The Blackmail Bride

Chapter 48 Part 2

Was out for a whole month due to work. Hello!

Rantings

I didn't know how we ended up sitting together in the living room. Me with a blanket over my bent legs while I leaned back against a throw pillow propped against the arm rest. The tips of my toes touched Jace who was comfortably settled in the middle the sofa. He was partly crouched into his laptop, making work calls.

The movie playing on the flatscreen TV lent some sense of domestic entertainment, but I'd muted it hours ago after having to watch Jace struggle with one of his meetings. And instead of the movie, I was more interested in watching the complex expressions the busy person beside me made as he gave instruction after instruction to whoever was on the other end of the line. And somehow the list of people steadily grew with the trickling time.

What confused me with our current position was why he was working in the living room when he had a perfectly good office upstairs. But I found out the answer to that when I tried to stand up after one of his first phone calls.

His head snapped up, a hand automatically cupping my knee to prevent me from standing up, and he asked, "Where are you going?"

"I'm disturbing you," I replied in a low murmur, stealing a glance at his laptop screen. It wouldn't stop pinging.

Jace just shook his head, "No, you're not. Stay where I can see you."

But why should I?

"It's almost lunch," was my excuse. I blinked swollen eyelids and sniffed.

"I'll order something," Jace tapped a calming rhythm on my knee, misinterpreting that I was volunteering to cook. I was going upstairs to sleep, "What do you want?"

I shrugged, "I don't know."

I didn't have an appetite and truthfully, I was embarrassed about bawling and hugging him simultaneously earlier. I must've looked insane. My eyes drifted to his form, I could only imagine what Jace thought of such a display. But the steady gaze he directed at me with those eyes, no hint of judgment in them, didn't make me feel any better.

"Okay, I know a restaurant with good Kani salad."

Confused me sat back down, hugging a throw pillow to my chest. The bento boxes from some posh Japanese restaurant came and the promised Kani salad with it. We ate with the provided wooden chopsticks from plastic containers in the living room. Jace cleared the mess afterwards before going back to his laptop.

There was no need for me to lift a finger. I sat in the same place, and it was now afternoon. I may have dozed off twice but whenever I woke up, Jace was still beside me. And as if he knew I'd been sleeping, he'd glance at me and return to work.

It was a quiet, uneventful day at home...

It should even be considered restful and calm... maybe from the outside looking in.

But the domesticity of the picture we were portraying only stirred the tumultuous thoughts growing in my mind. There was something about this brand of calm that scared me out of my sanity. It begged the question of what was going to happen now?

My life was becoming a storm in the middle of the ocean and the wave of events were beating down on my small boat. There were calm days like this too, that somehow lent me the falsehood of respite... then the beating would start again and somehow, it was always way worse than the last one. It was endless.

What did it want me to suffer next? I admitted to myself, that there was a part of me that whispered the crashing waters may never cease and that I was going to have to learn to live with it.