Stripped Down (26 page)

I waved my hand dismissively. I didn’t really care if we were in front of a live talk show or the national news or completely alone.

I was angry. I was so fucking angry with him. We’d both signed them last week and he’d told me that he was giving them to the lawyer that day. I’d believed his words, trusted him. Now, I felt like a complete fool. He’d walked over me with this, and I was no closer to being divorced from him than I had been when I’d signed the fucking papers.

“
Beckett
!”

No—angry didn’t even come close to it. I was fuming. If I were a cartoon, I’d have had steam coming out of my ears and I’d have been taking off into the sky somewhere.

I stormed into the kitchen in search of him. He was nowhere to be found, so I searched every downstairs room. His car was there, so I knew he was there, but he appeared to be invisible.

“Fuck me.
What
?” His voice had come from behind me.

I spun on the balls of my feet. His gaze dropped to the envelope in my arms, and instantly, he froze.

“What?
What?
That’s a good goddamn question, isn’t it? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” I stalked across the kitchen and slapped the papers to his bare chest. For once, I wasn’t distracted by his fine physique. “You didn’t file them? What the fuck, Beck? You promised me you would!”

“You told her?” Beck turned to West, his shoulders tensing.

West shrugged.

“Jesus fucking Christ, West!” He rubbed his hand down his face. “I told you I was calling him today.”

“You should have told her, bro.”

“Sure, don’t mind me,” I said sarcastically. “I’m only the wife you’re apparently not divorcing, but sure, let’s hash it out with your best buddy instead of telling me why the fuck those papers were in his desk and not your lawyer’s!”

Beck’s indigo eyes found mine, and he held the envelope up. “I didn’t get around to it, all right?”

“Fuck me backwards, Beck. They’re divorce papers, not a prescription for a goddamn headache! What the hell do you mean you didn’t get around to it?”

He slammed the envelope down on the island and walked to the fridge. He pulled a bottle of water out and looked over his shoulder at me. “I’m not fighting with you, Blondie. Unless we’re going to talk, I’m not doing this.”

“Oh, we’re talking all right. You’re not leaving this conversation. And, if you call me Blondie again, I really will shove my knee into your balls.”

He took a long drink from the water bottle and put it on the island. He leaned forward, his gaze easily finding mine. “I didn’t file them. All right? I’m sorry.”

“I got that much. What I want to know is
why
. It’s not algebra, Beckett. It’s simple as simple gets.”

“Because I didn’t!” Now, he was yelling, slapping his hand against the counter. “I didn’t, all right? That’s fucking why. I don’t have some epic fucking explanation for you. I just didn’t.”

“Just didn’t?” I laughed bitterly. “I have a child. I’m the queen of ‘just didn’t.’ You’ve gotta do better than that if you want me to even
try
to believe you.”

“Cassie.” West stepped forward. “This isn’t getting you anywhere. Come back, calm down, and do this later.”

“No.” I swung my attention to him. “I’m not leaving until I get an answer. He owes me an answer, and he knows this. This isn’t good enough. We made a deal that this would end quickly and painlessly. If I wanted it to be drawn out, I’d have gone after the money I don’t want.”

“West.” Beck dropped his head. “Leave us to it, yeah?”

West hesitated, looking at me, but I nodded.

“Call Mia when you need to leave,” he said. “She’s got Ciara’s car seat, and she’ll come get you with her, all right?”

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

“Beck?” He turned to him.

Wordlessly, Beck turned his head, looking at him from beneath his arm.

“Don’t be a prick.”

Then he left. The shutting of the front door signaled his exit, and I ran my hands through my hair.

I couldn’t believe it. It was almost worse that he’d admitted it.

He hadn’t handed them over.

We weren’t even close to ending this marriage.

“Why, Beck?” I asked, my voice softer than I’d thought it would be. My hands fell limply to my sides. “Why didn’t you do it? You promised me you would. We agreed on this.”

“I know.” He slumped even farther forward on the counter. His fingers sank into his hair as he moved, and his shoulders heaved as he took a deep breath in and then sighed it out. “I was going to. I forgot to grab them on my way out last week, and then, shit, Cassie...” He dropped his hands to the countertop, our gazes meeting. “The more time I spent with you and Ciara, the less I wanted to do it. Until I stopped thinking about it all together.”

