Page 147 of Kneeling to Candy

My eyes blink rapidly, like it’ll somehow change the names on the certificate, or at the minimum make it make sense to me.

How? When?

An earlier memory of me standing in front of the hotel Vegas bathroom mirror, one where I thought I was having errant thoughts about standing at an altar with Butch and a Ring Pop on my finger, comes to the forefront of my mind.

“It wasn’t a random thought,” I say out loud, my free hand kneading my forehead.

“What wasn’t a random thought?” Butch asks from behind me, his voice sounding extra gravelly from exhaustion.

Startled, I spin to face Butch with his leather cut draped over my forearm and the marriage license—our marriage license—clutched in my hand.

Standing in front of me, in only a towel hanging low on his chiseled hips, Butch looks at me with an arched brow. Whatever he sees on my face has his eyes dropping to my hand. He takes less than a second to spot what I’m holding. His hazel eyes jump back to mine, panic clear as day in them.

He swallows loudly. “Goddess?—”

“What is this?” My voice quakes as I hold out the certificate. “And why were you hiding it?”

Butch’s shoulders slump. He runs his hands down his face, looking at me with a mixture of shame and alarm.

“It’s our marriage license,” he answers in somber gruffness.

“I can see that. When the fuck did it happen?” I already have a pretty damn good idea of when it went down, but I need the confirmation from him.

“On the eve before we left Vegas, the same night we first got together.”

“And you knew of this?” A tear sneaks out of the corner of my eye, rolling down my cheek. I don’t bother brushing it away—I’m too hurt to care. “You knew this whole time we were married?”

He nods with another hard swallow. The look of humiliation on his face hits a little differently this time. What I thought was embarrassment for hiding a marriage from me feels an awful lot like embarrassment for being tied to me at all.

“Why would you hide it from me?” My voice raises an octave, anger leaching into my tone. “Were you ashamed to be married to someone like me, a former bunny and sex worker?”

The worry on Butch’s face dissipates, replaced with a livid glower. “What? No. Of course not. You’ve done nothing in life to merit shame from me or anyone.”

Frustrated, I snap. “Then why, Butch?”

“Candy,” Butch pleads, reaching for me.

I back away from him, our marriage license still in my grasp. Hot tears spill down my face. I scrub them away furiously with the back of my hand, irate to be losing my cool in front of Butch.

He hid this from me. He doesn’t deserve my tears, to see how much he’s wounded me.

The air in the room becomes too heavy to take into my lungs. I need air, space, and to be away from Butch while I work through my emotions.

As I turn for the door, Butch is on me. His arms wrap around me like a constrictor, making it harder to breathe than it was already.

“Goddess, please. Stay. Let me explain.”

Choking back on a sob, I say, “Butch, let me go. I need a moment alone.”

He spins me to face him. His chest rises and falls rapidly with his ragged breath. “Then stay. I’ll go. You deserve the privacy right now.”

As sweet as his gesture would be under any other circumstance, the idea of being alone, surrounded by Butch’s things, isn’t my idea of getting space from him.

“What I deserve is a partner who doesn’t hide shit from me,” I snap, tossing the cut his face. He grimaces when the leather smacks him, catching the vest before it falls to the floor.

“Butch, how could you?”

“Baby, I’m sorry,” Butch says, with a hitch in his voice. His hazel eyes are red-rimmed. “This wasn’t how I wanted you to find out. I wanted to tell you. But the timing was never right.”

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