Wicked Game

by Michelle Betham

  His voice is a little calmer now, he’s lost the anger. That slight edge. And when he pulls me into his arms I cling onto him. I hold him. I scrunch his shirt up between my fingers and I grip it tight because I’m scared. But now that Noah knows, I also feel relief, that I don’t have to keep Joe’s appearance a secret anymore. We can deal with him together.

  “We’ll get through this, baby, I promise,” he murmurs into my hair, and I close my eyes and breathe him in. And for a moment it feels like everything’s going to be okay, like we really can deal with this. But that moment quickly passes, and I pull away from him, frowning slightly.

  “Get through what, Noah?”

  It’s the first time I’ve heard him even allude to there being a problem between us, despite the fact we’ve both known one’s been there, looming over us like a dark, unwelcome cloud. A problem I sensed even before Joe Millar turned up, out of the blue.

  He looks at me, his expression a little confused, and he doesn’t seem in any hurry to answer my question. And then I remember what Joe said.

  It had to happen …

  And again, my mind goes back to the night Noah asked me if I’d do it again, what we did with Joe. And I’d asked him the same question, and his reply …

  We don’t need to …

  “We don’t need to …” I murmur, and I look at Noah, and his expression’s even more confused now. “That’s what you said, when I asked if you would do it again …”

  “Jesus, Kari, why the hell are you bringing this up?”

  “It had to happen …”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Joe said. That night, the night I slept with him, he said it had to happen … why would he say that?”

  “Because he’s obviously twisted. I mean, showing up like this …” He leans back against the wall, turns his head away from me and for a second or two nobody says anything. A heavy silence fills the room, my stomach tight with nerves and fear. “He wants you, is that it?” He looks at me, and I don’t know what I’m feeling now.

  “You said, we don’t need to – we don’t need to do it again …”

  “Please, Kari, just let it go.”

  “I can’t.” I shake my head, I’m as confused as he is, except, I think he knows more than he’s letting on. I think he’s hiding something. I think Joe’s hiding something, and that isn’t fair. That scares me more than anything else I may have thought was going on here; that my husband, and Joe Millar, know something I don’t. “It had to happen … why would he say that, Noah?”

  His eyes lock on mine, and that fear I’m feeling is about to explode, it’s tearing through me like a tidal wave, I’ve never been so terrified.

  “Baby, I don’t know. I don’t … I have no idea what he means by that.”

  “Then, what did you mean? When you said we don’t need to do it again?”

  “Kari …”

  “What did you mean, Noah?”

  He lets a few beats pass, and that only serves to make me more nervous than I already am, I’m terrified of what I’m about to hear, and the atmosphere between us now, it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

  “It was never meant to be this way, Kari.”

  “What way? Noah, what’s going on …?”

  “You wanted it too, didn’t you? What we did … you wanted it …”

  He’s giving a statement, not asking a question. “If I knew what the consequences were going to be … Noah, you’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t let this change us, Kari.”

  “It already has.”

  He looks at me, right at me, and there’s a fear in his eyes, too, which only scares me all the more. We’ve never been to this place before, where everything feels threatened; verging on over. We’ve never been here, I never thought we ever would.

  “I was stupid, Kari. What I did, that was stupid …”

  “What did you do?” My voice is barely a whisper, it’s shaking, I’m shaking.

  His eyes burn into mine, and I will this to be nothing more than a bad dream; a nightmare we’re both going to wake up from any second now.

  “What I did, that was bad enough, but how I tried to fix it … that was reckless. Nothing more than a way of me avoiding the truth, disguising it as something it wasn’t. A way for me to assuage my own guilt.”

  “Guilt?” I whisper, and he can’t look at me now. He can’t hold my gaze.

  “I slept with someone else, Kari.”

  His words slam into me like a speeding truck, knocking the breath right out of me. My knees weaken and I grab onto the chair behind me to steady myself, I can’t breathe. Can’t focus.

  “Kari …?”

  “Don’t … don’t say anything else, just … don’t.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, I just don’t think it was that. It wasn’t, and now it’s like my whole world is crumbling down around me, and I don’t know what to do.

  “I thought … I thought that if I …”

  “I said, don’t speak. Don’t open your fucking mouth …”

  “No, Kari, you’re gonna listen to me, okay?”

  I look down at his hand grasping my wrist, and then I raise my head, my eyes locking with his.

  “I thought … I thought, if I saw you with another man …”

  It feels like someone just punched me in the stomach, the pain in my gut, it’s real. “You – you thought watching another man fuck me would make you feel better? Ease your own fucking guilt?”

  “Baby, I am so sorry …”

  The slap I give him echoes around the kitchen, ricocheting off the walls, it’s so hard my arm tingles with the force. “You engineered that shit? You made it happen to make yourself feel better?”

  He holds his cheek, stares back at me, but I’m not seeing my husband now. I’m seeing a manipulative man who created a situation in order to rid himself of his own guilt.

  “Did it even the score, Noah? Are we straight now?”

