Daddy.
My stomach flips. It’s go-time. Ian’s home, and it’s time to have this out. I scratch Ariel’s back and then continue into the house. Ian’s not in the living room, so with Ariel hot on my heels, I go into the kitchen.
He’s at the table with his laptop, the screen reflecting on his lenses, and he’s surrounded by neat stacks of white pages. As I step into the room, our eyes meet. He doesn’t seem surprised to see me home early, and he doesn’t look thrilled either. Just like last night, his poker face offers nothing.
Without a word, he closes his laptop. He takes off his glasses, sets them on top of the computer, and stands up. Now that his glasses are off, the heavy shadows under his eyes are unmistakable. My guilt burrows deeper—guess I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep last night.
Beside me, Ariel’s tail slows, no longer making whip-whip-whip sounds through the air. Ian’s got one of her toys on the table, one of the ones that can be filled with kibbles, ready and waiting as if he’s been prepared since he got home to gently distract her while we fight it out, so she doesn’t get as stressed. He picks it up and hands it to her. She grabs it out of his hand, drops onto the floor by the sink and starts pawing at it to get the treats out.
For a moment, we stand there, facing each other from miles apart. The only sound is Ariel rolling the toy around and crunching on the treats that fall out, and even that’s barely audible over my thumping heart.
“We should…” Ian swallows. “We should talk. About last night.”
“I know.” My throat tightens, and I take a deep breath. I run a shaky hand through my hair and can’t make myself look him in the eye. “I’m sorry. You trusted me to do this with Michael and not get involved like that, and I…” There’s no explanation. No rationalizing it and making it nice and pretty so he can brush it off and pretend it never happened. The cold hard truth is that my husband trusted me to have sex with another man, and to keep it as sex and nothing more, and I fell for that man anyway.
I make myself meet his gaze. “I’m sorry, Ian. I wish there was something else I could say. But I’m sorry, and I love you, and I don’t want to lose you.”
Please tell me I haven’t already lost you.
Ian comes closer, and my knees are shaking as badly as they did the day Michael forced us to hash it out after that stupid breakup years ago.
He doesn’t say a word. His eyes tell me nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again, sounding so goddamned useless and pathetic.
“I know.” He wraps his arms around me, and my knees almost collapse out from under both of us. I want to believe this is silent forgiveness, but I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m scared to death he’s just waiting for the right moment to calmly, quietly tell me that he’s going to move in with his brother, and we can talk to attorneys next week, and that he hopes we can do this amicably.
Though I’m not sure I want to know, I ask, “What do we do now?”
He doesn’t answer right away, but finally says, “Come on. Let’s go sit.” He leads me into the living room. Rosie is on the couch, so Ian moves her to the back of one of the armchairs. We sit down, a full cushion dividing us. There’s still a lot of space between us, much more than I’m comfortable with, but Ian takes my hand. At least that’s something—at this point, I’ll take it.
Ian takes a deep breath. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since last night.” He watches his thumb running back and forth along the backs of my knuckles. “And maybe this whole thing with Michael… Maybe we went about it the wrong way.”
The wrong…huh?
I cock my head. “What do you mean?”
He wets his lips and lifts his gaze. “Maybe what we’ve been doing with him shouldn’t be just sex. And maybe it shouldn’t be…temporary.”
I blink, not sure I heard him right. “What?”
“Maybe you need him.” He swallows. “Maybe we both do.”
Okay, I definitely heard him right that time, but… What? “I don’t understand.”
Ian takes a deep breath. “The thing is, Michael’s been a part of your life forever, and he’s been a part of ours ever since we met. He’s never tried to intrude. Hell, he kept us together when we fucked up.”
“Yeah, true.”
“He’s never been a third wheel. More like…more like the third corner. And when we started getting physically involved with him, it was…” He’s quiet for a moment, eyes unfocused. “The thing is, look how fast he was willing to let me join the picture, even with all that trauma still hanging over him. And I cared from the start about him getting past all his flashbacks and panics, but when I was really involved in it…” He grimaces.
“It hurts. To watch someone you care that much about going through that.”