Chapter 348

I roll over in the overly warm bed and groan loudly as light hits me in the face, someone’s pulling the curtains back in our room to flood us with an unearthly glow. Burying my head under the duvet I try to stop the swirling insane motion of the room and the penetrating pain as shards of light try to slice my skull open. Head booming away like someone is merrily stamping on it, and my body is fragile like cracked glass that’s about to fully shatter under pressure.

“Time to get up. We have a tour this morning of our future abode.” Alexi is way too chirpy for a guy who partnered me in drinking ourselves into oblivion last night and I cannot remember anything past the first bar and the twenty shots we downed in a drinking game with his brother. My head’s thumping out a badly played rhumba beat, and nausea is swirling in my throat so that I gag anytime I move. My mouth is literally carpeted with some old man’s swirly 50s shag pile and I have the awful taste of metallic that I just can’t shift. I’m suffering and this demon needs to leave me be. I don’t want to go anywhere.

“Nooooo.” It’s all I can mumble out, muffled pathetic whining in my nest of covers and sheets that seem to be wrapped up around me. Not all that comfortable but it’s better than the light slicing my retinas and impaling my brain. If I move, I may actually die. My stomach contents are warning me that any slight tilt up may end in exorcist style spewing. Every single inch of me hurts and I’m suffering the hangover from hell.

“I have aspirin and iced water here. Come on, get up. Don’t be a lightweight.” Alexi tugs the sheets from over my head and I immediately squeal at the searing pain of level 1000 sun glare once more.

“Stop it. I hate you.” I cry and grip at them to get them back, but he doesn’t stop there, catching my foot under the end of the duvet and yanks me free from the covers and drops me nakedly on my arse at the foot of the bed. A lovely ungraceful thud as my naked booty collides with a furry rug, and I curl into the foetal position, grimacing, covering my head with flailing arms. Much like a vampire about to be toasted to death. I don’t know what the hell he is on but he’s about to be castrated for this. Covering my eyes with my palms as I try to adjust to this assault.

“Tosser!!” I bark at him but that smug grin as he towers over me, freshly showered, shaved and in an open white shirt over dark trousers is all I get in response. Blinking his way and trying not to grimace with this god-awful pain. I swing a slap at his face and get nowhere near it, yanking what I can reach of the bedclothes back to save my eyesight, but Alexi stands on it. Stopping me from hiding once more.

Arsehole is a sadistic prick.

“You loved me last night. So much.” He emphasises the last two words and gives me a knowing wink which earns him a slap in the kneecap for torturing me this way. It’s all I can reach, and I end up hurting my hand on hard muscle and bone while he just continues to smile at me.

Owww

I blow on my dented digits and wave it around to curb the burn of hurting myself on his leg.

“Drunken sex is not loving you. It’s alcohol-fuelled horniness, and you were available.” I snap at him. Insanely tearful with how miserable I am in my current state; head almost reaching pressurised explosion level, I squint as my eyes water. I crawl up weakly and back onto the bed awkwardly, uncaring about being starkers and hauling the sheets to get back under them into a safe little cave. My brain feels like it’s colliding with the insides of my skull and my eyes are all but glued shut. My tongue has an inch-long fuzz covering it and my throat feels like I have drunk sand.

I honestly reckon I must have drunk a bar’s worth of booze to get in this state and it’s the first time in my life I have lost all memory of a good night out. I know we had sex because my body feels like we had sex. A lot of it, mostly wild, definitely aggressive, and judging by the fact I feel bruised in every muscle and joint, we had ourselves an adventurous workout. Only sex could leave me feeling this way. Only sex with Alexi, anyway.

“Well, you loved me enough to marry me, so …”

“What?” I lose all forms of rejection and stiffen completely.

Alexi catches me around the waist as I give up my pathetic doggy crawl to the top of the bed and lifts me up like a weightless lump before propping me back on my feet at the side of the bed this time. Not that I’m fighting, while my brain pulls out his sentence, stretches it out across my dark muggy space and dissects every single word slowly. My blood runs cold and magically all hangover symptoms just freeze.

“What did you say?” I stand up by myself this time, turning to him abruptly with widened eyes as he bends to pick up a sheet and drapes it around my shoulders for me. He looks completely serious now and gives the covering a little tug so I can catch it at the front and cover myself fully. Automatic pilot initiated, I catch hold of it, eyes glued to his face and I can only imagine. I’m bug-eyed and gawping.

“That you love me. Even when you say you don’t.” A wink, a smile and a peck on the check before he saunters off towards the bathroom to continue his morning routine of getting ready. Mr chirpy and not hungover at all and I have to blink, shake myself to recall his exact words, so sure I just imagined them.

I just stand very still, brain catching up and repeat what he said in a slow, deliberate manner. Feeling them out.

“Married you, so …” I almost choke on the words as my stomach dives like a brick into the depths down there. My mind a swirling mess of hazy memories, bars, clubs. An Elvis impersonator and Alexi fucking me on the bonnet of someone’s car in a dark car park behind a huge white building. Broken images and slight foggy replay slowly come back the longer I stand here, but nothing at all to do with any kind of marriage.

Alexi wanders back through with a toothbrush in his mouth, letting go of it and holding it in his cheek, he walks by the side table and swipes something up before bringing it to me. It’s a piece of A4 paper and he holds it up to show me it in all it’s awful and so not funny glory.

He pulls out his toothbrush, slight disbelief overshadowing that smile as he stares right back at my shocked, probably white pallor. Not sure if I’m being serious or not.

