Playing with Fire_Shen

by Shen, L. J.

  “Grams, no. You don’t know—”

  “I do know.” Her voice was low. Eerily calm all of a sudden. “Grace. Gracie-Mae. Quite the nuisance you are, Gracie. You were the reason she ran away. Did you know that? You were too much. Too loud, too whiny, too demanding. When she gave you to me, I looked at you and all I thought about was that I’d got myself a raw deal. A granddaughter for a daughter. I never wanted you. You took her away from me. You.” She pointed a shaky finger at me, her nostrils flaring, her lips turning blue, along with her ever-paling skin in the cold water. She was going to catch pneumonia, and I needed to get her out of there, but I couldn’t stop her stream of words. “You no-good Devil’s daughter! My only consolation is, God has already done the work for me. Punished you with this face. Paid you back for all your sins!”

  She tilted her head up to the ceiling, smiling, as if touched by an invisible ray of sun. She pressed her eyes shut, a bitter chuckle leaving her mouth. “They all think that you did it. All of them. No one knows our little secret, Gracie-Mae. No one knows what I did that night.”

  There was a loaded pause before she went in for the kill.

  “I did it on purpose. Left the cigarette next to my nightcap and let it catch. I didn’t want to live anymore. Didn’t want you to either.”

  A feral scream tore through my throat. I launched at the old lady, gripping the hem of her dress and hurling her out of the bathtub, dragging her out to the hallway and into her room to dry her up. I dumped her onto the flowery linen of her bed like a sack of potatoes, throwing a towel over her and patting her dry. She fought me, but I still took care of her.

  Me and my ugly face.

  Me and my dead mother.

  The broken flame ring seared my skin, and I wanted to dump it on the floor and stomp on it a thousand times. Grandmomma was wrong. It never granted me any wishes. It just reminded me that I was an unwanted child.

  Grandma Savannah blamed me for all of this. For Courtney crumbling down. For the Shaw household following in her footsteps. I was the responsibility Grams had been saddled with, a dead weight, someone she wanted to get rid of.

  We wrestled on her bed, me on top, tears blurring my vision. I was almost done drying her up when I felt a strong hand on my shoulder.

  “Go, Tex. I’m taking over.”

  “But I …”

  “Go.”

  I turned around, running away, not daring to look him in the eye and see what was there. Everything about me was complicated and disheartening, and I wondered, for the millionth time, why West had stuck around when he could have had something so much better with any of the beauties who worshipped the ground he walked upon.

  Selfishly—oh, so selfishly—I locked the bathroom door and took a shower, ignoring the filled bathtub not a foot away from me. There were soaked towels on the floor, toothbrushes, and soap scattered everywhere.

  I focused on scrubbing every inch of myself clean under the scorching water, shedding the god-awful day from my body—my ugly, scarred face included.

  Then I tiptoed to the hallway. I heard West behind Grams’ door, soothing her quietly to sleep, an unwarranted arrow of jealousy ripping through my heart.

  I should be the one being comforted in his arms. He is mine.

  I slinked into my room before the urge to start a catfight with my elderly, Alzheimer-suffering grandmother overtook me.

  I put my jammies on and collapsed on my bed, staring at the ceiling. The tears ran freely down my cheeks. For the first time in years, I didn’t try to stop them.

  After Grandmomma’s soft snores filled the hallway, I listened as West stomped about the floor. I heard him cleaning up the bathroom, mopping the hallway and the stairs, and going down to the kitchen to brew some coffee.

  Listening to him living, breathing, existing in my realm by my side, was reassuring. He was a godsend. I couldn’t have handled Grams on my own tonight.

  Eventually, it sounded like he ascended the stairs, put the two mugs of coffee down on the floor outside my room, and pressed his forehead against the door from the other side.

  It scared me how well I knew his body language. The way he carried himself around my house. I could practically envision him doing all that.

  “Open the door, Texas.”

  In my haze, I’d forgotten to reapply my makeup. I didn’t want to face him. Not when I knew he’d heard all the ugly things Grams had said about me while the phone was on. It was bad enough that I was atrocious, without anyone seeing me.

  I’d been broken many a times, but never quite like I had been today.

  I didn’t answer him.

  “I want to see your face.”

  The urgency in his voice startled me. He sounded choked up, on the brink of something I didn’t want him to go through.

  “Okay. Give me five!” I swung my legs sideways on my bed.

  “Bare.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks, halfway to my desk to pull out my makeup kit.

  Fear glided up my spine like a deadly snake, wrapping its length around my neck, choking my breath.

  “You don’t know what you’re askin’,” I said thickly, throwing his words back at him. I still remembered how he thought I wouldn’t be able to forgive him had I known what he did to make him the way he was.

  “Fucking try me.”

  “You heard her. I’m ugly. The Devil’s daughter.”

  “You’re beautiful. My girlfriend,” he countered.

  “She wanted to kill us …” I broke down, sobbing, still standing in my room aimlessly. It took him a moment to answer me.

  “No. She was confused and vindictive. She wanted to hurt you. She never wanted to kill you. The fire was an accident.”

