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I squeaked as my belly hit his shoulder blade but didn’t tell him to put me down.
He carried me straight into his bedroom. Then treated me like he hated me.
I. Loved. It.
• • •
He was lying there, silent and still, in the aftermath of the most fantastic sex we’d ever had. Which was saying something, because holy wow, did the man give good sex.
“Used to, I wanted to fill a house with children,” I said as I stared at the ceiling above my head, surprised by the words that’d come out of my mouth. “I wanted to wake up and spend my days raising a passel of kids on a farm with ducks, donkeys, and so many chickens I couldn’t count them all.”
He took so long to respond I thought he was asleep.
But when I turned over to look at his sleeping face, I saw him glaring hard at the ceiling.
I waited, feeling like maybe he was working through something, and he would speak when he was ready.
It ended up being a solid ten minutes before he did.
When his angry words permeated the calm vibe I had going on, I was utterly shocked.
“I don’t want kids.”
I blinked.
But before I could ask why, he answered for me.
“My wife killed our children.”
His wife. Killed. His children.
I was smacked in the face so abruptly with those words that at first, I couldn’t comprehend.
I blinked. “I’m…what?”
There were no freakin’ words. Absolutely none. I couldn’t come up with some even if I tried, his words were just that brutal to my soul.
I mean, you’d always heard about this happening.
Postpartum depression was a real thing.
But you never expected it to happen to someone you knew.
Let alone someone you were trying to convince yourself you weren’t falling in love with.
“My wife. She killed our children. She’s currently serving three and a half years for the murder of our two babies. Twins. They were seventeen months old,” he said carefully.
Detached.
He was so freakin’ detached.
And I knew without a doubt that would be all I ever got from him about the matter.
He wouldn’t be able to share anymore.
This big, beautiful papa bear was broken, and the one woman in the world he was supposed to trust with them had been the one to break him.
“Three and a half years?” My voice rose an octave with each word. “What kind of fucking sentencing was that?”
He looped his hands behind his head and continued staring at the ceiling.
“The kind where the judge felt like she’d suffered enough,” he scoffed.
I swallowed past a large lump in my throat, unable to form the right words.
“What did she want with you today?” I asked.
He turned his neck once to the left, and once to the right, eliciting a loud pop as he cracked his neck in each direction before answering.
“They had two years’ worth of court dates and appeals,” he said. “She spent two years in a psych facility getting better, and then two and a half in the state penitentiary.” He closed his eyes. “That meeting was her telling me that they granted her parole. She’ll be out next month.”
Next month.
She’d be out next month after killing her own twins.
That was…unreal.
“I…” I started, but he interrupted me.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he said stiffly. “Just know that there’s a reason this’ll never be anything more than it is.”
Never be anything more than it is.
Could I live with that?
“You don’t ever want to be with another person ever again?” I asked.
He shook his head.
Was I okay with that? Getting scraps?
No.
But was I able to leave him just because of that?
Also no.
It was a damned if I do, damned if I don’t type of situation.
But maybe, if I tried hard enough, he could get past that fear?
I mean, sure, I didn’t want kids anymore. But that didn’t mean one day I wouldn’t change my mind.
I hadn’t met Winston before.
Now…who knew what I’d want in a couple of years.
“Being with someone like that makes you vulnerable,” he said. “But she broke me. There’s not a single piece left of me that wants to feel that way ever again. And the easiest way for that to happen is to never form an attachment that has the potential to hurt me. So yes. I don’t want that. I don’t want you that way.”
I don’t want you that way.
I had no clue that something so innocuous could ever hurt that bad.
Yet, he’d accomplished it.
And I had no choice but to live with it.
CHAPTER 17
I was crazy back then. (Yesterday.)
-Text from Crimson to Simi
CRIMSON
I flipped through the air, my feet catching the tight rope easily, and reached for the metal hoop that was swinging past my head.
My mind was luckily blanked.
In the two weeks since we’d had that discussion about him wanting nothing to do with me in any permanency, we’d spent very little time together.
