Widowed a Year, I Masked Up and Took Both of His Brothers novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Say It Again
The screened porch ran the whole length of the camp, and the lake lay flat and gray beyond the mesh.
I stood at the far end of it with my fists shut and the ash still on my forehead.
Behind me, two men were not moving.
"Three years," I said.
Nobody answered.
"Three years I sat at that table and passed the bread to a man who knew."
"Celie," Tommy said.
"Don't. I'm not finished."
I turned around.
Tommy stood in the doorway, naked, with his hands open at his sides.
Vince stood behind him, holding his bad hand against his chest.
"The receipts in my kitchen drawer," I said. "Why did you pay on my house?"
Tommy did not look away.
"So the roof would be yours if you ever left him," he said. "A woman with a paid house can walk out."
My throat closed.
"At the ball you said, we know exactly who you are. What did you mean?"
"That you carried a casserole to every wake in this family with a black arm under your sleeve," Tommy said. "That you never once complained."
"We knew who you were," Vince said, quietly. "We never dreamed you'd pick us."
"Did you look at me every Sunday and see Carlo's wife?"
Tommy crossed the porch.
He stopped an arm's length away, and he did not touch me.
"I never once thought of you as his," he said. "Not at the wedding. Not at the funeral. Not once."
It broke something in me, and what came out was not tears.
"Then stop being so careful," I said.
"Celie."
"I am angry, and you're going to hold still for it. Against the wall, Tommy."
He looked at me for one long second.
Then he put his back to the cypress boards and his hands flat against them, and waited.
I walked up to him and laid my palm over the three old ridges on his side.
"Pick me up."
He did.
His hands went under my thighs, and I rose against the wall with my legs around his waist.
I was still slick from the morning, from both of them, and he was already hard against me.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Widowed a Year, I Masked Up and Took Both of His Brothers are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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