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“Say what?” I am so fucking confused. “Umnitsa?”
Instead of answering, she bolts for the bathroom.
The door is slammed in my face before I can even attempt to wedge my foot in there. I have no fucking clue what just happened. No idea what to do next.
All I can do is just stand here like an idiot while she starts sobbing loudly behind the locked door.
The shower turns on.Fuck. I thought we’d kicked the scrubbing-her-skin-raw habit. But my gut says she’s cranking up the heat and sinking back into the darker recesses of her mind.
“Clara?” I knock on the door, hard enough for her to hear me but not so hard it will scare her. I hope. “Talk to me. Please.”
“Go away!” More sobbing.
“I want to help you. I don’t… I don’t know what I did.” I run a frustrated hand through my hair. “Fuck, Clara, tell me what’s wrong. Please. Tell me what I did so I can make it right.”
I don’t understand. We were in tune; we were more intimate and synchronized than ever before.
What the fuck happened?!
“Clara, please.” I’m trying to ignore the way my heart fractures at the sound of her crying. I want to help her. I want to save her from whatever it is that’s causing this.
“You…” Clara’s voice calls out weakly over the roar of the shower. “You sound just like him.”
27
DEMYEN
I fucked up.
The immediate cause was an unthinking slip of the tongue. A sin for which Clara is now scrubbing off every remnant of our lovemaking in some boiling hot shower.
I knock on the bathroom door one more time. “I’m stepping out. Give you some space.”
I need her trust and her respect, and earning both of those things requires me to step back when all I want is to step in. So, in lieu of getting either of those…
I go get a fucking drink.
I yank on the first pair of sweatpants I can find and shuffle my way toward the kitchen. Before I go down, I check on Willow just in case she happened to hear the drama or the dramatics that preceded it.
Thankfully not. She’s sound asleep in her bed, one of her new teddy bears tucked under her arm and the rest of them snuggledwarmly around her. A light snore hums through her nose and manages to make me smile just a tiny bit.
I love this little girl.
I love her mom, too.
But what if my love isn’t enough to overcome my failings? Love doesn’t change the blood running through my veins. It doesn’t erase the mistakes I’ve made again and again. It doesn’t?—
I turn away and continue to the kitchen before I let any more dark thoughts compound in my mind. Though I’m growing increasingly tempted to just walk into the lake and let fate decide what happens to me.
I grab from the stash of liquor without bothering to see what I pick. As long as it’s in a glass bottle and pretty damn big, it’ll do. I dangle it from loose fingers at my side as I walk out to the patio, fully determined to overthink my life and drink all my guilt and sorrow away.
Or, at least until I’m unconscious.
“What happened?”
Good fucking hell, I damn near drop the bottle.
Bambi is curled up in one of the overstuffed papasan chairs, cocktail in one hand and her phone in the other. She clicks her phone shut and sets it on the end table next to her, then looks up at me with a tight smile. When I continue to just stand there, she gestures to the chair next to her.