“That’s not fair. You can’t just not file them because you don’t want to. That’s supposed to be a decision we make together.”

“Yeah? Would you ever agree with me that we shouldn’t?” He raised his eyebrows. “Because I know for a fact that, if I said I was taking them to the lawyer right now, you’d follow me just to make sure I would.”

“Yeah, I would! Jesus, Beck. This”—I waved my hand between us—“will never work. You know it. I know it. It really doesn’t matter if we want each other. We’re too different.”

“Are we? Because, the way I look at it, we’re not. We’re more alike than you think we are.”

“I think you’re seeing things that aren’t there.”

“I think you’re too damn afraid to see anything past that fear you hold onto so tightly.”

“I have every right to be afraid. It isn’t going to change overnight just because somebody wants it to. I’m always going to have the fear of being left alone.”

“But I’m not him!” Beck yelled, slamming his hand against the counter. “Damn it, Cassie! I’m not that piece of shit who left you when you were sixteen and pregnant. I’m not that man. I never will be that man. Stop comparing me to that asshole in your past.”

“It’s not that easy.” I ran my fingers through my hair again, fisting at the base of my neck.

“It’s not fucking hard!”

“How would you know?”

“Because, every single goddamn night I walk into The Landing Strip or Rock Solid, women look at me and see one thing.
Money
. They don’t ask my name because they know it. Protection is my responsibility because I don’t trust any of them. They see my car and my house and all of that material bullshit and think it’s the life they want. They don’t want me, Blondie. Me.” He jabbed his finger into his chest then waved his arm. “They want all this. They want nice cars and expensive dresses and diamonds that cost more than the average person earns in a year. I know exactly what it’s like to trust nobody.”

“That’s not even close to the same.”

“No, you’re right. It’s not. But I trust you.” His knuckles whitened against the edge of the counter as he gripped it. His entire upper body rippled with tense muscle. “You don’t look at me and see all of that shit. You look at me and see...me.”

My lips were dry. I ran my tongue over them and looked away, out the back doors and into his yard.

“I know you can change fear because I did it. I just fucking wish you’d try to change yours.”

I took a deep breath, still not looking at him. “You’ll leave, Beck. When you realize just how hard it is, how much freedom you’ll lose...you’ll leave. When you realize what my life truly is, you won’t want to be a part of it. Because you’ve seen the good side. You haven’t seen the hourly wake-ups during the night because Ciara had a bad dream. You haven’t seen the screaming fits over spiders that turn out to be fluff or the absolute, inconsolable horror of Cookie going missing. You haven’t seen the dirt and the mess and the stress and the inability to do something so simple as go to the damn toilet without a catastrophe happening. And, when you have...you won’t want it. Nobody does.”

“I’m not nobody. I’m not that person.”

“I still can’t...” I inhaled sharply. “The entire ground floor of my house fits into your kitchen and dining area. Do you get that? Three rooms fit into one room of your house. I don’t even have a driveway. You can barely kick a ball in my yard. My bathroom is so small that I can pee while I wash CiCi’s hair.” I smiled sadly. “That’s my life. It’s not yours. And, if it were, you’d tire of it.”

“You think I’d choose this big-ass empty house over your little home?” He pushed off the counter and walked around it. “How much plainer do I have to make it, baby? I don’t give a shit if you live in a tiny, little house, because I’d rather live there than here if it meant I could have you. I don’t care if it means getting up every hour to shoo monsters from a bed or wipe vomit or clean sheets. I love your daughter. From her endless questions to her obsession with Tangled and everything else in between. I’m not afraid of bringing her into my life. I can’t think of anything better than having her in it. I want her, Cassie, and I want you. I want you so bad I’m going crazy out of my fucking mind falling for you.”

“But what if it’s too hard?” My voice was a thick, low rumble now. My throat felt like it’d been swelling up more with every word he’d said, and my chest was so tight. I was being suffocated by my own emotions. “What if it’s too hard and we can’t do it?”

