“Of course not,” he quickly says and pushes away from the counter and makes his way to me. “How could you think that?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug as he stands in front of me, holding my face in his hands.
“It just pissed me off that she had the nerve to call me and ask me personal questions that are none of her business and she’s not entitled to know the answer to.” He clears it up. “I’m pissed she’s probably going to call her lawyer and it’ll prolong the divorce. I’m pissed I had to spend thirty-five minutes on the phone with my own lawyer.” I look up at him. “I’m pissed that instead of buying you flowers like I wanted to, I forgot all about it and then came home.”
“You were buying me flowers?” That’s the only thing I think to say.
“Yeah, I wanted to surprise you.”
“I still have the flowers you sent me for my birthday,” I remind him.
“But you don’t have flowers here,” he rebuts, bending and kissing my lips. “I wanted you to have flowers here.”
“I don’t need to have flowers here,” I whisper up at him. “I just need to have you here.”
“I know you don’t.” He kisses my lips again. “But that’s why I wanted to get them, and now I’m even more pissed that I didn’t remember.”
“Knox.” I try not to laugh as he groans. “Maybe we should talk about the bigger issue right now.”
“Us having sex before dinner?” I roll my eyes, and I feel like a weight has been lifted off me when I see the lightness come back into his eyes.
“No.” I move away from him. “About the kids telling her about us.”
“What is there to talk about?” He turns and heads back to the cutting board, grabbing it and moving it to where he can cut while he talks to me.
“Well, we should have maybe anticipated they would tell her about me.” I walk over to the stool and pull it out, sitting down, facing him. “Shouldn’t we?”
“I don’t give a fuck if she knows about you. She was going to know about you eventually anyway. What I give a shit about is that she thought she had a right to know about you.”
“Well,” I fold my hands together, “I am spending time with her children.” I hold up my hand when he glares at me. “You would want to know if some random man was hanging around your kids.”
“Don’t fucking do that.” He points the knife at me, and I have to bite my lower lip to stop from laughing. “Don’t fucking make me feel bad for wanting to tell her to go fuck herself.” My mouth hangs open. “Listen, she has no right to know if I’m seeing someone.” I try to say something, but he shakes his head. “She doesn’t give a shit if you are bad for my children or not. She cares that I’m seeing someone, and she didn’t know about it. She’s pissed I’ve moved on instead of going back to her.”
“Does she want you back?” I ask, getting mad now.
“I don’t know. I stopped listening to anything she had to say when I caught her cheating on me.”
“Knox.”
“Kylie.”
“I think it’s better for everyone if you co-parent civilly.”
“I’m civil in front of the children and that is all that matters,” he tells me, “but I want nothing to do with her if it doesn’t have to do with the kids. I don’t want to have coffee with her. I don’t want to sit with her at our children’s activities. I don’t want to look at her face if it doesn’t have to do with our children. Actually, if we didn’t have kids, I would pretend she never existed.”
“Well, you can’t do that.”
“Which makes me pissed off,” he grumbles and now I laugh.
“I’m sorry that she pissed you off,” I say and he glares. “I’m more sorry for myself that you didn’t give me a proper greeting when I walked into the house.” He tosses the knife down and looks at the cutting board in front of him and then back up at me. “I’m hungry. I didn’t eat lunch today and then I rushed out to come here because you said you were going to cook for me.”
“It won’t take long.”
“Just what I want to hear after us not having sex for a week. It’s not going to take long.”
“We had sex two days ago.” He raises his eyebrows. “I came over after I dropped the kids off at school.”
“It lasted ten minutes and you fucked me against my door.” He smiles big.
