Page 39 of Hearts of Fairlake

"It...there's no way it could hurt!"

As we rolled to a stop at a sign, he turned to look at me with the biggest eyes and the smallest voice. “But what about myfeelings? Those can be hurt."

For one horrified moment, I stared at him as I realized there was a very good chance I had completely ignored how he felt about this entire situation. And while hyper-focusing on my worries and fears, I’d ignored him altogether. The poor man had grown up loved but had always been pretty smothered, and sometimes his feelings had been forgotten while he grew up trying to be strong for everyone else. Now, here I was, completely losing my mind on him and making him feel?—

He snorted softly and began to pull away, but I saw his lip twitch again.

I was married to an ass.

I gave him another swat, this time on his stomach, and made him huff in surprise. “You're an ass!"

"It made you stop freaking out," he said, rubbing his stomach comfortably. "So I'll consider it a win."

"You're sleeping on the couch tonight."

"We don't own a couch. We have a loveseat and some chairs."

"Fine, then I'm sleeping on the couch, and you can deal without having me there like your own personal teddy bear."

"You love being my personal teddy bear."

Not the point. “Not very much right now."

He sighed, reaching for my hand, but I pulled it away. Maybe someone else would have caught the hint and pulled back, but Luke was not someone else. He was Luke. Instead, he waited a moment before reaching again, shaking his head likeIwas the one being ridiculous here, and waiting before doing it again. I smacked at his hand when he tried to grab it again. On the next slap, he caught my hand and pinned it to his thigh as he drove one-handed.

"You know," I said with a snort. "I hear life after divorce isn't all that bad."

"Why now?" he asked softly.

"Probably because it took me this long to realize what kind of shit I married."

"Why decide to freak out this hard about it now? I know you've fretted and worried. You've talked into the night about this before, so...why now?"

I'd known from the start what he was trying to do, which was precisely why I’d tried to avoid his attempts. Now I was stuck in the car, the bastard was holding my hand, and he was genuinely trying to reach me emotionally.

I hated it when he cheated.

"Because...this might be the meeting," I said with a wince. "Like you said, all the warnings we had before, all the roadblocks, those felt...perfunctory. They felt they had to throw all that at us after talking to us for so long. But now? After all of that negative hype? Now they wanna meet with us?"

"It feels like that might have been for nothing," Luke saidin understanding. "Like this is when it could actually happen."

"I mean, Jesus, Luke. They're talking about giving us a kid," I said, breathing the final word like it took all the air out of my lungs. "Do you understand how big that is?"

"I do," he said. "But not in the same way you do. I know better than you what it means when you raise them right, and you know what it means when you do it in the worst way possible."

I let out a bitter laugh. “My parents didn't raise me. Fuck, Grant raised me."

"Might not want to tell Grant he's a failed parent."

"Who said he's a failed parent?"

"You're the one always talking about how shitty your childhood was and how awful your parents were."

I paused at that and then snorted, wiggling my arm to try to smack him playfully again, but my hand was still caught. "Yeah, don't tell Grant that. He would probably take it literally, and then extremely personally. He did the best he could and fulfilled a role no kid should have to. And that includes protecting his older brother when I executed our parents to make sure they didn’t try to play sex trafficker or whatever they were going to do.”

"I've always liked that you refer to it as executing," Luke mused with a wry smile. "Not that you killed them or murdered them."

"The law called it that but then looked the other way when the facts came out, including Grant's age. They just shoved him and me under the rug and pretended shit like that wasn't happening all the damn time," I said bitterly.

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