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Travis wouldn’t stop spending money.
It was reasonable at first, but it had gone well past the point of being okay. Since I was the one who handled the bills and did the banking, I had a front-row seat to the finances.
Over the last year, I’d questioned several of Travis’s purchases, but he always had a reasonable explanation for why he purchased what he did. But no matter how easily he justified his purchases, I believed there came a point when he had to be reasonable and start thinking about other things.
“You’re right, Travis. Things are great, and I hope they continue to stay steady, but I can’t ignore what I’m seeing,” I informed him.
His brows pulled together. “What are you seeing?”
I sucked in a deep breath and let it out before I replied, “For the first nine months of me working here with you, we saw massive growth month-over-month. For the last three months, that has changed. We haven’t seen things decline, but we’re not seeing the same growth, either. I’m not suggesting something bad is happening, but I think we need to be mindful of what’s going on. All I’m asking is for you to consider that, and I’m begging you to rein in the spending for a couple of months, just so we can set more money aside while we make sure things aren’t going to spiral downward.”
“I don’t see what the problem is if all the bills are paid,” he argued. “Staying steady at our income for the last three months might just be an indication we’ve reached the top of our earning potential in this area. If we continue to earn like we are, everything is going to be fine.”
I couldn’t argue with that, because he was right.
If things continued exactly as they were now, we’d be fine.
More than fine.
But as a worrier by nature, I couldn’t help feeling an overwhelming sense of foreboding. Why had things stopped growing? Was it as simple as Travis was making it seem? Could I be certain we weren’t heading for disaster?
“What’s it going to hurt to just take a few months to stash some money away, Travis?” I asked, wondering if I could appeal to his senses in a different way.
Shrugging while throwing his arms out to the side, he returned, “Why should we not be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor? We’ve worked hard, Indy. We can treat ourselves.”
I blinked my eyes in surprise. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” he deadpanned.
Tipping my head to the side, I shot him a look that indicated I knew he didn’t actually believe he hadn’t gone overboard. “It’s been one thing after another, and it’s just becoming too much.”
Travis spun around in a circle, taking in the sight of our bedroom. The big bedroom in the gorgeous house he’d gone out and decided to rent without telling me, so we could move in as soon as my lease was up.
It was a four-bedroom house, far bigger than the two of us needed, and in the Colorado Rocky Mountain region, the cost of rent was just shy of three-thousand dollars a month.
When I first learned what he’d done, I was upset. It was a huge decision, and it was one he made without talking to me about first.
Travis had the right to do what he wanted to do with his money, but I had believed we were a team. Unfortunately, since he’d already signed the long-term lease and mine was ending, I’d decided it was best to not keep the added expense of my place.
Travis made it clear he wanted us to have a nice place, and this was just one thing he wanted to do to give us both a bit of a reward for how hard we’d been working.
A month after moving in, I couldn’t say it wasn’t nice. We had so much more space, and it felt good to see how working hard had paid off for us.
But things didn’t stop there.
Travis wanted to furnish the house, which was understandable. But where I would have settled for the basics of what we needed to have in the rooms we used, Travis wanted everything furnished, even the spare bedrooms that nobody slept in.
He offered me what I thought was a reasonable explanation at the time. It was our home, and it should have felt like one.
Unfortunately, after spending thousands of dollars furnishing the home, paying cash for everything, so we weren’t in debt, Travis wasn’t done.
New cars were up next, and he insisted on getting them for the both of us. He’d gotten loans for both of them, and with the cars being purchased brand new and at top dollar, we were laying out a healthy sum every month for transportation costs before we even filled our gas tanks or paid for insurance.
Then it was new computers.
The holidays rolled around, and he wanted to spoil every person in our lives. There was no budget for holidays and birthdays. He was happy to just spend all the time.
I was growing warier with each day that passed, which was the reason I’d decided to bring this conversation up again.
