Chapter 32
Shay
Students will be able to crash hard.
Noah pushed open the door and stepped into my room. His hair was a wreck, his eyes red and weary. He sat on the edge of the bed, exhaled a whole paragraph, and shook his head. “What the literal fuck happened here tonight?”
I folded a sweater, shook it out, started folding it again.
I didn’t need to do this. I always organized my laundry the second it was dry.
Putting it away was another story and that was the story that led me to this state of uncontrollable futzing.
While Noah had tucked Gennie into bed, the day’s adrenaline spikes drained and I found my hands shaking.
Conveniently, I noticed the shirt on the top of my laundry pile looked slightly rumpled and thus a perfect project was born.
One that gave me a thread of control and just enough purpose to regain some calm too.
“Are you looking for an answer to that?”
He glanced at the clock perched on a tall bureau.
It was after two in the morning. Getting Gennie home was one thing, though thanking everyone for their help in searching and sending them on their way was something else altogether.
They meant well, they certainly did, and I understood the desire to linger.
Part of me wished they’d linger even longer than they did.
I needed that crush of voices and bodies to distract me from—from everything .
“Not really,” he grumbled. “We’ll spend enough time figuring it out with her therapist this week.”
“Did Gennie tell you how she got out?”
He flopped back onto the bed. “Out her bedroom window, onto the porch roof, down a pillar to the porch. Apparently she’d tested the gutters and they were too shaky.”
“Perfect.” I held up a jersey knit skirt, smoothed it out, folded it. “Are you okay?”
“No.” He ran a hand over his face. “I am not qualified for this. I don’t know how anyone could be qualified for this but I definitely am not.”
I nodded. He didn’t notice. “I was thinking that—I think I should go. Not right now but tomorrow. I should go back to Thomas House.”
He pushed up on one elbow. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I should move back to Thomas House. I think it would be better. For everyone but Gennie in particular.”
“Please explain to me how that makes any fucking sense, wife.”
“From the start, we said we’d protect Gennie. She wouldn’t get caught in the middle, right?” He glared at me, his eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth cut in a sharp scowl. “She’s in the middle, Noah. She thinks we’re going to have a baby and abandon her.”
“She also thinks her mother chose a prison sentence over her,” he said, each word ice-cold. “Clearly, there are some misunderstandings rooted in the fact she’s a child who has experienced multiple emotional traumas in the past year.”
“Listen, I can’t risk hurting your kid because we decided to get fake-married so I can inherit my grandmother’s farm.” I threw a bra into the basket. “And the longer I’m here, living in Gennie’s house and participating in her daily life, the more it’s going to hurt when I leave.”
“It’s going to hurt regardless. She’s been attached to you from the start.”
“All the more reason for me to go,” I said.
“You told her you’d be there for her. You said you’d be there if anything happens to me. How do you reconcile saying that to her tonight and then moving out tomorrow?”
“You have a family here and I am intruding on that,” I argued. “I can play the part of the fun aunt she visits on long weekends and summer holidays. I can be that person for her. But we can’t fake our way through this when there’s a real kid involved.”
“You can’t walk away now and pat yourself on the back. She’s loved you since the day you showed up here and I think you know that.”
“I know what it’s like to be a kid and have people visit—never stay, just visit—in my life. I know how confusing and lonely that feels. The sooner I leave, the better it will be for everyone.”
With a huge groan, Noah pushed up from the mattress and gained his feet. “Yeah, I don’t buy it.”
I went back to the laundry. This bra wasn’t going to fold itself. “Don’t buy what?”
He waved a hand. “Any of this.”
“It’s not a matter of whether you buy it or not,” I said. “And I’m not asking for your permission.”
“This story you’ve thrown together, the one where you save everyone by walking away, it doesn’t impress me.
It ignores most of the relevant facts of this situation and it fails to recognize that you will save no one and succeed only in hurting everyone.
” He folded his arms over his chest. “But go ahead. Tell me all about how it will be better for you to be alone at Thomas House instead of here with us.”
“What do you want us to do, Noah?” I pushed my fingers through my hair. “Should we stay married forever?”
He lifted his shoulders. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s—what’s wrong with that?” I sputtered.
The bra flew out of my hand and ended up under the bed.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the part where I talked you into marrying me because I’m randomly sentimental about Lollie’s farm and have some silly, half-formed idea about transforming it into a wedding venue.
Or the part where I convinced you that I wouldn’t let your niece get caught between us and I’d do everything to protect her.
