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We settle in on the couch together, and I have to admit, it feels good to sink into his arms. When he leans in to kiss me, though, I tense up. “I’ve had a really bad night. I’m still stressed out,” I tell him.
The truth… I can’t. Not after his betrayal. I’m still not over it.
He bites his lip, starts to say something, then stops and mutters, “Nothing.” He does that a lot, and it’s a habit that drives me crazy. It’s a petty little power trip. He’s angry about something. Part of my punishment is him hinting about it and then refusing to tell me what’s upsetting him.
“No, finish that sentence,” I insist.
“It’s nothing.” He has a mildly martyred look on his face as he looks off into the distance.
Begging him doesn’t work. The only thing that works with Landon is threatening to withdraw. I’ve learned things like that from years of watching my mother—how to manipulate people. It’s not a healthy thing to do in a relationship, but it’s a technique I find myself falling back on all too often.
I stand. “I’m going to sleep in the guest bedroom.” I walk away without looking back, counting to three in my head.
“Wait!” he calls out.
With my back still to him, I can’t help the small smile of victory spreading across my face. I take a deep breath and wipe the smile away before I head back and sit down, looking at him expectantly.
“After the wedding, will you consider marriage counseling?” he asks.
I look at him in confusion.“Afterthe wedding?”
“Or a sex therapist. To deal with…” He lets the sentence trail off. I look at him expectantly. “The problem we have in the bedroom. You know.”
My eyes widen.Does he know?
“What problem is that?” I try to bluff.
“The fact that I’ve never been able to give you an orgasm. And the fact that you feel obligated to fake it.” Hell.He knows.How could he not? I insist we have sex with the lights off. I undress in the dark with my back to him. And my acting skills aren’t that great.
My stomach turns to water. “That’s an exaggeration,” I say, but I can’t meet his eyes.
“Is it?” he asks gently. Too gently. He’s too good to me.
I avoid having to reply by answering the question with a question. “If you think that, why do you want to marry me?” If one of my patients had tried that, I would have totally busted them on it.
“Because I love you.”
“Why?” I say despairingly.
He looks me in the eye. “You’re strong and smart and pretty. I love how kind and generous you are. I love that you do volunteer work with people who nobody else wants to deal with. I… I just love being with you.”
“I haven’t been much fun lately,” I say, my voice shaking. For months now, a dark cloud of bad luck has followed me around, and I feel brittle and defensive all the time.
Ever since the wedding announcement. That was the first day things started going bad. That very afternoon, a virus got into my laptop and blasted out emails with confidential client information to everyone else on the client list. It was a nightmare; numerous people threatened lawsuits, and the practice’s insurance company had to make some quiet settlements.
The IT department went over my laptop with a fine-tooth comb, but in the end, they saw that I only used my work laptop for work and had not been on any questionable sites that would have made me vulnerable to a virus. The IT guys were baffled by the virus, so I didn’t get in trouble.
Then there’s all the other stuff that just keeps piling up.
I’m starting to wonder if this wedding is cursed.
I mean, logically, I know it’s not. I’ve just suffered a run of bad luck lately; there’s no such thing as curses. I’m a rational woman. I’m a therapist. I deal with observable phenomena with clear-cut causes and effects.
“I’m just thinking that with what happened to you as a teenager… seeing a therapist couldn’t hurt, could it?”
“Iama therapist,” I say automatically, which is another BS answer. Plenty of therapists see therapists. Some therapists seeme.
Then, what he just said hits me like a wall of concrete slamming into me at a hundred miles an hour.
