C5, PT. 2

“Is it? If I was some other man’s daughter, maybe you would have confided in me about your trials and let me console you. Instead, I was treated like the enemy. Why would I subject myself to a lifetime of punishment for things I have no control over?” She fixed him with a level look through dull, glassy eyes. “Yet here I am being punished because my father blackmailed and put you on his blacklist.”

She saw that hit home when his hand balled into a fist.

“You’re here because I finish what I started. I was blackmailed into letting you go. You were blackmailed back into the position you deserted without my permission. We’re even. If I really wanted to punish you, I wouldn’t have allowed you to spend time with the Davies and Johnny and Aleixo. We wouldn’t even be talking right now, going over our history. If I saw you as a sex object, you’d be on your knees, and I’d be down your throat so deep, you couldn’t spout this fucking bullshit.”

He let a blanket of stifling silence fall. Her skin buzzed as his fingers went to the button of his slacks.

“Don’t.” Her voice shook. “If you don’t see me as a whore, you won’t…”

His hand dropped to his side. “I never saw you as a whore until I read your books as Thalia Crane.”

She went numb.

“It never crossed my mind that you would cheat on me until your father told me you had a replacement. I resigned myself to seeing the announcement in the paper or hearing from a business associate that my wife was now someone else’s. When nothing happened, I assumed Maximus was yanking my chain. And if he was lying about that, then maybe the other things he said were just taunts meant to rile me…”

The sound of her heartbeat matched that of the ticking clock that she wasn’t sure was a figment of her imagination or hidden somewhere in the room.

“A few months before I saw you in Colorado, I read your series. With book one being nearly autobiographical, I had to assume what came after was more fact than fiction as well.” He paused, taking in the way she stood completely motionless, like a rabbit hoping it would blend into the brush. “The reality of what you did was worse than I ever imagined.”

Her face was soft and serene, but the tear that slipped down her cheek gave her away.

“Did you go home with that biker the same day you filed for divorce, like the character in the book?”

She didn’t answer.

“Jasmine.”

“I considered myself a free woman the moment you walked out of here to go to your meeting,” she said in a cool tone that belied the guilt and defiance that warred for supremacy within her. “I decided to divorce you before I reached the lobby. Filing was just a formality.”

“Legally, you were still my wife.”

“A technicality.”

“No, a legally binding reality,” he countered. “You thought you had the final say in our marriage?”

“After you broke your promise to me, yes.”

She wasn’t surprised when he dismissed her charge with a sweep of his hand. She had one condition before she agreed to marry him. In her mind, she heard the distant echo of her tearful, earnest voice say, “I don’t want you to regret this.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“A few careless words canceled out two years of marriage?” he said derisively. “Your family has said and done countless cruel things to you, yet you still sought to mend fences with them and are willing to put your life on the line for them. Why am I not given the same grace for the one time I—”

“Because you meant more to me than they ever did!” Her throat ached from the scream that came from the depths of her soul. “You…” She whirled away, hands scrubbing over her face as she tried to get hold of her rioting emotions. “You were everything to me. You made me feel accepted, seen. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere, with someone. I would have done anything for you—did do anything for you,” she amended and felt her knees buckle from the staggering weight of disillusioned sorrow she still carried. “I was conditioned to accept that kind of treatment from them. I never thought you’d join them. After being treated like an outsider all my life, someone to be tolerated, I wasn’t going to beg to be respected when I’d done nothing wrong but love you the best way I knew how. And yes, all it took was one time and a few careless words. Sometimes that’s all it takes to shatter someone’s world.”

She was breathing hard, shaking from the pain of exposing herself. This conversation made her feel as if she were tearing off pieces of her skin while he watched with an imperturbable poise that made her want to attack him with a machete. He stood motionless in the middle of the room while she paced like a confined feral cat. He initiated this conversation, knowing it would rile her while he looked on, as unaffected as he’d been when he got her out of bed. Nothing rocked him. She was ready to collapse while he played judge, weighing her explanations as if he weren’t as riddled with sins as she was. He was so calculating, so much like her father… She wanted to throw in the towel and lock herself in one of the bedrooms, but since he was in the habit of finishing things, she would follow suit and finish this talk once and for all.

“If you were honest with yourself, you’ll admit that we never had a real marriage. You’re an expert at compartmentalizing and keeping me in one area of your life that doesn’t touch anything else. You held me at arms length, never letting me close, never letting me get to the heart of you. You never once said…” She held her hand up to stop that train of thought. It was no used going down that path. “You said yourself—I was lonely and vulnerable, the perfect target. I was a chess piece you acquired to fast track your career. But the pawn finally realized she was part of a game and walked off the board. It never occurred to me that you would fight the divorce. The only thing that makes sense is that you didn’t want to prove Dad right or were too stubborn to fold on an investment that you hadn’t gotten your money’s worth from. Either way, I wasn’t going to put my life on hold until you decided to release me. I had to move forward.”

“Into a life of fucking anyone who looked your way?”

She didn’t show any outward reaction, though his words whittled down what little self-worth she managed to stash to almost nothing. Instead, she lifted her chin and met his critical gaze with quiet dignity. “You don’t get to judge me for the way I chose to cope.”

“Did you do it to punish me?”

She stared at him for a long moment before she looked away. “No.”

She did it to punish herself for being too blind and stupid to recognize that she was in a one-sided relationship. Realizing she’d given all of her firsts to a man who used her, she tossed herself into the whirlpool of life with reckless abandon. She gorged, the knowledge that he was doing the same, spurring her on. Her conquests helped her through the grief and confusion while simultaneously giving her new material to write about, so she didn’t get stuck on the chapter labeled: naive wife. She learned to stand on her feet and live without her husband’s support. And she wasn’t going to apologize for it.

**This is a raw draft of Bitter Confessions. Please do not share or distribute.

Copyright © 2024 Mia Knight. All Rights Reserved.