“Fucking hell, Lawson!” Oakley pulls the shower curtain to the side, bubbles from his shampoo trailing down the side of his face as he stares at me, wide-eyed. “You mind?”
“Are we leaving tonight or in the morning?”
He blinks at me, mouth open. “The morning. I’m gonna need a good night’s sleep to deal with this shit.”
“All right.” I go to exit the room when I notice a bruise blooming over Oakley’s shoulder, big and blotchy. “What’s this?”
His nostrils flare when I touch the purple skin. “Hazard of the job. It’s nothing.”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine. Now unless you’re planning on hopping in, would you shut the damn door? I’m getting cold.”
I take a step back and tug the curtain into place. “Dinner in ten.”
Oakley mutters something I can’t make out as I close the door behind me, heading back through the house. Bell is in the backyard, enjoying the last of the sun, so I set to work plating up our dinner. Oakley emerges from the bathroom before long, stopping in his bedroom to change. His hair is stillwet when he joins me, not overgrown enough to fall into his eyes but close.
Seeing food on the table, he drops into a seat, eyeing me as I bring fresh lemonade over. “Thanks, hubby.”
“Don’t be a smartass,” I tell him.
“Yes, Pops.”
He laughs when I smack him upside his head, not hard, but hard enough to know I mean it. There’s a smile on his face when I sit down opposite him, and he digs quickly into his food.
I watch him for a moment, my chest feeling tight in a way that’s different from how it was on my drive here. And in the months preceding. Years, even.
I’ve missed Oakley so damn much.
“I’m not parenting you,” I tell him, my voice coming out rougher than I’d like. He stops shoveling food into his mouth, eyes meeting mine. “You say I came here making demands. Well, that’s because I’ve got a right to. You’re my best friend.”
He opens his mouth, but I go on before he can speak.
“When you care about someone, you look after them, Oak. And you’ve been out here, no one looking after you for years now. And don’t try to tell me Stevie looked after you. They didn’t.”
He doesn’t say a word.
“I’m not trying to treat you like a child. I just… I love you. So damn much. And I’ve missed you. So let me look after you a little, all right? It’s the least you could do after being such an asshole.”
“I was the asshole?” he asks, sounding amused.
“Damn right you were. You couldn’t even come home for Christmas?”
He lets out a sigh. “You knowStevie—”
“Yes, I damn well know Stevie tried their level best to alienate you from everybody else in your life who cared. You see that, don’t you? Everything was about them. Making concessions for them. What about you, huh?”
His brow furrows. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
I let out a humorless laugh, my dinner all but forgotten. “Loving someone means protecting every piece of who they are, past, present, and future. It doesn’t mean asking them to change and then leaving when they fail to live up to that impossible task. Stevie never saw you for who you are. They didn’t even try. So yes, it was that fucking bad.”
Oakley doesn’t once blink, even as his chest expands with his heavy breath. “You never say ‘fuck.’ Not unless you’re really mad.”
“Well, I’m mad.”
His breath puffs out. “I can see that. Why the hell didn’t you say something sooner, Law? If you thought Stevie was so bad for me, why didn’t you say so?”
“You had your sights set on them, and by the time you two were serious, Stevie was already interviewing for new jobs.” I toss my hands in the air, frustrated. “Was I supposed to tell you not to go? Would you have listened? If I’d pushed, Stevie would have excised me from your life.”
