Miles away, in the sterile silence of his own apartment, Marc sat frozen on the edge of his bed. The phone lay face down on the nightstand, but the echoes of that call, the raw, guttural sounds that had bled through the speaker before the line went dead, were still reverberating in his skull like a physical assault.
He was wide awake. His heart was hammering against his ribs in a frantic, irregular rhythm.
He stared at nothing, his eyes bloodshot, his mind trapped in a loop of what he had heard: the wet, slapping sounds, the unmistakable rhythm of someone being driven into a mattress, and Maya's voice not angry, not scared, but ruined by pleasure.
"What the fuck was that?" he whispered to the empty room, his voice cracking.
He rubbed his face with trembling hands. "What was that sound?"
He tried to rationalize it. Maybe she was watching something?
Maybe she was... alone? But his gut twisted with a sick, nauseating certainty.
