I stared at him, mouth forming wrong around everything I had left to say. His laughter settled into a smirk; his quirked eyebrow provided the crowning asshole touch. Anger welled like fevered blood, consuming my guilt. I’d compromised everything for this—set aside years of fear and pride, stuffed down every scrap of dignity until I choked, and he was fucking grinning. Did he really think I’d let him stand there and mock me? Did he even have a fuck to give?
“Don’t you dare, Connor,” I said, low. “You knew how I felt. You knew it all, and you wanted me anyway—you don’t get to blame me now for being honest.”
“Oh, trust me, I’m fully aware of my role in all of this.” Connor backed away, opened the warehouse door, stepped over the threshold. Turned away from me; my arms; my desperate, overflowing eyes. “Go on back to him. You have a chance to finally get what you want. You should take it.”
“Goddamn it, will you listen to me? That is not what I—”
The door clanged the end off my sentence.
I heard the click the second I touched the handle. This door hadn’t been locked a day since I’d known him, and he’d gone and fucking locked it in my face.
That son of a bitch had locked me out.
“Hey. HEY.” I yanked on the handle again, then pounded on the metal until it sang. “CONNOR, OPEN THIS DOOR.”
“I doubt he’s planning an encore.” Grey’s words were soft at my back. “I still don’t want to go in there, but I can text him for you, if you think it’ll help.”
“Ugh, no. I appreciate it, but that might be the worst idea you’ve ever had.” I stared at the sliding door another beat, then lashed out at it, my sudden violent kick echoing through the lot. “FUCK YOU, CONNOR. FUCK YOU.”
“Okay, Elaine, I think we’ve done enough. Come on.” Grey tugged me away from the door, steered me across the gravel to his waiting car. “Let’s go home.”
32
“SCORE ONE FOR APARTMENT LIVING, right?”
I blinked at Grey. He was flushed and breathless, slumped against a tree, rake handle gripped loosely in his tired hand. We’d spent the entire afternoon raking the yard, yet barely made a dent in the ankle-deep leaves. It didn’t matter that there were four of us, double that of every year previous, or that the day was sunny and cold and beautiful. It didn’t matter that we were all home at once, a rare occurrence made possible only by our school holiday break and the seasonal employee Dad had hired for the business. My back hurt. My knees hurt. My arms and feet and head and heart—everything hurt. All I wanted was to curl under a blanket and be still.
“I love these woods,” Grey continued. “I always hated our old apartment, with no yard and no trees. I always wanted a space like this. But leaves in general can kiss my ass.”
“Yep. Welcome to the reality of outdoor chores.” I ditched my rake and leaned against the tree beside him. Skye and Dad were still soldiering on at the other end of the lot, smiling at each other over a half-full lawn bag. Yard work was shockingly less efficient when forty-five of every sixty seconds were spent gazing into each other’s eyes. “Wait until it’s time to shovel snow and salt the icy sidewalks.”
“I preferred the bulb planting. That was fun. That was the day I really started to feel at home here.”
“Yeah, I remember.” The bulb planting, Jesus Christ. That was a day that could pass without further mention into eternity, a stitch slipping unnoticed from the needle. The starting point of our unraveling.
Not that I wasn’t weirdly nostalgic for the simple days of unrequited longing; Grey’s constant and oblivious rejection had become routine, a dull, comfortable sting that blended time into itself. It sure was less complicated than the tornado of fucking feelings that now spun through every waking moment.
It had been so much easier, not knowing what I was missing.
Grey plucked a leaf from my hair and began picking it apart, tipped his head back to rest against the bark. Closed his eyes, seeking the sun.
“I heard from Sadie this morning.”
“Did you?”
“She wants to get back together. Said she’ll wait until I’m done with school, that we can make it work long-distance.” His eyes opened, mouth pinched over a sad, sorry frown. “She says she still wants to marry me.”
“Oh, Grey.” I had to fight to hide my grimace. I of all people knew how it felt to love him, helplessly and hopelessly, and have that love amount to nothing. Poor Sadie. “You told her no, didn’t you?”
