So, I lay next to him in our beautiful house long into the night until it was the darkest of the evening hours. Only then did I quietly turn onto my back, lift my nightgown and sink my fingers into my burning hot pussy. I came in under two minutes with my clit pinched between my fingers and another two shoved deep inside, thinking of the sexy young blond king and how he would rule me if I were his queen. It was the hardest I had come in years, maybe ever, and right on its heels came the tears. I cried silently and long into my pillow until it was steeped in salty wet and I was steeped deeply in shame. It was in all two hundred and six of my bones, so entangled with my molecules it was an essential strand of my DNA. I’d been living with it since I was pubescent teenage girl and I was so tired of it.
I was tired of boredom. The monotony of my loving husband and our life together, the hamster wheel of our social life with shallow suburban moneyed folk and the irrefutable fact that I was not attracted to my husband.
I lay in the dark for what seemed like an eternity, dissecting my thoughts like an academic at a conference. Slowly, with no discernable evolution, I was furious.
I was a twenty-six-year-old woman acting like a depressed middle-aged housewife. I had decades ahead of me still to live, to live a life where excitement, spontaneity and change could be a constant. Why was I lying in the dark like a victim? Because I was ashamed that my perfect life and husband didn’t make me happy?
Pathetic.
Then, I wondered if I really was. William loved me because I was beautiful and obedient, because he had trained me to be this way since I was an impressionable girl. He did not love the side of me that was scratching and wailing to break free of the social constraints he’d bound me in so beautifully for years. It was the part of me that wanted to lie, steal and cheat; to sin a little every day and gorge myself on a steady diet of thrills. That side would bring the Irons name shame and the most important thing to William was his wealth and reputation.
It was his wealth that gave me pause. I had no real money of my own unless I counted the few thousand dollars my grandfather put into a small trust for me. I didn’t know if it would be enough to start a new life. I didn’t even know if I was savvy enough or strong enough to strike out on my own, not after an entire life of obedience to my father, and then my husband.
I didn’t know, but as I lay there cradled in the dark night, I decided that I didn’t care about the certainty. That, in fact, it was part of the thrill.
I rolled over to look at William lying beside me, his face slack and peaceful in slumber. Reverently, I traced his thick eyebrows, the slightly jagged edge of his hairline down to the winged ear that I liked to kiss. I peeled the covers away from his body carefully so that I could run my eyes over the entirety of my husband for the last time.
The finality settled in me like a bright thing, something light that made the heaviness in my bones fizzle and pop into nothingness.
“William,” I whispered, pressing a thumb to the corner of his lips. “Wake up. I have to tell you something.”
Three months later.
Everyone was talking about it.
They’d let one of them in.
And not just one of them but the spawn of the devil himself.
Zeus Garro, infamous President of The Fallen MC, the most notorious motorcycle gang in the country, had somehow enrolled his son in the best private school in the province, not to mention halfway through the school year.
Entrance Bay Academy’s halls were humming with the news but the teacher’s lounge at lunch break that day was practically echoing with it.
“Can you believe it?” Willow Ashby stage whispered to her best friend and colleague in the music department, Tammy Piper. “They’re letting the son of a freaking gang member into the school. How can any of us expect to be safe now?”
I rolled my eyes but pretended to keep reading my heavily annotated copy of Paradise Lost. Ostensibly, I was reviewing it in preparation for my lecture in my sixth period advanced English twelve class but I’d read the epic poem at least twenty-two times, knew the heaviest hitting lines by heart and had prepared my lesson plan to the most minute detail three months ago when my life blew apart and I had nothing to do but read.