Holding Out

by Serena Bell

  He’d stunned her, he could see. And hurt her. He wanted to take the words back as soon as they’d left his mouth—

  But he couldn’t. And he wouldn’t, because they were true.

  He knew he’d lost her even before she started shaking her head.

  He stood there, panting, and she stood there, looking back at him, her eyes full of hurt and her teeth worrying that sweet, plump lower lip, and she didn’t have to tell him that it was over.

  But she did, anyway.

  “No,” she said. “No. You’re wrong about me, Griff. For the first time, I know I’m good enough, and I’m going to treat myself like I deserve the best. And in this case?”

  Her hair shone in the moonlight, and her eyes were blazing, and she was possibly the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  “It means I won’t set myself up for failure.”

  And she turned and ran back to the house.

  43

  They were all in the kitchen when she came back, starting to dish the dinner into bowls and pull out serving spoons and carry things to the table. They looked up from what they were doing, took her in, and did their best to look away. All except for Alia, who came towards her.

  The soft look on Alia’s face was the last straw for Becca.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not twelve, and I’m not breakable. You may have been right about Griff, but you were wrong about me. You were wrong that I don’t know how to take care of myself. You were wrong about my ability to make good decisions. And you were wrong to make me feel like a twelve-year-old. You and Nate both. This was not your business. It wasn’t ever any of your business.”

  Their friends, even Nate, had melted away during her speech, leaving the sisters alone in the kitchen. There were tears in Alia’s eyes. “Bex—I—”

  “I know you need to do this. Take care of me. Believe me, I understand. But I need you to not right now. So, we’re going to have to find some middle ground.”

  Tears streamed down Alia’s face, and part of Becca wanted to let her sister off the hook, but she knew that it was now or never. She would never know, so deeply in her heart, that it was time for her to do exactly what Griff had said she hadn’t: grow up.

  “I love you. You know I love you. But no more. I’m a full-fledged woman and have been for some time. You can be my friend. You will always be my sister. But you. Are. Not. My. Mother.”

  “I’ll try,” Alia whispered. “It’s hard.”

  Becca touched her sister’s arm tenderly. “I know. I’m not angry. I just—this is me. This is my life.” She took a deep breath. “I’m going to go back to Seattle.”

  Alia’s mouth opened, then closed, like the last turning of gears in a windup toy running down. She stayed silent.

  Becca smiled and touched her sister’s hand. “Thank you.”

  “What are the rules, exactly?” Alia asked.

  “The rules?”

  “Of being your sister and friend but not your mother? Can I comfort you?”

  “Of course.”

  Alia opened her arms and wrapped her sister up. “Then this is me, being your sister.”

  Becca began to cry.

  “Can I tell you it’s going to be okay?”

  “You can tell me,” Becca said, between sobs. She buried her face against her sister’s shoulder. “But I might not believe it for a long time.”

  Alia squeezed her tighter and Becca cried until she ran out of tears.

  Her friends were boisterous at dinner, cracking jokes, giving each other a hard time. Becca thought it was mainly to cheer her up, but it didn’t work. No matter how much noise they made, no matter how many jokes they told, there was a big empty space at the table where Griff was not. It hurt her, that empty chair.

  She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be at Friday Night Dinner again. Not without Griff.

  Even Alia and Nate’s amazing Middle Eastern feast tasted as bland as sawdust.

  Midway through dinner, Robbie got fussy.

  “He doesn’t need to eat any time soon, does he?” Becca asked.

  “No,” Alia said. “I was hoping he was going to fall asleep and sleep through dinner, but he’s overstimulated and overtired now and I think I’m out of luck.”

  “I’ll take him for a walk.”

  Nate slowly unwrapped the kicking, drooling baby and handed him over. Becca wrapped him to her chest, facing in, and he protested at the loss of his view, fussing and trying to free his bound limbs.

  “Shh,” she told him. “You and me, dude, we’re going to take a nice, long walk.”

  She left her friends behind, and stepped out into the night. Robbie was still fussing, his unhappy sounds starting to escalate.

  “Shh,” she said. “Shh, shh, hey, baby, shh,” she said, and started to cry again.

  Robbie caught the thread of her misery and wailed. She added a bounce to her step, hopelessly out of sync with how she felt, which was like lead. After another block, the motion started to get to him and his sobs subsided to hiccups and then to loud breaths which lengthened as he relaxed against her, warm and pliable.

  She walked for a long time, until she was sure they’d be done eating back at the house, done with their roses and thorns and teasing and affection.

  The whole time, her tears fell, occasionally landing on Robbie’s sleeping head, leaving long wet tracks in the pale fluff of his baby hair.

  44

  It was not a good day for Griff to be in charge of the mental health of ten other men. He’d gotten very, very drunk the night before with liquor snuck into his room, the first time he could remember drinking alone since those lost days right after Marina had left. Now he was hungover and sluggish and unhappy. Everything filled him with regret—the sight of his belongings crowding his small room, the fact that he was pretty sure he could still catch a whiff of Becca’s scent on his sheets, even the view of the lake with mist rising off it, because it reminded him of the simple delight of flirting outrageously with her.

