Page 96 of Nailing Heat

“No, not worried about that at all.” I say smiling at him. “You get what you need and get his shit out of here.”

“Will do. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I can.” He starts to head back the hallway.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I’m the one who caused this mess, caused him to live with you. It’s only fair that I undo it. It’s the least that I could do.” He shrugs and head back the hallway in search of Dex’s room, with a duffle bag and suitcase.

I look over at Cassie, “He’s not as bad as everyone thinks.”

“I’m beginning to see that too,” she admits.

I leave August to it for a while, but then I decide I have to ask him a question. One that has been running through my mind since Elise left the apartment this morning.

August is now grabbing charging cables and whatever else from the bedside table. He sits down on the edge of the bed and sighs, grabbing what he can and throwing it into the boxes Dex never broke down.

“I have one question for you.” I hobble over to August and sit down on the bed beside him.

“Shoot,” he says, smiling warmly at me.

“Did you know? Did you know all about the cheating and the reason that he was getting a divorce?”

He nods. “Yeah, I knew. He told me about it.”

“When?” I ask.

He sighs a scrubs a hand down his face. “When he called to tell me that his marriage was over. He told me what he had done, all the mistakes that he had made. From there, I made it my mission to get him here, to have him work on this team, because he sounded so devastated. I knew that he needed something to hold onto. I had no idea that when I placed him in here, this apartment, that you two would start something,” August chuckles. “I thought there was a chance of a hookup but not this sort of relationship that he was building with you. I thought it mighthave been too soon after the divorce. Plus, I knew that you were practically married to the job, so I didn’t worry about you two starting anything.”

“Apparently, it wasn’t. Or it didn’t mean anything, and he was scratching an itch.” I shrug and say, “You know what they say, whatever gets you through the day.”

August shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s what this was, Amelia. I really don’t.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Yeah, he told me that you both said ‘I love you’ last night. Is that true?” I nod. “Then I don’t think that you were a flash in the pan. I know Dex, I’ve known him for quite some time, and that isn’t something he says lightly. Took him a while to say it to Elise.”

“She’s something. Not what I pictured when he said he had an ex-wife,” I admit.

August chuckles. “She wasn’t someone that I thought he would ever marry. I about fell out of my chair when he called me and asked me to be his best man. But I did it. Smiled, put the cummerbund on and watched him make a mistake. Because that’s what he needed from me.”

“Well, unfortunately, you weren’t here to stop him from making a mistake about going after me,” I tell him, my tone as sour as my mood.

“I didn’t think that was my place to tell anyone about anything. But, I wouldn’t have stopped him, or you for that matter. When I saw you two at the bar the other night, I thought to myself, ‘That is the kind of girl that I always saw Dex with.’ You two made sense.”

“What kind of a girl is that?”

“The kind of girl that likes to have fun. Is lighthearted, can laugh at herself, and that makes the man she’s with feel good about himself. I think all Elise ever did was talk down to him or treat him like a whipped dog. I wanted to tell her to knock it the fuck off every time I was around the two of them.”

“How long were they married?” I ask him, taking in the information that he’s giving me.

“About three years,” he admits with a shrug.

“When did he start cheating on her?”

“These are questions that you should be asking him. You know if you would have let him stay and let him talk with you, he could have explained himself,” he bumps my shoulder.

“Well, I don’t want to talk to him,” I say defiantly.

“Right, you want to learn about his marriage, figure out if what he told you was true or if you were another notch on his headboard.”