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His eyes locked with mine.
“I don’t need a gun to kill you, Clara,” he said. “You are barely over five feet, you’re weak, you’re small. I could hit you as hard as I can and it would kill you instantly.”
My throat was so dry I could barely breathe. The heartbeat in my ears felt raw and my mouth ached from being bitten.
There was a scar in my mouth, inside my lower lip, from when I’d fallen as a child. I focused on that, trying to block out the panic. Maybe if I chewed it, I could feel only that pain.
I bit it hard enough to bleed. Copper filled my mouth as I bit it again, chewing on the tender skin. Ripping it open with my teeth like an animal chewing its leg free of a trap.
Something slipped from the corner of my mouth and trickled down my chin. But I didn’t stop gnawing at that spot.
“You will respect me from now on because in the back of your mind, you’ll always remember how easily I could kill you. Now tell me you understand.”
I swallowed the mucus and blood pooling in my mouth. My lips stung as I licked them.
“I do,” I gasped.
“No, say it. Say you know that you’re weak, that I could kill you if I wanted to.”
My jaw shivered as a sob worked its way up.
“I’m weak,” I whispered. “You could kill me if you wanted to.”
He didn’t say anything, he just got up and left with the gun in his hand. After almost three hours, I heard him leave the house and I peeled myself from the chair and made it to my bathroom.
I threw up everything inside me. My father never brought up the incident again and I sometimes wondered if I dreamed it.
But I knew I hadn’t because there was a scar inside my mouth.
And I couldn’t stop chewing on it.
***
I’d never told anyone what had happened that day. Not Candice, not Merrick. I’d dissociated from it and blocked it from my mind. But now, standing in the kitchen with Osian, that memory was creeping back into my body.
He was tall and anger simmered in his eyes. I was five feet and two inches, barely reaching his shoulder.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked, frowning.
It took everything I had, but I managed to pull myself together. Breathing deeply, I squared my shoulders and looked him in the eyes.
“You don’t want to marry me, Osian, and I don’t want to marry you either,” I said. “We just don’t have any chemistry. Let’s call this off before it gets ugly.”
His jaw tensed.
“Who says I don’t want to marry you?”
“You clearly don’t,” I said. “You’ve been fucking as many other women as you can before our engagement. Clearly you don’t want to be tied to me.”
“Who said I wasn’t going to fuck other women while being tied to you?”
There was a short, shocked silence.
“Are you serious?” I spat.
“Yeah, I’m fucking serious.”
“Okay, we are done,” I snapped, grabbing both wine glasses and dumping them in the sink. “I’m not marrying you.”
