His Tainted Love

Eight years married, and Draven still left video calls open all night on business trips just to hear me breathe.

Friends called it devotion. Only the two of us knew what it was.

The night before our wedding, I walked in on him tangled naked in bed with a girl.

Since then he's owed me — and he paid, in grand gestures and in a love that landed ten times heavier than it needed to.

Last week, I found out I was pregnant. I decided to bury the past for good—right after one last surprise visit for his birthday.

I flew eleven hours to London. Ducking into a rainy corner shop, an American voice caught my ear.

"One hour without me and your phone's on fire," the woman purred into her cell, laughing. "I'll wreck you tonight, birthday boy."

Her American accent made me look.

I froze.

It was her. The girl from the night before my wedding.

...

She didn't recognize me. She turned to the counter, still talking.

"I'm not cold. I'm layered. You can count for yourself later."

A pause.

"Or slide your hands under my coat and follow my waist down, and keep going—"

I don't know what made me do it. I pulled out my phone.

[You out of the office yet?]

No reply.

The girl reached past the register and took two boxes off the shelf.

Same brand. Same scent. Same size. The ones I buy. The ones that live in the top drawer of Draven's dresser in Connecticut.

"Eight o'clock," she said. "However many times you want. It's your birthday."

I checked my phone again. Nothing.

I paid. I followed her out.

"Don't rush me," she said, walking fast. "I see the car."

The rain hit my face like needles. I pulled my coat closed and pressed call with a hand that wouldn't hold still.

The number you have dialed is not available.

Of course.

Draven had told me himself — the overseas division was brutal this quarter, once he stepped into that building he couldn't take calls.

It had happened before. It had happened so many times I'd stopped counting, and that, I realized later, was the whole point.

A black Bentley idled at the corner.

"Draven!"

The girl ran the last few steps and pulled the passenger door open.

I turned my head. One look and I was nailed to the pavement.

The window was cracked. Draven sat behind the wheel.

The girl bent and kissed the corner of his mouth.

He smiled, brushing a thumb across her cheek. "Needy."

The streetlamps were weak. I saw his face anyway. I would have seen it across an ocean.

That face has walked through all thirty years of my life.

At three, we held hands into preschool and he pressed candy into my palm.

"I'll look after you. Don't cry," he said.

At sixteen, he hid a drawing of me inside a textbook, and when I found it his ears went red.

"So what. I like you. Problem?"

At nineteen, our first kiss, and he was so undone he paid for the entire dining room.

"I want everybody in this place to know I'm the luckiest man alive."

At twenty-two he got down on one knee in front of both families and swore he'd love me until the end.

Everything stopped the night before the wedding.

I opened that door and saw him tangled up with a girl, no sheet, no excuse, no time to build one.

The next days were a blur of damage control.

He'd been drunk. He'd mistaken her. Everyone agreed — his father, mine, my mother with her hand on my wrist — that a girl he'd known since preschool owed him one mistake.

Even the girl knelt on the carpet and cried that it was her fault, that she'd bribed a bellman for the key card, that she'd only wanted one night of a fantasy.

Draven, who had never once in his life wept, broke apart. He found a knife in the fruit basket and held it against his own chest.

"Scarlett. I did this to you."

"If you don't believe me, I'll open myself up and show you. There's nobody in there but you."

His voice shook on every word.

"Don't throw me away. Please. You know how long I've loved you. If you leave, I'm done. I mean it. I'm done."

So I sealed that night in a box.

We'd been stitched together since before we could read, and I thought that made us permanent — the boy and the girl, all the way to the end of the line.

Then the Bentley pulled away from the curb with the girl in the passenger seat, and eight years of him proving he loved me went with it.

I stayed on that corner until the rain soaked through my coat, and I understood the thing I'd been refusing to understand since the moment I heard her voice.

All our years together. Finally in ruins.