The cursor hovered over the play button, my hand frozen mid-air. One flick of my finger, and everything I feared would come pouring out.
My phone sat dark on the desk. Not a word from Chris since he dropped the bomb. His intended mercy, a gesture of friendship, had soured into a curse, hurling me off a cliff.
Melissa’s voice drifted through the wall, humming “I Knew You Were Trouble,” the same Taylor Swift song from the concert a few months back.
I’d screamed every word that night, loud and desperate, almost pathetic, pretending sheer volume might somehow save us.
Now the same melody floated in, light and careless, each note a quiet taunt, blind to her mother’s descent and her father’s collapse just feet away, twisting the morning’s nightmare even deeper.
All that remained was the choice: click and witness the events that had left Emily a disheveled mess kneeling between the twins, or don’t, and live with the kind of doubt that eats a man alive.
The apartment shrank around me as the play button glowed above a version of my ex-wife I no longer recognized. Even with the air conditioner rattling at full blast, it felt like a hundred degrees. Sweat rolled down my sides, soaking through my shirt, the fabric clinging to my back as if the walls themselves were closing in.
My life reeled back in flashes: our wedding day, anniversaries, family vacations, fall Saturdays with college football on the TV. The quiet rhythm of dinners at home. The steady hum of two people who had once been a team.
Now it all ran like a cruel montage, taunting me as I sat there staring at proof of what she’d become.
I clicked before I could stop it. My hand outrunning my thoughts, as if some deeper part of me had already decided.
The video stuttered to life, and there she was. No buildup. No introduction. Not the woman I’d married, and not yet the wreck from the aftermath photo that had dragged me here, but something in between, a before I barely recognized.
This version of Emily sat under layers of heavy makeup, wearing the Florida Gators T-shirt and jeans she’d lived in for twenty-five years. Our alma mater’s colors, the uniform of every Saturday, orange and blue like lifeblood through our family. Her skin was buried under a spray tan so thick it looked painted on. Her hair, once soft, easy, and worn with that Jennifer Aniston glow she carried so naturally, was teased high and shellacked stiff, leaving her with the brittle, overdone sheen of a bargain-bin 90s porn star.
She sat on the couch. Not just any couch, but that couch, almost as infamous as the twins themselves. Dumped in the living room of some shitty Miami apartment, its whereabouts known only to those who had signed the contract and been chosen to become the next thumbnail.
Yellow cloth, sagging from years of abuse: the stage for every Double Decker that had ever taken place, its fabric saturated with the stains of a thousand women before her, a crime scene masquerading as furniture.
The camera stared, unblinking, its cold gaze fixed as always. Emily shifted beneath it, squaring her shoulders as if a straighter posture might somehow mask the tremor in her hands. Her fingers knotted tightly in her lap, clung to each other like her last anchor.
I tried to look away, but the pale band on her finger nailed me to the screen: a ghost circle, the only untouched strip of skin on her painted hand.
She’d worn the wedding band into the booth and only then taken it off, like a diseased appendage she’d finally had amputated.
While I was folding our life into cardboard boxes, she was in some strip-mall salon letting a stranger airbrush twenty-five years away in one bronze cloud, the ink on our divorce papers still wet.
Her eyes flicked away from the lens, panic sparking like a live wire. She looked small, almost pleading, still clinging to an alternate reality that this wasn’t a production, that she might be able to slip behind a closed door with the twins, no lights, no camera, taste the Double Decker, scratch it off her bucket list, and walk out untouched, her innocence and anonymity still intact.
It didn’t take long before the voice cut in, the one everyone knew. Ed. The man behind the camera. His voice carried that unmistakable British accent, casual and almost cheerful, instantly familiar to anyone who had ever caught one of their clips. He wasn’t one of the stars. He hadn’t hit the genetic lottery like Big Ben or Parliament. Just a childhood friend who’d piggybacked on their success and managed to carve out his own niche as the cameraman and the voice behind the production. All of it delivered with the smug arrogance of a man propped up by bigger friends, Napoleon syndrome in full bloom.
As Ed’s voice faded, the camera pulled back, framing Emily alone on that sagging seat. Shoulders locked rigid, she clung to the last shred of control. Her eyes darted, dodging the camera, like a cornered animal sensing the trap about to snap shut.
She’d studied the footage like scripture, devoured the content behind every thumbnail while I pretended everything was fine, years spent rehearsing the ritual’s cold, unchanging steps and its aftermath in her head. She’d volunteered for their assembly line, knowing its logistics and its humiliation: middle-aged moms like her prepped like patients on a gurney, stripped and positioned with the same contempt shown to twenty-year-olds raised fatherless, every one of them reduced to tomorrow’s forgotten square.
