by Alam, Donna
‘Excuse me. Sorry,’ she murmurs, though from Ivy, not a word is uttered in response. Just as well, I think, because as they leave, my wife’s eyes rise to me again.
Finally. No more of this hiding bullshit; her gaze is bright and angry, and right now, she looks like she wants to lean across the island, slide her hand to the back of my neck, and pull hard . . .
. . . smashing my face into the marble slab.
The thought makes me smile, and my smile seems to make her more mad.
Maybe now we’re getting someplace.
It all reminds me of this one time at a bar when a girl came onto me. It was before this mad fame hit. I didn’t do anything, didn’t encourage her or brush her off. I didn’t need to because, in no time, Ivy was winding her way around me and sliding her fingers into my hair. To anyone looking on, she was this dark, sensuous thing, staking a claim on her man. And she was, but not remotely with that come fuck me, baby intent. Even with her tits squashed up against me and her breathy voice in my ear, I swear I felt the shift in the air as she leaned in, taking my head with both hands. She looked square into my eyes and whispered I was working my way to a Glasgow kiss. Excited? Fuck, yeah; I was rock hard and also a little terrified. She kissed me full on the lips—a long, passionate kiss—smiling sort of secretly as she pulled away. A Glasgow kiss sounded great—I imagined all kinds of things. It wasn’t until later I learned to be kissed Glasgow style wasn’t a treat. She’d just threatened to slam her cranium into mine; to head-butt me.
Sweet, mild Ivy has her jealous side. And I loved it. And I love how she’s looking at me like she wants to hurt me, ‘cause at least she’s looking, right?
‘How many,’ I say.
‘What?’ she asks, a line drawn between her brows. A line I inexplicably want to reach out and smooth away with my thumb.
‘How many women do you think I’ve screwed since you left?’
She flinches then grates out, ‘How the fuck am I supposed to know?’ She’s still watching me, and that she’s swearing is a good sign. ‘I don’t even care—’
‘Darlin’, play along. We’ll both guess. Come on, don’t tell me you’ve never thought about me or asked yourself who I’m fucking these days. I know I’ve thought of you.’ Tortured myself with images of Ivy and another man. Men, even. ‘But I guess it’s easier for me. I have a lot more material to work with, seeing as how you already set the scene for me.’
Set it so fucking well.
‘You’re such a conceited arsehole.’ She pushes away from the island, the feet of the stool punishing against the tile, but the sound isn’t as bad as when it topples. The clang is almost deafening, but she isn’t waiting around.
I spin in my seat, catching her arm as she brushes by.
‘And you’re a cunt.’ My fingers are punishing even though my voice is calm.
‘Suck my dick, Dylan,’ she spits.
‘I do suck lady dick pretty well, as you know. And I’ve had plenty since you left.’
‘Good to know,’ she says, stepping into me, almost between my splayed knees. ‘Because I wouldn’t fuck you with someone else’s dick these days.’
‘Come on,’ I goad. ‘How many men have you fucked since you left?’
‘That has nothing to do with you.’
‘I’m still your husband, babe. Like it or not. You think you can hurt me any more than you already have? Not gonna happen. Want me to go first?’
‘I don’t—’
‘No?’ I watch her pissed gaze, trying to ascertain her overriding emotion. I see anger and fear, but something else is also lurking there. Pain? ‘Sit the fuck down.’ I loosen her arm, pushing her a little ways. ‘You tell me how many, and maybe I won’t say. How about that?’
She doesn’t return to her seat, not that I expect her to, her gaze no longer for me, but over my shoulder somewhere.
‘You’re making no sense.’
‘No? I want to know how big of a slut my wife is, and clearly, you don’t care enough to want to know about me.’ I tilt my head sideways in an echo of our mutt. ‘Or maybe you don’t want to know ‘cause it’ll hurt. Play the game, babe.’
Because I want it to hurt. Again. And again.
‘You’re perverse.’
‘Just the way you like me, right? Look.’ I tap the papers again with my index finger, drawing her attention there. ‘Fuck enquiring minds. Gotta make sure the ink dries for the right reason.’
