Page 67 of I Hate You More

There was nothing soft about the way she used that word—fucking, fucked,fuck.

“I’d give you anything.” He lifted a hand and reached for her. She allowed him to make contact, but it felt like grabbing a marble statue. “You just lost your job of ten years, Ruby. And you’re obviously in a lot of discomfort right now. Why don’t you come back to my house? I have some medical supplies, and without Caleb there, you’re free to crash if you need to. We can—”

“She doesn’t need to crash at your house.” A now-familiar woman’s voice sounded behind him. Spencer turned to find Mrs. Orson standing in the doorway to her house, her slight frame swathed in a colorful quilt, a pair of pink-rimmed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. There shouldn’t have been anything intimidating about an eighty-year-old woman who weighed as much as a sack of potatoes, but Spencer felt a quaver unlike any other.

That woman would end him, if given half a chance. Both of these women would.

“I have enough medication around this place to perform heart surgery, should Ruby require it, and she has a place on my couch for as long as I continue to live and breathe on this planet. There’s no need for you to stick around.” Mrs. Orson held out a hand. The quilt fell from around her, opening like a queen’s robe. “Come, Ruby. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Spencer glanced back and forth between the two women, so far out of his depth now that he might as well have been buried at the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. The look of understanding that passed from Mrs. Orson to Ruby and back again made him realize that they were both upset. With him.

He wanted to defend himself, to point out that he was only trying to help, but if there was one thing Spencer was good at, it was knowing when he wasn’t wanted.

From the rough way Ruby picked up the box containing ten years’ worth of both nothing and everything, Spencer could tell hedefinitelywasn’t wanted.

She hoisted the box against her hip and held it there for a moment—no more than a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

“Thank you for helping Wheezy today.” There was a chill in her voice that he’d never heard there before. “And for all your assistance in training him. But I’d rather you didn’t fix your dog show in my favor, if it’s all the same to you.”

“That’s not what I—” he began, but there was no use. Everything about her posture indicated that she was done with this conversation and, by extension, him.

Chapter 19

“There’s no need for you to go to all this trouble, Mrs. Orson.” Ruby set her box on the kitchen counter and watched as the older woman bustled around the kitchen, putting hot water on to boil and pulling out a Tupperware container of various tea bags that Ruby knew for a fact had been left by the previous resident. “It’s, like, eighty degrees outside. I don’t think hot tea is going to help with my rash.”

“Hot tea always helps,” she said firmly. “Especially if you grab the whiskey from inside the flour canister to give it an edge.”

“The flour canister? Really?”

Mrs. Orson glanced over her shoulder. “My ex-husband never liked to see a woman drink, so I got in the habit of keeping it hidden. To this day, I have no idea what he thinks I was doing alone in the kitchen every night.”

Ruby was shaken and reeling from her interaction with Spencer, but she followed Mrs. Orson’s orders. Although she wanted to get home to lick her wounds—both metaphorical and literal—in peace, she had to admit there were worse things in the world than being coddled by a sweet, elderly woman with a penchant for—

“Wait a minute.” She paused in the middle of popping the top off the flour canister. “Did you say yourex-husband?”

Mrs. Orson shuddered. She’d given up on the quilt she’d been wrapped up in—for effect, no doubt—and was swathed in a chic paisley scarf instead. The ends of it quivered with her body’s movements. “Yes, thank goodness. Didn’t I tell you? The divorce came through earlier this week. That’s why the girls and I were hitting the banana bread so hard. We were celebrating.” She turned to find Ruby’s hand still suspended on the canister and took it from her. Assuming Ruby was having a hard time with the lid, she gave it a strong-gripped twist and pop. “There you go, love. Pour with a heavy hand. You look like you could use it.”

Mrs. Orson finished pouring the cups of stale tea and held them out for Ruby to add hard—and expensive—liquor.

This time, Ruby didn’t do as she asked.

“Mrs. Orson, what do you mean, you got divorced from your husband? He’s alive? You’re not a widow?”

Mrs. Orson shook her head, a mischievous, dangerous smile playing on the edges of her lips. “I thought about it all the time, if that helps. Arsenic in his pot roast. A snip to his brake line. A long walk on a cliff’s edge when the wind was rising.” She took the bottle from Ruby and poured. “Despite my dreaming, I could never make myself go through with it. Pity. I would have looked so good in black.”

Ruby could only stare as Mrs. Orson took both cups and saucers in her firm, unshaking grip and moved toward the living room.

“Peek in the bathroom to check on Wheezy before we settle for our chat, would you? You’ll find antihistamines in the second drawer down if you want to do something about that face—or, if you need something stronger, I think there’s morphine inside the douche box. It might be expired, though.”

Ruby couldn’t find it in her to be shocked or outraged by any of the words coming out of Mrs. Orson’s mouth. The fact that she stored out-of-date morphine inside feminine hygiene product boxes was no more surprising than the fact that her dear, departed husband was neither dear nor departed after all.

Andbothof those things had no power over her while Spencer’s words were still rolling like pinballs inside her head. He’d offered to throw his dog show for her. He’d offered to throw his dog show for her for no reason other than the fact that they were sleeping together.

And worse than that, he’d offered herforgivenessfor it.

She bit back a sob as she searched through the bathroom drawers for the promised antihistamines. It was more of an angry sob than a sad one, even if her eyes were having a hard time getting the message. She dashed a hand at the back of her cheek with one hand while searching through a trove of medications with the other. There was a good chance that what she ended up taking was yet another baby aspirin with the letter scraped off, but it wasn’t like it mattered. She was going to be a bloaty, itchy mess no matter what she ingested.

As if in solidarity, Wheezy let out a high-pitched whine, his legs twitching with dreamy sleep. Ruby put a hand on his heaving side to calm him. She was surprised to find that the warm bulk of him—that hefty, stubborn mass—did more to calm herself instead.