“Liv, I’m in love,” he pointed a finger less than an inch from my face, “with you. We’re gonna make kids. You’re gonna do whatever you do at David’s office. I’m gonna run Georgia’s crew. And it’s all gonna be the way we wanted it to be.”

“If it’s all gonna be the way we wanted it to be, Tommy, how is my cousin pregnant?”

He shrugged.

Yes.

Shrugged.

Then he explained, “It took Georgia longer than she expected. I kept ridin’ her ass. She told me she’d deliver. I saw the fruits of her labors, they came slow, but I saw them so I trusted her. In the meantime, your dad kept givin’ me a load of shit for not knockin’ up my wife. The bitch I got at home was also givin’ me shit. To shut them down, keep a lid on it, make them think I was still cowed and to give Georgia time to do what she needed to do, I knocked her up.”

Was I once in love with this man?

“Tommy,” I started for reasons I didn’t know due to the fact this conversation was moot. Regardless of what he thought, there was no him and me. “You’ll remember the way we wanted things to be was not being involved in this life.”

“Babe, love you in a bikini on a Jet Ski. Love you in a bikini anytime. But you start havin’ my babies, the bikini will be out and you’ll have kids to take care of, so the Jet Ski will be out too. That was us bein’ young and stupid. This,” he pointed to the floor, “is our life.”

“It isn’t my life,” I told him. “Or at least I don’t want it to be, Tommy, and you know that.”

“It isn’t yours,” he agreed. “You’re right. But it’s mine. It’ll put food on our table. It’ll keep us with the family. You do what you gotta do, babe. You leave the rest to me.”

I held his gaze as I stated softly, “I cannot believe you’re saying these things to me.”

He shook his head in annoyance. “I can’t believe you can’t believe it, Liv. Fuck. You’re the love of my goddamned life.”

“Did you think of sharing that sometime in the past six years?” I asked.

“I did every time I looked at you,” he answered tersely.

This was, I had to admit, true.

“Perhaps you could have used your words,” I suggested. “And/or my sister using hers.”