Chapter 11 – Adrian
ADRIAN
It’s past midnight when I get back to the house. I’m being a pussy, but I didn’t want to deal with the immediate blowback from Cora when Chambers called her, so I stayed late at work.
Delaney used the opportunity to drop by my office with Chinese. She took her suit jacket off, and her top was basically lingerie. She was visibly pissed when I told her to put her clothes back on and leave the food on my desk.
I need to come to some sort of amicable parting of the ways with her.
I’ll deal with that once things are sorted with Cora, and I can focus again.
Right now, the sleep deprivation is wreaking havoc on my filter and my temper is too close to the surface.
I’ll end up saying something that’ll land the company straight in litigation.
It’ll probably end up there anyway. Delaney is the type to demand a pound of flesh. Meanwhile, Cora wants nothing more than to put me in her rearview.
Instead of staring past me like I’m see-through, I wish Cora would fight with me. She’d feel better if she punched me in the face. I would too at this point.
I figure Cora will be asleep when I get home. She crashes pretty soon after she gets Winnie down, so she can get as much sleep as possible before her night feed. When I check the camera in the nursery, though, Cora’s not in bed, and there’s light showing under the closed bathroom door.
My heart leaps into my throat. Gruesome images from horror movies burst into my head—razor blades and blood, pink water overflowing a bathtub.
I bound up the stairs and race down the hall.
She said, not too bad. I believed her. Why? I don’t believe anyone.
She’s fine. I’m overreacting.
No matter how angry she is at me, she’d never leave the children.
She’s mopey and bitchy and not eating, but she’s sleeping fine and caring for the kids and keeping up with her hygiene. Farhadi would have told me in no uncertain terms to get her help if he thought she was really at risk.
He would, right?
Does anyone tell me the hard truth unless it benefits them?
Heart racing, I force myself to slow down when I get to the nursery. The last thing I need to do is wake the girls. I enter the room slowly, softening my steps. Winnie is sleeping in her crib. Pearl is in her bed. Both of their chests gently rise and fall.
I jog across the room, straining to hear sounds from the bathroom, but the doors are solid-core.
I turn the knob, stopping myself at the last second from rushing through the door when I hear hippie music, the kind massage therapists play. Then I hear a splash, and suddenly, my lungs can inflate again.
Cora glares blearily at me from the tub, her knees drawn to her chest. There’s a red wine glass on the ledge, and two bottles of my best Madeira sitting on the floor.
Her hair is up in a messy bun, and her skin is rosy from the hot water or wine or both.
Relief floods my body as blood surges to my cock, and in an instant, I’m so hard, I’m dizzy.
“What are you doing here?” she snaps.
She doesn’t scream at me to get out, so I shut the door behind myself. “I saw you weren’t in bed.”
“Stalking me on the cameras?” She wrinkles her nose and reaches for her glass, exposing the top of her right breast. It’s plump and blue-veined, heavy with milk. I love her tits when she’s nursing, but she can’t stand to have me touch them. I think she’s embarrassed that she leaks.
I try not to watch her nurse. I’m terrified I’ll pop wood, and that’s just fucking wrong.
The other day with the marshmallows was different somehow.
Maybe because I’m so tired, my mind didn’t go there, so I actually watched her feed Winnie for maybe the first time.
She does it so naturally, like the baby is an extension of her own body.
If she worries that she’ll accidentally hurt the baby, she doesn’t let it faze her.
I could never. Even Pearl’s still too small and delicate. Every time I pick her up, I’m afraid I’ll misjudge my grip and make her cry.
“You can get lost at any point,” she slurs, thunking the glass back onto the ledge.
I cross over to her in two steps, sink to my knees next to the tub, and grab the glass before it can teeter onto the floor.
“Hey. That’s mine.”
I offer her the glass back. She snatches it from my hand and leans back against the tub, scowling at me while she sips, both tits now fully exposed.
They’re perfect. Her nipples darken from pink to brown when she’s pregnant and nursing, and she gets these little freckles on her aureolas.
The freckles fade eventually and everything returns to normal, except her tits get a little bigger and hang a little lower with each baby.
I could stare at them for hours. My mouth is watering now.
When she’s not nursing, she loves for me to touch them. Right now, she’s watching me look, and her pupils are widening, but she’s not yelling at me. She must be really tipsy.
