Page 52 of Swept for Forever
Shit! She was awake.
“You need something?” I asked, already rising.
“Water,” she murmured, trying to sit up. Her eyes were half-lidded but tracking me. Just enough to make me wonder how long she’d been listening.
I filled a glass from the bathroom sink and crouched beside her, holding it out. She wrapped both hands around it. That kind of grip came from experience, from knowing what it meant to go without.
Her hands shook. I closed mine around hers, steadying them as I murmured, “Easy.”
A few strands of hair clung to her mouth, but I brushed them away. Her lashes fluttered, her lips still at the rim of the glass as she finished the water.
When she let go, I took it from her hands.
“You want more?”
She shook her head, so I set the glass on the sink and stood beside her bed.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“Yeah. You want me to go? Turn the lights off?”
“You can go. It’s not fair of me to keep you here. It must’vebeen boring as hell. You’ve got better things to do than sit with some meek little doll.”
“You’re not a doll,” I countered.
I’d met the type who weren’t, women who came sharp-edged and loud, proud to prove they didn’t break easy. But Autumn wastoughtough. The kind who didn’t posture, who gritted her teeth through real pain, hauled herself out of hell, and still found room to laugh about it. She didn’t announce it; she just lived it.
I added, “And you’re not meek. I know what that looks like.”
I’d seen it. Hell, I’d lived under it.
Weakness was calling your own wife soft because she cried when you hit her, and never once praising your kid, even when that kid fought like hell to be better than you.
“Hey,” she whispered, her fingers grazing mine. “I didn’t know asking for water would get you so upset.”
“Upset? No. No.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said, already half-asleep again.
She was something. But me? I wasn’t her kind of something. I was the asterisk. The fine print in a dating app bio. And I still remember her cracking that “father-daughter” joke over our matchingIBuffaloberry HillT-shirts.
My gaze dropped to her hand, slack against the edge of the blanket. It was close enough to reach. To hold. To want.
But I didn’t move.
Instead, I rose quietly, brushing off the ache.
Lulu stirred, lifting her head toward me.
“Shh. Stay with her.”
And she did.
While I slipped out, I told myself it was the right call.
Even if it felt nothing like it.
13
