Holding Out

by Serena Bell

  “So this time, I put my money on things working out,” Jake said. “I just knew. Because of the way you guys were at Friday Night Dinners, like an old married couple pretending they’d never met so they could role play picking each other up at a bar.”

  Becca laughed at that. She liked it, the old-and-new of it. “You guys,” she said.

  Mira crossed her arms. “I actually thought you’d get together, too, but I let him choose the winning position because I thought his ego needed it.” She smirked in Jake’s direction and he rolled his eyes at her. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I might have expressed some concern that Griff was too damn stubborn to ever fall in love again. But I’m really, really glad he did. And we can all see that you were way happier together than apart, even those of us who were dumb enough to bet against you the first time around.” Mira’s eyes were warm, and Becca threw her arms around her, and then around each of her other friends for good measure because she was stupidly happy.

  When she’d finished the hugging, she did a fast Google Maps search and discovered the Toutle River rest area was exactly two hours away.

  I’ll save dessert for you.

  Is there something wrong with me that that totally turned me on?

  “You’re blushing, Becca,” Alia purred.

  “Shut up, Alia,” Becca shot back.

  That was my intention.

  On my way.

  Drive fast.

  She sat with her friends and ate Alia’s breaded chicken breasts stuffed full of prosciutto, mozzarella, and basil. But she couldn’t actually taste it. She also couldn’t pay attention to anything anyone was saying. Trina told a story about something fabulous that Phoebe had done, Sam and Cora told a story about a pilgrimage they’d made to Powell’s Books in Portland, Hunter and Nate got into a fight about whether the Mariners were having a rebuilding year or if their GM was just an incompetent bastard. But the only thing in Becca’s head was Griff’s words: I am sitting in the Toutle River rest area off I-5, feeling like I just won the lottery.

  They were the longest two hours of her life. But the man she wanted most was well worth holding out for.

  49

  He rang the doorbell at Nate and Alia’s and it opened slowly, revealing Becca wearing jeans and a scoop neck pink T-shirt that bared a delicious helping of curves.

  Not that he noticed.

  “Hey,” Becca said. “Eyes up. Groveling before ogling.”

  She was grinning at him. A full-on Becca smile. It was impossible not to smile back.

  He peered behind her. “It’s awfully quiet back there.”

  “Robbie, Phoebe, and Clara are in bed. Everyone else went out to Bottoms Up. I don’t think any of them actually wanted to be around when you showed up.” She smirked. “Alia may have hinted about how traumatized she was by what she witnessed the last time. . . .”

  He made a chagrined face. “Yeah. The couch is off-limits.” He smiled at her. “But hopefully that doesn’t mean you’re off-lim—?” he began, but she grabbed the back of his head and yanked him down. Her mouth was soft and warm, and she opened to the slightest tease of his tongue. And moaned. Which made him instantly hard.

  “What if we just skip all the talking and I take you back to my room?” he whispered against the sensitive curl of her ear, and she shivered.

  “Mmm,” she murmured. She turned her head to capture his mouth again, twining her tongue against his in a way that made him think about other things he was going to do to her as soon as possible, preferably right now.

  Then she drew back abruptly. “Wait, no. I don’t need you to grovel, but I have things I need to say.”

  He chuckled, because she looked so fierce. “Shoot.”

  She drew a deep breath. “There are lots of things I should probably say, but I was thinking about it and the only one that actually matters is that I love you.”

  He couldn’t keep the startled expression from showing on his face. She flinched, but to her credit, she straightened her shoulders and said, “I do. I love you, and I hope that you love me, but if you don’t, that’s okay, too. And for what it’s worth, you were right. I looked at you and Marina and I saw what I’ve always seen in the past, which is that I’m not enough, not good enough or smart enough or pretty enough or worth sticking around for. And I can’t promise I’ll never make that mistake again because it’s difficult to unlearn bad habits, but I’m working really hard on it. Because you make me want to be better all the time in all the ways.”

  “If it helps at all,” Griff said, “I don’t actually want you to be better. I want you to be exactly the way you are. And I love you. So much.”

  That made her laugh and cry at the same time, which made him kiss her again. Until they had to break apart to breathe.

  When she’d caught her breath, she said, “I also want to say that you don’t ever have to worry that I will pull a Marina on you because I cannot fathom how any woman who had you for her happily ever after could possibly throw it away.”

  “Oh,” he said, because she’d struck him speechless.

  I cannot fathom how any woman who had you for her happily ever after could possibly throw it away.

  “Becca,” he said.

  She looked terrified. She’d said a lot of things, and he knew better than anyone how hard that must be. She was a woman who’d been shown more than once that she wasn’t “worth” the trouble, and he’d almost done what Nate had made him promise he wouldn’t and reinforced that message. Still, she’d put everything on the line to tell him she loved him, and—

  “I meant what I said about not wanting you to change. I never should have said that thing about you needing to grow up.”

  No,” she said. “You were right. And like most of the things you say to me, it made me realize I had some things I needed to work out. It led to an overdue conversation with Alia about my needing a little more mental space.”

  “Right or wrong, it was cruel. I was angry and scared and I lashed out.”

