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“Did Sah get new jeans?” Remy asked.
Wyn nodded.
“Did you tell Manon she needs to dump this guy?” he asked.
Wyn’s lips tipped up again. “You think your daughter needs to dump every guy.”
“Only when she dates putzes. And this guy is a putz, if he gets in a snit when it’s more important she be with her family.”
“According to you, they’re all putzes.”
“Because they’ve all been putzes.”
Her smile came back.
“Do you think Sabre is acting strange?” Remy asked.
The smile went away, and she nodded.
“Yes. For Sah, he’s being…” she looked like she was searching for a word before she found it, “overprotective of Manon, when Manon is handling learning what happened to you a lot better than I expected.”
“He’s giving me a break, or he thinks he is.”
“Sorry?”
“He thinks I need to deal with Mom dying and he knows, usually, I’m overprotective of Manon. So he’s taking that on because he feels I need to have time to deal and not worry about my daughter. And he made a show of making sure I knew he was on the job.”
“We’ve got good kids, Remy,” she said softly.
“The minute she was out, I bought new mattresses,” he announced. “They were delivered yesterday while you and the kids were shopping.”
That made his wife look like she was going to bolt.
Since she didn’t, he went on, “Even so, I hadn’t slept with her in that bed in weeks.”
“Remy—”
“Because I fucked her, are you never going to touch me that way again, Wyn?”
“I think maybe we should get into this when—”
“She was my first, and only, after you.”
Color came into her face, and yeah.
He was getting pissed off.
The worst part about it?
He had no right to.
Not about that.
He’d done that to himself.
Regrettably, it didn’t make him any less pissed off.
“So you had a first but not an only,” he guessed, feeling that knife sink into his gut.
“I think maybe this is something we should both let fade away,” she suggested.
He didn’t take her suggestion.
“How many were there? One? Two? Five?” he pushed.
“Remy.” That time his name was a warning.
He wasn’t sure ever in their lives together he’d heeded one of her warnings.
She also never heeded his.
And this time, it was no different.
“I know it’s on me. I’ll have to live until my dying day knowing I made it so you took another man…or men. But since you did, I don’t think it’s fair you make me pay for having another woman.”
“This isn’t about being fair, Remy, or making you pay. It isn’t about her either. It isn’t about…the others.”
Fuck.
Others.
Plural.
Fuck.
“It’s about me seeing to you,” she finished.
“Seeing to me?” he asked.
“When you hurt…like that…you want affection, not sex.”
What was she talking about?
“Sorry?”
“When you get hurt, when your feelings hurt, or you get sensitive or emotional…”
Jesus Christ.
“…you like to cuddle and get in your head playing piano with me close,” she concluded.
“This is one of the major reasons I did not want to tell you about my parents,” he growled.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t want to cuddle, Wyn. I’d much rather be buried in you than buried in Debussy. You like me to play. You like to cuddle. I do it for you.”
“Do you…not like to play? Does it…remind you of your mom?”
“For fuck’s sake, Wyn!” he exploded, standing. “I’m not some wuss-ass bundle of fragility you have to coddle just because my mother was fucked up. Every piece of my life is not about her, every part of me is not about her.”
She uncurled her legs on the couch to sit straight, but she didn’t stand up.
And she said pacifyingly, “All right, honey.”
This, of course, made him angrier. “And don’t do it now, for fuck’s sake.”
“You use the F-word a lot when you won’t let your sons do it,” she remarked.
A diversion tactic.
He wasn’t diverted.
“That’s because you let me be just who I am and I have a foul mouth, and yeah, maybe that’s because my mother used to smack it when I got older and started to defy her. But that still doesn’t mean everything about me is about her.”
She looked stricken.
And it gutted him.
“She used to smack your—”
“Jesus Christ, let it go, Wyn!” he roared.
She closed her mouth.
“You do see me standing right here?” He slapped his hand on his chest to emphasize his question.
“Yes, Remy, I see you,” she said gently.
He had a bad taste in his mouth as he spat, “Don’t be docile and meek because you don’t think I can handle shit.”
She shut up again.
“I’m not exactly a hundred-pound weakling,” he pointed out.
“No, you’re not,” she agreed.
“I had a growth spurt at thirteen, started filling out at fifteen, but before then, all that shit stopped mainly because she pushed me into a wall when I was eleven, and I got ticked. So I pushed her back.”
Her eyes got round.
“She lost her shit, dissolved onto a chair, howling with crocodile tears, asking me what kind of son she raised and threatening to tell Dad I put my hands on her. My response was, ‘Please, Mom, tell him.’ She read that threat for what it was, shut shit down immediately, gave me a good look and realized that particular reign of terror was over.”
