It’s like I have surpassed opening Verity’s underwear drawer, and now I’m rummaging around among the silk and lace. I am well aware that I shouldn’t be reading this. This is not why I came here. But…
I slide the manuscript onto the couch next to me, and I stare at it. I have so many questions about Verity. Questions I can’t ask her and questions Jeremy probably doesn’t feel like answering. I need to get to know her better to see how her mind works, and you can’t get more answers from any other source like you can from an autobiography. One this brutally honest.
I can see myself getting sidetracked by this, and I really shouldn’t. I’m here to find what I need and get out of this family’s hair. They’ve been through enough and don’t need an intruder touching their underwear.
I walk over to the monster desk and pick up my phone. It’s already after eleven. I arrived around seven this evening, but I didn’t expect it to be this late already. I didn’t even hear anything outside of this office. Like it’s soundproof.
Hell, it probably is. If I could afford to work in a soundproof office, I would.
I’m hungry.
It’s an awkward feeling, being hungry in a house you aren’t familiar with. I know Jeremy said to help myself, so I head for the kitchen.
I don’t make it far. I pause right when I open the office door.
The office is definitely soundproof, or I would have heard this noise. It’s coming from upstairs, and I have to still myself completely to focus on it. To pray it’s not at all what it sounds like.
I move quietly and cautiously to the foot of the stairs, and sure enough, the sound seems to be coming from the direction of Verity’s room. It’s the creaking of a bed. Repetitive creaking, like the sound a bed would make if a man were on top of a woman.
Oh, my God. I cover my mouth with unsteady fingers. No, no, no!
I read an article about this once. A woman was injured in a car wreck and was in a coma. She lived in a nursing facility and her husband came to visit her every day. The staff became suspicious that he was having sex with her despite her being in a coma, so they set up hidden cameras. The man was arrested for rape because his wife was unable to give consent.
Much like Verity.
I should do something. But what?
“It’s noisy, I know.”
I gasp and spin around, coming face to face with Jeremy. “I can turn it off if it bothers you,” he says.
“You scared me.” My voice is full of breath. I blow out a sigh of relief, knowing that whatever I’m hearing is not at all what I thought it was. Jeremy looks over my shoulder, up at where the noise is coming from.
“It’s her hospital bed. It’s on a timer every two hours to lift different parts of her mattress. Takes weight off her pressure points.”
I can feel the embarrassment creeping up my neck. I pray to God he doesn’t know what I thought that noise was. I cover my chest with my hand to hide the redness I know is there. I’m fair skinned, and anytime I get nervous or worked up or embarrassed, my skin tells on me, erupting in angry red splotches. I wish I could sink into the lush, rich-people carpet and disappear.
I clear my throat. “They make beds like that?” I could have used one when my mother was on hospice. It was hell trying to move her on my own. “Yeah, but they’re obscenely expensive. Several thousand for a brand
new one, and insurance wouldn’t even cover it.” I choke on that price.
“I’m heating up leftovers,” he says. “You hungry?” “I was just on my way to the kitchen, actually.” Jeremy walks backward. “It’s pizza.”
“Perfect.” I hate pizza.
The microwave timer goes off right when Jeremy reaches it. He pulls out a plate of pizza and hands it to me, then makes himself another plate. “How’s it going in there?”
“Good,” I say. I grab a bottle of water out of the fridge and take a seat at the table. “You were right, though. There’s a lot. It’s gonna take me a couple of days.”
He leans against the counter as he waits for his pizza to finish. “Do you work better at night?”
“Yeah. I stay up pretty late and then sleep in most mornings. I hope that’s not an issue.”
“Not at all. I’m actually a night owl, too. Verity’s nurse leaves in the evenings and comes back at seven in the morning, so I stay up until midnight and give Verity her nighttime medications. Nurse takes over when she gets here.” He grabs his plate from the microwave and sits across from me at the table.
