Leaving at Noon by Jess Dee Page B

had sliced down the length of his inner
wrist. The cut was worsened by the weight of his body pushing down
on the crystal, ensuring it went deep. Deeper than he’d ever
dreamed possible.
    The excruciating pain of glass severing
flesh, tendon, nerve and artery had registered immediately. The
gravity of his injury hadn’t. Lying on the floor, dazed, he’d
watched as blood pumped out of the wound. The startling redness had
fascinated him, as had the wet warmth as it pooled around his arm,
the remains of the bowl and the salad. Blood had even squelched
beneath his cheek.
    He’d have yelled for Zoey, but strangely he
hadn’t had the energy.
    If she hadn’t walked into the kitchen a few
minutes later, Theo would have bled out. It was only thanks to her
medical training and lightning-quick reflexes that he’d survived
the freak accident. The lengthy surgery that followed, the blood
transfusions, the days spent in hospital and the months of
rehabilitation to regain full use of his arm were good indicators
of the seriousness of his accident.
    Zoey had saved his life that day.
    And told him three years later she regretted
it.
    He forced his teeth to unclench so he could
talk. “You said you should have let me bleed out.”
    “ I didn’t mean it,” she
whispered roughly. Her eyes were enormous and filled with
regret.
    “ Yeah, babe. You
did.”
    “ No! I meant to push you
away. I wanted you to back off. But I never, ever regretted saving
you.”
    “ In that moment, as you
said it, you meant it.”
    “ I meant to hurt
you.”
    “ Well done. You did.”
Jesus, no wonder he forgot this shit within minutes of it being
said. If he’d been forced to endlessly bandy her comments around in
his head, he’d have lost his motherfucking mind by now.
    He sipped his beer, looking anywhere but at
his wife.
    “ Theo.” Her voice was a
harsh whisper.
    Reluctantly, he returned his gaze to her
harrowed face.
    It was Zoey’s turn to grab his hand in both
of hers. “If… If I hadn’t gotten to you in time that day—” She
closed her eyes and shook her head as though horrified by the very
thought. “If you hadn’t made it, I wouldn’t have made it either.”
Her hands shook violently. “I wouldn’t have survived without you. I
wouldn’t have been able to live through a single day if you weren’t
a part of it. You have to believe that.”
    He did believe it. Zoey had felt that
way… then . “And if I sliced my wrist now? Would you be in as
big a hurry to save me?”
    “ Oh my God.” She gawked at
him. “How can you even ask such a question?”
    He shrugged. “You don’t like me. You said it
yourself. You walked out because you couldn’t stand to be in my
company another day.”
    “ I wasn’t liking
you very much, Theo.” Anguish filled her eyes. “But I’ve always
loved you.”
    And just like that, the rage drained away.
Pointless holding grudges about statements made in anger. “Jesus,
this is fucking with my head.”
     
    “ That’s what we’ve been
doing for months.” Her voice cracked. “Fucking with each other’s
heads. Using the issues that mean the most to us to cause the most
pain.”
    “ How did we do it, Zo? How
did we go from you not being able to live without me to you not
being able to live with me?”
    “ It’s not that I can’t
live with you. It’s that being together was destroying us. We
needed this time-out. We had to break the hideous pattern of
behavior we’d fallen into. Using our weaknesses to hurt each other
is a crap way of building a marriage.”
    The fillet sat like a lead ball in his
stomach. “I abused your trust in me.” Over and over he’d taken the
information she’d told him in confidence and used it to hurt
her.
    He hadn’t just insinuated she was like her
mother. He’d hurled abuse at her about her father too. And that
didn’t begin to cover the other shit he’d brought up in fights.
He’d used her weaknesses to stab her in the back.
    “ I did