Page 14 of Mine to Fear
“I want to be the man you deserve,” he told me one night as we lay in bed together. “I want to be someone you can depend on.”
I wanted to believe him. I chose to believe him. Because the alternative—admitting that I had made a terrible mistake, that Jude had been right to worry, that I had been so desperate to prove Kieran wrong I chose the first man who paid attention to me—was too painful to accept.
The next incident happened three weeks later, when I came home late after visiting Jennifer—the only friend I had made while I was still working. Dex was waiting up for me, pacing our living room like a caged animal.
“Where were you?” he asked the moment I walked through the door.
“I was with Jen, like I told you. It ran later than expected.”
“Until midnight?”
I kicked off my heels, already exhausted from a long day and not in the mood for an interrogation. “The kind where you just keep talking and laughing, and before you know it, hours have passed—you lose track of time. I hadn’t seen her since our wedding, and we just got carried away catching up.”
“I don’t like that bitch,” he said, his jaw tightening as he glanced away.
There was something ugly in his voice, a bitterness that made me look at him more carefully. His eyes were bloodshot, and I smelled alcohol on his breath despite his promises to cut back on drinking.
“Dex, are you drunk?”
“Does it matter?” he slurred, eyes narrowing. “You were probably too busy flirting with every guy in that bar with her to think about me sitting here alone.”
“I wasn’t flirting with anyone. I was just hanging out with a friend.”
“Right,” he snapped, his voice tight. “Hanging out with someone who still has a life and a social world. Of course you’d rather be out there than sitting here with me.”
We’d had this argument before, always in different forms. Dex resented every trace of my life before him—my friendships, my confidence, even the independence I used to have—especially when measured against his unpredictable art sales. His irritation lurked beneath the surface of our relationship and bubbled up whenever he drank too much or faced another rejection.
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you meant.” He stepped closer to me, and I instinctively stepped back. “You think you’re better than me. You think I’m a loser.”
“I think I’m tired, and I want to go to bed.”
I tried to walk past him toward the bedroom, but he grabbed my arm. Not hard enough to bruise, but firm enough to stop me.
“Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.”
“Let go of me, Dex.”
“Not until you admit what it was really about. You’re ashamed of me. Ashamed that your husband wasn’t some hotshot businessman in a thousand-dollar suit.”
The description hit too close to home, conjuring an immediate image of Kieran in his expensive clothes and confident smile. I felt my face flush with guilt and anger.
“Let. Go. Of. Me.”
Instead, his grip tightened. “You were thinking about him right then, weren’t you? Your brother’s friend. The one you were still hung up on.”
My blood turned to ice. “What are you talking about?”
“You thought I didn’t know? You thought I didn’t notice the way you got that look on your face sometimes—like you were remembering something that made you sad? You thought I didn’t know why you couldn’t fully commit to us?”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“Was I? Because I thought you were still in love with someone else. I thought you were with me because you couldn’t have him. Is that why you didn’t want to be pregnant with me?”
The accusation was so close to the truth that I panicked. I remembered the birth control pills tucked away in my drawer—the ones I started taking again because I wasn’t ready to be a mother, not then, not like this. I couldn’t say that out loud.
“You’re drunk, and you’re being ridiculous,” I said, my voice tighter than I meant it to be. “Let go of me so I can go to bed.”
