A shocked silence fell over the room, stretching out for a few seconds before Fi finally exhaled a long sigh and Gigi began quietly weeping into a green and white checkered dishcloth.
“You asked her to marry you?” Stella asked. When Danny nodded, she did, too – her eyes searching his face, a wry smile tugging at her lips. “Yeah, well, she obviously left that particular detail out of what she told me, the little sneak.”
Memories of Kat holding the ring he’d so excitedly and carefully picked out for her flooded Danny’s brain.
Watching her put it back in the box instead of on her finger had been the most painful thing he’d ever experienced and Danny had experienced a lot of painful shit in his lifetime. Which was part of the reason he’d requested she take it. Knowing Kat had it in her possession would have comforted him, somehow. Just knowing she had it in her house and that maybe once in a while she might actually try it on and think of him would have brought him a tiny measure of peace.
But then she’d left it there on the corner of the counter, along with the key he’d made for her…
“Sit down, Danny,” Stella said, pulling him out of his thoughts. “Let’s talk.”
Danny stayed put, crossing his arms over his chest. “About what?”
Stella pointed across the table again. “Please sit down.” When Danny refused, her brow quirked. “I do enough talking up at gigantic men. I’d like to be able to do this without hurting my damn neck.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Danny replied. “I appreciate you wanting to fix everything, but there’s no changing this. It is what it is.”
Stella sighed. “Danny, I really hate to do this to you, but if you don’t sit down and talk to us, I’m going to start crying.” She gestured over her shoulder at Gigi. “G is already half-drowned…”
One quick glance confirmed Stella’s statement – Gigi’s cheeks were covered in still-falling tears, which knotted his stomach up harder.
Stella jabbed a finger into her chest. “And
I’m
perilously close. So unless you want at least two – possibly three, if we piss Fi off enough – women sobbing, I would suggest you sit down. Now.” When he didn’t move, her brow quirked again. “Or should I go grab the Kleenex?”
As he walked over to the chair, Danny muttered under his breath – yet again – about the manipulative she-devil. He pulled it out and sat before crossing his arms back over his chest.
Danny shot Stella a pointed look. “Okay. Now what?”
She studied him in that intense, soul-stripping way of hers for a few seconds. “What did Kat say to you –
exactly
–when she broke up with you?”
Every muscle in Danny’s body tensed up and a fine sweat broke out across his forehead, because he was in no mood to dissect what had gone wrong with him and Kat. Danny could handle tongue-lashings all day long, but he was not going to sit here and relive the agony of Kat leaving him over and over.
But, before he could answer, Fi piped up.
“No, wait, before we get to that, I have a question.” Fi turned to Danny. “Why didn’t you tell me Kat was the one who broke up with you the other night at our apartment? You know how closed-off she is…you must have known she wasn’t telling us anything. Why did you let me believe the worst about you?”
“First of all, because what happened between Kat and me is none of your business.” Fi’s brows shot up, Nina scoffed, Stella smirked, and Gigi wrung her hands. “Second of all, because I’d rather you think the worst of me than anything negative about Kat.” The perpetual lump he’d been lugging around his throat expanded and Danny swallowed against it. “Not that there’s anything negative to think. It’s not her fault she doesn’t love me and doesn’t want to be with me. Yeah, she could have handled shit better, but…”
His earlier anger was rapidly wearing off, leaving only the awful, gnawing ache he’d felt since the last time he’d held Kat.
Danny cleared his tightened throat. “At the end of the day, I can’t really blame her, right? What with her being her and me being me. And with this being her first…” Danny struggled to find a word that summed up everything that had gone on with him and Kat, but all he could come up with was, “Relationship.” He shrugged. “It’s easy to see how she got carried away. And confused.”
Stella laughed. “Kat, carried away? And
confused
? I’m not sure she’s been either of those things even once in her entire God-blessed life!” Her grin faded into a wry smile as she studied Danny’s face. “Is that what she told you? That she, of all things, had gotten carried away and was confused?”
Danny paused, because he was still very uncertain of why this conversation was happening, where it was headed, and where it would ultimately end up.
