Worth the Fight (Accidentally on Purpose) (28 page)

“Em,” I gasped, putting both hands on either side of her head to stop her ministrations. “Stop. You don’t have to -” I was cut off when she knocked my hands away and continued to suck me, wilder than before.

I dropped my head back on the pillow, lacking the power to make her stop. At least she was touching me. I thought I’d have to eventually beg her for sex, but here she was offering it up.

Emmy suctioned her lips, making her mouth tight around my erection as she bobbed her head, sliding my cock in and out of her mouth with hot friction. I groaned and again thrust my hips up to meet her. She gave me one last good suck and then pulled me out of her mouth. She gripped me with both hands and started to lick the bulbous head like it was a lollypop in her favorite flavor.

“Emmm,” I groaned as my dick twitched in her hands.

I looked down at her, but the room was dark. Unlike our apartment in the city, the moonlight was lacking. I could vagu
ely see her face, but I wanted to look her in the eyes. It wasn’t something I had to have every time she gave me head, but I needed to see her eyes now. Though I was physically enjoying what she was doing to me, something felt off.

She released me and straddled me. She rubbed her moist slit along my shaft, priming me with her arousal. I reached up to put my hands on her hips, but she knocked my hands away again. She reached between our bodies and put the head of my cock at her entrance. There was no teasing and no hesitation b
efore she dropped herself sharply, impaling herself on me and then crying out. It didn’t sound like a pleasurable cry. It sounded like a painful cry.

“Em,” I said her name and put my hands on her hips, but again she slapped my hands away. “Emmy, are you okay?”

Ignoring my question, she began to move on top of me. There was nothing intimate about her rhythm, no give and take. She was all take, with a violent detachment that burned me deeply. She rode me hard, knocking my hands away every time I went to touch her, no matter where it was on her body. She grunted and sometimes groaned, but again it didn’t sound pleasurable. It was angry and sorrowful and painful.

“Emmy,” I said her name more firmly and gripped her hips to make her stop.

She tried to push my hands away from her, but I refused to let her go. She tried to move on top of me as she tried to bat my hands away, but I wouldn’t let her budge. She let out a frustrated scream and slapped at my hands.

“We’re not doing it like this,” I almost yelled at her. If I couldn’t touch her and if she couldn’t stand to be touched by me, and if she was as mentally and emotionally detached as I believed she was, I didn’t want to be inside of her. It didn’t seem right.

She stopped struggling, but I didn’t release her. She sat atop of me with me still inside of her, breathing heavily and trembling.

“Emmy, I can’t make love to you when your heart isn’t in it, and I sure as hell can’t fuck you if your head isn’t in it.”

I expected something in reply, but she just sat there in silence as my cock began to soften inside of her.

I opened my mouth to speak again, but Kaitlyn’s cries crackled over the baby monitor. It was a reflex to release Emmy at the sound of our baby’s crying, and she took advantage of it and scrambled off of me and hurried into the bathroom prob
ably to get her robe.

“I’ll get her,” I said, pulling my boxers back up. The bathroom door closed and I went to go take care of Kay Kay.

I fed Kaitlyn, changed her diaper, and rocked her back to sleep. By the time I got back into the bedroom, Emmy was on her side of the bed with her back to me. I moved over close to her and put my arm around her and tucked my chin into the space between her head and shoulder.

“Baby, are you okay?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer me, but she very subtly rolled her shoulder, and I took that very subtle hint and backed the hell off. I lay in bed, wide awake for the rest of the night, staring at her back. In the morning she would pretend that everything was okay again, and I would play along.

*~~~*

“I told you not to come here anymore,” I said to the woman sitting in the chair on the other side of my desk. “I don’t even know why you sat your ass down in that chair, because you’re going to walk out of my door in about five seconds.”

“What if I came to apologize?” Iris asked.

“I don’t care why you’re here, Iris. I only care that you leave.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” she said.

“There was no misunderstanding,” I said darkly. “You knew exactly what you were doing. Now get out.”

She didn’t get out of the chair. Even Claire knew when it was time to leave.

“I know how I must look…like some kind of a slut, but -”

“Even sluts don’t do what you did, Iris,” I growled. “Get. Out. Now. Don’t stop to chat with my staff, just keep it moving. If you’re ass isn’t walking out of that door in the next ten se
conds, I will embarrass the shit out of you as I
throw
you out.”

“You wouldn’t physically harm a woman,” she snorted, but then her eyes grew wide when she realized I was counting out loud.

