Burn (14 page)

“I see.” His hands clenched into fists.

“No, you don’t.” She took his stiffened jaw in her
hands, hoping to diffuse his mounting anger. “I miss the
way we were before we got married. Do you remember
the time you took me to Stowe, and you cried after we m
ade love in front of the fire? I want that back. I want
you to relax and let me show you how—”

He roughly shoved her, his movement so sudden that
Cinder had no time to prepare herself for the spill. She
stumbled off her shoes and landed in an ungainly heap at
the side of the bed. Sumchai yanked her back to her feet
by her right arm. “What? You think I need a lesson in
fu—”

“Chai, stop it, that’s not what I meant,” she cried. She
tried to wrench her arm from his grasp, but he was too
strong.

“You want to seduce me, slut?” he spat, his spittle
speckling her face. “You think I need to be taught how to
screw my wife?” He let her go and she fell to the bed. “I
come home after a crappy day and all I get is more criti
cism and disapproval?”

He paced the side and foot of the bed, ranting. “I
didn’t deserve to get fired,” he muttered.

Cinder squinted her eyes tight. Every argument,
every disagreement always returned to Sumchai’s greatest
disappointment. His greatest failing.

“The only reason I hit that kid is because he deserved
it,” Sumchai ranted. “He disrespected me, but no one
cares about that, not even you!” He slammed his fists on
the top edge of the footboard, scaring Cinder into
crawling down the bed to get to him, to see if he was
injured. Sumchai snatched his hands out of her reach,
continuing his tirade. “You don’t think I know that
you’ve had to support me? That I don’t know that makes
me less of a man?”

“
No, it doesn’t, and you know it,” she said.
“Everything happens for a reason, Chai. If you hadn’t lost
your job, I would never have worked up the courage to ask for a promotion. I’m proud of myself for being able
to support us. You should be, too, because now you can
take the time to find a position that will make you happy.
You don’t have to take the first thing you’re offered just so
we can make the mortgage.”

He stood at the foot of the bed, breathing heavily,
rage still hardening his features. “In Thailand, women
never forget that they exist to serve their husbands and
sons,” he said darkly. “I should have married a woman
like my mother.”

Cinder gave up trying to reason with him. “Your
mother threw a dinner party for me when I got pro
moted. I wish you’d been as happy for me as your family
was. And as for sons, I’m not the one responsible for us
not having one. I’d love to have a little boy with your eyes, and—”

Sumchai didn’t move, but no sooner than her words left her mouth, Cinder saw something snap in his eyes.
“You carry the Y,” she hastily told him, all the while
knowing that she had crossed into dangerous territory.
“That’s all I meant. I wasn’t referring to your ability to—”

He scrambled over the foot of the bed and pressed her
to the mattress with such force, one of her shoes flew off. Straddling her, he ripped off her filmy dress. Ignoring her
screams of pain and protest, he caught her arms, wrapped
them from wrist to elbow with the torn garment and
secured them to the headboard. She tried to buck him
o
ff, but his weight and determination rendered her
efforts useless. With one hand he forced her legs apart, the other unbuttoned and unzipped his pants.

His hands rough, invading, damaging, he barely
moved her G-string aside before he shoved into her with
such force that her head banged into the teak headboard.
Deaf to her pleas to stop, he pounded into her, arching
upward to avoid looking at her tear-streaked face. He
prefaced his climax by taking handfuls of her hair, pulling
it so hard the skin of her face went taut. Her agonized
cries matched his grunts of release. When he finished, he
rolled off her, lying beside her to catch his breath. “I
think I might like having a personal slut,” he panted.

Too angry and still too stunned to think of anything
bad enough to say in response, Cinder stared at the
ceiling fixture. The lead eagle medallion supporting its
frosted glass globe was original to the farmhouse, but they had purchased the globe shortly after moving in.
They had spent a Saturday comparison shopping at
home goods, antique and lighting stores, searching for
the perfect globe. Such a small task, yet it had been so
much fun driving around with her new husband on a
rain-glossed day.

But as she lay there, bound and sore, she recalled a few
details about the way he had treated her that day. The comments he’d made in front of sales assistants, making fun of her choices and suggestions—they had seemed
amusing and harmless then, in the wake of their new
union. With pain and humiliation lending clarity to retrospection, she saw his behavior for what it had been. Abuse.

She thought back to the last time he had left marks on her, at an anniversary party for Zae and Colin. She
had danced with Colin’s younger brother to one too
many Earth, Wind & Fire songs and Sumchai had
escorted her from the dance floor, holding her upper arm so tight his fingernails had broken her skin. He’d apolo
gized and she’d forgiven him. But she hadn’t forgotten.

Every insult, every smack, slap, pinch, kick, and push came back to her, snowballing into something so big and
ugly, Cinder could no longer ignore it, not in light of
what he had just done.

Sumchai left the bed and stripped off his clothes as he
strolled into the bathroom. Cinder’s hurt and humilia
tion morphed into fear that didn’t lessen until she heard
the quiet whoosh of the shower. She wrenched her arms, struggling to free herself from her bonds even if it meant
snapping one of the slats in the headboard.

