Nodding, I glanced up at him and tried to stop my lower lip from trembling when the new pain on top of the old pain in my arm kicked in. “Garrett?”
He was typing something in on his phone, so he didn’t look up when I called his name. “Yeah?”
“I think I broke my arm again.”
And that’s how I ended up fucking up my arm again and getting a new cast. I was starting all over again, joy. I’d also torn some of the stitches on my back, but because the wounds had mostly healed, it hadn’t reopened them. What it’d done instead was tear the skin they were stitched into, so now I had some new cuts on it being held together with steri-strips.
As we walked across the parking lot to where he’d parked, Garrett put his arm around my waist and pulled me into his side. “Don’t worry, I’ll be your hair slave for another six weeks.”
That’s what was worrying me. After six weeks, was I going to have to give him back?
The trainer, Phil, came to the house the next morning to discuss Clyde with me and show me what I needed to do.
Apparently, his behavior last night with the tables had been him testing boundaries. He was trained to protect, but he was still a puppy, and I had to make sure I kept him within the set limits so he didn’t get ‘sloppy’.
“I don’t know if I can be that mean. Have you seen those eyes? How do I say no?”
Garrett had come home to speak to Phil with Dave in tow, so the two of them burst out laughing at the same time when I stood there anxiously chewing my thumbnail at the prospect of telling Clyde off.
Had they seen those puppy eyes? He killed me.
“Zuri, you’ve got to be tough. I’m not saying be mean to the guy, I’m saying you’ve got to be firm and keep the boundaries firmly in place, or he’s going to forget his training. So, when you say no, you mean no. When you give a command, he gets rewarded for obeying it. When he reacts how he should to things that impact your safety, he also gets rewarded,” Phil explained calmly. “This is why we do these last weeks with y’all together. We’re not only training you individually, but we’re also training you together.”
Looking down at the sad eyes staring at me, I had to wonder if mine looked the same to him. “I’m weak. All I want to do is sit on the couch and feed him treats.”
The problem was, Garrett had bought him for me to not only keep me safe but also because I’d never had a dog. It was his way of ticking both the boxes for us. However, Dave knew my story and why I was here, so saying this in front of him was the wrong thing to do.
“I think you know better than anyone how important it is to be safe, Zuri. You know as well as I do how much bad shit can happen and that you need to use whatever you can to stop it and protect yourself,” he said quietly.
I felt the blood drain from my face and had zero doubts that Garrett didn’t see it when he frowned and looked between the two of us.
“What do you mean?” he asked Dave.
Keeping his eyes on mine, Dave lifted his chin and gestured in Phil’s direction to remind him that we had company. “Zuri will talk to you later, and she will be talking to you, or I’ll be over to tell you myself.”
Oh, fuck my life. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Garrett, it’s just that I knew once he had all the details, he’d treat me differently. He’d either look at me like I had an infectious disease, or he’d go nuts when it came to my safety.
I knew I had to be careful. I’d spent the last year living like I was afraid to breathe until recently.
I’d even been running through ways to tell him everything in my head, but I could never get the guts to go through with it.
That’s why I’d been on that damned chair hanging up the frame in the first place instead of waiting until later that night. It’s hardly like one of the first things you do is hang up pictures when you move. Usually—at least for me—that was done once you’d put everything away. I’d planned to tell him that day and was freaking out, so I’d picked up the frame and started messing around with placement and that level thing, with the bubble in the fluid inside it, to make sure it was even before I’d even put a nail in the damn wall.
Sighing, I nodded at Dave and focused back in on what Phil was saying. If Garrett ran screaming from the house later on, at least I’d have Clyde to keep me safe.