It Stings So Sweet

by Stephanie Draven

  My mouth falls open. “Then what are you doing?”

  He holds up the folded shirt in his hands. “Unpacking. After last night’s misconduct, it doesn’t seem right to let you face the music by yourself.”

  So he is the agreeable gentleman again. The bloodless man who has lived in this room, apart from me, for the past year. “You’re not leaving,” I say, to be certain I have it right.

  “I’m not leaving. Not now.” Again, he averts his eyes so that I can’t read anything in that striking blue gaze. “Not unless … not unless you want me to.”

  I surprise myself by saying, “That depends.”

  He takes some sock garters from his bag, folding them precisely. “If it’s the money you’re worried about, you can have it all. I won’t leave the marriage with anything but what I brought to it.”

  “You bought this house, Jonathan. With money that you earned.”

  “Working for your father,” he says, flatly. “It’s been very profitable for me.”

  “You could work for someone else. Or for yourself.”

  He turns away to open a bureau drawer. “I’m sure I could.”

  I’m captivated by the beauty of his lean shoulders and the youthful arch of his spine. That I feel as if I can’t reach out and touch him, that I can’t press my lips to the back of his neck and draw him into a kiss … that even though I am his wife, I don’t feel free to do any of these things, not even after last night, decides it for me. “Jonathan, I don’t want you to stay if nothing is going to change.”

  He stiffens, hands gripping the edge of the bureau. “I can’t give you what you need, Nora.”

  “I know I behaved like a spoiled brat. I let another man put his hands on me to get your attention. I acted like a daddy’s girl who has never had to go without anything she ever wanted in her whole life—”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did. When I couldn’t have your attention, I let Robert Aster give me his. It was foolish. I was foolish. I was selfish. And you have every right to be furious—”

  “Stop it,” Jonathan says.

  “Why won’t you let me tell you how sorry I am?”

  “Because all of this is my fault, not yours. And even if it weren’t, I’ve already forgiven you.”

  A gasp sputters from my throat. “What?”

  “You were drunk and you kissed another man. It’s not the crime of the century. I forgive you. It’s done, Nora. It’s over. We never have to speak of it again.”

  “Given the scene at last night’s party, I doubt that very much.”

  “That won’t happen again.”

  “Maybe it should.”

  He turns to face me and bellows, “Goddamn it, Nora! I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I want you to want me,” I cry, though it is only the smallest part of what I want from him.

  “For the love of God, woman, I can’t stop wanting you. That’s the whole problem.”

  If this is a problem, it is one that has never occurred to me. “Then why have we been sleeping apart for the last year?”

  Pure agony swims in his eyes. “I’m trying to protect you from the monster that lives inside me.”

  “You’re no monster,” I say, coming to him to give comfort.

  He shrugs away. “I am. You know I am. You saw only a glimpse of that monster last night—”

  “I provoked you, Jonathan.”

  “And some part of me was grateful that you did. You gave me just the excuse I needed to let my worst instincts run riot. Watching those men touch you, watching you dance with them, it made me need to possess you. To show them all—and you—that you’re mine.”

  “I am yours,” I whisper, unspeakably aroused by the way he says the word mine.

  “You gave me an excuse to punish you, Nora. And I liked it. I loved it.”

  Am I supposed to condemn him for this? I’d be a sorry hypocrite if I did. His words only make me want to do it all again—push him to the edge of fury. The only thing that stops me is the fear of pushing him too far. “So … maybe …” My head feels as if it’s filled with cotton and I have difficulty forming thoughts. Trying to capture everything I’m thinking, everything I’m feeling, I say, “I’m your wife, Jonathan. Maybe you don’t need an excuse.”

  “Wife or not, I have no right to treat you that way. You stand here telling me that you’re sorry, asking for my forgiveness, when I’m the one who should be on bended knee, begging for yours.”

  “For what? I don’t know how many ways I can say it, Jonathan. You didn’t do anything to me that I didn’t want you to do.”

