Verity(47)

Live with him and the two girls he loved more than me.

Live without him.

They were a package deal at that point. I hate myself for not using birth control. For thinking I could do this and everything would be alright. Everything was not alright. Not with me anyway. It was like my family existed in a snow globe. Inside, everything was cozy and perfect, but I wasn’t a part of them; I was just an outsider looking in.

It was snowing outside that night, but the apartment was warm. Even still, I woke up with chills. Or tremors, really. I couldn’t stop shaking. The nightmare I’d had was so vivid, I felt the effects of it for hours after I woke up. A nightmare hangover.

I dreamt of the future, of the girls and Jeremy and me. They were eight or nine years old. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know a lot about kids and what they look like at each stage. I just remember waking up and feeling like they were eight or nine.

In the dream, I was walking by their bedroom. I peeked inside and couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Harper was on top of Chastin, covering her head with a pillow. I rushed over to the bed, terrified that it was too late. I pushed Harper off her sister and pulled the pillow away. I looked down at Chastin and then slapped my hand over my mouth with a gasp.

There was nothing there. The front of Chastin’s face was smooth, like the back of a bald head. No scar. No eyes, no mouth. Nothing to smother.

I glanced at Harper, taking in her sinister expression. “What did you do?”

And then I woke up.

My reaction wasn’t to the dream. It was to how much it felt like a premonition. And how much it gutted me.

I hugged my knees, rocking back and forth on the bed, wondering what this feeling was. Pain. It was pain. And…heartache.

I had felt heartache in my dream? When I thought Chastin was dead, I wanted to fall to my knees and weep. It’s exactly how I felt when I thought of the possibility of Jeremy dying. I would lose all function.

I sat there and cried, the feeling was so overwhelming. Had I finally connected to them? To Chastin, at least? Was this what it felt like to be a mother? To love something so much, the thought of it being ripped away from you causes physical pain?

It was the most I had ever felt since the girls had been conceived. Even if I only felt it for one of them, it still counted for something.

Jeremy rolled over in the bed. He opened his eyes and saw me sitting up, hugging my knees. “You okay?”

I didn’t want him to ask me that because Jeremy was good at getting my thoughts out. Most of them, anyway. I didn’t want him to know this one. How could I admit that I’d finally fallen in love with one of our daughters without also admitting I had never loved either of them to begin with?

I had to do something. Preoccupy him so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. I knew from experience that Jeremy couldn’t get the truth out of me if I had his dick in my mouth.

I crawled down him, and by the time I was positioned over him, my mouth ready to work, he was already hard. I took as much of him as I could take.

I loved it when he moaned. He was a quiet lover, but sometimes, when I really caught him off guard, he wasn’t so quiet. In that moment, he was euphoric. And I wondered, before I came along, how many other women had coaxed noises out of him? How many other pairs of lips had been wrapped around his dick?

I let him slide out of my mouth. “How many women have sucked your dick?”

He lifted up onto his elbows and looked down at me, perplexed. “Are you serious?”

“More like curious.”

He laughed, dropping his head back to the pillow. “I don’t know. I’ve never counted.”

“That many?” I teased. I climbed up his body and straddled him. I liked it when he jerked beneath me and gripped my thighs. “If it’s not an immediate answer, that means it’s more than five.”

“Definitely more than five,” he said.

“More than ten?”

“Maybe. Possibly. Yes.”

It’s odd how that didn’t make me jealous, but two infants could leave me seething. Maybe it was because the girls were currently in his life, but all his past whores were just that…in the past.

“More than twenty?”

He raised his hands to my breasts and cupped them. Squeezed them. He was getting that look on his face that was my cue I was about to be fucked. Hard. “That’s probably a good estimate,” he whispered, pulling me to him. He brought his lips close to mine and stuck a hand between us, rubbing me. “How many guys have licked your pussy?”

“Two. I’m not a whore like you.”

He laughed against my lips and then rolled me onto my back. “But you’re in love with a whore.”

“A former whore,” I clarified.

I had been wrong about the look he had gotten in his eye. He didn’t fuck me that night. He made love to me. Kissed every inch of my body. Made me lie still while he teased me and tortured me, when all I wanted to do was suck his dick. Every time I tried to move, to take over, he would stop me.

I don’t know why I got so much pleasure out of pleasing him, but I liked it more than being pleased. That’s probably defined in the love languages or some bullshit. My love language was acts of service. Jeremy’s love language was getting his dick sucked. We were a perfect match.

He was moments from climax when one of the girls started crying. He groaned, and I rolled my eyes, and we both reached for the monitor. Him to look at them. Me to turn it off.