Chapter 26 #2
I couldn’t bring myself to answer him, not yet anyway.
It seemed as though I wasn’t done crying against his custom silk shawl collar tuxedo with a single button and breast pocket trimmed in silk to match.
What I loved most about it was the slim-fit pants we’d paired it with.
It made Nick look positively dashing, not that he needed any help in that department.
I’d married a man who knew how to dress and buy a woman jewelry, two very important traits for a man to possess. And I’d found them both in him. The man who wanted to divorce me. I wasn’t even mad about it because I would divorce me.
Look at me.
Just look at me!
He probably thought I was having a mental breakdown, and I supposed, in a way, I was. I couldn’t even form words to respond to him. I just cried and sobbed and cried some more.
Not only for my gown that broke my heart in ways unimaginable because my love of fashion was simply unmatched, but for so much more. What had been unleashed in me was far greater than just my ruined gown.
I cried for the girl I’d once been.
I cried for the girl who was made to feel like dirt.
I cried for the woman I’d become.
I cried for my husband who didn’t understand me. Who didn’t love me like he once had and was leaving me.
Nick tried again. “This isn’t you, Candy. Talk to me.” He never once removed his hands from me, though. It was as if he feared if he did, I’d go down and wouldn’t be able to get back up.
In some ways, that might’ve been accurate, but I couldn’t even begin to process that myself.
After the tears started to slow, the hiccups came fast and hard, and my chest hurt with every heavy thump.
I’d virtually ruined Nick’s tux. I’d certainly ruined the evening.
“My gown…” I started, wanting to explain, but apparently still unable to string together the words to make a coherent thought.
He backed up and pried it from my hands, pulling it out from between us, his hard chest now firmly pressed up against my breasts.
The corded muscles masked by his tux couldn’t be missed.
We hadn’t been this close in a long time and the reaction my body was having to his was almost embarrassing as I felt my nipples harden under the constraints of my bustier.
I was an expert liar. I had to be since I’d been lying to myself. I wanted him. Even now.
“This?” Nick finally asked, holding it out and dropping it on the floor like the trash it was. “Who cares? You have other dresses.”
I shook my head, peering up at him. I blinked so I could see without the fog of tears. “You don’t understand,” I said in between soft sobs.
“If it’s not about the fucking dress, then what is it about?” He squeezed me closer, both hands coming around me now. I could feel his heart beating in his chest like a caged animal ready to pounce free.
On an exhale, I wiped my eyes, the heavy black mascara I wore on my fake lashes coming off on my hand.
I stared up at Nick, our eyes meeting again, but never once stepped out of his embrace.
He was grounding me, tethering me to the here and now.
“I can’t keep doing this.” It was the most honest I’d been with him and myself.
“What? Going to these events?”
“All of it. It’s not just the events. It’s everything.”
“I need more, Candy.” His expression was serious, his eyes pinning me in place while also cutting into me and making me feel exposed, like I was standing before him stark naked. It was in that look he stole the breath from my lungs.
“I’m exhausted. I’m so fucking tired,” I said, surprising myself by the profanity I’d chosen to slip in there.
Nick shook his head. “Do you want to stay home?”
Did I want to— “You love this event,” I insisted. The guilt of him not doing something he actually enjoyed would simply eat away at me. We only had so many moments like this left, and he deserved to do things he liked.
Man, now was so not the time for this, but it hit me like a rock to the head.
His vicious mother had been right, and it was wrong of me to tell him to stay married to me if he didn’t want to be.
“I’ll divorce you,” I said then, softly, almost in a whisper.
I think on some level, I wanted him to not hear me.
Although I knew it was unlikely that would be the case.
And that was okay because it felt good to think about how happy that’d make him.
And his mother, the witch that she was. Her, I didn’t care about, though.
She could choke on it. Respectfully, of course.
The declaration gave Nick the pause he needed to lean back, extending himself from me.
The hairs on my arms stood with awareness.
He placed his thumb under my chin, jerking it up so I was forced to meet his gaze. “Is that what you want?” he asked, his husky voice taking on a smooth cadence.
My cheeks warmed. “I want to stop feeling like I do,” I admitted.
“And divorcing me will help you with that?” he asked, his brows furrowed.
I shook my head. “No.” I’d never put all my…everything…on Nick. That’d just be plain wrong. But divorcing might stop this raging guilt I felt for holding him back from something he obviously wanted.