“I didn’t invite you in here,” she says.
“It’s my house, too.” I grab one of her bottles of Madeira and help myself to a sip.
She snorts. “It’s all your house. I just live here.”
“I built it for you. You picked out everything in it. You love it.”
“Not anymore.” She frowns and swirls the water with her free hand.
The instant that we got out of the car, she fell in love with the place, moved to tears that I’d had it built right after we met with her in mind.
She immediately started planning what she was going to change and how.
The nursery would need to be moved. A play area would go at the back of the gardens.
We’d need a smaller dining room for family meals.
She was so excited, waddling from room to room. She was heavily pregnant with Pearl then. She chatted my ear off in the car on the ride back to Maddox Tower.
I miss her voice, not this bitter one, but the high-pitched chirpy one from before. I miss her smiles.
It’s all my fault. I changed the entire way she speaks to me, and I didn’t consider the weight of the loss for a second. I assess risk and reward for a living, but not the one time when the cost was actually too high. Why?
Because I was on edge. Was I angry? At her?
Maybe. Sometimes I’m angry for a reason, and sometimes I’m angry, and a reason presents itself.
I don’t know any men in my circle who aren’t the same way.
It’s the testosterone, maybe, or the pressure.
Or the fact that most of the time, people are quick to appease a pissed-off rich man.
In a way, we’re socialized to be bastards.
Cora drains her glass and tries to set it down again. I rescue it before it topples off the ledge.
“Talk to me,” I say.
“Pour me another glass.”
“What about the milk?”
“I’ll pump and dump. The fridge in the pantry is stocked.” She frowns. “And besides, it’s my body. Not your business.”
I pour her another glass and then polish the bottle off.
I’ve been plying her with the finest vintages for five years, and yet, she only really likes dessert wines, the sweeter the better.
Madeira is meant to be sipped with a sticky toffee pudding, not guzzled by the bottle. She’s going to be hating life tomorrow.
“You and the girls are my most important business,” I say, wrapping her hand firmly around the top of the glass.
She tries to glare at me. Her brow creases, and her mouth thins, but there’s too much sadness in her eyes to carry it off. My stomach hollows, the stone that lives there now a weight in my guts.
“Then why did you do it?” She draws her legs to her chest again and rests her chin on her knee.
There is no good answer. There’s no real answer. I don’t know. I was off. I’d been off for weeks. Months. That night, Delaney was there, and she offered. I didn’t think. I’m an asshole. Maybe I have issues I’ve never bothered to unpack since they never inconvenienced me.
I didn’t predict that it would be the end of everything if Cora found out. It never had been for my parents until the money ran out.
I didn’t appreciate that there was an everything that could end.
I didn’t know that when she took herself away from me, it would feel like walking around the world without skin.
“I’m an asshole.” It feels the closest to whatever the truth is.
She rolls her eyes. “You think admitting it is going to do anything for you?”
“I doubt it.” I ease the glass out of her fingers. She seems to have forgotten she’s holding it. As I polish the wine off, I notice her sea wool sponge floating beside her. When we met, she was using a synthetic puff, just scrubbing microplastics into her skin daily.
I set down the glass and scoop up the sponge, squeezing the excess water out and grabbing a bottle from the basket at the foot of the tub.
“Do you like this one?” I flip the lid and hold it under her nose.
“I like them all. That’s why I bought them.”
“You’re never going to give me an inch again, are you?” I squeeze a dollop of soap on the sponge. It smells like honey and vanilla.
“Why should I? This isn’t a relationship.”
“What is it then?” I begin to soap up her back. Her body is tense as hell, but she doesn’t move to stop me. My fingers itch to stroke her skin. She’s so soft. It’s been so long.
“It’s a transaction. You’re the one who said so.” She thinks for a few seconds. “You’re the one who decided that.”
“What if I wanted this to be something else?”
“Too late.”
We’re both speaking quietly, almost whispering. I didn’t take the time to roll up my sleeves, only pushing them up as far as they’d go, so my cuffs are wet. I’m kneeling on the floor, bending forward, gently washing her, careful not to brush the crack of her ass or the side of her tits.
My entire body is wired, every nerve on alert, like I’ve got hundreds of millions riding on this trade. I dab the sponge against the nape of her neck. She shivers. Her neck is beautiful. It curves like a swan.