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“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. It was five against one, and this is the only damage I took. The rest of them are in various states of unconsciousness or maybe in an ambulance by now.” I’d texted Mercedes on my way out of the garage to let her know the location, condition, and general demeanor of the gentlemen I’d left behind, so if they weren’t in an ambulance, they were probably in a cell.
“You could have been killed.”
I gave an exasperated sigh. “Are we going to do this right now? Right now?”
“I can’t think of a better time to talk about it,” he snapped. “When you’re healthy, you act like you’ll live forever. But then you show up looking like this, and God knows what happens to you when I’m not around that you underplay or don’t tell me about.”
“I told you about the broken bone in Bolivia.”
“The cast told me about your broken bone in Bolivia,” he countered. “The only reason I knew about Mercy reaching into your fucking chest was because I was there. If it hadn’t left a scar, you wouldn’t have told me at all.”
He was right. I wouldn’t have. I was a big believer in the notion that if something didn’t kill you, there was no sense on dwelling on it after the fact. I wasn’t sure why he was so worked up when this was hardly the worst fight I’d ever been in, but now that he was on a roll, he had no intention of slowing down.
“This is insanity, Secret. You can’t just run into fights against men who are bigger than you, stronger than you.”
“Oh come on. Desmond, this is a bullshit sexist argument. I’m trained, and I’m a better fighter than anyone on the street, and you seem to willfully ignore that every time I get punched, which means you don’t believe I’m capable of taking care of myself and think I need my strong werewolf husband to look after me.”
“You won’t let me give you a bodyguard.”
“I don’t need a fucking bodyguard.”
“You need to protect yourself.” His volume was rising, and I knew this was going to be a legit fight, not a polite disagreement we could ignore. Lucky for him I was already in a fighting mood.
“God, Des, it keeps coming back to your need to own me. You want me to be here all the time, you want me to be a werewolf so I’m in your pack and under your thumb. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was still married to Lucas.”
Oh yeah.
I went there.
If fights between married couples were like car racing, I’d done the equivalent of going from zero to sixty directly into a brick wall.
Kaboom.
“What’d you just say to me?” His dumbfounded expression told me he honestly couldn’t believe I’d struck so low so quickly, but the anger was still there, under the surface, and he was going to strike back with his own ammunition any second.
We argued a lot, yes, but usually it was normal young-couple stuff. This level of bitter animosity was reserved for the really bad fights, the ones that only happened every year or so. The ones where we both said things we didn’t mean because we knew the best way to hurt each other.
As it turned out, the more you love someone, the more you know how to cut right through to their heart.
I had a feeling we’d both be doing some serious apologizing later.
That was the thing. I loved him. I loved him more than I loved anything else in my life. And even though I was sick to death of having this same argument over and over and over and over, I wasn’t sick of him and never would be.
We would fight this fight, no matter how many rounds it needed to go.
At the end of the day, I’d still be his, and he’d still be mine.
But right now I wanted to punch him in the goddamn throat for making me say something so ugly.
“You heard me.”
“So now me wanting to keep my wife alive is the same as manipulating her, using her, driving her away from the people she loves. Okay, sure.”
On the plus side, at least we weren’t speaking ill of the dead anymore by bringing up Lucas.
I got up, in spite of my body protesting that this was an argument we could definitely have in a lounging position. Instead of agreeing, I threw the ice pack at him.
