by Kate Meader
Her eyes go wide. Shit, I—shit. That wasn’t supposed to come out like that. It wasn’t supposed to come out at all.
“Grant, what are you talking about?”
She touches my jaw, and I recoil in self-disgust. The last time we fought like this, I fucked her in a diner restroom, pouring all my anger into sex that won’t solve anything in the long term. I can’t do that again.
I’d expected that Aubrey would play her part and be the one to walk out of this argument. For the first time in fuck-knows-how-long, that privilege is mine.
Chapter 20
Aubrey
Grant walked out on me, and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.
It’s okay.
God knows we’ve hurt each other, and it’s about time he told me off for being the crazy one in this relationship. But what he said…he can’t possibly believe that, can he?
I exit the restroom corridor and run smack into my mother. The look on her face makes it very clear she heard every last word of that exchange with Grant.
“Here to make this all about you?” I snap.
She doesn’t even look surprised, which means that maybe Grant’s right and I should have lost my shit with her years ago.
“What happened, Aubrey, with the baby—I wish you had told me.”
“Why? So you could tell me how disappointed you were that I couldn’t even get that right?”
Shock crosses my mother’s face. Of all the things to move her…
“Chérie, I don’t know what to say,” she says, for what might be the first time in her life.
I don’t have time to soothe her. All I can think is that Grant needs me. For years, he’s been holding on to my shit and his own. Hearing this from Marie-Claire is an irony I’m not quite ready to wrap my head around.
He’s not in the foyer. He’s not in the bar. I spot him outside talking to the valet.
“Grant!”
His body freezes up, and he speaks without turning. “Go back inside. It’s too cold.”
“We have to talk.” I move around to face him.
“No. No, we don’t. We’re all out of words. That’s what you want, right?” He takes off his jacket and throws it over my shoulders, which is so fucking Grant.
“I need to know what you meant. About not being able to keep your hands off me.”
His face twists in pain just as the valet arrives with his car.
“I can’t be here, Aubrey. With these people. With this toxicity.” He looks over my shoulder. “You should go back inside.”
The implication is that I belong with the toxic people. I don’t. I belong with this man who fills up my soul and never leaves me empty.
“I’m coming with you.”
Instead of arguing, he opens the passenger door. I step inside, so does he, and then we’re off, a twenty-minute drive weighted with a crushing silence neither of us seems capable of breaking. I want to question him about what he said, but it seems really important to focus on navigating the icy roads without dying. In my head, I try to parse the words.
I couldn’t keep my hands off you, and our baby is dead.
Grant’s always been so aware of his size. He’s a big, husky guy who is completely in charge of his body—and mine, too. He’s never hurt me, but he seems to think…oh, God, he thinks he might bear some responsibility for what happened that night.
Back at the house, he parks and exits the car, stalking toward the house. Whether I follow doesn’t seem to concern him, but I do. Of course I do.
Inside, it’s quiet as the grave. “Grant, stop.”
He turns, and we stare like we’re seeing each other for the first time. I want to ask him a million questions, poke and pry and pick at the scabs. But mostly I want to feel everything he does.
We fly at each other, clawing and hungry, hurt and on fire, smashing our mouths together.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as his tears mingle with mine. Tears for what we lost and what we’ve missed. All this wasted time when we should have been healing together.
“No, please,” I beg, not sure what I’m urging him to do.
Don’t apologize.
Don’t take this on your broad shoulders.
Don’t stop loving me in all the ways I don’t deserve.
He slips a strong arm under my thighs, lifting me into his steady embrace, then takes the stairs two at a time. I love his strength, the obvious physicality of it and the less obvious internal fortitude that keeps his heart so steady.
“Grant, I—”
“It’s okay. No more talking,” he says, though it’s the opposite of okay. I’ve made a mess of everything. He’s offering to do it my way, use our bodies to express it all. I’ve worn him down and made him come around to my way of thinking, a victory I can’t in any way savor.
The next few minutes are hushed and urgent, weighted with the knowledge that we can’t go back and forward is just as uncertain. We’re caught in this no-man’s-land of lust and pain.
His hands move across my nakedness, first with care, then with necessary roughness. It’s how I like it. How I’ve always liked it, and that he should have beat himself up over how he touched me that night…oh, my love.
I grasp his ass and mold him to my body. “What you need, baby. Everything you need.”
He’s inside me before I’ve spoken the last word, filling me so completely because his cock belongs there. Is part of me. He’s squeezing his eyes shut, but I wouldn’t dream of closing mine. I don’t want to miss him pumping all his strength and emotion into me. I’ve always loved to watch him, especially that moment when he’s close to bringing me off. He gets this slight, smug twist to his mouth.
But not today. Today’s different because everything has changed. We’re not the same. We’re not better, but we’re better together.
“I love you,” I whisper, and those words I’ve withheld so long cause his eyelids to snap open. All that heated blueness. They’re liquid and filled with more than lust.
