“You’re not abhorrent,” JoAnn whispered, face crumpled and lined. “I never, ever thought that.”

The raw truth in that declaration drove April to reach for her mother’s hand. JoAnn’s fingers were slender and cold and unsteady. So fragile, April couldn’t squeeze too hard for fear of breaking them.

Still, her mother needed to realize. “But that’s how you make me feel.”

Everything she’d scripted in her head last night, she’d said. All but the last bit. And the voices of the two men were getting louder, closer, so she needed to say it now.

“Dad will never, ever understand how he’s hurt us. Even if he did understand, he’d never acknowledge it.” April gave her mother’s hand a gentle shake. “But you’re not him. Please, Mom. Please think about whether you want to keep hurting me, now that you know you are.”

Her mother’s tears were silent now, their trails glinting in the sunlight through the window, her pain etched in lines around her pale mouth.

“I only wanted to help,” she whispered.

April pressed a kiss to the back of her mother’s hand, the skin there more papery and thin than she’d recalled. Lightly freckled, despite sunscreen and spot-reducing hand creams.

In her mind, her mother was still young and glamorous. Sheathed in slender, formfitting dresses, makeup perfect as she left on her husband’s arm for his firm’s holiday parties, calling out last instructions for the babysitter until Brent got impatient and yanked her out the door.

But she wasn’t young anymore. Neither was April, really.

They were running out of time to fix this. To fix them.

The only way forward was honesty. “It doesn’t help, Mom. It only hurts.”

Then the guest room door was opening, and the amiable, man-to-man chuckles of Marcus and her father stopped abruptly.

Brent frowned but didn’t move closer to his wife. “JoAnn? What—”

“I think we’d better go,” April said. Somehow, Marcus was right there beside her, his hand resting warm and strong on her shoulder. She instinctively stepped away from the contact. “I’m sorry to miss lunch, Mom. I left your present in the den.”

In her peripheral vision, she could see Marcus staring down at her, brows drawn, hand frozen in midair, but he didn’t matter now. Her mother was still sitting on that bed. Still hunched, narrow shoulders shaking as she wept silently, so as not to embarrass anyone with her heartbreak.

Bending down, April kissed the top of her mom’s head. Inhaled the powdery scent of flowers, maybe for the last time.

“When you’ve had a chance to think, call me.” She was wetting her mother’s hair, so she lifted her face after one last inhalation. “I love you, Mom.”

With her father blustering protests and demands, her mother crying, and Marcus trailing silently behind her, April gathered her purse and left her parents’ house.

Her eyes might be blurry, but her back was straight.

Good thing too. This hellacious day wasn’t over yet. Once they were five minutes down the road, she was having Marcus pull over.

Her mother wasn’t the only person who’d hurt her today.

She didn’t intend to let it happen again.

Rating: Mature

Fandoms: Gods of the Gates – E. Wade, Gods of the Gates (TV)

Relationships: Aeneas/Lavinia

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe – Modern, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Arranged Marriage, Lavinia Has Body Image Issues, For Obvious Reasons

Stats: Words: 1893 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 47 Kudos: 276 Bookmarks: 19

Untouchable

Unapologetic Lavinia Stan

Summary:

Lavinia knows exactly why her husband doesn’t touch her, doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t bed her. Possibly, however, she may have made a few assumptions along the way. Ones Aeneas intends to correct.

Notes:

Thank you to my fabulous beta, Book!AeneasWouldNever! He’s been helping me work on emotional heft in my fics, so whatever such heft this story has belongs rightfully to him.

* * *

At night, the irony choked her. Somehow, having a beautiful husband, having a husband she’d grown to love, had made her married existence so much worse, so much more painful, than if she’d simply married Turnus instead. Turnus, her fiancé before fate—and parental interference—had broken the engagement. Turnus, all brown curls and bluster and righteous anger and wiry strength.

Turnus, who would have bedded her in darkness, fucked her from behind whenever possible, and avoided looking at her face the same way he’d avoided looking at her face since meeting her.

But at least he’d have taken her to bed. Unlike her actual husband.

Her husband, golden in the sunlight. Her husband, smooth muscles and features polished to perfection. Her husband, polite and attentive and distant as the moon overhead.

For Aeneas, evidently, no amount of darkness was sufficient to disguise whom he’d married, whom he’d have to fuck. For him, she was more than simply homely and awkward and everything else her father had ever told her. She was untouchable. So ugly he couldn’t abide a fingertip’s worth of contact.

