He squeezes our fingers together again as his only reply, and I’m glad. I’m not sure I want his forgiveness.
Not yet.
I’m dreading the moment we pull up to my parents’ house, taking a roundabout way to ensure nobody followed us. I asked Garrick if we could stop at a hotel first, the nearest one being half an hour away from my hometown, but he simply looked at me and said, “Rip the Band-Aid off, Rylee.”
The fact he knows I’d make a million excuses not to go right to their house tells me he’s a little too perceptive. Even if I hadn’t texted Mom to let them know when we’d landed, she would have found out. She lives for gossip sites like TMZ, usually filling me in on the latest celebrity news whenever we talk. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if Garrick and I are plastered on the tabloid’s homepage as we speak.
Blowing out a breath, I sink into my seat and stare at the rustic blue farmhouse style home. Everything is the same as it always has been minus the few little renovations Dad worked on inside. The windowpanes and shutters are still white, the flowerbeds are empty from the cold season taking over the pretty greenery, and there’s still a large dent in the corner of the enclosed porch from where a FedEx driver backed into it when I was in high school.
I’m not sure when, but Garrick had pulled his hand away from mine. Maybe it just happened, maybe it happened as soon as we left the airport parking lot. He undoes my seatbelt since I haven’t made a move to and turns to me, knee brushing mine. “They love you,” he reminds me, a fact I’ve known my whole life.
That doesn’t make this any easier. Any time I’ve done something wrong, I always think they’ll hold onto a grudge. Like the time I washed all our colored and white laundry together and turned everything pink. Dad had to go to work in a pink polo because they didn’t have time to go to the store to buy new ones for him, and his coworkers gave him flack for weeks.
Or the time I accidently scratched their car during my first three months of driving and made it worse by trying to get an old high school crush to buff it out before they noticed.
There have been countless times when I messed up and was terrified of letting them down, and all those incidents were nothing I should have wasted my anxiety on. Puny compared to the one I’m freaking out over now.
I look to Garrick. “How can you face this like you’re not scared? You’re about to meet two complete strangers who won’t be happy with either of us.”
I swear he smiles, but masks it. “I have to deal with strangers all the time, including angry ones. Plus, I’ve done drugs.”
“Okay, first, what does that have to do with anything? And second, please don’t let that be your icebreaker when you meet them. They’re, er, conservative. Sort of.”
He snorts. “I’m sure they’ve done their research on me already, Rylee. I married their daughter, they’re going to want to know who I am and what I’ve done, and all my little rehab stories and pictures from back then are still plastered everywhere online. Everything they need to know about my past is one Google search away. But, if it makes you feel better, I won’t outwardly introduce myself as the former addict who loves giving their daughter orgasms.”
Oh my God. I’m not sure how he can joke about this, even if he’s had plenty of practice dealing with unhappy people. “These aren’t just any other strangers you’ve met, Garrick. They’re my parents.”
He nods, seriousness washing away the playful nature of his expression. “I know. They mean a lot to you, just like my mother means a lot to me. And you did well in that situation, like I’ll do here. I can’t promise they’ll like me, but I won’t give them any reason not to. But they’re going to forge their own opinions about me on their own if they haven’t already, and neither of us can stop them.”
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out my ring, winking as I eye it stunned. “Don’t think I didn’t double check to make sure we brought this. It’s all about the appearance, right?” Taking my hand, he gently slides it onto my finger and brushes a kiss just above it. I feel every single nerve in my body fire even after those lips retract and he brushes a thumb over the piece of expensive jewelry. “Are you ready, wife?”
I shiver at the title, wondering if he can hear the thump, thump, thump of my heart. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that.”
“Better start, love.” Pecking my cheek, he opens his door a crack before shooting me a weighty look and stuffing the ring box back into his jacket pocket. “Your parents are walking toward the car.”
I think my heart stops.
There’s a thick tension in the air as we sit around the living room, a large open space painted yellow because Mom said it was warm and welcoming. Everyone is spread out in here instead of cramped around the kitchen table like we would have been since most serious talks happen there.
Like when my goldfish died, and Mom tried telling me it went to boarding school. Or my rabbit, which they said got a letter to Hogwarts. I knew that was bullshit, but I let them lie and used the opportunity to ask if we could get a cat.
They’d said no.
Every time they wanted to talk about something big, it happened at the chipped, square table that Dad proudly found at a garage sale. He’d sanded it, repainted it, and said the wear it’d gotten over the years gave it character. The bottom has random