  But he’d come this far, and he’d come this far because of her, and he wasn’t going to crawl back into a hole.

  “Hey,” he told the circle. “Most of you know how this works, but there are a couple of new guys here today . . .”

  He gave the rest of Jake’s intro spiel, then said, “I’ll start. I’m Griff. . . .”

  It didn’t take him as long as he’d thought to tell his story, even though he started at the beginning, at the moment when he’d first noted the absence of the children, and even though he told it all the way through to the end, when morning came and they assessed their losses.

  “I felt like, God gave me this huge responsibility. And I blew it. I fucking blew it, and six men died. And then I came home and my wife was gone and there was just a note, and I felt like—”

  Oh, shit. He was going to break down. At his very first support group, he was supposed to be in charge, and he was going to cry.

  He looked up and from across the circle he saw CJ watching him and nodding. And Griff thought, Fuck it. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “I felt like it was what I deserved,” he said, and his voice broke, and the wall in his chest broke, and everything fucking broke, and he was, in fact, crying.

  He didn’t sob or anything. He pulled it back together and looked around the circle, his gaze challenging them to give him shit about it, but they were all pretty much just nodding and meeting his eyes, theirs full of sympathy and understanding.

  “So,” he said. “I am just going to try to work on feeling like I didn’t deserve to be punished and like I deserve to be happy. And if anyone wants to work on that with me, we can set some goals around that together.”

  There was a moment of surprised silence—Jake had never really said anything much like that—but then the men started shifting in their seats and raising their hands and calling out. Just two or three, but it was enough, and they said they’d come back next week having tried to notice all the times in
a week they told themselves they deserved to feel like shit.

  Afterward, as the men were filing out, Jake came in.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’d it go?”

  “I feel like—” Griff looked to the ceiling. “I feel like I’ve been wrung out and run over.”

  “It gets easier.”

  “Does it? Doesn’t feel like it’ll ever get easier.”

  “The more times you tell the story, the less power it has over you.”

  Through his exhaustion, he could feel the truth of that. He’d relayed the events to Becca, the stranger in Home Depot and CJ, Jake, and now the men of the support group, and each time, he’d felt a tiny bit of grace trickle into the dark space of his guilt and remorse. He could imagine that someday, there would be enough light for him to see clearly. Someday, he wouldn’t hate himself when he thought of that night.

  Someday.

  Jake eyed him sympathetically. “Hey, man. I’ve been meaning to say. I’m sorry about Becca.”

  The sound of her name made his heart feel twice as heavy in his chest. He shook his head. “Not half as sorry as I am.”

  “Have you tried talking to her?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Pretty sure we both said everything there was to say.”

  It was Jake’s turn to shake his head. “You know you’re making me lose to Mira for the third time, right? Can’t you take pity on me?”

  “If I could fix this, I would. I tried.”

  Jake tilted his head. “I was listening just now when you were leading the group, you know. You did good. And that’s how it was for me, too. Feeling like I never deserved to be happy, after what I’d let happen. It’s a dangerous feeling. It can keep taking and taking from you, if you let it. Don’t let it.”

  Griff just stared at him. He knew Jake meant well, but he couldn’t absorb any more right now. His whole body felt bruised. His soul, too, if he believed there was such a thing. Whatever part of him Jake’s words had just poked at, anyway.

  “Enough touchy-feely shit for one day, huh?” Jake laughed. “I get it. Well, let me know if I can help. Not because I’m your friend or anything. Just because I want to win a fucking bet with Mira someday.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  Jake put his fist out for a bump, and Griff left feeling just as hungover and miserable as when he’d come in.

  He went out to the archery range and shot until his arm muscles trembled and his fingers felt raw where the strings dug in.

  He’d come to the range to distract himself, but it wasn’t working. He kept thinking of the day of the picnic. The feel of Becca in his arms, the tease of their words, the promise that had simmered in the air.

  Usually, archery made him feel better. It was something he could control. It was simple, forceful, and precise.

  But today, it just made him remember how off the mark he was, and what he’d lost.

  45

  She sat behind the reception desk at Wallingford Wellness and chatted amiably with a parade of beautiful women who had come into the spa to get more beautiful. To become their best selves, which, to them, was something they could buy. She envied them their conviction that it was possible.

  And she didn’t begrudge them their happiness, not at all. She didn’t resent how blissed-out and relaxed all the spa’s patrons looked as they ambled out the door, having put aside their to-dos for an afternoon. She just didn’t feel very much of anything else, either.

  She kept hoping against hope that some shaggy vet would walk through the door, seeking the massage that would give him the first relief from pain he’d had in days or weeks or years.

  “I think we should give a veteran discount,” she told Wendy one day, a week into the job.

  “A veteran discount?”

