Chapter 20 #3
Handing me a tiny fork, she urges me to try, and when I do, I almost cry again. After the tart, she brings me a rosewater and white chocolate chip cookie, then a slice of passionfruit cake covered in a yellow glaze that’s so shiny I can see my own reflection in it.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Are you okay?” she asks, glancing toward the doorway that leads into the shop where we left Knight.
Honestly, I’m surprised he’s stayed out there, which makes more tears want to spill from my eyes, but I bite my tongue, forcing them away.
“No, I’m not,” I admit.
“Want me to kick his ass?” she offers.
Smiling with wobbling lips, I shake my head. “No.”
“He loves you. He might not always know how to show you, but he does.”
“He’s better than you think. He shows me. But it’s when he takes it away that it hurts the most,” I say, hugging my arms around myself tightly. “How much of your stock did I just eat?” I ask, needing to change the subject.
“Oh, it’s on the house.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I burst in here and insisted you feed me. The least I can do is pay for what I ate.”
“I’ll add it to Knight’s tab,” Tori says, smirking.
“Okay.” I nod. “Do you have a washroom I could use?”
“It’s the one in the apartment. Nero’s on shift, so head on up there. The place is empty.”
Thanking her, I climb the stairs and freshen up, grateful that I brought some makeup with me in my purse today. Once I’ve put myself back together as much as I can, I head back downstairs, hugging Tori tightly before I step past Knight, ignoring him as I step out onto the sidewalk.
“Wife,” he barks seconds before my feet leave the ground, and I find my back pressed up against the wall at the side of the bakery.
“Put me down,” I snap, staring at a spot over his shoulder and refusing to make eye contact.
“No,” he says, clearly fighting to remain calm.
“I have to get to work.”
“No.”
“Knight, I don’t want to talk to you right now. I have to go to work, and I’d rather not do that looking like I’ve been crying.”
“I don’t understand,” he says almost desperately.
Sighing, I fight the urge to wrap my legs around him, unwilling to let him comfort me or allow myself to dismiss my feelings, even if he obviously has no idea why I’m upset.
“We can talk later, at home, but right now I need you to put me down.”
His jaw clenches as he holds me off the ground for two long minutes before he reluctantly lowers me to my feet. When I start to move forward, he uses his body to block me, only letting me pass once my fingers are securely entwined with his.
The silence surrounding us makes an acidic taste coat my tongue, melting away the sugar and chocolate goodness. Not speaking, I don’t try to tug my hand free, letting him keep hold of me as we silently walk back to the studio.
Betty’s gaze turns toward the door the moment we push through it, and she looks me up and down, taking in my outfit. “Oh, ohh,” she whistles beneath her breath, turning back to the iPad in her lap.
“Hot damn, mama. You’re a smoke show,” Leo coos from her seat beside Etta at the front desk.
Without saying a word, Etta jumps up from her seat and comes over to me, pulling me into a tight hug. “God, I missed you,” I say into her pink hair, hugging her back and struggling to hold back my tears.
“Do we need to talk?” she asks, pulling back enough to look at me, but not letting me go.
“I have a client due in ten minutes. Lunch?” I ask.
“Of course. Is the big guy going to be okay with that?” she asks, turning to glance at Knight, who is behind us, my hand still held in his.
“He’ll be fine,” I assure her, without asking Knight, who most definitely will not be okay about me excluding him. But honestly, right now, I don’t care.
As the morning passes, Knight’s expression gets more and more perturbed until the muscle in his jaw is twitching so quickly, he’s starting to look like he has a tic.
When Jaiden shows up with his order pad at noon, Knight almost rips his head off when I tell him I’m not hungry and just ask if he would mind bringing me a coffee.
“You need to eat lunch,” Knight growls quietly, making the sound seem even more authoritarian than normal.
“I think I’m capable of deciding when I’m hungry,” I snap, turning my back on him and focusing on the tattoo I’m shading.
