Adultery Phantom Thread

[IronQuill]

After Tulip leaves Masterji's Shop

Masterji watched them go, the little bell above the door jingling a cheerful farewell. The air in the shop seemed to settle, the energy of their vibrant visit receding like a tide. Priya’s laughter echoed faintly in his mind, a fleeting, sharp sound. But it was Tulip’s image that remained, etched behind his eyes. The curve of her shoulder, the delicate line of her throat, the way the fabric had yielded to her form as he measured her. She was perfect. A vessel of exquisite potential.
Ramesh was still staring at the door, a lovestruck, foolish grin plastered on his face. Masterji clicked his tongue, a sound that was both sharp and weary.
"The measuring tape is for measuring, Ramesh," he said, his voice flat. "Not for dreaming. Put the ledger away."
Ramesh jumped, as if struck. He fumbled with the notebook, his cheeks flushing. "Yes, Masterji. Sorry, Masterji."

As Ramesh busied himself with tidying the counter, his movements jerky and clumsy, Masterji retreated into the back room. The scent of silk and starch was stronger here, a familiar perfume. He sank onto his low stool, the wood groaning under his weight. For a long moment, he did not move. He simply closed his eyes, calling the memory of Tulip to the forefront of his mind.

He recalled the precise numbers he had written down, but they were merely code. What he truly remembered was the warmth radiating from her skin, the faint, clean scent of jasmine in her hair, the way her breath had hitched when the tape tightened around her bust. She had been nervous, her body held with a taut wire of self-consciousness. That was good. The nervous ones were always the most sensitive.

Threads would bind them, yes. But they would first tease. They would first teach.
He envisioned the future Lehenga. Not just the design she had shown him on her phone – that was mere child's play, a flat, lifeless imitation. He saw it in its true form. A crimson so deep it looked black in shadow, threaded with gold that was not thread at all, but filaments of harvested sunbeams. The bodice would be a cage of exquisite torment, stitched to cling, to remind her of every breath, every heartbeat. The pleats at the waist would be engineered to flare with a dance of seven veils, hiding and revealing with every step she took.

But this Lehenga was not for her. Not yet. This was a hunt. And every good hunter knew you did not attack the prize with your bare hands. You crafted the perfect weapon first. And he had the raw material waiting for him.

His thoughts drifted from Tulip’s unspoiled canvas to another body. One he had already been painting on for months. Ruchi.
A slow smile spread across his lips. To feed on one while preparing another… there was a sublime artistry to it. He siphoned life from Ruchi, not to restore his own fading youth, but to pour it into the threads that would claim Tulip. Ruchi’s late-night shivers, her soft, confused whimpers, her body's betraying arches against unseen lips… all of it was grist for the mill. Her quiet desperation was the dye that would give Tulip’s Lehenga its impossible, blood-deep color.
He rose from his stool, a deliberate grace returning to his limbs. The mundane business of the day could wait. Tonight was for communion. Tonight, he would visit Ruchi and draw another draught of surrender from her willing, if unknowing, flesh.
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Ruchi’s house was quiet, bathed in the humid blue of the moon. Her husband was away on another of his endless business trips, a fact that had become a blessedly regular occurrence. The only movement in the street was the lazy circling of a stray dog.
Inside, Ruchi slept. She was not, however, at peace. She was tangled in her sheets, her brow furrowed. It had been like this for weeks. A persistent, thrumming arousal that lived beneath her skin, a ghostly touch that visited her in the liminal space between waking and sleeping. At first, she had fought it, whispering prayers until her throat was raw. Now… now she simply lay there and waited for it, a shameful mixture of terror and anticipation coiling in her stomach.
She was wearing one of his gifts tonight. A simple, pale-blue cotton nightgown, so light it felt like a whisper against her skin. As always when she wore it, the familiar sensation began to stir. It started as a soft hum, a vibration that seemed to emanate from the fabric itself. Then came the touch.