He finally nodded.
“
That little shit…
” Fi breathed out, head shaking. “Carried away with and confused about
what
, exactly?”
“Us. The relationship. How she felt,” he replied. “Said she thought it was love, but it was actually just lust.”
“Uh-huh,” Stella said, thoughtfully tapping a finger against her lips. She pointed it at Danny. “And you bought this cockamamie explanation, I take it?”
“Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”
All four exchanged looks that left Danny feeling like the stupidest, most out-of-touch person on the planet.
He lifted his hands. “What? She didn’t get carried away and she wasn’t confused?”
Nina huffed. “You ever met Kat before? She seem like somebody that gets carried away and confused a lot to you?”
Danny paused. “No, but a lot of shit happened between us in a very short amount of time. I think most people in that situation would feel that way.”
“Yeah, well, Kat’s not most people,” Fi replied. “If Kat doesn’t want to do something, she doesn’t. If she does, she does, and it doesn’t take her long to figure out which. So the fact that she did it…” Fi’s lips curled. “And
you
, means she was not in any way unsure of her feelings or the situation.”
“Well, maybe you don’t know your sister as well as you think you do, because she said she got carried away and was confused – in addition to a lot of other shit.”
“Like what?” Gigi asked.
The painful memories washed over him, tightening Danny’s chest and throat.
A part of him wanted to tell Kat’s sisters it was none of their business and get the hell out of there…but another bigger part of him wanted to see where they were going with this. And to maybe gain some insight –
any
insight – into the situation.
“She said I was not the kind of man she saw herself marrying,” Danny said.
“But you
were
the type of man she’d give her virginity to? After holding onto it for about a hundred years?” Fi said, laughing. When he shot her a dirty look, she added, “Danny. I know you’re an oblivious, clueless man, but come on!”
Danny shrugged. “Lots of women have given their virginity to men they don’t love or even care about. And most of them don’t marry the dude they gave it to.”
“At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Kat’s not most women. Wouldn’t you agree?” Fi asked.
When Danny shrugged again, Stella said, “You said something before about Kat telling you she loved you and then taking it all back. What was that all about?”
“Just what I said. She told me she loved me over and over…said she wanted to marry me and be a family. But then, all of a sudden, she broke up with me…out of thin fucking air. Said she’d been confusing lust and love, that she’d never loved me, and that she couldn’t see herself marrying someone like me.” Danny clenched his teeth and ground down hard on his jaw, opening it back up just enough to add, “And that she’d lied about her feelings so we could keep doing the physical stuff.”
Stella, Fi, and Nina scoffed loudly, while Gigi had the decency to just smile benevolently.
“
Really
?” Fi said. “Kat the smooth-talking player was stringing you along like a booty call boy until she got tired of you and moved on? Oh, and with the guy she’s been blowing off for years?”
All Danny could manage was a half-hearted shrug.
Stella’s smile slowly faded as her expression turned thoughtful. “You saw her today, Danny. Did that look like a woman who’d moved on to greener pastures? Like someone who was even the slightest bit
okay
, let alone
happy
?”
“I’m not saying she doesn’t feel terrible about what happened. She told me she did – and I believe her. No matter how shitty some of her decisions were, I know Kat’s not a bad person. Of course she’s going to feel bad about hurting me,” he said.
“Danny, I’ve watched Kat go through a lot of stuff – her entire life, but most especially over the past ten years,” Gigi began, her eyes welling again. “Our mother getting cancer and dying, our father going crazy with grief and trying to commit suicide, her MS diagnosis and seven years of MS-related fear, pain, and uncertainty, Stella’s cancer, and then Stella almost dying last year. But I have never,
ever
seen my sister fall apart – or even come
close
to falling apart – before now. Before this. With you. What you saw today is not Kat feeling guilty, sad, or even devastated – because we’ve seen her in all those conditions in the past and this is very, very different. This is complete destruction…because she is heartbroken and lost with you.” Gigi reached across the table, took his hand in hers, and squeezed. “Because she loves you, Danny.”
He shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. She couldn’t. She never did.”
