I missed that, I realized. Not the playing of the games, though maybe I missed parts of that too, but, more, I missed the telling about them.
And so, six weeks after he’d left, when I was bored out of my mind and unable to ignore the thoughts in my head and the journal on my nightstand, I picked it up and began recording him. Began recording everything I’d had planned for him and how my game had come about, sure to include every one of his nasty assholish quips and misogynistic demands. If he picked it up and read it, he could hear about how much I hated him. How terrible he was. How easily I’d schemed against him. I wouldn’t care. In fact, I hoped he did.
But the writing morphed as I went on, and I found it impossible to write with the detached voice that I had in the stacks of journals sitting in the closet of my condo back in New York. Edward had stirred too many emotions. They’d leaked through small punctures in the Teflon walls I’d so carefully built inside. Punctures I hadn’t known he’d made. Emotions I hadn’t known still existed. I had a lot of feelings about my parents, apparently. I missed them, but not as much as I thought I did. I resented them. I wanted their approval. Their affection. I hated them a little, too.
And there were other feelings, about other people. Hudson, his father, my uncle Ron.
Edward.
So much about Edward.
Most of the emotions were still shapeless blobs, too complicated to call one color or another, but they were there, oozing out of me. They trickled out into my words even as I tried to hold them back, and soon I wasn’t just telling about the devil who’d inspired me to play him and then took me into captivity, but the man I’d begun to glimpse underneath. How he affected me. How I longed to affect him.
How I suspected I did affect him.
It was cathartic to have a space to pour it all out, a place to line up the stray feelings and examine them properly. It was like he’d chipped away at a big stone wall inside of me, with his demands and his smirk and his I’m-gonna-break-you sessions, and now I was collecting the pieces, attempting to figure out the picture they made if they were whole.
It gave my life meaning. Not because it was one of the only activities available to me on the island, but because of how it let me look at myself. It didn’t just give meaning to the life I lived here but to the life I lived before. I began to understand things about myself, things I’d never known, things I hadn’t wanted to know. Like how much I enjoyed the power struggles. How they made me feel alive, even when it was exactly that type of struggle that had landed me captive on an island by a man who easily dominated me.
I liked that too. Being topped. Being cared for. Being seen.
There was more he brought out in me, and writing about it, I started to become more comfortable with those feelings—the desire, the anger, the longing, the jealousy.
I found myself in the words. Things I’d buried, I wanted to uncover. Things I’d held back, I wanted to share. Things I’d suppressed, I wanted to feel.
The most shocking part was how much I wanted those things with Edward.
Because he’d started this whole journey, probably. Because I associated this self-reformation with him. Because I was lonely and confused, and he’d brainwashed me. That was likely too.
It was part of his plan, I was sure. Little by little, he was breaking me down, like he had been all along, like he was still doing from afar.
Only difference from before was that now, I wasn’t just letting it happen.
Now, I wanted it to.
Thirteen
I consciously fought not to hold my breath as I watched Edward move around my bedroom. It was the beginning of May, almost three months since he’d last been on Amelie, which had been just enough time to have the new design of my bedroom implemented. It had been finished so recently, in fact, that I’d only slept in it two nights.
Like before, Edward had shown up without any warning. One minute I was capturing Eliana’s queen, and the next, my husband was standing over us, criticizing my winning move.
I was so excited to see him, I hadn’t minded. I’d jumped up, given him a kiss that he might have assumed was for our guest, then tugged him out of the library to my bedroom to show off what I’d done. There was a momentary coldness before he accepted my grip around his hand, a split second where he’d felt cut off and callous like he’d been when he’d threatened to kill me instead of the coy and almost charming man who’d said he’d miss me, but it disappeared so quickly, I decided I may have imagined it.
And then I forgot about it entirely because I was too eager for him to see my room.
It didn’t make him special. I’d cajoled everyone on the island into coming by and seeing the finished product three days ago. That was half the fun of completing a design project—showing it off.
I hadn’t been nearly as nervous when any of the others had checked it out though. Maybe because everyone else had walked around with smiles on their faces, complimenting each and every detail.
Edward strolled through silently, tracing the beading on the plush gold settee as he walked by it, studying the mural behind the bed and the newly plastered walls. His expression was stoic, his lips drawn in a tight line, his eyes guarded.
“The curtains are purposefully heavy,” I said, as he lifted a panel from the ground, as though testing the weight. “It adds drama to the room.”
He nodded then sauntered over to the antique curtained yellow and filigree cabinet. He fingered the curvature of the cutout without saying a word.
“It’s Louis XV period. Some of the metal adornment has tarnished, but I really wanted an authentic piece in the room.”
Again he nodded.
The knot in my chest tightened as I thought about the small decorative decisions I’d implemented in his room. Would he hate those too? Would he tear down the tufted wall I’d added behind his bed? Would he get angry when he smelled me in his bedding?
The last one was stupid. He probably wouldn’t even recognize my smell, and surely Sanyjah had changed the sheets on his arrival.
Edward continued on to the other authentic piece in the room—the bronze gilded writing desk I’d discovered in one of the antique catalogs he’d left me. It was small and ornate, and it locked and had been exactly what I’d been looking for when I’d found it.
It was quite unlike anything that had been in the room previously.
“I suppose I have different tastes than Marion,” I remarked when my husband had almost made a full circle of the area and still hadn’t said anything. His last wife had decorated the space, or rather, stuck furniture in the room and called it good. It was possible the changes were a shock.
I stared at his profile as he carefully examined the rope molding I’d added along the top of the walls, expecting to see him nod again.
“Better taste,” he said, surprising me.
His voice was even and his posture unremarkable, and the only reason I noticed the subtle twitch of his eye was because I’d been staring, which meant he hadn’t wanted it to be seen, but I had noticed it.
And I wondered what it meant.
Then I was sure I knew. He’d never talked to me about his former wife, but Blanche Martin, a woman I’d involved in one of my cons who had also once worked for Edward, had told me he’d been heartbroken when Marion left him. Devastated.