Tate grunted. “I can see why it’s a shock to you. Are they close?”
I lifted a shoulder. “She knows what he’s like. She loves him. He’s her dad.”
“So she doesn’t condone his behavior?” Wynter asked.
“I don’t need my twenty-five-year-old girlfriend standing up for me to her dad,” I snapped. I ground my molars together. Goddammit. I’d thought I was done with this humiliation.
Teller tapped his fingertips together. “Is it the twenty-five-years-old part that bothers you or the standing-up-to-her-dad-for-you part?”
“Both, I wager,” Tate said.
My teeth ached as I clenched. All of it. It wasn’t the age gap but the difference it represented. I was almost her dad’s age, still working for my family, still getting food from my mama, still painting my figures at my kitchen table. “It’s an issue for her dad, and as much as I fucking hate it, he’s important to her.”
Summer frowned. “Wasn’t he older than you?”
“Yes.” It was all semantics. “He’s technically older.”
“Like four years,” Tate added.
“That’s not scandalous,” Autumn said. “She can deal with Bobby, and she can probably deal with him better than anyone. You like her, Tenor.Reallylike her.”
I liked her a whole fucking lot. “She only thought she liked me.”
“Ruby has always struck me as a person who knows her own mind,” Wynter said. “So is it the age, or is that an easy excuse?”
I shifted in my chair, trying to find a more comfortable position. There wasn’t one. “No.”
“Are you sure?” she asked softly.
Yes. No? “Her dad?—”
“Is a prick,” Teller said. “A giant asshat. But you’re giving him a whole lot of power over your life—again.”
“It’s not that,” I argued.
“Then what is it?” Summer asked gently. “Because you really liked her.”
“It was fake.” There. I’d confessed.
They stared at me. Teller rolled his goddamn eyes.
“What was fake?” Junie asked.
I had forgotten she was there, or there’d be more attention directly on me. I pulled at my collar. “When we first started dating, it wasn’t real. The woman who used to make Ruby feel like crap in school came into the bar. She happened to be with Ruby’s dick of an ex. They were the wedding we went to a couple of weeks ago.”
“But it wasn’t fake after the wedding.” Teller tapped his fingertips together.
He might think he was making a point, but he wasn’t. “We started out as a lie.”
“Sounds to me like you grabbed on to an excuse to date her,” Summer said.
Tate drew in a sharp breath. “And now he’s doing the same thing to end it.”
Summer nodded.
“What the hell?” Did any of my siblings have my back? I wasn’t happy about the breakup. My sleep had been shit, and all I’d thought about was that disbelieving and devastated look on Ruby’s face when I’d said we were done.
“We don’t blame you,” Wynter said, her tone full of sympathy. “You want to protect yourself.”