I can’t even make eye contact with him. All I can think of when I look at him is the part of Verity’s manuscript I read where she mentioned his hand was between her legs at the Steak ’n Shake. God, I shouldn’t have read that. Now I’ll be blushing every time I look in his direction. He has really nice hands, too, which doesn’t help the situation.
I need to change the direction of my thoughts. Like now.
“Did she ever talk with you about the series she was writing? Like what she had planned for the characters? The ending?”
“If she did, I can’t remember,” he says, looking down at his plate. He absentmindedly moves around a slice of pizza. “Before her car wreck, it had been a while since she’d written anything. Or even talked about writing.”
“How long ago was her wreck?” I already know the answer, but I don’t want him to know I Googled his family’s history.
“Not long after Harper died. She was in a medically induced coma for a while, then went into an intense rehabilitation center for several weeks. She’s only been home for a few weeks now.” He takes another bite. I feel bad for talking about it, but he doesn’t seem put off by the conversation.
“Before my mother died, I was her only caregiver. I don’t have any siblings, so I know it isn’t easy.”
“It isn’t easy,” he says in agreement. “I’m sorry about your mother, by the way. I’m not sure I said that when you told me about it in the coffee shop bathroom.”
I smile at him, but say nothing else about it. I don’t want him to ask about her. I want the focus to remain on him and Verity.
My mind keeps going back to the manuscript, because even though I know very little about the man sitting across from me, I almost feel as
though I know him. At the very least, I know him the way Verity described him.
I’m curious to know what kind of marriage they had, and why she ended the first chapter with the sentence she chose. “Until he discovered the one thing that meant more to him than I did.”
The sentence is ominous. It’s almost as if she were setting up the next chapter to reveal some terrible, dark secret about this man. Or maybe it was a writing strategy, and she’s going to say he’s a saint and that their children mean more to him than she did.
Whatever it means, I’m dying to read the next chapter now that I’m staring at him. And I hate that I have so many other things that should be my focus right now, but all I want to do is curl up and read about Jeremy and Verity’s marriage. It makes me feel a little pathetic.
It’s probably not even about them. I know a writer who admitted she uses her husband’s name in every manuscript until she can come up with a name for her character. Maybe that’s what Verity does. Maybe it was just another work of fiction, and Jeremy’s name was only there as a placeholder.
I guess there’s only one way to find out if what I read was true. “How did you and Verity meet?”
Jeremy pops a pepperoni in his mouth and grins. “At a party,” he says, leaning back in his chair. Finally, he doesn’t look sad for once. “She was wearing the most amazing dress I’d ever seen. It was red, and so long that it dragged on the floor a little bit. God, she was beautiful,” he says with a hint of wistfulness. “We left the party together. When I walked outside, I saw a limousine parked out front, so I opened the door and we climbed inside and talked a little. Until the driver showed up and I had to admit the limousine wasn’t mine.”
I’m not supposed to know any of this, so I force a laugh. “It wasn’t yours?”
“No. I just wanted to impress her. We had to make an escape after that because the driver was pretty pissed.” He’s still smiling, like he’s right back in that night with Verity and her fuckable red dress. “We were inseparable after that.”
It’s hard for me to smile for him. For them. Seeing how happy they seemed back then, and then looking at what their life turned into. I wonder if her autobiography explains in detail how they got from point A to point
B. At the beginning of it, she mentions Chastin’s death. Which means she
wrote it, or at least added to it, after that first huge tragedy. I wonder how long she’s been working on it?
“Was Verity already an author when you met her?”
“No, she was still in grad school. It was later, when I had to take a temporary position in Los Angeles for a few months, that she wrote her first book. I think it was her way of passing the time until I came back home. She was passed up by a couple of publishers at first, but once she sold that first manuscript, everything just… It all happened so fast. Our lives changed practically overnight.”
“How did she handle the fame?”
“I think it was harder for me than it was for her.” “Because you like being invisible?”
“Is it that obvious?”
I shrug. “Fellow introvert, here.”
