Chapter Twenty-Five #2
His military boots are almost silent on the tile, but then he’s right next to me. Leaning his hip on the counter, he sets his palm on the cool granite and his deep voice is almost a whisper. “Are you okay?”
I nod and pour two heaping scoops of coffee into the filter, my focus on not dropping coffee grounds all over the counter because my fingers are shaking. “You’re in my kitchen.”
His warm finger slides across my cheek and tucks a stray curl behind my ear, making my stomach flutter even more. “I am.”
Closing the top on the coffeemaker, I turn to him, leaning my hip against the counter and forcing myself to meet his eyes. “I’ve hated you for a long time.”
He winces, the motion makes small lines form next to his dark eyes. “I know, but I’m hoping to change that.”
Seeing those lines and letting myself look at him, really look at him, it’s not twenty-year-old Mato from my memories looking back at me.
His jaw seems sharper, and his eyes don’t hold that boyish sparkle anymore.
Mato, the man, is standing in front of me with laugh lines around his eyes and ten years of life experience.
Jealousy bubbles in me as I wonder just how much he experienced after he left me and I shut it down. It took a long time to stop myself from wondering if he found someone else, and I won’t go back to that.
Refusing to let pretty words sway me, I hold my ground. “You can’t wipe away ten years, Mato.”
His chest rises with a slow inhale, his gaze moving over my face. “I’m going to earn your trust back.”
There is a soft confidence in his voice, and I’m not sure if I want to take offense or be impressed. Instead, I cross my arms. “What if I can’t?”
He tilts his head. “I’ve got plenty of time.”
Against my crumbling resolve, my heart skips a beat, and I have to look away. With a small huff, I drop my gaze to the coffeemaker next to me.
His rough fingers gently cup my chin, tipping my head, and I look up at him. “If I have to spend the next ten years proving I’ll never leave you again, I will.”
He holds my eyes captive, the deep brown I used to get lost in, as my heart beats double-time.
I’m not sure if he’s expecting me to say something, but when I don’t, he nods and takes a step away from me, his hand dropping to his side.
“Starting tonight. If I could get a blanket, I’ll sleep in the chair in the living room. ”
What?
A jolt moves through my body as my eyes go wide. “You can’t stay here.”
Sliding one hand in his pocket, he holds up the other in surrender. “Just until we can talk about how to move forward. I won’t leave all this on you. If it were just Koda, I would take him with me to my place, but I have a feeling Miss Trunchbull will have a problem with me taking Nova.”
A smile tips my lips at the mention of one of my favorite childhood movies, Matilda. He’s right, though. It looks like I’ve gotten myself into something that is going to put me in frequent, if not daily contact with Mato. As much as I want to dislike it, I don’t.
I lift my eyes to the clock over my small, two-person breakfast table across the room, after four.
My body sags at the realization of what just happened tonight, and that there are two children asleep in my living room and a man I've spent ten years hating standing in my kitchen, the only thing my body wants to do is sit down on the floor and not move.
So that's what I do. I slide down the wall next to the dishwasher and sit on the kitchen tile with my knees up, and after a second Mato sits across from me, his back against the island, his long legs stretched out so his big boots are next to my hip.
Neither of us says anything for a while. The sound of the refrigerator humming is the loudest sound in the room.
“She grabbed his shirt.” I finally say. “In her sleep.”
His brown, patient eyes take me in. “I saw.”
"How does a five-year-old learn to do that?" It wasn't really a question. "Hold on like that. In her sleep."
He doesn't answer because there isn't one, and I’m grateful he doesn't try to give me a fake one. That was something I'd forgotten about him, sitting here in my exhaustion, confiding in the man I’m not sure I can trust. He never tried to fill the silence; he knows I don’t like to be soothed just for the sake of it.
"I don't know what I'm doing," I say with a sigh.
It just came out. Any other time, I would have held my emotions close to my chest, but I’m too tired to stop them.
The part of me that bristles every time he’s near braces because I feel like I’m giving him something I shouldn’t, but behind that, deep down somewhere, I know he won’t use it against me.
He looks at me across the tile, his face is soft in the dim night lights mounted under the cabinets. "Me neither."
Stretching my legs out in front of me, our knees next to each other, I look down at the jeans I wore to work in all day yesterday. "You seem like you do." I slide my finger over a stain on my thigh that could be anything.
"I've known him for three weeks." He scrubs his hand down his face. He looks tired, too. “I’m guessing. Every day I’m guessing, I just don’t let him see it.” His hands drop to his thighs and he tips one side of his mouth up.
“You do the same thing with your animals; you put on a brave face and stay calm when they’re hurting. ”
Something turns over in my chest.
He sees me.
For a decade, I’ve told myself I’d created the person I thought he was in my head, I was blinded by my love for him back then, and there was no way he knew me like I thought he did.
It was just a stupid teenage girl’s fantasy.
Then he says something like that. Maybe it wasn’t just a fantasy. It was just because he was gone.
I look away from him. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Be —" I wave my hand over all of him, sitting on my kitchen floor just before sunrise, being exactly what I need right now. "That."
He observes me quietly before he softly says, “I’m not trying to be anything, nudo. I’m just tired and I’m sitting on your floor with you.”
The old name crawls under my ribs and sighs, and I’m too wrung out to fight it right now. On the other side of the wall, a small body shifts on the pull-out, and we both go still, listening, until it settles. When I look back at him, he’s already looking at me, and for a second we sit like that.
His knee is warm against mine, and I don’t move away. There’s a small amount of comfort there, but I tell myself that I’m just too tired to move right now.
"You should sleep," he says softly. "I'll sleep in the chair and keep an ear out for them. If either one wakes up, I'll come get you."
And the worst part, the part that scares me more than anything, is how easy this is, how good it feels, just for tonight, to share this with him.
Pushing those thoughts away, I plant my palms on the floor on either side of me and make myself stand up. "Wake me if she cries."
"I will."
I go to my room and leave the door open a crack for the kids. But I lie there for a long time listening to him move quietly around the living room, settling in to keep watch.
For the first time in a really long time, I feel like someone is holding the other end, that I’m not so alone.
My heart is beating hard in my chest because I’m scared to let myself feel the comfort in it. What if it’s just one more thing I have to survive losing?