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“I certainly wouldn’t expect it, but then, I did know your granny carries Glocks around and can shoot them both at the same time, western-shootout-style, which is quite abnormal. I didn’t think you would be involved in anything like that. Not to that extent, anyway. Did she…she didn’t adopt you all just because she was looking for partners in crime, did she?”
He shakes his head against my pillow, and goodness gracious gravy boats, I don’t think I’m ever going to wash that pillowcase again. I’d say the sheets too, but that might sound dicey. Although, we technically did what we did on top of the quilt, so maybe the sheets are good to go. I’m kidding. I’ll wash them all. Gross.
“No. She adopted us because she has a huge heart. She never had kids of her own, and she always wanted them. By adopting a bunch of law-breaking, street kids with bad pasts, she was able to get kids and grandkids all in one bundle. We weren’t old enough to be her biological kids, so I guess we’re a bit of both. She saved us—straight up. If we didn’t want to be involved in whatever she was doing, she would never have involved us. She gave us a choice, each of us. Kind of like how she showed up on my doorstep and told me that I had to give you a choice. You had to know what we did so you could decide whether you wanted to get more involved with us—I mean with me—or not.”
My heart skitters in my chest and comes to a crashing standstill. “Is that why you were so quiet earlier? Because you thought I wouldn’t choose you?”
Lennox turns his face and looks up at the ceiling. “It’s not really that. I kept wondering if it was fair to ask you to choose between your life now and what we do.”
“You think I can’t have both?”
He slowly tilts his face back to look at me. “I don’t know if anyone can.”
I can feel all the heat gathering in my chest again, but this is a brand new heat so painful that I can barely breathe through it. It’s the kind of heat that signals loss, grief, and pain. It’s hot as freaking blue blazes, and the sting is echoed behind my eyes and in my sinuses. My nose is tingling like I’m going to sneeze, but I know it’s not a sneeze gathering there.
“So you don’t want to try? You don’t…you don’t think we could make it?” I’m not mad. I’m not going to leap to conclusions here about what Lennox is trying to say, and I’m not going to let my doubts get into the driver’s seat because they suck doubly as drivers and will farging steer me off the road every single time.
He does a grunt sigh thing that I can’t possibly decode. Grunt sighs can mean anything from no, I don’t think so to one hundred percent we absolutely could. “I just don’t know if you could live our lifestyle, I don’t know if I could keep going with the one I’m living, and I don’t know if we could have it both ways. We’ve never tried.”
I hate the shitstorm of doubt coming for us, at us, surrounding us. Yes, it’s shitstorming in the bedroom. The ceiling is opening up and raining poo. What? It could happen. I’ve heard of terrible things happening in apartments where the sewer backs up, and…never mind. I know this is a condo, and there isn’t anyone above me, fortunately for me. They’re the thin, skinny kind of condos that are self-contained units with no one above or below. The shitstorm is of our own making.
“What about…what about Ransom and Ayana? And your other brother. I know you have another brother. In Canada…” I grasp onto anything I can think of at the moment to prove to him—to both of us—that we can do this.
“Ransom is learning how to be retired while my other brother, Alden, is fully retired. He and his lady brought her family with them, and they now live a pretty secluded life at the lake. Ransom couldn’t just abscond with Ayana. Not with a baby, and not when she’s so entrenched here. Azalea just had her parents, and they were willing to move with them.”
“It’s not that you couldn’t. It’s that you don’t want to. To retire, that is. It’s not that you don’t want to choose me. Not that it’s about choosing me. Is it about choosing me? I mean, I know we’ve only been…well, I don’t even know if you could call it dating, but we’ve only been unofficially together for a little bit, so I’m not saying it to sound all butthurt and whatnot….”
“Hey.” Lennox rolls onto his side and cups my chin. He’s a good chin-cupper. His hands are the perfect shape for it. They’re the perfect shape for a lot of things that have to do with my body, and my heart leaps with hope, even though I should do better at controlling my eagerness to believe in that four-letter word. “It’s not about choosing you. And it’s not about how long or not long we’ve been together. Ransom and Ayana were only together for a few hours one night before they found out they were expecting a child. Alden and Azalea were actually engaged at birth—that’s a long story—but they knew each other for all of a few days before they chose their path.