He laughs. “Verity isn’t your typical author. She loves the spotlight. The fancy events. It all makes me uncomfortable. I like being here with the kids.” There’s a very subtle shift in his expression when he realizes he spoke of his girls in the present tense. “With Crew,” he says, correcting himself. He shakes his head and then clasps his hands behind his neck, leaning back like he’s stretching. Or uncomfortable. “It’s hard sometimes— remembering they aren’t here anymore.” His voice is quiet, and he’s staring past me, at nothing. “I still find their hairs on the sofa. Their socks in the dryer. Sometimes I yell out their names when I want to show them something, forgetting they aren’t going to come running down the stairs.”
I watch him closely, because not all of me is convinced yet. I write suspense novels. I know when there are suspicious situations, suspicious people almost always accompany those situations. I’m torn between wanting to find out more about what happened to his girls, and getting out of here as fast as I can.
But right now, I’m not looking at a man who is putting on a show to garner sympathy. I’m looking at a man who’s sharing his thoughts out loud for the first time.
It makes me want to do the same.
“My mother hasn’t been gone that long, but I know what you mean. Every morning that first week, I’d get up and make her breakfast, only to remember she wasn’t there to eat it.”
Jeremy drops his arms to the table. “I wonder how long it lasts. Or if it’ll always be this way.”
“I think time will definitely help, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to entertain the idea of moving. If you’re in a house they’ve never been in, the reminders of them might fade. Not having them around would become your new normal.”
He runs a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “I’m not sure I want a normal where there aren’t traces of Harper and Chastin.”
“Yeah,” I say in agreement. “I wouldn’t either.”
His eyes remain on me, but it’s quiet. Sometimes a look between two people can last so long, it shakes you. Forces you to look away.
So I do.
I look at my plate and run my finger along the scalloped edge of it. His stare felt like it was going far past my eyes, into my thoughts. And even though he doesn’t mean for it to, it feels intimate. When Jeremy’s eyes are on mine, it feels like an exploration of the deepest parts of me.
“I should get back to work,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper.
He’s unmoving for a few seconds, but then sits up straight, quickly scooting back his chair as if he just broke out of a trance. “Yeah,” he says, reaching for our plates as he stands. “I should get Verity’s meds ready.” He walks our plates to the sink, and as I’m exiting the kitchen, he says, “Goodnight, Low.”
When I hear him call me that, my goodnight gets stuck in my throat. I release a flicker of a smile and then walk out of the kitchen, in a hurry to get back to Verity’s office.
The more time I spend in Jeremy’s presence, the more eager I am to dive back into that manuscript and get to know him even better.
I grab it from the couch, turn off the lights in Verity’s office, and take the manuscript to the bedroom with me. There isn’t a lock on the door, so I push a wooden chest from the foot of the bed all the way to the door, blocking it off.
I’m exhausted after traveling the entire day, and I still need to shower, but I can fit in at least one more chapter before I sleep.
I have to.
 |
 |
I could write entire novels about the first two years we dated, but they wouldn’t sell. There wasn’t enough drama between Jeremy and me. Hardly any fighting at all. No tragedies to write about. Just two years of saccharine love and adoration between the two of us.
I. Was. Taken. By. Him.
Addicted to him.
I’m not sure it was healthy—how codependent I was. Still am, really. But when a person finds someone who makes all the negativity in their lives disappear, it’s hard not to feed off that person. I fed off Jeremy in order to keep my soul alive. It was starving and shriveled before I met him, but being in his presence nourished me. Sometimes I felt if I didn’t have him, I couldn’t function.
We had been dating almost two years when he was temporarily transferred to Los Angeles. We had recently moved in together, unofficially. I say unofficially because there was a point when I just stopped going back to my place. Stopped paying the bills, the rent. It wasn’t until two months after I’d completely moved out that Jeremy found out I didn’t have my own apartment anymore.
He had suggested I move in with him one night, during sex. He does that sometimes. Makes huge decisions about our lives together while he’s fucking me.
