Page 54 of Bartholomew
“What?” Levi asked in confusion.
“I hadn’t told her yet!” I was angry at him. This whole thing was a disaster. Before I could go after her, Delilah was back in the room, a towel in hand, and began mopping up the mess. “Delilah…” I began. I reached out to her, but she jerked away.
“You tie up and beat your wives?” she seethed between her teeth.
“No, it’s not like that,” I sighed in exasperation.
“I’m so over that sentence, Ollie. So, here’s how this is going to go. Y’all are going to stop beating around the bush and speaking in riddles and just tell me what the hell is going on here!” Her tone started soft, but by the end of her tirade, she was near screaming, her fists balled up at her sides.
“This is a conversation for private, Delilah,” I urged her.
“Ruth, it’s time we made our leave. I’m sorry for letting that slip so callously. I only assumed you had told her,” Levi whispered in hushed tones. Not that it helped. We were all situated closely enough that nothing was a secret.
“Of course not! It’s been six days. Why would I have told her that so quickly?!” I ran a hand through my hair in abject frustration.
“You said you had shared with her more than you’d shared with any other woman! What was I supposed to think?” Levi argued.
“Levi, let’s go,” Ruth insisted, taking her husband by the hand, and leading him out of the room.
“Levi, let me know if anything else happens. And honestly, thank you for keeping me updated and such,” I resigned myself with a sigh. Clapping him on the back as he and Ruth left the house, I turned back to my wife. She sat in the chair; the wet washcloth clutched in her hand after cleaning up. With eyes cast to the floor and her fingers were rubbing over each other worriedly.
“How did we go from bliss this morning to this, in less than two hours?” I asked her rhetorically.
“By not being honest with me,” she sighed in return. “Do you want to tie me up and beat me?” she asked, pain etched on her face.
“It’s complicated, Delilah,” I answered honestly, doing mental gymnastics as I sifted through a plethora of ways I could try to explain the situation. None of them seemed like a good idea.
“Ollie, I’m too mentally and emotionally tired to keep my filter in place. Maybe, just maybe, instead of saying it’s complicated after every question I ask, you could just rip your own filter off and try telling me the truth. The whole truth.”
Well, that was a thought. Still, something clenched low in my gut, telling me that this could get much worse instead of better. I wanted better. I wanted to erase the last few hours and go back to the delicious bliss we had shared in bed this morning. And last night. A repeat of that was exactly what I wanted.
“One reason that led to our decision to leave Zion is that we discovered kink,” I huffed out, flopping in the nearest chair in defeat. If she wanted unfiltered honesty, that was what she would get. I just prayed to the mythical sky daddy that she wouldn’t go running to her parents, or worse, and derail this entire thing.
“Kink. You used that word last night,” she murmured, mirroring my position in her own chair. We looked like two people exhausted after a long day of work rather than a married couple on their honeymoon in the mid-morning after a night of passion.
“I did. It’s a long story —” I began, but she cut me off.
“Ollie,” she stated, drawing my eyes to hers. “I have time.”
I read the truth in her eyes.
“Six years ago, Reverend Jacob tasked Levi to find a car part in the city,” I began again, resigning myself to the truth; the blunt and whole truth.
“This sounds like the beginning of a novel,” she quipped with a humorless smirk on her face.
“It is, in a way. But you asked for the truth, so here it is. Levi searched for this stupid car part the Reverend needed, for who knows why, and after looking for it for a few weeks, he had finally found it. He drove into the city, address written on a little piece of paper. It was some back-alley shop. Well, by some odd twist of events, he took a wrong turn, walked down the wrong alley, and into a building he thought was the place.” I took a drink, trying to wet my dry mouth as the story of how I became the man standing in front of her, or sitting as the case was, came to be.
I watched her as she sat there, watching and listening intently.
“The place he walked into was not the pawnshop with the car part. It was a club,” I explained.
“Like a dance club?” she asked. As children, they had taught us about places like dance clubs being sins of the flesh.
“No,” I chuckled humorlessly, “not a dance club. It was a dungeon.”
I let that word sink in, watching her reactions pass over her face.
“It was a local kink dungeon. Meaning a place that hosts people whose proclivities venture into the world of BDSM.”
