I never fell back asleep, which is why I’m pouring my second cup of coffee and it’s just after eight in the morning.
I stand at the sink, staring out the window. It started raining around five o’clock this morning while I was in my bed with Jeremy, pretending to be asleep.
April’s car pulls up into the muddy drive as I’m staring out the window.
I wonder if Jeremy will tell her what happened.
I haven’t seen him this morning. I assume he’s upstairs, where he usually remains until April arrives. I don’t want to be in the kitchen when April walks in, so I turn to head toward my office. I unexpectedly bump into Jeremy, but he cushions the blow by taking a step back and grabbing my shoulders. Thank goodness because it saves my precious coffee from spilling.
He looks tired, but I can’t judge him for that since it’s my fault. “Good morning,” he says it like it’s anything but.
“Morning.” I’m whispering. I don’t know why.
He moves so that he’s right next to me, leaning in as if to shield anyone from hearing what he’s about to say. “How would you feel if I put a lock on your bedroom door?”
His question confuses me. “You already did.” “On the outside of the door,” he clarifies.
Oh.
“I can lock it after you go to sleep. Open it before you wake up. If you ever need out, you can text me, call me, and I’ll open it in two seconds. But I think you’ll sleep better, knowing you can’t leave the room.”
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t know why it feels more drastic than a lock on the inside of the door, when they’d both be used for the same purpose: to keep me in my room. Even though the thought of it
makes me uncomfortable, I’d be more uncomfortable knowing I could possibly get out of the room again. “I’d like that. Thank you.”
April enters the house, pausing when she passes the kitchen. Jeremy is still looking at me, ignoring her presence. “I feel like you need to take a break today.”
I look away from April, back to Jeremy. “I’d rather stay busy.”
He regards me for a silent moment before nodding in understanding. “Good morning,” April says, kicking her muddy shoes off at the door. “Morning, April.” Jeremy says it so casually, as if he has nothing to
hide. He walks past her, toward the back door. She doesn’t move. She stares at me with her glasses at the tip of her nose.
“Morning, April.” I don’t look as innocent as Jeremy. I head back to Verity’s office and start my day, despite not being able to get over what happened last night.
I spend the morning online, catching up on emails. Corey has forwarded a few interviews, something that’s never been requested of me. A lot of the questions are similar, wanting to know why Verity hired me, what I plan to bring to the table, how my past experience has put me in the position to write for her. I copy and paste a lot of the answers.
After lunch, I focus on developing an outline for the seventh book. I’ve given up on finding one, so I work on building the novel from scratch. It’s hard because I’m exhausted from last night. I’m unsettled. But I try not to think about last night.
It’s afternoon when I smell tacos. It makes me smile, knowing he’s making them because I requested them. I’m sure he’ll save me a plate like he always does. I’m just not in a position where I feel comfortable eating dinner with them when April has Verity at the table.
I spend the next several minutes thinking about Verity, wondering why I’m so scared of her. I stare down at the drawer that contains her manuscript. One more chapter and I’ll stop. That’s it.
 |
 |
It had been six months since they were born, and I still wished they didn’t exist.
But they did, and Jeremy loved them. So I tried. Sometimes I wondered if it was worth it. Sometimes I wanted to pack my bags and leave and never look back. He was the only thing stopping me from going through with it. I knew a life without Jeremy was not a life I wanted to live. I had two options:
Live with him and the two girls he loved more than me. Live without him.
They were a package deal at that point. I hate myself for not using birth control. For thinking I could do this and everything would be alright. Everything was not alright. Not with me anyway. It was like my family existed in a snow globe. Inside, everything was cozy and perfect, but I wasn’t a part of them; I was just an outsider looking in.
It was snowing outside that night, but the apartment was warm. Even still, I woke up with chills. Or tremors, really. I couldn’t stop shaking. The nightmare I’d had was so vivid, I felt the effects of it for hours after I woke up. A nightmare hangover.
I dreamt of the future, of the girls and Jeremy and me. They were eight or nine years old. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know a lot about kids and what they look like at each stage. I just remember waking up and feeling like they were eight or nine.
In the dream, I was walking by their bedroom. I peeked inside and couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Harper was on top of Chastin, covering her head with a pillow. I rushed over to the bed, terrified that it was too late. I pushed Harper off her sister and pulled the pillow away. I looked down at Chastin and then slapped my hand over my mouth with a gasp.
There was nothing there. The front of Chastin’s face was smooth, like the back of a bald head. No scar. No eyes, no mouth. Nothing to smother.
