His grin turns wicked. “Yeah? I wonder why.”
I roll my eyes. “I wouldn’t know. Stella, are you done with your ice cream? We need to get home so I can get dinner started.”
“We alweady had dessewt.”
A smile pulls across my lips. “We have—this was a very special treat that Owen planned for us.”
“I wuv Owen.”
I pause, my hands outstretched, prepared to wipe the remnants of the ice cream off her face. Suddenly it’s too much. Between Lesa, Owen’s confession, and Stella’s declaration, I feel like everything is somehow spiraling out of my control. And I really don’t like it.
“Tristan.” Owen’s voice jerks me into action and I reach forward to finish cleaning off Stella’s face. “Tristan, look at me. Please. Don’t overthink it, remember.”
I glance over to him as I drop the used napkin into the empty ice cream bowl in front of Stella. “What?” I act like I didn’t hear him. It’s obvious he doesn’t believe I didn’t hear him. “Are you ready to go? Stella’s had a busy couple of days. I think we need a quiet night at home before we kick off the week.”
“You aren’t going to block me out, Tristan.”
“I’m not trying to block you out, Owen,” I practically snap. Stella’s eyes go wide at my tone, and I force myself to take a deep breath. “I just think it would be good if Stella and I had a quiet evening at home.”
“Without me.”
I meet his gaze head-on, telling myself to ignore the hurt that is burning in his. “I think it’s moving a little fast. That’s all. I just need some time to think.”
He studies me for a few minutes before finally nodding his head. “That’s fine, baby. You take all the time you need to think. I’ll be waiting.”
Chapter Thirteen
Tristan
Monday dawned with a sky full of rain clouds. It matched my mood perfectly. It matches Stella’s too, because my little girl is even more of a pill than usual. She felt the tension between Owen and me in the car on the long ride home, and that tension had obviously rubbed off on her if our twenty-minute argument this morning was any indication. The argument that started because she couldn’t find her purple hair bow, which matched her purple shirt, and refused to leave the house until we found it. Unfortunately the bow was lost, and Stella is now pouting in the backseat.
If this is a sign of things to come, I am not going to make it through her teenage years. Hell, I might not make it to her teenage years.
I drop her off at the daycare, and the mom guilt I feel, at the pure relief of handing her off to someone else to handle for a little while, is practically tangible. I’m grumpy enough for the both of us—I don’t need her grumpy on top of mine, and I truly feel for anyone who’s going to have to deal with Stella today. I know I’ll have to reign in my attitude while dealing with my patients, but Stella, at three, doesn’t know how to reign that attitude in so everyone in her path is bound to get blasted.
Having been on the receiving end of that attitude, I mentally lay bets on how long it will be before the daycare calls and tells me to come pick her up.
She was pissed at me last night when I made it clear that Huck and Owen would not be joining us for dinner, as they had started to do practically every night. I need the separation between us, but Stella doesn’t understand the reasoning.
When I first moved to Broward, it was with the sole purpose of creating a life for Stella and myself. I didn’t think about making friends, or finding myself in a relationship without quite realizing how I’d gotten there, but that was what happened. The Gallahangers happened, and it’s overwhelming as fuck.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve been manipulated into a relationship with Owen, or coerced, or anything along those lines, but listening to him tell me the story about mo chuisle mo chori, which was unbelievable on its own without bringing the sorceress aspect into it, and it somehow felt like my choice had been taken away from me. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, but worse than that, was the question that had kept me up all night.
If left to make his own choice, would Owen pick Stella and me? Or had this mo chuisle mo chori nonsense somehow led him into thinking I’m supposed to be his one and only true love when all it really boils down to is that he’s attracted to me?
The more I thought about it yesterday, and watched the way that he interacted with Stella, who is obviously in love with him, the more I wondered if whatever it was that had been building between us was real, or based on this asinine story he suddenly believed in. And when reality sets in and he realizes his mistake, where will that leave Stella and me?
My cell phone rings as I’m pulling out of the parking lot of the daycare, and a quick glance at the screen shows that Dylan is calling me. I’d tried to call her last night to help try and sort through everything, but she didn’t answer.
“What’s up, Country Girl?” Dylan’s warm, husky voice fills the car when I hit the speaker button on the phone.
I roll my eyes at her greeting. “You’ve got to give up the country thing, Dylan.”
Her laugher echoes around me. “Never. How you doing, kid? How’s my girl?”
“I’m three months older than you,” I remind her. “And Stella is pissed at me.”
“What’d you do?”
I turn down Main Street, enjoying the light, early-morning traffic. With summer officially over, the number of tourists have started to thin out, though Monroe assures me, as winter starts to settle in the Northeast, that we will start to see more of the “snowbirds” start to show up. “I didn’t let Owen and Huck come over for dinner last night.”
“You still say his name like a thirteen-year-old girl with a crush.”
I feel my cheeks redden, thankful she can’t see me. “I do not,” I deny, knowing it’s a lie.
“Oh yeah, you do,” she contradicts. “Why didn’t you let them come over? I thought they had practically moved in.”
“They had. Maybe that was the problem. It was so much, so fast. We’ve hardly been here two months, Dylan, and his ex has turned out to be a lunatic and I slept with him, and he told me I’m his destiny because his family saved some sorceress like a gazillion years ago, and he’s perfect with Stella, and it was just too fucking much, and I needed a time out.”
Silence descends in the car as I pass the library. The silence stretches out as I turn off Main and onto Hickory, where the doctor’s office is located. “Dylan?” I question. “You still there?”
“Ha.” She laughs once. “I’m trying to decide which part of that statement to start with. That’s a lot of information you just dropped on me.”
“You should be living it.” I groan. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Okay.” Dylan hesitates for another second, and then laughs again. “Okay, let’s take this one thing at a time. His ex is a lunatic?”
“Yes!” I cry. “She’s crazy, Dylan. She made up a prowler at her house so Owen and I couldn’t go on our date. Who does shit like that?”
“Crazy people,” Dylan agrees with me. “Don’t you work with her?”