“Well, yes. I thought about it.”
“Then why the fuck didn’t you do it?” she squealed.
While nobody in their group would have heard her, nearby dogs would have, as evidenced by the fact that Scheherazade trotted over to sit on top of her feet, looking up at her in concern.
“It was late. We needed to be up early. She was exhausted. She needed to sleep?—”
“Okay, did you sleep?”
“Well, no.”
“And why was that?”
“Because I was upset. I hurt her.”
“And you don’t think she wasn’t upset?”
“Well, of course she was upset. It was why she left my bed in the first place.”
Gem groaned and put her head in her hands. “It’s got to be the Y chromosome. I don’t know what else it could be,” she mumbled into her gloves. When she picked up her head, her hands grabbed the lapels of his jacket and fisted them tightly. “So let me get this straight. You thought that after you upset her, letting her go to her room, alone, may I remind you again, upset, that she’d easily sleep and recharge.”
When she said it like that, it did sound completely asinine.
“And when you came out of your room in the morning, after not sleeping all night, mad at yourself for what you said, you thought the best way to fix it was to still say nothing?”
Yeah. Not his best moves.
“Well, I?—”
A single finger stabbed him in the chest. “Don’t. Don’t even try it.” She murmured the next sentence to herself. “And I always thought you were the smart one.”
“Gem, I don’t think you understand?—”
“I said don’t!” The finger poked him again. Hard. Hard enough to leave a bruise through all the layers. The pixie was pissed. “I sure as hell do understand. I live with Nemo, for fuck’s sake.”
She had him there. Nemo was the ultimate fuckup. He was constantly apologizing for things, according to Medusa. His mouth flew a hundred miles an hour, and it was a never-ending source of amusement to the entire Mythos crew. The joke was—when he fucked up, Gilgamesh made bags of popcorn for all their operatives and put them in their spaces. That’s how they all knew to come watch the show as Nemo tried to extricate himself from whatever mess he’d gotten into this time.
“Fix. It.” With a snap of her fingers to the dog, she turned and started to walk away. She made it maybe three steps before she whirled on him, her finger pointed at him with as much anger as an inanimate object could. “Now.”
The morning after Daleyza left his bed, he’d exited his room to find her sitting on one of the kitchen barstools, her bag packed and ready to go. There were dark circles under her eyes, along with a glassy sheen over her beautiful brown irises, but the words he wanted to say got stuck in his throat. The pain he saw in her gutted him.
He could have explained to her right then that she’d misunderstood. That he’d compounded the misunderstanding by not going after her, but then some twisted part of him stopped him from doing it. It was like a devil inside told him he deserved her anger—which he believed to be true—and that if letting her go, way back when, wouldhave been the right thing to do—which he also believed to be true—then cutting ties now and not correcting the misconception was the best thing for her. She would be hurt. She would be beyond angry. But she’d be free to move on eventually. She couldn’t stay hurt and angry forever.
Could she?
Fuck. Of course she could. She basically told him she’d been hurt and angry since he left to go back to the Navy. That was ten years. If she hadn’t recovered by now, she wasn’t going to.
And his dumb ass just went and added to it.
Gem was right. There was definitely something in the Y chromosome that caused brain damage.
A voice broke into his self-flagellation.
Nemo spoke first. “Dorothy, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore.”
TB followed with, “Does anyone else feel an unusual urge to go buy a watch and then follow that up by gorging on chocolate?”
Involuntarily dragged into the conversation, he looked down on what looked like a Swiss village and said, “Bariloche has a long history with European influence. The Spaniards arrived first, conquering the indigenous people and systematically rehoming and ultimately reducing their numbers. The Germans came next, and by the 1930s, ‘Little Switzerland’ was born.”
