Page 48 of Wicked Games

Gently, he pulls out and kisses one of my butt cheeks. “I have a feeling I’ll be down on my knees many, many times worshipping you. Are you okay?”

I sink down onto a pillow. I hope Seth doesn’t mind cum all over the place. “Which part?”

He sits next to me. “How about the sex part first.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Good,” he says, tucking a piece of my hair behind my ear. “How about the rest?”

I don’t want to do this now, what’s left of his tears glinting on his skin in the light coming in through the window, but the sooner the better.

“Seth, we need to talk.”

“Is it Darren?”

“No. It’s something worse.”

“It’s Hattie.”

I look down at his hand resting on my knee. “Yeah.”

“Okay. You can get cleaned up in here and I’ll meet you in the den where we watched that movie. Coffee or wine?”

“I think wine would be best.”

He tilts my head up with a finger under my chin. “This is bad.”

“Yeah,” I whisper.

He has no idea how bad it is.

I clean up, his cum leaking out of me. Being a woman is hard. You’re pulled in so many directions and you never know which one is the right one. I never gave Darren children. I couldn’t, but not for lack of trying. I didn’t care much about it, and in some fucked up way, the more he wanted them, the more I didn’t. I began to resent him long before I knew I was, his semen between my legs a painful mockery of what my life had become.

But as I wipe off Seth’s cum sticking to the insides of my thighs, I think having children is something I could have wanted. Women aren’t supposed to want children. We’re supposed to want other things and have children just because that’s what our bodies are made to do. Mine wasn’t, and I didn’t take it personally or act like it was Fate’s betrayal. In the end, Darren blamed me enough for both of us.

Seth doesn’t want more kids. Anyone would understand that, and it’s another thing I’ll miss when he sends me away. That we could have just lived our lives and been happy knowing that what we had was enough.

I put my clothes back on and go downstairs.

He’s already in the living room, sitting on the couch, and two glasses of wine are on the coffee table.

Vaguely, I wonder if he ate the leftover pizza or if he threw it away.

I sit on the opposite end of the couch and he frowns. “I don’t like this.”

Reaching for a wineglass that’s half full of red, I say, “You won’t like it more when I’m done.”

“This isn’t about you. I talked to Detective LaSalle this morning. The gun that shot Theo was the same gun that shot Hattie. Violet told me you wrote the last post on her blog, and I read it. You must miss her a lot. Was she a good friend of yours?”

I stare, and my lips part in sick realization. Fuck. He doesn’t know, but then, why would he?

“It is about me. Hattie wasn’t my friend, she was my sister, and I think she was involved in Theo’s kidnapping.” I tell him about the trashed post and he angrily pushes to his feet and starts pacing the floor. “I don’t know if it’s true or not. If it is, I don’t know how she knew to be there.”

He glares at me. “She was there. I called Marcy after I told you about what happened, and I asked her to walk me through that morning again. She said a woman sat next to her and they talked about the weather. She was wearing a camel-hair coat and high-heeled boots. Your sister was there.”

I bury my face in my hands. I knew it, I just didn’t want to believe it. “I don’t know how she knew to be there,” I repeat helplessly.

Angrily, he says, “Don’t be stupid. Someone told her, and she was there to watch it go down. Did you think of that? That she told someone that it happened? What did she get out of it? She didn’t write about it, so it couldn’t have been for her blog. Did she need money? Someone paid her to make sure Marcy was preoccupied and didn’t do anything? Was she working with that gang? Did she piss them off and they shot her?”