“I never liked that asshole.”
“You only met him once,” I said, a smile almost twitching at my lips from Lee’s flared nostrils.
“Once was enough. He didn’t deserve you. Gary said it too.”
“Gary always said that about any man who looked twice in my direction.” I rolled my eyes. “Listen, if you stop looking like you’re about to flip the table, I will explain.”
“I can’t promise anything.” He leaned back, crossing his arms.
“Fine,” I breathed out. “I caught Zach stealing from me. I was away a lot, as usual, so it took me a long time to notice. And even then, I didn’t totally piece it together.”
“Stealing what?” Lee spat out, his body still rigid with rage. I tried to focus on the details and not swoon like a moron over how infuriated Lee was on my behalf.
If Gary had been here, hewouldhave flipped the table, right before he called his old army buddies in the Midwest to run surveillance on wherever Zach was now.
Getting attention from Lee was a slippery slope. The more I’d craved it, the more I’d avoided it because it always left me wishing fordifferentattention, attention I’d never get from Lee because he’d never see me like that.
The energy between us, at least from my side, wassometimes like when you put two magnets together right before they’d connect. That wavy force field would make me wobble, the attraction luring me in, but I’d push against it and stop right before it sucked me in all the way.
It was a line I’d teetered for years.
Badly.
I’d gotten over all the pining for what could be when Lee had married Katie, but sometimes the old feelings would bubble up, like a muscle memory I couldn’t stop.
“Things started disappearing. Jewelry, cash I’d kept in the apartment, our joint account was always in the negative. He would tell me it was from repairs to the apartment or car issues. It seemed fishy, but I’d been on a brutal assignment and barely had time to eat and sleep until it was over. I came home early from a work trip and found pawn shop receipts in the kitchen for all the things he’d told me I probablylost in my travels.”
“Fucking asshole,” Lee gritted out. “What else did he take?”
“Most of my income went to a personal account he didn’t have access to, thank God. I didn’t care about the cash. Well, I did, but not as much as the necklace my father gave me for my sixteenth birthday right before he passed away or the ring I’d bought for myself after I graduated from college. Irreplaceable stuff I knew I’d never find again.”
“Was it drugs?” Lee asked.
“Gambling. High-stakes poker, sports. I thought he was just in one of those fantasy leagues, but there was much more to it. I waited for him to come home, and I shoved the receipts at him the minute he came through the door.”
I crossed my arms over my torso as if I were bracing for the impact again.
“He said he got into a little trouble and he’d get the stuffback and pay me for what he took, but he wouldn’t admit how much. I told him to get out and that I was calling the police, and he lost it.”
“That’s when he hit you?” Lee whispered, his voice low.
“Yes, and as luck would have it, if you could call it luck, the neighbors had already called the police because we’d been fighting pretty loudly. They were nosy and annoying, but it came in handy that one time,” I said, letting out an empty laugh. “The police arrived just in time for them to see me holding a dish towel full of blood to my face. They took him in when I agreed to press charges.”
I didn’t remember the actual moment his fist hit my face. It was like all those times I’d fallen as a kid, and sometimes as an adult, and I could never recall the actual blow that led to a bruise. It either happened so fast that I couldn’t register the details or my brain erased the trauma from memory.
“My God, Stella,” Lee said, his gaze so intense I had to avert my eyes. Past and maybe some present feelings notwithstanding, I’d known Lee for most of my life. The shame was still hard to shake, especially in front of friends and family, and the last thing I wanted to see was pity in his eyes and feel even worse.
“They took him to the station, and the police called an ambulance for me to get it all on the record. I spent a long night in the ER alone, telling the story over and over again.”
The rest of the night was burned into my mind with crystal clarity. The pain, all the blood gushing out of my nose that had almost made me choke, and the lingering looks from passersby, some with sympathy, some disdain.
I’d known at that moment I needed to come home—or the last place I’d had a home.
“Why were you alone?” Lee asked, his voice soft enough to make tears prick my eyes.
“Who would I have called? We had neighbors but not friends. I never took the time to get to know anyone on the block. It wasn’t like Brooklyn, where you knew everyone without having to try.”
I tried to push a smile across my face in an attempt to lighten the mood—or at least get Lee to blink.