I glanced at Harper, taking in her sinister expression. “What did you
do?”
And then I woke up.
My reaction wasn’t to the dream. It was to how much it felt like a premonition. And how much it gutted me.
I hugged my knees, rocking back and forth on the bed, wondering what this feeling was. Pain. It was pain. And…heartache.
I had felt heartache in my dream? When I thought Chastin was dead, I wanted to fall to my knees and weep. It’s exactly how I felt when I thought of the possibility of Jeremy dying. I would lose all function.
I sat there and cried, the feeling was so overwhelming. Had I finally connected to them? To Chastin, at least? Was this what it felt like to be a mother? To love something so much, the thought of it being ripped away from you causes physical pain?
It was the most I had ever felt since the girls had been conceived. Even if I only felt it for one of them, it still counted for something.
Jeremy rolled over in the bed. He opened his eyes and saw me sitting up, hugging my knees. “You okay?”
I didn’t want him to ask me that because Jeremy was good at getting my thoughts out. Most of them, anyway. I didn’t want him to know this one. How could I admit that I’d finally fallen in love with one of our daughters without also admitting I had never loved either of them to begin with?
I had to do something. Preoccupy him so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. I knew from experience that Jeremy couldn’t get the truth out of me if I had his dick in my mouth.
I crawled down him, and by the time I was positioned over him, my mouth ready to work, he was already hard. I took as much of him as I could take.
I loved it when he moaned. He was a quiet lover, but sometimes, when I really caught him off guard, he wasn’t so quiet. In that moment, he was euphoric. And I wondered, before I came along, how many other women had coaxed noises out of him? How many other pairs of lips had been wrapped around his dick?
I let him slide out of my mouth. “How many women have sucked your dick?”
He lifted up onto his elbows and looked down at me, perplexed. “Are you serious?”
“More like curious.”
He laughed, dropping his head back to the pillow. “I don’t know. I’ve never counted.”
“That many?” I teased. I climbed up his body and straddled him. I liked it when he jerked beneath me and gripped my thighs. “If it’s not an immediate answer, that means it’s more than five.”
“Definitely more than five,” he said. “More than ten?”
“Maybe. Possibly. Yes.”
It’s odd how that didn’t make me jealous, but two infants could leave me seething. Maybe it was because the girls were currently in his life, but all his past whores were just that…in the past.
“More than twenty?”
He raised his hands to my breasts and cupped them. Squeezed them. He was getting that look on his face that was my cue I was about to be fucked. Hard. “That’s probably a good estimate,” he whispered, pulling me to him. He brought his lips close to mine and stuck a hand between us, rubbing me. “How many guys have licked your pussy?”
“Two. I’m not a whore like you.”
He laughed against my lips and then rolled me onto my back. “But you’re in love with a whore.”
“A former whore,” I clarified.
I had been wrong about the look he had gotten in his eye. He didn’t fuck me that night. He made love to me. Kissed every inch of my body. Made me lie still while he teased me and tortured me, when all I wanted to do was suck his dick. Every time I tried to move, to take over, he would stop me.
I don’t know why I got so much pleasure out of pleasing him, but I liked it more than being pleased. That’s probably defined in the love languages or some bullshit. My love language was acts of service. Jeremy’s love language was getting his dick sucked. We were a perfect match.
He was moments from climax when one of the girls started crying. He groaned, and I rolled my eyes, and we both reached for the monitor. Him to look at them. Me to turn it off.
I could feel him growing softer inside me, so I pulled the plug out of the back of the monitor. We could still hear the cries coming from down the
hallway, but I was certain I could drown them out if he’d just resume where we left off.
“I’ll go check,” he said, trying to roll off me. I pulled him back to the bed and climbed on top of him.
“I’ll go when you finish. Let her cry for a few minutes. It’s good for them.”
He didn’t seem comfortable with that, but once my mouth was back on his dick, he accepted it.
I’d gotten so much better at swallowing compared to the first time I attempted it. I could feel him ready to come, so I pretended I was gagging. I don’t know why, but that always set him off, thinking I was choking on his cock. Men. He groaned, and I forced him farther down my throat with another gurgling sound, and then it was over. I swallowed, wiped my mouth, and then stood up. “Go to sleep. I can deal with it.”
I actually wanted to deal with it this time. It was the first time I’d ever felt anything other than irritation at the thought of having to feed them. But I wanted to feed Chastin. Hold her, cuddle her, love her. I was excited when I approached their bedroom.
But that excitement turned to irritation as soon as I saw that it was Harper who was crying.