  “I know,” she said. “I forgot—I did the worst thing and blindsided you.”

  He shook his head. “You were just trying to make sense out of the Marina thing. I handled that so badly. That must have been confusing and awful—and then I didn’t say the right things at all. I should have said that I had been an idiot for leaving my shit at her house for so long but that I was completely over her because you had blown her out of my head and my heart and there was only room for you. And I should have said that in the beginning I thought we were just playing but every time I was with you, I learned more about you and fell harder for you.”

  He ducked his head and kissed her, licking into her mouth until she clutched his head and whimpered. He released her, and she protested, but he had important things to say.

  “One more thing,” Griff said, drawing back even though it pained him. “I know I asked this before, but then I blew it. So I’m going to try again. How would you feel about coming back to Tierney Bay, and we could get a place together?”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “You don’t have to answer that right away. But I thought you should know that I want us—both of us—to keep on growing up together. And I want every Friday Night Dinner from now on to be foreplay for what we do when we go home together. I want to wake up every morning and have donuts and coffee with you. I want All. The. Things.”

  Becca was laughing and crying, and he reached out and brushed tears back from both her cheeks, then took her face between his palms and kissed her until she stopped shaking.

  “All the things is good,” she said, when he let her go.

  She reached her hand out and he took it. Her hand in his felt small but strong and warm.

  She got a funny look on her face, and his stomach clenched with worry. She wasn’t having second thoughts, was she?

  “Or would it be all the things are good? I’d better learn to be grammatically correct if I’m going to be acting like an expert in the tutoring department,” she said. The
thought made her smile, thousands of lumens of glorious summer daylight, as she tipped her face up for another kiss.

  50

  Becca’s chest felt tight as she rang the doorbell to the little Portland bungalow where her mother was now living. Part of her wished she’d taken Griff up on his offer to accompany her—or Alia, who’d said she and Robbie could serve as reinforcements. But no, this felt like something Becca needed to do on her own.

  Footsteps approached the door and it swung open to reveal a woman so stunning in her familiarity that Becca almost took a step back from the impact. Her mother’s face was framed with shoulder-length ash-blond hair, streaked with silver, and her face had new lines in it, but she was still the woman Becca remembered. The face moved slowly into a smile—tentative, a little fearful. “Becca,” her mother said.

  “Hi, Mom,” Becca said.

  There was an awkward moment where a hug might have happened for other mother-daughter pairs, and then her mother stepped back, revealing the living room behind her. “Do you want to come in?”

  No, said something still wary inside Becca, but she ignored that voice and stepped forward. And got walloped by another familiar sight.

  The couch was the couch of Becca’s childhood, where she and Alia had sat to watch movies on the television—this television. The knickknacks on the mantle and tables were the ones she had played with, broken, repaired. She drew a deep breath, intending to steady herself, but oh, God, the room smelled like her childhood, as if the house were only a shell, and Becca suddenly, unexpectedly, found herself near tears.

  “I’ll make some tea,” her mother said. She gestured to the couch, and Becca sat, trying not to breathe too deeply because if she did, she was going to start crying in earnest.

  Her mother hurried into the kitchen, and Becca heard the hiss of an electric kettle and the clink of spoons on mugs before her mother reappeared with two steaming mugs. She handed one to Becca.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, formally.

  “I just thought—” Becca began, and stopped. She didn’t have a plan. She hadn’t rehearsed any words or decided what this visit was about. She’d simply woken one morning and thought that it was probably time. She and Griff had been together a couple of months, and her worries that he’d grow tired of her, or leave, or—she didn’t even know what—had dried up and blown away in the face of his love and devotion.

  Because Griff was not a man who stopped loving easily. She adored that about him above all else.

  “Becca,” her mother said, and Becca realized with a start that her mother was crying. “I’m so, so sorry. I wasn’t there for you. I was a terrible mother.”

  Becca’s first impulse was anger. She felt trapped by the apology. Because if she accepted it, did it mean her own suffering was swept away? And if she refused it, did it mean she was heartless? Her mother had, after all, done the best she could.

  For a moment she hovered there, gobsmacked and miserable, and then her eye fell on a china shepherdess on the mantle. She’d loved that shepherdess, and she’d played with it over and over, until, inevitably, one day, she’d broken it. She’d sat over the pieces, crying, and Alia had found her and gathered her into a hug. And then her sister had dug in the junk drawers in the kitchen and found a tube of Krazy Glue (that Alia had, no doubt, herself purchased at the grocery store). Alia glued the shepherdess back together and said, “Look. Good as new.”

  Becca had cried more, then, because Little Becca knew there were cracks and she would never be as good as new.

  But the newest version of Becca, Becca 3.0, saw things differently. Those cracked places, mended by her sister, were the strongest parts of that shepherdess.

  Jenina was right, after all. New Becca’s project had been to wall herself off so she couldn’t be hurt, but that wasn’t the trick. The trick was to love even though you could be hurt, and to trust that the people around you would help put you back together again.

  And really, if this house was about anything, it wasn’t about the woman sitting across from her, still uncertainly waiting for . . . something. It was about how Alia had made Becca safe and loved when safety and love were in short supply.

