Page 36 of Between Our Hearts

How much of this care and affection was genuinely hers, and how much of it was for the sake of appearances, Clark didn’t know.

A gutteral tsking sound left her lips. “You really got yourself. I’m going to have to Dermabond this. Come on. I have some under the sink in Lottie’s bathroom.”

He covered the paper towel with his own hand. “Be back in a minute, Mom.”

“I’ll be here,” she sang.

He followed Sadie’s determined frame upstairs and waited as she released the child safety lock on the cabinet under the sink. His wife had brought home some hospital-grade products like the liquid sutures she was now looking for in case Lottie hurt herself.

“There it is.” She set the pencil-shaped cylinder filled with purple liquid on the counter and shoved everything else back under the cabinet.

Even watching her sloppily pushing things back made his heart twinge. Clark had never met a messier woman, but damned if it never bothered him. He wasn’t necessarily a neat freak—tidy, but not too strict about it. He’d seen clothes strewn all over, dishes in the sink, and stacks of mail on the counter of her two-bedroom townhouse that very first night and hadn’t cared. He still didn’t care. It was all somehow . . . just Sadie. She had this essence that he loved everything about, except now he was going to have to unlearn that instinct.

A pained cough came out of him when he realized that when they divorced, he’d eventually have to see her with the man she’d rather be with—passing Lottie back and forth like a baton.

“Why don’t you sit on the counter?”

Clark sat and reached for their daughter’s yellow polka dotted washcloth to clean his forehead, mostly to give himself something to do besides trying to avoid eye contact. The silence between them felt palpable, like he could reach his hands out and catch the wispy threads of it. They could even hear his mother softly whistling a James Brown song from her place in the kitchen.

“I’ll do it.” Sadie plucked the cloth from his fingers and let the sink run for a long time, staring into it.

“What are you waiting for?”

Her features softened when her eyes lifted to his. “It’ll hurt less if the water is warm.”

His heartbeat thrummed in his throat. No one was watching now. Her actions could be those of a wife still in love with her husband.

Or of a conscientious doctor, his mind countered.

His hand fisted, but Sadie missed it because she was testing the water temperature. She stood between his open knees and delicately touched the washcloth to his skin. He swallowed roughly when her natural scent hit his nose. Because of her job, she never wore any perfume, but the chamomile scent of her shampoo, mixed with something undeniably Sadie, could be caught at very close proximity.

Her lips parted as she focused on drying the wound. A cracking noise broke through the weighted silence, and then she was holding his hair back with one hand and steadily applying the liquid sutures with the other.

“It just needs a minute to set.” She stepped back to toss the applicator in the trash. “Then you should be fine.”

“I’m not fine,” he rasped.

He hadn’t meant the words to leave his lips, but there they sat between them. He hadn’t been fine in a long while. He wasn’tgoingto be fine. He wanted his wife, and he wanted her to love him back. Not knowing if she did was ripping him to shreds.

Misinterpreting him, she moved forward and examined his forehead again. The feather light touch of her fingertips added to the layers of pain surging through the rest of his body. He pressed his eyelids together to stave off the worst of it.

“Clark?” Her voice was thick with concern.

A hard swallow allowed him to separate his lashes.

Her pale green irises darted between his, her fingers still delicate over his temple. Then she inched forward and pressed her mouth to his more gently than she’d ever done in their relationship. Her head rocked forward until the center of their brows met with a heavy exhale before she kissed him the same way again.

He couldn’t stop his hand from reaching up and brushing a thumb over the edge of her jaw. As her mouth found his a third time, her body leaned against the counter, against the insides of his thighs. When her tongue darted out hesitantly, a raspy breath sucked between his teeth. Then he pushed into her more firmly but still kept the slow rhythm as his tongue met and danced with hers. Her hands gripped and held his shoulders, kneading at indistinct intervals, depending on what he was doing with his mouth.

“Sadie . . .” He wanted to ask what this meant, but part of him worried that words would only make this intimate moment they were sharing fall away.

Her shallow breaths passed through her parted lips, millimeters from his, as she waited for him to finish his sentence.

“Dada!” Lottie’s voice came from behind her toddler safety-locked door adjacent to the bathroom. “I wake.”

His wife blinked and then looked around as if she was lost. When Lottie started knocking on her door, Sadie took a step back.

He tried to keep the grimace from running across his face. If only he could have had five more minutes, ten more minutes, screw it—a lifetime of kissing Sadie like this.

---