She shifted to toss it on her desk and then she looked out the window.
“Babe?” he called.
“In all that’s going on, I forgot to reply to Corbin’s text asking me to sit down and have a chat with him. He felt that was rude. And to teach me a lesson about this rudeness, instead of having an adult conversation with me, he decided to give Juno something she really wants, something a lot of her friends have, something I am staunchly against her having until she can process what will be coming at her in all the ways she can use it…a cell phone.”
“Right.”
She was still looking out the window when she carried on.
“He says not only does she want it, he has the means to give it to her, but also she can have it in case of emergency. I asked him when she’d possibly ever have an emergency, considering she’s always one of four places. At school. On the bus to or from school. With him or someone he assigns to watch her. Or with me, or someone I do the same.”
“His answer?” Auggie prompted when she stopped talking.
She still didn’t look from the window when she replied, “He had no answer to that.”
She took a second, tipped her head in a stilted way like she was trying to crack her neck, then she spoke again.
“I think it’s safe to say that he’s out of the trying-to-win-me-back zone. He’s gotten a good look at you, you with me, how Juno reacts to you, and he’s realized that isn’t going to happen. Now he’s in the acting-out zone, which could peter out this week, if he finds some woman to devote his attention to, and he forgets about me. Or it could last until you sit at my side while I weep at Juno’s wedding.”
“Okay, but, baby, I gotta ask. Why aren’t you looking at me?”
“Because, I’m so angry, I’m seething that he felt the appropriate response to not getting what he wants was not only to use our daughter to get back at me, but also to do something that might cause her harm in the long run. And furthering this, he broke an agreement we’d made about this particular subject, one he knows I feel strongly about, doing this on the whim to strike back. And I don’t want you to see how deeply pissed I am about that.”
This was not good.
Not only all she said.
But because he had no place in it.
And that wasn’t because this was his first dinner with Juno and Pepper in their home, time to get to know one another, see if they all fit, and how that might happen.
But because he’d never have a place in it.
He’d had some temporary stepdad- and stepmom-type people along the way.
That didn’t cipher into what Aug was currently thinking.
He wasn’t Juno’s father. He’d never be her father.
It would never be his right to get in his car, drive to this asshole’s house, and lay it out for him.
He could not protect Juno. He couldn’t protect Pepper.
He could do absolutely nothing but stand there.
And he didn’t like it.
So yeah.
This was not good.
“Maybe give him some time, you take some time, and then broach the subject a little later,” he suggested.
“He says he’s going out tomorrow to buy her another phone and she’ll be free to use it when she’s with him, but he’ll keep it when she comes to me so I won’t ‘do anything stupid.’”
“Have you disagreed before about this kind of thing?”
She finally turned to look at him.
“We’ve had our ebbs and flows. In the beginning—”
She stopped speaking and pulled in her lips, which meant Auggie braced.
She let her lips go and her voice was different when she said, “Okay, in the beginning, I admit, I was a basket case. I was angry. I was hurt. I loved him. I missed him. I was also scared to be alone. And there was some time, and sadly it lasted longer than it should, where I was hot and cold with him.”
She shook her head vehemently and kept going.
“We didn’t get together in that time. But I can’t say that I didn’t give him mixed signals. My daughter was sad, and I hated that. And I was sad, and I didn’t like that much better.”
“That’s understandable, Pepper,” he pointed out.
To that, she nodded, mumbled, “Thanks,” and went on, “As a consequence, we were around each other a lot. Or at least he came over a lot. I could act a little…crazy. And I think maybe Corbin got it in his head that I did that because I was gone for him, he’d always be,” she did air quotation marks, “the one for me and the fact that you’re the first after him, and it’s been years, solidified that opinion.”