Page 122 of The Auction
I had a thousand snarky answers to that until finally I just nodded and said, “Yeah.”
I followedhim into the bedroom and watched him strip out of his clothes. A bandage was wrapped from his ribs to his waist, from the right side of his chest to the middle of his back. That’s what was causing his wince.
I didn’t ask. I just watched him half step under the spray of water. Wash his hair and face and then step out and dry off. Patch followed his every motion. Eventually, when Creed looked like he was ready to stretch out on the bed, I grabbed him a pair of clean underwear out of his drawer and handed it to him.
He raised his eyebrow.
“I’m too mad at you to get distracted by your penis. Put them on.”
He did and then carefully stretched out on his left side, which was the wrong side of the bed for him, but left room for me to lay down and face him.
Patch climbed up the comforter and settled onto the pillow above his head.
Traitor.
In quiet, soft, muttered words, he told me about something called a high profile extraction. Surveillance for weeks in a jungle, ultimately leading to a successful mission, however, he was shot in the process.
(THAT’S RIGHT! HE WAS SHOT!)
I held my opinion on that and instead listened while he explained the reason he’d been gone longer than expected. It was because he was held up in a hospital in Mexico City before he was able to make it back over the border.
“Kay,” I said, when he was done.
His eyes were starting to shut and I could tell I was losing him to exhaustion.
“You sleep. Talk later, yeah?” I said, echoing his previous sentiment.
He knew what it meant. I had some stuff I had to get out and he needed to listen, but also, as I rolled off the bed quietly to my feet, I knew I had to make a decision.
Was I going to trust him again not to leave?
I suppose I wouldn’t be sure of that until we said all the stuff we had to say. I left him and Patch sleeping in the bed and went back to my momma’s garden because it was something to do with my hands while I cleared my thoughts.
It might have beenan hour or two when he finally emerged. I could sense him behind me.
Maybe…I could even smell him.
“You eat?” I asked him, without turning around.
“Yeah. All you had was Kraft Mac & Cheese.”
That was true.
I turned to face him. He had his ball cap on but hehadn’t shaved his beard yet. I remembered Tank making a big deal of it that he had.
“You going to shave your beard?”
He huffed, folded his arms carefully over his chest, and looked out over the fields. “That’s what you want to ask me. Did I eat and am I going to shave?”
“No. Had all sorts of stuff to ask. I’ve got this list I’ve been keeping on my phone. But I think…none of that matters now. Not really. At first I was real mad. Then sad. These past couple months, I mostly thought of you every day, even though I didn’t want to. Afraid you were dead. Afraid you’d decided not to come back. Afraid you might come back and then I’d start feeling the way I do about you all over again. Only for you to leave without a word again.”
“Jules-”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “Hear me out. This whole marriage was fucked from the start. But after that, before you left…well, I guess there’s no other way to say it other than I fell in love with you. Never really done that before with anyone, and I have to say, I don’t like the empty feeling in my chest when it’s gone. So, for all those questions I was going to ask, I guess there’s only one that matters. Are you staying? For good?”
He took a step forward.
He bent his head, then lifted it so he was looking at me. “I made sure I didn’t think about you at all,” he began. For the record, I wasn’t thrilled. “Made my decision, figured it was the best one for both of us, and when I drove my truck off this farm I didn’t even fucking look in the rear view mirror. That’s how it had to be, Jules. Because if I thought about you, if I let you in my head, I would have turned around. I would have come back.
