You Looked Down on Me Once Now You Look Up (Patricia and Oliver) novel Chapter 701

Oliver hadn’t expected her to be awake. He paused, then reached over and switched on a small table lamp.

His voice was low and rough, like he’d been chewing gravel. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” Patricia’s reply was barely more than a whisper. She was uncomfortable, her words almost fading away. As he came closer, the heavy scent of alcohol hit her, and she couldn’t help but ask, “Did you drink a lot?”

“Yeah, more than a little.”

He really did seem drunk. He stood at the foot of the bed, no furniture nearby to steady himself, looking a little unsteady.

Patricia leaned forward from where she sat against the headboard, about to say something. But then she watched as he bent down, set his phone on the bench at the end of the bed, and sat down himself.

“Should I call Johns to come up?” she offered quietly.

“No need.” Oliver pulled the tie from around his neck and tossed it aside.

Patricia frowned. “You drank too much.”

He answered simply, “I’m still clearheaded.”

“All I want is for you to be safe. And if you do end up in trouble, I want to know right away so I can do something. But that’s just it. Jackson can’t give me that, and honestly, neither can you.”

“Sometimes I think you forget you’re married now. You forget that if anything happened to you, your husband would be left behind. What would I do? What would happen to this little family we have?”

Oliver finally looked up, his eyes meeting hers in the dim light. He spoke softly, “Let’s say one day we have a kid. She meets someone she really likes, makes a good friend. But this friend doesn’t care about the rules, urges her to run across the street, to ignore red lights. Would you still want her to hang out with someone like that?”

He sounded calm and reasonable, like he was just laying out the facts. Calling Jackson someone who “doesn’t care about the rules” pretty much summed it up. It wasn’t that he was a bad person. He just couldn’t follow the rules.