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“Get a room,” Dad coughed, holding his barely clenched fist over his mouth as if it would do any good.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out as Cole said something to Dad, a bit of business talk and an apology for his shameless flirting. A text message from Hunter lit up my screen.
We need to talk. Come over. I’ll cook.
My upper lip curled in irritation. I didn’t want to talk to him, in fact, I’d avoided just that for a week now.
“I’ll be right back,” I sighed, shoving myself to my feet again and walking toward the house. I just needed a moment to think, a moment to decide if I wanted to give Hunter the benefit of the doubt that it wouldn’t be another argument, or if I wanted to stay with Dad and enjoy the time I had left with him.
I leaned back against the kitchen counter and stared down at the text. Three little dots bounced in a bubble on my screen, indicating he was typing something else, but whatever it was never came. He must’ve typed and deleted.
“What’s up?”
I looked up from my screen at Dana’s curious face stuffed with the last of her samosa. “Just Hunter. He wants to talk.”
“Marriage struggles already?”
Dana was the only person who knew it wasn’t a real relationship, at least not to the extent that we were pretending it was. She didn’t know about what happened before the wedding. She didn’t know we were barely speaking. “Something like that.”
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“Not really,” I scoffed. “There’s a lot going on. I just don’t know if I have the patience for it, not with Dad being so… close.”
“You can’t think about that right now,” she sighed. “You’re married. You have to survive through at least the next year without killing him or yourself. Do you honestly think that not fixing this is what your dad would want if he knew the circumstances?”
I blinked at her. She hadn’t used my father’s state of health against me at any point up until now, and even though I knew she was right, she also didn’t know enough to make that call. If Dad knew the circumstances, he would probably collapse on site.
“Go talk to him. I’ll stay here with your dad and Cole.”
I narrowed my gaze, flicking my line of sight out the window to where Dad and Cole were chatting before looking back at her. “You’re just going to fuck him on my bed.”
Her mouth popped open as her cheeks turned red. “I would not fuck him in the same house as your dying father, Lottie.”
“But you would fuck him.”
“Obviously.”
Chapter 33
Hunter
“Do you want to do this before or after we eat gumbo?”
Lottie glanced behind me into the kitchen at the big pot bubbling away on the stove. “I didn’t get to finish my lunch before you messaged, so…”
“After we eat, then.” I plucked a couple of bowls from the cupboard and set them on the counter in front of me. The air hung between us uncomfortably, thick and heavy. I just wanted to fix things, just wanted it to feel the way it did back in Austin when I cooked for her then, but I knew better than that. I knew I couldn’t snap my fingers and make everything okay, especially with everything she was dealing with.
Slowly, she lifted herself up onto the high-top chair at the center island.
“You don’t have to eat with me if you don’t want to,” I said, dipping the ladle into the gumbo and pouring it into her bowl. Even if she had betrayed my trust, knowing what I knew now, I didn’t hate her. I didn’t want her far away from me, not even in the next room.
“It’s fine.” She leaned forward onto her elbow on the counter, her chin perched in the palm of her hand. “I’m going back home tonight, though.”
“Okay.”
The awkward conversation put me on edge. I slid her bowl over to her along with a spoon, a glass of water, and a napkin. She didn’t waste a second before her spoon clinked against her teeth. “Mmm,” she hummed. “It’s so good.”
“Thanks.” I set my bowl across from her, standing on the other side of the island, and resigned myself to leaning and eating instead of sitting next to her. No need to make it more cramped than it already felt.
