Chapter 7-The Night Before Revenge
761 Words
It was three nights after the wedding.The penthouse was too quiet. Charlie hadn’t come home for dinner. Aurora had eaten alone at the big table, the chair across from her empty.
At 1:14 a.m. the front door opened.
She heard his shoes. Not the usual two-beat, pause. This was slower. Heavier.
Aurora was in the kitchen with the lights off, laptop closed. She hadn’t been coding. She’d just been sitting.
Charlie stopped in the doorway. Tie loose. Shirt wrinkled. He smelled like whiskey and rain.
“You’re up,” he said.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He didn’t turn on the light. The city lit his face through the windows. Jaw tight. Eyes tired in a way she hadn’t seen before.
For weeks he’d looked at her like she was glass. Something to break.
Tonight he looked at her like he didn’t know what she was.
“Why are you here?” he asked. Not cruel. Just tired.
“This is my home too,” Aurora said quietly.
Charlie laughed once, low and humorless. “Right. Home.”
He set his keys down. The sound was too loud.
“My father toasted us at the club tonight,” he said. “To the Kingston-Hayes merger. To revenge that looks like love.”
Aurora didn’t answer.
He came closer. Stopped a foot away.
“Do you hate me?” he asked.
Aurora looked at his hands. They were shaking a little.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The silence stretched. Outside, a siren.
Charlie ran a hand through his hair. “I keep seeing her,” he said. “Lila. In every room. And then I see you, and you’re not her, and it makes me angry.”
“I’m not trying to be her.”
“I know.”
He sat down on the floor. Right there on the marble, like the penthouse wasn’t his. Like he was twelve again and drowning.
Aurora sat too. A careful distance between them.
“I didn’t want this,” he said. “Any of it. The marriage. The papers. You.”
“I know.”
“But you’re here. And you don’t fight back. And that’s worse.”
Aurora turned to him. “What do you want me to do, Charlie? Scream?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at her. Really looked. Not through her.
Her hair was down. No makeup. The sweater she’d worn for three days.
She wasn’t Lila. She wasn’t a weapon. She was just... there.
Charlie reached out before he could stop himself. His thumb brushed the scar above her eyebrow. The one from the lake.
Aurora didn’t pull away.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“For what?”
“For all of it.”
He leaned in. Not with anger. Not with revenge. With exhaustion. With something that felt too close to needing.
Aurora could have moved. Could have stood.
She didn’t.
The kiss was slow. Unsure. Like both of them were asking a question and afraid of the answer.His hands moved slowly towards her waist. She felt the rhythm like a wind piercing through her soul. He kissed her harder this time with pressure.
She wasn't so sure what she was doing.perhaps,s*x was what he wanted and now he's drunk.They both pulled off their clothes. He licked every bits of her c**t like it was candy before inserting his d**k into her. She gave a soft moan grasping the bedsheets. He reached out for her boobs while progressing with the rhythm.
To Charlie,he has one of his best sex.who knows…..maybe it was because he took more shots.
In the morning Charlie was gone before sunrise. A note on the counter: Board meeting. Don’t wait up.
Aurora stood in the kitchen in the same sweater. She touched her mouth, then dropped her hand.
She told herself it meant nothing.
That it was grief. That it was whiskey. That it was revenge in a different form.
She didn’t think about it again. Not until eight weeks later, in a clinic in Queens, when a nurse slid a paper across the desk and said _congratulations._
She remembered the floor. The quiet. The way his hand had trembled against her face.
She remembered thinking, just for a second, that maybe he wasn’t only marrying her to hurt her.
She filed the memory away with the divorce decree.
This was hers now.
And Charlie Kingston, who had married her to get even, would never know that the one night he’d forgotten to hate her was the night that changed everything.
- Writer
