Page 29 of Scarlet Thorns
How long has he been waiting here? How did he even know I was here? The questions multiply in my head, but I force myself to keep walking. I won’t let him see that his presence rattles me. I won’t let him steal the gift I was given tonight.
“Stanley.” I keep my voice steady, professional. Like he’s a difficult client instead of the man who shared my bed for two years. “What are you doing here?”
He pushes off from my car, moving to block the driver’s side door. “Answer my question first. What the hell are you doing in a place like this?”
“A place like what?” I raise an eyebrow, channeling some of TMG’s quiet confidence. “It’s a bar. I had a drink.”
“Don’t play stupid with me, Ilona. I know what this place is.” His eyes are hard. “Private rooms. Anonymous encounters. Very… discreet.”
Ice floods my veins. How does he know about that? How much does he know? But I keep my expression neutral, refusing to give him the reaction he’s fishing for.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I step toward my car door, but he shifts to block me more completely. “Move, Stanley. I want to go home.”
“Who are you fucking?”
The question hits like a slap. Direct, brutal, designed to wound. But instead of the shame and defensiveness he’sexpecting, I feel something else rising in my chest— anger. Clean, righteous anger that cuts through fear like a blade.
“No one.” The truth comes out steady, unashamed. Because it is the truth, technically. What happened with TMG transcended physical acts. It was connection, understanding, intimacy without penetration. “Move away from my car.”
“Bullshit.” Stanley’s composure cracks, revealing the jealous rage underneath. He slams his hand against my hood with enough force to make the metal ring. “First you won’t have sex with me, then you start sneaking around to bars, staying out until all hours—”
“I’m sick, Stanley!” The words explode from me with two years of accumulated frustration. “I have endometriosis. That’s why sex hurts. That’s why I’ve been distant. But you never bothered to ask, did you? It was easier to just accuse me of cheating.”
His expression doesn’t change. No surprise, no concern, no recognition of the pain I’ve been carrying. Just the same cold calculation, like he’s deciding whether my diagnosis is convenient for his narrative.
“So you’re saying you have some… condition that makes you frigid?” The word lands like acid. “How convenient. Right when I start asking questions about your behavior.”
“Convenient?” I stare at him, finally seeing him clearly for the first time. This man I thought I loved, who I defended to my friends and family, who I made excuses for when he cheated. “You think I’m lying about a medical diagnosis to avoid having sex with you?”
“I think you’re lying about a lot of things.” He steps closer, using his height to intimidate. “The constant excuses, the way you flinch every time I touch you. Something’s going on, and I’m going to find out what.”
The accusations pour out of him like poison from an infected wound. Every insecurity, every projection, every twisted interpretation of my behavior when I was struggling with pain and confusion. He’s constructed an entire story where I’m the villain and he’s the victim.
“You want to know what’s going on?” The anger builds to something volcanic, powerful enough to burn away nearly two years of conditioning that taught me to minimize my own needs. “I’ve been feeling lonely in this relationship for months. Like I’m only useful to you in the bedroom. You never ask about my emotions, my fears, my dreams. When I try to tell you something’s wrong, you dismiss it as overreacting.”
“Here we go.” Stanley rolls his eyes. “The victim routine again.”
“And when you cheated on me with Melissa,” I continue, my voice rising with each word, “you somehow made it my fault. Like I wasn’t available enough, wasn’t understanding enough about your needs. But the second I need understanding about my health, you decide I must be lying.”
“That’s different—”
“How? How is it different?” I’m shouting now, months of suppressed frustration pouring out in the empty parking lot. “You get a free pass for actual infidelity, but I get interrogated for going to a bar alone?”
Stanley’s face flushes with anger and something that might be embarrassment. “You don’t get to throw that in my face forever. I apologized for Melissa. I made it right.”
“Made it right?” I laugh, but there’s no humor in the sound. “You mean you convinced me to take you back after I caught you fucking her on your desk. That’s not making it right, that’s manipulation.”
“I never manipulated—”
“You gaslight me constantly!” The words feel like liberation, like finally naming something that’s been suffocating me for months. “Every time I have a concern, you tell me I’m overreacting. Every time I need something from you, you make it about how I’m being unreasonable. You’ve made me question my own reality so often I started to believe maybe I was crazy.”
Stanley’s expression shifts from anger to something colder. “So what are you saying? You want to throw away two years because you’re having some kind of emotional breakdown?”
The dismissal in his tone— reducing everything I’ve said to a breakdown—crystallizes something inside me. This is who he really is. Not the charming man who swept me off my feet, but this person who reduces my pain to inconvenience and my needs to hysteria.
“It’s over, Stanley.” The words surprise me as much as they surprise him, but once they’re out, they feel like the most honest thing I’ve said in months.
“What?”