“Move in with me,” he said, thrusting slowly into me. He lowered his mouth to mine. “Break your lease.”
“I can’t,” I whispered.
He stopped moving and pulled back to look down on me. “Why not?”
I lowered my hands to his ass and made him start moving again. “Because I broke my lease two months ago.”
He stilled inside me, staring down at me with those intense green eyes and lashes so black, I expected to taste licorice when I kissed them. “We
already live together?” he asked.
I nodded, but realized he wasn’t reacting the way I’d hoped he’d react.
He seemed blindsided.
I needed to fix things—to take over and sidetrack him. Make him realize it wasn’t that big of a deal. “I thought I told you.”
He pulled out of me, and it felt like a punishment. “You did not tell me we’re living together. That’s something I would have remembered.”
I sat up and positioned myself so that I was on my knees right in front of him, face to face with him. I ran my fingernails across both sides of his jaw and brought my mouth close to his. “Jeremy,” I whispered. “I haven’t spent a night away from you in six months. We’ve lived together for a while now.” I grabbed his shoulders and then pushed him onto his back. His head met the pillow, and I wanted to lie on top of him and kiss him, but he seemed a little angry with me. Like he wanted to talk about this subject I considered closed.
I didn’t want to talk anymore. I just wanted him to make me come.
So, I straddled his face and lowered myself onto his tongue. When I felt his hands grip my ass, pulling me closer to his mouth, my head rolled back for a delicious moment. This is why I moved in with you, Jeremy.
I leaned forward, gripped his headboard, and then bit down on it, stifling my screams.
And that was that.
I was happier than I’d ever been until he was transferred. Sure, it was only temporary, but you can’t take away someone’s only means of survival and expect them to function on their own.
That’s how I felt, anyway—like the only nourishment for my soul had been ripped from me. Sure, I got small bouts of replenishment when he’d call me or FaceTime me, but those nights alone in our bed were grueling.
Sometimes, I would straddle my pillow and bite down on the headboard while I touched myself, pretending he was beneath me. But then, after I came, I’d fall back onto an empty bed and stare up at the ceiling, wondering how I’d survived all the years of my life that he hadn’t been a part of.
Those were thoughts I couldn’t admit to him, of course. I might have been obsessed with him, but a woman knows if she wants to keep a man forever, she has to act like she could get over him in a day.
And that is when I became a writer.
My days were filled with thoughts of Jeremy, and if I didn’t figure out how to fill them with thoughts of something else until he returned, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hide how much his absence gutted me. I created a fictional Jeremy and called him Lane. When I was missing Jeremy, I’d write a chapter about Lane. My life over those next few months became less about Jeremy and more about my character. Who was, in a sense, still Jeremy. But writing about it instead of obsessing about it felt more productive.
I wrote an entire novel in the few months he was gone. When he showed up at our front door to surprise me with his return home, I had just finished editing the final page.
It was kismet.
I congratulated him with a blowjob. It was the first time I swallowed.
That’s how happy I was to see him.
I acted like a lady after I swallowed, smiling up at him. He was still standing by the front door, fully clothed, other than the jeans that were now down to his knees. I stood up and kissed him on the cheek and said, “Be right back.”
When I got to the bathroom, I locked the door, turned on the water in the sink, and then puked in the toilet. When I let him come in my mouth, I had no idea how much there would be. How long I would have to continue swallowing. Keeping my composure was tough while his dick was in my throat, drowning me.
I brushed my teeth and then returned to the bedroom, where I found him sitting at my desk. He had a couple of pages of my manuscript in his hands.
“Did you write this?” he asked, spinning in my desk chair to face me.
“Yes, but I don’t want you to read it.” I could feel my palms beginning to sweat, so I wiped them across my stomach and walked toward him. He stood up as I launched myself forward to snatch the pages from him. He held them over his head, too high for me to reach.
“Why can’t I read it?”
I jumped, trying to pull his arm down so I could reach the pages. “It needs work.”