‘You saw all the evidence you need,’ she says through gritted teeth, her gaze slipping back to me and away again. If looks could kill . . . ‘We were both there.’
‘Maybe I doubt my own eyes,’ I say, in an echo of the words she used on me. ‘I’d had a lot to drink, and as I recall, you never once said you’d fucked the guy.’
‘Never said?’ she repeats warily, sliding her hands into the pockets of her pants. Loose navy pants, a tight tank, and flip-flops. Beach chic; her long dark hair pinned to her head in a messy knot, the curve of her neck exposed, delicate and fine-boned.
She looks like she belongs in a café on some beachfront—the kind of girl who wears Ugg boots and oversized sweaters that expose too much shoulder in the cold. What you see with Ivy isn’t at all what you get; Ugg boots are unethical, and meat is a sin unless we’re talking about what’s between my legs. Or at least, she used to be. Despite the cool and calm outward appearance, my wife is incendiary. You just have to know how to get her there. That fucking hair. I want to bury my nose in it. Pull out the pins or whatever the fuck’s keeping it in place. Run my fingers through it—grab it at the base of her skull and pull her head back until she’s staring at me.
Just. Fucking. Look. At. Me.
‘You never once said, Dylan, I fucked up. I went out and had a little too much to drink and brought a guy home to our bed.’ She flinches. I smile. ‘Not once did you actually admit it; not then and not after.’ Not in the days following when I ranted and raved. Days I tortured myself and her. Evenings spent unwisely. Imprudently. Recklessly. Intermittently drunk then high before coming home to start the cycle again. Home. What a joke. And all the while I raged, she hedged. I can see that now.
‘I was wasted. We ended up in bed. I didn’t do it to hurt you, and I’m sorry.’
Those are, what I’d call, the bare facts. As in, they’re barely factual.
We had a party at the end of the shoot. She didn’t want to go, and we fought; she’d been in a strange mood the whole week—fuck knows why. But I needed her there, and she wanted to stay in the suite and sulk.
I told her she could please herself. My needs be damned.
I went. She followed. We got wrecked—separately. We were like planets orbiting that evening and destined for a collision in hindsight. I lost track of her, lost in the fugue of euphoria and a drunken vibe. Then later, my mood softened, sap that I am. I tried to put myself in her position. I went to look for her, but she hadn’t gone back to the suite. She also wasn’t answering her phone.
Short story, real late—or real early, depending on your take of things—I caught a limo home. And there she was, near naked and sprawled across our bed. She was alone, but she’d had a man there; he’d left his shirt hanging in the bathroom. Who leaves without their fucking shirt?
I’d always thought myself a natural brawler, but right then, I was nothing but a fucking cripple. And she was the cause.
‘So you’re sorry. You’re sorry? Yeah, well, so am I.’ My voice gets louder, and I shove my fists in my pockets to stop from putting them around her neck. ‘I’m so fucking sorry,’ I roar, ‘that you left me for a lie. You fucking left—threw it all away. And for what?’ She opens her mouth, but I’m not ready to hear her talk. ‘The asshole is fucking gay.’
So I’ve lived imprudently.
So I’ve fucked my way through half of L.A. since she left.
So I fought and got drunk and made lots of nasty new friends.
So I did all those things just to block her out.
I’m also
a masochist because I made it my business to find out who she went home with—a grip from the movie I was working on. I wasn’t sure what to do with the information, short of beating him into non-existence. I thought about it plenty—how could I contrive to hurt him without anyone knowing how much I hurt. And then he appeared on my latest set. The guy didn’t know who the fuck I was, beyond being Dylan Duffy, and was equally perplexed when I got up in his face.
Did you enjoy fucking my wife? Sure, she’s hot, but maybe that she was mine was part of the draw?
Such a conceited asshole.
