Page 120 of A Lick and A Promise
He was losing it.
But I had to ask.
“Why didn’t you explain it like this?”
“Because I’m an asshole. Also because I’m an asshole, and because I am trying to wash the taste of you out of my mouth, after you and I were through, I get with the first bitch who’s willing to put up with the fact I’m in love with another woman. I wring her dry. And she ends up stalking me and the woman I love, which I deserve because I played her. But you do not.”
“Cheyenne’s antics aren’t on you.”
“They aren’t?”
“Not even a little bit.”
He didn’t respond, and apparently he was talked out because he didn’t say anything else either.
“You didn’t think you were worthy of me?” I whispered.
“Babe,” was all he said.
But his gaze went to my dog. My couch. Then he lifted his arm in his sling.
And he spoke again.
“I went to a sit-down with my sister’s boyfriend to end their bullshit once and for all, things deteriorated, and one of his lackeys fucking shot me.”
So that was what happened.
It was a skeletal sketch of events, but at least I knew part of it.
So I could say, “That isn’t on you.”
“That’s my family. That’s my life.”
“That was your life. No, that was the life other people around you lived. But you escaped.”
He lifted his slinged arm again. “I have?”
“You take on too much of other people’s shit.”
“I had to get a Lyft here, like I had to get a Lyft to the club, because I won’t be cleared to drive for at least another week. By the time I left for basic, Crew and Poe used to compare GSW and graze scars, the more you had, the more of a badass they thought you were. I’m one of them now more than ever before.”
That made me stand and snap, “Stop it.”
He shut his mouth.
“You should have told me this,” I stated the obvious.
“And there’s me being an asshole again, baby,” he drawled. “Because I didn’t. And I didn’t because I didn’t believe in you. I didn’t because, you didn’t know it, but that whole two weeks was a test.”
Uh-oh.
“A test?” I asked quietly.
“Every fuckin’ day.”
“A test,” I spat.
“Waiting for you to turn on me. Waiting for you to take off on me. Waiting for you to be done with me. Like everything good I had before.”
