Julia
I trail my hand over his chest, listening to his slow breathing as I lie in bed beside him.
Outside, I can distantly make out the sounds of the city streets, but it sounds like it’s coming from a million miles away, as if whatever is going on here is far removed from what happens out in the real world.
But I know damn well that’s only wishful thinking.
I can try to convince myself, a million times over, that what happened in the apartment with Andreo is nothing more than a dream, a nightmare that I’ve woken up from and never need to worry about again.
But it’s not true. We need to face up to it, as painful as I’m sure it will be for Antonio, as much as he clearly wants to put it all behind him.
I glance up at Antonio to find him staring at the ceiling, clearly lost in thought.
I can only imagine what’s going on inside his head right now, all the ways that he’s beating himself up, going over and over what happened earlier today, trying to work out if he made the right call or if he should have chosen differently.
Our physical connection, at least, we have confirmed is as strong as it ever was.
But there was something different in the way he fucked me this time, as though he was trying to prove something, even to himself—perhaps prove that what we have is worth protecting.
To prove that he has no need to overthink what he did to Andreo.
The way he clutched to me, his hands all over my body, demanding to hear me say his name, it’s a far cry from the dominance and control he exerted over me before.
I like both sides equally, but I’m sure I know what coaxed out the sudden arrival of this one.
I bite my lip, looking up at him, and reach out to touch his cheek so I can bring his gaze around to mine. He glances down at me, and, though his eyes are on mine, his head is somewhere else entirely.
“You okay?” I ask him.
Seems like a stupid question, all things considered, given what has just happened. He cups my head in his hand and plants a kiss against my forehead, wrapping an arm around my waist and splaying his hand against my lower back. He doesn’t reply.
“Antonio…”
“Careful,” he remarks, a slight smile on his face. “You know what it does to me, when you talk to me like that.”
I raise my eyebrows, propping myself up on his chest, so he has no choice but to look me in the eye properly. “Antonio, we need to talk.”
“What about?”
He’s playing dumb, but I see right through him.
“You… I was there when it happened today,” I remind him.
“And that’s not the kind of thing you can brush off.
I mean, I thought—” I stop myself before I can go any further.
I don’t want to burden him with my insecurities, but then, I can tell he has clocked on to it before I can hide behind some distraction.
“You thought what?”
His voice is curious, and I take a deep breath. In the name of being honest, I guess I have to start this conversation myself, and that means coming clean about what I imagined would happen when I closed my eyes back at the apartment.
“When Andreo was telling you all that stuff,” I confess.
“When he—when he said that I was the problem between the two of you, and that things would go back to normal if I was gone. I thought that you believed him. I thought that you…” I swallow hard.
I can still remember that sensation, the odd acceptance of my fate, and I know it’s not something I’ll soon be able to forget.
He leans up on his elbows, frowning. “You thought that I would…?”
“I thought that you’d…choose him over me.”
His face darkens, as if the very idea disgusts him. “Jesus, Julia,” he mutters. “You thought that I would choose him over you and the baby? After everything he’s done to me?”
“I didn’t know,” I protest. “And I—fuck, he’s your son, like he said. Your flesh and blood, I thought you would take his side…”
“He was my son,” he corrects me. “He lost that status the moment he went to Salamanca. And he knew it. He was just looking for some way out of it, some way to get back at me for marrying you.”
“You think that was what this was about?”
He sighs. “Some of it,” he concedes. “He’s never been good at other people having what he thinks belongs to him.
And me, marrying you…it’s not as if anyone would understand it, no matter how you tried to explain it.
He just saw it as me being vindictive, snatching something away from him that he thought belonged to him. ”
I shiver at the thought. The idea of belonging to Andreo, on any level, is enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
I hate the very notion of it, and it’s hard to believe how close I came to becoming his wife, even if I had been prepared to put the ring on my finger and vow myself to him for the rest of my existence.
“Is it really that much of a surprise?” he asks me. He gazes down at me for a moment, as though genuinely confused as to how I came to any other conclusion.
For a second, his question catches me off guard, and I find that I don’t have an answer to it.
Because he has a point, I guess. I am carrying his child, I’m his wife, and I didn’t betray him the way Andreo did.
But in the moment when I heard the gun cock and closed my eyes, I was ready for death, completely coming to terms with the way it felt to lose everything at the hands of a man who had sworn to protect me.
I shake my head, trying to conjure up some kind of reason for it. Finally, my tongue unstiffens and I manage to get something out. “I guess…I guess I’ve just never been chosen like that before.”
Antonio props himself up with a pillow behind him, eyeing me with obvious confusion. “What do you mean?”
I shake my head, wrapping the covers around myself as I trace out the pattern on the sheets below.
A lump jumps up into my throat, and I swallow it back, not wanting to make this into something it isn’t.
I hate talking about myself in these terms, laying bare all the wounds that I’ve done my best to forget over the years, but something about him makes me feel safe in putting at least some of them out there.
