Page 72 of For Pleasure Or Worse

I opened my mouth to protest, closed it, opened it again, and my thoughts of how terrible that idea was languished on my tongue. “It’s something to think about,” I said. “I’m not even supposed to be having this conversation right now. I’m supposed to be downstairs enjoying a fucking party, getting ready to go do ridiculous things in Las Vegas for the next twenty-four hours, and having sex with my fiancée without our mother down the fucking hallway for the first time in five months.”

“I can tell how badly this is stressing you out,” Angelo said. “And I thought taking the burden of hiring someone off your shoulders might loosen you up a bit. You can’t do it all on your own.” He shrugged. “Well, you can, but look where that’s gotten you. Taking work calls in the middle of your bachelor party.”

“I’ll deal with it,” I shot back. “After this weekend we can revisit you coming to work for me and this whole thing about Mom and Dad buying a house in Florida. Now’s not the time.”

The bedroom door that was left cracked open creaked on the hinges and Natalia slid out from the shadow behind it. My blood froze, and my heart leapt into my throat.

“Your parents bought a house?”

“Tal.” I stepped toward her. “I was going to explain everything to you when it was a better time.”

Her jaw tensed and relaxed and she looked back and forth between Angelo and me. “You were never trying to hire anyone, were you?”

“Of course I was.” I rubbed the back of my neck. Thinking on my toes was once my strongest suit. Now I was tripping over all the excuses and lies piling up in my head trying to make two things meet in the middle and soften the blow. It was past the point of that. I couldn’t do it anymore. “I mean, I wanted to. There were a lot more semantics involved, and it wasn’t the right time.”

“You hadmonths,” she emphasized. “You watched me struggle without a partner at home, left me out to dry, fending for myself thinkingIwas the one being selfish for wishing you would come home for dinner when you had so much on your plate at work. You were staying away on purpose. To punish me for inviting your parents to stay, or something.”

My entire body recoiled. That had never crossed my mind, nor did I think Natalia would ever come to such a ridiculous conclusion. I had actively tried to keep my parents on a leash around her. “Do you really think I would do that?”

Tally’s face paled and her lips parted in small surprise. She dragged a thin breath through her teeth. “I don’t understand why you would lie about it, Mateo. I thought we talked about this. I thought we agreed that thesecretswere over, thelieswereover. Or was that just referring to me? I can’t hold onto things in our relationship, but you can?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not the same thing. This…this is not…this iswork. Okay? It had nothing to do with you; it had no bearing on anything. You were keeping a fucking prenup from me, Tally. That is between us, very much so between us. You can’t possibly compare the two.”

“Does your parents moving into our backyard have no bearing on our relationship?” she spat back. “Because you had plenty of chances between rounds fucking me last night to tell me that, and you didn’t. So I’m going to assume it was another thing I didn’t need to know, according to you.”

“I’m gonna…” Angelo gestured to the doorway and slipped quietly from the room, shooting me a sorry empathetic expression on his way out.

“That’s not fair,” I scoffed, leaning my hip against the wooden dresser. “Everything I do has a purpose, Natalia. All the decisions I make, the things I keep to myself, it’s for a reason. You didn’t need to know about my parents yet, because I was trying to save the weekend from crashing and burning. But I should have fucking known it would anyway.”

“You don’t get to decide what I need to know, Matty. And lying about actively interviewing is a pretty big fucking deal, regardless of if it affects me or not. And it did, by the way. It affected everything. You’ve been missing from our life, stressed, working late, abandoning me with your parents…” She squeezed her little fists together and closed her eyes. “I know it was my idea to have them stay, but we agreed to take it ontogether. We made a fucking promise. We made a lot of promises thatIam the only one honoring.”

I bit my cheek so hard I tasted iron. We were both angry, and hurt, twisted too tightly to communicate, and I was a stubborn yank who wanted her to trust me, blindly, because I loved herand I would never hurt her purposely and I couldn’t see why she wasn’t understanding that. My chest was so tight it felt like I was choking on air, clawing my way to a surface that was farther and farther away with each reach. I had to clench my palms to keep my fingers from shaking.

“Why did you lie?” she asked. “What is the purpose you’re so adamant about?”

“To protect you,” I said sternly.

“Protect me from what, Mateo?”

“Me! To protect you from me. From all this shit going on in my head I didn’t want you worrying about. You have enough going on.” I sighed out a long breath and several shorter, more stilted ones followed. I swallowed a wave of nausea and focused on a crack in the wooden floorboards trying to ground myself.

“Iwantto worry about you,” Tally stressed. She was too far away and my hands ached to grab her and pull her to me, shake her into seeing where I was coming from. “Iwantto get through things with you. Iwantyou to look to me for fucking support.” Her voice caught and my eyes darted from the floor to her face.

“I do.” I took an urgent step forward and she took one back that stopped me in my tracks.

“We’re supposed to be partners, Mateo. Partners in this, in life. Figuring it out together. We are gettingmarriedin less than a month, and you’re still worried I might not be able to handle parts of you. When I said yes, it wasn’t to a ring, it was to you. Everything that comes with you. Everything you haven’t dealt with yet. I didn’t realize there were caveats and exceptions.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t back away. Don’ttryto hurt me when the pain you're feeling was unintentional.”

“It was mediated!” she snarled. “You knew I would react this way eventually, and you were putting it off. You were trying to save your precious bachelor party from Natalia getting angry and losing her shit again.”

“I found out about my parents yesterday,” I reasoned. “If I knew trying to save this weekend from turning to shit would make me the bad guy I wouldn’t have done it. I would have told you everything instead of letting you enjoy Vegas with your sisters and your girlfriend.”

Natalia put both hands on her hips and threw her head back, staring at the ceiling. “You know what, you’re right. I am going to enjoy my weekend in Vegas. I’m not going to let this get to me, because I deserve it. I’m going to win a fucking scavenger hunt, too.”

She stormed past me toward the bathroom like a gust of wind, setting me off balance. Before I could argue with her the door slid closed and the lock latched.

I knew I fucked up. When Natalia was in her moods she was deep in them. We butted heads over ridiculous things like laundry and watching a show while the other was at work, but this was more real than that. We didn’tfightlike this. We’d never had grounds to more than disagree with each other; it was one of the reasons we were so compatible.

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