I felt guilty for not doing more. For not stopping them. For not opening my mouth and complaining about that little jerk when Mr. C had first stuck him with me.
A small part of me, that honestly wasn’t so small, felt dumb for not putting the dots together.
Another small part of me felt a little betrayed that, if it was true that they were related, that neither one of them had ever said a word.
Especially not Mr. Cooper, who had been a better father figure to me than my own dad had been. This man that I genuinely loved hadn’t even hinted at the fact that the forty-one-year-old man I saw five days a week, if not six days a week, might be his son.
If I thought about it… if I really thought about it… they both had the same tall, broad builds. Wide shoulders, big chests, they were tank-like. Ripley didn’t have his eyes, but he did have his chin. And if I hadn’t met Mr. Cooper after he’d gone completely gray, they might have the same hair color too. They liked their coffee the same way, had a couple of the same tics….
If they were related, then their hostility toward one another made so much sense it was annoying.
If anyone knew what it was like to be resentful toward a relative, it was me.
And I hadn’t known.
I hadn’t even had a clue after nine years of knowing the older man.
Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe I had misunderstood, but I seriously, seriously doubted it. Why else would Rip use the “mom” word around Mr. Cooper? If they were related by any other means, I bet it would have been brought up by that point. And the years made sense. Hadn’t Rip said he was eighteen when his mom had died? Hadn’t Mr. C remarried a year later and been with Lydia twenty-two years?
They were related.
They had to be.
And they had kept it a secret.
Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets hurt someone.
It wasn’t the time to focus on that, I tried to tell myself. It was time to worry about Mr. Cooper. This had nothing to do with me.
Sometimes, it was a lot easier to accept things when you realized that at the end of the day, you were just an innocent casualty in a train wreck that had been caused by something that had slowly rusted and fallen apart over decades.
Going up to my tiptoes to stretch my calves, I took in the grave, withdrawn expression on Ripley’s face as he sat in his chair a few feet away from the one I had been in, and asked, “Rip? Do you want anything? I can get you a soda too if you don’t want coffee.”
He still didn’t take his attention away from the television as he said in a gravelly, tight voice, “No.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d even eaten his lunch. I hadn’t felt like eating mine after everything that had happened with my cousin. “Something to eat?” I asked, battling that helpless feeling for the man in the operation room.
“No.”
I saw his fingers spread where they were on his thighs, watched the way he flicked his gaze up to me as his lips parted a little, this… annoyed expression coming over his face. I knew that expression. I’d seen my parents make the same one enough times over my life.
Specifically when I would try to talk to them and just ended up bothering them instead. It was their stupid idiot kid face. Like they pitied me for caring. For wanting something that they knew I wouldn’t get, something I should have known they wouldn’t give me, but had been too young to understand.
It was the face they made right before I had a reason to feel regret.
“I don’t fucking want anything, Luna, okay?” he said so calmly it was eerie.
I swallowed. I reminded myself that he might be feeling guilty and angry because someone he had a history with was in the hospital, and he felt bad. Someone who might be his father. Maybe.
So I tried to shrug it off. I tried to forgive him for that face that made my stomach clench harder. I tried to tell myself that sometimes people didn’t know what they needed or wanted when they were suffering. Nobody was rational when they were upset. Not even me. I had asked this man to break someone’s hand for me in retaliation hours ago. Hello, hypocrite.
“Are you sure?” I didn’t drop it, because I knew he needed to eat or at least drink something. “I don’t think you’ve eaten anything and—”
That ugly, ugly expression didn’t go anywhere, that calm, weird, soft voice sticking around his vocal cords. “I already fucking said I don’t want anything, okay?” he growled.
His dad had a heart attack and you need to be patient with him, I told myself, told my heart as it hurt and my stomach as it got impossibly tighter.
I kept my gaze on his face, and told him patiently, “I’m just asking, Rip. You don’t have to bite my head off. I’m only trying to help. I won’t ask again, okay?”
This man who had slept in my bed rolled his eyes. His hands opened and closed on his thighs, and I tried to prepare myself. Tried to tell myself, kill him with kindness. Choose patience. And that all fell apart and away as this man I knew but didn’t know snarled, “Go back to the shop, Luna. I’m not in the mood to deal with your shit.”
Deal with my shit?
Okay. All right. He was dealing with stuff. I had to remember that. I had to. He didn’t mean what he said. So I kept my voice as friendly and patient as I could muster. “I’m here for Mr. Cooper.” Then I tried to give him a little smile. A patient one, so he would know I was just trying to help. If I didn’t care about him, I wouldn’t give a crap about his calorie or liquid intake. Didn’t he know that? “I’m here for you too, Rip. You shouldn’t be here alone.”
It was his head cocking to the side that put me even more on edge. The tone of his voice didn’t help. Not at all.
“I’m not in the mood, do you get me? I don’t need you to worry about me right now. What I need is for you to give me some space without worrying about hurting your feelings.”
I wanted to flinch, but I didn’t. “You don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings.”
