The Second Wife by Melinda Mulera (book club reads .txt) 📗

"Y-You both kept all this...." I squirreled in my voice as tears streaked down my face.

I was with the wrong men.

I pushed the chair back and dashed out of the kitchen, feeling a bit too sick in the throat. I felt nausea. I rushed into the door of the restroom beside the staircase, rushing towards the toilet as the nausea got the best of me.

I felt very nervous and my body was exaggerating it.

Leaning into the toilet, I felt my internals suddenly slip out of my mouth and into the clear toilet water. Everything I had just eaten suddenly poured right out.

"Sh*t, forgot these pregnancy issues." I heard Avery chuckle behind me as I felt his fingers stroke my forehead as he gathered my hair from my face.

"Why? Have any kids, Avery?" I hissed as I glared at him over my shoulder, only to look away as I emptied my stomach into the toilet.

It suddenly began to hurt. My head, my stomach, my arms, everything.

"I don't have kids." He said as he sat beside me. I reached to my head only to notice my hair was braided. That's the only thing Avery is probably good at. "I don't think I'd have kids though, Rose, my wife, she can't... Give birth, not like she wanted to anyway. She's this uptight strict woman who really doesn't give a damn about closure or..
Me." He chuckled to himself as I looked away and flashed the toilet, spotting Hazel by the door, staring at me with a deep frown. I glanced back at Avery and he was looking at the floor with a rather sad expression. He looked sort of .... Let down. "So, when I met you, Iris, you gave me unwanted attention. Of course you hated me at first, I could see that, but you didn't push me away or say I wasn't good enough. I felt as though we had even become friends at some point. For the first time I felt connected to someone and it made me feel good, when I can't even have small talk with my own wife before she brushes me off and reminds me time and again that we don't need to become friends or anything close to it, since it's a business marriage." He sighed as he ran a hand through his thick black hair.

Business marriage?

"An arranged marriage?" I asked and he nodded slowly. "By your dad?"

"No, my mother actually. Rose has a really rich family inheritance and being married to the name Bronze gives us also some link to it. We merged our companies because she didn't want to run the company, she wanted to start her own jewelry company. So since she couldn't shut down her father's life ambition, she decided it was best she handed it over to her husband. So since then, our relationship has been purely business. We hardly speak, if I want to talk to her about anything, I need to schedule it since she's working home and is overly busy. We have separate rooms on separate floors that way I don't disturb her. I feel lonely, sad to say...,
Even when I'm married." He whispered before laughing out, clearly forcing the laugh out of his dry throat. "But when I met you, I felt... Well it's stupid to say but I felt loved, for the first time. And then I heard you were more into Hazel and were getting serious, I tried to back off and show I wasn't interested in you. I made it seem so and I actually managed to convince you. Now you're even planning on marrying him and it sort of... Ticked me off a bit. Then it mixed in with the fact you're pregnant and Tina convinced me that it'd be mine since she gave you painkillers instead of real medicine." He chuckled as he glanced at me, though I could tell he was off. "Then I remembered you had Hazel before me and the chances are very slim that it'd be mine. Even though that all happened, I wanted to leave you and Hazel alone, since I ruined his last relationship but I knew I won't just forget you that easily. I'd probably live the rest of my life regretting I let you go." He sighed out shakily and bit onto his lower lip as he looked up at Hazel. "I'm sorry, Hazel, but I won't let her go. I think I love her."

I glanced towards Hazel as my heart skipped a beat at what Avery had just said.

He loved me...

At least he thinks he is.

"So it's not because of Iris that you didn't want ms in the family?" Hazel asked instead as I visibly saw him clench his jaw tighter. "Or was it because of it?"

"She's got nothing to do with why I disowned you. It's all on you, Hazel, you made it hard for me to see you as a brother. You could always cause trouble for me, I never used to live in peace with you around. I already had problems at home and you would fuel my pain and I got sick of it. I had no choice but to remove you. You even caused my mother and sister pain because you wanted to gain a favour from dad. You'd pretend we did something to you just to get us in pain and we got sick of it. It's a good thing dad saw past your mask and decided to finally take our side for once. You've never seen dad's dark side and you're lucky he didn't show it to you, but those of us you put into trouble wished we'd died over and over again. We got you out for revenge, not because you were a bastard. It was the only thing we could do to make you feel the pain we did." He said with a pained expression, his eyes clearly red from holding back his emotions.

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