“That’s fine,” he said, backing up a step. “But I still want to read it.” “I don’t want you to read it.”
He gathered the rest of the manuscript and tucked it to his chest. He was going to read it, and all I could think about was stopping him. I didn’t know
if it was any good, and I was scared—terrified—that it would make him love me less if he thought I was a bad writer. I dove across the bed to try and reach him faster, but he slipped into my bathroom and locked the door.
I beat on it.
“Jeremy!” I yelled. No answer.
He ignored more for ten minutes as I tried to pry open the door with a credit card. A bobby pin. Promises of another blowjob.
Fifteen more minutes went by before he made a noise. “Verity?”
I was on the floor at this point, my back pressed against the bathroom door. “What?”
“It’s good.”
I didn’t respond.
“Really good. I am so proud of you.” I smiled.
It was my first taste of what it felt like for a reader to enjoy what I had created for them. That one comment—that sweet, simple comment—made me want him to finish reading it. I left him alone after that. I went to our bed, crawled under the covers, and fell asleep with a smile on my face.
He woke me up two hours later. His lips were skimming my shoulder, his fingers tracing an invisible line down my waist, over my hip. He was behind me, curved around me, molded to me. I had missed him so much.
“Are you awake?” he whispered.
I made a soft moaning sound to let him know I was.
He kissed a spot below my ear, and then he said, “You’re fucking brilliant.” I don’t think I’ve ever smiled so big. He rolled me onto my back and swept my hair out of my face. “I hope you’re ready.”
“For what?” I asked. “Fame.”
I laughed, but he didn’t. He pulled off his pants and removed my panties. After he pushed into me, he said, “Do you think I’m kidding?” He kissed me, then continued. “Your writing is going to make you famous. Your mind is incredible. If I could fuck it, I would.”
My laughter was mixed with a moan as he continued to make love to me. “Are you saying that because you believe it? Or because you love me?”
He didn’t answer right away. His moves became slow and deliberate.
His stare was intense. “Marry me, Verity.”
I didn’t react, because I thought maybe I had misheard him. Did he really just ask me to marry him? I could tell by the intensity in his expression that he was more in love with me in that moment than he’d ever been before. I should have said yes immediately, because that’s where my heart was. But instead, I said, “Why?”
“Because,” he said, grinning. “I’m your biggest fan.”
I laughed, but then his smile disappeared and he started to fuck me. Hard, fast thrusts that he knew would drive me crazy. The headboard was slapping against the wall, and the pillow beneath my head was slipping. “Marry me,” he pleaded again, and then his tongue was in my mouth, and it was the first real kiss we’d shared in months.
We needed each other so badly in that moment, our bodies were making it difficult for our mouths to stay aligned, so the kiss was sloppy and painful and “Okay,” I whispered.
“Thank you,” he said in the middle of a sigh, his words full of more breath than voice. He continued to fuck me, his fiancée, until we were covered in sweat, and I could taste blood in my mouth where he had accidentally bitten my lip. Or maybe I’d bitten his. I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter because his blood was my blood now.
When he finally came, he did it inside me, without a condom, while his tongue was in my mouth and his breath was sliding down my throat and my eternity was entwined with his.
When he was finished, he reached to the floor for his jeans. He crawled back on top of me and lifted my hand, then slipped a ring on my finger.
He’d planned to ask me all along.
I didn’t even look at the ring. I brought my hands up over my head and closed my eyes, because his hand was between my legs and I knew he wanted to watch me come.
So I did.
For two months, we looked back on that night as the night we got engaged. For two months, I would grin every time I looked at my ring. For two months, I would tear up when I thought about what our wedding would be like. What our wedding night would be like.
But then the night we got engaged became the night we conceived.
And here is where it gets real. The guts of my autobiography. This is the point when other authors would paint themselves in a better light, rather than throw themselves into an X-ray machine.
But there is no light where we’re going. This is your final warning.
Darkness ahead.
