37. Carter
CHAPTER 37
CARTER
T hough everything returned to normal after Megyn’s parents left, I still had questions which nagged at me. I came home the next day after work with the intent to work through those queries.
Megyn was in the kitchen again, stirring flour into a bowl. I lingered in the doorway, watching her, just taking in the way her breasts bounced. The muscles in her back and arms rippled as she stirred and stirred, adding more flour and stirring again.
“You think I can’t hear you drooling back there?” she called.
I came up behind her and wrapped my arms around her middle. I peered into her bowl and saw a nice gooey cookie dough coming together. “Am I drooling over you or the cookies?”
Megyn giggled and rubbed her butt on me, taking my breath away. “I guess that’s up to you to decide. What’s more important to you?”
I rested my chin on her shoulder and pretended to think about it, humming deep in the back of my throat. “Considering that you have a tendency to burn the cookies…”
“Oh, he’s a funny man. Well, funny man, maybe if you want the cookies to come out properly, you should help me.”
I rubbed my cheek on hers and she giggled again as my beard hairs tickled her. “I’m all for it.”
“Can you get the chocolate chips out of the cupboard?”
I went and found an opened bag of semi-sweet chips and brought them over. “Is this a bad time to talk about what happened yesterday?”
Megyn poured chocolate chips into a measuring cup, added them to the dough, and then added in more with a shrug. She picked up a spatula and started folding the chips into the dough. “No, it’s okay. I have something to tell you about it, too.”
She had my interest piqued. I went to a drawer and rummaged around for a cookie scooper. “It’s just that I can’t get over how awful Crystal was to you. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt at first, but it’s clear to me at this point that she’s just a terrible person. How on earth does your father stay with her?”
“Can you get a baking tray?” Megyn murmured. “I think it’s what we talked about before. He wanted a change. She certainly gave him one. Now… Now, I don’t know if he knows how to get out. If he can get out. You heard the way she talked, right? As if it was Dad’s money, not hers.”
“I did. And that was what I really wanted to ask about. Do you think they’re really in trouble or were they trying to manipulate us?”
Megyn scooped out cookie dough and started laying out the chunks of chocolatey dough on the baking tray. She got some of the dough on her hand in the process and I had to resist the urge to lick it off. “I don’t know. I feel like it almost doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing either way. Crystal decided upon something. She wanted Dad to go along with it. So he did.”
“You really feel bad for him.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “She’s got him miserable. But he made his bed and now he has to lie in it. Unless…”
“Unless?”
Megyn turned to me. I wiped a smudge of flour off the tip of her nose. She smiled a little at me, though her eyes showed the depths of her sadness. “Dad called me today. I’m pretty sure he did it in secret. He was whispering and the sound was echoey, like he was in a bathroom.”
“And what did he say?”
“He apologized and said he wished he had hugged me goodbye. And I told him that if he ever left Crystal, maybe we could try to patch things up and he could give me that hug.” Megyn nibbled on her lower lip. “That wasn’t a bad thing to say, was it?”
“Oh, Megyn.” I went to her and hugged her. It wasn’t the one she wanted—or needed—from her dad, but it would have to be enough for now. “Of course, not. In fact, I’m in agreement with you.”
“You are?”
“You know it,” I reassured her. “We’d have a calm discussion about it if I didn’t.”
I wanted her to know that true support wasn’t blindly following what someone said just to avoid an argument.
Megyn seemed to understand. She hugged me back. “If he really does need help, if he leaves Crystal, can we support him? Or help him?”
“You know we can.”
“I just don’t want to feed into Crystal’s sense of what’s right and wrong, all warped around like it is.”
“Megyn, you don’t have to convince me,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. “We’re all good here.”
She smiled and kissed me back. “Can you preheat the oven for me, my prince?”
I bowed, and kissed her breasts while bent over in front of her.