BILLIONAIRE Island: Idyllic Mischief

by May, Savannah

  And it was the loneliest thing to live with someone and yet be so alone.

  Sex had dwindled to once a week, once every couple of weeks, infrequently, and finally zilch when she fell out of love with him because he was obviously not in it, and never had been. He was far too deeply in it with his first and only love. Their communication had become shrouded in the half truths of fogging, where Brad spun every conversation into alphabetti spaghetti by double-backing on issues, excusing his failures with outlandish reasons, tossing problems back at her door. If all that failed, he instigated a blow out rage that gave him the excuse to storm out and slam the door, leaving her more alone than ever.

  How could she bring a baby into a world like that?

  Those were the times Indie hated most, even more than the shouting and raging. Even more than the time he'd walked away from her down the hall in their Manhattan apartment, stopped and leaned his forehead into the wall as though about to cry. He'd lifted his fist and pummeled it straight through the plaster and she thought; 'That could have been my face.'

  More than the rage, she hated when he slammed out because she knew instead of talking to her, he was going to his favorite lover. The one who always had his attention and had stolen him from her before she ever had him. His real relationship was always waiting for him and he never failed that true love. Her husband's one true love was poured from a bottle.

  It hadn't always been this way so why couldn't it be like before. When they met at his casting call for a huge beer ad, Bradley had dominated the room, super-charging it with his charisma and making all the girls laugh flirtatiously hoping his eyes would light approvingly on her over the others.

  As a showroom model, Indie didn't get to go to many castings for commercials, but they needed a lot of girls in bikinis for the ad being planned around spring break, so the agency sent her on the call along with a thousand other girls. They were called into the studio three at a time, told to leave their card, put on their marks and told to jump around for the camera as though in a crowd of friends at the beach having the time of their lives.

  “Come on girls, let's see those happy faces.” Brad was a barrel of confidence, the ringleader holding the power to deliver fame and fortune, or at least a brief appearance on prime time TV, to a bevy of eager and impressionable girls. At twenty-four, Indie was slightly older than the rest but Bradley caught her eye, smiled and held it longer than was necessary. She somehow knew she'd get the job and leapt up, hands in the air as though she'd hit an impossible winner across an imaginary volleyball net.

  In the first year, he'd been loving and attentive as though she was the most special to him but now Indie believed that was a ruse to keep her innocent of the fact that he was elsewhere. She should never have asked the question that let him know she was on to him. Taking back a question is like putting the genie back in the bottle – it can't be done. And the moment she questioned his drinking was the moment he began to change and all his charm and flattery gave way to denial and fault finding. He became a highway robber in the marriage, waiting by the side of the road to hijack her before she had the chance to get the sheriff on him.

  Indie had tried to talk. Best time to get a response was when he was contrite and sorry for passing out on the bathroom floor or embarrassing her in public after one, or ten, too many. The next day, in his version of a hangover, because drunks don't get real hangovers, they only come down from escaping painful emotion into brief regret. Then Brad said that marriage was too much responsibility, that he felt pressured to be the caretaker for two when it had always only been him. Mostly he complained there were too many bars everywhere in Manhattan.

  Another week passed and Indie fessed up to Betty before she told her husband.

  “Oh honey, I've known it for weeks.” She patted Indie's arm in her motherly way. “Tell you what we'll keep it our little secret for as long as possible, or until you burst the seams but I doubt you'll be able to go to Europe.”

  “Thanks, Betty you're an angel. I figured as much. I just don't know what to do yet.”

  “Don't rush your decision sweetie, it's a big step, the biggest. At the same time don't sit on it forever.”

  Indie made the commitment to tell Brad when he came home that evening and base her decision on his reaction. Perhaps starting a family would pull him out of his stupor and back into their marriage. She'd Googled alcoholism and the local head office of AA had shown up top. When she left the showroom the afternoon, she found herself making the detour to Park Avenue to check something out.

  “Hallo, I, um-wanted to ask a question.” She was tongue-tied with humiliation. What if the woman at the desk thought she was the alcoholic?

  “What can we do to help?” she said, neutral and non- judgy so that Indie felt the overwhelming desire to spill it all.

  “I wondered how you know if someone is an alcoholic for sure and if they can stop.”

  “Sure, it's a common enough question and alcoholism isn't about how much you drink or whether you drink alone, it's determined by whether the alcohol causes a change in your personality.”

  “I see.” Unfortunately she saw more than she'd wanted to. “So a person would find it hard to change that?”

  “Without the program, basically impossible,” she said. “And it's a family dynamic. All members of the group need to be in treatment.”

  “The entire family?”

  “Everyone living in the home with the illness is contributing to it.”

  “But not the children, the children don't go to treatment?”

  “Especially the children.” It hit her then, how important it was to choose your partner wisely, not based on how charismatic or exciting they were, or how many other women wanted him for themselves. Somehow the fact that Brad had chosen her and she'd chosen him meant that she was involved in his illness.

