Beauty in the Broken

I turn my head and catch him watching me feed Lina the water.

“Leave us.”

His green puppy eyes plead with me. “Let me help. Tell me what you want me to do. I can take care of her. You go for your run.”

I don’t answer. I don’t need to. My silence, quietly explosive, says it all. His shoulders slouch as he turns and leaves. It’s irrational, but I don’t like him seeing Lina with her sleep-tussled hair and eye-fucked body. This feels too private. She feels private. It’s crazy. Zane isn’t a threat. Still, my cum is on her underwear, and I feel her warmth in all the places I am cold.

Lina regards me warily as she pushes up against the headboard. “What happened?”

There’s no easy way of explaining, so I walk to the bathroom and ransack her cosmetic bag. I take out every bottle of pills. There’s stuff for headaches and nausea and menstrual cramps, but it’s over-the-counter medicine. Satisfied that there’s nothing life-threateningly dangerous, something she can overdose on, I pack everything into the overhead cabinet.

“Happy?” she snipes when I walk back into the room.

There’s something in her eyes, something like hurt, as if I’m at fault for not trusting her when she can’t be trusted. Even then, even if trust isn’t something I can give her, I want her. I have a feeling I’ll want her forever. No, I know with the kind of clarity that comes once in a scary lifetime. Lina is my obsession, now that I have her even more than before, if such a thing is possible. Nothing can ever happen to her.

I cross my arms. “You’ll take no more medication without my approval.”

No answer. I only get her defiant look, an expression that’s going to cost her later, turn me hard, and make us both come.

“I didn’t ask for the pill,” she says. “Zane forced me to take it.”

Zane is many things, certainly not a good person, at least not in the traditional sense, but I trust him with my life.

“Lina.”

“You don’t believe me.” She utters a wry laugh. “Of course, you don’t.”

I don’t believe Lina is lunatic crazy like her old man implies, but I do think she’s a danger to herself. Sometimes, that is. She’s not always on a hunger strike, a hermit, or suicidal. I do believe she has issues, as her history shows, and I don’t believe lying is beneath her.

My little wife doesn’t like my silence. She doesn’t like what it implies. Throwing back the sheets with an angry movement, she prolongs her act of defiance as if it’s going to make a difference. She’s in the process of swinging her legs from the bed when she freezes. She looks down at her bare thighs, and then her crotch. Her face pales at the same time as her cheeks redden, creating a stunning contrast of shock and embarrassment. My gaze follows hers. We’re both looking at the dried cum on her black silk panties. She inhales and exhales once, twice. She wrestles with her anger. I see the battle in the rigid set of her shoulders and the stormy blue hue of her eyes when she lifts them to me.

Her voice is chilled. It doesn’t ring like bells, but like ice cubes. “What happened?”

We’re back to the same question, and I still don’t have an easy explanation.

Her volume rises in panic. “What happened?”

“Don’t worry.” I lean against the doorframe, trying to sound dry when I’m hard, harder than earlier. “I didn’t fuck you.” Only with my eyes.

Jumping up, she yanks the underwear from her legs. She can’t free her feet fast enough. It stings, but I let it slide. Sooner than she realizes, I’ll make her sleep with her pussy full of my cum all night.

“You ejaculated on me, you sick pervert.”

Can’t deny it. That I did, and that I am. “I jacked off in bed. Don’t you?”

She flushes, not the angry, blotchy red, but a full-on face red. Guilty.

“Maybe I’ll make you show me,” I say.

Bundling the panties in her fist, she marches to where I stand, coming to a stop with her breasts inches from my chest. She waits. I’m blocking the door to the bathroom, and I don’t move. She waits. I’m not going to apologize for something I don’t regret. It’s a stare-off. She breaks first, like I knew she would.

“Do I need permission for the bathroom, too?” She throws the permission part in like a jab, getting back at me for what I said about the pills.

I step aside. “The bathroom is free.”

Her eyes slice me up in ten different ways. When she pushes past me, I grab her wrist. It’s partly to touch her, and partly to let her know I’ll let her get away this time, but the decision is ultimately mine. When my fingers close around the circumference of her delicate bones, she sucks air through her teeth and winces. I didn’t grab her hard. I’m mindful of my strength and her much smaller body. I slacken my hold and look down. Like firecrackers, my anger ignites. It’s not the volcanic eruption of earlier but rather an ongoing chaos of sparklers.