THE CONTROL: An Arranged Marriage Romance by Elena Monroe (ebook reader android .txt) 📕

The tension was so thick it toyed with me first, making less work for Bowen but it wasn’t any less enjoyable. You had to be so pure that you didn’t even contemplate sinning to not enjoy Bowen Astor.

I enjoyed him, soaked him up like a bad habit and asked for more.

Bowen was leaving kisses on my thighs and hips while I came back from climaxing the way I only could at his hands. Sitting up I bit my lip. “Stand up.” I wanted to return the favor, and I was determined for him to let me.

He stood up, and I was faced with every hard inch of him just below the fabric doing a poor job of holding him back. Letting my hand smooth against his length, my fingertips toyed with the band on his boxer briefs peeking out of his joggers, teasing me with a good time that might chase away our confessions.

I wanted to say something comforting. At least clear up that whatever he smelled on me was nothing in comparison. I should have given him the truth—anything but the silence lurking inside my mouth making me mute.

Just as I pulled the band away from his body, his grip crushed my small hands so hard I felt myself wince. “We aren’t doing that here… I don’t need your pity.” His words might as well have been venom.

It was well-deserved, my body screamed use me to bury the pain and my eyes were glazed over in sympathy. “Bowen…” I was trying to slice through the immediate anger cocooning him when his grip didn’t let up, still holding my hands too tightly.

He looked down on me like I personally insulted him in the least redeemable way. “It doesn’t matter how damaged you are when you look at me like that. It would have been easier to just sit pretty and be the wife I don’t want. No demons except me. Now there is nothing holding me back from making sure that fake halo is replaced with horns.”

Standing upright instead of looking down at me like a silly girl who couldn’t handle his demons, his fists clenched making the wraps get even more taunt around his hands.

My mouth was still gaping open but no syllables or sounds came out. Not one word while I watched him square up to the bag hanging in its place. “You always wanted to match.”

My eyes stung with tears, and I felt myself suck in my bottom lip like it was the key to holding them back.

Hitting a small remote in his pocket, music flooded his home gym, too loud to think or talk anymore.

Bowen’s fist drove into the bag over and over, making me flinch every time. I pushed him to be someone to me and didn’t take into account how skewed how my expectations were.

My expectations were soul crushing.

My expectations were selfish.

My expectations disregarded trauma altogether.

I mumbled a quick sorry around my trembling bottom lip hoping that would suffice.

Few steps forward and ten back seemed to be the dance with the devil. He promised to fuck my halo into horns and now I felt overwhelmed by the need to be just as broken as him.

We always matched.

Now we didn’t and he could see it all over my face.

Running back upstairs, I let the tears break free, not for myself but for my Bowey. It’s hard to not blame yourself when you’re hopeful enough to believe you can change someone’s life by just being there.

I never contemplated anything but our happy ending.

EVE

It had been days of silence, treating each other as passing ships.

It became routine to ignore each other. I was ashamed of how tortured I felt, enough to let it change how I saw Bowen, and he was angry with me for not being as damaged as he expected.

If we were both damaged to the same degree this would be easier.

I went from being someone who wore a halo, too good for him, and now to someone he wanted to sear with enough sin to grant me horns.

I couldn’t begin to know what I wanted when every desire was to absolve him of all the pain of my absence.

Swallowing the fact that I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was anymore, I took my coffee mug outside, avoiding Bowen’s morning routine of blending up veggies and fruit at a deafening tone. It was easier to lick my wounds and digest the truth by myself than to pretend I didn’t see him in the room.

Walking along the perimeter of his vast yard, I put more and more distance between us when I got lost deeper than I had before. There was this odd looking tree sitting in the corner of the yard, twisted and demonic the way he was seen as. I found it devastatingly beautiful.

I made the mental note to paint this since my subject content had to move past Bowen and eventually take shape as other things. The painting used to help me work things out, every stroke peeling a layer deeper to the things holding me together, making them permanent on the canvas.

My pain was a variety of different colors, but I normally only painted in blue.

Bowen’s backyard basically opened into the wilderness and he had already warned me that coyotes and wild animals roam free.

We didn’t have anything roaming Denmark and nothing was free.

Enjoying my coffee slowly enough to waste time until Bowen was out the door, I found a white snake slithering in the grass at my feet. The snake was small, and you could barely see its scaly pattern coating its body. It felt like the world dropped a metaphor at my feet, many of them actually, snakes in the garden was the perfect way to describe