Damn it.
I suck in a breath to calm my nerves.
I sit back down. “I’m so sorry. About everything. How many times did she cheat on you?”
“Too many to count. I should have followed through with the divorce after the phone incident. Because that came with a nasty side of crabs. And you can imagine the cleanup that we had to do for that! Scrubbing and combing down everything - and everyone - in the house.”
Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh.
“It’s okay,” Aaron snorts. “You can laugh. I know I do often enough.”
That opens the floodgates of laughter. I can’t help myself. Aaron joins in, grabbing his stomach as he laughs.
“I didn’t have sex with her again after that.”
And just like that, the laughter floodgates shut off without so much as a warning. “What?”
He nods.
“Wait. You didn’t have sex with your wife for,” I do the quick math in my head. “Thirteen years?”
He nods again.
“Have you had sex since then?”
He shakes his head no.
“Am I the first person to break your abstinence?”
He smiles.
Holy shit.
“No fucking way.”
“Yep.”
Damn it.
If there were a way to order a sinkhole to open and swallow me down to the Earth’s core, I’d do it. Maybe there’s an app for that.
“Long time to go without sex,” I point out.
“Worth it.”
His face tells me of the years he lived in regret after our tryst in the closet. It shares the pain of finding out the woman he married was fucking around on him. It broadcasts how grateful he is that I’m in his life again.
And it shoots daggers straight through my body that hurt worse than being stabbed by crops.
“Listen, I need to tell you something…”
His phone rings.
“Can you hold that thought? That could be one of my daughters.”
Aaron frowns at the screen, then swipes to answer. “Chief Pearce.”
I watch him frown harder, then look at me and reach for a pen and paper. “Yeah. I think we can arrange that. Give me the coordinates.”
When he hangs up, I stand. “Are we going somewhere?”
“That was Virgil Troutwine,” Aaron pockets his phone. “He claims he has evidence that he’s responsible for the deaths of our friends.”
“Well, then, I guess we better get going,” I breathe a sigh of relief.
I’ve gotten a reprieve from telling him the truth.
Unfortunately, it only feels like a stay of execution, not a pardon.
