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“Because it doesn’t make sense,” she retorted, and even laughed. Though maybe not because she thought this was really all that funny. She pushed her hair back from her face, which told him she was more agitated than she was letting on. He…didn’t like that. “What happened after you said those things? I left you?”

“Yes.”

Ruthie let out another little laugh. “So this person you’re describing as a paragon of virtue was completely oblivious to the struggle that you were going through, demanded that you add a baby to that mess, and then, when you reacted badly, abandoned her struggling husband of five years to his own devices. The end. Is that the story?”

He thought his jaw might actually have dropped. “You are twisting this—”

“Because I have to be honest, Dallas,” she said. She shook her head, but she didn’t look away from him. “I sound like kind of a dick.”

“You weren’t,” he growled. Through his teeth. “I don’t know how you put up with me.”

“Funnily enough, that was my next question.” She seemed to settle back against the couch. “I’m not understanding some things. We couldn’t travel? Some people think that traveling is spending time together, but we didn’t think that. We didn’t want to have experiences. So I married you very quickly after meeting you, which is questionable in and of itself.”

“Ruthie. It was not questionable. It was impossible not to get married. It was like a hunger.”

She did not look impressed with that. “And then we…what? Isolated ourselves away from the world whenever you weren’t at work? What was I doing when you were?”

“You had a job,” he said, not focusing on how he was defending her to her. “Or you would get a job. You did different things. We knew that the Army wasn’t going to be forever, so there was no reason for you to tie yourself down to some career that you maybe didn’t even want.”

“Wow, the picture gets better and better,” she said with another one of those laughs that he also found he did not like at all. “I was a receptionist at this hair salon near my grandmother’s house in Columbus. But they said I’d only had the job for a year or so. And I guess working for a living is traumatic for me, because I don’t remember what else I did before that.”

“You were saving all your money, and mine.” Dallas sounded angry when he wasn’t. He just couldn’t understand the spin she was putting on this. “Because we were saving up our time and our money for afterward. We were going to have our babies and then travel. As a family. Until I ruined it.”

“I can’t relate to this woman you’re describing.” And he didn’t know what expression he must have made, but Ruthie laughed at it. A real laugh this time. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what high horse you think I ought to have been sitting on. You were the one who was deployed to do things you either weren’t allowed to talk about, or couldn’t bring yourself to talk about, and I was…what? Working odd jobs and dreaming about being a housewife? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if that was my calling, why wasn’t I doing that? I still don’t understand—”

“You would quit whatever job you had when I was home,” he told her stiffly. “So we could spend time together.”

“What were we doing?” she asked, a little wildly. “That we had to spend all that time together, to the exclusion of literally everything else, in the entire world?”

For a moment, Dallas only stared at her blankly. Then it was his turn to laugh, though he didn’t think anything was funny. Mostly because he could remember exactly what they’d been doing.

“We were having sex,” he said matter-of-factly. “We couldn’t keep our hands off of each other, Ruthie. We didn’t like to get out of bed. It’s difficult to check in for your shift if you’re too busy rolling around in a bed with your husband. That’s what we were doing.”

“For five years?”

He nodded. “Whenever, wherever. We were insatiable, and it only got worse as time went on.”

Her eyes got wide. And he could see a flush on her pretty cheeks, a flush that he happened to know extended all over the rest of her body.

These were not things that he needed to be thinking about right now.

“Insatiable,” she echoed.

“I think it was like a sickness,” he said, though the words tasted sour in his mouth, because he’d decided he should think that. He wasn’t sure he did, even now. “It was like that from the start. We were just… It was like two magnets. We just couldn’t stay apart.”

“That must have made it…difficult to be out in public.”

“We had some challenges in that area, yes.” He rubbed both hands over his face and ordered his body not to react to the things he was remembering right now. “Listen. It was a long time ago. We were young. I was… I was to blame.”

“If there were two magnets that were irresistibly drawn together, I’m not sure how one could take responsibility for the whole… magnetism of it all,” she pointed out, like she was being reasonable.

“You were not this flippant about it, back then,” he gritted out. “You told me you wished you’d never met me. That you were sorry you’d ever touched me. And I earned that, Ruthie. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

She was making a face again, like she didn’t understand. “So for the previous five years, when we got in fights, did we do this? Did we take everything that was said in anger as truth and burn it all down?”

“We didn’t get in fights.” When she stared back at him, he lifted his shoulder. “We never fought. Probably because, the one time we did, it was catastrophic.”

“Dallas,” she said, and she sounded so damned reasonable. Like she was trying to manage him. Or something equally unbearable to contemplate. “Do you think that there’s any possibility…?”