She looks at me. “Are you always this argumentative when you’re worried?”
I don’t answer that. I take her ankle in both hands, gentle as I can. She hisses but doesn’t pull back.
“Can you flex it?”
She flexes it and wince, biting back another pained sound.
Okay. She can move it. Likely not a break, then. I’ve broken enough bones to know that if you can move it, it’s not broken.
“Probably a sprain,” I say. “But we’re getting an x-ray right away. We can be back in Marble Falls in under an hour by helicopter.”
She looks at me with sad eyes. “We’re on our honeymoon.”
“Nothing to be done about it,” I tell her. “We gotta get you looked after by a doctor.”
Outside the sleet has turned to hail. I can hear it against the tin roof, like a thousand pebbles raining down on us. The fire is going now, throwing warmth into the small space as the logs crackle. I sit back on my heels and look at her ankle.
“I’m so damn sorry,” I tell her. “It’s my job to keep you safe, and I’m failing hard.”
She reaches out and touches my jaw gently. “You’re not failing at anything.”
That’s a lie, and we both know it. I come up from my knees and sit next to her on the cot and lean back, feeling frustrated with myself and helpless to fix this.
“You can back out of this at any time,” I tell her. “Wives have divorced their idiot husbands for less.”
“Stop talking like that,” she says. Sharper than I’ve ever heard her.
My eyes lock on hers.
She swallows. “I like being married to you, all right? I like talking with you and spending time with you. And I know we’re still figuring things out, that there are—there are bumps in the road and there will be plenty more to come—but I’d like to think we’re on that road together. That we’ll weather this storm and any other with each other. As a team. Isn’t that what you promised me? At least for the year we’re together, before this ‘clean break’ we’ll make of it?”
She’s got me dead to rights. That’s exactly what I promised her. Because that is what I want to give her, and that’s what I want for myself, but I’m fucking scared that the closer I get to her, the more impossible a clean break will ever be.
“You’re right,” I say. I take my baseball cap off and push a hand through my damp hair, starting to dry in the warmth of the fire now.
“I don’t know how to do relationships,” I admit. “My only real friends are my family, and that’s because they’re blood andthey won’t let me disappear on them.” I look at the fire. “And now I’m your husband and I don’t have the first clue how to do that right. Even on paper.”
She gives me a small, hesitant smile. Takes my hand in her small, cool one. “I’ve never been a wife, either. But I’m enjoying it so far. So maybe we can figure this whole ‘married couple’ thing out together. What do you say?”
“I’d like that,” I say quietly.
She squeezes my hand. “Good. See, look at us, learning to communicate. Progress.”
“Progress.” I offer her a smile of my own in return. Small and maybe kind of stiff, like those are muscles I haven’t used in a while, but it feels good.
“And Slade, honey?” she says. “You don’t need to run away every time you get a hard-on. I actually know how to handle that kind of thing.”
I just stare at her, my dick swelling very inconveniently and inappropriately.
And I think, not for the first time, that I’m hopelessly outmatched by my wife.
Chapter 23
Down and Dirty
SLADE
The resort coordinates the helicopter. Within forty minutes we hear the rotors above the tree line.
