“How much is a laptop?” I managed to ask, clinging onto that thread of love like it was going to save me from falling off a cliff.
“You don’t have to do that, Luna. It’s fine. I can figure it out,” she said.
“But you need it for school. I can send you some money over—”
Thea shook her head sharply. “No, it’s fine, Luna. I’ve got it.”
She had it? How?
“I promise,” she insisted, just making me even warier. And hurt.
Okay. I forced my hands loose, forced myself to stay calm. To stay focused on that love inside of me. “What can I do then? What do you need?”
“I don’t need anything,” she said, but it felt more like a slice to my Achilles.
Beside me, Rip shifted and his voice was low as something touched my lower back briefly, so lightly I almost didn’t feel it. “I’ll wait in the car.”
I ignored the sandpaper-quality filling my throat, focusing on the woman in front of me. Because she was a woman. And for some reason I didn’t, and more than likely wouldn’t, understand, I told him, “You don’t have to. You can stay if you want.”
“Luna.” Thea’s voice went a little too soft. “I promise I’m fine. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”
She might be a liar, she might be hiding things from me for some reason, but I loved her. I did. “I’d do anything for you. You know that.”
“I know, but I really am sorry.” Her eyes slid to the side, the way they had plenty of times while she’d been younger. “My roommate will be here in a little bit, and I need to talk to her.” She rubbed at her eyes again, still averting them. “I have to be at work at eight tomorrow, and I’ll be there all day.”
“Okay.” I knew what she was trying to say. I knew it.
“We agreed not to let people stay over…,” she kept going.
There it was.
“I’m so glad you came. Only you would. You’re the best half-sister I could ever ask for.”
It was the half-sister that finally, finally made me flinch.
She had only called me that every once in a while, and only over the last five years. Before I had always been her sister. Her big sister. And now, now I was her half-sister.
“I wish I didn’t have to work tomorrow, but I need the money.”
She needed the money.
“I don’t know when I can come down again, but I’ll try to real soon.” My sister gave me a smile that fell flat, that sliced me again, this time straight across my stomach. “I miss you. I wanted to stay longer this last time, but I just couldn’t.”
All I could do was stand there.
With my heart feeling awfully close to breaking.
With a knot in my throat that seemed to be growing by the second.
I loved my sister. I genuinely loved Thea with everything in my heart. She had been the first person to be put into my life that had loved me back.
And she was, in few words, asking me to leave after I’d traveled almost four hours to come and see her.
My mouth watered and not for a good reason.
But I wouldn’t pitch a fit. I touched the LOVEYOU bracelet on my left wrist. I wouldn’t beg.
I just… nodded and gave her a smile that didn’t feel all that understanding, but I hoped it didn’t make her feel guilty either. She had just hurt me, but that didn’t mean I had to hurt her right back. What I couldn’t let go of right then was that freaking ache in me. I wasn’t going to give her a hard time for kicking me out.
But…
But I couldn’t just walk out of here, letting her think that she’d pulled a fast one on me. As much as I might want to believe she wouldn’t do that… she had. Or at least, she was trying to, and I couldn’t let that small thing go away. Not this time.
“Why didn’t you tell me you moved?” I asked her, ignoring how numb my voice sounded.
She paused, and the face I knew so well grimaced just a little but just enough. “I just…” Was she trying to think of a lie? “I… I didn’t want to bother you.”
She didn’t want to bother me.
Maybe I had literally hours ago said those exact words to Rip, but that had been because I didn’t want to ask him for help.
My sister moving out of her apartment wasn’t bothering. Why would that be bothering? How would that be bothering?
Thea must have realized how weak that excuse was because she gave me a smile that time that was just as fake as her last one had been. “My roommate invited me to come live here with her, but she doesn’t like people coming over, so I didn’t see a point in telling you and then….”
Having to tell me I wasn’t allowed to spend the night? After I had paid for our apartment all on my own while she had lived with me for three years? I would have understood.
She knew that.
I wasn’t unreasonable. I could have stayed at a hotel.
But she had always shut down every time Lily and I brought up coming to visit. Every single time. Instantly. Over and over and over again over the years.
Hadn’t Kyra come and stayed with her a few months ago? I wondered for a moment before deciding I didn’t want to know. In case she was lying to me.
I scraped my tongue against the roof of my mouth as I stood there and nodded like I understood. But I really didn’t. Not even a little.
Thea watched me carefully, back to wringing her hands.
I bit my bottom lip.
I was loved. I was happy. I had my own place. I was a decent person.
And Rip had driven me all the way to Dallas to come see my sister because she had asked.
I wasn’t going to feel ashamed or bad. I wasn’t going to let this get to me. Even if she was one of the last people in this world who I would have ever expected to hurt me the way she just had.
I was going to choose to be happy after this.
“Okay, Thea,” I told her carefully, not able to muster up more than just a smile that consisted of a twisted cheek. “Let me know if you need anything, all right?” I still found myself offering.
