Christine Zolendz © 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Again, this is dedicated to the ones that are bruised and broken
Take my hand
It’s scarred and stained
I’ll pull you up and help you stand
You have the strength to ride the storm
I promise you
Don’t look into the darkness
Don’t look back
Don’t even wave goodbye
Just find that courage
There is strength inside all of us
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Cold-Blooded Beautiful Playlist
Books by Christine Zolendz
Prologue
I had just finished my trauma ICU rounds. The overhead call came through for an incoming trauma, while I was sneaking in a Snickers candy bar and leaning with my back against the cool wall of the staff lounge. “Trauma One. Trauma One. ETA five minutes.” Savoring the sweetness of my first mouth-watering bite, I learned that the paramedics were en route and they were transporting a fifteen-year-old girl. She had been ejected from her family’s car after a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler on the Henry Hudson Parkway. God, that made my stomach plunge, while burning bits of chocolate-nougat-caramel bile teased the back of my throat. In this job, you never knew what was going to come through those emergency room doors: gunshot wounds, stabbings, motor vehicle collisions, but the worst, was when any of them had anything to do with kids.
Shoving one more bite of candy into my mouth, I tossed the rest of the unfinished chocolate bar into the trash, rushed out, and sprinted down the corridor. Icy blasts of sterilized air mingled with the dark bitter smells of disinfectant and hospital food, permeated around me—through me.
I was running through a crowd of people toward the trauma bay to scrub up, when a stunningly gorgeous woman stepped in front of me, tripping me and almost hurling me into the wall. She grabbed my arm with icy cold hands and yanked me to a stop just before I landed.
“You know,” she whispered in my ear, digging her perfectly manicured fingers into my skin, “he says my pussy is perfect. He calls me his ‘Triple P.’ Perfect Piece of Pussy.”
Oh, crap. Did the Freud Squad lose another patient?
“Excuse me?” I laughed, a bit out of breath, thinking she must have me confused with someone else. Either that, or someone left a bag of nympho-crazy-women open on the wrong floor of the hospital.
“Your husband,” she explains, “after I ride him hard and fast. It’s what he says. ‘Triple P is what he calls me.” She smiled triumphantly through blood red lipstick, and sashayed away on a pair of loud, deep-red clicking heels that were the exact shade that was smeared heavily across her lips.
“I believe you have the wrong person, Miss,” I called after her, standing straighter, one hand dropping over my stomach.
The stunning woman pivoted on the balls of her feet, flinging a handful of golden bouncy curls over a shoulder as if she was starring in one of those perfect hair dye commercials. The hospital corridors spiraled out behind her; bright florescent lights casting blurs of bleeding rainbows inside my tired eyes. “Oh, I don’t think so, Doctor Samantha Matthews. No, I don’t think so at all. He, David, even showed me a picture of you.”
She knew my name. And my husband’s.
Was my I.D. badge showing?
No, it was inside my scrubs.
Behind the woman at the other end of the hall, over the loud hiss and clink of the emergency room doors, chaos erupted with the incoming rush of EMTs rolling in the injured girl, and for a moment, a brief one that I am still so ashamed of, I froze in complete and utter anguish. Rusty metallic smells hit my senses so forcefully that I stumbled back a step, caught off guard. The blonde haired woman smiled widely, winked, and then my vision caught the body of the fifteen-year-old trauma patient rolling towards me. I was on the move, trying my best to detach and store the hurt and anger for later. This bleeding fifteen-year-old needed me more. I barely had time to snap on a pair of latex gloves.
My stomach twisted, tightening every organ on its way up to my throat, filling it with a pool of vomit. I had to gag before swallowing it back down. Detach. Just do your job. Focus, before your knees buckle.
The patient flailed about on the gurney, covered from head to toe with blood, as panting paramedics screamed the rundown of what had happened. Deep crimson gauze was wrapped around the patient’s thigh, head, and midsection, and I had to work fast and stay sharp if I was going to save the child’s life. Dear God, please, please help me save this child. Let me forget about David for a minute. Let me do my job.
Removing the dressings, I started going through my checklist and barking out orders. Thankfully, Samantha Matthews, the sideswiped wife, disappeared, and Doctor Samantha Matthews, head trauma surgeon, took over.
Despite the thousands of hours of surgical training, horrifying years as a military surgeon overseas, and even all the brainwashing I endured in my early medical career, I still struggled with all of the human emotions that go along with harsh trauma. You don’t get desensitized to it, not when it’s a kid lying on the table, fighting for her life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Yet, as I always do, I try my hardest to project confidence, grace, strength, and complete control in front of my trauma team. Mentally, as my hands crawled along the poorly bandaged girl, I felt all of her injuries with the tips of my fingers.