A single, spectral fingertip traced the line of her jaw. Her breath hitched. It was ridiculous. Impossible. But it was happening. The touch moved down her throat, a slow, possessive caress that made the pulse there flutter wildly. The phantom hand cupped the base of her neck, a proprietary gesture that was both terrifying and strangely intimate. Ruchi’s own hands clutched the bedsheets, her knuckles white.

Elsewhere, in his silent room above the shop, Masterji sat perfectly still. He wasn’t in the shop. A part of his consciousness, dark as the space between stars, had unfurled and stretched across the sleeping town. It was a skill honed over decades, a thread of will cast out to hook into his waiting fabric. He didn’t need to be there physically. His clothes were his hands. His threads were his nerves.
He felt Ruchi’s soft skin through the nightgown as if he were touching it himself. He felt her terror. He also felt her liquid excitement blooming beneath it. It was a feast. He focused his intent, pushing more of his essence into the garment.
Back in her bed, the touch grew bolder. A second hand joined the first, and they began to smooth down the sides of her body, following the curve of her ribs. The sheer cotton of the nightgown seemed to become alive, tightening and loosening in waves, a massage designed by a master of pleasure. It molded to her breasts, the fabric pressing against her stiffening nipples with a torturous, delicious pressure. A soft moan escaped Ruchi’s lips, a sound she choked off immediately, her shame rising like bile. Her husband's face flashed in her mind – kind, dependable, utterly ignorant. The guilt was a sour tang, but it was no match for the overwhelming tide of sensation.
Masterji smiled in his darkened room. The struggle was the sweetest part. The crackle of resistance only made the final surrender more potent. He willed the threads of the gown’s hem to uncoil.
Ruchi felt it. A slithering sensation against her calf, then her inner thigh. The hem of the nightgown was lifting itself, inch by agonizing inch, its edge tracing a hot line upwards. It felt like a thousand tiny tongues licking at her skin. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing it to stop, even as her hips began to shift involuntarily on the mattress.

The nightgown had a mind of its own. One sleeve tightened around her wrist while the other slid its way up her arm, the fabric whispering against her skin like a lover's promises. A pressure, light and warm, materialized on her stomach, circles of slow, deliberate motion that made her abdomen quiver. It was as if invisible palms were learning every contour of her body, memorizing the map of her arousal.
Her breathing was ragged now, shallow pants that filled the silent room. Her inner thighs felt slick with a heat that had nothing to do with the humid night air. The phantom touch found this moisture and played with it, teasingly tracing the edge of her soaked undergarment, dipping just slightly beneath the elastic without ever quite making contact where she desperately needed it most.

"Not… please," Ruchi whispered to the empty room, though the plea was lost, muffled by the roaring in her own ears. Her resistance was a fragile thing, tearing apart with every ghostly caress.

In his shop, Masterji’s hand curled into a fist. He could taste it now – her essence, thick and sweet on the edge of his senses. He wasn't just Raghunath Master, an old tailor. He was the loom. She was the thread. And he was about to pull her taut.
With a final, merciless surge of his will, the living fabric struck.

The part of the nightgown covering her sex abruptly molded itself against her, the cloth becoming both impossibly soft and unyieldingly firm. It pressed directly onto the swollen, sensitive nub of her clitoris, vibrating with a low, deep hum that resonated through her entire pelvis. At the same instant, another pressure, cool and smooth as polished stone, probed her entrance, not entering, but promising, circling with an expertise that shattered her last vestige of control.



A strangled cry tore from Ruchi’s throat. Her back arched off the bed, a bowstring drawn to its breaking point. The phantom hands held her there, the nightgown a second skin driving her wild. The world dissolved into blinding light and a wave of sensation so profound it felt like dying. Spasms wracked her body, violent shudders as she came with a force she had never experienced with her own two hands. She clutched at the sheets, at the air, at nothing, a shipwrecked woman tossed in a sea of bliss.