Or even the part where I said we could have sex and it wouldn’t complicate things too much. ”
“I mean, yeah, that last part is pure delusion,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “We are old friends with good sexual chemistry—”
“Really good,” he added.
“—but we’ve built this thing on a pile of empty cardboard boxes and it’s about to cave in. Even if we wanted to, even if I hadn’t forced this relationship from thin air, it wouldn’t work.”
Noah stared at me for a long moment, his arms crossed and his jaw ticking. Then, “Why not?”
“Because it’s not real,” I whisper-yelled. “Everything about this is fake and we’re—”
“Not everything.” He reached out and ran the back of his finger down the column of my neck, over the rise of my breasts. “It hasn’t been fake for a long time and you know that.”
“I’m living with you to cover up the fact we’re only married for Lollie’s estate. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for chatty people in public records offices and you know it.”
“You’d be here,” he said, still drawing that finger over my sweater. “And you know it.”
I closed my eyes. “The way this all started and how I convinced you—”
“Stop that,” he growled. “Don’t think for a minute that you convinced me to do anything I didn’t want. The way I remember it, I was the one who offered to marry you and followed up on that proposal until you had to bark at me to back off.”
“I didn’t bark at you.”
He moved his palm to the nape of my neck. “Get that noise from your ex out of your head. I don’t want to hear another word of it.”
“It’s not noise.” I leaned into him then, my head resting on his chest and my hands on his waist. “I forced this. If I hadn’t shown up here with a problem only a fake marriage could solve, you never would’ve looked twice in my direction.”
His fingers flexed on my neck. “That’s not true.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’d love to see you prove otherwise.”
We were silent for a minute or two and it seemed like we’d tacitly agreed to leave this matter to the morning but then Noah said, “We can still do this. We can start over and do it better than the mess we made in the beginning.”
“But Gennie—”
“Gennie is going to be all right,” he said.
“Tonight was awful and the things she said ripped my heart straight out of my chest but she’s going to be okay.
She’s getting the help she needs. Would it be nice if she could’ve parachuted into a perfect, ready-made family?
Of course, but she got stuck with me instead. ”
“Not a bad place to get stuck,” I said.
“It’s not going to ruin her life to watch while some adults figure out how to be together, okay?
Be real, Shay. This is hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the shit she’s seen.
” He huffed out a quiet laugh. “You’re not going to save anyone by running away.
I’m wise to your game, wife. I know you think that’s going to solve all our problems but it’s not.
Abandoning people before they abandon you won’t make anything better. ”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” It was very possible that was exactly what I was doing.
It was also possible that I was feeling too many terrible things at once and the only good solution was exiting myself from the situation.
“I know it isn’t fair of me to fall apart right now but I can’t hold it in any longer. ”
“You don’t have to hold it in. But you don’t have to leave either,” he said softly.
“Not yet. It’s going to be hard enough dealing with our little escape artist and getting ready to visit Eva.
Give me some time, wife, and if you still think you know what’s best for everyone but yourself, I’ll move you down the hill myself. ”
After a moment, I nodded. “Okay. I can do that.”
“Thank god.” He tucked his fingers under my sweater. “I’ve experienced more emotions in the past day than I have in my entire adult life and I don’t like it. I’m taking you to bed, and regardless of what I said earlier I don’t plan on being nice about it. Is that okay? Tell me now if it isn’t.”
I breathed out a laugh as he yanked my shirt over my head.
Laughed as he stripped off my jeans, steered me toward the bed.
Laughed when he positioned me facedown on the mattress and pushed into me with a ragged growl.
Laughed as he gripped me by the hips, his fingers splayed over my belly roll, and gifted my back and shoulders hot, open-mouthed kisses.
Laughed when he pounded into me, his body hard and aggressive like never before.
Laughed when he hiked me up, pressed his teeth to the round of my ass, pinched my pussy, twisted my hair around his fist. I laughed when I came and when he was quick to follow.
Though at some point, those breathy, shuddering laughs had turned into breathy, shuddering sobs.
It was all the same since only the mattress knew my secrets.
It was the mattress that knew I had fallen for my husband today but also long before today, and this fall was quite unexpected.
It was also quite irreversible, and his refusal to let me go only made it worse because I knew I’d be crushed when he realized I’d cornered him into a relationship he didn’t want but couldn’t leave.
That was how it would end, of course. He’d wake up one morning and blink at me through long-suffering eyes, discovering that he’d rescued me the way he rescued everyone, and in doing so, lost himself.
I knew he’d tell me I was wrong if I said any of this so I kept these secrets between me and the mattress.