by S. Massery
“No,” he says. “How do you feel?”
“I’m furious with you. I’m thankful. I spent six weeks chewing on anger, just to spit it out at the cancer, and now—”
My hand reaches his throat. I slide it to the back of his neck and pull him down. Our mouths brush as my words spill out of me, because it’s easier to confess against his lips. For all my griping, I missed him. “I don’t know if it’s going to come back. I don’t know if I’ll die in two months, two years, twenty years. I don’t want to hate you.”
His lips touch mine, lighter than the memory of a dream.
I’ve missed this.
He presses into me, hungry for more, and I gasp into his mouth. I wind my arms tighter around him. Our bodies fuse together.
I try to tell myself that this isn’t forgiveness. The last time he kissed me, we tasted my tears and anger. He broke my heart when he walked away.
“How do I make it better?” he asks, leaning his forehead on mine.
We’re both breathing hard.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ve come all this way, but it’s been no time at all. You left me, Griffin. Again.”
He exhales. I try to remember to breathe, too.
“You’re right. We spent five days together. That’s nothing compared to our history—and it’s drop in the bucket now that we have the rest of our lives. I’m going to make this right.”
But not right now. Promises like that just hurt too much.
I look away. “Please get out.”
He lifts himself higher.
I can’t avoid his face.
“Hadley?”
“Griffin, please. I can’t deal with this right now.”
“I came back—”
“You came back too late,” I snap. “Do you think he would’ve got to me if you had been there?”
He rears back. “Hadley,” he repeats, and his voice is full of indignation. Like he has any right to be more upset about this than I do. “I did it because I love—”
“Do not tell me you love me,” I say in a low voice. “Because that’s not how you treat someone you love. Get out of my room. Please.”
He stares at me for a beat, but I refuse to back down. The cracks across my heart are too painful to erase. It hurts to breathe.
He lifts my hand and kisses my knuckles.
It hurts to exist as he walks out of the room.
I close my eyes to keep the tears from falling.
They fall anyway.
Delia and I are playing cards.
Blackjack, to be exact.
“I played a few times,” I had told her when she pulled out the deck of cards.
We’re both cross-legged on the bed, playing for pieces of candy. She ran over the rules, some helpful tips, and off we went. In a matter of three hands, she won most of my candy. It doesn’t help that we’re both eating them as we go.
She grins at me. “Sorry. I was raised on this stuff.”
I can’t help but smile back, although it feels surreal to be sitting across from her. A Mafia princess. Or, excuse me, former Mafia princess. When she came into my room and introduced herself, I almost wanted to pretend that I was still asleep. But she just winked and sat in the chair next to my bed, and told me that Jackson had taken Griffin for a walk.
He wouldn’t leave the hallway, and he was freaking out the other patients.
She stayed, and after no time at all, she got me talking. And gambling.
“I wasn’t,” I say. “I had a normal childhood. My mom and I played bridge with my grandparents until their eyesight—and memory—started to go.” I shrug.
“Do you have siblings?”
“Nope.” I stare at the hand she dealt me. It’s blackjack. Finally. “Do you?”
“No.” She glances at her stomach. “Did Griffin tell you we’re expecting?”
I perk up. “He didn’t. Then again, we haven’t really spoken. Congratulations, Delia.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” I flip over my cards, and she laughs. “Well played.”
“Luck,” I murmur. “When are you due?”
“Not for a while,” she says. “We haven’t been to a doctor yet. We just found out three days ago.” She pushes the candy toward me and adds an extra piece, then says, “So, what’s the deal with you and Griffin?”
“What’s the deal?” I echo. “We have a history.”
Delia rolls her eyes. “I know there’s history. I want the dirt. It’ll stay between us, I promise.” Her eyes glitter. “I knew Griffin before I knew Jackson. If he’s screwed up—”
“You think he didn’t screw up?” I lean back. “He dropped me off on a fucking island for cancer treatment and said, ‘See ya later, Hadley!’” I scowl.
“Okay,” she says, holding up her hands. “I shouldn’t have said if. We both know he did. From the sounds of it, he hurt you quite a bit. In fact, I told him that how much I like you would depend on how quickly you forgave him. Since you’re still holding out, I’ve decided I like you quite a lot.”
I laugh. “I should’ve expected it. That’s what sucks the most. In all my time knowing Griffin, he’s always left me behind.”
She tilts her head to the side. “Examples,” she demands. “You knew him growing up?”
“Yeah.” I can’t make the words come out. I don’t know where to start. My parents never knew the extent of Griffin’s involvement in my life—I was afraid to say anything to anyone, because if I spoke up, he might’ve vanished.
“From the beginning,” she suggests. Her voice is gentler than it was a moment ago.
I flop back onto my pillows, staring at the ceiling. She moves the cards and candy and lies next to me. We breathe in silence for a moment before I start talking.
“He’s five years older than me. He came to us when he was thirteen and lived with us for four months. He celebrated his fourteenth birthday with us, only a week after he arrived.” I close my eyes and picture it. “He wasn’t the first kid my mom temp fostered. She was a social worker as well as a licensed foster home, so she usually took the kids in to keep them out of group homes, at least until a permanent foster could be found in the county.
