Regret16 min read
Tie, Ice Cream, and the Way He Ate Me Alive
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I woke with the taste of someone else's breath still warm on my tongue and a name like a secret pressed against my ribs. "Rafael… mine," I whispered to the empty air and surprised myself with how steady it sounded.
A knock at the door dragged me back into the shabby little desk, the thin mattress, the small life I'd borrowed for a week. I blinked the dream away and found my palms sweaty and my cheeks wet with tears I hadn't known I cried. I sat up, wrapped my school uniform tighter around my shoulders, and opened the door.
Delphine stood there like a queen inspecting a charity case. Her dress was too perfect, her smile like a set of teeth on a hunting dog. She carried a big mahogany box and a grin that counted favors.
"Look what I brought," she said. "Abigail, these are my castoffs. Pretty, aren't they? Go marry Rafael and the world will think you are mine."
"Why don't you marry him?" I asked, because questions come out of me the way rain comes after drought.
Delphine's lip curled. "He's twenty-eight and rich, and I'm the eldest. Do you think a skinny country thing like you is worthy? I would never marry someone who looks like a barnyard animal."
She reached out, touched my shoulder like it was fragile glass. I looked up and saw her surprised as if she had expected a smaller creature under my skin. I smiled in a way that felt like armor and said quietly, "I will marry him."
Delphine's face split in suddenly furious light. Before I could understand what was happening, my feet left the floor and the sky dropped with me. I hit the terrace hard and heard Delphine's voice above me, a broken thing of fury.
"You bitch! You broke my leg! I'll have you killed!"
I lay on the cool stone and tasted metal. The servant who had come with Delphine scurried away, terrified, and I heard the nest of voices in the house as if from under water. That was the day I stopped being a simple girl and became a chess piece.
Weeks later I arrived at Rafael Vasiliev's house wearing a white dress one size too big. They called it my wedding, but Rafael didn't appear. He had never agreed to it. The old man had said a thing about his grandson and profit and so the house placed me under a chandelier and called me their future.
"You're just a name on a paper," the cook told me once when I wandered into the kitchen. "He'll cancel it. We'll pay you a little and send you home."
But I had decided. I had told myself a thousand times in the months since Delphine's shove that I would not be someone to be thrown away.
That first night Rafael found me in his bathroom, standing under the shower that belonged to him because my own had been "broken," as the servants said. Water ran over my spine and fog rose like a curtain. When I turned, he stood framed in the doorway like a painting. His shirt was white, buttoned to the top, his tie neat. He wore glasses with gold rims and moved like someone who had taught the world how to be still.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"I—I'm Abigail Bond," I said and added, because I thought it was the truth in that moment, "I'm here to be his wife."
Rafael's mouth curved. "You call me…?"
"Uncle?" I asked, too small suddenly. "I mean—Rafael—"
He caught the edge of my towel, and for a second my breath left me. "Call me 'uncle,'" he said, correcting me in a voice that did not mean "uncle." "Call me that. For now."
I called him "uncle" because he asked, and when he left the door he said, softer than the stone under my hands, "Try being his wife."
He let me stay. The servants whispered. They said I had the look of someone bought at an auction. They said he wouldn't keep me. They said a lot of things like knives.
"You're supposed to be delicate," the head maid whispered one afternoon. "You ruin everything by being so visible."
I learned the rhythms of his house. I learned how to cook, to clean, to keep my voice small. I learned the servants' schedules, the way Rafael's eyes watched me in the quiet, and the way his temper wrapped tight like a leash.
One evening, while I helped in the kitchen, I cut my hand cleaning a broken plate. The kitchen fell silent when he came in.
"Your hand," he said.
"I'll be fine," I tried to say, voice small as a child's, but he walked over and took my fingers into his mouth.
Time folded. My heart did something a young animal does before it surrenders; it surrendered.
"Take a bandage," Cedar Powell, the butler, said after what felt like ten minutes of trance. "I'll—I'll go get a nurse."
He came back with a box of bandages and a professional confusion on his face. Rafael dismissed everyone and called me "wife" in a voice that made my knees weak for reasons I did not understand.
"Call me 'uncle,'" he'd said months ago. Now he called me "wife." Names have weight.
My days passed in small sweetness. I learned to make the soup he liked, to fold his handkerchiefs, to put warm footbaths ready at night. I discovered things like a man's hands on your wrists and how quickly your skin can set aflame. The house whispered that he was fragile—someone to protect.
