. I’m glad he’s gone.” She broke eye contact at this and I felt her shame, her regret. More, I felt my own. How could I have allowed