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| The Lifestyle That Got Away; PJ | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 1 2012, 06:08:22 AM (745 Views) | |
| Colin Beckett | Mar 1 2012, 06:08:22 AM Post #1 |
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Thursday, March 10, 2039. 3:05 pm This was all very bad. Awful. Terrible. But really, it was inevitable. He knew it, PJ knew it, but that didn't mean he had to like it. He'd done all he could about it for now. Now there was just telling PJ... He came exactly five minutes after her class let out. He wouldn't have been able to tolerate standing around in the lobby, waiting with the parents, and he didn't want to interrupt her while her class was still going on. The kids were usually all gone by five past, and she never left immediately after. So theoretically, this was the idea time to show up and stop her from going home. Colin looked as frustrated as he felt. His hair was all over the place, his clothes were rumpled, and he couldn't stop his muscles being tense. His palms were sweaty and he wiped them on his jeans as he walked into PJ's classroom. He felt sick immediately. He felt awful telling her here, but he didn't really see any way around it. It was such a happy, innocent place. It seemed wrong to sully it with bad news. His eyes darted all around the room, making sure there weren't anymore kids around. There weren't. He waved at PJ in greeting, unable to find the will yet to say anything. He sat on her desk with a sigh, hunched over, and ran both hands through his hair. He looked back up at her and gave her a sad smile. "Can I start with 'I love you'? I feel like that's a good place to start. I love you. Have you had a good day so far? Because I'm about to ruin it, so if there's anything you want to be happy about before I do it, now would be the time." |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 1 2012, 02:57:32 PM Post #2 |
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Yes, PJ had been quite happy. She was nineteen weeks pregnant today, and very excited about the fact that they would know for sure if Prufrock was a boy or a girl in the next couple of days. Before leaving with her father, Alcyone had kissed her cheek and told her that she loved her and that she was a good person, just like she did every day. Only this time, she had kissed PJ’s belly and told the baby that she loved it, too. PJ had teared up, but she’d been doing that a lot the past few days. When she looked up from the bucket of water where she had just set the paintbrushes to washing themselves, only alarm was left on her face. Generally, Colin didn’t stop by her classroom. The messy hair and rumpled clothes might not have been a big deal, but he was quite obviously tense. Every time that she could remember seeing him run his hands through his hair like that, something devastating had happened. “And I love you,” she told him slowly, voice riddled with apprehension. She flicked her wand and the unoccupied portrait of Jane Forsyth flew off the wall and into the supply closet. She was nosy, and she rather enjoyed gossiping with the headmistress. “Oops,” she muttered, flicking it again as she walked toward her desk and shutting both the closet and the classroom doors. PJ still only felt Prufrock move a couple of times a day. When she was overly nervous or upset, though, the baby tended to do back flips. She was pretty sure it felt agitated when she did, but she liked to think that maybe it was just trying to cheer her up. She looked down and managed a sad half-smile at the thought, and then looked back up at Colin. "So?" |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 2 2012, 11:01:46 PM Post #3 |
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He took his hands out of his hair and gripped the edge of the desk. "So... we got raided today. Our house and the apartment in London, too. The cats are fine- I took them to Trent's for now," he added quickly, not wanting her to worry. "I don't think they took anything. I mean, there's nothing illegal in either place. I'm not- I'm not worried about that. There's a bit of a mess, but that's not any real concern either," he sighed. "I'm worried about what they might have left behind," he told her pointedly. Eavesdropping spells, slow acting curses, mind altering potions coating cabinet doorknobs... okay, so that was a bit of a stretch, but that was beside the point. The point was it wasn't safe anymore. "We can't stay there anymore." |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 3 2012, 12:20:37 AM Post #4 |
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PJ nodded once when he said that their house had been raided. The sudden flood of thoughts and emotions had rendered her incapable of anything else. They’d figured that something like this would happen, actually they had figured that it would happen sooner, but that didn’t help all that much. Her first thought, of course, was whether or not her cats were alright. Delilah had a tendency to pounce visitors, and Ophelia was quite old. She’d be nineteen in May. Knowing that they were alright was little comfort, though; because it left her mind open to wander elsewhere. Elsewhere, as in the fact that her hot glue gun might now be a listening device for all that she knew. She walked away from the desk, grabbed a tub of Legos, and poured them out onto the rug designed like a small town that hosted the block area. She sat down criss-cross-applesauce and began separating them and putting them back in. She felt like the entire Department of Magical Law Enforcement had just seen her naked, and she was already homesick. She lived in the house in Kirkwall, Hogwarts and Alwood (which didn’t really count), and there. She’d been living there since she was twenty-four. “The cats are alright,” PJ repeated. “How’s Sorcha?” The apartment in London had been raided, too, afterall. Living things, then plans. |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 5 2012, 10:22:38 PM Post #5 |