"You'll wait for him?" my friend Griffin Mitchell asked, concern held like a lantern in his voice.
"I like him," I said, which was not the whole truth. I liked how he smelled like cut grass and how he swallowed the world in his hands. I liked the way he asked me to call him "uncle" and then pretended to scold me for saying "husband." It made me feel like I knew a secret those around us did not.
Sometimes, when I went to work at the café in the morning—because I told Rafael I would still work, to be honest in the things that mattered—Griffin would complain like an older brother.
"You're too soft," he said one day. "He'll play you."
"He's not playing me," I said.
"You don't even have his number," Griffin said. "You trust that he will send the carriage when he says he will?"
So I waited. For five hours on a curb outside a coffee shop, I waited for him. A man with a yellow Lamborghini, Griffin, came to sit with me and offered coffee. I refused. When Rafael finally arrived, he pulled me back into his car with an affection that tasted like smoke and thunder. He told me to go home early from work and keep to myself. He said it in a way that made me want to obey.
"You must protect yourself," he said once, looking at me with eyes colder than ice on a winter morning, "or I will lock you away."
I smiled. "I will only belong to you," I said. "I will not belong to other men."
A dozen people crowded into our life. There was Mario Liang, the chef Rafael's house hired, who made food that made my heart ache for different reasons. There was Chance Ikeda and Eli Engel—old friends who treated Rafael like a god and me like the moon's reflection on a pond. Jordan Makarov, a woman with practiced sighs, came to the house and called herself his friend. I learned, gradually, the customs of men who guard things.
One afternoon when the house was quiet, Rafael sat me beside him and asked with that curiously calm voice, "Do you know what a wife owes a husband?"
We had flirted with words like that before. I had learned how to make his food and tie his tie. "To cook and care and keep the house in order," I said, with my head bowed.
"And to protect? And to share warmth?" He glanced at me as if testing a new instrument.
"I will do that," I said.
He smiled in a way that startled me, and for a moment—only a moment—he loosened the neatness of his shirt, the precise order of his life.
That night he let me sit with him while he worked. Later, he took off his dark glasses and stared at me over the rim. For the first time, the glass barrier between us was lifted and the world revealed in him something fierce. He bound my wrist with his tie, not cruelly, but with an insistence that felt like magic.
"Bound to me," he murmured, "I can work knowing you're here."
We worked with our hands tied like two halves of a chain. He typed and I watched and my fingers brushed his, and the world made sense.
Everything moved toward a center until the night of the company crisis.
"Someone stole our code," Eduardo Chandler said on a night the sky was a slab of coal. He was Rafael's assistant, a man who kept his voice in check. "A senior engineer—Gage Duke."
"What?" Rafael's hand closed like a fist.
"He's gone overseas," Eduardo said. "He resigned and took a leave mid-project."
The lab filled with the kind of silence that has teeth. Rafael's shoulders dropped and then tightened in slow, terrifying motion. "Who else knew?"
"Only the team," Francisco Myers, another assistant, said. "We suspect an inside job."
I felt my stomach drop. The work Rafael had poured two years into—two years of nights and blood and fingers—was taken. Worse, Rafael's face became a map of hurt.
"You need me," I said.
He blinked. He had been fierce, a god in that room, and now he looked like a man with a wound. "I need someone who keeps me from losing myself," he said. "Stay with me tonight."
So I sat in the lab while he worked. We ate from small boxes that tasted like home, and when an alarm went off he did not shout. He only touched my hand, meaning, "Go."
A week later, the traitor's name surfaced at a press conference Sebastian had been preparing for. Papers whispered about Gage Duke going abroad, about a pregnant lover, about bribery. We created a trap. We let rumors line up like children and then we pulled the final thread.
But not all traps need spies. Some need a public stage.
Delphine's face appeared at the charity ball, the same smile that had thrown me. She had gone on to more marriages, more parties, more influence. She always seemed to be the one with hands in pockets when life required delicacy. She had guests, a thousand shining faces, and a huge screen behind the dais where the family played their "memories"—carefully edited, glossy.
I walked into the hall with Rafael at my side, not because I wanted to attend but because he asked, and I had learned that saying "no" to Rafael was a small revolution. The hall buzzed with people who had positions and brand names. Delphine swept by in a gown and smiled like an empress on a white horse.
