by Sam Mariano
But he doesn’t stop, not until he comes. And when he relaxes on top of me, his weight crushing me, I can’t keep from wrapping my arms around him. I can’t keep from holding onto him. Maybe he’s the cyclone who rips through and ruins everything, but he’s the strongest thing I have to hold onto.
Chapter Eighteen
Meg
We let Mia pick dinner tonight.
To say it’s not how things are done would be an understatement—Morelli dinners are always planned out literally weeks in advance, groceries purchased, prep done—but since Mia is having such a rough time and I want to make her feel better, I decide a nice “I’m really sorry our sorta husband murdered your boyfriend” gesture would be letting Mia pick dinner.
And Mia picks tacos.
Which turns out to be an issue, since Mateo never ever has tacos on the menu, so we have no tortillas. Maria is in here helping with dinner instead of Cherie, and she must like Mia more than she likes me, because after Mia gets the sad news that we don’t have tortillas, Maria disappears for a few minutes and comes back with the goods.
“Score!” I say, grinning and grabbing one of the bags to show Mia. “See, Maria came through for us.”
I think Maria swears at me in Spanish, but I don’t care. Mia’s almost smiling, and that makes me happy.
“I’m so glad to have you back in here,” I tell Mia, as I dump bags of taco fixings on the counter. “I’m pretty sure family dinner is where we’re going to really rock this sister wife thing.”
That makes her wince, and I realize she probably still hates Mateo. I’m horrified at having brought it up, not only because it brought her pain, but because the last thing I can handle right now is possible verification that Mateo is forcing his affections on her. Since that horrible night, I’ve already thought about leaving him more times than I ever imagined leaving Rodney, and I didn’t love him. But Rodney was just a useless goober; Mateo is dangerous.
Before she can say anything to ruin my life, I change the subject like a bad outfit. “So, I hear you’re going back to school tomorrow. That’s good, I think that’ll be… good.”
Mia offers me a faint smile, glancing at me sideways as she stirs the taco meat on the stove top. “Yeah, good.”
“You like school,” I say, like she doesn’t know. I’m literally terrified I’m going to say something to remind her of Vince, but my mouth just won’t stop. I’m so happy to have back a slice of normalcy, I could explode.
“I do like school,” she agrees. “And, hey, since I missed all last week, I probably don’t have to finish The Awakening.”
“What’s that?”
“A book I loathe. I haven’t cracked it open since everything happened, but somehow I feel like I’m going to hate it even more now.”
“Oh, yeah, you shouldn’t finish it then,” I agree, frantically looking to get away from that topic. “Uh… the girls! You should come play with the girls tomorrow after you get home from school. They know you live here now, but they haven’t really seen you, because—so they—” Goddammit, why do I keep mentioning things like that? “Um, they want to have a fashion show for us in Little Paris.”
Mia nods. “That would be nice.”
“I’m sorry about the whole no baby thing,” I blurt.
Mia frowns, glancing over at me in confusion. “What?”
I’m already grimacing. This is exactly the opposite of the direction I should be going in. I should be avoiding any mention of Mateo. We should talk about flowers or some shit. What do I know about botany?
“What no baby thing?” she asks, since of course that sounds like a thing that requires follow-up.
“The… It’s my fault you can’t have—I asked Mateo—I’m sorry, we should call him something else. Is Voldemort too on-the-nose? We could call him Voldemort.”
Looking at me like I’ve lost my mind, she assures, “I can hear his name, it’s fine.”
“Okay. Sorry. I’m being crazy.”
“You’re always crazy,” she says, as if to reassure me. “Back to the no baby thing.”
“I told Mateo I didn’t want us both to have his babies. And that’s really awful and selfish of me because I know you want babies, and maybe someday I won’t feel that way, but I just thought while we make sure this works, we shouldn’t take that risk. And so it’s my fault he uses condoms with you and that’s probably weird and I’m sorry.”
Her face is completely blank for a moment—like she hasn’t the faintest clue what the hell I’m talking about. Slowly she absorbs the words I just spilled out all over the kitchen, and then she looks… angry? Yep, angry. At me? Not at me. She drops the spoon she was using to stir on the countertop and turns around, leaving the kitchen without a word.
“Shit!” I look over at Maria, ready to ask her to watch the food, but she’s already heading to the stove and shooing me away.
I catch her in the hall, before she makes it to the study. “Wait, stop! What are you doing?”
“Murdering your fiancé. Someone has to do it.”
“Why? I mean, well, okay, there are a lot of reasons,” I acknowledge.
She’s walking away from me now, and although I give chase, she barges into the study. Mateo is inside, propped against the edge of his desk like always. Adrian is in his wing chair, Alec is in his. But the one where Vince usually sat, where she often sat on his lap, is noticeably vacant.
Her chest is working and I realize this is probably the first time she’s been in this room since Vince died. Everyone is staring at her. I realize she’s crying—I didn’t even notice her start crying, she just is, and I think she’s having difficulty breathing. She’s staring at Vince’s empty chair, her face is crumbling, and oh, God, I fucked everything up again.
I grab her arm, dragging her out of the study and yanking the door shut behind us.
