WORTHY, Part 2 (4 page)

“Penny for your thoughts,” Ash offered, pouring me another glass of champagne. The soup was too hearty for the bubbly to stand up to, but I didn’t mind. To me, champagne was delicious no matter what the occasion.

“I was worried about getting fat, but this is so delicious I don’t care,” I said, tearing off a hunk of my bread bowl and dipping it in the soup before enjoying the warm, chewy goodness.

“There’s that self-esteem factor I’m worried about again,” Ash warned me, wagging his finger. “You’re not fat, I doubt you ever have been, and I know you never will be. You have lots of lean muscle and a body most of my clients would pay thousands for me to give them. When are you going to realize what a catch you are?”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling wistfully. “I guess I’m just lucky to be with someone who caught me.”

“Are you sure I can’t refer you to a psychiatrist?” he asked. “Hell, I see one. Everyone sees one. It’s the best way to deal with your issues.”

“Why do I need a psychiatrist when I have you?” I ribbed him, grinning. “I feel like I could tell you anything.”

“An occasional lunch does cost less than a psychiatrist,” Ash allowed, taking another bite of his chicken salad. “We’ll just have to make another appointment, then. Lunch again, and soon.”

-----

It had been fun to go out with Ash, and I could see us remaining good friends no matter what I decided to do about my scarring, but the truth was that he was just too busy. He’d been kind enough to promise to meet me again for, if not lunch, drinks, but it would have to be in the far future. It was perhaps a sad testament to the state of self-esteem in Chicago women that he was so busy bestowing dream bodies and fantasy faces to them.

Ash had been a great distraction, but I found myself getting lonelier and lonelier with each week that passed by. Jonathan was apparently in the middle of a frenetic leg of his word tour. All he’d had time to do lately was send me terse but thoughtful little text messages.

“Loving you and missing you in Monaco,” one read.

“About to give a speech to a chairman I don’t think knows English,” another read.

“Wish I could’ve packed you in my suitcase,” read yet another.

“Thought I was in Italy for a whole day until I looked up and saw the Parthenon,” read his latest.

I’d responded to that last one with the idea that it was clear to me my husband wasn’t getting the rest he needed to be a successful and happy CEO of Wharton Group, but I hadn’t received a response. I hoped I hadn’t rubbed Jonathan the wrong way, but the truth was probably that he was just too busy to respond. I’d only started texting again when Jonathan and I moved to Chicago, but it seemed like a silly thing to be too busy to send a quick reply to a text. It took a second. Just one stupid second to send back a smiley face or an “OK” or whatever.

I shook my head and hit my forehead with the heel of my hand, trying to knock myself away from my grumpy mood.

The scary thing was how easy it was to become irritable with Jonathan while he was away. It wasn’t fair to him, first of all, because I knew that he was busy and stressed and feeling like this was something he had to do to prove to his family — and me — that he was a competent man.

Second of all, it was no mystery that Jonathan loved me. I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. He loved me and there was no reason for me to be annoyed that he was too busy to call me.

Of course, as rationally as I could think that, it was all too easy to ignore when I was feeling lonely or blue, which was most of the time these days.

Life would be so much better if Jonathan were just here by my side, but I knew I would just have to be patient. We had the rest of our lives to be together. Once we got over this little hurdle, we’d be home free. Daydreaming began to be one of my favorite things to do. I’d fantasize about how it’d be when Jonathan finally came home from his travels. I would meet him at the airport, of course, running toward him on the tarmac like in some cheesy romance movie.

Somehow, we’d both be running in slow motion, the wind making our hair undulate.

Then, I planned on us not leaving bed for weeks on end, holding each other and remembering what our fingers felt like entwined together.

Sometimes, my memories of him would get so intense that it was impossible not to touch myself to try to relieve just a little bit of that tension.

The way he would hold my head when he kissed me.

The shape of him by my side in bed, and his warmth when I pressed my length into his back.

The way he stretched my body when he plunged in, taking me for his own, thrusting until both of our pleasures culminated in wild, delicious orgasms.

I came thinking of my husband, hoping he was thinking of me, too, wherever he was. My own climaxes, by myself in the dark of Jonathan’s room, paled in comparison to the ones he usually gave me — even the one we’d shared on Skype. These releases never lasted for very long, either. After a while, they even stopped sending me to bed, leaving me wide awake and missing my husband.

I sometimes roamed the compound late at night, remembering how it’d been when we first arrived in the city, before his family had arrived and all our drama started.  Jonathan and I had sex on almost every surface of the living quarters. Each piece of furniture or stair made me nostalgic for his caresses. Would we ever have that again?

“If you’d never met my son, you wouldn’t feel so sad,” Amelia told me almost cheerfully as I lurked in the game room one lazy afternoon, examining the billiards table and wondering how hard it was to learn how to play proficiently.

“If I’d never met your son, he probably would’ve been dead in the woods,” I fired back, just as cheerful. I wasn’t going to let Amelia get to me, even if she had practically forced me into servitude a couple of months back. I’d thought that turning over my wedding planning to her would help mend relations, but she was a viper without Jonathan around. It was all I could do to avoid being bitten.

“I will never consider you my daughter-in-law,” Amelia said. “Never. No matter what you say or do or try.”

