But, as usual, just as I’m starting to get comfortable and think I understand how things work, my whole world gets turned upside down.
“So she sleeps in your bed every night now, huh?” Bobby opens the conversation with Angelo with extreme attitude. Angelo has been very busy lately. I don’t know what he is doing, but I know it is distracting him. Apparently, Bobby is feeling as though he’s missing out. He’s blaming me for it, though I haven’t been sleeping in Angelo’s bed either. I decide not to bother to say anything. This isn’t about me. It’s about him.
“Mark, I need you in the office,” Angelo says. “Bobby, you go with him.”
Mark gets up to go and do as he is told. Bobby does not.
“Boy, I will whip you in front of Tilly if I have to.”
“Will you, though? Aren’t you afraid of frightening your wife?”
He says those two words, your wife, with so much spite. Bobby is still afraid of losing Angelo, I think. Without Angelo, Bobby wouldn’t exist. He’s so much a reflection of the man. He might be decades younger, but he has Angelo all the way in his soul.
SMACK!
I draw in a gasped breath. Angelo just backhanded Bobby hard enough to knock him out of his chair and send him sprawling. Apparently, Bobby just hit the limit of my husband’s patience.
Bobby scrambles up as if it’s happened a hundred times before, but I am shocked to my core. It’s not that I haven’t seen violence before. I watched my father’s brains be turned into table decorations, for god’s sake. But this is different.
I feel immediately sorry for Bobby. He has no way of standing up to Angelo. Angelo fills this house with his presence and power. Seeing Bobby get hit is horribly like seeing a puppy kicked. Even if it is a vicious puppy that likes to bite and growl, it’s wrong.
“What the fuck!” I exclaim, real anger in my voice.
I don’t know where those words are coming from. They’re not the usual words I’d choose. I rarely swear, and I’ve never stood up for myself in my life. I don’t know why I’m suddenly standing up for Bobby, physically as well as metaphorically. I put myself between Bobby and Angelo, and I glare at Angelo with all the outrage and anger I’m feeling.
“He didn’t do anything to deserve that.”
“Of course he did,” Angelo says, looking down at me under hooded eyes. “He disobeyed me.”
“Is that how it works here? If anyone fails to obey you, you smack the hell out of them? Are you going to slap me across the room too?”
I brace myself, knowing he very well might.
“Let’s all calm down.”
Mark is back. The eternal peacemaker. He looks worried. If Angelo backhands me across the room, there’s going to be an all out brawl. I know it. Angelo knows it. I stare up at him defiantly, and see just a glimmer of amusement in his dark eyes.
Behind me, I hear Bobby growl.
“I don’t need a girl to protect me,” he hisses resentfully, pushing past me. “Let’s go, Mark.”
I watch, confused, as Bobby follows Mark out of the room. I didn’t defend him because I wanted gratitude. I don’t know why I defended him. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Apparently putting myself on the line means nothing to him.
“You'll come to understand how things work here in good time,” Angelo tells me.
He didn’t answer my question though. Is he going to beat me the way he beats Bobby? He spanked me once, but what he just did to Bobby was very different. It was swift and brutal. It demanded immediate and complete obedience.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
I know what living in that kind of world is like. I have done it my entire life. I am well equipped to survive here. So why do I suddenly feel this blazing need to rebel against the worst man in the world to rebel against?
Angelo gives me a look, stern, but amused.
“No. I’m not going to treat you the way I treat Bobby. You wouldn’t physically survive it,” he says. “But I expect you to obey me, Tilly.”
“Of course,” I say. What I really mean is, of course you do.
Angelo expects the entire universe to bow down to him. And if it won’t, he has ways of making it wish it had.
Angelo
Female submission is such a slippery thing. I know this girl is not giving me her full obedience. When she leaped up to defend Bobby just now, it was the first honest reaction she’s shown since I met her, aside from when she wants to be fucked. Tilly is a lustful little creature.
She’s blushing now. Nervous. All the courage it took to blurt out something to defend Bobby has drained away and left her with the stark realization that she just swore at me and spoke very disrespectfully.