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Colin pushed himself off from the desk and followed PJ to the block area and sat cross-legged beside her. He sighed. "Sorry is... a five foot tall person shaped mass of rage. So, nothing out of the ordinary," it was a half joke, and badly formed. He sort of regretted saying it; so he elaborated. "I had to physically restrain her so she wouldn't show up and get herself arrested. But, yeah, otherwise fine," he shrugged. Sorry didn't really do 'fine'. She was quite cross, and that was about as close to 'fine' as she was going to get right now. Which was fine, for her. "She said she was going to Eoin's. We were together when my watch alarmed." He looked down at his wrist watch. Like nearly all British wizards, his had been a gift when he turned seventeen. It had been his uncle's, before he died, and had already done a more than just keep time when it came to him. Now it did so much more than even that. He started pulling Lego blocks apart and resisted the urge to apologize. He wanted to so badly. He chucked his free pieces into the bin and picked up another mass of pieces to pull apart. He looked up at PJ as his bricks 'plonked' and fell to the floor. What could he say to her? He knew she hated him apologizing and he wasn't going to make any promises he couldn't keep. 'Everything will be okay' was blatantly untrue. Colin set his half-deconstructed conglomeration aside and put his hand on PJ's knee. "We always knew we'd be stuck on fast-forward," it was the term she had used to describe their relationship back when it first started, "and we did it anyway. What we have now makes it more frightening than I ever expected it to be... but you make me far braver than I ever was before. It's all worth it to me. All of it. I'm never going to stop... except for you. We're in this together, and I won't go against you. Not ever. Okay?" |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 03:07:34 AM Post #6 |
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Sorcha and Eoin were probably the last two people on the face of the planet that PJ thought should be in the same location, but that was really, really none of her business. She went rather rigid when Colin touched her knee without meaning to. She had to resist the urge to push his hand away. She wasn’t angry with him, she knew she wasn’t, but he was the only person around at the moment, and to be honest she didn’t have anyone to be angry with. She wasn’t angry with the aurors for doing their jobs. She wasn’t angry with Colin for being who he was. She wasn’t angry with herself for making highly illogical decisions. She was just angry in general, perhaps at God for allowing everything to unfold this way. If that wasn’t enough she felt embarrassed and frazzled and scared. She took a handful of recently freed Legos and threw them in, watching them scatter to opposite ends of the bucket expressionlessly. She couldn’t look all those ways at once, so she looked like nothing at all except maybe dazed. Okay? Okay what? She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She had to run back through everything he’d said. Her circuits were overloaded, swimming with emotions. Prufrock was still perturbed at her for being perturbed, which was surprisingly distracting. Unwanted thoughts kept finding their way into the part of her mind that was still capable functioning and she had to drive them out. It was a wonder that she had heard him at all, really. She blinked a few times, as if that would somehow clear her head. Then she shook it. For someone wearing a t-shirt that said, “You can’t scare me: I’m a teacher,” she sure felt terrified. “I,” she started, but then shook her head. She had no idea what she was going to say, and unlike Colin, she couldn’t just talk when that happened. "If." She shook her head again and growled in frustration. Surely he didn’t mean what she thought he meant, which meant that he wasn’t making any sense to her at all. She looked at him, obviously perplexed, but didn’t say what she was thinking. She turned a red block over and over in her left hand. “What do you need me to do?” |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 03:29:02 AM Post #7 |
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"I need you to be brave," he said, holding her gaze. "Because this is just the beginning. Everything gets harder from here on out. I need you to be strong. Steadfast. Patience Jane, you just keep being yourself." She was tense under his hand, but he couldn't help squeezing her knee and giving her that hopeful smile. "What we need to do, starting now, is plan for the worst...but that doesn't mean we can't still hope for the best." |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 04:11:47 AM Post #8 |
