by Ren Benton
He peeled back two of her fingers so he could speak. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t trust me not to try trapping you with a baby?” Holly always seemed to think it would work.
“You wouldn’t have to. I’m already yours for the taking.” He kissed the top of her head. “You shouldn’t have to be alone. Besides, I have to drive you back downtown.”
“I forgot.” The period between walking out of Swann’s and walking into Griff’s house was hazy. She’d been too numb for it to leave an impression on her.
“I’ll see your memory loss and raise you not being able to feel my legs.”
Her weight was crushing his nerves. She should move. She didn’t. “Do you have somewhere to be?”
“No. They didn’t wait until I was all the way out of the office to start the celebration, but I’d like to be able to appreciate the woman I’m holding with all four limbs.” He tilted his head back against the door. “Want that doctor’s note now?”
She put her fingers back on his lips and rubbed them down as if sealing duct tape in place. Exchanging lab work was what responsible adults did before making an informed decision to engage in unprotected intercourse with one another within the framework of a monogamous relationship. This was a one-time lapse. The damage, if there was any, was done. She’d watch for it in her own lab work.
He wouldn’t ask for her medical records because she, of course, was pure as the driven snow.
He peeled back her fingers again. “I’ll expect your test results for the past ten years no later than the close of business Monday. You didn’t get this scorching hot by being as boring as you claim to be.”
Oh, damn him for understanding her loathing of her virtue being taken for granted. What was wrong with her that the insinuation she might have an STD was even more romantic than strike plate screws?
Her head weighed heavily on his shoulder, and a fresh supply of tears leaked from her eyes. “They gave my promotion to someone else.”
“That’s bullshit. No one works harder than you.”
He barely knew what her job was, but he supported her as if she were the best in her field. Her greatest skill, however, was being a doormat. “Exactly. I’m already giving them maximum effort. Why buy the cow when they’re getting the milk for free?”
Moo.
“But you don’t have the luxury of telling them to go fuck themselves because you have four kids to feed and an image of stability to uphold for the court.” He was quiet for a minute, letting her marvel in the depth of his comprehension. “I wanted to be the hero who saved the day, but I’ve got nothing.”
“You’re the best thing about this day.”
His chest jerked with silent laughter. “Which says a lot about how shitty it’s been.”
“You’ve been the best thing about every day you’ve been a part of since the day we met, and at least two of them haven’t been shitty.”
“I don’t believe it. First day was a wedding. Second involved Taylor Swift. Third, you thought I was going to blackmail you. Then you were convinced something terrible would happen to the kids while you were with me. Your friend’s husband blamed you for their separation.” He extended all the fingers on one hand and began counting on the other. “I was a stupid ass. Your sister got roughed up.”
“You screwed my doors and let me hit some balls.” She wiggled two fingers of her own, which met the definition of a couple. Barfing children, a rejected marriage proposal, and today’s episode could go without saying. “I’m sorry everything else has been drama and discord.”
He pressed his thumb against her lips. “Don’t you dare apologize to me. Or call yourself boring again. Damn, woman, you are a disaster.”
Reduced to a bulleted list, she was. Their whole relationship was. It hadn’t seemed hellish at the time because he made everything fun.
Her sensible side made a compelling argument that a disastrous relationship should be put out of its misery before it deteriorated, but what else could go wrong? They’d been tested so many times already, but here they were, clinging to each other as if they were the only stable thing in the world. If they comforted each other on shitty days, the good days would be amazing.
Surely, good days would come.
That had been her mantra all her life. Things will get better. All she had to do was wait.
And wait. And wait some more.
The quiet time with Griff had a confessional quality. “I always thought, if I was good enough...”
No. She couldn’t say it out loud. Some confessions were too shameful to confide.
“There would be a prize.”
She looked up at him. She ought to be used to his ability to read her by now, but it was a surprise every time. “How did you know?”
“I haven’t been trying as long, I haven’t been as successful at it, and I started with a goodness deficit you wouldn’t believe, but I know the burn of getting no credit for good behavior.” He ran his finger along a strap of the bra that never did get removed. “What’s the point of depriving ourselves of so much temptation if there’s no reward?”
“Preferably in the form of what we’ve been depriving ourselves of.” Being good was a moral diet — long periods of deprivation followed by guilt-inducing lapses followed by stricter deprivation followed by wilder binges, when all along it would be healthier to simply indulge in moderation. “Pretending to be good only to benefit ourselves is a serious character flaw.”
“If you’re relentlessly good and don’t get so much as an acknowledgment, you’re being taken advantage of. That’s somebody else’s character flaw.”
For all her alleged virtue, she felt hopelessly inadequate. “I don’t know who to be mad at — everybody who’s taken advantage, or myself for letting it go on for so long.”
“If I get a vote, everybody else.” He kissed her hair again. “You’re freezing. Will you please get in the shower?”
She would need greater incentive than warmth to move from his arms. “Only if you’ll get in with me.”
