Avenoir

Avenoir - Marlena

Marlena

"I'm just sorry anyone else got hurt," John says. I know he's talking about Roman and my heart aches a little as I think about my ex-husband. My feelings for Roman are still so complicated. I know, with distance, how badly he treated me on his return. I know I tried everything I could to make our marriage work. I know that my affair with John was probably inevitable given how badly we all dealt with my return and then Roman's return on top of it. A natural result of the way we tried to close off our feelings and pretend they had never existed. And part of me is still angry with Roman for skipping out on his family, for literally abandoning the children that still needed him so much.

But part of me still loves him and always will. Part of me still feels guilty, feels responsible for his pain, for his absence from Salem.

Like I said, complicated. But I do know that he is my past. Now, John is my love, an integral part of my past, and my whole future.

I lay my head back on his chest and run my fingers through the coarse dark hair as my mind picks through our history, through the mistakes I have made.

"Is she really that manipulative?" John asks quietly.

I wonder momentarily how he can even ask that. In what other circumstances would I have kept quiet about my feelings for him?

"She helped Stefano take me away from you," I remind him. "She is evil, John. She's Stefano's daughter. She would do anything to keep you for herself. Anything."

"I..." he sighs. "I don't understand any of this. How could I be that dense, Doc? I thought Kristen had escaped Stefano's influence. I thought she was honest and kind. And now I find out she's anything but...?"

"Don't blame yourself honey," I say, but it sounds lame, even to my own ears. How can he not blame himself? I blame myself for not seeing who she was earlier than I did. I should have known; Stefano's influence is nothing if not insidious. Even those biological children who have grown up not knowing he was their father quickly fall under his malignant spell. How could children who have grown up in his house, learning at his knee not fall prey to his twisted thinking, his perverse influence? "She had all of us fooled for a long time. I think maybe she was trying to combat Stefano's influence but when she thought she might lose you, that's when it came to the fore."

"She helped Stefano take you away," he repeats my earlier words. "Not just from me, but from our children. From all the people who love you and need you." He shakes his head, his blue eyes swimming with pain. "Doc, she didn't spare one thought for your safety, for your happiness. She would have let our children grow up without their mother."

"Don't think I haven't thought about that," I say softly. It still haunts me, the memory of Stefano's fury in that hideous cage when I turned him down. I had been so close to giving in to him, so desperate to clutch at the double-edged straws he was offering me. All the while knowing that his word was as reliable as his temper, liable to turn on the wrong word.

And for me, the wrong word (or the right word in that case) was no.

You bitch... you BITCH! He had lifted his hand and I had cowered, thinking he was going to strike me. But he had gathered what little restraint he had left and stalked from the cage, insisting I would never see my family again.

And Kristen did everything in her power to help him make sure that happened. That my children never saw their mother again, that I remained Stefano's unwilling captive and probably eventually a victim of his desire to physically possess me. "I wanted to tell you so many times," I say as I trail my fingers across his pectoral muscles and twirl my fingertip around his nipple. "But I was nervous. I was scared your feelings for me had changed."