Masterji’s eyes flew open in the darkness. He gasped, a raw, ragged sound, his body arching in mimicry of hers. He felt the psychic shockwave of her climax as it broke over him—a torrent of life essence, pure, unadulterated fear and surrender flooding his consciousness. It surged into him, a cool, revitalizing river that washed away the grime of years. The phantom ache in his knee vanished completely. The tired brittleness in his bones dissolved, replaced by a deep, marrow-deep vitality. He could feel the cells in his body rearranging themselves, the subtle iron-filings of decay being pulled out and replaced with something new, something potent. He ran a hand over his forearm; the skin felt thicker, younger, dusted with a few stray dark hairs where there had been only pale parchment before.

He slowly unclenched his fist. His breathing was deep and even again. On Ruchi’s side of town, the energy receded. The nightgown became just a nightgown once more – limp cotton, damp with sweat and other things. Ruchi collapsed onto the bed, her limbs like water, a single tear tracing a path from the corner of her eye to her temple. The shame was a settling fog in her post-orgasmic haze, heavy and suffocating. Yet intermingled with it was a horrifying, undeniable spark of gratitude. Thank you, a traitorous voice whispered in the deepest, most exhausted part of her soul. But in the tailor’s quiet room above the sleeping town, there was no shame. There was only satisfaction.

The essence had been powerful, but he knew it needed to be cured, ripened like fruit on the vine before it could be woven. It needed to be steeped in longing and tinged with despair. His attention, satiated from Ruchi’s immediate harvest, now flickered back to the main prize. Tulip.
He rose and moved not to his bed, but to a heavy, locked cedar chest against the far wall. The key was on a worn leather thong around his neck, warm from his skin. He turned it in the lock; the ancient wood groaned as it opened. Inside, nestled on beds of dried yellow flowers and crimson silk, lay spools that had no place in any mortal market.

One was wound with what looked like pure liquid starlight, glinting with an impossible silver light. Another shimmered with the golden red of a dying sun, radiating a faint heat even through the fabric. A third was threaded through with midnight black strands that seemed to drink the very light from the room. These were his threads, spun from despair and joy, from moonbeams and stolen secrets, nurtured over decades.

But for Tulip’s Lehenga, he would not use old thread. It called for a new weave, one that hungered with a specific appetite. He needed a foundational thread that was not merely an accessory to magic, but the core of its appetitive sentience. For this, he needed the very essence of Ruchi’s addiction. Her will to resist had been broken not just by his phantom touch, but by her own mind’s traitorous yearning for it. That addiction, that paradoxical desire for the very thing that corrupted her, was the purest source material.

He retrieved a small, empty spindle of sandalwood, smooth and cool to the touch. Then he went back to his stool, sat, and closed his eyes once more. He did not send his consciousness out this time; he drew it in. He gathered the leftover energy from Ruchi’s climax that still thrummed in his own system, the psychic residue of her surrender. He focused on it, separating the coarse terror from the fine-grained need. He found the memory of her whispered "please," which had meant both "stop" and "don't you dare stop."

He began to spin.

No thread materialized in his fingers. This was a deeper act of creation. He spun from memory and intent, twisting the very idea of her longing into a single, ethereal filament. He drew out the frustration of her lonely nights, the shame of her secret orgasms, the aching emptiness that followed every ghostly touch. He poured it all into the spindle. A slow, hypnotic rhythm took him, his breathing deepening, his head nodding. It was exhausting, profound work, like giving birth to a ghost.

After an hour, he stopped, panting. On the sandalwood spindle was a single thread. It was so fine it was nearly invisible, and it seemed to have no color at all. Yet when he tilted it in the moonlight coming through the window, it captured the light not with a sparkle, but with a deep, pearlescent shimmer, like a slick of oil on water. It radiated a subtle, compelling cold. He held it up to his nose; it smelled faintly of rain on dry earth, a smell that spoke of both parched thirst and quenching release.

This was the Seed Thread. The engine of desire. It would be the first stitch laid into Tulip’s wedding Lehenga, the invisible core around which all the magic would weave itself. He placed the spindle carefully on the high shelf, next to a small brass lamp. This was not just a thread; it was a stored charge. An addict's soul, waiting to be grafted onto a new, more magnificent host. Tomorrow, he would begin.