Page 38 of Possessed By You

“He told me he wasn’t going to stop pursuing you. That he and you had something special and he didn’t care about my thoughts on the subject.” He sighs heavily. “I had Dimitri keep a close eye on him. Not one of my finer moments, I’ll admit. One night he showed up at the bar, but you were off. Dimitri told me, and I went to his apartment…I just lost it. Fucking destroyed him.”

I stare wide-eyed at my husband, shocked beyond words.

“I have no remorse for the damage I did to him that night, which should tell you how he behaved. I won’t repeat what he said, but remembering it makes me glad you married me instead of him.”

“I don’t even know him, Benjamin. He and I spent time together that one night at the gala. There was never any possibility of marriage or even a relationship.”

“Well, he’s fixated now on the notion that he’s crazy about you, that he always has been. And that I kept him away from you.”

“I can only imagine how angry you were when I told you I saw him at the bar the other day.”

I’m relieved when he smirks. “Maybe at him. Not you. I didn’t trust you before. It’s different now.”

“Because you do trust me?”

“Yes.”

Yet you’re keeping a whopper-sized secret from the man.

He places his hands on the railing and stands behind me, caging me to him. We both hum when his lips meet my cheek.

“Is this normal? Is this what this is supposed to feel like?”

“What?”

“Love. Marriage.”

“What does it feel like to you?”

“Secure.”

He rests his chin on my shoulder, lacing his fingers with mine on the railing. “I feel like nothing can break us.”

“Nothing can,” I whisper back, relaxing into his embrace.

***

In bed hours later, I lie awake, tangled in the sheets bunched up at the end of the bed. Benjamin’s head weighs down my chest, his cheek against the hill of my breast. The waves rock the yacht back and forth, the moonlight shining off the water and onto my husband’s glorious body, which is unabashedly bare.

Catching me by surprise, he moves his arm, indicating he’s been awake this whole time too and content in our silence. My pulse speeds as he glides a hesitant hand over my stomach, touching the skin softly.

He lifts his head, laying it down on the arm that was massaging him, his emerald eyes watching me. Speechless, I watch his gaze settle onto his hand on my stomach.

“I’ve been imagining a boy,” he says.

“You have?”

He nods, caressing my skin lightly. “I don’t know what to feel about this. At moments, I think I don’t want children. I panic, I get angry…then sometimes, when I think…when I think of it being ours and you being its mother, I feel a kind of happiness I haven’t felt before.”

“I’m scared too, Ben, but we’ll do our best. I think we’ve both experienced enough in our pasts to know what a child wants from their parents.”

He turns me toward him so we’re face to face. Our bodies flush together, he takes my mouth, tangling a hand into my hair.

“You’re going to be a beautiful mother.”

***

I untangle myself from Benjamin desperately when I feel a familiar tight sensation in my throat. I scramble out of bed and pull up the toilet seat cover in time to vomit. Unwilling tears blind my vision as I heave, my throat catching on fire.