  “That’s not how it was meant to be, Kari …”

  “How was it meant to be?” I back away from him, shaking my head, I can’t do this now. I can’t do this, at all. “Get out. Go stay with Jenna and Leo, I don’t want you here.”

  “Kari, baby, we need to talk about this …”

  He tries to reach out to me, but I swat his hand away, I don’t want him touching me. “I love you, so much, and I can’t believe you’ve done this … I can’t …” I don’t want to cry, not in front of him, I want to get angry, but all I can feel is a crushing sadness. A real, physical pain that hurts like hell. “It’s your fault he’s here, you brought him here. You caused this shit …”

  “Kari …”

  “Just go, Noah. Please.”

  I walk away, over to the window, folding my arms as I stare outside. And I stay there, I wait until I hear the door close behind me before I move.

  I go into the living room and sit down on the couch, pulling out my phone, and I slide out the card – his card.

  Joe Millar …

  Nothing feels real anymore, everything’s messed up. Complicated. Ruined …

  Staring down at his name, I wonder, did he know what he was doing, when we brought him into our fucked-up fantasy? Did Noah tell him the full story? The reason why he needed to see a stranger fuck his wife? Did Joe know?

  I have no idea how long I sit there, just staring down at that card, it isn’t until I hear the front door open that I’m dragged from my almost trance-like state.

  “Kari?”

  It’s Jenna. And I quickly shove Joe’s card into my pocket.

  “In here.”

  She comes into the living room, sits down on the chair by the fire.

  “I thought you’d gone to Durham.”

  “Everything’s sorted. Not that big an emergency after all … You need to talk to me, Kari.”

  I look at her, but I let a few beats pass before I speak. “I don’t know what to do, Jen.”

  “Sleep on it, kiddo. L
eave it a while, but then I think you should talk to him.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That he slept with someone else, that’s all. But I’m guessing that isn’t the full story.”

  “That’s all …” I trail off, looking down at my clenched fists, and then I raise my gaze and Jenna’s frowning now. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Her frown deepens. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?”

  “Leave it, Jenna. Please.”

  “No, Kari, I’m not going to leave it. I want to know what’s going on, because something is. You guys haven’t been right since you got back from Norway …”

  “I slept with someone, too, Jen. Someone else. Another man.”

  Jenna’s expression changes to one of confusion, she can’t get her head around this. Neither can I. It’s a mess, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t even know if it can be fixed. Did we push things too far? Play too dangerous a game? Step over a line we can’t cross back over? And now Joe’s here, a man I slept with so my husband could feel better about his own betrayal. Joe’s here, and everything’s a mess.

  “I … I don’t understand …”

  “I slept with another man, when we were in Norway. I had sex with another man, and Noah watched it all.”

  Jenna looks as though her head is about to explode, she doesn’t know what to think, and I can’t blame her for that. It sounds crazy, because it was crazy. And now that I know the circumstances; now that I know the truth, it was wrong, what we did, the reasons why we did it. None of that was right.

  “Okay … Look, I’m going to get us a drink, and then I really need you to talk to me, Kari.”

  I nod, dropping my gaze to my hands still clenched together in my lap.

  Joe Millar …

  How much did you know?

  How big a part did you play?

  Who are you, really?

  “Here. Drink this.”

  Jenna comes back into the room and hands me a tumbler of whisky, sitting back down on the chair opposite me.

  “He said he couldn’t live with the guilt. Thought that seeing me – watching me, with another man, he thought that might, somehow, make him feel less guilty about what he’d done.” I look at Jenna, and her expression is still one of confusion. “He thought it would even the score, so to speak. I mean, he told me that wasn’t how it was but that was exactly how it was. He cheated on me, and then he created a situation that was designed to play out by his rules, to make him feel better. And I am so angry, Jen. So fucking angry. I feel used, I feel dirty, and I want to hate him for what he’s done, but I can’t. I can’t hate him … I hate myself.”

  “Jesus, Kari …” She sits back, drags a hand through her hair, sighing heavily. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Can he stay with you? Just until I get my head around this? I can’t … I can’t have him here.”

  “Yeah, of course he can stay with us, but you do need to talk to him, Kari. At some point. And I’m not condoning what he’s done, believe me, I could kill him for doing this to you, but before you do anything, you should talk to him.”

  “Maybe …” I look up, at a still very confused Jenna. “I liked it, you know? At the time. When I’d thought it was nothing more than some shared fantasy we’d both wanted to happen … It was a birthday present. A harmless game played out between three people who knew exactly what they were doing …” I laugh, I can’t help it, because I don’t think we knew what we were doing at all. “He’d wanted something special, something different, something I’d never even thought about before. I’d never wanted another man to touch me, never wanted to be with another man, but, the more I thought about it … I liked it, Jen. That night, it was probably one of the most incredible experiences I’ll ever have, I can’t even begin to describe … but it’s tainted now. Because it was nothing more than a scenario engineered by my cheating husband … a sick, twisted scenario …”

  “This man – this other man, who was he?”

  “No one. A stranger.”

  She can’t know it was Joe. She can’t know that.

