15. Alexander
CHAPTER 15
Alexander
I t felt really shitty to walk into the room the next day for marriage counseling and see all of Delilah’s friends there, and realize they were her rocks. They were the ones supporting her without question. Not me. In fact, they were supporting her from any distress that I might cause her . The pain of my failure was like a jagged tear across my skin.
Everything she had said to me since announcing we were done had felt shitty, and her refusing to let me touch her, even to hold her, was shitty and made me sick to my stomach. And this was another painful, grueling blow to my ego and my heart.
I wanted to be the one supporting her. I wanted to be the one she looked to for advice and unfailing support and loyalty.
But instead I had repeatedly publicly betrayed her trust in me, making me the last person on earth she would confide in or look to for support.
For a moment, my knees almost buckled under me, the consequences of my incredibly shitty behavior washing over me in waves.
Numbly, I pulled the chair out across from Delilah.
I hadn’t eaten much this morning out of nerves, and it felt like I was stuck in a nightmare. This couldn’t be my life, sitting across a table from my stony-eyed and cold wife. It was only a few weeks ago she had looked at me with love in her eyes.
I desperately wished there was someone, anyone else I could blame for this. But I had to sit with the awful truth that it had all been my own goddamn fault. And I couldn’t even blame thinking with my dick. My dick was barely interested in the women I had fucked. I had just been wrapped up in the power, the prestige of being the prince. For my entire life, I had barely had to lift a finger to get what I wanted, and I was used to indulging myself with the smallest half-ass impulse.
Well, now things were different. I had thrown everything I had at Delilah.
And it had all failed.
She was unmoved. She didn’t love me anymore. She didn’t want to be with me. She only touched me to taunt me with what I couldn’t have.
And I deserved it all.
It was hard to control my memories to try to brainstorm ideas for getting her to give me a second chance. The memories came at me differently. Some memories burrowed under my skin with a prickly, needy heat. Like the time she had fallen to her knees after rock-climbing, pulling my cock out as her eyes sparkled with the naughty thrill of fucking each other in the woods. The way she had wrapped her legs tightly around my waist when we had sex, like she wanted to imprint me under her skin.
Some memories left me with an aching emptiness, like the memory of her curling into me in the middle of the night, which was so painful now that I woke up by myself every morning. And some memories were just painful jagged glass scrapes across my skin. The expression on her face when I had been caught fucking Jewel. The way her lip had curled when she caught me fucking Julia.
“I want to save this marriage,” I croaked out before any of them had the chance to say anything. “I want to save it more than anything else in the world. I’ll do anything, Delilah. I am desperate to fix this. I can’t accept that it’s over. I can’t let you go .”
“Silence, degenerate adulterer,” Magnus said irritably, lowering his spectacles down to his eyes and scanning the big ancient book I had found with this loophole, as if he was trying to figure out what the minimum effort on his part was.
“Are you all right taking notes?” he asked Roger as the big man reluctantly sat down in the chair. Great. That meant there were three reluctant people here who thought this marriage shouldn’t be saved, with one desperate man who would do anything to save it.
Me.
And before I knew it Libby was in there, too, bringing in mugs of steaming tea as an obvious pretext for snooping on the counseling.
“Let’s see the passage,” Delilah said coldly. “Make sure it isn’t another thing he’s lied about.”
“Nothing I’ve said is a lie!” I cried desperately, feeling tears already starting to prickle behind my eyes.
She ignored me, scanning the passage.
“It’s legit,” she said reluctantly.
Magnus sighed, and then took several long slurps of his tea. Did the old savage Archbishop guess how close I was to tears? Fuck fuck fuck .
“How did you feel learning that Alexander was a liar?” Magnus asked Delilah, fixing me with his steely gray eyes behind his spectacles.
I let out a strangled gulp.
“I never lied to you, Delilah! I swear!”
“What do you call our wedding vows, then?” she shot at me.
“I never lied about loving you,” I said in a low voice. “Never.”
“Why did you marry me?” Delilah asked angrily, her arms crossed over her chest. “Because I was the boring option you thought would make a proper Queen who wouldn’t give you any trouble?”
