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“Sissy, what the fuck? What the fuck are you doing with him?”
I had to try to explain what was happening here but I didn’t know how to even start. This wasn’t what Ward was thinking! It wasn’t, was it?
But before I got the words formulated enough to speak them out loud, Bowie had answered. “We’re fixing the front door because it fell off its hinges. Watch your mouth in front of her.”
Ward’s jaw went slack for a moment before he gathered himself again. “Watch my mouth?” he yelped. “What the fuck? Don’t talk to me like that, you stupid gorilla!”
“Gorilla?” Bowie repeated. “You know they can rip a man’s arms off, right?” He put down the level, unhitched his tool belt, and hung it over the railing.
I watched Ward, and he watched Bowie, but his words were directed to me. “What are you doing, Sissy?” he demanded again.
“We’re putting in a door. That’s all,” I said.
“What?”
“We’re fixing this door, which you might have done in the six years you’ve known her except I think you’re too much of a pussy to know how to use a hammer,” Bowie announced. He looked at me. “Pardon my language,” he said.
“What did you just call me?” Ward yelled. And he ran at the house.
Before I knew what was happening, I had been moved to the side—Bowie had picked me up and put me in the corner of the porch—and Ward was sailing through the air again, just like he’d done at Aubin’s wedding. I watched as he thudded heavily onto the patch of hard dirt that had once been the front lawn of this cottage. He stayed there, wheezing in a way that told me the wind was knocked out of him.
“Nope,” Bowie said to me. I realized that I had started moving toward where my boyfriend sounded like he might be dying. “Let him be. He’ll be fine and that will make him calm down.”
A moment later, Ward rolled to his side and then got to his feet, now breathing normally. “What’s going on here, Sissy?” he asked, and he didn’t swear and he didn’t yell it.
“Bowie—Garrett Bowman came over here to fix this door. He broke it by mistake, so he’s fixing it,” I explained. “That’s all.”
“When was he here to break it in the first place?”
“She can have people over. You’re not in charge of the guest list,” Bowie told him. “There’s nothing that you need to be upset over besides me calling you a pussy. Pardon my language,” he repeated to me.
Ward flushed red with anger but he stayed where he was. “I knew you were seeing him behind my back.”
“Just as friends,” I admitted. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should have.”
“I knew it,” he repeated and my heart dropped even further into my stomach. He didn’t make a move toward me, though, not with Bowie standing next to me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, and I heard the quaver in my voice. I was sure that both of them heard it, too.
Ward looked at me for a moment and then he walked back to his car. He whipped a U-turn that took him through several overgrown bushes and when he was pointing back toward the main road, he put his head out the window.
“You’re a fucking bitch, Sissy. You’re going to be sorry.”
Bowie was halfway to him when Ward hit the gas and the car disappeared into a cloud of dust from the sandy gravel.
I sat down on the step, on one of the boards that probably needed to be replaced, and rubbed my eyes with shaking fingers. “I was playing with fire,” I said out loud.
“Are you all right?” Bowie knelt next to me, but on the rock path instead of the rotten wood. “What did you say?”
“I was playing with fire,” I repeated. “I knew that I shouldn’t see you. It’s not allowed by the Woodsmen and it definitely wasn’t allowed by my boyfriend.”
“He shouldn’t be able to allow who you see.”
“Why not?” I asked. “If he had some woman around and I thought she was a threat to me, to our future together, I would have asked him not to see her, too.”
“Would you have dared to do that? What would that guy have said back to you, if you had?”
I put my hands over my face for a moment. They still shook. “I don’t know because that was just a dumb hypothetical. I’m here now, in this reality where my boyfriend thinks I’m cheating on him.” What was Ward going to do about it?
