Veil of Deception: The Replacement wife

🔥I'm done🔥

(Home – six weeks post-discharge)
The house felt too big and too quiet after the constant hum of hospital monitors.

Somehow it seemed everything smelled like lemon polish and the faint antiseptic would still clung to my skin no matter how many times I showered.

Alexander had carried me over the threshold like a bride the day we came home, even though I told him I could walk.

I couldn't. Not really. Not without paying for it later.

I'd been sleeping in one of his T-shirts every night, the hem hitting mid-thigh, soft cotton hiding everything I didn't want seen.

We hadn't touched beyond careful cuddles, his arms around me from behind so he never had to look at the damage head-on.

He never pushed. Never once did he try to slide his hand under the shirt.

He just held me, kissed my temple, and let me hide.

I hated myself for it.

I hated the coward I'd become.

This morning he was downstairs handling calls. I thought I had time.

I stood in front of the full-length mirror in our bedroom in nothing but pale-pink lace panties and one of his white dress shirts, unbuttoned, trying to work up the courage to get dressed for the first real outing since the shooting: dinner with his family, something normal.

I let the shirt fall open.

The scar was livid under the morning light: a thick, raised rope from ribs to hip, still red, still angry. The smaller laparoscopic dots looked like bullet holes themselves. The entry wound on my side had healed into a permanent, puckered star. My stomach, once flat and strong, now carried the faint silver of new stretch marks where they'd had to open me so wide.

I looked like a patched-together doll someone had tried to throw away and then changed their mind.

My breath stuttered. Tears came fast and hot.

I didn't hear him come in.

"Scarlet."

His voice was low, dangerous-quiet, the one that used to make me wet in seconds flat. Now it just made me flinch.

I yanked the shirt closed, clutching the edges together with shaking fists. "Get out. I'm getting dressed."

"No."
He shut the door with a soft click that sounded louder than a gunshot. When he turned the lock, my stomach flipped.

"I'm getting dressed," I snapped, refusing to look at him. "I said get out."

"You've said that a lot lately." He prowled closer, barefoot, wearing only gray sweatpants, the kind that hung low enough to make my mouth water on better days. "And I've let you. Six weeks of letting you hide from me. Six weeks of sleeping next to the woman I love and not being allowed to touch her because she thinks I'll be disgusted." He stopped right behind me; I could feel the heat of him through the shirt. "I'm done."

He stopped just behind me. Close enough that I could smell clean skin and the faint trace of the eucalyptus soap he used this morning. Close enough that when he exhaled, it stirred the loose hair at my nape.
He didn't touch me yet. He just let the silence stretch until it felt like a hand sliding between my legs.

"Look at yourself," he ordered.
I couldn't.

"Alexander—"I start before getting cut off.

"Take the shirt off, Scarlet and look at yourself."he says plainly.