Conviction(21)

“So what is it you do for work, Nina?” Charlotte Walters asks me. I pick up my napkin and dab at my mouth and above my top lip, which is probably displaying beads of sweat after my freak out of a few seconds ago. I look up at Charlotte and her brown eyes meet mine, she gives me a slight smile and I have the distinct feeling that she knows that I was just now on the verge of a psychological breakdown… That I’m always on the verge of some kind of breakdown when I’m around my husband or brother, or parents.

“I have a chain of four, hair, beauty and day spa salons.” Her eyebrows raise with a look of surprise but before she can speak, Marcus interrupts us, “Keeps her busy and out of trouble, doesn’t it sweets?” I don’t even look at him. I know I’ll be in trouble later. I know he’ll throw a little hissy fit about the fact that the conversation has steered to the topic of my career and hasn’t been all about him. My husband is an egomaniacal arsehole sometimes, but I know how to calm him down and I’m an expert at stroking his ego.





“Just one night, just for one f*cking night, could the conversation not have ended up being all about you?”

I stared out of the window of the taxi, not bothering to face him as I replied, “Charlotte asked what I did, so I answered. Besides, it was you that mentioned how much we both love our careers.” I use air quotes and finally turn around and face him.

“Well, it doesn’t set a good impression telling them the truth. I know Andre Walters, he would see it as a sign of weakness. I want his business and the last thing I need him to be thinking is that I’m weak.” It’s Marcus’s turn to stare out of the window now.

“Just tell them it’s me. Tell anyone that you need to that I’m the one with the fertility problem, I’m the one that can’t conceive.”

“Well, let’s face it Nina, there’s a bloody good chance that is the case.” He remains staring out the window, oblivious to the effect his words have on me. I wipe the tears from under my eyes and remain silent for the rest of the journey home.





I take off my makeup and clean my teeth. I’ve kept my bra, knickers and hold-up stockings on and hopefully, this will provide enough incentive for my husband to show me some attention. It’s been almost three weeks… three whole weeks since we last made love. Since we had any kind of sexual contact really, apart from the odd kiss on the cheek. Marcus had never been particularly affectionate and now, now I feel more like his sister than his wife and lover.

I climb into bed and press myself into him from behind. Sliding my stockinged toes, up and down his leg and my hand around his hip trying to reach into his boxers. He grabs my hand, takes it in both of his and brings it up to his mouth and kisses the back of it.

“Go to sleep, Nina. It’s late, I’m tired. I’ll sort you out in the morning before I go to golf.”

My heart sinks and tears once again sting my eyes from his words… ‘He’ll sort me out in the morning?’ Like he was doing me some kind of massive favour? Like being a thirty-one-year-old woman and wanting to have sex with your thirty-five-year-old husband, after a night out together was a ridiculous notion. What was wrong with me? What was it he found so repugnant, that despite the fact that I was lying here next to him, wearing my black, lacy, Victoria’s Secret underwear and stockings, my husband wasn’t even interested in turning around and looking at me, let alone giving me a goodnight kiss, or heaven forbid, f*cking me?

Fuck.

Fucking.

Marcus and I had never f*cked that wasn’t his style. Actually, he didn’t really have a style and in the eight years we’d been married, he had never once given me an orgasm. I managed them easily enough on my own. Either by touching myself or by using my super duper, thrusting butterfly vibrator. But I wanted my husband to make me come. I wanted my husband to take his time, to lick and suck and f*ck me to an earth shattering, leg shaking, clit twitching orgasm. Instead, all I usually got was three thrusts, a squeeze of my tit and a grunt to let me know it was all over.

I know that sex isn’t everything. But if he just paid me some kind of attention, if he could just notice me as a person, just once, it might help me not to feel so alone and so lonely. All I wanted was to feel loved and desired by my husband. He told me he loved me every day. He told me I was beautiful all the time, but he never showed it and he never made me feel it. He had chased me for so long, almost begging me to go out with him and yet, when I finally said yes, it was like all the fight and passion he displayed whilst trying to convince me to go for a drink or to dinner with him, just vanished.

I should never have married him! It was my own fault, I knew what I was in for. Our sex life was passionless from the very first awkward attempt and I didn’t love him, not then and I’m not really sure that I do now. But then my brother stepped in, bringing up my past indiscretion, threatening to take my story to the papers. Knowing full well the damage that might possibly do to my newly flourishing business and my mother’s political career. Then he pulled his trump card. He had loaned me thirty thousand pounds when I set up the first salon with Sophie and if I didn’t marry Marcus, he wanted it back, in full.





Much to my parents absolute disgust, instead of staying in school until I was eighteen and taking my A levels, I’d left school at just sixteen and found myself a job at a local hair salon. I had never had any desire to be a hairdresser, but after the way my life had changed on that New Year’s Eve and Conner had made the choices he had, never attempting to contact me again despite the letters I’d sent to him, I’d become a little rebellious and decided to set my life on a path that I had a little more control over. A path where I didn’t need to rely too much on other people.