Page 116 of Necessary Cruelty

Thirty-Four

I’m notsure when I decided that Zaya and I are permanent.

I keep telling myself that it’s just the novelty of having someone to play house with that has me twisted up. It would be a struggle to remember the last time anyone used the oven in the pool house for something aside from drying out weed, if ever. But Zaya is obsessed with her newfound ability to prepare meals using more ingredients than what comes in boxes from the food bank. All those years without a mother seemed to have primed her for playing happy homemaker.

She cooks, she cleans, and she sucks my dick like it’s the absolute highlight of her day.

But as much as I like a gorgeous and willing girl to come home to, it’s more than that.

When she smiles at me, I feel a pressure in my chest that makes it difficult to breathe. Any time she manages to wake up before me in the morning, which has been happening more and more often these days, I find myself rolling over to inhale the pillow where she slept. It always smells like the conditioner she uses, vanilla milk and plumeria.

I’ve bought about a dozen bottles of the stuff so she isn’t tempted to switch to anything else.

Fast forward a year when she has a newborn baby in her arms and a more comfortable life than she has ever dreamed of, it won’t matter that we started with a lie. It won’t even cost her anything. A baby might delay the start of her future, but she can still go to college. I’ll have a nanny sit in class next to her if that’s what she wants.

I can give her everything she never had — it would be stupid for her to walk away.

I’ve never been able to take my eyes off her. It used to be because I was thinking of more and more creative ways to torture the truth out of her. But it’s hard to care about the past when the future is punching me in the face.

When I watch her now, it’s only because I struggle to tear my gaze away.

Getting her pregnant started out as only an obligation, something that needs to happen for me to keep my inheritance. But I find myself watching her for signs of morning sickness or tenderness in her nipples, although sucking on those until they’re hard as almonds on her chest has always been a favorite pastime. Even though I’ve managed to put a few pounds on her, she is still skinny enough that a baby bump will probably be obvious pretty early.

Even in my own head, it’s hard to call it love. There are too many other emotions wrapped up between us for me to put a name to just one. If love is forgiving her for trying to poison me when we were kids and never giving me reason why she did it, then we can call it that.

Also obsession, possession, and any emotion that involves never letting her go.

A few years after it all happened, I read the medical report. There was enough concentrated oleander in my blood to represent thousands of flowers. Something like that doesn’t happen by accident. The poisoning had to have taken place over weeks, with a higher dose on the day that I finally collapsed. My weak heart had nothing to do with poor genetics and everything to do with the effects of all the oleander being slipped into my food.

A poisoning that started when Zaya became my childhood playmate.

But if I can forgive her for that, then she can forgive me for playing a dirty trick on her womb.

Maybe someday, I’ll convince her to finally tell me why.

Although I’m not sure I really want to know.

* * *

The dayof our wedding ceremony dawns bright and clear. Harsh waves crash on the silky sands of the Shore Club, and the water is too frigid for even a toe dip, but the beach is there to look at and not to swim in.

That water is cold enough to stop your heart after only a few minutes.

There is a nice metaphor in there for the rich people of this town, pretty on the outside but deadly when you get too close.

Giselle has truly outdone herself, which isn’t precisely a compliment. Hundreds of white wooden folding chairs are decorated with gauzy bows, forming a semicircle around a raised altar that has to be the result of about a hundred hours of illegal labor. Almost everyone in town has RSVP’d, and this is shaping up to be an event that puts even the Founder’s Ball to shame. Everything, from the decorations to the view, is like something from a manic chick’s Dream Wedding Pinterest board.

It’s perfect.

And I can’t wait for it all to be over.

Giselle spirited Zaya away early this morning when I was still barely awake. My stepmother insistent that we do the full pre-wedding workup, everything from hair to makeup to sitting in a dressing room and sipping champagne with Giselle’s vapid friends for a few hours. Apparently, I’m not allowed to see her until she walks down the aisle because of some bullshit related to bad luck.

The fact that we’re already legally married doesn’t seem to have filtered through the haze of Giselle’s wedding planning.

Iain is standing up as my best man, with Elliot and Cal behind him as my other groomsmen. Zaya’s bridesmaids are a few random daughters from families on the Bluffs, handpicked by Giselle based on their dress sizes and coloring.

God forbid that the wedding photos embarrass us.

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