I promise. “And now I need to get out of here. This detergent is making me nauseous.”
She laughs. “Oh, I remember those days. Just you wait.”
I emerge from the laundry room with hope, and I gulp in breaths of air that’s not filled with the perfumed scent of detergent. I march right to the family room because she’s right. Luke and I need to talk about his feelings. He needs to unload whatever he’s holding inside, and then I can give him our good news, and fingers crossed he’ll see it as good news, too.
When I get to him, he’s watching football. It’s some game he recorded, and he rewinds and studies the same play over and over. At least it’s not the one where he got hurt.
Pepper’s head rests on his good leg, and he absently strokes her ears with one hand while working the remote with the other.
“Can we talk?” I ask.
“After the game,” he grunts.
“After the game you’ve seen a thousand times?”
He doesn’t even acknowledge me.
I wonder if he’d even notice if I moved out...not that I have anywhere to go.
“Have you done your stretches?” I ask.
“No.” He rewinds the same play to watch it again.
“So, to be clear, you’d rather watch a game you’ve already seen than have a conversation with me about something important.”
He finally glances over at me. He raises both brows. “Uh, yeah. That about sums it up.” His eyes return to the television.
I know this is the knee injury talking. This is his pain talking. This isn’t him. This is the exact attitude he warned me about, and Josh warned me about, and even Debbie, to some extent, when she warned me that I need to be the strong woman he fell in love with.
She’s right.
And I refuse to take his shit any longer.
I grab the remote out of his hand, and his brows dip in surprise. “Hey!” he exclaims.
I turn off the television and throw the remote out of his reach.
“What the fuck?” he says.
“This has to stop,” I yell at him as I fold my arms across my chest.
He stares at me like I’ve grown two heads. Before he gets a chance to protest, I get a little more passionate.
“I’ve let your bad attitude slide because you had my sympathy. But I refuse to be your punching bag, and I refuse to sit meekly by while you treat me like garbage. Josh told me not to take your shit, and he’s right. So you’re going to do your damn stretches and you’re going to talk to me while you do them.”
He looks surprised. “You can’t tell me what to do,” he says. I figured he’d put up a fight.
“Uh, yeah, I can. If you can’t bear weight on that knee yet, you’re pretty dependent on me. And if you can be a dick to me, I can be a bitch back.”
He huffs out an annoyed sigh, a signal I’ve won this battle.
I sit on the edge of the chaise lounge and help brace his foot so he can do his knee exercises. In other words, I’m forcing him to do his knee exercises by basically doing them for him. He winces as I lift his leg, but he pulls it up to an angle to stretch it anyway. “You haven’t told me how you’re feeling about finding out Michelle’s baby isn’t yours.”
“Yeah I did,” he says. “Relieved, remember?”
“Right, relieved you won’t be tied to Michelle, but what about the actual baby?”
“Oh,” he murmurs. I watch his eyes carefully. They’re focused down on his knee as he holds the stretch we’re supposed to hold for a full minute. “I guess I was sort of excited about the idea of it, but I didn’t let myself get attached since I never really believed it was mine.”
“And how about finding out it’s Jack’s?” I ask.
“It was Jack’s way of getting me back for sleeping with Savannah.” His tone is bitter. I don’t say anything because I sense he’s going to say more, and he does. “When I ended things with her, she told me she was going to fuck my brother. I told her to go for it, and I told him to go for it, too. She said it to hurt me, thinking in some twisted way I’d grab her back into my arms and defend what we had. But I never felt about her the way she felt about me. I’m just glad she’s his problem now.”
“What a mess,” I say.