Cold-Blooded Beautiful (2 page)

Dear Samantha Matthews,

You don’t know me, and you may not believe anything in this letter. You may even think of it as a cruel prank, but please read it in its entirety and try to believe every word.  I’m writing because you need to know the truth.  We both need to know where each of us stands on this issue. 

We have a lot in common, you and I. For one, we are both fucking your husband.  Yes, you’re the wife of my lover.  A lover who has told me that he and I need to take some time away from each other, because he says that you are pregnant.  That’s why I came to the hospital today, to see for myself.  To see with my own eyes all that should have been mine. 

I’ve hated you for so long.  I’ve hated everything you were.  You have taken everything that was supposed to be mine and kept it for yourself.  Now you need to know the truth, the truth about David and me, and let us be.  I only hope that you have the brains to understand that I’m the one he’s supposed to be with.  He doesn’t love you.  He can’t, because he’s too in love with me.  I’m the one he craves, and I’m the one he sneaks out to, because you’re just not enough for him.  Truth be told, he never loved you.  Yours was a marriage of convenience, a business deal.

I’m not sorry for anything I have done.  I’m not sorry for hurting you, because everything you have, should have been mine.  And I’m not sorry for telling you this, because you need to leave and let us be together.  Everything I have done with David has been out of pure love and zero regret.  My heart, my body, my mind, and my soul, belong to him; not yours.  I belong with him and to him; you are not the right one for his needs.  Maybe in the medical world that you both live in, but not in David’s real world.  A world you know nothing about.  You’re not what he wants or needs, I am.

I love him too much to be without him.

Every single time he came home late, it was because of me.  Every single time he came into your bed, smelling a little different, it was because of me.  Every minute he is away from you, he is with me. 

I don’t even know if you’re really pregnant, nor do I care.  Just realize that you will never know the real David, the one who loves me more than he could ever love someone like you. 

Please show this letter to him, and listen to what he says.  I’m sure he’ll lie to you and leave the punishments for me.  I will take anything he will give me.

Aurora

My heart raced. 
What the hell kind of crap did I just step in?  What kind of delusional freak writes a letter to her lover’s wife?
Not that I believed it
.

I needed my shift to end.  I needed to get home.  I needed to show this to David.  None of this could be true, right?

Right?

I mean, I would know if he…I would be able to tell…  Right?

I feel sick.

He says my pussy is
perfect
.  He calls me his Triple P. 
Perfect Piece of Pussy
. 
He showed me a picture of you
, she’d said.  Those were the exact words.  I couldn’t unhear them, and they wouldn’t get the hell out of my head.

I counted the minutes in heartbeats, because that was all I felt, all I heard. The thick pounding thumps of my pulse slammed against my chest, until I could leave the hospital and go home.

In the stark white hallways, people spoke to me. I might have smiled some sort of zombified smile back at them, but I’ll never be sure.  You’re never sure how other people experience you. The only thing I knew, was that I was just walking through corridors and waiting.  Waiting until I could get home.  Waiting to see my husband. 

My husband.

The one who might be fucking a perfect piece of pussy. 

Which apparently, was
not
mine.

David, the man that stood next to me in his sharp Armani suit, in my excruciatingly expensive antique framed wedding picture, which hung on tiny silver hooks against the soft cream-colored walls of our home. 

I don’t even remember leaving the hospital.  My brain could not wrap around the thought of the person I was married to, being with someone else.  The front door to our apartment just sort of appeared in front of me, and I walked right through it. Sick to my stomach and so freaking nervous, I thought that I might shit myself.

I found him in the kitchen drinking his morning coffee, New York Times in hand, a glint of early morning light reflecting rainbows off his Rolex watch.  He’d be leaving in ten minutes, following my rounds in the hospital. We were a well-oiled machine, at least that’s what I had thought.  Until that woman grabbed my arm and whispered those words in my ear.

Perfect Piece of Pussy
.  His
Triple P
.

He never called me that.  He usually never spoke while having sex with me.

This bullshit couldn’t be true.

But she knew I was pregnant.  Not many people knew, and I sure as shit didn’t look almost twenty weeks into my pregnancy
. 
I really feel sick
.

I laid the letter out flat on the kitchen island where he sat, sliding it silently across the granite top, until it passed underneath the newsprint paper he grasped in his fingers.

He took a few seconds to skim over it. A small downward dip of his lip was all the expression he gave.  “You aren’t entertaining the writings of some psychotic, are you?”  He asked casually, after dropping the paper quickly.  Picking up his coffee cup gingerly, he sipped silently at his fancy homemade vanilla cream latte.  The stench of its sweetness made me gag.

“I thought it warranted a peek from you, since your name was implicated in the affair.”

“Where does it say my name?” He asked, turning the letter this way and that.  “My
full
name?  How do I know she’s writing this about me and not David Resner over in gynecology.  He’s faced with cunts all day long. It’s probably him.”

“She spoke it, when she came to visit me at the hospital, and don’t be vulgar.” 
Yes, I was bluffing
.  She never mentioned his last name, only mine.  Look, I usually trusted my husband explicitly, but something just didn’t feel right about this. It felt too
real
.  For the first time, I questioned him, because really, it could very well be true.  Maybe being pregnant was giving me a sixth sense.  Paranoia.

He stood up and pecked a chaste kiss against my temple, leaving the letter on the table, disregarding it completely. “Don’t be fooled by childish high school drama.  I have no time for affairs. I’m lucky if I get to make love to my wife.” He smiled, grabbed my chin hard, and told me he loved me.

It was the first time I knew, without a doubt, he was lying to me. 
The first of many times
.