The lights dimmed and a hush fell. The microphone whispered. "We would like to present a short film," the host said.
Delphine beamed. I felt Rafael's hand tighten around mine, the heat in it like a live coal.
Then the screen lit, but what rolled was not old wedding footage; it was messages and photos and hidden camera clips—a patchwork of secrets. The feed cut to an old CCTV of Delphine in our family's terrace. Then the sound—a man's voice, shaky—that fit over the image.
"How can we allow her to go?" it said. "She ruined my plans. Throw her out."
Delphine's smile faltered. The clips were relentless. There were messages displayed in big white letters on black: "Make it look like an accident." "No one will know." "I will make sure she never speaks again."
I watched the room tilt. People reached for phones. Somebody started recording. The crowd that had come to admire a socialite watched as that socialite's mask slid and fall: Delphine's face, as she watched footage of herself, went through a sequence I will not forget: "confidence → confusion → denial → rage → collapse → supplication." She had been the hand that sent me into the terrace that day. The room was witness.
"Who gave that to you?" she shrieked. The syllables were thin and precise and suddenly vulgar in her mouth.
I stood up. My palms were steady. "You pushed me," I said into the hush. "You broke me. You put me on a terrace like a toy and expected the world to sort it out."
A hundred phones rose, the screened hall became a sea of cameras. Rafael's voice, low and almost quiet, reached me like a river. "Tell them what you did," he said.
I did.
I described how my sister had said I was "unsuitable," how she had thrown me, how she'd stood and cursed me with a voice that wanted my end, how her servants had fled. "She tried to ruin me," I said.
Delphine's face went from a flinty grin to a pale mask. She laughed once, a sound like breaking glass, and said, "You lie."
"Do you deny it?" I asked.
She looked at the people around her, her patrons, her friends. The sound of murmuring swelled. Cameras flashed. Someone called out: "Show the chats!"
The screen jumped to messages—her messages—calling me "trash," arranging times, bitter words typed when she thought she was safe. The host, his professionalism slewed by shock, kept the microphone steady whilst the cameras recorded. I watched Delphine's fingers tremble. Her breathing was a living thing.
She came toward me then, rage like a dog lunging. "You can't—" she began.
"Sit down," Rafael said. He was standing now and the room flattened into a single note. "Sit down and tell them why."
She obeyed like someone had cut her leash.
"She was little more than a name on a paper," she snarled. "Our family…"
"Sit down!" This time it was Eduardo who rose, the tension of the family like a taut wire snapping. He took Delphine by the arm. "You're under scrutiny."
"No!" she cried. "I didn't—"
She looked around. People were recording. People were whispering. People who had once accepted her performance now listened with new eyes. A woman in a sapphire gown stood up and said, "You set her up, Delphine. You made that child a joke."
Delphine's face melted into tears. They were not the grand theater tears she was used to showing on command; they were smaller and more human now. Her voice went high, then broke.
"Please," she begged. "Please don't—"
"Why?" I asked, stepping forward. "Why did you throw me?"
Her knees gave. She sank to them like a puppet with strings cut. "Because I was afraid," she said at last. "I wanted him to have someone of a status. I—"
"Aren't you ashamed?" asked a woman at the back. "After all this—"
Delphine's mouth moved, then stilled. She began to plead with the whole hall, with the microphones and the cameras and the people she had once charmed. "I didn't mean—please—"
Her voice broke down into the exact sequence I had been told to expect by certain cruel tales: first the surprise, then denial, then public shame, then a collapse into tears and, finally, begging. And the crowd did something that felt like reckoning. Some started to take photos for newsfeeds. A group of young women clapped—not kindly, not sarcastically—but to applaud the truth coming out. Others recorded. Someone shouted, "Justice!" A man took out a tape recorder like court proceedings were being given life.
Delphine crawled then—literally got on her knees on the glittering floor of the hall, the jewels in her hair reflecting a dozen angry lights. "Please," she said to me, her voice trembling. "Please forgive me. I'll do anything."
I looked at her hands, the hands that had once touched me as if rearranging a doll. Her nails were chipped; the varnish like old promises.
"Do you think a sorry will fix what you tried?" I asked. "Do you think kneeling in cameras will bring back the months you wanted me silent?"
