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I guessed we weren’t sleeping now either.
He definitely needed it, though. More than I did. He was carrying so much pain—and it wasn’t only Blake. He’d just buried his mom, his last living relative.
“We’ve hated too much.” His voice came out almost as low as a whisper, and he had to clear his throat. “I can’t do it anymore, El. I was just…” He exhaled and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I converted everything into anger. The hurt of missing you, of not being the one you chose—”
“I did choose you.” I had to make that clear. “Be angry about whatever you want, but not that. I did choose you, Joel.”
He frowned and glanced at me tiredly. “You didn’t, though. I waited for you—and then to hear you’d decided to give your wife a second chance… I—”
“What?” It was my turn to frown. “I didn’t—I was late to come back home, but I didn’t give her a second chance. I don’t know where you got that from. There was no second chance to give anyway. Lizzie had moved out when I returned from Uzbekistan.”
I couldn’t blame her. We’d turned each other into our worst nightmares. She’d tried to change me, always bitching and complaining, and I’d grown heartless.
Joel looked like he was trying to solve a math problem beyond his comprehension. “I’m too exhausted to sift through hazy memories. Can you give me the timeline of what happened when you came home?”
Thanks to my talk with Reese earlier, I’d dusted off a few of those memories already.
“My contract in Uzbekistan took longer to carry out, so I came home after roughly five months instead of two,” I said. “At that point, you still had a couple months till you could transfer from Florida, and I didn’t wanna call you until I was done. Lizzie and I started our divorce proceedings, and I worked my ass off with Tariq. I didn’t even have time to visit my folks. They had to come up and see me in LA—and Piper drove up too, so I could see Blake. Piper told me you’d reconnected.”
“Okay… Yeah, I reached out to her on Facebook,” he murmured pensively. “I couldn’t find you on there, and I knew it was useless to try your phone.”
When I was in the field, yeah. I usually didn’t bring it with me, which I’d told him.
“I remember that,” he said. “When they headed up to LA to see you. I was on pins and fuckin’ needles, hoping for an update about you. It’s possible I asked Piper more than once about what was going on in your life. I’d just transferred—they let me go a couple months early.”
“All right—well, that’s it. Work and divorce. That was all that was going on in my life for the months I was stateside,” I replied. “Ma was a little bummed and said she hoped we could work things out, Lizzie and me, and I told her I’d already met someone else in San Diego. She changed her tune right away, ’cause suddenly she knew I’d be able to visit more often.”
“And Piper was present for that conversation too?” he pressed.
“Yeah…? We were at dinner.”
He sighed and fell back against the mattress, and he rubbed his hands over his face.
“Tariq and I were off to Mali after that,” I went on. “Hillcroft had a semi-permanent operation there for a few years, and we rotated our security presence every ninety days. By the time I came home, Piper told me you were dating.”
He lifted his head and stared at me. “She actually said that?”
“Yeah. What’s going on? Was she wrong?” I didn’t understand the new edge in his tone.
“No, she was fuckinglying,” he said. “After she went to see you in LA, she came home and said you’d decided to give your marriage another shot.”
What thefuck?
“And we sure as hell didn’t start dating that year,” he continued, ticked off. “We slept together once when we were shit-faced, but it was probably another six months before we began an on-and-off kind of relationship.”
Hearing about them together pissed me off, no matter the nature of our discussion, and I had to put some distance between us. I rolled out of his bed and went for my sweats.
It wasn’t possible. My sister could be a little sneaky at times, but not like this. This was a level of deception that hurt people and burned bridges.
If Joel had gotten together with anybody else, it was highly likely I would’ve lost my composure and confronted him, maybe even publicly, drunk off my ass… Who knew. But it’d been my baby sister. I’d pulled back instead. I’d avoided the situation altogether, and I’d swallowed my hurt every time I had to see them. Like at their wedding. Whenever Blake had a birthday. And once at our folks’ anniversary dinner.
“I need a smoke,” I muttered.
I still had River’s pack in my sweats—
“So you never got back with your wife,” Joel stated.
“Fuck no,” I snapped. Shit. I blew out a harsh breath and ran a hand through my hair. “You comin’ or not?”
