"As I said, I'm not weak."
She smirked at him when the doorbell rang." Expecting anyone?"
__
"No, are you?" He asked back.
Her head shook sideways. "I'll check it out then."
He left the room, she didn't want him to, she needed him with her here and now, his body on hers like a droplet on a leaf. She wanted him to stay but he left anyways, to the door that sang to him, ding dong. Going with her throbbing heart.
The dong sound ricochet round the room while he reached out his hand and opened the door slowly.
No one,
No one? What was this? Some prank? He had left the comfort of warm arms to the cold of an intending rain wind outside his home.
Mmmmm...
Whatever this was, he didn't like it. His mind began to drift from the pain of answering a prank doorbell to his wife waiting for him in the kitchen, he shivered.
He did not realise the cause of the shivering was not from the thought of what his wife could do to him when he retraces his step back to the kitchen, it came from a small dark orb of wind that passed through him into the house.
He didn't realise this because he thought about one of the blessedness of being married. He smiled like a boy in love for the first time.
"I remember that smile" Idalia said leaning by the kitchen door, her eyes longing and pleading, the cloth she wore still the way it was. D*mn! She had a way with him always and always.
He needed to be a man and man up the situation.
"What smile?" He closed the door slowly.
"That one on your face now" she answered.
Taking a first step to her he shrugs, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Well..."
___
His mind could not stay on the food in front of him for long, he was thinking of the other food sitting opposite him eating delicately and carefully like she was going to break.
He smiled.
Without raising her head, she says; "He is looking at me, isn't he?"
"He just can't take off his eyes from her" He chuckled slowly.
"Indeed," she nods her head carefully. "Well, she's eating for two, so he's got to wait."
__
She looked at him and knew he was a different man, he had grown to love her, he had grown into maturity. Both of them had been a victim of forced marriage, it sounds strange in this century but yes, they were, and it hit Lai irawo harder than it did to Idalia.
She loved him almost instantly when they met, she appreciated him, she felt protected, she felt like a woman, she felt more alive than she had in a long time. This was the effect he had on her from their first meeting.
But there was sadness in his eyes.
Sadness she knew she was supposed to feel but couldn't after looking at him. She knew she was going to try her best to make him love her back... The same way she did.
Lai irawo on his end wasn't so pleased with being forced into marrying someone he only saw on social media and met only just one. Yes, she was a figure, an ambassador of some very famous brand like that, he saw her crown of beauty and adored it but...
His heart was broken into pieces.
He'd loved someone and she used him for a sport, this made him grow cold towards the gender. Not because she played with him, but because she was someone he had committed to and she, she 'wasn't so sure she could deal' according to her parting words.
Several months into their marriage,
Idalia had tried so much to bring him out of the pit he had buried himself in. He saw this and wished he could help but, he was comfortable where he was until...
The accident.