  Ricky, Indie's favorite doorman was brandishing a package when she arrived home. She clutched it to her in the elevator, excited as a kid at a birthday party, by the stamps from the Island of Mauritius all over the paper. Sasha had sent her a gift, a pile of beautiful hand-stitched baby clothes. Mauritius being a one time French colony, she said the clothes there were top quality, although that was changing with the competition from the Far East. Indie lifted the tiny outfits from the paper, minute white buttons down the front of a soft lawn onesie, no bigger than a poppy seed and imagined the little person inside her that would in no time at all put its tiny arms and legs through the openings. A surge of excited happiness blossomed as she imagined the child and her as a family unit. She knew she really wanted to have her baby.

  The note from Sasha told Indie to meet her in London as arranged. She was still going for her annual shopping tour, mostly to source new riding clothes and leather boots and Indie should join her even if she wasn't doing the shows. It would be her last chance to travel before the baby and she needed to see her, had loads to tell her and wanted her best friend's advice.

  Indie made dinner, her special pasta sauce with tortellini and dithered over whether to open a bottle of wine. Afraid of the consequences of either decision, him getting drunk and belligerent, or else antagonized that she was with-holding wine because she thought he couldn't control himself. In the end she decided against. Once she told him, she'd have the perfect excuse of being pregnant for not drinking.

  Close to midnight Indie went to bed, after cleaning up all the evidence of food. If any remained, Brad would likely flare up for trying to make him feel guilty for not coming home.

  She must have fallen asleep instantly because she was dragged from rest hours later by the crashing of broken glass out in the living room. The leap of terror at the fear of intruders was soon replaced by one deeper when she heard Brad swearing and cursing in his slurring lost voice.

  “What fucking idiot left that there? Trying to fucking kill me in my own home.”

  The impulse to pull the covers over her head morphed into the need to get him to bed. More items were being overturned
onto the solid wood floor and shattering and her irritation kicked into gear.

  “Brad, just lie down and sleep it off before you destroy every single thing dear to me in our house.” She picked up the pieces of an antique frame her grandmother had given her that held a photo of her departed father.

  “I am trying to fucking get to my bed but you put all these fucking doo-dads in my way to fucking trip up on, you stupid bitch.”

  “Okay, just sit down on the sofa and take off your shoes while I get a quilt for you. And please mind your language.”

  “Are you fucking crazy woman? I'm going to my bed,” he slurred. The acrid aroma of stale beer belched from the side of his mouth.

  “We agreed that when you came home- late- you would sleep out here, remember?” Indie said.

  “I said, I ain't sleeping on no fucking sofa. I paid for the bed and I'm going to it.” A tiny quell of fear rose in the pit of her stomach as the snarl of rising anger crept into his voice. She knew she should have left it alone but couldn't. Her own fury was rising at him already breaking what he'd promised if she'd only agree to stay and at living her life at the mercy of his drinking binges.

  “You need to stay out of the bedroom, Brad because you smell atrocious and I'm not waiting up all night in case there's a repeat of you throwing up on me.”

  “That's it, throw your shit in my face like always.” In a flash his rage erupted from beneath its onion skin layer of restraint. “I told you I'm not sleeping out here so don't bring up your lying shit from the past to get your own way.”

  “It's not my way and I'm not lying. My way would be that you don't come home so drunk you can't control your own mind or body. Nothing in this marriage is my way.”

  “I can control myself, I just can't control you from getting on my case all the fucking time. I've had enough of you nagging and bitching.” He was shaky on his feet by the side of the couch, towering over her, trying not to huddle away from him, wishing this wasn't happening.

  “No you can't. Because if you had any self control you'd get some help for whatever's eating at you so bad yo u need to drown it out of yourself with poison that's destroying both of us.'

  “Only thing eating at me is you.” From jabbing his finger at her, he re-clenched it back forming a fist that he raised in the air. With enormous visible effort, he managed enough self restraint to bring it down not on her but on the chrome and glass art deco side table she'd discovered in a small antique store on the Ile-St-Louis in Paris and bought with her own money to carry home, dismantled, in her luggage. It was a reminder of happy travels and small successes, covered with framed photos of her family and collection of antique perfume bottles. The sound of shattering glass was all but muffled by Brad's howl as the glass and metal cut into his wrist and hand. He fell back about to topple as blood streamed onto the white Montauk sofa and Jonathan Adler pillows, testament to their designer lifestyle.

  The smell and aura rose from his body and enveloped them like a black magic spirit as Brad reached out two claws that she was certain he was going to wrap around her throat. Indie stood frozen, gaping in disbelief at the demon her husband had morphed into and at the last moment, he changed direction and instead of grasping her by the neck, grabbed her waist and hauled her painfully, fingers digging hard into her tender stomach, up over his shoulder. He lurched into the bedroom and threw her onto the bed with the dismissive rage of an inflamed toddler tossing away a stuffed animal. Indie scrabbled up the bed toward the headboard, pulling the quilt and her own limbs around her as a shield from wherever his need to vent would carry him. No way she was lying supine on the bed, laid out for his wrath.

  Blood was still dripping heavily, all over her best Hotel Collection linen and Brad yanked the sheet untucked and pressed it hard to his wrist to staunch the flow. Holding the Egyptian cotton tight, he kicked off his shoes furiously.

