Page 7 of Don't Leave Me
“OMG, it’s his wife. I saw her picture inVanity Fair.” This from the girl who wasso high.
This, I thought.This is what he’d been hiding. From me, the world. A sexual fetish for underage girls.
“Leave,” I said, my voice trembling with anger. Not at them. They were victims, even if they didn’t realize it. Give a blow job. Get some drugs and cash. The slashes those actions would leave on their souls might not be felt for years, but eventually, they would see they had been used and manipulated by someone old enough to know what he was doing was wrong.
Walking around them, I stepped up to the door and knocked.
Evan answered, his voice annoyed. “What did you forget?”
He was shirtless, in jeans that were hiked up on his hips but not fastened. It was strange, I thought. He was my husband, and this was the first time I’d seen him in any state of undress.
His chest was flat and undefined. Not like Marc at all. But then, Marc had been an athlete growing up. Evan didn’t strike me as someone who wanted to work hard at anything.
Which was maybe why he preferred sex with young girls instead of women.
“What are you doing here?” There was an ominous threat to his tone. He had to know I would have seen them leaving. Much harder to explain away the presence of two overtly sexy teenage girls, than it was the daughter of his housekeeper.
He paid them by check. How foolish. It meant there would be a record. Even if he made the checks out to cash, there would be evidence of money leaving his accounts, and money hitting theirs.
Pulling me inside, he closed the door behind me.
“I’ll ask again. What are you doing here?”
“I had a problem and came to you to help find a solution. Now, I see that was a fool’s errand. Someone as sick as you could never possibly offer any rational solution.”
He laughed. The sound was as perverted as he was.
“Can we be blunt?” he asked, parroting the words I’d asked him the day he proposed.
“You’re a pedophile. How’s that for blunt?”
Like the first time he hit me, I didn’t anticipate it quickly enough to attempt to avoid it. A backhand hard enough to send me down to one knee, but I was quickly up again. Moving out of his strike’s range. I felt a trickle of blood on my cheek, and watched as he twisted his wedding ring around his finger. As if he’d hurt the appendage by hitting me as hard as he had.
“My sexual proclivities are none of your concern. The girls and I have a mutually beneficial arrangement.” His head tipped back like he was frustrated with me. “The point of having a virgin wife was so she wouldn’t suspect such things. The point of buyingyouin particular, was so I would have control over this marriage.”
“You do,” I quickly told him. “You have all the control. Do you think I care what you do?”
That took him by surprise. “You don’t?”
I shook my head. “As long as you’re discreet and you maintain our bargain, why should I? Those girls didn’t look as if you’d assaulted them.”
I had to swallow down, hard, the bile in my throat, but I knew this performance was my only way out of the apartment alive. He had to believe me. For my sake. For the baby’s sake.
“How very practical of you.” He smiled. “You know, there was a time, when you were younger of course, I thought of making your father give you to me. But that would have been temporary, for a short period, then done, while this arrangement suited my long-term goals far more effectively.”
“Lucky me,” I said between clenched teeth. “I’ll see myself out and I promise to call ahead next time if I need to see you.”
I started to move past him, but he grabbed my arm before I could make it to the door. His fingers squeezed around my bicep with the intent to hurt. I winced, but then schooled my features.
“There isn’t going to be a next time. You do understand I own you?”
I nodded.
“I can beat you, fuck you, break parts of you if I want to. You are my property, thanks to your father’s very poor financial decisions. Your role is to stay where I put you, until I need to take you out and use you. You do not come to me for help. You do notneedme. Do you understand?”
I nodded again.
“Tell me why you came here.”