  He looks me directly in the eye. “I killed our child, Nora, and you know it.”

  This stops me. Startles me into utter silence. My limbs go rigid. I am a statue of horror. “What?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I can’t stand it.”

  But I don’t know what he’s talking about. I haven’t the faintest idea. I only know that the reminder of the baby I lost still hits me so hard that I need to sit down. I find a chair, a stool, I don’t know what. I just flounder for it, and sink down. “What did you do, Jonathan?” I ask, in morbid fascination.

  That he didn’t want the baby, that it had trapped him into marriage, was obvious from the start. But I could imagine no scenario in which he might have taken action against me or my unborn child. I’d been wretchedly sick, that much is true, but he can’t have had any control over that. What is he suggesting? Poison in my tea?

  Jonathan slams the door, as if that would prevent the servants from hearing our argument. Then he turns on me like a madman. “Are you going to tell me you don’t remember the last time we had sex?”

  “Given the state of my ruined dress, I’m not likely to forget it.”

  “Not last night. Before. The last time.”

  I shake my head. I remember the night of the wedding on a bed piled high with cushions. The time in front of the fireplace, on the chaise lounge. The afternoon when we stole away from a garden party and found a place against a tree in the hedge. But all of that was before the miscarriage … I don’t remember which time was the last time.

  He crosses the room in three angry strides and grasps me by the back of the neck. “Stand up.” Slow to move, I’m propelled by his strong arms into a standing position. Moments later, I find myself down, face-first, on the mattress. “Does this refresh your memory?”

  It does, actually, and all of my insides turn to liquid heat.

  “I took you from behind,” Jonathan says, shaking me like a rag doll on the bedspread. “Like an animal. I held you down against the mattress. I struck you. With my belt.”

  The memory forces me to moan. It had taken two, maybe three cracks of his belt on the backs of my thighs before I begged him to put himself inside me. He’d shoved inside me, slammed his hips against me, and kept me pinned to the bed. And when I fought to push back, to take him deeper, he’d caught the nape of my neck in his teeth. I’d yelped with an orgasm that left me exhausted and deeply satisfied.

  The thought that he might do the same to me now makes me weak with desire, but he’s trying to make a point. “Do you remember, Nora?”

  “Yes,” I say, stretching my hands to push the half-packed suitcase off the bed. It falls to the floor, spilling its contents everywhere, and I twist in his arms. He has me in his grips, but I have him in mine. “I remember.”

  His expression collapses, lower lip trembling. “Two days later, the baby was gone.”

  He’s tangled with me upon the bed now and I make him look at me. “That wasn’t your fault, Jonathan! God, how can you even think it?”

  His voice is barely a whisper. “I beat that child right out of you.”

  Some dark part of me nearly seizes onto this explanation. Finally, an answer to all my questions. All my late-night tearful pleas, in which I begged God to show me what I’d done wrong. In which I’d been certain that losing my child had been a punishment
for all my wickedness. It took so long for me to accept that there was nothing we could, or should, have done differently. But somehow, looking at the anguish on Jonathan’s face, it takes only seconds for me to accept it again now. “Women miscarry, Jonathan. It just happens.”

  “It doesn’t just happen,” he says.

  “Yes, it does. My mother lost four pregnancies before she had me. My sister lost her first as well.”

  This seems to shock him. “I didn’t know …”

  “I never wanted to tell you. I didn’t want you to worry that … that you’d married a woman who … who couldn’t bear you children.” It’s horrifically difficult to admit this to him. Still, his body is knotted in wordless pain that I’m desperate to soothe. “A few little slaps with a belt in love play did not cause a miscarriage, Jonathan. You didn’t beat the child out of me!”

  His features twist with grief, eyes bloodshot. “Then why did you tell your father that I did?”

  I begin to wonder if Jonathan is still drunk—or perhaps I am. “My father? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t blame you for running to him. He told me what you said, Nora.”

