Chapter 3 #2
He snorts. “Your highness,” he says mockingly. “I’d have heard your tapping from all the way over there, so, no. You’re done for the night. Now. Go. To. Sleep.”
After hours of being pushed to my limits, I lose my temper as I wriggle to work my arms out from under the comforter. “Why are you so bossy!”
“Because I can be!” he snaps with frustration. “Finally, after years of having to ask if I can so much as use the restroom with privacy, I get to make the decisions.”
“That doesn’t mean you can boss me around.” I cross my newly freed arms over my chest, staring at the ledge of the breakfast bar above my head.
“You need someone to do it for you,” he says snidely, “since it’s obvious you can’t take care of yourself. And if I have to live with you for the next three years, I’m not doing so in a filthy apartment while allowing my wife to try killing herself by eating moldy mac and cheese.”
“It wasn’t moldy,” I insist.
“Yes. It. Was. Now, for the love of god, go to sleep!”
“Fine!” I stew in my anger, my hands and face growing hot while I wait and wait and wait for him to fall asleep so I can get back to work.
Rolling onto his back, Conrad suddenly slaps his hands against the mattress at his sides.
“What’s wrong now?” I ask tartly.
“It’s too quiet.”
“Are you kidding me?” I throw my hands up and let them fall with a thud. “First, my tapping was too loud, and now it’s too quiet in here? What do you want?”
He drags his hands down his face and scratches his jaw through his beard. “I don’t know. I think…I’m too used to all the noise from the other prisoners.”
Fine. He can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, so I ask the thing I’ve been too chicken to bring up before. Maybe pestering him to death will finally get him to leave. “Why were you in prison?”
“Do we really have to do this now?”
“Yes.” I almost tack on a please because I was raised with manners, but I’m feeling pretty petty right now since he’s had no problem not using his manners.
Conrad takes a long time to answer and only does so after I prod him again, reminding him that since we’re married and stuck with each other, it’s my right to know.
“Possession with the intent to distribute a Schedule One substance and transporting it across state lines.”
I lean away from him as far as I can. My voice is harsh when I ask, “You’re a drug dealer?” That’s not just a simple, regrettable mistake. It’s a premeditated crime. What the hell has my mom gotten me into?
“No.”
“Then what? An addict?” Is that better or worse? I don’t know.
“No,” he grits out. “Not that I’m against the weaker stuff, but I haven’t touched it since college.”
“Okay, then what?”
“It was my younger brother’s, but I was the one driving. He had—” Conrad’s voice is thick with emotion. “He had a glioblastoma. Inoperable.”
My anger toward him lessens at the heartache in his voice.
“He used weed to manage the pain and nausea from treatment. The legal stuff we could buy in Colorado was stronger and less likely to be laced than anything he could find down here.”
“So…what happened?” I ask softly.
“We got popped crossing the state line into Texas on our third trip there and back. Troopers searched my car. Found his stash. I was arrested, and the rest is history.”
I almost want to reach out and hold his hand as my heart clenches for him. Almost. “Just you? What about your brother?”
“I told them he had nothing to do with it. That he didn’t even know I had it. Since it was my car and they couldn’t prove any of it belonged to him, they let him go.”
“Why take all the responsibility?”
“I didn’t want his last few months alive spent in and out of a courthouse or in some institution. I took the blame, and I’d do it all over again, if I could go back.”
“That’s…sweet.” Though I don’t have any siblings, I think I would do the same for my mom if she were ill. “What was his name?”
“Andrew. He was my best friend. The youngest of four kids.” Conrad chuckles lowly, but it’s one of pain, not humor. “I told our older brother, Brad, once that I was going to name my firstborn son Drew in Andrew’s memory. Brad beat me to it.”
“That’s so not cool,” I say.
“Yeah. Not cool at all, princess.” There’s a heaviness to his silence afterward, ending any further conversation. At least until he says, “How is it I’m so fucking tired but still can’t sleep?”
“Would white noise help?” I suggest, since anything that helps him fall asleep faster means I’ll get time to myself to process the most bizarre day of my life without him bossing me around.
“Sure,” he says, his voice gentler now. “Let’s try that.”
Sitting up, I pat around the breakfast bar where I’d seen Conrad had placed my TV remote.
Flopping backward, I turn on the TV and scroll to a streaming channel I use when I, myself, find it too quiet after being holed up in my apartment for too long.
It’s full of self-recorded conversations and nature sounds, so it feels all the more real than if I was to put on a show or movie in the background.
The tiny words on the screen are a blur from this far away, but I press play on a recording of people whispering, and the white screen fades into a variety of teal shades that gently swirl like oil in water.
“Better?” I ask, tossing the remote to the end of the bed where I normally keep it.
“Yes. Thank you.”
The whispering is so soothing that, after a time, I find myself yawning, sinking deeper into the mattress while Conrad’s breathing finally evens out.
“You’re taking me so good, babygirl. You love it, don’t you?”
“Yes, Daddy! I love it.”
What was that? I go still, straining my ears to make out the scratchy words, as if the conversation had been recorded through a door or wall.
“Cum on my cock, babygirl. I want to feel you squeeze Daddy’s dick and milk the cum from my balls.”
Oh my god! I lurch upward, narrowly missing cracking my forehead on the breakfast bar, and scramble to find the remote.
“I’ve already cum inside you twice now, and I’m gonna fill you up again.”
Where the hell is the remote! Then I hear it when I flip the edge of the comforter back, and the remote scrapes across the wall before falling on the floor.
“You gave yourself to me, and this pussy is mine now.”
I lunge forward, falling on my stomach, and reach as far as I can for the remote on the carpet until I’m half hanging off the bed.
“Mine to fuck, mine to fill, mine to breed.”
There, I got it now, and I smash the buttons, managing to at least mute the TV. I brace a hand on the mattress to lift myself when Conrad suddenly growls from behind, “Don’t move a muscle, princess.”