Carmen
I was frozen still on the altar. I hadn’t moved since Ben had surprised me by kissing me on the cheek instead of the lips. My cheeks were burning red, but I didn’t know if it was from embarrassment, fear, relief, or some other emotion that they hadn’t even invented words for yet. All I knew was that I was way out of my depth. My life was spinning rapidly away from everything I knew and loved, faster than I could get a grip on what it was becoming, on where I was headed. It almost made me feel dizzy.
His back grew smaller as he stormed down the aisle without looking back. What had that expression in his eyes been? Tortured was the word that came to mind, but that just didn’t make a single lick of sense. What did he have to be tortured about? He wasn’t the one with a child in him. He wasn’t the one being shipped off by their parent. He wasn’t going through the things I was going through. No, that was just me. All alone.
I looked at my father where he sat in the front pew. Not a single other person had come to the wedding. I wondered if he’d told them about it, or if he’d even gone so far as to warn them to stay away. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. Did he love me? Hate me? It was impossible to say.
He and Ben were alike in that sense. Both men were dark and unreadable. The door swung open at the far end of the aisle and Ben disappeared through it. All eyes were fixed on me. My face felt so hot that I was sure someone could see me blushing from space. Without any other ideas, I stepped gingerly down from the altar and walked as fast as I could down the aisle after Ben. No one followed me.
He was waiting outside. I saw that he had undone the bowtie and the top few buttons of his shirt. The tie hung loosely around his neck and the starched white fabric of the shirt parted to reveal a bronze chest glimmering with ink. He’s beautiful, came the unbidden thought.
Shut up, I reprimanded myself mentally. He’s the reason you’re in this catastrophe to begin with. Back and forth went my thoughts, pinwheeling from the same awestruck intimidation I’d felt when I first met Ben to a cold anger at his role in getting me here.
His bike was chugging behind him, still resting on its kickstand. He didn’t look at me as he swung a leg over and heeled the stand up, straightening the handlebars like he was about to leave.
“Are you coming?” he asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” I shot back. I felt suddenly furious. Jeez, my emotions were wildly out of control. One minute I was angry, the next I felt like I wanted to sit in a dark room and cry until there was no water left in my body.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He eased out on the clutch and started to roll forward.
“Wait!” I exclaimed. “Are you just going to leave me here?”
He turned to look at me for the first time since the bizarre non-kiss a minute earlier. His face was blank but strained, like he was working as hard as he could to prevent himself from showing me a single sign of normal human emotion. Or maybe I was just imagining that. Maybe he was actually just incapable of feelings at all. “If you don’t want to come with me, then go back with your dad.” He jerked his head towards the church behind us.
I shuddered at the thought. I had buried thoughts of my father as far below the surface as possible. I wasn’t even close to ready to opening that can of worms. Just the word dad made me feel dizzy and nauseous. “No,” I said stubbornly. “I’m not going with him.”
“It doesn’t seem to me like you have a lot of choices,” he drawled. “You go with me or you go with him. Your call.”
I looked behind me. The church rose tall and blank behind us. I remembered coming here with my mother every now and then when I was little. Daddy had never joined us, so it was just my mom and me, wearing our cute dresses and coming here to sit in the back and clap and sing. I actually liked it. In my memories, I associated this building with singing and my mom’s warm hand holding mine. She was never religious or anything; she just liked to hear the music. I hadn’t been back here since she’d died.
What kind of life was ahead of me? I felt like getting on the back of the bike was the real vow, like everything we’d just said on the altar had been a big build-up to this moment. If I got on there with Ben, that was it, no turning back. We’d peel out and my life would officially be taking a sudden and extremely unexpected turn, one that was going to take me into territory I was completely unprepared to enter.
But did I have a choice? Ben was right. I had him or my father. And Daddy had closed all doors that led back to him. It wasn’t a choice at all. There was only one way to go. I bit my lip, then hiked up my skirts and walked over to the bike. Swinging one leg across the seat, I clambered up. Ben nodded once I had settled on and we took off, headed for God only knew what.
# # #
The smell of fresh paint overwhelmed me as Ben opened the door to the apartment. I followed him inside. The place was practically bare, with just a few pieces of furniture scattered across the wood floors. Nothing hung on the walls. It looked like a monk’s cell, though I did notice that there were big windows along one wall that let the sunlight stream in.
