The lines at his forehead and along his mouth got even deeper, and I couldn’t miss the way he shook his head slowly, thinking who knows what. The skin at his cheeks changed color and got… pink? Why?
“I changed it eight years ago,” I explained to him, glancing out the window to look through the side mirror again. More people exited the building, but none of them looked familiar.
I wondered if my dad had already gotten to whatever car he was now rolling around in, without me noticing.
“Mr. Cooper and Lydia drove me to the courthouse two days after my eighteenth birthday so I could start the process. They paid for the filing fees. The judge eventually granted my petition, and… I changed it,” I explained, still looking through the side mirror, the pain behind my eyeball still sharp. “No one but my sisters, the Coopers, and now you, know I changed it.”
The breath Rip let out was low and long, and the leather creaked as he shifted around.
I was a coward and didn’t want to look at him. “Did you see it on the news?”
He didn’t respond. The leather just creaked more, and the next sigh he let out was even louder than the last one. The deepest one I had probably ever heard from him.
Out of the side mirror, I watched a hearse pull around to the front of the building and a police officer appearing out of nowhere on a motorcycle.
It was time to go.
To go and see my dad, whose smallest offense had been selling drugs. The man who I would have forgiven for doing that, if he’d just been a decent person. If he’d just been… different.
“If you don’t want to go to the burial, I understand,” I found myself telling Rip as I fought the urge to scrub my face with the palm of my hand.
There was another sigh—not as deep but still off—and then he said, “We can go.” The words had barely come out of his mouth when he started the truck and then put it into drive.
I could feel the wheels in his head turning. Could sense his tension. I didn’t like it.
Did he think…
“I’m not… like them,” I told him, just in case he was thinking that I was. I was reliable. I had never actually lied to him before. I hadn’t stolen a single thing in years, and even then the stealing I had done was subjective. At least I thought so. “I’ve never done a single drug in my life. I rarely drink. I would never do anything to hurt anyone at the shop or anywhere else, even if they deserved it.”
His scoff almost made me jump. His fingers flexed on the steering wheel for what might have been the hundredth time since he’d picked me up. “That’s not what I’m thinking.”
I held my breath and kept on looking at him and his facial features, but they didn’t give a single thing away. “It’s not?”
Rip scoffed again, shaking his head while his attention was on the other side of the windshield. “You’re a good girl. Everybody knows that.” He paused and a muscle in his cheek twitched.
“Nobody’s fucking perfect, Luna, but I know a good girl—a good person—when I see one.” His breath was more of a sigh. “And you are. I’m not about to start a fucking tally with you about the shit we’ve done in the past. I know you’re not like… them in there.”
My nose tingled, and I didn’t… I didn’t want to talk about those things I’d done. “I haven’t seen them since I left when I was seventeen,” I rushed out. “I told you, I’m not… it’s complicated. We don’t… like each other.”
A line had somehow formed while we’d been talking, following the hearse that had just driven off. Rip squeezed the truck in between a Chevy Impala and a small Toyota pickup. I looked behind me to make sure that it wasn’t anyone I knew in the truck.
I wouldn’t put it past the cowards I called my family members to do something stupid like accidentally run a light or look down. That’s who and what I was related to.
Crap. What the hell had I been thinking? I had no business being here.
Yes, you do, Luna. You have every right. You think they were close to Grandma Genie? You think they’d be here if there wasn’t some other motive? They never do anything unless they can get something out of it.
People don’t change. Well. Most don’t.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I told him. “I guess I’d hoped that they wouldn’t come.”
He didn’t say anything. He just drove, and as the silence stretched, all I could do was stay where I was and, after a moment, look out the window. The ache behind my eyeball got worse as we drove on.
We pulled into the cemetery and parked after a moment. I held my breath as we got out of the truck and walked in the direction of where two heart-shaped sprays of flowers were located. Rip walked beside me the whole time, the tension still just pouring directly off him. It said something about how much I distrusted the people I was related to that I kept glancing over my shoulder to make sure none of them were following us.
I was pretty sure if I looked up the Miller family history, the word “backstabbing” had to have been stemmed from an ancestor somewhere down the line.
Luckily, I didn’t see any of them, at least not directly behind us. As we stopped at the gravesite, a hole that seemed too small for a casket, I kept my head aimed down, but I didn’t close my eyes.
Rip’s arm brushed my elbow as he settled in so close beside me I could feel the heat of his body. It wasn’t unwelcome. The size of him, the knowledge that he more than likely wouldn’t let anyone physically hurt me, even if he was unhappy about all of this—including finding out I was related to a felon—made me feel better. It was too warm for my long-sleeved shirt, and I could only imagine how hot he had to be in his jacket and dress shirt, but he didn’t complain or act in any way like it bothered him.
I had a feeling it was him there that kept me from walking off as I watched the three people I hadn’t seen in years approach slowly.