  By god, what had I said? Consumed with grief I had gone to my father’s house after the miscarriage. But only for a few days. I’d just wanted to sit in my old room. I’d wanted familiar things around me. I can scarcely now recall, in my haze of mourning, what I’d said or done. “Jonathan, I didn’t blame you for what happened, even then.”

  “You told your father that I put rough hands on you,” he says.

  “I did not!” I exclaim, hurtling up to a sitting position.

  “You told him that I was too rough with you. That I hurt you. That I hurt the baby—”

  “I said no such thing,” I insist, and this time, there are no doubts. No madness of grief would ever make those words pass my lips. Not to my father or anyone else. “It isn’t true. It just isn’t true.”

  My husband has been carrying this for a year now and I see how reluctant he is to put it down. “Nora, you don’t have to protect me. I’m a man. It’s my job to protect you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me or our baby and I never told anyone that you did. I didn’t go running off to my father, or to Robert Aster, to get away from you. You’re my husband, Jonathan.”

  He searches my eyes, as if he wants to believe me. “Am I truly? Because I know that you were trapped into this marriage when you got pregnant. And if I were any kind of honorable man, I’d have let you go before now.”

  The breath goes out of me. “You think that you trapped me into this marriage? That’s what you think?”

  “I remember how scared you were the day you told me that you were pregnant. But I was thrilled, Nora. I was barely making a wage. I didn’t know how I was going to support a wife and child. But none of that mattered to me because your being pregnant meant that I had you. I had you and no one could take you away from me. I had something that would’ve otherwise never been in my reach.”

  Is he talking about me or my father’s fortune? The revelations turn my world upside down. “Then my father threatened you. He told you that you’d lose your job if you didn’t propose marriage to his daughter.”

  Jonathan laughs. It’s not a joyful laugh. It’s sour as lemons. He rolls to the side, eyes on the canopy over the bed, one knee bent in casual disdain. “Oh, that much is true. Your father did threaten me.” He laughs again and I don’t like it. It’s a sound of dark despair. “He tried to run me off. But I wouldn’t go. I promised to ruin you if he wouldn’t let me marry you.”

  I’m incredulous. “Ruin me?”

  “I wasn’t about to allow Robert Aster to raise my child. I wasn’t going to let him have you. I was perfectly willing to trap you in this marriage. So, yes, I threatened to ruin you. There it is. Now you know the truth.”

  Now I want to laugh. He’d threatened to ruin me. To mire me in scandal. I find it perversely romantic, charming and quaint, and utterly demented. Curiosity overwhelms me. “And what were you going to do? Tell everyone I wasn’t a virgin? Or did you plan to seduce me in such a way that I’d be caught with my skirt up over my hips, drunkenly surrendering my virtue in the parlor on a desktop?”

  His ears redden, and I regret mocking him. He is so vulnerable to me right now. My hands go to his dark hair, and I devour his face in kisses. The dark brows. The impossibly sharp cheekbones. The thick, brooding lips that have given me so much pain and pleasure. “You’re a fool, Jonathan. A fool,” I say tenderly. “Women like me aren’t trapped into marriage. My father could have sent me away into the country if I’d have been willing to go. I’d have developed some mysterious ailment and returned some months later and been courted by fifty men, all of whom would be more than willing to overlook the scandal in favor of my father’s fortune.”

  “But you wanted to keep the child,” Jonathan argues. “So you had to take me in the bargain.”

  This is the man who knows how to make my body vibrate with arousal. This is the man who can make me writhe with pleasure. This man can make me abandon all sense of shame and crave things I’ve never even known I wanted before. And yet, I worry that he doesn’t know me at all.

  “I hoped that you’d learn to love me,” Jonathan says.

  “I do.”

  It’s as close as I can come to saying the words, and it startles him.

  Then doubt spreads over his features. “If that’s true, why wouldn’t you ever say it? I told you that I loved you … before we were even married. But you never said it back.”

  My tongue trips over the words. “B-because I never believed you.”