“I love you,” I say again, concerned he hasn’t heard me. Really absorbed the words.
He thrusts harder, and I arch up into him, the orgasm building and sparking and conquering me so fast I didn’t see it coming. But he’s not finished with me.
He slips out and turns me over, his brute hands spreading my legs for his pleasure. I’m expecting a hard thrust—I welcome it—but that’s not what I get because Grant has never played to my expectations. Now his soft tongue bathes me in love, each flick over my sensitive tissues a beautiful torment. Still no words, only our desperate moans filling the air.
It doesn’t take long—it never does—and soon my heart and lungs are flying apart, scattered to all corners of the room, the earth, and the heavens beyond. Before I can seal my organs together again, he’s back inside me in one brute stroke. But it’s gentle, too.
It’s Grant, my protector.
Still buried in each other, we fall to the bed in a spoon. Grant covers my breast with his big hand while he leaves no spot inside me untouched. Every corner found, nowhere left to hide. His hand moves up to my chin to turn me toward him, ensuring I see everything he wants me to see.
He doesn’t tell me he loves me. I know it with every stroke inside me, with every grunt from his throat, with every flash of those eyes.
I know it because he’s crying.
His body shakes when he comes, then goes as still as the air around us. I try to hold on to consciousness—it seems important to stay awake in this moment—but I slip away into the sleep of the guilty.
* * *
—
When I awake, he’s still here, his gaze on me, keeping me safe.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
His smile is everything
. “I worked you good, Bean. It’s okay to rest. It’s only been an hour.”
So everyone is still at the party. Good. Grant and I need to talk before the circus comes back to town.
“What you said before about taking the blame for the baby—surely you don’t think that?”
He closes his eyes for a moment, then reopens them slowly. “Sometimes I was rough with you. You’re so tiny, and I loved dominating you, my big oafish body ruling your petite frame. And that night I couldn’t help thinking that I’d had some part in it. And I couldn’t ’fess up, so I tried to stay away from you after. Be careful.”
While I was spending my mourning period trying to re-seduce my husband, he was battered with guilt over the imagined role he’d played in our tragedy.
I curl my hand around the back of his head and pull him close. “Nothing you did caused the miscarriage, Grant. It was just one of those things. Some weakness in me—”
“No. Don’t take this on. Not again. It wasn’t your fault.”
Ah, but…“It wasn’t the first time.”
He leans up on his elbow, his eyes blue flames. “What do you mean?”
“It happened in law school. In our second year. I didn’t even know I was pregnant, but I had awful cramps and thought it was just a really bad period. Stressed about exams or something.” The words gush out of me with a whoosh that sucks in all the air around us. “But I was late, and it was at the wrong time, and—”
“Did you see a doctor?” he snaps.
I nod. “She said it was probably a miscarriage, that it’s more common than you’d think. I didn’t want to worry you. It seemed easier to try to get past it. Move on.”
“Easier.” The word is quiet. Lethal.
My heart’s flapping like a baby bird’s wings. “I didn’t want to put that on you. Another problem.”
He sits up, leaning thick forearms on his knees. “This had happened to you before, years ago, and when it happened again, you didn’t want to burden me with it? We were going through the shittiest time of our lives, unable to communicate, barely able to crawl through the pain, and you wouldn’t even tell me this funda-fucking-mental thing that was tangible, that we could focus on to get over the hump. That maybe we should be doing more medically or talking about it from a different angle.”
“I was too caught up in the present. In what was happening to me now. Then.”
Disgust dims his eyes, and I realize I’ve made a huge mistake.
I should have given him that. Told him everything so it would absolve him of any guilt he might be feeling. But I didn’t even realize he was carrying that.
Because you didn’t ask, Aubrey. Because you don’t know how to.
“I knew I had this problem, and when I realized it might be the thing that destroyed the dream you had of a family—”
“You were the dream, Aubrey! I wanted you. The woman who loves me enough to tell me her deepest, darkest fears. But you know what? She doesn’t exist. She’s a figment I invented because I was blinded by the rest. The out-of-my-league beauty who graced her favor on the southern boy. I’d love it if she had my children, but if we weren’t blessed, we could have figured out a solution because there are a million kids out there in the rotten world who need loving parents. But you know what else they need? Parents who talk to each other. Who don’t keep it all in like they win prizes for who can shore up the most secrets and who can internalize the most pain.”
He rips back the covers and stalks around the bedroom, picking up his clothes.
Terror quivers through me. “Grant, I screwed up. I know that. But spilling my guts is new to me. It’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I can do it.”
“So you’ve said. But we were together for years, Aubrey, and you still never opened up. Not fully. You can blame your family or your upbringing, the pots of money or the goddamn country club, but when I needed you to give a little, you decided it was on a need-to-know basis.” He stabs his legs into his suit pants.
