So why can’t I force out that one simple word? Why can’t I just say yes and go to my tote and pull out the papers and shove them at him along with a pen, thank him after, and tell him to get the hell gone.
Why does my tongue form words all on its own? Words that I don’t want to thrust between us? Words that I don’t want to mean? “Do you want a coffee?”
He stares at me, his eyes changing, that placid surface becoming stormy and turbulent below. On the outside, he looks composed. Serene, even. In control. Beautiful in that rugged, ruined, seen too much life, sort of way.
The same way I am.
“Yeah,” he finally rasps with a hard nod.
He pushes the door the rest of the way open, and when I stumble back, he steps inside.
Chapter 10
Gage
Inever wanted to be like my father. Not that you could ever call him a father. Or like my mother. The woman who abandoned me in her search for her own freedom. She could have taken me with her, fuck, she could have handed me over to CPS, but instead, she left me to rot with that bastard. She left me with his rage and his hate, his fists and his demons and the empty fucking bottles that littered every square inch of the house.
I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my life. Things I don’t regret exactly, because I did them while I was trying to survive. I want to say that I’m better than that now. Better than the people who created me, but the hard truth is, their DNA flows through my veins. They made me from nature and they nurtured me, or rather, didn’t, through the first half of my life. So what does that make me?
It’s lose-lose on both fronts.
Except that, from the moment I step into Ami’s small apartment, I know that every second that I’ve spent trying to distance myself from them and what they represented, was worth it.
She invited me in here because I’ve managed to establish a thread of trust and I’ll do everything in my power to prove to her that I’m worthy of it. It’s small, that first step, that entrance into her private domain, but it’s more than she’s ever given me and I’ll cling to it like a man clings to his last breath.
And even if it kills me, I’ll sign those fucking papers.
I won’t continue to antagonize her in order to make her pay for a past she really was a victim of as much as I was. She lied to protect me. Tracker conveniently omitted that point when he spilled to Steel about what he’d done. I wish she’d told me the truth sooner, but what’s done is done. It’s been one fucking year of both of our lives, and if we ever want to move on then we just have to do it.
Move the fuck on.
Ami backs up like I have the plague. I shut the door behind me, and she takes another step back, eyes wide and shimmering with something I can’t decipher. For someone who just asked me if I want a cup of coffee, she sure looks like she’d rather throw it on me than serve it to me.
Since I didn’t come here for third degree burns, I lean up against the door and let her have her slow retreat. She whirls and disappears around the corner, and I try not to focus on the way the air dances sensuously behind her, like she left particles of her spirit in its wake.
The place is smaller than I figured it would be. I didn’t imagine the MC putting my AWOL wife up in a palace, but I thought it would be bigger. Nicer. Homier. The apartment is none of those things. I shove off into the living room, feeling nearly claustrophobic by the stark walls and the confined space. There isn’t any art. Nothing to make the place feel like hers. She didn’t leave personal touches anywhere. Not in ornaments or knick-knacks or any of that cluttered up shit that women seem to like so much. The furniture is basic. It’s too new, too stiff, too… too something. Too unlike Ami.
Not that I know her tastes.
The couch looks like she’s never sat on it. The chairs too. They look rigid and lonely in the room without so much as a coffee or end table, a rug, or a piece of artwork.
Not that I’ve ever been in one, but a prison cell would look a hell of a lot more like home than this apartment does. Okay, I might be exaggerating, but still… home sweet home, it ain’t.
There’s rattling from around the corner of the bleak white wall that separates the kitchen from the living room, and then a hiss and the mouth-watering aroma of fresh coffee. That at least smells a little more like someone lives here.
My eyes stray to the hall that breaks off from the living room I can make out the shape of a door and then the shadowy form of another. Likely, the bathroom and her bedroom.
I can’t help the bitterness that burns the back of my throat. Is this little box of a place without any warmth really so much better than what I could offer her? Is her self-imposed loneliness and isolation here, in a city that Steel chose because it was far enough away from Helena and Jacksonville, that much better than her own family? Her sisters? Her father and her brothers? Does she hate us all so much that she’d rather spend months here, and never do anything to make it feel like her own, like she’s just biding her time or wading through the years with her eyes screwed up so tight that seeing is an impossibility?
While the coffee burbles from the other room and the scent continues to wrap around me, thick and rich and fragrant, I imagine Ami in there, utterly silent, trying to find the courage to come out and face me, now that I’ve invaded her sacred personal space.
I’m considering joining her in the kitchen, but before I can decide whether that move would be smart, given she looks likeshe wants to cut my balls off, she stalks into the room, with a mug—white, just like the walls in this madhouse—perched in her hands. She holds the cup at the bottom like it’s not hot at all and wouldn’t scald her, the other hand curled around the handle.
She extends it to me, and I don’t ask her where hers is or if she has cream, even though I hate drinking it black because it’s likely to burn a hole straight through my stomach. Instead, I put my palm out and she passes it over, careful not to touch me. Our fingers nearly brush, nearly, but they don’t, and she pulls back like I have the plague.
Ami walks over to the chair directly across from the couch and parks her ass in it. She tucks her legs up underneath her, so that I can barely see any of them, even though she’s wearing a dress. She stares at me and when I notice that her eyes are red-rimmed, like she’d been crying in the kitchen while she was making coffee, I want to crunch that mug in my hand, grind it to dust like a beast, and find the bastard who hurt her.
Except that it’s me. It’s me who hurt her.