“I always worry about hurting your fucking feelings, Luna. Give me a break,” he snapped.
It didn’t surprise me that I didn’t reel back at his words. Not even if his statement stung me like a burn under hot water. “Since when?” I asked him, hearing the tension in my voice and not liking how he was making me feel.
This man shook his head. “I’m not in the fucking mood.”
He wasn’t in the mood?
“I’m not in the mood to have you be mean to me when I’m only trying to be your friend,” I replied, feeling my face go hot and indignation fill my soul at how he was just trying to get rid of me like we were strangers.
He had slept in my bed the night before. He had made me lunch and dinner. Bought me breakfast.
Friends were there for each other, and that’s what I was doing. Trying to watch out for him. Be there for him.
And he was pushing me away, and not in a nice way.
The next few words out of his mouth proved it. “You’re trying to be my friend? Be my friend by giving me some space before I say or do something I’ll end up regretting later. Give me some space so that later on I don’t have to feel bad for making you feel bad.”
Maybe I should have let it go, should have walked away and given him the space he wanted, but it had been a long day and I felt riled. Prickled. Hurt already physically and emotionally. I didn’t feel like letting him steamroll me.
Especially after everything that had happened lately with the funeral and my sisters and my dad. Maybe if my sister hadn’t kicked me out of her place, or these wounds from my dad hadn’t been reopened, or if my cousin hadn’t just shown up to my work to try and hurt me… Maybe I could have let it go if all those things hadn’t existed so recently. If they hadn’t rubbed me raw as much as they already had.
Now this? From him of all people?
I didn’t like being threatened, especially not today.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked him cautiously, fear pooling in my stomach as I tried to think about him having things to
say that would intentionally hurt me.
“Drop it.”
Drop it? There was something to drop? My heart started beating faster, and that survival instinct told me to let it go. Told me this wasn’t worth it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I repeated myself. “What would you say to me that would hurt my feelings?”
The face he made… the face he made warned me. It was the only preface I was going to get before he aimed blue-green eyes at me like they had fire in them.
“Tell me,” I kept going even though some part of me knew I didn’t want to know.
“Stop.”
I couldn’t though. I couldn’t. Not today. Not after this life I’d been living for so long where it seemed like half my loved ones didn’t trust me or didn’t value me enough. I didn’t want to take it from one other person I was so invested in. I didn’t want Rip to be on that list. Was that so wrong? “I want to know. I don’t want you to tiptoe around me because you think I’m weak or pathetic. I’m not. I’m not either. I want you to tell me.”
His expression alone might have killed me. “Yeah? That’s what you want?” he asked, something about his tone almost cruel. “I’ve known what you fucking did to your family from the day we went to the funeral, Luna. It’s not some fucking secret. I knew. Everyone fucking knew, Jesus Christ.”
Don’t you let him see you flinch.
But he wasn’t stopping. He wasn’t freaking done. “You wanna know how I knew? You wanna know the truth? I didn’t read about the bust in the paper. I knew about it because that gang you asked me if I was in wasn’t a gang. I was in an MC. A motorcycle club. The Reapers. And we didn’t fuck with your family’s drugs, but I’d met your uncle. I’d met your dad. I heard all about the girl that got half the family arrested. I knew about you before I met you.”
Some rational part of my brain tried to tell the rest of it that what he was saying wasn’t a big deal. That it didn’t change anything. That it didn’t mean anything.
I wasn’t embarrassed by it. I didn’t feel bad about it.
But…
“Cooper’s known the entire time too, so you know. He told me years ago that he’d hired a PI to look into you, and he’s always known where you came from and who your family was.”
He’d known too. For who knows how long, maybe from the beginning, he had known.
And he’d never said a word.
I could understand keeping his first wife a secret. Maybe, I could even understand him keeping Rip a secret if I really wanted to be logical. But he’d known about my background and never said anything? Not in nine years?
“Is that good enough? Will you go now and give me a fucking break, or do I need to spell it out for you? Leave me alone.”
Leave me alone, my sister had projected at me wordlessly countless times.
Leave me alone, my dad had hissed at me countless more.
Leave me alone.
I could have held a whole lot of anger in my heart. When people like Thea or Kyra made me upset, there were a million things I could have thought of to hurt them, but I never would. Because I would never want anyone I loved to hurt because of me. I would go out of my way to make sure that didn’t happen.
Yet…
I froze. I blinked, and I swallowed as I said, almost woodenly, attempting to ignore the familiarity of what had come out of his mouth, “I’m only trying to be your friend.”
“Does it look like I give a fuck about that right now?”
I had gotten real good at getting crapped on by people. By being taken advantage of.
But not from people who I thought I could trust. Who had made me believe that I could. Yet here I was.
You can’t make anyone love you or care about you. I knew that better than anyone.
The hairs on my arms stood up, my back prickled, and I just went… numb as I stood there, looking down at the man I had cared for, for years. The one who had started to make me feel that I wasn’t a nuisance, that it was okay to ask him for things. That had made me feel safe. Understood.
