Page 105 of The Sound Of Us

I calculate my proximity to the nightstand where he keeps his gun. I’m closer to it, he’s across from me, at the door. I’ll never win, but I’ll have a head start if he tries to get to it and I’ll have a few extra seconds to fight to my death.

Pushing the empty box back into the bottom cubicle, I rise as if boulders sit on my shoulders. Heavy and effortful, preventing a confident straightening of my spine as I turn to face him.

Heart banging against my rib cage, air trapped inside my body, screaming for release. My hands, my knees tremble and my teeth clamp together to keep from chattering.

My beaded bracelet hangs from the index finger of Frank’s right hand. He lifts his other hand. “Or this?” My black lace womens' underwear hangs from that index finger.

He slips my bracelet over his wrist and, with a smirk, reaches into his pocket. And when he pulls that hand out and lifts his fist in the air, and then opens that fist, a wail leaves my chest. Small, shredded bits of paper flutter to the carpet. My mother’s letters, written to me when I was a baby, fall, crushed and defeated. Like me.

Frank's face is calm, but his eyes mock me with the filthiest disdain I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe I’d loved this man for ten years. Called him my husband. Entrusted my heart to his care and believed every promise he’d made and continued to believe, even when he broke them over and over again. Even when he blamed me for breaking those promises, still I believed in him. In us.

Until Eli. And then I realized there was nothing extraordinary about Frank at all. Without my desperate need to be loved by him, he is nothing but a monster.

Even with a handsome face and strong arms and the charm he exuded when he was out in public, I can finally see the ugliness he spewed at me and the weakness he showed by the way he treated me. I can finally see that it was never me. It was always Frank. He was the monster, not me.

But despite all my recent revelations, I’m still right back where I started. Shaking in my boots and at his mercy, hardly able to breathe for fear of what he’d do to me and fury that I can do nothing to stop him.

“He been lettin’ you walk around with these panties like little Goldilocks?” His question rolls off on a sneer. Why had I never noticed before how the lift on the right side of his mouth makes him look so nasty?

Or the cruel slits of his eyes.

Or how empty his eyes are when he’s angry with me.

I stand my ground, shifting discreetly toward the nightstand so I’m directly in front of it.

He laughs lightly. I hate his laugh. His cruel chuckle makes me so angry I want to tear my hair out of my head. “Let me go, Frank,” I breathe.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says with a calmness that makes me rage. He slips my mother’s bracelet off his wrist and snap. The beads fall, skittering all over the floor. My body vibrates with madness, but I refuse to give in to the insanity.

Pepper scratches at the door again. My eyes flick to behind him. “Let Pepper in, Frank,” I say softly.

Another enraging laugh. “Why, you need her to therapy you through this, Axel, you fucking cheatin’ whore?”

“Frank, it’s over between us,” I whisper, forcing his words to bounce off me. “Please let me go.” My vision blurs with unshed tears for my mother’s letter and her bracelet.

“Let you go?” Until now, he’s kept his physical distance from me and… the nightstand. Now, he takes a step forward. I take a step back, an instinctive move, and I hate it.

“Axel, you fucked another man. Do you really think I’ll let you go? Let you get away with it? The only way you’ll leave is in a body bag with a bullet through your skull.”

“Frank, don’t do this,” I beg.

He shrugs. “What difference does it make, Ax? You’re dead in two to five years, anyway.”

I swallow. “What?” I whisper.

With a dead straight face, he says. “I talked to your doctor. The test results came back. You kept that away from me, too. After everything I’ve done for you. This is how you repay me?”

“You talked to my doctor?”

“He called your cell yesterday. I got him to tell me what the results were.”

“He’s not allowed to…” I choke. Even though I knew, I knew, to hear the words from Frank’s mouth like this is unbearable. Deep, earth shattering pains begin low in my chest, rumbling up my throat.

“I’m your fuckin’ husband, Axel. And I’m no stranger to your doctors, something you’ve clearly forgotten.”

I'm not surprised. Frank can be that charming. He must have spun an amazing tale to get the information out of Dr. Shashi.

“What did he say?” I ask, through the clogging in my throat, like a masochist begging for more pain.

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