Chapter 3 - The Three Seconds
|
For three long seconds, I didn’t move. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream.
I stood there, iced in white, with buttercream clogging my nasal passage and a thin red stream dripping down my lips onto my pristine silk bodice. My cheek burned with a deep, pulsing throb.
The room’s laughter began to waver, dying down into an awkward, uncomfortable hush. Guests exchanged uncertain glances. The cruelty of the act was too raw to ignore completely, even for high-society bystanders who preferred to look away from bad behavior.
My maid of honor, Lena, stood up so fast her chair screeched against the marble floor. Her face was deathly pale.
Derek noticed the stain of blood running down my upper lip. A shadow of annoyance crossed his handsome face, followed immediately by an irritated roll of his eyes.
“Jesus, Claire. It was a joke,” Derek scoffed loudly enough for the head table to hear, raising his hands in exaggerated mock surrender.
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
That sentence frightened me far more than the physical pain of my bruised cheekbone.
Because I had heard that exact phrasing for eighteen grueling months.
When he punched a hole through the drywall right beside my ear during an argument over my work schedule, he called it “losing his temper because he cared too much.”
When he squeezed my wrist behind a restaurant pillar until dark blue bruises bloomed across my skin, he told me I was “too sensitive to normal affection.”
May you like
When he confiscated my personal cell phone for forty-eight hours because I didn't answer his call on the first ring, he rationalized that “married couples shouldn’t have secrets anyway.”
He had spent a year and a half breaking me down, piece by piece, building a subtle wall around my life until I felt completely isolated.
