How About No
Page 38

My eyes sharpened. “Do you want to?”
She looked at the still smoldering ashes in the sink. “I want to get married again. I want to do it all over again. I want it to feel real.”
I took a step in her direction and hooked an arm around her waist, pulling her to me. “You’re saying that what we have doesn’t feel real?”
She shook her head with frustration plainly written on her face. “I’m saying that I fucked things up, and I want to make sure that you remember you’re mine. I want everyone to know that you’re mine.”
I looked down at her hand—which still didn’t have my wedding ring back on it.
“Where’s your ring?” I asked.
I didn’t bother to ponder it being lost in the fire. I’d seen the box in her purse last week when I went through her bottomless pit in search of ibuprofen. I’d seen it in the middle section, all by itself, as if it was just taunting me to put it back on her hand.
“My purse on the counter,” she whispered.
I didn’t waste a second going to retrieve it.
Stepping over Capo who was laying peacefully in the middle of the kitchen, I winced only slightly at the jarring movement before quickly retrieving her ring and walking back to our bathroom.
Once I was back in front of her, I opened the box and stared at the ring.
“This ring means you’re mine,” I told her, not taking my eyes off of the piece of diamond and metal that had changed my life the moment I’d slipped it onto her finger.
“I was yours whether I had that ring on or not,” she whispered. “I’ve been yours since the moment that I walked into your classroom.”
I felt my heart swell as I reached for her hand.
“I’ll marry you again,” I told her. “I’ll pay for another ten-thousand-dollar wedding if it makes you smile at me like I’ve lit your entire world.”
Sliding the ring on her finger, I felt something inside of me once again become whole at the sight.
Her breath caught, and I finally lifted my gaze back to hers.
Her eyes were blazing with the same emotion that was filling my own chest—euphoria.
“Where’s yours?” She licked her lips.
I reached into my pocket and pulled it out.
A day hadn’t passed that I hadn’t had it with me.
The day that I almost died next to my car, I’d slipped it onto my finger while I’d been laying in my own pool of blood.
Her cool, delicate fingers brushed mine as she reached for the solid hunk of gold. It was scratched and no longer as polished as it’d once been, but it didn’t matter. That piece of metal resembled us—solid and strong despite all the damage that it’d been put through.
She reached for my hand, and I snickered. “Other hand, baby.”
“Oh,” she rolled her eyes, swaying slightly on her feet. “Yeah, I knew that.”
She’d done the same thing at our wedding—reached for the wrong hand. I teased her about it constantly over the course of our marriage, so it only seemed fitting that she’d do it now, too.
Clumsily she slipped the metal onto my finger and made a frustrated face when it wouldn’t go past my second knuckle. “Give it a twist, baby.”
She did, and the ring finally slipped fully on, sliding into place exactly where it was always meant to be.
“I’m never, not ever, going to let go again. I promise, Wade.”
Her shining eyes, and her perfect mouth saying those words were exactly what my heart needed to hear.
“Good,” I told her firmly. “Because I would’ve followed you wherever you went.”
Her smile was brilliant. “Now, take me to bed. I feel like I’m about to topple over.”
I took her to bed, then I made love to her until she passed out from my attentions.
All the while I wondered if life was too good to be true.
Chapter 17
Why is it called boob sweat? Why not humidititties?
-One of life’s unanswered questions
Wade
All the good mood from the night—or early morning—before was now gone.
With both of us standing on the front lawn that we had seeded with our own two hands, it was hard to see anything in this situation at all positive.
Not with the grass a black blob, nor with the tree we’d planted the day we moved in charred to a barely distinguishable cinder.
Hell, even the mailbox hadn’t been spared, and that, I remembered, had been an arm and a leg to build because Landry had wanted a fuckin’ dolphin of all things.
“This is bad,” she said softly. “I don’t think there’s a single thing that we can salvage.”
I didn’t think so either.
“Even the lawn furniture is gone,” she whispered. “My mailbox, the one that I loved—gone. The stupid gnome is even broken.”
The gnome was what finally broke her heart.
“Awww, baby.” I curled my arm around her shoulders and dropped a kiss onto her head. “It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t see how,” she sniffled. “It’s gone. Not even our weeping willow survived.”
I dropped one more kiss onto her head and let her go, my eyes on the outside.
The inside was a total loss. The only thing left standing were the outside walls, and even those were well on their way to falling down thanks to the support beams being charred to cinder at the foundation.
Unluckily for us, there’d been a second house fire that had started about an hour before ours had, and the entire volunteer fire department had been at that one trying to keep it from spreading to neighboring homes. Our house had burned to the ground, and not a single drop of water had hit it until two hours after it’d started.
Though, that likely had more to do with the fact that the other home that’d been on fire was one that was threatening other neighbors while ours had been at the end of a block.
“Did they give you what you put into it?”
I turned to see the county arson investigator’s assistant, better known as Castiel, standing behind me.
Castiel was a jack of all trades just like Zee was, and had started the arson investigating about two years ago when the old fire marshal had lost his right-hand man. Castiel had stepped in for a few weeks to cover for him. That few weeks had turned into a few months, and those few months had turned into two years.
Castiel still said that he was planning on moving on from the job, but he hadn’t done it yet.
“They gave me what I wanted,” I told him bluntly. “It didn’t cover the furnishings or all the decking outside in the backyard, but that’s to be expected. Luckily, Landry was safe. That’s all I really care about.”
Castiel was quiet a moment. “I feel like a dick for being so mean to her since y’all separated.”
I cast him a sideways glance. “She understands. It’s hard to be faced with the choice of choosing your good friend over the woman you met because of the friend.”
“Still,” he grunted. “I’m not proud of the way I acted.”
“But you’re human,” Landry’s soft voice said from behind us. “And we all make mistakes, even though I am happy that you stayed loyal to Wade. He deserved that, not me.”
But Cass and I both turned to survey the woman looking so heartbroken standing behind us.
I kept my mouth shut, realizing that this was something that Castiel and Landry needed to discuss, or it’d never get straightened out.
A lot of the guys were likely feeling much the same way, but none of them had been as vocal about their dislike of each other more than Landry and Castiel.
Castiel was one of my best friends, and even though we didn’t have much time to hang out due to our jobs and our obligations, we still knew that we each had the other’s back.
“You deserved to be treated differently than the way I treated you,” he murmured. “Suffice it to say, I should’ve been able to control my anger, but that has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the fact that the same thing happened to me. But where you both have a happy ending—I didn’t.”
“I never knew you were married,” Landry said softly.