The Wrong Vow, My Perfect Match

Chapter 9

Charlie

What have I done to myself?

The taillights of the limousine disappeared around the corner and I was still standing there on the pavement like a man who had just watched something irreplaceable drive away for the second time.

"Was that really Evey," I muttered under my breath, turning away from the empty road, "was that actually her, because that woman in there, that was not the Evelyn I knew, that could not have been her."

But it was. I knew it the moment she opened her mouth, the moment she looked at me like I was a stranger whose name she could not be bothered to learn, and somehow that look, that particular brand of nothing she had aimed at me, had rattled something loose inside my chest that I had no business feeling.

I grabbed my keys from the valet without a word and drove.

The bar was dim and half empty when I got there. I dropped onto a stool and the bartender walked over, wiping his hands on a cloth, "what can I get you?"

"Double scotch, neat," I said, then stopped him before he turned away, "actually, just leave the bottle."

He set it down without comment and I wrapped my hand around the glass, poured until it was full, brought it to my lips and drank the entire thing in one slow, deliberate pull, then set it down and poured again. The second went the same way as the first.

My phone lit up on the counter with Serena's name.

I picked it up.

"The event has ended, Charlie," she announced without greeting, in a tone sitting somewhere between a question and a summons, "so explain to me why you are not walking through our front door right now."

"Air," she repeated, and the word landed like a gavel, "you needed air, not to come home to your wife, not to debrief about the most important business event of the quarter, but air, in a bar presumably because I can hear the noise."

I reached for the bottle and poured a third glass, and as I brought it up slowly. A woman slid onto the stool beside me leaning over and wrapping her fingers around my wrist, easing the glass back down to the counter.

"Slow down on that drink, sweetheart," she smiled.

The line went completely silent.

"Who was that," Serena breathed, and something in her voice shifted into a register I had learned to dread, "Charlie, whose voice was that."

"A stranger at the bar, Serena, nobody…"

"A stranger," she erupted, and the volume came fast and total, "so you are sitting in a bar letting strange women touch you instead of coming home to your wife, you shameless, spineless, ungrateful excuse of a husband, after everything I have done, after everything I have sacrificed to keep this family standing, you sit on a barstool like I do not exist, like I am absolutely nothing…"

"Serena," I cut in sharply.

"Do not Serena me, you get home right now, do you hear me, right now or so help me…"

"Stop the crap," I snapped, "I am asking you once, stop it."

The silence that followed was the kind she used like a weapon, long and deliberate and loaded.

"Ten minutes," she finally delivered, each word bitten off with precision, "you have exactly ten minutes to walk through that door, or you sleep wherever you are sitting tonight, and I mean every word of that."

Then, she ended the call.

It had not always been like this, or maybe it had always been exactly like this and I had been too blinded by the idea of Serena to see the reality of her. She had moved into Thorne Enterprises the way she moved into everything, quietly at first, then so completely that by the time I noticed, the doors were already locked from the inside.

Contracts I had personally negotiated stopped reaching my desk. Partnerships I had built from scratch were apparently signed and sealed without me sitting across a single table. Every time I pushed for documentation she had an answer waiting, smooth and reasonable and completely impossible to verify.

Board members my father had trusted for decades now looked at me in meetings like I was visiting. The lawyers smiled at her and reported to her and I had stood in my own company watching it happen like a man watching someone else's house burn.

While Serena squandered every bit of our profit. My company's wealth, everything I worked for.

I settled my tab, stood up and walked out without looking back.

I was not going home.

The hotel was close enough and I checked in with nothing but my jacket and my wallet, rode the elevator up and let myself into the room. I dropped onto the edge of the bed, loosened my tie and sat with my hands between my knees in the silence.

Evelyn came back immediately. Not the woman I had spent three years punishing, but the woman at that podium tonight, composed and sharp and completely indifferent to my existence.

My mind drifted back to the nights we made love. Just the thought of her gave me an erection immediately.

I walked to the mirror, taking off my tie, my pants, my shirt, and everything else I had on.

I lay flat on the bed, imagining Evelyn walking up to me.

I lay flat on the cool hotel sheets, squeezed my eyes shut and wrapped my hand wrapped tight around my throbbing c**k. I stroked faster, imagining Evelyn on top of me, her tight, wet p***y sliding down my shaft as she rode me hard.

“F**k, Evey,” I moaned, bucking my hip up into my fist. “Just like that, baby… ride me.”

A loud thud exploded against the door “Boom! Boom! Boom!” Violent enough that I was on my feet before I had finished the thought, crossing the room in three strides and pulling the door open.

Serena stood in the corridor, in her loose hair, looking angry and wild, held back on either side by two hotel security guards who were doing their considerable best to keep her from launching herself through the doorway.

"Let me go," she snarled, twisting against their grip, "let go of me right now, that is my husband.”