Tabula Rasa(7)

I looked away as Trevor took off his shirt and then his pants. Thankfully he stopped at his boxers. He slid into the bed while I stood awkwardly, my arms wrapped around myself as if to ward off a chill that wouldn’t arrive for months yet.

My gaze shifted to the sofa, wondering if I could make that work and how offended he’d be if I did it. Shouldn’t he have the decency to take the sofa and offer me the bed? If he was my husband? If he supposedly loved me? Shouldn’t he be more concerned about my memory? About my general physical and mental well-being?

He seemed in denial, like he just refused to accept the facts of the situation. Somehow he’d accepted the rest of the world as it was, but me not being able to remember him or our life together was too much. That was his line in the sand.

He turned off the lights. “Elodie... get in the bed.”

I kept all of my clothes on and slid in on my side, staying as close to the edge as possible. I closed my eyes trying to get that ride out of my head, trying to get everything that had happened since I’d woken in the pirate ship out of my head. I wanted nothing more than to dream of a world where everything was normal, and all the trucks and trains still arrived on time.

I felt him scoot up behind me. His arm came over my waist like the safety lever on the ride downstairs. His warm lips pressed against my neck.

I tried to squirm away from him. “Please don’t. I don’t know you.”

“Goddammit, Elodie. I’m your husband.”

I cringed at his tone. There was no one I could go to for help here. I couldn’t stop thinking about the drawbridge that effectively sealed me in with him until he decided to let it down. I was now convinced that I probably couldn’t even turn the crank to lower it down by myself. Maybe I was being irrational, but I felt so helpless.

“But I don’t remember that,” I said. “Please be reasonable. You’re a stranger to me. Can’t you understand that?”

He stroked my hair and let out a long sigh. I lay there stiffly, just waiting for him to stop touching me. After a few minutes of this, he backed off to his side of the bed.

I sat up against the headboard. Carved golden cherubs stabbed me in the back. I put my pillow between the carvings and me. “Can we talk about this?”

“Talk about what?”

“I don’t remember anything about my life, about you, about our life together. And you’re acting like I never told you I couldn’t remember anything. Like nothing out of the ordinary happened today.”

I heard him sit up and silently prayed he wouldn’t turn the lights back on.

“I just think it’s f*cking convenient that you fall and get amnesia of all f*cking things right when we were in the middle of a fight.”

“So you don’t believe me?”

He shrugged. “I just think it’s f*cking convenient. Do you know how rare and unlikely amnesia is? Especially the kind of full-on memory wipe you seem to be suffering from. On a soap opera, fine. In real life, absolutely not. I just don’t buy it.”

“Well, I’m sorry you don’t buy it.”

Maybe he just didn’t want to believe it. If our positions were reversed and the only person I had to count on in impossible circumstances suddenly didn’t remember me or anything that had happened to get us to that point, I’d be pretty upset about it, too. Maybe his anger masked loneliness. Or fear.

“I’m really scared,” I said.

“Yeah? Join the club.”

“I can’t believe my husband would act this way.”

“Well, I can’t believe my wife would climb around on an unstable pirate ship like a monkey despite how unsafe I told you it was. If you hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be in this situation!”

“I’m sorry.”

He snorted. “No, you’re not. You can’t remember doing it, so how can you be sorry? You’re just trying to appease me. And I f*cking hate that even more. I hate that you’re afraid of me.”

“I-I’m not afraid of you.” I was so glad the lights were out, that the darkness that enveloped us was so total and complete. He would have seen in my eyes that I was lying. I was afraid of him.

I was pretty sure by now that he was being honest about being my husband, but that didn’t make him a good guy. Millions of women were married to abusive men. And he seemed to have a short fuse. More than once, I’d already been afraid he’d just grab me and shake me or something.

Even if I couldn’t remember him, if he was the kind of man a normal woman would want to be married to, wouldn’t I at least feel safe with him? Instinctively? He was definitely good looking. I couldn’t imagine it would be too much of a strain to take comfort in those arms going on appearance alone. But something felt so off about him.

“Like I said, I’m all you’ve got. And there’s only so long I’m willing to wait for your memory to come back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means. The only good thing I had in my life was you. The only comfort I had at night was you. And now you’re ripping it all away.”

What a selfish bastard. He should count himself lucky I’d agreed to marry him to begin with.

I heard him scoot back down on the bed and felt him jerk the covers over his body, ripping them half off me. I didn’t say anything else. I was too busy going through the horrifying idea that he’d put a deadline on my memory retrieval, and if everything didn’t come back... if I wasn’t in love with him, he’d just... take what he felt was owed? We really were back in a pre-civilized world.