Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 85414 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85414 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
That both scares me and consoles me.
On one hand, I know that Jonathan won’t prevent me from gathering those pieces. If anything, he’ll help put them back together again. On the other hand, I recognise that I don’t want anyone but him to touch my pieces ever again.
Not that I allowed anyone in the past.
Jonathan grunts as he spills inside me, his seed warming my walls. This time, he doesn’t curse because he came inside me or didn’t use a condom.
This time, he kisses my nose. “Good girl.”
16
Jonathan
During the next family dinner, Aiden and Levi do cook, and they give their all into it, too, messing up Margot’s kitchen in the process.
They don’t even allow their wives to help them. As we all sit for dinner, my son and nephew glare at each other across the table with that competitive streak that’s always existed in the King household.
James and I used to compete with everything when we were younger. Then, as we grew up, he became dull and started forfeiting. That’s why I found my competitive fix in Ethan — whose throat I will cut if he ever shows his face here again.
The fact that he saw Aurora in her nightgown is his first and final strike. No one gets to look at her dressed like that. Actually, even if she wore traditional religious clothes like Black Belt, I still wouldn’t like it if anyone looked at her.
She’s sitting at my left. Levi only gave up his place after some dramatic bitching about how he’s always pushed out and some other nonsense.
I study her closely as she takes a bite of the beef. It’s not about how her lips wrap around the fork — though that in itself is a sight to behold.
Since we returned from Aiden’s house a week ago, I can’t stop watching her. Not that I’ve ever been able to. But now is different. The fact that she could — and would — slip into a black hole is a possibility that could become a reality.
I could blame the way she mixed up facts on lack of sleep or the attack back in Leeds. After all, she was under a lot of stress during that couple of days. What’s concerning me, however, is how she hysterically insisted that everything did happen.
That’s how Alicia’s decimation started. She said someone was following her, then that ‘ghost’ — as she called him — sent her voice messages and whispered things to her. However, whenever I asked her to show me, she couldn’t find them.
The doctor said it was hallucinations due to stress. She became neurotic, and gradually, her mental health deteriorated. She hid her pills and it only made her state worse.
Unlike Aurora, Alicia didn’t insist she wasn’t crazy. She didn’t scream at me or hit me or anything like that. She just…pulled back. With time, she stopped talking altogether and dived into her internal world, where she never really allowed anyone in — except for maybe Aiden sometimes.
My son thinks I could’ve provided for her emotionally, but he doesn’t know that she never allowed me to get close. Just because she let him in didn’t mean she let me. He thinks she cried because of my neglect, but she cried whenever I tried to talk to her. She cried when I asked her to take her pills. She cried when she returned from Leeds and wrote in her scattered journals that she missed Clarissa already. That she wanted to kidnap her baby sister and take her and Aiden to a place no one could find them.
She said the three of them would be happy without the ‘ghost’.
Then she burnt those journals for no apparent reason, as if she didn’t want anyone to read them.
She became paranoid to the point that she sometimes refused to eat for whole days because the ‘ghost’ could’ve put something in her food.
Not once in our married life did Alicia come to me, or even attempt to talk to me. Forget the physical aspect. Due to her mental state and the meds, she became asexual, and withdrew from me. She told me to have mistresses, but I never did, because that meant disrespecting the mother of my son.
The only women I touched were long after her death.
The sole presence Alicia leant on was Aiden. He was her anchor, in a way, and when he disappeared because of Abigail, her state of mind spiralled out of control and then…she died.
That simple.
Could I have done better? Probably. But there was a wall between me and Alicia; sometimes I thought she wasn’t the same woman I first saw in the cemetery, and others, she appeared just like her, broken and lost.
I have a lot of regrets when it comes to Alicia, and there’s no way in fuck I’ll repeat them with Aurora. It doesn’t matter that she’s showing the signs.