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“Brave has never been in me,” she told him as she grabbed the hand on her knee. “Steadfast I can handle. Listen, you didn’t…I mean,” she sighed. “You didn’t tell me that you loved me and that everything’s worth it because…because you’re regretting us, did you?” Part of her was afraid that he was convincing himself or working overly hard to hide that sort of thing from her. She had really complicated his life. She was starting to think that it would have been kinder never to have given him her number. |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 05:06:26 AM Post #9 |
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Colin instantly shifted to his knees and wrapped his arms around PJ. "Don't you believe that for a second. Don't you dare." He held her tight and buried his face in her hair. "I said those things because I don't regret anything and I'm not going to. I'm doing everything on purpose. And that's what I'm asking of you, too. Don't do anything you don't mean, and don't let me have you do anything you regret, alright? No regrets. This is how things are and it's no good thinking how things might have been." He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips against her temple in a kiss. "We can only change the future. We do it all the time with our choices, yeah? This is what I choose. You, and me, and our baby, and... a better world. But we've got to fight for it first. No giving up." He pulled back a bit and moved his hands to hold her face. "And none of this nonsense about not being brave, either. That's rubbish. You're brave all the time." |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 02:43:51 PM Post #10 |
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PJ wanted to argue that what she passed off as bravery was really just more stubbornness, but there was no use arguing with Colin about something like that, just like there was no use arguing that she wasn’t attractive. She did manage an eye roll, though, even though he was holding her face and looking right at her. Then, she shifted to her knees, too, so that she could better hug him. It took a second longer than it used to, but she succeeded in closing the distance that he had just put there. “I’m sorry that I had to ask that,” she told him. “I just needed to hear you say it.” She took another deep breath, and as she exhaled there were three quick taps on her classroom door. A man stood peeping through the little glass window of her door. He was actually about twenty-five, but he was built rather like a teenager, and his black hair was just a little too long and much too messy. His cheeks turned bright red and he looked at the ground when he spotted them. “Mr. McGovney,” PJ explained in a groan. He was Thomas and Maddy’s teacher, but she didn’t want to see him just now. “Do you mind?’ Edited by PJ Beckett, Mar 6 2012, 03:17:18 PM.
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 04:39:14 PM Post #11 |
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"I'll say it as many times as it takes," he promised. He was stopped from saying anything furter by a knock on the door. He let go of PJ and rocked back on his heels. He shrugged at her question. Yeah, he minded, but it wasn't like they could just tell him to sod off. "Go on and see what he needs. I'll be right here." He stood up and offered his hand to help her up as well. |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 6 2012, 06:49:35 PM Post #12 |
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PJ gladly accepted the help and got to her feet. She huffed as she walked to the door. Normally, she wouldn’t have been nearly so sore with him for knocking, she was in a school building after all, but today wasn’t normal. When she got to the door she opened it, but she did not step back to let Mr. McGovney in. She wanted him to go away, and he didn’t do that well. Once he was inside, the three of them would be forced into an hour-long conversation. “What, Jacob?” she asked, arms crossed. “I, er,” he handed her a stack of papers and a book. PJ smirked a little at his reaction. It wasn’t every day that you ran across two adults hugging over a pile of building blocks, but it wasn’t like he had walked in on something. They were just hugging. She took the stack and looked at the page on top. “Oh, right. Damn. Well, if she doesn’t bring this back and she tells you that I didn’t give it to her, believe her. My fault. Got it?” “Okay…everything alright?” he asked, trying to be nice. He couldn’t remember PJ ever swearing before, and she usually wasn’t this cross. PJ rolled her eyes. “Stupid question, Jacob. My hormones are all over the place. Thanks for this, now shoo,” she told him, waving him off. She hoped that would both explain her odd behavior and discourage him from asking any further questions. Apparently it did, because he shrugged and headed back toward his own room at a trot. PJ shut the door behind him and sat the papers down on a table that looked as if it were built for house elves. “I’ll have to remember that one for next time. Nice, but same timing as Napoleon, and impossible to get rid of,” she explained as she walked back over to her husband and grabbed both of his hands. “So, what else before we go,” she caught herself about to say ‘go home.’ “Well, leave.” |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 7 2012, 03:13:33 PM Post #13 |
