She left after that.
Luckily, she left the champagne too.I was pretty much drunk by the time the door opened then closed quietly. We hadn’t come to any kind of verbal agreement, but every night Kace came. Sometimes early enough to have dinner with Jack and Lily. To read Lily a story. To talk to Jack about plans for the car.
Other times it was so late he woke me up with his lips between my legs.
But he always came.
I never slept alone.
He still snuck out before the sun came up, before the kids woke up. Then he strolled in again around breakfast time, acting like he hadn’t just left a few hours before. No way was I ready to have them knowing Kace slept over, though.
It was bad enough I was becoming used to him being there. Relying on it.
Though tonight, I wasn’t. Tonight was a bad night for him to come. I should’ve called and told him that. But I got distracted. By Amy’s words. With the deal in front of me. Then with the champagne.
His footsteps echoed through the quiet house.
I didn’t look up when he entered the room. I kept staring at the number on the page. Amy was right. It was a big number. Now, I might not know a lot about the current state of the publishing industry, but I knew first-time authors were not getting deals like this every day.
Amy had to have pulled strings. She had many to tug on. Her family name carried weight.
It couldn’t have been me. My story. My pain.
“The door wasn’t locked,” Kace growled.
Not a good growl.
A pissed one. I rarely saw Kace really pissed. Nor heard it. He was an easy-going guy, outside of the bedroom at least.
I blinked, looking at the clock, at the darkness that had engulfed the twilight in what seemed liked minutes, then at the empty bottle of champagne.
“I forgot,” I answered lamely.
“You forgot?” Kace repeated.
I nodded. “Yes, I’ve got a lot on my mind tonight.”
“I should fuckin’ think so, in order to forget that some asshole in a suit is borderline obsessed with you and that you’re alone with the fuckin’ kids after downin’ what I’m guessing is an entire bottle of booze.”
I snapped my head up. He was really pissed. And that made me pissed. Mostly because he was right. I’d been sitting here, wallowing and drinking while night fell, my kids asleep, thinking their mother was going to keep them safe when instead, she was too self-absorbed to lock the fucking door.
“I had a fight with Amy,” I muttered.
Kace looked taken aback, still pissed, but surprised. He’d most likely been expecting me to argue with him, since that was what I did about almost everything.
“Okay, that sucks, babe. But you still need to lock the fuckin’ door when you’re in here.” He grabbed a hold of me so I was standing, supporting most of my weight. Which was good, since I was pretty sure I might’ve fallen over if I’d been forced to stand on my own.
His lips went to my forehead. “You’re precious,” he murmured. “All of you. And this world is full of assholes who like to steal and tarnish precious things. So I’m gonna need you to set the alarm and lock the fuckin’ door. ‘Kay?”
I nodded, although I should’ve been pissed that he was ordering me around. He wasn’t wrong, though.
“What did you and Amy fight about, baby?” he asked after a beat, all anger gone from his voice.
That was Kace. He had been pissed. Really pissed. Now he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to hold it against me, act like an asshole all night. He said what he’d had to say, and we were moving on.
On to a topic I really, really did not want to talk about.
“Are you a math genius?” I asked instead of answering.
He blinked in surprise again. “A math genius?” he repeated.
I nodded. “Like Rain Man.”
He smiled now. “Rain Man was not a math genius, he was an all-around genius. But I’m not any kind of genius. Just good with numbers. Shit with words. Always get them jumbled up. Now I know it’s dyslexia, but shitty public schools and foster parents who didn’t give a shit just thought I was stupid or a troublemaker. Which I was, since I got too frustrated, embarrassed that I couldn’t do the work. No one wanted to help me. Fuck, even if they did, there were too many kids that needed help, and just one underpaid, exhausted teacher to try and stretch herself across them.”
I thought of my childhood. Of the small classrooms in our small town. Mostly caring teachers. Very few speed bumps. Reading came easy. Math didn’t, but I had a father who sat with me after dinner and talked me through all of my homework, rewarding me with ice cream my mother only let me have on weekends.