Chapter 16

16

Carter carries me through the living area and around the kitchen corner to the hallway, and deposits me gently on the bed. "It's bright in here," I grumble.

"There's literally no lights on." I can't tell anything by his bland tone. Is he angry? Resentful? Amused? Before I can ask, he adds, "Be right back."

I groan. I'm still wearing my out-to-dinner clothes. I stand—slowly—and take off my satin crop top, and slide my high-waisted trousers to the floor. When Carter returns, I'm wearing nothing but my black lace push-up bra, decidedly not-matching boy shorts in neon green, and nude slipper socks.

He freezes at the entryway to the room, a large glass of water in his hand. In fact, he stops so suddenly that his hand gets doused, dripping with the water, but he doesn't even notice. His eyes are on me, all over me, and even though he was right, there aren't any lamps on in here, from the window an outdoor light illuminates his face enough that I see the way he swallows thickly. "What are you doing?" he grits out.

"I was uncomfortable." I reach behind as Carter's eyes widen. "And now I'm getting comfortable."

He turns one whole second after my bra falls to the floor, his breath heavy. "Teal…"

"Don't you want to?" I ask him. "You wanted to last year at least."

Even though he's facing away from me, his eyes are squeezed shut. "And you're drunk, just like last year. When"—he shakes his head—" if something ever happens between us, it can't be like this."

"I wasn't drunk yesterday." Yet another rejection of me—two in twenty-four hours!—is sobering me up quick. I dart over to the dresser and pull out a huge, soft sleep shirt. "And yet you found it prudent to act like I was the most disgusting thing you'd ever touched." I sigh. "I'm dressed. So you can stop acting repulsed now."

I sit on the bed and listen to his soft footfall against the carpet get closer. He nudges the water into my hands. "Drink. Please."

I want to cross my arms and tell him to go away, but I also don't want to wake up puking my guts out tomorrow morning. I sip the water until it's gone, and he takes the glass. After a minute, he returns, sitting next to me. Not close enough to touch, but not exactly as far away as he can, either.

"I don't know if you'll remember this in the morning," he says, his voice gruff and crackly. "But you're the fucking most beautiful girl I've ever seen. No one else comes close. No one else has ever come close."

When he stands I turn my face to him, my eyes wide. Somehow I feel even more naked than when I was only in my underwear a few minutes ago. "No one thinks I'm beautiful." I whisper it.

I know what I look like. Johnny told me all about it often enough. My hips are too narrow and muscular, and my shoulders are too wide and thick. My breasts, just one cup too small, and my ass could be bigger, too, for that matter. My lips and eyes are too narrow and my waist, despite my defined abs, could be smaller. "Not bad," Johnny had said the first time he saw me naked. He was the first man to ever see me naked. And I knew his not bad wasn't a compliment. It was telling me about all the flaws of my body, the things that I could never change, the way I could never be enough for him.

Or for anyone. He made sure to tell me that a lot, too. No one but me would ever want you.

"Everyone thinks you're beautiful. 'Cause that's what you are." Carter sounds sincere, at least. I can almost believe him.

But that doesn't stop me from turning away from his blazing gaze. I can accept that Carter is physically attracted to me, after yesterday's events. But I guess that means that the rest of me—my personality, namely—is what he is running away from. And I'm not sure which is worse.

I can't respond to him about it. So I say something that's been on my mind—something I haven't had the guts to say till there's a lot of drinks in me. "I wish you had told me about Abuelo Gene, Carter." I take a deep breath and begin counting. On my next exhale, I add, "I loved him, too."

It sounds like he's stopped breathing for a few seconds, and then: "I know, Teal. I should've told you. I'm sorry."

We sit in silence for several long minutes until he clears his throat. "I'll be on the pull-out if you need me."

I nod. And when he's gone, I let myself quietly cry, for five minutes, no more, before falling asleep.

If I thought this room was bright last night, well. Late morning, I feel like someone is trying to beat me to death with the bright yellow rays of sunshine leaking in through the windows. And that's after only barely opening a single eye.