These horrible little gasping noises are bursting out of her now, like she literally can’t breathe, and I feel so awful for her. I don’t know what to do so I just grab her and pull her into my shoulder. She clings to me and cries her heart out.
Mateo opens the study door and comes out, but I take a hand off her back, holding it up to stop him. I shake my head subtly so as not to jostle her, but I hope I’m adequately conveying “don’t you fucking dare, Satan” with my eyeballs.
He hesitates, looking like he might do it anyway, but then he sighs and slips back into the study, closing the door.
So, that’s how our first taco night starts.
Mateo seemed like he was in a better mood all morning and afternoon, which meant the whole house got a break from the darkness, so I had high hopes for this dinner. But now Mia is wrecked again, so Mateo is displeased, and the rest of us follow their lead.
He’s also not remotely impressed that we’re having tacos for dinner. I find his disinterest in tacos almost more alarming than his penchant for murder. What kind of psycho doesn’t like taco night?
Long story short, we’re definitely never getting tacos at family dinner ever again.
When we’re clearing up the dishes from dinner, before we head our separate ways, Mia pulls me aside and requests, “Can you please take him tonight?”
“Um… I can try,” I offer, though I’m really not sure how successful that’s going to be. Since his dick touched her again, it hasn’t come near me. Which, since the whole Vince thing I haven’t been as sad about, but it still makes this request a challenge to grant. If things were going well maybe he would come back to me for a night, but since that whole thing happened in the study I’m pretty sure he’ll want to be with her.
I try to think up ways to entice him to stay with me when we go back upstairs to put the girls to bed. Lily gets two stories out of us tonight, then I drag both girls off the bed and chase them down the hall to their bedroom.
Once I return to our bedroom, I climb up on the bed and crawl across. Deciding to ditch subtlety, I straddle him.
“Well, hello,” he says, smiling up at me, arms fol
ded behind his head. My heart aches a little, because this is the version of him I miss. My Mateo. I want his sweetness back in my life.
But he had to go and murder Vince and fuck everything up.
I’m also still not totally sure Mia wants him in her bed, but since she specifically asked me to keep him out of it tonight, I’m guessing no. Which I hope means he hasn’t had sex in a while. It’s really difficult to picture a reality in which Mateo lies in bed next to a woman every night and doesn’t have sex with her, but that’s the reality I need.
It’s all really stressful to think about, so I stop.
“So, I told Mia tonight that I’m the reason she can’t have babies, and she didn’t seem to have any idea what I was talking about.”
His eyebrows rise casually, but he offers back, “Strangely enough, in light of recent events, it has not come up.”
“Well, I thought it might’ve come up before you got all murdery. Like, presumably the first time you wrapped your dick before putting it in her body, since she knows you’re not really into that.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t explain it. I planned to, eventually, just hadn’t yet.”
“Well, I tried, and it did not go well.”
“I noticed,” he says, dryly. “Thanks so much for your help.”
“You’re the one who made the chair empty,” I point out.
“I didn’t have a choice, Meg.”
This is super not sexy, so I climb off him and onto the bed beside him instead. “Yes, you did, Mateo. Even if he had to die, you didn’t have to do it like that. You didn’t have to do it yourself. You could’ve sent Colin or Adrian or literally anyone. And even if you had to do it yourself because of some bizarre, evolutionary, caveman impulse, you didn’t have to do it in front of her. You have way more tact than that. Don’t try to act like you don’t. Either you did what you did on purpose, or you’re so damn obsessed with that girl that you actually lost your mind. But you didn’t have to do it. Not like that.”
“I don’t want to fight about this. I’m tired of fighting about Vince. I wish he were here right now so I could punch him in the face again for being such a pain in my ass.”
“Well, that’s a little morbid, even for me,” I inform him.
Mateo rolls his eyes and sighs, making the move to get out of my bed. The move he always makes, right before he goes to hers.
“No, wait,” I say, pinching a section of his shirt before he can stand and tugging him back. “Why don’t you stay with me tonight?”
“I thought I might be able to when things were on track, but now that all that happened, I think I should—”
“She doesn’t want you to come to her room,” I interrupt. “She asked me… to keep you in here tonight.”
This causes him to scowl. I realize immediately I shouldn’t have taken the honest approach. I should’ve taken my shirt off or started giving him a blow job; I should not have told the truth.
“Then I need to go check on her,” he says, getting up off the bed.
“Mateo, come on…”
“If she specifically asked you to keep me away, that could mean she’s planning something.”
Eyes bugging out of my head, I say, “Yes, Mateo. I think she probably is planning something—like, maybe, crying herself to sleep over the loved one you stole from her. I think that’s probably her master plan tonight.”
He ignores me, stepping away from our bed and heading toward the door. “Well, I need to be sure.”
“Did you smother Beth like this?” I blurt.
He freezes, then slowly turns back to look at me like I’ve lost my fucking mind.
Which, to be fair, is a logical conclusion to draw from what I just said to him.
“No,” he says, ice practically dripping from his words as he holds up his hands, then clenches them into fists. “I strangled her.”
