Page 22 of Forever Fighting
I roll my eyes at her and put on nineties grunge instead.
“Better. Now I’m all ragey.”
I laugh, but she’s not kidding. She grabs a pair of scissors and cuts up the sheets that were still on the bed and leaves them in a pile on the mattress.
“More?”
She shrugs. “I mean, that was sort of satisfying, but not really. I threw my ring at him when what I should have done was pee and leave it in the toilet for him to fish out.”
I crack up. “Savage.”
“Right? But I bet there’s something I can do along those lines.” She heads for the bathroom, and I wait out here even though she doesn’t shut the door. “I’m not peeing,” she calls back to me. “Get in here and do this with me. You know you want to.”
I totally do, so I enter the bathroom and lean against thewall as I watch her take his toothbrush and use it to clean the toilet.
“Why do guys always get pee on the toilet? So gross.” She makes a tsking noise as she shakes her head in dismay and cleans the entire thing with his toothbrush. When she’s finished, she puts it back on the charger. “Your turn.”
“You took the best one.”
“That was a good one. Wait, I have Nair. I’ll replace his shampoo with it.”
I start to lose it. “Remind me never to cross you.”
Her eyebrows bounce. “Who knew I was this vindictive?”
She gets to work on his shampoo, and I dip his hairbrush in the toilet, which feels lame in comparison. I’m more of a guy who uses his fists or would perhaps mildly poison his food to make him sick all night. Then I feel like shit for doing that to his hairbrush.
“I’ll bring your things down.”
“Knock yourself out.”
It takes me three trips, but my SUV is all packed up.
I head for the kitchen and dump an entire bottle of hot sauce into his ketchup and shake it up. He eats ketchup with everything and hates hot sauce. It’s also revenge for that time he came to Round House, ordered lamb chops that were perfectly cooked, and proceeded to dump ketchup all over them.
This is more my style, and he deserves it, so I don’t feel so bad about this one. Braelyn pops her head around the corner just as I’m putting the ketchup back in the fridge and hiding the empty hot sauce bottle at the bottom of the trash. She lets out an amused laugh.
“Damn. That’s a good one. He’ll cry like a little bitch when he eats that. I think our work here is done. Let’s go see a movie.”
“A movie?”
“I don’t want to go home and think. I’m trying to channelmy inner badass or hard-ass or whatever women who can brush off their cheating exes and come out bright and shiny and amazing on the other side are.”
I comb some of her dark curls back from her face. Her pretty brown eyes, framed by impossibly long lashes and sitting above two beds of freckles, blink up at me. I don’t usually touch her like this. Not so intimately where I’m standing this close. Close enough that all I’d have to do is bend to kiss her.
“You’ve got this, kid. You’ll get through it, but you’re already bright and shiny and amazing.”
“Maybe he was dulling my colors,” she says, her voice a breathy whisper.
“Maybe you’ll find that this was the best thing to ever happen to you.”
“I think it will be. Once I get over the burn and the heartache and betrayal, I think I’ll be something better than I ever imagined I could be.”
I don’t know where it comes from or even how it happens. But I dip down and kiss her cheek. Thankfully, not her lips, but I don’t typically kiss Braelyn. Sort of how I don’t usually touch her, I’m apparently breaking a lot of boundaries I shouldn’t be breaking.
Instantly, I pull back, and that’s when the front door opens and in walks the dickhead. He spots us hovering by the kitchen, us standing close, and instantly his expression breaks.
“Hi,” he says, his gaze locked on her.
