Broken Bride

“How are you feeling?” Angelo taps on the door before he enters, in case I’m spraying my internal juices all over the place again, I guess. I’ve never been so very embarrassed.

“Okay,” I lie. I feel like my uterus is trying to kill me slowly, with internal punches.

“You are going on birth control,” Angelo tells me. “We are not risking…”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t.”

“I get high blood pressure and I bleed uncontrollably, depending on the pill. That’s why my body is going haywire from that pill you gave me. My body hates hormones.”

He stares at me as if he never expected to hear that combination of words in his life.

“Oh.”

There’s a pause.

“Then Bobby is getting a vasectomy.”

“I am fucking not!” There’s a howl from outside which retreats at high speed. I guess Bobby was listening in.

“You’re not going to do that to him, are you?”

“No,” Angelo winks. “But it’s good to make him consider the consequences of his actions from time to time. We’re going to get you some actual, products for this.” He says this with a general hand wave to the midsection of my body.

“Thank you,” I say, still so embarrassed. “I’m really sorry.”

“No need to be sorry,” he says. “Feel better.”

Chapter 19

Angelo

I’m listening to my boys talk. They've taken it upon themselves to help. Apparently, the way they are helping is destroying the supplies we’ve ordered for Tilly. Bobby has opened each and every one of the packages and stuck them on basically every part of his body and half the furniture.

“Tampons or pads? Why are they called tampons?”

“I don't know, Bobby,” Mark sighed. “Stop opening them. They’re not toys for you.”

“We should know these things now we have a girlfriend.”

"We don’t have a girlfriend. Angelo has a wife.”

“Yeah. Well. I banged his wife.”

“And he almost hospitalized you for it. Hands off Tilly.”

“It was good, Mark. She was good. I didn’t know how she’d feel, but she was so warm and so wet and…” Bobby looks at him with bright eyes. “We’re going to do it again. She was into it. She said I was better than Angelo.”

“Did she?” I decide that’s a good time to interrupt the conversation with that casual question. I have no intention of letting Bobby get cocky.

“Uhhhhhh…” Bobby makes a guttural sound of fear. “I… uhhhhh.”

“You should put some ice on your face,” I tell him. “It looks like it is swelling again.”

He makes a quick exit, which is about the only smart move he’s made in the last six months, or maybe longer. Maybe since I met him.

Mark looks up at me, and shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have hit him. You don’t care that he and Tilly had sex.”

“How do you know what I care about?”

“You don’t care about anything.”

There’s bitterness in his voice. I know he’s worried. About Tilly. About Bobby. About himself. Probably about me. He still doesn’t understand everything that has happened, and that’s starting to get in the way.

“I care very deeply, Mark. You know that. You don’t want to know it, but you do. I care for you, and Bobby, and now Tilly.”

Mark tilts his head and shrugs, gathering what remains of the sanitary products. “I’m going to take some of this to Tilly. She knows what she wants to use, I’m guessing.”

“Mark.”

I reach out and stop him. He looks me in the eye, hurt and angry. I look back at him, holding him there until his gaze softens and I see the man I know looking back at me. This has gone far enough, this game of secrets. It’s time for the truth to come out.

“I was hoping that you’d come to realize that there’s a problem, but you’re too enamored with her to see what you should be seeing.”

“And what am I supposed to be seeing, Angelo? Besides a girl who came to us an innocent virgin, and who has now been defiled by both of you?”

“Is that it? We have been with her, and you haven’t?”

“That’s not it. I’m not trying to take advantage of her the way you are. I’m trying to preserve what little innocence she has left.”

“Innocence. You’re obsessed with innocence. She's not innocent, Mark. She had that taken from her a very long time ago. What you think is innocence, is a facade. It’s a mask she has been wearing her entire life, and it’s a mask she doesn’t have to wear around me, or Bobby.”

Mark looks at me with those big, helpless blue eyes. He’s the innocent one. After all he has endured with me, he still believes in goodness.

“Notice she hasn't said a single word about her father since she got here. It’s been well over a month, Mark. And she doesn’t have a word to say about her tragically departed daddy.”

He gives a confused shrug. “Some people don’t talk about their trauma. Maybe she’s blocked it out. A defense mechanism.”