I don’t know what to say to him. It feels like we’re stuck in our one true fight, fated to go around in circles. I’m closed off and unavailable. He’s the paragon of communication I can’t appreciate. Two archetypes that can never meet in the middle.
He’s right. I don’t deserve him, and I’ll never make him happy.
He grabs his shirt off the floor but doesn’t put it on, torturing me with the sight of his strong chest—the one I may never get the privilege of touching again. “I’m heading to Georgia.”
“Okay.”
A sad, disbelieving headshake. “That’s it? Just okay?”
“You’re better off without me, Grant.”
“You fucking coward.”
The words strike me like an open-faced slap, though I deserve them fully. I deserve worse.
Two seconds later he’s gone.
Chapter 21
Aubrey
A plate of brownies whisper to me from their spot on the coffee table in Gran’s apartment. I suspect they’re riddled with pot.
“Jordie makes these for you?”
“What else is he going to do all day while I nap?”
Fair point.
I’m tempted to get high on my grandmother’s illegal baked goods, but I figure the glass of wine in my hand is more my speed.
I can’t believe he left me. Again.
You drove him away. Again.
“So, you’ve gotten yourself into quite the pickle, girl.”
“Every time I think we’re moving forward, I do something to lock us waist deep in mud.”
She sighs and takes a bite of her brownie. You’d swear the morsel sends her soaring on contact if her starry-eyed look is any indication.
“You should have told me, darling. About the baby, the divorce, everything.”
“I’m not like you, Libby. I might aspire to your level of no-fucks-given, but it’s just not in me to share like that.”
“You mean overshare?” She laughs warmly. “I know I talk too much and embarrass the hell out of you. I never expected you to be the same, but I hoped…” She trails off, her disappointment in me obvious.
“I’m glad you were there for Grant,” I say, truly meaning it, though the initial reveal hurt. “In a way I couldn’t be.”
“Did I ever tell you about the airman I had an affair with in 1943? He was going off to the front, and there I was, the prettiest of all the March girls….They called us the Wild Ones because we were unstoppable. I would have enlisted myself if they’d let me fight with the men. You girls today have it so easy. Can do whatever the hell you want.”
Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother hears a word I say. How is this related to anything that’s happening right now?
“Marvin McTavish was his name,” she continues. “He had a crop of red hair, and the carpet matched the drapes, I can tell you.”
Oh, God, I so don’t want to hear about my grandmother’s sexual conquests, especially when they’re made up. Marvin McTavish, my ass. “Is there a point to this story?”
“I’m getting there!” She sniffs, which I don’t buy, considering the source. “He died within twenty minutes of getting to France.”
“Wait, in 1943, you would have been only fourteen!”
“I know, I was a late developer. Marvin kissed me and said, ‘Don’t forget me, Lizzie.’ And I said, ‘Don’t call me Lizzie, you shithead. It’s Libby. You never listened to a word I said.’ ”
I wait for the punch line, fairly assured this will be a long one.
“Thing is, Grant did listen to you. He listened to you too well, and he let you make all the decisions about how this situation would play out. You dictated the schedule, the release of information.”
I know all this. “You’re suppose
d to be making me feel better.”
“You want to feel better? Eat a brownie! You want the truth, then listen to what I say.” She leans in and holds my chin. “I tried my best to make sure you weren’t like them, Aubrey. But you were too damn stubborn. You thought that shell of yours was a strength when it was really a weakness. Grant figured out how to get you to drop the act. He never wanted perfection because he thought he’d already found it. With you, scars and all.”
I swallow my emotion, feeling like I’m choking on it in my effort to hold it all in.
“I lost a baby, Libby.”
“I know, darling. And I’m so sorry.”
All that pain and emotion I’ve been keeping in bubbles and burns. Libby puts a bony arm around me and pulls me close.
“But worse, I lost the one person who wanted to be there for me. Because I wouldn’t let him.” My throat feels thick, my nose itchy, and then they come: those elusive tears. “I’ve made a complete mess of everything.”
“You were always so hard on yourself, darling. Like you had to prove you deserved your place here, when really you were worth a hundred of them. I see that, and so does Grant.”
“I’m—I’m too walled off for him. He needs someone softer. A nurturing type.”
My grandmother looks skeptical. “One nurturer per relationship is enough. Let Grant play to his strengths—taking care of you, putting up with your nonsense—and you give him what he needs.”
Which is what? Every marriage needs contributions from each partner. What gaps do I fill for Grant?
In answer to my unspoken plea, Libby says, “Passion, humor, drive. It all skipped a generation and went from me to you. But you shouldn’t have to go it alone, not when you have a man like that ready to step up. Just let him love you the way you deserve.”
Thing is, I don’t believe I deserve it, not from Grant. And until I realize my worth, what I can contribute to this relationship, then I’m not sure I can be the woman Grant needs me to be.