Page 114 of Misrule
“Place this on your eye,” he told her when he returned to their bedroom and handed her the wet cloth.
Without question, she did as she was told.
Sighing, Christopher took her free hand and examined the cuts on her knuckles. Pouring peroxide onto several cotton balls, he dabbed her injuries.
“Ow!” she moaned. “That hurt.”
“I know, baby,” he said gruffly. “When you give a motherfucker a beat down, your hands get as fucked the fuck up as their face. Punch a motherfucker in the mouth, you graze fuckin’ sharp ass teeth. Hit a assfuck in the nose, you hit fuckin’ cartilage. Shit ain’t as hard as bone, but, dependin’ on the velocity of your fuckin’ fists, you still injure yourself.”
“You sound like an expert on fist fights,” she said with a small smile.
“I had my fuckin’ fair share,” he admitted, leaning forward to kiss the top of her head. He drew in a deep breath and focused on tending to her injuries, not on her scent, her nearness. “You okay, Megan?” he finally asked.
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Her lower lip trembled, then she sucked in a breath, and anger transformed her features. “I cannot believe Kendall.” She shook her head. “No, I can’t believe me. I gave her the benefit of the doubt so many times, Christopher. I sided with her over you. I’ll never forgive Kendall.Never. I don’t ever want to see her again.”
On the last word, her voice broke.
“We are…we were family,” she sobbed. “How could she do this to us? To CJ? ToJohnnie?”
“Cuz she a conscienceless cunt, baby. She don’t see people. She see steppin’ stones.” Abandoning his triage, he sat next to her, put an arm around her shoulder, and hugged her close. “This a valuable lesson, Megan. I been tellin’ you to leave that bitch the fuck alone, but you wasn’t ready. I shoulda backed the fuck off and trusted you was gonna get to a fuckin’ point where you had e-fuckin-nuff. It’s just that you hurt now and I don’t never want you in pain.”
“You can’t protect me from everything. Life is a learning experience. That’s the only way we grow and become better.”
Christopher nodded and dragged her onto his lap, resting his chin on the crown of her head. He grunted and covered the jolt of cock-and-ball pain with a forced smile. “What the fuck you mean when you told me I already fuckin’ messed with the business of my cock?”
Did she know what he’d done?
“We were…are…were, um, there’s an argument going on between us. I didn’t think we’d make love tonight. That’s what I meant. Why what did you think I meant? What else is going on?”
He’d sworn to Megan that he’d never lie to her. He could alwaysnottell her something, but, for the most part, if she asked him a direct question, he’d answer her honestly. There were some exceptions to this rule, as in Traveler and Dinah’s deaths, but that was about it.
As proud and as gleeful as he was that Megan had fucked up Kendall, he knew, too, a certain innocence had been lost within her. She might become less trusting.
Less forgiving.
He also had the sin of meeting Emily without Megan’s knowledge to live with. Kendall was on her No-Kill list. He’d promised he wouldn’t kill her. He’d also sworn never to hide any meetings he had with other women. Fuck, but he was batting a fucking thousand.
In comparison, his procedure seemed inconsequential.
“I got my dick snip flipped,” he confessed.
She was quiet for a moment. “You got the vasectomy reversal?”
“Yeah, Megan. Yesterday. I ain’t sure I was gonna tell you, so I let our disagreements get the fuck outta hand.”
The washcloth slipped down as her hand went slack and mutiny gathered in her one punched-up blue eye; the other motherfucker was red from her crying. “You would’ve just let me end up pregnant and think your vasectomy failed?” she asked, appalled.
“Not at fuckin’ first,” he said quickly. “Then you threw me a fuckin’ curve when you told my ass you ain’t want no more lil’ motherfuckers.”
She heaved in a breath, then cocked her head to the side, her anger leaving her. “Do you really want us to have another baby that bad?”
He picked up on the hopeful note in her tone.
“Do it matter?” he asked cautiously. “Ain’t you said you ain’t want no more babies cuz you were in shape and shit?”
“That’s what I’d been trying to talk to you about this morning, when you got up and walked away,” she said in a hurt tone.
“I ain’t able to fuck you for two fuckin’ weeks, but I fuckin’ figured in five or six days, my cock and balls woulda looked normal a-fuckin-gain, so we coulda made up.”
