Verity(42)

I licked him, teased him, touched him for fifteen minutes without ever putting him inside my mouth. I knew how much he wanted me to, because he was growing restless and needed that relief, but I didn’t want him to get relief from my mouth. I wanted him to get it by fucking me for the first time in weeks.

His hand was impatient, squeezing the back of my head, pressing me down on his dick as he silently begged me to take him in my mouth. I refused and continued to fight against the pressure of his hand as I kissed and licked him, when all he wanted to do was shove it into my mouth.

When I was certain I had driven him so crazy that his desire outweighed his concern for me, I moved away from him. He followed. I fell onto my back, spread my legs, and he was inside me without a second thought about whether or not it was too soon for him to be there. He wasn’t even gentle. It was as if my tongue had driven him to a point of madness, because he was pounding into me so hard, it actually did hurt.

It lasted almost an hour and a half because as soon as he finished, I sucked him off until he was hard again. Both times we fucked, we never said a word. And even after it was all over and I was crushed beneath the weight of his exhausted body, we still didn’t speak. He rolled off me and wrapped himself around me. Our sheets were covered in sweat and semen, but we were too consumed with sleep to care.

I knew then that it was okay. We would be okay. Jeremy still worshipped my body as much as he always had.

The girls might have taken a lot from us by then, but his desire was the one thing I knew would always be mine.





This chapter has been the most difficult to continue reading by far. How a mother could sleep soundly down the hall from her crying infants baffles me. She’s callous.

I’ve been under the impression that Verity might have been a sociopath, but now I’m leaning more toward psychopath.

I put the manuscript away and use Verity’s computer to refresh my memory of the exact definition for psychopath. I scroll through every personality trait. Pathological liar, cunning and manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness and lack of empathy, shallow emotional response.

She displays every characteristic. The only thing about her that makes me question if she was a psychopath is her obsession with Jeremy. Psychopaths find it more difficult to fall in love, and if they do, it’s difficult for them to retain that love. They tend to move on quickly from one person to the next. But Verity didn’t want to move on from Jeremy. He was Verity’s entire focus.

The man is married to a psychopath, and he has no idea because she did everything she could to hide it from him.

There’s a soft knock on the office door, so I minimize the screen on the computer. When I open the door, Jeremy is standing in the hallway. His hair is damp and he’s wearing a white T-shirt with a pair of black pajama bottoms.

This is my favorite look on him. Barefoot, casual, easygoing. It’s sexy as hell, and I hate how attracted to him I am. Would I even be attracted to him if it weren’t for the intimate details I’ve read about him in that manuscript?

“Sorry to bother you. I need a favor.”

“What’s up?”

He motions for me to follow him. “There’s an old aquarium somewhere in the basement. I just need you to hold the door open for me so I can bring it upstairs and clean it out for Crew.”

I smile. “You’re gonna let him have a turtle?”

“Yeah, he seemed excited today. He’s a little older now, so hopefully he’ll remember to feed this one.” Jeremy reaches the basement door and opens it. “The door was installed backward. It’s impossible to come up the stairs with your hands full or you can’t open the door to get out.”

Jeremy flips on a light and begins to descend the stairs. The basement doesn’t feel like an extension of the house. It feels abandoned and uncared for, like a neglected child. Creaky steps and dust on the handrail attached to the wall. Normally, I would have zero desire to walk into a basement this unwelcoming. Especially in a house that already terrifies me. But their basement is the only place in this house I’ve yet to see, and I’m curious what’s down there. What kind of things could Verity have packed away?

The stairwell leading into the basement is dark because the light switch at the top of the stairs only powered a light that was inside the actual basement. When I reach the bottom step, I’m relieved to see the room isn’t at all as eerie as I had expected. To the left is an office desk that looks to have gone unused for quite some time. There are stacks of files and papers all over the desk, but it looks more like a corner used for storage than a place where a person could actually sit and get work done.

To the right are boxes of things accumulated over the years they’ve been together. Some with lids, some without. There’s a baby video monitor sticking out of one of the boxes and I cringe, thinking about the chapter I just read and how Verity admitted to unplugging it during the day so she couldn’t hear them crying.

Jeremy is sorting through a collection of things behind and in between the boxes.

“Did you used to work down here?” I ask him.

“Yeah. I owned a realty firm and brought a lot of work home most days, so this was my office.” He lifts a sheet and tosses it aside, revealing an aquarium that’s covered in a layer of dust. “Bingo.” He begins to rummage through the contents inside the aquarium to ensure he has all the pieces.