Page 39 of The Spare

If she’s brave enough to open up to me, then I can step up for her.

It’s the least I can do.

CHAPTER 18

Selena

During our musically prompted heart-to-heart, I didn’t tell Benedict that one of the 1989 songs I used to think about the most was ‘Style’. Looking back, I can see I spent far too much time imagining how Xav and I would appear from the outside in. In those teenage years, I was obsessed with the optics of marrying him rather than the reality of it—probably because the latter was too overwhelming. I told myself all I cared about was whether we’d look good as a couple. Whether all the other girls who were after him would think I was pretty enough for him, polished enough for him, everything enough for him.

Did we have the right vibe?

Would we achieve cult couple status?

Would the glossy magazines want to feature our wedding?

These were the things I spiralled over at school; these were the cracks of insecurity that I identified in Taylor’s lyrics, that I seized and ran with.

These days, with my adolescent angst far less of a distant memory than I’d like it to be and my adolescent assumptions about the future way off target, as it turns out, I’m far more fixated on ‘Out of the Woods’.

That’s the other thing I didn’t tell Ben.

But, like in the song, whether he and I are out of the woods yet is something I ask myself over and over and fucking over.

It sounds far less cool in my head than it does when Taylor asks it.

I spend a lot of time with thoughts (read: obsessions) about the future ricocheting around in my head. It’s still an enormous effort to wrench my thinking from the years and years I spent meticulously pondering and planning my marriage to Xav.

How many kids would we have?

How long would we wait to have them?

What kind of father would he be? Answer: focused, dutiful, committed, loving.

What kind of husband would he be? Answer: the first three adjectives stand, but I was never sure about the last one…

Anyway, I’ve had to recalibrate everything I know about my future, and I have far fewer answers yet about my new husband than my old fiancé.

But it’s hard to give a damn about a single one of the questions that send me spiralling at three a.m. when I walk into the bathroom of my family’s palatial chalet.

Because my husband is standing in the shower, water streaming down his face and over every perfectly cut muscle, his dick in his hand as steam billows around him.

‘Get in the shower, sweetheart,’ he says with that mixture of arousal and impatience and arrogance that turns me straight to putty.

Mere months ago, I was an innocent, my preferred form of porn a photo of Jonathan Bailey wearing slutty little specs and a DRINK YOUR MILK t-shirt.

Poor, sweet, naïve Selena.

This is porn.

I peel off my clothes as quickly as possible: off come my salopettes, my white t-shirt with the famous interlocking Cs picked out in gold sequins (it’s been sunny enough to swap out the base layers for t-shirts), my ski socks and my underwear. I’m sweaty and exhausted and shaky-legged after a mogul-filled morning in excellent snow, but when my husband looks like this, and when he looks at me like this, none of that is relevant compared to the ache deep in my core, the need for him to fill me up, to use me.

No sooner have I stepped into the huge marble-and-glass shower enclosure than he scoops me up in his arms, moulding my body to his under the torrent by clamping down on my bottom as he gets me in a headlock. His kiss is hot, urgent, and I luxuriate in the feeling of his tongue dominating mine as his cock thumps against my lower stomach and I glide my hands over the hard, soaking musculature of his shoulders and arms and back and—finally—that rock-hard arse of his.

The man is a god.

Useless to deny it.

And Jesus, he knows how to kiss.