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Colin pulled PJ into his chest and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "Nothing. Not before we go, anyway. Already said too much here." He rubbed his hand over her back and sighed into her hair. "Do you want me to stay and help you finish up or should I leave and come back for you in a bit?" |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 7 2012, 03:56:35 PM Post #14 |
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“Don’t worry about anything you’ve said. It’s safer than you think. I make sure of it every morning and again on my lunch break. Yet another reason why I drive the headmistress crazy,” PJ assured him with a snort. She would have stopped him otherwise. She shrugged under his arms at his question. “I’d rather you stay, but do whatever you need to. I won’t be much longer at any rate, because naturally today was the day that I left my teacher bag at our house. I didn’t have time to go back for it. I got tied up at my brother’s because Maddy woke up with dragon pox. I didn’t even have my key to get in when I got here. I’ll have to go get that, you know. And I should probably tell Mr. and Mrs. Mackay that we won’t be staying there anymore. They’ll be worried if we don’t turn up.” When her mind sorted things out and started functioning again, everything sort of began tumbling out at once. |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 7 2012, 04:18:13 PM Post #15 |
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"I'll stay," he told her. He'd rather stay, himself, he just wanted to make sure he wouldn't be a bother if he did. "Don't worry about your things. I'll get whatever we need. I'll talk to The Mackays as well." He did not want PJ going back. Not so soon, anyway, and probably not ever (just to be safe). Her health and safety was of great concern to him. He knew she could take care of herself, bla bla bla, but there was a part of him literally growing inside her now and she had just admitted to voluntarily exposing it to dragon pox. He didn't feel it was wrong to feel like she might not be thinking things through. And actually, the more he thought about that, the more it bothered him. "Don't go back to Patrick's while Maddy's sick. I can't believe you didn't tell me. That's really dangerous, PJ." He let go of her with one arm and ran his hand through his hair. "Maybe we should go to St. Mungo's first..." |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 7 2012, 05:37:52 PM Post #16 |
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“I DIDN’T KNOW THIS MORNING!” PJ insisted a bit louder than she had intended, stepping back with one foot to look at him. She was offended to think that he thought she was reckless or indifferent about their baby. “And if you’ll remember, I was a little distracted when you first got here. She’d only started sneezing sparks just a few moments before I got there, and that’s when they noticed her digging at her toes. There was nothing in the bath the night before. Patrick had the sense to stop me at the door. I called Paul. What took so long was the massive argument that the three of us had on their doorstep. So, yeah, I probably was exposed to it yesterday. And Asterope had the mumblemumps last week. And Noah before her. And Maddy had to catch this from somebody. There are probably a thousand-and-one things floating around in that hallway right now, but there’s really not much that anyone can do about it.” |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 7 2012, 06:52:24 PM Post #17 |
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Colin startled at PJ's increased volume and dropped his arms away completely. She stepped away and looked in his eyes. He couldn't help thinking that her being angry was the best way to get her to look at him. Maybe it was good for her to get angry sometimes. It was so easy to fall into old patterns... "You knew she had something! You just didn't know what! God, I'm sorry." He threw his hands up. "I'm a crazy person." He crossed his arms. "I don't care that our house has been ransacked by the government. That's just stuff. I am bloody sick of Patrick calling on you for every fucking thing! This is all just the very last thing I wanted to ever think about. It's not like you're the only witch he knows, or is even related to. I must have told him a thousand times that he can call me because I don't have a group of five year old depending on my presence every day. God, I really want to just destroy his phone in a great blaze of fire that takes out all the cell towers with it so he can only send you letters and you'll stop rushing off without thinking!" He pressed his palms to his eyes and shook his head ."I can't, I can't, I can't..." he inhaled deeply and dropped his hands. "I can't handle finding out things like this. You should have told me before you went over there. I don't care if I was in the shower. We have to tell each other everything. What if something happened? Fuck that, something did happen. Several things happened- it all happened!" He fisted his hands in his hair, took a deep breath, and looked up. He let go of his hair and looked back at PJ and said, as evenly and calmly as he could, "We have to be very careful. About everything." Edited by Colin Beckett, Mar 7 2012, 07:33:39 PM.
