Chapter 30
Thealina
I should feel guilty. I should be ashamed.
Embarrassed. And even if Rafe’s fingers were used for medicinal purposes, I still crossed a line.
But I won’t ignore how warmth hums beneath my skin, settling into the spaces where pain used to live.
My body feels strange, heavy but weightless, floating somewhere above myself while every nerve still remembers his tender touch and heated words.
He stays close, forehead resting against mine; his breath mingling with the shaky rise and fall of my chest. One hand still sprawls across my stomach, the heat of it penetrating my womb, easing the dull but distant gripes of pain.
I’m shocked an orgasm has the power to do that.
So many years I’ve suffered, yet I had no clue.
That single tear betrayed me, slipped from the corner of my eye when I thought I had managed to hold everything inside.
He saw it. Saw it all. Because of course he did.
Rafe doesn’t appear to miss a thing. And instead of looking away, instead of pretending it didn’t happen, he asked.
Not with pity, not even with softness—just quiet honesty.
Regret or neglect.
The answer came before I could stop it, floating through our linking bond so faint it barely felt like my own voice. Definitely not the first one. No regrets.
I want to ask him the same.
Does he regret touching me so intimately. During my cycle. Most men would recoil at the thought. I thought it was quite a beautiful moment.
Our dynamic is forever changed. The truth sits between us now, thick as smoke. There’s a strange kind of relief in it.
His touch hasn’t left me, his hand strokes lazy circles against my skin with no expectation in the gesture. It shouldn’t be possible someone so large, so intense, could feel so safe. But here he is. He hasn’t pulled away or recoiled at the mess beneath my panties.
Panties his hand was just in.
No, he just washed them in the basin beside the bed, washed me and proceeded to lay down to caress my sensitive flesh. No one’s held me like this before. Even my husband, in our good days, never took the time to take care of me like this. Nurture me.
I never knew I needed that until now.
The silence stretches, but it isn’t uncomfortable. It’s steady. And peaceful. For the first time in a longer time I want to admit, I’m not tense, nor bracing for disappointment.
‘You didn’t have to… I hope it wasn’t too mess… thank you,’ I whisper my thought, struggling to string my sentence together.
I expect him to answer or maybe make some offhanded joke to ease the weight of what’s settled here. He doesn’t. Instead, his lips brush against my temple, a barely-there touch that steals the breath from my lungs. No demands. No clever remark. Just him.
A wave of exhaustion pulls at me, but I want to cling to the moment with Rafe.
Sleep would mean surrendering to whatever comes after this, and I’m not ready.
Not when everything about tonight is fragile, precious in a way I haven’t felt in years.
Because what if we go back to being platonic travel companions. What if we never have another moment.
Moments like this is temporary, they always are, I’m sure.
But he hasn’t left. His hand still moves in slow, steady patterns, and his heartbeat thuds against my arm, a steady drumbeat reminding me I’m not alone.
I don’t say anything else. Don’t need to.
It’s enough, for now, to let myself rest against him, let my body remember what it’s like to be cared for.
Not taken like I’m used to. Just… held.
Gods, I don’t want to let him go.
***
“Will you tell me about it? Him… I mean.”
My body tenses, and it’s not because of the eerie owl hoots and whistling breeze coming through the kitchen window.
The breath I hold burns.
Rafe still holds me. I awoke some time ago to him studying me, running a tentative finger over my face like he was mapping my features.
We lay on our side, my nose nuzzling his chest as he rests his chin on top of my head.
His scent and weighty arm around me is grounding.
Just what I need if I’m to discuss my husband.
How much time must pass between husband and wife before I can call him my estranged or ex-husband?
‘You really want to know about my marriage?’
Are folk that interested in marital woes. Although, my situation is a little more than just woes. But no one ever asks me questions. No one ever truly wants to know me. Never had. Except Aurelia.
“I’d love nothing more than to never waste another breath on that prick. But I care about you more. And things like this eat us up if we don’t talk about them.”
‘I know the healers’ section is your favourite part of the paper, but I don’t think that gives you the credentials to therapy me.’
Rafe pokes my side, and we chuckle, squirming in each other’s hold.
“I mean it, Lina. Talk to me.”
I blow out a long breath, heating Rafe’s skin beneath my cheek as I nuzzle in some more, making sure he can’t see my face.
