Still Waters

Chapter 33

      ** VIOLENCE, STRONG LANGUAGE AND ADULT SITUATIONS AHEAD **

So our little therapy game worked for a while. Collin started changing, slowly but surely, into the man that I knew he always wanted to be. He spent more time in the office and less time on the streets. He took whatever he had been storing over at my place out, probably because he knew it was too much of a temptation for me to have such easy access to it. Understandable, considering I was pregnant with his son. But it was all good. Without Collin stressing me all the time, I was also making my way to kicking my own bad habits...one by one.

Eventually, though, little stuff started setting him off again for no apparent reason. Like, he would yell at me if the TV was too loud, so I started watching it just above a whisper, not wanting to take any chances on potentially resurrecting the old Collin. Minor things like that didn't really bother me too much, though. I knew that if I changed whatever it was that I was doing to tick him off, then it wouldn't become a problem. The thing was, I was beginning to get used to living my life on eggshells. I tried to make as little noise as possible whenever he was over and I tried my very best not to speak to him unless he spoke to me first. I never could tell which topic of the day would set him off, so I simply settled comfortably into my own world of silence until I felt sure that it was safe to speak. It wasn't so bad, actually. The more pregnant I became, the more moody I became, too, and I didn't really feel like hearing a whole bunch of talking anyway.

Around the beginning of my third month, the morning sickness kicked in. Or, should I say the 24-7 sickness. Every little smell sent me running to the bathroom puking my guts out. Collin thought this was so funny. True, he was a changed man, but he still had that mean streak in him. Case in point: No matter what time of day he came over, he would make it a point to cook sausage and eggs.

Now, even that I could tolerate. It was messed up that he liked to make me sick, literally, but at least we weren't fighting anymore. In fact, it wasn't until the hang up calls started happening again that the tension resurfaced between us. I knew it was that same girl he was screwing, too, because every time she called he would snatch the phone away and start yelling and cussing into the mouthpiece. Collin only overreacted like that when he was dead wrong and knew it.

But I didn't say anything about that, either, too into the idea of keeping a peaceful home. Until...one day I walked into my peaceful home (keep in mind Collin still didn't actually live there at the time, he only had a key) and found a woman standing next to my man in my kitchen laughing and pushing all up on him, acting like she was trying to force a finger full of icing from my cake into his mouth. For a second I just stood there blinking, sure that I couldn't have possibly been seeing what I thought I was seeing.

Then I heard her voice.

I recognized it immediately.

Collin was dangerously close to licking the icing right off of her finger when he finally felt my eyes radiating a hole into the side of his head, and looked over. As soon as he saw me, he took a step back and tried to act like he knew I was standing there the whole time.

"Natasha, um, this is..."

I didn't even give him a chance to finish. Before he spoke the first word, I was already in the kitchen and punched the bitch dead in her bright red mouth.

"Get the fuck out!" I screamed at the top of my lungs and grabbed the nearest thing I could get my hands on. As luck would have it, it was the butcher knife that Collin had apparently used to cut the surprise cake that I had baked for him earlier that day. My hot homemade strawberry icing was still dripping from it.