“I didn’t give it to you for safekeeping, Toots. I gave it to you for you to spend it.”
“Well, I did,” I announced.
“Good,” he muttered then asked, “You nervous about meeting Gear and Tatie?”
“Yes,” I answered truthfully.
“It’ll be okay,” he assured.
Right.
“Mm-hmm,” I mumbled.
He fell silent.
Then, for some bizarre reason, likely because the universe hated me, he asked out of the blue, “You were with your ex for ten years?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Why didn’t you have kids?”
My stomach clutched.
My mouth spoke.
“Rogan said we had time.”
He did say that.
We married young and Rogan had our lives planned.
According to Rogan’s plan, I’d be pregnant right now or already have a wee one at home. He said when I was thirty, we were going to start our family. We’d have two kids. Then we’d stop.
And I was so happy with him, I was happy to do whatever he said.
I would never know how fortunate I was that he wanted to wait when I did not. I wanted to start a family right away. I wanted to have babies and give them everything I never had.
But I fell in with Rogan’s plans which meant, when his life collapsed, taking mine with it, it didn’t drag down our children.
All that had happened with Rogan was bad.
This was good.
“And you?” Buck pressed.
“Me what?”
“Did you want to wait?”
“No.”
“But you waited.”
“Yes,” I pointed out the obvious.
“Do you want kids now?”
“No.”
I felt rather than saw his eyes on me before he looked back to the road and asked, “No?”
“No, Buck. I have no home, no job and my car got repoed,” I reminded him. “I need to depend on a man I barely know to keep me fed, housed and in a cell phone. I’m a mess. I’ve got no business bringing children into this world.”
Suddenly, Buck changed lanes, going from the far left, straight to the shoulder. Then he stopped, put the SUV into neutral and set the parking brake while I blinked at the pavement ahead of us.
After all of this craziness, I felt his attention on me again.
“Babe, eyes,” he growled, and hesitantly, my heart skipping rather than beating, I turned to face him. “What the fuck is up your ass?”
I stared at him.
He was angry and he was using his quiet, venom voice.
“Nothing,” I whispered, feeling infected by his tone.
“Bullshit,” he shot back.
“I’m just tired,” I told him.
“You get tired, you get cuddly and sweet. You do not turn into a bitch.”
I blinked again.
When I got tired, I got cuddly and sweet?
“I’m not being a bitch,” I denied.
“You won’t look at me. Your voice is flat. And what you just said was fucked,” he returned.
“What did I just say?”
“You need to depend on a man you barely know to keep you fed, housed and in a fuckin’ cell phone.”
“This is true,” I told him.
And I couldn’t believe he was ticked about it, because it was!
“Toots, I’ve had my mouth between your legs, you’ve sucked me off, and I’ve had my dick in you.”
“That isn’t knowing you, Buck.”
“You liked it and I liked it,” he went on like I didn’t speak. “You want more, and I want more. You can be uptight because you’ve been taught to be that way, caution equals survival for you. But when you relax, your smile comes easy and you’re easy to be with. Now, you are not relaxed. Now, something is up your fuckin’ ass. And I’m not takin’ you home to my kids, who I want to like you, when somethin’s up your fuckin’ ass.”
“I told you.” I was beginning to get angry so my words were short and terse, not as short and terse as his, but they were still short and terse. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day. We went to, like, I don’t know, a hundred stores. I tried on so many clothes it isn’t funny. Shopping is exhausting, Buck.”
“Right,” he clipped, obviously, and unsurprisingly, not an experienced shopper.
“It is!” I snapped. “And you want your kids to like me, how do you think I feel? You told me straight out Tatiana isn’t going to like me. I’ve got a black eye, I’m dressed like a librarian with a shoe fetish, and I’m barreling in an SUV toward a sixteen-year-old Daddy’s Little Girl who is not going to like me until I win her over. I don’t know how to win her over! I don’t know anything about sixteen-year-old girls! Even when I was sixteen, I wasn’t sixteen. Do I offer to give her a manicure and ask her about the boys she likes? Do I read teenage vampire novels in hopes of finding common ground? I don’t know how to give a manicure and we both know I’m not dexterous. What if I wound her while filing her nails?”
“Babe—”
“And Minnie and I got into it at lunch. It ended up okay, but she didn’t like me at first. We had words and everyone was tense. We worked it out and they all decided to be Professor Higgins to my Eliza Biker Babe. They think it’s fun and I don’t want to disappoint them, I like them. Even Minnie, who’s kind of hard to like. So I have to try to be a biker babe when all I know how to be is a geeky, brainy librarian.”