  “Or free massages to veterans, maybe. We could even do a special clinic for them. Maybe have all the massage therapists come in Thursday afternoon and evening when we’re open late, and they could volunteer, like, half their fee, and the spa could donate the other half to veterans’ services.”

  “I’ll think about that,” Wendy said, in the tone of someone who had no intention of wasting a quarter of a brain cell on the topic.

  When Becca wasn’t working, she mostly hung out with Jenina, who had been doing everything in her power to snap Becca out of her down mood. But Becca wasn’t interested in Jenina’s cure of choice, swiping right.

  “I thought the whole point of sleeping with Griff was that now your sex life would be a hundred percent less complicated. And what point is there to that if you don’t take advantage of all the no-strings sex the world has to offer?”

  Becca shrugged. They were sitting cross-legged on her bed, their phones tossed in the space between them. Becca had just swiped left until she had tendinitis.

  “Can I ask you a question, Bex?” Jenina said.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Jenina gestured around her at the apartment, and then a broader sweep that seemed to encompass the whole city of Seattle. “You haven’t seemed happy since you’ve gotten back here.”

  “I’m fine,” Becca said.

  “Do you think it’s possible you had more feelings for Mr. Pop My Cherry than you’ve told your good friend Jenina?” She gave Becca an innocent open-eyed look.

  Becca heaved a big sigh, closed her eyes, and leaned back on her pillows.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. What actually happened down there?” Jenina always talked about the Oregon coast as if it were on the other side of the world, as opposed to just a four-and-a-half-hour drive. And the truth was, it felt that way to Becca, too. She missed her sister and Nate and Robbie, Jake and Mira, and Sibby, as much as she had ever missed people in her life. She kept having dreams where she was playing with Robbie, and he was giving her his single-toothed, drooly grin.

  And then there was Griff. Who she didn’t allow herself to think about much, except that he had a way of creeping back in whenever she let her guard down. Like late at night, when she would remember the way he touched her. Kissed her. Teased her. Filled her. Or worse—when she would remember the simple pleasures of being with him, watching The Princess Bride or the Mariners game, playing dirty Taboo and learning naughty archery, eating donuts and drinking coffee.

  Confessing, confiding, soothing. Poking and prodding each other to take one more step, to try one more thing, to wake up the next day better and stronger.

  Damn it, her eyes were filling up with tears, and Jenina, who didn’t miss a thing, was watching, her face bright with sympathy.

  “I don’t want to miss him,” Becca wailed.

  “Of course you don’t.”

  She told Jenina about the last conversation she’d had with Griff in the street outside her sister’s house.

  When Becca was done, Jenina made a humming sound.

  “Can you believe he said that?”

  Jenina tilted her head to one side and gave Becca a long, hard look.

  “Shut up,” Becca said.

  “I said nothing,” Jenina said. But she was smirking.

  “I don’t do that. I don’t do that anymore,” Becca amended.

  “So you’re sure that the look on Griff’s face that day was because he is still in love with his ex-wife?”

  “I—”

  But Jenina, relentless as ever, plowed on. “Do you think it’s remotely possible that he was just really, really surprised to see her? And maybe trying to wrestle with coming face-to-face with a ghost from his past? And that maybe the hug was just a goodbye hug?”

  Becca opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Saw, in her mind’s eye, the two of them coming down the stairs.

  She tried it on for size: They’d been moving Griff’s stuff, and then they’d come down the stairs, and he’d given her a hug goodbye.

  She took a deep breath and looked at her friend. “Why do you refuse to ever, ever let me get
away with my shit?”

  “Because I love you madly,” Jenina said, blowing her a kiss. “And one more question, while we’re at it. Has it occurred to you, my friend, that maybe the problem isn’t that you’re too weak, but that you’re too strong?”

  “Me? No way,” Becca said. “I mean, you remember me before New Becca. I had the shittiest self-esteem. I let people walk all over me.”

  “So you say,” Jenina said carefully, “but I never really thought you were weak. And New Becca, she’s great, but do you think maybe sometimes she is a little bit of an ice princess?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Like, ‘I’m not going to let anyone in, and that way, I can’t get hurt?’ Like, ‘I’m not going to set myself up for failure’ is really just another way of saying, ‘I’m not going to risk getting hurt by you?’”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “But if you don’t take the risk of getting hurt, you also can’t set yourself up for success. It’s like with the tutoring thing, right? If you never tried it, you’d never suck at it, but you’d also never discover you loved it. Same with Griff. If you push him away, you don’t have to think about whether maybe, just maybe, you’re actually in love with him—which is, admittedly, terrifying because heartbreak and disaster and ugly crying. But you’ll also never get to find out if maybe? possibly? he’s also in love with you?”

  Becca’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

  “Just think about it, hon,” Jenina said kindly. “Meanwhile, if you’re just going to let the wide, beautiful world of Tinder go to fucking waste, let’s at least watch a movie or something. Or,” Jenina said, as Becca burst into tears, “we can do the ugly crying. I’ll get the tissues.”