“Stand up, love. Shirt off,” Ed barked, his British accent cutting sharp and cold, no difference whether she was a porn star in the making or a self-conscious housewife chasing a midlife crisis. To him, they were all the same: objects, holes, just fuel to keep the money machine running.
Emily froze, breath snagging in her throat. She rose slowly, almost against her will, knees cracking with that soft pop no one else might ever catch, but to me it was a knife twist, the same sound I’d heard for twenty-five years, proof this was still my Emily, body obeying the pull of what she’d come for before her mind could scream stop.
Her movements were stiff, almost robotic, those high-waisted jeans, the uniform of every bake sale and school pickup, still clinging to her hips like a costume from another life. Trembling fingers gripped the hem of her shirt while the camera pushed in, merciless, pinning the panic that flooded her eyes.
She’d rehearsed this long before the ink dried, back when we still looked like any other couple. The burner email, the application, the “why me” confession typed like a prayer, proving a woman nearing fifty could outshine the perfect tens who usually ended up on that couch. While we sat side by side, me lost in football and a bowl of chips, she quietly filled out consent forms on her phone, every soft click another invisible step toward that apartment, a countdown ticking right beside me I was too blind to notice.
She peeled the shirt off slowly, inch by inch, one hand instinctively shielding the soft swell of her stomach before she let the fabric fall.
The faded Gators logo flashed once as the cotton hit the floor, revealing the white lace bra I knew by heart. It was the one she had always owned, the one that used to drive me insane every time she wore it, now buried for years behind the same plain Costco underwear she had lived in since everything between us had died.
“Bra off, love,” Ed barked, voice cold and clipped, like ticking a box.
“Let’s see them baps.” Ed drawled, his British voice thick with lazy filth, the same slurred tone a half-pissed bloke might use when leaning over the bar, begging the barmaid for a quick flash for the lads.
Her fingers froze at the clasp, trembling as if fighting to obey, but the lens stayed locked on her face, drinking in every quiver of dread and the urge to bolt as she unhooked it. The straps slid off in silence, revealing her breasts; natural C-cups, full and real, softened by motherhood, capped with pancake-sized nipples that had always made her self-conscious, yet still unmistakably hers.
Tits I’d only glimpsed a handful of times over the past few years, always by accident as she stepped from the shower and hurried to cover up. The tan masked the stretch marks and the unevenness time had left behind, giving her skin that polished, uniform sheen the camera demanded.
“Now the jeans, love,” Ed continued, voice flat and routine, like calling for clamps in an operating room.
No reaction.
No acknowledgment of her hesitation, half-naked, vulnerability carved into every line of her body. Just another step in a routine he’d run a thousand times.
Her trembling fingers fumbled with the button and dragged the zipper down.
She eased the jeans over her hips, the fabric snagging for a moment before it crumpled to her ankles.
As her pants slid off, the camera panned down, locking onto the pale crescent just below her navel, a C-section scar, softened by eighteen years and nearly concealed by the bronzer, yet unmistakable to those who knew what they were looking at.
The lens lingered with calculated cruelty, a signature BBP taunt for anyone bearing such a mark, aimed at loved ones who might one day be tipped off by their own Mikes, in denial that the woman who had once belonged to them had somehow landed on that rancid couch.
The scar, once a private mark of Melissa’s entry into the world, now twisted into brutal proof, punctuating a scene designed for humiliation.
She stepped out of her jeans, nearly stumbling, bare feet hitting the grimy floor as the last scrap of who she’d been crumpled behind her.
Without waiting for Ed’s command, she hooked her thumbs in her panties and dragged them down too, letting them drop like she was already past the point of being told what to do.
The cotton was faded, sensible, the kind worn under jeans to school drop-offs. Never meant for this room, this glare, these men. She peeled them down with unsteady fingers, revealing skin she hadn’t shown in years. The shave was hurried, patchy, razor bumps angry along her thighs, stubble missed in uneven swaths. A woman long out of practice, processed all the same.
She stood fully exposed, nothing left to strip away, nervous sweat beginning to sheet across her skin under the dim glow of apartment lights. The shot tracked with cold precision, cataloging her body like evidence.
My chest tightened. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the body once solely mine, now laid bare, scrutinized, and moments from being ripped apart by men who didn’t even know her real name.
It happened fast: rehearsed, impersonal, no questions asked. Everything they cared about already laid bare in the application she’d typed with shaking hands, her hunger spelled out in every desperate line.
Movement stirred at the edge of the frame. Shadows stretching across the wall, their outlines unmistakable.
Big Ben and Parliament.