Ben threw the keys onto the kitchen counter. He strode to the couch, then eased himself onto it with a groan as he ripped off the jacket and tossed it aside, followed by the bowtie. He rolled up the sleeves of the shirt, revealing brawny forearms rippling with veins. Then he leaned his head back against the cushions and closed his eyes.
“Does anyone actually live here?” I demanded. I was bristling with irritation for reasons I couldn’t explain. How could he just sit there and look so freaking comfortable? Did he give a damn about what was happening to me? About what he was doing to me? What he was making me do? It sure as hell didn’t look like it. He looked like the most content man in the world, leaning back on that couch with his eyes closed like he was about to take a nice little catnap.
He didn’t open his eyes when he spoke. “New place,” he murmured. “Just got it.”
“Do you own anything? Furniture, kitchen supplies…?”
“Nope. What you see is what you get.”
“You’re joking.”
“It’d be a pretty bad joke.”
I crossed my arms and huffed. I knew I was coming off as petty, but for the moment I didn’t care. I wanted him to react, to do something or say something so I knew he wasn’t just some tattooed robot. He had to be feeling something. I had emotions enough for the two of us, but that wasn’t good enough. I needed to get behind that pretty face of his and figure out just what he planned to do now.
“Why did you agree to all of this?” I asked.
“Eh?” he grunted.
I waved my hands around. “This! All of this! Marrying me, for crying out loud!” Could he really be so dense?
“Dunno.”
“What?”
“I said, dunno.”
I stared at him in disbelief. I wanted to slap him. This wasn’t the smooth, charming biker who’d more or less swept me off my feet at a party. The man sitting on the couch a few feet away from me was a mute Neanderthal with the emotional capacity of a rock. I wanted to wake him up, jolt him to life, shake him until he admitted that he actually gave a damn about what happened next.
Then again, maybe he didn’t. More likely than not, I’d been another forgettable notch in his belt, just some innocent girl he’d taken advantage of and then tossed into the night like a used condom. Maybe there were more girls like me, stashed in empty apartments like this across the city, waiting desperately for him to come home and feed them miniscule scraps of his attention. I wouldn’t be like that. I would never beg him for anything. Not now, not ever.
“You don’t know,” I said flatly.
“That’s what I said.”
“Is this something you do frequently? Get girls pregnant and marry them just to keep their daddies happy?”
“I’d have to say this is a first for me.”
“You seem awfully casual about it.”
“It is what it is.”
I felt like tearing my hair out in frustration. Or maybe I’d tear his out instead. “‘It is what it is?’ You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I do.”
I stammered wordlessly. There were no words for how angry he was making me. How could one man get under my skin with such little effort? My face felt hot again, but this time it was with a blank, fiery rage, directed at one man—Ben Killmore. “You…I…You have to…I mean…” I babbled. Finally, I managed to spit out, “You have to feel something.”
He cracked an eye open for the first time. “Nah.”
All I could was echo him. “Nah?” I screeched.
“Can you do anything besides repeat what I say?”
Before I could stop myself, I took one long stride and slapped him across the face. Served the bastard right. How dare he mock me. Didn’t he know that my life was crumbling around me? Didn’t he know he’d caused it?
His reaction was lightning quick. He rose, unfurling himself to his full height, which towered over me. Grabbing my wrists in each hand, he spun me around. At the same time, he hooked one foot around my ankles and swept my feet out from under me. I fell backwards onto the couch. He followed, pinning me down. I was surrounded by his bulk, his smell. His face flared with intensity. I shivered. My rage shriveled immediately. Something about the way he was looking at me screamed danger, heat, violence. It screamed, Listen.
“I didn’t want this any more than you did, princess. But like I said, I didn’t have a choice. I’m stuck in this hellhole of a situation just like you. We’re mired in the same shit, you and I. I’m gonna try to make the best of it, by which I mean stay as far out of your way as possible. You do the same, and we’ll be just fine.”
He let the last few words linger in the air. Then he slowly released my wrists and stood up. Without a backwards glance, he paced into the adjacent bedroom and shut the door.
I sat on the couch for a long time after he had gone. Silence settled back over the room, so deep and complete that I could hear my heart beating in my ears. I rubbed my wrists back to life where he had squeezed them. I knew I looked ridiculous. I was sitting on this squeaky new couch in this sparse new apartment, wearing a pristine white wedding dress and staring at the floor with the world’s blankest expression. I could think only one thought, and I thought it over and over again for the longest time.
I’m married to a madman. And I’m pregnant with his kid.