Blue-Eyed Devil (Travis Family #2)(14)

"I like my regular name. I don't want to be Marie. I want — "

"Jesus, can't I just have a normal wife with a normal name?" He was turning red, breathing hard, the air clotted with hostility.

The whole situation felt unreal. I was married to a man who didn't like my name. He'd never said anything about it before. This isn't Nick, I told myself. The real Nick was the guy I'd married. I glanced at him covertly. He looked like an ordinary, exasperated husband. He was asking for normal, and I wasn't altogether certain what that was.

I worked to steady my own breathing. We were almost at the restaurant — we couldn't walk in there looking like we'd just had a light. My face felt as if it had been coated with glass. "Okay," I said. "So we'll be Nick and Marie tonight."

"Okay." He seemed to relax a little.

After that evening, which had gone well, Nick hardly ever called me Haven, even when it was just the two of us. He said it would be too confusing when we went out with other people, if I wasn't used to being called Marie. I told myself it could be a good thing, this name change. I would let go of my past baggage. I could become whoever I wanted, a better person. And it pleased Nick, which I wanted desperately to do.

I'm Marie, I told myself. Marie, the married woman who lives in Dallas and works at the Darlington and knows how to iron a shirt. Marie, whose husband loved her.

Our marriage was like a machine I learned how to operate Inn never understood the inner mechanisms that made it work. I knew how to do the things that kept it running smoothly, all the minor and major requirements that kept Nick on an even keel. When Nick was happy, I was rewarded with affection. Hut when something had set Nick off, he would become sullen or irritable. It could take days to coax him back into a good temper. His changeable mood was the thermostat that regulated our household.

By the time our first anniversary approached, I realized that Nick's bad days, the days I was required to sympathize and compensate for every small injustice done to him, were outnumbering the good days. I didn't know how to fix that, but I suspected it was my fault. I knew other people's marriages were different, that they didn't constantly worry about how to anticipate their husbands' needs, they weren't always walking on eggshells. Certainly my own parents' marriage hadn't been like this. If anything, the household had revolved around my mother's needs and wants, while my father showed up every now and then to appease her.

Nick maintained a steadily percolating anger toward my family, blaming my father for not giving us money to buy a house. He pushed me to make contact with my father and brothers, to ask for things from them, and he got angry when I refused.

"It wouldn't do any good," I told him, even though that wasn't true. Regardless of my father's attitude, my brothers would have given me anything I asked for. Especially Gage. The few occasions we had talked on the phone, he had asked if there was anything he could do for me and Nick, and I had said no, absolutely not, things were fantastic. I was afraid to give Gage any hint of how things really were. One pulled thread and I might unravel completely.

"Your dad will have to start doing things for us when we have kids," Nick told me. "It would be a public embarrassment for him to have grandchildren living in a damn shack. He'll have to cough up some money then, the stingy bastard."

It worried me that Nick seemed to regard our future children as tools that would be used to pry open the Travis family coffers. I'd always planned to have children when I felt ready, but this situation couldn't begin to accommodate a fussy, demanding infant. It was all I could do to keep my fussy, demanding husband happy.

I had never had problems sleeping, but I began having dreams that woke me up at night, leaving me exhausted the next day. Since my tossing and turning kept Nick awake, I often went to the sofa in the middle of the night, shivering beneath a throw blanket. I dreamed of losing my teeth, of falling from tall buildings.

"It was so weird," I told Nick one morning while he was drinking his coffee, "this new one I had last night. I was in a park somewhere, just walking by myself, and my right leg fell off. No blood or anything. It was like I was a Barbie doll. I was so upset, wondering how I was going to get around without that leg, and then my arm broke off at the elbow, and I picked it up and tried to hold it in place, and I was thinking, 'I need this arm, I've got to find someone to reattach it.' So then — "

"Did you take your pill yet this morning?" Nick interrupted.

I had been on birth control ever since we had started sleeping together. "No, I always take it after breakfast. Why? Do you think the hormones may be giving me bad dreams?"

"No, I think you're giving yourself bad dreams. And I asked because it's time for you to go off the pill. We should start having kids while we're still young."

I stared at him. A huge wave of unwillingness went through me, every cell in my body resisting the idea of a great big hormone-fueled helplessness that would make everything impossible But I couldn't say no. Thai would set off a bad mood that might last for days. I had to work Nick around to changing his mind. "Do you really think we're ready?" I asked. "It might be better to put away some money first."

"We won't need to. Your dad will be a lot more reasonable once he finds out Gage and Liberty aren't the only ones who can pop out a kid."