Or so she might have gone on believing forever, until she got drunk one night. Very, very drunk. For the first time ever. At Dido’s bachelorette party, drowning her stupid envy over how Aeneas’s ex—now Lavinia’s faithful friend—had managed to get over the man and move on in a way Lavinia never could as his wife.

When she came home in a cab, he met her at the end of their driveway, forewarned of her arrival by Dido’s text. When she staggered, he tugged her against his side and supported her with a strong arm around her shoulders.

When she looked blearily up at him and slurred, “Don’t have to touch me. Know you don’t want to. Made that clear enough,” he stopped dead on their front sidewalk, still holding her, brow furrowed in confusion.

Then, when she repeated the horrible, humiliating truth, he glared at her with eyes blazing like the stars above and spat out his own truth.

“I have wanted to touch you every minute of every day for months now,” he said. “What the actual, ever-loving fuck are you talking about?”

24

APRIL HAD SHRUGGED AWAY HIS ATTEMPTED COMFORT IN her parents’ guest room, so Marcus didn’t try to reach out to her again. Instead, he silently accepted her keys, passed her the tissue box and a bottle of water, set the GPS to her apartment’s address, and began driving them home.

She didn’t want him to touch her. That was her right, and no doubt she had good reason to distance herself from him. He simply didn’t understand what that reason was. And he might not be allowed physical contact, but he could still steal glances at her as he drove. At stop signs and red lights, and when he needed to wait behind someone making a left turn.

In fleeting glimpses, he scanned her tear-stained countenance for some hint of what he’d done wrong, and found . . . nothing. Nothing.

Her face was speckled stone. Impervious.

His confusion and anxiety ballooned by the moment, filling his skull until he wondered how his ears hadn’t popped from the pressure.

Without warning, she pointed to the right. “Pull off here.” They’d reached a little park not too far from the freeway, and he obediently turned into its lot. “Pick a space without anyone else nearby, please.”

The farthest corner of the lot offered spots with the most privacy, and he chose the last space on the end. Within moments, the car was parked, and the hum of the engine went quiet, but he kept his hands clutched tight on the steering wheel. Because he was nervous, and because he needed to keep them away from her until she was ready to be touched.

He studied her blotchy face and the balled-up tissues in her lap, his jaw aching with tension, his need to offer comfort overwhelming but stymied.

She didn’t speak. Not one word.

“April . . .” he finally said, her name a gravelly plea. “I don’t know what happened with your mom, and I don’t know how I fucked up, but I obviously did. I’m sorry.”

He’d thought he understood. Her father was an asshole, and being in his company upset her. If Marcus offered himself as a human barrier, then she could spend time with her mother and escape the visit home unscathed. Simple as that.

Only she’d emerged metaphorically bloodied instead, and Jesus. Jesus. Evidently he hadn’t helped at all. Best he could tell, he’d hung her out to dry instead.

His skin fucking crawled with shame at having inadvertently abandoned her in need. It was the absolute worst feeling. The worst.

Had he simply not listened hard enough? Or had she told him less than he’d realized, less than he needed to support and protect her? And if so, how could he have failed to notice such a glaring omission?

After another torturous silence, she finally responded to his apology, her words blunt and abrupt and startlingly loud in the hushed confines of the car.

“My father despises fat people. Including me. My mother wants to save me from the judgment of people like him, so she constantly advises me about my body.” She pressed her trembling lips together. “I told her today I would no longer visit her if the two of them came as a package deal, because I have no desire to see him ever again. Then I said I would cut off contact with her entirely if she didn’t stop discussing my body.”

Metal in his mouth. He’d drawn blood somewhere, lip or cheek or tongue, and it felt right. Blood should be spilled in response to what she’d just told him.

That motherfucker.

There were assholes, and then there were—

He didn’t even know what the right term for her father was.

Even then—even ravaged by tears, her cheeks blotched with distress—April glowed in the sunlight through the window. How her father couldn’t see her beauty or value, how he’d turned away from the daughter who should have been his greatest pride, Marcus had no idea.

And her mom. Her mom.

In some ways, that was almost worse, wasn’t it? In the end, a dismissal by her malignant asshole of a father might be easier to shake off than the inadvertent slights of her mother.