“Tell me, Candy cane, how do you feel? You have to tell me what’s going on in that pretty blonde head of yours.” And, on that note, he fingered some of the soft wisps of hair my stylist had kept out of my updo to frame my face.
I searched his blue eyes. If I could have swam in the depths of them, I would have. That had always been the thing about Nick, he had this way where he could suck me in. It had been a long time since the feeling struck, but I never forgot it. It haunted me like the kiss of a ghost.
“Horrible about myself,” I replied, trying to explain, but also knowing I was failing miserably. I cleared my throat and tried again. “The only time I don’t feel that way is when I’m shopping, and even then, there’s this nagging voice in the back of my mind.”
There was no hesitation. He responded hardly a second later, not giving what I said a moment to linger in the air like the smell of his cologne I loved so much. “Why do you feel horrible?”
I took a deep breath in. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of me was annoyed by the question.
How was it possible that my husband didn’t understand just a fraction of the things I’d been feeling, thinking?
Perhaps because you never shared them with him, and he hasn’t been gifted with the ability to read your mind.
That little voice was right because I never shared with Nick.
Not like I should’ve. He had no clue. About any of it.
I took a steadying breath and looked down at the heap that my gown had become.
It was done for, that was for sure. For good measure, I pointed my toe and gave it a shove.
It was a mess, and it was every bit representative of my life and the way I felt.
“Some days I look in the mirror and I hate myself. I wonder how I got here, how I became this person,” I admitted, my hoarse voice coming out thick with emotion.
“You mean the person who cares way too fucking much about what other people think? The person who pretends like our life is some movie, and we’re the lead actors? The person who covets material shit like it goddamn matters?” Nick questioned, giving me a lot to think about in under ten seconds.
Had he recognized all of those things about me? He certainly spoke with enough disdain about them for me to assume he had. Why hadn’t he ever said anything?
Not that I would’ve listened to him.
Everything I did…
Everything I’d done…
Everything I’d become…
Had been for Nick.
So I could be a good wife for him. So he’d always love me. So he’d always be happy. And never look for something elsewhere, outside of our marriage. I didn’t think I could handle a devastation like that.
Maybe it was warped and wrong, but I might as well have been on the stand for a murder trial because it was the whole truth and nothing but.
I had been so sure my way was the right way. The only way. How wrong I’d been. “Yes,” I all but screamed.
He fell silent.
“Fine! Is that what you want to hear? I’m tired of it all.” I threw my hands up in the air, my bustier doing far too good a job as it was practically squeezing the air from my lungs.
Nick didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink an eye. He didn’t attempt to say a word. “Then stop, Candy cane, because this isn’t you, and none of that matters.”
It was easy for him to say. He was perfect.
Everyone loved him. He fit in everywhere he went, whether it was the pub where he worked or Wall Street and everywhere in between.
“I never wanted people to judge us. Me.” My voice was softer than it’d been all evening, but the words that floated in the air were also the most vulnerable I’d ever spoken. At least in a ridiculously long time.
“People’s opinions may be the very least important thing in the world. They don’t matter.” He shook his head, and what I would have given to run my hands through his hair that reminded me of shiny obsidian. “Don’t you see that?”
My teeth pulled on the corner of my lower lip.
I heard him, and he was right, but it was so much more than that.
“Maybe so. I just can’t take it anymore.
I can’t worry about what other people think anymore, Nick.
I’m sorry, but I just…can’t. Regardless, I want you to know that I heard you loud and clear at that dinner table, and if you want to leave me now, you can…
” I told him cautiously. “I’ll be okay.” I didn’t want him to worry about me or feel like he needed to stay with me out of guilt.
Even so, the sting from knowing he could walk away, before Christmas, would hurt, but it’d pass just like everything else did in this world.
“We had an arrangement,” Nick retorted, his voice stern, like he didn’t like the prospect of me reneging on it.
“I’m not going anywhere, and you’re not getting rid of me just yet.
And, for the record, I don’t care about the charity gala.
” He brushed his fingers through my hair, the hairspray that was holding it together fracturing.
He slipped the pins from my hair, slowly letting them fall to the floor one by one.
“I only enjoy it because I see how happy it makes you to give back to the community.”
A smile flickered across his face, and I remembered. I remembered all of it, every last bit of it. This was what it was like to come completely undone at the hands of Nick Crane.
Hearing his words, feeling his touch, I could no longer ignore the way my body, my heart, reacted to my husband. I reached up and pulled him close, but it was what Nick did next that had visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.