Then she grinned.
Then she reached into the shower stall and turned on the water, tugged off his tee she wore to bed and shimmied out of her panties. Then she stepped in.
He bent his neck, spit, rinsed, reached and shoved his toothbrush opposite Lexie’s in the holder.
Then he moved to the shower.
* * * * *
Ty was standing with a hip against the counter, bowl of sliced bananas, cut strawberries and yogurt held up in front of him, spoon in his other hand shoveling the food into his mouth.
His eyes were on his woman who was back in his tee and a clean pair of panties, hair wet, combed back but drying fast and wavy in the Colorado air. She was filling a travel mug of coffee for him at the same time eyeing the dirty dishes, the stains and crumbs on the countertops and the piles of mail all the while looking like she wished she could stop eyeing them.
Before she left, there was a time or two when he came home when their bed wasn’t made but this was rare; a time or two when she’d done a half-assed job of it, yanking up the covers, fluffing pillows and tossing them wherever they’d land but this last was more than he’d ever do. A couple of days would go by where their clothes would remain on the floor where they’d discarded them or tossed them in the preliminaries to f**king. A week might go by where she’d let mail stack up on the side kitchen counter. A few times, she’d leave the dishes in the sink and do them the next morning.
But under all that was always clean and eventually she’d get to tidying.
Clearly, six weeks of build up was about five and a half weeks too much.
He chewed, he swallowed then he spoke. “Fill the dishwasher, mama, and I’ll empty it. I’ll take out the trash. I will not vacuum. I will not clean a f**kin’ toilet. And, on the inside, I had enough of sweepin’ and moppin’ for a lifetime. So, I will kick in in the ways I just said. Other than that, it’s up to you to decide if you can hack it or if we gotta find a cleaning lady.”
The first words he spoke, her eyes came to him.
When he was done she asked, “You’ll fill the dishwasher and empty it, did you actually do that while I was away?”
Even though he sensed she was teasing him, his gut tightened at her tone.
He’d just got finished f**king her in the shower. Before that, she made a show that she was taking them forward, with him all the way to their next step of building a family. And after she did that, she’d grinned at him.
But, since their shower, he got that tone and that tone matched the set of her frame. Quiet, pensive, borderline uncertain.
He’d bought that, being a dumb f**k, treating her like a dick, saying shit to her he shouldn’t have said, comparing her to Misty, a woman he hated and she hated and, it was arguable, but he got the sense his wife hated Misty at least as much as he did. On some level, it could be worse, seeing as Misty was a sister and Misty strapped the sisterhood with the shit he piled on Lexie, shit she didn’t deserve. Misty perpetrated a betrayal to that sisterhood, an unforgiveable one.
But Lexie was treading cautiously, probably not even knowing she was doing it. Twice, he f**ked up, twice he was a dick, twice he lashed out and mouthed off. The first time, she didn’t do shit to deserve it, the second time, she did but his response was way the f**k over the line. Now, he could see, she was going to do everything she could so she didn’t buy a third time.
Ty would take that tone over the one she spoke to him with when she was on the beach, her voice void, dead, remote. He never wanted to hear her talk like that again, feel the darkness that shrouded her, experience her being so far gone, he knew he could run flat out every day for the rest of his life and never reach her. He never wanted that back, for him or for her, that was so agonizing, he’d take anything else from her, even this.
That said, he still didn’t like it.
So he put his spoon in the bowl, set it aside and ordered gently, “Mama, come here.”
Lexie, being Lexie, came direct to him.
He wound an arm around her waist, pulling her body to his and her hands came up, flat on his chest, not to hold him back, just to rest them there as her head tipped way back to look at him and his other hand wrapped around her neck, his thumb moving on her jaw.
“It’s gonna take time for you to trust me again –” he started but she cut him off swiftly.
“I trust you.”
His thumb stopped stroking and his fingers gave her a light squeeze as he dipped his face closer. “Baby, you don’t.”
“I do.”
He shook his head and asked quietly, “Can you shut up a minute so I can talk?”
She pressed her lips together but her eyes flared.
Now that, he liked.