My sisters’ mom didn’t look at me.
But my cousin was staring. Beside him, the man who was half responsible for my existence acted like I was invisible.
I stood there and watched them both.
I wished that later on I could have looked back on that moment and been the bigger person. That I could and would have looked away from them while the chaplain or whatever he was said some more generic words about a woman he had more than likely never met. I wished I could have let myself focus on Grandma Genie and the few memories I had of her.
But I didn’t do anything like that.
As the man went on, I stood there and took turns staring at my cousin and the man that my birth certificate said was my father.
My cousin basically snarled.
My dad looked right through me with those green eyes I saw every time I looked in the mirror.
Rip’s arm brushed mine a few times, but I was too caught up in my own moment to worry about how bored he must be. Or how disappointed he might be in me for being related to these people. There were a million other things that he might have been thinking, and none of them were good.
It was only when the chaplain stopped speaking and the thirty other people around us approached the casket with mementos that I snapped out of it and took a step forward to drop the small picture of my sisters and me that I’d put in my purse the day before in the hole.
I was ready to leave, and it had nothing to do with the people on the other side of the casket.
I just wanted to go back home to the place that made me feel safe, to the people who made me feel loved, to the life that made me happy—that I swore from now on would only make me happier.
Turning to face Rip, who it seemed had his entire attention focused on me, I met his eyes and nodded.
He nodded back, his gaze flicking behind me for a beat, and we headed back toward his truck, avoiding old headstones and flowers.
Fortunately, I hadn’t been able to relax or let my guard down, because I heard the hurried steps coming and was partially expecting the hand that wrapped around my wrist, the hold tight and hurtful and mean, a second before it
yanked at me.
Or tried to.
Because I didn’t let that happen. I’d spent years with Lenny at the gym so I’d know how to defend myself. That was how we’d met. She had taught a self-defense course I’d taken. Then kept on teaching me things after it ended. So I didn’t hold back when I threw my elbow as hard as I could backward, and in a move that would have made her proud, I kicked my right leg out, feeling it connect with a left leg. The second the person behind me stumbled forward, I grabbed their right arm and extended it across my body into a straight armbar position—a submission move that hyperextended their elbow—his elbow, if you wanted to be specific, because I knew who it was.
It was the same move that Lenny and I had worked on time and time and time again, so many times, I had gotten sick and tired of doing it. She had done it to me lightly before and it had hurt for days. It had been totally worth it, I guessed, because instinct had just… kicked in, like she had said it would.
“What the fuck!” the voice I didn’t recognize anymore hissed.
“Don’t touch me,” I snapped at my cousin as I took in his face, tightening my grip even harder, knowing I was hurting him and not giving a single crap.
I had seen Rip out of my peripheral vision jerk to a stop and turn around, but I had this.
I had always had this. Even when I was younger. Because maybe I was an Allen now, but I had been a Miller, and being a girl, being younger, didn’t mean anything. I had gotten into fights with every single Miller kid around my age growing up, even some that weren’t my age. They were all bullies and jerks. Every single one of them.
This one specifically had been the first one who had knocked me around. I still had a tiny scar on my forehead from one of those times. As I looked at his own cheek, I could see the one I had given him when I’d been fourteen and had punched him right in the cheekbone as hard as I possibly could.
“Put your hands on me again, and I will break your hand,” I told him, dead serious.
His face, thin and oval, was pinched and in pain as he tried jerking his arm away, but there was no way he could. “Let me go, you fucking bitch.”
I wasn’t him, I reminded myself as I did finally let go, shoving him away at the same time so that the man who was only a few inches taller than me, stumbled back.
He looked terrible too. I could see the staining at his teeth, the gauntness at his cheeks, and the discoloration in his eyes.
This was what I’d avoided. This was what my sisters had missed.
Thank God. Thank God.
I took a step back and stopped only when I bumped into the hard mass of a body that belonged to Ripley. His hands didn’t touch me. He didn’t do anything but stand there.
Hopefully he was at least shooting my cousin that face that I knew damn well made the guys at the shop turn around and walk away.
“I only came here for Grandma Genie,” I told my cousin as calmly as I could, even though I didn’t feel all that calm. “Just leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone?” my cousin snarled as he clutched his arm. “You came here. You knew what the fuck you were doing. We told you not to come back.”
He was right.
It had been a mutual decision in a way.
But it didn’t change the fact that he could have let me walk away.
“I came for the funeral. I don’t want any trouble,” I tried to tell him, but he was already shaking his head before I’d even finished the first sentence. “I’m never going to come back after this.” I almost added “believe me” to the end, but I knew it would be pointless.
Honestly, I had an idea what he was going to say before he said it, and my cousin had never been the brightest or most creative crayon in the box. “You fucking bitch—”
My hand formed into a fist, ready.
But I felt it then. The hands on my shoulders.
I heard it then. The deep grumble from the man behind me.
