SERENA

––––––––

MY DAYS OFTEN FELT surreal. For sanity’s sake, I tried to compartmentalize my emotions. There was the outrage I felt for my father and then there was the passion I felt for the man who’d made the accusations. Lately, my passion for Mac took precedence. Tonight, for example, I planned to cook dinner and have it on the table for him when he got home from work. The idea was quaint and entirely ridiculous considering our situation and still, I wanted to do it.

“I’m cooking tonight,” I told Tom. He was the one who handled deliveries to the house.

Tom was a man of few words. Usually, I had to read his body language and even that was restrained. The corner of his lips lifted in the tiniest of smiles as I gave him the ingredient list for lasagna. Either he thought it was amusing that I was doing something so domestic or he was pleased I was doing something nice for Mac for a change. One thing for certain, he was loyal to a fault when it came to Mac.

When the groceries came, he set down the box on the counter and gave me another slight smile.

As I cooked, my attention kept getting drawn to the tarot cards I’d dealt earlier on the kitchen island. I’d laid them in the basic Celtic cross formation. My reading of them suggested I was being deceived.

I remembered when my mother’s obsession started taking hold. She’d become increasingly anxious about my father coming home late and what she saw in the cards convinced her that he was cheating. She’d confronted him and he’d denied it, vehemently, but she couldn’t shake the conviction that he was lying. She was so wildly in love with him that she lost all sense. One night, my father blew up, threatening to burn her cards. When my mother started crying he cried, as well, and pleaded with her to see a doctor. She went finally, begrudgingly. She took the pills prescribed for about a week before dumping them down the sink and turning on the garbage disposal.

I worried that I might be falling into a similar pattern. This would be the third time I’d read my fortune in as many days. It occurred to me, I wasn’t doing as great at compartmentalizing my emotions as I thought I was.

But Mac kept too much from me. And he always managed to deflect my questions.

After sticking the lasagna in the oven, I sat down on the stool again and reshuffled. The magician turned up reversed again. I couldn’t ignore it.

Tom glanced away from the flat screen TV in the den as I passed. He always seemed to manage to find some team sport to watch, no matter what time of day it was.

“Taking a nap,” I said.

He nodded and returned his attention to the TV.

I shut the bedroom door and hurried to Mac’s side of the dresser. I slid out the drawer. Whereas my underwear drawer looked like a mess of lace and silk, Mac’s boxer briefs and socks were rolled tightly and lined up with precision. It seemed pretty clear that there wasn’t anything hidden beneath them.

I moved onto the other drawers. Nothing but neatly folded clothing. I fought the urge to pull out one of his t-shirts to see if his scent lingered, but I knew I would never get it folded like that again.

The closet door made a bit of a grating sound as I slid it open. I braced myself for Tom barging in and finding me snooping. When seconds passed and he didn’t come knocking, I tiptoed to the door and locked it. I was still both, the one being guarded, and the one being watched. Well, distrust ran both ways.

I checked the pockets of all his suit jackets, then moved onto his leather jackets. Nothing. I considered that I’d read the cards with a confirmation bias. That I’d been just looking for an excuse to snoop. But those thoughts didn’t stop me. I stooped and checked beneath his shoes and then turned each one over to see if anything would drop out. Again, nothing.

There was a small, discreet desk of the same wood as the dresser. It contained a single drawer. Not a scrap of paper, not even a pen. He was a man with no personal paper trail. His office was full of files, but my search had turned up no personal documents. I was beginning to doubt he really lived here?

A lidded waste basket sat beneath the desk. I pulled it out. I hesitated for a moment, this is what I’d been reduced to, checking the trash for clues as to who my husband really was. I pressed my foot on the lever. There was a bag from a convenience store. It felt a little sleazy checking the receipt. The condoms had been purchased after our marriage.

Beneath the bag, I finally found some paperwork. It had been ripped into tiny pieces. I pulled out a handful and started to reconstruct it. The pieces were so small it was almost impossible to assemble. Mac had clearly taken the time to shred this by hand till it was almost pulp. Why? Then I managed to slip a piece in and it all came together. My lungs constricted. I was looking at discarded pieces of our marriage license. So this is what he thought of our marriage?

I examined the scraps more carefully. The text was blurry as if it had been printed on a poor desktop printer. It was an amateurish attempt at an official document.

I recalled the ceremony. How the clerk had had to read every word as though he was unfamiliar with the ceremony. How he’d made a point of nudging Mac to, “kiss the bride,” which seemed to irritate Mac. Obviously a friend of his. It had a been a setup and Mac had tried to destroy the evidence.

I jammed the scraps back into the wastebasket and stuffed the convenience store bag back on top.