“I… don’t really remember the first month or so. I was eight, just about to turn nine, and he was withdrawn. Mom made him walk with me to school, and he opened up a bit. We became friends.”
It’s terrible, letting feelings build up inside you without being able to express them. That was Griffin at fourteen years old.
“He moved into a real foster home one town over, but he didn’t really disappear like I expected him to. He showed up after school to walk me home. Every day. Sometimes he’d show up in the morning, too. He’d have breakfast with me and my dad, and off we’d go.”
“Sounds like he was sweet on you,” Delia murmurs.
“Maybe,” I agree. “But it was innocent. He asked me about bullies, about my homework, about boys I liked. The bullies left me alone out of fear. I didn’t realize that until later. I started high school, and suddenly he was done—graduated and gone to join the Navy.” That was the first time he left. Eight weeks of radio silence.
He woke me by touching my cheek, and I nearly shrieked. I was fourteen. He was newly nineteen, and he looked older. Impossibly handsome.
This is your friend, I thought to myself. I moved to sit up, unsure of what I wanted to do. Hug him? Slap him? I’d never hit anyone, but eight weeks was a long time to leave someone without an explanation. I moped around the house, unable to explain my broken heart.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
He leaned his forearms on the bed, and I caught a whiff of the spiced cologne he began to wear before he left. He wasn’t just a teenager—he was half man. At fourteen, my heart raced around him.
“I had some time,” he said. “How are you?”
Sad, I almost said. A lump formed in my throat, and I shook my head. I pushed myself back, toward the wall, and lifted the covers. It was like I was po
ssessed by someone much braver than me. He looked down my body—the t-shirt that had once been his, my shorts, my legs—and slowly stood.
Rejection boiled up inside me—right until he kicked off his shoes. He slid into bed next to me, pulling me close. My body was a live wire, lit up like a city at every point we touched: my shoulder, my waist, my knee.
“You’re going to go back?” I whispered, tucking my face into his neck. I could inhale his scent forever and not get tired of it.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re okay?”
Dying of a broken heart, I almost answered.
At fourteen, I was a chicken, so I swallowed my words. I didn’t tell him about the girls at school who picked on me, about the two guys at the corner store who leered at me when I walked home. Whistles and cat-calls chased me away from that street.
“Well enough.” I wondered if he would be there in the morning. If he’d walk me to school like he used to.
He wasn’t.
I woke up to an empty bed and an empty heart. Sitting on my desk was a white feather.
“He left in the middle of the night?” Delia wrinkles her nose.
“I went back to school, and things were the same… but the guys at the corner store were gone.” I lift one shoulder. “I never saw them again. Maybe it’s just coincidence. Maybe they moved away, ran out of money, got arrested—”
“Or Griffin took care of it,” Delia says. “I’m rooting for that version of the story.”
“Maybe,” I agree.
“When did you see him next?”
“A few weeks later. He came to tell me he was being deployed. I found a feather in my backpack after he’d left.”
Delia nods. “The Navy.”
“I never watched the news so much while he was gone. Mom called Judge—his foster dad—a few months into his tour and asked when Griffin was coming back. Judge said he didn’t know. No one knew.”
I grew up. I graduated high school. I met a guy, and we dated—it was my first boyfriend. The first guy I kissed. On that particular night, there was a bruise on my wrist from where he’d grabbed me too hard, and another on my thigh from when he pushed me away from him and I hit the dining table.
It was something I was simultaneously ashamed and afraid of, and above it all, I told myself that it was just one time. One time turned into three times, and I still hadn’t left.
I got home late from a movie with him. My parents were asleep—they had vetted my boyfriend and deemed him acceptable—and the house was silent. I shed my clothes as I climbed the stairs. Shoes by the front door, socks in my hand, sweatshirt over my arm. Goosebumps broke out across my skin.
I turned the light on in my room, and there was Griffin. He spun toward me, and I automatically backed up. I bumped the wall next to the door.
“Hadley,” he said, his voice hurt. “Why—?”
“What are you doing here?” My room was packed away in boxes except for the desk and my bed. Some clothes I was leaving here still hung in the closet. It was a half-finished job.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
I raised my eyebrow. This was the first time I’d seen him in a few years—since I was a junior in high school, I guessed, although I’d lost track—and now I was about to start my life as an adult.
My heart galloped out of control.
“College,” I said in an even voice. I shook my head. “I don’t want to know where you’ve been.”
He stared down at his boots. “Overseas,” he answered. There were dog tags around his neck. His gaze traveled up my body, from my toes all the way to the top of my head, and he flinched when he spotted the bruise.
I pressed against the wall.
He started toward me, and he slowly lifted my hand. His fingers touched the outer edge of the bruise, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Boyfriend?”
I couldn’t answer.
He brought my hand up to his lips. His eyes on mine, with his lips on my skin, felt like fire in a bottle. Too much.