  Becca was lucky. She had Alia and Nate and Robbie, Jake and Mira, Jenina, Griff—to name just a few of the people she knew would die before they’d let anything bad happen to her.

  If you were well loved—and Becca was—then you could afford to be generous with your own love.

  “You were hurting,” Becca said, and tears rolled down her mother’s face. With surprise, Becca realized there were tears on her own cheeks, too. She reached a hand out, touched her mother’s knee, and her mother’s hand wrapped around hers and held tight. “Do you remember,” she said slowly to her mother, “how you used to make pompom caterpillars with us?”

  After all, she wasn’t a kid anymore. She didn’t need her mother. But she could still love her.

  Becca’s mother nodded, her damp eyes raking over her daughter hungrily. In times past the needy look on her face would have set up a panicked craving in Becca—she does love me!—but now it only stirred the faint memory of a small girl who’d been disappointed too many times. It’s okay, little Becca, Becca 3.0 told her oldest self. We’re good, no matter what.

  And she believed it.

  “You don’t by any chance still have any of those supplies lying around, do you?”

  Griff picked her up two hours later. He took one look at her and said, “We’re going to Voodoo Donuts.”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “You look like you need Voodoo Donuts. Anyway, we need to do a comparison with Dundee’s.”

  He didn’t ask what had happened with her mother. He talked at her instead, about CJ, who had driven his smoking hot Shelby Mustang to a bar the other night and taken home a leggy brunette. (“I saw him the next day. He was like a different man.”)

  She was super grateful to Griff for giving her a reprieve from having to talk about her mother. She needed a few minutes to put herself back together.

  When they got to Voodoo and Becca saw the cases with all the crazy donuts—some topped with Froot Loops, others frosted in outrageous colors, every one a donut event—she said, “There’s no comparison!”

  Several minutes later, Griff bit into an eight mile cake and frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is good, sure, but it’s—it’s distracting, you know? From the essence of donut.”

  Becca sampled a blueberry cake donut and had to agree. “It’s like they’re two different things, you know? A successful life would have to have both Voodoo and Dundee’s donuts. Dundee’s for Sunday mornings and Voodoo for celebrations.”

  “I think we can manage that.”

  It wasn’t until he’d filled her with donuts that he asked her how it had gone.

  “It was—it was really good to see her. I hugged her when I left, and she smelled like my mother, and that was—” Becca’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t want to love her, you know? But I think it might turn out to be one of those things I can’t help.”

  “I know the feeling,” he said, reaching out and pushing her hair behind her ear. They smiled at each other. She could not stop feeling joyful that he was hers.

  “She’s finally found meds that work for her, and she’s dating this guy, Chaz—”

  “Chaz?”

  “Your name is Griff,” Becca pointed out. “You can’t judge.”

  “Griff is a respectable nickname for Griffin. Chaz is a total corruption of Charles.”

  “Anyway, she’s doing well, and she’s happy. For now,” Becca said. “And I told her about you—”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Well,” Becca said, “I said you were very good-looking. And very supportive. And that you’d taken my V-card and ruined me for every other guy in the universe—”

  “You did not!”

  “No,” she admitted. “I didn’t tell her that. But it’s true.”

  Griff look
ed very pleased with himself, which had a funny effect on Becca’s southerly geography.

  Griff set down his donut and cocked his head. “Do you want to know what I was doing while you were with your mother?”

  “I thought you were checking out Powell’s.”

  “Nah. Not much of a reader,” he admitted. “I was checking out Portland’s downtown hotel scene. And I think I figured out where we’re spending the night. I found a whirlpool suite for us. Hot tub in room. Haven’t had sex in a hot tub yet, have you?” He smirked at her.

  She grinned at him. “You would know.”

  “Hurry up and finish that donut,” he said. “Wait. You have a sprinkle on your upper lip.” He grabbed her hand, tugged her forward, and kissed it off. Becca bit back a groan.

  She set her donut down.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Griff’s mouth fell open. “Wait a second. You’re leaving mid-donut?”

  “Some things are better than food.”

  Epilogue

  One Year Later

  Becca flounced through the door and threw herself down on the couch in her and Griff’s rental cottage with a dramatic flourish. She tossed her phone aside with the text from her mother still illuminated on the screen.

  “That good?” he asked her, with a smile.

  “Who knew that my own mother would turn out to be the biggest bridezilla in three counties?” she asked. Her mother and Chaz were tying the knot, and Becca was helping her mother plan the wedding.

  “And how does that make you feel?” Griff teased. “Tell Dr. Griff everything. I bet he can make it all better.”

  She rolled her eyes at him, but she was smiling now. He’d already made it better. He made it better by just existing. And she was so damn proud of him. He’d continued leading the support groups. He still had flashbacks, because that trauma was part of him, lodged deep where it would take years—or a lifetime—to purge the poison, but now he went to his own therapist and learned the best techniques for wrestling PTSD to the mat. He was finishing his bachelor’s degree online, and his long-term plan was to get a counseling degree and become a therapist himself.