"Make it stop," I mumble, pulling my pillow over my face. After a moment, I peek through the cushion to discover that the sun still exists. "Why is it still there?"

"Why is what still there?"

I nearly fall backward, even though I'm lying down, at the sound of Carter's voice in the room. When I pull the pillow away from my face, he's sitting on the edge of the bed. I give his expression, posture, basically his whole vibe a quick assessment. He doesn't look awkward or like he hates me after last night's regrettable series of events. His eyes are warm and bright.

"Why is the sun still there," I respond eventually. "Is what I was asking." My voice sounds like it belongs to a toad that's been unalive for about ten thousand years.

He stands and hands me a glass of water and what appears to be two over-the-counter painkillers.

"Thanks." I down everything in less than a minute.

"How are you feeling?" He's returned to the edge of the bed.

"Not horrible. My head feels like it's being pressed between two bricks that are being wielded by giant yetis. But—" I pause as he laughs. It looks good on him—the laughing, I mean. The way his smile somehow makes this way-too-bright room even brighter, but in the best way. I glance down before he notices I'm staring. "But, yeah. Sorry, I don't know what else I was going to say."

"Well, the Tylenol should help with the yeti-brick thing." He pauses. "Listen. I'm not telling you what to do or anything, but…"

"Carter, trust me. I'm not drinking like that again anytime soon."

"Right, I mean, that's good, because remember, that amount of alcohol doesn't mix with your meds."

He's right. It does something to my heart that he's even thought about this. That he cares about my health like that. I want to somehow say what I'm feeling, but instead what comes out is, "I hear you."

He nods and clears his throat. "By the way, your phone alarm has been going off for a while. I think you might've missed something? An event labeled DSATS?"

"What? I missed the DSATS?" I jump up and immediately regret it when my legs buckle beneath me. My right knee in particular is just not up for standing today, I guess. The rug comes at me in hyperspeed before Carter's arms intervene in a big blur of muscles.

"Hey," he says, sitting on the floor and putting me in his lap all casual, like we do this sort of thing all the time. "You okay?"

"It's my knee," I say, flexing the leg out.

"The one you messed up back in high school?"

"Yeah, that's the one."

He reaches down and begins to press his fingers lightly around the bone of my knee. I let out a sigh and lean back on him, because it feels nice. But then he hits the sore spot and I wince, hissing as I smack his hand away.

"You should get that checked out."

"I did. It's a bone spur or two." I move away from his lap so now we're both sitting on the floor, facing one another.

"Um. Okay. So which is it, one bone spur, or two?"

I look directly at the carpet, at my heels squished in the tiny curls of beige. "It's more like three or four."

He's frowning at my knee when he lets out a long huff of a sigh. "You're running way, way too much, Teal, for having so many bone spurs."

"It's nothing," I respond, and then I remember why I'm on the floor in the first place. "Shit." Glancing at the light, I see that the Dahlia Society Annual Tuber Sale was a good two hours ago. For some reason those idiots thought meeting at seven in the morning was a grand idea, and for some reason, this idiot—as in me—thought drinking her weight in whiskey the night before was also a stroke of brilliance.

"Does the DSATS have anything to do with dahlia roots or whatever?"

I look at him sharply, and then wince when my head feels like one of the yeti bricks smashes extra hard on the left temple. "What do you know about the dahlia tubers? I didn't tell you the plans yesterday," I manage to grunt out. "No one knows about my dahlia tuber plans. Not even my sisters."

He responds by lifting his phone and showing me a text. It's from Tía Nadia, as in the great-aunt who sort of raised me, when Sage wasn't doing the heavy lifting, that is. Tell Teal to not bother with the Dahlia Society tubers. Most of them have gall. Just start with the seeds, otherwise she's wasting her time.

I groan. All-knowing Latine elders and their meddlesome ways. "What's gall?"

Carter slides his thumb over the screen of his phone, lifting it to show me some nasty pictures of plants. I guess gall is some kind of dahlia bacteria. Like, it literally looks like gross alien parasites are growing on them and shit. "I'm going to vomit. Get that away from me."