Emily’s head turned, uncertain, caught in a single breath where she looked ready to smile, freeze, or run for her life. The lens swung wide, pulling focus from her to what was coming, as if she were just the introduction, not the reason anyone was watching.
They approached from opposite sides of the couch, fully nude, their cocks swinging like cartoonish firehoses, impossibly thick and veined, each a solid eight inches even flaccid, the kind of exaggerated size that looked almost fake.
Below, their balls hung low and heavy, swollen grapefruits swaying with deliberate, pendulous weight at every step, so oversized they defied gravity and common sense.
The camera followed them in flawless sync, a choreographed entrance like a wrestling tag team stepping into the ring.
They settled onto the couch with practiced ease, never a word spoken, no handshake, no nod, no glance her way, Ed their only mouthpiece while the twins remained mute, silent instruments there to do the job, as if she were mere furniture, positioned and prepped to serve their purpose.
“Meet the guys,” Ed boomed, voice bright and theatrical, but with a steel edge beneath it.
Emily stayed paralyzed, body rigid, shoulders forced back, chin held high in a brittle show of composure, but her pressed lips and shallow breaths gave her away.
Nothing could have prepared me for her face under that merciless apartment light. Eyes blown wide, lips trembling, a broken whisper “Oh, for the love of God” spilled out, not for the camera, not for show, but the raw, stunned gasp of an addict suddenly staring at the fuel of a thousand secret orgasms now standing right in front of her. Every late-night fantasy, every hidden climax had been rehearsal for this exact second. And now it was real, bigger than any dream, and it demolished her.
In that moment, she was already gone, untethered from reality, consequences erased. Our parents, our friends, Melissa, me, none of us existed anymore. She was a junkie with the needle buried deep, riding the rush so hard the rest of the world could burn and she’d still beg for one more second of it.
The twins sprawled on the couch like bored royalty, eyes sliding over Emily’s forty-something body, old enough to be their mother, with the lazy clinical hunger of men who usually saw nothing but perfection.
Naked and trembling she stood under their stare, nerves and arousal colliding so hard she forgot every stretch mark and sag, the age gap erased while they sized her up like a rare, flawed delicacy.
Their cocks rose together, untouched, swelling in perfect lockstep like valves opening to flood twin pipelines. From eight inches soft, they lengthened, thickened, lifted toward the ceiling: two flawless, obscene towers, so perfectly proportioned they looked engineered rather than born. Arrogant smirks covered their faces, the kind that came with knowing their anatomy alone could make even a straight man stop dead and question everything he’d ever believed about his own sexuality.
It felt like the last scene of Old Yeller, the one where the dog dies and you’d give anything for a different ending. Anguish and helplessness pinned me to the chair, forced to watch with no rewind, no mercy.
The aftermath photo had already been that bullet behind the barn: proof she wasn’t coming to her senses, wasn’t bolting, wasn’t turning back. And now Ed spoke; that brash, signature beat in every BBP video, second only to the brutal money-shot close-up of the double cream pie that always capped the Double Decker. The exact second the tension snapped into cold transaction. The moment the fantasy died and the contract took over.
“Go on, love,” he said, voice stripped of sympathy, thick with expectation. “You know what comes next.” Of course she did. Everyone did. The coin toss. The infamous ritual. The moment the twins let fate pick which hole belonged to who. A piece of theater as old as BBP itself, but no less brutal for its familiarity.
Ed reached into his jeans, pulling out the oversized coin, held steady before the lens like a magician, its scratched sides, Parliament’s jagged spires, and Big Ben’s etched clockface stamped into dull metal, worn smooth from endless use, each groove heavy with repetition. Without fanfare or ceremony, he dropped it into her hand like spare change tossed at a beggar, the dull metal landing flat against her pale palm, the only place the ridiculous tan hadn’t reached, exposing a truth the camera couldn’t hide.
She stood there frozen, fingers trembling around the weight of it. And that was the moment I knew reality had hit her, how fast it was all happening. How far past the point of return she already was.
She tossed it, stiff and reluctant, the movement barely more than a flick, like her body wasn’t ready to participate, but her mind had already given up the fight.
Ed’s camera tracked it immediately, smooth and clinical, following the arc like a golf broadcast catching a tee shot mid-air. The coin spun high, catching the overhead light, then plummeted. A sharp metallic clack echoed off the tile; one bounce, then a frantic spin, a scratched blur of silver twirling on its edge.
A final wobble. Then stillness. Ed held the frame a second too long, the coin centered, lit like a verdict, hanging there on screen like a sentence being read aloud. Then came his voice, bright and theatrical in my earbuds, laced with smug delight: “Parliament it is! You get the arse, lucky lad. Ben, you’ve got the front. Let’s make it a proper Double Decker, yeah?”