It wouldn’t be one rash moment of infidelity, it was tens, it was hundreds,
hell,
it was probably more like thousands.  I thought David was the love of my life.  I was wrong.  He was the love of many women’s lives.  I found out that little tidbit of information fifteen minutes after that bastard left, and I tore through his piece of shit computer, armed with his password and printer.

What the
hell
?

Images, so many of them,
file folders of them
, of the most disturbing sexual nature I’d ever seen.  Videos of rape fantasies, and OH MY GOD! 
WAS THAT A HORSE? 
Emails and exchanged pictures with other women, so many other women.   There was an account on the popular
AshleyMadison website
, the number one dating site to find someone to cheat on your spouse with, beyond disturbing correspondence with private
punishment clubs
.

I know what all you marriage-believing-you-could-work-through-anything-if-you-just-believe-people, are thinking right now. 
Oh, she shouldn’t throw away a good marriage just because of a little infidelity
.  If only it were that easy.

Although, I would give you a slow applause for whatever
you
would choose in
your
own situation, I was not a person who believed a
slew of infidelities
could be forgiven.  It couldn’t.  Not in my eyes.  Not in my heart.  My marriage was over.  There were no accidental slips and falls into various different vaginas. There were only distinct planned out
choices
to have affairs and go through with them.  Repeatedly. 

Unfortunately, his affairs were the least of my problems.

One particular file folder glowed on his desktop as if it were radioactive. 
SamMatt Pharmaceuticals
. 

SamMatt Pharmaceuticals?  As in Samantha Matthew Pharmaceuticals?  What the hell was in there?

With steady and precise fingers, I clicked it open. 

SamMatt Pharmaceuticals was a multi-million dollar company almost as big as Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer.  Its labs were outsourced to other countries, and there was a list of top hospitals and doctors who spoke in their favor.  Why was my name at the top of this list?  Why was this company, SamMatt, named after me?

I had no clue.  I couldn’t think straight.  I had no…I mean…David was cheating on me and I had no idea what to do. For the first time in my life, I was clueless.

I was damn sure to print out everything I found.

And copy all his files onto my flash drives. 

Both of my flash drives.

It was like signing my own death certificate. 

Three hours later, I walked out of his office, sick to my stomach, feeling the very first fluttery butterflies of the small life that had been growing inside me for the last four and a half months.  I hid everything in my computer bag, emailed everything to myself, and walked out into the brilliant light of the August summer sun.  Moist heat melted over my body, instantly sticking my clothes to my skin. My stomach rolled and fluttered. Placing a free hand over it, I hummed a small lullaby to the child within.  With trembling legs and a feverish mind, I completed a couple of errands that were on the criminally insane side of the law. I would not let David get away with what I found, not with cheating on me, and not with whatever pharmaceutical hood he was pulling over the hospital’s eyes.  I mean, this was my father’s hospital.
My father
was the president and those papers were falsified. God only knew what that was all about.   Then I vomited for the rest of the day, hovering over my bathroom sink, wishing I had the physical strength to pack my bags. 
Maybe after a little nap
.  I had plenty of time to pack a bag and leave.

But all that wasn’t the bad part.  No, not yet.  That was just the beginning of my nightmares.  I should have left then.  Through the stomach rolling, vomiting, and exhaustion, I should have just gotten up and hailed a cab to a hotel.  I should have just disappeared and never turned back.

Nobody would have died then.

Chapter 1

It was a humbling experience to know and love her. She made everything I’d ever thought as my truth, something that I could transform into, and something better that I could live with on the inside.

Samantha was still asleep.  Loose cinnamon colored hair splayed out across the feathered pillows as she curled herself around my body.  She lay bare, save for the thick gray comforter she’d tangled her body in. I wanted to wake her and talk.  I wanted her to tell me the story of her past, the one she had run from, the one that led her to this desolate town, the one for whom I had the whole bloody Sherriff’s department and hospital fake her death.   It was terror that stopped me from waking her and demanding more answers.  Not my terror, not my fear; hers.  For all the strength and courage she possessed, I knew that whatever had happened between her husband, David and her, was some sort of darkness that had slowly spread inside her, completely paralyzing her.

I knew everyone had a past. I knew she wasn’t some bright-eyed virgin when I met her.  She was a thirty-two year old woman who was one of New York City’s most renowned trauma surgeons, who spent six years overseas putting back the pieces of our broken soldiers.  This woman was tough, brave, and I just wanted,
no…fuck
, I needed to know how one piece of shit of a man, made her give up everything and run.  I mean, the man made her give up her career.  She was a
surgeon
, and I knew she loved it. I saw her save my brother’s life when he was gunned down in his bar.  I watched her eyes light up when her trained fingertips slid over his broken flesh, and like some sort of magic, stopped his blood from flowing out of his body.  Why would she leave all that behind?   

She curled tighter beside me, nuzzling her face deeper into the soft folds of the blankets.  A faint glint of light fell through the open curtains, as the sun began to break over the horizon.  It landed softly along the smooth skin of her arm, making her ivory skin look as if she was cast in stone, and her beautiful skin that whispered her scent to me, the soft, smooth, ivory flesh that touched me like no other.  Despite the gentle rays of sun brightening on her, she somehow radiated light from within.  For months now, she’d been bloody illuminating my darkness, shedding light on my demons who lurked and hunkered down, drooling and growling in the corners of my messed up mind. I wanted to skim my fingers across her skin and wake her, make her tell me all her fears.  I wanted to destroy them, rip them to small confetti sized pieces, send them out to sea, and feed my savage demons with them.