And that was never supposed to be it. It was supposed to be enough that she keep him happy. That should be enough to make her happy. It could be. It would be.
Why did it feel like it wasn’t?
A tear rolled down her cheek, and he paused, catching it with the corner of his thumb and brushing it away. When he looked at her, his expression was concerned. But she didn’t want him to worry about her. She wanted to fix him.
So she kissed him, hard and deep. And with every ounce of desperation inside of her. To make him feel what she knew he should.
We are going to have a life together. We’re going to have a baby. Please let that be enough for you, please. Please let that be what you want.
She smothered a choked sob as she deepened the kiss, as she let him lift her up off the ground, as she wrapped her legs around him, clinging to him while he lowered them both to the floor.
She jerked his tie loose, ripped open his shirt, moving her hands over as much of his bare chest as she could. While he made quick work of his belt. He opened the front of his pants, not bothering to take any of his clothes off all the way. And he thrust inside of her, deep and hard. His movements erratic and intense. She wanted to take all this, all his rage and his pain and take it down inside her, hold it, take it from him.
She wanted to fix him.
Please. Please. I want to be enough. I want this to be enough.
She didn’t realize she’d whimpered that out loud until he caught her lips with his and swallowed the words. And then he was stroking that sensitive place between her thighs, his thumb sliding over her as he thrust home, and she could think of nothing but her own pleasure. She cried out as it crashed over her, as she shook with the power of her orgasm. And he still wasn’t done. She felt like she had failed somehow. Like she had been meant to serve him, and had ended up taking her own pleasure so greedily she hadn’t done enough. But then he was shouting out his orgasm, and she couldn’t worry about it anymore. She just held him.
But when it was over, and he looked down at her, he didn’t look better. He didn’t look happier.
He looked tortured.
He moved away from her, looking at the casualty of their coming together. “You have to stop this,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“You need to be more careful with your body.”
“I’m not the one who ravished me on the floor.”
“You tempted me,” he said. “Don’t bait the darkness in me, Liliana. You cannot fix it.”
He turned and left her standing there, the table still beautifully appointed with dinner, her dress destroyed in pieces all around her.
“I just want to make you happy,” she said.
“You can’t,” he responded. “I’m not your father for you to spend your life serving, Liliana. You will not find a magic formula to bend me to your will and make me into the man you want me to be. You must stop now. I will not endure it.”
“Don’t make it sound like that. Like I’m being selfish. I am...giving to you.”
“Are you?” he asked, his words like the crack of a whip. “Or are you trying to make me into a tamed thing that you can control as you see fit?”
“I am not.”
“Then what is it you’re trying to do to me, Liliana?”
“I want to make you happy.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.” Desperation clawed at her. “You already know it. Why are you acting surprised?”
“Because I thought you would understand by now, my darling wife, that it doesn’t matter how you feel about me. It isn’t going to change who I am or how I feel.”
“You need me,” she said.
“I desire you,” he said. “For a man like me that is a very different thing.”
“No,” she returned. “It isn’t. It isn’t that. If it was only desire then you wouldn’t still whenever I touched you like you’re a spooked horse who needs a gentle hand.”
“You vastly underestimate the male libido, tesoro. When you put your hand on my arm, I’m imagining it somewhere else on my body. And that is the beginning and end of that.”
“Liar.”
“You’re not the first woman I’ve been fascinated by, Liliana,” he said, his tone sharpening to a knife’s edge. “I was married once before—do not forget it. I imagined myself in love with her, but I’ve since learned the realities of myself. I like soft things. I like beautiful things. And I have never especially cared whether or not they liked me. My wife, Karina, intoxicated me. She fascinated me. Our connection was sexual... It was dark. I wanted that thing she had. That deep, dirty debauchery. I wanted to get it all over me. And I did. But then I did what I do, and the end result was that she was broken.”
“Diego...”
“No,” he said sharply. “You need to listen to this. You need to listen to me. I saw you, and I wanted your light. All that sweetness. You must understand I don’t care if I use it up. I wanted you, and so I captured you. And in the end I will break you too, Liliana. If you allow it. And then I will find the next thing. Because that is the man I am.”
“I don’t think it’s true.”
“No. Because you want to change me. You want to love me so much that I will love you too, because I can’t resist the force of it. But isn’t that what you spent your entire life doing with your father? And didn’t he simply use you as a pawn in the end? Men such as us are what we are. We cannot fight it. And you cannot change it.”
“So you’re telling me that the best I can hope for in life is to be a discarded husk that lives in your house as your wife and doesn’t have your attention?”
“I will not betray our vows. I’m simply telling you what I know to be true about myself.”
“Will you fantasize about other women? Wish that it was them because I’ll never be enough for you?”
“No one and nothing will ever be enough for me, Liliana. Some people are born black holes. And we swallow them. Everything. We take. We don’t give. You will not change me, my dear. Love me all you want, but it will never matter.” He looked around the room. “Did you think a nice dinner was going to change that?”
She had. She had imagined that if she were good enough, if she were strong enough, made him enough dinners and touched him, kissed him, made love with him when he needed it, that he would love her. That he would need her. She was staring down her very worst fear.
She had fallen for him desperately and she didn’t know what she could do to make him—to make him feel the same way. To make him need her like she needed him.
Maybe he’d been right before. Maybe she was trying to turn him into the man she wanted him to be, and not the man he was, for her own ends. Her own comfort.
She loved Diego. But she wasn’t sure she knew how to love someone in a way that wasn’t this.
And she wasn’t making him happy. So what was the point of it? What was the point of any of this? They could have a baby and not be married. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. It wasn’t what she wanted, but plenty of people did it.
She blinked back tears as she looked at the table still set with dinner.
She was torturing him. He wasn’t happy. And she didn’t know what she could do to fix it.
She needed to leave, but she didn’t have anywhere to go. Even the very idea filled her with a strange kind of desolation.
Her life had been so much about her father, and now Diego, and beyond the two of them, she had nothing. No connections.
No friends.
She was about to have a baby and she...
She was going to pour all her love into that baby the way that she had done for Diego and her father.
And she wasn’t having a sudden crisis where she realized she wanted to live her best life or be more selfish but...
She felt like she needed to know some things about herself. About what she wanted, what she was made of.
What she wanted beyond making someone else happy, because she had no idea how to make Diego happy if she couldn’t even figure herself out.
She needed to make herself happy.
She’d never even tried to do that. She’d always gone with what she was told. And even going with Diego...
She hadn’t taken responsibility for it. It had been something she’d wanted, but protecting her father’s reputation had played a part in it. As had a kidnapping, which she had not chosen.
She wanted Diego. But she needed...
She needed to go. She needed to make a choice.
“I need to go,” she said, looking around at the remains of her dress.
“What?”
“I need to go,” she said again, striding off toward her bedroom. She began to dress herself quickly, ignoring Diego standing there in the doorway.
Once she was decent, she took her purse and started to march toward the door. Diego caught her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away from you,” she said, jerking her arm back and breezing out the door, shocked when he didn’t follow.