The Virgin Next Door by Stasia Black

Reece: CHAPTER ONE

My husband sat across from me eating the Denver omelet I’d prepared for him while scrolling through his email on his phone with his thumb. Two slices of bacon crisped to perfection sat on a side plate, along with a piece of wheat bread, toasted to a light brown, one pat of butter right in the center. One glass of orange juice, one glass of water. His cup of coffee was in a to-go insulated mug. I’d warmed the cream in a water bath to make it the correct temperature so it didn’t cool down the coffee—not microwaved. Jeff hated the taste of coffee with microwaved cream.

It all had to be done just so.

I’d taken extra care this morning to get everything perfect. All the while knowing that perfection didn’t always mean safety.

If Jeff got an email he didn’t like, or read something on the news that annoyed him… Well, there were a thousand variables I couldn’t control.

A sick part of me sat in anticipation for his mood to turn. For that twitch in his eyes, the flare of his nostrils that meant the placid silence of the morning would turn on a dime to chaos and violence.

Jeff looked up at me sharply and frowned. “Why aren’t you eating?”

Crap. I smiled, careful to keep my expression neutrally pleasant. “Just thinking about the day, darling. I need to take the dry-cleaning in today. I look forward to getting some sunshine. The rain’s supposed to clear up later.”

He frowned before glancing down at his phone. “No.”

I blinked and swallowed, my fingers tightening in their grip on my fork and knife as I sliced into one of my two boiled eggs. All I was allowed for breakfast. “Oh? Would you prefer I went tomorrow?”

“I don’t want my wife gallivanting all over town in a rainstorm, is that too much to ask? It’s supposed to rain all week.”

I demurely put the bite of tasteless boiled egg in my mouth. It would be pointless to mention that there was going to be a break in the weather this afternoon. Or that a little rain had never hurt anyone.

Jeff shoveled the rest of his breakfast in his mouth, standing up and grabbing his half-finished toast. Then he glared down at me. “You haven’t taken your pills.”

“Oh. Forgive me.”

I grabbed the handful of pills from the little bowl he’d put them in beside my plate setting. Five pills. Three were anti-depressants. One was an anti-psychotic. The last was a tranquilizer.

I tossed them in my mouth, then took a swallow of water.

“Open,” Jeff demanded.

I opened my mouth wide.

“Tongue.”

I lifted my tongue to show there weren’t any pills squirreled away underneath.

“Good girl.” He picked up his briefcase from beside the door to the garage, then his coffee. He stood there waiting, and I scurried to do the expected.

I hurried to his side and kissed his cheek. He patted me on the backside, then looked at me meaningfully. “I expect dinner on the table at six sharp. I might be late, but I might not be. Either way, I expect the food to be hot, so keep it warm in case I’m late. But don’t let it get rubbery. I hate that.”

“Of course.” I smiled. Pleasantly. Vacantly.

“Good girl.”

“Have a good day at work, darling.”

He ignored me, attention back on his phone as he pushed through the door to the garage and let it slam behind him.

I stayed still, my back ramrod straight, until I heard the garage door open and then shut again.

And then I ran to the bathroom and stuck my finger down my throat until I was choking up the pills. I counted, only breathing out in relief when I saw all five of them floating in the toilet.

I sat back on the cool tile as I flushed. Not for long, though. I got up and brushed my teeth. I was sure the enamel on my teeth was getting worn by this morning routine, but I didn’t see any other way. Besides, it was a short-term fix. I’d only been doing it for eight months.

The withdrawal was a bitch, that was for damn sure.

I looked at myself in the mirror. Slim. Long blonde hair. Under thirty. The trophiest of trophy wives.

As long as you didn’t look too closely at my wrists and the scars from the deep slashes there. Bruises could be hidden with concealer, but scars were more difficult. I wondered if any of our so-called “friends” ever wondered why I always wore long sleeves or else a watch and heavy bangles on my wrists, no matter the occasion. Then again, they didn’t need to wonder. Jeff told anyone who would listen that I’d tried to kill myself. It fit well into the narrative he painted of me as mentally unstable and “fragile.”

I’d been on the cocktail of pills ever since I’d made the attempt to exit this shit life six years ago. During the withdrawals last fall, I couldn’t say I wasn’t tempted to take the shortcut again. Jeff had finally allowed me to be around sharps again after year two out from The Incident. So I had access. I could have done it.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d been planning the first day I threw up the pills after drinking just enough water to swallow them past my uvula and get them lodged in my throat. Well, the first time had been accident, but the day after it had been on purpose.

Before that, I hadn’t felt much of anything at all for… years. I mean I still felt the pain when Jeff hit me. A slap was a slap and a broken bone was a broken bone, and it hurt. He never let me get numb enough not to feel the pain. What fun would that have been?