“Then I grab your fucking hands and we do it anyway,” he answered, taking my hands in his and squeezing. “I’m not trying to say it’ll be easy. I have no doubt it’ll seem impossible at times, but as long as we’ve got each other, I can’t think of anything we won’t be able to do.”

“But what if it is impossible? What if it’s too much and you do leave?”

“What if, what if, what if.” He released my hands and held my face firmly, forcing me to keep my eyes on his. “What if it isn’t impossible? What if I stay?”

I parted my lips, but nothing came out except a slow exhale.

“Cassie, baby, please.” He touched his forehead to mine. “Trust me to stay. I can’t think of any situation that would ever make me want to leave the two of you.”

“I can think of hundreds.”

“Your fear can think of hundreds.” He dropped his hands and stepped away. “Here. If you really think I don’t want you enough to fight when it gets hard, your get-out is right here.” He tapped his fingertips on the divorce papers then picked them up. He looked at the envelope for a minute before he threw it to my feet.

It landed with a smack a few inches from my toes, which drew my gaze toward it.

“The address for the law firm is written on the front. If you want this over, I’m grabbing a shirt, and then I’ll be waiting in the car to take you there so you can end it.”

I didn’t move, although he did. I stayed standing where I was, my heart beating at what seemed like a million miles an hour, and stared at that godforsaken envelope. Time passed almost audibly, ticking in my ears. But, no, that wasn’t time. That was my pulse. It was the relentless beating of my blood around my body, spreading fear and chills and—

The front door shut.

A car engine started.

He hadn’t been kidding.

Fear... It changed. From its old apprehension about someone leaving to an entirely new, shiny, gut-wrenching fear of leaving someone who didn’t deserve it.

Beckett Cruz deserved better than me. He deserved better than a flighty, fearful, guarded single mother who was too dumb to see what was right in front of her. He deserved someone who knew what she wanted, who was grounded and open and unafraid of whatever he could give her.

But the problem was that the very idea of it made me sick to my stomach.

The idea of not having him in my life hurt a little too much.

I stepped back, away from the papers, and sat down at one of the chairs for the breakfast table that was likely never used. The one that was used to fill space. The one that Ciara would cover in crayon and finger smudges in two minutes if she was allowed.

The papers glared at me from the floor, daring me to pick them up and walk out to the car.

That would have been the easy way. I knew that it would have been. I could have gotten them, gone, and gotten the hell out of this marriage. This sham that now felt a little too real. A little too honest and scary.

He was right.

He wasn’t the piece of shit who left me. He wasn’t the pathetic excuse for a man who’d ruled my life for so long now.

He was more. He was...
him
. You could take away the house and the car and the money, and he’d still be a good, strong, irresistible guy. He’d still make you want him even if he came without frills.

That was where I’d gone wrong. I’d seen him without his frills and his fanciness. I’d seen the man beneath it all: the joker, the fool, the softie. I’d seen past the sexy exterior and all the things everyone else pegged him to.

I sniffed, but it didn’t work. Tears burned my eyes. I couldn’t even be mad at him anymore. This situation was one I’d had a hand in creating, and it was one I had to have a hand in ending.

Except I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to pick those papers up, get in that car, and go to the lawyer’s office.

So I didn’t. I left them there.

Living easily without him was a whole lot scarier than the prospect of the fight to live with him.

I hugged one knee to my chest, hooking the heel of my foot on the edge of the chair seat. Time passed so slowly as the echoing of my pulse in my ears finally settled to a more bearable beat. That didn’t mean my heart was any calmer, but it did mean I could hear something other than its rush.

Then the door slammed.

I peered up just as Beck appeared back into the kitchen. His gaze landed on the papers before it did me, and his fingers twitched as his sides.

Slowly, he looked up, his gaze dragging across the floor then finally finding me. My cheeks were tight where the few tears that had fallen had dried, and I had no doubt whatsoever that the tears had taken my mascara with them.

“I thought you would bring it out.” His words, quiet and rough, had been eerily calm. There was no hint of emotion on his handsome face, no way at all to determine what he was thinking.

He was an enigma. An open book one moment, Pandora’s box the next. It was how he protected himself. He let it all out. Then he closed off. He was my opposite.