Bitsy
Istared down at the tall man plastered in mud from foot to tie, and staggering in front of me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked again.
“I got your note,” he gasped, crawling up the stairs toward me.
My husband looked more like a swamp creature than anything else.
“What note?”
“The note saying you were leaving me, and I had to come down here to talk you out of it! Please, baby, please don’t leave me.”
I stared some more. This was not like Chad at all. Since when was he this panicked about me? Usually this level of worry he reserved only for work stuff.
And whereas before I would have been anxious to smooth everything over, now I was feeling so unappreciated I didn’t care.
“Did you forget I was going home for a few days for Granny’s birthday?” I asked, my shoe going tap-tap-tap on the wooden steps as he collapsed in front of me.
“I—er—yes, yes of course.”
“So why are you here looking like you drove like a bat out of hell all night? Why do you look and smell like you’ve been driving for 18 hours in a row?”
“Well—I—maybe I didn’t remember the party.”
Why did this not surprise me? Chad had been “forgetting” a lot of things lately. Pretty much anything to do with me. Now everything to do with work, he remembered, like that dinner party with his boss he was absolutely obsessed with.
“I asked you to go and you said you couldn’t,” I pointed out.
He cringed.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been kind of distracted at work lately. You know, with the promotion and everything.”
“Right. The promotion and everything.”
“Actually, uh, I guess I thought you had left me. Because of—what I said.”
“Go on?” I said coldly.
My dad and brothers had suggested burying him alive at first, then scaled back to promising me all the help I would need for a quickie divorce.
But divorce? Oh, no, that would be too easy for Chad. Oh no, he wasn’t going to be getting a divorce just yet.
I’d fallen head-over-heels in love at first sight with Chadley Parker-Bowles. When he first came over to buy one of my apple pies, I thought it must be a joke. How could a guy who looked like that want me?
What could a jock frat bro and a whimsi-goth possibly have in common?
He was so tall, played college basketball so he was super fit and athletic, had that artistically messy hair so dark it was almost black, and the cheekbones and gorgeous face of a model.
And he looked like a guy who was going places. The kind of guy who’d have a picture-perfect wife.
Not a girl from the bayou who had grown up driving swamp tours and maneuvering around crocodiles.
But he wanted me. Like crazy bad. And what was even crazier—we seemed to have so much in common. Both were real homebodies, wanted to start our own businesses someday, and loved role-play.
That had been my favorite thing—seeing my starched and proper husband relax and be silly.
But maybe we didn’t have as much in common as I thought if he wanted me to hide who I was.
“All right. Well, I was flying down here for Gran’s birthday.”
“But you would never leave me, right?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that yet, so I just looked at him.
“I came here for Gran’s birthday.”
“But you never would, right? Right? How come you aren’t answering the question?”
“I don’t know, Chad,” I said as my dad and brothers gathered as the bottom of the stairs. “Maybe we don’t have that much in common.”
“We have everything in common!”
Even though I had a guaranteed job at the swamp tour company, I’d had bigger dreams for myself. I wanted to do something big. Bigger than my tiny town of 270 people.
Something big, something where I could put my love of creativity and food together.
I didn’t know what that was yet, but I’d come to the big city to get a business major and met someone I thought was the love of my life.
That those words had come out of my loving husband’s mouth were shocking to me.
If he loved me, how could he have said such things?
I wasn’t leaving him at the moment.
I had poured so much love into him. Just because it bubbled out of me and I wanted to show it. And I thought he appreciated all the little things I did for him.
Well, those things and me obviously weren’t appreciated.
“I’m really sorry for what I said about the lunches,” Chad said. “And your hair. And the house. And everything else. Let’s just pretend I never said it. I must have been stricken with temporary insanity.”
“All right,” I said, smiling sweetly.
Instead of soothing him, my smile only made him twitch nervously.
“You forgive me, right? Everything’s going to go back to normal, right?”
“Normal, yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.”
But that was a damn lie.
Because if he wanted a sweet little submissive traditional wife like Mr. Van Buren was sooo enthusiastic about?
He was gonna get it.
But that didn’t mean he was gonna like it.