Carter leans back after he tucks his phone back in his pocket. I hadn't noticed before, but he looks damn good right now, in jeans, a soccer jersey, and scruff growing thick around his soft pink lips. He levels those golden eyes right on me and then I remember that I probably look exactly how I feel—the veins in my eyes too red, my skin and mouth dehydrated, my hair resembling the gnarled roots of some frizzy tree. I turn my face away from him as he keeps talking.

"I have the day off today."

"Okay?"

"You need help planting your seeds."

"My what now?" I touch the tips of my fingers to my forehead. "Right. The seeds." Then I make a face. "Wait, that basket of ugly-looking herbs Nadia gave me are seeds ? Dahlia seeds?" How can something so gorgeous grow from little things that look like something you'd toss in the compost? My next inhale is a little sharp. "I don't even remember where I put those!"

"They're in the gym room closet. They're fine." Carter pushes up to standing, and in the process, for just a moment, I am eye level with the bulge between his legs and even in my yeti-brick state, it does something to me. All those dumb words I said to him last night come tumbling down in my head like yeti anvils. And all the sweet, amazing stuff he said to me does, too.

And just like that, I'm blushing.

"There's breakfast on the stove. Eat and drink a lot of water. We have work to do." Then he walks away, and I'm too hungover to stop myself from ogling his magnificent ass.

After showering and making myself resemble a non-massively-hungover human as much as possible, I devour the breakfast Carter made—"hangover hash browns," he called them, and they were somehow exactly what I needed, all crispy and buttery, topped with herbs, cheese, and two poached eggs. After which we began the work Carter had promised—namely, shoveling compost and manure he "borrowed" from work into the little dahlia bed I dug up from his yard earlier.

"I've been reading about it," he explains to me as we take a water break. It's only been twenty minutes of shoveling from the pile he'd brought over from the farm this morning, and we're both sweaty, with streaks over our clothes and arms of two kinds of shit (manure, being the animal shit, and compost, being basically made up of bug shit, if you also count bacteria and fungus as bugs, which I do). "Dahlias are heavy feeders. So they need all these nutrients to thrive. You can't plant them in this clay and sand mix here in the yard."

"But the grass is doing fine in the clay and sand mix," I say, frowning.

"Grass and dahlias are two very different plants."

"Hmm." But Carter doesn't let me linger with my thoughts. He tosses my shovel back at me and after another thirty minutes, we've incorporated all the various forms of shit, and after that, we top it with a sweet-smelling mulch he says is made of cypress. Bugs that like dahlias don't like the smell of cypress, so it should do some work in keeping them away.

"Why are you helping me with this?" I ask after we're done.

He shrugs. I let my gaze linger on the broadness of his shoulders, but he doesn't seem to notice. "We're married now. We're a team. When I saw Nadia's texts, I figured out what you were doing here, digging up the grass. And I wanted to help you do it right, is all." He glances away from my face. "Speaking of. We need to talk about a game plan for tomorrow."

"Shit." I'd completely forgotten what he'd barked at me when he ran away after the whole kitchen counter shenanigans. "Your family's coming for dinner, was it?"

"Lunch."

I take a deep, deep breath. "And let me guess. Abuela Erika's coming."

Carter laughs. "It was her idea."

I fold my arms over and survey the yard. We've created a flower bed that is about fifteen feet wide and five feet deep. His front yard isn't all that large to begin with, and now most of it is a mixture of dirt, shit, and mulch. But he hasn't complained or made a face or gotten passive-aggressive, like my ex would have, even over something as inconsequential as digging up a flower bed in a yard he never noticed or cared about.

As I watch Carter as he glances over our work, he looks proud.

"So are you going to tell me why you kept me a secret?" I ask finally.

Carter's face turns to me fast, and this time he doesn't deny keeping our marriage from his family. "Erika has gotten…worse as she's gotten older. I didn't want to subject you to her until we couldn't hold off any longer."

I clear my throat. "And we have to see her tomorrow, so you can get your money, right?"

It might just be my imagination, but Carter takes a beat to answer. "Yeah. Tomorrow's for the money."