7. Cass
CASS
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I tripped.
On the rug.
And fell.
I learned a phrase during a linguistics course in college.
It’s called “semantic satiation”: when you say a word or phrase too many times in a row and it loses its meaning.
A famous psychologist came up with it in the 1960s.
He said it had something to do with your neurons getting tired of doing the same thing over and over again.
I understand how my neurons feel.
Because I’m getting tired of doing this same thing over and over again, too.
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I’ve been repeating this lie for an hour again, trying it with different accents and inflections and points of emphasis, until it sounds natural and nonchalant in a way that won’t raise any red flags.
It’s not just that I’m tired of, though. It’s this whole routine. The anger. The argument. The blow. The apologies that follow.
And then the lies that follow that, one after the other, so many of them that I start to lose track of where the lies stop and the truth begins.
I do know where this most recent downward spiral began, though.
It started the night I came home from Khaza.
Raymond was waiting for me. It was like something straight out of the cheesiest soap opera you’ve ever seen.
Picture a dark living room, me tiptoeing through with my high heels in my hand, and then the voice slicing through the darkness—“Where have you been”—and the lamp clicking on, Raymond in his matching pajamas, his scowl, his bristling mustache, his white-hot rage.
The six weeks since then have been more of the same. It’s all anger, all the time, 24/7 like CSPAN.
Kill him? Ha! I hardly have time to even look him in the eyes without feeling like I’m going to get knocked into next Tuesday.
He’s suspicious of every single thing I do.
If I sneeze wrong, I get an angry glare and a snarled warning to get my shit together.
God forbid I drop something or show up late to an appointment.
I’m farther away than ever before of achieving what I entered this marriage to do.
At this point, I’m just focused on surviving.
The nights are still sleepless. But what I think about as I watch the ceiling fan revolve has changed.
It’s no longer just Raymond’s dead body I picture, or me standing over it with a satisfied sneer of revenge painted on my face.
A new player has entered the chat, and his name is Matvei.
The Blue-Eyed Bastard. Haunter of dreams, savior of damsels, kicker of asses. He’s justice in human form, and I can’t stop thinking about him to save my life.
Tonight was particularly bad. Raymond had dragged me to yet another dreary function with various important so-and-sos, people I couldn’t care less about but who had opinions that apparently mattered a great deal to my dear husband.
I knew my role at these events: stand at his side, look pretty, and don’t say a fucking word.
The last part was the most important.
Normally, that’s fine by me. I never care about these people and they don’t care about me. Some of the other wives try to make conversation, from time to time, and I don’t blow them off, but they realize pretty quickly that I’m not like them.
Tonight, though, it seemed like the world was content to leave me alone.
I drifted along at the country club in Raymond’s wake as he gladhanded politicians and traded dirty jokes with wealthy entrepreneurs.
I only ever chimed in when directly spoken to.
Otherwise, I just laughed at Raymond’s punchlines and sipped my champagne silently.
Until the moment.
A newly elected city councilman was making the rounds. When he got to us, Raymond made a big deal of having a waiter come refresh the man’s whiskey. Then, pulling him aside, Raymond offered condolences for what I gathered was the recent passing of the man’s cousin or aunt or dog or something.
“Terrible thing, terrible thing,” Raymond said, shaking his head. He clapped the councilman on the shoulder. “But it’s no use wallowing. Best practice is to look to the future. The dead don’t get any less dead no matter how long you sit with them.”
The councilman nodded in a strange way that I realized with a pang I recognized. Just sort of bobbing his head once and swirling the liquid around in his glass without drinking it. His eyes, I noticed, were puffy and a bit red, like he’d been recently crying.
He wasn’t putting on a show. Whoever he’d lost, it had devastated him.
Something in me fired up before I could snuff it out.
“I lost a sister, actually,” I blurted. In the corner of my eye, I saw Raymond’s head snap in my direction. His hand on my hip turned into a claw of warning.
The councilman peered curiously at me. “Oh, did you? I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too. It’s been five years and it still… yeah.” I shrugged. “I just wanted to say that I know how bad it hurts. May your loved one’s memory be a blessing to you.”
“Thank you.” He cleared his throat and looked around nervously like someone might be watching. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How do you move past it?”
“Oh, I haven’t,” I said without thinking. “Raymond just prefers I do my wallowing quietly.”
The councilman blinked in confusion. Meanwhile, Raymond’s claw climbed up to the small of my back and dug in. “My wife has a dark sense of humor,” he chuckled. “Would you, er— Would you excuse us a moment, Councilman?”
His fingers pressed in harder as he steered me toward the exit. I kept smiling, but I knew what that pressure in my skin meant:
I was going to pay for that snark.
I still don’t know why the country club even has a room like the one he took me to.
It was like someone’s rich grandmother’s bedroom, minus the bed.
A tall bureau stood in one corner, a desk along one wall, heavy crimson drapes obscuring the windows.
The air was stuffy and reeked of furniture polish.
A thick rug underfoot had been vacuumed flawlessly.
I had about half a second to register those things before Raymond was on me.
