I can’t get that night out of my head.
I can’t get him out of my blood.
I am your wife and I have to come beg at your feet.
Be my puppet master, make me dance with your desire and bleed on your stage.
Ruin him with reality.
Ruin me.
Please.
Forty
STORY
January faded into February. I was five months pregnant and it showed—five months pregnant, and in West’s bed. Grayson and West snuck me to the necessary doctor’s appointments, and with Beryl and Arthur gone, we’d fallen into comfort as we grew used to this new normal, a world where I woke in another man’s bed.
A comfort like the warmth before dying from hypothermia.
Deadly. Wrong.
I held sheets to my chin, staring at the faint crack on the soft eggshell paint in the ceiling. That was how my heart felt.
Maybe I should’ve been grateful West hadn’t tried anything…but every time I go to bed, I wonder: is tonight the night his hand finds his way to my inner thigh? But then he just slid into bed and wished me goodnight.
I hated it.
He always kept his phone next to him on the nightstand. Most mornings—and some nights—I could get to it and try a few passwords.
Now, slowly and quietly, I lifted the blankets off to reach for it—
“I know you’re awake,” West said, opening his eyes and stretching.
I dragged my hand through my wild curls—as if that was what I’d been planning.
I hate that I know what he looked like in the morning. I know how the color in his eyes deepened when he was sleepy. There was a question burning in my chest now. It wouldn’t leave, and the longer I stayed, the deeper it burned.
Why did West use his coin on me? If people were willing to die over it. Kill for it.
That night with Grayson, he threw it down for a few seconds with me.
“Why did you use your coin on me?” I whispered.
West paused mid-stretch, arms over his head. He slept without a shirt, and in the morning light, his biceps glowed like roasted chestnuts.
Slowly, his warm brown eyes found mine. “You really don’t know, Story?”
“It doesn’t make sense to me.”
He stared at me a moment, chocolate eyes reading something from me. “Why have you slept in my bed every night for months?”
For Grayson.
For our love.
So he could have the happily ever after he deserved, so he didn’t have to choose. But I wouldn’t tell West that.