Stella smiled warmly. “Oh, but she does. And she could. And she always will.”
“But then why would she tell me she didn’t love me, if she does? And if she loves me, why would she break up with me? That makes no fucking sense!”
“You know, I really hope you never plan on going for detective, because you have got to be the blindest motherfucker to ever walk this earth, MacDonough, you know that?” Nina scoffed. “Hell, I’m the most emotionally clueless person alive and even
I
could see the shit she was pulling!”
“Oh, you did not!” Gigi exclaimed.
Fi leaned over and met Nina’s eyes. “Uh,
no,
you couldn’t.”
“We almost had to draw you a diagram to get you to figure it out, but okay,” Stella said, eyes rolling.
“Yesterday, I said I’d noticed how was weird it was that – even though she was supposedly the one who broke up with him – Kat had been crying all the time!” Nina said. “And how she wasn’t eating or sleeping!”
Fi huffed. “Yeah,
after
we told you Nathan figured it out!”
The four of them started arguing over each other – something to do with Kat’s stubbornness, Nathan’s attentiveness, and, again, Danny’s alleged obliviousness.
“What did Nathan figure out?” he asked. When no one answered, or even appeared to hear him, Danny raised his voice. “Hey, what did Nathan figure out?”
When they
still
ignored him, Danny yelled, “Hey! What the fuck are you guys talking about? What did Nathan figure out?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Fi whipped around to face him. “Kat broke up with you because she thinks her MS is getting worse!
“Her MS?” Danny shook his head, no more stunned than if Fi had said Kat had broken up with him because she was, in fact, Batman. “But, what the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything, apparently. Kat thinks the disease is progressing, although there is no hard, clinical proof of that, yet, and she decided that you needed to be spared from watching that or feeling obligated to take care of her,” Stella said. “She lied to you, Danny…told you she didn’t love you and didn’t want you so you’d walk away. So that you wouldn’t – as she put it – waste your life taking care of her.”
“But…” Danny’s mind raced, trying to make sense out of what Stella was suggesting, but finding it impossible. “Why would she do that? I’ve told her over and over that I
want
to take care of her!”
“Yeah, well, Kat’s not big on letting people take care of her, even if they want to,” Fi said, eyes rolling. “Trust us…we’ve all been down that road with her more times than we can count. I think you’ll agree when I say the woman can be a stubborn pain-in-the-ass sometimes.”
Nina snorted. “Sometimes?”
“Okay, all the time,” Fi conceded with a grin.
“But she seemed like she was getting better,” Danny said, his brain still racing to figure shit out. “She used her cane all the time when I first met her. Now she doesn’t use it at all.” He reconsidered. “Except for whatever that was today.” Danny rubbed at his chin, thinking back. “And she didn’t say anything to me about it the whole time we were together. I mean, she said she was sore. And tired. But, hell, that didn’t seem weird, considering…” He glanced up to find the four of them eyeing his sudden discomfort with great interest.
Well, not Nina. Nina looked like she wanted to rip out his carotid artery and strangle him with it.
And not Gigi, who was still sniffling into the towel.
But Stella and Fi appeared to be highly amused.
“Considering, what, Danny?” Fi asked, smirking.
But Danny’s mind had already moved beyond his and Kat’s frequent, often demanding sexcapades and back to her disease.
“Why does she think it’s getting worse?”
When Stella paused, a weird guilty look crossing her face, Danny’s throat tightened. “
What?
”
“She fell last week at work,” Stella replied, wincing. “Hit her head pretty good against the corner of a cabinet and needed to be taken to the Emergency Room.”
The first emotion he experienced?
Heartbreak that Kat had been physically hurt.
The second?
Guilt that he hadn’t been there for her, even though he hadn’t known a fucking thing about it.
And the third?
Yeah, that third was a rapidly increasing relief and fucking
ecstasy
that there was a tiny chance in hell that what her sisters were saying was true.
“When did it happen?” he asked.
“Last Wednesday,” Stella answered.
The night she was MIA for a while and then blew you off. The night she refused to see you and the night she got all huffy about needing space.