Page 40 of Absolution

“I don’t need anything from you except for your ass to get out of my home.”

“I guess the honeymoon is over then,” I fire back. She screams and finds the nearest object, throwing it at my head. The glass vase whizzes past my head and crashes on the wall next to me. Her chest heaves with exertion and anger as she watches my reaction. My face remains unchanged, and it only infuriates her more.

“Fine, you stay in here with a splitting headache. I’ll be in the kitchen waiting on you to be more reasonable.”

I start for the doorway, but her heavy footfalls soon start after me. She hesitates as we both get to the door at the same time. I wave for her to go on, but she stands her ground. Giving up, I start out the door. She shoves past me in the hallway, and heads straight for the newly stocked freezer. While she may not have an interest in cooking, a week’s worth of bar food has taken its toll on me. She was shocked the first night she came home from the bar, and I had a home-cooked meal on the table waiting for her. I may not look like much from an outside perspective, but life has dealt me out many lessons learned, including how to cook decent meals.

I lean against the edge of the hallway as she makes a show of getting the frozen bag of peas and slapping them to her head. She winces at the change in temperature and contact. Pushing away from the wall, I go to her side. The bag balances against her head as she inhales and exhales trying to soothe herself.

“Give me that,” I advise, removing the bag. A towel dangles from the front door of the old stove and I snatch it. The bag is too cold, and the shock of it against her already inflamed skin isn’t going to do her any favors. Wrapping the towel around the bag, I gently re-lay it against her head.

“That’s better,” she comments, leaning into my hand. “How did you know how do to do that?”

“Life skills, Siren. One of far too many I had to learn the hard way.”

I give her a few minutes to soothe the bump on her head, before I take her by the hand and lead her toward the couch. The feverish anger that she had earlier still lingers under the surface, and what I’m about to tell her is going to make it go either of two ways. She’ll understand or she’ll explode into a million, tiny pieces. I’m hoping for the latter to not be the case.

She lowers herself down, but I decide that it’s probably better if I am not within striking distance, so I take the chair that I found buried in one of the other rooms across from the couch.

“I know you’re mad,” I start, but she instantly cuts me off.

“Mad doesn’t even begin to cover it, Ratchet. It isn’t even in the same ballpark. How in the fuck are we married?”

“When two people love each other very much,” I tease, before she glares me into stopping. Okay, leading in with a joke didn’t go over as well as I thought it would.

“Cut the bullshit. How did this happen without my knowledge? I may not have the best idea of how normal people live their lives, but isn’t there supposed to be a white dress and a church?”

“Yes, that’s the gist of it. You can probably guess as to the how portion.”

“Fucking Voodoo,” she growls. “He hacked the system, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but at my request. Do you remember that stack of papers I had you sign earlier in the week? Most of that was about the truck, but one of them was a marriage license.”

“I signed what!” she shrills loud enough to make me wince in reaction.

“Let me get this straight,” she says, pulling the bag away from her head. Her hand rubs across her face as she tries to grasp what I just told her.

“You took it upon yourself to obtain a marriage license, have me unwillingly sign it, and then had Voodoo hack the system to upload it. Do I have that right?”

“Yes, that’s about it.”

“How did I not know this was going on? This whole thing took serious planning and you did it right under my nose,” she spills out. “It doesn’t make sense. Not one bit of sense.”

“Siren, please understand that I did this all for you. Should I have involved you first? Yes, but there’s nothing that I can do to take that back. It’s done.” Hard truth, it is. “We’re married because you needed a husband to help your case for Asher.”

She sighs and looks away from me. My heart breaks knowing that I have done this to her, but it was only in the idea that it was all to help her. The impulse to protect her has been engrained in me from the moment that I saw her at Red’s, and this situation has only made it worse. My heart beats and soul yearns for her happiness, and along the way, I still find ways to continually fuck it all up.

“What I did was reckless. That I fully admit. But without that piece of paper, you may have never even gotten a chance to meet Asher. The adoption system isn’t as easy as it looks, and I wanted to give you the best chance possible. With our marriage, it shoves your chances from slim to none to a strong maybe.”

“How do you even know this? Did you go buy a book on How to Trick a Woman into Marriage to Help Adopt a Child?”

“I lived it, Siren. My history and your brother’s share a similar plot line. I was raised in the system, and that system ended up putting me on the street with nothing to eat, no roof over my head, and no way to survive. Had it not been for Jagger, I would have died there a nameless child that was the product of an even more fucked up family. Your brother is getting a chance to avoid the fate that I had, and if I had to do this all over again, I would because his life is worth more to you than the piece of paper binding us together.”

A flash of understanding flashes behind her eyes giving me a bit of hope, but the wheels of her mind continue to turn trying to process this.

“Is our marriage even legal? If the courts find out that it’s a fake, they’ll throw us both in jail.”

“It’s not a fake Siren, it’s completely legal. While we may not have said the words in front of a preacher, both of our names on the dotted line make it that way. In the eyes of the law, we are husband and wife until death do us part.”

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