Short story? She lied. She let me believe she’d fucked some guy when a good Samaritan did nothing but take her home. He said he found her sobbing outside the hotel, almost incoherent with drink and clearly upset. He’d been at the party but didn’t know we were together. But how could he when she made our marriage a secret. She’d told him she’d fought with her husband and wanted to go home; that she just needed a cab. He ended up driving her there, helping her out of her vomit-splattered dress and then into bed. Turns out she’d vomited on him, too, so he’d stripped out of his puke-stained shirt. He’d left her tucked onto her side and left in his undershirt.
I’ve punished us both for her supposed infidelity, and every woman I’ve fucked had her face. So many women, so many times. And I’ve hated them all in her place.
Guess who’s the adulterous one now.
So much for getting her to rage. As she recoils, my anger boils. She doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t answer, simply hanging her head.
Fucking shame. I hope she’s feeling it because fuck knows I am.
‘When did you find out?’
‘When did I learn my life was a joke, and my wife a lying cunt? About three weeks ago.’
‘I still don’t know what you want from me, Dylan.’
I want to know if you ever loved me.
I want absolution.
I want you to fucking look at me!
‘I want you to tell me how many men you’ve fucked since you left.’
She grits her teeth against more cursing, spitting out instead, ‘None, okay? I haven’t s-slept with anyone.’
‘Ah, too bad,’ I reply with an exaggerated pout. ‘Because this here?’ I spread the papers out in front of us both. ‘This says you committed adultery. If you want a divorce, you gotta make that right.’
Chapter 10
Ivy
‘Make it right?’ My mind is racing a mile a minute, and I don’t know what to say—what to think. He can’t mean it. Why would he say such a thing?
‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?’
‘From where I’m standing’—I lift my head and sneer—‘you look pretty smug. And from what I’ve seen? It looks like you’re doing just fine.’
‘The fuck would you know,’ he growls.
‘Well, apart from Miss Perky Tits walking Nigel, I suppose I could also cite DMZ.’
‘Oh, so you do wonder?’ he says, the smug one now. ‘You been keeping tabs on all my bitches, babe?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ I hurl back, wishing I hadn’t let that slip; acknowledging any interest in Dylan won’t do either of us any good.
‘You’re a fucking trip. It’s all about the evasion—you can’t even admit I’m right, can you? Because if you don’t confess, no one knows sweet Ivy isn’t as sweet as she seems. Did you get some sense of satisfaction, knowing you’d ruined me without soiling your pristine fucking self?’
‘Do you hear yourself? So you found out I didn’t screw him but did you ask yourself why?’
‘He’s not into vaginas, babe.’
‘You know what? This is a waste of time.’
‘Like the rest of our marriage, huh? You ask if I’ve wondered why. The answer’s all the fucking time!’ he roars. His face is so full of rage that I find myself stumbling backwards out of his reach. ‘Why would you do that to us—to me—but then it occurred to me, like a blinding flash.’ His hand grasps my wrist, pulling my body into his. ‘You kept our marriage a secret so you could walk out when it suited you. Not quite as unsullied as you seem, Edera, baby?’
A rush of disbelief is expelled from my chest. ‘You have it all figured out, haven’t you? If that’s what you think, why bloody well ask me?’
Knows nothing, more like. Nothing at all. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction, either. I’m not going to tell him the pressure I was under from his nasty agent; how he’d cornered me in the hotel that night to lecture me again, to tell me I was the only thing holding him back. That, if not for me, his star would truly shine.
It must be bloody incandescent now. A bit like his rage.
I’m not going to stand here and ask him to explain how my silence equalled guilt in his eyes. Or admit the situation snowballed out of my control—that as he ranted and raved, the cogs in my mind whirred.
If he believes you brought a stranger home, he doesn’t know you. He can’t love you, not really. If he believes, it’s because he wants it to be true. He doesn’t need you. Didn’t his agent already insinuate it was only a matter of time before he cheated, anyway? Better to cut my losses before the pain is unmanageable.
I think we were both in a state of disbelief, and following that awful morning, I spent only hours living with him as his wife. I don’t know what I expected—maybe for him to shrug off the shroud he’d covered me with. Maybe for him to wake up and see the truth—to see me.
