Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 85399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
“You know what I really hate?” I ask, my face heating. “I hate when you are home and the shop calls and you just get up and go. There’s not even a flinch of thought about it. The shop always wins. It doesn’t matter if we’re doing something as a family or at a wrestling meet. You just . . . go.”
“But, Lo—it’s my business.”
“Yes, but we are your family.” I force a swallow past the lump in my throat. “I’m not saying you never have to get up and go because, believe it or not, I am rational. I understand things are important and you’re the boss. But you’ve trained your team, Jack. They’ve stopped even trying to do things because they know you’ll come running. That pisses me off—not just for me and Maddie and Michael, but for you too.”
His temple pulses. Have I pushed too far?
“Okay, got it,” he says. “What else?”
I stare at him for a long moment. What else? He really wants me to keep going? But the longer I sit quietly, the longer he waits me out.
Fine. “Mow the field beside the house.”
“I did mow the field beside the house.”
I laugh. “Yeah. You did. Two years ago. Want to know how I know? Because last year, I paid to have someone do it because the kids couldn’t even play basketball on the driveway because of the bugs. And last month, the guy I hired last year came back to see if I wanted him to do it again—which I did, by the way. Did you even notice? Or did you assume, I don’t know, that I was doing it?”
He sighs, his jaw flexing. Guess what, Jack? I don’t like this either.
A rise of emotion lifts from my chest—the burn of anger, the fog of sadness, and the bitterness of regret. It’s all I can do to hold it together—to stay calm. To show him the things that have gotten me to this point. But the mountain of grudges I want to get off my chest feels insurmountable, and the pain of it all grows by the second.
“Okay,” he says, finally. “I’ll put a reminder in my phone to mow—”
“I hate that you never want to have sex with me.”
The words are in the air before I know I’m going to say them. It’s as if they’ve been sneaking behind the other frustrations until they could find an opening to burst into the scene.
And in the scene they are.
Jack’s eyes widen, and his jaw falls open. I pull my arms down and shift on the bench.
“You think . . . ,” he says, pausing to gather himself. “You think that I don’t want to have sex with you?”
The words are padded with disbelief. They’re laced with shock. He says them like he’s still trying to process them . . . and failing.
“What else am I supposed to think?” I ask, my cheeks warm to the touch.
He runs a hand down his face. “Wow.”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” I say. “I don’t get your attention.”
“When I give you my attention, you get pissed.”
It’s my jaw that drops this time. “What are you talking about?”
“I come up behind you while you’re cooking, and you complain about your day. I ask you to ride with me to look at a car, and you act like it’s the last thing you want to do. I climb in bed and reach for you, and you pull away and rattle off a list of all the shit you want me to do—and none of that is having sex.”
“I . . .” He’s right. I do that. I force a swallow that almost gags me. Why can’t he just hear me? “I’m bitter. That’s the ugly truth of it. It feels like just another thing I get to do for you.”
His eyes widen.
“That sounds terrible, I know. But it feels terrible too,” I say, blinking back red-hot tears. “I have no outlet. There’s all of this stuff building inside me, and I have no one to talk to about it. It feels like no one cares. So when you do try to have sex with me and haven’t bothered to even talk to me, let alone ask how my day was or take out the trash that’s running over onto the floor, it feels like you’re just asking me to use my body—the last thing that I have that’s mine—for your benefit. And that’s . . . hard.”
“Wow.” He blows out a breath, bowing his head. “I need to process that.”
“I’m just frustrated,” I say, my heart thumping. “It’s hard to feel like you’ve skipped off to have a life and left me behind to clean up after you. I have value beyond my homemaking skills, you know.”
The irritation gathered at the corners of his eyes is there, but it’s softened. The blaze in his eyes has calmed a touch. I’m too seasoned to hope he’s actually listened to me. But I wish I weren’t.