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“Are we okay?” I asked.
“What did you do to my phone?” There was subtle steel in his voice.
I shook my head and opened the front door, letting him go inside ahead of me. With another glance at his jaw, I hustled into the kitchen.
“You should be icing your own face,” Tav said from behind me as I pulled ice packs out of the freezer. I handed him one, then slapped one to my left eye, and he chuckled as he held the pack to his jaw. “Where are the boys?”
“The office.”
I leaned against the counter next to him, and he rested his shoulder on mine. The ice, coupled with my damp clothes, had me shivering. He tipped his head until it knocked against me, and we stayed there, quietly contemplating the world.
“I could just get a new phone,” Tav said, glancing at me to gauge my reaction.
“I’d just do it again.”
“How can this not be about distrusting me?” he asked, exasperation heavy in his tone.
I shrugged.
When he dropped his ice pack on the counter and dragged me into his arms again, I went. I let my ice pack slip to the floor and held him.
“I’m going upstairs to lie down. My head does hurt,” he murmured. I opened my mouth, and he frowned before I could get a word out. “Not enough for a doctor. Just everything, the stress, I think, has a migraine building.”
“Makes sense.” I pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“You should go back to work,” he said softly.
“Are you really going to stay here?” I studied his eyes.
He shrugged. “Guess you’ll know if I don’t, superspy.”
He was back around to sounding irritated, but his lips were welcoming when I pressed mine to his. I wanted to be inside him, assure myself we were still fine that way, but another idea had started swirling in my brain.
“I’m going back to the office,” I said.
He nodded and kissed me again, and I grabbed Advil for him out of a cupboard, then watched him walk upstairs with the bottle in his hand. I waited until I heard our bedroom door shut, then took off like a shot. It took a surprisingly short time for an Uber to arrive so that I could go get my Honda.
I didn’t lie.
I did go to the office, but as soon as I was in and had checked on the boys to make sure they were doing okay, I called a moving company and asked them to clean out Tav’s trailer. I gave strict instructions to take the boxes to my place. I didn’t care what Tav said, he wasn’t going anywhere that I couldn’t keep him safe ever again. He was mine, and I was keeping him, and my mother and every other person I knew wasn’t going to stop me.
22
TAV
I groaned when I stared at all the boxes the movers had set in the living room of Judah’s house. He’d been rash, once again, and I wished I was surprised by his actions, but he wasn’t Judah if he wasn’t doing something crazy like this. It was a power move, and anyone else might’ve grown mad at him, but I couldn’t bring myself to be anything but mildly miffed. So, instead of sending him a long text about all the reasons why that had been silly to do, I patched up my hurt hand, then went to work finding spots for my possessions. Some of the belongings were Ellis’s, too, but he didn’t have much.
I took the time to find homes for everything, smiling when I came across items I’d completely forgotten about, including a trophy I’d won when I was six for BMX. Mum and Dad had been so proud of me, but after seeing one of my friends in a rough crash, which resulted in a lot of broken bones, I’d been too scared to get back onto the BMX course. I’d never beaten the anxiety.
I placed the trophy in a display cabinet Judah had in the living room, beside some of his own for football—soccer—and American football.
The next special thing I found was a photo of my parents and me from when we’d first moved here. We were standing in the garden of our first, and only, home as a family. It was a small Craftsman house and wasn’t worth much, but it’d been a place to call ours. I hadn’t visited it since Mum died, and I had no intention to because it came with a mountain of memories I didn’t want to hash over.
The negative outweighed the positive.
But the photo itself was beautiful, with me at the age of thirteen standing in front of my parents, each of their hands on my shoulder. Even though I was in my early teens, I was already tall. Their smiles were huge, the happiness of change lighting up their faces. I had more trepidation about my new home, but Judah had quickly put an end to that.
I placed the photo in its white frame on the mantel of the fireplace, beside a snapshot of Judah at his college graduation. If Judah wanted me to make this my home, then I would, and he’d come back after work to find pieces of me scattered around the house as though I’d always been here. In a strange way, I had been. He’d never forgotten me, like I’d never done with him. We’d always been there for each other, ghosts of the past that never left.