  He accepts this answer with equanimity, seeming to weigh it in his mind. Sprawled on the bed, he closes his eyes. I know that he’s thinking, because I can see his fists clench and release. Eventually he sits up, both feet on the floor, head bent over clasped hands, elbows on his knees. “I don’t suppose I could make you believe it now …”

  “I want to believe you … but how can I, if we keep living like this? Alienated. Apart. If we—if we love each other—there’s no reason for it.”

  “You want things, Nora. You need things … that I can’t give you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like respectability. After last night, I doubt we’ll receive many invitations into society again.”

  His naiveté is endearing. “Oh, but we will. We gave everyone something to talk about. The ladies will clutch at their pearls and call me names behind my back. The men will feign disapproval, all while secretly admiring your nerve or wondering if they can seduce me. And they’ll invite us everywhere, so that they can point at us and shake their heads with distaste when they think we aren’t looking.”

  “You shouldn’t have to endure that kind of censure,” Jonathan says.

  “It will sting, I admit. The next time I walk into a room and see any of those men from last night, I’ll die a little in shame. But the heat of that shame will burn between my thighs, and it’ll only make me want you more.” I’ve never spoken so brazenly to him before when his hands weren’t on me. He looks up in surprise. “I want your approval, Jonathan. I don’t care about anyone else’s. I don’t care about society.”

  “Spoken like someone who was born into it. Like someone who has never been on the outside of it. You say you don’t care, but you just don’t know any better.”

  “I tell you, I don’t care.” Then I stop and stare at the man who has had to claw his way to the top. Who has worked tirelessly, under constant scrutiny. “Oh, but you care, don’t you? You care, Jonathan.”

  “You’re damned right I do,” he breathes.

  I want to rail at him for his materialism, for his shallow desire for acceptance. But he’s the son of a field hand. He’s a man who has come from nothing. And I want him to have everything. “I can behave myself in public, you know. If you care so much about society—”

  “Not more than I care about you,” he says. “Let’s be clear on that. If society was t
he only problem between us, Nora, I’d let them all go hang.”

  “Then what keeps us apart? Is there something else you don’t think you can give me?”

  “A child,” he says. “After the miscarriage, I swore to myself that I’d become a better man. That I wouldn’t touch you again until I was worthy of you. Well, I’m not. And after last night, I don’t know that I ever will be. I hit you, Nora. And I enjoyed it. So we can’t simply return to the way things were, pretending that I’m not going to crack one day and do it all again. Because I will. I don’t know how to love you gently.”

  How is it that he won’t hear me? That he won’t understand. “I never asked you to treat me gently!”

  “Listen to me. If we stay together as other men and women do, I’ll look for excuses to yank at your clothes, to bite at the back of your neck and turn you over my knee. What I want is wrong and it’s sinful. I am a depraved monster inside, Nora.”

  If there were anything near enough, I would throw it at him. “Stop saying that!”

  “Oh, for the love of God, I don’t need your pity. I’m not one of the poor orphans at your charity house.”

  “It isn’t pity, you horse’s ass. I’m insulted. When I went with you that first time, when I let you put your hands up my skirt, let you bed me, I thought that I wasn’t a virgin. But I was. Because you were the first man to ever touch me. Truly touch me. Or at least, the first man to touch what was really inside of me. Everything about myself that I’d been afraid of came awake in a moment, and it wasn’t ugly. I’m not twisted and ugly inside, Jonathan.”

  He stands up, rounding the bedpost to face me. “I never said you were.”

  “You say it every time you call yourself a monster. Because if you’re a sick and sinful and depraved man for what you want to do to me … what does that make me for wanting you to do it?”

  His eyes narrow. He exhales sharply from his nose. He looks away.

  “Oh,” I whisper, both hands to my face in despair. “Oh. You do think there’s something wrong with me.”

  He takes my hands, pulls them gently from my horrified face, and clasps them in his. “It’s just … I used to see men beat on their women on the farm. Drunken sots, big fists, lots of tears. I’d see those same women go back to those men. Make excuses for them. Just like you’re doing for me.”