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I don’t react to Grady taking my steak, but I do glare at him only to take a foot to my other shin when he kicks me. “Son of a bitch!” I scream in pain because it’s like he’s wearing steel-toed boots. Grabbing my beer off the table, I take a long drink, hoping to talk myself down from drop kicking this child. “Stop that. You’re lucky I don’t stab you with this knife.”
Grady is two years old. And doesn’t talk. I’m positive he doesn’t understand when you talk either.
Nathalie throws a piece of bread at my head from across the table. “Don’t talk to my son that way.”
I set down my beer with a loud thud on the wooden table. “Teach him some manners then.”
Have you ever heard the term resting bitch face? If not, just look at Nathalie. She has the look perfected to a fucking art. “Yeah, you’re one to talk.”
With a grin of satisfaction, Grady takes off toward the pool.
Remember when I said he’s a devil child?
Clearly, I knew what I was talking about.
I don’t say anything more to Nathalie but I glare. I’m hoping my glare might make her head explode. If only I had super powers.
AFTER EVERYONE LEAVES that night,Madison’s in the kitchen cleaning up and I can see she’s tired and wants to go to bed. What do I do?
I should probably help her but I’m more focused on trying to seduce her again so I lick the back of her neck. She doesn’t find this sexy and slaps at my head. “Stop it.”
“Why?”
Subconsciously I think I’m annoying her to get her to yell at me because that meant talking instead of ignoring, right?
She turns to face me, wiping her soapy hands on a hand towel beside the sink. “You want to know what upsets me?”
I smirk. “I’mdyingto know.”
“Just once I’d like to come home for you to have actually done something around here. I get it, you run a business and have little time for anything else but would it kill you to put your dishes in the sink and not on the counter. Or better yet, in the dishwasher?”
“I’m never sure if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean,” I say, attempting to defend myself with humor. “And I don’t do the dishes because what if I break one? Remember that time I broke that plate your grandma gave you? You didn’t talk to me for an entire day.”
“At this point, I wouldn’t care if you broke every dish we have as long as you made a damn effort. Or when you see that I’ve picked up the house and put away all the laundry, why do you have to leave your pants on the floor in our room? Do you not see everything else is nice and clean and it’d be nice if you helped me keep it that way?”
I blink a couple times but I don’t say anything right away. I’m not sure I know what to say. For an intuitive and observant person, she was painting me to be oblivious to what was happening to us. Had I really turned my back on her for that long?
I scrub my hands over my face, leaning back into the counter. “I’m… I just don’t understand any of this, Mad. I thought you were happy. Why haven’t you said anything to me until now?”
“I have said things, Ridley. I’ve asked for your help but it was apparently not what you wanted to hear at the time. You don’t seem to get it. By the time I get Callan ready for bed, you’re already asleep or still at work. And when you are home, you think I should give you all my attention, but you know what, you’re just like having another child.”
I amnota child. “What’s your point?”
Do you see that look I’m getting? The one where she looks strangely like she might be constipated? I think I shouldn’t have said that.
She throws her hands up in the air, reaches for the door to the dishwasher and then slams it shut. “My point is when you are here, you’re not! I feel like a single mom most of the time. We’ve grown apart.”
We’ve grown apart? She thinks that?
And my first thought is, I should have seen it coming if we’d grown apart, right?
“Ridley, I was so in love with you. I was, but now, I just don’t know what’s happening anymore. I want to make it work, but I’m scared all this, you being here, trying, I’m scared it’s just a phase, and a couple months go by, and you’ll go back to what it was like before. I don’t even know how this happened. We went from being these two people who couldn’t get enough of one another to this, barely talking in passing. That’s not a marriage. It’s not even a life. I refuse to be married to someone like that. I deserve a husband who wants to share his life with me, not one working all the time.”
Do you see that guy, the one with itchy balls and a confused expression on his face?
He needs to up his fucking game for sure.
Eleven