She slid her forearms together, working them back
and forth an inch at a time. Although she tore her skin in the process, she managed to release one arm. The other
came out much easier. Freed, she scooted off the bed. She
picked up the striped button-down Sumchai had dis
carded on the floor and put it on as she slipped out of the
bedroom and hurried down the carpeted stairs.

She had retrieved her car keys and purse from the
kitchen and was approaching the front door when,
faintly, she heard the shower stop. She opened the heavy
front door and left it standing open, so he wouldn’t hear
its tell-tale latch upon its closing.

“
You’d better be down there getting dinner on the table!” His command chased her to the driveway, where
she got into her sensible Audi and started it. Sumchai’s
big pickup blocked her in the long driveway. She tested
her car’s maneuverability by backing over the low stone
border she had spent three afternoons putting in, onto
the lawn, and down to the two-lane street.

Her tires spun for a moment, long enough for her to
see her husband’s silhouette against the bright light
bleeding from her front door, before she zoomed away,
her headlights blazing a path in the night.

* * *

“Did you go back to him?”

Gian still held her hand and Cinder was grateful for it. It was the only thing that had steeled her enough to
tell him her reason for leaving her husband.

“I wanted to,” she admitted. “I tried to. The night I
left, I showed up at my parents’ house with nothing but
the shirt off Chai’s back and my car keys. My dad wanted to kill him, especially when Chai got to the house a half-
hour after I did.”

“That guy had a lot of nerve,” Gian said. “I hope you
called the police.”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the votive. The bright
flame seemed to skim the liquid surface of the melted
wax. “He spent two nights in the Middlesex County jail
because I wouldn’t post his bail. He couldn’t get arraigned
until Monday morning.”

“I’ll bet that pissed him off.”

“I didn’t do it to piss him off. I needed some time to
get my clothes and things out of the house.”

“Most women wouldn’t have found it so easy to just
leave like that.” Gian summoned the waiter.

“It wasn’t easy,” she stated firmly. “I still loved him, at
that point. I couldn’t just turn that off, no matter what
he’d done to me. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to stay
there and let him do it again. I was in love, not insane.”

“Point taken,” he conceded.

A smiling waiter appeared and took Gian’s order for
coffee. Once the waiter hurried back to the kitchen,
Cinder continued. “He called or drove by the house
every night for two weeks, until I threatened to get an
order of protection. He left me alone after that. One day,
about a month later, I called him.”

Gian opened his mouth but Cinder spoke over him.
“I wanted to help him. I thought medication or therapy,
something, would help him control his temper and
manage his impulses and paranoia.”

“What was he paranoid about?” Gian asked. “He was convinced that I would leave him.”
“He forced you to.”

She smiled somberly. “I tried not to. I really did.”
“I can see that you did.”

“We started seeing each other. We’d meet for lunch
and he’d tell me about his job search. The lunch dates
went well, so we started having real dates. He was so nice,
the way he’d been when we were first dating. He prom
ised to see a therapist and told me that he would be
w
illing to go to marriage counseling. It took him three
months to blow it.”

“How so? Did he hurt you again?”

“He came to pick me up for dinner and a movie one
Saturday, and my cousin David was visiting. He was
twenty-six years old, and he’d just gotten his degree from
the Massachusetts School of Law. He’d come to my par
ents’ to pick up a graduation present. It was a sterling
silver Cross pen with his name engraved on it.”

The waiter returned with a busboy, who collected
their plates and empty sake cups to make way for coffee
and a small tray of delicate almond cookies.

“David was leaving when Chai pulled into the drive
way,” Cinder continued once she and Gian were again
alone. “I was on the front porch giving him a hug. Chai got
out of his car, charged across the lawn, jumped onto the
porch, and threw David against the side of the house. He
broke David’s nose before my dad and I could pull him off.”

“What the hell was wrong with your ex?”

“Chai thought David was a date.” Tears spilled over her lower lashes when she blinked, and they sparkled in
the candlelight until she wiped them away. “David came
to our wedding. Chai had met him before, he knew
David was family! That was it, for me. He hadn’t
changed. There were things wrong with him that I would
never be able to fix. Everything he’d said about getting
help was a lie. I couldn’t go back to him and the toxic life
we’d built. I’d been living with my parents for a year, and
it was time for me to rebuild my life. I filed for divorce a
few days later.”

“How did your ex handle it?”

“Not well,” Cinder said tremulously. “He wouldn’t
sign the papers.”

“There are ways to divorce someone, whether they
want to be divorced or not,” Gian insisted, sitting back in his chair.

“Those ways took time,” Cinder said.

“So when did you get your divorce?”

“Shortly after I last saw him.”

“You’re being cryptic.” A tinge of impatience tainted his words. “When did you last see him?”

She swallowed hard and still struggled to get her next
words out. “We agreed to sell our farmhouse in
Manchester-by-the-Sea. The day I was emptying it, he
violated the order of protection I’d taken out on him.”