Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 125962 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125962 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
He was serious. Extremely so. It hit me that I hadn’t seen him laugh since I met him. Granted, the situations we’d been in hadn’t exactly been laughing matters, but still. Every time he smirked or smiled, the expression was filled with wickedness. Malice, not joy.
Everything about him was severe, grim almost. Dangerous, deadly, certainly. Like he didn’t have any happiness inside of him. And I liked that.
I was always shocked to hear women I knew talk about what they wanted in a man. Sure, there were qualities that differed depending on the woman and their preference in regard to age, financial status, height, religion, but there was always one common quality.
“I want someone who can make me laugh.”
Everyone wanted to laugh. Everyone wanted a man with a sense of humor. I wasn’t sure if it was because women saw others looking for that and were too scared of being outliers, or if they generally wanted some jokester as a partner.
Whatever it was, I couldn’t make sense of it. I was, for the most part, a serious person. Sure, I liked to play with Eli, laugh with Jessica over a beer or three, but my main pursuit in life was not to have a happy one.
I wanted safety. Security. Great, sordid, filthy sex.
I did not need my partner to be a comedian. In fact, I actively avoided them. Because in my experience, a man who ‘made women laugh’ was someone who was always ‘on.’ Usually someone with mother issues, desperate for approval.
Which was why, along with a lot of other more depressing reasons, I went for older, richer and more serious men.
But when my relationship before Pete ended the way it did, because of my pursuit of seriousness and dirty sex, I was disgusted with myself, shamed and hurt. So I’d decided to search for a man who was the opposite of everything I used to search for.
Pete was younger, less serious and liked to smile. He was still hypermasculine and a trust fund baby, but he’d seemed like enough of a departure, and I was attracted to him. He tricked me at first, seeming lighter than the men who came before him but not completely juvenile.
The sex was great, he was well educated and didn’t want to tie me up and humiliate me.
All boxes ticked.
Then there was what he did for me when my mom was sick. Love mixed with obligation meant I said yes to him when he got down on one knee on a trip to Paris, despite how disgustingly cliché and performative such a proposal was.
The ring went on my finger and things changed. They’d started before that but the situation with my mother was less than humorous, so I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t seen him for what he was.
An overgrown child with mother issues, desperate for approval, acceptance. For people to love him. The jokes that had come sporadically doubled. Then tripled. He’d started to sulk when I didn’t give him my full attention as he performed for me. I had to be his audience, his coach, his cheerleader. His eyes would glow with desperation when we were out for dinner, scrambling at every chance to make people laugh, alighting when he got it or glistening with fury when he didn’t.
I was exhausted by constantly pretending to laugh at his jokes, to find him as amusing and adorable as he found himself. I’d had to remove myself from many situations where I wanted to rip his face off instead of smiling tightly, even that small of an expression a strain.
Cristian hadn’t tried to make me laugh when we first met. He hadn’t needed to. He hadn’t needed to do anything. This was a man so sure of himself, with so much command over others, he wasn’t desperate for anything, let alone approval.
I now knew the life he lived didn’t afford many opportunities for anything light or amusing, and I liked that. I hated that I liked that. I was supposed to be miserable in captivity. Everything about this life, about him, should disgust me.
But it didn’t. With every passing day, this life, this man, was becoming more and more appealing to me as I fluctuated between self-hatred and self-realization.
I’d spent years trying to fit in, trying to escape my dark and sordid past, trying to convince myself I could refuse my urges. And I’d never felt more myself than when I was with him.
The man who was forcing me to marry him.
The murderer.
The mob boss.
My captor.
The man Pete sold me to.
They say that people tend to romanticize the past, be kinder to it than they were in the present. If that truly were the case, I wondered what had been going through my head, staying with Pete throughout everything?
What had been going through my head, saying yes to a lifetime with that man?