Page 9 of Follow Me
Chapter Three
Mal had been prepared for Kel to try to work on her the entire drive home to Sarasota, to beg, plead, even go Master on her to order her to reconsider this.
She hadn’t been prepared for his devastated silence. Not a cold or chilly one, either.
More one of…grief.
When he reached the exit on I-75 for their house, she finally broke the silence. “I love you, Kel.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart.”
“I’mnotmad at you,” she said.
He slowly nodded. “I get that.”
“Ihaveto do this. It’s been over eighteen months.”
He took a moment to respond. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” She hated that she knew he weighed every response to her now, terrified of causing a reaction in her.
“I want to know you’re not angry with me,” she said.
It was as if he deflated, and that was somehow worse. “I’m not angry, sweetheart. Not atyou,” he muttered.
“Don’t you dare yell at Doyle and Niall and Doug.”
From the grim set to his jaw, she knew that’s exactly what he wanted to do. “Why didn’t you tell me you were working on this plan? Especially with them?”
“I don’t want you lashing out at our friends.”
“If they weretruefriends, they would havetoldme you reached out to them so I could have talked you out of this.”
“Not when I reached out to them as a patient and not as your slave, no. Theywantedto talk to you, believe me. I told them no.”
He pulled over into the next shopping center and threw the shifter into park before he turned to face her. “What do you want me to say, Mal? You want me to wish you luck in trying to kill yourself? Because you sound pretty damn fatalistic, honey. It’s like youwantto die.”
The tears he tried to blink back and hide from her gutted her, but she didn’t cave as he continued. “It feels like I’m the only one working to keep youalive. You’ve pushed us all away—me, Mom, Chelbie, our friends.”
“Chelbie has the baby to take care of,” she said. “And everything she’d doing for Rich’s career. She doesn’t need extra work on her plate babysitting me because I don’t have my shit together.”
He played dirty, and honestly, she was surprised he hadn’t played this card earlier. “If Tilly was here, you damn well know what she’d tell you, right?”
Mal slowly nodded. “Yeah,” she softly said. “I know exactly what she’d tell me. She’d tell me to suck it up and move forward and pull my own weight. She’d tell me if what I’m doing isn’t working and I know it, then it’s time to quit making excuses and find something thatwillwork. And you know she would. Because that’s what shehastold me in the past. Want me to call her so she can confirm she said it?”
Kel threw his head back against the seat and stared out the windshield for several minutes.
Mal didn’t interrupt.
“So you trade one kind of limbo for another?” he eventually asked.
“No. Four weeks.”
He drew in a ragged breath and looked at her. “You want me to live at the apartment for four weeks?”
“At the end of four weeks we’ll revisit it.”
“And if you’re doing worse?”
“How much worse can I be doing, Kel? Other than dead?”