“No one will hurt you,” he promised. “Never again.”
He slid past me into the hallway, leaving me alone with his retribution hanging in the air.
I shivered, but I didn’t try to stop him. I lay in bed with the lights off, watching the window. He didn’t come back, even though I kept my eyes open as long as I could. Inevitably, I fell asleep. I woke up to another feather beside me, white speckled with gray.
My phone had a message from my then-boyfriend. Two little words.
We’re done.
The relief was instant, and so was the suspicion. What had Griffin done to him?
“Take a break,” Griffin tells Delia. She casts a glance at me, and then at the folder in his hand, and slides off the bed.
“Thank you,” she says to me. “For trusting me with your story.”
I nod and watch her go.
Griffin stalks into the room, the muscle in his jaw jumping, and stands at the foot of my bed. I stare at him as he opens my file and reads, “Hadley Quinn Weatherly. Admitted to the hospital in Ashleigh, New York, at one-fifty-two a.m. on September seventeenth. Treated for a compound fracture to the forearm, internal bleeding, a head laceration and concussion, and cracked ribs.”
He lifts his head and glares at me. I stare back. My hand goes to my forearm, the scar there. The bone had come clean through the skin, and it still felt achy on cold days.
I had just turned twenty-one. The college thing didn’t really work out, so I was back in Bitterwood, in my own apartment. My parents told me that I could try again once I figured out what I wanted to do. I think a part of me was too anxious to be away in case Griffin came home.
I had another boyfriend who was a bit too aggressive. He hadn’t hit me, but he’d yelled a lot. I don’t know why I stayed with him. I don’t know why I was attracted to that kind of physicality, except maybe I was just hoping for someone to save me.
Did I create situations where I was the damsel in distress?
Maybe.
Anyway, it backfired. One day, he snapped and attacked me. He put me in the hospital for the very injuries Griffin just listed.
Griffin didn’t come back like I thought he would. He didn’t return for retribution—so I had to get it myself. I worked with the district attorney’s office to put my ex-boyfriend away, and I won my case. He went to prison in upstate New York. I have a still-standing restraining order against him.
That hospital stay led to the cancer diagnosis. Before then, I had never so much as had the flu. But the blood tests the hospital ran came back with an elevated white blood cell count. When Judge came to visit, I begged him to never speak of this to Griffin. I didn’t want the pity or the anger.
So it stayed our little secret… until right now.
I moved to New York City to get away from Bitterwood. I couldn’t deal with the trauma that followed me around—and after that, it felt like Griffin had let me down. He wasn’t there when I needed him.
I worked at the florist shop and saved up for law school while taking online classes at the community college. I lived in the little apartment and balanced classes, work, and hospital appointments. Putting away bad guys was an addicting high that I needed to recreate.
“You were diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia from that hospital stay.”
“Correct,” I say.
He closes his eyes. “This is my fault.”
My world slows to a halt. “What?”
“I saw him—your boyfriend—yelling at you. When he left, I…” He sighs. “I threatened him. I said if he ever touched you, I’d come back and kill him myself.”
Some trauma buries itself. I replayed that night in my head for weeks before I finally put it in a box and locked it away in the back of my mind. I shake my head before he’s even finished talking. “No.”
“If I hadn’t— I didn’t want him to hurt you.”
The laugh bursts out of me. It’s either laugh or cry. “He came at me with a bat, G
riffin. He kicked me in the stomach so hard, he bruised my organs. He broke my ribs with his steel-toed boots. You always thought you were the greatest protector.”
“I’m so sorry, Hadley.” He circles the bed and kneels, taking my hand in both of his. “I didn’t know—”
“I made Judge promise not to tell you,” I admit. “I was more than humiliated. The entire town knew what had happened to me.”
“That’s why you moved to the city?”
“You threatened him, and he beat me to the brink of death. And now he’s in prison.” I square my shoulders. “It made me a stronger person. And, yeah, it led to the cancer diagnosis.”
“Can you forgive me?”
I reach over and cup his jaw, my emotions at war. “For that? Yes. For everything else?” I grimace. “I don’t know yet, Griffin. I want to go home.”
He nods, sitting back on his heels. “Well, let’s get you home, then.”
I start to pull my arm away, but his grip tightens. His fingers trace the scar, and all the pain I should be feeling flashes across his face. And then he stands and backs away.
It shouldn’t hurt when he leaves the room, but it does.
26
GRIFFIN
The expression on her face is similar to the one I wore when going into battle. She walks past me, to the breakfast bar, into the kitchen. She hops up onto the same counter that Dalton usually occupies, and she shoves open the window over the sink.
“Hadley,” I start. I open and close my mouth for a few seconds as she looks out the window. Eventually, her eyes come back to me. “I am so sorry.”
She nods. “I know.”
“I— What?”
“Dalton told me that you were feeling guilty,” she says.
Her voice is so far away, and I’m surprised by how much it hurts.
“He said you felt bad… but that didn’t change your mind. Revenge had to come first.”
“It wasn’t revenge,” I murmur. “I was trying to restore my name—”
