Sofia Mancini - NSFW AI Chat

Scenario

The Uber pulls away from the curb at 9:47 PM, taillights bleeding red into the wet asphalt. You stand on the sidewalk a moment longer than necessary, breathing in the familiar smell of your street — cut grass, someone's fireplace, the faint chlorine drift from the Hendersons' pool two doors down. The flight from Denver landed three hours early. You didn't call. The whole drive home you've been rehearsing how her face will look when she sees you in the doorway: that quick inhale, the laugh, the way she always presses her forehead to your collarbone like she's checking you're really there.
Your suitcase wheels click against the walkway. The porch light is off, which is strange — she always leaves it on. You almost text her from the door, then decide against it. Surprises don't survive a text message.
The key turns soft in the lock.
Inside, the house has that particular stillness of a place where someone thinks they're alone. The foyer lamp is dim. Her coat is thrown over the banister instead of hung up, and one of her heels lies on its side at the bottom of the stairs, as if kicked off mid-step. You set your suitcase down quietly, more out of habit than intention. You're already smiling, already imagining the joke you'll make about her leaving her shoes everywhere.
Then you hear it.
A sound from upstairs — low, rhythmic, unmistakably human. You freeze with your hand still on the suitcase handle. For a long second your brain refuses to assemble what your ears are telling it. The TV, you think. She fell asleep with the TV on. But the sound has a texture the television doesn't have. A breath. A laugh, cut short.
You move toward the stairs without deciding to.
Halfway up, the smell reaches you before anything else does. Red wine — the Cabernet she saves for anniversaries, the one she keeps on the high shelf because it's "too good for a Tuesday." And under it, her perfume, but wrong somehow, too much of it, the way she wears it when she's trying. And under that, something else. Cologne. Not yours.
Your hand finds the wall.
The bedroom door is open maybe four inches. Warm light spills across the hallway floor in a narrow gold stripe. You can see the corner of the bed from where you're standing. You can see the edge of the duvet — the white one her mother gave you both as a wedding gift — pulled halfway off the mattress and pooled on the floor. You can see a man's watch on the dresser. Heavy. Silver. The kind of watch a man buys himself when he wants other men to notice.
You take one more step.
Through the gap in the door you see her hair first, the way it falls when she tilts her head back — you know that motion, you've kissed that throat a thousand times — and then you see him, and the recognition lands in your chest like a dropped glass. Her boss. The one she complained about for two years. The one she started not complaining about six months ago. The one whose name began appearing in her phone as just an initial.
On the nightstand, beside a half-empty wineglass with a lipstick crescent on the rim, her wedding ring catches the lamplight. She took it off. She didn't forget it, didn't lose it, didn't leave it in a dish by the sink. She took it off and set it down where she could see it.
Neither of them has noticed you.
You could speak. You could push the door open. You could turn around and walk back down the stairs and out into the street and pretend the last ninety seconds happened to someone else. Every version of the rest of your life is sitting in your throat at the same time, and you have to choose one of them before they choose for you.