AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I looked him straight in the eye. “The fact that I have to read a book to know my husband should tell you why.”
He rolled his eyes. “This again.”
“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes, I am sick and tired of living with a stranger and pretending everything is okay. Do you only hate your job, or do you hate me, too?”
“What?” he said, narrowing his eyes at me. “Are you actually asking me if I hate you? I can’t do this today, Cass. Today of all days. I swear to God,” he said as he shifted the car into drive and glanced over his shoulder to pull back into traffic.
“Are you kidding me?” I shrieked. “What makes today any different than yesterday or a week from today? Were you ever going to tell me how you felt about your job? Are you ever going to tell me who this man I married truly is?”
“The man you married is a ghost,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the man you married is a figment of your imagination.”
“You’re not exactly putting my mind at ease, Marc. What the hell are you talking about? Do you want a divorce?”
He flashed me a scathing glance. “No, I don’t want a fucking divorce. I want…”
I waited impatiently for him to finish his sentence, but he remained silent. “What do you want, Marc? I feel like I’m beating a dead horse. Why won’t you tell me what’s going on with you? Why do I have to read about you in a book?”
He shook his head. “That journal doesn’t even scratch the surface.”
“Believe me, I know that,” I replied. “I’m ashamed I violated your privacy, but all I gleaned was that you hate being a lawyer, and you think I’m hiding something from you.”
“Aren’t you?” he shot back as he turned onto our street just a few blocks from my parents’ house.
“What would I possibly be hiding from you? You know everything about me.”
“I don’t know why you love me.”
His words took my breath away. I was speechless as he pulled into the garage of our townhome. He parked the Audi next to my SUV and turned off the engine before hitting the button on the remote control attached to the visor. The garage door rolled closed behind us.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said, reaching for the door handle.
I grabbed his forearm to stop him. “Please don’t walk away from me.”
He sighed and let go of the door handle. “What do you want, Cass? You want me to tell you that from here on out I’m going to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Because I don’t think you really want that. You think you do, but you don’t. I know you better than you know me, and the Cassidy I know would run from these secrets. And that's the truth.”
My breath came in slow, angry intervals. “I’m done trying to break through your armor.”
“Why can’t you just accept that there are things you don’t want to know? Why can’t you trust my judgment?”
“Because you’re making this decision for me. You’re taking away my agency.”
“This is not about you, Cass. It’s my past. Not yours.”
“This is our marriage. Does that mean nothing to you?” I held up my hand to stop him. “Don’t answer that. You’ve already answered with your actions.”
“I could say the same thing about you,” he replied, throwing open the driver’s side door.
I sat in the car and watched him walking toward the door leading into the laundry room. He stopped at the door and turned to look at me through the windshield. His eyes asked if I was coming with him, but the hard set to his mouth said he didn’t care.
As my throat constricted with a surge of emotion, Marc let out a deep sigh and returned to the car. He slipped into the Audi and closed the door. Without saying a word, he pushed the button on the side of his seat until he was reclined as far as the car would allow.
He closed his eyes and smiled. “Remember the poem your dad read at the wedding?”
My chest ached as I placed my hand on the button on the side of my seat, but I didn’t tilt the seat back yet.
“Amber Sky,” Marc continued with a chuckle. “I joked with him that he was awfully confident to guess the color of the sky on the day and time he would be reading the poem. And he said he didn’t have to guess because he’d written the poem an hour earlier.”
I smiled as I pressed the button to recline my seat and closed my eyes, just the way we used to when we were dating in college. “Well, my dad always says his best work is written the day before a deadline.”
Marc shook his head. “He didn’t write the poem an hour before the ceremony because he was procrastinating,” he said as if he knew my father better than I did. Sometimes, I thought he did. “He waited until then because he didn’t know what he would want to say until the time came to say it. If he’d written it the day before, he would have been merely guessing. That poem is the definition of the magic that can happen when creativity and inspiration meet.”
I let out a soft chuckle, in awe of this observation. “You do know him better than me.”
I closed my eyes and let my mind wander back to the day Marc and I got married. I had a copy of the poem my father wrote that day framed. It hung on the wall in our dining room before the separation, and I’d yet to put it back up.
After a brief silence, I began to feel Marc’s gaze burning into me. Sure enough, when I opened my eyes, he was looking at me with such admiration, it almost made me uncomfortable. I wanted to look away, but I forced myself to hold his gaze, to feel the full strength of his love.
“I don’t deserve you,” he began, and I fought the urge to interrupt him. “But I promise you that someday I will. Someday… Someday I’ll tell you everything.” He reached toward me, gently laying a hand on my cheek. “Once I figure out how to legally chain you to the bed so you can’t leave me after I tell you.”
I shook my head. “I would never leave you.”
His thumb stroked my cheek. “Even if I told you I have no past because I’m a time traveler from the future?”
I nodded. “Yup. Is that your secret?”
“Do you want it to be?”
My stomach clenched at the question, and I shook my head.
He leaned across the console between us and planted a soft kiss on the tip of my nose. “Without written records, our hist
ories fade into the ether, like a long-forgotten dream.”
I closed my eyes to try to remember what he was referring to, and it hit me suddenly. “The play? At the Sydney Opera House?”
He didn’t reply, which told me I was right.
I thought back to our trip to Sydney, and how I had been reluctant to see the play, which had received mixed reviews. But Marc insisted we had to see something at the opera house, and that was the current offering.
The play was an epic family drama, mostly centering around a father and daughter who are at an intergenerational crossroads. Much to the father’s dismay, the daughter ends up uncovering a brutal family history, which puts her entire heritage into question. It was haunting and irreverent and apparently left quite an impression on Marc.
“Come to bed with me,” he whispered.
I swallowed hard as if it were the first time he had ever asked me to sleep with him. When you hardly know your husband, every day can feel like a day full of first times. It was a sickening truth that I loved the thrill of our cat-and-mouse game.
As I allowed him to lead me upstairs to the bedroom, I had a sudden idea that made me question my sanity. Marc had said he wanted to figure out how to legally chain me to the bed, which was a crude way of saying he wanted to make certain I wouldn’t leave him when he told me the truth about his past. Wouldn’t having a child together make it more difficult to leave him on a whim? Is that what he was waiting and hoping for?
It was a reckless thought, but I decided to believe it. Marc wanted to tell me his secrets. But did I really want to know?
I woke to a veil of darkness. Blinking a few times, I reached for my cell phone on the nightstand and saw it was 2:13 a.m. Laying the phone down, I turned over and saw the silvery outline of Marc’s profile as he stared at the ceiling.
“You’re still awake?” I muttered groggily.
He removed his hand from behind his head and beckoned me into his arms. “Come here, beautiful.”
