Page 81 of Screwed (Dad Bod Contracting 4)
“Good god, James.”
He goes on, as if he didn’t hear me. “I grabbed her hand, and she looked at me, and I knew she knew. It was in her eyes. ‘Take care of the girls.’” He whispers this. The way she probably did. “I couldn’t say a damn thing, I was crying so hard. It’s okay, she said. It’s going to be okay. Take care of the girls.” A long pause. “‘Don’t stay alone forever, Jamie.’ She squeezed my hand so fucking hard when she said that. ‘Promise me, Jamie. Promise me you’ll find someone to take care of you.’”
I’m crying, because there’s no other logical response.
“I promised her.” He clears his throat, dashes a wrist against his eyes. “But until now, I had no concept of what it meant to be able to actually keep that promise. I made the promise in the moment, and it’s stuck with me, but…how do you do that? I couldn’t figure it out. I’m still working on it.”
What do I say? I just hold his hand tightly, and lean my head against his shoulder.
He glances down at me. “Doc Rich says I have PTSD from it. That people often go untreated, because there’s this idea that only combat veterans, or people who go through, like, something like 9/11, or whatever, can get PTSD. But anything super traumatic can cause it, and it’s a spectrum, you know? Varying degrees of severity and it shows up in different ways with each individual.”
“Makes sense,” I say.
“So, it’s not something I’m going to just get over.”
I look up at him. “Of course not. I don’t expect that.”
He lets out a breath, staring out over the field again. “I just want you to understand that I’m working on it. That I…I’m working on moving on. On being a better father to Nina and Ella—more present, more involved, more…how did Doc Rich put it? More emotionally available to them.” He fiddles with the barbed wire, rubbing the pad of his thumb over one of the barbs. “And for you. I want…us. I want you—not just sex, but life with you. I want to love you.”
I feel my heart swell. “James…” I pull him around to face me.
I have a million things to say, but they’re all jumbled and tangled and stuck behind the lump in my throat. And sometimes, the only thing to say is nothing—the only way to say what you need to say is with a kiss.
So, I kiss him.
And kiss him.
And kiss him.
Until we’re both breathless and I’m gasping and he’s rumbling in his chest, breathing hard and staring down at me with awe in his eyes. “Jesus, Nova.”
I smile against his lips. “Now you know how you make me feel when you kiss me like that.”
“I got one more thing I need to say. And it may come out kind of…messy.”
I cling to his shoulders and nod up at him. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“You’re not going to have to compete with her ghost, Nova. I’m gonna love you, and it’s…it’s a different kind of love. I don’t love you the same way I loved Renée. Don’t mean it’s…less, or not as strong, or…or not as real or whatever. Just that it’s…different. You’re you, and the way we are together is just a whole different thing than the way she and I were. So…you’re not competing. I’m not comparing. It’s like…well, at the risk of sounding like a typical construction dude, you’re a hammer and she was a screwdriver. Different tools, and you can’t compare them to each other. They’re different.”
“Thank you for saying that,” I whisper. “I needed to know that.”
“I needed you to know that.” He brushes my lips with his thumb. “You’re you, exactly you—and I’m in love with you. You make me feel like a kid again, sometimes. Like I just fuckin’ want you so bad it feels crazy. A good kind of crazy.”
I smile up at him, a mischievous grin. “How about you be the hammer, and I’ll be a nail, and you can pound me?”
He cackles. “God, Nova. Only you could make a dirty joke out of that.”
I rub my hands over his broad hard chest. “Who was joking?”
He doesn’t say anything—just stares down at me for a moment, and then hauls me into a fast walk back toward his house. We reach his front door, and he’s unlocking it, but pauses in the act of turning the key.
I glance at him. “What’s the issue?”
He palms the back of his neck. “The, um…the condoms are at your house. I don’t have any here.”
I laugh. “Then I guess we go to my house.”
We make the drive in record time—I wouldn’t say he drove recklessly, but this was an occasion when it was fortunate that he knew the back roads as well as he did.