‘He wasn’t the worst man at the start. We had a few years of joy. But his mother came to live with us when her husband walked out on her. After a while I noticed how their relationship changed into something… emotionally incestual.’
“For real?”
“Mhmm.”
“I bet their family tree is a wreath.”
‘Shit. Maybe. If we were out and he held my hand, she’d go on his other side to hold the other one.
She also stood way to close to him for my liking and touched him way too often.
Too intimate for mother and son. But when I voiced it, I was the problem.
I was the one with the sick mind. Creating something out of nothing.
In the end, I just kept my mouth shut. It turned my stomach just how much she latched on to him.
Their snide and belittling comments and actions were me always taking it the wrong way.
I even got accused of being jealous. Maybe I was? ’
I was jealous of people that hadn’t met them, was what I was.
Though, how could you not be jealous when your husband makes another woman a priority over his wife.
Even if said woman was his mother. How could I not be jealous she celebrated him and his life yet when it came to mine, she made me feel like I inconvenienced her.
Like I wasn’t enough. I had no mother to be proud of me.
And there was a time I wanted my mother-in-law to be proud of me, to tell me I do a good job, how I’m valued in the household, how life would be dull and lifeless without me.
Life was miserable and bland with me, is how she made me feel. Yet she was in my house. Taking over my husband’s time.
‘My achievements were overlooked. His achievements were hers. For a while I bent over backwards trying to get on the inside of their tight circle. Tried to be who they both wanted me to be. Even that wasn’t enough.
Eventually my responses became short. To the point. And my hugs and kisses were quick.’
‘He used to apologise at first when he made me sad. When he’d say demeaning things or get angry if I ever brought up his incompetence. He weaponised it. But nothing changed.’
“Apologies without change is manipulation.”
‘Agreed. I could never express myself without being told I was over-reacting. Hysterical. A troublemaker. Trying to cause a rift. My opinion, wants and needs were brushed over, whilst his mother’s took priority.’
Sadness creeps into my soul, the feeling of not being enough still haunts me despite my hardened walls.
‘Our birthdays are a day apart. We’d always merge them into one day.
It was our day. I can’t tell you how awkward it was to sit there watching her fuss over him like a child, shower him with presents as I prepared our birthday breakfast, thinking maybe my presents would come when we sat down to eat.
They never did. And it’s so stupid, I don’t care about presents.
I want for nothing. But it’s that feeling of… of being…’
“Forgotten? Underappreciated? A spare part?”
My bottom lip wobbles. ‘Yeah.’ I squeeze my watering eyes shut as all the memories drown me.
‘I’m an orphan. No family. Just a home full of kids and a husband and wife who did their best for us.
I couldn’t wait to get out. I’d daydream about the family I’d create as I got older.
All the love and laughter. Imagine all the things I’d give my own family.
Everything I never had. But him and his mother they…
I just became a maid, cook, her caretaker because she seemed to have a different ailment each day, oh and not forgetting… a wet hole.’
I snort, fiddling with Rafe’s chest hair, aware I’ve vomited repressed hurt all over him in one sitting. I don’t miss how Rafe tightened his grip on me when ‘wet hole’ leapt from my mind.
“You’re doing well,” he says, squeezing me and placing a sweet kiss on my head. “Keep going.”
‘Am I being charged for this session?’
“I take peach and syrup tarts as payment,” Rafe’s chuckle vibrates through my bones.
‘Ah you’re a fan, huh’
“Can’t stop thinking about them.”
It’s my turn to giggle; thankful Rafe can’t see my reddening cheeks. Even a compliment about one’s food can be enough to uplift a sorrowful soul.
“Was it a gradual thing?”
“Mhmm.” It shocks me he seems so interested. Most folk like to bury things or avoid deep conversations like this. It’s like I’m being heard.
It’s foreign. Makes me a little uneasy, but also, validated. Belonging. Self-worth swims through my veins at an alarming speed.
‘Before I knew it decades went by. And it got harder and harder to leave. It was like I woke up one day and had nothing but him. My money was taken. What little friends I had were cut off. Aspirations mocked.’
“What were your aspirations?”
Crawling heat of humiliation creeps from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. My skin prickles, the hairs on my body standing on end as pores open to sweat.