Sinning in Vegas (Vegas Morellis 2)

Looking down at the band in his hand, he says, “We got married young. You may have picked this up, but I tend to be a one and done kind of man. I don’t piss around looking at what else is out there once I have something worth hanging onto. I lock it down and that’s it.”

Smiling faintly, I nod my head. “I like that about you.”

“Yeah, she did too, back then.” He says it absently, maybe a little dismissively. He says it the way you talk about something you don’t believe anymore—just a review of what you thought then, before you knew you were wrong. “Thing is, it didn’t last. I liked our life. Even when it got harder, less exciting. Even when it wasn’t perfect, I never wanted to leave it. To me, it was just something we needed to get around to fixing. She felt differently.”

Even though a small, selfish part of me is glad this idiot threw him out so I could have him, the larger part of me feels bad for the pain this must have inflicted on him. “She left you?” I surmise.

He shakes his head, looking a little haunted. “No. That would have been one thing, I guess. Direct enough that I know there’s a problem I clearly need to fix. No, that’s not what she did. I felt her pull back, I started to notice distance, but I didn’t want to see it. She stopped responding to things, even when I would try. If I’d surprise her with something I knew she liked, she could hardly muster a smile. It was like she was just so fucking tired of me, nothing I did could renew her interest.”

I want to hug him. I need to hug him. I can hear leftover agony in his voice, and it hurts me—not in a jealous way, I just don’t want him to relive this old pain. I don’t need him to. He was married and now he’s not—fine. I can accept that. Not a big deal. Let’s put it behind us and never think about it again.

“This part’s almost funny,” he says, glancing at me, though there’s no humor expressed in his features. “She came onto Rafe one night when we were all hanging out, when I was in the other room. He came and told me because, you know, we were friends. I told him he read too much into nothing. I didn’t want to believe that, you know?”

I nod. “Sure, of course.”

“I should have confronted her that night. We should have fought. There should have been a big fucking blowout where we just aired all our problems and dealt with it—I realized that later, but at the time, I just…. I convinced myself she would stop, she was just bored and acting out for some reason. I told myself the problem would fix itself, even though I know from professional experience, problems almost never fix themselves. I had my head in the sand. I was young, you know.”

I remember him telling me I’m young that night he said all those awful things and chased me off. It seems like he has more faith in me now than he did then, but the way he uses youth as an excuse has me thinking we should touch on this base again later so I can remind him my age doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.

Finally, he says, “She cheated on me.”

Oh, God. “Not with Rafe?”

That startles him, and he finally looks at me. “No, no. Not with Rafe.”

Sighing with relief, I nod my head. “Okay.”

His mouth curves up faintly now. “You think I’d have stayed his friend after that? Fuck no. No, our relationship wasn’t complicated until you came along. Before that, we were friends. Neither one of us would have ever worried about leaving our wives alone with the other.”

That makes me feel kinda shitty. “Sorry,” I murmur.

He transfers his old wedding ring to the other hand, freeing up the one closest to me so he can reach over and place his hand over mine. “None of this is your fault.”

I don’t want to drag him off track, so I tell him, “Anyway, sorry, I interrupted. What happened?”

“She got pregnant,” he states, looking down at the bedding. Just in case there’s any doubt, he adds, “Not by me.”

“Oh, Sin.” Now my heart isn’t the only thing aching—my stomach joins in.

He doesn’t look up. “When she told me, I think she expected that to be it. Most sane people would probably… they’d be done at that point, but I wasn’t. I’d made a commitment, and I intended to see it through. I was so pissed and hurt and—” He trails off, shaking his head, like he can’t find the right words. “My whole life was just ripped out from under me in an instant. I should have had the upper hand—she fucked up, everything was fucked up, but she’d be sorry and she would be desperate to fix things. It was too big for me to shove aside and ignore, too big to pretend it didn’t happen. This wasn’t flirting with my friend, this was fucking another man and getting pregnant by him. This was fucking huge. Insurmountable, some might say. But none of that happened. She wasn’t sorry. She wasn’t desperate to fix things. She was cold, detached. Told me there was nothing I could do to fix it—me, like I was the one who fucked up. Our marriage wasn’t even over, and she had already moved on. She told me she was leaving me for that fucking asshole, and I saw red. Literally… just a red haze overtook me. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until it was too late.”

Oh, God. Oh, no, please not this. I want to stop him, I want to beg him not to tell me his deep dark secret is that he killed his pregnant wife. I swore to him nothing he said would change things for me, but I cannot stomach the idea of that being the skeleton in his closet.

I fight the urge to clamp my hands over my ears, but just barely.

Fuck. My mind is already trying to salvage this, reaching for excuses—a crime of passion, temporary insanity, perhaps a legitimate mental break as his life shattered, an episode of psychosis. Things that would make this less his fault.

None of them make me feel less icky.

Why wouldn’t Rafe have played that card? How could he leave me here alone with Sin after that helicopter date if he knew Sin had a history of snapping like that? I could have been killed!

Unaware of my nervous breakdown, Sin continues his story. “I drove to the guy’s house. I knew who he was, but I don’t know how she met him. I meant to ask her, but I forgot. It didn’t matter anymore, all that mattered was making it go away. Making all of it go away. Getting control over my life, because it was spinning the fuck out of control.”

“Was this after…?” I halt, not knowing how to phrase this. After you killed your pregnant wife?

Sin frowns slightly. “After she told me she was pregnant? Of course. So, anyway, I go over and get this guy and I bring him back to our house. Paula’s here, but she doesn’t know what’s going on.”

Wait, Paula is alive? I realize I got the story he’s telling and the story in my head confused—he has not killed the wife, he just left his house in a hazy red fog and went to get the man she cheated with. Okay, I’m back on track. Phew.