The coldness returns to his eyes. “Fuck you, Nina, fuck you!”
“If only you would’ve Marcus. If there wasn’t eight-week gaps between each shag, I might’ve been prepared to listen to your bullshit excuses, but we haven’t even got that as a foundation to work on.”
“Eight weeks? Jeeezusss and I thought I was in a drought,” I hear Sophie say and again, I try not to smile.
Marcus swings around and glares at her. “You best stay the fuck out of my business, Gardner. I bet you’ve been filling her head with bullshit all night. I bet this has all come from you.”
Sophie steps toward him, showing absolutely no fear. “Actually, I think you’ll find this all comes from the fact that you’re not man enough to make love to your wife once in a while, and then when you do, you punch her into unconsciousness and fuck her against her will… Yeah, I have a feeling that’s definitely where all this comes from, you prick.”
He glares between us, his hands opening and closing into fists. “Fuck the pair of ya. You fucking pair of dykes.”
“Oh, very mature, Marcus. At least I can get it up more than once every two months.”
He swings for her, he actually pulls his arm back and starts to swing a punch toward Sophie. And while people stop and stare, I just stand there frozen to the spot.
“Do it,” Sophie screams at him, “Fucking do it, you coward. I’ll have the police on you in an instant, lawyer boy. Just you fucking watch if I don’t.”
He spits on the ground between us and turns and walks away.
Saturday night, Sophie and I go clubbing. We dance until it feels like my feet are bleeding and we get absolutely hammered; falling through her front door at around five in the morning.
We spend most of Sunday in bed recovering. There’s a spare room at Sophie’s place with a perfectly functioning queen sized bed but for some reason, Soph seems reluctant to let me out of her sight. I actually don’t mind. It reminds me of the old days, back when my life was a little less complicated.
We wandered drunkenly over to the park with Duchess, after returning home and I take her out again at ten. Sophie must hear her crying at around noon and takes her out again and I finally crawl out of bed around four, shower and take her for a long walk and let her run free around the dog park, feeling extremely guilty for keeping her so couped up.
There’s a bit of a garden up on the roof that Soph and I had landscaped when we first bought the place, but there’s no shelter up there as yet. I’ll go and buy Duchess a kennel tomorrow, at least then she can spend the day outside until I decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.
At around seven, Sophie emerges from the bedroom, freshly showered and looking like a model. We order a Chinese takeaway to be delivered and discuss my plan of action for the next few days.
We Google divorce lawyers and decide not to use anyone too local, just to reduce the risk of them being an acquaintance of Marcus’s and there being a possible conflict of interest. Sophie comes up with a couple of possibilities both based in central London. We store the numbers and will call them first thing Monday morning.
I decide to take a few days off from work just so I can have a bit of time to decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I’m hoping that a divorce should be pretty straight forward. We have no children and I’m financially independent. Marcus earns a lot of money these days, but I don’t expect him to share any of it with me. The house is in joint names, but if he decides to make things difficult I’ll walk away and let him keep it. It’s not that I’m soft, stupid or a pushover, it’s just that now I’ve come to the decision to end my marriage, I want it done. I want to draw a line under this part of my life. I’m thirty-two later this year and more than happy to be single.
I’m not looking for love or any other kind of relationship right now. I’m just going to enjoy being single for a while. Like Sophie said, I’d become lost over the last few years. I’ve lost a sense of who I am and allowed myself to become who Marcus wanted me to be. I’m not blaming him, I take full responsibility for allowing it to happen. I could’ve fought harder, I could’ve refused to marry him when my brother insisted, but I didn’t. Marcus was a safe option. I knew that I would never love him the way I’d loved Conner Reed. Therefore, he would never be able to hurt me the way that Conner had. I didn’t realise though that the loneliness and indifference from my husband that I felt during my marriage hurt almost as much as Conner leaving me the way he had.