Page 17 of The Auction
It wasn’t until I came home from a town run to find several large packages lined up on the porch that I actually felt the presence of Creed in my world.
Two men were hauling a mattress out the front door and throwing it in the back of a delivery truck. Done with that, they then pulled out a new mattress wrapped in plastic.
Creed was supervising the move.
“What’s this?”
He turned to look at me like he’d almost forgotten what I sounded like.
“She talks,” he said.
“Explain.”
“I’ve given you a week to…grieve, I guess. Is that what you’ve been doing? Anyway, it’s enough time. I’m moving into my bedroom.”
“Your bedroom?”
“Your father’s bedroom. It’s the biggest in the house and it has an attached bathroom. I own this house now, so yeah, it’s my bedroom.”
“My father died in that bedroom!”
It wasn’t that I believed in ghosts or anything, but that room smelled like death, morphine, and antiseptic. Who would want to claim it?
“I know. That’s why I’ve had the windows open all morning to air it out and I’m replacing the mattress. Go head, guys,” he said, directing the delivery men. “Back of the house, the bedroom on the right.”
Instantly, I was furious.
“You need help bringing in the groceries?”
I stomped up to the porch looking at the brown boxes stacked up. “What is all this?”
He came up behind me. “A new desktop I thought we could share. A television for the living room. I checked it out and you can stream just about anything as long as you have WIFI, including live sports. This is just a start, though. I did an assessment of all the kitchen appliances and there’s nothing in there that isn’t over twenty years old. All of it will need to be upgraded.”
I reached up to grab my hair with the idea that I mightrip all of it out. “You can’t do this! This is my house, my home. I say what stays and what goes. And you don’t get to just take what bedroom you want!”
I was shouting. Screaming at the top of my lungs. I could see the two delivery guys scrambling out the front door as if they knew I was about to pop off like a rocket and didn’t want to be around to see the fireworks.
My chest felt tight, like I couldn’t breathe right. I started taking shorter breaths, but that didn’t help. Soon I was panting and I could see spots in front of my eyes. This had never happened to me before. Was I dying? Was this some type of heart attack? Had this been Creed’s plan all along? To take what was mine and let me die of absolute frustration at my lack of agency?
His arms wrapped around me from behind and my first instinct was to fight him. I aimed my sneaker covered foot at his shin, but whatever feeble blows I landed, did nothing to stop him. He pulled me inside the house to the living room. and sat on the couch with me on his lap. Wrapped in his embrace like he was a fucking anaconda, I assumed he was trying to smother me to death.
Then I felt his chest rising and falling. Rising and falling against my back.
“Deep breath in,” he said. Then did it. “Deep breath out,” he said. Then did it.
Again and again until I picked up his pattern.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
The black spots in front of my eyes melted away and my pants turned back into normal breaths.
I could feel tears welling up in my eyes but I didn’t want to cry in front of him. Crying would show him weakness and I couldn’t have that. Not if I was going to defeat him.
“You see how wrong this is, don’t you?” I finally said, my voice cracking against my will. “You see what you’ve taken from me?”
“You’re my wife. I haven’t taken anything from you. And if you would let yourself accept that, you would see you’re better off.”
“Better off? With some fucking person I don’t know,” I spat at him over my shoulder. I still couldn’t move my body from his damn embrace. I tried wiggling out of it, but his arms were fucking massive and one squeeze of his biceps let me know I wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe his job in the Navy had been pulling up anchors.
