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Craig’s hand stopped moving and clenched the skin on my thigh roughly, painfully. “But you won’t love this,” he said, voice cold and cruel again. His eyes had that malicious grin that was becoming more and more common as his hold on his façade loosened. “I promise you that.”
Bile crept up my throat.
He let my thigh go.
His face cleared. “Of course I want to protect you. Because I still care for you. You’re such a gentle soul,” he said it like a threat. “So very breakable.” His hand relaxed on my face and the release of pressure was almost as painful as the grip itself. “I don’t want you to be broken. You don’t want to be broken, sullied, dirty, do you, Polly?”
I swallowed. “No,” I croaked.
“Good. It’s decided.”
He stood, and I sank into the bed as it sprung up with the release of his weight. But there was still an immovable weight on my chest.
I watched him move to a bag on the armchair by the window.
He pulled a laptop out, went to sit across from me on the other bed and opened it up.
The tapping of the keys echoed in the room.
I wondered if I’d be able to hear the tapping of laptop keys again and not be reminded of this moment. But that would be a blessing, I told myself. Because that would mean this moment was in the past and I was okay, whole in the future.
“I’ll need your bank login details,” he said, glancing up from the screen. “And then we can arrange the transfer.”
I blinked. “The transfer?” I repeated.
He sighed, long and exaggerated as if he were a tired parent dealing with a sullen child. “Yes, Polly,” he said. “The people I told you about, the ones who want to hurt you. They need money. Money I don’t have because your stupid fucking…” He stopped himself from saying the word that I guessed was his label for women he couldn’t control. “Because I lost it in the divorce,” he said after a beat, his voice shaking from the effort it was taking him to keep it even and pleasant. “Now you don’t need that money. It’s one of the things I love about you. You’re so low maintenance.” He worded it like an insult. “So it’s not hurting anyone by transferring the money. In fact, it’s saving the hurt.”
The threat was painted in the air.
But he didn’t need to keep reminding me. It was carved into my bones.
“Okay,” I breathed. Then I rattled off my bank details without hesitation.
He was right.
It was only money.
What did I care?
Money was fluid. It wasn’t necessary. The abundance or lack of it wasn’t something that changed the core of who I was. But what would happen because of my abundance—I thought of Craig’s stare—that still might happen regardless, was something that would change the core of who I was.
I hoped it was as simple as money and then I could be released. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
There was more tapping.
A loaded pause as Craig’s eyes darted over the screen.
His face changed again.
It was scary, terrifying to see a person change so quickly from one identity to the other. Scarier too when it was someone you thought you loved, someone you once promised to love forever.
But there was only one person I’d love forever.
The man who I’d been forcing myself not to think of because if I did, I’d break down. Because we’d finally, finally, maybe gotten toward where we should be, after all the pain. And now there was this. I knew he’d know I was gone by now. And I knew it’d be torturing him. I thought I was done torturing him, inadvertently or otherwise.
But with love, and with me, it seemed, the torture was never done.
“Where’s the fucking rest of it, Polly?” Craig asked quietly.
“The rest?” I mimicked.
He looked up. His eyes were cold. “Yes, Polly. The fucking rest. I don’t want games. If you’ve hidden it, I’ll find it eventually. It’ll be the whole amount, but I can’t promise you will be quite as whole at the end. You had over three million dollars in the divorce, there’s fifty measly fucking grand in here, where the fuck is the rest of it?”
“There is no rest of it,” I said quietly.
He blinked. Then he laughed. Like really laughed. Like we were across from each other at a restaurant and were sharing a joke that only two people in love could really understand.
Instead, it was two people who had both pretended to love each other, both for very different reasons. Me, because all of my love was used up, spent on another man. Craig, because he was obviously some sort of creature, some sort of monster not capable of such an emotion.
“Yeah, like you could spend all that in one go,” he said, still speaking in that false jovial tone. “I know you’ve been away. But I also know that you barely spent anything on your trip. You volunteered. You stayed in hostels,” he spat the word. “You’re still in that piece of shit apartment. You’re still driving a piece of shit car. So I know you didn’t spend it. Not my Polly.”
