Page 28 of Nothing But It All
“Thanks for that,” I say, letting my head roll around my shoulders.
“Yeah, well, no matter what’s going on between us,” he says, “our kids won’t talk to you like that.”
His hand slips off my shoulders. The side of his finger brushes down my arm, and I can’t help but wonder if it was an accident ... or purposeful.
“I appreciate it,” I say.
“Can I ask you something?”
“I suppose.”
He rocks back on his heels. “Do you not want to stay? Or do you not want to stay because you think I don’t want you here?”
Both.
I study the scar above his right eye that he got when he was a child. He slipped and fell in the rain, bashing his face off a metal step. Somehow, since the last time I really looked at him, it’s deepened. The edges are sharper. The skin is lighter.
It’s easier to think about his accident than the answer to his questions.I don’t want to stay because leaving, knowing that next year we’ll be divorced and I’ll never get to come back, might kill me.
He shifts. “I don’t know how we would work it. I mean, I can take the couch.”
“Is that what you really want, though? Or are you just throwing it into my lap and making me be the bad guy?”
He rolls his eyes.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” I say earnestly. “Not about this.”
Jack squares his body to mine. He towers over me a good eight inches. He’s close enough to reach out and touch me ... but he doesn’t.
I don’t reach out to touch him either.
And I don’t know how I feel about that.
“What do you want, then?” he asks. “Do you want me to tell you what to do? Because I know you, and you hate being told what to do.”
“There’s a difference between being told what to do and having someone cooperate in a decision, Jack.”
He nods as if he’s biting back a curt reply.
This isn’t getting us anywhere.
“Fine,” he says, his jaw flexed. “Here’s what I think—you made an appointment with an attorney, according to the kids, so it looks like you want to be divorced.”
What the hell?My blood pressure rises. I let that bit of information go so we don’t become focused on my actions. “Yougot a fucking puppy that you keep at the shop. So that really seems like it’s your home now, doesn’t it?”
His eyes narrow. “Yeah. You’re right. I did.”
Fuck you, Jack.
“Since we’re about to burn the last two decades to the ground, and we’re already here, let’s give them their vacation,” he says, warily. “Let’s make it not about us. Surely to God, we can be civil for fourteen fucking days.”
My chest closes up as I stuff my emotions into the little box where I keep them.
He is right. So much of this year has been about Jack and me, and so much of last year was about us too.
Let’s give them two weeks.
Jack watches me wrestle with my feelings, his gaze softening by the second. “Lauren ...”
