Page 21 of Don't Leave Me
6
The next day
Marc
I saton the park bench and waited. It was torturous. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so if I hadn’t chosen to get here so early. She said to meet her at two, but I sat my ass down at one because I couldn’t wait any longer in that motel room. I couldn’t wait to see her again, yell at her, make her feel as horrible as I’d felt for so many months.
All night long, as I laid in bed not sleeping, I thought about what I could do to her. Some small revenge for the pain she’d inflicted.
Release snakes in her bakery.
Ash hated snakes.
Replace all the sugar in her containers with salt.
Place a blow-up rat outside her doors and tell people who passed by that the woman inside was a cruel and vicious owner.
Stupid, juvenile stunts that made me smile, even as I considered, then dismissed them.
Then there were other options.
Like torture.
I thought about laying her out on a bed, naked, and finding ways to give her orgasm after orgasm without my cock touching her once, until she cried out in surrender.
It had been the first time I’d gotten an erection since learning of her death. All that time in jail, all the time since I’d gotten out, I hadn’t even thought of sex. It was like that part of me died with her.
Only last night, it had reawakened, and I’d jacked off to a fierce orgasm thinking about how I was going to sexually torture my wife.
My wife.
Was that how I still thought about her? I’d married her. I’d saidI do. Just because Sanderson had intercepted the paperwork didn’t make it any less true.
I glanced at my phone. A quarter to two. Maybe that was something else we needed to talk about.
Looking around the park, I saw a woman pushing a stroller along a path that ran around the edge of a playground. Lucky kid to grow up here, where most days seemed like another bright, sunny day in Florida.
This was Ash’s new reality. The warm weather was good for her lungs, too.
Although I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care about her health, or her wellbeing, or whether she was fucking happy in Florida, because she’d gutted me. My pain needed an outlet. She was going to have to pay for that.
Possibly in orgasms.
Then suddenly, it was two o’clock, and I looked toward the store to watch her follow her routine. Flip the sign to Closed, lock the door. She didn’t look across the street to see if I was here; she simply used the crosswalk to make her way to the park.
I didn’t stand to go to her. I waited until she came to me. I didn’t even glance over when I felt her sit next to me on the bench. She didn’t deserve anything from me other than a nod of my head indicating I knew she was here now.
“You left me,” I told her. “You promised you never would.”
She shook her head, and I wondered if she missed her long hair. The way it would fall over her shoulders.
“No, I promised I would always love you. I haven’t broken that promise. But, like I told you yesterday, some things are bigger and more important than you. Than us.”
What the hell did that even mean?
She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. “It’s all here, but you need to listen to me, Marc. You have to think about how you’re going to do this. You can’t be reckless. You can’t give him any outs. You need to figure out what the laws are, make sure the police you work with don’t fuck this up. Because he’s running for federal office, you can go to the FBI. They’ll be better able to handle this. Everything is at stake if you choose to do this and get it wrong.”
I reached for the drive and pulled it from her fingers. “I’ll do it right. He won’t escape.”