Holy shit, under the bandages, the kid was ripped to shreds. It was as if her skin, the entirety of it, split down her center on impact. The stark white of her bones stood out against the angry red of her torn flesh. The deafening sound of my pulse rushed through my ears, engulfing my entire universe into one focal pinpoint. Exact. Simple. Save the life.
Immediately, I shoved my index finger into the bloodiest laceration on her thigh, plugging up the source of the most lethal area of the hemorrhage.
“Let’s secure an airway!” I turned my attention to one of the trauma nurses. “I need an IV, an operating room…and get me two units of O-negative.”
“Vitals!”
“Eighty-two over fifty-two! Heart rate one twenty!”
“Let’s go. Let’s go,” I barked, and within minutes, my trauma team flew into the operating room, rolling in the patient with my fingers still deep inside her leg. The child’s femoral artery was completely severed. In a matter of minutes, she could be dead, so I needed to work fast.
My team worked like one fluid person, perfect, and precise. No one noticed my bones were warring with gravity to move,
or that my muscles were braided with thousand pound weights that were trying to pull me through the floor.
Within a few hours, I meticulously repaired whatever damage I could, dressed her wounds, and in my head, said a tiny prayer for the girl. Praising my flawless operating staff, I trudged out of the operating room, and headed straight to the sink to scrub the mess of blood and fluids from my body.
Emotionally exhausted, I made my way back to my office where I’d left the small lamp on, and the door wide open. The outside sky had turned almost black with the moonless night, and only one street lamp shone through my small window.
I’d done my best to save that girl’s life. She was finally in stable condition in ICU, after four hours of intense surgery, and piecing her back together. But there was no family for her to be comforted by, because they were all down in the morgue. There wasn’t any family to inform of the surgery or condition of the patient, because they all perished in the crash.
With my adrenaline rush depleted, my body crashed, and I collapsed heavily into the chair behind my desk. I was beyond exhausted, and I still had two hours left of my shift. Dropping my gaze, I noticed a stark white envelope lying in the middle of the desktop, with my name written in bold red letters across the top. I could’ve left it there, unopened and untouched, and then my story would have been so very different, but I didn’t. The tiny slip of a paper, a small tear in the flap, and life could change completely. Endings and beginnings were meshed together, and formed circles like the little hamster wheels I never knew I ran in. My bones turned rubbery as I opened it, hesitantly, and fumbling. Unfolding the letter that was hidden inside, written on elegant pale pink stationary, I leaned my head back against the cold leather of the chair and read the words that would change my entire fucking life. Decorated and scented with roses was this shit:
Dear Samantha Matthews,
You don’t know me, and you may not believe anything in this letter. You may even think of it as a cruel prank, but please read it in its entirety and try to believe every word. I’m writing because you need to know the truth. We both need to know where each of us stands on this issue.
We have a lot in common, you and I. For one, we are both fucking your husband. Yes, you’re the wife of my lover. A lover who has told me that he and I need to take some time away from each other, because he says that you are pregnant. That’s why I came to the hospital today, to see for myself. To see with my own eyes all that should have been mine.
I’ve hated you for so long. I’ve hated everything you were. You have taken everything that was supposed to be mine and kept it for yourself. Now you need to know the truth, the truth about David and me, and let us be. I only hope that you have the brains to understand that I’m the one he’s supposed to be with. He doesn’t love you. He can’t, because he’s too in love with me. I’m the one he craves, and I’m the one he sneaks out to, because you’re just not enough for him. Truth be told, he never loved you. Yours was a marriage of convenience, a business deal.
I’m not sorry for anything I have done. I’m not sorry for hurting you, because everything you have, should have been mine. And I’m not sorry for telling you this, because you need to leave and let us be together. Everything I have done with David has been out of pure love and zero regret. My heart, my body, my mind, and my soul, belong to him; not yours. I belong with him and to him; you are not the right one for his needs. Maybe in the medical world that you both live in, but not in David’s real world. A world you know nothing about. You’re not what he wants or needs, I am.
I love him too much to be without him.
Every single time he came home late, it was because of me. Every single time he came into your bed, smelling a little different, it was because of me. Every minute he is away from you, he is with me.
I don’t even know if you’re really pregnant, nor do I care. Just realize that you will never know the real David, the one who loves me more than he could ever love someone like you.
Please show this letter to him, and listen to what he says. I’m sure he’ll lie to you and leave the punishments for me. I will take anything he will give me.
Aurora
My heart raced. What the hell kind of crap did I just step in? What kind of delusional freak writes a letter to her lover’s wife? Not that I believed it.
I needed my shift to end. I needed to get home. I needed to show this to David. None of this could be true, right?
Right?
I mean, I would know if he…I would be able to tell… Right?
I feel sick.
He says my pussy is perfect. He calls me his Triple P. Perfect Piece of Pussy. He showed me a picture of you, she’d said. Those were the exact words. I couldn’t unhear them, and they wouldn’t get the hell out of my head.
