Chapter 257
713 Words
An hour later, Cordelia was perched on a stool in the kitchen, drinking a glass of white wine and watching Hunter stir-fry some shrimp. It smelled incredible.
“So,” he said as he chopped up some leeks. “Is everything OK at home? With Sean?”
“Yes. Mom has everything under control.”
“She helps a lot, huh?”
“Oh, God, that’s an understatement. I’d never manage without her.”
Sully nodded, started chopping some celery. “She lives with you?”
“No. No, she wanted to but I put my foot down.” Cordelia hesitated. “She’s quite a – a forceful personality and if she lived with us, it’d be hard for us to get along.”
“Let me guess. She’d want to mother you, and you’d revert back to childhood squabbles and sulking.”
“You got it.” She took a sip of wine. “You know something about this?”
“A bit. My Dad lived with me for a while after Mom died, and he was all about trying to just pick up the parenting gig where it’d left off when I was nineteen and left home.”
“And now?”
“Oh, when his Alzheimer’s started to advance, he voluntarily entered an assisted living facility.”
“He did?” Her own mother had sworn to resist that step until she drew her last breath. “He chose that?”
“Yep. He knew what was going on with the illness, and he knew that I worked weird hours and traveled a lot and so I couldn’t be there to make sure that he turned off the stove, you know? He made the decision while he was still able to, and he’s actually really happy there. Lots of people to talk to and lots to do. I think he may even have a girlfriend.”
“Really?” Cordelia found that ludicrously sweet and touching, for some reason.
“Yeah. He’s cagey about her, but he slips up once in a while.”
“So you left home at nineteen?” she said, curious about Hunter’s life before Solid Security; it was the one topic that he’d been deliberately vague about while they were in Foxburg Falls. “To join the military?”
“Uh-huh.” He tossed the veggies into the second wok. “No college for me. I went straight from high school to a dead-end job to enlisting.”
“The Marines, right?”
“Eventually. I was in active service for twelve years, and ten of them were as a Marine.”
Cordelia saw the tension in his shoulders now, noticed that his answers were getting shorter, more clipped, and she wondered what it was about this time in his life that he avoided talking about. Maybe he even avoided thinking about it.
“Do you miss it?” she asked, changing the subject slightly. “The Marines?”
“Sometimes. But I like working for Dallas and I like the team. They’re damn good people, and even though I find the work incredibly stressful sometimes, it’s all worth it when we actually help someone. When we protect them.”
He was speaking fluently again, and he was relaxed. So the Marines wasn’t the sore point – it was something that had happened around the same time, but it wasn’t the military. Something more personal?
He turned now, saw her face. It was watchful, speculative. f**k, he had to watch himself around her: she’d see way more than he wanted to give away if he wasn’t careful. Better to be evasive, and have her know that’s what he was doing, than to hand her his entire f****d up failure on a silver platter.
“Dinner’s in five minutes,” he said. “You want to set the table?”
To her eternal credit, she didn’t push him. She knew damn good and well that he was ducking something big, and he knew that she knew. But she just nodded, slid off the stool, headed out to the dining room. Left him alone with his secret and self-hatred.
What would she think about me if she knew? And why do I think that she’d understand?
- Writer
