She shakes her head. “I’ll let the soup settle. Thank you.”
I turn to leave her room but stop at what she says next.
“I missed you every day. Every single day.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. I firm my lips and head into the kitchen. I put the dishes in the dishwasher and pull up an app on my phone. I order a sandwich and then sink down on a damn berry cushion to wait for the delivery.
I need to face the giant fucking elephant in the room at some point. She missed me. Missed me every day. I sure as hell missed her every day. I missed her so much that some nights, I’d lie in bed and my chest would ache. I’d remember her smell and the way I slept like a goddamn corpse with her beside me. I feel like I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since she left. And I asked her to stay, but she didn’t. Not that I blame her. I don’t know what a man like me could offer a woman like her.
I’m a criminal. Lawless, through and through. I live by a code, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a single wrong step away from a one-way ticket back behind bars. I have the money and the power to buy sheriffs, cops, judges today—but I’m almost forty. How’s it gonna be when I’m sixty and can’t kick ass like I can today?
I have never been a guy who thought he’d live to see the age of thirty, let alone be planning to turn fifty or even sixty. But meeting Violet changed me. I don’t think I could change enough to deserve her, though. My phone chirps when the food is here, and since I don’t know the access code to let the driver in, I run to Violet’s room to ask for her keys.
When I enter the room, she’s rubbing her belly through the blanket, staring blankly down at her hand.
“Hey.”
At the sound of my voice, her eyes snap up and she smiles. “I was congratulating my stomach on a job well done. Soup’s still where I left it.”
Something inside me goes feral in that moment. She wasn’t talking to any damn soup. She was talking to the baby. Our baby.
“Good, sweetheart. Rest and I’ll be back.”
She gives me a smile as her eyes slowly close.
I eat standing up at her kitchen counter, dropping Stella a text.
Me: Soup worked. Keeping it down so far. Good call on the salt.
She texts me back a massive row of emojis and likes the text. Stella’s good people. I don’t know a ton about her, but I’ll have to do something nice for her—detail her car or something—when I’m back at the compound.
A few days and maybe Violet will spill it. Tell me about the baby and what she plans to do. What she wants. Until then, I’m gonna do my best not to get attached. I don’t do relationships, but that was before I met Violet James.
18
Violet
Shadow is the vomit whisperer. As disgusting as it is, my morning sickness has dropped to really manageable levels by the end of the third day. I tried to convince Shadow that he didn’t have to stay and nurse me back to health, but he insisted. And since I wasn’t ready to tell him that the condition I have won’t go away in just a couple of days, it seemed easier to accept his help. God knows my body has needed it.
Shadow isn’t a bad cook for a guy who can’t cook. He’s made me soup, rice, plain noodles, crackers, and fruit, which I guess isn’t cooking, but it’s the closest he’s come, so I’m saying it counts. And if I didn’t have to prepare it, it sure feels like being cooked for.
Since Shadow came on the day my doctor confirmed the pregnancy, I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about it—not my sister or my parents. And, of course, not Shadow.
Since I’m new at my job, I’ve been working during the day, taking breaks to get sick or shower. And then at night, we cuddle in bed and watch movies. It’s shocking to me how comfortable it is just being with Shadow. He’s a human body pillow I wrap myself around every night. We haven’t had sex or even kissed—maybe because he’s not sure that I don’t have some kind of flu or bug. And I have been puking every chance I get, so I can’t say I expect him to pounce on me like he did during the storm. But a few days without any sex has given us something I wasn’t sure we’d ever have—a relationship.
We can talk about anything—well, except the baby I’m carrying. We’ve talked about politics, religion, our families. It’s amazing how much time is freed up to understand each other when we’re not banging our brains out. I miss that, of course, but it’s hard to imagine moving around that much. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn.
Today was a fairly stressful day at my job. Shadow washed the sheets and bedding while I took two video calls. I had to go off-camera once to heave into a trash bin, but then I made it through the second meeting relatively unscathed.
So unscathed, in fact, I get a little overconfident. When Shadow tells me he is going to order burgers for dinner, I ask him to get me one.
“You sure about that?” He eyes me suspiciously. “You looked green after plain dry toast at lunch. You’re ready to go in for a burger?”
“Plain,” I tell him. “No fries, nothing on it. I think some protein could do me good.”
Shadow has been adding chicken to my soups, but just the idea of a burger makes my mouth water.
“I can handle it,” I assure him.