“Five. Six. Seven.”

She got up and walked to the door, but then she stopped and turned around. She started to say how sorry she was again, but I had stood up and started rounding the desk because I had reached ten. She scurried out of my office, but I went out to make sure that she left the building.

“Did you just scare the muffin lady away?” Kacey asked very quietly at my side as we watched Iris hurry down the sidewalk towards her shop.

“Yes.” I answered simply.

“Good,” she sniffed. “I don’t like her.”

“Me either, Kace,” I said and went back into my office.

When I got home, Emmy was perky. She kissed me lightly on the lips after I spent a few minutes with the kids. She chattered about dinner and her parents’ upcoming visit. She smiled and pretended really well, but not well enough for me. At dinner, she only ate a small amount of food and rambled about the big lunch she had. She was lying through her teeth. Not that I could see the inside of her stomach, but I had been watching her like a hawk since the Iris incident only a week ago, and I knew she was skipping meals. I worried that she was struggling hard inside, as hard inside as she was pretending on the outside. I worried about her health – mentally and physically. But I pretended right along with her as I always did, because I didn’t know what else to do.

Later that night after I got Lucas to sleep, I ran dow
nstairs to make sure the lights were off and the doors were locked. I grabbed a bottle of water and headed back upstairs. I opened the door just in time to see Emmy hurling something across the room. I heard glass shatter on the hardwood floor. I looked in that direction for a moment before looking back to Emmy. She looked at me briefly and then looked away. I put my water down on a bureau and began to walk over to where the object she had thrown was lying on the floor. I only got a couple of steps before I stepped on glass. I backed up, plucked the small shard out of my foot, and went downstairs for the broom and dustpan. While I was down there, I grabbed the sneakers I wear for yard work out of the laundry room and slipped them on. When I got back upstairs, Emmy was still sitting on the bed, staring at her hands in her lap. I went to the source of the broken glass and tried not to make a sound even though my heart was screaming. It was our favorite wedding picture, framed in a heavy silver frame, but now glassless. I looked across the room at its vacated spot on the table on Emmy’s side of the bed as if I couldn’t believe that it was the same picture. I kneeled there, plucking out what was left of the glass in the frame and then put it aside while I swept up the glass.

I wanted to comfort my wife, but I knew she wouldn’t want comfort from me. I wanted to talk to her, but she would just shut the conversation down. I wanted life to be normal, but we were in a seemingly endless cycle of pretend normalcy.

After disposing of the glass, I put the frame back on the table where it belonged. At least one thing about us should be where it belonged.

I looked down at her. I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t think I could stand to watch her recoil from me again. Without a word, I grabbed my bottle of water and went downstairs.

Chapter Thirty

“You and Casey should come over for dinner,” I told Emmet as we walked out of the office together one night.

“Absolutely not,” he said, shaking his head. “We had enough of my mother this week. Nice try though.”

“You guys only had her for three days,” I complained. “We have her for five.”

“Yeah, but we lived entirely too close to her for a long time. You have only ever had to deal with her during visits. She’s leaving tomorrow morning. You’ll survive.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder and then turned right while I continued straight across the street.

“Thanks a lot!” I shouted to my brother-in-law.

The truth was that I could handle Sam better than her own family most of the time. I tended to ignore her brass co
mments and gently bumped her out when she tried to put her nose in our personal business. Usually, a visit from her wouldn’t bother me, but Emmy and I were still pretending. Since Sam seemed to be a professional at seeing even the hidden things, we pretended extra hard in her presence. I knew Emmy wouldn’t want to be hounded and I simply didn’t want to snap on my mother-in-law, which was bound to happen if she nagged me about my marriage. I was thankful that Emmy’s dad had come along this time, too. Most of the time Sam came alone, but since his heart attack Fred had been traveling with his wife more often than not. At least when he was around, Sam didn’t nag too much. Fred didn’t like to hear Sam nag Emmy, and now Sam went out of her way not to upset her husband.

When I got home, I found the women and Kaitlyn in the kitchen. Through the French doors, I could see Fred and Lucas busy in the backyard. I didn’t know what they were doing, but Lucas liked being outside and he loved being with his grandf
ather, so I didn’t care if he did some of my work out there.

Emmy stood over Kaitlyn, cooing and talking to her. I swept the baby out of her seat, anxious to spend my time with her as I was every night.

“Hey, that’s mine!” Emmy cried out.

It was show time. It was happy Emmy and Luke time. I leaned in to kiss her.

