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Another jaw tick. "No. Yes. Sometimes I’m going to have to make a call. It comes with the territory . I'm saying I'm sorry, aren't I? I’m working on it."
Tears pricked my eyelids, and I blinked them back rapidly. "The problem is, Atticus, it says you don't trust me. You don’t trust anyone. That's what it says."
His head snapped up. "That's bullshit. You're the only person I trust with everything."
"You have a shitty way of showing it. You promised me you wouldn't do this, you wouldn't shut me out, keep me away. You know that it's important to me."
His brow furrowed. "I wasn't shoving you out. I was protecting you!"
"Yeah, like you protected me and broke my heart a few months ago? I can’t be with someone who doesn’t trust me."
He jerked back as if I had slapped him. "Gwen?—"
"It's the same thing. You made a decision. Yes you called, but to give me your dictate. To hand down your unilateral decision. Oh great Atticus, leader of us all. You know, even King Arthur had his knights, his advisors. But you don't learn."
He reached for me. "Gwen, that's not?—"
I pulled back and didn't let him touch me. "It is. You swore we were a team. I'm your wife now."
He didn't trust me. Hell, the one thing I'd asked him for was to never put me in the position of him making a choice that involved me without my input. He swore up and down he wouldn't do it. And then at the first sign of trouble, it was exactly what he’d done.
"Gwen, please don't pull back. Talk to me."
"Would there be any point in talking to you? You'll still just do exactly what you want to do."
His eyes went wide. I could read the panic in them, but still I stayed just out of reach. "I think you should go sleep at the penthouse tonight," I said.
He scoffed. "That's ridiculous. Yes I made a mistake, but you can't cut me off for making a mistake."
"I'm not cutting you off Atticus. I’m just reading the room. You married me for a reason. I married you so that I could protect my people. But you asked me to forgive you and I did. I love you, but to you, I'm just a chess piece to be moved around the board at your whim."
He reached for me again, and I wrapped my arms around myself, staying out of his reach. "Please go, Atticus. I can't talk to you right now."
He pushed away from the island. "I fucked up. I know that. And for what it's worth, Lakewood didn't even want to help. But when I told him that it would protect you, he?—"
"Bringing Lance into this right now is not a good idea. He's not the one who fucked up. You are. You made me one promise, and you couldn't keep it. All you had to do was say, 'Hey, I'm really worried about this. If I have a chance to do it earlier, I think I will. What do you think?' It’s the what do you think part that’s the kicker. You have to trust people to care what they think.”
My heart cracked as I watched him try and process what I was saying to see the path where he'd gone wrong, but he was unable to find it. He would always make decisions like this, and I would be a bystander in my own life. Stuck waiting for him to make a decision that I would follow, because any decisions we made together, he would ignore in favor of what he wanted to do. I couldn't live like that.
He loves you. He's just worried.
It didn't matter. I couldn't live with someone else pulling my strings. I'd done that for far too long. I loved him, but there was no way I could go on like that. I thought that he could change, but he was who he was. He had to make the decisions, and he would always expect me to follow. And I knew deep down that I wasn't meant to follow him.
Chapter 40
GWEN
"So how long are you going to stay mad at him this time?"
I glanced at my sister. "It's not about me being mad. It's about him having the opportunity to honor our arrangement and then going back on it. I'm just resigned to the fact that he’s never going to really trust me. Not like a partner."
Morgan's brow furrowed. "Look, I know that he fucked up, but he's a man. He's going to fuck up, probably a lot, honestly. Maybe you can forgive him?"
"It's not a matter of forgiveness because in a way I do understand. He did what he did partially to protect you. And I can't be at all angry about that. You're my sister. I love you. And if he protects you, he gets an automatic pass. This is more about being who I want to be. All my life, I've been taking care of other people, and I thought I wanted someone to take care of me for once. But it turns out what I really want is someone to give me the room to be able to make my own decisions."
She sighed and took my hand. When a waiter passed by with champagne she grabbed a glass. I lifted my brow at her and she shrugged. "What, it's to look the part."
She took a sip and wrinkled her nose. "Uh, I forgot I don't actually like champagne."