  But there was no way either of us could know. The truth of the matter was that I was never going to be able to ask lucid Grams this question. It was too painful for everyone involved.

  I stepped toward the mirror on my study and blinked back at myself, catching a glimpse of what West was about to see in a few seconds. There wasn’t a lick of makeup on my face. My history—my tragedy—was written all over it, like a scream.

  The melted complexion of my left side. My slightly crooked left eye, a tad smaller than my right one due to the scar tissue pulled around it after the reconstructive surgery. The missing eyebrow. The purple … everything.

  Gingerly, I moved toward the door. I put my hand on the handle and threw it open before I lost my nerve.

  West and I stood in front of one another silently.

  I watched him watching me. He took it all in, gulping every inch of me. His eyes ran the length of my left side, inking it to memory.

  He cannot unsee what he is seeing, I reminded myself. From now on, every time he looks at you, with or without makeup, this is what he will see.

  West’s expression didn’t give away what he was thinking. I felt my insides collapsing like a demolished skyscraper imploding and knew that if he chose to walk away from me, my phoenix wasn’t going to be able to fight its way past the ruins.

  But he didn’t walk away.

  He took a step into my room, raising his hand. He traced his fingers over my scars so gently that I wanted to cry, staring into my eyes, gazing at my naked soul. His fingers were trembling. I snatched his hand and kissed it. One of my tears caught between his index and middle finger.

  “Listen to me carefully, Grace Shaw. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life. When I look at you, I see a fighter. I see resilience and strength and defiance that no one can touch. You take my breath away, and no one—and nothing—will change that.”

  I closed my eyes and opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I tried again, searching for my own voice. I didn’t know what was going to come out of my mouth.

  The truth, I supposed. The most vulnerable secret a person could tell.

  “I love you. I’m terrified of loving you, but I do, nonetheless,” I admitted gruffly. “Have since the moment you helped me find Gra
ms that terrible night, not letting me refuse the help I so obviously needed. My heart is in your fist.”

  He kicked the door shut behind him, diving in for the kiss to end all kisses.

  It was the kiss that rewrote our history.

  A kiss that made me feel like the most beautiful girl in the world.

  A kiss that tasted like victory.

  “I won’t break it.”

  West

  The kiss tasted like a lie.

  I’d said I wouldn’t break Grace’s heart, but I could already see myself doing it.

  As I undressed her.

  Made love to her.

  I needed to put some distance between us. Kade Appleton had been watching me, I knew. And almost living at her house put a target on her.

  When dawn broke, I grabbed my stuff and made my way home.

  I was waiting at an intersection when a helmeted man on a Harley came out of nowhere and crashed into me. I was thrown off my bike, hurled onto the middle of the road. Luckily, there weren’t any other vehicles at butt-crack o’clock.

  I twisted on the gravel, hissing as I held one of my hands tightly with the other. I’d landed wrong and could already tell I’d broken at least two fingers. The sound of heavy boots on concrete came thudding toward me, and I looked up to see who wore them.

  When he reached me, the man leaned down, crouching to my eye level, bracing himself on his knees. There was nothing I wanted more than to tear the helmet from his face and introduce his nose to my fist, but I couldn’t move.

  “Nice little girlfriend you have there. Shame if somethin’ happened to her, eh?”

  He turned around and walked away, back to his Harley.

  I had to keep Grace safe, no matter the cost.

  Even if it meant losing her.

  Grace

  A week into rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire, and even though Marla had been agitated and West had been mysteriously distant (and sported some seriously freaky-looking fingers, presumably after his last fight), I knew I had one thing going for me:

  I was thriving onstage.

  True, the amount of makeup I required to actually go onstage was sure to make me go bankrupt, but the ball cap was off, and I enjoyed being Blanche. Being trapped in her head was a lot like being in Gram’s head, I assumed. Confused, but smart. Sweet, but feisty. Lost, but found.

  I’d decided not to think about the things Grams had told me that day in the bathtub. Something I’d told Tess resonated with me—if I couldn’t change something, I had to let it go. Even if my grandmother truly believed I was the source to all of her woes, I couldn’t change it. Not now. Probably not ever.

  Finlay salivated over my performance at rehearsals, and Lauren was always sitting a few rows from the stage, cheering and clapping whenever I nailed a scene.

  Even Tess had simmered down. We weren’t exactly friendly, but she was professional and made a point of not throwing any more crappy remarks my way.

  We were in the midst of an early morning rehearsal, so close to the night of the premiere I could almost touch it, when we took a ten-minute break. I scurried backstage and grabbed a drink of water, talking to Finlay and Aiden after crushing the scene in which Stanley rapes Blanche.

  Tess swaggered up next to me, talking to Kelly, the producer.

  “Seriously, I’m so happy I started dating Reign. He is so there for me, you know? I just don’t need complex right now.” She flung her hair to one shoulder.

  If it was meant for my ears, she was wasting her breath. I hoped she and Reign were happy together. However, if she thought dating someone who had been mean to me would throw me off-kilter, she was wrong.

  Finlay continued talking to me as Tess sighed dramatically behind my back. “I really couldn’t see myself dating someone so dangerous and imbalanced like West. This answers-to-no-one gig just gets old at some point, you know?”