I counted the minutes in heartbeats, because that was all I felt, all I heard. The thick pounding thumps of my pulse slammed against my chest, until I could leave the hospital and go home.
In the stark white hallways, people spoke to me. I might have smiled some sort of zombified smile back at them, but I’ll never be sure. You’re never sure how other people experience you. The only thing I knew, was that I was just walking through corridors and waiting. Waiting until I could get home. Waiting to see my husband.
My husband.
The one who might be fucking a perfect piece of pussy.
Which apparently, was not mine.
David, the man that stood next to me in his sharp Armani suit, in my excruciatingly expensive antique framed wedding picture, which hung on tiny silver hooks against the soft cream-colored walls of our home.
I don’t even remember leaving the hospital. My brain could not wrap around the thought of the person I was married to, being with someone else. The front door to our apartment just sort of appeared in front of me, and I walked right through it. Sick to my stomach and so freaking nervous, I thought that I might shit myself.
I found him in the kitchen drinking his morning coffee, New York Times in hand, a glint of early morning light reflecting rainbows off his Rolex watch. He’d be leaving in ten minutes, following my rounds in the hospital. We were a well-oiled machine, at least that’s what I had thought. Until that woman grabbed my arm and whispered those words in my ear.
Perfect Piece of Pussy. His Triple P.
He never called me that. He usually never spoke while having sex with me.
This bullshit couldn’t be true.
But she knew I was pregnant. Not many people knew, and I sure as shit didn’t look almost twenty weeks into my pregnancy. I really feel sick.
I laid the letter out flat on the kitchen island where he sat, sliding it silently across the granite top, until it passed underneath the newsprint paper he grasped in his fingers.
He took a few seconds to skim over it. A small downward dip of his lip was all the expression he gave. “You aren’t entertaining the writings of some psychotic, are you?” He asked casually, after dropping the paper quickly. Picking up his coffee cup gingerly, he sipped silently at his fancy homemade vanilla cream latte. The stench of its sweetness made me gag.
“I thought it warranted a peek from you, since your name was implicated in the affair.”
“Where does it say my name?” He asked, turning the letter this way and that. “My full name? How do I know she’s writing this about me and not David Resner over in gynecology. He’s faced with cunts all day long. It’s probably him.”
“She spoke it, when she came to visit me at the hospital, and don’t be vulgar.” Yes, I was bluffing. She never mentioned his last name, only mine. Look, I usually trusted my husband explicitly, but something just didn’t feel right about this. It felt too real. For the first time, I questioned him, because really, it could very well be true. Maybe being pregnant was giving me a sixth sense. Paranoia.
He stood up and pecked a chaste kiss against my temple, leaving the letter on the table, disregarding it completely. “Don’t be fooled by childish high school drama. I have no tim
e for affairs. I’m lucky if I get to make love to my wife.” He smiled, grabbed my chin hard, and told me he loved me.
It was the first time I knew, without a doubt, he was lying to me. The first of many times.
It wouldn’t be one rash moment of infidelity, it was tens, it was hundreds, hell, it was probably more like thousands. I thought David was the love of my life. I was wrong. He was the love of many women’s lives. I found out that little tidbit of information fifteen minutes after that bastard left, and I tore through his piece of shit computer, armed with his password and printer.
What the hell?
Images, so many of them, file folders of them, of the most disturbing sexual nature I’d ever seen. Videos of rape fantasies, and OH MY GOD! WAS THAT A HORSE? Emails and exchanged pictures with other women, so many other women. There was an account on the popular AshleyMadison website, the number one dating site to find someone to cheat on your spouse with, beyond disturbing correspondence with private punishment clubs.
I know what all you marriage-believing-you-could-work-through-anything-if-you-just-believe-people, are thinking right now. Oh, she shouldn’t throw away a good marriage just because of a little infidelity. If only it were that easy.
Although, I would give you a slow applause for whatever you would choose in your own situation, I was not a person who believed a slew of infidelities could be forgiven. It couldn’t. Not in my eyes. Not in my heart. My marriage was over. There were no accidental slips and falls into various different vaginas. There were only distinct planned out choices to have affairs and go through with them. Repeatedly.
Unfortunately, his affairs were the least of my problems.
One particular file folder glowed on his desktop as if it were radioactive. SamMatt Pharmaceuticals.
SamMatt Pharmaceuticals? As in Samantha Matthew Pharmaceuticals? What the hell was in there?
With steady and precise fingers, I clicked it open.
SamMatt Pharmaceuticals was a multi-million dollar company almost as big as Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. Its labs were outsourced to other countries, and there was a list of top hospitals and doctors who spoke in their favor. Why was my name at the top of this list? Why was this company, SamMatt, named after me?