Then I caught onto everything that came out of Rip’s mouth, the rumbling rattle of each word etching themselves into me for the rest of my life.
“You can shut your fucking mouth.”
Then I held my breath again as I took in the calm within Ripley’s voice.
What I witnessed though was the way my cousin opened his mouth to say something, then he closed it. He made a face that said he didn’t want to do that, but he had, and he took a step back. And another step back, the snarl on his face growing as he backed further and further away.
Keeping his mouth shut the whole time.
It wasn’t until he was at least twenty feet away that the hands on my shoulders fell off them.
Only then did Rip take a step back.
By the time I turned around to look at the bodyguard I’d had to use my one and only favor on, his hands were at the scarf around his neck.
He was tightening it for some reason.
His cheeks were more flushed than any other time I had seen, and the tendons in his hands popped with restraint.
And his gaze… it had been on the ground, his lips thin.
I had made it. I was fine. I was loved. I had a home. I had everything I wanted and needed and more.
Yet knowing all that didn’t stop my body from breaking into a shiver.
Maybe the adrenaline had disappeared and left me feeling shocked at the sight of what had happened to the people who I shared genes with me. Maybe it was at the reminder of what I had left. Of how desperate they had made me feel that I’d left their house at seventeen years old, not knowing what I was going to do, not knowing where I would live. Of how scared I had been after. Of how mad.
But mostly, maybe I just felt overwhelmed at how empty I had felt for so long. Of how much I had wanted things to be different. Of how much I had suffered from yearning for things that I had never been given.
It could have been any of those things and all of those things.
I’d felt lonely on and off for so long, the reminder that my little sister was finally leaving me soon hit me like a wrecking ball straight in the chest.
I wanted love, and even after all these years, I had found it, but I hadn’t.
I was almost twenty-seven years old and I was still looking. I hadn’t stopped wanting it after all this time. Here I was, not able to hug my sister because I was worried I wouldn’t recover if she didn’t let me. Because I had two other sisters who had pushed me away out of anger years ago, and I had never been able to get over it. This was who I’d become because of them.
I hated them.
I stood there, and all I could do was suck in a breath that sounded almost like a gasp.
I had never in my life done anything malicious just for the sake of being an asshole. I had sacrificed for my sisters. I had busted my ass for us, day after day. I had tried to be a good, decent person because that was who I wanted to be.
And here were these people who had treated me like total shit my entire childhood, trying to do the same thing after so long.
I hated them. I hated them so much I couldn’t catch my damn breath. I couldn’t catch my own freaking breath because of them.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I hated myself too for letting my stupid cousin get to me now.
I didn’t see Rip’s eyes as they sliced over me, and I didn’t watch as that hardened, rough expression turned into one that was still hard but surprised. I would never see the way his head reared back, his chin tipped down, and his nostrils flared.
“Luna…”
I grit my teeth as tears bubbled up into my eyes all of a sudden, but I made myself look up at him. I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t ashamed about any of this. All it did was piss me off.
I was choosing to be happy. I was choosing to be happy every day for the rest of my life, and nothing and nobody was going to take that away from me. No freaking way.
But why couldn’t things have been different?
“You all right?” he asked, still taking his time with his words, his expression seeming like this mix of horrifie
d and shocked as he watched me.
“Yes.” I bit my cheek and then shook my head immediately afterward. “No.”
Those eyes sliced to somewhere behind me for a split second before returning to my face. That foreign expression disappearing into that mean-muggin’ Rip face that was my favorite. His chest expanded with a big breath, and he was totally serious as he asked, “Want me to go whoop his ass?”
“Yeah.”
One of his big feet moved.
“But don’t.” I reached up to wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand, thankful I’d worn waterproof mascara and put a setting spray on my face that morning just in case. I knew better than to let this get to me. I knew better. I was better.
“Luna….”
I wiped under my eyes with my index finger and felt a shudder go right through me, violent and uncomfortable, starting at my shoulders and making its way down, and just… sucking. Just sucking, sucking, sucking. Had it really been that much to ask for, for things to be just a little bit different? To just come to a funeral and get through it without a reminder of what I had grown up around and tried my best to move on from?
I knew I had lost my damn mind when I asked him in a voice that wasn’t totally steady, “Give me a minute would you?”
He didn’t even think about it. “Sure.”
I licked my lips.
When I had been a teenager, I had wondered what things would have been like if my mom hadn’t died giving birth to me. If she would have been a better mother than the only one I had grown up knowing. I wondered if maybe our dad would have been different.
But as I got older, I realized that things might have been worse.
I had to accept I would never know how differently things might have been.
All I could do was stand there and slow my breathing, inhale and exhale.
“Just thirty more seconds,” I told him, quietly, trying to ignore the ache in my chest.
But he didn’t listen. He moved, and before I knew it, something warm and heavy fell over my shoulders and arms.
Luna and the Lie Page 14