Page 115 of Perfect
He keeps bank account statements for Alex’s accounts in a separate folder, and that fuck has spent close tohalfof Alex’s inheritance. She inheritedso muchmoney, and he’s spent almost everything that wasn’t tied up in investments. I drain my glass and look up at the ceiling, furious. He’sreallyfucking stupid, because mismanaging that amount of money is criminal.
Alex makes pretty little whining sounds in the other room, which calms me down.
Danny keeps everything in his calendar. He works long hours, but he’s consistent about what he does in his time off. Gym, golf, bar, strip club, most of it with his friends and his brother. He gets a lot of massages, randomly scheduled and sometimes up to six times a month, so I’m going to guess he frequents sex workers. If I go back through his calendar, it looks like he took Alex to a nice dinner once a month.
Is this how she got through it for so long? Because he was out of the house most of the time, fucking other women? What did she even do all day besides work out and cook and clean? Read, probably, and she mentioned she took online classes. I’m sure she shopped, and shedefinitelydrank a lot.
Now that I know where he goes and what he does, I can start planning to kill him. He’s a cop, so I need to make sure I’m very fucking careful. I can’t risk getting caught, and it can’t get connected back to Alex. I should probably shoot him from a distance, as unsatisfying as that would be. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been hunting, so I need to get Boss’ guns from Yachats and start practicing again. Luckily, I have time. I can’t go to Boston until I’m off parole unless I get permission.
I wonder if Officer Dent would approve it if I told him I’d be meeting my girlfriend’s family.
Either way, I need to wait until I’m absolutely positive Alex won’t run away once she gets access to her old life. Not that she could, but things are finally getting where I want them with her. Since I beat the shit out of Ben, it seems like she’s almost entirely adjusted. She calls me her boyfriend. She’s more relaxed. She’s sharing more. She’s playful. She initiates sex just as much as I do. She’s starting to do things for me, little things I’m not sure she notices, but little acts of service all the same. She smiles at me,reallysmiles at me, all the time.
We have fun together.
Her trust issues are still a big problem, though. She’s still notentirelyopen with me and hides her feelings from both of us. It’ll still take time to get her fully adjusted, and I don’t feel like losing any of the progress we’ve made.
From the long, low moans coming from the bedroom, I know Alex is close, but she hasn’t come yet, so I still have to wait. I keep poking around in Danny’s computer, but I’m not finding much else of interest. His taste in porn skews exclusively towards teen girls, he’s got a bit of a gambling issue, and he’s been sleeping with a coworker’s wife for a few months – all shit that I don’t care about.
I navigate to his photos, which are mostly photos of him with his family and Alex. There are so many photos of him and Alex on vacation, always stretched out somewhere on a sunny beach. I wonder where she’d like us to vacation together once I’m off parole. Knowing Alex, somewhere with lots of wine and huge art museums, but I don’t know where I can even go after being incarcerated. I’m thinking about that as I absently open up the videos folder, but I stop dead when I see a folder labeled BUNNY. I click it open to see dozens of thumbnails of him and Alex fucking, and one subfolder labeled FF.
I get up, pour myself another drink, and leave the room, making a beeline for Alex.
I’m not doing it. I can’t watch those videos. I can’t watch him fuck her. I already know Danny was abusive, and I don’t want to see Alex be miserable. I’m just going to stand in the doorway and drink and watch Alex come for me. I watch her chest flush as her body shakes and listen to her gorgeous, stifled moans as she does exactly what I told her to do.
Then I finish my drink and go watch the videos, because I can’t help myself.
Thankfully, most of the videos are boring. Alex’s orgasms are so fake it’s kind of funny. They’re studied, like she watched a lot of porn and mimicked it, which is possibly exactly what she did. She does the right things, makes the right sounds, but she’s fuckinglying. Either she can lie to other people much better than she can lie to me, or Danny didn’t care enough to notice.
I notice with a level of juvenile satisfaction that there’s an apparent size difference between Danny and me, not that it matters. The thing that actually matters is how different Alex is with him. She’s so unenthusiastic, and it seems like she’d rather be doing anything else.
A long, sweet, keening sound echoes down the hallway, and I force myself to stay at my desk, eyeing the subfolder with unease before I open it. It has a few dozen videos, and I can tell from the thumbnails that these areapologies. I click on one, then another, getting progressively angrier as I watch them.
He makes her beg forgiveness for the dumbest shit before he brutally fucks her face. It’s not rough the way Alex likes, it’s meant as a punishment. How he talks to her makes me sick – he’s degrading her in a way that’s obviously not supposed to be enjoyable, and I can tell he’s actively trying to hurt her feelings. His favorite thing to call her is a stupid, worthless, pathetic fuckup, and it makes me sick to my stomach to hear it over and over and over. Alex cries in the earlier videos, but her face is relatively blank in the later videos, her eyes glazed over, and I can’t tell if she’s drunk or zoned out or both.
Either way, she looks like she’s just not there.
I’m fucking nauseous. Nine years ofthis?
I think about her reaction to being asked to apologize back in October, and I stare down at my feet, my head in my hands. I have beensucha shitty boyfriend by accident.
I close out of Danny’s computer and take deep, shaking breaths as I leave the office because I’m so fucking furious. I goto the basement and sprint on the treadmill for a few minutes, thinking about killing Danny the entire time, which helps calm me down.
Once I’m calmer, I go back upstairs to Alex.
I lean in the bedroom doorway and watch her writhe on the bed, listen to her whine and take harsh breaths through her nose, watch her shake as she starts to come again. Suddenly, being tied up and used isn’t what I want for her right now. She likes it, I like it, but I can’t get that blank fucking look of hers out of my head. I can’t stop hearing Danny tell her what a stupid, worthless bitch she is.
I want to be tender with her right now, treat her with the kindness she didn’t have before, wrap her up in my arms and make her feel safe and warm and secure.
I need her to know she’s loved.
I get undressed slowly, watching her. She’s so different than I thought she was, and I don’t know how to handle that. I don’t know how to help her with all the hurt she’s been through, but I can do this, I can make her feel good.
I kneel on the bed, and she makes an excited sound, tilting her hips up a little as I pull the vibrator out of her slowly and untie her, massaging the stiffness out of her legs and hips, which makes her purr behind the gag. I unfasten the nipple clamps and slip the headphones and eye mask off, and her eyes are heavily lidded and adoring when they meet mine. I unbind the gag and slip it out of her mouth, massaging her jaw gently, and she hums in pleasure.
“Welcome home,” she murmurs, her eyes closed and her face dreamy. A thrill goes through me, and I know I’ll do anything to hear her say that to me every day for the rest of my life.
The thought makes me slightly uncomfortable, for some reason.
