Lately, I keep dreaming that someone has my wife pinned against a wall, kissing her.
My wife's lips are red and moist, her slender fingers buried in the long hair of the person on top of her. But the person pinning my wife isn't me.
Because I'm disabled. I can't stand up.
"No..." she gasps, arching her neck to bare her vulnerable throat. "Ruan Ruan..."
My name is Ruan Wangmian. Tang Yu likes to call me Ruan Ruan.
But it's strange. I always feel like she's not calling me.
I jolt awake, cold sweat soaking my back.
The pillow beside me is empty. I hear faint rustling outside the bedroom.
I turn my wheelchair and quietly approach, then push the door open a crack.
In the kitchen, my wife has her back to me as she straightens her collar.
The neckline of her nightdress is crooked, revealing ambiguous red marks.
"...Tang Yu?" I call to my wife.
She stiffens when she turns around, then gives me a gentle smile. "You're awake? I got up to have some water."
She comes over to touch my face. I pull away. It makes me sick.
Who is it?
I stare at her, wanting to demand an answer, but I can't bring myself to ask. I don't dare.
Why would my wife cheat on me?
Isn't it obvious? Because I'm a cripple who can't stand up.
The only answer I'll get will be one that humiliates me.
I still bought a pinhole camera.
The outlets, the stuffed toys, the bedside table.
I only want to know who's touching my wife.
Why does she smile so sweetly when she talks to the neighbor?
She took fifteen minutes longer to buy groceries. Who did she go to see?
That late-night phone call... who was it from?
The marks on my wife's body keep multiplying.
Kiss marks at her neckline, fingerprints on her waist, bruises on her inner thighs...
But ever since I became disabled, I haven't touched her.
On the surveillance footage, the bedroom suddenly goes black in the middle of the night.
When the picture comes back, my wife's pajamas are disheveled, her lips swollen and red. She lies on the bed, eyes unfocused, as if someone has just had their way with her.
And there's no one else in the room.
My wife and I have a terrible fight.
She cries and asks me why.
Why... why...
You don't know?
Why would you ask me such a humiliating question... Do you have to humiliate me completely?
Tang's perspective
My wife is having nightmares again.
She always trembles at night. When nightmares torment her, I try to comfort her. She wakes with a start, her pupils contracting as she stares at me.
"...Tang Yu?" she rasps.
"I'm right here." I take her icy fingers and kiss her cheek. "Did you have a nightmare?"
Her gaze falls to my collar, and her expression suddenly turns gloomy.
I look down.
My pajamas are crooked, and there's a faint red mark on my collarbone.
She left it last night when she lost control.
But she seems not to remember.
My wife has been acting strangely lately.
She keeps watching me with a scrutinizing look.
Sometimes that look grows even darker, almost hostile. She'll suddenly grab my wrist, rubbing her thumb hard over a bruise. Her eyes are cold and dazed.
"How did you get this?"
I say, "You grabbed me last night."
Her expression darkens further. She clearly doesn't believe me.
I've started noticing new things around the house.
A faint red light in an outlet, a brief glint in a stuffed toy's eye, a tiny black dot on the bedside table that wasn't there before.
She's watching me.
I'm very uncomfortable with that.
My wife keeps waking in the middle of the night. With an empty gaze, she pins me down, digs her fingers roughly into my waist, and bites at my collarbone.
But by the next day, she remembers nothing.
We have a terrible fight.
Her eyes red, she demands to know where the marks on my body came from and why I keep answering the phone in the middle of the night.
Then she asks something worse: whether I'm tired of her because she's disabled.
I cry and shake my head, but she only sneers. "Of course you wouldn't admit it."
I don't understand why, after a car accident, my kind-hearted wife became like this. Why did we end up like this?
In less than a year, I still let go and divorced my wife.
This is written in third person, but the first-person blurb makes it more compelling.
Theme: Don't be so messed up!