He turned that claw onto my throat and slammed me up against a bare stretch of wall. “Have you lost your fucking mind?” he hissed in my face. “Embarrassing me like that?”
“Embarrassing you?” I rasped. It was hard to speak when my throat was being kinked shut like a garden hose. “I was being polite, Raymond. He just lost someone!”
“I don’t give a shit what he lost.”
“Obviously not. That would require empathy.”
Sure enough, there it came: time to pay for my mouth.
Raymond’s face turned a shade of red I’d only seen a few times before. His grip eased on my throat.
Then his other hand came flying up and he backhanded me across the face.
The hit spun me sideways. As I pirouetted like the world’s worst ballerina, my heel caught on a fold in the rug. I stumbled, tried to catch myself on the bureau, but missed.
My cheekbone clacked against the corner of the bureau on the way down.
There was a sound in my head like a lightbulb popping. Then came the floor. I hit it hard. Too hard. Sparkles flashed in my vision as I came to a stop. I could see the little brass feet of the bureau an inch from my nose.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to move ever again.
Raymond stood over me, breathing hard. “Get up.”
I didn’t.
“Cassandra. Get up. Christ, this is…”
I didn’t understand at first why he was so panicked. It’s not like this was the first time this had happened. I’d just slip out the back door and have the driver take me home. Raymond would fabricate excuses for his friends, and that would be that.
Then I put a hand to my face. It came away wet and red. The skin above my cheekbone had split open. As soon as I touched it, it was like I’d given the wound permission to be felt. It throbbed, deep and ugly.
“You stupid bitch,” Raymond muttered. He crouched down and looked at my face, then recoiled when he turned my chin enough to see the full extent of the damage. “Christ. Fuck. Fuck me, this is… This is a disaster. That’s going to need stitches. People are going to ask questions.”
“Good,” I whisper.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing, Raymond. I didn’t say anything.”
We rehearsed the lie as we waited half a block down for the ambulance. He left before it arrived, not wanting to stick around for the paramedics to question him.
They asked me again and again on the ride over to explain what happened, and I gave them the same answer every time.
I tripped on the rug and fell.
I tripped on the rug and fell.
After a while, even I started to believe it.
When we finally arrived, the ambulance stopped. The back doors opened. Cold air rushed in my face and woke up every cut and bruise all over again. I winced, which hurt, which made me wince, which hurt… et cetera.
“Easy, sweetheart,” one of the paramedics crooned. “We’ve got you.”
They lifted the gurney out and the wheels dropped onto the pavement. I felt every bump in my molars as they started rolling me toward the hospital entrance.
I could see myself in the glass panes of the doors, reflected back. Half my face was a mess. One eye swollen. Hair matted down on one side. I barely looked like me.
The doors slid open…
And there he was.
Matvei is standing right in the middle of the entryway, his shirt half-buttoned, his jaw clenched tight. His blue eyes find mine the moment the doors part. Like he’s been standing there the whole six weeks, waiting for me to come back.
“Cassandra.”
His voice is quiet but it cuts right through the noise of the hallway.
The paramedics stop pushing. The gurney jolts a little. One of them, the tall guy with the shaved head, looks between me and Matvei.
“Sir, you need to step back,” he says.
Matvei doesn’t move. His eyes are locked on mine. “Cassandra,” he says again.
“Ma’am.” The other paramedic, a woman with a blonde ponytail, bends down closer to me. “Do you know this man?”
I squint up at Matvei.
He looks like he did that first night. The black stubble. The sharp jaw. The shirt half-buttoned so I can see a stretch of his pale chest. His hair is messy like he’s been running his hands through it. His hands are at his sides, open, ready.
He looks like he’s been waiting.
I think about saying yes. I really do. I think about saying, Yes, that’s Matvei, he helped me once. He’s the only one who ever did. I think about reaching out a hand and letting him take it and letting him haul me off this gurney and out of here and away from all of this.
But then my thoughts turn to Raymond. He’d find out, somehow. If he sees me with Matvei, or hears even a whisper of it, there’s no telling what he’ll do.
Matvei took a knife for me once. I can’t ask him to do it again.
This is my problem, and honestly, I was selfish to ever think someone else could fix it for me.
“Ma’am?” the paramedic prods again. “Do you know him?”
I swallow. It hurts. Everything hurts.
“No,” I say. “Never seen him in my life.”
The paramedics look at each other in confusion. We all just heard him say my name. But I know how to channel my inner Raymond and sound too imperious to deny. “Can we go, please?” I ask haughtily.
“Let’s just go,” the woman mumbles to her partner. “Sir, please step aside.”
I wonder if he’s going to do something reckless. The look in his face says he might. It’s an angry, scathing look, and I know full well what he’s capable of doing.
But in the end, Matvei steps aside.
He doesn’t say anything else. He just moves out of the way and lets them wheel me past.
I keep my eyes on the ceiling. I don’t look at him as I pass. I can’t. If I look at him, I’ll change my mind. I’ll go begging and pleading for him to scoop me out of my life and carry me off somewhere else, anywhere else, as far away from Raymond as we can get.
Then doors behind me swing shut.
And he’s gone.