“Don’t bother,” Lucas says, retreating down the hall before slamming his office door.”
My mother turns to me, her eyes welling with tears as she pushes past me to grab her purse off the entryway table. “I didn’t know he felt this way.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, don’t believe it. Don’t…listen to him, he’s not himself.”
Both of us shriek as Lucas speaks from behind us, leaning against the wall with an empty lowball glass in hand, his eyes as wide as his deviant smile. “Maïwenn, you should believe me.”
“Lucas, stop! Stop!” I scream just as my mother shuts the front door behind her. I chase her out to her car, and she turns back to me with a small tear running down her cheek. “I’m so sorry, Mila. I’ve felt so guilty for that day for so long. I should have apologized to you both years ago.”
“Mom, he’s not himself, he’s immersed in this role, and he’s just being…unreasonable. Please come back inside. I’ll talk to him.”
She starts her car. “It’s best if I leave.”
“I’ll call you later,” I offer as she pulls away.
Taking steadying breaths, I do my best to calm down. Minutes later, I’m on the verge of hyperventilating. Maybe she deserved it, but then, not six years after the fact. What Lucas did was just as cutthroat, it was the best revenge. I am just as furious with him as I was with her all those years ago. Slamming the door behind me, I make my way into the hall and see he’s talking on the phone. He didn’t even have the decency to wait on the argument he picked. Heading to the kitchen, I toss the carefully prepared dinner into the sink and start the dishes. Lucas emerges a few minutes later and opens the fridge taking a beer from it. “I’ll take my dinner on the patio.”
“Your dinner is in the fucking trash. Feed yourself and don’t ever talk to my mother like that again.”
He lifts a brow. “She deserved a lot worse.”
“Maybe then, but not now. Your behavior was deplorable, and you two have been civil for years!”
“Because your husband has made it that way,” he adds easily. “I think it’s about time he stood up for himself as far as that woman is concerned.”
“That woman?” I say, shaking my head. “Go back to your cave, madman,” I snap testily before glancing up to look at him and what I see when I do, disgusts me. “You think this is funny?”
“You’re cute when you’re angry.”
“Don’t you dare!” I say as livid tears threaten. Grabbing my keys off the counter, I move to gather my purse when he catches my wrist and jerks me to him. Our bodies align naturally, but everything else is foreign.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Anywhere but here, with you,” I say, jerking away before fleeing out the door.
The next morning, I wake up to a red Cartier box on the pillow next to me and am instantly furious. My husband has never bought me a piece of jewelry other than my wedding ring. I walk down the hall with it in my hand never opening the box and find Lucas in the kitchen lifting a coffee cup for a drink. Coffee. The monster in the kitchen is not my husband.
He eyes me carefully not saying a word. Even Nikki Rayo has redeeming moments in the script. There’s a bit of a romance mixed in with that psychopathic killer, the ma
n in front of me is lost, utterly void of emotion. I throw the box into the trash can next to him and leave him there.
Listening to the crash of the waves, I decide to sit on our deck and wait him out. He’s probably due at the studio soon, and I don’t want to be anywhere near him. Avoiding his company is definitely not something I’d have ever thought myself capable of.
The sound of the door sliding open lifts me from where I dwell in a life that now seems so distant, it’s piercing the deepest parts of me. Lucas’s new voice sounds from behind me, kicking my heart into an aimless state.
“I finally have enough money to get you nice things, and you throw them in the trash?”
“Fuck off…Nikki,” I mutter into the sea breeze.
“That’s not nice.” He’s standing directly behind my chair, in a ploy of intimidation I’m no longer playing into.
“I don’t want to know you,” I say. “At all. So please, just pretend I don’t exist. Can you do that? Take some direction from your wife for once? I don’t want to know you.”
He circles the chair and squats down in front of me, a killer smile in place. It’s eerie, and it reminds me of someone, probably because he’s someone else. It’s a smile that insinuates that I’m the one being unreasonable, that I’ve imagined his behavior and I’m the crazy one. I’m not buying it, just like I’m not buying into that jewelry. He’s still acting.
“I work hard for you, you could show some appreciation.” He palms my thigh, and I smack it away. He clenches his fists, his eyes on me as I do anything but give him the attention he’s asking for.
“I’m under so much pressure,” he says testily. “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what I had to do to get roles like this.”