Page 30 of Brutal Husband

Mia has a crush on our stepfather.

I’m surprised to find how much I’m not shocked and disgusted about this. I should be, shouldn’t I? I mean, he’s married to Mom, yet the way Laz acts around Mom and the way he acts around Mia is like night and day. I don’t blame her for feeling her heart soften for a man who’s good-looking, makes her laugh, and is a little bit dangerous.

Mia slips on some water, and suddenly Laz is there, holding Mia and setting her back on her feet.

“Careful, Bambi,” he murmurs, stroking his fingers through her hair and gazing tenderly down at her. There’s so much sweetness in his usually harsh face. It matters to him if she hurtsherself. It matters because she’s the most important thing in his world.

The ache in my empty lower belly doubles, right where there should be a baby, just like the ache in my empty heart.

10

Rieta

Laz leaves my home, and I tell Mia we have to talk.

“What does it feel like?” I ask Mia when we’re seated on the sofa with glasses of wine. It doesn’t matter if I have a drink today. I know I’m not pregnant.

“What does what feel like?”

“For a man to have a crush on you? To feel his eyes follow you across the room and know that he’s thinking about you and only you. Burning for you.”

Mia frowns in confusion. “But you know how it feels. You have Nero.”

“Nero never looked and acted around me the way Laz does around you. At least, he hasn’t for a long, long time.”

Mia feels sorry for me. I’ve let my mask slip for a moment, and she’s seen the extent of my unhappiness. It’s not just that I can’t get pregnant, it’s also that my husband doesn’t love me.

How that truth burns. My husband doesn’t love me.

Later, when Mia leaves and meets Laz outside, I watch them through a gap in the curtains. They’re not even touching, they’re being so careful not to get caught, but I see how much love and desire burns between them.

I go back and pour myself another glass of wine, playing the evening over and over in my mind. Laz and Mia are like Romeo and Juliet. Forbidden and intense. I swallow down my envy and misery along with the wine. Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve finished the whole bottle.

When my fertileperiod comes again, I feel sick to my stomach at the thought of passionless, robotic sex with Nero. I haven’t made any effort to leave my husband, so I suppose that deep down I don’t want to. I text him that I’m ovulating, and that night we endure our monthly ritual. I can tell that he hates it as much as I do. Once it’s over, I can hear him showering in his bathroom while I lie there with my legs propped up, waiting for his semen to take.

A few days later I’m emptying the dirty laundry hamper in Nero’s bedroom when something falls out of the pocket of a pair of his discarded trousers and rolls against my foot. I pick it up. It’s a yellow plastic pill bottle, and it’s a quarter full. There’s no sticker on the side saying the name of the drug, so I tip some of the pills out onto my hand and examine them. They’re blue, diamond-shaped pills, stamped with the logo of a drug company. I open the browser on my phone and search the name and description of the pill, and the drug name appears immediately.

Viagra.

My husband needs Viagra.

Did Nero always use Viagra? Once he took my hand and pressed it against his erection, saying,Feel what you do to me, baby. I want you so much.It’s one of my most treasured memories of him, but now I wonder if it was a lie.

I trawl through the memories of our brief courtship, and the moment that I keep coming back to is our wedding. Nero could blow hot and cold, but the moment he left our wedding reception seems like when the line was drawn. Later that night when he entered the bridal suite, he’d changed. What happened to my husband in those intervening hours? I wonder if he got hurt during the fight with Paul Shields in some way that he’s not telling me, or if he discovered a secret that rattled him to his core. I know so little about my husband and his past. I’ve met none of his family, and I don’t even know if he has any friends. Could he have suffered some kind of psychological damage or physical assault that’s made him unable to enjoy sex? Perhaps he found out something terrible about his parents, like his mother was raped and he’s the result. That kind of revelation could damage a man. Or maybe he had a mentor that he trusted like a father, and he was betrayed. Maybe Nero himself was raped, which is a heartbreaking thought. I go over and over the possibilities, weighing each one against my husband’s secretive behavior, but I have no idea what the truth could be. If Nero trusted me enough, he’d confide in me. Our courtship was a test about whether I was a trustworthy person, and I failed.

I put the pills and laundry back where I found them and pretend I never saw them.

Over the next few days, I do an excellent job of forgetting all about the little blue pills until a terrible thought occurs to me. What if the Viagra isn’t for me?

That thought sends me into another tailspin. Is he having an affair? The sex between us is nothing like the sex I know hecraves. Nero could be popping these pills and going to town on some beautiful, willing woman who isn’t me.

I’m driving mindlessly home from the store the following day, sunk in my miserable thoughts, when I see Nero passing me in the other direction. I’m not on the right street, and I should make a left if I want to head home, but instead, I make a U-turn and follow my husband. I follow him across town without really knowing why I’m doing it.

Nero visits one of his clubs. He strides confidently inside, and a few hours later, he leaves again, exchanging a few words with one of the bouncers as he goes.

The next morning after he leaves the house, I go into his bedroom, seize his crumpled shirt from his laundry basket, and bury my nose in it. No woman’s perfume. No suspicious receipts in his pockets. I feel like there’s something important I’m missing. Something he’s hiding from me that I have to discover.

So I keep tailing him. To and from his office. To his clubs where he meets with his business associates. I only ever see him with men. Is he having an affair with a man? I focus my attention on watching him through the windows of bars and restaurants, but he never touches anyone, and his gaze never lingers on anyone, man or woman.

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