I gaped at her. “No! God, no! How could you think that, Delilah? I married you because I love you! Because no one else has ever made me feel like you do. I’ve never wanted anyone as badly as I want you. Because I never got bored of you. Because you’re the cleverest, sweetest, most beautiful, funniest woman I’ve ever—"
“Adulterer says what?” Magnus broke in.
“You’re not even trying to reconcile us,” I gritted out at him.
“Why should I try to reconcile you?” he snorted, bringing out his bag of knitting and beginning to work on a soft blue sweater. “Delilah is better off without you. Now, what does everyone think about this color for Roger? It seems to me it will enhance his baby blue eyes to perfection.”
My heart sunk and I looked anxiously at Delilah. Did my wife think she was better off without me, too?
Delilah was looking at me with a frown on her face.
“Why can’t you let this go?” she asked abruptly. “Why can’t you accept that it’s over?”
I felt my voice break out into a sob, struggling not to let the tears fall in front of my uninterested wife and her extremely hostile friends.
“Maybe there are other men who would be better for you, but I swear no one could ever love you as much as I do. I feel like I’ve lived a fucking century in the weeks since you told me it was over. I have all the material things I could possibly want in the world, and I don’t care about it because I don’t have you.”
Taking advantage of her silence, I got up and walked over to her, taking advantage of how her legs were tucked primly under her chair. Bending swiftly down, I hugged her legs tight to my chest.
“Do you want me to beg on my knees, Delilah? I’m doing it. Please, baby. Please, sweetheart. I swear I’m not that man anymore.”
Her bare legs were warm and silky and I could have cried just from the memory that I used to be able to touch them every day before I threw my happy marriage away like a total shithead.
“Even if I forgave you,” Delilah said, raising one dark eyebrow at me. “I couldn’t ever trust you again.”
“What can I do to make you trust me?” I begged, clutching at her tighter. Now that I was holding her, my emotions felt even more out of control, the sobs building in my chest over and over.
“I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” my wife replied, shrugging her slim shoulders.
For a moment there was silence in the room, broken only by the clicking of Magnus’ knitting needles, Roger’s diligent note-taking, and Libby’s spoon as she stirred sugar in her tea.
I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
Burying my head in her lap, I breathed in her scent. Sweet, sun-touched skin, a light floral scent, a touch of cream on her leg. Maurice adored her, so she got special treats and elaborate pastries, and homemade cream for her coffee.
“I can’t live without you,” I said, willing my voice to be strong. But it wasn’t. It was broken and weak, like me.
“Back in the day,” Magnus said, “Adulterers got proper punishments.”
“They knew how to do it in those days,” Delilah agreed, laughing.
A bit of her little teeth flashed at me as I raised my head to look at her. She took her bottom lip between her teeth, making the spot where she held her lip blush a brighter shade of red.
I wanted to kiss those lips so badly, bite them too, pull at them so gently, suck on her skin until I couldn’t taste anything but her on my tongue.
“What do you mean?” I asked numbly.
“I believe one traditional punishment was putting the adulterer in a stock in the town square,” Roger said.
“Wonder if we have a stock somewhere in storage,” Libby added innocently.
“That’s modern society for you,” Magnus said, holding up the sweater against Roger’s beard. “Good wholesome punishments like throwing rotten vegetables at adulterers has gone out of fashion.”
Delilah laughed, but she tapped firmly on my shoulder. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do,” she said.
I let her go, reluctantly, my arms almost immediately feeling empty without her in them.
This marriage counseling had been a total disaster, but I had still gotten to see my wife for half an hour. Even if she was mad at me, it was still heaven to see her. She could have run away; she could have refused to do it.
But I had seen her eyes sparkle when the others mentioned the traditional punishments for a cheater.
At this point I didn’t have any dignity left. I was desperate enough to try anything.
And if getting rotten cabbages thrown at my head made my wife realize that I was serious about loving her and cherishing her, that I’d never make that mistake again?
I’d do it.