My heart pounding, I moved to the nightstand. The first drawer contained nothing but his phone charger, and paraphernalia from our sex life. Even though I was alone, I blushed. There was the small empty box that he’d ripped open our first night sleeping together, and then the much bigger box that only had a couple of condoms remaining, and the tube of lube.

The second drawer seemed to catch for a moment as I pulled it out. I thought of TV shows, mysteries in particular, where important documents were taped to the undersides of a drawer. I swept my hand along the bottom of the first drawer and found nothing. I needed to get the drawer out. I studied the track and found the levers and pressed on them. The drawer slid out smoothly. There was nothing taped to the sides or the back.

I tried to leverage the bottom drawer out in the same way, but I was met with resistance. I was sure that meant there was something obstructing the drawer. I had an urge to yank it hard, but all my stealth would be for nothing if I ended up snapping off the rollers.

I pulled the drawer out as far as it would go, and swept my hand over what I could reach of the underside...nothing. I needed to see the backside. Impatient, I yanked anyway and fell on my backside as the drawer pulled loose. I sat quietly for a second, the drawer in my lap, expecting to hear Tom’s footsteps. But the hallway stayed quiet; there was only the faint sound of the TV coming from the living room. I expelled the breath I’d been holding and checked the back and sides of the drawer. Nothing. Putting the drawers back turned out trickier than getting them out. I was actually breaking out in a sweat by the time I finished.

I was going to give the closet a quick sweep and be done with this search.

Suits, ties, dress shirts all neatly hung. Guilt washed over me again as I went through his pockets. How could a person have no personal objects? I glanced up at the shelf above the hanger rod, but couldn’t see anything. I backed up and stood on my tiptoes to get a better view. The shelf was empty except for an umbrella. I untwisted a wire hanger and pushed aside the umbrella. I backed up again. I’d uncovered a small wooden box.

I lugged the desk chair over rather than making noise by rolling it across the floor. I climbed onto it, holding onto the wall to keep the chair from tilting. With my other hand, I slid the box off the shelf and then got down from the chair.

Surely this box would contain something. I opened the lid to find cufflinks, a couple of tie pins, and a watch. The watch looked expensive. Expensive and heavy. I lifted it out of the box and checked for an engraving. Again, nothing. I set the watch back in its compartment and the bottom of the box wobbled a little, like it didn’t quite fit. I walked over to the bed and dumped out the jewelry. Using my fingernail, I pried up the bottom. It came up without a fight. All that was stashed between the false bottom and the real one was a pair of dog tags on a chain. Another dead end, I thought, as I read the name on them. James W. McAllister. A friend’s dog tags? Maybe a comrade he’d lost in battle.

But then why hide them? A nickname for McAllister could surely be Mac.

I used my phone to google the name. I found him fairly easily. James Weston McAllister. He’d been quite the hero in the small town in Texas he’d come from. There were write-ups in the local paper about “Mac” McAllister leading his high school football team to victory two years in a row and an article in a more important newspaper about receiving a Silver Star Medal. There was a photo to go along with that article. He’d been an exemplary soldier, judging by his chestful of medals. My fingers tightened around the dog tags. I could not conceive of an innocent explanation for this.

Nobody went to such elaborate lengths to hide their identity unless they were up to no good. It wasn’t a stretch to assume he was working again for some arms trafficking syndicate. It was even possible he’d used blackmail to land the job at my father’s company. Perhaps he’d known about the fraud, maybe even profited from it, and then he’d threatened to expose that knowledge if my father didn’t hand him the keys to the company.

The oven buzzed, shaking me out of my thoughts. I could stay and confront him or I could just get the hell away from him.

I quickly devised a plan. I’d pull the lasagna out, open the bottle of red wine to breathe, and make like a good little wife, so that Tom wouldn’t suspect anything. I’d follow the same procedure I’d used to escape the intruder. Mac would obviously send out an alert on the missing car so I needed to act fast.

Deciding it was best to let him know that I’d uncovered his deceit, I threw the chain with the tags in the top drawer of the nightstand next to his phone charger and then experienced an instant pang of guilt. My father had been correct, what he was now didn’t erase the fact that he’d been a hero once. I picked up the chain and arranged it with care, almost reverently.

I didn’t feel the same compunction about the fake marriage license. I dug beneath the plastic store bag in the wastebasket and grabbed a handful of paper scraps and sprinkled them like confetti over everything in the drawer before shutting it. If he or his men came after me, I’d simply call the cops. He couldn’t use the distraught husband searching for his missing wife excuse with them, since it was a lie that could be easily disproved.

