His entire body trembled, and he kept his hands to his sides, keeping them close. He was afraid that if he grabbed me, he would hurt me—his restraint made his muscles tense. And he wanted to, I could feel it down to the marrow, but he tamed it down.
“No, it’s not the same! This was supposed to be a surprise!”
“I hate fucking surprises when it comes to you.”
“Well, surprise,surprise, this is yours!”
His eyes took slow inventory of my body, pausing on the bruise on my hip. I woke up with it after hitting the table beside the bed on my way to reach Maggie Beautiful.
“Tell me who else’s.”
I slapped him, hard, across the face. He smirked, nothing remotely friendly about it.
“How dare you,” I seethed. “H-how dare you!”
Forcing myself from the bed, I went into the bathroom, retrieved my robe and covered myself. When I met him again in the room, I pointed to the door. A tremble I couldn’t control caused me to chatter all over. “Get out!”
“Make me.”
I made a noise between a sob and a growl, taking one of our pictures from the shelf and humming it as his head. He sidestepped the throw and the picture collided with the wall.
“Yes! Let me see!” I said, frantically looking for another. “I’m going to have pictures of my husband and me in my lover’s—” a deep, trembling, ferocious sound went off in his chest when I said the wordlover“—house, is that the way it goes? I know I’m naïve but I’m not effing stupid!”
I threw a few more, and after he had enough of the tantrum, he went to walk out, but jumping over some glass, I screamed at him over the railing.
“You started this! Don’t walk away from me! Don’t you dare walk away! Not now!”
I went to go after him, but he turned on me so fast that I stopped a few steps away. He was a man possessed, and if pushed any harder, he was going to snap.
“Get back upstairs.” He rolled his powerful shoulders. “Now.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, but I went back up, damning him underneath my breath as I did so. I took a seat on our bed, crying silent tears at the mess. The old place was in complete stillness, not a creak, not a shudder. He was still close. I could feel him, though he didn’t make a sound.
After some time had lapsed, I tiptoed down the stairs, blindly finding my way. Every light had been turned out.
Close to the kitchen, I stopped, realizing what I had missed. He waited in the darkness, expecting someone.
* * *
I fell asleep without knowing that I did, and when I woke up, Brando sat on the lounger, staring out of the window at the garden. He barely turned to look at me, but I caught it all the same—the same mood he had been in the previous night was still alive and well. No. Even worse.
We were supposed to meet Rocco and Rosaria today. I had asked her to be there so this would all be clear to him, but there was no moving him, much less shoving. I would have to go alone and try to figure out another way to handle this.
Handle him.
In all of our years together, he had never been so fully possessed by a thought. Not even after our time apart, after he sent me to Paris and Nemours tried to persuade me into marriage, did he react in such a visceral way.
What possesses you, Brando? Oh, that’s right. What had he told me after he proposed marriage to me? He’d be a different man. Possessive.That was an understatement.
I found myself boring a hole in his head while thinking this over. He looked out at the mess I had made, the grave I dug for the roses, probably wondering why I left it in shambles. The earth was turned over, ready, and the roses lined the stone fence, waiting to be planted.
An uneasy thought came to me then. He was probably imagining the empty face tangled in the sheets with me, and after he was through feeding him to the devil, he was going to bury me below the roses, then rest next to me.
His face after he found out Nemours had gotten a glimpse of my breasts was burned into memory forever. This didn’t even come close.
“Brando,” I said, voice firm. “I would rather cut out my heart and bury it out there in the garden than ever do you wrong. I—I could never hurt you in that way. Ibelongtoyou.”
“Why?” His voice was colder than frost.