She… she just nodded.
I took a step back and thought about that hug I wished I could or would have given her, but she didn’t step forward or make a move to make it seem like she wanted one either.
So I let my hands drop to my sides.
“Take care,” I told her, hearing how wooden it came out.
She didn’t even flinch. “Drive safe,” she told me like she had a hundred other times when things between us were fine and normal. The scratch she made to her cheek was the only thing that told me that she might feel a little bad. And just a little. I didn’t expect much more than that.
I thought I was a strong person. I was forgiving. More patient than most people I knew. I wasn’t really that petty. I didn’t expect a lot from anyone, ever.
But as I walked around my sister with my eyes glued in front of me, I felt shittier than I could ever remember in the last ten years.
It honestly, genuinely, felt like my heart was breaking. Or maybe the fracture had always been there and it was getting wider and deeper, cutting into me even more than before. I hadn’t thought it was possible.
I went down the hallway and opened her door, fisting my hands at my sides and breathing in through my nose and out of my mouth.
She didn’t call out after me.
She didn’t change her mind about me leaving.
I felt Rip’s presence, heard the door slam shut behind us. I bit the inside of my cheek and jogged down the stairs, not running but not walking. And when I hit the first floor, with Rip’s steps close by, I stopped there, giving him just enough room to go around me.
I wasn’t going to feel bad. I was going to be happy. I was fine.
My hands went to my hips, and I took a deep breath in through my nose, feeling myself shaking my head more than actually being aware of the decision that I did it.
There was no way for me to ignore the subtle but sharp pain going on right in my solar plexu
s as I stopped there.
“I just need a minute,” I told Rip quietly, still in front of him so that he couldn’t see my face.
His “all right” was just as low and soft as my request had been, but I was in no condition to analyze it in any way.
I nodded, hoping he’d seen it, and I started walking again.
I was choosing to be happy. I was choosing to be happy. I was—
Not.
I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t even wrangle a little bit of it. Not a speck of it.
My feet took me into the parking lot, past Rip’s truck. They took me down the middle of the lot in the muggy Dallas air. I walked to the end of the building and back, breathing in through my nose and out of my mouth, shaking my head every once in a while. The entire time, not letting myself think about how sad and hurt I felt. Not letting myself think of how not happy I was in that moment.
I tried with everything in me to force my mind blank as I turned around and walked back in the direction I had come.
I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to get upset.
This was not the worst thing that had ever happened to me. My sister telling me I couldn’t stay with her. My sister referring to me as her half-sister. My own fucking sister not wanting me around for whatever reason.
I had driven out here because she had asked. Not because I expected anything.
But I had expected more than to get sent home after ten minutes of being inside her place after she’d called me upset.
I specifically didn’t let myself think of how she had disregarded me.
Pushed me aside.
I bit the inside of my cheek again and cracked the knuckles of my hands as I kept walking.
Rip didn’t care. He would never shame me for what happened or make fun of me, I knew that in the center of my bones.
Nope, this burn had nothing to do with him.
Nothing.
One single tear slid out of my eye and right along my nose, brushing the side of my mouth as it kept slipping down and over my chin.
I blinked.
She hadn’t even tried to hug me.
After everything—
She didn’t even bother wanting to take a second and talk to me. Just in and out. Out you go. Bye.
I squeezed my hands harder into fists as I approached Rip’s truck and found him leaning against it, arms crossed over his chest, him watching me. His face was blank, for all intents and purposes. He even had one foot crossed over the other.
I tipped my head back to look at the sky, covered in charcoal gray clouds and lit up by city lights.
And I took a deep breath.
Then I took another.
But those breaths didn’t do a single thing.
Not one single thing as another tear escaped my eye and followed the track the first one had left for it.
This croak built up in my throat, and my instincts tried their hardest to keep from letting it out. I even had my mouth closed, but this tiny sound escaped, sounding like a whine. Sounding pathetic and sad and like a note something made when it broke.
And another tear came out.
Then another.
And another closed-mouth noise escaped.
“One more minute,” I slipped out, sucking in a shuddering breath that probably mutilated the words and had them sounding like something totally different.
I heard his “all right” just as I sucked in another breath, just as another tear slid out of my eye.
I had no reason to cry.
My sister loved me, I knew it. She was just… I didn’t know what she was doing or why she was being that way.
Sometimes you outgrew people.
Maybe that’s what she had done. Moved on from her high-school dropout sister who painted cars for a living. Her half-sister since that’s how she thought of me now.
And it was that half that was the prick I needed for more tears to roll out of my eyes. One after another, after another, until I had the meaty parts of my palms tucked into my eye sockets, diverting the flow of one traitorous tear after another.
“Luna,” came the deep, deep grumble of a voice.
“Fifteen seconds,” I tried to tell him as I told myself to stop. Stop.
Stop, Luna.