She shook. "I'll leave town. I'll give you my ring. I'll—" Her words flowed like a badly mended dam.
"Say you'll apologize in writing," Rafael said. He had not spoken until then. Every syllable was a blade.
"Say you'll pay for the hospital bills you would have caused," Eduardo added, "and you'll turn over any evidence you have—messages, recordings."
Delphine's face collapsed into a ruin. She had miscalculated everything. The room's reaction changed from fascination to an appetite for accountability. The cameras created a new kind of public square.
People around us recorded, applauded, shouted. Someone took a picture of her on her knees. "You're done," a young man said into his phone, and the word spread.
Delphine's proud shoulders slumped. She tried to stand and her legs would not. She was denied even the dignity of standing. "Please," she whimpered, a sound that had once been used to manipulate now hollowed with true fear.
Others moved in, formalities now in motion: "We will review the evidence," the host intoned. "Legal counsel will be contacted." A woman in a wine-red dress stepped forward to comfort me with a steady hand on my shoulder as the cameras kept rolling.
Delphine looked at me then and for the first time saw the child she'd once tried to crush. She begged. She wailed. "I didn't mean to," she said. "They told me—"
"They told you to ruin a girl's life," I finished. "You tried to make me invisible so you could be visible. Now the world knows."
Her final shift—from arrogant predator to a small creature begging to be safe—was complete. She was asked to leave the hall, to step onto a networked path of inquiries and laws and social scorn. Cameras followed her. People recorded, posted. A chorus of whispers and clicks and cameras made a new truth.
At length, she was escorted out, still pleading, still stumbling on the syllables of regret.
No one beat her. No one forced her into a pit. The punishment was worse: exposure. The world watched the queen fall and nothing was ever the same.
Back at home that night Rafael pulled me close and said, "You were brave."
"I had a reason," I said. "I had you."
He looked at me and his gaze traveled like an inspection. "You will not have to fight alone."
After Delphine's exposure and the company's narrow escape from ruin—thanks in part to a trick we set to lure Gage Duke back—we settled into an odd life of me learning and him protecting. I leaned on his arm more, kept his shirts neat, learned how to empty his pockets so I could find the notes he forgot. He taught me nothing with lessons; he taught me by occupying the spaces in which I thought to be small.
There were nights I thought I might explode with love and nights I thought I had no right to love at all. He pushed back at my advances sometimes, warned me about boundaries with a voice that flamed like a match and then cooled. Other times, when he was alone and the lights were only the moon, he'd tie our wrists together with a tie and let me fall asleep in the curve of his shoulder.
"Why hold back?" I asked once.
"Because I fear what would happen if I didn't," he said. "You are small in years, and I have the force to break the world for you. I will not destroy what I mean to protect."
"Slowly," I whispered. "One step at a time."
"One step," he agreed.
We learned each other in staccato, in footbaths in darkened rooms, in burned dinners, in tired laughter with friends by the lake. There was a day I brought him a melting ice cream by the pool because I had read somewhere that sharing a lick of a cone could be like a kiss. He took the cone and… then the water rose around me as he hauled me into the pool; his arms closed around me like a shelter.
"Up," he said, when the world spun with the sound of water and my hair stuck to my face. "On the steps. Now."
I did. He wrapped a towel around his shoulders, peel the wet weight from us both, and he looked at me as if I'd done something brave and small and tremendous. "Next time, I won't let you throw away the cone," he said.
"Would you ever let anyone take me?" I asked.
"Not if I can live one more night," he said. He smiled then, a brief easing that between two people said more than a thousand promises.
There were other wounds to wield against him. Gage Duke returned, enticed by the promise we'd dangled—a lie of a foreign lover expecting a son—and he came back only to be stopped by papers and the law. The company regained the code, my husband the dignity of his work. Gage left in chains of corporate justice, the papers wrote him into a life where he could not touch the things he'd stolen.
At home, the men who used to make the house cruel were gone. Cedar Powell ran the manor like a careful grandfather. Mario Liang made food like a king made gifts. Chance and Eli argued about the best wines and the worst chess moves. Jordan tried to be charming and failed; she wrapped a present for me once and left a note like an apology.
