Sabatini Strands

Cesare

Sighing, I close out of the spreadsheet I was reviewing. The moment I blink, my eyes hurt. Shit. I check my watch and see I was working longer than I intended. I promised Alicia I would only be another hour after she told me she was going up to bed. It’s now more than two hours later. She’s going to be pissed, but she’ll bite her tongue until it bleeds before she says she is.

I don’t bother taking the time to shut down and clear my desk the way I usually do. Moving fast through the house, I take the stairs two at a time. When I open the door to our bedroom, she's coming out of the bathroom, her hair still wet from a shower. However, she’s already in her nightgown and she’s applying her moisturizer. I’m not wrong. She doesn’t even glance my way.

“I’m sorry, I got caught—”

A cry from the baby monitor cuts into my apology. Nicky is crying. “I’ll go.”

“I’ve got him.” She’s brushing past me.

“I can go.”

“I can take care of our son.” It’s short and abrupt.

All I can do is watch her walk away. I don’t want to fight with her, but it feels like lately it’s all we do. She’s still pissed I’m refusing the plastic surgery she wants. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve explained I wasn’t willing to take the chance of losing her in multiple risky surgeries to change what doesn’t need to be changed.

Almost twenty minutes later, I’m out of the bathroom. Our room is empty, but there’s no noise from the monitor. I bring up the video. Nicky is sleeping again without Alicia anywhere on the screen. Grabbing my cell, I bring up the cameras in our home and find she’s walking into the kitchen. I don’t need to keep watching to know what she is doing in there.

It takes five minutes for me to dry off and pull my boxers on before following her.

Her eyes are sullen as she sees me. In defiance, she drinks deeply from the glass of wine. “What?”

I bite my own tongue before turning away. I’m not sure what the hell I thought coming down here would do. Except the sound of the bottle of wine thudding on the countertop stops me.

Two steps are all it takes for me to reach her, grab the glass from her hand, and throw it into the sink. The sound of it shattering is barely louder than her gasp. I grip her around her waist and set her ass on the counter. Leaning on my hands on each side of her, I lower my head to hers—unwilling to let her hide.

“You’re angry that I won’t say yes to someone cutting you open, to weeks of you in pain, unable to carry or even hold our children while you heal. Do you have any idea of what I would do, go through to keep you from being hurt by anything or anyone—including you? Yet now you want me to paste a smile on my face while you undo the changes in your body that brought me the best things in my life other than you. How can you ask me to do that? Why do you not understand what you’re asking me to do would bring me pain?” I unleash all the anger I’ve fought against over the last few weeks.

“I’m not asking you to do anything but support me in this. After eight years everything for me is softer and sagging and everything for you has only gotten hotter. Even your gray hair has women drooling over you and I’m just there beside you stuffed into support hose—”

Has she lost her mind? “Are you jealous of other women? I don’t care about any other woman but you. I don’t see anyone else but you.”

“But I do, and they’re right there in front of you. While I’m stuck here at home with the kids. This isn’t about permission. I am going to do it. I made the appointments for pre-surgery already.” The defiance is back.

If she hit me, it couldn’t hurt more. I reel back, untrusting of being close to her. “Fine. No need to hide down here with your emotional support wine. Take the bottle up to bed with you. I’ll be in the guest room.”

***

Alicia

I don’t see Cesare walking away through the tears in my eyes. Hand shaking, I swipe at the tears. All I want to do is follow him and beg him not to… I’m not sure what anymore. A few weeks ago, it was to have his blessing. As much as I want the surgery, I was scared, too. Only as the days passed, I became more and more resentful. How could he not understand this was my body, and I didn’t care if he thought I shouldn’t do it? That’s a lie. I did care if he liked me as I am. I’m not only doing this for me, it’s for him—us.

I’m thankful he wasn’t like so many of the horrible men I’ve read and even seen up close who expected their wives to immediately lose their baby weight. Men who wanted women to have their body go back to the way it was before their child. Which was crazy. Cesare said it himself: your body could never go back to the way it was before pregnancy and birth. Everything changed over the long ten months. There was no going back.

While I was at first relieved he wasn’t the one urging me to surgically change my body, I’ve gradually become angry he refused to accept what I wanted. To reclaim my body, I feel like I lost in three pregnancies and eight years of marriage.

A pang of guilt hits me. I don’t regret my children or the years. Hell, in the beginning, I was scared he’d grow bored with me. That one day, he would wonder why he was settling for me when he could have other far more beautiful women.

His shock at my jealousy and his insistence he didn’t see other women was too raw to be faked. Unease has me wondering if it was truly worth alienating him by going through with the surgery. Only for my eyes to run over my body and flinching from the way my breasts sag beneath the silk nightgown I’m wearing.

Why does he have to only see the negatives? I’m aware the weeks of healing won’t be easy. It didn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth it in the end. The same as the pain of my cesareans.

I stare at the mess of the wine glass and red wine in the sink. The desire to walk away from it and leave it until tomorrow is high. Only it’s not fair to leave it for Ruby to clean up. Wincing at the memory of Cesare’s emotional support wine dig, I can admit I deserved it. I’ve come to rely on a glass of wine to unwind at night—that has become two glasses too often.

At first, it was fun to do every once in a while with Bethany. But it’s become more than that. It felt necessary. I pour out the bottle. This is something I can control, it stops now.

I’m hoping he changed his mind, but our bedroom is empty when I go upstairs. I go into our cameras on my cell phone and don’t find him anywhere. Which means he is in one of the bedrooms. None of the cameras went into the bedrooms. There’s a nanny cam in Nicky and Sophia’s bedroom. We’d actually removed the camera in Nicky’s room until he began having nightmares over the last week after he saw Luca was hurt with an eyepatch to hide his lost eye.

A quick glance to see if there’s anything new from Bethany brings up nothing. But as I’m about to close out, I get a message from her asking if I’m okay. I’m honest and reply I’m not. My phone rings two seconds later.

“What’s the matter?”

“We fought. Again. This time… I told him that I made the appointments. That I’m having the surgeries. Now he’s sleeping in a guest bedroom.”

“Oh shit. He’s never done that before, has he?” Bethany gasps.

Closing my eyes, I sink into bed. “No. Never. We’ve fought. But never so bad he walked away like he did tonight. Or slept in another room.”

She sighs. “Wow. Is it really worth it to you, to jeopardize your marriage?”

“Bethany!” It feels like a betrayal.

Another sigh. “Don’t Bethany me. You’re willing to place a stress on your marriage so your tits don’t sag. They’re going to do it eventually. Unless you’re willing to go through it again in another ten or fifteen years, you can’t escape time. It’s only about delaying the inevitable.”

“I’ll worry about it then. For all I know, I’ll get hit by a bus before it happens. I’m tired. Talk tomorrow.” I hang up before she can argue.

Annoyed, I plump up my pillow and bury my face in it. It’s so quiet. Too quiet. I don’t dare look at the empty expanse of our bed. Cesare hasn’t traveled in years. He didn’t want me home alone with the kids when they were babies. Once they were older, he’d gone to New York to handle a client. After that, he downright refused to spend nights away, complaining he didn’t sleep well without me.

I close my eyes against the tears. It’s fine. It will be…eventually.