Griff joined her in the shower after throwing her clothes in the dryer. They washed each other and kissed a little bit but were too emotionally — and, in Ivy’s case, physically — wrecked for it to lead anywhere. As he pointed out in the mirror while drying her with the fluffiest towel she’d ever had the pleasure of having against her skin, her back looked like she’d been beaten with a chair.
After her meltdown in the foyer, being self-conscious about her naked body seemed pointless. She fit her fingers into the purple smudges marking her butt. “Don’t take it personally. I always did bruise like a peach.”
“I’d say something crass about eating you, but I don’t want to start something I can’t finish before taking a nap.”
A nap would be an unheard of indulgence. She raised her arms so he could put one of his T-shirts on her. “We’ve never slept together. I mean, slept.”
“Not true. When we camped out in your living room, I held you gently throughout the night” — he dropped the towel around his waist and pulled on a pair of sweatpants — “by the ankle, to stop you from kicking me in the head.”
“That’s awful.” She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. “Why didn’t you move?”
“I had two kids sleeping on me, and jostling them seemed like a good way to cause another eruption of Mount Blows-Chunks-A-Lot.”
Look at him, suffering for the greater good like a pro. The least she could do was acknowledge his sacrifice. “Show me where it hurts. I’ll kiss it and make it better.”
With his hand, he indicated the whole right side of his head. “It was more nudging than kicking, honestly. It didn’t hurt.”
“Don’t be a hero, Dunleavy. Shut up and take the sympathy.”
“In that case, your toes were pretty icy, too.”
She planted warm little kisses all over that side of his face to apologize for her arctic nudging and to thank him for being present when she needed him.
> He slid an arm around her. “We don’t have time for a nap today.”
“I know.” She finished by brushing her lips against his. “Someday.”
He closed his eyes as she combed his hair with her fingers, dark, heavy strands gliding over her knuckles. If her hair was as thick and luxurious, she’d have her hands in it constantly, not just when something was troubling her. She pressed more firmly on his scalp, and he rewarded her for the massage with a blissful hum and another arm wrapped around to pull her close.
If there had been any doubt previously, today proved once and for all that she was profoundly screwed up and in no position to judge anyone else, so she hoped he would talk to her honestly, one flawed person to another. “What did you mean when you said you’re the guy wives come to when their husbands won’t fuck them?”
He turned to stone in her hands.
This was not happening. They did not just smash against each other until their jagged edges fit perfectly together, only for her to call him out for being a fuck toy while he was still battered and bleeding.
When he tried to pull away, her fingers tightened in his hair. They might as well have tightened around his lungs. “Let me go.”
“No.”
How did he get out of this, break her fingers? He’d be a different kind of asshole, but maybe it was better than the kind of asshole he already was.
“I can tell it hurts, Griff.” Thumbs he would never, ever hurt rubbed soothing little circles on his temples that did nothing but fracture him further. “It can’t be any uglier than what I’ve shown you.”
“It is.” She got tangled up in other people’s ugliness by trying to help. He created his own ugliness through willful ignorance and then denied responsibility, claiming someone who knew all the facts should have volunteered them.
“Prove it.”
He couldn’t get out of this. If she knew he was keeping a secret from her, he would lose her. If he told her what a scumbag he’d been, he would lose her. “Let me go.”
Her jaw edged forward mutinously.
“I’ll tell you, but... I can’t bear you touching me. Please.”
Her dark eyes glistened with moisture, but what was one more offense added to his list? Her hands slid down to cup his cheeks, and she pressed a trembling kiss against his lips.
She let him go.
He didn’t realize how much support she’d been providing until he had to stand on his own two feet and the task proved too daunting. He backed into the sink and let it support some of the weight bowing his shoulders.
He recapped the part of the story she knew. “I had dropped out of college, again, because I was too smart to learn anything and because I was bored. My family had disowned me, again, not that it had any effect at that point. I was working as a carpenter. Framing, trim, hanging doors, nothing you’d look at with lust in your eyes.”
That work had been the first link in the chain that led to Ivy cooing over his work, though. The only part of that phase in his life he could be proud of.
“One day, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen appeared on site. She looked like she’d just come from a photo shoot. The kind of high-gloss finish you don’t see in real life because it takes an army of stylists and special lighting and camera filters and airbrushing to create, but she really did look like that all the time.” To him, at least.
Ivy, who obsessed about her every imagined imperfection, wouldn’t want to hear how physically flawless Faye had been, but that was the only defense he had, feeble as it was. “I made some comment I thought was charming but was more likely inexcusably sleazy because I was a punk, but she laughed.”
Faye had often told him how entertaining he was.
“She was polished and smart and sophisticated and fucked like the world was going to end and she wanted to go out on a high note. Everything a bum in his twenties thinks he deserves, in other words. We spent whole days in bed. We went on trips and spent whole weeks in bed.”
It hadn’t occurred to him at the time how wasteful it was to travel to Madrid or Rio or Tokyo and never set foot outside of a hotel room. Regardless of the stamps on his passport, he couldn’t rightfully claim to have been any of the places he went with Faye. A motel by the interstate would have served the same purpose.