“I had to. I can’t go back to how things were. I can’t be what she wants. But I never thought it would come to this. I thought she was the one, bizarre as that sounds.”
“But how does that work? How can you love her like that and still decide to let her go?”
“One has nothing to do with the other. We broke up because we want opposite things, but she’s still Sadie. Of course I love her.” He picked the last shreds off the leaf and tossed away the skeleton. “Who knows—maybe she is the one. But I need to sort myself out before I can say that for sure. And I need to do it on my own.”
“Oh. Well, you’d know better than I would.” I pushed myself off the tree trunk and fished my rake out of the leaves. “Fortunately, I’ve sorted out enough about myself to avoid that ‘together forever’ shit in the first place.”
“Well, sure, for now. But don’t you want a family, eventually? Don’t you want to belong to someone else, and have them belong to you?”
“Yeah, that’s a great idea, Greyson. I can barely function as an individual, but let’s go ahead and chain another human to my side for the rest of eternity. Where do I sign up?”
“Whatever. You’re tolerable enough. And I know at least one human who wouldn’t turn down a set of those chains.”
I thumped the rake against the ground and turned to face him, mouth set, hackles up. Stomach knotted somewhere around my ankles.
I’d spent years molding the edges of my life into very specific shapes, ones that could never hope to align with my mother’s. I’d sliced all the heads off the fucking hydra; detonated every path that led to marriage or children; picked Grey out of thin air to complete the package—the perfect dream guy, unavailable and unattainable. Impossible to connect with at all, much less drag down an aisle of any kind. Now here he was, beautifully human, toe-to-toe with me instead of lashed to a pedestal. And now here I was, again, with too many options on the table. Too many paths leading straight to a white-tiled floor.
“Okay, you can stop right there. Not that I can’t appreciate the compliment all but fucking shrouded in that statement, but none of what you’re saying applies to me, or ever has. Not even hypothetically.” I stabbed at the leaf pile a couple more times, then shoved the rake away. Pressed my palms to my aching eyes. “Fuck this. Fuck this entire time of year.”
“Hey.” He was beside me then, retrieving my rake and taking my hand, closing my fingers around the handle. Covering my grip with his. “It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t. You broke Sadie’s heart. I broke Connor’s. Neither of them will talk to me, and you’re going to Duke. I’ll be here alone, tripping over our poor lovesick parents every time I turn around. Tripping over my whole fucking flat tire of a life.”
“So, change your life. What do you want to be? What do you want to do? Go do that.”
“I have no idea. None.” How I could think about the future long-term, when life consisted of getting through a week, a day—even an hour at a time? I’d never had a direction beyond “hopefully not backward.”
“What about college? There’s plenty of time left to apply.”
“I’m not you, Greyson. I don’t have the grades for a full ride, and I make fucking yarn accessories for a living. What I have in the bank wouldn’t even cover books.”
“You don’t have a college fund?”
“You do?”
“Yeah, it’s called my father’s problem. Court-ordered savings account, in lieu of child support. I get statements every month—trust me
when I say I’m set.”
“Well, the whole soap-making single dad thing doesn’t exactly net untold riches. They used to have some savings, but it got eaten up in funeral expenses and moving out of that house. She had insurance, but it wouldn’t pay out for a suicide.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh’ just about covers it, huh? Everything circles back, no matter what I do.”
He fell silent, studying me. I stared at the tree line, a wash of tears clenched just behind my jaw.
“It seems that way sometimes, Elaine. I know it does. But I promise you, it won’t last forever.”
“Sure feels like it will. Feels like the whole world is dead, right about now.”
“Not for long. It’s almost the solstice.” He took the rake from my hand and pushed it through the leaves, uncovering a vibrant patch of green. “See? All this life, still hanging in there. It takes more than a few leaves to smother the world.”
“I miss him, Greyson.”
