“They’re in the gym room closet. They’re fine.” Carter pushes up to standing, and in the process, for just a moment, I am eye level with the bulge between his legs and even in my yeti-brick state, it does something to me. All those dumb words I said to him last night come tumbling down in my head like yeti anvils. And all the sweet, amazing stuff he said to me does, too.
And just like that, I’m blushing.
“There’s breakfast on the stove. Eat and drink a lot of water. We have work to do.” Then he walks away, and I’m too hungover to stop myself from ogling his magnificent ass.
After showering and making myselfresemble a non-massively-hungover human as much as possible, I devour the breakfast Carter made—“hangover hash browns,” he called them, and they were somehow exactly what I needed, all crispy and buttery, topped with herbs, cheese, and two poached eggs.After which we began the work Carter had promised—namely, shoveling compost and manure he “borrowed” from work into the little dahlia bed I dug up from his yard earlier.
“I’ve been reading about it,” he explains to me as we take a water break. It’s only been twenty minutes of shoveling from the pile he’d brought over from the farm this morning, and we’re both sweaty, with streaks over our clothes and arms of two kinds of shit (manure, being the animal shit, and compost, being basically made up of bug shit, if you also count bacteria and fungus as bugs, which I do). “Dahlias are heavy feeders. So they need all these nutrients to thrive. You can’t plant them in this clay and sand mix here in the yard.”
“But the grass is doing fine in the clay and sand mix,” I say, frowning.
“Grass and dahlias are two very different plants.”
“Hmm.” But Carter doesn’t let me linger with my thoughts. He tosses my shovel back at me and after another thirty minutes, we’ve incorporated all the various forms of shit, and after that, we top it with a sweet-smelling mulch he says is made of cypress. Bugs that like dahlias don’t like the smell of cypress, so it should do some work in keeping them away.
“Why are you helping me with this?” I ask after we’re done.
He shrugs. I let my gaze linger on the broadness of his shoulders, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “We’re married now. We’re a team. When I saw Nadia’s texts, I figured out what you were doing here, digging up the grass. And I wanted to help you do it right, is all.” He glances away from my face. “Speaking of. We need to talk about a game plan for tomorrow.”
“Shit.” I’d completely forgotten what he’d barked at me when he ran away after the whole kitchen counter shenanigans. “Your family’s coming for dinner, was it?”
“Lunch.”
I take a deep, deep breath. “And let me guess. Abuela Erika’s coming.”
Carter laughs. “It was her idea.”
I fold my arms over and survey the yard. We’ve created a flower bed that is about fifteen feet wide and five feet deep. His front yard isn’t all that large to begin with, and now most of it is a mixture of dirt, shit, and mulch. But he hasn’t complained or made a face or gotten passive-aggressive, like my ex would have, even over something as inconsequential as digging up a flower bed in a yard he never noticed or cared about.
As I watch Carter as he glances over our work, he looks proud.
“So are you going to tell me why you kept me a secret?” I ask finally.
Carter’s face turns to me fast, and this time he doesn’t deny keeping our marriage from his family. “Erika has gotten…worse as she’s gotten older. I didn’t want to subject you to her until we couldn’t hold off any longer.”
I clear my throat. “And we have to see her tomorrow, so you can get your money, right?”
It might just be my imagination, but Carter takes a beat to answer. “Yeah. Tomorrow’s for the money.”
17
My meeting with the privateinvestigator was exactly forty-two minutes, even though I had paid for the full hour. But to be honest, I wasn’t exactly having the best time so I didn’t mind getting out of there a little early.
The guy’s name is Gerald Samuels, and he’s just this older white man who kind of reminds me of Jeremy Renner, with an almost cartoonish droopy face. He smells heavily like laundry detergent and faintly like cigars. I had the impression that he smoked a lot, and when he wasn’t smoking, he was spraying Febreze on everything around and on him.
I’m in the parking lot, doing my breath work, when Sage calls.
“So, did you and Carter finally get it on?” she asks without even saying hello first.
I groan. “What do you think?”
“I think I watched that man’s eyes gobble you up like you were his favorite candy, then throw you over your shoulder like a caveman and take you to bed.”
“Where he gave me water and treated me like a gentleman, even after I flashed him.”
At this, Sage laughs and I smile, just a teeny bit. “Where are you?” she asks.
“Outside the private investigator’s office.”
