Chapter 13 – POSY
POSY
I ’m as roly poly as a pot-bellied pig, but I’m happy. Ish.
I’m married. Dario and I flew to Vegas and got married by Elvis in a chapel. We almost got kicked out of the casino for counting cards, which Dario was totally doing, and maybe I was, too, but not as obviously as he was.
We’re going to have a baby, and I spend my days decorating the nursery and bugging my husband to ditch work and play board games. It’s a snowy winter, but the temperatures aren’t too bitter, and there’s no reason for me to be so unsettled.
Dario loves me. I’ve made him tell me over and over until the words are mundane. I thought that would make them feel real. It didn’t work.
It’s a real bummer because I love him. Madly. Irredeemably. Idiotically.
And despite some of my life choices, I’m a bright woman, and I know I’m building a house of cards. Of course, I couldn’t stop if I tried.
I’m his queen. There’s no doubt about that.
I can read it on every face when I walk into a party or a restaurant on his arm.
There’s nothing but respect. Deferential smiles.
Dario pays it no mind, but I do. Sometimes I lean a little too close to another man so I can watch the guy tug at his collar and try to take an inconspicuous step back. No one wants a bullet in the throat.
I know Dario has been bracing for blowback from Lucca’s coup, but so far, it’s been quiet. The laughter at parties has less of an edge now, and everyone is settling into a new normal.
Maybe I’ll finally believe in my happily ever after when the baby’s born. Or maybe I’ll always have this little voice in the back of my head, telling me I’d better run, while my heart digs her nails into love like a desperate bitch.
I plop the last spoonful of noodles from the pot into the serving dish. I made spaghetti and meatballs tonight. Nothing fancy. Dario’s already sitting at the table, on his phone, even though I’ve told him a hundred times no trading during dinner.
I waddle over and set the bowl down on a hot plate, scanning the table. I’ve got the bread, butter, and salt. Once I sit, I’m not getting back up.
I sigh when I finally lower myself into the chair next to Dario. I kick off my shoes under the table. After the first hour or so I’m up, my feet ache all day, and my toes look like puffy little white sausages. I don’t know how I’m going to do nine more weeks.
I snatch Dario’s phone and set it face down next to his plate. Without skipping a beat, he reaches for the salad and heaps a serving on my plate. He thinks I’m not eating enough fruits and vegetables. I think he’d better mind his own damn business if he knows what’s good for him.
“You should have Maria stay and do dinner,” he says, passing me the Italian dressing. It’s homemade, my mother’s recipe.
“I like cooking.”
“You’re tired. You sound like a leaky balloon every time you sit down.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
“It doesn’t bother me.” His jaw twitches. Dario cannot handle me when I’m cranky. He tries to reason with me, and it always blows up in his face. “It’s just, you don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Play the good wife.”
My temper flares. “I’m not playing .”
He scrubs his neck. “I know. It’s just this—” He gestures at the table I’ve set and the food I’ve made. “You don’t have to do it. This isn’t the fifties. I don’t expect it.”
“Then you don’t have to eat it.” I spear a meatball and plonk it onto my plate.
Now it’s his turn to sigh. He focuses on his dinner. I shove the salad to one side and rip off a huge hunk of crusty warm bread.
“Pass the butter?”
He narrows his eyes at my bread. Judging. I reach right past him for the butter dish.
“You need to eat more leafy greens.”
“You need to crawl out of my ass.” I haven’t put on more weight than I’m supposed to, and even if there’s a little more of me to love these days, he doesn’t seem to mind. If I show the slightest interest, he’s all over me. He’s downright obsessed with how my boobs have changed.
Dario sets his knife and fork down on the table with a thump and skewers me with a glare. “What is making you unhappy?”
“You.”
“Because I didn’t pass the butter?”
I shove my plate away. The spaghetti is sticking to the meatballs, and the sauce is clumpy, and it’s just gross. “Yes, Dario. I am pissed as hell because you didn’t pass me the fucking butter.”
He glares up at the ceiling like he’s asking the Lord for strength, and now I want to hit him. In the face. In his cold, unfeeling, unconcerned, unconflicted face .
“You need to eat better. The bigger it grows, the more the baby is depleting your nutrient reserves.” He says this very slowly as if he’s speaking to a child. “You need iron. You need vitamin B.”
With any other man, I’d flip him off—or bite his head off—but not Dario. I don’t take what he says lightly. Not now that he’s honest with me.
Unease robs me of the rest of my appetite and puts a damper on my hormonal peevishness.
“The baby isn’t hurting me.”