I sighed as she glowered at me. “Do we have to do this?” I asked her. “Wouldn’t you just like to skip all the hysterics and try to get along?”

Amelia’s nostrils flared, and I was reminded of a bull — proud, relentless, and endlessly stubborn.

“I have no use for you,” she spat. “Unless you can be convinced to start cleaning my quarters again. I must confess that you did quite a better job than the usual help.”

She’d meant it as an insult, implying that I was nothing more to her than the people she paid to tend to her every need, but I only smiled.

“Would you look at that,” I said. “Your first compliment to me. It might’ve taken a while, but I’m confident that more and more will follow, like turning on a faucet that you just can’t quite get turned back off.”

“Your flippancy doesn’t fool me for one minute,” Amelia said. “I know that you’re lonely, and I’m glad of it. You deserve to be lonely. You robbed me of my son.” It was a strange and irrational thing for Amelia to say, but then again, she was both of those things. I hadn’t robbed her of Jonathan. His own injuries had seen to that. I’d saved him, taken him into my home, and cared for him when it became clear that he needed support. If that was robbing Amelia of her son, then I was guilty of it. However, I honestly just believed that my mother-in-law just felt bitter that I wasn’t Violet, Jonathan’s previous fiancée.

There was something about Violet that Amelia had absolutely loved, though I couldn’t put a finger on it. Maybe it was her vapid devotion to Jonathan, or her empty mind.

“Is there anything else you might need a hand with?” I asked, as Amelia turned to sweep from the room. “I mean, besides cleaning your room. I’m sure we both remember just how close Jonathan was to washing his hands of you when he found out about that.”

Honestly, half of me wished Amelia would give me something to do. I was seriously considering grabbing the cleaning cart from Winston, the head of the Wharton family staff, and proceeding upstairs with it to make Amelia’s floor sparkle, but I was pretty sure it would backfire somehow.

“I could help you in one of your benefits or charities,” I persisted, hating myself a little as I looked for some sort of reaction from her. “I’m usually pretty good at following directions, and you can trust me with money, food, and friendliness.”

Amelia actually snorted at my little speech.

“If you think I’d allow you into one of my functions, help or not, you’re insane,” she said. “And you’re so lonely you can’t stand it. Get a nice, good wallow, girl. This is what the rest of your life is going to be like. During the majority of our marriage, Collier was away on business. It just makes it easier to separate emotionally in the long run.”

I swallowed hard, but tried not to let her know to what extent she’d wounded me. Getting used to being away from Jonathan was one of the things I feared the most. I wanted to be with him, to share my life with him, to discover new things with him. I never wanted to stop being sad with him gone. He was the love of my life. I needed to be with him, desired for him to be by my side. If he wanted to, I’d even roll over for Amelia, play into her hand, do anything she wanted me to do. Hell, I’d even play nice.

But, for right now, Jonathan was across the world, and there was only so much satisfaction I was willing to give Amelia in one day.

I forced myself to smile. “First you pay me a compliment, then you give me motherly advice,” I said. “Soon, Amelia, you’ll be begging me to call you ‘Mom’ and demanding to know how soon you can expect to see little grandchildren scampering around the compound.”

“You’ll call me Mrs. Wharton, you arrogant little shit,” Amelia said, stalking out of the game room.

As entertaining as all of that was, I was forced to sigh after my mother-in-law left. The entire exchange hadn’t taken much more than fifteen to twenty minutes, and I still had an entire day to fill.

-----

There was something about nighttime that really drove me to roam the compound and the surrounding grounds. I’d taken to walking along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, but I knew it wasn’t safe. I got long stares from far too many people. I tried instead to content myself with sitting outside in the courtyard, looking at the stars. It was nice to be outside, even with the pitiful scattering of stars, their brightness masked by the city lights. It helped me not feel so alone.

“You’ve found my favorite spot,” Collier said late one night, walking out of the house to join me in the courtyard.

“I’ll let you have it back,” I said, smiling as I stood up from the chair I’d pulled beside a bistro table. “I was just borrowing it for a while.”

“Sit, sit,” he insisted, plopping down in a chair beside me. He lit a piece of a cigar and puffed it, the fragrant smoke washing over us.

“Do you have trouble sleeping, too?” I asked.

He nodded, the end of the cigar glowing with each breath he took. “I always have. Used to drive Amelia nuts, but she’s gotten used to it. You can get used to anything, you know. It’s the strangest thing.”

“I guess I haven’t gotten used to living in the city yet,” I said, looking at the courtyard. It was beautifully landscaped, especially in the summer with all of the blooms, but the fact of the matter was that we were still walled in on four sides by concrete and glass. There were only a few stars visible in the sliver of sky above us, giving us very little comfort and even littler illusion of freedom.

“It’ll be better once Jonathan has returned,” Collier assured me. “I know it must be terribly difficult for you to get by without him.”

“I miss him a lot,” I said, certain that I could be completely honest with my father-in-law. I trusted him even more than I trusted Jane. “I wish we could talk to each other more often, but I realize that he’s very busy.”

“He is,” Collier agreed, nodding his head thoughtfully. “I’m able to advise him as much as I can, but he’s going the rest of it alone. Letting the chairmen meet the new man he’s become. It’s the strangest thing, Michelle, but I’ve never loved him so much as now, his memories vanished, his job in peril.”