When Jaiden reappears just before one p.m., Knight surges forward, taking the food he ordered and my coffee and slapping a twenty into the kid’s hand before he reaches for me. I dodge him. “I’m having lunch with Etta.”
“Octavia,” he says.
“You need to stop, okay. I’m having lunch with my friend, alone. Now go eat your sandwich and calm down,” I say dismissively, taking my coffee from him and beckoning for a concerned-looking Etta to follow me into the break room.
I feel rather than see Knight waiting behind the closed door, but as much as my body is urging me to go and throw myself in his arms, I can’t. I won’t.
“What the hell is going on with you guys?” Etta asks, sitting cross-legged opposite me on the couch.
“I’m pregnant,” I blurt, blinking widely when I realize what I’ve just said.
“Oh my god,” Etta shrieks, then lowers her voice, leaning into me. “You’re pregnant.”
“I nod. Four weeks. We found out yesterday.”
“Holy fuck,” she whisper-yells. “Okay. So are you happy, and he’s not, or is he happy, and you’re not? With the fireworks coming from you two, I have no idea which one it is.”
“Neither. We’re both happy. I know it’s fast, and I know it’s crazy, but we wanted this,” I tell her, hearing the emotions that are bubbling to the surface thicken my voice.
“So…” She trails off, waiting for me to tell her what’s wrong.
Moaning, I cover my face with my hands and exhale loudly. “This is going to sound crazy.”
“I’ve gotten pretty used to crazy,” she confesses.
“Knight, he’s…” I try to think of the word he used to describe himself. “Particular.”
“Particular,” she repeats, rolling the word over her tongue. “Okay, yeah, I don’t know him that well, but I could see that.”
“His day is structured. He gets up at five a.m. and works out. He eats breakfast at seven a.m., lunch at one p.m., and dinner at seven p.m. The same exact thing every day. If things don’t happen at the exact right time, it bothers him.”
“Okay,” she says.
“He loves me,” I tell her.
“I see that.”
“He quit his job so that we could be together…all the time.”
“And you don’t like that?” she asks, her brows furrowed.
“No. I know it’s weird, but I do like it. I want to be with him all the time.”
“Okay.”
“The first couple of days after we got together, he tried to get me to wake up at five a.m. with him—”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” She laughs, interrupting me.
“Exactly. I’m not a morning person unless my morning starts at like ten a.m. So he bought a bed and set it up in the gym, and when he gets up at five a.m., he carries me downstairs, and I sleep in the gym while he works out.”
“That’s…weird.” I’m not sure what my expression looks like, but she quickly adds, “But kind of cute, I guess.”
“It is cute. Now I wake up and get a show. He’s all hot and sweaty, his muscles all bulgy and…well, yeah. I’m not averse to mornings when they start like that.”
Smiling, Etta nods. “Yeah, I totally get that.”
“So after I wake up, he makes us breakfast, and then we go upstairs and get ready for our day. He runs me a bath, and he washes my hair, and then he dries it for me. He learned how to do pigtails and how to use a blow dryer, and he takes care of me and…it’s…he’s perfect.”
“I’m waiting for a but here, babe,” Etta says.
“So yesterday we went to the doctor. I didn’t know I was pregnant. We just went to talk about me not renewing my birth control shot. It turns out I’d gotten my dates a little mixed up, and now I’m pregnant.”
“And he was happy?”
“So happy. We both were. We both are, or I thought we were. But then this morning, I woke up in bed. Not the bed in the gym, but the bed in our bedroom. It was eight thirty a.m., and Knight was in the bedroom, fully dressed, just staring at me.”
Tilting her head to the side, Etta stares at me expectantly.
“He got up and went downstairs without me. He left me in bed alone while he was in the gym, then he cooked and ate breakfast without me. He showered and got dressed without me.”
“You’re mad that he left you in bed to sleep instead of waking you up?” she questions, clearly confused as to why what sounds like a thoughtful gesture has actually upset me.
“Do you know how long we’ve spent away from each other since he turned up in Rapid City?”
She shakes her head.