Dead to Her(49)

Marcie closed her eyes and waited for his guilty tread and the feel of him as his body weight sank back onto the mattress. After a moment, she risked opening her eyes slightly. Jason didn’t notice. He was staring at the ceiling, his face as cold and impassive as it had been when he’d been on his cell with William. What was happening in that mind? Did she even know him at all? Secrets. Their marriage foundations had been secrets, an affair, and lies. It had been exciting then. It wasn’t so much fun now. Not when he was keeping secrets from her and she was cheating on him. But still—if he had his secrets, what was so wrong with her having hers? Why shouldn’t she have something for herself?





31.

Marcie had been here before. She had shivered with this sense of an imminent and terrible unraveling that she was central to, that she was causing, but that she just couldn’t stop. There were so many echoes of her affair with Jason. Even this position, straddling Keisha in the car, her skirt hitched up around her waist, was how she and Jason had fucked the first few times. Then it had been about making him come, keeping him happy, but now all her thoughts and focus were on her own pleasure and what the other woman was doing with her fingers. Marcie had said we can’t keep doing this every time they’d met since the weekend, and her resolve had gotten weaker each time. That was the problem with affairs. Once you started them they were so very hard to stop. Addictive. Exciting. Especially when Jason’s moods were still so unpredictable and she was starting to actively dislike him, and there was something flattering, if dangerous, in Keisha’s neediness for her. It was so opposite to how Jason had become. It was nice to feel wanted and special and to have her own secret—screw you, Jason—even if there was a slightly worrying edge to how hard and fast Keisha had fallen for her.

“You’re so beautiful,” Keisha murmured. “I could watch you come all day.” Marcie pressed herself down onto those long, beautiful fingers as she shuddered to a climax. “I could let you,” she whispered, smiling. It was strange how Keisha was so fragile in the emotional side of the relationship and yet so confident in the sex. Marcie liked it. Despite Marcie’s constant proclamations to the contrary, the Englishwoman had wormed her way inside her head, and when she wasn’t wondering what duplicity Jason was up to, she was thinking about Keisha’s soft skin and dirty laugh, which no longer seemed crude and coarse but joyful and fascinating. She leaned forward to kiss her, hair falling across both their faces. “You’re so good at that. Do you want me to . . .”

“No, I’m okay. Making you happy makes me happy. Anyway, they’ll be waiting for us at the club.” Keisha rolled her eyes. “I swear to fuck the only way I get through him touching me is thinking about you.”

Another thing Marcie liked about Keisha was the way she cursed. It reminded her of her own youth when life was grittier and her lungs felt raw with every breath just from the power of surviving. “Don’t start on that again,” she said, sliding back over to the driver’s seat. “What are you going to do? Leave him? You’re kidding yourself. And I keep telling you, I’m happy with Jason. Things are good for us. I’m not going back to having nothing and being nothing. You need to understand that.”

“You’re not happy with him,” Keisha said. “I can tell. The man’s an arse.”

“Happiness is relative,” Marcie said, adjusting her underwear. Sex with a woman in the underground garage on Whitaker Street. It made her want to both laugh and also slap herself around the face for the stupidity. She was in that moment of postsex clarity, a window of sanity before all her desires resurfaced and lust took over once more. Maybe the sex would wear off and they’d get bored with each other. That would be the best outcome.

“We’re not like you and William. Jason doesn’t revolt me. And maybe I’m not as in love with him as I used to be, but I did love him.”

“What does that mean?” Keisha looked stung.

“You know what that means.” Marcie softened, leaning over and kissing her cheek. “I don’t think badly of you for it, because I totally get why you did it, but if you marry a man for his money, sweetheart, you will always end up earning it.”

“We could be happy poor?” Keisha was like a hopeful puppy.

“No, we couldn’t. I couldn’t. And you want money as much as I do, otherwise you’d have left him by now, postnup or no postnup. So forget about it. Please.”

“I thought getting married to Billy was everything I wanted. But it’s everything everyone else wanted.” Keisha’s eyes were clouded with hurt and anger. “And he’s not who I thought he was.”

“No one ever is,” Marcie said softly. “Now come on. Go get in that little red Corvette and let’s go tell those dull men of ours all about how decadent this party is going to be.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Keisha smiled then, suddenly all light and life again. She was so childlike. Marcie had seen it again when Julian and Pierre had talked them through the various food options for the night. Keisha had found that boring, Marcie could tell by the way she’d backed off and let Elizabeth, who’d joined them at the start to discuss various food intolerances of some of the guests, take over.

Only once Elizabeth had left and they’d started looking at the various red and black satins and velvets to be draped across marble plinths and decorated with gold snakes wound around them, glittering lights sparkling from open-fanged mouths, had Keisha lit up again, clapping her hands together with delight. They hadn’t chosen their dresses yet, but Julian had promised to show them a selection that would make the rest of the partygoers “simply die” with envy. For the first time, Marcie was actually looking forward to one of William’s parties. “Now, shoo. I’ll go ahead.”