  Joe Millar. A man I don’t trust, the same way I can’t trust my husband anymore. A man I still can’t get out of my head, and that’s Noah’s fault. All of this, it’s Noah’s fault.

  I finish my drink and look out of the window, across the street, at Jenna and Leo’s house. And I wonder what version of this story Noah’s telling Leo. How is he spinning this?

  “Kari …?”

  “I’m tired, Jen. I’m going to bed.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  I look at her, and I nod. “Yeah. I do.”

  She gets up and comes over to me, pulling me in for a hug. “Things might look a little less crazy in the morning, huh?” she whispers, and I smile weakly. I slide my hand into my pocket and I finger that card, the one I should have thrown away. Except, now, I think there might be a reason why I didn’t.

  Fourteen

  It was deliberate, of course it was. Making sure we ended up in Noah’s restaurant. Making sure he saw me with Kari, that had to happen, just as that night had to happen. Just as everything that’s about to follow has to happen. Am I lying to Kari? No. Not all of the time. There are certain things she doesn’t know, because she doesn’t need to, not yet. When the time is right she’ll find out, and by that time she’ll feel differently, about me. About everything. Those changes, she’ll welcome them. Embrace them. She’ll see why they needed to happen, so no, I’m not lying to her. Not all of the time …

  *

  I’m on my way out when Noah walks up the driveway, and just seeing him – I still don’t know how I feel. Everything’s still too raw. It’s only been a few days, since I found out the truth, I don’t think I’ve even begun to deal with it all. I’m still trying to believe it happened.

  “I’m on my way to work, Noah.”

  “We need to talk, Kari.”

  I ignore him. I throw my bag onto the passenger seat of the car and walk around to the driver’s side.

  “Kari …”

  “Not now, Noah.”

  I pull out my phone to see who’s just text me. It’s Jenna, asking if I can pick up a jar of coffee on the way in. She was up and out before me this morning, she let me have a bit of a lie-in, but all the sleep in the world can’t erase what’s happened. What’s happening.

  “What’s this?”

  I swing around to see Noah standing behind me, holding Joe’s card. It must’ve fallen out of the back pocket of my jeans when I pulled out my phone. “You can see what it is.”

  “Why do you have it?”

  “You’re interrogating me now?”

  “Why do you have his card, Kari?”

  “He left it, in the room. In Norway.”

  “He left it? Where?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it fucking matters.”

  I shake my head and turn away from him. “Like I said, I don’t have time for this.”

  “Why would he leave his card …?”

  He’s talking to himself now, he isn’t directing that at me, and I turn back around to face him, but I don’t say anything.

  He looks at me, flicking the card between his fingers. “You kept it.”

  I stay silent, keeping my eyes locked on his.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “You asked another man to sleep with me. A man who’s now decided to turn up on our doorstep, invade our lives …”

  “You want to sleep with him again, hmm? Is that it? Did you ask him to come here?”

  “You saw to it that I had my revenge fuck without even realising it was happening.”

  “Enjoy it just a little too much, huh? Feel like going there again without me to distract you?”

  “Grow up, Noah. You were the one who caused this shit. You were the one who did this. Not me.”

  “It meant nothing, Kari, she meant nothing …”

  I throw my head
back and laugh. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you’re spieling me that clichéd crap.” I look at him, right at him. “Answer me one thing, Noah. Did you kiss her? Whoever she was – and I don’t want to know, okay? Never tell me who she was, don’t ever do that ... but I need to know this. Did you kiss her?”

  He briefly drops his gaze, shoves his hands into his pockets, and he nods. And I feel my heart break; shatter into a million pieces, and I know, right there and then, that I’ll never be able to fix this, not properly.

  “He never kissed me. Joe. He never kissed me. Did you make sure of that?”

  Noah looks up, his eyes locking back on mine. But he stays silent.

  “Did you ask him, not to kiss me, Noah? Did you tell him he could do anything he wanted, anything I wanted, as long as he didn’t kiss me? Did you do that?”

  I know he did. Joe told me he did, I just need to hear Noah say the words.

  “Kari, please …”

  “It’s such an intimate thing, isn’t it? A kiss. The first time you kissed me, it was like you were touching me in places I never knew you could reach, it was beautiful …”

  “Kari, baby, please …”

  I shake my head, back away as he moves towards me. “You kissed her. And that kills me more than you actually fucking her, that breaks my heart. And I need you to go.”

  “Don’t do this, Kari. Don’t shut me out …”

  “You did that to yourself, Noah.”

  “I love you … Jesus, this is killing me! And I don’t know why I did what I did …”

  “We crossed too many lines,” I whisper, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I really don’t want to cry. “We crossed them. And I don’t know if we can ever come back from that.”

  “No. No, don’t say that …”

  “I feel cheap. Dirty. I feel used, because of what you did. Because I fucking enjoyed it, at the time, when I thought it was something we both wanted, for the same reasons. And I’m still trying to deal with that, so … no, not yet. I can’t do that conversation, that talk. It’s too soon. I can’t pull this apart and try to piece together this mess, not yet. I’m not ready.”