I had to school my features so that Tom didn’t pick up on my distress. I headed to the kitchen and turned off the oven and pulled the heavy pan of lasagna out. I pulled the bottle of wine from the grocery box and then found the corkscrew.

Tom showed up in the kitchen as I was removing the cork. “Smells good,” he said.

“I’ll cut you a piece.”

He refused my offer with a sort of half-hearted wave of his hand.

I ignored him and cut him a big slab anyway.

He took it with a sheepish smile and sat down at the island. I poured him a glass of wine.

Now that he was preoccupied with eating, it seemed a perfect time to sneak out.

“Be right back,” I said, sounding too obviously like I was up to something, but Tom didn’t seem to notice. He took another big forkful of lasagna.

I closed the door to the bedroom and locked it again and started gathering essentials.

I heard the front door open and my pulse rate skyrocketed. He was home and I’d missed my window of opportunity.

I’d have to put it off and wait for him to disappear into his office for an hour or so. Something he did every night before he went to bed. Probably to touch base with somebody and relay information gained during the day. Whatever covert thing he was up to, he drowned it out with heavy metal music. I could swear that the speakers faced directly at the door in case I was hanging around.

“Baby, I’m home,” he called.

Despite my plans to escape, I had the usual Pavlovian response to his deep drawl; my panties got instantly wet.

How was I going to explain why I’d locked the door? I chucked my panties and my bra and slipped into a wrap dress. It was thin and clingy, making it completely obvious that I was naked underneath it. Maybe he would just think I’d been fancying myself up to seduce him.

He was trying to turn the knob.

I took the clip out of my hair, shook my hair out then opened the door.

“What were you doing in here?” Was the man just naturally suspicious or was I giving off obvious waves of anxiety.

“Just putting on a dress.”

His gaze dropped to my breasts. He’d obviously caught the bounce. His eyebrows rose at my braless condition. He scooped me toward him as I walked past.

“Dinner’s ready,” I said and wriggled out of his hold

Tom had gone home, leaving his rinsed plate and fork in the sink. I found a box of matches in the cupboard and headed toward the dining room. My hand was trembling so badly it took concentration to target the wick with the match flame. How was I going to carry this off? I pulled in a few meditative breaths before returning to the kitchen. I slipped on the potholder mitts and brought the heavy glass pan to the table. Maybe I could just wear the mitts all night to hide my shaking hands.

Mac appeared in the dining room with his tie off and the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up. He whisked me back against his hard body as I passed. I was still wearing the potholders as he leaned in and kissed me thoroughly. I wondered if he could feel my heart pounding against his chest. But then my heart always pounded hard when he kissed me.

“Hey, little witch, fuck me first then feed me.”

If I lost control of this situation I’d find myself under him in bed while he searched the bedside drawer for a condom. I panicked thinking about the paper confetti and dog tags. I was beginning to realize how stupid a gesture that was.

I squirmed out of his arms again. My hands were trembling as I tugged loose the bow of my wrap dress and then untied the inner panel. He lifted me onto the dining room table, his gray eyes darkening at the sight of my taut nipples and pantiless pussy.

I ran my toe up his pant-clad leg. “I know it’s ridiculous, since I barely know you, but I feel like I’m falling in love with you, Mr. Sutton,” I said huskily.

He tilted his head back slightly and gave me one of his, narrowed, suspicious looks. I was telling a partial truth and taunting him all in one fell swoop. Teasing him with the part of his name which was completely false. Unfortunately, I wasn’t just falling...I was already there. I was flat-out in love with a man I had zero faith in.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Sutton?”

“Stop with the Mr. Sutton bullshit.”

“Thought it would be a nice touch, since you like your women obedient.”

“Baby, that’s not obedience that’s stubbornness pure and simple,” he growled.

I braced my hands behind me and leaned back which thrust my breasts out.

“I need to get a condom.”

My breasts were rising and falling with my rapid breathing. “Just this once,” I said and parted my legs. His intense gaze fastened on my pussy. Clearly I wasn’t exposed enough. He used his fingers to spread apart my lips, revealing my pink folds. He stroked my hot sex with the fingers of his other hand, then plunged his finger inside me. Another stroke and then a thicker plunge, with his thumb this time.

“Mac,” I moaned, momentarily forgetting the Mr. Sutton ruse.

He unzipped his pants, releasing his huge cock, then gripped my hips and took me in a single hard thrust. “You know me, babe.” Another thrust. My eyes rolled back in my head. “Deep down you know exactly who I am.”

“Admit it,” he demanded, He shoved his cock to the hilt, his thighs hitting the table making it jolt. 

I felt his body tense as he waited for me to respond.

He didn’t take my silence well. He dug his fingers into my hair and tugged my head back so I was forced to look up into his face as he pumped into me.