“I mean, when I was growing up, my parents…they would always take each other’s side, even when they were fighting,” I explain.
“And they would look at me like I was the problem. Like everything would have been okay if they never had me. Even when they were deep in an argument, the one thing they seemed able to agree on was the fact that they didn’t want me around, and I… ”
I shift slightly, shoulders hunching up before I can stop them.
“I guess I just started seeing it that way. Seeing myself that way, I mean. Thinking…well, if I didn’t find some way to prove myself, then I wasn’t worthy of someone’s care, or attention, or time, or any of it.
When Andreo came along, he made me feel like I actually had a place in his life at first, that’s why it was so easy for him to get me wrapped around his little finger.
But he was always out, always flirting with other girls even when he was at home—his phone would go off and I would see the names of the people texting him, but he would leave the room before I could figure it out for sure one way or another. ”
I’m surprised that recounting that part of it doesn’t sting the way it used to.
Maybe because he’s gone, or maybe because I can see now that I was stuck in some fantasy of what our relationship could have been rather than what it was.
Now that it’s behind me, it’s almost as though it happened to someone else, a fiction invented to explain away all those years before I finally met Antonio.
“And when he started spinning all that to you, I guess I just went back there in my head,” I admit. “I thought—I thought you would choose him, because I’ve always been the second choice for people in my life, and I just didn’t see that changing.”
He doesn’t take his eyes off me as I talk, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper with every sentence, as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing.
I gaze at him, waiting for him to say something, anything.
Anything to fill in the gaps that hang in the silence, anything to wipe away the sharp edges of that revelation I’ve just shared with him.
He reaches for my hand, the one with the ring, turning it over so it catches the light. He brushes his thumb over it pointedly.
“You see this?” he asks. “This is proof that I chose you, Julia. And I still choose you. Whatever has happened before, whatever brought us here—I choose you now. And I’m not going to stop choosing you.”
My heart swells at the sound of those words.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone speak to me with such certainty, as if they know for certain what they want from me, that they won’t settle for anything less.
My heart flutters, and I gaze down at the ring, trying to permanently connect those words with the sight of it—so that I’ll remember them every time I look down at the band on my finger.
“Thank you,” I whisper. It doesn’t feel enough to express how I’m really feeling, but at least it’s something.
“Besides, we have the baby to think of too,” he points out. “I was never going to choose Andreo over the child. Never.”
I nod, and he moves his hand to my belly, as if he can already feel our child inside of me.
I smile slightly. His touch is so comforting, even after everything that has happened.
How could a hand that pulled the trigger on his own son make me feel like everything was going to be okay?
It doesn’t make sense, but I feel like I should have long ago given up trying to fit all of this together.
“That was one of the things I was most scared of,” I confess, the words coming more easily now that I’ve started talking. “That—that Andreo was going to raise the child, and he was going to give them the same upbringing that I’d had.”
Antonio lifts his chin, indicating for me to go on.
“I know it’s ridiculous,” I assure him. “And I know my parents’ problem wasn’t that they were—like Andreo, exactly.
But I just kept thinking, what if I ended up resenting this child the same way they resented me?
What if I left them feeling the same way I had, like they were unwanted?
Like they were a problem? I would never have been able to forgive myself, I know what that does to a person, how it—” I stop in my tracks.
I feel like an open wound, a part of me laid out in front of Antonio that I would never be able to tuck away once more. But I’m not sure he needs to hear all this from me, given what has just happened with Andreo. God knows he’s probably going through enough of his own shit as it is.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m just rambling—”
“No, I want to hear it,” Antonio assures me, though there seems to be something in his gaze that disagrees with him.
I stare at him for a long moment, wondering what’s going through his head, wishing I could reach in and figure it all out one way or another so that I could put this all to rest—but I know it’s not that easy.
There’s still so much we have to learn about each other, about the way we approach our lives, the history that wove us into the people we are today, and I’m not going to push him to lay it all out on the line right here and now, when there’s clearly so much more going on inside his head.
“How are you…feeling?” I ask him, a little impotent in the face of everything he has gone through. His gaze flashes, briefly, with a dense storm of emotion—grief, guilt, maybe even something close to doubt—but he swiftly wipes it away, as though intent on me not having to lay eyes on it.
“Tired,” he replies, and he gestures for me to come closer, pulling me into his arms with ease.
I lean against his chest, listening to the thud of his heartbeat under his skin again, reminding myself that, despite everything, I am alive. I am here with him. And that it might be all I have to focus on right now.
I rub my thumb along my ring, reminding myself once more of what he just said to me.
That he chose me. That he will always choose me.
That there’s nothing else that matters other than him choosing me, as hard as it might be to believe, as much as there’s a part of me that will always want to deny it.
I have never had someone like him in my life before, and I intend to cling to him with everything I have, every bit of strength in my body.
And to give this child inside me a chance at life that I never did.
And it’s with that in mind that I slowly drift off to sleep, the weight lifting long enough for me to rest.