And Delphine? The world had recorded her fall. She reappeared months later at an arbitration hearing where she had to answer for her deeds. The press swarmed. I sat at the far table and watched her come in with a face like the moon in eclipse. Her voice trembled when she spoke. "I made a terrible mistake," she said. "I am sorry." She was sentenced to community service and ordered to issue a formal public apology on the steps of our family hall. People gathered. Cameras were there. This time, there was no private outrage; there was the slow click of accountability.
I watched her say the words I had once performed for her. She did not get to be a queen ever again. She was reduced publicly—kneeling, then standing, then bowing—to the size of someone who had hurt another human for reasons that never were reasons. Her fingers trembled. She begged. The crowd murmured. She cried until the words meant nothing but the sound of regret.
I did not feel triumph. I did not dance on the ruin. I felt only the absence of the danger that had been always near me. That absence had a face like Rafael's when he cradled me, and in that emptiness I found something like peace.
We grew into a strange pair: me learning to be not only a daughter of a farmhouse but the wife of a man who could color the skyline with the tilt of his hand; he learning to hold someone without breaking them. We tried being patient. We cooked together, we argued about small things, and we kissed only when the world was gentle.
"One day," I told him once as we sat on the terrace where the first betrayal had happened, "I want to kiss you properly. Not accident, not dare, but because it is right."
He looked at me and tapped the rim of my glass, a small quiet sound. "Then we'll do it right," he said. "No pressure."
We were a slow thing. We held ties as threads between our wrists until we learned how to take them off.
When the world finally turned and the heat of the scandal cooled, I sometimes opened my phone at night and saw messages from others who had watched: "You were brave," they typed, or "I cried," or "My sister did the same." And sometimes I answered.
"Stay," Rafael said once that night when the moon had a silver crack over it. He put his tie loose around my wrist and leaned in. "Stay with me. Let me make you shore."
I stayed. I learned how to make the dinner he liked and the soup that made his shoulders drop. I learned how to stand up when people stared and to answer when they asked why I did not leave. I learned that being someone's safe place could be a fierce work.
The tie he used to bind our wrists sometimes was the same tie that I later kept in a drawer like a talisman. It smelled faintly of him. The ice cream we never finished by the pool lived only in a slippery memory of a fall into water and a hand that caught me.
I burned my bridges with the old world and let the new one build around us. We were not perfect. We were two damaged people leaning together, and sometimes leaning was a perfect thing.
"Do you regret anything?" I asked one winter evening when the snow had made the garden quiet and white.
He looked at me, the corner of his mouth a private smile, and then he brushed my cheek with a thumb. "Only the thought of living without you," he said.
"Then do not speak like that," I told him. "It is selfish."
He laughed softly. "Maybe I am selfish."
We kept the tie and the ice cream and the memory of the terrace. Those things belonged to us. They reminded us of how fragile we had once been and how someone had chosen to guard the answer in me.
At times I thought of Delphine and felt a ghost of pity. The woman who had tried to destroy me had been afraid in the worst way. Her punishment, public and searing, was never mine to deliver, though I had stood when the world recorded her. The law and the crowd had done the sharpest work. The rest of the world learned how to watch.
We survived. Rafael learned how to be not only the man with a perfect tie but the man who could be kind and cruel in careful measure. I learned how to be both cunning and tender. We were not storybook. We were a series of small daily choices and the slow building of trust.
At night, sometimes he would bind one wrist to mine with nothing more than his tie, and we'd see who could last the longest without reaching for the other's hand. "I win," I'd say sometimes, and he'd pretend to be offended.
We grew old with the habit of each other's warmth. The last time I saw the old terrace where Delphine had pushed me, I laughed with Rafael and said, "You know, the place doesn't scare me anymore."
He kissed the top of my head like someone locking a door. "You were always braver than you believed," he said.
I smiled then, because I had learned that the kind of bravery that matters is not loud. It's the kind that gets up after being pushed, the kind that feeds and protects and keeps vigil. It tastes faintly of ice cream and the rust of a tie and the memory of a hand that caught you.
In the end, the world remembered us by those small things: the tie looped in the drawer and the picture of me, dripping and laughing, by a pool that reflected a man who had once nearly drowned in his own feeling and now lived in the quiet of looking after me.
We kept our ties. We kept our ice cream cones half-melted in a memory album. And every year, on the night the charity ball used to be, we would sit on the terrace and look at the sky and say the one honest sentence we had learned to say to each other.
"Once more," Rafael would murmur, and I would laugh and hand him the tie.
The End
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