He made a move to withdraw and I locked my legs tightly around his waist to hold him deep inside me. I clung to his big shoulders as he shot his hot seed into me.

He heaved a sigh and stepped back. Finding release hadn’t helped him to forgive my stubbornness. He jerked up his zipper and buckled his belt, all the while glaring at me as I scooted off the table and retied my dress.

“I think I’d better put the lasagna in the oven for a few minutes to warm.” I was the efficient, cheerful housewife again. I strode out of the dining room carrying the pasta laden glass pan, Mac’s semen sticky between my thighs.

I heard the door to his office slam. Would he hear the car start from that side of the house? Better to just floor it than go too slow. Considering how capable he’d been on the night of the intruder despite all the liquor he’d imbibed, I could only imagine how alert and formidable he would be in a sober state.

I stuck the lasagna in the oven but did not bother turning it on. I wasn’t going to be around to check on it, and I didn’t want to be responsible for burning down the house.

I heard the heavy metal music turn on. If he really was using the music to mask his subterfuge then it was satisfying to think it would mask my leaving.

I noticed his suit jacket draped over the chair and stopped. I quickly patted the inside pockets to find his wallet. My hands were shaking like crazy when I opened the thin leather wallet. His driver’s license and credit cards all had his alias, Mac Sutton. I returned his wallet to his pocket.

No time to think or do anything else I stuffed my purse with underthings, and grabbed a handful of clothes, hangers and all out of the closet. I’d only just moved my clothes out of the boxes to share his closet, fooling myself into thinking this might last.

My survival instincts were kicking in. I had a sudden idea that I might need something to sell. I swept my necklaces and earrings off the dresser and tossed them into my purse.

I stepped out of my heels, picked up my sneakers, and walked soundlessly to the glass door of the gym then hurried across the smooth wood floor to the back door. The cement driveway was cold beneath my feet and the moon was bright.

My heart was beating like mad as I turned the corner of the house. Escaping the stranger who’d broken into the house had been just a dry run for this. I readied the key to open the car door the old-fashioned way. I feared pressing the remote would be too loud. I imagined the beeping sounds echoing in the carport.

The shaking was no longer limited to my hands, I was trembling from head to foot. My hand was so unsteady that I scratched the car aiming for the keyhole.

I didn’t take time to put on my seatbelt, just turned on the ignition and threw the car into drive. I winced as the wheels spun in the dirt. Panicking, I stomped on the gas and the car shot forward suddenly, gravel pinging against the side of the house. I made too sharp a turn from the dirt road to the paved highway and my back tires lost their grip again and the car fish-tailed. I had a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel as I crested the hill. I glanced once at the view of the brightly lit valley and realized I would probably never see that particular view again.

The road had no lights only the occasional reflector barrier along the steepest sections of the winding road. My hands were sweating as I clutched the wheel and leaned forward to see out the windshield.

Stop driving like you’re ninety years old. Mac was probably getting into his car this very moment. I hit the brights and put my foot on the gas.

I remembered suddenly the GPS unit Tom had said was under the car. I pulled off onto the narrow shoulder and scrambled out of the car. I used my phone to light the underside of the front bumper...nothing. Back bumper...nothing. I scooted as far under as I could...nothing. I went around and ran my hand inside one of the wheel wells. The third one was the charm. It was a small box, smaller than those people kept spare keys in. It had a magnetic mount. I pried it off with my fingernails, only cracking two in the process.

Wait one measly second, I thought. The GPS tracker wasn’t to track a kidnapper, any self-respecting kidnapper arrived in their own vehicle. The GPS unit was to find me if I ran away. Why was I surprised? He hadn’t trusted me from the beginning. I hurled the small device as far as I could throw it.

I took the curves at some pretty unsafe speeds as I neared the bottom of the hill. And instead of waiting for a semi truck to pass, I gunned my right turn just squeaking by.

I pulled off the highway at the first sign of a sprawling mall and stopped at an ATM and withdrew the limit. I shoved the cash into my purse. I’d need a lot more money to survive. I’d have to find a branch of my own bank and withdraw a large chunk of my savings.

I felt dizzy with adrenaline by the time I got on the highway again. I hit the electric window buttons and rolled the windows all the way down, letting the fresh night air pour in.

I headed toward one of the branches I was familiar with. The parking lot was dark and deserted and a chill ran up my spine. Mac hadn’t done any of this for altruistic reasons. He was somehow complicit in my father’s death and keeping me under lock and key was for his own protection, not mine. The adrenaline surge was coming to a sudden crashing end. Feeling emotionally and physically spent, I folded my jacket to use as a pillow.