Page 21 of Two Wrongs
I want absolution.
I want you to fucking look at me!
‘I want you to tell me how many men you’ve fucked since you left.’
She grits her teeth against more cursing, spitting out instead, ‘None, okay? I haven’t s-slept with anyone.’
‘Ah, too bad,’ I reply with an exaggerated pout. ‘Because this here?’ I spread the papers out in front of us both. ‘This says you committed adultery. If you want a divorce, you gotta make that right.’
Chapter Ten
Ivy
‘Make it right?’ My mind is racing a mile a minute, and I don’t know what to say—what to think. He can’t mean it. Why would he say such a thing?
‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?’
‘From where I’m standing’—I lift my head and sneer—‘you look pretty smug. And from what I’ve seen? It looks like you’re doing just fine.’
‘The fuck would you know,’ he growls.
‘Well, apart from Miss Perky Tits walking Nigel, I suppose I could also cite DMZ.’
‘Oh, so you do wonder?’ he says, the smug one now. ‘You been keeping tabs on all my bitches, babe?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ I hurl back, wishing I hadn’t let that slip; acknowledging any interest in Dylan won’t do either of us any good.
‘You’re a fucking trip. It’s all about the evasion—you can’t even admit I’m right, can you? Because if you don’t confess, no one knows sweet Ivy isn’t as sweet as she seems. Did you get some sense of satisfaction, knowing you’d ruined me without soiling your pristine fucking self?’
‘Do you hearyourself? So you found out I didn’t screw him but did you ask yourself why?’
‘He’s not into vaginas, babe.’
‘You know what? This is a waste of time.’
‘Like the rest of our marriage, huh? You ask if I’ve wondered why. The answer’s all the fucking time!’ he roars. His face is so full of rage that I find myself stumbling backwards out of his reach. ‘Why would you do that to us—to me—but then it occurred to me, like a blinding flash.’ His hand grasps my wrist, pulling my body into his. ‘You kept our marriage a secret so you could walk out when it suited you. Not quite as unsullied as you seem, Edera, baby?’
A rush of disbelief is expelled from my chest. ‘You have it all figured out, haven’t you? If that’s what you think, why bloody well ask me?’
Knows nothing, more like. Nothing at all. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction, either. I’m not going to tell him the pressure I was under from his nasty agent; how he’d cornered me in the hotel that night to lecture me again, to tell me I was the only thing holding him back. That, if not for me, his star would truly shine.
It must be bloody incandescent now.A bit like his rage.
I’m not going to stand here and ask him to explain how my silence equalled guilt in his eyes. Or admit the situation snowballed out of my control—that as he ranted and raved, the cogs in my mind whirred.
If he believes you brought a stranger home, he doesn’t know you. He can’t love you, not really. If he believes, it’s because he wants it to be true. He doesn’t need you. Didn’t his agent already insinuate it was only a matter of time before he cheated, anyway? Better to cut my losses before the pain is unmanageable.
I think we were both in a state of disbelief, and following that awful morning, I spent only hours living with him as his wife. I don’t know what I expected—maybe for him to shrug off the shroud he’d covered me with. Maybe for him to wake up and see the truth—to see me.
That day and those hours that followed, I let him degrade me, call me names. But not once did he ask me if I’d actually betrayed him—if I’d really screwed another man.
Nor did he ask why.
He just raged, said awful things, and then stormed out. He came back later that evening stinking of someone else’s perfume. My memory of it all is crystal clear. Cuts like glass, too. I was waiting on the sofa when he stumbled in. As he stood in the archway, his abhorrence of me was clear. My eyes tracked his body, the body I called home, scanning every inch of him just to reassure myself that he was okay—that he was whole. That maybe he’d come to the truth. Instead, my heart was pierced when I saw the smudge of lipstick near the zipper of his washed-out jeans.
Leave later, and it’ll hurt so much more than it does now.
He didn’t know me. Didn’t care to.
