Page 45 of Heat Exchange
Because she was rushing, she swung the door closed behind her with a little more force than she’d intended and it slammed. Wincing, she headed for the stairs. She may have showered, but she needed a fresh set of clothes and some hair product before it totally dried that way.
“Lydia?”
Dammit.“Yeah, it’s me. I have to get ready for work.”
Ashley walked out of the kitchen, and Lydia could see she’d been crying. “Danny stopped by again last night.”
And she was still puffy-eyed and red-nosed. “You should have called me. I would have come home.”
“I don’t know what to do, Lydia.”
On the inside, she let out a long, resigned sigh. Outwardly, she offered a supportive smile. “Go pour us each a cup of coffee. I’ve got to get this hair into a pony or it’ll drive me crazy.”
Once she was upstairs, Lydia took a few seconds to send a text to her dad, telling him she might be a little late and he needed to head to the bar or let the cook open. It shouldn’t have surprised her when her phone rang in her hand a few seconds later. The man hated texts.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Why are you going to be late?”
It was tempting to tell him she was having lady problems. Nothing made her old man bail from a conversation faster than bringing up menstruation. But she needed to hold that in reserve for if and when it was actually an issue. “Danny stopped by last night and Ashley’s upset. I’m going to talk to her for a few minutes and then I’ll be in.”
“Why didn’t you talk to her last night? Or earlier this morning? You gotta wait until it’s almost time to open the bar?”
Lydia froze, making anouch,bustedface she was thankful he couldn’t see. That’s what she got for trying to multitask. “I was out. I just got home.”
Maybe it would be enough. If menstruation held the number one spot for things Tommy Kincaid didn’t want to hear his daughters talk about, sex was definitely a close runner-up.
“You went out after the bar closed last night? Where did you go?”
Lydia sighed, but quietly so he wouldn’t hear it, and lied. “I had to stop by Becca’s and we got talking and it was late enough so I just crashed on her couch.”
“Fine. Go see what’s up with your sister. I swear, those two really need to get their shit together, so talk some sense into her, would ya?”
Once the call was over, she changed into some clean clothes and put her hair up, muttering unflattering things about her father the entire time. She knew as dads went, others had worse. Hers didn’t drink more alcohol than he could handle. He’d never laid a hand on his wife or kids in anger. But he was also gruff, emotionally hands-off and—perhaps worst of all—not exactly progressive when it came to his thoughts about women and family. The implication Ashley should just get over whatever her problem was made Lydia want to dump a full mug of ice-cold beer over his head.
Ashley, who was leaning against the counter, gestured to the mug on the table when Lydia walked into the kitchen. “I made you a coffee, but you don’t have to drink it. I know you have to get to work, and I’m okay now. I just had a moment, that’s all.”
“Why were you crying?” Lydia pulled out the chair and sat in front of the coffee. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened. He texted me and asked if he could stop by again, and I said yes. When he stopped by in the morning, he only grabbed his dress shoes, so this time I thought he was ready to talk. But when he got here, he just wanted to talk about the financial situation. We have joint accounts, of course, and he said he didn’t feel right taking money out of them without talking to me, but he was running low on cash.”
“That’s better than him taking the money out and screw you if you don’t like it.” Ashley stared into her coffee mug, looking like somebody had just kicked her favorite dog. “I asked the wrong question. You told me what happened, but what were you expecting to happen?”
She knew she’d hit the right button when her sister’s eyes filled up with tears. “I want him to fight for me—for us. I want him to tell me he loves me and that he doesn’t want our marriage to be over, and not sound like he’s reading it from a script or something.”
“When you told him you weren’t sure you wanted to be married anymore, you were testing him, weren’t you? Pushing him into a corner so he’d have to give you some kind of emotional validation.”
Ashley took a deep breath and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I honestlywasn’tsure if I wanted to be married to him anymore, but I saw it as some kind of wake-up call that we needed to work on it before it got worse. I guess he saw it as my way of saying I wanted a divorce.”
“And you don’t.”
“I love Danny. I don’t want a divorce.”
“You need to tell him that.”
“No,” Ashley said, and Lydia sighed. She really wanted to go to work. If somebody was having a bad day, you set a beer and some pretzels in front of them and put a game on the television. “If I tell him that and he comes back home, nothing’s changed. Maybe we won’t be divorced, but the problems that drove me to that point will still be there. I need for him to show me he loves me. I’m not going to let him keep assuming I know.”
Lydia wrapped her hands around her mug and took a long drink of her coffee to give herself time to think of how to phrase what she was thinking. While Ashley was the most even-tempered of them, she could be pretty stubborn.
