He was sitting at the kitchen counter, in a trance-like state, when I limped in the room.
“I think it's best if I go home,” I mumbled, my voice cracking.
“No,” he said hoarsely. “You shouldn’t even be walking.”
“I can’t be here Justin when you won’t tell me what’s hurting you so. I know you don’t want me here. I can see it in your eyes. I can hear it in your voice. I can smell it in the air. Please take me home.” Tears stained my face as the words left my mouth.
“Terri I...”
“Please. If you can’t tell me why you feel this way. One minute things are perfect between us and the next, you’re withdrawn and uncommunicative. I don’t know what to do. I can’t lay up there all alone in your bed wondering what the hell happened. And...” I lost it then.
He was there picking me up but I protested and punched him. “No! You have to talk to me and not do this. I can take care of myself Justin. I have for years. I can’t be here with you like this. Can’t you understand?”
He set me down and shouted, “Yes, damn it. I can. And let me talk a minute. It was Ava. She made me question myself, my integrity and my value to you. Whether or not I was good enough for you. And the more I thought about it, damn it, the more I wondered if she didn’t have a valid point!”
My jaw crashed to the floor. “You’re letting someone else, someone who hasn’t even seen us together, who hasn’t even spent any time around us, dictate to you what you should be feeling about yourself? Justin! That doesn’t make any sense!”
I tore my hands through my hair and started chewing on my bottom lip.
“She made some valid points about my past!”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about your past and I’m the one who counts where that’s concerned. Am I right?”
He stared at me, his eyes grabbing onto mine like a lifeline. “When we decided to give us a try, I was leery of you, yeah. But not because of your past. It was because of that incident with the two girls and then because you didn’t tell me the truth about my leg. What you’ve done with other women before we met I really could give two shits about.”
He still just stared, locked onto to me, unmoving.
“Look. Do you think I’m naive or something? I know women throw themselves at you. Hell, that crazy bitch that pushed me down told me stuff about you. And I’m quite sure it was a bunch of crap. Listen to me Justin. I. Don’t. Care. What I do care about is how you treat me. And whether you respect me and are honest with me.” I finally shut up because I ran out of steam. This whole thing had fried my mind.
He didn’t move for quite a while. I rubbed my face in an attempt to stop the fire from burning in my eyes and to dry the tears that had fallen. When I lifted my head, he took my hands in his and started kissing each of my fingers.
“I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
“Justin, you only hurt me because you wouldn’t talk to me. Don’t do that to me. You can’t put a wall up between us because that’s a sure fire way to destroy what we have going here. If you have an issue or concern, voice it.”
“I will. I’m so sorry honey. I just started feeling so inadequate and thinking that maybe you deserved someone better than me.”
I fisted my hands in his shirt and pulled him to me saying, “Don’t you think I should be the judge of that? I’m a big girl and I get to make my own decisions about stuff like that.”
He scooped me up and said, “I need to get you off that leg and ankle. And I’m not going to abandon you again. Up we go.” He carried me back up the stairs and put me down on the bed. Then he leaned in for a kiss, a long, slow, soft and sexy one.
When he finally pulled away, I said, “If you ever think about taking that away from me again, you better check with me first buster.”
He laughed a little. Then he laughed harder.
“Terri, that thing you did earlier...you know, with the ice? I’m gonna do that to you sometime. Just giving you fair warning.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Justin
Every time I think how I almost blew it I want to throw up. What the hell was I thinking? How could I let Ava and her blabbing mouth effect me like that? I groaned inwardly. I was getting to the point where I could barely stand to think about it. Seeing Terri standing there, crying like that. My guts felt like they’d been torn out and had acid poured on them. I don’t ever want to make her feel that way again...ever.
Thank God the second X-ray turned out okay too. That would’ve really put the nail in my coffin. She’d ended up with a relatively good sized bruise and a painful sprain, but other than that, all was good.