Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Even though it had been years, Aidan could still hear the longing in Antony’s voice. The silence between his words was filled with memories of Antony as a younger man, maybe a wilder one.
Antony shook his head, straightening himself up a bit. He took Aidan’s pitchfork from his hands gently. “You go on now,” he encouraged. “You go on and make up with your missus.”
“You think I can?” Aidan asked quietly.
“Sure,” Antony said confidently. He looked Aidan up and down. “You’re not a bad person—you just dress badly.”
“What’s wrong with how I dress?” Aidan demanded, looking down at his gray trousers and faded shirt.
“Never you mind,” Antony said. He made a shooing motion at Aidan with one of the pitchforks. “Don’t come back until you two have made up, y’hear?”
Feeling properly chastised, Aidan retreated from the barn. He was in no particular hurry to complete this errand. As he walked up to the house, he kicked absently at clumps of grass on the way.
When he was about halfway to the house, he saw Alexandra coming toward him.
Her face was uncertain, a pensive crease to her forehead.
She hesitated when she saw him, her eyes studying him.
Aidan slowed, trying to gauge her mood. They both stopped, several paces from each other, sizing each other up like a pair of gunslingers.
“Well?” Alexandra prompted after a moment of staring into each other’s eyes.
“Well what?” Aidan fired back.
Alexandra’s eyes narrowed, her mouth growing slightly more pinched. Aidan immediately regretted his flippant answer. Despite what she might think, he didn’t actually want to cause her any distress.
“I’m sorry,” he said more softly, trying his best to convey real contrition.
“For which part?” Alexandra snapped. “The part where you seemed to delight in tormenting me, or the part where you were hiding debts? Or do you mean your propensity for constant criticism?”
Aidan winced. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did,” Alexandra responded matter-of-factly.
“I know that I might seem like a bookish spinster, na?ve to the ways of the world, but I’ll have you know that I’ve done my share of living as well.
I freely admit that I had a picture in my head in which you would sweep me off my feet, and we’d live with the children in perfect domestic harmony.
” She laughed then, bitter and tired. “Call it the last of my girlish fantasies.”
She lifted her eyes to Aidan again, and her face was hard for all of its soft roundness. “You quickly disabused me of that notion. Why did you speak to me that way for so long?” She took a stride closer, her eyes unflinchingly on his. “Did you not think that I was a feeling, breathing person?”
She turned away from Aidan, and he longed to reach out a hand to her, to touch the shoulder that was almost within reach. Before he could do so, she whirled around again, and her eyes were positively blazing.
“And I was wrong about you,” she said, as though that were an accusation of its own.
“I don’t care for being wrong. But then you go and take such care of my aunt, and you make sacrifices to ensure that we are comfortable.
You give up your dreams to tend to the children.
You put up walls of bitterness and anger around yourself to hide away the real you.
You made me think so terribly of you! How dare you?
” she demanded. “Don’t you know how badly we need you, the real you? ”
“Do you think it was that simple?” Aidan said, also taking a step closer. He loomed over Alexandra, head and shoulders taller than her. His temper flared, stiffening his spine. “Do you really think the children need laughter and jokes right now?”
“Yes!” Alexandra cried. “Of course they do!”
“No!” Aidan retorted, matching her volume. “They need safety and security, you all do! You don’t need amusement, you need a roof over your heads and food in your bellies.”
“We need love!” Alexandra yelled, her voice at a pitch that Aidan had never heard before. She blinked, seeming to realize what she had done. She pulled back slightly, gaining control over her expression. “You cannot deny that children, especially those children, need a little tenderness.”
Aidan didn’t say anything, just inclined his head stubbornly.
“Look, that is all something that can be worked out,” she said, her tone low and reasonable again. “The real problem is the debt. You should have consulted with me.”
“Because you’re such an expert on these things?” Aidan said sardonically.
Alexandra bore this jibe with grace, which made Aidan’s cheeks flush with shame.
“No, because I’m your wife,” she answered simply. “We are either in this together, or we aren’t. You have to tell me things.”
“Why? So that you can tell me what a fool I am, what I should have done differently?” he demanded.
“No,” she said again, her tone still even and unflinching. “Because I would have told you to do the very same thing you are doing now. Paying money to that vile, flannel-mouthed cretin? Absolutely not,” Alexandra said, her pert nose wrinkling in disgust.
Aidan couldn’t keep one corner of his mouth from rising. “Then why get so hot under the collar?”
“Because we should decide these things together. Then, whatever comes, good or ill, we will be in it together.” Alexandra paused. “And because you frankly don’t know everything.”
Aidan stared at her for a moment. Everything was at war within himself: his desire to keep the family safe, his admiration for Alexandra’s spirit, his own lost independence.
He tried to understand how so small a person could be full of so many contradictions—tender yet hard as steel, loving but sharp as a razor, angry but reasonable.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re positively infuriating?” he demanded.