Play It Safe

Luckily, the uncontrollable urge didn’t strike to reverse it and slam my bumper into theirs. My car was new but it was paid for, I loved it and, if Gray’s truck was anything to go by, I’d need to keep it awhile.

I drove home fuming and as I was coming up the lane, Gray, in a tight, wine colored tee, one of seven (yes seven, I’d investigated, all were equally battered like he inherited them from his father or something) of his tatty baseball caps on his head, leather workman gloves on his hands, came sauntering out of the stables as I did.

This was something I was discovering that I loved about Gray. Not only the fact that he was so hot he could look delicious wearing a ragged baseball cap but also when he knew I was going to the grocery store and I got back and he was around, he always stopped what he was doing to bring in the groceries for me. I might take in a couple of totes but I stayed in and put the groceries away while he went back and forth and lugged them in.

So I drove around his truck (thus closer to the backdoor to the kitchen) and parked. Then I got out. Then I slammed my door and planted my hands on my hips.

Gray stopped two feet away from the other side of the car and took me in.

Then he muttered, “Oh shit.”

“Oh shit is right!” I snapped. “Guess who I ran into at the grocery store?”

“Osama bin Laden?”

That was funny but I was not laughing.

“No, Gray, he’s dead,” I told him something he already knew then leaned in and hissed, “Cecily.”

His torso swayed back an inch as he crossed his arms on his chest. “You know she lives here, dollface, you knew it would happen eventually. What the f**k?”

Something about Gray then and now, he was rational and logical to a fault and mostly very easygoing. Unless it was Buddy Sharp, my brother (back then) or his uncles (then and now), he didn’t get riled easily.

Which sometimes sucked and I discovered that at that very moment when I was in rant mode and I wanted someone to understand exactly why and commiserate with me.

So I explained why.

“She had a hand in the play Buddy made to get me out of Mustang.”

And there it was. I got someone to commiserate with my rant.

The problem was, in my snit I had temporarily forgotten that when Gray wasn’t being rational, logical and easygoing and he got pissed, he got pissed.

“Say again?” he whispered and he was across the car from me but I heard the menace in his whisper.

“She had a hand in the play Buddy made to get me out of Mustang,” I repeated a little less heatedly, studying him and wondering if I should have kept my mouth shut.

“She tell you that?”

I shook my head but said, “I know.”

“How do you know?”

“A girl knows.”

“Think, you say something as explosive as that, Ivey, you need more than ‘a girl knows’,” Gray replied and it was then I realized the hole I’d dug with my fit of temper.

Because I didn’t want to go there but now that I’d mentioned it, I had no other direction available to me.

I sucked in breath, walked to the car and put my hand on my door then said, “Remember when she came up to us at the VFW our first date?”

“Ivey, I think you know I remember everything about you, specifically everything about you when you were with me. Outside of our kiss and watchin’ you bendin’ over a pool table for an hour, that was the best part of the date.”

He wasn’t happily reminiscing, unfortunately. He was telling me to move it along.

Still, Gray impatient or not, I liked what he said.

I didn’t share that.

“Well, our, um…conversation in the chiller cabinet aisle at Plack’s was along the same vein.”

“Again…” Gray started, clearly seeking patience, “say again?”

Damn.

Here we go.

“She walked right up to me and told me, essentially, that while I was gone, you’d been with other women.”

At that point I learned something new about Gray and how to deal with him.

Because he had been pissed, alert and impatient.

Now he was enraged.

So I learned, belatedly, that I should tread cautiously even when I was justifiably in full rant.

“That bitch,” Gray whispered.

“Gray, honey, it’s not like I didn’t know.”

“That…fuckin’…bitch!” Gray clipped, this time loudly.

“Gray,” I said softly, “it’s okay.”

“Right, I know, Ivey, f**k, I know,” he returned, uncrossing his arms and throwing one out. “You aren’t stupid and you know me, you knew about the girls before you. I know you know but that doesn’t f**king mean,” he leaned in, planted his hands on his h*ps and thundered, “she had to tell you!”

“Honey.” I was still whispering.

“I was not gonna go there with you. Not ever. I knew you knew and I didn’t need to make myself feel better and you feel like shit by goin’ over it with you. I knew what I felt when I called you in Vegas and Lash answered the phone at twenty past seven, knowin’ he was in bed with you, thinkin’ what I thought he was to you. It burned through me but I was in my own f**kin’ kitchen on my cell phone. That bitch threw that shit in your face while you were in f**kin’ Plack’s f**kin’ grocery shoppin’ and knowin’ she gleefully set about makin’ you feel that burn when you were not in a safe place or f**kin’ doin’ it ever pisses me right the f**k off.”

“I can see that,” I said soothingly.

Gray glared at me then bit out, “That f**kin’ bitch.”

“Gray, that isn’t the part you need to know. What I mean is –”

“That f**kin’ bitch.”

I fell silent.

Gray deep breathed.

I waited.

Gray kept glaring at me and deep breathing.

Then he asked, “Anything frozen in the car?”

“Ice cream,” I answered quietly.

“Right, toss me your key. Let’s get this shit in.”

I tossed him my keys; he nabbed them and bleeped the trunk open.

I headed to the kitchen. He brought in a load and I started putting it away. Then he brought in the second and last load, dumped it on the counter and I continued putting it away while he rested a hip to the counter, crossed his arms on his chest watched me and ordered, “Right, now, give it to me.”

I kept putting food away while I told him, “She has a thing for you.”