“Interesting. Steven has a huge crush on a girl there. They have this whole enemies-to-lovers thing going on, except they haven’t become lovers yet. He goes in there just so she can kick him out again.” Amy laughed. “You probably know her. Give me all the dirty details.”
A crush? Steven didn’t like me any more than I liked him. My gaze darted to the kitchen, where I could hear him opening cabinets. “Maybe they’re really just enemies,” I dodged. “It sounds like he’s trying to piss her off. That’s not a crush.”
Amy shook her head. “You don’t know my brother like I do. He’s a quitter.”
I thought of that day in the rain eight months ago, the way he refused to leave Junior to the mountain lions. “Steven is a lot of things, but a quitter isn’t one of them.”
“He is,” Amy insisted. “When things get hard, he quits. Football, rodeo, horse training. He’ll self-sabotage or just stop trying. There’s no way he would ever care enough about pissing someone off to show up every week. He’s got better things to do. Trust me on this. My brother does not put in effort when he doesn’t care.” She lifted her head off the floor and looked past my shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Steven?”
“Isn’t what right?” he asked, rounding the couch with a glass of ice water in each hand. He set one down on the coffee table. “That’s for you, Amy.” He handed me the other one. “Pregnancy adds fifty percent more blood to your body. You need to stay hydrated.”
My eyebrows went up. “Look at you with the random pregnancy facts.”
“I might have flipped through a book or two.” He shrugged. “I was curious.” He nudged Amy’s hip with his boot. “What were you saying?”
Her eyes darted between us as though she were watching a fascinating tennis match. “I was saying that you half ass everything.”
“Not everything. But most things.” He smirked. “Very few things out there are worth my whole ass. It’s too good to waste on petty shit.”
Amy rolled her eyes at me. “See, I told you. He has to really care about something to give it his all, and then…” Her voice trailed off and she split another look between us. “And then he’s relentless.”
20
CHLOE
Olives were amazing.Take out a tooth-chipping pit, replace it with a perfectly uniform red pepper, and boom. Fucking genius.
“What are you doing up?” came a sleep-roughened voice behind me.
I yelped in surprise and banged my elbow on the open refrigerator door as I whirled around. The jar of olives slid from my fingers, bounced once against the linoleum tile but thank god did not shatter, olives and briny juice erupting from its open mouth like a volcano before it spiraled across the floor, rolling to a stop at Steven’s slippered toes.
He looked at it for a long moment, so I looked at it, too. It was kind of pretty, actually, the way the pale green liquid glistened in the refrigerator light. I did not like the cold, sticky feeling of the juice on my bare feet, however.
“Did you eat half a block of cheese last night?” he asked, still staring at the jar, as though one thing had everything to do with the other.
“Which cheese?” I hedged.
“The cheddar.”
“Yes.” I had also eaten the feta, but he hadn’t asked specifically about the feta, so it seemed unnecessary to share that information. “It turns out that the only time of day I do not have morning sickness is three a.m. My body has traded anxiety for hunger, apparently.”
He looked up. “You’re hungry?”
“Starving.”
The olives mocked me from the floor, plump and green and shiny, their adorable red pimentos winking at me like a dare. I had only eaten two. I bit my lower lip. Steven kept a pretty tidy house. Sure, Junior had free rein of the place, but how dirty could the floor really be? It looked fine from here.
“Chloe.” Steven’s voice sliced through my thoughts. “You’re not actually thinking about eating olives off the floor, are you?”
I huffed. “Until you find yourself famished and nauseous at the same time, twenty-three hours a day for six weeks, don’t you dare judge me.”
“For fuck’s sake, princess,” he growled.
My hand was inches from an olive, but I paused. It was the damnedest thing, the way my heart bounded hopefully at those words, like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the ring of a bell. Because Iknew. Whatever stupid, inconsequential problem I had, if Steven grunted those words at me, it meant he was going to fix it. And hell yeah, I was going to let him.
Maybe he thought he needed to run to my rescue because I was incompetent, but I knew I wasn’t. My whole life, I had taken care of other people. My brothers, my mom, even my stepdad. Between mom’s lupus diagnosis and the financial strain of medical bills on top of farm bills, and the emotional upheaval from losing my dad and then my grandfather, all of us had to give one hundred percent. And we did, every last one of us.
But I had learned early on that my hundred percent went a little further. I was older than my brothers, healthier than mymother, and had more time than my stepfather. I could give more.
