know I hate when people shorten my name.” One of my biggest pet peeves was being called Dee. Do it and I stopped liking you. Unless your name was Point. He did it just to drive me crazy.
“You hate it when everyone but me calls you Dee,” he countered.
“Only because you refused to not do it.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Now that I think about it, it seemed to be your goal to call me Dee whenever you could.”
He shrugged. “I know how to push your buttons. That’s what married people are supposed to do, right?” he chuckled.
So the truth comes out. “I think you might have that a little sideways. Your goal in life should not have been to annoy me.”
“Kept you on your toes, Dee.”
I grunted. “The game is up, Point. It’s Deedra. Unless you’d like me to call you by your real name.” A name he hated that I never called him because I knew he didn’t like it.
Point shook his head.
“Is that a no? You wouldn’t like that?” I laughed. “But…I guess it is my job to push your buttons since we are still married, right?” If he could do it to me, I could do it to him.
His name was on the tip of my tongue.
“Don’t,” he warned.
A smirk spread across my lips. “Don’t call you Wendel?” I tapped my finger on my chin. “You don’t like to be called Wendel Schmid?”
“You’re playing with fire, Dee,” he growled.
“Stop calling me Dee, and I’ll step away from the fire, Wendel,” I reasoned. Though I liked standing next to his fire. It heated me to the core and I didn’t want to step away from it.
Point slowly stood. “You first, Dee.”
He ambled over to me and caged me in with his arms on either side of me. I had plenty of time to move and get out of the way, but it seemed my feet were glued to the floor.
“How about we both agree to not do…that?” Point being so close to me was making my brain foggy. “Yes?”
He leaned into me. “No.”
A simple word that somehow made a shiver run through me. “Uh, what was the question?”
Fried brain complete.
Point’s lips were a breath away from mine. “The question is, do you still love me?”
His closeness, the smell of his woodsy cologne, and his breath on my skin were too much to handle.
“Yes,” I breathed out. I couldn’t deny it anymore. I never stopped.
Not even for one second.
“I never stopped, Dee. Even when you tried to throw my heart in my face and walked out on me. I knew you were still mine even if you said you didn’t want me.” His lips brushed against mine, and the world stood still. “I’ve loved you since the day I met you.”
The words broke my heart. I had this man, and then, I had foolishly thrown him away because I wasn’t able to make heads or tails of my feelings. “I’m sorry for what I did.”
He reached up and cradled my cheek. “I’ve wanted to hear those words come out of your mouth for three years. With each day that went by where I didn’t get papers served to me, I held out hope that you were still mine.”
I was still his. Sure, there had been one or two men since I had left, but right here in this moment, I couldn’t even remember their names, let alone think they were better than Point. “I wasn’t a saint,” I blurted out. “I mean, I wasn’t a ho-ho, but I wasn’t Mother Mary, either.”
Point chuckled. “I’m pretty sure I would have told you that you were full of shit if you tried to tell me you were a born-again-virgin since we broke up.”
A horrible thought floated into my head. Point had been with other women. More than likely, a lot more than the two men I had been with. My eyes dropped to the cut he was wearing—a lot of women, seeing as he was part of the club.
“I wasn’t a saint either, Dee.”
My eyes darted to his. “Stop reading my mind, and I don’t want to know.”
I couldn’t handle knowing about Point and other women.
He chuckled. “Relax. It wasn’t like I was about to give you the blow by blow of the past three years. I just wanted you to know like you wanted me to know. I hoped one day I would be with you again, but we’re both human.” His thumb stroked my cheek,