And I realized the burn in me was actually a freezer burn.
Leave me alone, Lucas Ripley had just said to me.
I didn’t have much pride, but I had enough.
Maybe Rip couldn’t put things together enough, but I had left the people who hadn’t wanted me around and never looked back. Enough was enough. I was over it—those words, getting shoved aside by all these people I cared about, being made to feel dispensable—that all of this felt like acid on my soul.
He wanted me to leave him alone too? He didn’t want to be my friend? He wanted to keep things from me like everyone freaking else?
Biting the inside of my cheek, I kept my gaze steady on him as that freezer burn pain spread through me. I could feel it in the pores of my face, along my mouth, in my eyes.
I should have let it go, I knew. I should have avoided this conversation, but I hadn’t. I had walked right into this, and this pain was all my own freaking fault. I had nobody else to blame but myself.
Then again, he could have said just about anything else to me, too, that wouldn’t hurt half as bad.
But the funny things was: he hadn’t. I was fed up. I was so damn tired I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt more exhausted. And all of a sudden, so lonely I couldn’t bear it.
This was what I got for hoping. For forgetting.
Everyone deserves love, but there are people that don’t want it, no matter how desperately and truly you might give it to them.
I took a step back and then another, giving him one single nod as I said with a calmness he didn’t deserve, “You’re right, Mr. Ripley. You knew better than me that you could hurt my feelings, but you did it anyway.” I bit the inside of my cheek and squeezed the hell out of my soul. “I’m sorry for stepping over the line. I’m sorry for pushing you. I won’t ever do it again.”
I didn’t shed one single tear as I turned around and walked out of the waiting room. I didn’t shed a tear as I made it to the cafeteria and got myself coffee. And when I carried it back with me to the same waiting room where I’d left the last person to ever break my heart, I was proud of myself.
Just because he didn’t even want my support didn’t mean that I was going to run and hide, not when someone I cared about and someone who cared about me right back was undergoing surgery. Lucas Ripley might have kicked me in the chest just now, but he wasn’t going to make me forget why I was there.
This was for Mr. Cooper. The man who wouldn’t have kicked me out of the room. The one who had been there for me time and time again.
Maybe he had known where I had come from, and that hurt me that he would keep so much from me, but I’d deal with that later. Deal with it when I knew he was fine. I wouldn’t hold any bad feelings toward him when I wasn’t sure if he was even going to be okay.
Thanks to the clear glass that was used as walls for the room, I could see it was still empty except for the one dark-haired man I was not going to look at.
I kept my chin up high as I took the same seat I’d been in before instead of taking one further away from my boss.
Then I sat back, put my eyes on the television screen, and didn’t look at Ripley again until thirty minutes later when a doctor came in, asking for relatives of Mr. Cooper’s. I eavesdropped long enough in the conversation to hear that he had made it through surgery successfully but would be in intensive care for the time being, which could be hours or days. Until then, only family.
And that was one thing I wasn’t. Any of their family.
Maybe I didn’t have the best basis for what a family was supposed to be like, but I was fed up with being lied to. Fed up with being kicked aside, over and over and over again. Even I knew that wasn’t what family was supposed to be like.
Leave me alone.
I was fucking sick of it. Sick of those words. Sick of even myself.
I picked up my phone, dialed Lydia’s number, and waited for her to answer. When s
he finally did, apologizing for being with a client, I told her what happened. Then I listened to her wail of shock and her promise to be there as soon as possible.
Only at that point did I get up and leave; as much as my heart might tell me otherwise, I wasn’t family.
My family consisted of a dad who had threatened to kill me, a brother who had walked out on us, a cousin who had tried to beat me up, two lying sisters, and the one and only person who loved me as much as I loved her.
I loved myself enough to know what I deserved.
And this… shit… that had just happened, was not one of those things.
There weren’t enough donuts or homemade lunches in the world to make this worth it. That was for freaking sure.
Chapter 26
The news that Mr. Cooper, our beloved boss, had suffered a heart attack had shaken up everyone at the shop. It hadn’t been a major one, but it had been severe enough that his doctors had insisted that he take his time coming back. That he rested. That he manage his stress levels better.
Lydia had been kind enough to call me soon after I’d left the hospital—in the process asking why I hadn’t waited for her—and then kept me up to date on how he was doing. The next day, I went to visit him again just as Grandpa Gus was leaving the hospital.
“You saved me, honey,” my boss had whispered when I’d made it over to his bed the day after his heart attack.
I had reached out to take his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze as I smiled down at the lined, still too pale face, trying not to think about what could have happened to him if it hadn’t been a minor attack. I’d made the mistake of reading that heart disease was the leading cause of deaths in the country. “All I did was give you an aspirin,” I told him, trying my best to ignore the sting of pain when I thought about the things he had kept from me for so long.
“You told me to buy a new bottle of aspirin when the last one had expired, do you remember? You insisted I get aspirin, ‘just in case, Mr. C,’” he tried to argue in his weaker-than-usual voice, giving my hand another squeeze.
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