That day and those hours that followed, I let him degrade me, call me names. But not once did he ask me if I’d actually betrayed him—if I’d really screwed another man.
Nor did he ask why.
He just raged, said awful things, and then stormed out. He came back later that evening stinking of someone else’s perfume. My memory of it all is crystal clear. Cuts like glass, too. I was waiting on the sofa when he stumbled in. As he stood in the archway, his abhorrence of me was clear. My eyes tracked his body, the body I called home, scanning every inch of him just to reassure myself that he was okay—that he was whole. That maybe he’d come to the truth. Instead, my heart was pierced when I saw the smudge of lipstick near the zipper of his washed-out jeans.
Leave later, and it’ll hurt so much more than it does now.
He didn’t know me. Didn’t care to.
So I packed a case and left for good.
‘You’re a piece of fucking work.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I reply evenly. Nothing good can come from arguing with him. ‘I faked the whole thing just to get out of this marriage. I did it all—faked adultery to make you despise me. It worked, though, right?’
Something dangerous crosses Dylan’s face. It’s not confusion—it’s almost like he doesn’t care to know. Releasing my wrist, he turns away.
‘Nice to hear the truth for a change, but it’s not enough,’ he says, whipping back to face me once again, though this time from farther away.
‘Enough with the cloak and dagger,’ I say wearily. ‘You’re not on set now. You asked me to come—’
He quirks an eyebrow, folding his arms across his broad chest. ‘I never ask. I take.’
‘And don’t I know it. You forced me here—blackmailed me. Now, just tell me why. How can the fact I haven’t committed adultery be put right?’
As I speak, the expression on his face works through a whole bunch of things—black anger to amusement. Amusement to devilry—and not the fun kind. Before he even opens his mouth, I know what he’s going to say. I know it, but I can’t believe it. Not from him.
‘That’s easy, babe. You just have to fuck some other guy.’
I don’t answer as his words settle in my stomach like a cold stone. I can feel my brows furrow because he can’t mean it. He can’t want me to—
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Well,’ he says, rubbing his chin now. ‘I do have a kind of extensive video collection. I could maybe get my kicks from that. Me and the rest of the world.’
‘I don’t understand why
you would do this,’ I repeat softly.
‘And I don’t care,’ comes his response. ‘Not anymore.’
Chapter 11
Ivy
Tonight.
He’d brushed by me as he’d walked from the kitchen without even righting the fallen stool.
‘Wear something nice.’
And by that, I’d understood we were going out. Out to get screwed.
I think I’m still in a state of shock as I can’t be considering this. Can I? Yet I’ve showered, and I’m sitting in front of the dresser with a hairbrush in my hand.
This is some kind of test. Maybe he’s seeing how far he can push before I cave. But that’s not happening, and the Dylan I know couldn’t be so cruel. So callous. Not to me, anyway.
Whatever his reasoning and whatever the outcome, I won’t be able to manage my end of this charade without a little crutch, and that’s why I’m staring at the glass of vodka on the dressing table as my phone begins to ring.
‘Want to hear something funny?’
‘Hello, Natasha.’ My voice is calm—too calm—and without the slightest of slurs. Not that she notices as she ploughs on.
‘Well, do you?’
‘I could do with a giggle,’ I reply, exchanging the brush for my glass.
‘Oh, yeah. Poor you—you’re the one in sunny L.A. while we’re in wet flippin’ Auchkeld slaving away.’
‘I’d swap you. Right now,’ I add following a mouthful of the fiery liquid. ‘Seriously.’
‘Are things that bad?’ she asks, a little more solemn now.
‘No,’ I answer immediately. ‘They’re okay. I’m just tired. The flight—you know?’
‘That’s all it is?’ she asks, unconvinced.
‘Abso. Come on, don’t keep me in suspenders. What’s so funny I need to hear?’
‘Suspense, y’wee daftie.’
‘Come on—not even I’m that awful. I was being ironic.’
‘Hmm,’ she responds, unconvinced. ‘It’s no’ so much funny ha-ha as funny strange.’
I make an enquiring noise, staring at the clear liquid as I swirl it around my glass.
