Are you going to let her get away like that?
Rick’s hand stayed on my bottom. He squeezed my little cheeks very gently through my panties. I bit my lip hard and managed to keep the whimper that threatened to rise in my throat down and silent. I knew with a thrill of shame, however, that I would definitely smell my lack of self-control when I took off these panties.
I absolutely did not want to bring Scott and April up again, and I didn’t want to argue. We would cuddle: I would show my wonderful husband that if he could remain patient, I would let him hold me and touch me, and then he could go to the bathroom and ‘take care’ of himself in the shower.
“Nothing,” I whispered, and I put my arms around his strong back. The feel of my bare flesh on his sent a little thrill through me, one I felt I could welcome and enjoy because Rick and I had done it—we had gotten married and we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. I knew how that contradicted the way I felt about intimacy, but right now I just wanted to love my husband and to give to him what I felt sure I could give. “Go brush your teeth and let’s cuddle.”
Rick’s fingers on my bottom moved softly, caressingly. My forehead creased even harder, and I had to bite down on my lower lip. To my horror, though, I couldn’t keep my hips from moving, pushing my backside into my bridegroom’s possessive hand.
Had he felt it? Had he sensed my body’s betrayal of my modesty? Rick didn’t show any sign of knowing about the mortifying turmoil inside me. He let go, and stood up, as I stepped aside to get into bed.
As soon as he had closed the bathroom door behind him, I fled; threw my sweats on over my nightgown, put on my flip-flops, and walked right out of the room. I didn’t know why, just that I had to get out of there.
Scott, clearly returning to his and April’s room with an ice bucket in his hand, saw me coming the other way.
CHAPTER5
Mandy
Our drive home to New Jersey the next morning, after Rick had found me in the lobby, staring blankly at the fireplace, and I had refused to say anything, and he had slept on the couch in our room while I lay sleepless in the bed where I had promised to cuddle… that silent six-hour drive home easily took the prize as the worst experience of my life.
We pulled up in front of my parents’ house, where we had asked to stay while we found the perfect starter house for a happy young couple. I couldn’t look at Rick; I had stolen a few glances during the drive, hoping to see any softening of his impassive face, but by this point it had become clear no softening would occur.
I looked out the car window at the horrid little house where I had grown up, learning the lessons of modesty that I knew somehow had ruined my young marriage before it had even properly begun. I hadn’t cried since getting out of bed in our lovely room in the beautiful lodge in the mountains, after weeping on and off all night. I felt a sob rise in my chest now that the awful drive had ended and some decision would have to be made about what would happen next.
Rick hadn’t turned the car engine off. I figured that meant he intended to drop me off here and then go to his old apartment, where his former roommates had found another guy to take Rick’s room. The new roommate probably hadn’t yet moved in, I guessed, hoping without thinking about it that my husband would at least have a bed to sleep in now that we were clearly going to get the marriage annulled.
That thought, which I hadn’t really let myself consider until this moment, dragged a sob from deep in my chest. I didn’t turn from looking out the window at my childhood home, but I choked out, “I’m… I’m sorry.”
He had tried so hard, when he had found me in the lobby. I had given him nothing, other than to tell him he had better sleep on the couch.
“I talked to Scott this morning before we left,” he said.
Despite the bizarre yet enormous role that insane conversation on the porch had played in this disaster, it took me a moment to comprehend what Rick had just said. He had disappeared from the room when I had gotten out of bed, but I had assumed he had just gone to get coffee and maybe to take a walk. I didn’t know why it shocked me so deeply that instead he had talked to someone.
I turned around to look at him, feeling anger rise out of my grief. He had the same blank expression on his face that he had worn all the way home.
“What did you tell him?” I demanded, as the heat rushed to my cheeks.
“Well,” Rick said, looking at me intently, “he asked me if you were alright, first of all.”
I felt my face crumple, tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes onto my cheeks.
“Asshole,” I said, looking away, out the windshield, so I wouldn’t have to look at Rick and see his reaction to my swearing. I wondered with a lurch of my stomach how long we could sit here before my mom noticed us and came out to see why we hadn’t gotten out of the car.
“Dee, look at me,” Rick said.
My eyes went wide as I complied, and saw that the same strange new note I had just heard in my husband’s voice seemed to be echoed in the narrowing of his eyes and the tilt of his chin.
“What?” I asked, scorn coming into my tone, fed by something defiant deep inside me. The flash of rebellion, rising in reaction to the severity in Rick’s expression, seemed foreign to my character and yet also somehow essential to it.
The youngest of three children, I had had a reputation as a brat all the way into high school, before deciding I wanted to put that behind me. I had done it so successfully that my sister had even joked at my graduation party that she thought I might go psycho from all the brattiness I had walled up inside myself. Everyone had laughed.
And now I’ve gone psycho.
I watched Rick’s brow furrow at the sneering tone and the scornful look on my face.
“What?” I repeated, liking my new anger and disdain for his stupid masculine attempts to take control and to get what he thought was his right as my husband. The little book could say all it wanted about how a loving wife lets her husband enjoy his conjugal rights whenever he chooses to express his love that way. If Rick had the same idea, well, we should just go ahead and get the marriage annulled as soon as possible.