Remembering those same hands locked around my throat in the dungeon beneath the house, I swallow, out of verbal missiles to fire at him.
I probably should be a little more careful with my homicidal fiancé who seems to be currently obsessed with someone who isn’t me.
I’m still a little afraid of what happens if Mia ever decides she wants to be number one. Or that she doesn’t want to share at all. Right now she hates him, right now she wants him away from her, and that only makes him chase her harder. But what happens when he catches her? What happens when she likes him again? What happens if she doesn’t want him leaving her bed anymore than I want him leaving mine?
It’s not like I can ask him any of that, but he leaves me in our room alone before I even have a chance to consider it.
And I do not get a goodnight kiss.
Chapter Nineteen
Mia
Since I have school tomorrow, I open up my laptop and go online to check my syllabus and see what I’ve missed. It hasn’t been on my mind this week, so I’ve done literally none of the reading. I’m going to show up to class completely unprepared and hope no one calls on me. I can’t even pull the “my boyfriend died” card, because since he was murdered by a damn mob boss, there’s no record of that even being a thing that actually happened.
Now that my mind has inevitably gone there, I’m depressed again. I tool around with the syllabus for a few more minutes, flipping through The Awakening, but I do not find the motivation to read even a single page.
Finally I just fall back on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, trying not to get lost in my thoughts and feelings. I don’t want to think about Vince because it breaks my heart, but it also feels like a betrayal not to think about him. Probably as much a betrayal as lying in this bed, where I let his murderer give me an orgasm just last night.
I’ve never hated myself more for wanting Mateo. And I’ve judged myself pretty hard for that, so that’s really saying something.
I pop upright as I hear my door open. I scowl when I see Mateo walk in. Meg was supposed to keep him off my ass tonight.
He doesn’t have his suit jacket on, but he’s still wearing the dress shirt and slacks, his dark hair perfectly tousled. He still looks incredibly sexy—for a murderer. I glare at him, resting a hand on my laptop so he’ll get the impression I’m busy.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Getting stuff ready for school tomorrow. You said I have to go back,” I remind him, a bit sullenly.
He doesn’t waste his time responding to my petulance. “Why did you ask Meg to keep me away tonight?”
Sighing, I state boldly, “Because you murdered my boyfriend and I don’t want to fuck you anymore.”
“That’s not true,” he says mildly, approaching my bed, flicking a glance at my laptop, then the book. “What are you reading?”
“Still The Awakening. I’m not reading it, I’m avoiding it. I’m only halfway through and I hate everything about it.”
“Don’t finish it,” he advises, plucking it off the bed and literally tossing it across the room and onto the floor. “I’ll save you the trouble. She kills herself to get away from her responsibilities and the crushing emptiness that is life.”
I roll my eyes. “Was she a Morelli?”
“That’s cold,” he states.
“You’ve been fucking me without a condom since we started sharing and Meg specifically asked you not to,” I reply, meeting his gaze. Might as well get into that, since it’s the only reason I wanted to see him tonight.
Nodding, he takes a seat on the edge of my bed. “I was going to start soon, if you weren’t pregnant already.”
“And if you already got me pregnant?” I ask, despite the notion making my stomach sink. “What then?”
He doesn’t immediately answer, then he does, and it’s awful. “There was already a chance Vince got you pregnant the night you told me about. If there was a chance you were pregnant, I needed there to also be a chance it was mine.” This makes my heart stop anyway, but he continues, “I also know you want a baby, and I figured if you got pregnant straight out
of the gate like this, when there was still a chance it wasn’t mine, we could pass it off as…”
“Vince’s baby,” I finish, although my voice is hardly audible.
I hadn’t even thought of that. Not once. I’ve been lost in sadness and grief, and the practicalities of life, the basic principles of unprotected sex and the possible consequences hadn’t even crossed my mind. The night I had all that wine and Vince and I had really mean sex with each other, he didn’t use a condom. Mateo had asked when I was last with him, and even though it was humiliating, it was when things were so wonderful and I wanted to be honest.
Mateo nods. “Then Meg wouldn’t have to know, but you’d still get your baby.”
“So, if I’m not pregnant now, I never get a baby,” I say. Though, honestly, I hope I am pregnant. And I hope the baby’s Vince’s, not Mateo’s.
Vince’s final act of revenge—it would be a good one, too. Mateo would hate that, and it would make Vince really happy; the thought kind of makes me smile.
“You’ll still get your baby; it will just have to wait a while. A long while, if the current state of things is any indication,” he says, sighing and lying back on my bed, the way I had just a moment ago.
I despise the impulse to ask him what’s wrong. To let him put his head in my lap, to run my fingers through his dark hair and let him share his burden.
I will not do that.
“If Meg doesn’t change her mind though, I don’t get a baby.”
“I’ll give you a baby whether she changes her mind or not, that will just make things less pleasant. Accidents happen. Condoms break. But Meg isn’t my biggest fan right now either, so I need to wait a while before I pull something like that.”
I shake my head. “You’re awful.”
Sighing, he says, “You’re the wrong woman to plot with. Sorry, I’ll save my plotting for Meg.”