“You married me in a Chapel of Love, London. So, Good morning, Mrs Carrero.” He looks smugger than fucking smug. Seriously, even for him, it’s like all the fucking smugness available in the universe just landed on his arrogant fucking face of intensified, quadrupled smugnicity and I snatch that offending A4 sheet of bullshit right out of his hand, dropping my damn sheet and pulling it to my face for my blurry vision to cut through.

I devour it with the speed of a cocaine addict and literally gasp out loud in an agonising muffled wail. My brain melting on impact.

My head just stops dead, and every fear I have ever had about being someone’s possession, their belonging, their servant, runs through me at a searing level of terror as that paper of ownership swims before my eyes painfully.

I was Rick’s; I was his prisoner. I was my mother’s, legally hers to do as she pleased. Now this … tied to Alexi, a man who destroyed me, and irrational as it is with no real obvious reason to feel so terrified, I am. I know how owning something negates all worth of them as a person and behaviours change. I saw it in his cousins today and what they expect from a wife. It’s how this world works, and Alexi was once that man. I was an object he owned.

I was an object my entire life and what came with that?

Debauchery, pain, a misery that ripped me to shreds and left me as only a shell of a person. This binding law that straps you to another human and silences your voice because you no longer belong to yourself.

I know I’m being ridiculous on some level, but I can’t help it. Blinding fear that I just put myself in a cage and threw away the key is bearing down on me with that suppressed pain of years of slavery to a man who ruined me. I cannot separate the two. The faith and security I have been building with him die in the face of a drunken decision.

It’s like a choke hold on my throat. Losing my identity, my freedom myself. Becoming the shadow to a man that already has severe ownership flaws.

The blood runs from my veins all the way down my body, leaving a cold wave of pale in its wake as I read the tiny cheesy scrawl on the worst looking marriage certificate I have ever seen. So bad it cannot be real.

A cream printed sheet with a border of hearts and musical notes in red ink. The certificate itself basic, black ink and right at the bottom two very familiar signatures, followed by two more traitorous bastards’ scrawls.

“Elvis married us.” I baulk at the writing on the bottom, scanning over the legal crap, eyes falling over our two witnesses.

Alessandra and fucking Gino. Wankers.

“This isn’t funny.” I stutter breathlessly, literally losing the ability to breathe. Tears hit me hard as I read it over and over and my heart and stomach join my blood flow down in my feet. My legs turn to jelly and I stumble back to sit on the bed as the shock overtakes me. I flop on the bed and can’t do anything except stare at it in utter horror.

“Marriage isn’t a joke, Cam.” He says it so calmly I snap my head up and glare at him stupendously.

“Why would you do this to me? What about fucking trust?” I yell, tears cracking through, my voice hoarse and painfully raw, louder than is warranted, but as fire and rage bring everything back up, my body and cold limbs burn hot with the lava I’m spewing. Tears blurring everything and panic coursing through me at a rate of knots. I’m on the verge of an all-out panic attack.

Alexi has the audacity to look pissed now too.

“What the fuck has trust got to do with us getting shitfaced and rocking up at a chapel in Vegas?” He snaps it right back, missing the memo on the proper handling of your girlfriend when she wakes up to your stupid as shit behaviour.

“Because I fucking know you!! Everything you do is planned and coerced and I can pretty much bet my life on it that this was your planning and manipulating. Do you think marrying me means you get more control? That now I can’t ever leave you? Well, fucking watch me go, wanker.” I get up to toss the paper at him, with a very anticlimactic flutter as it see-saws to the ground between us and I turn on my heel to stomp my way out of the room. I don’t care if I’m naked. I can’t take a breath and the walls are closing in on me as I struggle to inhale any oxygen. Flailing, grasping at my chest because it feels like I’m having a heart attack.

The room is still tilting from side to side and I’m walking on Bambi legs with a pounding face, but I still give it a go.

“Nice. Sure, just fucking leave. I’m sure roaming the hotel naked will work out great for you. Oh, and by the way … it was your idea. So, your anger is a little misdirected, babycakes.”

I stop dead in my tracks, a glimmer of an idiotic idea about being Queen Carrero and having Mico shoot that Marianne woman in the eyeball flutters across my brain, and once again all my insides slump to the deck. I was so consumed with marriage before I got drunk that it’s not farfetched to assume that while intoxicated, I rolled with it. I literally crumble where I stand and clutch my face in my hands with an almighty groan as I slump in a dishevelled heap on the floor.

“Yeah thought that would cool your jets.” Alexi sounds peeved, agitated and that snarly, husky tone he usually reserves for fight mode is spiralling around me.

I spin on him, ungraciously, seeing as I’m on the floor and it’s more of an animal like manoeuvre, but I’m not willing to back down as my entire life flits before my eyes.

Marriage is like a prison sentence for someone like me. It’s ownership. Jail bars, handcuffs on me from now on and I already know what a controlling dickhead he can be, at the best of times. There’s a good chance he will turn into his cousins and treat me like something he owns once more.

This is the worst thing ever and the last thing I would ever have done sober. He was supposed to take care of me.

“You shouldn’t have taken advantage of me in that state. The fact I have zero memories of much of last night is a sign you should have taken better care of me!” It’s venomous and yet also anxiety fuelled. Sobbing, voice hoarse as I throw accusations at him. Heart weighed down like a steel block is resting on my chest.

I am full-blown panicking, head racing at how to undo this, but he just stands holding his black toothbrush and glares right back at me. Fighting mood engaged and I know I’m going to get limited sense out of him when stubborn arsehole mode is activated.