Page 78 of Casanova LLC

Talk.

I handed her a teacup and sat down on the opposite couch. I adjusted my robe, making it an appropriate complement to hers. We sipped.

“So. Where do we start?”

I honestly didn’t know. “Where do you want to start?”

“With Richard.”

Great.

“I could not be more confused than I am right now.”

I had to maintain complete objectivity. I had to ignore what I already knew. “About what, exactly?”

“What’s so disorienting about discovering all this, besides the betrayal, obviously, is that… I literally didn’t think he was capable of cheating.”

Was she serious? “Why do you say that?”

“As far as I knew, having sex wasn’t really his thing.”

“You and he…you weren’t intimate?” She didn’t answer. “If you’d rather not?—”

“No, no, we’re doing this.” But she took a breath. “Before we were married, the dating stage…it was fine. We were fine. Normal. He desired me. Wanted me. But once we were married, things changed. Like, overnight changed.”

The part of the story I didn’t know. What happened after he found out she was not willing to do to him what he was more than willing to do to her. “In what way?”

“He stopped actually touching me. He’d put an arm around me if the occasion called for it, or a kiss on the cheek in front of people. But when we were alone? Nothing. When it came to anything sexual, he was…specific. Very specific.”

“Specific?”

“He only wanted me to watch him. Pleasure himself. Just stand there while he did it.”

I was not surprised. My instincts had been right. From the day I met him, and the night I met her, it was clear. This was a man so intimidated by a woman’s power that he had to take back control of himself. Put it in his own hands. Literally. Stand there and watch me not need you.

And thereby have control over her by starving her of her own pleasures.

“I couldn’t touch him. He wouldn’t touch me. I couldn’t touch myself. He just wanted me to watch.”

And I shook this fuck’s hand.

“Do you know why?”

She sipped her tea. “He said he respected me too much to ‘sully’ me. He said he didn’t deserve me. So having me watch him was all he was entitled to.”

I wasn’t a violent man. I’d outgrown homicidal rage the way I’d outgrown the need to jack off. But I would have traded the deed to this palazzo for fifteen minutes in a locked room with that manipulative motherfucker.

“I thought—I can’t believe I’m saying this now—but for the longest time, I thought that it meant he loved me. That we were above all that…dirty need. That desire was base, and the fact that I missed it meant I was a—” She banged her teacup on the table, stood. Paced and toyed with her robe. “How stupid could I have been? What is wrong with me?”

“You weren’t stupid and nothing is wrong with you. You were the victim of a weak man.” I wondered if he would have treated her differently if I’d slept with her. Hard to know. It would have given him the control he wanted and made him less of a piece of shit. Probably not.

“How was he weak?”

I sat forward and poured her more tea, hoping a fresh cup would lure her back to the couch, while I gathered my thoughts. “There are a lot of pieces to this, Claire. And they don’t all logically fit together. Like IKEA furniture.”

She didn’t laugh.

“Okay. Before Richard, did you have any experiences that stayed with you? That made you believe there were good men out there?”

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