Page 18 of Blazing Embers

I slump against the shower wall as he saunters out like we didn’t just have sex in the shower. My legs feel like jelly. My body still thrums. Desire mingled with the sting of not having had sex for so long, and still a little raw from a rough natural labor. I don’t think my body was ready. Not fully. Not yet. I’m still a little raw. It’s only been a month, and my period has just started to subside.

My mind flickers to the look in his eyes. The way they’d settled on my breasts. Fear engulfs me as I finish washing.

Fuck, could he know something?

I breathe through the ache between my thighs. My hand shakes as I shut off the water.

As I dry off, I hear his voice echo in my memories—Ten minutes.

Fuck him. I’m not going to let him treat me like a piece of shit or a two year old child by him or anyone else ever again.

But I still find myself moving.

I towel off and I’m about to pull on the pants I laid out earlier, black ones. But I changed my mind and got the blue pair I saw instead. I place it beside the Cashmere sweater and eye out the underwear beside it. Even my underwear is expensive.

I’m about to step into the pants when pain slams into me like a blade—low and brutal. I drop to my knees, gasping, one hand flying to my belly. The other grabs the bed frame, knuckles white as I grit my teeth and ride it out.

It passes.

Not completely, but enough.

My stomach still feels… bloated. Tender. Like there’s something curled inside, heavy and wrong. But I push through it. I have to.

What the fuck was that?I push through and pull the pants on slowly, carefully, avoiding the tightness that makes the ache worse. My hands shake slightly as I reach for the sweater. Every movement feels exaggerated, stretched too thin.

I’m starving. And nauseous. All at once.

Perfect, I think bitterly. Hungry and sick. My favorite combination.

My stomach twists again—sharp, but not like before. More like soreness. Lingering. Inflamed.

Probably from the bleeding, I tell myself. The nonstop, never-ending, body-vengeance bullshit bleeding after giving birth. It’s bad enough the pain of labor but then… afterward there’s the inflamed boobs from milk inflammation shit… Then there’s the fact that it can take up to six weeks for the bleeding and other swelling to go down.

Jesus. I love my little girl but fuck, woman suffer the anxiety of carrying the baby, the pain of birth, and then the brutal weeks that come after it. Most mothers have a baby to look after while they’re going through this. My mother was right about one thing: we don’t really appreciate just how much they sacrifice or go through for us, from the moment they conceive. Well I sure as shit appreciate my mother now… well my stepmother anyway. She looked after a three year old and a newborn… so… fuck year I appreciate her as she was nothing but kind and loving to me while she was going through this.

I look in the mirror. “Get your shit together Tara. Stop fucking moping about. It’s just a cramp.”

My eyes fall on the items neatly set out on the dresser for me, distracting me from my woes. There’s a hairbrush. Perfume. Moisturizer.

All the stuff I’d love to have bought but could never afford. If we weren’t married, I’d feel like a kept woman—oh wait! I am not just a kept woman—I’m a fucking prisoner married to the prison guard giving him a license to do pretty much whatever he wanted to or with me.

I shake away my grim thoughts, brush my hair, and pull on the shoes I took out. I glance at myself in the mirror once again. Even if my stomach is bloated and really uncomfortable right now, the pants are still a little baggy, but to give Ruslan his due, if I hadn’t lost so much weight, they would’ve been my size. Sighing, I look at the door, wondering if it was locked. I walk to it and try it—it opens.

“Huh!” I purse my lips and exit the room in pursuit of food because, despite everything, I’m starving.

RUSLAN

I finish dressing in my room and head to the study. My thoughts keep circling back to Tara’s breasts and how much fuller they are.

Her scream of pain when I entered her. Maybe she gets very sensitive when she has her period because of her genetics, but then maybe she lied. My eyes narrow as my brain ticks over everything I found out about that day Tara allegedly miscarried. According to the report I was given a little too easily, she was going for her regular monthly check-up, and on the way, she started cramping. By the time she got to the hospital, she’d started bleeding and was in excruciating pain.

I open my laptop and pull up the video footage I obtained from the hospital, and hit play. It shows Tara entering with Clyde. They hurry in, and Clyde explains what's happening to Tara, who turns and looks around. She’s crying and tries to hide the blood on her jeans by pulling her sweater down.

The nurse rushes around the desk and disappears down the corridor to return moments later with a wheelchair. Clyde helps Tara into the wheelchair, and they disappear down the hallway. There are no cameras in the part of the hospital where she was taken. Clyde apparently stayed there that night, sleeping in the chair in Tara’s room. I fast forward to the following day at midday when they left the hospital.

Tara and Clyde stop at the front desk on the way out. She signs something and then turns once again toward the camera. Headbowed, touching her stomach. Clyde puts an arm around her, and I have to try not to punch through the screen, seeing him put his hands on her. He turns to walk her out of the hospital, and a doctor stops them. The doctor who attended to Tara gave her a brown bag and a prescription. I freeze the screen as Clyde and Tara walk out of the room.

I sit back and stare at it, and can’t help but feel that something’s off.

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