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I found ten texts and two voicemails from Sadie warning me of my parents' impending arrival. Clearly I needed to glue my phone to my forehead so I didn't miss anything important.
I wanted to kick myself. I should have been able to warn Anton. We could have turned off all the lights and hid behind the couch and pretended we weren't at home. As it was, my mother whirled into the breakfast nook at nine, in high dudgeon. Anton had left the house half an hour earlier, pausing only to give me a cursory, distant kiss on the forehead. He didn't even look me in the eye before he drifted out the front door. My mother thought it rude of him to leave without greeting his houseguests.
"You are kind of unexpected," I told her. "He has things to do that don't involve you. Or me. Like running a financial empire."
"Felicia," my mother said, plopping herself down in the chair across from mine at the breakfast table, "why on earth did you marry a rich man? You are never going to be the first the first thing in his life. He is always going to be a businessman first and a husband second. Sometimes third or fourth! What were you thinking?"
I wanted to strangle her. Or hug her. I couldn't tell which.
"I was thinking, wow, he's really hot and rich and wants to marry me, let's do this," I said, which was kind of half the truth. He was really hot. I loved fucking him. On the other hand, now that I had some coffee in me and the damage from last night was becoming app
arent, I hoped I had satsified him for at least a week. My pussy was raw and aching, and I kept shifting uncomfortably in my chair.
My mother, thankfully, didn't seem to notice. "Well, we are going to his office and retrieving him after I've had breakfast."
I blinked at her. "What?"
"We're going to go pick out wedding cakes and inivitations today. And we'll need to secure a venue." She sighed, as though this were a great burden and not something she had decided to do without even asking me. "It's going to be a lot of work. You'll both need to pick a wedding date, too."
I stared. She sipped her coffee and sighed. "Why do we have to do it this morning?" I asked her. "Can't it wait? Anton and I haven't even been married for forty-eight hours yet. Can't we... you know, ease into it?"
"That is not my problem," my mother told me. "My problem is your wedding, and I will not sit idly by while your husband blows you off like mine did."
Not for the first time, I thought that there was probably a reason my father blew her off, but I kept my mouth shut. Nothing was a sorer subject with my mother. She could talk about how terrible a husband my father was for hours on end if she really wanted to—my therapist had told me that it was highly inappropriate that she had done just that to me on several occasions—but the second someone on the outside of their relationship said anything she would burst into tears. It was maddening.
"He's not blowing me off," I said. "Believe me, he pays me plenty of attention."
She gave me a cool eye. "Not enough attention to give you a proper wedding," she said. "If he truly cared about you, he would have wanted to meet your family, given you two a proper start in life."
He doesn't care about me, I thought. He doesn't want to care about me. He just wants a companion. A roommate fuckbuddy. It didn't really matter how much he liked to fuck me if he didn't actually like me, did it? And I had missed out on the wedding of my dreams. Which wasn't much, but I still wanted that princess dress.
And if he was angry with us barging in? Then maybe he'd talk some sense into my mother. If he could get my mother out of this absolutely insane, irritating obsession with seeing me married in a ceremony, it would be worth it to bug him this morning. Ten minutes of hassle and a possible spanking versus two months of stress and parental hovering? I couldn't imagine Anton putting up with that sort of shit. I was a slave to my family, and he was the opposite. Maybe I could get something out of this marriage besides a sore cooch.
"Fine, we can go see him," I said.
"I wasn't asking your permission, dear," my mother said. "And we should leave as soon as I've had some toast. I have an appointment this afternoon that I must keep."
I pressed my lips together and said nothing.
*
To say that Anton was surprised by his newly-minted wife and mother-in-law showing up at his office was an understatement. Even as we walked in the door, I felt him shut down from across the room. I wished I'd been able to get ahold of Sadie, but she wasn't answering her phone and I knew she'd been at Anton's office earlier this morning to discuss her employment. Maybe Anton had eaten her.
His sparse office, perfectly appointed for a rich man without attachments, seemed far too spare to me when I walked into it. Where before I had been impressed by its restraint, looking at it now I saw the repression that boiled over whenever Anton touched me. He was pushing a lot of things down, keeping them deep inside, and every refined, understated piece of furniture in the office gave me the willies, like I was looking at the pit of a long-dormant volcano and seeing the swell of the ground as something molten hot underneath struggled to come to the surface.
"Good morning, Anton," my mother said, striding toward his desk. "We have several appointments that require your attention this morning."
"Oh?" he said. "Do you?" His eyes shifted to mine and I tried to look contrite, mouthing sorry to him over my mother's shoulder. He raised a brow at me, but left it at that.
"Yes, wedding cake, venue, date, and invitations need to be sorted out this morning."
"That's a tall order. I do have a lot of work to do..."
"Yes, well, be that as it may," my mother cut in, "you are a married man now and have responsibilities."
He grew very still.
Oh, shit.
