We had or who.
And after we talked to Lewis, we even had ourwhy.
The sickening part? It led back to our strange relationship. It seemed that it wasn’t only our friends who caught on to the focus of our anniversary. Lewis twigged pretty fast who we were to each other. Maybe it was coming into a new workplace, meeting fresh people, new places. Maybe it was putting all those people together as one work entity.
Maybe he was always going to obsess over her.
I should have realised she never meant me when she talked about the presents. I never picked tacky shit, only things I thought she’d want.
And every year, Sia threw a few out. Things I knew she wanted to keep. It was a part of our ritual. I chose expensive, ostentatious gifts. Crazy, out there presents, and she opted to throw some back in my face, tossing them right in front of me, just as she had this year.
Only I never bought her two of the same box, or even similar boxes, like the ones she threw out near the AV room.
Or the cheap crap she whined about my gifting her.
Lewis jumped on that bandwagon fast, doubling down on my little habit. And it wasn’t the only one.
He had us all figured out, from the love bombing to the stalking side. The only part he didn’t have down, thank fuck, was the endgame.
Instead of taking the pretty offering Sia presented on her bedroom floor when he walked in two full hours and change ahead of me that night, Lewis opted to carve my wife up with a kitchen knife instead of fucking her.
Ruin over rape.
His voice still bounced about the inside of my skull, justifying his reasons while I did the job that he couldn’t.
“She was just there, waiting. And you weren’t.” Desperate reasoning lit his eyes with the sort of fervor that fuels an obsessed man’s heart.
The darkness I knew well.
“Just waiting.” I nodded, gliding my fingers along the blade that he used to carve her flesh open with.
“Exactly.” He smiled, pleased that I got it while Solace twisted his plump little arms behind his back. He still hadn’t registered his predicament. Or maybe he had, and this was his brain’s way of shutting down.
I didn’t much care.
“Thanksgiving turkey. Overdressed,” Solace muttered, yanking at the younger man’s collar. “You’re doing the honors.”
“It’ll be messy either way.”
Awareness crept into Lewis’s eyes. “She was there. She was waiting!”
I smiled and pressed the blade to a soft part of his anatomy. “But that wasn’t your home, any more than it was mine. Not any more. Her space, kid. And you didn’t have an invitation.”
He fell to his knees a few moments later, no longer needing Solace’s assistance to prevent the sounds that gurgled from his mouth.
“Squishy.” Solace made a face. “He wasn’t a team player.”
“Jokes. At least he fell on the plastic.”
Removing him saved her, but the ease that he’d found and used her in his way sickened me. When I called her after the game ended, she was minutes away from bleeding out into the carpet. I cradled her, my shirt pressed into her wounds, waiting for the ambulance to arrive to tend to her unconscious form.
No matter what I wanted, this couldn't happen again.
Tonight was the first time I’d left, four days later. She seemed safe, for now. But she wouldn’t always be that way if we continued on the way we were. Breaking my vow of touching her was the beginning of a new habit. One I couldn’t continue.
I owed Solace several. Bad knees and all.
He peeled away in Lewis’s rust bucket of a car, and I headed back toward the hospital to sweet talk a doctor who hated me into letting her release my wife.