The words fell to our feet and rolled away, scuttling for cover. We stared after them, Grey’s foot moving absently back and forth over the uncovered grass. Skye’s laughter trailed after her and Dad as they headed for the house, their yard bags abandoned, nowhere close to full. His hand guided her through the back door, slipped around her hip as the screen swung shut behind them.
My father, so ridiculously content. So effortlessly buoyed by Skye—by her careful hands and level, clear-eyed gaze. The soft, frequent stretch of her smile. Her unscarred arms and effortlessly beating heart.
It must be a relief for him, in so many ways, to share his home with a happy woman.
The kitchen light went on. We watched through the window as Dad opened the refrigerator and bent over, searching the shelves, watched Skye give him a playful swat on the ass. I turned away from that horror in time to see Grey shudder in shared revulsion.
“I know how it feels to miss someone,” he said, voice catching. “It sucks to be left behind, wondering why you weren’t enough to make a person stick—never really getting it. Always looking for that one thing you could have done to make a difference. But it happens to everyone, at some point. And that pain won’t last forever either.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Yeah,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut against a flash of sun dipping sharp and sudden through the naked branches. I watched it play across his face, turning his skin and hair and mouth to flame. “I know exactly what you mean.”
* * *
We’d barely settled at the table when Dad and Skye ghosted us, retreating to their bedroom with their sandwiches. Grey slumped in his seat, staring at his own food with markedly less enthusiasm than he had the moment previous.
“Don’t get me wrong, Elaine. I think Rob’s great, and I’m glad my mother found someone who makes her this happy. But holy shit.”
“No, I get it. Believe me, I’m suddenly nauseated myself.” I sighed, using a corn chip to push a glob of egg salad around the edge of my plate. “At least they’re compatible and infatuated and completely in love, even if it is sick-making.”
“Very true.” His chuckle was almost a sigh. “Mom told me their fate lines are nearly identical. Pretty sure that convinced her on the spot it was meant to be, and that was before he’d even asked her on a date.”
“I’m sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Fate lines?”
“Palmistry. You know, the lines on your hand, and how they speak to your personality and destiny. They compared their hands the first time they met. You know the rest.”
“That’s how they got together? You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“I am one hundred percent serious. Look.” He took my right hand, turning it palm up in his. “These lines represent aspects of your character. Their depth and appearance speak to who you are. Foretell your future.”
“Oh, Jesus. Here we go.”
“Shut up. These are the three major lines: life, head, and heart. And that one right there is the fate line: the one that brought our parents together, leading you and me to this very moment. That one’s tied to everything else—anything that happens to you or because of you, within or beyond your control.”
“Ah, I see. And which one’s the bullshit line?”
He tried so hard to hold in that laugh. He tried so hard I almost felt sorry for him, but one giggle escaped, then another, and soon we were both howling. My forehead was on the table, his was bowed over my still-upturned palm, and there wasn’t enough air in the world to help us catch our breath.
“I know,” he gasped. “I know it’s bullshit. But it’s fun, isn’t it? To try to guess how life will go? And it’s always cool when some little thing comes true. It’s like the whole universe is aligning: nature, man, and cosmos—everything linking together. Everything destined to be.”
“Yeah, and now you and I are related because our parents’ hands sort of match. That goes a bit beyond harmless fun.”
“But see, they’re perfect for each other. These things happen, and they just fit. They can’t be random. Everything circles back on itself. Everything falls into place.”
“And you believe that, after all that’s happened.”
It wasn’t a question so much as a declaration, a defining facet carved on the heart of Grey McIntyre. He did believe—it was there in the sure set of his shoulders and in the shadows beneath his tired, tranquil eyes. It was good to see him smile again, to see him slowly recapturing the boy he’d been.
“I do,” he said. “These past couple months, my head was in a real bad place—like, the one core tenet of my moral compass is to do no harm, and that basically all went to shit the second I moved in here. Now I have this laundry list of things I fucked up, that I can never take back, and it’s killing me. So many things I should have done differently.”
