He shook his head. “Nephew.”
My eyes strayed from Miller to Downy, who was not relaxed in the slightest anymore.
I could practically see the anger rolling off of him.
“When are you going to put him out of his misery?”
I blinked and looked over to Miller. “What?”
“Misery. When are you going to put him out of it?” Miller asked, gesturing to Downy.
I sighed. “I’ve always planned to. I just wanted him to know I was mad.”
He snorted. “That’s such a girl thing to do. Fuckin’ talk to him. It’s cruel and unusual punishment to do this to the man that you love.”
My brows lowered. “How do you know I love him?”
He shook his head, taking a sip of my coke before standing. “Anybody with two eyes inside their head can see it. Y’all are like two magnets. He moves, you adjust. Been doing it since you got here. It’s like some invisible force field that only the two of you are allowed on. You can’t fake that. You’re in love with him, and you’ve shown us that over and over again.”
With that, he left us, and I only had Mercy’s smug face to stare at.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Go talk to him,” she urged.
I watched as Miller got back and said something to the table as a whole, causing Downy to get up and leave before his food had even arrived.
“And take him his food,” she offered. “He deserves that and more.”
I pursed my lips. I hated being wrong.***Walking into his house, less than thirty minutes later, I smiled when Mocha walked up to me, licking me from top to bottom.
“Hey there, sweet girl. Did you miss me?” I asked her.
She waggled her tail, and then went off with Peter to play in the backyard.
After watching them play for a few minutes, I followed the sound of the shower, finding the object of my desire there.
He was leaning against the tiled wall, both forearms planted near the top of the shower with his head hung.
Water ran in rivulets over his head, dripping down his face and hair as he looked at his feet.
A beer was in one hand, nearly all the way gone, held out of the water by a finger curled around the lip of the bottle. His other hand was grasping the showerhead, directing the flow of pounding water onto his head and neck.
The clear glass was new, as was the showerhead.
Stripping off my clothes in the other room, I came back in naked, stepping into the shower and finally drawing his attention.
He didn’t much care at first, only looking over his shoulder like something cursory had caught his attention.
Then he saw me, and everything in his expression went blank.
“What are you doing here?” He rasped.
Well his words came out a little garbled since he didn’t even bother to move out from under the spray.
Water ran down his face and into his eyes as he looked me up and down. “To torture me some more?”
My nipples beaded at his perusal. “No. I came to tell you I’m sorry for acting like an ass.”
His eyebrows rose, but he still didn’t move out from under the water. “Huh.”
I suppressed a smile at the sound. “That’s all you have to say?”
He looked at me. “Well, I’ve had dreams for the last three weeks about you coming over here and telling me you forgive me. Then I wake up from my dream and it was all just a game. A sick, twisted nightmare that I have to live over every goddamned night. I’m just waiting to wake up, I guess.”
His words sounded so damn defeated that it hurt my heart.
“I have bad dreams. I relive every-fucking-thing. Literally, anything bad that’s ever happened to me, I relive it. The time I broke my arm and my mom was at work, I walked to her job, five freakin’ miles, with my arm at a weird angle. Every agonizing step I relieve in my dreams.” He shook his head. “Then there’s the time I watched a good friend get his head blown off by a fuckin’ sniper in Afghanistan. Now I get to add your fucking abduction, waking up to you duct taped and tied down to a fucking filthy ass chair. Seeing your eyes stray to the window to witness your dog about to die.” He took a deep breath, and I shivered at the look of desolation covering his face.
“The worst dream, though, is reality. I wake up every morning with the taste of you on my lips, but you’re fucking gone. The smell of you on my sheets has faded. I can’t remember what it’s like to hear you laugh. Or the way you make me feel.” He shook his head and ran his hair underneath the water again. “I hate the way I can’t fucking breathe without you here.”
I lost the battle to stay away from him.
I went to him, wrapping my arms around his chest and squeezing tightly.
“I’m here now, Downy,” I said softly.
I felt his chest expand with a huge breath, and then he let it out slowly.
“This has been a pretty shitty three weeks,” he admitted.
There was one more thing to ask him before I said what I had to say next. I needed to know.
“Did you know what the implant in my arm was?” I asked, holding my arm up until he could see the incision in my arm where I’d had the GPS chip removed.
He turned around, eyeing my arm like it was a serpent ready to strike.
He looked at me curiously. “Your birth control? I thought you said that was good for two more years.”
I visibly wilted with his words. Something inside of me was set free, and I finally allowed myself to feel happy about my circumstance for the first time in three whole weeks.
I shook my head. “Not birth control.”
His eyebrows thinned when they rose nearly all the way to his hairline. “What?”
“When I was nineteen, I’d asked my mom to make me an appointment with my girl doctor for some birth control. I was interested in having sex for the first…” I saw his face contort into something that closely resembled rage, so I skipped forward to what I had to tell him. “My mom made me an appointment, and then took me to the appointment where the doctor I’d had her call implanted what I thought was birth control… it wasn’t.”