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 7 2012, 11:12:09 PM Post #18 |
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“Fine. You want to know everything?" PJ began in the overly-controlled tone that she used when she was trying really hard not to yell at the kids. "Patrick calls me so much because I actually like helping with the girls. I want him to call me, though I’m not going to go parading into a house full of dragon pox for them, so don’t you start worrying about that again. I sure as hell wish that I had had an aunt like me so that I didn’t look like an idiot all the time when I went to Hogwarts, but I did, and everybody laughed, just like you still do.” She took a breath, but started in again whether he was talking in or not, her tone less harsh but more matter-of-fact. “And you know what else? I hate it when you actually have a point. It seems like every time we fight, you end up being right even if you are being a jackass about it, and I hate it. Let’s just get it out in the open: I’m not as smart as you, alright? I can’t see the domino effect until the last one slaps me in the face.” She crossed her arms on top of her belly, embarassed at the admission. “Penny, however, can. I think I’m going to call her, and we’ll probably go to her flat and see if I can’t get calmed down enough to make Prufrock quit turning somersaults so that I don’t feel like I have popcorn popping inside of me.” |
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| Colin Beckett | Mar 8 2012, 04:04:40 AM Post #19 |
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Ugh, there was so much he wanted to say to that. But first things first. "Can we please not go to Penny's? I really can't see how she'd be calm about this. Elliott Fix still has his flat in London. He's told me before it's basically just sitting there and available if we need it for anything. We wouldn't be putting anybody out that way." Also, Elliott felt like neutral territory, where either of their families had the potential to escalate into a disagreement about their life choices.... Okay, next. "I don't want you to not be there for the girls. You know I love being around them all. I just..." he closed his eyes tight and then opened them again. "...I want you to be there for me, too." He probably felt just as embarrassed admitting this as PJ had about thinking he was smarter. The next part all came out in a rush. "I was going to ask you to marry me and you blew me off for Patrick. I mean, he's one of my best friends now, thanks to you, and I do love him to bits, but I can't... I feel less important. It's childish and insecure and I'm sorry. Sorry I somehow ended up jealous of your brother and his family." He crossed his arms, but didn't look away. "I made you my family and I thought that being your husband would somehow... elevate me on the priority list. But I've still got to be out of the house on Friday nights for Penny, and cancel dates and come when we're called for Patrick, and I didn't ever want to make you feel badly about any of that, I swear. But I felt badly about it. And now we're essentially homeless and you don't have the things you need because you were at Patrick's. "It's not even..." he swallowed hard "... forget what I said about me..." he already regretted voicing those feelings "...you need to prioritize for yourself. You're going to end up dead if you don't put yourself first at least some of the time. "And I'm sorry- I know I can be a jackass. I fight dirty because it's easy," he was just as matter-of-fact as she was. "But I'm not smarter than you, PJ. We just have different ways of thinking about things." His right hand threaded back through his hair and his left stayed wrapped around his stomach. "If I were really smart you'd think I would have learned by now how to be less of a selfish jerk. I'm sorry for that. And for this. Just- everything." |
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| PJ Beckett | Mar 8 2012, 03:24:29 PM Post #20 |
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When PJ had decided to go to Penny’s, she hadn’t planned on taking Colin with her. The “we” that she had been referring to was Penny and herself and Prufrock. Colin was angry and he was right and she just couldn’t take it right now, so she had resolved to do the one thing that she had never done before. She was going to run away from him, to the one place she knew that she could go without having to listen someone tell her that he was right or that she should calm down or what a good person he was or that she should make up with him. If she was going to be irrationally cross with her husband, Penny’s was the perfect place, especially if Paul was at work. He could be reasonable, and she wasn’t feeling reasonable. He was going to, wait, no, when he had originally intended to propose and why he had waited wasn’t what they needed to talk about right now. That was all over and done with and they had plenty of current shit to plow through. “You’re not- I’m sorry that I started with the name calling,” she told him first, shaking her head. She sighed. No, she wasn’t going to forget anything he had just said. “We probably should have had this conversation a long time ago. I wish you would’ve said something. I mean, I know you like having me around, but I never really felt like you needed me to be there. You need me like you need another hole in your head, really. I can fix thing for the girls, take care of them. Penny’s got some stuff going on, and I feel like I can take care of her right now, too.” Colin had probably noticed by now that PJ had a pathological need to be needed. She needed something to take care of. “I mean, I’ve tried feeding you, but it doesn’t seem to help. And you were perfectly capable of living on your own before I came along. Hell, that's how me and Fix got to be friends in the first place. I was trying to take care of him. You do realize that if anyone finds out we've been at his place he's...I can't think of a nice word for it.” |
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