“Karma’s about to break a piece off your ass,” I snickered, taking far too much pleasure in his answering groan.
“That is way too true to be a joke, Elaine. Still, things are turning now. Think of what it took for us to get to this moment, right here, and the infinite number of ways it could have gone differently. I can feel that circle closing, see so many things I thought were permanent dying in front of me, and it’s heartbreaking—but at the same time, it’s like they’re not really endings. They’re the jumping-off points for everything that’s about to start. And I can’t wait to see what—”
His phone howled as he spoke, Sadie’s all-too-familiar ringtone blaring through the kitchen. That calmed him fast. He let it go to voice mail, and she immediately called back. Then a third time, and his mouth was a hard pinch.
“Do you need to get that, Greyson?”
“No. I asked her this morning to give me some space, and she agreed. Yet here she is, mere hours later. I’m not even surprised.”
He sighed and dropped my hand as the phone shrilled yet again.
“Holy shit, she is not letting up. Hold on.”
He barely got more than a syllable out before the world upended. I could hear her nonsensical sobs as if she were right there at the table. Grey frowned at the phone, then looked at me, my concern reflected in his face.
“Hey, are you okay? Sadie—Sadie, I can’t—I can’t understand you, babe. Calm down. What? They what? Wait there. No, wait there. I’ll pick you up. Yes. I know. Don’t be sorry. I love you. Of course I do. Sadie, stay calm. I’ll be there soon.”
“What is it?” I was on his case before he even disconnected the call. He stared at me, his eyes wide and green and horrified. “Greyson, what?”
“It’s Connor,” he said, kicking the legs out from under my heart.
33
SHE STOOD ON THE CORNER beneath a leafless oak tree, barely visible in the streetlight. The sun had set on the drive to her Biltmore Forest neighborhood—or, more accurately, the neighborhood three blocks from hers, where she’d told Grey to pick her up. She hadn’t brought a jacket; her shirt was long-sleeved, but thin. I could see
her shivering before we were close enough to slow down.
Her face changed as Grey pulled up to the curb, closing and darkening at the sight of me climbing out of the front seat, holding the door for her to take my place. She hesitated, then raised her head, focusing on some distant point beyond us as she spoke.
“Thanks.”
She tried to step around me, but I caught her hand. Her fingers were long shards of ice, stubbornly limp against my palm. She no longer wore her promise ring.
“What happened, Sadie? Please tell me.”
“He called me from the police station. I don’t know why he’s there, or if he’s okay, or what’s going on at all—he only had a minute to talk. He told me to get hold of Paul, have him come down there. And then I tried to leave, but my dad—he heard me on the phone, and he took my keys, and …” She crumbled, coughing out a tiny sob. “I left anyway. I waited until he’d gone out to the kitchen, and I just grabbed my purse and ran out the door. They don’t know I’m gone, and he’s going to kill me. But I couldn’t leave my brother there.”
“We won’t. I can’t leave him either.”
“I know. Lord, Lane, I know you can’t.” Her voice was small and scratchy, jagged with tears, face blurred to a quavering mess as she pulled me into a hug. I saw Grey in profile over her shoulder, head bowed over the steering wheel.
“We need to hurry,” she finally said, letting go of me and sliding into the front seat. “I don’t know if he’s been arrested, or needs bail money, or when they’ll let him go, but we need to get there and help him, before my parents realize I’m gone.”
I crawled into the back seat and buckled up, rummaged in the seat pocket for a tissue. I found an old Bojangles’ napkin, crumpled but clean, and immediately reduced it to soggy shreds. A movement between the front seats caught my eye—his hand, reaching across the console for hers. Her fingers, shuddering, then clenching, then linking with his. His face lit in silhouette as he looked at her, holding her eyes past the point of safety, past the point of rationale, and I saw the stop sign and the other car, was drawing breath to warn him, when he swung his gaze back to the road and tapped the brake casually. Drew us smoothly to a stop in plenty of time to dodge disaster.
Together We Caught Fire Page 21