He tosses a shoulder. “It would hurt you less if you ate a salad once in a while.” He narrows his eyes and his lips turn down. “I’m not upset with the baby. It’s just biological fact.”
“Okay.” I take a slow slip of water.
He exhales. “You’re never going to be how you were before, are you?”
“Like how?”
“Happy.”
“I’m happy.”
He arches an eyebrow. I have my arms crossed, and I’m doing everything in my power not to make eye contact with the red-splattered lump lolling on top of my spaghetti.
I roll my eyes. “I’m pregnant and hormonal. That’s all.”
“Why won’t you look at your plate?”
“The meatball.”
He waits as if that isn’t explanation enough.
“It’s disgusting.”
“Didn’t you make them?”
“Things were different then.”
“An hour and a half ago?”
“Are you trying to start a fight?” I level a glare at him. The sleeves of his white button-down shirt are rolled to his elbows, but everything else about him is unperturbed. His face is a glass lake, not a black hair out of place, his beard a straight edge slashing across his hard jaw.
He still scares me sometimes. Like walking past a tiger at the zoo, the kind of exhibit where they use ledges and moats instead of bars to keep the animals inside. You believe it can’t hurt you, but you can’t see what’s stopping it, either.
“No.” He silently considers me for a moment. Then he stands, his dinner uneaten, too. He offers me his hand. “Let’s go play a game.”
“That’s your answer to everything,” I spit peevishly, but I’m already hauling myself upright. Anything to get away from the stench of garlic.
He leads me upstairs to our bedroom. The chess board is already set out on our table in the nook overlooking the garden.
He must have been hankering to play. I’ve been getting tired in the evenings, and sometimes lately I don’t want to spend hours kicking his ass.
Other times, like tonight, I need it. When this thing we have doesn’t feel real, the games do.
They’re the closest we can get to each other, the only wavelength we really share.
I go to take my seat opposite him, but he holds me back. He sinks into his leather wingback chair and pulls me onto his lap.
“I’m too heavy.” I squirm, but he has an arm wrapped underneath my big belly. This is like that horrible day in his office. I tense and strain against his grasp.
“Relax.”
“It’s uncomfortable. You’re too hard.”
“Not yet.” I can hear the smirk in his voice. He tugs the board close enough for me to reach and moves the white pawn to e4.
“So you’re white?”
“I won last time.”
“How do you even remember?”
“You were pissy then, too.” He says it as if he’s recalling the weather. My moods don’t phase him in the least. It’s a small blessing of being married to a psychopath.
I bring my queenside bishop pawn to c5.
He sighs happily, and we settle in to play.
The tension slowly ebbs from my spine, and I curve against his warm chest. He begins to jiggle his knee gently like he does when he thinks he’s got something up his sleeve, and it feels oddly soothing.
He’s clearly going for a variation of the Jerome Gambit.
Clever, but I can see it coming a mile away.
Six moves later, he’s in check. Then mate. I tilt my head back and rest it in the crook of his neck. “Better luck next time.” I nuzzle the spot under his ear. It smells faintly of cologne. The first scent today that didn’t turn my stomach.
He’s already setting up the board again. “That should have worked.” He drops a kiss on the top of my head.
“On an idiot maybe.”
He chuckles. “I’ve been working on that for days.”
“Waste of time.” I blow air on my nails and polish them on my top. “You should concede now so we can watch TV. It sucks watching you embarrass yourself over and over again.”
A low laugh reverberates against my back.
He loves it when I smack talk. The fog of irritation I’ve been smothered by today lightens a little.
I exhale and wind my fingers through his, tilt his hand until he’s cradling my belly.
She’s pretty active. Maybe he’ll feel her.
Maybe he’ll stop forgetting and calling her it .
“What was that?” he asks, hand paused above a bishop.
“What was what?”
“You were relaxing, and then you tensed again.”
“Dark thoughts.”
“You don’t have dark thoughts.”
“So you read my mind now?”
“Close to.”
“Then how come I keep whupping your ass at chess?”
“You only win about forty percent of the time.”
“You keep track?”
He doesn’t answer. I bet he does. I bet he has a spreadsheet, or maybe he’s made an app that runs the odds. My lip twitches. He’s such a strange man.
“What dark thoughts?”
I guess he’s decided that he might be wrong, considering he is about forty percent of the time.
With my mind half on the game, and half on a hundred other things, I reach for a nothing kind of answer, and instead, I say, “What if all of this is a terrible mistake?”
The hand hovering above a knight drops to the arm of the chair. Now he’s tense.
“What do you mean?”