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And then his sister and brother had called, and I’d gotten angry.
My ultimatum of having his phone for him to come inside hadn’t been a paltry request. I’d literally taken his phone and turned it onto silent once he’d come through the door. Over the course of the night, he’d gotten three more phone calls from his sister, and one from his brother, and all of them resulted in pissed off voicemails when he hadn’t answered.
God, I hated his family.
They were assholes to the fourth degree.
I wanted to punch them all in the face each time they said something mean to George. Even though, in all honesty, he’d never tell them that they were hurting his feelings. He’d rather play off that he was upset rather than actually letting them know that they’d gotten to him.
And, I understood that. Mostly.
I just hated that they continued to treat him the way they did.
They knew that Micah had been hurt.
They were fucking lucky they got anything at all, in my opinion.
And, let’s not forget that Christmas was still over a month and a half away.
There was no way in hell that they’d purchased any gifts for them yet. They waited until the last minute to buy anything, and normally what they got were the crappy leftover unwanted toys from the Dollar Store on Christmas Eve.
I knew, because the year that everything in my life was perfect, we’d taken one God awful weekend to go up there and spend the holiday with them so Grams didn’t have to split her time between all of us.
It’d ended in a lot of crying on my end, Grams pissed off to hell and back, and George trying to buy kids presents on Amazon and get them delivered the day after Christmas.
Needless to say, the next year we didn’t go back, and then we’d gotten divorced.
This would be my third Christmas with George being a part of my life, and I would be damned if he went there again just to appease them.
Fuckers.
So yeah, I shoved his phone into a drawer so he wouldn’t get any of the calls. Then deleted the texts and calls every couple of hours so he wouldn’t know that they called.
Then I’d texted Grams and let her know that we were home, and what the other two asshole grandchildren of hers did.
She’d then informed me that she was coming to our house on Christmas, and to make sure we got over whatever we’d started to fight over by then because she didn’t want to have two Christmases.
“I saw it happen on the news.”
I blinked and looked up to find George standing closer to the bed, his hand running over Micah’s hair.
“You did?” I croaked.
God, if there was one thing I never wanted George to know, it was the particulars to that accident.
I hadn’t wanted him to know—or see—what exactly had happened. I didn’t want him to know that Micah’s poor little body had taken such a beating. I didn’t want him to have those visuals forever in his mind.
But in doing so, I’d kept all of it bundled up inside, and it was hard to function when all I kept seeing was my little boy’s body flying through the air.
“Yeah,” George said. “The radio station had a television crew there recording the footage for the five o’clock news. Apparently, it was a big deal since we’d never been to the playoffs before. They wanted to document the excitement of the town. Meaning I saw the entire thing happen in real time.”
I looked down at my hands, which I was tangling together in the dark.
“I’m sorry, George,” I whispered. “If there was one thing in this world I would keep from you, it’s that.”
Then I felt George’s muscular arms wrapping around my shoulders. “I don’t want you to protect me from that,” he murmured. “I was letting you know because I wanted you to know that I understood. And if you ever wanted to talk about it, I’d be there to listen.”
I pressed my forehead deeper into the indention of his pectorals and shook my head. “That day was truly the worst day of my life.”
“Mine, too,” he agreed. “I think I might’ve scared the guys. Rhys, the unshakeable badass, looked at me like I had a screw loose.”
“You do have a screw loose,” I teased.
He squeezed me tighter. “Only when it comes to my family. To you and Micah.”
That I agreed with wholeheartedly.
I breathed him in, basking in his scent, and remembering how much I’d missed it over the last nine months.
I’d hugged him more in the weeks since Micah had been hurt than I had in the last year.
And I realized just how much I’d been missing that, too.
“Let’s go to bed,” he whispered.
I felt the reverberation in his chest along my head and hands.
