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“Who was that?” I growl.
“I told you: my instructor.” She waits for me to open the car door for her, and then straps Nina back into her car seat. “Also,” she adds, “a man you shouldn’t slaughter in a public parking lot.”
“I wasn’t going to slaughter him.”
She closes the door and crosses her arms over her chest. She looks unreal in her black sports bra and it takes serious effort to keep my eyes on her face. “So you weren’t considering the cleanest way to dismember and dispose of him?”
“I never said that. I just said I wasn’t going to do it.”Probably.I open her car door, and she slips in with an eye roll.
“Is this why you came to pick me up?” she asks as soon as I open the driver’s door. “Are you here to check on me and make sure I’m not running around on you?”
I start the car with a little more force than necessary. “Should I be worried? Trevor sure seemed surprised you were married. And you aren’t wearing your ring.”
“Because I get hot during class and my hands swell. I don’t want to get the band surgically removed, so I took it off,” she explains. “Also, Trevor is a good yoga instructor, but he’s too busy listening to the sound of his own voice to listen to anyone else’s. I’ve told him—and everyone else—about you and Nina. They all know I’m married.”
I’m a little ashamed to admit how much the possessive beast in my chest likes to hear that. Even if it also liked the idea of my ring being permanently welded to her finger.
“You’re my husband, Arsen,” she finishes softly. “That means something to me.”
Does it mean we’re going to sleep in the same bed again? Does it mean she’s going to forgive me? I want to demand she tell me right now exactly what she means, but I have a strong suspicion Laila doesn’t know herself.
“It means something to me, too. Namely,” I say under my breath, “that I’ll fight any asshole who thinks he can have you.”
Her hand slips across the console, and I think she’s going to grab my hand or touch my thigh. Instead, she drums her fingers on the leather. “I know you want to fight for me—but you need to trust that I’m fighting for you, too.”
Our eyes lock together. Something passes between us. I’m pretty sure Laila feels it, too, because she pulls her hand back into her lap and forces her eyes to the windshield.
I turn the engine on, feeling for the first time that I may have a real shot at coming back from all this.
31
LAILA
I can’t stop seeing Arsen with another woman.
Another woman in his passenger seat. Another woman with her hand tangled with his as they walk down the sidewalk. Some blonde, leggy supermodel, probably, with perfectly plump Cupid’s bow lips and a set of gravity-defying boobs that plastic surgeons all across the world would request blueprints of to try to replicate on the operating table—all that grinning up atmyhusband.
I groan at the cruelty of my own imagination, which in turn makes me lose my balance and sends me tumbling onto my ass from my shitty attempt at a scorpion pose.
“What is wrong with me?” I mumble, pounding a fist into the plush carpet.
Ever since Arsen picked me up from my classes this afternoon, I’ve been on edge. At first, I blamed it on him charging up to me and Trevor, all puffed-out chest and unspoken threats. It’s the twenty-first century, not the Neolithic Era—who acts like that? Iwas just talking to Trevor. It’s not like he was giving me naked piggybacks through the parking lot or something.
Arsen is my husband. He should know I’d never cheat on him.
But then I got to thinking… would it even be cheating? We’re separated, technically. I asked Arsen for space. I meant that I wanted my own room, but does it mean I could date around if I wanted?
Idon’t want to. Not at all. But it leads to the next, horrifying question…
Could he?
When Polina poked her head into the bathroom an hour ago, she could immediately tell something was up. I was giving Nina a bath, so lost in thought that I was about to wash her hair with hand soap.
“You look like you could use a nap,” she suggested, plucking the hand soap and the rubber ducky I was slathering it on out of my hands. “Or a good, long soak of your own. I’ll watch Nina.”
With my head in such a mess, Nina wasn’t exactly getting great quality time from me, so I let Polina take the reins and retreated up to my room for some yoga.
I don’t know why I thought yoga would help clear my mind. All it did was make me think of the academy and Trevor, which made me think of Arsen getting jealous, which made me wonder if I’d get jealous of him in the same way.