“I was happy for the first time in my life. Faye was the thing that had been missing. She filled the void that kept me restless and unsatisfied. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her like that.”
He couldn’t look at Ivy. It would have taken her two seconds to figure out what an idiot he’d been. It took a year and Faye explicitly explaining his idiocy before he caught on.
“I bought her a ring, did the candles-and-rose-petals thing, and got down on one knee. The whole cliché. And it was the funniest thing she had ever seen.”
Mase and Wes knew this much of the story. They had grilled him, trying to extract evidence that he had noticed some sign that all was not well. As obvious as it was in hindsight that nothing had been right from the moment he laid eyes on Faye, until that ill-fated proposal, he had been utterly bewitched and clueless.
“She literally patted me on the head and patiently explained that I was an excellent piece on the side, but I was too shiftless, irresponsible, and destitute to be husband material, even if she hadn’t already had one.”
Ivy’s sharp intake of breath was the kind that hurt deep in the chest. He felt a corresponding stab. Yes, I participated in adultery. But wait, there’s more!
“Sure, her husband was fucking a barista, but he brought in high six figures annually and wasn’t a hypocrite about her getting hammered by a lowly carpenter, and that’s what a good marriage is all about.”
This was the director’s cut, never before shown to an audience, now with bonus stupidity, bitterness, and self-loathing. “I thought about it for two days. I loved her. I’d been happy with what we had up until that point. It made no sense to throw away love and happiness because I couldn’t have more. I felt very mature and worldly when I told her my decision. Rather than falling into my arms, overcome with joy that I had come to my senses, she asked very nicely that I not make a nuisance of myself, and then she rode off into the sunset — again, literally — with the horseback riding instructor she’d replaced me with in less than forty-eight hours.”
Other than that one pained gasp, Ivy hadn’t made a sound. If not for the little white toes at the edge of the sector of floor he’d been doggedly staring at, he might have thought she’d left him already. He hadn’t put a heating coil under the tile yet. Her feet must be freezing. He should have gotten her a pair of socks to wear.
“Apparently, I have an air about me that screams for a good time, call. Or maybe Faye gave me a four-star review on a local gigolo website. ‘Great dick, but difficulty maintaining professional distance.’ For whatever reason, I’ve been found by several women who already have men they can rely on, who are good providers and loving fathers but just can’t keep up with them in the sack, which, by happy coincidence, is all I’m good for.”
Not every woman, but enough that when one who superficially had it all and maintained an air of mystery wanted to fuck him, it was safe to assume an inventory of her possessions included a husband.
If that’s what it took to make a marriage happy these days, he wanted nothing to do with it, so another man’s wife was the closest he was ever going to get.
Especially when Ivy had the sense to turn him down.
“You make a hell of a grilled cheese sandwich.”
Her whispered addition of a second talent surprised a ragged laugh from him. He dared to glance at her, only to find tears streaming down her face again. He pushed away from the sink. “Ivy, it’s not worth crying over.”
He wasn’t worth crying over.
Before he could fold her up and hug her tears away, she had her hands on his face again. “You’re a brilliant craftsman. You’re a nonjudmental listener. You always know what I need, and I’m so sorry I used—
”
“Don’t.” He stopped her with a fingertip to her lips. She leaned into it, turning her silence into a kiss. “Never apologize for being passionate and wanting to share that with me. We’ve established you’re not married.”
“And I’m scared to death of horses,” she mumbled against his finger.
He smoothed her damp hair away from her face. “See? It’s not the same at all.”
“And I already told you you’d be impossible to replace.”
You are ‘the one’ until it’s over. And probably for decades after.
If he had his way, they would never be over.
She laid a tender hand over his heart. “I am sorry she hurt you.”
No ouch, man, but you reap what you sow. No sympathy with a hefty dose of accompanying censure. Not from Ivy. Just simple regret for another injury she wished he hadn’t sustained.
After ten years of almost-good behavior, he felt something he hadn’t believed he deserved — redemption. This woman bestowed it upon him with her tears and a protective hand over a heart she still didn’t know belonged to her.
He remained unconvinced he deserved it, but he wouldn’t throw a gift from her back in her face.
Ivy’s belly swooped as Griff scooped her up in his arms and carried her from the bathroom. “We need to talk about your propensity for manhandling me.”
“Want me to stop?”
“I want you to be more consistent. There have been times I’ve had to walk everywhere on my own two feet for days. For days, Griff.”
“It won’t happen again.” He placed her atop one of the barstools at the kitchen island. “Would you want to know if I had a tub of Nutella the size of your head?”
“Absolutely not.” That crisis had passed. It would make her sick, anyway. “But where would one acquire such a thing? I’m asking for a friend.”
He told her the best place for her imaginary friend to obtain bulk dietary indiscretion while he puttered around the kitchen putting lunch together. In no time at all, he was sliding a plate in front of her, covered with deli ham and baby Swiss on potato rolls, accompanied by a small bunch of grapes. “I’d cook for you, but the therapy session ran over into the lunch hour.”
