Chapter 17
COURTNEY
“Would you please come home, so we can talk things out?”
My eyes lifted to see Hadley across the room. She gave me a slight nod of her head before she walked off to her bedroom to give us some privacy. “What you did was not okay.”
“I know.”
“I won’t allow another Robeson man to walk all over me.”
“I know.”
I shook my head as a queasy feeling in my stomach made me reevaluate my last statement. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t a fair thing to say to you.”
“No,” Flynn said as he gently moved me back so that he held me at arm’s length. “You’re entitled to feel however you want, Court. It’s been a whirlwind to say the least. One minute you were engaged to my cousin and the next you were married to me. You didn’t even get a decent amount of time to grieve the loss of one relationship before you were thrown in the next one. When we started this together, it was an arrangement. We blurred those lines from the beginning, but I think maybe that’s part of our problem.”
“You regret the things we’ve shared?” I asked him as that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach grew into a giant void that threatened to swallow me up at any moment. Flynn sighed and shook his head vehemently.
“No, not at all. My only regret is not giving you time to adjust first. I want you, sweetheart. There’s no doubt about that, but I want you the right way. I don’t want you to be confused or to resent me in the end for trampling all over you and pushing too hard for something you’re not ready for.”
“I’m pretty sure it was me who pushed for our wedding night,” I teased to try to alleviate the thick tension that threatened to form a wall between us. Flynn’s face remained serious as he pulled me in for another hug.
“Do you want to stay here for the night with Hadley, or…” He let the sentence dangle there with the hint of an invitation to come back home with him. It was still weird for me to think of his place as home. I lived there, but everything was his from before I was in the picture. Maybe Flynn was right and we had both jumped in feet first without really taking the time we needed to sort ourselves, let alone what we were to each other.
“I want to come back. Hadley should get to enjoy what’s left of her long weekend without having to mop up my tears or babysit my crazy emotions.”
“I don’t mind,” My best friend called out, letting me know that we truly had no privacy in her tiny apartment.
“I’ll meet you back at the house.”
“You don’t want to ride with me?” Flynn seemed almost hurt by me wanting to get there on my own.
“I would, if it weren’t for the fact that my car is parked downstairs too, and I don’t really want to have to worry about coming back for it later.”
“Yeah, sorry, I forgot.” Flynn backed up and then took another step backward toward the door. “I’ll see you at home?”
“I’m right behind you, I promise.” He offered a small smile and then left me there in my best friend’s apartment. Once he was gone, Hadley came back out of her bedroom.
“Well?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“He apologized, right?”
“Yeah, but where do we go from here? He’s right. We jumped right into this. I jumped right into this,” I corrected. “I was running from what Beckett did and buried all my anger and sadness. The wedding, our night together, the days after…” I sighed. “It was all a distraction.”
“Except you’re missing the most important part of the equation,” My friend informed me.
“What’s that?”
“You were happy being distracted by Flynn and you weren’t all that sad about losing Beckett.”
The first thing I noticed when I got back to Flynn’s house was that a couple of my smaller paintings were sitting propped against the wall. “What are they doing here?” I asked.
“I realized today that you never really moved in.”
“Of course I did.”
“No, you didn’t. The only thing you have here are some of your clothes and the shit you use in the bathroom. There’s no nicknacks, paintings, or all the other little touches that come with a person making a space theirs.”
“Well, it’s not my space.”
“See, that’s the thing, it is. We got married. You were supposed to move in here with me. You’ve just been sleeping over though.”
“I see.” It felt like Flynn punched me in the chest with those words. He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t moved in, but I also didn’t want to rock the very precarious boat we had been floating around in since the wedding.
“How do we do this?” I finally asked.
My husband shrugged his shoulders. “One step at a time.”
“That sounds oddly simple.”
“I want to give you some space to figure things out, Court. I want you here with me, but you need to want it too.” Before I could interject anything, he threw his hands up in the air to stop me. “You need to take the time to really work through the Beckett situation.”
“It won’t matter. I’ll never go back to him.”
“That might be the case, but it doesn’t mean you would have chosen to be with me under normal circumstances.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Flynn was right. “Okay, but what does that mean for our current living situation?”
“You can have the master bedroom. I’m going to sleep on the couch until I get a bed in the spare room.” One of his spare rooms was a gym, the other was an office. Either one would take some work to transform into a bedroom.
“It’s your bedroom. I can sleep on the couch or go back to…”
“No,” My husband nearly shouted at me. “I mean, I’d prefer if you stayed. We can’t really figure things out if we never see one another.”
“That’s true, but I don’t think it’s right to take your bedroom. It’s your house.”
“It’s our house, Court. We’re married and I invited you to live here with me as my wife. We might sleep in separate spaces until we figure out if you want to remain my wife, or whatever else we need to work through, but this is your house too. I need to know you’re comfortable and that you have a private space to get away from me, if you need it.”
“And what about your private space?”
“I can go in my office or work out my frustrations in the gym until I get some things moved around.”
“Flynn, I don’t want this to be the end of us.”
“Well, that sounds like a really good place to start. When you’re sure, and you’re ready to have a conversation about the future, you let me know and we’ll work on what it takes to get there - together. Unless you don’t want us to do it together,” He reluctantly tacked on at the end.