But the pills let me drift, pull apart from my body. It let the weeks drift into one another, and then become months, and then years were passing.

I was the broken, cowed thing Jeff had wanted from the beginning, and he reigned over me as Lord of the Manor.

And then one day, I stood at the kitchen doing dishes from breakfast and looking out the window, and there was a hummingbird buzzing around the tree that had just flowered outside.

I stopped, hands in the soapy water, and I watched it. It was beautiful, glorious, with wings flapping so fast I couldn’t see anything but a blur as it moved from flower to flower. It had this amazing, iridescent breast of feathers. I was absolutely mesmerized.

I don’t know how long I watched it… Before, all of the sudden, it zoomed straight into the window I was watching through with a loud thump.

I jumped and let out a little screech, horrified. And then I ran outside when I didn’t see it fly back off again.

Only to find the back end of the bird sticking out the mouth of a neighborhood cat at the foot of my kitchen window.

“No!” I’d cried uselessly as the cat ran away with its catch.

I’d felt sick, and hurried back into the house, and I’d thrown up my breakfast.

And seen the pills I’d swallowed not fifteen minutes before. Some were half-digested, others were still in their bright capsule casings.

And it all felt so horrifying. What had happened to the bright bird. How quickly it went from flying free and glorious to becoming prey.

Jeff liked to talk about prey. He had a theory he liked to espouse that the world was full of predators and prey. He was a lawyer, a defense attorney, and he liked to think of himself as a predator who conquered the foolish and weak.

That he considered me one of the foolish and weak prey was a fact we both took for granted in this metaphor. He often talked about women as the weaker sex. When he was in a generous mood, he’d tell me patronizingly that it was good I had someone like him on my side, or else the world would eat me alive.

As if he hadn’t been that cat waiting to devour me whole the moment I was vulnerable and stumbled across his path all those years ago.

The next morning, I’d shoved my fingers down my throat the moment he’d left for work, and every morning since.

Hurrying from the bathroom into the bedroom, I donned my gardening clothes and then I went into the backyard, grabbing my best hoe from the shed as I went.

It was raining and I was quickly soaked but I didn’t care. I was operating on autopilot. If I thought too much about what I was doing, I might not have the nerve. And nerve was the only thing that was going to get me through this.

I’d almost gone twice last week. It had been sunny. There was no reason I shouldn’t have done it then.

Except for the fact that I wimped out. Jeff had been in a good mood and I… I don’t know what the hell I thought. But then one day, he came home and found me scrubbing the floorboards.

No wife of his should ever be on her knees. Except when he put me there, apparently, because the next thing he’d done was give me a swift kick in the back of my ribs.

Like I was a dog.

It hadn’t escalated.

But I’d decided that was the last time he would ever kick me.

I was done.

So I dug into the wet, loamy soil. I dug and dug, one foot down, then another several inches. Until I came to the hard metal cash box. I pulled it up by its handle.

The rain continued to fall, making a mess of the mud and dirt. The box was waterproof, and everything inside double-bagged in ziplock bags, so I ran over to the hose off the side of the house and washed it clean of the clinging wet dirt.

My clothes and shoes were a mess by the time I ran to the back porch and rather than trying to clean them, I just kicked off my shoes and disrobed down to my underwear before stepping back into the house.

I moved fast now. If Jeff came home… The thought stopped my breath. There was almost a thousand dollars in the box, squirreled away bit by bit in varyingly daring bids to build a war chest. Plus other items that couldn’t be easily explained away. Wigs, hair dye…

There was no reason for him to come home, though. I tried to breathe and think rationally.

Still, I got quickly ready, blowing out my hair again. I’d already had makeup on for breakfast—Jeff said he wanted to look at something pretty in the morning, that was how he put it, “something pretty,” so I always woke up two hours before he did to get ready and make breakfast.

I pulled on a dress, the only sort of thing I really owned besides the gardening clothes.

Plus, putting on a show was important for this leg of the journey. I slid my feet into high heels. Then I shoved the bags from the cash box into some of Jeff’s luggage, called for a taxi, and waited with bated breath in the foyer until the cab pulled up ten minutes later.

* * *

I need a new man like I need a hole in the head.

The last one almost killed me. Literally.

I barely escaped with my life, and when I end up on a ranch in Central Texas, I’m just looking for a place to hide out and recover.

But then Reece Walker saunters in.

(Why, God? Do you enjoy torturing me like this? Is it fun for you?)

I tell myself it’ll just be one night. We’ll do the horizontal mambo and then I’ll have him out of my system.

… But it turns out Reece isn’t the kind of man you easily forget.

One-click Reece now so you don’t miss a thing!