You’re fine.
Quit being dramatic.
You’re taking this too personal.
Stop it.
I’d swear I heard a muttered “Fuck” from somewhere too close, but I could never be sure.
What I could be sure of was the body that stepped right up to mine. The body that didn’t give me a chance to stop crying or even drop my hands because that body wrapped itself around my own. An arm curled over my shoulder, another right below it, draping itself across my shoulder blades.
The body was warm and hard and molded to mine, crushing my arms between us like they weren’t even there in the first place.
Legs and thighs pressed against me, and something warm grazed my cheek as gentle, almost delicate words filled my ears. “It’s all right, baby girl,” they started.
“You’re a good girl.”
“A nice girl.”
“The nicest.”
“Sweetest.”
And more tears just came right out of my eyes with each thing said into my ear, spilling over my fingers and wrists, down my arms as I stood there, letting my boss, a man who barely talked to me on a good day, hug me and tell me I wasn’t a sad, pathetic person who deserved to feel so small.
You’re such a dumbass, Luna, my dad had told me so many times, it sounded like he spoke the words into a tap that sent him directly into my brain.
“You got your ‘love you’ bracelet on. You’re all right.” The arm closest to the top, directly over my shoulders, tightened, and warmer, soothing words tried to drown the old ones away. “I’ve got you. I’m here,” the man holding me said.
He had me.
Maybe just for a minute. Maybe for ten. And even though I knew it was dumb and that I had no right to and I needed to get it together, I leaned into him. I went a little limp against his body, even tilting my head forward until it rested right between his neck and collarbone.
For one moment in time, I let Lucas Ripley hold me up while tears just dropped out of my eyes, making the ones I’d shed in my bedroom after my grandmother’s funeral seem like nothing.
All I had ever wanted was to be loved.
And one of the only people I had expected to give me that unconditionally for the rest of my life had let me walk right out of her place, without as much as just... talking to me about how school was going. Or work. Or anything.
We had driven all the way over here and….
One of the arms around me moved, and what had to be his hand landed on the back of my head, fingers dipping into my hair, running through the ends before coming back up to do it all over again.
“Ten more seconds,” I mumbled into my hands, into his shirt, into him.
“Ten more seconds,” he agreed into my cheek, his hand cupping the back of my head again.
I sucked in a breath through my nose and pressed my face even closer into the high point of his chest, feeling bones and hard muscles beneath it—a reminder that this man was immovable. Tough. Hard. Even leaning into him with more of my weight than I had ever let someone support, he held it without an issue.
His fingers worked their way through my hair to touch my nape.
Those rough, calloused fingers worked their way to straddle the back of my neck, to hold my head in place, right where it was.
Thea loved me. I knew it. But it didn’t feel like it. It didn’t feel like it.
“I just… I just….” I tried to say but couldn’t find the words.
“I know.” Those fingers kneaded my muscles lightly, the band around my shoulders tightening. “I know. You’re good. You’re fine.”
I was good. I was fine.
I sucked in a breath through my nose and nodded against him.
I was.
; I had food. I was fine. I had everything I wanted and needed.
I wasn’t going to be upset over Thea.
I wasn’t.
I wasn’t.
I was good. I was fine. I was loved.
I was—
“Five more seconds,” I told him, knowing somewhere in the back of my head that it was more like five minutes after my initial request.
Those fingers went through the ends of my hair some more. “Five more,” that gentle voice agreed.
I sniffed, fighting the urge when more tears popped up in my eyes again. I was fine, I was fine, I was fine. But I still didn’t move. When his fingers went through my hair once more, I whispered, “That’s really nice, Rip,” hearing it sound all broken and chopped.
I was fine.
I would be fine.
“It always made me feel better when my mom would do it for me,” he told me, doing it all over again, so soft, so naturally. “Didn’t matter if I was scared or sad or mad; everything always felt better after she did it.”
It was hard to picture Rip as a little kid having his mom soothe him.
But it was even harder to picture that it was him soothing me right then the only way he knew how. Maybe. Possibly. I didn’t know. I was starting to think I didn’t know anything.
“She’d put me to sleep doing it too,” he kept going in that gravelly voice that felt like a secret itself. “Two more seconds?”
It wouldn’t be until later, much, much later, that I’d realize he had been teasing me.
But I still said, “Yes, please” as my sniffles stayed sniffles, but the tears slowed down.
I was fine. I was all right. I didn’t need to cry. This wasn’t going to kill me today, tomorrow, a week from now, or ever again.
So what?
So what if my sister had changed her mind after I’d driven all the way here?
So what if she had lied to me? I had lied a hundred times in my life.
I was fine.
But I still said, “One more.”
And Rip still replied, “All right.”
Sorrow so deep I didn’t think I was capable of, covered everything around me. The tips of my fingers, the tops of my hands, right between my shoulder blades, right at the center of me.
Luna and the Lie Page 22