Are you jealous?

Present Day

I was sitting on the couch in Miraj's room reminiscing the first time we had met. He was still drinking Whisky beside me. No one spoke.

I thought about what he had told me today and shared what I thought, "Your father disapproved of you and Mathews' daughter so you did what? You had a relationship in secret? Told the world that you were single but you were with her long enough to want to make her your wife."

When I had first had him investigated, I looked for an engagement but there was no mention of it anywhere. Infact, there were several women he was rumored to have slept around with but no girlfriends were mentioned except one.

Mathews' daughter was the only girl he had dated and it was when he was fifteen. They had dated for 3 months before they broke up. I had dismissed it as a teenage romance that he didn't care about anymore.

"Actually we really broke up the first time when we were fifteen. I was too young to go against my father's direct orders so we broke up because he wanted us to. I tried to move on but she lived in my house because her father lived and worked there. It is difficult to move on from someone when you see them day and night and the worst part about the break up was that there wasn't any bitterness between us to keep us apart."

He finished the Whiskey in his glass and poured more. I knew it when people tried to dull their senses in order to not feel the pain. He was trying to not feel the heartache.

"We got back together when I was almost seventeen, after passively crushing on each other for two years. This time I told her I loved her and wanted to spend my life with her. She said she felt the same. We both moved out of my father's house soon. I was starting college in a different city and she applied there too. I had my own apartment and so did she. It wasn't too hard to sneak around then, we disguised ourselves when visiting each other's house and we met up on campus everyday. Apart from my personal guards, no one knew our history and I knew my guards were loyal to me. The disguises were a precaution against people looking into my life secretly. I just had to flirt around with other women whenever I was in my father's presence and all would be fine."

I thought about the promiscuous nature reported in his file and wondered if all his one night stands were the same person with different disguises. He laid his head back and closed his eyes. The more he showed his pain the more I wanted to kill Mathews' daughter.

For some reason, I kept finding myself referring to her like that. I couldn't call her by her name. That would make her a real part of my life. And I didn't understand why I didn't want it to happen but I knew I didn't want it to happen. I didn't want her to come back.

Damn it! Mathews is going to be over the moon when he notices all this. That smug son of a bitch can't win. Instead of focusing on the love part I decided to focus on the break up part.

"So what went wrong between the two of you?", I asked. I sank deeper into the couch to settle myself, not understanding that the uncomfortable feeling wasn't from the couch but from the things in my heart.

He opened his eyes and turned his head to look at me.

"Why do you care?"

"I don't. This woman obviously did a number on you but you aren't with her now. So what happened?" This conversation was getting increasingly uncomfortable.

"Are you jealous?"

I laughed at that. I don't remember since when but it was a running joke between us where we just made fun of our relationship in comparison to actual romantic relationships. We would act how a real married couple would. Sometimes in bed, it actually felt like we were married for real when we would talk about mundane things that required both our attention. Ari was a big reason for that. So whenever one of us was curious about the other's feelings about something we pretended like we cared about each other.

"Yes, I am jealous. My husband is drinking to forget the pain a woman gave him years before we were married. What do you expect?", I had thought about how a wife would act in this situation but when I said those words I realized not all of it was acting. My fear was real.

I was worried about this situation because this alliance was in danger. If he wanted to get back together with Mathews' daughter, it could break the pretense of family we put on for our son. I didn't want to raise him in a broken home.