Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(26)

“You seem more animated.”

His arms unfolded. I’d startled him. “Animated? What’s that mean?”

I faced him. “The coldness is gone.” I put my hand on his chest and drew it through the patch of hair in the center, down to his abdomen. “Is something going on you want to talk about?”

“No.”

I shrugged. I wouldn’t normally gesture like that any more than I’d roll my eyes. Normally, I’d acknowledge his feelings without validating or dismissing them. But I didn’t feel normal. I felt a little less in control, a little more impulsive. Less like a professional psychiatrist and more like a wife who knew her husband’s boundaries.

“You on call today?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He took my hand and kissed inside the wrist. “I’ll call you.”

I kissed him in typical married-person way. A punctuation between activity. A comma in the day. I didn’t get to the bedroom door before his voice stopped me.

“Greyson.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t take this back once I say it.”

This couldn’t be good. Anything he might want to take back wouldn’t be a statement to celebrate.

“Okay?”

“You might want to cancel your appointment.”

“Caden. Is everything all right?”

Sucking his lips between his teeth as if he wanted to hold the words back, he tightened his jaw and tilted his head. We were frozen in his moment of decision while the currents of his courage swirled and gathered together.

“I think.” Hands though hair. A pause. I stayed absolutely still. “I think I’m going crazy.”





Part Two





HOMEBREAKING





Chapter Thirteen





GREYSON - DECEMBER, 2006





Caden’s hands, what they could do, how careful they were in doing it, were always different in my memory than in real life. I forgot them every time they were out of my sight. They were always wider, more articulated than I remembered. When I saw his wedding ring on the fourth finger, tying him to me, I stood in awe of that single band taming a force so powerful.

“Hey,” he said, meeting me at the desk at the front of the administrative offices of the hospital. He was crisp and showered in a suit with a textured silk tie. He always smelled of alcohol when he got out of surgery. He covered it with cologne and sex, but it was deep in his pores.

When he signed out, his gold ring wiggled with the letters of his name.

“How are you feeling? Since this morning?” I asked, remembering the taste of those fingers.

“If I wasn’t fine, I’d let you know,” he lied.

I let him have that particular deceit because it was to protect me. He was painfully honest in everything else. We started down the hall.

When my heels clacked on the floor, he looked at my feet. “Are you all right in those?”

I turned my calf so he could see the outline of the shoe and the stockings under it. “Do you like them?”

He walked again. “I like them over my shoulders.”

Stating facts. Clear and concise. Cold because he was nervous, not because he was losing his mind. He wasn’t lying about feeling better, only that he’d tell me.

“How’s your thigh?” he asked when we were alone in the elevator.

“Nice contusion.”

“Muscular or dermal?”

“Subcutaneous.”

He nodded, hands folded together in front of him. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

We got out at the doctors’ level of the garage, which was nicer than any of the others, and had valet. His Mercedes was waiting. He let me in.

“Where are we meeting him again?” he asked.

“Gotham.”

“We should have taken a cab.”

The car pulled onto Central Park West. It was the week between Christmas and New Year. Traffic was on a break.

“It was a cutting day,” I said with a playful curl to my question. Surgery left him raw and potent. We usually fucked on cutting days.

“Just a quad. Easy. He was young though. So we had tertiary distress.”

He made a left, crossing hand over hand, his attention always sharp, even when the streets were empty.

“You don’t want to go,” I said.

“To dinner?”

“To dinner with Ronin.”

“I like Ronin.”

“To dinner with Ronin to discuss the new protocol.”

“No.” He faced me when he made the denial, and for a second, I saw his raw power. “I don’t want to go to dinner with Ronin to discuss this at all. Ever.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do, Greyson.”

“You don’t.”

“Yes. I. Do. For you.”

“Don’t lay this on me.”

“Jesus Christ. If I wrote you a check for three hundred bucks, would you listen to me for fifty minutes? We’re married. I do things for you. You do things for me. We make sacrifices.”

Before I could talk about agency, autonomy, and acceptance, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. For a month, his touch outside our home had gotten rare, and it froze me.