Our kisses without Sam around were always short and rather cold and chaste. Our kisses in front of Sam always gave the illusion that they were more than what they were. I always kissed Emmy, but she never kissed me back. My tongue would seek entrance between her lips, but I was always denied. But she always ended the charade with a smile, as if she had enjoyed the whole thing. But this one was different.

Emmy’s lips weren’t rigid. They parted slightly, hesitan
tly, and I hesitantly pressed forward. When she didn’t resist or bite my tongue, I felt hope tingling in my chest. When her tongue gently thrust forward to meet mine, the tingling changed to small bursts of hope. When I heard her sigh ever so slightly and felt her mouth relax, my small bursts of hope turned into an explosion of hope, radiating through my limbs.

The kiss was real. There was nothing fake about it, not
hing pretend. If it weren’t for the fact that I was holding our daughter and my mother in-law wasn’t standing a mere three feet away, I would have explored her mouth for hours, relishing the realness of her kiss.

I found the strength of a hundred men to pull away from her lips.

“Hi, baby,” I smiled at her. There was so much more implied in those words than a simple hello. I was saying hi to the woman who I thought had been lost to me. I was saying hi to the woman I knew before two weeks ago. I was saying hi to the real Emmy and not the pretend Emmy.

I turned my attention back to our daughter and carried her into the family room, with my heart much lighter and my lips still burning.

Fred and Lucas joined us in the family room some time later. Fred held the baby while Lucas and I worked on coloring a picture of a Ninja Turtle. The news was on in the background and mouthwatering scents were wafting in from the kitchen. Fred and I talked about the upcoming football season and the winding down baseball season. Sam poked her head in every now and then to see a news story. It felt like a normal day in a normal family, but Emmy was absent from the picture.

Later Sam told me to go upstairs and get Emmy for di
nner. I dug my phone out of my pocket and started to text her.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked me. “Are you texting her?”

“Yes,” I said absently as my fingers flew over the screen.

Suddenly my hands were empty. I blinked and looked at my phone in Sam’s hand.

“I said to
go upstairs
and get Emmy for dinner. Not to
text
her,” she spat.

I put my hands up in defeat. I didn’t want to fight with her and delay eating the delicious food she had just made.

“Fine, okay,” I said backing away towards the kitchen stairs.

“And uh, no need to rush down,” she sniffed as she put my phone on the counter.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked her and then thought better of it. “Never mind.”

I jogged up the stairs. I assumed Emmy escaped from the kitchen so that she wouldn’t have to kill her mother. I found her in the bedroom on the bed, holding our wedding picture. I froze for a second, eying her warily. We had just shared an awesome kiss not that long ago. Was it just an anomaly?

“Hey,” I said softly as I closed the door behind me.

“Hey,” she said and tossed the frame onto the bed.

I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt like Emmy was slipping away from me again, that the kiss was only a short reprieve.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Great,” she lied.

“Dinner is ready. Do you want me to bring it up to you so you don’t have to deal with Sam?”

“No,” she said, forcing another one of those hollow smiles. “I’m not very hungry.”

I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t noticed her eating habits as of late. It needed to be addressed. It wasn’t just her I had to worry about, but she needed to eat right so that she could pr
oduce enough milk for Kaitlyn.

“Em, you’ve been skipping meals like crazy lately.” I d
ecided to try a different approach. “Are you sick?”

“No. Just trying to lose a few pounds and I haven’t had much of an appetite.”

I didn’t necessarily disbelieve her. She hated the extra weight she put on after she had the baby. “You know I think you’re beautiful no matter how many pounds you are, right?”

“Sure,” she said, unconvinced, like I was lying.

I wasn’t lying about that. But I was tired of lying about
us
– to her, to myself. I was tired of pretending. I was done with this pretending shit. I wanted my wife back all the damn way. I had been patient and waiting for things to shift back, but we seemed stagnant. I told her once I would fight for her to the death. Now it was time to fight, though the enemy I was fighting wasn’t Kyle, it was us. I needed to know exactly how she felt and what she thought before I put on my armor.

“Em,” I said her name with weariness. I was tired, very tired of our charade. I sat down on the bed beside her. “Just…just say what’s on your mind.”

“I have nothing to say. I said all I have to say. I’m not hungry and I’m trying to lose a few pounds.”

“And you went to see a plastic surgeon,” I said darkly.

That wasn’t something she had told me about. I found out by accident only a few days ago. I answered her phone while she was in the shower, and it was a doctor that was popular in the area for his cosmetic work. They called to confirm her follow up appointment. I canceled it.