How disappointing.
Their cribs were head to head, and I was surprised Chastin was sleeping through Harper’s screams. I walked past Harper and looked down at Chastin.
It hurt how much I felt for her in that moment. It hurt how much I wanted Harper to shut up.
I lifted Chastin out of her crib and carried her to the rocking chair. When I sat down with her, she stirred in my arms. I thought about my dream and how terrified I was to see Harper trying to hurt her. I thought I might cry just from the thought of losing her someday. At the thought of it all one day possibly coming true.
Maybe what I felt was mother’s intuition. Maybe, deep down, I knew something terrible was going to happen to Chastin, and that’s why I had been given that immense and sudden love for her. What if it was the universe’s way of telling me to love that baby girl as much and as hard as I possibly could, because I wouldn’t have her for as long as I would have Harper?
Maybe that was why I felt nothing for Harper yet. Because Chastin was the one whose life was going to be cut short. She would die, and then Harper would be the only one left.
I knew, somewhere inside me, I must have been burying the love I had for Harper. Saving it for after my time with Chastin.
I squeezed my eyes shut, getting a headache from Harper’s screaming.
Shut the fuck up! Crying, crying, crying! I’m trying to bond with my baby!
I tried to ignore it for a few more minutes, but I was afraid it would concern Jeremy. I eventually put Chastin back in her bed, surprised she was still asleep. She really is a good baby. I moved to Harper’s crib and looked down at her, filling with anger. It somehow felt like her fault that I’d had the dream.
Maybe I was misinterpreting my dream. Maybe it wasn’t a premonition. Maybe it was a warning. If I didn’t do something about Harper before it was too late, Chastin would die.
I suddenly had this overwhelming urge to rectify what I knew was going to happen. Never in all my life had a dream been that vivid to me. I felt if I didn’t do something about it in that moment, it would come true any day. For the first time, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Chastin. It hurt almost as much as the thought of losing Jeremy.
I didn’t know anything about ending a life, much less the life of an infant. The one time I’d tried, it resulted in nothing more than a scratch. But I’d heard of SIDS. Jeremy had made me read about it. It’s not uncommon, but I didn’t know enough about it to know if they would be able to tell a difference between suffocation and SIDS.
I’d heard of people choking in their sleep on their own vomit, though.
That would probably be harder to declare an intentional act.
I touched my finger to Harper’s lips. Her head moved back and forth quickly, thinking it was a bottle. She latched on and began sucking the tip of my finger, but she wasn’t satisfied. She released my finger and started screaming again. Kicking. I shoved my finger farther into her mouth.
She was still crying, so I continued to shove. She made a gasping sound, but was somehow still crying. Maybe one finger wasn’t enough.
I pushed two fingers into her mouth and throat, until my knuckles were pressed against her gums and she was no longer crying. I watched her for a moment, and soon, her arms began to stiffen between each violent jerk of her little body. Her legs locked up.
This is what she would have done to her sister if I hadn’t done it to her first. I’m saving Chastin’s life.
“She okay?” Jeremy asked.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I pulled my fingers out of Harper’s mouth and picked her up, pressing her face into my chest so Jeremy couldn’t hear her gasping for air. “I don’t know,” I said, turning to him. He was making his way across the room. My voice was frantic. “I can’t make her happy. I’ve tried everything.” I was petting the back of her head, attempting to show him how concerned I was.
That’s when she puked on me. As soon as she puked, she screamed. Wailed. Her voice sounded hoarse, and she was gasping between screams. It was a cry like neither of us had ever heard before. Jeremy quickly grabbed her, pulling her from me so he could try to soothe her.
He didn’t even care that she had puked on me. He didn’t even look up at me. He was full of concern, his eyebrows drawn together, his forehead wrinkled as he inspected her. But out of all that concern he held, none of it was for me. It was only pointed in Harper’s direction.
I held my breath and walked straight to the bathroom, afraid to breathe in the smell. It was the one thing I hated most about being a mother. All the fucking vomit.
While I was in the bathroom, Jeremy made Harper a bottle. By the time I got out of the shower, she’d already fallen back to sleep. He was in our bed, plugging the video monitor back in.
I froze as I was climbing into bed. I stared at the video monitor, at the perfect view right into Harper and Chastin’s cribs.
How did I forget the fucking monitor?
If he had seen what I was doing to Harper, he would have ended it with
me.
How could I have been so careless?
I slept very little that night, wondering what Jeremy would have done to
me had he caught me trying to save Chastin from her sister.