  Yeah, I was sure her decision had nothing to do with the fact West had ignored her repeatedly since they’d hooked up.

  “I mean, look at him, going on a second fight against this Kade Appleton guy next Friday. Who does that? Only someone with a death wish. No, thank you. I like to sleep at night knowing my boyfriend is in one piece. Even Reign tells him he should back out of the fight. But it’s a well-known fact West cares about money more than he does about the people in his life.”

  My mind filled with red fog as her words sank deep into my stomach, settling in there like rocks.

  He took the fight after all.

  He had lied to me.

  I’d asked him … No—I’d begged him to promise me that he wouldn’t pull any of the crap he fed to other girls on me, and he did.

  He made me a promise, and he’d broken it.

  “I need to … I need to go …”

  Finlay, who was midsentence, closed his mouth, frowning at me in confusion. I grabbed my JanSport and rushed out of the auditorium. It was probably an eyeful for Tess, who must’ve known I wasn’t privy to the information she’d fed me. If any of it was even true.

  Maybe she just wanted West and me to fight.

  There was only one way to find out.

  I burst into the hallway, looking around frantically, expecting to find West in the sea of students. This was the building he had most of his classes in, so it made sense. I scanned the ocean of heads, but couldn’t see him. I didn’t even know if he was on campus. Sher U wasn’t exactly small and consisted of a few different faculties. I took out my phone and hit dial on his name.

  Straight to voicemail. I tried again. Same outcome. I texted him.

  Grace: Call me. It’s urgent.

  Pushing the double doors open, I searched for him outside. By the fountain. At the gym. Then headed to the cafeteria. I wanted to strangle him. Now I knew how his parents must’ve felt. I was about to head out of the cafeteria, get in the pickup, and drive to his house when I noticed a head of auburn curls in the corner of the cafeteria.

  Max.

  My legs carried me to him, my mind focused on one thing—preventing West from getting into the ring next Friday. Next Friday. That was why he was so agitated this week. Lord help me.

  Max was chatting up a pretty girl, leaning over the wall she was plastered against. I tapped his back. He turned around slowly, his smile vanishing when he saw my face.

  Feeling’s mutual, pal.

  “Uh, hey?”

  “Hi. I’m Grace Shaw.”

  “Okay,” he said as he pushed his sunglasses up his head. “How can I help you, Grace Shaw?” He made a show of repeating my full name, like it had been dumb of me to introduce myself like that. The girl next to him snorted.

  “You’re West’s bookie, right?”

  His chest broadened boastfully, and he flashed me a grin.

  “That’s right. You’re his flavor of the week, right?”

  I ignored his jab.

  “I’m here to ask you to stop the fight on Friday from happenin’.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.” I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t want him in the ring with Appleton.”

  “West’s a big boy.”

  “He’s also not doin’ the smart thing here, and we both know that.”

  “He’s about to make more money than he made in a year and a half, so with all due respect—and I have none toward you because I don’t actually know you—we’ll agree to disagree.”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but he shouldered past me, forgetting about the girl he was leaving behind. He wanted to run away from this conversation before it got ugly, not knowing it was too late for that. I followed him.

  “Now, I suggest if you have issues with the fight, you take it up with him personally. I’m not his momma.”

  I caught his wrist in a death grip, every bone in my body burning with anger. He stopped.

  “If you let this fly,” I bit out every word, my teeth clenched tightly together as I spoke, “I’ll go to the authorities with this information.”

  As
soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were the wrong ones. Max stilled. The chatter around the cafeteria halted. Disaster hung in the air, fat and swollen, ready to blow in my face.

  No one snitched on Max and West.

  No one had informed the authorities about the Sheridan Plaza parties. For years.

  That was the rule.

  And I’d just threatened to break it.

  Max turned slowly to face me, but it was West who made my heart leap in my chest. I saw him galloping from the entrance in my direction, Easton and Reign on either side of him. His eyes skimmed the room, and when they found what they were looking for—me—he headed straight in my direction.

  The first time he’d acknowledged my existence at school since we started dating, and I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like it.

  Someone had tipped him off about my public argument with Max.

  West knew what was happening.

  Knew I knew about his fight. About his lies.

  But I wasn’t the one who was supposed to feel the way I did. Angry, flushed, and scared. He’d broken a promise. He had a lot to answer for.

  West came to a screeching halt in front of me, all bronzed muscles and barely contained fury. I took a step back and reminded myself that this was the same man who worshipped me between the sheets every night. Who acted as a caregiver to my grandmother when I broke apart. Who cared.

  “Is there a problem here?” His voice dripped ice. He stared me down like I was a complete stranger again. Devoid of any emotions. I took a deep breath.

  Really? That’s how you talk to me in public?

  “There is, actually.” I tipped my nose up. I spotted Tess in my periphery, behind West’s back, standing next to Reign. They were pushing and whispering to each other.

  “I told you not to tell her. He didn’t want her to know.” Reign groaned, and Tess shrugged helplessly, looking humbled for the first time since I’d started dating her crush.

  “You lied to me, West. I asked you about taking a fight with Appleton, and you flat-out lied.”