“How do you know about that?” she asked quietly and I told her.

“Why the hell are you seeing a plastic surgeon?” I asked her.

“I need some work done. It’s no big deal.”

“You don’t need any work done and you were never into being plastic before. Why now?”

She stared up at the ceiling. “Just because. It’s my dec
ision, right?” She was trying to keep the conversation light, but I could hear the anxiety in her voice.

“It is your decision,” I softly conceded. “But it’s not like you.”

“I guess we’re all being someone we’re not lately,” she said and then bit her lip as if she had not meant to say it.

I hung my head, nearly blown over from her words. I sighed and tried to stay on topic.

“Em, I wouldn’t change anything about you. I think every part of you is perfect. Will you please come downstairs and eat something? You love Sam’s cooking.”

“Maybe later,” she said, but I knew she was lying as she sat there, palming her chest. I knew it ached, because so did mine. It ached so damn bad. There was no reason not to ask the obvious questions. There need not be any more holding back.

“Do you want to…separate? Do you want to leave me?” I swallowed hard after asking the questions. It wasn’t something that I was willing to grant her, but I needed to know where her mind was.

To my surprise, she looked at me with a stunned expre
ssion on her face. “I never said that.”

“You act like it. You’re acting happy when you’re not and I’ve tried everything to try to prove to you how sorry I am how much I want
you
. What I did has not only devastated you but it’s devastated
me
. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Luke, it’s been two weeks,” she said bitterly. “I would think that you would give me a little more time. It took you nearly two years for you to stop being angry about what I did to you.”

“Emmy, I just don’t want to find out six months from now that you can’t get over it.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. “I’m handling it the best way I know how.”

“I just…I just want to know what you’re thinking,” I said. I know I looked desperate, but I
was
desperate.

“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking,” she gave a humorless laugh.

“Damn it!” I snapped. “Emmy, I just told you that’s what I want from you!”

She looked at me with slightly widened eyes, surprised at my outburst, but then she sat up and faced me.

“Okay. Here it is,” she said. “Every morning that you have to go into the office, I feel like I can’t breathe. I put on a good show when you’re leaving, but once you’re out the door, I have to struggle to
breathe
, Luke, because I don’t know – will today be the day you run into Iris? What will you say? What will she say? What will you
do
? Will today be the day that she walks into the office despite what you told her? And will you let her in and close the door? What will happen behind that closed door? Will today be a day when you say you’re working late but you’re really with her?”

My eyes widened and my mouth fell open. Those were a lot of serious questions she was asking herself every day. Her state of mind was becoming very clear and I was feeling like an even bigger asshole than before, especially since Iris
did
come into my office and I hadn’t told Emmy. I opened my mouth to speak, but she put her hand up and cut me off.

“Oh, I’m not finished yet,” she snapped. “I wonder how long you guys have been talking as more than friends. I wonder at what point you knew you were out of line and what did you think that made you continue. I think about how you told her she was beautiful and sexy while I’m walking around with baby vomit in my hair and my fat flabby ass. I wonder how many times you’ve kissed her before, if you’ve touched her, if you’ve made her come. I wonder what you think is wrong with
me
– what am I lacking that would make you even turn your head to look at someone else. I wonder how you could do this after all the hell we had gone through to get to the happy place we were in – at least I thought it as a happy place. And…”

I felt gutted by her words. Her questions about my actions were understandable and expected, but when Emmy star
ted questioning herself and the happiness we had, it was more than I could take. My eyes burned with unshed tears, but I had to fucking man up, and I needed to hear all of it.

“And what?” I asked her. “Finish.”

“I’ve said enough,” she said gently and looked at her hands in her lap.

“But you haven’t said everything you’re thinking,” I said impatiently and gritted out “Say it all.”

I watched her delicate throat as she swallowed hard. After months of watching Emmy close herself off, I knew when she was trying to shut down. I wasn’t having it. No more silent pain and anger. No more pretending. My emotions were heavy in my chest and pushed me slightly over the edge. 

“Just fucking say it!” I yelled.

She flinched and looked at me with so many emotions spread across her face, I was unable to categorize exactly what she could have been feeling. I fully expected her to get up and walk away from me, but to my surprise, she got on her knees and wrapped her arms around me. I clutched her fiercely.

“I never touched her before that day, I swear,” I said to her as I tried to keep it together. “I liked her but I didn’t think anything of it until she said something on
that
day. There is nothing that you are lacking, Emmy. You’re perfect.”