Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 58346 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 233(@250wpm)___ 194(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58346 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 233(@250wpm)___ 194(@300wpm)
I lean closer to her, wanting her to really pay attention to what I’m saying. “You’ve never shamed me for any of my other dark desires, have never told me no to anything I’ve wanted to try with you. The only thing you’ve ever done besides jump in head first, the only times you’ve ever had any hesitation, you told me you’d like to study up on it first. And we did. We watched scenes at the club; we watched videos. We even asked Seven"—the head of training and an owner of Club Alias—"to give us a lesson before we tried things on our own.”
I shake my head, my eyes narrowing, and then I do something I’ve never done in my entire life. I grovel. “But in the end, I got what I wanted. You’ve always given me what I wanted. So it’s my fault, baby. It is all my fault I didn’t bring this to you. It’s my fault for dropping stupid-ass hints to see what you thought, like a pussy, instead of coming to you with this desire like I did any other time before it. But I admit, a big reason I didn’t is because I was scared you would not only tell me no for the very first time, but that you wouldn’t understand my reason for wanting it and that you’d look at me differently just knowing I had this need inside me. I thought it would turn you off of me so thoroughly you’d never look at me the same way again. I truly believed it would be a sort-of game changer in our relationship, and not a good one. The kind there’s no coming back from. And I’m so sorry I feared that happening. There’s no excuse for it. I’m just sorry for letting that fear get the best of me and everything that happened because of it.”
My heart hurts at the look in her beautiful eyes as they well with more tears. Fuck, I’m so sick of every negative emotion I see there, knowing I’m the cause of it. So many times I’ve seen the whites of her eyes turn pink these past several eggshell-paved months, and every time, the sight is followed by the whip of her hair and she spins to hurry away from me. Unwilling… unable to hear what I had to say because it hurt too badly on top of the pain she already felt. Or when she’s been triggered—a term I had to search out, because I couldn’t understand how one second it would seem we might be heading down a crooked path that’d straighten out after some rough terrain, and then in the span of a blink, she’d be quietly sobbing on the other side of our locked bathroom door. It took me some time, but after some research, I realized the smallest, most insignificant thing could somehow spring the worst memories to the forefront of one’s mind.
And it tore my soul to pieces even more jagged than they already were when I started to pinpoint the moments my beautiful wife was triggered.
Our wedding song playing quietly over the sound system at the grocery store.
Sliding individual items of hanging clothes along the closet rod and then coming upon the silvery dress she wore New Year’s Eve that fit her like a second skin.
Even people’s names.
She’d cringe at the name Pete.
She’d flinch at female names that start with an F—Farrah, Ferron, Fiona.
Those were probably the ones that took me the longest to puzzle out. Days would go by with little to no tension between us, and then suddenly, it’s like a switch would flip inside her, not just the old adage of taking two steps back, but like an invisible force hadouken’d her like a character in Street Fighter all the way back to Ground Zero of her pain.
And there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t like trigger warnings for a movie, something easily avoidable just by looking it up, peeking at some reviews, maybe using common sense and context clues in the preview. Like, hey, this is a horror movie about a haunted house. If I’m triggered by jump scares… probably not a wise idea for me to go see this movie, even though it doesn’t clearly state on the site “Contains Jump Scares.”
No, these were tiny things, microscopic details in the grand scheme of our life. There was no way to make sure our song wouldn’t be on random playlists for the foreseeable future. I wanted to throw away the dress but thought she might kill me in my sleep, so I stored it in a part of the closet she never ventured—the very top shelf, all the way at the back, where I kept shoeboxes of my old video games and the DVD cases she couldn’t bring herself to throw away after putting all our movies into a leather binder.