  “There is no way I am sleeping in this bed beside you tonight,” Indie said, coldly, in a white hot fury at my impotence in this partnership.

  “Good then get out. Why don't you get out of my fucking house and fucking life completely?”

  “Fine. But tonight, you aren't sleeping here,” Indie shot back.

  Brad's eyes narrowed to slits as he momentarily ran through his options for vengeance.

  He grabbed her arm and yanked it so it popped in pain and she was sure it had emerged from its socket when she could get no purchase to push herself up. Pulling her body by the one loosened limb, he dragged her off the bed and she stumbled to one knee, trying to find a footing as he pulled her half on her knees, half stumbling along on her crooked feet back through the bedroom door. Across the hall, he shoved the bathroom door open and yanked her through, bashing her head into the door jamb and grazing her back across the sharp wood.

  With one hand he pushed her hard into the basin, pushing her head down and holding her body still with the force of his drink-sodden body against her, grinding her stomach into the edge of the china bowl. With the other hand he opened the cabinet and yanked something out. The sound of squirting from a can, he pushed her pajama bottoms down and the squirting sound again mixed with the cold dispersal of crème into her crack.

  In one move, Bradley unzipped his pants and rammed into her. She reached out both arms screaming no, then just screaming as the pain in her shoulder seared through her. He was panting and groaning and he shoved his cock in and out of her dry cavern. Then he pulled it all the way out and she bent further with relief that it was done. Then she realized, and the scream was soul-piercing as he rammed into her asshole. He had missed that tightly puckered entrance with the crème and spritzed most of it into her pussy. The pain of those walls collapsing was unbearable. He rammed into her until he finally groaned with relief, pulled out and zipped himself back up.

  He lifted his wife like a doll, gouging at her torso with his raging fingers, every bit of burning anger channeling through those angry prods, he mangled her over the edge of the tub to crash down on the solid iron, banging her head and hip joint as she landed on the bottom.

  Brad stood over her, eyes blazing as though what had happened was entirely her fault, then turned and left the small room, slamming the door closed with a final statement. The noise of him adjusting a chair or some other device in the handle to barricade her in the bathroom was the last thing she heard before everything went silent.

  Chapter Three

  The searing pain through her stomach was such that she had never experienced. The cut of a knife from deep within and the agony of life wrenching away from its support system. She didn't think that much blood could have been held inside a uterus, but it came pouring out in great gashes with each mind-blowing contraction of agony in her core. Every time she thought it was finally over and collapsed curled up in the unforgiving bathtub, the surge of pain welled even more strongly and her body regurgitated another swell of blood and mucus between her legs.

  Indie was too weak to even call out for help, although it would have been pointless. Brad would be passed out rock solid for hours, not even New York City sirens stirred him when he was drunk. Certain she was going to die alone in that tub and he'd discover her when he finally came to and remembered to unincarcerate her. At least she wasn't totally alone. She would die along with the baby she'd decided that afternoon to welcome completely into her life, with or without Brad's involvement.

  She came around in solid agony down one side, from curling up fetal in the bath and the solid metal had compressed her wrenched muscles and joints into a mass of bruised human remains. Outside, she heard Brad, skulking around the apartment in morning-after silent rage.

  “Where are you?” he shouted down the hall. “Answer me. Nowhere to hide. I know you tried to freaking kill me while I slept.”

  She gurgled a whisper of ironic laughter. Just who had tried to kill whom? But she had no energy, not one iota of strength would muster in the beaten body, shattered from inside and out. Then to add the ultimate insult to the injuries, her stomac
h contracted and heaved, with massive effort as though forcing an alien bodysnatcher up through the windpipe, managed to retch a cup of orange green bile into the bath all over her hair and sleepshirt. Her body shook in giant shudders, but she was too heavy to lift her half battered head off the bottom of the bath as she hurled every drop of viscous substance remaining in the digestive tract. What the fuck? Could this life get any worse?

  The sound of her puking alerted Brad to her whereabouts and he unhooked the restraint on the door handle. Please just let us out of this right now before I have to deal with a raging husband. No luck, he threw back the door with a curse ready on his lips and Indie knew the tub must have looked like attempted double homicide by his reaction.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, no, no, Jesus, Indie, India answer me. Oh God, what happened? Did I do this? Did I hurt you, Oh God India please answer me. Don't leave me.”

  Indie didn’t know whether this was punishment or a sign from the Universe but she knew right then that was what she had to do.

  “Just get me an ambulance,” she croaked. While they waited for emergency services to take their New York sweet time to arrive, contrite instead of silent-rage Brad smoothed her brow with a cold facecloth and fed her ice chips to suck on when she was unable to lift her head enough to drink from a glass. He was throbbing with fear about what would happen to him for his attempted murder, or what he thought was attempted murder as Indie had no strength and less desire to tell him the truth. Even trying to open her mouth hurt like Hades. Brad called his office right there in the bathroom and told the girl he was going to be in late, his wife was not well. Just as he had done a dozen times before, when he woke up too hungover to get to the office in time. His co-workers must have thought she was a major pain-in-the-ass hypochondriac demanding shrew of a wife but Indie no longer cared.