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I swallowed as the light turned and we started moving. My eyes focused on his hands, and they widened when I saw the reddish bruising and scabs covering his knuckles. I didn’t know how I hadn’t noticed them before. Well, I did know. I’d been distracted first being pissed off about the car thing and then the phone thing. Then my kid being super cute, then staring out the window at anywhere but Lance while trying to get a hold of my anger.
“You hurt yourself,” I whispered as he pulled into the parking lot. I had to clench my fists on my knees to stop myself from reaching over to touch the skin.
This time he did look over at me. “You’re concerned over a couple of scrapes when I know you’re smart enough to read between the lines of what they mean?”
He still had his sunglasses on so I couldn’t read his expression. No doubt it would be blank, as always.
I nodded. “Robert’s had those scrapes plenty on his fists,” I replied. “I’m not concerned about him experiencing just how hard someone has to be hit for that to happen.”
This time I didn’t need to see his eyes in order to see his reaction. Lance’s entire body stiffened, the cords in his neck pulsated with my words. Another violent, confusing and kind of hot reaction.
“I’m more concerned about you hurting yourself for me,” I continued, my voice raspier than before. “I don’t want you doing that.”
His entire energy focused on me, and the force of it hit my lungs, constricting them, making it difficult to breathe.
Lance lifted his hands, turned them, regarded them so I could see their large span, the bruises and marks. So I could imagine them on me.
Wait, no, that wasn’t what this was supposed to be.
“This isn’t pain,” he said, gaze now directed at his hands. “If anything, this is a remedy to the pain I live with every day.” He paused, lowering his hands and focusing his shades back on me. “I don’t hurt myself for you. I don’t hurt with you. And that’s the problem.”
On that, he opened the door and slammed it in my face once he got out, leaving me blinking, struggling for breath, confused and turned on all at the same time.
If I had wondered whether I affected him at all before, I didn’t need to know.
Chapter Eleven
Three days have passed since the exchange with Lance in the SUV. Since something cracked in his steely façade and I saw something. Something ugly. Something beautiful. Something that showed me I was more than a job to him.
We were more than a job to him.
I held onto those bruises on his knuckles, the bruises on my soul from the words he’d spoken for the three days he went back to cold, detached, almost cruel. I held on tightly. As he drove Nathan and me to school for the next three days, as he responded to everything Nathan asked him with less coldness, and even when he didn’t speak to me at all in the car.
I don’t know why I was holding onto it. No. I knew exactly why. Because it was a distraction. From the silence I’d heard from Robert since the phone call. From the growing dread at the bottom of my stomach, that this wasn’t done. Wasn’t over.
I couldn’t do anything about that dread. Or even Lance. There was no use pushing, trying to get him to talk, to open up to me. I knew that. So I controlled what I could control. Working. My son. Our routine.
Which was why I was in a demure—for me—dress and cork wedges with my hair delicately curled and makeup covering up the angry bruise on my face. My dress had long sleeves, which were wide and loose, it was tight at the chest and the flowed down to just past my knees.
Nathan was in his little navy button-up and tan shorts. Tennis shoes I’d scrubbed so they weren’t covered in whatever dirt a five-year-old managed to discover.
I knew Lance was inside because I heard the door open and close and the security system disable. He did that. Let himself in. To bring coffee for me in the mornings. Not donuts, not every morning. Just on weekends now. But he ensured our interactions were brisk, silent if possible. Silent interactions with Nathan were impossible, but he humored my son, making him fall even more in love with him.
I braced, hearing that beeping, the air in the room changing. But I didn’t stop what I was doing, I was determined not to show Lance just how much he affected me.
The low thump of boots against the carpet told me he was moving closer.
As did my son’s scream of “Captain!!”
I assumed he greeted my son with his usual forehead lift and lack of verbal response, which Nathan inexplicably loved.
