Wild Fiction

Page 42 of 199 | Previous Page | Next Page

She felt a knot tighten in the middle of her chest. Was it just her that they did not want to have children with or had she just picked the wrong men. The author was a seedless jaffa and now this man doesn’t want the child she was carrying, his child.
Her mind returned to the present and she took another sniff of the air. The smell of perfume in the bathroom had disappeared. Either she had become used to it or had been imagining it. If he’s up to something, she thought, it’ll be easy to catch him at it. He has no sense of cunning and will trip himself up eventually.
The author was first to retire to bed that evening. Genevieve followed him half an hour later. She listened carefully to his snoring when she entered the room. There was something different about it, more regular, more comical, perhaps even staged. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at him. He was lying on his side facing away from her and his body lifted gently each time he breathed in. The rhythm was faster and more even that it usually was when he snored. She smiled to herself. He’s faking it, she thought. He’s pretending to be asleep.
She crawled under the sheet and lay next to him. Five minutes later she began to breathe deeply and slowly in a steady rhythm. Within minutes of her faux sleep, the author stopped his charade and moved. She kept her eyes tightly closed but could feel him leave the bed and heard him open the door and slink from the room. She slipped out of bed and put on a pair of thick ski socks. Keeping a distance behind him, she followed him down the stairs, through the kitchen, through the garage and into the basement. She heard conversation ahead of her and quickly hid behind a pillar. From there, she could see her husband talking to two men. They were too far away and speaking too softly for her to be able to pick up more than a word or two. After a couple of minutes of frustrated straining she left her hiding place and walked up to the men. James stopped speaking in mid sentence and stared at her.
‘I heard a noise so I came to investigate,’ Genevieve said. ‘Who are these people?’ she asked pointing at James and Conrad. Rebecca was nowhere to be seen. The three men stood there, dumbstruck. ‘I know you,’ she said to Conrad, ‘and you,’ she said turning to James. You were in that disastrous novel he tried to write. You had a sister as well. Where’s she?’
‘You had her edited out,’ James replied.

Page 42 of 199 | Previous Page | Next Page